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.

Nirmal Verma Passes Away

Nirmal Verma, one of the most famous of the modern Hindi writers, passed away yesterday. Although I don't consider myself very well read in Hindi (not that I am well read in any language) but I have read most of Verma's short stories and at least one of his novels (Lal Tin ki Chhat). His most famous story Parinde, which broke new grounds in form and heralded the nayi kahani movement, is still one of my all time personal favourites, in any language, even after 12-13 years when I first read it. I still remember the cold, foggy day, much as the weather in the story, when I finished the story completely overwhelmed with a most mysterious sadness. It was not the kind of sadness I associated with reading a sad book -- the kind of sadness, that just goes away or fades as soon as you close the book. Perhaps it was just something that I was too young to understand then because the story tackled the quintessential adult themes of death, human disconnection, memory, loss and regret. But even though I didn't understand all the finer motivations of the three main characters, they remained with me for long and I continued to worry about their fates. Did Lathika eventually marry again or did she leave the school and the hilly town? If yes, where did she go? Did Mr. Hubert eventually die of tuberculosis? What about Dr. Mukherjee? Did he change his mind or did he a get a chance to go back to his home?

In fact these feelings still return when I read the story and I read it at least once every year. But now, more enlightened as I am, I can understand why this was considered to be a revolutionary story in the modern Hindi literature. It must have broken almost all the literary conventions of the time. There were no farmers in his story, nor was any social reformism. There were no rapturous evocations of rural landscapes, nor any gushing over the triumph of the proletariat (or human spirit in general). Instead of looking outside at the society, Verma looked inside, into the consciousness of his characters and raised those eternal questions which plague our sorry existence on this earth, regardless of our class or gender. What are we doing here on this earth? Where are we going? Are we just like those migratory birds of the title of the story? He also did away with the elements of plot and caricature and instead focused on the ways in which those characters introspect themselves to find out answers to those questions.

And perhaps the most important convention he broke was the idea that a storywriter is basically a storyteller. Verma didn't want to just tell a story (an easy and entirely futile thing to do), he aimed to evoke a complex mood and feeling, things we generally associate with poetry or music, certainly not with prose. Curiously Verma did it without resorting to any overtly "poetic" language or creating innovative imageries. His prose is a model of simplicity and restraint. The best example of this writing is again in the story Parinde where Verma describes the effect of Music in the scene where Mr. Hubert plays Schubert on his piano and how it affects everybody in the dark room. It is simply marvelous. I don’t have the book with me right now so I can not provide any excerpts.

In these ways and the others, Verma is generally credited with bringing modern and European sensibilities to the Hindi literature and thus widening its horizons beyond what the progressive and social realist tradition had straitjacketed it into. He was 76 and his best work was behind him but even then his death does leave me very sad. At least with people like him Death does appear to be grossly unjust.
Here is something more.