Have you ever come across writing that sits like a pebble in your shoe? You read a story and there’s something in it that just won’t leave, it irks you or haunts you. Sometimes you feel on edge due to a general unease the story leaves you with, other times the text gives particular puzzles to solve while reading and after. All texts, however straightforward or convenient to engage with, call to us with questions and demands, if we’re listening. Some works stylistically use indirect language, abstraction or broken narratives and intentionally call upon us to do the work of interpreting and sitting with the discomfort of not having clear answers handed to us. I am drawn to such works. I gravitate towards their knots and irresolution, to sit with, unravel or savour, to inform me in my own writing.
I sing, make music and sound, think, translate, install and converse, but at the heart of it all even when speaking or making music, I realised I am guided by the gesture of writing. It turns out, I am writing Mumbai. Mumbai is home wherever I am in the world, I breathe in the city, it flows through me. Perhaps this natural taking to the city happened due to my father’s own finding of home here as an immigrant in the dense city that held space for him, and the transmission of his admiration and affection for it to me. Perhaps it was due to my mother’s entering into her own skin in this city that offers the dignity of individuation, the potential for freely thinking despite the weight of society.
It is trivial to say that Mumbai in its sheer size, fractal detail and relentless ambition has allowed for multilingual encounters and collisions of meanings, metaphors, symbols and tongues, ideational richness that pushes boundaries and generates new information, fresh forms of thought and expression. From its restless seething, at its edges and shores, Mumbai offers a literary avant garde in the forms of strange shapes, jagged lines, tangled threads, polished fragments and silences. I have run into these forms particularly in English and Marathi, in certain of this city’s writers, poets, playwrights, besides various arts. For a long time I was intimidated by the sophistication of their words as well as by simply being unable to engage adequately with Marathi in the original. However, I found pleasure in the non-linearity, marvelled at the performance of the opacity of tongues and minds in dialogue that writers of this throbbing city write from and about.
One such work is Mahesh Elkunchwar’s Party. As a youngster, I saw Party as a Hindi film on Doordarshan before I read the play in English translation found with a footpath book vendor, until finally having the chance in a University library in the US to read the Marathi original, along with his other Marathi plays including Pratibimb. Party presents a motley group of “art-world” regulars at a party in an influential patron’s palatial home in the Bombay of elite Marathi theatre, literature and politics. The web of characters orbiting the central woman in their literary entanglements, pretensions and aspirations and their intersubjectivity, forms the ground out of which Elkunchwar experimentally thinks through grand questions of what art/literature are about and for, what human relations are about and for, how both paradigms are inextricable. Pratibimb is much more austere in form, but more challenging and interesting in the questions it asks I think, and certainly more experimental. Whereas Party pitted multiple identities across a diversity of philosophies, Pratibimb faces off one man against multiple selves, and worse, against the silent darkness of the lack where the self is supposed to be, examined with humour via this man waking up to losing his mirror reflection. He is thrown askew, and tries to regain control of things by the surreal manoeuvre of entering and exiting his own mind along with companions, as they miss meeting each other in there. This man is an allegory for alienation in the city in a time of accelerating out-of-stepness among classes, a common man subject to multiple timelines at odds with each other overtaking human-scale time.
Party‘s subtle social satire built of deft movement into and across the depth and breadth of complex characters and their charged interpersonality, and Pratibimb‘s nonlinear layers of narrative, silences, set minimalism and absurd plotline flights reflecting on rapidly changing times – continue to be relevant themes as well as a delightful education for a mind hungry for knots, to observe how movement and stillness are deployed in sound and image. Both offered me a portal into the Marathi avant garde.
Marathi thought came to me circuitously, via Hindi but mainly via English, just as I am a second generation Mumbaikar with the native tongue of Telugu that I do not have as adept a grasp of as I’d like. Marathiness surrounds and embraces me once or many times removed, while I make sense of it in a consciousness built of English. The primal ground where my words are called forth is the lushness of the enfolding of Marathi. I can only express my affinity for Marathi in synaesthetic terms— as the richest green of a kamini bush in its perfuming presence under deep moonlight. Marathi is humidly floral, orderly, intensely beautiful, aloof. To not speak the language as a native does not entirely take away the experience of swimming in the world generated by that language and its thinkers, even as Mumbai in its intense complexity and contradictions offers convenient gated enclaves to never engage with Marathi or its creations. You could never pick up a Marathi text, just as easily as always choose to only speak in English here, but can you stand outside the world that bore you?
Arun Kolatkar’s jagged poetry makes up that world with its modern brush and ink. He jabs out hills, gods, stones and devotion, history and cynicism, faces and bodies, desires and desolation, belief opaque and seeking, despair, disdain and dejection, devotion an entire microcosm of a particular time in Mumbai, in just one volume.
demons
hills
cactus fang
in sky meat
hills
demons
vertebrated
with rock cut steps
demons
hills
sun stroked
thighs of sand stone
Uninformed of Marathi’s linguistic hierarchies, I began as a wide-eyed sponge in ignorant immersion. Ideas of a fantastic range surround(ed) me, sounds and music, cadences and lilts, guiding the heart and mind in desiring, dreaming, value-forming. As moving the songs, cymbals and rhythms of passing Vithoba devotees in white, violet, crimson in the midst of traffic snarls, that much exhilarating to learn of the mind of Nilu Phule in a gentle conversation with Kumar Ketkar about his tremendous life and work on a television tête-à-tête, the calibre of which has all but disappeared. Open conversations with rationalist thinkers in print or TV strengthened one’s own convictions while the city seen through modernist eyes such as Dilip Chitre’s impinged on one’s gaze.
Horniman Circle Garden Circa 1964
Discarded lovers
with charred eyes
fall asleep on the green bench
they don’t care any more
Your vision is blurred
But
you don’t need any help
I fantasise, if I were to be reborn it would be as the sagacious cool solitary Vatsalabai of Shanta Gokhale’s delightful short story Satkar. Her, or one of Eunice de Souza’s quicksilver Bombay women in For S who wonders if I get much joy out of life or Alibi. Films, television, newspapers, second hand bookstalls and the city itself in its footpaths, posters, trains and buses are my schooling.
I have found the act of translating from Marathi, of poems and songs in particular, to be as if a rich thick forest offers me clearings to venture in, where I have the temerity to keep aside incompetence, and luxuriate in the arms of language. A hunger to know overcomes me upon hearing the inflection and reading the contours, and I fall headlong into the sounds and word choices. Translation showed me that the act of moving between Marathi and English scrambling for words is to encounter directly what it means to be human. A fragment that has stuck with me forever is this phrase on TV, shabdāvāchun kaḷale sāre, shabdānchya palikadale which I decades later learnt is from a poem by P. L. Deshpande. These two words, shabdānchya palikadale, specifically, are evocative even out of context, in creating openings for thought— what do words hide, what do they obscure, are words even necessary to get to meaning? My endeavour as a writer and translator as well as a reader has been to go behind words, beyond them, between them.
Away on another shore, in Chicago, I was re-introduced to the Marathi impressions of my nascent years via parallel social movements with their artistic outcomes (more on this follows), and via parallel dimensions of a colonial tongue which opened up an entire spectrum of feeling and thought away from English. To pursue my baffling desire to grasp Portuguese, a language that hovers in our pre-conscious in Bombay, is, I believe, linked to grooves from my formative experiences with Marathi. To be highly subjective and controversial: I find both languages to be somehow dignifiedly emotional yet spiritedly restrained. Both offer an entire gamut of literary projects where experimentation and addressing the urgency of the social are centrestage. Here again, to commune with poetry and song lyrics keeping aside linguistics is magical, a parallax glide into an otherland. Portuguese took me back to Mumbai, to bring back to mind the formative experience of inexplicable unrequited affinity with language sounds. Two languages that in widely differing degrees form the metropolis that is home, with their own localised intersections, both of which I am a degree separated from.
My exposure to the Marathi tradition of experimentation has been indirectly at first, in translation or through thirsting after the parallel Hindi and Marathi cinema that Doordarshan offered, and then twice removed, through the spirit and conceptual gestures which i was fortunate to experience in the flesh in the rooms and stages in Chicago via friends who brought me into the musical fold during my years there. The universality of themes responding to the times reveals resonances across geographies of defiant positions that revel in creation.
A memorable piece of writing in my Chicago years came out of conversations with musician and storyteller Shanta Nurullah [1], whose illustrious career began with the Association for Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) and Black experimental theatre, both of which are the foremost pioneers in firmly establishing entire new ways of existence annihilating age-old segregations. Shanta, born Velma Patrice Neal, was a college student in the heady American days of the 1960s and had spent time in Pune in an exchange programme, studying the sitar with Pt. Bhaskar Chandavarkar and taking in the city sights, sounds and especially music concerts. This connection had intrigued me, besides her experimental sound on the sitar that was ear- and mind-opening, and so I had reached out to her for an interview. The AACM founded in 1965, is devoted “to nurturing, performing, and recording serious, original music,” and has given rise to a wide, tight-knit yet open-armed community of experimental groups that is at once fiercely progressive and grounded, sustaining itself against all odds of commercialisms. These groups exist in informal as well as long-standing small spaces that endure despite the relentless march of gentrification and financialisation. Resisting social stratification and ideologies of commodification and alienation, it is an avant garde that joyfully moves to explore and express the spirit of human creation. It was a huge realisation for me, in an albeit instinctive or yet uneducated manner, to see the parallel in the uncompromising, alive, idealist-realist, exhilarating spaces of Marathi experimental theatre in Pune and Bombay of the 50s, 60s, 70s that produced the finest artistes on screen and stage, as well as in the modernist experimental approaches in poetry with their politically defiant, social more challenging raison d’être, published in radical little magazine format. I was introduced to ‘zine culture and highly experimental DIY publishing in Chicago’s independent spaces, which directly echoed to me again forms that resistance takes across time and geography.
The luminous Shanta Gokhale speaking at length about Marathi experimental theatre, as well as the wide gamut of literary and existential dimensions of the city and the times, in an interview with Sahapedia [2], says, “There was still in the 70s the sense that we were building the nation with whatever we were doing. The idealism came from that, that we do our work as well as we can, and that then contributes to the nation becoming stronger […] But by the middle of the 80s and I see this in direct relationship with the gradual liberalisation of our economy […] things did begin to break up, people did become much more involved in their individual development and progress. So the strength of the movement began to wane after that.” Her prophetic words on that paradigmatic post-modern shift with its fragmentation and alienation within national boundaries, a shift that has now solidified into seemingly unscalable stone walls in these algorithmic times of accelerating manufactured crises, hijacking of human faculties, flattening of experience into convenient grammars of machine-serving monolingualism, again, resonate across geographies. Her words endure as a beacon for anyone anywhere who carries an ember of resistance or awaits a renewal. Therefore, for a journal such as Hākārā to exist, creating and nurturing a space in contemporary times for experimental writing rooted in Marathi and English, holding a firm ground for both languages with rigour, while bridging multiple shores of geographies and thought, inviting exploratory expression offering a home to those examining fleeting edges or anyone engaged in rooted disciplined practice, is a renaissance act.