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| rabi |
Posted
on 03-Dec-02 12:20 AM
Folks:
Here's a fascinating peek into a debate among Nepali writers of English about...none other than the great poet Laxmi Prasad Devkota.
The gist is that two influencial professors of English in Nepal (one the son of the Mahakabi) staunchly defend ANY criticism of Mahakabi's English peotry (he wrote good volume in English), while Samtra Upadhyay (the writer who made a splash with his novel Arresting God in KTM) counters that the Mahakabi may be the pride of the nation (MAHAN BIBHUTI? sounds trite), but should not be beyond honest (re)analysis of his peotry's meaning, language and style by any reader.
Makes sense to me, though I wish we could also read what the two professors wrote. Samrat has a point, though I can't quite figure out (may be I can ;) ) how he managed to begin the picece with misplaced first paragraph, as if his Word Processor tricked him with a wrong cut and paste!
I am awed by Devkota's language and ideas, but it's refreshing to hear somebody analysing his legacy in a different light. Samrat's piece was published in today's (Dec 3) Kathmandu Post with title:
"Under Devkota’s shadow: Nepali English literature in a time warp?"
Link and reproduction (in 2 posts--this is 1 of 2) below:
http://www.kantipuronline.com/kpost_html/kp_editorial.htm#Under%20Devkota’s%20shadow
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Under Devkota’s shadow
Nepali English literature in a time warp?
Samrat Upadhyay
The very day I received my copy of An Other Voice: English Liter ature From Nepal, I received another book with a strange language on its cover. As I gazed at the cover photo I realized that it showed the temple of Bouddha, with two girls in the foreground shying away from the camera. With thudding heart I flipped through the pages of this foreign language. Suddenly, on the inside front cover, there was my photo—I had written this book in this strange language! The moment turned euphoric, as if I had unwittingly slipped through an invisible fence that allowed me the pleasures of Greek. My wife and I joked about how my name, in Greek lettering, sounded like "Jhampat Utpatyang," the utpatyang part, in my wife’s opinion, fitting me perfectly. I imagined Greek men and women in small cafeterias in Athens reading the title of my book, Arresting God in Kathmandu, which, by the time it becomes Greek has turned into, I discovered later, God Hid Himself in Kathmandu. How wonderful, I thought, to witness this mongrelization, this confusion of language, this coming together of language, how marvelous that one stroke of a Greek pen allows God to escape arrest and hide himself in Kathmandu.
So imagine my dismay when I read, a few days later, Padma Devkota’s piece taking grave offense at the characterization, by the editors of An Other Voice, of his father’s work in English as "clumsy." According to Padma Devkota, Devkota senior’s work remains unmatched in this best of Nepali literature in English; writing about children playing a game of urination on the streets is somehow pandering to Western tastes; and criticizing Devkota senior seriously harms the "cultural image" of Nepal and amounts to "cultural terrorism." Since then, Manjushree Thapa has written a counter argument, asking for less puritanism and jingoism in the discourse on Nepali literature in English, and Hriseekesh Upadhyay has come to the defense of the Devkotas, both the father and the son, summarily dismissing the new voices in Nepali literature in English as "neophytes," full of themselves, with gross disregard for history.
Without getting into an elongated battle over whether Laxmi Prasad Devkota’s English was "clumsy" (I think it was, but I don’t think saying Devkota’s English was clumsy diminishes him in any way), we can chart some of the major themes that have appeared in this debate. India, with its history of colonial English, has already gone through this debate, and has emerged, unscathed, with a literary portfolio by the likes of Rohinton Mistry, Arundhati Roy, Anita Desai, and others that has galvanized world literature. It’s time we in Nepal, too, deal with this. Padma Devkota, Hriseekesh Upadhyay, and others are forwarding certain theories about Nepali literature in English that need to be interrogated, not only because their theories stifle and limit the potential of Nepali literature in English, but also because Devkota and Upadhyay appear to be "central" to the English Department at TU, and I, as a teacher of writing and literature, shudder at the thought that their students are being subjected to this restricted, self-serving view of literature that, inevitably, leads to repression of their creativity and critical faculties.
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| rabi |
Posted
on 03-Dec-02 12:22 AM
(...continued)
The most troubling theory of literature espoused by Padma Devkota and Hriseekesh Upadhyay is that no work or author that has risen up to the rank of a "classic" can be criticized. It’s not an entirely unsympathetic view—we all desire to create monuments. But monuments are human-made, and monuments can and do get broken, as we witnessed during the pro-democracy movement. This view "fossilizes" literature, so that classic authors are studied not for their facility with language, their perspective on history, on culture, on how humans negotiate their existence in this crazy world—the true function of literature—but because, they are, well, classics. So, if I dislike Milton, for whatever reason—I don’t care for his language, I find his world view depressing—the problem is not with Milton but with me because Milton is, well, a classic figure. It doesn’t allow room for individuals to come to their own conclusions, through reading, pondering, discussing, about the real value of these classic authors. In a sense this view is not dissimilar to the modus operandi of the Panchayat system, when one had to unquestioningly accept certain truths offered by the state. If one disagreed, then one was branded an "anti-nationalistic element." Despite years as a student of literature, I haven’t yet liked Milton, and I have no patience for Tennyson. I mention these two authors because their names get repeated, alongside Laxmi Prasad Devkota, as if it’s blasphemy to talk negatively about them. Well, I just did. And I think every student in every English Department worldwide should have the right to do so if he or she pleases.
In the same way, even as we can admire Laxmi Prasad Devkota for writing in English at a time when, as the editors of the anthology rightly point out, English was limited to the elites who didn’t use it for literature, we can still see that Devkota’s English was clumsy and derivative, even for his time, especially given that by the latter half of the 19th and into the first half of the 20th century, writers such as Emily Dickinson, E E Cummings, William Carlos Williams, and Ernest Hemingway were already electrifying the world with their rebellion against the constrictions of Romanticism, against the onomatopoeically delightful "babbling brook" kind of poetry that worshipped the soul in isolation, ignoring the world’s piss and grime. As early as 1855, Walt Whitman in his poem "I Sing the Body Electric," exemplified his homage to the sweat and shit of the body: "All attitudes, all the shapeliness, all the belongings of my or your body or/of any one’s body, male or female,/The lung-sponges, the stomach-sac, the bowels sweet and clean/....The womb, the teats, the nipples, breast-milk ...." Sure, Laxmi Prasad Devkota was limited by his circumstances, but his imitation of the high language of the Romantics might have led to his tortured syntax, as demonstrated by Manjushree Thapa in her example from Shakuntala.
Even in our neighboring India, by 1936 Mulk Raj Anand had already published Untouchable and Coolie, both novels stunningly beautiful in their simplicity of language and their strong critique of both the Indian and the colonial culture. By 1935, R K Narayan’s first novel Swami and Friends was published and noted for its depiction of Indian middle class life by blending Western realism with Indian mythology—in a simple sentence style that has earned him fans world over. Padma Devkota claims that his father’s English was better than these Indian writers as "they suffered from a lack of confidence whenever they wrote in English because they could not get rid of their colonial experience." To the contrary, the colonial experience propelled Indian writers to use the English language, in creative ways, as a mode of resistance against the colonizers. By 1938, Indian writers were already articulating their relationship with the English language, as this foreword to Raja Rao’s Kanthapura demonstrates, "The telling has not been easy. One has to convey in a language that is not one’s own the spirit that is one’s own. One has to convey the various shades and omissions of a certain though-movement that looks maltreated in an alien language. It is the language of our intellectual make-up—like Sanskrit or Persian was before—but not of our emotional make-up." Of course, now for many Indian writers (and increasingly, for Nepali writers) English has also become the language of their emotional make-up, but Padma Devkota’s suggestion that the Indian writers didn’t compare to his father makes a mockery of the enormously imaginative ways in which Indians used English as a subversive device against oppression. It also mocks his father by claiming that he was something he was not. (To be concluded)
. "(To be concluded)" above is a part of the article...he is going to have a sequel, I suppose. --rabi
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| rabi |
Posted
on 03-Dec-02 12:29 AM
Now I see the logical connection between the first para and the second...sorry gotto get some sleep...zzzzz
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