Selections of Bhakti poetry from Arundhati Subramaniam’s collection called ‘Eating God.’ These poems by different poets cover a variety of languages, regions and styles in English translation.
Here are some exercises in pure and sustained literary immersion from this week’s reading! Here are glimpses from Arundhati Subramaniam’s collection of Bhakti poetry called Eating God which I have been reading and which stunningly reflects the breadth and depth of the devotional tradition in all its regional and linguistic diversity.
That Strange Disease Called Bhakti
Don't you take on
this thing called bhakti:
like a saw
it cuts when it goes
and it cuts again
when it comes.
If you risk your hand
with a cobra in a pitcher
will it let you
pass?
(Basavanna: A. K. Ramanujan)
Like a sharp arrow
Is the love of Rama.
Only someone struck by it
Knows the pain.
You look for the wound,
But the skin is not broken.
You bring out the ointment,
But there's nowhere to rub.
When all the women
Look the same,
Who among them
Will the lord choose?
Fortunate is she,
Says Kabir,
In the parting of whose hair,
And hers alone,
Is put vermilion.
(Kabir: A. K. Mehrotra)
She lingers out of doors.
She rushes in
And she rushes out,
Her heart is restless.
Breathing fast,
She gazes at the kadamba wood.
What has happened
The elders chatter
And the wicked gossip.
Is she possessed
By some enchanting god?
Forever restless
Careless of clothes,
Startled, she jumps in her dreams...
Her desire inflamed
By passion and longing,
She reaches for the moon.
Chandidas says that she is caught
In the snare of Kaliya, the dark.
(Chandidas: Deben Bhattacharya)
The spotless being depicted holding a silver
conch in his left hand will not show his form
to me. He arrives through an underground
spring to liquefy my house's foundations,
to seep into the walls and overflow my heart:
pure torture. Warbling kohl-bird drunk on
honey from the twitching stamen of magnolia
blossoms, intercede to the lord of Venkata
on my behalf, murmur, get him to come.
(Andal: Ravi Shankar)
Entreaty
drunken clouds
bring
no message
from my love
frogs
peacocks
fever-birds
chatter
the cuckoo
sings
lightning flashes
in the dark
scared
I want him
the wind is
cool and musical
the clouds
are pouring rain
where are you
Hari
your absence
is venom
in my veins
(Mirabai: Rahul Soni)
Were I given a hundred thousand tongues instead of one
And the hundred thousand multiplied twenty-fold,
A hundred thousand times would I say, and say again,
The Lord of all the worlds in One.
That is the path that leads
These the steps that mount,
Ascend thus to the Lord's mansion
And with Him be joined in unison.
The sound of the songs of Heaven thrills
The like of us who crawl, but desire to fly.
O Nanak, His grace alone it is that fulfills,
The rest mere prattle, and a lie.
(Guru Nanak: Khushwant Singh)
Restless mind, don't infect the heart with fear.
That virus is not for you.
The Infinite knows what you hunger for.
Ask Him to carry you across.
And one day
Death shall arrive
to evict this squatter
from his fragile hut of bones
Then as the spirit
quivers, buckles,
collapses,
hurry, Goddess Abhirami-
you that are the primordial note
plucked by the strings of the veena
at the dawn of time
Hurry
with the soft clink
of braceleted wrists
Hurry
with your flock of handmaidens
of the sky
Hurry
extend a bejeweled hand
utter the words I need to hear
Reassure me, say, 'Do not fear.'
(Abhirami Bhattar: Arundhati Subramaniam)
This body that you're fussing over,
this body that you're dolling up,
this body that you're wearing to the party,
this body will end as ash.
(Lal Ded: Ranjit Hoskote)
Poets,
beware, your life is in danger:
the lord of gardens is a thief,
a cheat,
master of illusions;
he came to me,
a wizard with words,
sneaked into my body,
my breath,
with bystanders looking on
but seeing nothing,
he consumed me
life and limb,
and filled me,
made me over
into himself.
...
My lord
who lives in the city
of names
came here today
said he'd never leave
entered me
filled my heart
I've caught him
the big-bellied one
not content yet
with all that guzzling
on the sevenfold clouds
the seven seas
the seven mountains
and the world that holds them all
I've caught him
I contain him now
(Nammalvar: A.K. Ramanujan)
Brief reflections on reading Orhan Pamuk’s The Museum of Innocence
Orhan Pamuk’s The Museum of Innocence is an interesting piece of work that creatively uses the novel as a museum of stories. The novel itself which is scant on narrative but rich with life and insightful musings, spans across several years, sometimes a lifetime and even a generation. The story of Kemal who falls in love with a poor distant relation when he is already engaged to Sibel, follows one man’s obsession with love, loss and a lifetime of longing and yearning which finally result in his undoing. Yet, what in the eyes of society is a life wasted and ruined, is triumphantly countered in the end by Kemal’s assertion ‘Let everyone know I lived a very happy life.’
Through this novel, Pamuk delves upon the notion of happiness and in a strange way this happiness is so closely associated with innocence that the novel might as well have been called ‘The Museum of Happiness’ and it might not change the spirit in which the story has been told. Happiness for Pamuk is a retrospective feeling. One always realizes one was happy only when one looks back. Happiness in this sense, can never be lived in the present. And yet, when one looks back it is always through the prism of memory. Happiness and memory seem to be interlinked for Pamuk. The idea of the museum, is then a way of preserving memories through objects and their stories. These objects become portkeys (using a term from Rowling) to the past and one can re-live the emotions associated with them. The reason Kemal steals objects from the Keskin household is that he wants to preserve the time he has spent with Fusun and her family. A museum, Pamuk remarks, is the place where Time becomes Space. The objects are not only a way of preserving the past but of preserving a world into which one can escape. The museum of innocence that Kemal founds with his collection of objects through more than half a decade, create a world in which ‘the living can live with the dead.’
Pamuk interestingly uses the museum as a symbol of difference between the cultures of the East and the West. In the West, the concept of the museum is often associated with a collector’s pride in displaying his collection. In Istanbul, Kemal and other collectors like him are seen with disdain as their passions are regarded as an eccentricity that can only serve as negative examples to deter others. But Kemal decides to build a museum with the hope that he will be able to cope with the shame of collecting these objects throughout the years. It becomes a way of turning shame to a collector’s pride. It becomes an empowering act as he can finally put his story before the world.
Pamuk seems to be more of a feminist than has ever been acknowledged. In recounting the whole story from Kemal’s point of view, he reveals all the misogyny, chauvinism and hypocrisies of a privileged Istanbul male with a Western education. Through the specific male and highly biased perspective he also seems to reveal a lot more about the women characters than he would have been able to as an impersonal third person narrator. Pamuk’s women characters, both the modern Sibel and the traditional rebel Fusun are both stronger than Kemal who follows in the footsteps of his father in his obsessive love for a younger girl. While Kemal’s father wilts away his days in the memory of this girl, looking at her black and white photograph and drinking, Kemal’s story is also similar. The only thing different, as Vecihe, Kemal’s mother remarks, is that while Kemal’s father ‘did it’ quietly, Kemal’s story was fodder for gossip to everyone. One wonders how Vecihe, aware of her husband’s adultery, accepts it for the sake of keeping the family together in the eyes of the society and also still loves her husband. This is also seen in the way Kemal frequents the Keskin household in spite of Fusun being married to Feridun. Everyone knows of Kemal’s true intentions but everyone turns a blind eye and the situation becomes one in which a rich man comes to inquire about his beautiful, poor distant relation.
Fusun remains mysteriously unresolved as a character. We see her mostly through Kemal’s mind through the major part of the novel. In the beginning when Kemal has an affair with her, she is nothing more than ‘a girl who is taken advantage of.’ Kemal is perfectly happy having both, a mistress and a fiancée, at the same time. He even invites Fusun to the engagement party. His selfishness in wanting her to be close to him even as he cannot leave Sibel is likely to irk every female reader. He does not think of Fusun’s reputation or future. But in her resolute will to keep distance from Kemal and not encourage him when she is married, she becomes very much a woman of her own mind. She also punishes him by withholding from him that she found the earring he had left for her on his first visit to the Keskins after her marriage.
She never passionately proclaims her love for him, the way he always does. Her desire to become a film star and make something of her life is more important for her than a life of love. And in this desire we see her need for independence, a need that is thwarted by both Feridun and Kemal who prevent her from interacting with the ‘wretch’ of the film industry even though Fusun is clearly able to handle her share of anything in life. But it is perhaps this desperation, of not being able to achieve anything that she had wanted, of being ‘used’ by Kemal that ‘she could kill him’ and finally of not being able to hate him completely either that she deliberately rams the car to her death in an impulsive moment. Even in the moment of the crash, Kemal romanticizes the death of two lovers dying together. One wonders whether he has really ever understood Fusun. In spite of her tantrums and her moodiness, Fusun remains a character we empathize with, while Kemal although his suffering is strikingly poignant at times, remains in general ‘a sloshed lover’ who needs to be shaken out of his obsession and megalomaniac self-pity. Sibel as a character also commands admiration in the way she stays with Kemal in the hope of helping him out of his desperation. When she realizes her efforts are in vain, she has the courage to break off the engagement even as Kemal cannot. In the end, this monumental story about love, loss, innocence and happiness transcends its superficial love story of a jilted lover and comes alive in the details, in its nuances which contain the world and the human condition in its most vulnerable rawness.
Revisiting Ursula K. Le Guin’s Hugo-award winning science fiction novel The Left Hand of Darkness (1969)
The Left Hand of Darkness is a science fiction novel by Ursula K. Le Guin (1929-2018) that is breathtaking in terms of its world-building and deceptively simple given its slimness. Le Guin is a well-known name in the world of fantasy writing and children’s literature. Writing primarily in the 60s and 70s, she was one of the few women who wrote in a field largely dominated by mostly white men. Le Guin’s writings, especially The Left Hand of Darkness, which came out in the year of the Stonewall Riots, added a different perspective to existing literature. Most of all, it tackled larger human, social and philosophical questions through science, calling attention to an ideal of humanism, understood in its best sense, and of the need to rally beyond barriers of race, ethnicity and culture.
In The Left Hand of Darkness, an Envoy named Genly Ai from an advanced humanoid race is sent to the land of Karhide on a planet called Gethen to propose an intergalactic alliance with the Ekumen, a coalition that seeks to forge unity between the far flung planets of the universe and to unite them. In a land of political intrigue and vendetta, the astute and exiled Prime Minister of Karhide, Estraven is the only one who believes in Genly Ai’s cause and eventually dies for it after saving him and making an incredible journey across snow, mountain, forest and ice.
Each state in Gethen has evolved into its own society, politics, language and custom which the Envoy observes and analyses in an anthropological manner typical of Le Guin’s writing. Among these, one of the most striking aspects of Gethenian society, is the notion of gender understood by the term ‘kemmer.’
Gethenians are androgynous and ambisexual and become female across a cycle of 28 days at the end of which they go into ‘kemmer’, a few days in which they are sexually active while any partner in kemmer can conceive. This idea about cyclic gender was incredible for its time and had important implications. It envisaged a society in which continuous sexuality was no longer a norm which meant that a person could be on any point of a gender spectrum at any time. It also put forth the idea of ‘men’ sharing the reproductive labour of child-bearing and rearing so that gender was no longer one of the most prominent organising principles of a society. This reproductive serendipity is novel even for today’s times.
The study of the polis between Karhide and its rival state of Orgeryn run by a Commensal instead of a king, is another scintillating piece of writing. It traverses the gulf between a monarchy and communal governance touching upon notions such as Shifgrethor or personal prestige in Karhide to Orgeryn’s group conditioning and the boundaries between love for one’s motherland and nationalism as a political tool for power.
Amidst all this, Le Guin throws in mystical narratives about spiritual cults (inspired by her interest in Taoism), stories of origins about places, people and names from the points of views of different characters. There is also a breathless nightmarish account of the Envoy himself, describing his experiences to the Farm which eerily echo the treatment of Jews in concentration camps.
What is especially stunning is the journey that Estraven and Genly Ai take together, a journey that is both metaphorical and spiritual in order to meet halfway across their cultural differences and to forge a friendship and loyalty for a greater cause. The ecological descriptions of snow, forest, mountain and the terrain they traverse are vivid and detailed as is the empathy with which societies and polities are described.
While the novel is majestic in its sweep, it does have a few setbacks. The most striking of which is the representations of gender itself. Although we are reminded that Estraven is both a man and a woman, even in his/her mysterious elusiveness s/he appears largely ‘male’ both because of the travesty of language and of a template of femininity that has itself come into question in recent years. But The Left Hand of Darkness is a world by itself like most of Le Guin’s novels and seen in the context of its own time, it certainly spoke to a different age.
A write-up on Laurence Sterne’s landmark novel Tristram Shandy published in the eighteenth century and marked by digression, double entendre, problems of language and graphic devices.
Laurence Sterne’s ‘novel’ Tristram Shandy, born in the latter part of the eighteenth century, found itself in a waning tradition of biting satire of the kind earlier propagated by Pope and Swift. Although it is itself clearly a satire, through its meandering in and out of “scintillating wit and whimsical baffoonery” (Stedmond, 53), Tristram Shandy is nevertheless much more good-humoured than its predecessors. Even its profuse bawdy humour that presents itself almost naively throughout the novel, prompted Samuel Johnson to respond with “Nothing odd will do too long.”
And yet, two and a half centuries later, Tristram Shandy came to be widely regarded as the godfather of modernist literature. Sterne’s wild experimentation with form and voice was a radical departure from the orderly, structurally unified novels of the day, such as Fielding’s Tom Jones, and considerably ahead of its time. Sterne’s childhood was spent following his father’s army regiment around England and Ireland. This early experience of military life was to inspire some of his most memorable comic characters, including the war-game obsessed Uncle Toby and Corporal Trim. The satirical and stylistic influence of Rabelais and Cervantes can also be felt throughout Tristram Shandy, whilst the philosophy of John Locke informs one of the book’s key themes: the association of ideas.
The protagonist’s constant straying away from the story, if it could be called a story at all, switching back and forth in time, the smallest of trivialities or comical accidents triggering off the most outrageous fabrications, all contribute to render Tristram Shandy, a novel of digressions rather than of narrative. “Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine; – they are the life, the soul of reading! – take them out of this book, for instance,- you might as well take the book along with them” (50). And it is in this digression that the novel retains its uniqueness, a uniqueness upon which the author had long deliberated rather than stumbled upon. Thus although the author constantly laments having so much yet to write about, he still cannot check himself from straying into apparently irrelevant incidents. There is an implicit sense then, of the futility of recounting in the first place. This futility of communication seems to occur, not because of a lack of means but because the author takes on the impossible task of writing about his life while living it.
The central irony of the book is that the novel is being written more slowly than the life that is being lived, that while Tristram sits down to pen an incident, he nevertheless lives in a continuum of space and time and his experience keeps accumulating thus always adding to what he has to write.
Through this sort of hermeneutics, Sterne also seems to throw light on the complexity of human beings which are, like Tristram, brought into society by accident, or even through a process so mechanized and regulated that there is almost nothing human about it as suggested in the opening scenes with the winding of the clock. After being thus ejected into the world, human beings have to further undergo the trauma of baptism in order to exist and own an identity. It is Walter Shandy’s “magic bias” that will decide the character of his son through a name. But, Tristram is in fact a victim of several accidents, the biggest of which is probably his birth as not only is he mis-named and de-sexed in the novel, he appears, rather than the protagonist, more as a minor character or narrator whose voice is subordinated to the description of the other characters.
Tristram in the novel is in fact nothing more than a voice and yet it is Yorick that the author speaks through, deserting Tristram almost as cruelly as he does the other characters. The narration of the story is futile not because of the narrator’s continuous existence, but because of the characters in his world who are immune to him even in moments of severe crisis. This was the case when the maid and Dr Slop are trying to attend to Tristram after the window sash incident but fall to quarreling among themselves, leaving Tristram by the wayside. Everyone rides his hobby-horse and thus, not only is there no one to be part of the Tristam’s story, there is no one to listen to him as well. He is himself, like the rest of his characters, riding his own hobby horse of trying to recount a story that is never going to end.
This is where Sterne seems to equalize all his characters and allay a little bit of Tristram’s victimhood in a world in which everyone spins in his respective orbit but nevertheless in the gravitational field of the other. In a tower of Babel-like situation, everyone simultaneously talks about his own life and opinions in a desperate need to be understood and in the end, the confused hodgepodge of voices that is heard is not very different from the narrative chaos that undermines every attempt of Tristram to begin at the beginning. “Tristram Shandy is quintessentially a book about man’s attempt to give a reasonable and definitive form to his experience of the world-and about the inevitable tendency of experience to run counter to man’s formulations” (Briggs, 195).
Upon closer inspection, the narrator’s statements about narrating what he is doing and when he is doing it are seen as somehow “above or beyond the plot, as if these were outside the domain of the narrative proper- as if they existed as critical comments on narrative rather than as part of the narrative itself” (Williams, 1032). The narrator always freely shifts positions. He is self-reflexive in the way that he is aware that he is recounting his life ‘story’ and at the same time keep reminds us about it too. Unlike the self-effacing omniscient narrator, the self-conscious narrator of Tristram Shandy flaunts his whims and narrative agency to the reader. He can have a marbled page in the middle of the novel if he likes, he can have absurd patterns of asterisks or of any other typing symbol that he likes, he can even pretend the novel was suddenly a play and give stage directions to Garrick.
If he chooses, he can refrain from description altogether, then the reader might be at sea when it comes to certain events like the window sash circumcision: “It is in vain to leave this to the reader’s imagination” (377). This kind of narrator is then enormously powerful. Not only does he provide the narrative, but admits that he is as fallible as us, as ignorant. The reader’s interpretation is as biased as the narrator’s. There is no pretension of objectivity or reality. As the title itself spells out, the novel is not just about the life of Tristram Shandy, it is also about his opinions. Any act of narration is necessarily also interlinked with the act of sentience. To ‘be’ is necessarily tangled with the activity of explaining being.
In as much as Tristram may be considered as rhetor, the whole book consists of his “oration.” But this is the rhetoric of a “fool.” And it carries some interesting implications about Sterne’s conception of the nature of his audience. Like Swift in The Modest Proposal, he shocks the more squeamish members by reflecting upon their own underlying preconceptions. One kind of empty verbalism against which both Swift and Pope inveighed was the fulsome praise of the prospective patron. Sterne’s dedication of his first volume to Pitt is, significantly, not fulsome. Sterne was of course seeking a patron of a different kind-the reading public at large. He implicitly dedicates his book to them by titillating their tastes, while at the same time managing to satirize the human foibles involved in that taste. Thus, though dedicating his book to the “Lord Public,” he attempts to unseat that Lord from some of his “Hobby-Horses,” or at least to make him more aware of his “ruling passions.”
“With an ass,” Tristram says in his account of his travels in Volume VII, “I can commune forever.” Not so with jackdaws or apes, for they speak and act by rote. But with an ass, “surely never is my imagination so busy as in framing his responses from the etchings of his countenance-and where those carry me not deep enough-in flying from my own heart into his, and seeing what is natural for an ass to think-as well as a man, upon the occasion” (VII. xxxii.). The reader whose responses Tristram can gauge as accurately as he can those of an ass is one who will laugh at certain words in the bedchamber, but abuse them in the parlor. For his sake, Tristram must seek devices whereby he can “satisfy that ear which the reader chuses to lend me,” while not dissatisfying “the other which he keeps to himself” (VII. xx.).
Works Cited–
Briggs, Peter M. “Locke’s ‘Essay’ and the Tentativeness of ‘Tristram Shandy’.” Studies in Philology, Vol. 82, No. 4 (Autumn, 1985), pp. 493-520.
Stedmond, J. M. “Satire and Tristram Shandy.”Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, Vol. 1, No. 3, Restoration and Eighteenth Century,(Summer, 1961), Rice University, pp. 53-63.
Williams, Jeffery. “Narrative of Narrative (Tristram Shandy).”MLN, Vol. 105, No. 5, Comparative Literature (Dec., 1990), The Johns Hopkins University Press, pp. 1032-1045.
Krupa Shah 