On Namwar Singh and Allen Ginsberg: Delhi Part 4
The late afternoon sunlight slanted onto the mahogany floorboards.
I had marvelled at those floorboards at Ajeet Cour's FOSWAL office-cum-home in the Fort Siri area. While the ground floor office and basement were tiled, the two upstairs floors--sprawling spaces for holding poetry and musical recitations plus private living quarters--had wooden floors, perfectly fitted panels. I had been up there before during the daytime, but now as dusk approached, the floor was burnished to a warm beaten gold by the dying rays of the sun. Perfect for the sweet tussles of make-out evenings, for Cole Porter and Duke Ellington. Or Sinatra and Tony Bennett:
You must remember this
A kiss is still a kiss
A sigh is just a sigh
The fundamental things apply
As time goes by ... Dr. Namwar Singh, distinguished Hindi Marxist literary critic, academic, editor of the highly regarded Hindi journal Alochona and a leading voice in the Progressive Writers Association, was due to drop by for a chat. I had come to attend SAARC'S folklore festival (December 2007) and then had stayed back to meet with Indian publishers, writers and academics. "Daru," Ajeet Ji said now, bringing out a bottle of Scotch, "Namwar likes a little bit of it now and then." I smiled. 'Daru' was Punjabi slang for firewater and used by most Delhi-ites, except in Westernized drawing rooms, where they asked you what 'drinks' you'd like. In Ajeet Ji's home, however, I was in the world of vernacular speech, whether of books or plain folks. Hindi literature first came to me courtesy of Satyajit Ray, whose Shatranj Ki Khelari at some cine society showing, back at a time when wheezing red double-decker buses on Dhaka streets was a common sight, had been a revelation! What a cast--Sanjeev Kumar, Saeed Jaffrey, Victor Bannerjee, along with Shabana Azmi throwing lonely, sexually frustrated Begum Sahiba fits--and what a story -- two aristocrats playing chess and chewing paan against the 1856 backdrop of British colonial chessboard scheming for control of Awadh. It had made me search out the story's author, who turned out to be somebody named Premchand. Who, I then learnt in very short order, was the father of modern Hindi fiction, the writer who gave birth to the Hindi short story and the realistic novel. After that, whenever I could find English translations, along with Urdu fiction I also read Hindi writers: Ajneya, Nirmal Verma of course, Krishna Sobti, Ramakant, Hemantu Joshi, Uday Prakash. There were others too, post-Premchand generations who had veered away from social realism and anger towards desolate urban landscapes and existential angst in the Nai Kahani (New Fiction) movement in modern Hindi literature. It was on Premchand and the Nai Kahani group that Namwar Singh had first made his critical reputation. At the April 2007 SAARC writers' conference for the first time I saw Indian writers, poets, critics and academics who were superstars in the 'regional' languages, but who in my South Asian English world came through muted by translations. One of them was the stork-like figure of Namwar Singh in his spotless white kurta and dhoti. Since a literary editor's job meant tracking through journals and newspapers, I would come across him occasionally in the Indian dailies. He was a throwback, Old Left, somebody who had lived through the Indo-Soviet era of ideological friendship only to witness the collapse of the Soviet Union, to see the old revolutionary dream of a classless society give way to an India enamoured of the United States, where the ideal of revolutionary change had fragmented into the thousand disparate agendas defined by NGOs, civil society, human rights associations, feminists, minorities, anti-globalization, anti-World Bank and anti- neo-liberalism movements, etc. -- the Party not as vanguard of the proletariat but as harried arbiter of a thousand competing 'justice' lobbyists. Out was 'struggle', in was neon-lit consumerism. But Namwar Singh and his friends fought on in many a public forum, speaking out against the BJP, against communalism and the Sangh Parivar's 'Hindu fascism', marching for progressive causes, saying that the time had come for writers to speak on behalf of human `conscience' and `democracy'. One story about him had stuck with me, a report in the The Hindu newspaper about a conference of the Progressive Writers Association protesting vociferously against the Gujarat massacre and the RSS, against Manmohan Singh's bazaarvaad (market economy) as well as the murderous American and British occupation of Iraq. "April" Namwar Singh had said quoting Eliot much to the relish of his audience, "is the cruellest month." I too had smiled at that. And wondered, what was it about T S Eliot, the Anglophile monarchist arch-reactionary, that attracted the Old Guard Left? Even Samar Sen, poet and founder-editor of the Naxal-leaning journal Frontier, had confessed to such a seduction in his autobiography Babu Brittanto: "Yeats, Eliot and Pound made a deep impact upon the Bengali highbrow intellectuals of our time; especially Yeats, the 'pure' poet. I was more addicted to Eliot. Whenever I read Bengali poetry these days, I am reminded of his sentence 'poetry is not a turning on of the emotions'...." (translation Ashok Mitra). In person, in fact Dr Namwar Singh, despite the austere look and general air of cool intellectualism, proved to be a warm and friendly conversationalist. I and Ajeet Ji and Dr Singh spoke in Urdu and Hindi. His Hindi enunciation was clean and clear, no doubt due not only from decades of taking classes at JNU, but also from a certainty of beliefs. I could see why he was in high demand as a speaker. There was nothing of the stereotypical puritanical Bolshevik Marxist literary critic in him, all gaunt dialectics and living by the railway lines, still cursing Lech Walesa for the Gdansk shipyard revolt that started the decline of the Soviet Union's East European empire. I did not let on at all that I had some idea about him and his work--this was something I tended to do with the Indian writers and academics I met. I had found that it made them freer, led the conversation along unexpected paths. But this evening the lush light of the floorboards had shifted me into a different gear. Now I just wanted a simple adda with the man, not heavy duty conversation about the Urdu-Hindi divide, about politics, or Bal Thackery, or Lukacs' On The Theory of the Novel. No, not that, not now! So we chatted about Benares, where he had grown up and studied, and a little about Allahabad, a center of Hindi literary activities. Then he mentioned Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky's visit to Benares when the two had come to India in 1961-62. Both of them, he went on to say, lived upstairs in the house where he then was living, and both had riotous, insomniac habits, unmindful of clothes or 'normal' sleeping hours or bathing too often. You're joking, I said, those two actually lived upstairs from you in Benares? It seemed plain fabulous to me. Allen Ginsberg's contact with the Krittibas poets had indirectly influenced not just Calcutta's 'Hungry Movement' poets, but had also brought Beat sensibility to Indian English poetry, and had left a distinct imprint on it. Ginsberg's jottings, drawings, doodles, and poetic impressions are all there in his book Indian Journals: "Benares: First nite out walking ---...Cows (11) wandering in Manikarnika ghat at midnite under full moon, eating the rush ropes of the corpse-litters left behind on the sand near the woodpiles on which corpses wrapped in white cloth are burning...High bright ringing of bicycle rickshaw bells on empty streets at midnight, the rickshaws racing down the inclined street curving past stores answering each other's bell rings...." No, I'm not joking, Namwar Singh said, those two actually lived upstairs of me. So what were they like? Oh, I had to flee sometimes, he answered, the smell and smoke of ganja and hash would drift down so heavily downstairs, the whole house would reek of it constantly. Then the morphine and other stuff! And Ginsberg and Peter were, you know....(I nodded, I knew, yes, very gay), quite demonstrative about their love for each other, which some in Benares found a little too outre. A little stung, for I had grown up on Ginsberg's poetry, I protested: "But they were good people." And to my surprise, Namwar smiled a warm smile and gently nodded his head. Yes, he agreed, they were--" acchay aadmi thay,"--both of them were good souls, anarchic poet and artist. Good people, he murmured again. Now I really warmed up to him--the Hindi academic, a Marxist, an Benarasi-Allahabadi Indian if there ever was one--and he had looked past the drugs and the homosexuality (in that day and age), past the raggedy dress and outrageous behaviour, past the disruptions they had inflicted on his daily life, to sense something gentle and true in the poet and artist. Not for a second had he thought of morally judging those two Westerners. True to an ancient Indian tradition that held it to be sacred, he had no problems with madmen. And Ajeet Ji was right, he liked a 'little' daru--Namwar Singh was a one Scotch man. Later, after our chat came to an end, and I had to leave for the India International Center, for its bar and a little more daru in memory of all those sunlit times now gone like fumes in the air, Namwar Singh dropped me off at a taxi stand. I thanked him and the car drove off, his erect figure silhouetted in the back window. Night had fallen over Delhi, dark and cold. Time for crooners over. Now it was Midnight Train to Georgia, by Gladys Knight and the Pips: He's leavin'
on that midnight train to Georgia
Said he's goin' back to find
the simpler place and time
I'll be with him
on that midnight train to Georgia
I'd rather live in his world
than live without him in mine He kept dreamin'
that someday he'd be a star
But he sho' found out the hard way
that dreams don't always come true...
A kiss is still a kiss
A sigh is just a sigh
The fundamental things apply
As time goes by ... Dr. Namwar Singh, distinguished Hindi Marxist literary critic, academic, editor of the highly regarded Hindi journal Alochona and a leading voice in the Progressive Writers Association, was due to drop by for a chat. I had come to attend SAARC'S folklore festival (December 2007) and then had stayed back to meet with Indian publishers, writers and academics. "Daru," Ajeet Ji said now, bringing out a bottle of Scotch, "Namwar likes a little bit of it now and then." I smiled. 'Daru' was Punjabi slang for firewater and used by most Delhi-ites, except in Westernized drawing rooms, where they asked you what 'drinks' you'd like. In Ajeet Ji's home, however, I was in the world of vernacular speech, whether of books or plain folks. Hindi literature first came to me courtesy of Satyajit Ray, whose Shatranj Ki Khelari at some cine society showing, back at a time when wheezing red double-decker buses on Dhaka streets was a common sight, had been a revelation! What a cast--Sanjeev Kumar, Saeed Jaffrey, Victor Bannerjee, along with Shabana Azmi throwing lonely, sexually frustrated Begum Sahiba fits--and what a story -- two aristocrats playing chess and chewing paan against the 1856 backdrop of British colonial chessboard scheming for control of Awadh. It had made me search out the story's author, who turned out to be somebody named Premchand. Who, I then learnt in very short order, was the father of modern Hindi fiction, the writer who gave birth to the Hindi short story and the realistic novel. After that, whenever I could find English translations, along with Urdu fiction I also read Hindi writers: Ajneya, Nirmal Verma of course, Krishna Sobti, Ramakant, Hemantu Joshi, Uday Prakash. There were others too, post-Premchand generations who had veered away from social realism and anger towards desolate urban landscapes and existential angst in the Nai Kahani (New Fiction) movement in modern Hindi literature. It was on Premchand and the Nai Kahani group that Namwar Singh had first made his critical reputation. At the April 2007 SAARC writers' conference for the first time I saw Indian writers, poets, critics and academics who were superstars in the 'regional' languages, but who in my South Asian English world came through muted by translations. One of them was the stork-like figure of Namwar Singh in his spotless white kurta and dhoti. Since a literary editor's job meant tracking through journals and newspapers, I would come across him occasionally in the Indian dailies. He was a throwback, Old Left, somebody who had lived through the Indo-Soviet era of ideological friendship only to witness the collapse of the Soviet Union, to see the old revolutionary dream of a classless society give way to an India enamoured of the United States, where the ideal of revolutionary change had fragmented into the thousand disparate agendas defined by NGOs, civil society, human rights associations, feminists, minorities, anti-globalization, anti-World Bank and anti- neo-liberalism movements, etc. -- the Party not as vanguard of the proletariat but as harried arbiter of a thousand competing 'justice' lobbyists. Out was 'struggle', in was neon-lit consumerism. But Namwar Singh and his friends fought on in many a public forum, speaking out against the BJP, against communalism and the Sangh Parivar's 'Hindu fascism', marching for progressive causes, saying that the time had come for writers to speak on behalf of human `conscience' and `democracy'. One story about him had stuck with me, a report in the The Hindu newspaper about a conference of the Progressive Writers Association protesting vociferously against the Gujarat massacre and the RSS, against Manmohan Singh's bazaarvaad (market economy) as well as the murderous American and British occupation of Iraq. "April" Namwar Singh had said quoting Eliot much to the relish of his audience, "is the cruellest month." I too had smiled at that. And wondered, what was it about T S Eliot, the Anglophile monarchist arch-reactionary, that attracted the Old Guard Left? Even Samar Sen, poet and founder-editor of the Naxal-leaning journal Frontier, had confessed to such a seduction in his autobiography Babu Brittanto: "Yeats, Eliot and Pound made a deep impact upon the Bengali highbrow intellectuals of our time; especially Yeats, the 'pure' poet. I was more addicted to Eliot. Whenever I read Bengali poetry these days, I am reminded of his sentence 'poetry is not a turning on of the emotions'...." (translation Ashok Mitra). In person, in fact Dr Namwar Singh, despite the austere look and general air of cool intellectualism, proved to be a warm and friendly conversationalist. I and Ajeet Ji and Dr Singh spoke in Urdu and Hindi. His Hindi enunciation was clean and clear, no doubt due not only from decades of taking classes at JNU, but also from a certainty of beliefs. I could see why he was in high demand as a speaker. There was nothing of the stereotypical puritanical Bolshevik Marxist literary critic in him, all gaunt dialectics and living by the railway lines, still cursing Lech Walesa for the Gdansk shipyard revolt that started the decline of the Soviet Union's East European empire. I did not let on at all that I had some idea about him and his work--this was something I tended to do with the Indian writers and academics I met. I had found that it made them freer, led the conversation along unexpected paths. But this evening the lush light of the floorboards had shifted me into a different gear. Now I just wanted a simple adda with the man, not heavy duty conversation about the Urdu-Hindi divide, about politics, or Bal Thackery, or Lukacs' On The Theory of the Novel. No, not that, not now! So we chatted about Benares, where he had grown up and studied, and a little about Allahabad, a center of Hindi literary activities. Then he mentioned Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky's visit to Benares when the two had come to India in 1961-62. Both of them, he went on to say, lived upstairs in the house where he then was living, and both had riotous, insomniac habits, unmindful of clothes or 'normal' sleeping hours or bathing too often. You're joking, I said, those two actually lived upstairs from you in Benares? It seemed plain fabulous to me. Allen Ginsberg's contact with the Krittibas poets had indirectly influenced not just Calcutta's 'Hungry Movement' poets, but had also brought Beat sensibility to Indian English poetry, and had left a distinct imprint on it. Ginsberg's jottings, drawings, doodles, and poetic impressions are all there in his book Indian Journals: "Benares: First nite out walking ---...Cows (11) wandering in Manikarnika ghat at midnite under full moon, eating the rush ropes of the corpse-litters left behind on the sand near the woodpiles on which corpses wrapped in white cloth are burning...High bright ringing of bicycle rickshaw bells on empty streets at midnight, the rickshaws racing down the inclined street curving past stores answering each other's bell rings...." No, I'm not joking, Namwar Singh said, those two actually lived upstairs of me. So what were they like? Oh, I had to flee sometimes, he answered, the smell and smoke of ganja and hash would drift down so heavily downstairs, the whole house would reek of it constantly. Then the morphine and other stuff! And Ginsberg and Peter were, you know....(I nodded, I knew, yes, very gay), quite demonstrative about their love for each other, which some in Benares found a little too outre. A little stung, for I had grown up on Ginsberg's poetry, I protested: "But they were good people." And to my surprise, Namwar smiled a warm smile and gently nodded his head. Yes, he agreed, they were--" acchay aadmi thay,"--both of them were good souls, anarchic poet and artist. Good people, he murmured again. Now I really warmed up to him--the Hindi academic, a Marxist, an Benarasi-Allahabadi Indian if there ever was one--and he had looked past the drugs and the homosexuality (in that day and age), past the raggedy dress and outrageous behaviour, past the disruptions they had inflicted on his daily life, to sense something gentle and true in the poet and artist. Not for a second had he thought of morally judging those two Westerners. True to an ancient Indian tradition that held it to be sacred, he had no problems with madmen. And Ajeet Ji was right, he liked a 'little' daru--Namwar Singh was a one Scotch man. Later, after our chat came to an end, and I had to leave for the India International Center, for its bar and a little more daru in memory of all those sunlit times now gone like fumes in the air, Namwar Singh dropped me off at a taxi stand. I thanked him and the car drove off, his erect figure silhouetted in the back window. Night had fallen over Delhi, dark and cold. Time for crooners over. Now it was Midnight Train to Georgia, by Gladys Knight and the Pips: He's leavin'
on that midnight train to Georgia
Said he's goin' back to find
the simpler place and time
I'll be with him
on that midnight train to Georgia
I'd rather live in his world
than live without him in mine He kept dreamin'
that someday he'd be a star
But he sho' found out the hard way
that dreams don't always come true...
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