‘Conscience keeper’ is a phrase that automatically falls like an invisible cloak on writers and poets who raise their voice against fascistic forces. But Hindi poet and cultural administrator Ashok Vajpeyi, one of the first of the literary figures to return their Sahitya Akademi awards over rising ‘intolerance’, does not particularly love that term.
“I once wrote that poetry enters heaven with mud-soaked shoes. We have been in the mud, blood and the soil of the world. We are tainted people. It is not true to say that we are conscience keepers. If you can keep your own conscience, that is good enough. Nobody has given you the right to keep conscience for others. But the conscience must not remain a private property. World has become so much social, perhaps in the wrong way, that you have to act in the social arena. After all poetry, arts or literature are forms of civic action,” he says in an interaction in the city on Thursday. He was in the State to receive the Kadammanitta Ramakrishnan award.
He speaks of the need for creating a ‘forum of conscience’, in which different ideologies can come together.
“I still think there is need for us to come together with whatever different ideas and ideologies we may have as long as we believe that the three cardinal values of the Indian Constitution — freedom, equality and justice — are to be protected. These are the values we could judge ourselves and others by.”
Mr. Vajpeyi says that protesting is not the basic job of writers. “All poetics are poetics of celebration of interrogation, also of how to cope with adversity. We must keep on reminding ourselves that our basic job is to write. Clever way of doing is to keep your protesting spirit in the realm of social action and not in your writing,”
He believes that the country is amazing in that nothing is allowed to be singular for a long time.
“Everything becomes plural, whether gods, religions or cuisines. So, let us be plural. One of the things we have faced with is the tyranny of uniformity, which militates against our own traditions. Religions in this country, without exception, are lagging behind democracy. Our religions have not shown themselves firmly as incorporating values of freedom, equality and justice. Why should religions be frozen? Religions have to grow,” he says. Mr. Vajpeyi says he is enamoured of Kerala as it is one of the few societies left in India where writers and artists matter. “I have a deep regret though, that I was a member of the Jnanpith jury which failed to give the award to O.V. Vijayan. There were only two of us in that jury who pressed for him and we were defeated,” he says.
