Father Returning Home: Dilip Chitre

Bijay Kant Dubey

My father travels on the late evening train

Standing among silent commuters in the yellow light

Suburbs slide past his unseeing eyes

His shirt and pants are soggy and his black raincoat

Stained with mud and his bag stuffed with books

Is falling apart. His eyes dimmed by age

fade homeward through the humid monsoon night.

Now I can see him getting off the train

Like a word dropped from a long sentence.

He hurries across the length of the grey platform,

Crosses the railway line, enters the lane,

His chappals are sticky with mud, but he hurries onward.

Home again, I see him drinking weak tea,

Eating a stale chapati, reading a book.

He goes into the toilet to contemplate

Man's estrangement from a man-made world.

Coming out he trembles at the sink,

The cold water running over his brown hands,

A few droplets cling to the greying hairs on his wrists.

His sullen children have often refused to share

Jokes and secrets with him. He will now go to sleep

Listening to the static on the radio, dreaming

Of his ancestors and grandchildren, thinking

Of nomads entering a subcontinent through a narrow pass. 

Father Returning Home as an autobiographical poem by Dilip Chitre brings in the memory of his father tarvelling home, returning back to from the workplace just as a daily commuter leaving for in the morning and coming back to during the night-time. Through the image of his father, the poet actually wants to reflect upon the time-spirit, our society and culture. How the conventions, trends and traditions, norms and nomenclature change in due course of time and are in a flux? The image of a father waiting to board, alighting from, coming home with a bag, going to, on the platform, in the train, hurrying down, are the images and pictures of daily commuters, daily passengers which we often come across. His thoughts and ideas are those of a commuter swapping in between the home and the workplace. The modern times are hard times and to sustain under such is not an easy job.

Father Returning Home by Dilip Chitre is a picture of a father boarding the train to reach the workplace and returning from at night by the late night-time train which is but his routined affair, day-to-day business, he going in the morning and returning from after the work. So, as a result of that very coming and going, he often remains away from the home leaving it all. Even when he comes, who cares for whom? The family members remain busy with their own activities. The poor father has all that to do and to attend do. When he leaves, he is but a lonely and when he comes, he is but a lonely man. What there in the life of a daily commuter? Life spends as thus in commuting in between, shuttling between the home and the office. When he boards the train for the return journey, one among the commuters he stands in the compartment lit with the yellow light burning dimly, suburbs slide past and he unaware of it all lost into the thoughts of his. With a bag full of books, he alights from the train on the platform during the monsoon night. His clothes have wet a bit. The black raincoat and the chappals too are stained with mud. But apart from crossing the grey platform, the railway lines, he takes to the lane to lead to and to reach home.

Father Returning Home by Dilip Chitre is a picture of a father going to the workplace and returning back to as a commuter commuting daily which is but modern life, the compulsions of it difficult to be denied. The poem is not merely the picture of Chitre's father, but everybody's father. It is a specialty of the poet he can turn the commonplace things into a beautiful topic of deliberation. The humdrum and nuances of daily life seconded by a queer monotony punctuate this modern urban life of ours as some sort alienation and exile, angst and bewilderment have already a sway over us in this way or that way. The course of life too is not the same. Things keep changing, taking an unexpected turn in this age of displacement and dislocation and we are bound to be as we are helpless on this point. A commuter's life-style cannot be fixed. Today here, tomorrow where? Life runs keeping in view time, distance, routine, workload and distance. Father in the train boarding and going, returning back, standing in the midst of the commuters and the yellow lights burning dimly, the train stopping and he alighting from, hurrying down, crossing the railway line to be back home, these are the pictures of life which but a daily commuter can say and feel about. 

There is so much to mean it here as well as so much left to our conjecture. His getting off from the train is like a word dropped from a sentence. There is none concerned with his getting down, dropping down from the train with so many bogies and so many people dropping and getting down. In the crowds, who to care for whom? 

The opening lines of the poem tell of the things connected with the life of a commuter commuting in between the office and the house which is but taxation:

My father travels on the late evening train

Standing among silent commuters in the yellow light

Suburbs slide past his unseeing eyes

How have we got dislocated and disconnected? Apart from the description, there is something of our family system too in it. How do we pretend? How pragmatic and pontifical is our social hierarchy? Such a thing used to be in practice in our older joint family systems too. The aged and the old used to live in the outside adjacent bungalows. But it is difficult to be an ascetic, a hermit. The Vanprastha withdrawing from the world and handing over of the responsibilities to the younger ones may be also the talk of the discussion.

The shirt and pants of his father are wet and soggy, the black raincoat stained with mud and the bag stuffed with books. Let us see him:

His shirt and pants are soggy and his black raincoat

Stained with mud and his bag stuffed with books

The below-quoted two lines from the poem tells of the change in situation as for father retuning home, a word dropped from a sentence:

Now I can see him getting off the train

Like a word dropped from a long sentence.

Is the toilet the place of meditation and reflection for the modern man? Man’s estrangement from the man-made world is the thing of discussion herein. How much estranged has he become from life and the world? Man-made world has the limitations of its own. 

He goes into the toilet to contemplate

Man's estrangement from a man-made world.

Father Returning Home is a picture of a father returning home just as a commuter leaving the station in the morning and coming back by the night and similar is the story of his which but he paints and pictures in this poem; is an image sketched and drawn in words reflecting on this come and go of modern life and living. When to share with him? What care has he got from? He comes as a loner and returns back to the workplace as a loner loning on the ways of life. Our modern life too has become so busy and fast that there is no time to see anyone. We too have become so much self-centred.

A father's picture recollected by a son, seen from far just as a man going as a wayfarer, traveller, passer-by; a pedestrian, commuter and in this shuttling in between the house and the workplace which but is the order of the day, modern life and living life will pass away as thus.

His children refuse to share the hearty talks with him, the sullen children of his the jokes and secrets with him. How much have we undergone? The modern life is so centred that we have no time to take and share with.

His sullen children have often refused to share

Jokes and secrets with him.

An old man, what has he to share with; a commuter, what has he left with to enjoy in a company if his daily routine of life is otherwise? Listening to the radio, dreaming of  his ancestors, thinking of the way through which the Aryans made an entry into India, he sleeps down.

He will now go to sleep

Listening to the static on the radio, dreaming

Of his ancestors and grandchildren, thinking

Of nomads entering a subcontinent through a narrow pass.

The title is just and appropriate as far as the description and the narrative are concerned. The poet describes not only the coming and going of his father, but of everybody whosever is a commuter split in between the workplace and the house. The other thing too is this that our attitude to the old too has been pragmatic. In the modern age the situation has worsened and we need to build the old age homes to rehabilitate them as for the changing scenario.

Poetry: An Indian Perspective

What Is Poetry? The Origin And Development of Poetry, How To Write It Modern Poetry? (An Indian Perspective)

By: Bijay Kant Dubey

                                  

Poetry, what is poetry, how to define it? What it forms the crux of it? How the base? Several things conjure upon the mind’s plane while taking it deeply, deliberating upon the topic under discussion. Poetry is emotions and feelings of the heart presented in a lyrical manner. Poetry is the language of signs and symbols, sounds and melodies, motifs and beliefs. It is a medium of expression and the writers try to express thoughts and ideas. One of the seven arts, poetry has an appeal of own, taking sculpture, architecture, painting, song, dance and drama. But what is not poetry? Where has poetry been not? What there not in poetry? Poetry is inclusive of all, images, pictures, thoughts, ideas, beliefs, motifs, myths, symbols and all. The things have not changed though we like to call it modern, modernist, post-modern and contemporary in the modern times. What to construct, what to deconstruct? What colonial, what post-colonial? Poetry is not restricted to any ism or boundary and the writer can derive from whatever he likes to draw from history, art, culture, life, philosophy, economics, political science, classics, science, technology, theory and politics. Can poems be not tributes to? The topics may relate to Lincoln, Washington, Burke, Gandhi, Brezhnev, Gorbachev, Nehru, Bose, Churchill and others; may to Goethe, Tolstoy, Max Muller, Emerson, Whitman, Kant, Schiller, Schopenhauer and so on. Gandhi and Gandhism, Bose Studies, Nehru Studies, Tagore Studies, Oriental Studies, Indology, Sanskrit Studies, Peace Studies, Constituent Assembly Debates, these too may form the crux of the write-ups. Martyrs and patriots, nationalists and freedom fighters may also influence the poets as such Bhagat Singh, Chandrasekhar, Rajguru, Uddham Singh, Khudiram Bose. The lives and biographies of Patel, Azad, Prasad, Radhakrishnan, Kalam to Vajpayee may be topics. India has not been built only by the politicians, but the architects, economists, business magnets and tycoons too have modernized it. If somebody takes up Jamsetji Tata, his biography in poetry, it too can be a subject. Aldous Huxley’s visit to Bose Institute, Calcutta and Benares, Rudyard Kipling’s Hindustani pidgin-English and references to Mowgli and Bagheera, George Orwell’s birth and house in Bihar’s East Champaran, Allen Ginsberg’s recuperation and experiences, George Harrison’s Krishna movement and so on.  A poem can be about the Indian jugglers of William Hazlitt, Orwell’s house, Yeats’ writing of Introduction to Tagore’s Gitanjali.  Homi Jehangir Bhaba’s death in a plane crash too has a story of own shrouded in mystery. Atal Bihari Vajpayee seeing the testing of atomic blasts and the men behind with their brains at Pokhran accelerating the Buddha smiling programme of Raja Ramana is no less dramatic. The story is no less than a drama enacted in the desert. The naming of the missiles, as Prithvi, Agni, Trishul, Akash, BrahMos to Sudarshan Chakra to Rudra to the making of Aryabhata satellite has a relevance and connotation of own.

A poem can about the Indian kings and the cheetahs extinct, the deer parks, hanumans swinging, red-mouthed monkeys loitering in the temple complex, black bears, porcupines, golden jackals, blue birds, owls, woodpeckers, swans, egrets, herons, house sparrows, kites, hawks, vultures, golden orioles, green parrots. A poem can about the showmen, the bandarwallahs, bhaluwallahs, saperas, monkey-men, bear-men, snake-charmers. The washer man’s abandoned ass or the racing horses dying in harness can be the topic. The Indian jugglers juggling with balls and hats, the magicians with their hocus-pocus and the tantricas in sadhna too have drawn our attention over the years. A poem can be about the wayward, shunted and abandoned racing horses of Philip Larkin as well as can about Rana Pratap Singh’s Chetak.

The philosophy of poetry, how to say about? The philosophy of poetry, the poetry of philosophy, how to analyze it? Which came it first, sound or sign? The break of the sound with the creation of the universe, how to narrate it?  The alphabet of poesy, how did it take a shape? Every subject has but a philosophy, the philosophy of physics, the philosophy of chemistry. Where do the theories of physics lead to ultimately, fusions and fissions? Atoms for peace or for dropping bombs? What does chemistry about compounds and reactions? How much pesticides should we use? What the philosophy of philosophy?   The philosophy of economics lies it in planning and management and that of political science in administration. Does physics end up in existentialism, nothingness, a sort of vacuum, jyotirvidya, astrology and astronomy from where has it started? How to divide time into cosmic time and mechanical time? What about the Big Bang Theory, the creation of the universe, what about matter, mass? The philosophy of mathematics lies it in calculation and counting, exactness and appropriation with the calendar to determine and fix through reasoning and fact. The philosophy of medical science is to prescribe medicine and to cure, to serve sick and ailing humanity after diagnosing and prescribing remedies. The philosophy of biology is to study life-cycles and animals. The philosophy of botany is to study plants and woods for ecological and environmental purposes, greenery and existence. The philosophy of geography lies it in cartography and mapping, demography and weather readings, climatology and meteorology, geology and oceanography. The philosophy of information technology lies it in supplying instruments and appliances, sending of messages through technological tools as soon as possible.

What can we do with poetry? Can poetry give at all? Had the cemented houses been not, could we have preserved books? Had the watch, the radio, the cycle, the motorcycle, the bus, the train, the plane been not, could we have been? Had the schools, colleges, offices, hospitals been not? The modern age is an age of science and technology, knowledge and wisdom, fact and fiction, logic and reasoning, information and data, statistics and planning, time and distance, tour and travel. Had the modern things been not, could we have been modern? Had we been superstitions and blind to, could we have been? Modern life and living have changed our life-style and living standards. The impact of science on society we cannot negate it, nor can deny what not has it given.  With the expectancy of life lengthened, hope of living emboldened we have to go a long way diminishing ailment and sickness. The train lines connecting the far ends, the ships with the cargoes, the planes with passengers, what to say about? The world has shrunken. The mountains, seas, deserts and plateaus, woodlands, moorlands and marshes pose no threats. Today’s age is the age of smart phones and selfies, jazz bands and rock music; today’s age is an age of Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, WhatsApp, Messenger and Google Search. How to save ecology and environment?

In this age of dislocation and displacement, angst and bewilderment, decolonization and de-construction, sick and hurry and divided times, kar lo duniya muthi mei, take the world in the palm when we have reached the frontiers of information technology with global poetry? Vasudheva kutumbakam not, the whole world is a global village. Where do you want go? Ukraine, Czechoslovakia, Rumania, Hungary, Germany, Norway, Denmark, Bulgaria, Poland, Austria, the flights are almost ready take to. You should have just money in the pocket. In this age of the beats and Beatles, what to write about? How to give support to the addicted generation? How to save them from alcohols, narcotics and spirits? Hippie culture and bohemian life cannot give everlasting joys. How to save them from drugs?

A poem can be about the Bamiyan Buddhas, the fall of the Bamiyan Buddhas, Buddhas under threat, the  Talibans to shell and explode, dynamite and break with axes, hammers and rifles; a poem can be about the World Trade Center attacks and it falling like the cards, people running for cover and escape, dark clouds looming large over during the terrorist take over and crash-landing over the complex. A poem can be about Pope John Paul II and his endurance, Sathya Sai Baba of Puttaparthi and his aura of light. A poem can be about the Cambodian Zens. One may take Zhao Ziyang the former premier of the People’s Republic of China who had been sympathetic to the pro-democracy demonstrators of the 1989  Tiananmen Square protests.  The Chernobyl nuclear disaster, Bhopal gas tragedy, Iran-Iraq wars, Mars expedition, Florida deluge, etc. too can be the things of our deliberation. The penguins of Antarctica coming closer to the explorers, geologists and scientists on expedition may also entice someone to write on. It depends on mind to mind, heart to heart as to how to scribble and jot down the feelings so different from man to man and so the situations of life. Books too act as memories and reflections to be made. The selling of the wife in a fit of drunkenness in Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge accounts for the fall of the mayor when the news leaks out later for the activity committed earlier in his life. Such a thing keeps it happening all around. The drunkards often do such a thing after being addicted to bottles, mortgaging the things, breaking and setting house on fire, beating his wife and children. King Jong-un the Supreme Leader of North Korea shaking hands with Donald Trump is definitely a meet to be taken if one wants for a better world and better understanding. The death of Savita Halappanavar unable to undergo child related operations in catholic Ireland may be another topic. Religious orthodox all the time does not go in our favour. The world has greatest fears from the fanatics, the conservative people, the most orthodox and conventional people blind to thought and idea. We cannot think that man can be as such, so much madly under. Faith does not teach us to be inhuman and unkind. The modern world needs the charitable, philanthropic people, the virtuous and righteous ones rather than the uncouth men, rugged fellows. A mural of Savita Halappanavar outside the Bernard Shaw Pub in Portobello, Dublin says it all that about medical misadventure and the stricter laws relating to pregnancy terminations. We think how can we be so cruel and callous?

Poems can be written about marigolds, dahlias, poppies, pansies, dahlias, chrysanthemums, calendulas, petunias, asters, salvias, musk roses, daisies, lilies, orchids, carnations, freesias, hyacinths, daffodils, sunflowers. Indian kaminis, gandarajas, seulis, raatranis, juhis, champas and chamelis are no less than. The heavily-scented rajanigandha grassy sticks fragrance the nights. The lotuses white and pink and the lily red, white and bluish are no less. The naked leafless palash trees with the clusters of blooms and the simul trees with the big and bulging red booms strike the hearts. And what more to say about the gulmohars flaming red in the month of May? The beautiful violet-colour jaruls blooming can outwit with its beauty and shine beating the heat. Tecoma stans flower bunches with clusters beautifully decorate a landscape extraordinarily and here beauty lies it in the eye of the beholder. To quote it in the words of Keats, Beauty is truth, truth beauty. So are the poems of D.H.Lawrence about Bavarian gentians, lilies, pansies and bougainvilleas.

The peepul tree under which Siddhartha got his enlightenment, the banyan tree connected with Savitri and Satyavan, the rudraksha with Lord Shiva, the rishi with the trifala churna, haritika, bahra and awla wild herbal fruit paste dry mixture lengthening the elixir of life, how to allude to? India of dhams, ashramas, mathas; India villagerly and religious and what it adds to is this that havanas, holy fires kept the environment clean and free.

If the flowers can be poems, the objects of light, joy and pleasure and sight-seeing so beautiful, so true and so good, so divine, what to say about poetry? Poetry is just a representation of what we see, what we perceive, what we feel and think about. One of the fine arts, it is but satyam sivam sundaram. The terracotta temples, small-small, old-old made centuries ago from lime clay and small baked bricks with the baked plates with figurines, images, myth and mythology and folklore inscribed upon representing Raslila, Krishnalila and Ramlila, episodes from the Ramayana and the Mahabharata are really stupendous, no less than poetry and this is but mural poetry communicating through pictures, images and figures, symbols and signs and deserve merit side by side poetry.

Poetry lyrical, romantic, religious, spiritual, metaphysical, satiric, humorous, comical, epigrammatic, imagistic, photographic, linguistical, surreal, realistic; poetry modern, modernistic, post-modern, colonial, post-colonial. Poetry white, black, Dalit, non-Dalit; poetry feministic; poetry un-poetical and commonly, conversational, broken stanzas put forward for our reading. The types of poetry, schools and isms of it, aesthetic or didactic are based on taste and time-bars. Though poetry has nothing to do with black and white words, but Black poetry has no doubt a consciousness of own apart from its lacunae and drawback. So is Dalit poetry, of the Dalits, by the Dalits, for the Dalits. Eklavya’s poetry, let Eklavya write and we wonder what sort of teacher was it Dronacharya? Was he biased, prejudiced or not? The pains of Mira we have not felt them; the pains of Radha, Draupadi, Uma, Sati, Savitri. Who were Hidimbi, Surpanakha, Putana? Ethnic or Aryan characters? Was Ravana not a scholar, a Shiva-bhakta? The pain of Kabirdas, the son of a Brahmin widow thrown off, but reared by the Muslim weavers and the great shisya of Guru Ramanand, who has but felt it lying by the bathing ghats of Benaras he got the mantra from, the Ram-nama mantra as the feet of the guru touched his body and automatically the words came out, Rama-nama, oh, Rama! Adi Shanakaracharya saw, got a darshana of Shiva going as a kangal, poor destitute boy with a dog in his tryst with the Divine in a kangal rupa. Bhartrihari’s breaking of infatuation for his Queen Pingla and the infidelity met in turned into a bairagi, a great renouncer. Nagarjuna’s theory of nothingness, nihilism still keeps doing the rounds.

How to write modern poetry, in the modern times? What should be its topics and how to? Where to turn to and what to incorporate in? Should it be about history, art and culture, local and global, national or transgressing national boundaries international? Poetry ethnic, national, tribal, countrified or cosmopolitan, global, international? A poet of the woods, forest tracts, greenery and vegetation or one of rampant urbanization, concretization, deforestation and arid waste lands, of garbage heaps and vats? A scenery bereft of imagery, vegetation and greenery we are living today in a town, a city full so hustle-bustle, humdrum and monotony. The mega cities, metropolitan towns and cities, gala shopping malls, colourful theatres and with bus terminuses, parks, hotels, night clubs, airports, bar-cum-restaurants and routes for drives have engaged us otherwise giving special comforts as well as making so luxurious that often heed we not the basic needs and values of life, the matters related to our existence, what we ought to have and what not? Where are we going to, going to? Have you thought about it? Have we at least? The addicts on the roads roaming unattended and uncared for, without food, without medicine, is the reality to be marked. Where is the young generation going to from cigarette, ganja, bhang, tari (palm juice), handia (stale rice local liqour), tobacco, heroin, opium, brown sugar to wine, pleasureable song and dance in drunkenness? Who to look after the old men? The need to build old man houses is the thing of the day. How to rehabilitate them, the addicts and the old? Poetry aesthetic adding to joy and pleasure or didactic with a moral purpose, how to choose in between, should it be for values and ideals or should it be for pleasure sake?

Poetry as song sung and written by Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, poetry as music composed by Beethoven, Mozart, poetry as picture by Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, Sandro Botticelli, Pablo Picasso, Vincent van Gogh, poetry as sculpture by Michelangelo, Auguste Rodin, poetry as dance by Michael Jackson, Anna Pavlova, poetry as drama by Shakespeare, Bernard Shaw. Even if we live in India, how can negate the influences and impacts of Goethe, Bertolt Brecht, Emerson, Whitman? Many a thing we know it not. Who built the Howrah Bridge? How was Bombay in the initial stages? Had the schools, colleges, railways, ships, trams, telephones, offices, police stations, hospitals, radios, cinema halls, theatres, cycles, motorcycles, buses, cars, aeroplanes, electric lamp posts, roads, dams, bridges, machines, tools and appliances been not, could we have been modern? Had the televisions, mobile phone handsets with the GPRS facility, over bridges, flyovers, management schools, business establishments, highways been not, could we have been post-modern? The world has developed, progressed with new technology and its application and has shrunken into a globe merely.

During the British period, the Europeans had a tougher time in dealing with cholera, black fever, typhoid, tuberculosis, malaria, small pox and so on which but the dilapidating cholera wards, T.B. sanatoriums tell of themselves what they did, what they did not. We the Indians were but a fatalistic, inactive people believing in karma-dharma, papa-punya unnecessarily. But fate is it not all. Astrologers and palmists are not always the true people, but are thugs of some sort if to feel it sometimes. One can change the lines of fate through one’s karma, action. Even now we cannot tell about the rock-built temples of ours who built them and when the Konark Sun-temple, Jagannath Puri-temple, Khandagiri caves? Regional histories we know them not, just go on believing the historians blindly. What more can we say about the mahouts, elephant trainers? What more can we say about the languages of ours? Nothing lies it written, history of towns, cities, capitals, people, languages, events and happenings. Everything what it has come down to us is folklore and mythology shrouded in mystery. Caste, creed, custom, sect, belief, faith, food, attire, dialect, behavior, norm, nomenclature, geography, climate kept us divided for so long in the absence of proper understanding and reading.

The monstrous Sati system we have not forgotten it, the inhuman treatment and torture subjected to widows, the child marriage unaware of everything happening around the female baby, the immature girl child, the killing of the bride for dowry, the purdah system and is it all that has marauded our self for a long time in the absence of clear reasoning and logic, education and light. Under the ghumta the woman has shied from uttering the name of her husband. Poverty in the midst of plenty, unity in diversity, had been the dicta of our identity.  Today Sabrimala is disturbing us. Poetry is poetry, everything that you write about lyrically, in a poetical mood of your reflection. Can the life of Kadambari Devi be not drawn in words? She was the source of inspiration behind Rabindranath Tagore. Annapurna Devi, Indian surbahar player of Hindustani classical music and the daughter of Allauddin Khan of Maihar Gharana had been more talented than Pandit Ravi Shankar. A poem can be written as a tribute to her commemorating her excellence, musical melodies rippling through the sitar. Let us think of the day when Prince Siddharth would have left Yasodhara and Rahul sleeping, stepping out of the palace as for enlightenment. The pain of Mrinalini Devi, the wife of Sri Aurobindo, who could have known?

India the land of sadhus and fakiras, Rama and Krishna, Hare Rama, Hare Krishna, the Krishnites and Krishna movements, Krishna consciousness, the Beats and the Beatles coming to; of transcendental meditation even influencing Emerson, Whitman, Thoreau. The Cchou Dance representing Kali, Durga, Laxmi, Saraswati and so on through masks, dialogues, plays, music and dance keeping us spell-bound is really enjoyable. The terracotta temples made from lime clay and small bricks with the terracotta plates really take the canvas from. Where Telang Swami, where the great hatha yogi, O Asi ghat, Dashashwamedh ghat, O Vedavyas Ashrama at Hanuman ghat of Benares, say you, say you about the great saint!

Chanakya the Indian diplomat can be the topic of a poem dealing with polity and diplomacy. One may poetize the biographies or museums of Raja Ram Mohan Roy, Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar, Mahadev Govind Ranande, Lala Lajpat Rai, Dadabhai Naoroji. The Parsi view of life with the doongar-varis and the vultures sitting sideways of the tops initiate us. Jain Tirthankaras too motivate us with their Jainism and the Jainistic view of life. Buddha and Buddhism with Buddhistic Studies can tempt us for a reading taking to Sikkim, Mizoram, Arunachal to Bhutan, Tibet, Myanmar, China, Mongolia and beyond. How did the Mongolian, Thai, Cambodian, Japanese, Tibetan, Chinese, Siberian Buddhist artisans and artistes make the Buddhas cast in gold, copper, pewter, stone, clay? A poem can be about the great biologist J.B.S.Haldane and his life who domiciled in India, served it and died here. It can about King Ranjitsinhji and his art of playing cricket with English cricketers of his day. A poem can be about Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, Khan Abdul Gaffar Khan Frontier Gandhi, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel. A poem can be about the opening of Gandhian Studies department in foreign by great Gandhian scholars and disciples. It can be about Rajendra Prasad or Satchidananda Sinha. One may take up R.R.Diwakar. R.G.Bhandarkar, what more do we know about? If we turn over the pages of Constituent Assembly Debates, we shall come to find it that the chosen representatives are no less than Pt.Nehru or Rajendra Prasad, really a galaxy of illuminating stars.

We made the rock-built temples but knew it not who built them, who those architects, builders and sculptors were? Can we say it even now? We talk of the elephants of kings, but can we ever say about the mahouts, the great mahouts of India, the horse-trainers, camel-riders? What more do we know about or hagiography, historiography, museumlogy? Everything is but anonymous. We have not preserves our manuscripts too. Say, what have we done? History is silent all about that. What have we done for the cheetahs, lions, tigers, porcupines, stags, yaks and rhinoceros? Oh, India running by Ram-bharose! Just in the name of Rama, by the grace of Rama and we the people of Rama inactive, illogical, superstitious, blind, impractical, unreasonable, fatalistic which kept us held century after century deploring our condition! Only classical punditism cannot take us far if we seem to be pontifical, hypocritical and pragmatic and Machiavellian. Those who crossed over the seven seas were socially boycotted when came they from, but the same Brahmins and the same mentality other Indians  when afflicted with typhoid, black fever and tuberculosis shied not from being treated by European doctors.

In this modern age of global marketing, cosmopolitanism and technological revolution when nothing seems to be impossible, what to say about and how to take to poetry when this materialistic advancement comes seconded with environmental pollution, ecological disaster, global warming and climate change threatening our existence which we are least concerned with waiting to reap the dire consequences for the loot and spoil of our greenery? An earth bereft of greenery, vegetation, hills, rivers, lakes, plateaus, deserts, passes, falls, brooks, ravines, marshes, mountains, glaciers, woods, bushes, how will it, will it look to? Just like a barren land, arid and sterile, a waste land it will turn into devoid of vegetation and fertility if keep we negating the environmental hazards unmindful of moratoriums and obnoxious waste heaps and litters. Save tree, save life; Save life, safe drive; Keep the environment clean; Green earth, green life; The world one big family, the messages to be forwarded.

Dilip Chitre’s “The Felling of The Banyan Tree”

Dilip Chitre's “The Felling of The Banyan Tree” (An Appreciation)

By: Bijay Kant Dubey

“The Felling of The Banyan Tree,” by Dilip Chitre, is a poem of the cutting of a centuries old mythical banyan tree, shifting from Baroda to Bombay, leaving behind the memories and remembrances connected with the old paternal ancestral house where he grew up and passed his days even though the scenes and sights appeared to be more familiar and related to personally.

Soon after the decision the site gets cleared off bearing the brunt of destruction and devastation, wiping out the familiar images. The poet through this poem indirectly talks about the clearing of forests, changing ecology and environment while on the other rampant urbanization, concretisation and the mad craze for job and employment. What are we doing after all? Where are we going to? None thinks about, none cares for. Mythically, we take it the banyan tree connected with Savitri and Satyavan and the peepul tree with Goutam Buddha. But without referring to, the poet says to that the cutting of the green trees does not go in our favour as they are good for many purposes and are connected with our life and existence. Trees shade us from heat and direct sun rays falling on and oxygen as well as fruits to eat. It takes time in growing, but to cut it is so easy.

If seen from a different angle, it is an eco-centric poem predicting environmental hazards and green house effects and their bearing upon man.

The father of the poet orders the tenants of the rented houses on fare to vacate them as for the structures to be demolished and the land to be cleared forth and thereafter the woodcutters start cutting the trees and clearing the landscape, the spot, but to clear it all of a sudden not so easy as it takes time in establishing something and so the time in deserting it. To create something is difficult but to destroy is easier than. The cutters start cutting the trees one by one and the labourers working upon to demolish the structures one by one. Even going against the words of the grandmother that the trees are sacred, do not cut them as has been said by the patriarchs and saints alike, the sheoga, the oudumber and the neem trees are felled. But the huge banyan tree stands still just like a problem whose roots deeper than our life. Even after being unmindful of all that, the trees are massacred. The sole remnant house too tumbles and goes away crumbling and crashing down.

The banyan tree is three times bigger than the house, so huge, tall, mighty and sturdy with the scraggy aerial roots hanging all around, shady and bird-nested. With a fifty feet circumference trunk, the banyan is not so easy to tumble it down. The cutters first start cutting the branches and the twigs from the thirty feet above canopy. With the stroke of the axe, the chopper falling, birds start leaving the nests in wonder and astonishment as for being dismantled soon with so much hullabaloo and commotion and pandemonium. Clearing and cutting the branches and aerial roots, they begin sawing them and the place turns into a heap of the logs giving a peculiar look as the landscape takes a queer turn, wearing a strange look, difficult to be recognized and to be familiar with.

Finally, they come down to the trunk, the bust to clear forth and take time in chopping it, striking at the root to cut into, crack and tumble it down. Some fifty men are engaged in doing it. The great tree some two hundred years old with the rings within the circumference lies it fallen, saying it all about this waste land of ours, arid and sterile, modern landscape and scenery bereft of greenery and vegetation. The poet together with others see the slaughter and desertion and feel the plight in horror spellbound and speechlessly what it has taken place, what it has befallen. Soon afterwards they pack up the things and leave for Bombay for better prospects where there are but skyscrapers and congested flats, where there trees are not, where the spring comes it not with flowers, where man remains concerned only with jobs mechanically.

Gandhi for the Post-Truth Age

For Original click the link below:

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/10/22/gandhi-for-the-post-truth-age?mbid=social_facebook

Gandhi for the Post-Truth Age

The icon’s legacy is no longer secure, but he anticipated much about our current political moment.

By Pankaj Mishra

Inequality, Gandhi believed, left Western democracies open to totalitarianism.

In 2015, in South Africa, where Mohandas Gandhi lived from 1893 to 1914, a statue of him was defaced by protesters. The following year, the University of Ghana agreed to remove Gandhi’s statue from its campus, after an online campaign with the (misspelled) hashtag #Ghandimustfall charged the Indian leader with racism against black Africans. Compared with other recent targets of political iconoclasts—stalwarts of the Confederacy and Cecil Rhodes—Gandhi seems an unlikely symbol of racial arrogance. Nelson Mandela claimed that Gandhi’s tactics offered “the best hope for future race relations”; Martin Luther King, Jr., held Gandhi up as a model; decades before that, black activists such as Adam Clayton Powell, Sr., and Benjamin Mays were enthralled by the phenomenon of an Indian leading people of color in the campaign against British colonialism in India. Yet Gandhi’s legacy is no longer secure even in his own country. The Indian Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, cites V. D. Savarkar, a far-right Hindu supremacist who was accused of involvement in Gandhi’s assassination, in 1948, as his ideological mentor. A portrait of Savarkar, who loathed Gandhi for being too soft on minorities, hangs in the Indian Parliament building.

Even some left-leaning writers have recently argued that Gandhi must fall. In “The South African Gandhi” (2015), Ashwin Desai and Goolam Vahed depict him as a pro-British lawyer, who worked within the country’s white-supremacist politics to promote his Indian compatriots at the expense of black South Africans. In “The Doctor and the Saint,” Arundhati Roy indicts Gandhi for his failure to unequivocally condemn the Hindu caste system, calling him a “Saint of the Status-Quo.” The Marxist critic Perry Anderson, in his scathing account of Indian nationalism, “The Indian Ideology” (2012), charges that Gandhi’s “intellectual development” was “arrested by intense religious belief.”

Some of these reassessments may have been provoked by the halo surrounding Gandhi, which has shone brightly ever since Richard Attenborough’s Oscar-winning bio-pic, in 1982. It was only then that bumper-sticker homilies Gandhi never uttered—“Be the change you wish to see in the world”—were attributed to him. (Donald Trump tweeted one of these fake quotes during his Presidential campaign, in 2016: “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”) As Gandhi disappeared into T-shirts and Apple advertisements, it was easy to forget that this big-eared, cuddly icon of popular culture responded to an unprecedentedly violent and unstable period in human history, beginning with the intensification of imperialism and globalization in the late nineteenth century and continuing through two world wars. “Politics encircle us today like the coil of a snake from which one cannot get out, no matter how much one tries,” Gandhi once said. “I wish therefore to wrestle with the snake.” His prolific writings in that turbulent era inspired thinkers as disparate as W. E. B. Du Bois and Reinhold Niebuhr.

Today, Gandhi’s political thought resonates again. In recent years, many scholars have asserted that he has much to say about the issues that make our present moment so volatile: inequality, resentment, the rise of demagoguery, and the breakdown of democratic governance. In several pioneering books and articles, the Indian thinker Ashis Nandy has presented Gandhi as boldly confronting the “hyper-masculine” political culture of his time, which sanctified “institutionalized violence and ruthless social Darwinism.” Writers such as Ajay Skaria, Shruti Kapila, Uday S. Mehta, Karuna Mantena, and Faisal Devji present a radical figure, who, diverging from the dominant ideologies of liberalism, nationalism, and Marxism, insisted on the need for self-transformation, moral persuasion, and sacrifice. The origins of Gandhi’s world view in Europe’s fin-de-siècle culture are also becoming clearer: Leela Gandhi persuasively links her great-grandfather’s outlook to an antimaterialist tradition that flourished in late-nineteenth-century Britain. She sees him as refashioning democracy, in opposition to a widespread striving for the will to power, into a “spiritual regimen of imperfectionism.”

“Gandhi: The Years That Changed the World, 1914-1948” (Knopf), the second and concluding volume of Ramachandra Guha’s biography, offers a more conventional account. It covers the most widely known part of Gandhi’s life—the four decades, following his South African sojourn, when he emerged as the leader of the Indian freedom movement. Known as the Mahatma (an honorific meaning “great soul”), he became famous worldwide as a practitioner of nonviolent resistance.

Guha’s previous volume established how Gandhi, born in 1869 into a family of senior administrators in the princely states of Western India, went to Britain at the age of nineteen, to train as a lawyer—the first time he had travelled outside his home region. Afterward, in South Africa, working as a lawyer and a community organizer for the country’s Indian population, he lived in near-total isolation from events in British-ruled India, absorbed by his readings in the Bible, Ruskin, and Tolstoy and his experiments in vegetarianism, meditation, and celibacy. Guha claims that Gandhi, in the first four decades of his life, “may never have spoken to a single Indian peasant or worker (or landlord or moneylender) living or working in India.”

The second volume of Guha’s biography, more than a thousand pages long, begins with an account of how Gandhi, returning to India at the age of forty-five, set about familiarizing himself with his country’s realities, especially its great mass of poor people. Initially, Gandhi hoped to work for political reform as a loyal subject of the British Empire. Once he was exposed to the brutal facts of British rule—most notably, the massacre of nearly four hundred unarmed civilians in the city of Amritsar, in 1919—Gandhi turned resolutely anti-imperialist. In 1920, he launched his first nonviolent campaign against the British, and within a few years he had transformed the Indian National Congress, hitherto a party of upper-class Indians, into a vigorous mass movement. In 1930, he achieved international fame with the Salt March, a protest against a British-imposed tax on salt, which catalyzed civil-disobedience campaigns across the nation.

Four years later, however, Gandhi resigned from the Congress, unhappy with its inability to embrace nonviolence not merely as a politically expedient tactic but as a fundamental duty. From then on, he returned only briefly to active politics, most strikingly in 1942, as the head of an anti-British uprising called the Quit India movement. In the last decade and a half of his life, he preferred to focus on building India “from the bottom up”: he fought against the social practice of untouchability; devised methods of pedagogy and sanitation for rural Indians; and promoted spinning, weaving, and other handicrafts as a superior alternative to top-down modernization in a country largely populated by peasants. A day before he was murdered, Guha writes, Gandhi asserted that “the Congress should be disbanded,” since it had “outlived its use.” Far-right Hindu supremacists had always scorned Gandhi for his rejection of conventional politics; they conspired to assassinate him just as he was trying to calm murderous passions partly incited by them.

Guha’s previous volume maintained, in the face of much accumulating evidence, that Gandhi, in his years in South Africa, was “among apartheid’s first opponents.” It would have been more accurate to say that the young and callow Gandhi failed to recognize the necessity of a broader struggle against racial-ethnic supremacism; in 1906, he volunteered as a stretcher-bearer with British forces as they savagely crushed a Zulu uprising. The new volume likewise shows Guha to be admirably industrious in examining multiple archives, and diligent in his mastery of the arcana of Indian politics, but a bit languid in his analyses. Gandhi appears in his account as a symbol of India’s imperilled secular nationalism, whose “ideas on religious pluralism and interfaith harmony speak directly to the world we live and labour in.” This bland do-gooder has little of the “sublime madness” that Niebuhr identified in the man who wrestled with the snake of politics.

Arguing that Gandhi’s stock should rise, Guha writes that he “is still relevant on account of the method of social protest he pioneered.” This is undoubtedly true, attested by the ubiquity of boycotts, strikes, collective vigils, and other techniques that Gandhi pioneered, or practiced, with world-historical results. Activists fighting for the environment, for refugees’ and immigrants’ rights, and against racial discrimination and violence continue to be inspired by satyagraha, Gandhi’s neologism meaning nonviolent direct action. The aim of satyagraha was to arouse the conscience of oppressors and invigorate their victims with a sense of moral agency. Gandhi’s unique mode of defiance, Niebuhr observed as early as 1932, not only works to “rob the opponent of the moral conceit by which he identifies his interests with the peace and order of society.” It also purges the victim’s resentment of the “egoistic element,” producing a purer “vehicle of justice.”

Certainly, Gandhi, the resourceful activist, the impresario of nonviolent resistance, cannot be expunged from history as briskly as his statues. But there is also a case, which Guha does not make, for seeing Gandhi as far more intellectually ingenious. In “The Impossible Indian” (2012), Faisal Devji, the most stimulating of recent writers on Gandhian thought, calls him “one of the great political thinkers of our times”—an assessment not cancelled out by the stringent account of Gandhi’s fads, follies, and absurdities frequently offered by his critics. Far from being a paragon of virtue, the Mahatma remained until his death a restless work in progress. Prone to committing what he called “Himalayan blunders,” he did not lose his capacity to learn from them, and to enlist his opponents in his search for a mutually satisfactory truth.

Satyagraha, literally translated as “holding fast to truth,” obliged protesters to “always keep an open mind and be ever ready to find that what we believed to be truth was, after all, untruth.” Gandhi recognized early on that societies with diverse populations inhabit a post-truth age. “We will never all think alike and we shall always see truth in fragments and from different angles of vision,” he wrote. And even Gandhi’s harshest detractors do not deny that he steadfastly defended, and eventually sacrificed his life for, many values under assault today—fellow-feeling for the weak, and solidarity and sympathy between people of different nations, religions, and races.

No one would be less surprised than Gandhi by neo-Fascist upsurges in what he called “nominal” Western democracies, which in his view were merely better at concealing their foundations of violence and exploitation than explicitly Fascist nations were. He thought that democracy in the West was “clearly an impossibility so long as the wide gulf between the rich and the hungry millions persists,” and as long as legislators act like a “prostitute”—his infamous term for the British Parliament—and voters “take their cue from their newspapers which are often dishonest.”

True democracy, or swaraj, involved much more participation from citizens, he believed; it required them to combine self-rule with self-restraint, politics with ethics. Turning his back on his middle-class origins, he brought millions of peasants into political life. To him, the age of democracy—“this age of awakening of the poorest of the poor”—was a cause for celebration, and he conceived of democracy as something that “gives the weak the same chance as the strong,” in which “inequalities based on possession and non-possession, colour, race, creed or sex vanish.”

People in the West, Gandhi argued, merely “imagine they have a voice in their own government”; instead, they were “being exploited by the ruling class or caste under the sacred name of democracy.” Moreover, a regime in which “the weakest go to the wall” and a “few capitalist owners” thrive “cannot be sustained except by violence, veiled if not open.” This is why, Gandhi predicted, even “the states that are today nominally democratic” are likely to “become frankly totalitarian.”

Many other anti-colonial activists and thinkers also saw Fascism and imperialism as “the two faces” of a “decaying capitalism,” in the words of Jawaharlal Nehru, Gandhi’s close associate and India’s first Prime Minister. Gandhi’s critique of Western-style politics, however, extended to its underpinnings of political and economic liberalism, and its central assumption: that material progress and industrial expansion could continue without devastating political and environmental consequences.

“Industrialism,” he argued in 1931, “depends entirely on your capacity to exploit, on foreign markets being open to you, and on the absence of competitors.” But intensified competition from Asian and African countries could change everything, he warned presciently, decades before the rise of China and India as capitalist economies plunged once powerful nations of the West into irreversible economic decline and political crisis. Unlike Nehru and many post-colonial leaders, Gandhi derived no satisfaction from the prospect of heavily centralized Asian and African states industrializing and catching up with their Western overlords. He calculated early on the environmental costs of industrial progress by populous countries: in 1928, he wrote, “If an entire nation of 300 millions”—India’s population at the time—“took to similar economic exploitation, it would strip the world bare like locusts.”

For these reasons and others, Gandhi thought that it was not enough to demand liberation from “exploitation and degradation,” as socialists tended to do. In 1925, in an article titled “What of the West?,” he argued that those who wished to “shun the evils of capital” would have to do nothing less than wholly “revise the view point of capital,” achieving an outlook in which “the multiplicity of material wants will not be the aim of life.” Indeed, Gandhi’s critique of modern civilization hinged on what he saw as its refusal to recognize limits. To a civilization shaped by unappeasable human will and ambition Gandhi counterposed a civilization organized around self-limitation and ethical conduct. “We shall cease to think of getting what we can, but we shall decline to receive what all cannot get,” he wrote. “The only real, dignified, human doctrine is the greatest good of all, and this can only be achieved by uttermost self-sacrifice.”

Gandhi baffled many of his colleagues in addition to his enemies, as Guha relates. His unabashed invocation of quasi-religious values in politics and his key value of self-sacrifice are also likely to disconcert many readers today. Such assertions as “Just as one must learn the art of killing in the training for violence, so one must learn the art of dying in the training for non-violence” set him in stark opposition to the utility-maximizing premises of Western political economy. But Gandhi’s radically different conception of the human being, and its relationship with others, gives his ideas an inner coherence. Asked in 1947 by the director-general of unesco to contribute to the then new and growing discourse surrounding human rights, Gandhi retorted that he had “learnt from my illiterate but wise mother that all rights to be deserved and preserved came from duty well done. . . . The very right to live accrues to us only when we do the duty of citizenship of the world.”

At every point, Gandhi still upends modern assumptions, insisting on the primacy of self-sacrifice over self-interest, individual obligations over individual rights, renunciation over consumption, and dying over killing. What were the sources of Gandhi’s relentlessly counterintuitive thought, and what makes it resonate in our time?

Gandhi’s devout Hinduism, his vow of celibacy, and his penchant for wearing a loincloth and spinning cotton made him seem like an Indian mendicant—“a fakir of a type well known in the east,” in Winston Churchill’s contemptuous judgment. In fact, Gandhi, a devoted reader of the Bible, was, as Pope John Paul II once said, “much more of a Christian than many people who say they are Christians,” and the deepest influences on him were largely European and American. Immersed in an Anglo-American countercultural tradition, he counted Emerson, Thoreau, and John Ruskin as his gurus, borrowing from Ruskin the notion of the dignity of manual labor. His emphasis on duty came from Giuseppe Mazzini. Gandhi closely read the gay socialist Edward Carpenter, who stressed the ethical and spiritual dimension of democracy while distrusting its institutional apparatus, especially the centralized bureaucratic state. Living in South Africa, Gandhi corresponded with Tolstoy, who called him his “spiritual heir.” Guha described in his first volume how the Catholic writer G. K. Chesterton helped inspire Gandhi’s main contribution to political theory, “Hind Swaraj” (1909). Gandhi absorbed many ideas osmotically during an era when a range of artists and thinkers, from William Morris to D. H. Lawrence, deplored the condition of human beings in industrial production and their entrapment in the cash nexus, and emphasized interdependence over individualism.

Tim Rogan’s book, “The Moral Economists: R. H. Tawney, Karl Polanyi, E. P. Thompson, and the Critique of Capitalism” (2017), ably reconstructs the first extensive crisis of liberalism, during which Gandhi began to explore how to “revise the view point of capital.” In the late nineteenth century, the process of globalization was as disruptive as it is today. It had started to become clear that, as Rogan writes, “mutual utility—rational, self-interested actors meeting in markets overseen by a night watchman state—was not a sufficient basis for social order.” The social contract was breaking down across Europe, and those disaffected with the “social philosophy of laissez-faire” became vulnerable to authoritarian figures and “conceptions of a strong, unifying state.” Gandhi was thoroughly alert to this dangerous shift, eerily familiar in our own age of polarized, sectarian politics. “The violence of private ownership,” he once said, “is less injurious than the violence of the State.”

The moral economists argued against the political philosophy of liberalism, which saw the protection of life and property as the main impulse of social and political life. R. H. Tawney, a religious socialist, belittled the concept of economic man, and argued for a more exalted notion of human motives. Karl Polanyi, a refugee from Fascist Europe, became convinced that Fascism, “the most obvious failure of our civilization,” was the consequence of subordinating human needs to the market, and he called for “freedom from economics.” Gandhi likewise argued that, “at every crucial moment, these new-fangled economic laws have broken down in practice. And nations or individuals who accept them as guiding maxims must perish.”

Gandhi was obsessed with the dangers to human freedom from hyperorganized states, economic calculus, and technocracies, and he anticipated the many mid-century American and European intellectuals who grappled with the most obvious failure of their civilization: the eruption of barbarism in the heart of the modern West. Gandhi saw the link between European imperialism in Asia and Africa and totalitarianism in Europe decades before Hannah Arendt elaborated on it in “The Origins of Totalitarianism” (1951). He also recognized, well before such Catholic thinkers as Simone Weil and Jacques Maritain, that new conceptions of social interdependence, individual agency, and cosmopolitan responsibility were needed to save the world from the delusions of individualism and collectivism. But, then, Gandhi had a broader experience of the world than the moral economists, the Christian humanists, or even the German refugees from Nazism; he had been forced to assess modern Western democracies very early in the twentieth century, and from the vantage point of their profoundly undemocratic Asian and African outposts.

Most important, he devised a mode of resistance that skillfully infused mass politics with a moral imperative—to end the vicious cycle of violent antagonism and to prepare the ground for mutual toleration. Satyagraha, which presumed a basic commitment to dialogue on all sides, was likely to be impotent against Nazism or any other genocidal ideology. But it remains a matchless political means to reconcile clashing interests in diverse and fractious societies, largely because it accommodates Gandhi’s proto-postmodern view that truths in politics are invariably partial and contingent. A satyagrahi ought to give “his opponent the same independence and feelings of liberty that he reserves to himself and he will fight by inflicting injuries on his own person.” Maritain correctly described satyagraha as “spiritual warfare.” Gandhi claimed that those engaged in satyagraha were “true warriors,” fearless enough to never resort to arms—as opposed to the cowards driven by fear to violence.

This was a new way of achieving moral agency in the most oppressive circumstances. Yet, as Faisal Devji writes, Gandhi was no humanitarian, concerned above all with ameliorating suffering. Rather, “tempting violence in order to convert it by the force of suffering into something quite unexpected” was at the core of his politics. “Mere appeal to reason does not answer where prejudices are age-long,” Gandhi pointed out. “The penetration of the heart comes from suffering.”

All this seems far removed from the rational debates and discussions that we assume are the way to build public consensus and inform government policy in democracies. But Gandhi realized that democratic politics, as the philosopher Martha Nussbaum has pointed out, “must learn how to cultivate the inner world of human beings, equipping each citizen to contend against the passion for domination and to accept the reality, and the equality, of others.” Moreover, a profound philosophical conviction lay behind the communal endurance of pain and the refusal to retaliate. Gandhi believed that society is much more than a social contract between self-seeking individuals underpinned by the rule of law and structured by institutions; it is actually founded upon sacrificial relationships, whether between lovers, friends, or parents and children.

Gandhi could see that public life organized around a morally neutral conception of private interests is always likely to degenerate into ferocious competition and violent coercion. “Unrestricted individualism is the law of the beast of the jungle,” he warned. It undermines social cohesion, and, finally, creates the conditions for what the social contract is meant to preclude: a war of all against all.

As Trump’s trade wars, travel bans, deportations, and denaturalizations demonstrate, an obsession with preserving what one has can quickly lead to depriving others of their human dignity. Gandhi would have recognized immediately that the source of Trump’s power lies in stoking people’s fear that the material interests of their nation, race, or class will not survive unless ruthless measures are taken. He worked for much of his life in precisely such an inferno of existential terrors and predatory fantasies, when cruelty in the name of self-preservation received singularly wide sanction.

It was a man of the far right, consumed by survivalist anxieties about the “Hindu nation,” who shot Gandhi three times in the chest and the abdomen on the evening of January 30, 1948. Gandhi, who built an entire world view based on the nonviolent imperative of self-sacrifice, had looked forward to his assassination. Having survived a previous attempt on his life that same month, he made no effort to improve his security and, the night before his murder, told a close confidant of his wish to receive a “bullet in my bare chest.” His executioner failed to realize that he was merely helping Gandhi to perfect the “art of dying” and to consummate his cosmopolitan duty as a citizen of the world—the sacrifice of oneself for others. Many more of Gandhi’s statues may fall in the present climate of furious revisionism. But the Mahatma will remain, in his sublime madness, a consistently illuminating guide through the labyrinth of rational self-interest, and through our own decaying landscapes of liberalism and democracy. ♦

This article appears in the print edition of the October 22, 2018, issue, with the headline “The Great Protester.”

Pankaj Mishra has written several books, including “From the Ruins of Empire” and, most recently, “Age of Anger: A History of the Present.”

Rasa Theory

Niyati Pathak

According to Dimock Indian Poetics may be appropriated for Indian Literature. He believes ‘Sanskrit critics have taxonomic approach to the psychology of emotions’. The ‘taxonomic’ involves to more from the ‘personal’ to ‘transpersonal’. There is a highly particular level. It is the level of interpersonal aesthetic delight.

“An exhibition and enjoyment that is more like spiritual realization is very much present in Indian Literature,”- K. R. Shrinivas Iyanger

“Our emotions are the gastric juices which transform this world of appearance into the more intimate world of sentiments. On the other hand, this outer world has its own juices, having their various qualities, which excite our emotional activities. This is called in our Sanskrit Rhetoric, Rasa, which signifies outer juices having their response in inner juices of our emotions. And a poem, according to it, is a sentence or sentences containing juices, which stimulate the juices of emotion. It brings to us ideas vitalized by feelings, ready to be made into the life-style of nature” 

Rabindranath Tagore

Introduction:

Rasa is Sanskrit and has many translations in English, the main ones being: essence, juice, nectar, taste, or sap. Rasa is in everything, or I should say… everything has Rasa. Though some things have a higher vibrational  essence, others lower, some even dead. Rasa is the invisible substance that gives life meaning.

Rasa ( relish , passion ) but it is also described  as the state of ecstasy in the union with divine. The theory of Rasa-Bhava establishes a relationship between the performer and the spectator. The model spectator is a Sahrdaya, someone ‘who empathizes with the author.’ Since the success of a performance is measured by whether or not the audience has a specific experience (rasa), the spectator becomes a vital participant in the play. 

Bharata calls human soul as Bhava-Jagat (the world of emotions). Bharata and later authors explain how the Art universalizes emotions making them an instrument of appeal to the spectators. They say that the actor acts as bearer, media and connector of emotions of the character. By conveying emotions the actor step by step opens inner Bhava-Jagat of the character, creates special emotional atmosphere, which can be felt and relished. The actor introduces and involves the spectators into this emotional atmosphere. Thus, emotions of the character are spread through the actor to spectators, who share them collectively, as a group, by relishing the Rasa. Thus emotions are embodied and translated from one person to many.

In Tantra these 9 Rasas are the essence of all of our emotions ;----

Rasa is defined thus: / vibhava anubhava vyabhichari samyogat rasa/  

vibhava— causes or mainsprings of emotion (characters setting season,      background etc)

anubhava — effects of emotions that develop sentiments or rasas (anxiety, anger, depression through which love (the principal emotion) is expressed. Vibhava (determinants or catalysts) bhav

The means by which an emotion is activated are termed Vibhava. There are two kinds of Vibhava – the Alambhana Vibhava – the person or the object in respect of whom the emotion is experienced and whose appearance is directly responsible for the bringing forth of the emotion; and the Uddipana Vibhava – the situation in the environment in which that person or object is placed and which is helpful in intensifying the emotional experience.

ANUBHAVA (CONSEQUENCES)

The outward manifestations brought forth as a result of the Vibhavas are known as the Anubhavas. These are divisible into Vacika – those which can be expressed by words (Vac – “speech”) and the Angika which are expressed by bodily expressions. In Indian drama, for example, the Anubhavas communicate to the audience, the emotions being felt by the characters onstage.

There are also “involuntary emotions” known as Sattvikabhavas: Stambha (paralysis), Sveta (sweating), Romanca (hair standing on end), Svarabheta (changes in one’s tone of voice), Vepathu (trembling), Vaivarnya (changes in the colour of one’s face), Asru (becoming tearful) and Pralaya (fainting).

Vyabhicharibhava    — transitory states—33 in number. Vyabicaribhavas (complementary states)

The Sthayibhava (“permanent mood”) is a major emotion which is developed by a number of minor feelings referred to as Vyabicaribhavas. There are thirty-three Vyabicaribhavas: Nirveda (disinterest), Glani (tiredness), Sanka (apprehension), Asuya (insecurity), Mada (intoxication), Srama (exhaustion), Alasya (lethargy), Dainya (pity), Cinta (anxiety), Moho (delusion), Smrti (recollection), Dhrti (steadfastness), Vrida (shame), Capalata (impuliveness), Harsa (sudden delight), Avega (excitement), Jadata (stupor), Garva (arrogance), Visada (depression), Autsuka (longing), Nidra (sleep), Apasmara (epilepsy), Supta (dreaming), Vibodha (awakening), Amarsa (retstrained anger), Avahittha (deception), Ugrata (ferociousness), Mati (analysis), Vyadhi (sickness), Unmada (temporary insanity), Marana (death), Trasa (panic) and Vitarka (argumentiveness).

For example, the Erotic Rasa arises from the Alambhana Vibhava – presence of the lover & beloved, the Uddipana Vibhavas’ – the atmosphere of the place where the two meet, the call of night-birds; a gentle breeze, the moon, etc.; it gives rise to the Anubhavas – how the lover & beloved express themselves to each other (i.e. holding hands, kissing, embracing); it produces involuntary bodily responses (the Sattvikabhavas) and may give rise to complementary (or transitory) emotional states – the Vyabicaribhavas.

For Bharata, Rasa – the flavour or taste, emerges from from the combination of the various emotional factors in the same way that the distinctive flavour of a cooked dish results from the different ingredients and the manner in which it is prepared.

CAUSE + EFFECTS + TRANSITORY STATES= RASA

Then Bharata speaks about the dominant states:- stayibhava, vyabhicharibhava, and satvikabhava. 

Satvikabhava is translated as temperamental state. Sat is connected with manas.

Stayibhava:- love, mirth, sorrow, anger, energy, terror, disgust, astonishment

vyabhicharibhava:-  discouragement, weakness, apprehension, envy, intoxication, weariness, indolence, depression, anxiety, distraction, recollection, contentment, shame, inconstancy, joy, agitation, stupor, arrogance, despair, impatience, sleep, epilepsy, dreaming, awakening, indignation, dissimulation, cruelty, assurance, sickness, insanity, death, fright, and deliberation.

Satvikabhava:- paralysis, perspiration, horripilation ( goose flesh), change of voice, colour, trembling, weeping and fainting.

4 kinds of histrionic representation— angika, vacika, aharya, sattvika (representation of temperament.

4 styles—        verbal (Bharati)(eloquent)

                         grand (sattvati)

                         graceful ( Kaisiki)

                        energetic ( arabhati)

4 usages—       avanti, dakshinatya, odramagadhi, panccalamadhyama.

2 practices— lokadharmi, natyadharmi.

2 groups of musical notes:- sari ra (body) and vainava ( from vina, instrumental)

3 types of playhouses—oblong, square, triangular.

RASAS EXPLAINED

Rasa is produced from a combination of determinants (vibhavas), consequents (anubhavas) and transitory states. Is there any dristanta for it?

TASTES  results from a combination of spices, vegetables and other articles. Six tastes are produced by articles such as raw sugar or spices or vegetables. So the stayibhava in combination with other bhavas become rasa.

What is the meaning of rasa—it is capable of being tasted- (asvadyate). How is rasa tasted?

It is said that just as  well-disposed persons while eating food cooked with many kinds of spices enjoy its tastes and attain pleasure and satisfaction, so the cultured people taste the dominant states (stayibhava) while they see them represented by an expression of the various states with works, gestures and the temperament and derive pleasure and satisfaction.

We shall now enumerate the Dominant states in different sentiments.

1. The Erotic Rasa

The Erotic (Sringara) Rasa proceeds from the Dominant State of love (Rati) and it has as its basis a  bright attire; for whatever in this world is white, pure, bright and beautiful is appreciated in terms of the dominant state of love (sringara).

Hence the Erotic sentiment has been so named on account of its usually being associated with bright and elegant attire. It owns its origin to men and women and related to the fullness of youth.

It has two bases: union (Sambhoga) and separation (Vipralamba), of these two, the Erotic Sentiment in union arises from determinants like the pleasure of the season, the enjoyment of garlands, ornaments, (the company of) beloved persons objects (of senses), splendid mansions, going to a garden, and enjoying [oneself] there, seeing the [beloved one], hearing [his or her words], playing and dallying [with him or her]. It should be represented on the stage by consequents such as clever movement of eye, eyebrows, glances, soft and delicate movement of limbs and sweet words and similar other things. Transitory states in it do not include fear, indolence, cruelty and disgust. [The Erotic sentiment] in separation should be represented on the stage by consequents such as indifference, languor, fear, jealousy, fatigue, anxiety, yearning, drowsiness, sleep, dreaming awakening, illness, insanity, epilepsy, inactivity, [fainting], death and other conditions.

2. The Comic Sentiment      

The comic (hasya) sentiment has as its basis the Dominant emotion of laughter. This is created by determinants such as showing unseemly dress or ornament, impudence, greediness, quarrel, defective limb, use of irrelevant words, mentioning of different faults, and similar other things. This (the comic sentiment) is to be represented on the stage by consequents like the throbbing of the lips, the nose and the cheek, opening the eyes wide or contracting them, perspiration, colour of the face, and taking hold of the sides. Transitory states in it are indolence, dissimulation, drowsiness, sleep, dreaming, insomnia, envy and the like. This (sentiment), is of two kinds; self -centred and centred in others. When a person himself laughs it relates to the self – centred (Comic sentiment), but when he makes others laugh it (the comic sentiment therein ) is centred in others.

It has six varieties of which I shall speak presently.  They are: Slight Smile (Smita), Smile (Hasita), Gentle Laughter (Vihasita), Laughter of Ridicule (Upahasita), Vulgar Laughter (apahasita) and Excessive Laughter (Atihasita). Two by two they belong respectively to the superior, the middle and the inferior types [of persons].

To persons of the superior type belong the slight smile (Smita) and the smile (Hasita), to those of the middle type of Gentle Laughter (vihasita) and the Laughter of Ridicule (upahasita) to those of the inferior type the Vulgar Laughter (apahasita) and the Violent Laughter (atihasita)

3. The Pathetic Sentiment

Now the Pathetic (karuna) Sentiment arises from the dominant state of sorrow. It grows from Determinants such as affliction under a curse, separation from dear ones, loss of wealth, death, captivity flight)[ from one’s own place], [dangerous] accidents or any other misfortune. This is to be represented on the stage by means of consequents such as, shedding tears, lamentation, dryness of the mouth, change of colour, drooping limbs, being out of breath, loss of memory and the like. Transitory states connected with it are indifference, languor, anxiety, inactivity, insanity, epilepsy, fear, fainting, sadness, dejection, illness, inactivity, insanity, epilepsy, fear, indolence, death, paralysis, tremor, change of colour, weeping, loss of voice and the like.

4. The Furious Sentiment

Now the Furious (raudra) Sentiment has as its basis the dominant state of anger. It owes its origin to Raksasas, Danavas and haughty men, and is caused by fights. This is created by determinants such as anger, rape, abuse, insult, untrue allegation, exorcizing, threatening, revengefulness, jealousy and the like. Its actions are beating, breaking, crushing, cutting, piercing, taking up arms, hurling of missiles, fighting, drawing, of blood, and similar other deeds. This is to be represented on the stage by means of consequents such as red eyes, knitting of eyebrows, defiance, biting of the lips, movement of the cheeks, pressing one hand with the other, and the like. Transitory states in it are presence of mind, determination, energy, indignation, fury, perspiration, trembling, horripilation, chocking voice and the like.

5. The Heroic Sentiment

Now the Herioc (vira) sentiment, relates to the superior type of persons and has energy as its basis. This is created by determinants such as presence of mind, perseverance, diplomacy, discipline, military strength, aggressiveness, reputation of might, influence and the like. It is to be represented on the stage by consequents such as firmness, patients, heroism, charity, diplomacy and the like. Transitory states in it are contentment, judgement, pride, agitation, energy (vega) ferocity, indignation, remembrance, horripilation and the like.

6. The Terrible sentiment

Now the Terrible (bhayanaka) sentiment has as its basis the Dominant state of fear. This is created by Determinants like hideous noise, sight of ghosts, panic and anxiety due to (untimely cry of jackals and owls, staying in an empty house or forest, sight of death or captivity of dear ones, or news of it, or discussion about it. It is to be represented on the stage by consequents such as trembling of the hands and the feet, horripilation, change of colour and loss of voice. Its Transitory states are paralysis, perspiration, choking voice, horripilation, trembling, loss of voice, change of colour, fear, stupefaction, dejection, agitation, restlessness, inactivity, fear, epilepsy and death and the like.

7. The Odious sentiment

Now the odious (bibhatsa) sentiment has as its basis the dominant state of disgust. It is created by determinants like hearing of unpleasant, offensive, impure and harmful things or seeing them or discussing them. It is to be represented on the stage by consequents such as stopping the movement of all the limbs, narrowing down of the mouth, vomiting, spitting, shaking the limbs [in disgust] and the like. Transitory states in it are epilepsy, delusion, agitation, fainting, sickness, death and the like.

8. The Marvellous sentiment

The Marvellous (adbhuta) Sentiment has as its basis the dominant state of astonishment. It is created by determinants such as sight of heavenly beings or events, attainment of desired objects, entrance into a superior mansion, temple, audience hall (sabha), a seven – storied palace and (seeing) illusory and magical acts. It is to be represented on the stage by consequents such as wide opening of eyes, looking with fixed gaze, hooripilation, tears [ of joy] perspiration, joy, uttering words of approbation, making gifts, crying incessantly ha, ha, ha waving the end of dhoti or sari, and movement of fingers and the like. Transitory states in it are weeping, paralysis, perspiration like. Transitory states in it are weeping, paralysis, perspiration, chocking voice, horripilation, agitation, hurry, inactivity, death and the like.

 Bhava and Rasa

Bharata says that which can be relished – like the taste of food – is rasa: रस्यते अनेना इति रसः (अस्वादायत्व)

According to Bharata, the playwright experiences a certain emotion (bhava). The director of the play should properly understand the idea and bhava-s of the character and convey his knowledge and understanding to the actors. The actors perform their parts using their own vision and experience, but they should follow the main idea and key bhavas emphasized by the director, Sutradhara. 

The term bhava means both existence and a mental state, and in aesthetic contexts it has been variously translated as feelings, psychological states, and emotions. In the context of the drama, bhavas are the emotions represented in the performance. 

Bhava is that which becomes (Sanskrit root “bhoo”, “bhav” means “to become”); and bhava becomes rasa. In Natya Shastra it is said, that bhavas by themselves carry no meaning in the absence of Rasa’’. नहीं रसदयते काशीद_अप्यर्थः प्रवत्र्तते.”?Forms and manifestations of bhavas are defined by the rasa. It is therefore said, Rasa is the essence of art conveyed. 

Rasa is the emotional response the bhavas inspire in the spectator (the Rasika or Sahrudaya). Rasa is thus an aesthetically transformed emotional state experienced by the spectator. Rasa is accompanied by feelings of pleasure and enjoyment. Such emotions tunes perception of the spectators, they create atmosphere of empathy, make people more sensitive, help to open mind and heart to understand the idea and message of the play. 

Rasa is associated with palate, it is delight afforded by all forms of art; and the pleasure that people derive from their art experience. It is literally the activity of savoring an emotion in its full flavor. The term might also be taken to mean the essence of human feelings. 

Rasa is sensuous, proximate, experiential. Rasa is aromatic. Rasa fills space, joining the outside to the inside. What was outside is transformed into what is inside.

As Bharata asserts, “सत्व. . . is [something] originating in mind. It is caused by the concentrated mind. The सत्व is accomplished by concentration of the mind. It’s nature cannot be mimicked by an absent-minded man.” 

The Natya Shastra calls  सात्त्विका अभिनय the “Spirited” modes of abhinaya, but the best explanations link it to Stanislavsky’s “Magic ‘If’” and “Sense of Truth.” This allows the actor to convince himself the circumstances are real to the character, even though, as the actor, he knows they are not. 

1. 1Love/Sringara… It is the ultimate Rasa. The king or queen emotion that heals anything. It frees the ego and connects us to devotion. When you appreciate beauty it connects you to the source of love. It is the creative play between Shiva and Shakti, sun and moon, yin and yang. The purpose of the universe it to experience this divine love. This love exists in everything. It is within each one of us and radiates out to the cosmos.

 2.1. Joy/Hasya… This Rasa connects you to your humor, laughter, happiness and contentment. It is the extension of what you feel within love.

3.1.Wonder/Adhuta… Curiosity, Mystery, Awe. When you become fascinated with the idea of life. It is your playfulness and innocence. You enter into complete appreciation and become an explorer or adventurer. It is magic!

4. Courage/Vira… Bravery, Confidence, Pride. When you call upon your the Warrior that lives inside you. It is strong and vibrant

5. Peace/Shanta… Deep calmness and relaxation. When you become still and quiet. In peace you become so full that you are empty. You will not find peace anywhere but within.

6. Sadness/Karuna… When you can experience sadness and connect it back to the cosmos, you then experience compassion. Compassion is what connects us all. Through compassion we can relate deeply to each other. When ones sadness is truly experienced around a situation it can give a sense of completion. Grieving is a key aspect in healing.

7. Anger/Raudra… In anger we go into the fire. One moment of anger can destroy lifetimes of good merit. Respect anger. When anger isn’t honored it can bring up irritation, violence, hatred. Feel the anger. Let it move through you. Breath into the fire.

8. Fear/Bhayanaka… Doubt, Worry, Insecurity. When we live our lives in fear, we shut down completely.

9. Disgust/Vibhasta… self pity, Loathing, self hatred. Only through a loving emotion can you heal and appease disgust but bhakati rasa is the one which is revered most as all first 6--rasas can be attained  through भक्ति रस .how to taste the nectar of bhakati rasa the following methods has been  advocated----Bhakti is a Sanskrit term that signifies an attitude of devotion to a personal God that is similar to a number of human-human relationships (difference is that in bhakti relationships is soul-Supersoul, soul-God) such as beloved-lover, friend-friend, parent-child, and master-servant.

These nine principles of devotional service are described as helping the devotee remain constantly in touch with God.

Rasa means relish also --here is an example ---here is a discription by using an apple .you get an apple and from the outside the apple can look beautiful, shiny , red but then from inside that apple may be sour , mushy and disappointing .now , on the other side , you take an apple and take a bite , juice flies from the corners of your mouth , and the crisp sound cracks in your ears . the sweetest most lovely taste fills your mouth and little joy spreads throughout your body . it got the right amount of essence or rasa from the sun , the moon , the stars , the rain , the earth and was picked at the right time and eaten also at the right time therefore exploding with the  juice or nectar . this is the high vibrational rasa of apple.

So , all these rasas are in the human body for that matter in all the living kingdome and for that matter in universe also but man being man has to learn to keep the energy of all these rasas in balance  so as to enjoy the fruit of life and  enjoy the ecstatic experience of  भक्ति रस for the growth of soul / union of soul ~~ the main purpose of human life .

Natyaveda or Natyashashtra were divided into four parts:

1)Art of effective speech or recitation

2)Art of music

3)Art of acting and

4)Rasas

With the science or theory of which the Natyaveda is concerened,primarily presents Rasa,and the three acts are the means of its effective presentation.thus,it is an organic whole.so the Natya is divided into two parts mainly:Rasa & Presentation of Rasa.

The presentation of Rasa can be done in four ways:

1)Angika (Acting consiting part of body)

2)Vachika (Acting of speech organs)

3)Sattvika (The art of involve oneself in character and feel it which adds involuntary expressions & gestures.

4)Aharya (The other supportive create atmosphere for play. Sthayi bhava and vyabhachari bhava are the two types of bhavas.Rasas sre engendered from the combination of these three elements. Vibhav,Anubhav,Vyabhichari bhav and Sanyog are essential for Rasa. In brief let`s glimps on it:

Vibhav:it has two elements.

1)Alamban (It is the means of expression of feelings through which feelings reaches to the viewer.

2)Udipan (They are the events happens in the drama and the stage decoration as well as the atmosphere created by musis,light effect on the stage and depiction of the atmosphere through words in text.

Anubhav:it is the physical changes due to the rise of an emotion.these changes are voluntary as they can be produced by an effort of the will.they are called Anubhavas.

Vyabhichari Bhav:these are transient emotions.they are like waves,which rise from the ocean of the basic mental state and subside into the same.

Works Cited

(aesthetics), R. (2018, March 30). Wikipedia contributors. (W. contributors, Ed.) Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia.