History and a right - The Hindu

History and a right - The Hindu

AAP, BJP & Varanasi - The Hindu

AAP, BJP & Varanasi - The Hindu

450 years of Shakespeare, the secular Bard of the World

                                          Sukumaran C. V.

Shakespeare approximates the remote and familiarizes the wonderful; the event which he represents will not happen, but, if it were possible, its effects would probably be such as he has assigned; and it may be said that he has not only shown human nature as it acts in real exigencies, but as it would be found in trials to which it cannot be exposed. This therefore is the praise of Shakespeare, that his drama is the mirror of life.—Samuel Johnson (in his Preface to Shakespeare).

April 23, 2014 marked the 450^th birthday of William Shakespeare, the greatest and marvelous creative genius the world has ever seen. We can even form a library with the books written on Shakespeare. There are many writers who are remembered forever only for their writings on the Bard. The most famous examples are A. C. Bradley, the author of Shakespearean Tragedy and Wilson Knight, the author of The Wheel of Fire. And almost all well-known English writers have written on Shakespeare. Samuel Johnson, William Hazlitt, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Thomas Carlyle, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats…the list is never ending. What makes Shakespeare the subject of so many books and why he is read more than any author in the world was or is read?

The reason is, as Samuel Johnson says in his Preface to Shakespeare, “…the composition of Shakespeare is a forest, in which oaks extend their branches, and pines tower in the air, interspersed sometimes with weeds and brambles, and sometimes giving shelter to myrtles and to roses; filling the eye with awful pomp and gratifying the mind with endless diversity. Other poets display cabinets of precious rarities, minutely finished, wrought into shape, and polished into brightness. Shakespeare opens a mine which contains gold and diamonds in inexhaustible plenty, though clouded by incrustations, debased by impurities, and mingled with a mass of meaner minerals.”

I was attracted to Shakespeare by Julius Caesar. Mark Antony’s brilliant speech by which he wins the sympathy of a hostile people and turns them against the conspirators enthralled me and thereafter, I spent months and years on Shakespeare and found that the most remarkable fact about Shakespeare is that his plays are astonishingly secular. Let me borrow a passage from Bradley’s Shakespearean Tragedy:

“…although this or that dramatis persona may speak of gods or of God, of evil spirits or of Satan, of heaven and of hell, and although the poet may show us ghosts from another world, these ideas do not materially influence his representation of life, nor are they used to throw light on the mystery of its tragedy….while Shakespeare was writing he practically confined his view to the world of non-theological observation and thought, so that he represents it substantially in one and the same way whether the period of the story is pre-Christian or Christian. He looked at this secular world most intently and seriously; and he painted it with entire fidelity, without the wish to enforce an opinion of his own, and, in essentials, without regard to anyone’s hopes, fears, or beliefs. His greatness is largely due to this fidelity in a mind of extraordinary power.”

Read any of Shakespeare’s plays, you don’t feel that you are reading something written by another human being. Each play takes us into different aspects of human life. Again, in the words of Bradley: “We cannot arrive at Shakespeare’s whole dramatic way of looking at the world from his tragedies alone, as we can arrive at Milton’s way of regarding things, or at Wordsworth’s or at Shelley’s, by examining almost any one of their important works. Speaking very broadly, one may say that these poets at their best always look at things in one light; but Hamlet and Henry IV and Cymbeline reflect things from quite distinct positions, and Shakespeare’s whole dramatic view is not to be identified with any one of these reflections.”

When we read a literary work, we can garner the views of the writer, it may be religious or fanatic or progressive; but when we read Shakespeare we can only see Life and its evergreen emotions. There is no religious or theoretical dogma; there is no intolerance or fanaticism or racism that smothers life and its emotions. The powerful creative genius of Shakespeare celebrates secular life and its ecstasy and that is why even after 450 years, Shakespeare is still living and is loved.

Only an extraordinary creative genius can produce the following dialogue (of Shylock in The Merchant of Venice) four hundred years ago when the prejudice against the Jews was predominant in Europe:

“I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, sense, affections, passions;  fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that.”

In the present day India, where caste and religion wreak havoc on the innocent, we have to learn the truth that the Dalits, the Adivasis, the OBCs, the caste Hindus, the Muslims, the Christians and everybody are ‘fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases and healed by the same means’. If we learn this precious truth, it will blur our caste and religious identities and we all will be humans. 

And who can forget the dilemma of human beings, of any age or of any locale, beautifully expressed through Hamlet, the character who ‘has been the subject of more discussion than any other in the whole literature of the world’, in the world-famous ‘To be, or not to be’ soliloquy of the first scene in the Act III of the play Hamlet?

To be, or not to be: that is the question:
Whether it is nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them. To die, to sleep—
No more—and by a sleep to say we end 
The headache, and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to! ’Tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wished. To die, to sleep—
To sleep—perchance to dream: ay, there is the rub,
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause. There’s the respect 
That makes calamity of so long life:
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
Th’ oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely,
The pangs of despised love, the law’s delay,
The insolence of office, and the spurns 
That patient merit of th’ unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? Who would fardles bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscovered country, from whose bourn
No traveler returns, puzzles the will,
And makes us rather bear those ills we have,
Than fly to others that we know not of? 

The English actor John Philip Kemble as Hamlet in 1802, in the grave-yard scene.

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The battle begins - The Hindu

The non-stop march of bigotry and intolerance

Sukumaran C. V.

In 1811, Shelley was expelled from the Oxford University for publishing The Necessity of Atheism in which he wrote: “…all the religions of the world forbid examination and do not want one to reason; authority wants one to believe in god; this god is himself founded only on the authority of a few men who pretend to know him, and come in his name and announce him on earth. A god made by man undoubtedly has need of man to make himself known to man.”

Shelley was undermining the very structure of power and authority that oppresses people and denies them freedom of body and of spirit. And the authorities expelled him.

In 1798, Thomas Paine published The Age of Reason in which he wrote: “All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian, or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit…the church has set up a system of religion very contradictory to the character of the person whose name it bears. It has set up a religion of pomp and of revenue, in pretended imitation of a person whose life was humility and poverty.”

For publishing The Age of Reason, Thomas Williams was sentenced to one year’s hard labour and the British government confiscated all the copies of the book. The British authorities could not imprison Paine as he was already in prison in Paris for participating in the French Revolution.

In 1910, Gandhi published Hind Swaraj or Indian Home Rule in which he wrote that the western ‘civilization is such that one has only to be patient and it will be self-destroyed.’ The British banned Hind Swaraj. While all other Indian leaders tried to ‘reform’ the poor Indians according to the Western standards, Gandhi approached them not to reform them, not to tell them their ways of living and their means of production are inferior to that of the West. He wanted to tell his people that the western civilization will be self-destroyed. The book was undermining the very basis of colonial rule and the colonial masters banned it.

The manifold destructive instincts and ways of the humans, especially of the English, inspired Jonathan Swift to write Gulliver’s Travels in 1729. The world has yet to produce such a scathing and wonderful satire on the politics, colonization and military expeditions of the human race. In the second book of Gulliver’s Travels —A Voyage to Brobdingnag— Swift’s bitter contempt of mankind finds its most articulate expression in the remark made by the emperor of Brobdingnag to Gulliver: “But by what I have gathered from your own relation, and the answers I have with much pains wrung and extorted from you, I cannot but conclude the bulk of your natives, to be the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth.”

Great Britain banned Gulliver’s Travels for its attack on the British ways of governance and subjugation.

When The Satanic Verses was published, a fatwa was issued on Salman Rushdie and the largest secular democracy in the world banned the book! In July 1991, Hitoshi Igarashi, the Japanese professor of literature who translated The Satanic Verses, was stabbed to death. (It is ironic that a  ‘secular’ media house in Kerala that kept and keeps mum on the ban of The Satanic Verses is now yelling in full throat in defence of free speech!)

In the preface of the English translation of Lajja, Taslima Nasrin writes: “I detest fundamentalism and communalism. This was the reason I wrote Lajja soon after the demolition of the Babri Masjid in Ayodya on 6 December 1992. The book, which took me seven days to write, deals with the persecution of Hindus, a religious minority in Bangladesh, by the Muslims who are in the majority. Lajja was published in February 1993 in Bangladesh…banned by the government five months later….a fatwa was issued against me by a fundamentalist organization and a reward was offered for my death.”

Of course, those who are responsible for the demolition of the Babri Masjid would feel sympathy towards Taslima Nasrin and the Hindus of Bangladesh and anger against the Muslim fundamentalists. But let me quote the newspaper report Suranjan, the protagonist of Lajja, reads in the first chapter (Day One) of the novel:

“Needless to say, in Bangladesh too, the reaction to this event is bound to create frantic waves of religious hysteria. Temples will be smashed and leveled to the ground, Hindu homes will be burnt and their shops will be looted. Did the BJP, VHP and their associates, harbour the notion that their insane actions in Ayodhya would cause a reaction only in the geographical boundaries of India? In India the entire ordeal has already given birth to widespread communal riots. Five hundred people have died. Six hundred, may be even a thousand. The number of deaths increases by the hour. Did the devout Hindus, who were intending to look after the interests of their religion and their community, realize that there were almost twenty-five million Hindus living in Bangladesh too?”

                                              Taslima Nasrin

Now Penguin Books India, afraid of a fringe Hindu right wing group—Shiksha Bachao Andolan Samiti, has agreed to withdraw Wendy Doniger’s The Hindus: An Alternative History and to pulp it! Having secured an easy victory over their bigoted fight against the expression of alternative views, the intolerant SBAS is now after On Hinduism, another book written by Wendy Doniger. I am really shocked to read that the SBAS ‘gave an ultimatum’ to the publisher (Aleph Book Company) to withdraw the book and pulp it by March 8, 2014! Are we living in a secular democracy or theocracy? By banning The Satanic Verses, our secular democracy genuflected in front of the theocratic elements and the secular fabric of the nation is being weakened by each day while the theocratic elements are strengthened by the omissions and commissions of the polity. 

What we are witnessing is quite dangerous for our pluralism and secularism. If the obscurantist and fanatic elements are not strictly curtailed, they will undermine the very foundation of our secular democracy which has already been emaciated.

If democracy has to be vibrant, there should be as many alternative histories and narratives as possible. If you want to destroy the alternative narratives that may be entirely different from your ‘authoritative’ narrative, you are killing democracy. I have not read An Alternative History, but now I strongly feel to read it. Let there be a thousand alternative histories and narratives of everything to shatter the centralization of power and knowledge.

As Howard Zinn says, ‘there is an underside to every age about which history does not often speak, because history is written from records left by the privileged.’ Let's search for the records left by the underprivileged and try to have alternative histories to understand the undersides of every age.