Saikat Majumdar on Polytheistic Hinduism, The Left and Storytelling

 

Mashrur Arefin's 2019 novel, August Abchhaya, is full of moments that evoke the blood-stained memory behind the language of conflict. One such moment arrives in the intense exchange between the narrator-protagonist and Sarafraz Nawaz, prominent local citizen and the head of the local Mosque and the Madrassah committees. The liberal, artistic protagonist knows that the conservative Sarafraz sahib disapproves not only of his uninhibited lifestyle, but more importantly, of the ideology that supports it. More than anything else, he despises the narrator's pantheistic belief of the manifestation of God in all reality, in the manner of Hindu and Buddhist tantric practitioners, not least because it draws in its fold the beauty of women and possibly helps to disguise his "immoral" desires.
 
"Glory be to God for dappled things –
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow
 
         For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim"
 
In mid-Victorian England, a Jesuit priest named Gerald Manley Hopkins fought the pangs of his religious conscience for writing poetry of such Keatsian beauty about the sensuous beauty of the universe. How can an ordained priest take such delight in the senses?  His answer was Pantheism. Who else but God can create such beauty? Hence, "Pied Beauty", the poem which thus opened ended with these lines;
 
All things counter, original, spare, strange;
 
       Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
 
            With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
 
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change;
 
                      Praise him."
 

Pantheism – the perception of divine beauty in all reality – has historically bridged religions to a range of aesthetic and philosophical visions and lifestyle practices. It involves a broadening of horizons that helps to keep a sense-loving Jesuit priest such as Hopkins in the fold. But it also evokes hostility in the upholders of traditional faith, as evident in Sarafraz Sahib's suspicions.

 
Is the suspicion about the pluralization of divinity? Of worshipping many embodied gods as opposed to The Great Abstract One? When Rabindranath wrote the line: "Ami roopsagore doob diyechhi orup roton pabo bole" – "I have dived in the ocean of forms to find the formless treasure" – his pantheism became a credo for polytheism. One worships a range of images as the formless God is to hard to imagine. 
 
Artistic narration needs both kinds. In a famous chapter of Mimesis entitled "Odysseus' Scar," Eric Auerbach contrasts Homeric and Biblical narration: the former is externalized, sensory, digressive, while the latter is more obscure and abstract, directed unrelentingly toward a single goal. Unlike the Homeric epics, which take delight in sensory effect and lie and fabricate when necessary, the biblical stories lay claim to the singularity of an absolute truth.
 
Hinduism shares with Hellenism the sensory appeal of polytheism. It is the beauty of Saraswati, the goddess of learning, sitting with her book and her musical veena; the appeal of the blue Krishna, playing his flute and wielding his fatal weapon, the chakra; the terrifying beauty of the demon-slaying goddess Durga; even the violent rhythm of Shiva's dance of destruction that earns him the name "Nataraj," the lord of dancers. But the beauty of Brahminical Hinduism is also limited to its caste-beneficiaries. As the caste-oppressed intellectual Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd says in his memoir, as a boy in his village, he would wake up in the middle of the night to the nightmare of Saraswati as a ghost, ready to kill him as he nurtured dreams of education, unpardonable hubris for a lower-caste child.
 
The icons of polytheism can haunt as well as nourish, depending who you are.
 
 
***
 
But to identify religious faith with a conservative, even reactionary position might be a knee-jerk reaction for people on the secular left. This has repeatedly turned out to be a false instinct. There have been many progressive religious thinkers, even among those canonized as prophets. But writing in 2002, Ruth Vanita made an observation of curious but pointed significance — unlike the continuing presence of the Islamic or the Christian left, which collaborate with the secular left in different parts of the world, there is no Hindu leftwing in India, none left any more – the pun is unavoidable. Marxist thinkers and writers flock to Durga Puja celebrations on the streets and pray to shrines at home, but very few have tried to integrate leftist and religious thinking in the context of Hinduism. Thinkers like Ashish Nandy and Ramchandra Gandhi, who attempt to do so, are a tiny minority.
 
Why this lacuna? The reasons, Vanita argued, has much to do with the shame heaped on polytheistic Hinduism in the 19th century. This was essentially the work of British colonialism, which successfully labeled idol-worship as savage and backward. The British were confounded by Hinduism, which they found harder to understand than Islam — which was, like Christianity, monotheistic and based on a single text. Hinduism, with its textual and iconographic plurality, was much more like ancient Greek and Roman religions that Christianity had wiped out centuries earlier. Though Hinduism, which proved resilient through many centuries of attack on its temples and idols, was not to be wiped out easily, the modern method of attack was quite insidious: it took the form of shaming English-educated Indians regarding Hindu rituals, especially those relating to idol-worship. "The best evidence of this shaming," writes Vanita, "is the way new Hindu organizations, such as the Arya Samaj, who rightly embraced such causes as women's education and the eradication of untouchability, felt compelled to also renounce polytheism and idol-worship." Liberal and educated Indians continued to internalize the shame of polytheism; not long after the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi, whom Vanita calls the last left-wing Hindu, the Hindu left got lost between the stridency of the Hindu right and the shame felt by the secular left regarding Hindu polytheism.
 
The literary intelligentsia, especially as it has been forged through colonial modernity and the resistance to imperialism, has gradually moved further and further away from religious iconography, donning a secular mantle. The disenchantment with faith that in Europe energized the Enlightenment and forged the secular form of the novel found its way to India too, through anticolonial movements no less than through movements of colonial modernity. From the Bengal Renaissance to the Progressive Writers' Movement in Urdu, Hindi, and other north Indian languages, this disenchantment has gained pace, nowhere more so than in the English language literatures of India, produced almost exclusively by the urban, English-educated bourgeoisie.
 
But it would be madness to deny the tremendous aesthetic and emotive power of religion. Literature, and all art, have lived ancient lives enabling – and being enabled by – the beauty, emotion, mystery and terror of religion till secular modernity pried them apart. Subsequently, this has become a reality all across the subcontinent, across all religions. We are left wondering: can Arefin's narrator and Sarafraz Sahib even find a common language in which to voice their differences?
 
Art’s Pantheon. By  Saikat Majumdar. The Daily Star , January 16, 2021.

Polytheism can be a terribly confusing affair to monotheists. The confusion is not just spiritual but material and cultural. Non-practicing or secular people brought up in monotheistic cultures are just as likely to find polytheism bewildering. Attitudes toward polyandry or polygamy in societies that enshrine monogamous partnerships display a similar dynamic, but the problem is not merely the one versus the many. That’s just the surface manifestation.

 
For starters, the practice of representing divinity in a sensory plenitude of forms is confusing to those who believe in a single, formless God. But the plot thickens as the gods and goddesses represented in polytheism often behave in ways that appear morally chaotic to the sterner moral authorities of Abrahamic religions. “I recall,” writes Amit Chaudhuri in his introduction to the Vintage Book of Modern Indian Literature (2001), “some of the British critics of Peter Brooks Mahabharata noting in wounded tones the Machiavellian, unfathomable nature of the Hindu god Krishna.” It is scarcely surprising that, to British critics of Protestant or Anglican heritage (whether secular or religious), a god who conveys an important gospel, engages in ruthless statesmanship, and indulges in transcendental erotic play with thousands of women, all in the same lifetime, may come across as a bit much. It is hard to conceive of a similarly ambivalent and playful figure of central significance in the Abrahamic religions, which appear far more austere, abstract, and cerebral next to the sensual ambivalence of Hinduism — or, for that matter, Hellenism.
 
Until the Lions, the 2015 book of narrative poetry by the dancer and choreographer Karthika Naïr, retells the story of the Mahabharata in the voices of anonymous and outcast soldiers, abducted princesses, tribal queens, and a gender-shifting god. During a conversation, Naïr told me that such a retelling does not violate or overturn the original in any way, as the potential for violation is already latent in the text. Indeed, the Mahabharata creates the very conditions for that violation — one can go so far as to say that it encourages it. The character of Krishna tells us why. Peter Brooks depicted the classical, scriptural version of Krishna as the giver of the key gospel, The Bhagavad Gita, consigning the Machiavallian Krishna and the playful, erotic Krishna to the status of folk aberrations. I don’t know if that set-up helped soothe any moral injury among British critics, but it is quite far from true. The same character does all of these things, consistently, in all versions of his story. That generations of Indian poets, lyricists, and writers have been fascinated by such a character is natural and almost inevitable; the pioneering Bangla novelist Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay has a famous essay on this subject: “Krishna Charitra” — the character of Krishna.
 
Krishna is an impossibly multivalent character both because and in spite of the fact that there are many Mahabharatas. I have come across a few myself in the course of growing up in Calcutta, mostly in Bangla but also in other Indian languages, in text and performance. In her 2009 book, The Hindus: An Alternative History, Wendy Doniger busts apart the myth that oral texts are fluid and changeable while written texts are preserved in a singular form. “The Rig Veda was preserved orally,” she writes, “but it was frozen, every syllable preserved for centuries, through a process of rigorous memorization. There are no variant readings of the Rig Veda, no critical editions or textual apparatus. Just the Rig Veda.” The Mahabharata, on the other hand, was both written and oral. But, unlike the Rig Veda, “this text changed constantly; it is so extremely fluid that there is no single Mahabharata; there are hundreds of Mahabharatas, hundreds of different manuscripts and innumerable oral versions.”
 
But no matter which version I experienced, the fluidity of Krishna’s character was a constant. This moral complexity and ambivalence — chaotic perhaps, to certain value systems — extends to the entire pantheon of gods and goddesses in Hinduism.
 
 ***
 
In the famous chapter of Mimesis entitled “Odysseus’ Scar,” Erich Auerbach contrasts Homeric and Biblical narration: the former is externalized, sensory, digressive, while the latter is more obscure and abstract, directed unrelentingly toward a single goal. Unlike the Homeric epics, which take delight in sensory effect and lie and fabricate when necessary, the biblical stories lay claim to the singularity of an absolute truth. “The Bible’s claim to truth is not only far more urgent than Homer’s,” Auerbach writes, “it is tyrannical — it excludes all other claims.” It follows naturally therefore that “the scripture stories do not, like Homer’s, court our favor, they do not flatter us that they may please us and enchant us — they seek to subject us, and if we refuse to be subjected we are rebels.”
 
The Hindu epics — and, more importantly, the worldview behind them — resemble the Hellenic pantheon and Homeric narration far more than they resemble the biblical insistence on absolute truth. But that is only part of the story. The larger truth is that Hinduism is vast enough to contain multitudes; that something much like the Abrahamic insistence on a singular, abstract godhead and its ultimate authority is also part of Hinduism. Hinduism is both monotheistic and polytheistic, even though to Western eyes the polytheism overwhelms everything else.
 
Why does a devotee of God need both monotheism and polytheism? The poet Rabindranath Tagore offers the most beautiful answer: “I have dived into the ocean of forms to find the formless treasure.” In her book Bodies of Song: Kabir Oral Traditions and Performative Worlds in North India (2015), Linda Hess reminds us that a keyword associated with Kabir, the 15th-century Indian mystic poet who drew from — and criticized — both Hinduism and Islam, is “Nirgun,” which literally means “no quality.” “Nirgun” is the ultimate quality that cannot be concretized in any sensory form, much less visualized through language. Even though it expresses a negativity, Hess reminds us, “it simultaneously invokes emptiness and fullness.” Tagore’s invocation of the formless treasure, like Kabir’s “Nirgun,” seeks to go beyond the various beatific forms of polytheism and arrive at the formless divinity who eludes any kind of sensory representation.
 
Tagore’s poetry is defined by the mutual entanglement of the divine and the erotic, often depicting God as lover, as in the poetry of John Donne, whom he deeply admired. Here he offers the aesthete’s explanation of polytheism: the pantheon of gods, and the icons and images that represent them, matter because they offer concrete forms for imagining God, ways of becoming intimate with Divinity. Moreover, these forms are beautiful; the word “roop” in Sanskrit, as in modern languages like Bangla and Hindi, means “beauty” as well as “form.” It is the beauty of Saraswati, the goddess of learning, sitting with her book and her musical veena; the appeal of the blue Krishna, playing his flute and wielding his fatal weapon, the chakra; the terrifying beauty of the demon-slaying goddess Durga; even the violent rhythm of Shiva’s dance of destruction that earns him the name “Nataraj,” the lord of dancers.
 
***
 
Hinduism, and especially the Hindu pantheon of gods and goddesses, has inspired much literary, performing, visual, and plastic art throughout the ages, ranging from the epics to temple sculptures and dance traditions like Kathak and Bharatnatyam. Like Kabir, another great mystic poet of the Bhakti (devotion) movement was the figure of Meera, a princess from 16th-century Rajputana who considered herself married to the Lord Krishna and ushered in a whole tradition of devotional songs, some of which are attributed to her.
 
Most of these artistic and musical figures are pre-modern, in spirit no less than in historical chronology. Modern Indian literary traditions — some might say literature itself as an institution — appears predominantly secular next to the various entwinements of polytheistic Hinduism with the arts during the classical and medieval periods. This secularization was spurred by the processes of colonial modernization that led to the rise of a small but influential urban bourgeoisie. Tagore was one of the defining figures of the Bengal Renaissance that gave modern India a unique social and literary identity. Colonial realities, such as the pervasive presence of the British, deeply inform his writing, but it is just as passionately engaged with Sanskrit aesthetics and medieval vernacular literary forms and idioms. Hailing from a distinguished family of the Brahmo faith, that ultra-liberal sect of Hinduism that denies polytheism and its iconography, the poet has no trouble praying to — and playing with — the gods and goddesses. “Death,” he writes in one of his popular songs, “to me you are like Krishna.” His idiosyncratic personal engagement with God is at once intense, passionate, becalming, and erotic.
 
What does a serious literary engagement with polytheistic Hinduism look like in the clear light of modernity? A more recent example is Arun Kolatkar’s poem-cycle Jejuri (1976). The bilingual poet (“My pencil,” he wrote in a poem, “is sharpened at both ends / I use one end to write in Marathi / the other in English”), who died in 2004 of cancer, has left us this remarkable series of poetic sketches coming out of a day spent in Jejuri, a site of pilgrimage in the western Indian state of Maharashtra. The voice belongs to someone much like Kolatkar himself, a secular Bombayite who records his wanderings among the temples of this holy town.
 
I’ve taught this remarkable book many times in my literature classes, but recently, teaching it in a creative writing course, I became doubly attentive to its playful, ambivalent voice. This voice is both irreverent and affectionate, telling poetry in a simple diction, often cast in narrative form. The poem brings out the peculiar mix of faith, commerce, greed, and sincerity that makes up the ecosystem of any pilgrimage site in India. Much like a Benjaminian flâneur, the narrator makes his way through ruined temples and abandoned cowsheds, past avaricious priests and scheming tourist guides. He addresses idols with humor and intimacy, recalling the stories of stubbornly local gods, the contours of their bodies and the colored stones that make them up:

Come off it
said chaitanya to a stone
in stone language
 
wipe the red paint off your face
I don’t think the colour suits you
I mean what’s wrong
with being just a plain stone
I’ll still bring you flowers
you like the flowers of zendu
don’t you
I like them too.
 
The most striking thing about a polytheistic, idolatrous religion, for this narrator, is its sensory beauty. For the secular artist, the difference between a stone and a god is moot; what matters is that it’s a beautiful stone:
 
What is god
and what is stone
the dividing line
if it exists
is very thin
at jejuri
and every other stone
is god or his cousin
[…]
scratch a rock
and a legend springs
 
***
 
Identifying religious faith with conservative, even reactionary positions is a knee-jerk response for many on the secular left, but this instinct is wrong. There have been many progressive religious thinkers, even among those canonized as prophets. Writing in 2002, Ruth Vanita made a curious but pointed observation: unlike the Islamic left or the Christian left, which collaborate with the secular left in different parts of the world, there is no Hindu left-wing in India, none left anymore — the pun is unavoidable. Marxist thinkers and writers flock to Durga Puja celebrations on the streets and pray to shrines at home, but very few have tried to integrate leftist and religious thinking in the context of Hinduism. Thinkers like Ashis Nandy and Ramchandra Gandhi, who attempt to do so, are a tiny minority.
 

Why this lacuna? The reasons, Vanita argued, has much to do with the shame heaped on polytheistic Hinduism in the 19th century. This was essentially the work of British colonialism, which successfully labeled idol worship as savage and backward. The British were confounded by Hinduism, which they found harder to understand than Islam — which, like Christianity, was monotheistic and based on a single text. Hinduism, with its textual and iconographic plurality, was much more like the ancient Greek and Roman religions that Christianity had wiped out centuries earlier. Though Hinduism, which proved resilient through many centuries of attack on its temples and idols, was not to be wiped out easily, the modern method of attack was quite insidious: it took the form of shaming English-educated Indians regarding Hindu rituals, especially those relating to idol-worship. “The best evidence of this shaming,” writes Vanita, “is the way new Hindu organizations, such as the Arya Samaj, who rightly embraced such causes as women’s education and the eradication of untouchability, felt compelled to also renounce polytheism and idol-worship.” Liberal and educated Indians continued to internalize the shame of polytheism; not long after the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi, whom Vanita calls the last left-wing Hindu, the Hindu left got lost between the stridency of the Hindu right and the shame felt by the secular left regarding Hindu polytheism.
 
The literary intelligentsia, especially as it has been forged through colonial modernity and the resistance to imperialism, has gradually moved further and further away from religious iconography, donning a secular mantle. The disenchantment with faith that in Europe energized the Enlightenment and forged the secular form of the novel found its way to India too, through anticolonial movements no less than through movements of colonial modernity. From the Bengal Renaissance to the Progressive Writers’ Movement in Urdu, Hindi, and other north Indian languages, this disenchantment has gained pace, nowhere more so than in the English-language literatures of India, produced almost exclusively by the urban, English-educated bourgeoisie.
 
***
 
As a writer who has inherited both the polytheistic splendor of Hinduism and the colonial modernity that has tamed and rationalized its spirit, I feel restless with that modernity today. It is not so much a restlessness with narrative realism in literature — which, as Amit Chaudhuri has argued, does not have the same hegemony within Indian culture, where the classical epics as well as other genres of music and performance have deep, organic relations with the real — so much as with the larger worldview of secularism that gave rise to realism in modern Western culture. The non-modern elements of religion that got lost or subdued in the transition to modernity — the ritualistic, the communal, the performative, and, most powerfully, the polytheistic — were fascinating, morally and politically no less than aesthetically, and their depletion is a profound loss. The very emergence of literature as an epistemological category is inseparable from this loss, rather paradoxically so.
 
The reason why Jejuri moves me so deeply is its admittedly half-serious (and more moving for that) engagement with religion. Many Indian writers have entered the domain of the religious or spiritual with powerful intensity: Tagore is a rich example. One does not necessarily have to hark back to the lyrics of Meera or the cadences of Sufi poetry to experience the soul-blowing aesthetic power of religion. But still the very idea of literature, and its practice on the whole, remains rooted in the experience of secular modernity. Yet, whatever else they have achieved, the majority of writers and intellectuals, by disowning the aesthetic and affective power of religion, have surrendered it to forces that have fanned its passion into unholy flames. A crop of popular novelists has arisen that is eager to commercially exploit the narrative power of Hindu myths but remains unwilling to confront the moral complexity and ambivalence of polytheistic Hinduism.

Is it possible today for literature and the arts to engage with the affective power of polytheistic iconography and its ambivalent morality without celebrating the repressive dimensions of religious orthodoxy? It is of course sheer madness to deny the emotive, social, and artistic potential of this iconography. Literature — indeed, all forms of art — has long been enlivened by the beauty, emotion, mystery, and terror of religion, at least until secular modernity pried them apart, as the varied examples of Tagore, Kolatkar, and Karthika Naïr reveal. If, as Vanita argues, the Hindu left died from the relentless shaming of polytheism, can a sustained artistic engagement with the aesthetic and affective powers of Hindu religion serve to revive it? And, if it does, will the secular left recognize its language?
 
Left in Polytheism. By  Saikat Majumdar. Los Angeles Review of Books , October 2, 2018. 

 

In his poem-cycle, Jejuri, Arun Kolatkar showed how easily a trivial scrap of reality becomes transcendental in the environs of an Indian temple. Not necessarily in a spiritual sense — Kolatkar had mixed feelings about that — but in a very material and sensory way.
 
My Jejuri happened in the Sun Temple in Konark. We were getting the full treatment from a guide, with all the right revelations. The mood started to twitch with the appearance of sexually explicit sculptures across the temple walls. There were bodies in intricate positions in moments of sexual congress. Multiple players in a single frieze. Desire played out across sexes and genders. But nothing that would shock or surprise anyone who has seen erotic temple sculpture in India.
 
The guide started to make odd gestures; sometimes whispering in my ears in a voice hard to decode. Then, after a while, he asked me to step aside.
 
“You know…,” he whispered.
 
He didn’t want to talk about the sculptures before the female tourists in our group. It felt pointless debating the point with this shy, half-embarrassed but solemn figure in the misty twilight. Instead, I fell into a chat about Khajuraho.
 
“All those things that are there in Khajuraho, none of it is real. It’s all made up.” He said with a quiet wisdom.
 
“What do you mean?” I asked.
 
“None of these things — none of those acts,” he swallowed bravely, “ever happened anywhere. They were made up by the sculptors because they were away from home for a long time and were, you know,” his voice hushed again, “were missing their wives.”
 
Such amateur scholarship blooms by every roadside, tea stall and train station in India. But those blossoming under the arches of temples have a wild and unique fragrance.
 
Sex and religion
 
The guide’s whisper whorled like a night bloomer with insect-chewed petals. Here was a man who was part of the cottage industry of local religion, making his living through that bizarre mix of faith, awe, and commerce that is unique to the ecosystem of Indian temples. Here was his hesitant fascination with the supple, sculpted sexuality entwined with Hinduism in a mind-blowing, gut-wrenching and morality-bending tangle that would scandalise the austerity and abstraction of any Abrahamic religion, whether Judaism, Islam, or Christianity. Here was art born of the terrifying union of sex and religion.
 
And here was a bizarre metafictional claim about the statues being fermented in the fevered sensibility of “sex-starved sculptors,” confided by a guide to a male client, at a suitably shy distance away from the women.
 
What is the modern, liberal, bourgeois urban subject to do in the eerie twilight of ancient temples, before the whispers of the possessed but crafty souls who sculpted these? When he has to listen to someone explaining these away as mere imaginings?
 
Nothing. Just listen to the stories. And if blessed enough by madness, tell a few of one’s own.
 
The life force
 
Art is an experience akin to religion. And likewise in reverse. It’s something we all know though sometimes it becomes difficult to admit. Less widespread is the understanding that the process of art, too, is much like religion. I’m not talking of the divine invocation of the Greek Muse and the impregnation of the (always) female source of inspiration by the (almost always) male poet. I’m talking about meaning, that is, the Absent Life Force of art as well as of religion.
 
Everything in the mortal world that carries the weight of religion stands for the Great Absent One: God. Every symbol, every artefact, every ritual is a symbol of That-Who-Cannot-Be-Present. Art, too, is like that. Meaning is only half-fleshed in the concrete: be it a painting, a work of sculpture, a tune. The rest is always hidden, always a quest for the abstract and the invisible, a story beyond the frame.
 
The study of literature was first the study of the Scripture. Scriptures are the imperfect recording of God’s utterances. The interpretation of scriptures is the search for the true meaning of God’s words. Such is the spirit of hermeneutics, the science of interpretation. Along the inevitable march of modernity — first the Renaissance and then the Enlightenment — hermeneutics lost its religious character to morph into its secular antecedent: literary criticism.
 
God came to be replaced by the Symbol. Same exercise, different Object.
 
Perhaps it had to happen. The fatal seduction of The Word was already real to the believer. St. Augustine had warned against falling prey to the power of language and losing sight of what it is truly meant to signify: God.
 
That would be — as Daniel Coleman puts it beautifully — falling in love with the Valentine card instead of the person who has sent it.
 
Modernity created literature as that Valentine card. True reading was engagement with the card itself. Nothing beyond.
 
Art as itself
 
Modernity is disenchantment. The lifting of the darkness of the medieval church by the clear, often harsh light of Newtonian physics and the industrial revolution. Is it a loss or gain for art?
 
Following the Enlightenment, Art is now a self-conscious Being, aware of its elevated status in the world. There was a time when a painting or a mural existed only as a beautiful limb or fingernail of a church; a song was either a hymn or entertainment in a pub. A room full of nothing but paintings would probably not make sense to most people.
 
Welcome to the art gallery. Welcome to modernity. Welcome to Art as Itself.
 
Welcome to the understanding of literary genius that would not make sense to Shakespeare — the highest retroactive example of that very genius. The genius who fabricates original stories from inside the magical space in one’s mind now describes the playwright who refashioned tales taken from popular myths and history books. The halo of the great artist now illumines the storyteller who was essentially the Renaissance equivalent of a popular movie director.
 
Privatised art
 
But the modern age is the era of the individual and of private property. How can it be otherwise with Art? The great collective soul of the community — the keeper of myths and legends and fairy tales — fades away before the private artist and her ownership of the original idea. Plot. Story. Emotion.
 
This is the story of the West, which has had an eruptive encounter with Indian culture. It has fermented complex movements of colonial modernity such as the Bengal Renaissance, and its iconic literary protagonist, Rabindranath Tagore. But just as often, it has ignited indigestion and hiccups.
 
V.S. Naipaul, forever in our mind, now more than ever, wrote a maddening story. A young Trinidadian man of Indian origin wishes to become a poet. The wish makes absolutely no sense to his parents. It is not because they want him to be a doctor or an engineer. But because to them poetry is synonymous with the great religious epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. All poetry, hence, has already been composed. The idea of someone wishing to compose new poetry in the 20th century to them is absurd. He might as well have told them that his goal in life was to invent fire.
 
There is only one kind of poetry. The poetry of the gods. And it’s already there.
 
Modernity unveiled literature as secular. But today in 2018, one cannot help but rephrase Walter Benjamin: is this document of progress also a document of loss?
 
Today’s crisis in liberal modernity and its clearest cultural logic — print literature — coincides with the reappearance of god as demonic. We are living through the triumph of the province over the globe, Brexit over Europe, Trump over Clinton. The Yogi as Minister.
 
Have we lost too much by inventing literature as a secular enterprise? As we ask this question, it is impossible not to hear its political echo. Literature, literary criticism, literary intellectuals, the academy that studies it — what a triumphant distance we’ve come from the understanding of hermeneutics as the quest of the lost Word of God!
 
This is the most powerful reason why Jejuri moves me so deeply — its engagement with religion, admittedly a half-serious one (and more moving for that). There have been many Indian writers who have entered the domain of the religious, in some instances, the spiritual, with powerful intensity. Tagore is a rich example. And there are others from the realm of the modern. One does not necessarily have to hark back to the lyrics of Meera or the cadence of Sufi poetry to experience the soul-blowing aesthetic power of religion. But still the idea of literature, and its practice on the whole, remains rooted in secular modernity. Inevitably so.
 
Between brawn and shame
 

Way back in 2002, Ruth Vanita mourned the lack of a Hindu Left. It’s missing in India, she’d argued, unlike the continuing presence of the Christian Left and the Islamic Left, which often collaborate with the secular Left in different parts of the world. Apart from a very few like Ramchandra Gandhi and Ashish Nandy, she insisted, it is the rare Indian thinker who has tried to integrate religious and leftist thinking.
 
Vanita’s post-mortem of the Hindu Left is painfully perceptive. The 19th century experienced debates between right and left-wing Hinduism, but the latter eventually died under the corrosive force of what Ashish Nandy has called “Christianising Hinduism.” This was the shame British colonialism successfully conferred on the polytheistic experience of Hinduism, branding idol-worship backward and barbaric. Over time, progressive, English-educated Indians internalised this shame of Hindu identity, and not long after the assassination of Gandhi, whom Vanita calls the last left-wing Hindu, the Hindu Left got lost between the militancy of the Hindu Right and the shame of the secular Left.
 
In recent times, Madhavi Menon has foregrounded the dialectical relation between Kama and Yoga; the latter is meant to still and negate the former, and yet in a curious way they recreate each other through this opposition. The relation between religious and literary sensibilities in modern India offers a bizarre parallel. Modern literary-intellectual consciousness, primarily secular, has thrown religion under the rug and dimmed its fire. Whatever else they have achieved, by disowning religion, the majority of writers and intellectuals have given it away to forces that have fanned its passion to unholy flames.
 
Is it possible today for literature and the arts to engage with religious aesthetic without celebrating the repressive dimensions of religion? Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd has invoked the pitfalls of the Shashi Tharoor way, where a version of liberal Hinduism becomes possible only at the cost of suppression of the netherworld of the caste system that, as Ambedkar said, is a synonym of Hinduism itself.
 
It would be madness to deny the tremendous aesthetic and emotive power of religion. Literature, and all art, have lived ancient lives enabling — and being enabled by — the beauty, emotion, mystery and terror of religion till secular modernity pried them apart. But even our longing for a moving literary embodiment of religious force cannot rest free of the question: can this force ever appear as enabling to the worst victims of the religion itself?
 
Dreaming of a Hindu Left. By Saikat Majumdar. The Hindu, September  1, 2018.

I woke up last Saturday morning to find Prashant Keshavmurthy’s pointed response to my recent essay, “Dreaming of a Hindu Left.” It gave me pause, and not only because the fact that Keshavmurthy is an established scholar of religious studies. As I read his article, my engagement deepened into one of respect.

 
Here was an expert on the subject who had read my articulations with care, and had formulated scholarly scaffoldings from which to fire his cannons. As someone with a genuine intellectual investment in the idea (and practice) of the Hindu Left, he highlights historic markers of “Hindu socialism”, notably in a vernacular language that, he rightly points out, has largely been out of my reach. Appropriately, he holds up Ruth Vanita’s formulation of the lost history of the Hindu Left as the one most easily available to the English-language thinker – one that, in his argument, has serious blind spots of its own. In his road-mapping of the lost history (and reality) of the Hindu Left, his essay moves from being one-time critique to something far more powerful, a revisionist intervention.
 
I also realised that my story had set itself up for this kind of tough love.

I had used some of the scaffolding of intellectual history to basically tell the emotional story of a moment. One’s freezing at it. At its core was the desire to see the moral ambivalence of Hinduism as holding the blueprint of a kind of affective liberation, pointedly away from the strategically sanitised version of the religion that holds its vicelike grip on mass and national politics in India today. Wrong move.
 
But it was a moment of freezing. A frieze indeed, a marginal decorative moment that had me honestly iced. What do you do before the massive historiographic sweep of the temple guide, indeed, a powerfully fictional one, who tells you that absurd positions of sexual congress sculpted on the walls, often as a series of friezes, were just that – absurd! Quoting the scholar Daud Ali, Keshavmurthy gives us what is no doubt the right answer: that the placement of sexual art before the entrance of a shrine is meant to mock the worldly desire one is supposed to shed as one enters god.
 
But the story told by my guide – that they were done by the sculptors because they were missing their wives back home – is too, just that, a story, and a kicking one at that. Not just the tale either, but his whispering voice, his hesitant body language, the gesture of asking me to step aside as if he was about to roll me a joint.
 
Keshavmurthy, no doubt, has done the right thing: revealed the flaw in the argument. I was just besotted by the story. Does the story offer anything for art even if inaccurate? I think it does. Does this artistic inaccuracy offer a possibility of political liberation? I must say it does.
 
It is not that I celebrate being in a post-truth world. The last few years of my life have been divided between a triumphant America and a modified India. But in this age of re-enchantment, affect moves far larger mountains than fact and reason. That is devastating news for the legacy of the Enlightenment as Immanuel Kant dreamt it: the use of reason in public life. But the rational model of scholarship may not be the only way to stem the rot. We may have a powerful ally we might be neglecting, powerful precisely because it is just likely to be irrational, wild and politically ambivalent. Art. The story. Fiction.
 
This is not just to set up a cheap binary of art and reason.
 
That one is likely to fail, even more sadly than the usual pathetic binary. This is merely to recognise that even is the most scathing of dystopias, there is no such called the post-art world. Harnessing the affective power of the aesthetic may not be such a bad idea in this demonic post-truth age of ours. Especially since there is already a seductive, swaying bridge between religion and art that the Enlightenment and its legacy has often bypassed, with a large measure of embarrassment.
 
In that misty twilight of Konark, the guide was for me, a character in a novel. The event was real, none of it was made up. Hence, I was the reader, living in reality outside the book. Keshavmurthy asks why I assume I was the liberal one here and not the guide? My response to that is the gendered nature of the guide’s behaviour. If he had to share what to him was a historic fact about the temple, he had to pull out his male client to do so, depriving his female clients of that nugget of knowledge. The unease with sexuality might betray a bourgeois habit, but a truly liberal person would not play fast and loose between the sexes.
 
Why indeed, Keshavmurthy asks me, “should the normative viewer of such temple erotica be liberal, bourgeois and urban?” Absolutely not. But there is a peculiar burden of response on the privileged BUL, a bourgeois, urban and liberal viewer, not to the erotica itself, but of the stories sculpted around them. Especially when the stories are illiberal fictions of such disturbingly mesmeric power. At least to me they were, and I own up to being a BUL subject, albeit with a kissing temptation to illiberal fictions.
 
The affective currents of storytelling, often fictional, purely apocryphal ones, have, over the centuries, enriched the vast river of Hinduism.
 
The point where Keshavmurthy thinks we differ most emphatically from each other is also the point where we share philosophical affinity of the most troubling kind. Does techno-modernity unleash a period of disenchantment or re-enchantment? Any answer is a winner here. It is impossible to deny the disenchanted experience of the modern rational bourgeois subject, captured in the realism of print culture. But as Adorno and Horkheimer already anticipated on the eve of the holocaust, techno-modernity would soon carve space for a mass culture that would recreate an enchantment which is (post)modern in body but pre-modern in spirit. Television as religion. The holy ritual of the soap opera.
 
Does Keshavmurthy elide responsible scholarship here and stretch the metaphoricity of language over the meaning of enchantment? Perhaps, and he is my better friend for that. He asks, “Are these not massive cases of the enchantment through capitalist technology of spaces and objects that were not enchanted to begin with?” But it’s not just a case of the stretched metaphor. Television is indeed a kind of a religion and the Instagram-poet merely picks up the performative career of the medieval minstrel after the brief interruption by print culture. Chetan Bhagat, we’ve known for some time now, is the cultural logic of Narendra Modi.
 
In a deadly prophecy, Michael Moore had written in the summer of 2016, that if you want to counter Trump, send Bernie Sanders; Hillary is no match for him.
 
Invoking truth to counter post-truth has proved ineffectual. What we need is affect. There is a ready storehouse of it called art. Another one, usually forgotten by left-liberals, called religion. And yes, they overlap uncannily with each other, usually against the spirit of the Enlightenment.
 
The ills of religion must be cured by religion itself. Secularism is no answer to it.
 
Keshavmurthy foregrounds the key question at the heart of my project: “Majumdar writes: ‘Is it possible today for literature and the arts to engage with religious aesthetic without celebrating the repressive dimensions of religion?’” Keshavmurthy’s response is nuanced, scholarly, and politically conscientious. Much depends, he says, on how we define “religion” or “religious.” “Does a “religious aesthetic” refer to,” he asks, “the egalitarian bhakti content of the Tamil and Telugu texts sung in Carnatic performances? Or to the Brahmanised upper caste identities of most of its practitioners? Or to the non-sectarian aesthetics of its performance?” Absolutely.
 
Moreover, here Keshavmurthy touches the raw point of my own guilty conscience, which is why this question appears, a dark and inevitable shadow, towards the end of “Dreaming of a Hindu Left”. It is all very well to celebrate the beauty of religion as a privileged BUL subject, a conscious inheritor of a movement as the Bengal Renaissance. The romance of religion can be a mesmeric one for the secular individual; it’s the romance of the other side.
 
I’m not a Brahmin but the upper caste second in rank, a Kayastha, the social group which engineered the social reform movement in 19th century Bengal more than the Brahmins who initially sided with the Orientalists. Which makes me give the final and lasting priority in that article to Kancha Eliah Shepherd’s critique of Shashi Tharoor’s celebration of Hinduism blindly past its sharp caste inequities. This is where Wendy Doniger’s subaltern history of Hinduism is a life-saver for me. But that, as I’ve noted in a forthcoming essay in the Los Angeles Review of Books, is not only a deeply political debt but also a stunningly aesthetic one.
 
Yes, on this one, Dr Keshavmurthy, I stand guilty as charged.
 
Which is why Arun Kolatkar’s suburban flanerie in the sacred site of Jejuri draws me so. With full acknowledgement to Kolatkar’s longstanding “musical-textual engagement” with Tukaram, as Keshavmurthy reminds us via Laetitia Zecchini, I cannot but note the narrative cast of the poem cycle, and the character of its strangely shady but sincere, dissembling but intense, tourist guides to the temples – dreaming of the puran poli the urban tourist will bring on his plate. He reminds me of the guide I met in Konark. Kolatkar’s guides sallied in the daylight of bantering verse – the tourist there is there from Bombay on a day trip. My guide did dwell in the “eerie twilight of ancient temples.” But the flesh differs when the spirit comes together.
 
Taking apart the amateur scholarship sprouting under the arches of ancient temples is a worthwhile scholarly project. But to respond to it with banter – or simply a stunned silence – is, I’d say, also an essential gesture of art. The latter may sprout the seed of an unexpected political liberation.
 
Can the emotional power of art (and religion) be the answer to the problems of the post-truth world? By Saikat Majumdar.  Scroll.in.   September 23, 2018.
 

 

 

One of the most fascinating stories in dangles the promise of a bar joke. The orator Demades, having failed to gain the attention of a noisy and distracted Athenian audience, offers a story, to which the audience is immediately all ears.
 
“The goddess Demeter, a swallow, and an eel,” the story goes, “were walking together down the road. When they reached a river, the swallow flew up in the air and the eel jumped into the water.” And then Demades falls silent. Impatiently, the audience cries, “And what about the goddess?”
 
Demades’ reply comes like whiplash: “She’s angry at you for preferring Aesop’s fables to politics.”
 
Are stories more compelling than politics? Contemporary Indians might differ here from the ancient Greeks. Not least because so much politics around us is like spun yarn in shine and jazz.
 
Aesop’s Fables Poetry in the prosaic
 
But what exactly is the promise with which the story lures its audience? What is the twist that wrenches suspense from their guts, leaving them hanging breathlessly?
 
Many writers, I think, remember the childhood recipe of story-making: “Once upon a time, there was a king and a queen. One day the queen died. And then the king died too.” “That is a story,” we were told. But how about this? “Once upon a time, there was a king and a queen. One day the queen died. And then the king died of grief.”
 
“Now that,” our teachers exclaimed excitedly, “is a story.” Howsoever tiny. Events make up a story only when they are part of a causal link, leading up, ideally, to a moment that stages a climax and a closure.
 
This is the obvious question that looks into our face from the old art-life debate: Is narrative impossible without an event? That is, can we narrate only when something has And what, indeed, is an event? Is an event a necessary departure from everyday life — indeed, is it the very opposite of the ordinary everyday? Is it only a deviation from the repetitive temporality of the everyday that becomes marked as an event? Is narration possible when nothing out-of-the-ordinary has happened? Is the lack of this happening narratable, or does it defy the very fundamental condition of narrative?
 
The arrival of literary modernity with the Enlightenment in 18th century Europe gave birth to the English novel. One of the unique gifts of the novel was that it showed the ordinary everyday as worth narrating, just the way ordinary people were now to be celebrated as protagonists in literature, unlike the royal and the highborn in ancient Greek or Shakespearean tragedy.
 
Happened? not
 
Suddenly the dailiness of daily life became the stuff of narration. A new word became crucial to fiction: “verisimilitude” — life-likeness. While previous narratives were valued for their departure from the ordinary everyday into the realm of the fantastic, the modern novel began to be valued inasmuch as it showed itself as rooted in the very conditions of everyday life.
 
The fantastic and the extraordinary did not vanish but moved into the realm of the popular, while the conscious artistic imagination became committed to the demotic and the quotidian. In the early 19th century, Walter Scott’s novels about war and romantic adventures were runaway bestsellers.
 
But it is his contemporary, Jane Austen, with her gossipy stories about ladies’ drawing rooms and tea parties, who is considered a classic today and the then-bestselling Scott has been consigned to a distant second alley of the literary canon.
 
Italian critic Franco Moretti reads Austen’s as containing only three turning points. Elizabeth and Darcy meet in Chapter 3; she is disgusted by him. The action is set by this. 31 chapters later, Darcy proposes to Elizabeth. 27 chapters later, Elizabeth accepts him. These three “events” shape the trajectory of the plot.
 
In between, they meet, talk, have tea, go for walks, the sort of thing that adds texture and density to the novel, but does not affect the story. Moretti calls them “fillers.” Next to three turning points, he counts 110 fillers in the novel. The modern genre of the novel, it appears, draws more of its substance from
 
Pride and Prejudice
 
Fillers than from turning points.
 
And then Moretti notices something curious. As the 19th century moves on, fillers are on the rise. The background, he says, slowly starts to become the foreground. From simply giving shape and texture to novels, drinking tea and doing laundry became the very of the story, thereby violating the assumption that the narratable event is necessarily a departure from the routinised everyday.
 
The triumph of the non-event, one might say, climaxes with modernism, the period when a whole story comes to be made up of staring at a mark on the wall and a door-stopper of a novel outlines a single day where two men wander around the streets of Dublin.
 
If the poetic is understood to be an immersion in the experience of a moment and the narrative is imagined as a temporally activated account of causally linked events, modern literature comes to demolish the binary opposition between the two.
 
New orientalism subject
 
But this is the story of the West, right? The common claim about India is that it is, and remains forever, a storytelling culture. It is the land of epics, orality, folklore, myths embedded in communal memory — from the ancient sages to the prolix Indian politician in the modern parliaments and election campaigns. The Indian Demades, according to this imagination, would plunge into a story right away, not bother with abstract theories of the state. No conflict between the statesman and the storyteller in India, none at all!
 
Sure, stories have always played a key role in the Indian imagination — if the latter can be imagined with any kind of unity. But to construct the playful, prolix, fantastic storytelling culture of India as an alternative to modern Western rationality and its literary values — now, that too, is a new kind of orientalism, isn’t it? What else but a new version of the taxonomy that classifies the West as rational and scientific and the non-West as irrational and colourful?
 
As with the Scott example above, storytelling has always thrived in the popular imagination. Now, as the academy starts to reel under the suspicion of the modernity project, the critique of modernist literary culture comes full circle, joining the university and the marketplace together.
 
Amit Chaudhuri’s Literary Activism series declares itself as an attempt to reclaim the value of the literary in a postglobalisation age, which, Chaudhuri says, has been abandoned by both the market and the academy for peculiar reasons of their own.
 
The market, led by red-carpet events such as the Booker Prize, has entered into an unabashed celebration of, well, the market logic in literature — essentially the novel as the only globally marketable literary commodity. But this celebration has taken the trouble to disguise itself in the celebratory language of literary value, drawing in tropes of the genius, the masterpiece, the classic, the whole nine yards.
 
The academy, on the other hand, has abandoned the vocabulary of literary value altogether and has donned the mantle of the sociological, cataloguing and assessing books based on topical issues they probe, and entirely replacing aesthetic value with political valence.
 
‘Against Storytelling,’ the subject of the fourth annual symposium held recently at Delhi’s India International Centre, is a polemical return to the value of the literary for two interconnected, if counter-intuitive, reasons. The first is the fact that we now live in a moment that fetishises the event, not only in the news media but also as the very condition of literary narratability.
 
Key question
 
The poet Arvind Krishna Mehrotra declared at the symposium that he didn’t see the point in reading recycled news headlines in the forms of novels when there are so many more fascinating problems such as why one’s key doesn’t fit in the lock of one’s door at the end of a long day.
 
But is that a voice of dissent heard often today? Doesn’t the consciousness of the age identify the event — usually the spectacular and disruptive one — as the very condition of a narrative? And isn’t the narrative conflated with the story, and the story with all art? Is the sensory, densely atmospheric non-event at all the subject of aesthetic engagement today, as it was with the literary modernists, as with the epiphanic moments in Satyajit Ray’s films or even the fiction of Chaudhuri himself ?
 
The second polemical stake for Chaudhuri is the predictable conflation of non-Western cultures with storytelling, as already outlined above. “Storytelling,” he writes, “with its kitschy magic and associations of post-colonial empowerment, is seen to emanate from the immemorial funds of orality in the non-Western world.”
 
The new orientalism masquerades, irony of ironies, as the political conscience of post-colonial studies.
 
The newsy nature of much literature today, as pointed out by Mehrotra, and of the book industry on the whole, stems from anxieties about “urgency”. Socio-politically urgency not only in terms of newsbytes but also in terms of the political morality that dominates academic departments of literature today has come to fully displace the aesthetic with the sociological.
 
‘Against Storytelling’ cannot naturally be just a critique. It becomes also a perverse celebration of storytelling, if only of its inescapable centrality. The symposium buzzed with tales of guilt, languor, forgetfulness, and with the beastly, gurgling sound of poetry.
 
The poet and critic Tiffany Atkinson spoke of the “lyric embarrassment” of not being able to tell a story; not being able to do so in the event-driven way an oral storyteller or even the novelist today is expected to be, is the blushing embarrassment of the lyric poet.
 
It lies deep inside the core of the larger embarrassment that comes with the “So what do you do for a living” question in the dentist’s office. Embarrassment is different from shame as, unlike the latter, embarrassment belongs to both: the poet for being a poet, and her questioner for not understanding poetry or its significance in the world.
 
Such embarrassment does not only belong to the lyricist but is lyrical itself. It is the experience of an intense, delightfully toxic emotion that is also a pointed, if perhaps fleeting engagement with life. Such engagements, too, make up the subject of art, even though the present, with its fetish of the story, might have forgotten about their power.
 
It is, in the end, impossible to dismantle storytelling as a magnetic force that has held our imagination in thrall over centuries. Nor is it desirable that we do so. The important question to ask rather is: are there other elements that claim artistic attention? And have we left them on the wayside in our fateful march of globalisation, which might be one of the most powerful stories that runs our lives today?
 
And thereby hangs a tale. By Saikat Majumdar. The Hindu, March 4, 2018. 

The novelist and critic on his third novel, The Scent of God, that explores the mesmeric power of religion and the sensory, amoral nature of polytheistic Hinduism, being an ‘ethnographer’ of memory, and his fascination with the non-modern
 
Novels, says Saikat Majumdar, come from a wild and unpredictable place, but they end up capturing the spirit of the times, sometimes even of the future. The novelist and critic, who is a professor of English and head of the department of creative writing at Ashoka University, says he sees himself as an ethnographer of memory, not of reality. Majumdar, who explores the mesmeric power of religion and the sensory, amoral nature of polytheistic Hinduism in his third novel, The Scent of God (Simon & Schuster India, 2019), says the present is a muddled continuum — the past always contains the future, and future, the past. “History and memory meet in all my novels. Memory is simply that which is available to you in sensory form; archives outside the realm of the sensory are what we call history. But our memory is also the memory of others, usually, our elders, and those are the murky zones where history and memory meet, such as with theatre in The Firebird (2015), and religion and sexuality in The Scent of God,” he says. 
 
The universe of his first novel, Silverfish (2007), was made up of “the pulsation of the late 20th century modernity — quotidian life, the deadening impact of bureaucracy, and the throbbing banality of modern cities.” The Firebird, he says, sought to capture the wilderness of the non-modern in the composure of modern prose and the ritual and energy of performance.  Excerpts from an interview:
 
Shireen Quadri: In your novel The Scent of God, you explore religion’s unimaginable hold over a secular democracy and trace the disturbing contours of religious violence that recently erupted in Delhi, killing nearly 50 people. Unlike your previous two novels, which delved into the lives of women in the past, this novel, based in Calcutta like the other two, has a certain degree of immediacy and urgency. In what ways has this novel been shaped by the rising tide of intolerance and hatred that has now begun to choke us, and frighten us out of our wits?   
 
Saikat Majumdar: So far, India 2020 has been a nightmare. The year started off with the worst riot of the decade, and now everything is shut down due to the Coronovirus pandemic. Impossible not to see much symbolism here. But that’s how it is with history – the past always contains the future, and future, the past; the present is a muddled continuum. During my last visit to Calcutta, I was shocked to see the Islamophobia among bhadralok, middle and upper-middle class Bengalis, the tenor of conversation in parties, the way they freely mixed class and communal prejudice. Such is how a culture imagined to be liberal reveals itself as otherwise. Now that I look at The Scent of God, I realise I was unconsciously recording the seething intolerance, and the incipient rise of saffron power in Bengal in the late 1980s and early 1990s. It appeared in apparently innocuous things, such as a group of boys in a boarding school cheering for the Indian cricket team playing Pakistan and engaging in an imaginary rivalry with a neighbouring Muslim village. The young protagonist is drugged by the magnetic charisma of the Hindu monk who supervises them in the hostel. The story is based on a real Hindu monastic order in Bengal, a liberal one, that has, of late, tended to cosy up to the ruling Hindu majoritarian government. Novels come from a wild place, wild and unpredictable, but I realise they end up capturing the spirit of the times, sometimes even the future spirit.
 
Shireen Quadri: While religious violence is at the heart of your novel, it would be unfair to see it as just about that. Though it takes a look into a breeding ground of hate, it is essentially a story of love. The novel also hovers around other ideas like desire and abstinence, and the commingling of the spiritual with the sexual. The coming-of-age novel, set in an exclusively male boarding school of a Hindu Monastic order, depicts your protagonist Anirban's journey to adulthood — a journey that highlights how the wedge between communities is driven early on in young minds, preparing them for a life entrenched in hatred by indoctrination. What brought you to Anirban's story, and Kajol, and their quest for an impossible love in an unlikely backdrop?  
 
Saikat Majumdar: The Scent of God, as I imagine it, is first and foremost a love story. I was more delighted when Times of India listed it as one of the Best Romance Novels of 2019 than when they listed it as a notable book on same-sex love, because the dream remains for the day when non-heteronormative love will get the same status as heteronormative love and won’t have to be singled out as “different”.
 
I was intrigued by the first arrival of sexual stirrings at puberty, when a human touch is all the body longs, not caring about the sex or gender of the person touching you, distinctions that come to you later, perhaps conditioned by society. Of course, the inspiration behind this novel is a life I used to know, as a student at a saffron school similar to the one described in The Scent of God. I remember the peculiar intimacies that grew between students there daily, the friendships hard to name — all within the smell of incense and flowers of the monastic world.  
 
Shireen Quadri: The novel also pits several worlds and ideas against each other. The monk’s narrow, stifling and stultifying version of Hinduism is presented in conflict with Anirban’s aesthetic perception of prayer rituals. The sensory world of religious worship is shown to be in sharp contrast to the sensory nature of erotic desire. The idea of purity is contrasted against the profane, and love against lust. Sensual meets the sexual. In the school, detachment from the body and its desires is mandatory. In Anirban’s choice of defying this lies an act of rebellion, which is in contrast against the blind adherence of the rules of the school by other boys. The school, in some sense, stands as an embodiment of India, a secular democracy where religious strife runs deep. Did you work on sewing these elements into your narrative?   
 
Saikat Majumdar: Several reviewers have pointed to the paradoxes of contemporary Indian democracy as they appear in the novel. I did not think of it in quite this way, but on hindsight, it makes real sense. After all, the novel is set in a boarding school which aspires to build future citizens. It is also a school that works under a Hindu religious identity, albeit a liberal one. But the students, for the most part, do not aspire to be monks (our protagonist is an exception), but they desire lives of secular success, which in India, is often defined by the yardsticks of careers such as engineering and medicine. So these are boys who pray and sing hymns twice daily but their goal is to crack the IIT entrance tests and become normative and productive members of civil society. The student body, too, is a microcosm of the nation today, with its class and communal prejudice, chronicled somewhat prophetically for the last decade of the 20th century — to the terrifying nation we inhabit today.
 
Shireen Quadri: There is a lot of empathy with which you portray the love between the two boys. Your depictions of their encounters are tender and nuanced. The novel created a lot of buzz as a novel dealing with gay love. Did you foresee this happening, considering it has rarely been in the Indian contemporary fiction? Could you tell us about some of the recent novels on the subject you have read and appreciated?   
 
Saikat Majumdar: Naming non-normative forms of sexuality is important for purposes of political mobilisation. But, as an artist, I’m less interested in names than in forms of intimacy that are rather hard to name. Some of the attention this novel has received has come from the excitement over the abolition of Article 377 that was meant to penalise homosexuality. Queer people have celebrated this novel, and some of them have also criticised it for not being “activist” enough, but that, I feel, is not the essential call of art.
 
Indian writing, especially in the vernacular traditions, is rich with instances of such hard-to-classify intimacies. Probably the most famous is Ismat Chughtai’s “Lihaaf” that tells the stories of powerfully idiosyncratic intimacies that are often reductively described as homosexual. Or think of U.R. Ananthamurthy’s story “A Horse for the Sun”, where the character Venkat gives a massage to his old friend which is therapeutic and also something more. Or Amrita Pritam’s story “The Weed” where intimacies, both between and within genders, seem impossibly poetic and dangerously transgressive at the same time. Among the more recent novels, I thought Amrita Mahale’s novel Milk Teeth, which I loved, does a great job showing the self-hatred to which queer desire is often unfortunately doomed in middle-class India. Among other contemporary writers, R. Raj Rao, Hoshang Merchant, Nemat Sadat, Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar and others have created literature that can be more directly identified as representing homosexuality.
 
  
Shireen Quadri: In the novel, you also suggest that the violence unleashed by the students and monks studying in the religious school are linked to the denial of bodily desires. In desperation, the hungry boys secretly kill, roast, and eat pigeons. When he is struck by fits of rage, Premen Swami, a teacher, hits students with his whip, studded with metal, for even minor infractions. Do you see a link between the depraved acts of violence and sexually deprived lives of young men?
 
Saikat Majumdar: Yes, I think so. One form of research I did while writing this novel was to interview the alumni of the school on which this is modelled and ask about their experiences. One of them told me that he believed there were very clear links between the monks’ need to practise celibacy and their acts of physical violence, which included sports but also the brutal beatings of the young boys. Physical punishment thus becomes a channel for suppressed sexual desire, especially as flesh hits flesh. Same with the violent behaviour of the boys, such as when they catch pigeons and roast them live to eat. The monastic austerity imposed on them creates this simmering hunger and violence, which explodes from time to time, to invite an even more brutal regime of discipline and punish by the monks. And so the cycle continues.
 

Shireen Quadri: Like your previous two novels, your sentences in The Scent of God are evocative and lyrical. Do you think about  the elements of style and the texture and structure of the text while working on your novels? 
 
Saikat Majumdar: A moving sentence, a memorable phrase, for me these are the basic units of currency in fiction. Without these, gripping story, powerful character, all come to nothing. But good style, for me, does not mean flamboyant style, it is style that is honest and real; it can be either simple or complex depending on the call of the moment or the writer, but it must be a call that’s honest. I think over the years I’ve moved away from the idea of style as something clever and flamboyant to style that tries to stay bare and honest, but where honesty makes it haunting and lyrical, not straight and flat. I guess I have a natural writing style by which people identify me, but one’s style is simultaneously natural and cultivated — I revise and edit my manuscripts obsessively, and sometimes I wish I could revise subsequent editions, as the process never seems complete.
 
Shireen Quadri: Calcutta has been central to your stories. How has the city shaped your fiction?
 
Saikat Majumdar: Calcutta is the city where I grew up, and the city I left. Writing about a place of memory, always half-remembered, becomes an exercise separated not only by time and space, but also by a certain feeling. I’ve come to realise that I’m an ethnographer of memory, not of reality. It’s hard for me to write interestingly about a place when I’m physically there—it comes much better to me when I’ve left that place, and I’m groping my way through memory, which acts as a force of natural selection.
 
And Calcutta is an aesthete’s delight. It is a modern city in the historic sense of the term, in the sense in which that modernity is now in decline, or has been for the last four decades at least. This is the modernity that saw its daybreak with the Bengal Renaissance, and which was effectively stalled by the Communist regime inaugurated in 1977. The decay created by that stalled modernity has inspired both first two novels, Silverfish and The Firebird. The Scent of God is not set in Calcutta but in its penumbra; the school that inspires this novel is just a short drive off the southern tip of the city. The idyll of the ashram makes up part of the novel, but the other part is the dirt and grit of the city streets, and as you know, the protagonist has to make some hard choices in the end, between the city and the ashram — and between a heteronormative life and one that promises a different kind of love.
 
Shireen Quadri: In many ways, this novel, like Silverfish, unravels a writer’s experience with the real, the raw and the physical. The Firebird, on the other hand, was more of visceral, a work where history and memory met. How did you arrive at each of the three? How do you see these stories to be different? Is writing about the now more difficult since there is no luxury of the distance?  
Saikat Majumdar: I like Silverfish, but it now feels very much like a first novel — and not the great first novel that some gifted writers write. I feel that there my approach to reality, including that of Calcutta, was a bit anthropological, with a kind of intellectual distance that took something away from its artistic power. In contrast, both The Firebird and The Scent of God had stories that took me by my throat and demanded to be told, there was indeed a visceral quality to them that I think was missing in my first novel. I think history and memory meet in all my novels. Memory is simply that which is available to you in sensory form; archives outside the realm of the sensory are what we call history. But our memory is also the memory of others, usually, our elders, and those are the murky zones where history and memory meet, such as with theatre in The Firebird, and religion and sexuality in The Scent of God.
 
Shireen Quadri:  In Prose of the World: Modernism and the Banality of the Empire (2013), you wrote about how the  sense of banality and boredom were common elements of the daily experience for people on the colonial periphery, and how this affective experience of colonial modernity has shaped the innovative aesthetics of modernist fiction. In your novels, how do you see yourself straying away from the conventional impulses of narration and its distinct narrative aesthetics?
 
Saikat Majumdar: Prose of the World celebrated literature’s rootedness in what I felt was the most distinctive feature of Western modernity: modern literature’s preoccupation with the banal — of stories about marks on the wall and entire novels about men and women just walking along city streets. The prose of the world, as in the title of the book, was disdained by the philosopher Hegel as the trivial stories of daily life, but that was, I argued, the most defining characteristic of literature since Enlightenment and Romanticism, and in a more radical way, with the broken interiority of modernism in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. The universe of my first novel, Silverfish, was made up of the pulsation of this modernity — quotidian life, the deadening impact of bureaucracy, the throbbing banality of modern cities.
 
The Firebird was where things started to change. It sought to capture the wilderness of the non-modern in the composure of modern prose. The milieu, as before, was the stalled modernity of the late-20th-century Calcutta. But the real force in the novel, I now feel, is that of the pre-modern. It came through the primal terrors of childhood, the obsession with blood-kinship, the incestuous love for one’s mother and sister, and a persisting engagement with the spectacle of death. Most importantly, the novel sought to capture the ritual and energy of performance, which long predates the modern category of literature in print.
 
In many ways, The Scent of God continues my fascination with the non-modern. This time, it is the mesmeric power of religion. Particularly, it is about the sensory, amoral nature of polytheistic Hinduism, and endless erotic possibilities that lie within its layers. It all comes together in this boy’s life where spiritual and sexual awakening happen in the same moment, and in the same body. Hence the scent — the sensory aura — of the ultimate abstract, God.

Saikat Majumdar: Scent and Sensibility. By Shireen Quadri.  The Punch Magazine , April 18 2020.

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