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."

Saturday, February 12, 2022

...कारण टिपू सुलतान ब्रिटिशांसाठी एक सेलिब्रिटी होता....Tipu, a Celebrity


Linda Colley , 'Captives: The story of Britain's pursuit of empire and how its soldiers and civilians were held captive by the dream of global supremacy 1600-1850‘, 2003:


“...But Tipu, in the British imagination, was not just an Asian Napoleon. He was also – as his own court rituals and chosen symbolism proclaimed – a tiger prince, the personification of all that seemed to the British dangerous and unpredictable about India. And it was partly as a tiger, ‘tearing in pieces the helpless victims of his craft, or his rapacity’, that British propagandists now began describing him. This was something of a departure. Back in the 1780s, even captive Britons had generally described Tipu in moderate or even respectful terms. ‘He bore his success like a man accustomed to victory,’ wrote a colonel who had been captured at Tanjore: ‘nothing haughty or imperious about him.’ ‘His manners were easy and affable; his address and behaviour agreeable,’ recorded another British officer who was brought face to face with Tipu after the fall of Mangalore. ‘Easy’, ‘affable’, ‘agreeable’: these are the sort of words that Jane Austen employed in her novels to alert readers to one of her more acceptable gentlemanly characters. And the use of code terms denoting an English gentleman in these early British descriptions of Tipu is surely no accident. Nor was it accidental that – like his father – Tipu was often described as pale-skinned. Robert Cameron, an army lieutenant captured at Pollilur in 1780, customarily referred to the guards in his prison as ‘blacks’. Brought before Tipu, however, he saw him as ‘fair, with a pleasing countenance’. Another Scottish officer-captive of Mysore, Innes Munro, was critical in his narrative of miscegenation in India lest it ‘give a sallow tinge to the complexion of Britons’, but thought nothing of comparing Haidar Ali approvingly to Frederick the Great of Prussia.58 Even in 1790, an English observer could liken Tipu to Achilles, with all that this implied in terms of martial valour and classical physique. As would always be the case, non-Europeans of power, rank, and – in the case of Haidar and Tipu proven military success – could deflect and correct a racially hostile European gaze (and vice versa).

By the end of the eighteenth century, however, private and public British descriptions of Tipu had darkened in every sense....”


“...From the 1750s onwards, tigers stalk the British imagination. Sarah herself was mauled by a tiger in the early years of her marriage to John Cuff. Her arms were permanently scarified by its claws. She had another confrontation with the animal, when she witnessed one devouring the pregnant Indian companion of a Company army officer. (Or was this perhaps an addition by her ghost-writers worried at what was known about levels of cross-racial sex in the Company’s legions?) Building on the horror of these fierce encounters, Sarah’s publishers inserted a special appendix in her captivity narrative describing the wild animals of India, of which the tiger, they insisted, was by far the worst:

A tiger is one of the most ferocious animals that Nature has produced; stately and majestic in appearance, yet cowardly and artfully cunning in his actions; never openly facing his prey, but springing upon it from ambush.

The tensions in this description are interesting and suggestive. The tiger, in this version, is at once a magnificent beast and lacking in courage, both dangerous and devious. Most of all, it is unpredictable, as India itself seemed unpredictable. By this stage, anthropomorphic tiger references of this sort had become common in British literature and art. Before the battle of Plassey, however, Britons had known little of tigers outside of wildly inaccurate images in ancient bestiaries and books of heraldry. It was the conquest of Bengal that brought these animals to their notice....”


विल्यम डालरिम्पल यांनी नाना फडणवीस आणि महादजी शिंदे यांचा त्यांच्या नव्या पुस्तकात करून दिलेला त्रोटक परिचय वाचण्यासारखा आहे....

Nana Phadnavis
1742–1800
Pune-based statesman and minister to the Peshwas, known as ‘the Maratha Machiavelli’. He was one of the first to realise that the East India Company posed an existential threat to India and tried to organise a Triple Alliance with the Hyderabadis and the Sultans of Mysore to drive them out, but failed to carry the project through to its conclusion.

Mahadji Scindia
1730–94
Maratha chieftain and statesman who was the most powerful Indian ruler in northern Hindustan for twenty years, from the 1770s onwards. Badly wounded at the Battle of Panipat in 1761, he limped for the rest of his life and became hugely fat, but he was a shrewd politician who took Shah Alam under his wing from 1771 onwards and turned the Mughals into Maratha puppets. He created a powerful modern army under the Savoyard General Benoît de Boigne, but towards the end of his life his rivalry with Tukoji Holkar and his unilateral peace with the East India Company at the Treaty of Salbai both did much to undermine Maratha unity and created the conditions for the final Company victory over the Marathas nine years after his death.


('The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire', २०१९)



आता ही दोघे- विशेषतः नाना जे इंग्रजांच्या भारताला गुलाम करणाच्या वाटेतील सर्वात मोठा काटा होते- ब्रिटिश जनतेसाठी सेलिब्रिटी कधीच बनली नाहीत आणि त्यांच्याबद्दल तेंव्हा आणि आजही ब्रिटिश समाजात अज्ञान आहे. पण टिपूची गोष्ट वेगळी.... 


Ruth Scobie, History Today, December 2019:
“…Tipu, Sultan of Mysore, was the Company’s most formidable military enemy but also one of the most recognisable figures in British popular culture. Stories circulated in newspapers about his many wives, the luxury of his court, his vast ambition and his alliances with pre- and post-Revolution France. In 1792, the Sadlers Wells musical Tippoo Saib celebrated – a little prematurely – his defeat, while sentimental engravings depicted the Company’s hostage-taking of his two young sons. A bigger wave of melodramatic pictures in 1799 imagined Tipu’s death in the siege of Seringapatam and the finding of his corpse in the ruins of the fallen city. The Company funded and promoted its own propaganda about Tipu, including reports of torture, forced circumcisions and the cruel executions he had ordered carried out on British prisoners. ‘Nature shudders at the thought of Indian ferocity, as of late practised in the East by the orders of that sanguinary tyrant, the Nabob Tippoo Sultan’, sobbed the Gazetteer:
‘Grant us the indulgence of an hour! – on our knees we implore it!’ – said two brave officers (General Matthews’s brother and another) – ‘No! not a moment!’ was the answer; and their throats were cut from ear to ear!
By the late 1790s Tipu’s effective if unsubtle image as a Gothic villain was so well established in the British imagination that he appeared in popular novels. In the Minerva Press’ The Beggar Girl and her Benefactors, Tipu imprisons and threatens the heroine’s father for several volumes, ‘feasts on their agonies, and drinks their tears’.
Tipu’s celebrity sometimes also reflected a more ambiguous Orientalist fascination with pleasure and luxury. ‘La Robe a la Tippoo Saib’, according to the World in 1788, was ‘a new sort among the ton’, with ‘a very long train, after the Eastern manner, of Citron green taffaty, spotted with rose colour’ and ‘a plain rose colour taffaty petticoat, cut in points at the bottom’. A printed paper board for ‘The New Game of Tippoo Saib’, now in the British Library, shows a turbaned ‘sultan’ surrounded by colourful floral motifs. As Charlotte Smith joked in her comedy What Is She?, ‘the Bengal tyger, the amours of Tippoo Saib, or some secret history of a Nabob’ all sold well. Tipu’s celebrity fitted into the Orientalist tradition of fictional and fictionalised despots – but it also confirmed this tradition and gave it a ‘real life’ figurehead. Tipu, to a British public who knew him through all this print and performance, came often to seem a figure of gossip and entertainment – a commodity to be consumed…

Clockwise from top left: 19th-century Staffordshire pearlware (photograph © Myrna Schkolne); Karen Thompson’s ‘Death of a Species’ (2013); Michell and Napiorkowska’s ‘Sauce Boat Inspired by Tipu’s Tiger’ (1976); the V&A’s mechanical organ.

courtesy: LRB, January 2018

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