PEN World Voices: Books That Changed My Life report
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PEN World Voices Festival
It’s a good idea for an author panel: round up a few writers and ask them to talk about Books That Changed My Life. It was an interesting variety of authors, too, from sex-book-author (The Secret Life of Catherine M.) Catherine Millet to Wolves of…
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leave a comment PEN World Voices: Conversation: Jeffrey Eugenides & Daniel Kehlmann report
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PEN World Voices Festival
The only Daniel Kehlmann-novel available in English is Measuring the World (though Ich und Kaminski is due out in translation in November); it doesn’t seem to have been quite as successful here as elsewhere (30-some-odd weeks on the Taiwanese bestseller lists, he mentioned—as well as…
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Photos from the PEN World Voices Believer Event
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PEN World Voices Festival
"Presented by The Believer and hosted by actor and comedian Todd Barry, this year’s Believer event featured a musical performance by John Wesley Harding, a Vladmaster screening in which every attendee will simultaneously watch a “picture story” through their own personal View-Master, and a panel…
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Audio Video and Lots more Blogging at the PEN Website
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PEN World Voices Festival
I posted once or twice about the PEN blogs for the World Voices festival, but thought it time for a reminder because there’s a bunch more content there since they’ve recruited members to blog a lot of events. Here’s the opening of Marion James’ entry…
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Bill Marx on “The Art of Failure” Event
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Pen World Voices Festival
Posting at The Arts Fuse, Bill Marx reports on the Thomas Bernhard event that was part of the PEN World Voices Festival. This is how he began: Who would have guessed that a writer who proudly earned the reputation as the Oscar the Grouch of…
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PEN World Voices Report: Something to Hide - Writers and Artists Against the Surveillance State
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Pen World Voices Festival
Among the core missions of International PEN is “the defense of writers and of freedom of expression around the world.” In the last two decades, as Salman Rushdie has been both its beneficiary and its champion, this mission has become increasingly visible. However, the artistic…
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A Discussion on Short Stories at the PEN World Voices Festival
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Pen World Voices Festival
“Short Stories” was a discussion held at the Scandinavia House for the PEN World Voices festival of International Literature on Friday, May 2nd. The participants were Etgar Keret, Young-ha Kim, Ingo Schulze, and Abdourahman Waberi. The discussion was moderated by Radhika Jones. If Radhika Jones,…
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Pen World Voices Photos: Three Musketeers Event
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Pen World Voices Festival
MetaxuCafé was shut out by the 92nd St.Y from taking any photos or video from Friday night’s Three Musketeers Event. They wanted us to pay “several hundred dollars” to exercise our right to free speech. Ironic given that we were there to report on a…
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1 commentPEN World Voices: African Wars report
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Pen World Voices Festival
Despite the heavyweight-panel—Nuruddin Farah, Chenjerai Hove, and Abdourahman Waberi—African Wars was the most disappointing of the events I’ve been to so far. It’s also the first (of the ones I’ve attended) where the audience was charged for their tickets (though my press pass meant I…
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PEN World Voices: Private Lives, Public Lives, Other Lives, New Lives report
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Pen World Voices Festival
Ingo Schulze and Eliot Weinberger got together to discuss Private Lives, Public Lives, Other Lives, New Lives at the Goethe Institut, in front of a good-size audience. It turned out to be pretty much an introduction to Schulze, covering his career trajectory and especially his…
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PEN World Voices Festival - Three Muskateers Reunited
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Pen World Voices Festival
Salman Rushdie
Umberto Eco
Mario Vargas Llosa
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PEN World Voices Report: The Art of Failure
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Pen World Voices Festival
reporting by Garth Risk Hallberg Late Thursday night, after several PEN events and many drinks, a European friend and I succumbed to the temptation to make sweeping generalizations about the state of literature in America and abroad. Most of our aperçus wouldn’t withstand scrutiny in…
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Umberto Eco, Salman Rushdie and Mario Vargas Llosa at PEN World Voices
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Mario Vargas Llosa, Pen World Voices Festival, Salman Rushdie, Umberto Eco
“You’ll notice an empty chair has been placed next to the podium on stage. This is too symbolize those writers who could not be here today due to political oppression.” Thus intoned Leonard Lopate at New York City’s uptown 92nd Street Y, introducing a major…
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PEN World Voices: Bookforum: Political Engagement report
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Pen World Voices Festival
Asli Erdogan could not make it to the festival, due to illness, so Bookforum: Political Engagement was a two-man show, with Nuruddin Farah and Elias Khoury, moderated by Albert Mobilio. Farah and Khoury come from perhaps the two places in the world that have been…
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NBCC at PEN World Voices Festival
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Pen World Voices Festival
You may find some PEN reports at the National Book Critics Circle blog ”Critical Mass.” Jane Ciabattari reports on the Public Lives event. She ends her report with: Ian McEwan, whose last book, the brief and lyrical “On Chesil Beach,” was launched with a documentary,…
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Jason Boog at the PEN World Voices Festival
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Pen World Voices Festival
We had a few interesting reports on the very big production PEN made for announcing this year’s World Voices Festival, but I particularly enjoyed Jason Boog’s video account over at The Publishing Spot. Here’s his video: Also note on that post is a brief note…
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PEN World Voices: Publishers Weekly: On Translation report
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Pen World Voices Festival
The Publishers Weekly: On Translation-panel was the event I’d had the highest hopes for. It offered an impressive line-up: PW-editor Sara Nelson moderated, and publishers Edwin Frank (New York Review Books), Michael Krüger (German Hanser Verlag), Halfdan W. Freihow (Norwegian Font Forlag), and Morgan Entrekin…
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PEN World Voices: Soldiers, Gramophones, and Brecht: A Literary Conversation report
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PEN World Voices Festival
Soldiers, Gramophones, and Brecht: A Literary Conversation with Saša Stanišić and Gonçalo M. Tavares was a pleasant surprise. With PEN World Voice director Caro Llewellyn moderating, this turned out to be a very enjoyable and informative presentation, two basically unknown-in-the-US authors introducing themselves and their…
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PEN World Voices: Burma: A Land at a Crossroads report
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PEN World Voices Festival
As Levi has already reported at LitKicks, the Burma: A Land at a Crossroads event offered more of a political-historical overview than literary panel. Moderator Dedi Feldman effectively used Thant Myint-U’s The River of Lost Footsteps as a foundation for the discussion, and between the…
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Opening night of the 2008 World Voices Festival
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Annie Proulx, Evelyn Schlag, Michael Ondaatje, Pen World Voices Festival, Rian Malan, Salman Rushdie
Opening night of the 2008 World Voices Festival Salman Rushdie is President of PEN American Center. He opened and closed tonight's event. His closing comments were especially amusing. He said he was the punctuation at the end of the evening - the human embodiement of…
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A Glimpse of Burma
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Pen World Voices Festival
A lunchtime PEN World Voices panel with global journalist Ian Buruma, Burmese author Thant Myint-U and Words Without Borders editor Dedi Felman today offered a look at the modern history and current politics of Burma, the Southeast Asian nation that all three panelists agreed was…
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Pen World Voices Festival Blogs
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Pen World Voices Festival
I had initially arranged with the folks at PEN to have their festival blogs show up here and vice versa, but we somehow got lost in the cracks. So, I’ll just try to keep you abreast of what’s going on of interest there (and elsewhere…
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PEN World Voices Report: Public Lives/Private Lives
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Pen World Voices Festival
by Garth Risk Hallberg A crowd representing all ages, income brackets, and nationalities basking in the brilliant comedy of a Hungarian literary genius: isn’t this why one moves to the big city? Seduced by movies and periodicals (here Woody Allen and The New Yorker deserve…
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Bill Marx at the PEN World Voices Festival
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Pen World Voices Festival
Arts critic Bill Marx writes at The Arts Fuse about a PEN press conference this morning on the delivery of a petition to the Chinese Mission to the UN that asks for the release of imprisoned Chinese writers. He had this to say: The gathering…
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PEN World Voices: New Directions in Spanish-Language Literature report
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PEN World Voices Festival
The panel on New Directions in Spanish-Language Literature consisted of three novelists: Bolivian Juan de Recacoechea, Spaniard Andrés Ibáñez, and Colombian Juan Gabriel Vásquez, and was moderated by a fourth, Instituto Cervantes-director Eduardo Lago. Several of the authors have spent a considerable amount of time…
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PEN World Voices: Crisis Darfur
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Bernard-Henri Levy, Darfur, Dinaw Mengestu, Mia Farrow, Pen World Voices Festival
I got to the Florence Gould Auditorium a bit before 8:00 to find a peculiarly French combination of confusion and bureaucracy. To those of us seeking entry, there was lots of barking: “Stay in line!” “Hang on!”; amongst those in charge, there was much confusion.…
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Mia Farrow and Bernard-Henri Levy Urge Hope, Action, Olympic Boycott for Darfur
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Bernard-Henri Levy, Darfur, Dinaw Mengestu, Mia Farrow, Pen World Voices Festival
At one of the kickoff events for New York City’s PEN World Voices festival,actress Mia Farrow, critic Bernard-Henri Levy and novelist Dinaw Mengestu met tonight at the Alliance Francais to discuss the ongoing genocidal situation in Darfur, which has gotten no better after five years…
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2008 Pen World Voices Festival at MetaxuCafe
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Pen World Voices Festival
PEN American Center has announced the first event for the 2008 Pen World Voices Festival. The event includes Umberto Eco from Italy, British-Indian Salman Rushdie, and Mario Vargas Llosa from Peru and is dubbed “The Three Musketeers Reunited” (because the three held a reading together…
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Book Review of As You Were Saying: American Writers Respond to Their French Contemporaries
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Pen World Voices Festival
Published by Dalkey Archive Press, 2007. 73 pages. Attending PEN World Voices events comes with special charms of hearing extraordinary writers from the world over offer their on-the-spot insights on various great questions, such as what is Dutch humor? What dangers revolve around writing about…
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Pen World Voices: Report from the tribute to Cesar Vallejo
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Pen World Voices Festival
Do you know this poem?
Agape
Today no one has come to inquire:
nor have they asked me for anything this afternoon.
I have not seen a single cemetery flower
in such a happy procession of lights.
Forgive me, Lord: how little I have died!
This afternoon everybody, everybody passes by
without inqiring or asking me for anything.
And I do not know what they forget and feels
wrong in my hands, like something that is not mine.
I have gone to the door,
and I feel like shouting at everybody:
If you are missing anything, here it is!
Because in all the afternoons of this life,
I do not know what doors they slam in a face,
and my soul is seized by someone elses thing.
Today no one has come;
and today I have died so little this afternoon!
That is how I knew César Vallejo (1892 - 1938), but today I know this Andean poet a little better from attending a tribute on the occasion of Clayton Eshlemans publication of Vallejos Collected Poems.
Vallejos poetry - of which his fellow Peruvian Mario Vargas Llosa says contains within their seeming transparency, a nucleus irreducible to pure reason, a secret heart that eludes every effort the rational mind makes to hear it beat. - was first read in Spanish, then in translation, sifting through small pieces of the collection, with additional poems from each of Vallejos three major works - Los Heraldos Negros, Trilce, and Poemas Humanos - read in English without their Spanish originals.
Im not fluent in Spanish, but I love the sound of the language and I do enjoy hearing poems in their original form, particularly those where the music of the language should be brought out above all else. The readings were all basically good, although Im of a mind that poems should not be dramatized; the drama is in the words, and I felt Sam Shepard and one other reader was a little over the top when he/she could have just let the words do the work and let the lines fall into place.
Its impossible to say how many were Vallejo fans in particular, Poetry Project regulars, or fans there to watch Sam Shepard read, but St. Marks Church appeared to be at capacity. While it lacks the intimacy of Nuyorican Poets Cafe, it was perfectly comfortable for this largish (particularly for a poetry reading) crowd. I got in early enough to stake out a lounging place in the carpeted side-steps - pillow, fat book of poems, and video camera - and watch the readers and the crowd. Like a live music performance, readings give a work life that might have previously gone unnoticed, so now, as I read Trilce, I carry with me the sound of at least some of it in Español.
Pen World Voices: Tribute to Cesar Valljo on Vimeo
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Pen World Voices Festival - The PEN Cabaret
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Pen World Voices Festival
Musician, poet, painter, and preformance artist, Oliver Lake has created chamber pieces for the Arditti and Flux String Quartets; arranged music for Bjork, Lou Reed, and A Tribe Called Quest; and collaborated with poets Amiri Baraka and Ntozake Shange, choreogrphers Ron Brown and Marlies Yearby,…
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Pen World Voices Festival: Tatyana Tolstaya in conversation with David Remnick
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Pen World Voices Festival
“A Cup of Tea” reports on the Tolstaya event. Here’s an excerpt: It was Salman Rushdie, whose presence created a commotion of shifting bodies in seats, who asked the final and most interesting question. He said that he met Tolstaya at a 1988 conference in…
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PEN World Voices Festival - Literary Thrillers
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Pen World Voices Festival
Discussion of the new face of interntional high-tensile fiction with acclained mystery writer S.J. Rozan. S.J. Rozan is the author of 10 crime nobels. Her novels and short stories have won crime-writing awards such as the Edgar, Shamus, Anthony, Nero, and Macavity. Her most recent…
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PEN World Voices Festival - Reporting on Iraq, Living in Terror: Carolin Emcke & Mark Danner
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Pen World Voices Festival
As a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books, Harper’s, and many other publications, Mark Danner has covered Central America, Haiti, the Balkans, Iraq, and the Middle East. His books on politics and foreign policy include The Road to Illegitimacy, Torture and Truth:…
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PEN World Voices Festival - Conversation: Siri Hustvedt & Margriet de Moor, with Adam Gopnik
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Pen World Voices Festival
A conversation with Siri Hustvedt and Margriet De Moor hosted by Adam Gopnik of the New Yorker. Margriet de Moor is the award-winning Dutch author of Duke of Egypt and The Kreutzer Sonata. Siri Hustvedt’s (Norway/United States) work has been published in The Paris Review.…
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PEN World Voices Festival - Moving Stories: Writers on Film
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Pen World Voices Festival
Each of these writers has authored books that were later made into films. Together, they discuss the pleasures and trials of the process and what happens to literature along the way. Gener Seymour is the film critic for Newsday. Dany Laferriere’s (Haiti/Canada) short stories served…
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Times Union Rounds Up Pen World Voices Videos
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Pen World Voices Festival
Michael Janairo, of Albany’s Times Union rounds up some (but not mine) of the videos posted on the Pen World Voices Festival.
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PEN World Voices Festival - Black & Blue: Mediterranean Noir
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Pen World Voices Festival
Colin Harrison, stepping in for Aice Seybold, takes us on a tour of the dark passages of Mediterranean Noir. Tonight’s panelists discuss why this is one of the most important and popular literary movements to emerge from Europe in the last decade and how they…
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PEN World Voices: Conversation with Caryl Phillips and Abdulrazak Gurnah
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Pen World Voices Festival
I am embarrassed to admit that this is the first PEN event that I've attended this year. Circumstances prevented me from attending the events earlier this week, unfortunately. However, this afternoon, I was able to attend a conversation between authors Caryl Phillips and Abdulrazak Gurnah.…
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Pen World Voices Festival: Photos from the Imaginary Geographies Panel
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Pen World Voices Festival
These writers discuss how, and especially, why they invent - and re-invent - cities, towns, countries, and homes, and consider the responsibility of fiction to go beyond the merely real. Deborah Treisman, New Yorker fiction editor and moderator of the panel. Arthur Japin (Netherlands) studied…
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Pen World Voices Festival: Gritty Reality Panel
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Pen World Voices Festival
These writers describe lives that are hard and often brief. People survive on the streets and by their wits - generally with a gun in hand or in their face. Though short on romance, there is love, redemption, and an honest attempt to reflect real…
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PEN World Voices: From Page to Stage I
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PEN World Voices Festival
This years International Literature Festival brought about the first collaboration between PEN American Center and the Martin Segal Theatre Center. Thursday afternoon, a Polish, Russian, and Portuguese playwright gathered in the CUNY Graduate Center’s intimate theater setting with moderator Tom Sellar, editor of Theater Magazine, to talk about the challenges of bringing the private work of a play into the public eye. How does it feel for authors to see their work produced? To what degree do they get involved in the production process? How do they deal with issues of translation when their plays cross borders to different countries and cultures? Whats the difference between the work of translating plays and translating other literary forms? Those were some questions that Dorota Maslowska (Poland), Vladimir Sorokin (Russia), and Jos Luis Peixoto (Portugal) confronted during this session.
The highlight of this session involved a group of young actors, whom were not introduced to the audience, giving dramatic readings of the English translations of these playwrights recent plays. First up was Vladimir Sorokins Dostoevsky Trip. The premise of the play grew from the idea that literature is a drug. In the future, perhaps, we will live in a time and place where people can get their favorite literary fix in the form of a pill. In this play, seven literature addicts decide to take some pills together. They go to the dealer who is prepared to sell them Alexandre Dumas pills that offer a mellow trip, suitable for twelve friends. When the dealer realizes there are only seven of them, he shakes with disapproval; the Dumas pill will not work for seven; they must try the Dostoevsky drug. The friends make the purchase, pop the pill, and are suddenly transported to scene in The Idiot in which The Prince is admitting that he would like to marry Natasha Filippovna.
Next, we heard a more absurdist, yet just as dramatic reading of an excerpt from Jos Luis Peixotos The Winter Arrives. The playwright was influenced by Thomas Manns The Magic Mountain and Faulkners pregnant woman character from Light in August who changes the lives of the three men in the sanitarium. In Peixotos scene, three men talk nonsense over a grave then we see them sick in an asylum. Personally, I felt this play might be a more interesting read by an individual reader. It didnt come off as well as Sorokins.
Dorota Maslowskas play A Couple of Poor, Polish-Speaking Romanians features two young Polish people who have this idea of dressing themselves up to try to convince others that they are almost homeless Romanians. Over the course of the play, their ruse breaks down. According to Maslowska, it is a play about hatred. The actors read lines that came off as crude, sad, and funny. Their dramatic interpretations were quite gripping, and I would have loved to see the whole play in context to get a better idea of these characters motivations.
Overall, I felt that the discussion with the playwrights relied too much on this idea of drama being difficult to translate. Instead, I wished the discussion could have focused more on the playwrights writing practice, craft, and influences. For instance, it turned out that the only answer Vladimir Sorokin could give to the question of his involvement in the production is that he doesnt get involved. That is not his business. His business is the text. He admitted that he has walked out on the opening nights of his plays because he is so overwhelmed by what monstrous creations they become once they are produced. He laughed that he was sure the same thing would happen again in the future. But he also admitted that a writer shouldnt get involved in the production of his plays. Maslowska and Peixoto echoed these sentiments. A play, in its life, goes through many layers of translation and interpretation, and everyone participates: directors, actors, and audience members. These playwrights agreed that variety is something to celebrate. There seemed to be a lot of consensus on this panel, though we had just witnessed vastly different dramatic creations.
Saturday, April 28th at 6:30 pm, the Martin Segal Theater Center at the Graduate Center, CUNY will host From Page to Stage III: Whose Translation is it Anyway? Speakers include playwrights Charles Mulekwa from Uganda and Koffi Kwahul from the Ivory Coast. Their plays will be read in English and discussion will follow. Again, the discussion is supposed to focus on cross-cultural challenges. I wonder if there will be a future PEN festival that wont be so hung up on the challenging aspect of translation. Of course crossing borders poses challenges, but arent the audience members who are hungry for this PEN festival showing that they are willing and ready to cross borders, face the challenges, become more aware of the World out there? Perhaps someday panel discussion will better reflect our readiness to feel at ease with the challenges, confront them with grace, and move on so that we can ask these artists and translators about craft, transitions, adjustments, and fusion. Crossing borders is nothing new, really. Its been going on for thousands of years. When people learn that I speak and write the Chinese language, they often will ask, Isnt that a hard language to learn? I have not figured out a good answer to this question yet, but I know the question unsettles me. Usually I tell them, compared to English, Chinese grammar is very simple. Silently, I add: so what if learning a language or translating a text is hard? Life is hard for most of us, and a hard life is also a good life and is someting to celebrate. No?
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PEN World Voices Festival: Arthur Japin & Michael Orthofer in Conversation
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Pen World Voices Festival
A pretty sparse turn-out, but Arthur Japin put on a pretty good show in conversation with me last night. Originally an actor, he came to writing—at least on a large scale—fairly late, but retains the theatrical chops, as he showed in reading several of the…
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PEN World Voices Festival - Town Hall Readings: Writing Home
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Pen World Voices Festival
Salman Rushdie
Steve Martin
Pia Tafdrup
Don DeLillo
Kiran Desai
Alain Mabanckou
Tatyana Tolstaya
Saadi Youssef
Neil Gaiman
Nadine Gordimer
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Pen World Voices Festival: Homage to Pedro Pietri
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Pen World Voices Festival
Pen World Voices Festival: Homage to Pedro Pietri on Vimeo
“Made in Catalunya” Catalan poets pay homage to Pedro Pietri poetry reading, April 25th, 2007. Highlights Video. Pedro Pietri co-founded the Nuyorican Poets Cafe. He was the poet laureate of the Nuyorican movement.
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Pen World Voices: Images from the History and the Truth of Fiction Panel
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Pen World Voices Festival
Colum McCann (Ireland/United States) moderated the panel. He is the author of several story collections and nobels. His short film, Everything in This Country Must, was nominated for an Oscar in 2005. His most recent novel is Zoli. Arthur Japin’s (Netherlands) historical novels include The…
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PEN World Voices: Writers on the Environment
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Pen World Voices Festival
Last year, PEN kicked off the World Voices festival with a high-profile address by Orhan Pamuk. At the time, the Turkish novelist had just narrowly avoided a prison sentence for having the temerity to mention the Armenian genocide of 1915. This year’s opening event was…
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Kumar on post-colonial writing in a globalized world
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Pen World Voices Festival
Amitava Kumar sends word that he’ll be reading from Bombay-London-New York for his “Post-Colonial Writing in a Globalized World” talk with Ilija Trojanow at the Goethe-Institut tonight.
The section he has in mind, which I read while preparing for the Branding & Freedom in the Market Economy event last month, considers representations of Ghandi. I’m posting it in context here for those who can’t make it.
Once, when I came out of the subway in New York City, I saw a sign that said “Gandhi was a great and charitable man.” Beneath, in smaller type, were the words, “However, he could have used some work on his triceps.”
The sign was an advertisement for the Equinox Fitness Club. If you joined early, the sign said, you could save 150 dollars.
I confess I like the use to which Gandhi is put by the Equinox Fitness Club. No doubt the Mahatma would have found the price of the packet a bit steep. But I think he would have liked the thriftiness of the early-membership plan. Gandhi came from a family of traders. The name his family gave him Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was translated by the writer G.V. Desani as “Action-Slave-Fascination-Moon Grocer.” What a tantalizing mix of qualities! The qualities of a man of the world! This kind of man would even have understood advertising.
I am sure the Mahatma would have had a witty quip for the use to which Microsoft has put his bald visage. In America, Gandhi’s image appears on huge hoardings with the words “Think Different. There is a tiny logo in the corner showing a rainbow-striped apple. Salman Rushdie has commented on this phenomenon: “Once a half-century ago, this bony man shaped a nations struggle for freedom. But that, as they say, is history. Now Gandhi is modeling for Apple.”
In India, Gandhi had been a face smiling at me from the walls of the decrepit offices in the small towns of Bihar. The use of his image for a New York City gym has returned me to a different use of Gandhi, one that takes the Mahatma out of the museum. This use has not been unknown in India, it has just been ignored by official pieties. This is the irreverent Gandhi of the Indian marketplace. Long live Gandhi Safety-Match. Long live Bapu Mark Jute Bag. Long live Mahatma Brand Mustard Oil.
Do I really want to see Gandhi selling deodorants to a guy in Dadar?
“Cleanliness is next to godliness. Free your body of foreign odors!”
Perhaps not. But the point that I am moving toward is that a more robust, and perhaps muscular, Gandhi is visible in the pages of Indian writing in English these days. The sanitized Mahatma of early Indian fiction has given way to a maverick Gandhi.
Let’s take as an early example the memoirs of a writer like Nayantara Sahgal, who was also Prime Minister Nehru’s niece. Sahgal described her return from New York to New Delhi in Prison and Chocolate Cake. India had only recently won freedom; it had not recovered from the trauma of the bloody Partition. Then, Gandhi was assassinated. In Sahgal’s book, we saw Gandhi through a young woman’s eyes that are full of adulation: “My own reaction was mingled with reverence. Could it be true that a man could talk of love and truth and goodness, and apply these religious terms to politics and not be laughed at? Could it be true that such sentiments could actually guide a nation’s policy? Yet in India all these things were true.”
A few decades into the realities of independent India, and the scene appears irredeemably altered. In Upamanyu Chatterjee’s English, August, what we are left with is the post-apocalyptic image of the Gandhi Hall that looks like “something out of a TV news clip on Beirut.” Outside this building with its broken windowpanes and bombed-out appearance is the “statue of a short fat bespectacled man with a rod coming out of his arse.” This is the postcolonial Gandhi. And I like him because — I don’t know how to say this without irony — nothing seems foreign to his body.
Which is to say, my worry about his being used to sell deodorants is really an irrelevant question. Gandhi can take in anything and still keep smiling. A satyagrahi always stays on top of the world. This is also nonviolence taken to its real and proper extreme. In a country sodomized by its leaders, here is a leader who has chosen to stand among the people with a rod up his arse.
In the early 1980s, I was in college in Delhi. Each morning, I rode on a bus that took me past the memorials to national leaders, including Gandhi’s. During those years in college, I came across Kanthapura on my required reading list in an English course. Raja Rao’s Kanthapura, a novel about the Gandhian revolution, was first published in 1938, almost a decade before the independence. The novel was about the inhabitants of a village, innocent of any history, suddenly swept by the powerful tide of Gandhi-worship. Rao, along with R.K. Narayan and Mulk Raj Anand, formed the triumvirate of Indian writers in its early stages.
While our teacher discussed the book with us, in the world outside our classroom, another myth of Gandhi was being born. The British film-director Richard Attenborough was shooting his movie on Gandhi in Delhi. The newspapers printed updates of the film-shoot. There were complaints about Gandhi being played by an actor who wasn’t an Indian; then came the giddy news that Ben Kingsley was at least half-Indian. One of my fellow students, a stocky man who studied history and rode a motorcycle, had a small role in the film. One day someone came to class with the news that there were buses waiting outside the college gates. We could all go and join the scene of Gandhi’s funeral that was being shot that day. Attenborough needed a huge crowd of well-behaved extras.
Hollywood was going to bring our freedom struggle alive for us. In Kanthapura, Rao’s highly mannered syntax had conveyed to me the removed grandeur of idealism. I was discovering the past in a stylized way. Then, in the world outside the classroom, Hollywood brought peace and popcorn together, and gave Gandhi the honor he deserved. An Oscar.
It would be impossible for someone like me, born some decades after independence, to imagine Sahgal’s or Rao’s awestruck relationship with the Mahatma. Our freedom as a later generation of Indians has also meant a freedom from Gandhi-worship. Newer Indian writers have undoubtedly played a small part in this whole process of demystification. Consider Vikram Chandra’s portrait of Gandhi where he appears less a holy man on a pedestal and more a tactical mix of East and West, of high and low, of the sacred and also the secular: “Be fearless, like that suave cosmopolitan M.K. Gandhi, that most international of khiladis, who told us repeatedly that while his political gurus were Gokhale and Ranade and Tilak, his spiritual gurus were Tolstoy and Thoreau and Ruskin, and that he got his nonviolence not from the Gita, but from the Sermon on the Mount. Remember that Gandhi’s audience was not just Indian, but also everyone else; that all his actions, the spectacle of his revolution and the revolution of his self, were performed simultaneously before a local audience and a global one. He spoke to us, to those he loved, but in speaking to us he was also speaking to all the world, and in speaking to the world he wanted nothing less than to change all of it.”
Chandra’s Gandhi is a happy borrower. He is not unlike the Bombay criminals in this respect. Chandra describes them as “those CCTV-using, Glock-firing, Bholenath-worshipping gangsters.” Chandra finds them appealing because they “do whatever it takes to get the job done.” From
Gandhi to the Glock-firing gangsters… in less than 60 seconds! This is not only taking Gandhi off the pedestal — it is more like pushing him into the ring, with red boxing-gloves and a rakish grin.
The historian Partha Chatterjee has written: “The ‘message of the Mahatma’ meant different things to different people.” According to Chatterjee, what Gandhi’s words “meant to peasants or tribals was completely different from the way it was interpreted by the literati.” Following Chatterjee, it is quite interesting to me how what newspaper-editors call “ordinary Indians” also in their own unremarkable ways have made Gandhi their own. I think that the Gandhi of the Indian marketplace that I was earlier championing is an example of that easy accommodation.
The people, in fact, might be ahead of writers and editorialists. As the research of Shahid Amin reveals, peasants in Gorakhpur, in the eastern India of 1921, were producing a “many-sided response to Gandhi.” In the spring of 1921, The Pioneer carried an editorial about a report in a Gorakhpur newspaper that had cited reports of miracles popularly attributed to the Mahatma. “Smoke was seen coming from wells and, when water was drunk, it had the fragrance of keora (pandanus odaratissimus) an aloe-like plant which is used in the manufacture of perfume; a copy of the Holy Quran was found in a room which had not been opened for a year; an Ahir who refused alms to a Sadhu begging in Mahatma Gandhi’s name, had his gur and two buffaloes destroyed by fire, and a skeptical Brahmin, who defied Mr Gandhi’s authority, went mad and was only cured three days afterwards by the invocation of the saintly name!”
In this list of magic and change, I see a lesson about our buried, peripheral modernities. The lesson becomes clear to me long after I come out of the subway and see Gandhi’s name on a sign advertising a gym. But the lesson, slow in coming, is clear enough. It is about people mixing the rational with the ritual, science with séance, and politics with thepoetry of magical transformation. Long before Richard Attenborough, the mythmaker, long before the admen from Madison Avenue, long before our politicians had invented the Gandhi Jayanti Samaroh, long before Indian writers had found magical realism… were the peasants of Gorakhpur giving life to Gandhi. Long live the peasants of Gorakhpur.
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Pen World Voices Festival - Highlights from Green Thoughts Writers on the Environment
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Pen World Voices Festival
Pen World Voices Festival Highlights from Green Thoughts Writers on the Environment on Vimeo Highlights from the first event of the Pen World Voices Festival of International Literature on April 24th, 2007. This event is “Green Thoughts: Writers on the Environment” with readings by Jonathan…
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