The Chinese Opera, Ionesco, the Chairs, the Indian English theater and a mask

---Sunil Sharma

I was watching the Chinese opera last evening in an open-air auditorium in the suburban Mumbai. The February weather was mild. A cool wind was blowing off from the nearby river that flows into the Thane creek, creating a pleasant ambiance  The 90-minute performance by the visiting troupe left the audience stunned by transporting us into a different region. It also showed that good theater can transcend linguistic and geographical barriers easily. We did not know the Chinese; they did not know Hindi but the performance spoke directly to us. Pantomime, Kung Fu, song and dance were all part of this old Cantonese drama put by 27 artistes wearing dainty costumes and minimal make up on a bare proscenium in an Indian urban location. The music--- largely flutes and cymbals and drums---was haunting. There were no props. Not even scenery. Just a flood-lit stage dominated by the slim and pretty artistes gliding in the air in perfect sync with each other. Acrobatic and dramatic skills were highly evolved of these young artistes.
They were able to transform this corporate event into high performance art by their mobile facial expressions, body language and nimble footwork. An ordinary landscape was turned into a fairy land; an ordinary evening into a sublime experience through their stylized acting, singing and dancing.

We were taken back into the past and a China not found elsewhere in newspapers and books.
We were travelling autonomous art realms defying all logic of time and space. Past and present collided into each other, forming a continnum.
The imaginary never looked so real. That is the power of true art. It can make the unreal look real for the audiences everywhere.
That is public theatre--- a grand spectacle, involving music, acrobatic and acting skills, dance and powerful dialogues. Basically, it is oral communication and designed to be seen and heard. In other words, it lends itself more quickly for dramatization than any other genre; it is more liable to be staged successfully rather than other cultural forms like a short story or novel that demands to be read in solitude.
So theater is public; fiction is private. Theater is older; fiction in its developed form and finesse is newer. The early Greeks knew that plays were to be staged for the public. So did early Indians. Theater was mass. So is the cinema---thereat improved version for an industrial/ post-industrial, high-tech society. But fiction is historically meant to be consumed in private. To read your Tolstoy or Marquez, you need a quiet room; to see Seneca or Shakespeare, you need to sit in a big auditorium along with others, willing to participate in the common viewing of a common act. The requirements for both the genres are different. One is communal experience; another individual. But the person who likes Tolstoy and Shakespeare both can, given the different contexts, become a communal spectator or a private reader equally fast. Both public and private compete for his/her attention and the reader can effortlessly exchange the solitude for a public participation as a spectator in a cultural event that, as a staged performance of a team in a hired place designated as auditorium, can obtain full closure only with the participation of the citizens as willing viewers. In fact, the production is successful only when people turn up in large numbers to see the performance by paying for tickets in a special area famously called Broadway. In some cases, entry can be free. But the point is, free or paid, larger participation makes theatre a true theater and relevant also.
Sadly, the theater in the West and in India lost this original function and insight. Now, they are losing their audiences as well. Any theater that becomes the private property of few hundred clients in a closed space tends to lose its vitality and then, slowly, its appeal.
Let us take up the Indian folk theater like the Yakshagana. When I watched its open-air public performance for the first time---few years back, in another Mumbai suburb, on a street, late night---I was mesmerized by this spectacle put up by travelling amateur actors. There were a thousand people present for this performance on a makeshift stage. Again, the language was different---Kannada---but I could get the main drift of the action. The whole thing was sponsored by an Udupi hotel. There was no ticket. Everybody was welcome. And the diversified audience maintained discipline and decorum in that long performance that relied on elaborate make-up, gaudy costumes, fake mustaches and jewellery, and, loud dialogue delivery. A later identical performance in an upscale Mumbai auditorium failed to impress due to the congruity of the folk theater and its urban stage with sophisticated lighting and pit orchestra---an appropriate setting for more metro themes.
The world as open-air stage vs. enclosed space binary also plays a crucial distinction in the production and reception of plays.
 A similar 10-day, open-air production of the epic Ramayana also highlighted this factor vis-à-vis the effect of the popular theater  There was a large crowd of spectators. Some were sitting on the ground, some standing near the VIP enclosure. It was a kind of the Elizabethan stage where the commoners and the nobility met in the democratic and liberating theatrical space. Only difference was that this time the designated space was sacred as compared with the secular Elizabethan theatrical space. The story was well-known to everyone. It is in our cultural DNA. But the entire action was being lapped up hungrily by the quiet audience. There was lot of slapstick comedy and crude humor thrown in as comic relief by the cast of travelling amateur actors. Loud acting, costumes and music were a common staple. Dialogues in verses were for the actors playing the gods and prose, for minor characters. Ramayana and Mahabharata are the two epics that lend themselves easily to stage adaptations in every language of India and other languages of the world, including English. They contain all the elements that define and appeal to the folk psyche.
These are the master narratives that contain the entire civilizations in them. Their enduring beauty is that they still speak directly to us positioned in a completely different era.
As the folk theater  the production of such narratives becomes more flexible, open and supple. Artistes are free to innovate. The carnival nature of such village productions even to-day enables the critique of the official culture---entrenched feudalism in developing India in all its patriarchal and ugly manifestations---of power abuse at every level of society: educational, religious, political, panchayati, state, police by the troupes of wandering or resident artistes. Through humour, official order gets inverted. The power structures get lampooned and relief is provided in a grim social situation. Satire, burlesque and farce are other related developments of this flexible form.
It is a powerful medium of communication for a society---the public theatre where entire community or village participates either as spectators or actors and relevant meanings are socially produced, appreciated and dispersed collectively. The stage belongs to all. There are no hierarchies, no barriers. It is employed to question, educate and entertain the masses. The common public is both the creator and consumer of these public texts circulating in the rural areas: the ownership is common, so is its consumption. The role of public is important---as it was in the Athenian drama.
Modern theatre is private. And very pale vis-à-vis the more robust public theatre. The trend started in the eighteenth century Europe and climaxed in the twentieth. The royal patronage was gradually replaced by the individual, with the ascendancy of the middle-classes everywhere. Patrons, as individuals and a collective, became the deciding arbiters and end-users of a system designed to bring profits from theater as a commodity. In India, Anglicized upper-middle-class, in order to show the superiority of taste and their cultural exclusivity, came to patronize English theater in the 80s and 90s of the last century. The disconnect with the general mood was complete. English theater became elite. It reflected the aspirations, tastes, concerns and values of the power elites insulated from the problems and struggles of both middle-class and the toiling masses.
Theater had become artificial, effete and extremely private, out of bounds for the general public.
With further competition from TV and commercial cinema as sources of mass entertainment, the theater was rendered redundant and became finally extinct---or, almost. It lost its roots in the public place and vitality. Right from the Athenians down to our age, theater as a public form---street theater, for example, in our age---interacted with a live public and shaped up responses to major issues affecting entire communities. But privatization of this form and its patronage by the elites as cultural trophy suffocated this ancient form of communal communication, a kind of pluralistic artistic endeavor at producing, receiving and dispersing meanings and values, within the public art space---very much like the epics. The privatized theater produced tortured private visions in a dark Europe of the 40s and 50s and radical 60s. The English theater in metro India echoes Eugene Ionesco…and his famous play, the Chairs. By the second decade of the 21-century, English drama had exhausted its original creative spirit, its spark and got lost in the desert of puerile plots and inane dialogues that appealed to nobody in particular. The plot was lost completely. It was like the accumulating chairs on an empty stage, in an unidentified setting, where audience is expected anytime and chances of communication are difficult. Finally, when the audience arrives, it is not visible and the person called to deliver message is deaf-n-dumb! The old man and woman commit suicide from the tower by jumping into the sea. The effect, writes Ionesco, is to produce a sense of emptiness. Theater makes a rapid descent into bleak and cynical absurdity from its glorious heights achieved by Shakespeare and Ibsen. And nobody remembers their remote ancestors Sophocles or Euripides.
Everything marvellous becomes banal. The joint ownership of the form---between dramatist and live public audience--- becomes obsolete. The joint ties are sundered. Atrophy, ennui, despair, passivity step in and status quo continues with fractured visions. The Hamletian distressed cry of time is out of joint is completely drowned out in the cacophony of commerce.
English theater in England weakened; its distant colonial offspring wilted in an Internet age where amnesia is promoted and pizza and burger joints dominate the public discourses rather than Beckett or Pinter. English drama in India’s short renaissance is also over. The English novel in India is proving a tough competitor. It is an age not suitable to drama itself. A three-hour performance, highly-priced, is watched largely by wannabe actors, critics and writers. The general public is missing from these lavishly-mounted shows.
Any literary form loses its charm, once its historical age of production is lapsed. It gets overtaken by another developing form. Epic and its innocent age once over can never be replicated in the next age. Even if it does get replicated by a genius of Joycean stature, it fails to re-create the freshness and the original charm of the Homeric tales that still talk to us, like our own myths and epics. Theater --first as folk or public form, then as private form of expression of fractured artistic visions---is in critical stage. It has retreated into pricey auditoriums accessible to few rich clients. Broadway and Off-Broadway, street theater are some valiant steps to continue the tradition of dialogue, oral one, with the public, now passive spectators. Brecht did attempt some resuscitation of this passive consumer but after him, the consumer relapsed into a passive state. Theater is the voice of the people as famous Gaddar from Andhra Pradesh in India declares. Unless it returns to its roots and interacts directly with public, theater stands the danger of becoming a museum piece---whatever the coteries of critics, dons, writers, directors and actors might say. 
We need another rejuvenating spring for drama---and that includes the Indian English drama as well. India awaits its own Brecht in Indian English. The regional theater has been more vital, complex, real, meaningful and productive. People connect with the themes and productions. Drama needs a big jolt.  It is like wearing the theatrical mask of an Athenian or Classical or Noh or Yoruba drama on the stage and start seeing the world differently. A vision from that involved position, from that quick alteration---the rapid transition from person to actor to that character--- can be very uplifting and that frenzied state, that heightened perspective can ensure a revival and renewal of this crossover drama form here in India. Unless it is not done consciously by the stakeholders or its practitioners, English drama in India will remain a metro oddity---very much like listening to the American Jazz in a five-star hotel in Mumbai or New Delhi, along with the Page Three regulars, while rest of the city is in a hurry to catch the overcrowded evening bus or train to a distant home.

(Courtesy: Illuminati, 2012)

On : Language, Writing, Community and Ngugi

---Sunil Sharma

Ngugi  wa Thiong’o belongs to an illustrious tradition of story-telling that, for me at least, has got high summits like Cervantes, Shakespeare, Turgenev and Dostoevsky, among others. They all share common traits: concern for community and culture without being parochial or jingoistic; writing in and a preference for the vernacular language; a full life as an explorer of ideas, forms and cultures and an overall global artistic vision that encompasses all the classes of their native countries. Although topical in many aspects, these high-value and extremely gifted writers transcend spatial/temporal barriers and speak to us as contemporaries, despite the materiality of our rootedness in different geographical locations, literary tastes, linguistic contexts, cultures and eras. They are Immortals who have defied time, and, space just cannot restrict them. Serious writing is always like that, otherwise Homer would have been dead a long ago---with physical Homer. Ngugi is an inheritor of a long tradition of writing---in other words, story-telling; of un-stale, youthful master narratives that leave us rejuvenated, post-reading. The great bilingual Kenyan writer is what other post-colonial writers are not: He is local, yet global in his impact and reach. His later works, although composed in his first language for his community, still stir powerful feelings of empathy, affinity and identification; shock of understanding and appreciation; in other words, a host of fellow feelings among us---the forced residents of a globalised society where MNCs with USA bases largely dictate and decide what we have to see, read and eat, think and express, wear and drive and work, in this totalitarian cultural set-up. Big Mac is no longer theirs; it is ours now---a global icon that celebrates a way of eating, living and thinking. Country contexts do not matter in this relentless conquest of mind---the thinking mind converted into a consumer’s mind that gets their orgasmic peak by shopping in a Wal-Mart franchisee in Khartoum or Dhaka. In fact, in a post-colonial but neo-colonial world, Ngugi sets up a contrasting example for other writers desirous of an USA visa or assignment in Ivy-league universities there: Go local. Discover the joys of writing in your language. Return to your beliefs. Explore the folklores and folktales that embody the aspirations and the experiences of an entire community and by becoming one with this world-view, get the right feel of your location, your history---your situatedness in a timeline that has got a past, present and future. This return to your roots, this journey back to your own language and through this language, to your community’s overarching value frameworks, can be very redemptive, fruitful and productive. It is like walking through a dense fog in the jungle and suddenly running into a glittering civilization, out in the open that was there before us but invisible due to opaqueness of vision. For the skeptics, Ngugi shows the way in this reverse migration. He is the typical expert guide in the quest for indigenous cultures and helps facilitate in the recovery of the receding voices and documenting of the things about to be eclipsed by forces of post-modernization and post-colonialism on the rampage in most of the third-world countries. For every bi/tri-lingual middle-class writer/academic dreaming of a home in America, Ngugi leaves a choice: Homeland and native language Vs. English, its enormous fringe benefits and a Western recognition. They call it the debate between Achebe and Ngugi. Critics might say he is good master but poor role-model. He himself is settled in USA, finally. But these are the strong contradictions in every powerful writer’s personality: The paradox of living in a volatile world where ideas and oppressive politics clash and produce unstable social conditions for intellectuals that often degenerate into open hostilities, prison terms and even complete annihilation of the dissidents. Ngugi is many things to many folks but one virtue remains constant: His love for Kenya and Kenyan people. This sincerity of conviction makes him a stand-out figure. And, for me, a colossal among writers from Africa who prefer English to denigrate their own countries of birth. Ngugi is a nomad---like the earlier predecessors. He is bold and courageous. And he is one with the community. The latter is his inspiration and bedrock. He is epic in his sweep and presentation; others from Africa are not. The latter’s vision is fragmentary and micro. Ngugi is macro, comprehensive and majestic. Like Kilimanjaro, he towers above them all.

Besides, he is an activist. The one that makes engagement with politics a must for his life. A writer of commitment. No, it is not a dirty word for him. The year 2011 shows that commitment is new global mantra. De-radicalized age is receding behind---if not a myth, it will become so soon when the disinherited and disillusioned join the swelling ranks of protesters. The Tahrir moment is proving universal and a nightmare for every corrupt ruler. Arab Spring is invading every closed or open political system where 1% is allowed to rule over 99% of the people. In such an unstable scenario, Ngugi shows the moral value of dissident, of serious writing that challenges the status-quo everywhere. The writer as subversive. The writing as authentic. As not an individual search for hybrid and hyphenated identities but as the genuine, well-articulated communal resistance against debasement, oppression and exploitation.

His lineage is grand. The colonial world brings literary treasures to the colonized and transmits the finest values of revolutionary bourgeoisie through its literature.  Despite the dangers of casting the rest of the world in their image of superior civilization by manipulating such writings, the fact remains that the colonized become alert to the existence a better, democratic, liberal world and possibility of a completely humane world. Ngugi’s literary ancestors---and ours also---question the political system that promotes the welfare of the elite at the cost of the majority and talk of a sense of history that restlessly demolishes all the totalitarian social structures in its evolution and growth as a world force. In his long career, Ngugi, as a professor of English and indigenous writer, resists the temptations of English and its global domination---from the position of an insider---and ably demonstrates that as a post-colonial subject, still embedded in Anglo-American grid, he can, through his writings in Gikuyu, can resist the transmission of the hegemonic cultural values of an evangelical and imperialistic West and in this long and painful process of sheer evolution, undermine the monochromatic western vision, especially UK and USA, as leading power brokers and power elites of a USA-centered world teetering perilously on an economic collapse caused by the recession and sub-prime crisis and huge bail-outs. It liberates him from the shackles of imperialistic ideology and sets him back on a return journey to original Africa, largely unseen to Western tourists and writers so far.

In a way, Ngugi resists colonial languages for their purely political and commercial manipulations by the elites in the spread of the consumerist, cultural and hegemonic values and their capacity for colonizing mindscapes of post-independent nations in Africa and elsewhere through the literary and media routes, by extension. His return to his own language by abandoning the use of English for creating his version of Kenyan society is remarkable, honest and sincere. It has enabled him to capture the dreams of his community in their first language; their cadence, vitality and idiom, most authentically, realistically and poetically. In English, it was not possible. The daily struggles, hopes, existentialist despair, angst and frustration in living in a society ruled by corrupt new black or brown masters are vividly painted by him in Gikuyu rather than in English. This strategy has paid him off well. His reputation and integrity as a writer has globally increased and stature uplifted, and, writing in a medium understood not by many outside Kenyan borders and within has not diminished his position as a writer of eminence. He has achieved what other writers preferring to write in English in Africa or elsewhere have failed to achieve: Authenticity of local flavour and an immediate connect with his own people. His work resonates with them. It is like catching their dreams for them in full details.  

You catch your dreams in your first, your own language, not in the language of your colonial oppressors and greedy masters, for whom your grandpa was a dark-skinned coolie and your nation as a looting ground. The souls of these heathens were to be saved from rotting in hell and the dark place was to be saved from utter damnation and anarchy. Order, enlightenment and progress were to be brought onto such dark folks and a dark continent by the marching missionaries and merchants and their ruthless armies.

Writing in your first language brings a certain proximity denied to writers who write in English outside the West. It is gaining access to the collective dreams of your peers and compatriots. It is like portraying your own community and nation through a language spoken by a majority and thus recovering a healthy sense of historical moment via it. It is communicating with your people in their language, not in an alien language. It is dealing with contemporary realities through the prism of a common medium of perception and communication. Great writers have done this only. They have gone to the so-called vernacular rather than Latin or courtly French in the past for identifying the national sense and mood.

Cervantes, Shakespeare, Turgenev and Dostoevsky did that only---elevating the languages spoken by their compatriots and peers alike in their respective countries and time. Cervantes wrote in vernacular Spanish; Shakespeare in English in complete contrast to the prevalent style of the University wits, Turgenev wrote in Russian, despite his love for French and Dostoevsky was steeped in Russian language only.

Then, there are other affinities as well; uniting them across the temporal-spatial divides. Their nomadic nature; quest for national spirit; championing of the underdog and the subversive nature.

Take the wandering Cervantes first. He served in the army, got wounded fatally, lost his left arm, was captured as a slave by the pirates on the high seas and got ransomed and finally released; got jailed for fraud and later on settled down to write his vision of Spain in transit. Don is a living vital literary document---as alive and kicking to-day, as it was in the 17^th century. Its vitality is never diminished. He drew a complete picture of manners and mores, in a language spoken by the common people. Democracy had arrived in a big way. The vast canvas and the epic scale of Don are just staggering. You cannot have such broad and in-depth vision today. He talks of a society in transit. Aristocracy dying; the revolutionary bourgeoisie arriving in Spain, and, Cervantes caught at the intersecting junction.

Shakespeare, escaping from Stratford-upon-Avon---found sanctuary in London. He created unforgetful dramas for the Elizabethans in their lingo. His theater is live and inclusive. All classes meet here. History, robust and on the go, is witnessed in the mix of classes. A complete society emerges in his rich plays, a society in transit.

Turgenev, escaping from his past as a landed gentry and oppressive nature of such an unequal Russia of serfs and lords, roamed the countryside and came up with his famous Hunter’s Sketches, a sensitive, almost poetic evocation of Russian countryside and the domination of the serfs by the cruel landowning gentry. Again a society in transition. Anticipating broadly the revolution of the 20^th century Russia in its unrest and turmoil that such unequal social conditions are bound to crate sooner or later. Turgenev creates a claustrophobic Russia where future generation were to be active in order to breathe freely.

Dostoevsky was involved with radical causes, got death sentence that was commuted at the last minute and his religious conversion that helped him deal with the crises of such a violent world. All these writers were actively involved in the social life of their time and came to develop an epic world-vision by their identification with the historical moment in all its flaws and beauty. They condemned the brutalities and championed the cause of the poor. You might like their solutions or not but they are very sincere in their commitment towards their craft and society at large, elevating them above the ordinary.

Writing is a means of protest, of resistance, of change---in short, activism on behalf of the voiceless.

Ngugi inherits the same illustrious tradition of writing as a challenge to the ruling elite/s and dominant ideologies, if not consciously, but as a subconscious influence through a western education and exposure. His return to his first language and folktales---the repository of collective beliefs----signals his commitment to a social cause: Of radicalizing the consciousness of the recipient reader/viewer through serious writing and using literary forms as empowering sites of protest, resistance, awakening and change. His theatre does that for his people what Brechtian theatre did for the Germans and later on, to all of us.

It awakened us from our slumber.

Ngugi family suffered a lot during the early Mau Mau revolution. He came back to teach in Kenya, got arrested for his questioning attitude, suffered a lot, his home there got burgled; he moved to America by accepting a dual teaching assignment and was racially abused recently in a hotel---showing things have not improved much for him either in homeland or his adopted country. Issues like poverty, exploitation of the poor and political oppression in free African nations and racialism in advanced nations still preoccupy his artistic attention. The dream of a free and fully democratic and liberal society still eludes him---and rest of us, located in different historical moments and contexts world-wide. His nation is still in transition. Most societies are dynamic and in constant flux. From being an organic intellectual to a dissident, Ngugui has become a global beacon for the successive generations of the post-colonial writers and readers. He shows the way to us: Either follow the dictates of the Western academia and publishing MNCs and write about Africa/India the way they like you to be or abandon the language of the former masters, resist the colonization of mind and go back to your own roots by celebrating that lifestyle in your own language. Most of the post-colonial writings in Africa or Asia are either mildly critical or supportive of the colonial experience. Most of the time, it is organic to the project of colonialism. They treat the former white masters as benevolent ones and criticize the administration in mild terms. The writers still pander to certain myths and stereotypes in English or French or Spanish to please their new masters. A certain India or Africa---mostly caricatured, chaotic, unruly and despotic---is allowed to emerge in these carefully-calibrated and dispersed writings by writers writing in London, Paris or New York. Ngugi, through his radical views on writing, language and its politics, the experience of post-colonial societies, has demonstrated that for a full recovery of selfhood, racial memory and historical sense of location and situatedness, of community feeling, a writer, a true writer, has to abandon the language of former colonial masters and write in his nation’s language. The rest is as real as the fake roses in the dentist’s clinic---to cheer you up before your appointment in the reclining chair for that painful dental procedure called root-canaling. 

Tendai Tagarira interviewd by Sunil Sharma

Interview text of Tendai Tagarira: A Denmark-based versatile young author, poet, blogger, political exile

Q: What does it mean to be an exiled writer in a globalized world?
Exile is not easy. Speaking up is not easy. In my case, the price I have to pay for free speech is exile. As for globalization, that notion is a confusing one because it implies some things I don't quite fully agree with. The way I see it, I am one of the many voices that are persecuted for exercising their freedom of opinion by a government bend on suppressing its peoples freedoms, in Zimbabwe. Living in Denmark allows me to write or speak my opinions without a petrol bomb being thrown into my apartment. That is why I put up with the cold Danish winter, because I must exercise my free speech in order to speak for my generation in Zimbabwe.

Q: What role does memory play in the writing of the exiled?
In Africa, we have a storytelling tradition that involves metaphors, usually of animals representing the human social condition. This method has proved an indispensable way to keep ancient knowledge and history through the art of African story telling. It is easy to remember a good metaphor. For example, in the West, many remember Gorge Orwel's Animal farm. So, before I talk about memory, I must talk about metaphor, as it is good for method to keep an important lesson engrained in the readers memory. In most of my writings I use metaphors and irony, but sometimes I am too impatient and I write as if holding the barrel of a smoking gun. When that happens, it is as if my memory is a Tsunami wave. The end result is that I can write volumes of work everyday.

Q: can we re-produce a Proustean memory? Careful recall of certain lapsed moments and their artistic presentation?
Yes. I think the human mind is a powerful tool and even the latest sciences are only uncovering the secrets of the mind. I believe artists and writers are gifted in different ways and there is no one particular method that works. There are several methods, depending with one's experiences and background. Some authors make better use of their proustean memory, others don't.

Q: What is the role of the land exited? Does she call you back---a silent mother---on lonely, snow-covered, moon-lit nights?
Yes, and much more.

Q: What is the identity of an exiled writer? Hyphenated? Pull of the land receding behind; pull of the new welcoming shores? Are you capable of reconciling these competing pressures?
Identity of the exiled writer is one the writer chooses, but in most cases one cant help but feel rootless. Yet some embrace their new exile cultures, others hang on to the past, and some dangle between these two aspects. In my case, Identity is not cast in stone, but is always evolving. But I choose to be me and that is the essence of my identity. I have no one specific culture, but I can dabble with many cultures and therefore my identity is a diverse one.

Q; Is it all about new beginnings? Or, old appeals and sundering of emotional ties?
New beginnings are always a both scary and amazing time, depending how one looks at it. In my view its a question of looking at the glass as half empty or as half full. As for old emotional ties, I use that to fuel my writing. It is fuel and very good fuel.

Q: How can an exiled writer straddle these two worlds and remain relevant and appealing to both?
For me, its about taking one day at a time and keeping busy. I have a passion to collaborate with a vast number of artists from across the world. I also dabble in different artistic expressions. Last year I won the Nice Film Festival in France, for a film co-produced with Vitor Lopes(Portugal). The film is based on an old poem I wrote in 2010 and then I transformed it into a script and it took us one year to make 8 mins of animation film. So I keep busy and I hardly spend time straddling these two worlds. I live in the moment, just like a heartbeat.

Q: Is it not difficult to resurrect disappearing home landscapes in a new socio-cultural settings? You feel, initially, alien in both places---for your beliefs and values?
Hahaha. I am an Alien. At least that's what my Danish government issued travel passport said. In many ways, i am different from many people. No matter where I am, even back home,or while traveling, I am always a little different. Its my lifestyle and I love and embrace it. I am not afraid of being different so I embrace being called or feeling Alien.

Q: Has not political exile a programme of moving to West by some writers as a self-promoting exercise? You get asylum, better opportunities and recognition---for denouncing your country and its regime?
Trust me, not at all. One still has to work hard and network. One must still shake the coconut tree to get the coconut. And African literature has some kind of glass cieling in the West. That is why I am puting my literature in different art mediums like Animation, Comics and hopefully in the future, video games. In these new artistic expressions, its a level playing field. Where one comes from does not influence the marketing and promotion of the works. Today, with the internet, one's work can be in many places at the same time. So one can be in the West and not know how to network, and one could be in Africa and use the internet and achieve many positive results.

Q: Why not be an embedded writer in your own culture, stand up for your values and offer resistance and get caught? So-called dissidents in China, Latin America, Africa, Middle East, are doing this as an act of honesty and bravery.
Culture to me is dynamic, well at least mine is and all the time. So maybe this is where the aspect of globalization should come in. In my work, it can be very traditional, contemporary or even futuristic. I choose to swing from one cultural branch to another in the vast jungle of artistic expression.

Q: poetry as a political weapon. Can it bring required/desired changes? How? Dictators do not read poetry these days.
In Africa, poetry is mostly used in songs and if you look at singer/poets like Miriam Makeba, Fela Kuti, Thomas Mapfumo, Oliver Mtukudzi, Lucky Dube, you will see that they used poetry as the most potent weapon against the oppressors and many people heard the message. When Mandela was in Robin Island, many poems went out to the world. Even Mandela is a bit of a poet himself and his writings are a treasure chest for Africa's development.

Q: The role of writer in an age of micro-narratives?
I dont believe in Ages. The age that is, is the one chooses for him/herself.
I am in an Age of SELF Discovery and business is good.

Q: The politics of awards? Is there a life for the Non-Booker writers?
Yes of course. I have an award from a prestigious Film Award for my animation film, “A Can of Worms” A week I received this award, I was attending the Frankfurt Book Fair and giving a lecture at an event on stage. I told the audience that the term African writer is often misunderstood and used as a giant glass ceiling. Some Western editors decide for the rest of the world what is good African literature. In my opinion, this decision is best left to Africans just like the West decides upon its own literature. The big publishing firms are controlled by a cabal of people who sometimes don't do enough to promote African and so called Third World Literature. So for many African or third world authors, awards are a great way to leverage the economy of reputation.

Q: Role of community in writing is crucial. How exiled in their writing can capture that sense of involvement, while living abroad?
I think if one is to enjoy exile, one has to participate in the local community as well. I am a hyperactive person and so I can do as many as ten projects at the same time, one day at a time. So for me the community is a way to make friends and also networks and collaborate e.g my latest Children's book in Danish, which was illustrated by Lone Hadegaard. I have also developed a fan base in the community I live by starting a popular cultural blog.

Q: The role of English/ any other language in dealing with your ancestral realities, national paradoxes and ironies?
Most of Southern Africa was colonised by the British. So the English language was forced down my throat from an early age. I had no choice in the matter. That is why I can express myself so well in english. In any case, the British Empire has declined from its “glory” days and today english is a world language. So it enables me to reach mass audiences. But sometimes, I also write in my mother tounge but the readership is only in Zimbabwe and I am currently banned and exiled, including my work.

Q: Can an exile live by their literature alone?
Well one has to be a jack of a few trades in order to live from writing along. In my case, I have a vast set of skills that I use to leverage the economic situation. Mostly I enjoy starting innovative enterprises along the lines of art and culture.

Q: How is publishing scene abroad?
I already told you. Not easy.

Q: Any message?

I wish writers in India, Africa, Brasil and Latin America could join forces.

Conversations: Two writers on their favourite master: Dickens

Jaydeep Sarangi (JS) and Sunil Sharma (SS), two widely-published poets/critics/ writers, discuss their common idol in this freewheeling literary interview. Excerpts:

JS: Do you find relevance of Dickens as a novelist in the
postcolonial world where things fall apart?

SS: Works are written primarily for your own age and audience. Dickens is no exception. What make him a stand-out literary figure are his uplifting artistic vision, scathing realism, strong moral tenor, social involvement and conscience---things that make him taller than his Victorian literary peers. He provides the best moral critique of a heavily-industrialized society out to colonize the rest of the world on the basis of naked greed for poor colonies and naval power. He exposes, like Baudelaire, the underbelly of such an industrial narrative that tends to benefit only, as Occupy Wall Street Movement claimed in 2011, only 1% of the population by excluding 99% of it, the toiling masses. Dickens punctures the narrative of progress by showing up dark London and its marginalized figures. His work is consistently humanist, liberal in the true sense and pro-poor. He articulates the muted voices of such a progressive society that denies full opportunities of complete growth to the poor folks. He negates the full force of such a progressive claim made by capitalist class regarding the emancipator powers of capitalism as a humane formation, as an advance on earlier societies. Dickens, the writer, shows the darker side of such a social development and denounces it most strongly. He is truly democrat. His sympathies are with the marginalized of a very class-conscious English society. His profound moral vision, memorable characters, gritty realistic portrayal, public engagement and use of media like print magazines for serializing his fictions place him in an enviable vantage position that few writers have come to occupy since. Tolstoy, Hemingway and Marquez come to mind that got the same level of adulation by the reading public and left the same kind of impact as well.

Regarding his enduring relevance to a post-colonial world, well, to me personally, he is still meaningful not only to the culture of the independent countries headed in the direction of global capitalism but to the post-modern, post-structuralist, post-Marxist, and, other post- worlds as well. All these intellectualist discourses by an overfed critical hierarchy operating in the sacrosanct sphere of the academy have one common agenda: To deprive the working classes with right tools of resistance, of correct cognition, of correct mental theorizing. These pseudo attempts are meant to deny the praxis and revolutionary potential of such a scientific praxis. They deliberately paint a depressing picture of the world beyond any hope of change for better. This is not historically true analysis. It is a deliberate distortion. Dickens fought such cynicism, annihilism, pessimism by attacking the ideology of utilitarianism and posited his own artistic version of refreshing and reinvigorating humanism against it through a vivid wide canvas full of believable people and situations. Writer as a subversive emerged strongly in the open day-light that successfully challenged the hegemonic classes and their thoughts and could bring in reforms by awakening the vestigial conscience of a mammon-worshiping society.

This unique moral tone, this ability to see through the lies of so-called narratives of progress and change, this standing up for the rights of the disenfranchised sections, this moral critique of the vampirish system, makes Dickens still very relevant to a society, post-colonial or any other post, that continues to suppress and oppress large silent majority. His enduring popularity and appeal across the globalised world proves this point.

Dickens stands as a seer. He rubbishes as lies the ideology of capitalism and points out that any society bleakly following the sole agenda of profit is both morally and materialistically doomed. Regeneration is possible through a revival of humanistic philosophy only. He is, will be, valid to every other age that is to come.

JS: Who according to you is the most interesting creation of Dickens?

SS: Scrooge. He stands for any cold, calculating, money-driven, utilitarian age. He speaks for our post-colonial society as well where thingification is happening fast and our souls are shutting up. He is both a victim of utilitarianism and its artistic negation. By listening to the ghosts and believing, he begins changing internally for better. The message is: Seeds are within us. It is up to us to change or not; to grow as a better person by connecting with the larger humanity. For any moral regeneration, personal initiative is to be undertaken. And the joys of such re-connect with the larger humanity are varied and immense for us all. Even in most totalitarian societies, you will find folks like Schindler, helping out other folks. That is a strong message of hope that redemption is always possible through individual metamorphosis. It is said that this delightful novel changed the way Christmas was celebrated in England and, later on, in other nations as well. Christmas as an opportunity of reaching out to the poor and to God through them, of spreading cheer in cheerless lives, of feeling pain and suffering through wonderful human faculty of empathy. It is a great novel with huge emancipator powers, almost sacred, like the scriptures, for me, for its potential to effect deep moral transformations within and without.

JS: When did you read Dickens for the first time in your life?

SS: In school days. That was superficial reading. Deep reading came later on. The teachers did not help, of course. That kind of literacy is still missing in class-rooms everywhere. Literature is taught in a vacuum and most unimaginatively by the teachers who have no clues. No alliances or homologies are made between life and serious literature. It is a vacuous activity. Class-room teaching, in fact, kills the creative potential of great art-works everywhere. Literary literacy needs to be promoted and cultivated in a big way.

JS: Why did Dickens write about children and their hard pressed life?

SS: That you have to ask him only. Humour apart, in my view, kids and women are most vulnerable sections anywhere and most exploited. Childhood preoccupied Dickens, especially deprived one, as his own was very traumatic. Orphans and sick children roam freely his landscapes as they serve as the doubles for his own loveless childhood. He felt betrayed by his mother and that subliminal sense of abandonment gets echoed through creation of disadvantaged children and innocent women being victimized. In a way, innocent women and suffering orphans or abandoned children are identical in Dickensian universe---both often get brutalized and try bravely to retain their innate sense of beauty and innocence in such a lawless cruel bleak world of exploiters and ruthless gangsters and heartless suitors and scheming family male members. In every such unlucky family, a young woman tries bravely to be an angelic force. The portrayal of children is very sympathetically done by Dickens. Some of his shorts dealing with them are very poetic and tender. He appreciates their world much better than some of the current children’s books writers that pander to the marvellous detached from the immediacy and create false worlds of power and magic. Dickens never does that, despite his life-long fascination with the supernatural.
Here is the wonderful paradox: His fictions dealing with the young ones are more magical than the current blockbuster children’s books dealing with the magical in everyday life! Only a great Master can do that: Create magical lands: Lyrical, moving, soft and tender.

JS: Do you like his language?

SS: Language is a vehicle for expressing ideas in a creative way. For a highly prolific writer like Dickens, it serves him well. For some, Dickens might not be the cultivated or careful writers like a Flaubert or Henry James, but for me, he conveys the chatter of the streets so well. The rough and the tumble are captured so artistically by him. In his busy hands, it is not polished language but a passionate language working for him.

JS: What are his strong points as a novelist?

SS: His profound humanism; concern for the deprived; questioning the dominants, and, critical stance. He comes nearest to writer as a prophet for readers like me.

JS: At times Dickens’ characters are lifeless. Do you accept this criticism?

SS: In that case, we have to revise the meaning of the very term lifeless! I do not accept. His characters, after Shakespeare, are immortals!

JS: Will anyone read Dickens in the year 2050?

SS: Crystal-gazing is an art denied to me but as long as there will be an anguished search for a just, human and better world, Dickens will be a topper on the future reading lists of the humanoids.

JS: Is there any counterpart of Dickens in India?

SS: Premchand in Hindi. Manto in Urdu. Bashir in Malayalam. Mahasweta in Bengali. P.L.Deshpande in Marathi. List is endless. These are people’s writers, like Dickens.

JS: Should Dickens be read and studied as socially committed writer?

SS: That is for talented new critics like you to decide. Cannon-formation is these days highly elitist and reflects a bias for those writers that promote private fractured dismal and extremely limited worlds of drug-n-sex abuse, sexual orientations, individual ramblings of a fashionably-sick mind and what not. Dickens, even if outlawed by the dons, will continue to rule the hearts of public---his real readers. He enjoyed good rapport with them and changed his endings as per the public opinion. Such a rapport is missing, almost impossible, these days. Both writers and readers are getting atomized in the commercialized mass society. Literature is losing its élan for us. It is becoming an anguished cry of a neurotic only. These are real Hard Times for us.

 (Courtesy: Delightful Dickens: Yking Publishers, Jaipur)

Delightful Dickens

Delightful Dickens:  Contemporary responses to an immortal writer

Dickens is delightful. And sublime.

The great novelist can make you cry, smile and move in a strange way no other writer can ever do: Reading Dickens in the year 2012, for instance, is a delightfully moving and sublime experience than it was in a more conservative and laid-back India of late 1980s. What was just Victorian for this Indian college-level reader at that time underwent a strange metamorphosis: the same novels read earlier as part of courses for the undergrad and postgraduate classes in English Studies, came to reveal new dimensions missing in the previous readings of the same hallowed texts. Certain aspects of a serious art-work can be fully understood and appreciated at a certain age, chronological/mental; after gaining a certain level of maturity and solid worldly experiences. Great art refuses to be stale, despite the passage of time, and, multi-layered, it opens up to a critical gaze of a different time that follows. In this sense, it is unique. A classical Homer is as much ours as he was to the Ancients and the antiquity.  One of the features of great art is that it speaks to you and your age. The artist becomes your contemporary and friend. Dickens proves this. His Hard Times, A Christmas Carol, or, The Old Curiosity Shop---just to name a few classics at random--- can converse with you in a most intimate manner. You find these texts embedded with the echoes from your own age. Strange! But true. These three famous novels, stamped with the 18th-century, do carry the historical traces of their age but they also simultaneously contain the seeds of future buried in their formal structures. The serious art works--- visual, textual, audio or in the audio-visual--- have this unique capacity inherent: The ability to see correctly and historically both the past and the present, the continuum leading to the future; a future born out of the dialectics of past/present. It is a Janus-like attribute of art and artist, looking forward and backward from the vantage position of to-day. The talented Dickens is simultaneously both Victorian and non-Victorian in his approach and artistic vision---very much a product of his time, yet a visionary gazing beyond the past/ present into a future still to unfold like a crimson dawn on a high summit. His work feels as fresh as any recent writing of the 21-st century serious art, in terms of their overarching humanistic concerns and moral critique of the rapacious culture of post-industrial, mass society. Artist and art as subversive. Once revisited, these great and supple Dickensian works, in the globalized, privatized but no longer the liberalized times of the grim 2012---following a bitter 2010 and 2011 that saw the rise of  the Arab Spring, riding popular disenchantment and discontent in the Middle East and slow but sure collapse of dictatorships across the nations that once looked invincible due to the stamping out of political dissidence, lack of dialogue, suppression of human rights, profligacy and ruthlessness of the dictators  and a captive military and police as instruments of state oppression; the rise of Occupy Wall Street movement that went international; the increasing use and impact of social media for mobilizing public opinion and organizing people in large numbers in the public squares everywhere from First-World to Third-World nations; the increasing public anger against corruption, greed and ineptitude of the ruling elites; the complete reification of human relations and erosion of moral values in a mass society that encourages blind consumption, and, grave climate changes due to the rapacious system driven by the profit-motive---was an educative experience of high order. Dickens--- very much a precocious child of his age bound by its overall temperament and ruling ethos crystallized in the form of the dominant ideology prevailing at that time--- prove beyond doubt that a great artist can easily transcend the limitations of time, space and ruling world-view by looking into the future and rightly predict the broad contours of the developmental dialectics, historical and interconnected in nature. As an Indian reader, for example, you find these texts resonating with you very strongly. Hard Times is as much a moral indictment of industrial England and its accompanying philosophy of crass utilitarianism, as it is of India, a post-colonial country headed the same way of industrialization and its attendant utilitarian philosophy. India shows an utter disregard for the human values and human development in the process of self-aggrandizement and accumulation of super profits. It exactly mimics and mirrors the negative side of the western growth model first seen in England and later on, in other industrialized nations. There is an uncanny resemblance. What happened in the 18^th-century England was occurring again in the 21^st-century India. This is a frightening realization for any sensitive soul. If industrialization destroyed rural England and nature by replacing it with Black Country-like centers of unplanned growth, soot-covered, extremely polluted with macabre laws and harsh working conditions in the grey industrial towns, the same set of common ailments was recurring in India of the 1990s, leading to a recession-hit 2010-12. A wider disconnect between rural and urban India; a city-centric developmental model, untamed middle-class consumerism of the western products, aping of  the American ethos in every aspect, a widening hiatus between the urban poor and the rich and extreme commodification of relations, emotions and human body, among other crippling symptoms, plague our country too. The only difference: We do not have any Dickens to play the role of a conscience-keeper in our own hard times that go sans any moral scruples. If you read closely A Christmas Carol, you find experiencing déjà vu. Scrooge is a real character, still haunting us in one form or the other. With his heart calcified and cadaver appearance, he can be a turn off but a grim figure roaming the country side or slums. Scrooge still lives among us in India and elsewhere, un-transformed and un-redeemed. A frightening sight perhaps for some and a model for others as unfeeling, un-scrupulous being, finding his high in cold metals and coins accumulated in a corner safe or underground vault. Human warmth scares him. So does, a welcoming hearth. The poor are a despised lot, inferiors who deserve their wretched fate. Festivals of love and merriment are to be avoided. For the fictional Scrooge, redemption is possible through love, a re- discovery of and return to community on Christmas Eve. The moral transformation through values like compassion and piety and fellow-feelings revives the dead soul of Scrooge and finally, aided by the ghosts, he feels revived and re-vitalized through his quick return to the basic human values informing a just and equitable society. He is able to re-claim his lost self and basic human essence by realizing their profound value in a crass utilitarian society of self-absorbed profiteers by a super-fast journey of self-discovery whereby he is able to reclaim his better self, lost innocence. In a way, against the religious framework of Christmas---a festival commemorating love, compassion, self-sacrifice and fellow  feelings---Dickens unfolds a narrative of redemption for self-centered Scrooges of the world and suggests that the tale, howsoever implausible with its ghosts and all that, is real recipe for human and spiritual re-birth. It offers a genuine solution to the stinking and hated cadavers like Scrooge and hints that their only chance of true redemption as noble and meaningful humans in an unjust society lies in a return to simple humanism and empathy for the poor, the deprived, the downtrodden. It mounts a deep moral critique of a selfish system, exploitative and de-humanizing in its nature. In fact, fiction of Dickens, one way or the other, unveils the ideology of the capitalistic class and shows its true face to a stunned world. He shows, unflinchingly, that such a social system of development and progress is anti-humanist, predatory and ruthless. Although founded on most noble principles of Renaissance humanism, capitalism turns against its foundational principles and ideology and destroys everything in its rapacious pursuit of profit: Nature, human values, communal life-style of villages, harmony between humans and nature and among themselves and nations, and, lastly, human personality itself. Profits and markets are its sole concerns. Everything finer is of no use, if it fails to translate into money and more money. It leaves a destructive trail in its single-minded pursuit of profits. Village economy is destroyed. Villagers are rendered superfluous. Villages, therefore, get abandoned by the marching army of the hungry, unemployed, displaced and uprooted villagers in search of jobs. Cities emerge as the new dark centers of unbridled growth. The slums, the polluting black smoke from tall chimneys, the crime, the prostitution, the thievery, murders, and, brutality await the fresh arrivals from the destroyed villages. It is a bleak world out there for the Olivers of the system. Dickens, like Balzac and Tolstoy, raises some pertinent moral questions about a social formation that started off with the noble aim of changing the static world of feudalism with its liberating rallying cry of equality, liberty and fraternity but lost the human-centered, this-worldly philosophy of liberal bourgeois on the path of consolidating its power over a decaying aristocracy and its outdated world-view of Ptolemy and others. That was historically governed process of change but these conscientious writers in England, France and Russia were appalled by the loss of the original humanist vision of the founding fathers of the Enlightenment. They pointed out, like the Romantic poets, the contradiction between theory and practice of capitalism in its advanced stage. The tragic consequences of such a deliberate and politically-motivated erosion of original liberal- humanism by the triumphant bourgeoisie on the worker, the lowest-denominator of  so-called progress, the real change-agent, their alienation, the suppression and oppression, are all delineated by writers like Dickens and poets like Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats and Baudelaire, among others. Read the Hard Times again, and deeply, and you will find that it is an Indian or African or Latin-American story told artistically, with profound sympathy for the underdog, in a Victorian setting. It challenges the hegemony of the emerging capitalist class and posits that utilitarianism is a hollow credo of ruthless folks chasing profits like pirates chasing gold-laden ships on the high seas. Any system that excludes large number of hard-working and honest people, discriminates against children, women, old and sick, gypsies, circus artists and artistes in general is bound to be flawed and finally doomed for a violent death. The moral paralysis besetting London is one sure indicator of the rigor mortis about to set in a moribund society obsessed with its profits only. Dickens warns that unless such a rapacious system changes its ways of seeing and feeling, it is going to be dead sooner or later. For redemption, inner transformations are the only way out---by recognizing and feeling one with the toiling humanity. No doubt, Marx loved Dickens for his profound sense of humanism and sympathy for the marginalized figures of such a heartless social system of production---orphans, kids, workers, artistes, women and criminals. They all are permanent victims of such a callous system.

Dickens can leave a subliminal impact, very much like the uplifting encounter with other greats of the novel--- Cervantes, Turgenev, Dostoevsky, Flaubert, Zola, Hemingway, Joyce, Mann, Sartre, Camus and Marquez. You feel you are in a different world, yet resembling your very own. They are the summits of the world literature. Dickens can make you cry and laugh, sad and elevated, depressed and uplifted within the same literary space of a novel or short fiction, in a most adroit manner. Very few current Booker-winning authors can achieve this kind of literary feat. His characters are fictional, yet very real for us. His prose might be convoluted in places for some bitter critics but it flows, despite minor impediments in its course; his overall style is vivid, almost cinematic in its breadth and range---it makes us see. That is why many of his picturesque novels have been turned successfully into popular cinema. The characters are full of little oddities and have come to stay in racial consciousness as eccentric but lively figures. He creates a felt world at an epic scale that later novelists could hardly create with the exception of Tolstoy or Mann, in terms of its depth and width. Dickens, due to his direct involvement in community, became a public writer, as against the private writer of the last and current century. This is a major difference. He sings England. And makes the country in transition come alive at that historical juncture. He is a seer. From his vantage position, he can easily survey all the terrain…and beyond. His popularity continues. He is still morally relevant to us like enduring Shakespeare, Lewis Carrol and Cervantes, not necessarily in this order. In terms of moving and defining an age, Dickens is as contemporary as a Hemingway, Marquez, Kafka, Camus and Brecht---the writers who could successfully capture the zeitgeist of the 20th-century, in their own idiosyncratic ways, and leave huge impact via their writings on entire societies. There are dimensions in his oeuvre that clearly anticipate future developments of a society driven by the profits and lacking in serious morals and empathy, compassion and piety--- values as guiding force. He portrays, correctly, the consequences of such a money-obsessed culture---a collapse of moral order; a pauperization emotional, intellectual, human, spiritual. The Absurd of the 20th-century, post-war Europe is, in a way, stark confirmation of such a development.The bleak view of Kafka, Sartre and Camus, along with the abusrdists followed later on by the post-modernists and post-structuralists, highlight the cost of such human impoverishment for a society of consumerists. Dickens' Hard Times, Dombey and Son, among others, portray  such a scary society that subsequent alert readers find reflecting their own times and ethos. Although possibility of moral re-generation and redemption is explicitly offered in the highly instructive tale called A Christmas Carol, the callous ruling elites fail to notice this road-map to the spiritual re-awakening. It took the genius of a Tolstoy to offer the same recipe to an hedonistic society in his Resurrection. Dostoevsky, another writer preoccupied with moral questions in a decadent society on the threshold of change, most authentically shows the crippling effects of such a moribund society on human psyche and with equal force and artistic talent. In An Old Curiosity Shop---one of his most popular novels that created the frenzy seen these days with best-sellers in America like the Potter or the Twilight or the Hunger Games series---the idea is suggested, and later repeated, that innocence has to suffer a tragic fate in a cruel and wicked world. Echoes of Shakespearean tragedies can be distinctly heard in this and other works: Ophelias and Hamlets of the world have to die and Lears to finally go insane, in view of a scheming, violent, greedy, ruthless, morally-defunct and deceptive society chasing power and wealth, as their sole goals, at any cost. It is a heavy cost still being paid by some of us. Incidentally, Chekhov's Ward no Six comes nearest to this tragic moral world-view of these two exceptionally powerful writers.

What makes Dickens tick?

His vantage position in public life, in community. Like a folk artist, he is involved in the life of the community, the way a folk artist is even today. His historical position as an impoverished middle-class boy---due largely to his father's miscalculations and living beyond means like Bassanio and subsequent imprisonment in the debtors' prison; mother insisting on him to earn some money by continue to work in a daily 10-hour shift in a rat-infested dingy and dark blacking factory at the age of 12 and deep sense of betrayal and abandonment that haunted him forever, along with suppressed anger against such type of mother--- led him to understand and appreciate more sympathetically the plight of the deprived and the poor, especially children and women. Later on, Dickens, with heightened sense of social conscience, got himself directly involved in the public life by championing social causes and bringing changes through his writing---very much like to-day's journalists. He relentlessly focussed on social ills afflicting a mercenary society and his writing exposed the complacent middle-class readers to the dark underbelly of such an industrial progress that excludes, to quote a recent shibboleth, 99% of human population, out of the development process, and, demonizes them in strange ways. The dehumanized criminals, the wandering orphans, the suffering innocents, the brutalized ideal and sensitive men and women, as against a heartless capitalist class of crass individuals aligned with blind ruling class of politicians and parliamentarians populate his wide canvas. In the typical Dickensian world, even hardened criminals, fugitives, robbers---the standard outcasts---are capable of showing more humane virtues than your callous factory-owner. It is an inversion of popular perceptions and utilitarian ideology that deeply suspect such people as threat to system. His pitiless realism, great satire and humour, huge gallery of unforgettable characters, his ability to create scenes of extra-ordinary power and beauty--- all made him a towering public figure. His tours to various cities and regions of England; his constant touch with reading public through serialized publications in weeklies and monthlies, their feedback prompting the writer to alter his artistic plans and public readings---a novelty then, a marketing necessity now---created a larger-than-life persona. He was our first celeb writer; an influential; Only Tolstoy and Hemingway could get so much of public adulation, followed by Marquez. His standing as a tall public figure, a public writer, brought many reforms in legal, jail, education fields and working conditions of the powerless, hungry, displaced and deprived of the industrialized England.

Dickens was their collective and individual voice. Dickens was the sole conscience-keeper of a greedy society. His early grim situation and later volunteer involvement in social life made him a Colossus. His talents make him an Immortal; the One whom age cannot wither, nor custom stale. After him, perhaps with the sole exception of Gorky, no other writer has consciously engaged with social issues, polemicised with the system and brought changes. The novelist who mirrored the industrial England, warts and all, so realistically and precisely through his prose full of real speech of the various social groups, never despaired of life, despite its contradictions and never gave up hope for better change, although this change was to be brought in by a change of conscience and moral transformation of wealthy folks like Scrooge. This is a largely Christian humanism, a religious idea of an equitable and just world ruled by love for fellow beings. In this, Dickens was limited by the ideas of his age. Later on, another giant Tolstoy also talked of the same vision. What is important is that artists like them did talk of a possibility of change, rejecting the status quo openly. The stern writer did not approve of the profligacy of the rich, of the few privileged persons at the cost of others, the lesser mortals and criticized severely the industrialized society of England that had come to decenter the primary player---the common citizen or ordinary individual from the system and robbed the real change agent of the benefits of all socio/economic advantages attending such a historically advanced formation. It was like discussing Hamlet the play, without the Prince of Denmark. Such an exclusive society was not acceptable to Dickens on moral grounds, revealing his genuine humanist-liberal concerns towards the masses toiling hard in the most un-democratic and back-breaking conditions in factories and offices and where failure to pay back the mounting debts meant a term in a horrible prison. Dickens bared all the ills of such a society that was interested in producing mere workers for running their production only. Arts, music, painting, theater, circus---these things were of no value to the new capitalist; only profit, later on, colonies, mattered for him. This one-dimensional growth was not acceptable to the novelist. He suggested through his works that any society inhibiting the overall development of an individual, especially coming from a deprived background, is morally repugnant for any sensitive soul. This is the harshest criticism of capitalism that rode in on the egalitarian ideology in the first place by replacing the feudalism of the dark ages and the absolutism of lords and monarchs. This deep humanism of Dickens still makes him endearing and relevant. Then, there are other qualities, too.   The hugely gifted writer was an innovator too. He used elements from other prevalent traditions of earlier narratives, like ghosts, super-naturalism, romance in order to create a heightened aesthetic effect on his readers. Mixing of satire, caricature, grotesque, humour He also Dickens was the last of the giants and late capitalist age did not have any space for such writers. It needed only little narratives. The age of the master narratives was gone... at least, for the time being. Writers like Dickens were replaced by clever, self-centered wordsmiths producing well-crafted works celebrating the angst, the despair, the depressing, fractured, de-radicalised beings in capable of any human agency in a universe of artificial needs and endless desires manufactured by a smart ad agencies and disseminated by the TV in homes across the world by the manipulative cartels hoping for super-profits.

This is a slim volume of tributes to a great master from whom we can still learn a lot. It is deliberately kept slim---small is beautiful and everything is getting smaller in nano-age---as large scholarly tomes are getting out of fashion in an age of attention-deficit.All the tributes are invited. This is an anthology with a difference. Here you find primarily a cast of writers engaging with Dickens. Of course, majority are teachers---common trait of writers everywhere---who have elected to be writers in order to seek and create worlds of beauty through their writings---poetic or prose. All of them are by now well-known, thanks to social media. It is as writers and poets that they are tributing the Victorian novelist from their current location in time and space in the 21st-century. Their essays and poems reflect a rare quality of lyricism; their terms of engagement are also poetic. That quality makes this anthology totally different from your regular cut-n-dried academic criticism. Here, some of the finest writers/poets/editors are talking to Charles Dickens, and, Dickens, with them.

Even poems have been included in this flexi-format---appreciation is more intense and rare, if it floes full from a poet's heart.

 Canadian poet/ avid reader Gary Robinson, in his idiosyncratic way, does a reading of Dickens’s A Child’s History of England, a 400-page work. Gary jots down his impressions and views of Dickens in a diary- entry form of writing, still much popular for having a direct dialogue with the reader and more intimate than any other mode of narration. Besides, it can provide access to the mind of the writer in an immediate way. This reveals Dickens at his acerbic best, while re-counting the history of England and its monarchy---some of them very autocratic in nature. The germs of his deep humanism can be clearly seen in this work. Gary makes it current as well---by his cryptic commentary on it. Indian creative and critical essays, too, follow some rare dimensions of the novelist par excellence. Critic Arvind talks of alienation of the major characters in Oliver Twist but does not stop there. He talks of connections, too. In this thoughtful essay, Arvind echoes the true grit of some of the characters and their desire to overcome the feeling of being separate by fighting it out in their lives in an exploitative social system. Arvind manages to find a correct positive message in the famous novel and says we have to deal with alienation in positive manner; Banibrata explores the true delightful nature of Dickens in his well-researched piece by quoting extensively from some of the enduring Dickensian novels that still delight us in this century. Neeru takes up the Indian love affair with Dickens, as the themes raised by the novelist still haunt the nation, despite independence from the Raj. The kind of identification with the Dickensian themes and his humane outlook make him a favourite author for the readers here; Jaba delineates the subaltern concerns in Oliver Twist, a novel that presents realistically the bleak London of the floatsome jettisoned by the money-driven society---the outcasts and the oppressed, sans any voice, hence, subaltern--- in a convincing manner, thus proving the contention that great writers perform the task of oracles for ensuing ages and generations of readers; Kalpna examines the Great Expectations from a left position and traces the conflicting relationship between bourgeois and proletariat in that famous novel, sounding a bit cynical like the Frankfurt School  of Marxism in her analysis of the current proletarian scene; Shaleen revisits Hard Times and highlights the symbolism of the novel that exposes the industrialization as a merciless system of exploitation of the less fortunate, a system of wealth production that coverts men into machines and destroys their basic dignity and core human self; Sudhir feels that Indian sensibility can be found in Dickens and he is like an avatar to fight the ugliness of his age and reform the society by crusading against the evils---a new direction for any future study of the writer; Shubha focuses on children coping their way up in a miserable Victorian society and fighting for dignity and survival in that bleak world by talking of some of the celebrated short stories of the master, an aspect that is not much covered in recent criticism of the great Victorian story-teller and needs more study; Sangeeta talks of Little Dorrit, a short fiction, from a feminist perspective and shows how women were asked to conform to Victorian notions of ideal woman and made to sacrifice for the sake of family, a sacrifice often overlooked and forgotten by the selfish members; Sunil underlines the doubleness of serious artists and their works by placing Hard Times in contemporary political, cultural, literary contexts and establishing the transcendental nature of such classics that belong to an early age, yet possess the wonderful artistic capacity to converse with us intimately. The poetry section comes alive with lyrical tributes by some of the leading poets: Laura Bailey; Prem Katoch; Madhumita Ghosh; Ampat Koshy; Amitabh V. Dwivedi; Jaydeep Sarangi and Ram Sharma---prolific quality poets making waves through their poetry on international stage as well. 

The section on poetry is followed by a stunning series of artwork on Dickensian broad themes by hugely talented Era Tak, a young painter and poet, well-known for her works in visual and verbal media here and abroad. Amitabh too sketches two of his poems inspired by the famous characters of the Victorian novelist's work, rendering them very vivid for the reader.

A literary dialogue between writers Sunil and Jaydeep further explores the rich legacy of the novelist par excellence for the contemporary bi-lingual audiences in a post-colonial, globalized world and the impact of the Victorian on us, across the gulf of the intervening time that separates him from us, but his humanist concerns, paradoxically, transcend these temporal-spatial barriers and turn him, again, into a seer, visionary, capable of addressing our own anxieties and concerns, and his message very fresh and highly relevant to succeeding ages---a timelessness granted to great and serious autonomous arts, only. Short fiction by Sunil again explores some of the issues raised in the book are further explored in a creative manner and the manner in which Dickens haunts global imaginations across various artistic media.

This is a unique poetic/prose/visual high-quality tribute--- very talented and reputed poets/painters paying their appreciation in verse form to a very productive and respected novelist in a prose anthology but like Dickens, we believe in breaking conventions in this cross-over collection. The primary objective is to understand a genius, a master narrator from our vantage position of time and space and underline his relevance to the variety of the post-modern/post-colonial audiences everywhere, located in a homogenizing and largely globalized culture of instant forgetfulness, shifting brand loyalties and constant pursuits of newer sensations and more money. Human is no more individual but a mass consumer only with standardized responses, desires and common dreams. Hedonism is the new religion for the mobile middle-classes globally and societies---third-or-first-world---are open markets plagued by corporate wars for super profits. Dickens manages to speak to such a mass audience through movies, TV series and regular reprints, is sheer amazing fact of great import!

In brief, it is a heart-felt, sincere, trans-national multi-media tribute to a master painter of human nature and nature, blessed with a heightened sense of history, prepared by Life itself in its crucible to enable to play a greater role in the arena of arts. Please, enjoy the appreciation done by some of the best creative minds in these pages. And re-discover Dickens as a friend, guide and seer for the high-tech, new-age netizens, navigating strange worlds in the cyberspace. As a high star, he will illuminate your path and guide you to your destination, entertaining you as a pal, in this long and arduous life-journey.

Happy reading!

(Courtesy: Delightful Dickens: A global multimedia anthology, published by the Yking Publishers, Jaipur)

WEALTH OF IDEAS: Sunil Sharma Interviews Pakistani-American Novelist Bapsi Sidhwa

WEALTH OF IDEAS: Sunil Sharma Interviews Pakistani-American Novelist Bapsi Sidhwa

International Poetry Anthology or IPA

--Sunil Sharma

The IPA wants poetry that crackles on the page, very much like the dried leaves that snap up instantly under the shod feet on a jungle dirt trail, the creaking hissing cracking sound magnified by the contrasting silences of the desolate forest where the few wandering humans find themselves in the company of the soaring spirits that can talk to only the singing hearts of the poets. The spirits hanging from dust-laden tall trees near the static water-hole grab you on the brown-yellowish wintry afternoons in that wilderness. They hypnotize your mind and soul and take you back to a time when everybody was a poet by heart, greeting the rising sun in hymns and other sacred songs near the sacred grove. The trees were not mere trunks or branches but breathing spirits that guided you in life. You met the frolicking gods in the happy dale or a murmuring pristine river or, in a different electrifying setting, witnessed the bewitching Venus stepping out of a frothy sea!

Your poetry should sizzle on the white page/s. It should not have the coldness of the blunt steel or skeptic concrete in its veins. It should not suffer from the peptic ulcer or high blood-pressure. Anemic in poetry kills the very body of the experience being inscribed in the fluttering words. Rather, it should catch the flutter of the words dripping with the morning dew and infected with the fresh smell of a red rose smiling in that happy vale that only your eyes are destined to see! We want kind of pulsating lines that register like the ECG machine the rapid beats of an innocent heart feeling the joy of being alive in a multi-hued world that is still as mysterious as it was for the Neanderthals! The world experienced as fresh sensation on daily basis and as exciting as it is for a couple in love. Such intense poetry is eternal, appealing and enduring, a literary foil to an age that thrives on the culture of the instant gratification and forgetfulness!

IPA wants poetry that can gently carry you in its arms to distant lands immersed in mists, exploring the timeless realms of profound truths, with the aid of imagination and glittering words, dry- cleaned of accumulated dross of the preceding centuries of overuse. Poetry that opens up magical windows on perilous seas and locked well-guarded castles there, keeping a fair maiden imprisoned in that solitary rooms, watched by the giants. It tells us the secrets of an aching soul and the meaning of being a human being in most trying times. In other words, poetry that restores the child in us and that missing sense of wonderment that makes all of us natural poets fascinated by the racing clouds in the azure sky or flying sparrows across the green meadows dazzling in the summer suns! Poetry that brings us back our lost innocence and wholeness to a wounded spirit. It is a powerful song that erupts suddenly in dark recesses of soul and makes us…complete and cured!

If you can capture the agile moments in your tender tiny hands, render the winds and the storms in exploding words, then please send us your live poems to us as soon as possible.

Contact Dr. Shaleen Singh: drshaleen999@gmail.com

Or Dr. Jaydeep Sarangi: sarangij@rediffmail.com