Kayastha Pathshala

In India, and especially in Bengal and the hills of Nainital, Simla and Mussoorie and the capital of Delhi, there is a great degree of nostalgia that veers around our alma-maters. The colonial institutions with their European collonades, white-skinned Indophile teachers and their illustrous alumni become a reference point in our careers—right from getting a job to a wife. The more local institutions face neglect. While reading on the history of Allahabad, and while talking to a few UP-ites who have been taught by luminaries like Arvind Krishna Mehrotra and Durgananda Sinha, I stumbled upon this institution called the Kayastha Pathshala College. Founded in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, Kayastha Pathshala was, to begin with, a school. A leading lawyer of Oudh, Munshi Kali Prasad Kulbhaskar, had established the school in 1873. It was born out of a zeal to position the kayasthas on a platform equivalent to that of the Bramhins. Such was Kali Prasad’s zeal that when he died in 1886, he left his estate for the benefit of the Pathshala. In 1895, it became an intermediate college. One of its early principals was the great Bengal-Renaissance gentleman, Ramananda Chatterjee. Chatterjee was an alumnus of the St.Xavier’s College in Calcutta. He moved to Allahabad in 1895—the very year Kayastha Pathshala had become an intermediate college. Ramananda Chatterjee would later go on to establish the Modern Review—a magazine that operated out of Calcutta. One of his students at the college was Narmadeshwar Upadhyaya—a member of the bar of the Allahabad High Court. Narmadeshwar, a lawyer by profession, wrote almost Dickensian prose. One can sample his writing by picking up The Last Bungalow: writings on Allahabad (ed.) Arvind Krishna Mehrotra.
Perhaps the most well known student of the Kayastha Pathshala was Harivansh Rai Bachchan. (Bachchan did his PhD in English Literature from Cambridge University. His guide was T.R.Henn and his research was on W.B.Yeats.) In his autobiography, Bachchan writes—‘Education in the Kayastha Pathshala was not a matter of academic study: attention was paid to character building…’. Elsewhere he writes: “Moving from the Unchamandi School to the Kayastha Pathshala High School was like moving from a pigeon-coop into the open air…..there were expansive grass lawns and maidans to play on…and for each subject there were separate teachers who would come to class at the hour shown on the time table.”
Vande Materam was the assembly song in the Pathshala. It had established its credentials as a nationalist institute quite early. Sociologically, the kayasthas are an intermediate caste given to clerical and literary pursuits. This was a caste that was best equipped to negotiate with the English on issues of power through the subterfuge of co-operation. The mutineer's radicalism was fraught with problems caste and religion. In fact, western education came to the plains of northern India only after the mutiny of 1857 had been quelled, Oudh and Agra had been united under a single province that would be called the United Provinces. The Kayastha Pathshala and the trust that ran this great educational endeavour ensured that Northern India made the essential transition in its politics from the feudal to the bourgeoisie. The baniyas and the kayasthas joined hands in Allahabad and Lucknow (unlike in Bihar where they rarely inter-married) and the Agarwalas and the Sinhas and Saxenas took the Indian middle class of Northern India to be the rulers of post-independence India. In fact the Kayastha Pathshala was the breeding ground of bhadralok (genteel) intellectual-ism that survived outside ninteenth century Calcutta. I do not agree with the many western sociologists like Christophe Jafferlot and Susan Baily that the Kayastha Pathshala was a casteist ghetto that functioned within the larger circumference of Hindu revivalist aspirations. I believe that the individual geniuses of its faculty and alumni are easily missed if such an analysis is allowed to acquire precedence over the more romantic history that needs to be preserved. The kayasthas were nationalist Hindus and both in Lucknow and Allahabad they ran publishing houses, educational institutes and newspapers, wrote poetry, and taught generations to come—tehzeeb. Interestingly, in 1916 there was a deliberation for separate representation for Hindus and Muslims in the United Provinces. While the Kashmiri Bramhins, Tej Sapru and Motilal Nehru supported separate representation, Kayasthas from eastern part of the UP also supported the bill. While it is easy to dub the oppsers as communal (and Brijnandan Prasad, was indeed communal) it is difficult to understand why Gokul Prasad who was a trustee of the Kayastha Pathshala needed to vote against the bill. He did not fear Muslim majority in the bar—many of his clients must have been Mohameddans. He was a member of the Hindu Sabha but to the extent that a trader or a lawyer could be—it was a social group that reaped professional rewards. I have a feeling that he did not want to dispute the leader of the group and had hardly any significant stake in the debate.

The first president of the Kayastha Pathshala trust was Munshi Hanuman Prasad. Hanuman Prasad belonged to that generation of self-made men who reminded us of the Renaissance gentlemen of sixteenth century. He had given up his job at the court of the Maharajah of Beneras following his differences with the ruler. He came to Agra and became a lawyer. When the court was established in Allahabad in 1866, he moved to Allahabad. Hanuman Prasad, learnt English when he was forty-five! Gokul Prasad was his grandson. He was the last honorary Vice-Chancellor of Allahabad University and before that a towering judge of the Allahabad High Court. (It was difficult in those days for non-Europeans to rise so high and natives with extraordinary judisprudence were allowed such positions). Another illustrous member of the same family was Munshi Ambika Prasad, whose saintly demeanor is legend in the annals of the bar of the Allahabad High Court. Munshi Ambika Prasad also served as the President of Kayastha Pathshala.
I shall end my post by talking of one Dr Tara Chand, who was the principal of the Kayastha Pathshala College in the 1920s. Rajeshwar Dayal, who was an illustrous civil servant, a member of the family to which Ravi Dayal—the great publisher who first published Amitav Ghosh and had brought academic publishing to Indian shores as the managing director of Oxford University Press, India—belonged, and who most importantly was Dag Hammerskjold’s special representative to Congo on behalf of the United Nations was Tara Chand’s student at the Kayastha Pathshala. Dayal, with his upper class origins hated his Kaystha Pathshala. In his autobiography, A Life in our Times, he writes of his intermediate college: “There was an air of langour and neglect about everything”. Yet, as he survived his intermediate in science barely managing a second class and went on to study at the Kayastha Pathshala University College he seemed to love his alma mater. He writes: ‘Dr. Tara Chand had moved over to be the head of the college. The new college attracted good students and athletes and soon acquired a fine reputation.” Tara Chand had his D.Phill from Oxford. He was scholar par excellance. In his work called Influence of Islam in Indian Culture , this enthusiastic scholar and educationist writes: “Indian culture is synthetic in character. It comprehends ideas of different orders. …. It eternally seeks to find a unity for the heterogenous elements which make up its totality. At worst its attempts end up in a mechanical juxtaposition, at best they succeed in evolving an organic system.” Tara Chand, an early-twentieth-century scholar, had a rare insight.

Kayastha Pathshala intermediate college and university college along with The Pioneer, The Indian Press, and the Allahabad University laid the foundations of what was called the Oxford of the East—Allahabad. Yes, Allahabad is not just about the Nehrus and the Kumbh Mela (which is also a nineteenth century practice). It is also not so much about the Bachchans as it is about these instituions of learning and knowledge bearing.

Inspired by a friend’s chat line……..

Though leaves are many, the root is one;
Through all the lying days of my youth
I swayed my leaves and flowers in the sun;
Now I may wither into the truth.
William Butler Yeats

The poem is built around many binaries: many/one; leaves/root/; sway/wither; lying/truth.The central image is that of a flowering tree, with many leaves. But, it is also a fluid image—the tree changes from its full bloom ‘youth’ of ‘many’ flowers and leaves to a ‘withering’ state of ‘one’-ness. The speaker asserts that there is only one kind of truth and to reach that truth one needs to experience ‘withering’. We know that leaves wither and so do the flowers. The ‘tree’ as such has its identity from these embellishments. But, ‘death’ comes when the root withers. And, this is the irony or ambiguity that any reading of the poem must negotiate—how can the ‘truth’ symbolizing ‘root’, which is a source of nourishment for a tree, be associated with death or withering? The ‘self’ is defined by its many attributes—the professional and the personal. (the leaves help in photosynthesis and basic survival while the flowers carry out the reproductive responsibility). With age sets in withering. One no longer sways and one is no longer defined by the many. It is at this point that the poem runs out of correspondences. (tree-human: : leaves-professional attributes: : flowers-sexual/personal attributes: : youth-a tree in full bloom) What is the exact human correspondence of the ‘root’? The answer is a vague thing called ‘truth’—a term whose significance is cemented by invoking the ‘lying days of youth’. What was the lie? And, who was the liar? The expression—‘lying days of my youth’ is an adjectival phrase. ‘Lying’ is an act (and in a stand-alone situation it is a verb) but grammatically, it qualifies the noun, ‘days’ which belongs to another noun, ‘youth’. So, ‘truth’ stands against ‘the days of youth’ which are ‘lying’ in nature. Commonsense has it that ‘old age’ stands against ‘youth’. Hence, is ‘truth’ an equivalent of ‘old age’? But, epistemologically truth is the implicit state of knowledge when ‘lying’ flourishes. It is like the root that remains deep in the soil while the leaves and the flowers flourish. It is what sustains the plant, gaining nourishment from the soil. It is therefore that Yeats writes: ‘…the root is one;/Through all the lying days of my youth’. In fact, the normal grammatical syntax would be: ‘I swayed my leaves and flowers in the sun through all the lying days of my youth’. The inversion connects the ‘root’, as the singular and all-pervasive thing, via the connective ‘through’ to the ‘lying’ days. In old age one comes to realize that the ‘root’ was there all along and that one never paid attention to it. Then, one realizes the ‘truth’ which is the ‘root’ or the all pervasive-ness of the ‘root’. In other words, the ‘truth’ does not have the so-called human equivalent because there is no single truth that applies to all humanity. What sustains us and remains unseen even as it is within us unlike leaves and flowers that grow on us can be discovered only when one has withered and nears death. The image of the tree stands not to supply us with exact equivalents, but, as a process of arriving at the truth. The tree discovers its roots only as it nears its end. This tragedy becomes the message of the poem. The ‘tragedy’ like that of Macbeth’s is the delay of the arrival of truth.(Recall Macbeth’s final solliloquy where he claims that ‘life is a tale told by an idiot..’and then connect it to the witche’s prognosis—‘fair is foul and foul is fair’—that was made to him even before he set on his mayhem and progrom.) The reason why we are denied an exact human equivalent of the ‘root’ is because that is not the point of the poem. The point of the poem is in the pain of the discovery—‘Now I may wither into the truth’. The verb, ‘may’ conveys a sense of leisure at the speaker’s disposal. It also conveys the sense of permission. Life now permits the speaker his moment of discovery. But, the expression ‘wither into the truth’ underlies that the withering is a kind of a journey. The negativity is moderated by the assurance of the truth and its nourishing quality—the ‘root’. But, I refuse to accept that there is any sense of fulfilment. The nature of modernist truth is that it lies in a ‘heap of broken images’, in the poet ‘shoring his fragments’. One can arrive at the truth only by withering into it. The irony that one withers into a knowledge of the source of nourishment does not imply that there is redemption even as one approaches death. If a tree dies it cannot possibly ‘wither to the root’. What remains is the pain of ignorance and this pain is the ‘truth.’ In tragedy there is no redemption—there is only the re-cognition of pain. Therein lies the difference between ordinary morbidity and tragic anagnorisis. The greatness of this poem is that it enacts a tragedy in four lines.

Many thanks to Aakash for setting me on this train of thought and to my teacher Partho Mukherjee for having taught me the meaning of tragedy. And, thanks to my teacher, Suvro Chatterjee, for imploring me to write, again.

Dak Bungalow at Satoli

We hadn't slept well for three nights, our colleagues were partying at Goa, and the heat was slowly growing on us. Driving at night on a route that none had explored (I had crossed that on a bus, half asleep, twice) was not the greatest idea. But, Jai insisted that he would pull it off. Subramanyam and Uday from IBM expressed confidence and I sat beside Jai to keep him awake as lorries came rushing at us on a dusty, potholed highway(?). The strectch between Gajraula and Moradabad was dangerous. That is to say the least. It was also beautiful. We stopped at Rahi Masoom Reza's Adha Gaon--Gangoli. It was a full moon night and after a few spells of spring rains, it was nippy. The mango orchards were shrouded in white light, the Ganga flowed quietly as the remnants of a Ramnavami mela looked on. The car's stereo played Iqbal Bano's rendition of Faiz's Hum dekhenge, and Piyush Mishra's Yeh Duniya (Gulaal)
We reached Moradabad at around three in the morning. It was tea time. As steaming cups were emptied, we decided that we were not going via Kaladhungi and Nainital. We drove atraight to Rampur and from then on the road was a breeze. (By the way, the stretch between Delhi and Gajraula too is fantastic). Early in the morning, after some more tea at Haldwani, we crossed a small jungle. Pheasants flew past as a cold breeze hit us. We stopped to take the freshness in.
I went to the backseat as Uday came over to the front. I dozed off. The car screeched to a halt in front of a dazzling lake. Crisp sun and yellow leaves sparkled. Bhimtal. I had never seen it to be so beautiful. Boy, New England could now run a marathon for its reputation. We splashed the lake water on our face. And,we drove on. By the way, our destination is Satoli, near Mukteswar. We were to put up at Pradeep and Subha's place over there. They have leased a 1905 Class 1 dakbungalow (Indians and dogs not allowed kind)and run a homestay. Pradeep and Subha work for Aarohi--an NGO that works for education, livelihood, healthcare, and water supply over there. Started by Sushil and Una (Sushil is still alive; he is a doctor. But, Una Mansingh--his wife--has passed away. They had started working with Chirag which is an inititaive of Kanhaia Kishan Lal. Chirag works for solar energy and education. Kanhai Kishan lives in a splendid estate, a few miles above Satoli. His place is called Sitla. His is a huge place, with lovely cottages,and apple, plum, cherry and starwberry orchards that overlook a huge Himalayan range.) Aarohi is now Pradeep's baby as well.
After Bhimtal we reached Bhowali--the gateway of Kumaon. Here we took the longer and more picteresque road to Satoli. In other words we eschewed the Ramgarh route and travelled via Khairna. Ramgarh is also dotted with lovely cottages including one of a Bengali FRCS doctor. And, the roads--ain't they lovely. The river warbling by, the cascades from the hills and the road is perfect to a fault. Uday and Jai had an ale-break at Khairon. From Khairon, one road climbs up to Mukteswar while the other which is across a bridge, goes towards Almora and Kausani. After Khairon we drove for another thirty minutes and came to Subha and Pradeep's
Peora Dak Bungalow. What a view of Trishul, Nanda Devi, Pnachchulli and the rest!! Subha made us lovely Darjeeling tea and served some great lunch. We clicked our cameras. Then it was sleeping time. Our colleague Debjani-di had travelled almost on the same route to reach Ashish's resort at Sonapani--some 5 kilometres off Satoli. She phoned in the evening. Pradeep lit a bonfire in the garden and served Guranj wine, rum, vodka, and juices. All of it was on the house. In the evening, Subha made lovely tawa rotis and echorer dalna. We were also served potatoes with thyme and rosemary. A Kumaoni peda was our dessert. Next morning we had breakfast with pakoda's, homemade apricot jam, bread and eggs scrambled with mixed herbs. After that we went to Almora. Climbed up a mountain slope and rested amidst the pine trees. Admired Kumaoni girls as well. In the evening we went to see Debjani-di. She had come with her husband, a friend's family, and another friend who is single. The last one, Dwaipayan Bhattacharya, had a bad cold. Dwaipayan-da is a PhD from Cambridge, has taught for nine years at the JNU and now is a teacher at Partha Chatterjee's Centre Studies in Social Sciences. He is a political scientist! And, a great fun to be with. 'Bong' to the core, he is susceptible to catching a cold, intellectual conversations, jokes (with a hint of racism). He is great to look at and of course a leftist. The sky darkened and it looked ominous. Now, Ashish's resort is a good two kilometres downhill from the car-park. We had to climb a mud trail. There was no light. And, leopards aren't a myth. They are fond of dogs, and haven't ruled out humans for dinner. Well, supported by the torch of my cell phone we walked back. Sorry, we ran.
At dinner, Subha made some pullao. Pradeep told us tales o'th' hills. We slept on bay windows, and old fashioned beds. There is a fireplace in the room and the wooden arches are imposing. Next day Dwaipayan-da, Daman Singh and his wife and their dog, ruled out walking to Mukteswar. Debjani-di, her husband Sujan-da , and Jai insisted on the walk. I joined Dwaipayan-da and suggested that we walk from Corbett's home in Mukteswar to a rock face from where there is a seven and a half thousand feet drop to the valley. Castigated as cowardly Bongs and unSardarly Sardars we drove up to Mukteswar on an Innova. Much of Mukteswar is the property of the Indian Vetenirary Research Institute. There too we have a first class dakbungalow. It runs as a tea shop. We did walk up to the rock face. Debjani-di and Jai wanted to do rapelling. We dissuaded them. The equipment and the trainers looked spooky and amateurish. They settled for some firefoxing. Mad that they are!
We lunched at Ashis's resort. We were his guests. But, Jai and I never liked the place. Too pretentious and definetely not value for money.
At Pradeep's we spent our last night at Satoli. The snow mountains were under cloud cover. Subha served strawberries with cream. Pradeep showed us photographs of his son's visit. In the evening Ann Mukherjee had come from Sitla. We heard stories of this English lady who had married a Bengali ad-guru and was now a octogenerian widow. I told stories of my visit to Kishan Lal's estate. (This was when Jai and Debjani-di were climbing.) Stories of wind-chime, and tea-not-being-offered were told. Subbu and Uday had packed off from Almora--they had client meetings to attend. We missed those spirited souls.

Next morning we packed off with promises to return soon. I bought some herbs from Aarohi and have already tried hash browns with them. By the way, Subha makes lovely aloo-tikki burgers. If Macdonald's has put you off the burger try hers. You won't regret.
We drove downhill via Kaladhungi. The heat was unbearable. It seemed that Corbett was on fire. The riot of colours, the sun blazing down our neck...it was ghastly. And, the torture continues in myraid other forms. We are still driving downhill from that heaven of a place called Peora Dakbungalow.

To climb up-hill call Pradeep Gupta at 09719816154

Reading The Trouble with Harry

I recently got to see Hitchcock’s ‘pastoral’—The Trouble with Harry. Set in the fall, this film has the idyllic countryside of Vermont as its setting. But, it is dark and disturbing as we discover guilt, passion, ruthless and idiosyncratic law, foppery and elegance in a heady but well controlled mix. It is a re-telling of the myth of fall in an Eden-like world. It is also the repository of Quixotic humour. Finally, it is banal and candid and challenges every bit of old-world virtue.

The camera pans over a canvas as the credits are listed. It could well be the metaphor for the canvas of the artist in the film—Sam. The camera tracks across the stunning Vermont landscape before coming to a jolt as it focuses on the red blotch on the socks of dead Harry. We generally focus on the face of the corpse—Hitchcock’s aim is to shock with the unusual and he succeeds very well.
Sam’s art seldom sells and he couldn’t care less. The film itself bombed in the United States. Hitchcock makes his cameo appearance in the film when Sam’s prospective customer examines his paintings. The connection is that Sam is Hitchcock’s persona in the film. He connects all the characters, but he has nothing to ‘do’ with Harry. Sam is the ‘outsider’ in the film—the artist who objectively treats his subject but puts his passion in his craft or artistry. The film’s dénouement is achieved as Sam gives up his dispassionate pose and admits his subjective interest in the lives and fates of the characters. The point that Hitchcock makes is that artistic objectivity is dangerous and even in a funny and Quixotic way can compromise human society. Sam, makes a remark quite early in the film—he wishes to paint Jennifer Rogers nude. Nude painting is expected to reveal, objectively, the beauty of the human form. It is a slapstick remark by the standards of 1955 and runs contrary to the film’s New England landscape. The Edenic is challenged by the carnal as well as the human. The character of Sam reminds you of Rope where crime has no purpose and is secured by male-bonding of the most pathological sort. Women are slighted and family bonding demeaned. Murder is almost linked to art—hiding it cleverly is like the artist’s scheme of concealing artistry in his masterpiece. Here, in Trouble with Harry, objectivity is also portrayed as dangerous. Sam, in search of autumnal colours, bumps into the corpse of Harry. He sees it as a model for his ‘sketch’ (he later argues with the Deputy Sheriff over this point—he insists that what the cop calls a ‘painting’ is actually a ‘sketch’. This might seem funny but there is indeed a point to be made—Sam is pretending to be an objective artist when he has actually lost his objectivity as he is in love with Jennifer Rogers and wishes to marry her. This is a self-conscious joke that he brilliantly pulls off.) The sketch later becomes a piece of evidence that could incriminate the two couples. Sam, as already discussed, reverts back to his earlier self to avoid arrest. Objectivity is useful only in a scientist—the doctor is interested in diagnosing the cause of Harry’s death. He doesn’t care a whit more. This saves the couples. But, recall that when he bumps into the corpse twice he doesn’t even care to find out what he exactly bumps into as he is lost in reading Shakespeare’s sonnet 116. It is a sonnet which is ostensibly about love that is unrequited and yet claims to remain steadfast even as the beloved has moved when it ‘remover finds’. The steadfastness is evident and is towards art if not a human being. The ‘art’ in question is that of the sonnet. Yet, ‘art’ fails to teach him to recognize, instinctively, ‘death’—the very corollary of life. The film’s central irony lies in the fact that the objective artist/scientist, much like the film-maker, is instrumental in shaping its destiny. But, the film also critiques the objective pose and ridicules it. The doctor resolves a moral problem—it absolves a woman of the guilt of being a murderer. But, legally the characters had already got themselves in the clear. Physical evidence had been destroyed and tampered with great ingenuity. Law could do very little. In fact, the film condemns all sorts of coldness—Harry’s and the Sherriff’s as well. Harry, would have never have had to resort to the passionate excesses had he not been cold and indifferent to Jennifer in the first place.

Irony abounds in the film. Arnie, the son of Jennifer Rogers is a shrewd child who can bargain hard for muffins and a lot more. He will not part with the rabbit until he has had his muffins. He is the very antithesis of childhood innocence, the Biblical myth of the lamb that Blake uses in his Songs of Innocence. Arnie, and his confusion over the nomenclatures of time—‘tomorrow’ is his ‘yesterday’—becomes the alibi for the couples. Again, in the conniving camaraderie between the naval captain and the artist is the ironical partnership between the game-hunter whose pleasure lies in mindless poaching and the creative human being who seeks to eternalize life’s colours. The passion of the cold and heartless Harry brings trouble to the quiet Boston village while the artist’s sacrificing of his disinterested poise leads to its resolution. The only piece of art that Sam’s buyer misses out becomes the source of a great complexity in the plot. Sam’s artistic skill is important to the film not because he is a Picasso or a Dali, but because he uses it to save someone from charges of murder. The underlying message is that art is important only when it is linked to life. The price that Sam quotes for his work is actually social good. Hitchcock, comes up with a very socialist and Christian message even as he upholds artistic idiosyncrasy and independence.
Mistaken notions and identities give rise to the ironies in this film. Sam connives with Captain Wiles because Captain Wiles believes that he had killed Harry. Captain Wiles confides about his guilt to Ivy Gravely. Ivy herself believes that she had killed Harry as he tried to ‘rape’ her and she hit him with her shoe’s heel. To atone her guilt she invites Wiles to a coy date over muffins and tea. Had she not had this mistaken notion the couple would have never met and never fallen in love. The relationship between Jennifer and sam cements as Sam discusses Wily’s crime with her only to let Jennifer ‘confess’ hers. Crime breeds very strange but warm and beautiful love affairs. The greatest irony is of course that no one in this idyllic country is overtly disturbed by a murder. It is as if nothing has happened. Even as the people are comical in their attitude, it does remind one of the strange indifference in Rope. Again, the sharp and candid dialogue in this film is remarkable. It does not suit a pastoral romance at all. It approximates the frank banality of Frenzy and Vertigo. Hitchcock had this great habit of destabilizing established social myths. In Shadow of a Doubt—the myth of the happy American family is questioned by him. The treatment of pastoral love in this film is also similarly done. The final frame of the film reads—The trouble with Harry is over. It too is ironic in import. It could well mean that the film is over as it could that the ‘trouble’—the legal scare that the death had caused is over.

We must remember that so many people had so easily acknowledged that they had killed Harry because they had no idea as to what it takes to murder someone. They lived in a village far removed from practical cares. They could confess murder over cups of tea. The film is all about discovering what ‘crime’ is and what it takes to cover it up. In other words, the narrative traces the journey of four human beings through a discovery of what crime and criminal action is. They have hidden bodies, told lies, tampered with evidence, created alibi and manipulated witnesses—all are classic steps that a seasoned criminal would take when he commits a murder. The irony is that all this becomes a mock drill. Harry, after all, died of a heart attack.

Recently, given the responsibility of commissioning a textbook on the history of modern Europe (covering, roughly, the period between the French Revolution and the end of the Second World War) , I decided to spruce up my reading of the subject. I had to meet authors who had degrees from Ivy League universities and I couldn’t afford to prove myself to be a dud. Well, I did read a little and found out something interesting. Napoleon was, apart from being ambitious, a rather caustic character. His view of liberty, for one, is entertaining: ‘Liberty is a need felt by a small class of people whom nature has endowed with nobler minds than the mass of men. Consequently, it may be repressed with impunity. Equality, on the other hand, pleases the masses.’ Elsewhere he muses: ‘Liberty means a good civil code. The only thing modern nations car for is property’1
The point is that even the ‘Declaration of the Rights of Man’ made by the post-revolution French National Assembly declared that ‘…social distinctions may be based only upon general usefulness’. It does not define ‘general usefulness’ but did admit in the seventeenth declaration that ‘property is a sacred and inviolable right’. Interestingly enough very few of us know that simultaneous to the declaration of the Rights of Man there was a Declaration of the Rights of Woman. Anyone interested in knowing about this can pick up and read The French Revolution and Human Rights: A Brief Documentary History, ed. Lynn Hunt (New York: Bedford Books, 1996), pp 124-129. I found it more radical and passionate than most of the bull shit that a literature student encounters in his post-grad classes.


The Versailles Peace Treaty, we all know, sowed the seeds of the Second War. But, few care to read it. While the treaty put the entire blame of the war on Germany, extracting costs from it for all damages, it did little to blame greedy and lousy nations like Britain. It declared—‘Germany renounces in favour of the Principal Allied and Associated Powers all her rights and titles over her oversea possessions’. It gave Germany fifteen years to ruin itself sufficiently. After that, it promised to withdraw. However, it also declared that child labour needs to be abolished and that ‘labour should not be regarded merely as a commodity or article of commerce’. It accepted ‘The right of association for all lawful purposes by the employed as well as the by the employers.’ Lenin, we know, did not think much of the First World War and Soviet Union did not participate in it. (This disappointed a socialist called Mussolini greatly and turned him into what we know he was.) He decried this war as a capitalists’ war scourging for colonial booty. However, this declaration already shows the effect of the Russian Revolution: it acknowledges labour rights and concludes that—‘Each state should have due regard to the equitable economic treatment of all workers.’ The League of Nations did not respect it, the Great depression was inevitable. So was the Second World War, the fall of Churchill and the British Empire.


I can go on with my litany. The point is that the study of history in our country is lacking in that it disregards research and reading of historical documents and sources. It emphasizes rote learning and trusting secondary opinion as holy-speak. Thus, we grow up with half-baked ideas and politically biased summaries. I do not speak of obscure sources or pedantic thesis. Read, the freely available ones and know for yourself.

Rocket Science

The enmity between India and Pakistan is at a new high: nice time to have a cricket match—advertising will earn lots of money and beat recession. On the other hand, the press which has had nothing to report but lay-offs has increased readership. War stories and cries sell like hot pancakes on cold Christmas days. So, this war-mongering is good. It will also cause fears of scarcity and shoot prices up. There will be collateral damages like the Bengal famine, and Hiroshima. But, we will tide over recession via cricket matches and war-on-television. Mad mullahs versus an economist will be fantastic! The latter’s daughters do plenty of weird things like history teaching in India and civil liberties in America (she dares not do the same in India—no one wants an embarrassed daddy!). They’d get first hand experience on how parts of India become archaeological curios and civil liberty disasters.

Recently, my teacher and I walked into an eatery on Lodhi road in Delhi. A sales guy couldn’t spell ‘black forest’. We were bemused. But, the nation isn’t. We mourn job losses of ‘executives’ in retails. What would they have done if they didn’t have these jobs in the first place? Or what prompted entrepreneurs to employ these people? There was a surge in demand and quality had to be compromised to meet it. This is a simple answer that does not make me happy. I feel that the idea was to open up stores and staff them with uneducated and cheap labour. The idea is to not just make lots of money but to keep the bottom line fat. So, when demands fall my revenue dips but my margins continue to remain healthy. I invest less and make less money but I’m not in the red. My marginal cost and marginal revenue continue to be equal. In other words, I am still maximizing profits. This continues till my cost cutting makes me dysfunctional or till marginal cost and revenue both become zero. On the other hand this example makes us understand that all the employees in the information industry were uneducated too. Naryanamurthy, himself acknowledges that. In an interview he says--: I have no doubt at all that free trade is extremely important for poor countries to create more and more jobs. When we talk of free trade, it is free trade not just in India, it is free trade in G7 countries, free trade in G15, free trade all over. The key question we have to ask is what does a country have to offer, and what does a country have to sell in the global market? The moment we have something that we produce better than anybody else at the most competitive price in the global market, as long as there is free trade, then that country can sell those products in the global market, obtain global currency, and then import the best product at the best prices to fulfil its other needs. So free trade is good; there is no doubt at all.

But the assumption is that every country has something to offer in the global marketplace. Unless I have something to offer in the global marketplace, then free trade is not good for me, and I will blame others who believe in free trade. So the question that every doubting country has to address on a very urgent basis is: Have we something to offer the world at the best price? Have we something of the best quality at the best price? And that is a much more difficult question to answer rather than saying that free trade is bad for the world. But free trade is not bad for the world at all.

... At different points of time in different sections of the economy, different sectors of the industry, different countries will have competition at one thing. At one point in time China had computers; Japan had computers and radios. Even today, for example, when I go home I have a General Electric fridge, I open [it] and then I see Pepsi. I see so many of these things. My computers in this company, for example, we import $50 million worth of technology from the U.S. every year. The point is simply this. Indian computer manufacturers, Indian soft drink manufacturers will say, "Why do you drink Pepsi?" or "Why do you buy computers from outside India?" India must have some strength in certain products. United States today has the best strength in terms of computer technology, and everybody will buy the U.S. technology, but that's the best technology at the best prices. The question that we have to ask is what is it that I can bring to the global market at the best price, something that is considered the best in the world? That's the only way it works.1

The point is that in India we are very good at producing cheap labour. We still do not make great computers, fridges, or even colas. We produce graduates who know enough to sell their labour cheaply but not sufficient to claim first-world wages. So, all those who face lay-offs need to remember that their education is not indispensable. What can be duplicated easily and had at lower rates is definitely not high-quality specialized stuff. Rocket scientists are made of sterner stuff.


References

1 http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/commandingheights/shared/minitextlo/int_narayanamurthy.html#1

Premchand’s Ramlila and Joyce’s Araby: A Comparative Reading

Joyce’s Araby foregrounds, via the medium of the short fiction, a kind of psychological insight and use of symbolism that would soon become the genre’s mainstay. Storytelling, after Dubliners, would be more mimetic, symbolic (bringing to use classical myth as subtext), and less likely to discussing events in someone’s life. Direct narration of events would be replaced by dense psychological moments. (Like the description of a boy, love struck and lonely, clasping his hands and probably genitals, listening to the sound of rain drops pattering on the grass outside his room and he feels that they are like needles impinging on his skin and senses.) Few years later, the technique would be taken to a greater height of complexity by T S Eliot in The Wasteland. Cultural and psychological space would become like the cursed and barren kingdom of the Fisher king in the Arthurian legend: the mad poet in search of shanti would be described as ‘shoring his fragments against the ruins’.

Premchand, rooted and committed to social reality of the villages and small towns of his era, could explore psychological complexities through a way of narration that is less symbolic and more direct; he would use a style that would not make us question the authenticity of the ‘dramatized narrator’ (an expression lent to us by Wayne C Booth in his classic The Rhetoric of Fiction) as we are expected to when we read Araby. In Ramlila, for instance, as we progress with the story, we are told that the narrator does not think much of the Ramlila festival in Kashi for the one in his village was as colourful and more fun. Soon, we discover that the disenchantment is born out of nostalgia as he is now a retired man who has been pensioned off. He has fathered sons and worked to feed and get them married. In Araby, the boy is never seen to grow old. His disillusioned narrative, full of Biblical symbols that re-tell the story of Genesis and the Quest of the Holy Grail in a misogynistic fashion, constantly overlaps youthful romantic exasperation with a matured man’s sense of decadence that pervades his atmosphere. Expressions like ‘my foolish blood’ co-exist with ‘her name was like a prayer to my lips’.

Yet, Ramlila like Araby tells the story of growing up and disillusionment; both use the motif of the religious festival where evil triumphs over good and tell us how the festival becomes the occasion of epiphanic revelation of reality that subverts the cultural memory of mythical heroism and goodness. If the young boy in Araby journeys to the occidental fair imagining himself to be the Arthurian knight in search of the Grail; Premchand’s narrator enjoys his proximity to the mythical hero Ram. The father in Ramlila would find his counterpart in the drunken uncle of Araby who turns out to be a spoilsport and also a representative of a decadent gerontocracy. If Araby has been read as a precursor to Joyce’s classic bildungsroman Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the first-person narrator in Ramlila, much like Premchand lives in Beneras. The flirtatious women in Araby could be read as the counterpart of the tawaif in Premchand’s story.

The richness of Premchand’s story comes from its economy of style, its spare use of symbolism and yet the deep and subtle psychological ramifications that it brings out. Recall, that the story had begun with a sense of fondness for the Ramlila festivities in his village; he even privileges it over the more glossy and glitzy events of Kashi, that is, Beneras. The story ends with the narrator in tears, a mellow satisfaction of seeing off a friend with a couple of annas as fare for the road. The disillusionment has not been the expected one: that the mythical hero Ram turned out to be penurious or that he did not recognize his friend during the brief moment of glory as Ram. It came from the action of his father who could pay gold coins to a courtesan and not an artist who had entertained the spiritual needs of a whole community. He says, Us din se pitaji par se meri shraddha uth gayi. His respect for his father was lost on that very day. The perversity of a feudal lord, a government employee, and a businessman is placed against the innocent love and admiration that the narrator has for a friend and artist. While the older men respond to sexual gestures, the narrator is aroused by the sheer power of performance. But, what contributes to the complexity of this apparently simple story of growing-up is the way such a bitter memory is overpowered by fond nostalgia for the same experience.Discovering hatred for ones father cannot be explained away by merely citing Freudian theory; it is too strong an emotion to forget. If Ramlila has been the source of such strong and bitter emotions, one needs to understand the reason for renewed attachment to it. The fact that he has been a father himself is not explanation enough. I believe that there was something more enduring in the festival itself that has lingered on and more strongly than the sentiments of resentment.

There were two celebrations on the fateful day. One was the Ramlila itself. The other one was dance of the courtesan. The second led to a denial of the first. Let us work out a schema—Ramlila: Innocence::Nautch:Experience::Good:Evil::Son:Father. The triumph of Ram over the evil Ravana that the Ramlila symbolically conveys is denied by the commercial and carnal interests of the Chaudhary and the father of the narrator. (In fact the triumvirate of the Chaudhary, the Daroga and the Baniya, that silences the actor, carries the Marxist symbolism of the feudal, the bureaucratic, and the businessman working in cohorts against the proletarian artist. In Araby Irish politics is nonexistent. Here is probably the major difference between the modernist in South-Asia and in the West.) The act of giving a couple of annas to the actor, who played the role of Ram and earned money for the feudal-patron, is an attempt to fight for the mythical-hero and also the friend. This is what the Ramlila of childhood offered: a chance to be Ram. It is a role played in silence and oblivion but a role that the ‘real-Rama’ acknowledges. It fills his eyes with tears and heart with satisfaction—Unhe vida karke lauta, to meri ankhein sajal thi; par hriday anand se ubhra huwa tha. As he has moved on in life, Ramlila has acquired more colour and more glitz. Yet, here, he can never be friends with Ram; he can never win over the Ravana, even if that meant that the villain was his own father. Therein lay his pleasure and the source of all his fond nostalgia. Premchand invests in the narrator’s entry into puberty (when defying the father-figure is common) with social and cultural values. This is what distinguishes man from monkey; the artist from the munshi.