Looking at Cartoons, Getting Along

Launched on Nov 29 2006, now 2,100+ posts...This bilingual blog - 'आन्याची फाटकी पासोडी' in Marathi- is largely a celebration of visual and/or comic ...तुकाराम: "ढेकणासी बाज गड,उतरचढ केवढी"...George Santayana: " Everything in nature is lyrical in its ideal essence, tragic in its fate, and comic in its existence"...William Hazlitt: "Pictures are scattered like stray gifts through the world; and while they remain, earth has yet a little gilding."

मेघदूत: "नीचैर्गच्छत्युपरि च दशा चक्रनेमिक्रमेण"

समर्थ शिष्या अक्का : "स्वामीच्या कृपाप्रसादे हे सर्व नश्वर आहे असे समजले. पण या नश्वरात तमाशा बहुत आहे."

G C Lichtenberg: “It is as if our languages were confounded: when we want a thought, they bring us a word; when we ask for a word, they give us a dash; and when we expect a dash, there comes a piece of bawdy.”

C. P. Cavafy: "I’d rather look at things than speak about them."

Martin Amis: “Gogol is funny, Tolstoy in his merciless clarity is funny, and Dostoyevsky, funnily enough, is very funny indeed; moreover, the final generation of Russian literature, before it was destroyed by Lenin and Stalin, remained emphatically comic — Bunin, Bely, Bulgakov, Zamyatin. The novel is comic because life is comic (until the inevitable tragedy of the fifth act);...”

सदानंद रेगे: "... पण तुकारामाची गाथा ज्या धुंदीनं आजपर्यंत वाचली जात होती ती धुंदी माझ्याकडे नाहीय. ती मला येऊच शकत नाही याचं कारण स्वभावतःच मी नास्तिक आहे."

".. त्यामुळं आपण त्या दारिद्र्याच्या अनुभवापलीकडे जाऊच शकत नाही. तुम्ही जर अलीकडची सगळी पुस्तके पाहिलीत...तर त्यांच्यामध्ये त्याच्याखेरीज दुसरं काही नाहीच आहे. म्हणजे माणसांच्या नात्यानात्यांतील जी सूक्ष्मता आहे ती क्वचित चितारलेली तुम्हाला दिसेल. कारण हा जो अनुभव आहे... आपले जे अनुभव आहेत ते ढोबळ प्रकारचे आहेत....."

Kenneth Goldsmith: "In 1969 the conceptual artist Douglas Huebler wrote, “The world is full of objects, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more.”1 I’ve come to embrace Huebler’s ideas, though it might be retooled as “The world is full of texts, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more.” It seems an appropriate response to a new condition in writing today: faced with an unprecedented amount of available text, the problem is not needing to write more of it; instead, we must learn to negotiate the vast quantity that exists. How I make my way through this thicket of information—how I manage it, how I parse it, how I organize and distribute it—is what distinguishes my writing from yours."

Tom Wolfe: "The first line of the doctors’ Hippocratic oath is ‘First, do no harm.’ And I think for the writers it would be: ‘First, entertain.’"

विलास सारंग: "… इ. स. 1000 नंतर ज्या प्रकारची संस्कृती रुढ झाली , त्यामध्ये साधारणत्व व विश्वात्मकता हे गुण प्राय: लुप्त झाले...आपली संस्कृती अकाली विश्वात्मक साधारणतेला मुकली आहे."

Sunday, October 30, 2011

Bhau Padhye, A Mavali: Loveable Rogue or Lumpenproletariat?

Today October 30 2011 is the 15th death anniversary of Bhau Padhye (भाऊ पाध्ये).

Kathryn Schulz:

"...the lazy man’s “Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way” is “Fuck this shit.”...In The Mother Tongue, Bill Bryson argues that okay is “the quintessential Americanism” and “the most grammatically versatile of words.” Okay. But surely it has a rival—or a compatriot—in fuck. Wherever it originated (the jury is out), the F-word has flourished in our adolescent American soil. And pace Bryson, its grammatical versatility cannot be topped: You can use it as noun, verb, adverb, adjective, or interjection, not to mention in any mood whatsoever, from exultation to rage..."

('Ode to a Four-Letter Word/ And I don’t mean "okay."')

Jason Flores-Williams:

“Hipster culture today is harmless culture. And that’s an epic tragedy because being hip used to mean that you were heroic and dangerous. That you waged war on soullessness and greed through art and resistance. Being hip meant that you wanted upheaval in society. Being hip meant you were intense lower class, not detached upper class. Being hip meant being revolutionary.”

दुर्गा भागवत: "'लेखकराव' म्हणून इतरांना नावं ठेवणारे स्वतःच लेखकराव होवून बसले"

[Durga Bhagwat: Those who teased others as "establishment-writers" themselves became establishment-writers (insiders)]

The one guy who never became one- Bhau Padhye.

(Contrast this with, from another field, some one like Mr. Sunil Gavaskar, once an enfant terrible of Indian cricket, is now the establishment.)

The title of this post contains a Marathi word मवाली ('Mavali'). Mavali translates as rogue/ hooligan/ hoodlum/ ruffian. One meaning of 'rogue' is 'something or someone different from what is normal or expected'. Indeed, if anyone, Bhau was different.

Recently I came across following.

Economic and Political Weekly dated July 31 2011 has an essay by Juned Shaikh: "Translating Marx: Mavali, Dalit and the Making of Mumbai’s Working Class, 1928-1935"

'The Communist Manifesto' was translated into Marathi as 'Kamyunista Jahirnama' (कम्युनिस्ट जाहीरनामा) in Meerut jail in 1930-31 by Gangadhar Adhikari (गंगाधर अधिकारी) a scientist who had completed his PhD in chemistry from Berlin University in 1926.

The Jahirnama’s classified people in the city of Mumbai into the categories of such as kamgaar, Mavali and dalit.

"Adhikari used the term “mavali” to signify the lumpenproletariat. Mavali, a moniker for people from the hilly regions of western Maharashtra in the Bombay Presidency, signified categories of people prone to create law and order problems for the colonial police. In his explication of key words to the Marathi edition of the Manifesto that was published along with the Jahirnama, Adhikari characterised the Mavali as a class below the working class, who were “paupers” and lived in the city’s slums...Destitute and unemployed workers, paupers, and the lumpenproletariat are a step below the kamgaar varga on the social ladder...

He translated a passage from Das Capital to explain this point further:

"उद्योगधंद्यातून काढून टाकलेले लोक मोठ्यावस्तीच्या शहरातून गर्दी करुन राहतात; व गुंड, दादालोक, मवाली म्ह्णून प्रसिद्धीस येतात. उत्पादन क्रियेची व यांची कायमची फारकत झाली असते; असे लोक अर्थातच पैशा करीता वाटेल त्या प्रतिगामी पक्षाला स्वताला विकण्यास मागे पुढे पहात नाहीत. (The paupers who have been fired from work live in crowded slums in cities and become famous as criminals- (mavali). They have been permanently separated from the means of production and therefore these people do not think twice before selling themselves to counter-revolutionary forces for money).

Mavali indeed is a very complex term.

My affection for Bhau Padhye has been expressed a few times on this blog. One such instance is here.

Recently I read Mr. Narayan Bandekar's (नारायण बांदेकर) interview of Mr. Padhye here.

Agreeing with his high-profile and vocal critic Acharya Atre (आचार्य अत्रे), Bhau admits he is a rogue (मवाली).

"'वासूनाक्या'वरील आचार्य अत्र्यांच्या लेखात मला 'मवाली' म्हटलं व भटकळांनी बदनामीचा खटला करण्यास मला मदत करण्याचं आश्वासन दिलं. पण मला वाटलं, आचार्य अत्र्यांनी मला ही बेस्ट पदवी दिली. माझी वास्तव जीवनातील प्रतिमा का आली कुणास ठाऊक- मी घर उघड्यावर टाकलं नाही एवढ्यावरून-? बाकी सगळं केलं, (म्हणजे बाई, बाटली वगैरे!) मला वाटतं- माझा चष्मा, शोशन्नाचं सामाजिक कार्य आणि समाजवादी बॅकग्राउंड यामुळं ही गफलत झाली असावी. तुम्ही विश्वास ठेवा किंवा ठेवू नका, पण कॉलेज जीवनात काही मुलींनी मला खरोखरच 'मवाली' ठरवलं होतं!"

(Acharya Atre called me a rogue in his article on 'Vasunaka' and Bhatkal promised help to file a lawsuit for libel. But I thought, Acharya Atre has really given me a very good title. I don't know why my image in real life was formed- just because I never abandoned the house- did everything else, (means alcohol, women etc!) I think - my glasses, Shoshanna's social work and socialist background- they created mixup. You believe it or not, but in college life some girls indeed concluded that I was a rogue!")

Now this 'rogue' quality of Bhau is captured so beautifully in following 'cool' picture- spiky hair- more like Havells : Shock Laga ad- on head, wrinkles on forehead, beedi dangling from mouth, glasses, his horizontal stripe little short shirt exposing his crotch, hands in pockets, slightly bent right knee, a bunch of chest hair, and don't-give-a-damn attitude...

(Bhau would have surely liked my reference to Havells ad! For him life was sum total of all that happened around him. There was nothing higher or lower.)

Artist: Vasant Sarwate (वसंत सरवटे) from 'Nivadak Thanthanpal' (निवडक ठणठणपाळ ),1969

ERIN MCKEAN has said: "We like to think that human languages should be more like computer-programming languages: logical, orderly, efficient and goal-oriented. But they are more like our own DNA: complicated and full of junk information but at the same time gloriously mutable, able (for good or ill) to give rise to new living forms." (WSJ, August 10 2011)

Bhau played his part in the process of Marathi's mutation and while doing it, I think, he never sold himself to counter-revolutionary forces for money. He always remained orthogonal. And many Marathi lovers are luckier for it.