Mass Suicides in Indian Villages

Over 1,500 farmers in an Indian state committed suicide after being driven to debt by crop failure, it was reported today.
The agricultural state of Chattisgarh was hit by falling water levels.
"The water level has gone down below 250 feet here. It used to be at 40 feet a few years ago," Shatrughan Sahu, a villager in one of the districts, told Down To Earth magazine
"Most of the farmers here are indebted and only God can save the ones who do not have a bore well."
Mr Sahu lives in a district that recorded 206 farmer suicides last year. Police records for the district add that many deaths occur due to debt and economic distress.
In another village nearby, Beturam Sahu, who owned two acres of land was among those who committed suicide. His crop is yet to be harvested, but his son Lakhnu left to take up a job as a manual labourer.
His family must repay a debt of 400 and the crop this year is poor.
"The crop is so bad this year that we will not even be able to save any seeds," said Lakhnu's friend Santosh. "There were no rains at all."
"That's why Lakhnu left even before harvesting the crop. There is nothing left to harvest in his land this time. He is worried how he will repay these loans."
Bharatendu Prakash, from the Organic Farming Association of India, told the Press Association: "Farmers' suicides are increasing due to a vicious circle created by money lenders. They lure farmers to take money but when the crops fail, they are left with no option other than death."
Mr Prakash added that the government ought to take up the cause of the poor farmers just as they fight for a strong economy.
"Development should be for all. The government blames us for being against development. Forest area is depleting and dams are constructed without proper planning.
All this contributes to dipping water levels. Farmers should be taken into consideration when planning policies," he said.

SAARC Writers Conference Agra

Author is yet to die…

Uday Prakash
(Keynote Address)

We are living in a time when the death of author has already been pronounced by many scholars long before. Author was dead along with the ‘End of History’, it has been said so repeatedly since then that it appears as a truth.
And, when we look at it, it essentially comes out as a thoroughly factual statement. We, it seems, now are here, in 21st century, living posthumously. It’s a miserable life in posterity of some breed, class or font, ceased to exist anymore.
This year in January, I was making a small film on legendary Rajasthani author Vijaidan Detha, who had met with an accident and toiling to regain his lost memory, he said ‘ The age of writer is gone. In this town, where I live, out of 6000 people, it’s rare to find a person with book and with pen. They have mobiles in plenty, thousands of them.’ Obviously, I titled the film: ‘Author in the Age of Mobiles’.
Interestingly, the same celebrated thinker, Francis Fukuyama, who had pronounced the death of the history and the last man, in his new book ‘Our Posthumous Future’, makes an alteration about his earlier proclamation. He says:
‘Hegel had been right in saying that history had ended in 1806, since there had been no essential political progress beyond the principles of the French revolution, which he had seen consolidated by Napoleon’s victory in the battle of Jena that year. The collapse of socialism in 1989 signaled only the pronouncement of a broader convergence toward liberal democracy around the globe.’
Well, now just think about these two phrases, ‘Liberal Democracy’ and ‘Political Progress’. We, the authors, who are here today in Agra, coming from SAARC countries, must seek the genuine answers, we must make an effort to redefine and deliberate over these two phrases in our own contexts. Do we really have, or ever had, true liberal, modern democracies in our respective countries? Or have we sincerely witnessed ‘Political progress’ since we were told that we are now independent nations and its citizens? Is it true that we now taste the fruits of that utopia dreamed by Rousseau about ‘Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity’ and so on? Had descendents of Gandhi, Marx and others have tried ever to create societies which have been transformed medieval , feudal, colonial shapes to a modern, tolerant, liberal and democratic one?
Obviously no! Not anywhere.
Time is dark and gets worsened when we see what’s happening all around. In 1980s we were told: ‘Nothing to worry. The Third Technological Revolution has arrived. Information Technology, along with electronics and bio-genetic labs, is going to create a fabulous, prosperous, peaceful ‘Global Village’ very soon. The new science has now replaced the old politics with its outdated technologies. A new technological civilization has arrived with its new-tech generation. These new drivers will take us to bigger horizons. We silly, unintelligent, childish authors started dreaming the dream of Sahir Ludhiyanvi : ‘Who subah kabhi to ayegi …!”
And what was the aftermath?
9/11, clash of civilizations, growing terrorism and its retaliatory violence, collateral damages, carpet bombings, dismantling of earlier nation-states, new torture centers, POTA and TADA, Special Arm Forces Acts, disregard of UN charter of Human Rights Declarations…..
Author, one of the most vulnerable and powerless creature, witnessed a ghastly, horrific nightmare everywhere. On one hand we saw multiple Airliners, Huge skyscrapers, shopping malls, metro rails and markets full with modern gadgets….! We saw beauty ramps, our girls becoming miss universe, miss world, our masala films getting Oscars…and hundreds of channels showing dance India dance, laughter challenges, reality shows…And on the other hand we saw Mumbai Terror attack, Cannaught place bomb explosions….genocides..Encounters…criminals occupying apex political positions, corrupts sitting on top bureaucratic seats of powers…
This part of Asia, where the new Sun was to rise in the middle of last century, is overwhelmed with darkness, drenching in the blood of its own people….
And we also witnessed conflicts of all sorts, most violent and always on rise. These conflicts are fragmenting all grand-narratives in to narrow, tiny, sectarian pieces. Our minds and souls are restructured, our identities as a modern author has been confiscated and we are given now most retrogressive, obscure, and disgraceful identities of our religion, caste, race, color etc…Time here is now rolling back.
Unfortunately, we the citizens of South Asian countries do not have a homogenous society like most of the western countries. We are plural societies with a great variance of multiple races, religions, languages, castes, colors, cultures and so on. And we also see growing hostilities between all SAARC countries. In fact, they appear in state of a war now. TV channels, news papers are attempting relentlessly to make us all warmongers, enemies of each other. Forces are now on their business to convert us in to subhuman, soulless consumerists, greedy debauches, neo-colonial bastards and citizens of empire.
Castism in my country has been equal to communalism and racism. According to one survey, conducted by CSDS a single caste and its sub-castes monopolize the language I write and live in i.e. Hindi.
I end up this somber note citing about one anecdote. Last year I scripted a film, which was based on my own novella Mohan Das. It was a story a lower caste dalit, who has lost his identity. Mightier do take away everything here in my beloved country as they do in Panama or Pakistan. This film had its premiere in Osian Film Festival, New Delhi, in July 2008. I was not invited, as writers have hardly any space in Bollywood film world. I was passing through a bad stretch of time and was completely down and out.
I was in my village, in Madhya Pradesh searching for modes of survival. It was 19th July, 2008. I had sunk in to depressions. Suddenly my cell phone rang. I picked it up. Ajeet Cour ji was on the other side. Her voice was trembling:
‘Uday ji, I had cried only three times in my entire life. But today, watching Mohan Das, I wept seven times….”
I know she is an author. I’m an author too. Our identities have been taken away. We are Mohan Das and we have strong bonds with each other.
Let us be together…lets cling to each other….lets raise our voices…
Lets make a pronouncement here at Agra, a city of love that History might have ended, we are not concerned with that, but words are still living…
Words are ‘power inscribed’….so the author will remain the final ‘authority; to give a verdict against all other powers…
Jai Ho !!
13th March, 2009

Remembering Harold Pinter

Is Our Conscience Dead ?
Ann Wright

Friday 26 December 2008
On the news today of the death of Harold Pinter, the winner of the 2005 Nobel Prize for Literature, I remembered hearing his Nobel Laureate lecture/acceptance speech. I was in London in December 2005, speaking at the annual Stop the War conference when Pinter delivered his speech - not in Oslo, as Pinter was very sick and could not travel, but in London via TV link.
I was amazed and thrilled that he chose to use the Nobel Prize platform and devote a huge portion of his speech to shining an international spotlight on the tragic effects of the past decades of US foreign policy and particularly, on George Bush and Tony Blair's decisions to invade and occupy Iraq, on Guantanamo and on torture.
Pinter's Laureate speech question, "Is Our Conscience Dead?" is most relevant today when three years after his acceptance speech, "Art, Truth and Politics," Bush, Cheney, Rice and other administration officials are either trying to rewrite history or, as in Cheney's case - purposefully revealing his role in specific criminal acts of torture and daring the American legal system and people to hold him accountable.
Following is the part of Pinter's lecture that speaks to the invasion of Iraq, torture and Guantanamo - and our collective and individual conscience:
"Art, Truth and Politics" Noble Lecture by Harold Pinter December 7, 2005
"... The United States no longer ... sees any point in being reticent or even devious. It puts its cards on the table without fear or favour. It quite simply doesn't give a damn about the United Nations, international law or critical dissent, which it regards as impotent and irrelevant.
It also has its own bleating little lamb tagging behind it on a lead, the pathetic and supine Great Britain.
What has happened to our moral sensibility? Did we ever have any? What do these words mean? Do they refer to a term very rarely employed these days - conscience? A conscience to do not only with our own acts but to do with our shared responsibility in the acts of others? Is all this dead?
Look at Guantanamo Bay. Hundreds of people detained without charge for over three years, with no legal representation or due process, technically detained forever. This totally illegitimate structure is maintained in defiance of the Geneva Convention. It is not only tolerated but hardly thought about by what's called the 'international community'. This criminal outrage is being committed by a country, which declares itself to be 'the leader of the free world'. Do we think about the inhabitants of Guantanamo Bay? What does the media say about them? They pop up occasionally - a small item on page six. They have been consigned to a no man's land from which indeed they may never return. At present many are on hunger strike, being force-fed, including British residents. No niceties in these force-feeding procedures. No sedative or anesthetic. Just a tube stuck up your nose and into your throat. You vomit blood. This is torture.
What has the British Foreign Secretary said about this? Nothing. What has the British Prime Minister said about this? Nothing. Why not? Because the United States has said: to criticise our conduct in Guantanamo Bay constitutes an unfriendly act. You're either with us or against us. So Blair shuts up.
The invasion of Iraq was a bandit act, an act of blatant state terrorism, demonstrating absolute contempt for the concept of international law. The invasion was an arbitrary military action inspired by a series of lies upon lies and gross manipulation of the media and therefore of the public; an act intended to consolidate American military and economic control of the Middle East masquerading - as a last resort - all other justifications having failed to justify themselves - as liberation. A formidable assertion of military force responsible for the death and mutilation of thousands and thousands of innocent people.
We have brought torture, cluster bombs, depleted uranium, innumerable acts of random murder, misery, degradation and death to the Iraqi people and call it 'bringing freedom and democracy to the Middle East'.
How many people do you have to kill before you qualify to be described as a mass murderer and a war criminal? One hundred thousand?
More than enough, I would have thought. Therefore it is just that Bush and Blair be arraigned before the International Criminal Court of Justice. But Bush has been clever. He has not ratified the International Criminal Court of Justice. Therefore if any American soldier or for that matter politician finds himself in the dock Bush has warned that he will send in the marines. But Tony Blair has ratified the Court and is therefore available for prosecution. We can let the Court have his address if they're interested. It is Number 10, Downing Street, London.
Death in this context is irrelevant. Both Bush and Blair place death well away on the back burner. At least 100,000 Iraqis were killed by American bombs and missiles before the Iraq insurgency began. These people are of no moment. Their deaths don't exist. They are blank. They are not even recorded as being dead. 'We don't do body counts,' said the American general Tommy Franks.
Early in the invasion there was a photograph published on the front page of British newspapers of Tony Blair kissing the cheek of a little Iraqi boy. 'A grateful child,' said the caption. A few days later there was a story and photograph, on an inside page, of another four-year-old boy with no arms. His family had been blown up by a missile. He was the only survivor. 'When do I get my arms back?' he asked. The story was dropped. Well, Tony Blair wasn't holding him in his arms, nor the body of any other mutilated child, nor the body of any bloody corpse. Blood is dirty. It dirties your shirt and tie when you're making a sincere speech on television.
The 2,000 American dead are an embarrassment. They are transported to their graves in the dark. Funerals are unobtrusive, out of harm's way. The mutilated rot in their beds, some for the rest of their lives. So the dead and the mutilated both rot, in different kinds of graves.
I have said earlier that the United States is now totally frank about putting its cards on the table. That is the case. Its official declared policy is now defined as 'full spectrum dominance'. That is not my term, it is theirs. 'Full spectrum dominance' means control of land, sea, air and space and all attendant resources.
The United States now occupies 702 military installations throughout the world in 132 countries, with the honourable exception of Sweden, of course. We don't quite know how they got there but they are there all right.
The United States possesses 8,000 active and operational nuclear warheads. Two thousand are on hair trigger alert, ready to be launched with 15 minutes warning. It is developing new systems of nuclear force, known as bunker busters. The British, ever cooperative, are intending to replace their own nuclear missile, Trident. Who, I wonder, are they aiming at? Osama bin Laden? You? Me? Joe Dokes? China? Paris? Who knows? What we do know is that this infantile insanity - the possession and threatened use of nuclear weapons - is at the heart of present American political philosophy. We must remind ourselves that the United States is on a permanent military footing and show no sign of relaxing it.
Many thousands, if not millions, of people in the United States itself are demonstrably sickened, shamed and angered by their government's actions, but as things stand they are not a coherent political force - yet. But the anxiety, uncertainty and fear which we can see growing daily in the United States is unlikely to diminish.
I know that President Bush has many extremely competent speech writers but I would like to volunteer for the job myself. I propose the following short address which he can make on television to the nation. I see him grave, hair carefully combed, serious, winning, sincere, often beguiling, sometimes employing a wry smile, curiously attractive, a man's man.
'God is good. God is great. God is good. My God is good. Bin Laden's God is bad. His is a bad God. Saddam's God was bad, except he didn't have one. He was a barbarian. We are not barbarians. We don't chop people's heads off. We believe in freedom. So does God. I am not a barbarian. I am the democratically elected leader of a freedom-loving democracy. We are a compassionate society. We give compassionate electrocution and compassionate lethal injection. We are a great nation. I am not a dictator. He is. I am not a barbarian. He is. And he is. They all are. I possess moral authority. You see this fist? This is my moral authority. And don't you forget it.'
I hope you will decide that yes, we do have a conscience and that you will join the millions of Americans who say we must hold accountable those who have committed criminal acts while in government - the policy makers as well as the implementers.
Write and call the new President and the new Congress and demand official investigations into war crimes and other criminal acts committed by members of the Bush administration and join us on Inauguration day to remind the new President of his responsibilities.

From Mumbai to Obama: End Bush's 'War on Terror'

By Steve Weissman

The terrorist attacks in Mumbai call out to President-elect Barack Obama and his advisors to rethink the signature blunder of George W. Bush's eight years in office - the so-called War on Terror. As US intelligence reports have made clear, the centerpiece of the supposed campaign against terror, the military occupation of Iraq, has increased the likelihood of more attacks like those in Mumbai, Madrid, London and Manhattan. The new escalation in Afghanistan will similarly increase terrorist attacks there, in neighboring India and Pakistan, in disputed Kashmir, and throughout the world.
Bush and Cheney chose the word "war" with malice aforethought. From the start, they intended a military response, first against Al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan, and then against Saddam Hussein in Iraq. And, as Barton Gellman shows so brilliantly in his book "Angler," Dick Cheney and his team consciously wanted to create a wartime presidency with enormous unchecked power and scant regard for basic American liberties.
By contrast, Obama's advisors openly acknowledge that military force alone will never bring victory over terrorism. They would, in addition, provide more economic aid, use counter-insurgency tactics to pacify local populations, and work with surrounding regional powers, including Iran.
But Obama and his people still talk far too much about using military force and delude themselves into believing that the physical defeat of Al-Qaeda will significantly weaken the current terrorist threat.
Though it's still too early to know who staged the attacks in Mumbai, they were most likely militant jihadis, possibly with links to Kashmiri rebels and renegade elements of Pakistan's military intelligence service, the ISI. Al-Qaeda may or may not have played a role in the planning.
But even if Al-Qaeda did, how would killing Osama bin Laden - if he's still alive - or hanging all of his top aides, or hammering the Taliban in any way defuse the toxic brew of often justified grievances and outrageous religious fanaticism that we now face? The enemy is not a single man, and not a single group. It is a movement of shared ideas and beliefs, all too often encouraged by Washington's pursuit of policies that are both unjust and counter-productive.
The terrorist bloodshed started long before bin Laden and will continue long after his dialysis machine packs up. No magic bullet will end it, but military boots on other people's ground will almost always make matters worse. That's what they did in Iraq. That's what they are doing in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
What bin Laden added to the mix was the well-articulated idea that terrorist attacks could promote a clash of civilizations, or holy war. With his War on Terror, George W. Bush, the Crusader-in-Chief, responded exactly as bin Laden wanted, turning moderate Muslims around the world into terrorist supporters, funders, and enablers. Why would Obama want to continue the madness?
To gain perspective, Obama might ask his advisers to brief him on the very different wave of terrorism that spread from Russia, through Europe, and into the United States between 1881 and 1914. The terrorists were mostly anarchists, and they killed, among others, Czar Alexander II, King Umberto I of Italy, the president of France, the prime minister of Spain, and the president of the United States, William McKinley.
The assassinations shook the established powers throughout the Western world. One terrorist, a Bosnian nationalist, even triggered War I when he assassinated the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand in historic Sarajevo.
The new media of the time, the daily newspaper, naturally exaggerated the threat, spreading the terrifying specter of the crazed anarchist bomb-thrower. Just as naturally, the papers gave considerably less coverage to another image of the age - that of the government-paid agent provocateur.
In time, the anarchists themselves saw that their violence, their propaganda of the deed, was not sparking the revolutionary movement they wanted, and they turned instead toward organizing workers into unions. But, even at the time of the greatest murder and mayhem, I can think of no government that ever went anywhere near as far as the Bush administration in making the fight against terrorism a question of military force.
Today's terrorists have far more deadly weapons at their disposal, as Dick Cheney always told us. But today's police and intelligence services have more than enough technology to meet the threat. What they need is far greater international cooperation, which a reliance on the military makes more difficult.
Similarly, Islamic societies around the world have more than enough creativity to see the dead end into which terrorism leads. What they need is time and space to adapt to a changing world.
Barack Obama is in a unique position to build cooperation and encourage Muslims everywhere to find their own way forward. Happily, he has made a good start by announcing that he will close Guantánamo and end the horrors of torture. He has also raised the hope, however faint, that he will work toward a just settlement between Israelis and Palestinians and between India and Pakistan over Kashmir.
Even more to the point, his pledge to build a green economy will reduce any argument for continuing American support of despotic governments in countries with large reserves of oil and natural gas.
All this is promising. But it remains only a promise, and all of it will come to naught if Obama gives the orders to continue killing people and breaking things wherever and whenever the United States wants.

MOHANDAS : ABDUCTED, LYNCHED AND TORTURED

I’m back to Delhi, the capital of India, a country I loved so much since the arrival of my breath in wind of my small village. It was quite more than three months long wanderings in another planet enduring anyhow in the same nation-state.. My small village, Sitapur is just struggling to survive under the clutches of builders, contractors, corrupt officials and politicians who have one genetic consistency amongst them which owns greed and violence as their DNA distinctiveness.
They must be tested for it, medically and neurologically.
My novella Mohandas was born here, in the same soil, under the same sky, at the bank of the same river Soan, where I was born too around 56 years in the past.
Mohandas was never a fiction, a handiwork of imagination, an objet d'art created through arduous skills in a language named Hindi. It was not a daydreaming or scaring nightmare. Mohandas was and is never a fantasy….
It ‘s too real. Corporal truth about the life of us all working, moral and powerless subjects of this mighty corporate-political state. It’s a narrative which narrates its time and its helplessness. A gloomy, pessimistic saga of our life which succeeds to continue anyhow.
Well, Mohandas became very popular in no time throughout India. It’s translated in to almost all Indian languages, including English, which also is an Indian language without any snag. It has been played and being played as theatrical performances in big and small cities well spread over the country.
However, like ‘The Girl with the Golden Parasol’ (Peelee Chhatari waali Ladkee) this novella too created chaos and mess in my life. Now my being, I deeply feel, is an subversive act of clinging to life in a political, dehumanized, business minded state.
Irony or tragic comicality was here. If you remember, the novella Mohandas was dedicated to a lawyer who had taken up his case to the judicial magistrate, to my shock, the lawyer is now the Secretary of the Lions Club. A city club of businessmen and contractors. At the same time he is also the district secretary of the Communist Party of India.
So, things have changed very soon. History has ended and pragmatism has replaced ideologies. I visited the lawyers chamber, it’s equipped with split AC and interiors are lavish with expensive furnitures.
Well where Mohandas will go? And me, his author? Unemployed, uprooted…..! Money and power has snatched away our identities. I exactly remember the time when I wrote Mohandas three years before. I’d gone back to my village in search of survival as I was rejected by the selection committees for a University and an Academy. The member got his own son in law appointed in the same university and had full support of power centers of capital’s Hindi elites. Now, when I read a newspaper I found that the man who was selected for the post I was contender, is found guilty of sexual abuse and exploitation of a research student and an inquiry is on.
I know, nothing will happen. He’ll come out smiling in the same way as Vishwanath smiles as a victor, impersonating as Mohandas, seizing his identity. They are the Brahmins. Our life has been subjugated and slaved by them. Hindi is their colony.
Yes, Mohandas is made in to a feature film, produced by another Brahmin, who has nothing beside power and money and ambitions. Although he’s running his ‘production company’ faking it with his wife’s name in actuality he’s a government official. One can guess about his resources of wealth in today’s India very well.
I thank to media and media critics who came out questioning my absence during the Osian Film Festival and I also thank Osian people for displaying my name in all their banners and folios.
But the news is that film Mohandas repeated the same tragedy, perhaps as a farce this time with his author and writer.
I sincerely oppose it and criticize it.
I wrote a poem just before I left to my native land (Remember the brilliant poem by Amme Cesare : Return to My Native Land). The poem I wrote is about Delhi and its title is ‘Dayaar’. It’s published in a small magazine ‘samved’ edited by Kishan Kaljayi. I’ve been receiving many phone calls since then.
Yes, my friends …I’m down and out…
And the truth is, I’ve not opted for it !
I’ll write more very soon about all this.

Mohan Das : Hindi film's nasty face

Mohan Das, a novella authored by me, which has been translated in to almost all Indian languages by eminent translators, including English and which is still being staged by various theatre groups all over the country, seems has fallen in to the wrong hands for its film version. I just had a chance to see its brochure, printed by the producer for the publicity and promotion of the film, it steals credit titles which have been duly signed by me and the producer in a stamped legal agreement. Fact is, I've written the screenplay and Dialogues, which producer has acknowledged. I had faced some delay in getting agreed upon fee, but finally it was paid.
In addition, today I just spotted an interview of the Director in India Times and to my surprise, the director is conspicuously silent about the story, screenplay and dialogue.
I paste the entire text below so that you can see it yourself. I'm also approaching Osians to safeguard my rights as an author because this organization is headed by Aruna Vasudev, who herself is a writer, journalist and filmmaker.
I'll be moving to the court, if the credits are not properly shown in the film, to seek justice.
(For your information, few Hindi-power-centers are involved in this nasty game beside Bollywood, which has already earned notority in plagiarism, piracy and cheating the artists and writers)
Well, now read the interview:

Director Mazhar Kamran's film Mohandas, starring Sonali Kulkarni, Nakul Vaid , Sharbani Mukherji , Sushant Singh, Aditya Srivastava and Govind Namdeo, has been selected for screening in the 10th Osian's Cinefan, Festival of Asian and Arab Cinema (OCFF10) that will take place in New Delhi from 10th of July to 20th July 2008. Presented as an investigative satirical thriller, Mohandas unravels an unusual small-town scam of stolen identity. It has been filmed in remote parts of UP and MP, against the backdrop of the coal mines.

Comments Mazhar Kamran, "I am happy that I will be showing my film for the first time at a film festival with an Asian focus. Given the nature of the subject of my film and its roots, it is only proper that one begins at home. We are prone to looking elsewhere for recognition, when the best thing to happen is to be recognized in your own milieu." He goes on to add, "There is no dearth of stories that are unique to our time and place. We are not looking here hard enough and go on borrowing from other cultures. In the past, we have had our unique voice. Film-makers like Guru Dutt, Mehboob, Bimal Roy and K. Asif have shown the way our mainstream cinema could go."

Since its establishment in 1999, OCFF has become one of the most important film showcases in Asia. Founded in 1999 by Aruna Vasudev, as a film festival that screened 27 films, OCFF has grown rapidly, diversified and become competitive. It is now recognised as a leading film festival.

In the forthcoming 10th edition, OCFF will screen films from more than 40 countries. Osian's-Cinefan continues to bring the finest films from Indian, Asian and Arab countries and to breaking down artistic hierarchies of the popular and the highbrow -to re-invent a thoughtful and creative film culture for our times.

International Seminar in South Korea

Literature in the Age of Internationalism
Uday Prakash
(This paper was read in the recently held International Byeong ju Lee memorial Literature Festival, 2008 in Republic of Korea)
‘Our language can be seen as an ancient city; a maze of little streets and squares, of old and new houses, and of houses with additions from various periods; and this surrounded by a multitude of new boroughs with straight regular streets and uniform houses.
Language is a labyrinth of paths. You approach from one side and know your way about; you approach the same place from another side and no longer know your way about.
– Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations.*1

If literature is a verbal art form and if we accept it as an objet d'art of creating infinite possible architectures and structures in speech by an author, this quote coming from one of the most significant philosopher investigating the cryptic logic of language and mind, is of great help to understand the role and fate of literature in the age of globalizing or almost globalized (Internationalizing or almost Internationalized, we may call) world we live in.
From another point of view, what Wittgenstein had said, stands true to all works of language, from the time of epics and novels to newspaper stories and advertising copies, from poetry to a political party’s manifesto, a corporate media campaign and to a scripture. However, there is always a very thin line of ‘ethics’,’ aesthetics’ and ‘concerns’ which often separates literature from other constructs of the language. This we can feel if we look back to Wittgenstein’s time again, when he wrote these sentences. In a tormented and traumatized soul after the First World War’s catastrophes, his ascetic deviation from a turbulent power-capital centric world towards an exiled space of ‘abstinence,’ ethics’ and ‘religion’, he wrote his masterpiece ‘Philosophical Investigations’ and attempted to explore and discover a ‘logic’ under it. And while doing so, in my opinion, Wittgenstein was not working as a philosopher of language, but he was exerting himself in the language as an author because ‘author is the last philosopher of the book’ as said by Derida. Literature succeeds in providing an alternative world, a different space and time because: ‘Writing requires a break, with thought when thought ascribes to itself immediate proximity, a break with all empirical experience of the world. In this sense, writing is also a rupture with all present consciousness, being always already involved in the experience of the non-manifest or the unknown…’ *2
This ‘point of rupture’ with the ‘empirical experience’ and ‘present consciousness’ empowers literature, an objet d'art of language, to play its own role with its own power, in a world dominated and occupied by the other powers with their other roles. In a way, writing is ‘returning to a time before world and reaching to a time after the world’. It is speaking in language already spoken in elsewhere but with words, which reveal nothing, or something else. Writing is creating ‘signs’ which confront all other ‘signs’ manufactured and perpetuated by other powers through all possible technologies and affluence in world.
And it is here that literature attains its autonomy, emancipates itself to a privileged-private place. From here it might know about its own role, which only words can play. But then there is another crisis. As a famous proverb says –‘there is no inside whale to hide’ from the catastrophe and onslaughts of violent powers of greed and destruction. After all language is a product of world of reality. Therefore ‘word’ itself can never remain unscathed. Words are used, abused and exploited by the powers of reality. Words are wounded and contaminated. Recently in my trip to US, I bought a new collection of poems of Tadeusz Rozewicz, my most favorite Polish poet and was astounded to understand about another sphere where global forces might inflict injuries, the sphere of words:
‘Words have been used up
Chewed up like gum
By lovely young mouths
Have been turned into white
Ballon bubbles
Diminished by politicians
They are used for whitening teeth
and for rinsing out of mouths
in my childhood
words could be
applied to a wound
could be given to the one
you loved..’ *3
This poem’s concern about the basic nuclear component of poetry itself, in a lamenting spirit, reveals about the encroachment and invasion of techno-market-centric powers on language through everyday renewed technology. It consumes and exploits all verbal structures and manipulates and moulds them for its own tasks. The industrialized, commercialized capitalist world has become an outside world with invincible material connections and associations, and the individual (here poet) is living in the midst of that world.
If we probe this new world, it is ‘post industrial’ or ‘post-modern’ as it is generally defined and explained by sociologists and scholars. There are few who name it ‘post-colonial’ and there are others who term it as ‘neo-colonial’ or ‘late-capitalist’. There are few younger journalists and activists, who admit that now we all, irrespective of our nation and profession, have become ‘Citizen of Empire’. *4. The poem of Tadeusz Rozewicz, I have quoted above talks about the fate of word in context of this specific time which has arrived since the last couple of decades of twentieth century.
And indisputably this is the era of ‘globalization’ (or internationalization, as per topic of this seminar paper). It is typically defined as a time in which the sovereignty of nation states has declined and modes of exchange operate with increasing ease and speed across national boundaries, producing configurations of power that exceed the boundaries of the nation-state. It is said to have been ‘born’ with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the subsequent collapse of USSR as socialist super power and end of the Cold War. It is now a world of reality and virtual reality where an individual breaths and survives alienated from it and from himself. Most of the writers of the peripheral nation states or the third world countries or the developing countries witness this new ‘disni-fied’,‘Mcdonaldized’ or ‘pizzahutted’ *4 world on one hand and a world with ‘carpet bombing’ and bio-genetic terminator seeds and WMDs on the other hand, with instinctual skepticisms. The familiar world, they used to know, has become estranged and altered.
‘A reality belonging to the day before yesterday, a reality that long ago became its own ghost, is being conserved in rigid framework of phrases, prejudices, and hypocrisy. The end product of a vast machinery of research, investigations, analyses, statistics, conferences, reports and headlines is the comic strip, the embodiment of an illusory world of Everyman and No-man. Illusion displaces contradiction. The outcome of a multitude of ‘point of views’ is a hideous ‘uniformity’ of minds.’*5
This perception now appears a bit stale. Scenario now is much more changed and complex. As a result of multiplication and advancement of media and telecommunication technologies including cybernetics what Walter Benjamin had said in his most famous essay, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ or what Karl Kraus wrote about the printing press or Bertolt Brecht wrote about Radio, now appears stale, clichéd and sometimes juvenile. No other civilization in the past, had used and produced language itself in such a mammoth quantum. Just look around, it’s a big noise. Every channel and every electronic gadget, small or huge, is churning out language and converting it in to ‘chatter’ where words don’t posses any meaning. A language is reproducing itself, a language without truth, an endless meaningless chatter.
Language used and consumed for lies, biggest in it is the global industry of advertising. This is not merely the language of ‘Double Speak’ as George Orwell had thought in his dystopic prophecy of a totalitarian state. Liars of the past, Big Brothers and Goebbels appear tiny and dwarf when we witness colossal lies televised, screened, shown, thrown on masses, because the mind of the masses has to be manipulated through the power of ‘words’ and ‘images’.
In Samskrit, ‘pada’(word)has been conceived as Lord ‘Shiva’ and ‘artha’ (meaning) as Goddess ‘Parvati’ or ’shakti’. They were thought to be inseparable; any act of splitting them apart would have been a blasphemy. Everyone living on earth, which uses ‘pada’ (words) for his interest, is warned to have a restrain over using it excessively. Restrain and control in consuming and producing speech (Vaak samyam). It was thought that this universe has been born from the explosion of ‘nada’ (boom/ sound) which is the base component of speech or language. Poem is also born in the same manner like an universe. Through the explosion (sphota) of word (pada) meaning (artha) is produced which in a serial explosions of following words, form a sentence (vaakya) and through this process a poem (kavya) is born. This is what Bhartrihari had said in his treatise. It appears now, on the face level, an enigmatic, irrational, pre-scientific and obscure theory of genesis of a poem or an universe. But Derida in his Grammatology tells similar things in a little different style.
Now, if we look back again to the poem of Tadeusz Rozewicz, where we see that the ‘words have been used up like chewing gum’ by ‘lovely young mouths’ (of tv news anchors) and ‘diminished by politicians’ for ‘whitening their teeth’, then is it really possible now to compose a poem using same ‘used up’, ‘diminished’ words?
What after all a poet should do when a huge, demonic global commercial-political industry is using and manufacturing mammoth quantum of words every fraction of second? And that all for nothing but in advertising its product or lying to consolidate its power?
But, there is a hope. I now quote the last remaining lines of the poem:
‘Now diminished
Wrapped in newspaper
They still contaminate
Still reek
They still hurt
Hidden in heads
Hidden in hearts
Hidden under the gowns
Of young women
Hidden in holy books
They burst out
They kill.’ *6
And here is a hope for a writer or for literature to perform its role in a world where spaces for individual object de-art is shrinking every day. Word can still play a role. Word is ‘power inscribed in language’ so it holds a power, where all outside powers cease to exist.
But there is another plane where the process of internationalism is more concrete and physical. A strong storm of homogenization of cultures on international scale is on since the incoming of this ‘post-modern’ or ‘post-cold-war’ era. Peripheral countries and developing societies do not have any other option except adopting and accepting the economic policies and model of ‘development’ dictated by the rich countries of west, led by US and laid down by international organizations like IMF and the World Bank. India too is a country, with its multiple cultural-ethnic societies and sub-nationalities, which are undergoing through a complex and turbulent, process off late. In India, particularly, we witness a fierce resurgence and re-assertion of micro ethnic identities on rise and conflict since last few years. What Samuel Huntington had prophesied in his infamous book, contrary is the present scenario. These are not the ‘civilizations’ which are clashing against each other, these are much smaller cultural, linguistic, ethnic, religious identities which are indulging in violent conflicts every day. Homogenization through mass consumer culture, riding on the multiplied media campaign and dumping of luxury products in the indigenous market, from cars and bikes to fast food and fashion, is consequently developing in to balkanization of a post-colonial nation-state than homogenizing and integrating it.
Recently, I have read a paper by Girish Mishra, a noted Indian scholar, I quote a portion below to elaborate my point of view:
‘Fukuyama rejects the view that globalization is leading to cultural homogeneity. There may be homogenization of certain aspects of the economy and the society, but, at the same time, there will be an affirmation of distinctive cultural identities. If the process of cultural homogenization takes place, it will be too slow to discern. “Many people think that because we have advanced communications technology, and are able to project global television culture worldwide, this will lead to homogenization on a deeper cultural level. I think that, in a way, it’s done just the opposite.
“For example, there is probably less mutual liking, more distrust and greater emphasis on the difference between the cultures of the United States and Asia today than there was
40 years ago. In the 1950s and’60s, Asia looked up to the United States as a model of modernization. Now, Asians look at American urban decay and the decline of the family and they feel that America is not a very attractive model. Communications technology has allowed both Asians and Americans to see each other more clearly, and it turns out they have very different value systems.’*7
One need not agree with this geo-cultural estimation of growing distrust between Asia and the West or the US, here does come a perturbing question about the state of minor, lesser developed, poorer and deprived human groups in this process of global homogenization. Accumulation of wealth in a small section of people where more than 40 percent of population lives much below poverty line and 60 percent of it does not have access to health, education, sanitation and towards basic civil amenities, any such ‘modernization’ stands fake and farcical.
Literature again becomes an arena, where the voices of the diminishing cultural identities and suffering subjugated masses can be heard. Literature, if resist to get itself commoditized by the alluring offers from the market, can unambiguously play a significant role in these testing times.
In my opinion in the age of end of all adolescence, in the age of dystopia and chattering ideologies, it is literature alone, which through its murmur of words and fragile sentences, can act as a vanguard of suppressed identities and individuals. Because literature has an ability to create a critique and a comic versus any hegemonic power, out to dominate and subjugate smaller beings on planet. Words are the Gods of small things. They remain immortal and defy their death. Words can laugh, cry, ridicule, mimic and dance against all forms of violence of powers, anywhere.
‘Writing is the beginning of a mass gesture: against all discourses (modes of speech, instrumental writings, rituals, protocols, social symbolic), writing alone today, even if still in form of luxury, makes of language something
a-topical, without place.’*8
Therefore, it is literature, which is finally ‘Internationalist’, not the market and never the politics.
Words remain eternal even after the world.
I request you to recall the beginning of this paper, where I had put a quote from Ludwig Wittgenstein, to explain about the role of an individual writer and poet in the ancient city of language named literature, now I end this paper with a few words from Mahatma Gandhi, the father of post colonial independent India:
‘I do want that the winds from other cultures should enter in to my house, and I have let my doors and windows open to receive it, but I do not want that my foot gets uprooted, lose my balance and I get blown away with the winds. No way I want to go to the other’s house begging as a slave and no way I want to live like a emulator..!’*9


*1 - Ludwig Wittgenstine, Philosophical Investigation,’ Post-Modernism-Philosophy and the Arts, Edited by Hugh J. Silverman, Chapter 5, ‘In Situ: Beyond the Architechture of the Modern’, Stephen H. Watson p.p. 83, Published by Routledge, 29 West 35th Street, New York-10001.
*2 - Mark C. Taylor, ‘Back to the Future’. Ibid. p.p.15
*3 – Tadeusz Rozewicz, New Poems, Published by Archipelago Books, 25 Jay Street, #203, Brookelyn, New York 11201. (2007)
*4 – Robert Jenson, ‘Citizens of the Empire: The Struggle to Claim our Humanity’, City Light Books, 261 Columbus Avenue at Broadway, San Francisco, CA 94133, 2004.
*5 – Ernst Fishcher, ‘The Necessity of Art’,Translated by Anna Bostock, Penguin Books,625 Madison Avenue, New York – 10022, p.p. 203
*6 - Tadeusz Rozewicz, New Poems, Published by Archipelago Books, 25 Jay Street, #203, Brookelyn, New York 11201. (2007)
*7 - Girish Mishra,’Globalization and Culture,’ yet to be published, 2008.
*8 – Roland Barthes, ‘Writers, Intellectuals, Teachers’, Selected Writings, Edited by Susan Sontag,Fontana Paper backs, p.p. 401, 1983.
*9- P.C.Joshi,’Parivartan aur Vikas ke Sanskritik Aayaam’,Rajkamal Prakashan, New Delhi,p.p.67, 1987