मेघदूत: "नीचैर्गच्छत्युपरि 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: "… . . 1000 नंतर ज्या प्रकारची संस्कृती रुढ झाली , त्यामध्ये साधारणत्व विश्वात्मकता हे गुण प्राय: लुप्त झाले...आपली संस्कृती अकाली विश्वात्मक साधारणतेला मुकली आहे."

Sunday, June 25, 2017

टागोरांचा टीरोलियन ड्रेस घातलेला गूढवाद...Franz Kafka on Indian Religious Devotions and Rabindranath Tagore

फ्रान्झ काफ्का भारताबद्दल अस बोलले होते:

“...I lent Kafka a German translation of the Indian religious text, the Bhagavad Gita.

Kafka said, ‘Indian religious writings attract and repel me at the same time. Like a poison, there is something both seductive and horrible in them. All these Yogis and sorcerers rule over the life of nature not because of their burning love of freedom but because of a concealed and icy hatred of life. The source of Indian religious devotions is a bottomless pessimism.’ ...”

(‘Conversations with Kafka’ by Gustav Janouch, 1951/ 2012)

डॉक्टर सर्वपल्ली राधाकृष्णन याला काहीस उत्तर अस देतात :


“...The main charges against Indian philosophy are those of pessimism, dogmatism, indifference to ethics and unprogressiveness.  Almost every critic of Indian philosophy and culture harps on its pessimism. We cannot, however, understand how the human mind can speculate freely and remodel life  when it is filled with weariness and overcome by a feeling  of hopelessness. A priori, the scope and freedom of Indian thought are inconsistent with an ultimate pessimism. Indian philosophy is pessimistic if by pessimism is meant a sense of dissatisfaction with what is or exists. In this sense all philosophy is pessimistic. The suffering of the world provokes the problems of philosophy and religion. Systems of religion which emphasise redemption seek for an escape from life as we live it on earth. But reality in its essence is not evil....”

 (Dr. Sarvepalli  Radhakrishnan, 'Indian Philosophy Vol I & II', 1923)

थोडक्यात : काफ्का जे म्हणत होते  ते नवीन नव्हते पण त्यांच्या बोलण्यात दम आहे. भारतीय तत्वज्ञाना बद्दल ह्या अंगाने चर्चा अलिकडे कुठ वाचली नाहीय.

याच पुस्तकात काफ्का टागोरांबद्दल काय म्हणतात ते पहा:
"...I repeated Reimann’s amusing story about Kurt Wolff, the Leipzig publisher, who at eight o’clock in the morning rejected a translation of Rabindranath Tagore, and two hours later sent the firm’s reader to the central post office to reclaim the rejected manuscript, because in the meanwhile he had seen in the paper that Tagore had won the Nobel Prize.

‘Odd that he should have refused Tagore,’ said Franz Kafka slowly. ‘Tagore is after all not very different from Kurt Wolff. India and Leipzig, the distance between is only apparent. In reality Tagore is only a German in disguise.’

‘A schoolmaster, perhaps?’

‘A schoolmaster?’ repeated Kafka gravely, drew down the corners of his tight-pressed lips, and slowly shook his head. ‘No, not that, but he could be a Saxon – like Richard Wagner.’

‘Mysticism in Tyrolean dress?’

‘Something like that.’

We laughed."

रिचर्ड वागनर यांची ज्यू संबंधात तयार झालेली प्रतिमा ध्यानात घेता ज्यू काफ्का यांनी त्यांचा केलेला उल्लेख लक्षणीय आहे. तसेच त्यांच्या पोषाखाची केलेली किंचित थट्टा ('we laughed') सुद्धा : टीरोलियन ड्रेस घातलेला गूढवाद.... टागोरांच्या रेशमी छाटीची महाराष्ट्रात पण काही गोटातून थट्टा होत असे..... 


on the left Vintage Tyrolean dresses, on the right, sitting, the late Mr. Rabindranath Tagore with a companion

courtesy: blue17.co.uk and Timesnow

कै विलास सारंगांनी हे बहुदा वाचल नसणार. मला कै दुर्गा भागवत आणि त्यांची या सगळ्यावरची प्रतिक्रिया ऐकायला खूप आवडले असते.

4 comments:

अवधूत डोंगरे said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Aniruddha G. Kulkarni said...

Thanks Avadhoot.

Yes I was aware of the attacks on the credibility of the book. But I agree with Francine Prose:

"reading Janouch, I thought: If Kafka didn’t say all these things, he said some of them and should have said the rest. Perhaps he might have admired Janouch’s exploration of the line between appropriation, ventriloquism, and spirit possession: channeling, we might call it. I want to believe that Kafka said what Janouch wrote down, just as I want more than ever to pretend that I am walking in Janouch’s place, pestering Franz Kafka with sophomoric questions and thirstily imbibing the gnomic, goofy poetry of the master’s pontifications."

In fact I feel Kafka I quote is authentic because his criticism of Hinduism was NOT new.

Also तिरस्कार निराळा, आणि अंतहीन नैराश्य निराळं, असं वाटतं...I agree but I can see how the one can, at lease sometimes, lead to another.

Nikheel Shaligram said...

I am surprised to find the word छाटी used in your post for Shawl worn by Tagore. It is wrong. छाटी had been used by monks. Tagore was never a monk.

Aniruddha G. Kulkarni said...

Thanks Mr. Shaligram.


I have not used it. I have just quoted what used to be said in some quarters of Maharashtra.

It's entirely possible the usage of the word 'chhati' itself, instead of shawl, was for a purpose.