The Jaipur Literature Festival this year had its highs and lows, but chance encounters with engaging writers is always a high.
I met the well-known Hindi poet and writer, Vinod Kumar Shukla, on my way to the festival bar. I asked him if he could spare a few minutes and he accepted graciously.
Vinodji said something arresting about cinema. To him, the camera was like a torch trying to illuminate a dark zone of reality. He didn't call it an artifice; simply a space darkened in order to make bright the inner disturbances of life. Vinodji reiterated that the improving technique of the camera will further help in depicting the complex and dark view of reality.
I wondered aloud if the pen, like the camera, was also a torch. He wasn't sure of it. But the question of desire remained – of camera and pen as tools of desire. I was reminded of a line by Robert Bresson, about how the art of cinema is to “make visible what, without you, might perhaps never have been seen”. I concluded: reality is blind, but so are we. Unless we are able to “in-see”, to use Rilke's word, and lighten up the invisible. Not in order to strip what is invisible, but to illuminate its hidden-ness.
At unexpected places
Another observation Vinodji made was how poetry today was most noticeable in prose. I wondered if he meant the dislocation of the poetic into the prosaic due to a kind of material shift in lyric life. Or was it about rescuing the prosaic from its drab contours, its dull everydayness, by imbuing it with a poetic flight?
I asked Vinodji why he wrote in two genres. His answer was simple: there was a long road and a short one, there were things in life which demanded poetry, and those that demanded fiction. He spoke with serene grit about his difficult early years in writing. When I asked him for his email address, he fumbled and remembered it with difficulty. He lived away from the hazards of the new generation. But he could still offer new insights to that generation. As we walked our different ways, I recollected the lines from one of his remarkably simple poems, which captures the friendly otherness he exuded in conversation:
We walked together.
We did not know each other.
But we knew walking together.
Later in the evening I met James Kelman. I had heard him read from his controversial Booker-winning novel, How Late It Was, How Late, with the same amount of passion with which he must have written it more than a decade ago. The novel became infamous as the great “f-novel”, irritating many including Martin Amis. But Kelman's supposed nonsense with language is strictly no-nonsense, depressing, dismal, dark and full of the drudgery of working-class life. His prose, defiantly introspective and interspersed with slang, counters the grammar and phonetics of the English language he learnt to resist.
I caught Kelman, walking alone, a little lost, near the music-stage area. I told him I found the repetitive expressions in his prose an unavoidable technique for registering troubled memory. I mentioned Jacques Lacan. Kelman had read Freud and was interested in psychoanalysis. We discussed the disturbing, neurological phenomenon of the unconscious, where it draws upon the mode of insistence to relive certain traumas, and manifests itself into pathological repetition. Kelman saw vulgarity critically: as a burden for the poor, the wayward and the out of place, for whom cursing and cussing are part of a life which is thrust violently upon them. Kelman wouldn't abandon that language to gain any other literary merit. His alert, vagabond eyes, and his smoky, alcoholic voice, meant what they said. He didn't mince words: “We were told to look down upon our own culture and eulogise everything British. You couldn't stomach it, could you?” He didn't. The seat of his passions unseated elite, literary appetites.
I told him in India we confronted a more complex scenario. Much as we disapproved of the cultural leftovers of colonialism, we also had to critique our own past, littered with caste sickness and humiliation, religious bigotry, patriarchal excesses, etc. Kelman was aware of it. He immediately said, “I know you have a Right-wing problem in India.”
Surprise favourite
I asked Kelman about his favourite writers. Well, the Russians of course, he began. But he ended by paying tributes to Manto. “What Manto could do was very inspiring for any writer,” he said with serious respect. We shook hands and he wished me luck for my writing sojourns.
The chance luxury of a delegate pass acquired during dinner produced the miracle of meeting Orhan Pamuk. I saw him seated with Kiran Desai, finishing his food. I didn't hesitate to disturb Pamuk in the middle of his meal. I bent down beside his chair, plate in hand, and gathered his attention by coming to the point, “Orhan, I wanted to tell you something about hüzün”. He was interested. I took him on a musical tour of hüzün. After all, hüzün, as Pamuk had pointed out, was also evoked by the poetry of music in Istanbul.
At the heart of the brilliant, young Turkish director Fatih Akin's film, “The Edge of Heaven” was a lesbian affair, with a haunting background song by the Turkish singer ªevval Sam, chasing these ill-crossed lovers. I asked him if I spelt the singer's name correctly. Yes, yes, he affirmed. The song, Ben Seni sevdi?imi, has unusual lyrics: I have informed the whole world, I love you / But you have set down your eyebrows / Have I killed your father? / Go and gather stones from the river / Love isn't mine anymore, / Take the hairs away from my pocket…
It uncannily evoked the sense of hüzün which Pamuk had attributed to El Kindi, the Arab Iraqi polymath, who saw hüzün as a spiritual affliction in love, rancour and groundless fear. The sound of the kabak kemane, perfectly captured the hüzünic mood of distress, where the lover doesn't know if the pain is too much or yet too little. This Turkish influence also found its way into our contemporary Hindi film's music, thus creating a transported atmosphere of hüzün. Pamuk heard me with patient attention, and I was glad to be able to connect contemporary Turkish literature and cinema around hüzün. Before I left, he patted me and asked my name, for the sake of memory or forgetting.
No airs
To hear Pamuk is to hear a naughty and candid adolescent in the heart of an exquisitely thoughtful man. He talks without airs, and with a moving honesty. Hearing him is an undetectable process of learning about the art of writing. Pamuk called the advent of literature in his life as a growing illumination of the “dark corners” of his mind. I thought of the relationship between darkness and the unconscious. That brought certain preoccupations of all three writers together. It reminded me of Kundera's quoting the Czech poet Jan Skacel: Poets don't invent poems / The poem is somewhere behind / It's been there for a long time / The poet merely discovers it. Writing, Kundera explains, “means breaking through a wall behind which something… lies hidden in darkness”. In that sense, writing, like cinema, reveals to us our existing, human possibilities.
Manash Bhattacharjee is a poet and scholar, living in Delhi.
