[Reader-list] notes- trying to look at the question of english, fascism..

[abir bazaz]

It is after a long time that we are on the threshold of a really interesting discussion. But what I want to know for now is where I can buy a copy of the novel in Hindi. Penguin India (the publishers of the English translation) had written to Shukla that if he didn’t buy the unsold copies of his own novel, the copies would be turned into pulp. Can some of us buy the remaining copies on the rate offered by Penguin to Shukla- Rs 30?

It may also be a good idea to have a screening of Mani Kaul’s film on the novel at Sarai. I’ll try and post some of Mani Kaul’s own reflections on his film based on Naukar ki Kameez. Shukla had collaborated with Kaul on the screenplay for this film.

Abir 

On Sun, 24 Nov 2002 lush inkk wrote :
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>notes- trying to look at the question of english, fascism..
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>I read Naukar ki Kameez . Read it very late. thought and rethought about it. felt discontented by the end.  by the way the wife and baby to be give the all important respite, refuge and self affirmation. wondered at my discontent. perhaps it was with loading the wife with too much- correct emotion. keeping cynicism/ post modernity ( how the word rings for me) completely out of that relationship. the complete faith, the perfection of that reciprocated love made me uncomfotable. it seemed too much like a wrested ending.
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>a novel is not reality. and this novel is definitely an artifice- a work of art- that small bit by painstaking bit, creates/ wrests a space for dignity in the face of ugly dehumanised/dehumanised power. what startled me about the novel was the ( created, i have to keep reminding myself) existence of a character who recognised the manipulations of power so clearly,  and equally clearly , kept open a fierce place of dignity and life for himself.
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>the novel brought in, in new permutations, spaces inhabited by some people i have known. lower middle class houses holding onto their dignity. not sunk into poverty but in a continuous struggle to stay afloat.
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>Pratap Pandey's remark, many mails ago, about the need for an ethnography of fascism has stayed with me a long while. some people i have known from spaces like in naukar ki kameez- or at least spaces close to this- have veered into fascist thought- some kind of vocal support whenever they feel the need to do so. ( i do not know much about those that have not- though of course they must be there, they are there and i should renew my intimacies)
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>this book is written in 1979, with what seems like a deep intimcay with a matrix, and the creative power to make/salvage from it, with love and pain, a dignity.
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>i think of the people i know in the early 1980's, in similar contexts, and try to see if i can move in some small configuration about a  ethnography of fascism.
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>a lower middle class hindu family lives in a lower middle class neighbourhood in a town in western u.p. which has had a dominant muslim culture.the father of our hindu family works in a petty job in the bureaucracy. there is the strong consciousness of being a minority in the area, seeing the conservative ways of families around( not educated, finding their way by keeping cattle, doing some small business and building up their compound wall when there is some money. and keeping their women in). here in the hindu family, pride of education, gentility of poverty. and pride of caste which is not expressed vocally but somewhere it is there- i think. i feel the pride of the upper castes in their caste is so deepy ingrained..( although in naukar ki kameez, the realities of poverty bring are also accompanied by a sense of deep irony about religion, especially about a picture of laxmi dropping coins into the water that the protagonists wife has stuck into the inside lid of her trunk)
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>back to the west u.p. city -elsewhere in the city, in a more mobile middle class area, a close relative of the hindu family is prospering slowly but surely. a better paid job, the wifes timely( 1970's -80's) insistence on an englsih elite education for the children, ( it was an education she always dreamed of for herself- herchildren will have it) easier promotion and movement in the job, in an organisation which is partly public sector but is opening up.
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>family 1 wants to be proud of family 2. same family, there must be a shared sense of success. the 2 sets of parents must be trying, one lot to not let their children be bitter, another lot to not let them be supercilious. superciliousness is more easily warded off, but bitterness?
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>the parent attempts to give the child dignity by salvaging for it: have  a pride in language( good hindi)and a desire to work hard to better your  situation. to keep your mind clean, to not feel bitter about the cousins(' their father grew in the same mud as your father- he struggled out, you must too' i imagine might be the underlying evident thought)
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>the distance instead, is from the muslim neighbour, with the lack of education,  a fear of what brews behind those high walls.
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>  the children will  find it hard to struggle out as the 80's turn into the 90's. for reasons of the times. because they did not manage engineering or medical or a bank job in time- ( it is a time when public sector bank jobs are now not as good as they used to be?)
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>  because two of them are girls.
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>also because they cannot be bitter.  the struggle out is defeating, except for the providence of a good match for one of the girls.
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>how is english implicated in this story? ( remembering a bit of something else pratap pandey  addressed in one of his mails)
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>the pride of hindi is a myth maintained among all the children to keep a certian real world at bay. the cousins have genuine affection also for each other- and in that space where bitterness/superciliousness is kept scruplously out of, a lot of the games are- about the pride of hindi- jokes about one's ignorance of hindi, sharing of things in hindi one has read.
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>english cousin does not share much of her english world- it would not seem- correct, she might have felt(superciliously)
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>will  struggling out of the mud  necessarily mean an increasingly clear road to conservatism? especially because they are brahmans?
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>  what are other struggles out of this situation like?)
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>the one cousin who does not become bitter stays quietly in the class he was born into. he does not stretch out his legs too much, he struggles at a small job. he refuses favours from his uncle quietly .he is laughed at a bit and loved a lot from a distance for being a good man.
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>this is where he salvages his togetherness from what he has.
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>the english cousins will grow with a small sense of context to their privilige, some guilt and a certain lack of superciliousness. some of these qualities will wax and wane.
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>maybe they will bear the possibility of being downwardly mobile? maybe.
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>the uncle who came out of the morass- the father of the priviliged children, will work harder and harder. be - honest- in his work, and tough on many people like his job often demands.he will try and help relatives and friends of relatives. he will look around at others in his workplace who have had it easier- who were to the manor born. he will hold them in some- contempt.
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>his children have known, not prosperity, but definitely privilige, oppurtunity, the ease that comes with an education in english.
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>he will feel somewhat distanced from them, his children, who have lived their early lives more easily. this is the early 1990's. the distance will increase(waxing and waning- love affection a desire to love and comprehend will mitigate the process)
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>he will slowly become in what he says- a supporter of the fascists. so will some( or many- or all?) of the relatives he has bailed out from lower middle class poverty.
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>what are the threads running through this mans life that get tugged at in the 90's??
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>the awe struck wonder of the child when he saw nawabs and rich gentry come to patronise a famoussinger- cars and carriages. as part of the legacy of his city and his own rasik nature- he will always love the music too. his situation- he has friends from all communities, in his head those people will always remain his friends.
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>  he will tell his children about the worlds they have not known- the apples he wanted to eat as a kid but never could- his mom would tell him they are given to people when they are ill- he would long to be ill.
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>does he always hold dear the dignity of being a poor brahmain- the adherence to that fiction of a superiority- of caste - that was needed to keep them afloat when they were badly off??
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>the contempt and anger towards the english speaking- those who had it easy. by the 1990's he labelelled them those who had easy secular politics- his own children too..
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>the girls of family one- denied oppurtunity.
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>one discovered some kind of conservatism in her bitterness at being denied oppurtunity, at the failure of the pride of hindi to fulfil its promise, of the glory of school being very different from the situation outside. the conservatism probably increased with her good marriage into a reasonably well off family who was into private business.
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>the other one maintained her love for hindi and would not be bitter about her own relatives. she maintained her love for a culture rooted in that hindi, engaged with the complexsities of married life as mirrored in that literature?
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>to her vajpayee must be gentle articulate complex? advani a man of his word?
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>what of the memory of those muslim neighbours- i do not know.
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>  hansa
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