Manto stories – 1

Sometime ago finished re-reading a collection of short stories of Saadat Hasan Manto. Apart from some well-known partition stories, there are several other notable ones imbued with the trademark sensibility of Manto. The chaos and confusion (quite often accompanied with utter drunkenness which could be a metaphor for the unhinged time and place), as well as raw emotions surface in many stories where action mostly belonged to the turbulent period 1920-1950. Manto seemed almost like a detached observer of the big social and political transformations and the attendant changes brought on the human beings by poverty, destitution and lawlessness that preceded and accompanied partition. Though his emphathy for the predicament of the lowest among the lowly is unmistakable, nevertheless he characterizes and catalogues layers of depravity and villany to which human beings can descend to (especially under some special conditions like dislocation and uncertainty in the context of the partition) with almost a scientist’s empiricism. He appeared to look at his characters much as a biologist would unemotionally handles his petridishes and the bottles of specimens.

Side by side there are also some amazing stories of immense charm and innocence – especially the stories of apparent sexual awakening in the adolescent and the young adults. His empathy for the down and out, especially women (sex workers or others) in difficult and unenviable conditions (whence conventional morality had come unstuck) is well known, but he does it with a simplicity and sureness of touch that is breathtaking.

His partition stories apart (where much of his fame lay and the cold savage fury that characterizes his writing remains unsurpassed), I found ‘New constitution’, ‘Last salute’, ‘Odour’, ‘The blouse’ and ‘Wild Cactus’ in this collection great reading and were as good as any in the world literature.

The real and the moral - 1

There was this interesting article ‘The art of the provincial’ by Arvind Adiga (TOI, 31 March 2012). The essential points made by the writer are (i) that India’s historical cultural diversity was responsible, in the pre-independence days and even for some years post the event, for the natural and uninhibited cultural flowering in many small towns and cities of India, not necessarily the seat of political power or associated with important political events. Secondly, (ii) in contrast, in the past few decades, there seems to be a centripetal force (one guesses, though not directly suggested in the article, a politically engineered one) acting gradually to provide cultural pre-eminence to the political seat of power, the metro cities while effectively consigning many erstwhile culturally thriving provincial centers to gradual neglect and oblivion. Adiga illustrated his points by mentioning grooming and blossoming of writers, playwrights, poets of such eminence as R. K. Narayan, S. L. Bhyrappa, D. R. Bhendre and Girish Karnad in smaller (Tier-2) towns like Dharwad and Mysore and noting the vibrant cultural scene in others like Belgaum, Hassan and Udupi. He then sought to generalize his observations with reference to similar towns in other states like Pune and Kohlapur in Maharastra and Allhabad in UP.

The current decline in the importance and the visibility of the smaller provincial centers vis-à-vis wealthier and power protected metro cities and state capitals in cultural matters, implied the writer, may be indirectly ascribed to the subtle preferential state patronage given to the latter than the former. The seat of power has come to exert its expected influence on a narrower cultural center while wider and diverse and distant islands/hinterlands rich with the cultural diversity of India are being drained off their vitality in an unequal war.

In an insightful observation, Adiga says, the small towns like Udupi, Kundapura, Puttur and Mangalore have changed their character in that the cultural vibrancy that earlier generated public and multifaceted intellectuals like Shivarama Karanth is invariably sacrificed at the altar of the so-called economic progress – a perfect pound of flesh minus the blood !

While one may or may not sysmpathise with and entirely agree with Adiga’s implied prognostication about the growing importance of political patronage and manipulation (if not outright control) in the cultural life, the avenues of free and diverse creative expressions in the country are getting constricted. One has only to recall the number of times the political parties in power give in to bigots, obscurantists, fanatical supporters of religious and other sectarian groupings and hand out bans to books, paintings and other creative work. But the subtle and a long-term shift in the cultural paradigms are probably more worrisome. However, why should that trend surprise one in a country deemed by many to have been liberated from old moral values, socialistic ideals espoused in the earlier decades as the economy is liberalised and globalised progressively since the early nineteen ninety’s. A certain extent of standardization of thoughts and cultural perspectives should be considered an expected consequence.

The power centers in India today both at the central and state levels are interested in exercising culture as an important instrument for projecting the liberal values that, even if not completely consistent with, at least do not impede and dilute the focus of the nation from the goal and zeal of economic growth through certain specified policies of liberalization and concomitantly globalisation and, as a corollary, do not seriously question or subvert the socio-cultural trappings or fall out of such policies. A certain section of the cultural agents – movie and theatre actors, artists, writers, festival organizers, ad-gurus, fashion experts – are being selectively own over and co-opted to act on behalf of the powers that be who willingly or unwittingly promote the so-called modern or post-modern trends and cast not a little aspersion at the moorings of pre-1991 decades in India’s cultural history.

Adiga’s article somehow, between the lines, betrays a sense of loss one feels looking wistfully at the old decaying abandoned structures in certain localities in contrast to the self-evident prosperity in other more modern sectors of the same city. A strange heartache for a doomed time and place.