Indian Writing

Prayers for his health. Update (21 August 2006): Farewell.

“Mamu used to do his riyaz (practice) at the temple of Balaji (an avtaar of Vishnu) for 18 years. He told me to do the same thing. I would begin my riyaz at the mandir at 7 pm and end at 11 pm during which time I usually played four ragas. After a year and half, Mamu told me, ‘if you see anything just don’t talk about it’. One night as I was playing, deep in meditation, I smelled something. It was an indescribable scent, something like sandalwood and jasmine and incense. I thought it was aroma of Ganges. But the scent got more powerful. I opened my eyes - and when I speak about it I still get goose flesh - when I opened my eyes, there was Balaji standing right next to me, kamandal in hand, exactly as he is pictured. My door was locked from inside. Nobody was allowed to enter when I did my riyaz. He said ‘play, son’. But I was in cold sweat. I stopped playing.”

“He smiled, and disappeared. I unlocked the door. I thought a faqir may have come in. I took a lantern and searched all streets. They were empty. I ran home, ate quickly and slept. Mamu had understood what had happened. But he teased me, pretending he knew nothing, But as I blurted out the experience, Mamu slapped me, because he had asked me earlier not to talk about anything that might happen to me. Then he kissed me and asked me to go and buy vegetables. Mamu always told me ‘never look back, keep going forward’. Even now I go to Balaji’s mandir alone, at night and play all by myself. When I play before others, in my heart I’m listening to my gurus. In my heart, they clap for me at the appropriate time.”

For thousands of years I roamed the paths of this earth,
From waters round Ceylon in dead of night to Malayan seas.
Much have I wandered. I was there in the grey world of Asoka
And Bimbisara, pressed on through darkness to the city of Vidarbha.
I am weary heart surrounded by life’s frothy ocean.
To me she gave a moment’s peace–Banalata Sen from Natore.

Her hair was like an ancient darkling night in Vidisa,
Her face, the craftsmanship of Sravasti. As the helmsman,
His rudder broken, far out upon the sea adrift,
Sees the grass-green land of a cinnamon isle, just so
Through darkness I saw her. Said she, “Where have you been so long?”
And raised her bird’s nest-like-like eyes–Banalata Sen from Natore.

At day’s end, like hush of dew
Comes evening. A hawk wipes the scent of sunlight fom its wings.
When earth’s colors fade and some pale design is sketched,
Then glimmering fireflies paint in the story.
All birds come home, all rivers, all of this life’s tasks finished.
Only darkness remains, as I sit there face to face with Banalata Sen.

- by Jibanananda Das. Trans. Clinton B. Seely

More here.

…says Gunter Grass. As a 17-year old, he was drafted into the Waffen SS in the last stage of the war. Until this announcement, his version was that

in October 1944 he was drafted into an antiaircraft unit near Danzig, now the Polish port of Gdansk, where he was born in 1927; that he was wounded in April 1945; and that the following month he was captured by American forces, who held him prisoner until April 1946. Further, he had always admitted a share of guilt for the past.

“I belonged to the Hitler Youth, and I believed in its aims up to the end of the war,� he told The New York Times in an interview in 2000.

But in his new autobiography, “Peeling the Onion,� he explains that, when he was 15, eager to escape his family, he volunteered to join the submarine fleet but was rejected. Two years later he was drafted into the army, and, he writes, when he arrived in Dresden he discovered he had been assigned to the 10th SS Panzer Division, known as Frundsberg.

While he claims never to have fired a shot, Mr. Grass admits that at the time he saw nothing wrong with the Waffen SS and that he understood the truth about Hitler’s genocidal policies only during the Nuremberg trials of Nazi war criminals.

But the silence is baffling in the face of Grass’s own themes. Mark Sarvas points out that a reassessment of Grass’s legacy is called for:

We’re not suggesting - as some commentors seem to think - that he should be punished for youthful mistakes or for having been a Nazi (although it’s scarcely a fait accompli that he shouldn’t). We are saying that the sheer, naked, breathtaking hypocrisy here is inarguable. This cuts to the heart of what one requires of one’s moral exemplars, self-appointed or otherwise. A certain amount of consistency seems a minimum; at the other extreme, being outrightly two-faced for a period of 60 years seems ample grounds to merit reassessment of Grass’ place.

The only way writing after Auschwitz, poetry or prose, could proceed was by becoming memory and preventing the past from coming to an end. Only then could post-war literature in German justify applying the generally valid “To Be Continued …” to itself and its descendants; only then could the wound be kept open and the much desired and prescribed forgetting be reversed with a steadfast “Once upon a time”

…

Left to my own devices, I would have followed the laws of aesthetics and been perfectly happy to seek my place in texts droll and harmless.

But that was not to be. There were extenuating circumstances: mountains of rubble and cadavers, fruit of the womb of German history. The more I shovelled, the more it grew. It simply could not be ignored. Besides, I come from a family of refugees, which means that in addition to everything that drives a writer from book to book – common ambition, the fear of boredom, the mechanisms of egocentricity – I had the irreparable loss of my birthplace. If by telling tales I could not recapture a city both lost and destroyed, I could at least re-conjure it. And this obsession kept me going. I wanted to make it clear to myself and my readers, not without a bit of a chip on my shoulder, that what was lost did not need to sink into oblivion, that it could be resuscitated by the art of literature in all its grandeur and pettiness: the churches and cemeteries, the sounds of the shipyards and smells of the faintly lapping Baltic, a language on its way out yet still stable-warm and grumble-rich, sins in need of confession, and crimes tolerated if never exonerated.