Saturday, July 30, 2016
An activist life in fiction
Mahasweta Devi drew imaginary landscapes to narrate stories of the oppressed and the marginalised.
Great fiction, once come in your ken never leaves you. If I were asked to pack up and carry only one story with me to an imaginary world, I would cling to Pterodactyl of Mahasweta Devi. It transformed my dreams.
Pterodactyl is a mythical bird, ominous to the sceptic and epiphenic to the believer. Mahasweta brought it in to depict the truth about adivasis, to lash out at our failure to understand them. Gayatri Spivak translated it from Bangla and, together with Draupadi put it in a collection called Imaginary Maps.
When I first met Mahasweta, she was 72 and already a living legend. A Jnanpith, a Magsaysay and a formidable global fame as writer to her credit, she was already more of an idea than a person. Every feminist, political activist, aspiring writer swore by her. Therefore, when she agreed to visit Baroda, I had expected to meet with a difficult person, a female Che or a contemporary Laxmibai.
She was to come for the Verrier Elwin lecture of Bhasha Centre. When I asked where she would like to be put up, she replied with a single word, “home”. Her flight was to arrive at Ahmedabad. I requested Tridip Suhrud to receive her, feed her and bring her to Baroda. The flight was delayed. Tridip called me from Ahmedabad to say that she refused to eat. I knew that by the time they get to Baroda all restaurants will be closed. My wife Surekha was away in the US on a research assignment. I was not enough of a cook to feed a legend.
I kept calling friends who had already arrived in Baroda to listen to Mahasweta the next day. There was the folklorist Bhagwandas Patel, the rebel writer Laxman Gaikwad, historian Ajay Dandekar and poet Kanji Patel. Out of our collective courage, we put together some oranges, boiled eggs and peanuts as a possible meal. I knew how disastrous the results would be.
Close to midnight, the guest arrived. Mahasweta stood at the entrance tentatively. Neighbours had gathered to have a glimpse of her. After an uncertain moment, she held my hands and said nothing. I was thinking of the meal that we had concocted for her. Not knowing how to put across the difficulty, I asked, “Do you have teeth?” She laughed. That was a sterling laugh. She replied, quite unexpectedly in Hindi, “kuchh bhi de do, I don’t care.” She stepped inside and sat with all of us. The neighbours brought some daal and rice. I made tea. She asked for more. We talked of adivasis, struggles and her stories. By the time, the dawn broke out, we had become friends for life. What energy she exuded!
That was in March 1998. Over the next 15 years, she made Baroda her second home. Her visits stopped when, beyond 85, her body rejected the idea of long journeys. During those years, we travelled together to villages, towns and cities, meeting nomadic communities and listening to them. We travelled to all parts of India, in trains, cars, buses and planes. As part of our campaign for the rights of the de-notified tribes, we met prime ministers, home ministers, judges, police officers.
This was when I was trying to create the Adivasi Academy at Tejgadh. Mahasweta developed a great affection for the campus. There, in the old caves, she saw the pre-historic rock paintings for the first time and was surprised to see how the images resembled her depiction of the pterodactyl. We went to rivers, where she swam. We went to relief camps after the earthquake, after the riots. We shared people’s grief, agony and anger.
She spent long spells in Baroda talking to Surekha and Bhupen Khakhar, the painter, for who she had developed a keen admiration. She sang old Hindi songs and in return Bhupen sang Gujarati bhajans. She talked to him about her stories. In response, he painted epiphenic elephants. She would talk to us about her mother, her time in Shantiniketan, her uneasy marriage and son Nabarun Bhattacharya, a poet, of whom she was mightily proud. When she was not in Baroda, she sent hand-written letters to me, copies of various petitions she had filed, copies of Bortika, the journal she used to edit, lists of things that she wanted Surekha to get for her. She became a mother, a sister and a daughter to us, found her home in our home.
The Adivasi Academy became for her the Shantiniketan of her childhood; my colleagues became her adopted children. She repeatedly said she wanted to live on as a tree there. We cried thinking of her affection for us. At the Jaipur Festival, she said that sleep under the majestic tree at Tejgadh would bring her eternal peace. Her pterodactyl! This is the most extraordinary of endings she created in her fiction!
The author, a cultural activist and literary critic, founded with Mahasweta Devi the Denotified & Nomadic Tribes Rights Action Group, DNT-RAG
Source: Indian Express, 29-07-2016
When structure can boost creativity
In order to think out of the box, one needs to first understand the box, its shape and where its weaknesses and strengths lie.
It is a question that many of us often struggle with: does creativity and innovation flourish when there is structure and discipline or when there is total openness and freedom?
The answer — to some extent — came to me while listening to American writer and teacher of literary journalism John McPhee talk about the way he approaches writing. He lays out the main framework of the article, planning out carefully the start and end points, and key milestones along the way. Then he looks at his notes and marks out what will go where. And finally, he goes about the task of actually writing. When asked whether this was not too “mechanical” an approach to something that was essentially a creative, free-flowing process, he said that he in fact felt “freed up” to focus on creative expression, once the main structure was in place.
In other words, it was the structure that allowed him the freedom not to worry about structure.
Looking at things this way opened up a deeper understanding for me, which could apply to learning and to living life. It seems to me the importance of structure plays out in three areas of our lives as students. The first (and I know I’m going to be greeted by yawns here) has to do with the structure of our days. We are often irritated by people (usually elders, whom we don’t always consider wiser) telling us that we need to have a routine to our days, a pattern to the way we work. They tell us that such a discipline is necessary if we are to get ahead. And that word — discipline — acts like a red flag, spurring us to rebel against what we see as limiting and constricting.
But if we think about structure as a form of support, as something that “frames” rather than “binds” or “closes”, we might be able to appreciate its advantages.
So if we schedule our days in a way that accommodates the different things we have to do, we are then freed up to build in time for the things we want to do. The structure works only to break up your time into usable blocks. Within those blocks, you can still allow yourself as much flexibility as you need.
The second area where structure helps is in creating a foundational understanding of subjects. Much of our early training — in school, and in undergraduate programmes — has to do with learning the structure of disciplines, the rules that are foundational to them. Once we grasp the broad outlines of a subject, we can begin to see how to work within it, and, as we progress, how to go beyond it and chart new areas of doing things in new ways.
That is what research at the higher levels of education is all about. In academic subjects, we learn the principles and concepts upon which the discipline is based. In the arts, one learns the tools and conventions of a form before one can use those tools in new ways, to innovate and create new conventions.
The third area is in handling the complexity of daily life — dealing with civic issues, transport, relationships and community. Across all this, it is structure, in the form of social and cultural conventions that keeps us going. As students, the rules of the classroom and the expectations of performance make it possible for us to take certain things for granted (such as the fact that teaching will happen at a particular time) so that we can focus on what we need to do (studying, writing assignments).
Of course, sometimes structure can also be used to keep people from growing, to restrict their movement, and that is something to watch out for and to resist.
And then there is that overused term — “out of the box” thinking. In order to think out of the box, we need to first understand the box, its shape, what closes it and opens it, and where its weaknesses and strengths lie. We are often told that we have to learn the rules (of any game or field) before we break them.
We need to understand what exactly we are changing and how. We also need a sense of the shape of that change — after all, most of the time we are NOT calling for a complete absence of structure, but for a NEW structure that does not have the flaws or shortcomings of the old one.
So structure is not merely about a plan or rules, but also the map or the layout of a field. It is a way of organising time, ideas, and objects. It can be changed and it can be completely set aside for something else.
Structure and freedom are not necessarily opposing ideas — one can use structure, like McPhee, as a source of support that gives one the freedom to explore both inside and outside it.
The author teaches at the University of Hyderabad and edits Teacher Plus. Email: usha.bpgll@gmail.com
Source: The Hindu, 23-07-2016
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