Wednesday, October 26, 2005

More on Nirmal Verma

I remember reading an article by Rajendra Yadav, the editor of the very prestigious Hindi literary magazine Hans and a writer of significant repute himself, where he criticized Nirmal Verma for what he thought was his soft hindutva. I don't remember the exact line of his argument now, but the basic point was that Verma and some other writers like Shailesh Matiyani, with their soft-hindutva and spiritual mumbo-jumbo are helping the sangh-parivar by giving the Hindu revivalist movement a good name. I remembered this essay as I was looking up on Internet to find something to read about Nirmal Verma. I found this interview on Hindu Vivek Kendra (a site dedicated to Hindu revivalism). On asked about how Indian and European cultures are different he says:

On the basis of three sets of relationships: those of time, nature and self (atman). We were under a severe negative attack from Western civilisation. Nature for them is an object to be appropriated, because man is at the centre of the universe. And Time is measured by them in fragments of past, present and future. The past is overcome by the present, which in turn takes you to the future. Even for Max Mueller, India's "past was glorious" but its present merely a ghostly remnant of the past, and the future depended on its Europeanising itself.

Although he forgets that the western scientific tradition also produced Galileo and Darwin who demolished the Christian anthropocentrism. But overall, I think this is a valid argument but I could understand the problems people like Rajendra Yadav or even myself have when he says this about secularism and western civilizaztion:
Because of this concept of Dharma, there was no divide between the religious or spiritual, and the secular or civic life. This division began in Europe with the rupture with divinity during the Renaissance. The divine stayed with the church, and the civic with the society, which placed man centrestage. That may have led to the glory of the Renaissance but its ultimate consequence was also the ego-centred view of man in Nazi ideology.

I am fully aware of the ongoing debate on the secular versus the spiritual. But indian civilisation had an integrated approach to sansara or lok (this world) and the spiritual, parlok (the other world). Dharma is the harbinger of all our transactions in both, this world and beyond. This was the most important concept of Gandhism. Gandhi never used the word secular when talking of Hindu-Muslim unity. The religious and the secular were not separate but a confluence that nourished Indian civilisation.

This is just plain wrong. First, saying that the Nazi ideology had its roots in enlightenment rationalism and second resorting to obfuscation, that somehow secular and spiritual can be merged together. It is this kind of fallacious thinking that has enabled politicians to play politics in the name of secularism in India. What I don't understand is that in his stories and novels there is no writer, even among those who write in English, I find more "European" than him! No wonder people like Yadav were furious.

On a more positive note I found another interview on the same site, where he defends Rushdie's freedom of speech. As against Khushwant Singh who gives some really lame and sorry excuses. I also didn't know that Khushwant Singh (himself a writer of an almost-porn novel) advised the Indian publishers not to publish Rushdie's book! Talk about irony!

And here is a nice article by the noted literary critic Vishnu Khare from Frontline when Verma got the Jnanpith award a few years back. He sums up Nirmal Verma's themes very well:
Nature, especially hilly or northern European grass, flowers and trees, rains and monsoon clouds, sunshine, moonlight, tender animals, circuit houses, dak bungalows, civil lines, servants' quarters, aging colonial houses, Western cities such as Prague, Vienna and London, convents, churches, hospitals, town squares, walks and gardens, restaurants and concert halls, sausages, beer, chianti and cognac, Chopin and Mozart - all these populate his short stories and novels. Love, separation, abortion, divorce, alienation, lack of dialogue and mutual understanding between most intimate relations, nostalgia, guilt and repentance over unnamed things done and undone, secrets and mysteries and horror of relationships and psyche, mental masochism and sadism, death wish, death and the conjuring up and eternal presence of the dead, all enveloped in brooding, pitying tenderness, are Nirmal Verma's recurring themes.

Doesn't look like a healthy list? But then who needs sugary ideas in this age of Coelhos, Dan Browns and those predator self-help gurus? I, for one, will do well with some bitter medicine. Too bad, I don't have any of his books here in Zembla!

Previous post here.

4 comments:

readerswords said...

Have you read Dharam vir Bharati's Sooraj ka saatvan ghoda? I haven't read Nirmal Verma at all (my Hindi lit comrades did not exactly advise reading him !), and want to undertstand from a comparative perspective.

I found Sooraj ka Saatvan Ghoda to be quite revolutionary in Hindi literature compared to what you have rightly described as 'straitjacketed social realism', including what Dharamvir Bharati himself wrote elsewhere (like in Gunahon ka Devta)

Alok said...

yes I have read suraj ka saatwan ghoda, it is indeed quite experimental but i think it more or less experiments just with structure and modes of storytelling. I don't think it even reaches close to the depth and intensity of Nirmal Verma's stories. I am not too fond of his novels, Lal tin ki Chhat or Raat ka Reporter, the two that I have read, but his stories are masterpieces.

I am also particularly very fond of him because his story parinde and other stories in the collection were my first brush with "serious" literature, way back in my early adolescence. I have read them many times over the years.

I think Nirmal Verma had some problems with the literary establishment because of his style and themes, a concern with inwardness, a deep pessimism about human relationships and the general human condition and his refusal to see individuals just as products of their social circumstances, which his marxist critics i think didn't really like. he was also stridently anti-communist in his political opinions. incidentally he was a member of the communist party till the soviet invasion of hungary. although finally he did win the jnanpith award.

gunahon ka devta? ahhh. It is one of the most popular hindi novels but I found it embarassingly sentimental and naively romantic even in those school days :)

readerswords said...

Thanks, I had a vague feeling that Nirmal Verma was influenced by the existentialists and other modernist writers while he was in Europe.

I also felt the same way as you did while reading Gunahon Ka Devta.

In terms of style, indeed it is a very social realist work of the 50s and 60s.

Nevertheless I can gauge the impact of this novel on the middle classes of the time. It was highly recommended to me at the Delhi Book Fair by an attendant whose eyes showed how emotionally attached he felt to the book. Perhaps it reflected the wretchedness of his life, and those of many others.

Alok said...

Yes, he was definitely inspired by the modernist and existentialist movements in the west. Later in his life he also became very sympathetic to eastern mysticism.

I find him somewhat unique in Hindi literature, in so far I have read, because of his philosophical resignation and an absence of social and political protest in his works. Even in poetry, the best hindi poets (Muktibodh, Raghuvir Sahay, Nagarjun and others) wrote poems of protest and filled with anger over social and political institutions. I get the impression that he didn't even know these violent emotions. You can almost see it in his face!

His novel Raat ka Reporter for example is set in the emergency period and is about the crackdown of journalists and reporters (more or less) but he never mentions the word emergency even once in the novel!