फ्रेंच अल्फोन्स ड्युडेटना मुंडकोपनिषद माहित होते? ...Alphonse Daudet's "Homo Duplex, Homo Duplex!"

 मुंडकोपनिषद:

"द्वा सुपर्णा सयुजा सखाया समानं वृक्षं परिषस्वजाते ।

तयारन्यः पिप्पलं स्वाद्वत्त्यश्रत्रन्यो अभिचाकशीति ॥"

Julian Barnes:

“...When he was sixteen, his brother Henri had died, at which moment their father gave vent to a great howl of ‘He’s dead! He’s dead!’ Daudet was aware, he wrote later, of his own bifurcated response to the scene: ‘My first Me was in tears, but my second Me was thinking, “What a terrific cry! It would be really good in the theatre!” ‘ From that point on he was ‘homo duplex, homo duplex!’ ‘I’ve often thought about this dreadful duality. This terrible second Me is always there, sitting in a chair watching, while the first Me stands up, performs actions, lives, suffers, struggles away. This second Me that I’ve never been able to get drunk, or make cry, or put to sleep. And how much he sees into things! And how he mocks!’

‘The artist, to my way of thinking, is a monstrosity, something outside nature,’ Flaubert wrote. Daudet certainly feels monstrous to himself in these lines, almost revolted by the condition of being a writer. Some writers succeed in putting the second Me to sleep, or getting it drunk; others are less constantly aware of its presence; still others have an active and effective second Me, yet an unworthy or tedious first one. Graham Greene’s line about the writer needing a chip of ice in the heart is true; but if there’s too much ice, or the chip cools down the heart, the second Me has nothing – or nothing interesting – to observe....”

(Introduction to ‘In the Land of Pain’ by Alphonse Daudet)

पृष्ठ : १, 'एक झाड आणि दोन पक्षी', विश्राम बेडेकर, १९८४/१९९६

कलाकार : पुस्तकात लिहलेले नाही पण द ग गोडसे 

जॉर्ज बरनार्ड शॉ, मराठी रंगभूमी, आणि गिरीश कर्नाड ...Once The Presiding Deity of Indian Theatre G B Shaw Promoted Eugenics, Opposed Vaccination

 गिरीश कर्नाड म्हणतात : "... In the years following Independence, the presiding deity of Indian theatre was the English playwright, George Bernard Shaw. Shaw believed that theatre’s responsibility was to discuss social issues and the playwright’s aim was social upliftment. This corresponded with a philosophical belief underpinning the Indian independence movement: ‘To become eligible for independence we must wash away traditionally handed down evils from society and purify ourselves.’ Further, it was possible to sit back and enjoy Shaw’s plays since they were mainly comedies. From beginning to end, his dialogue threw up lines that elicited laughter. To him, humour and irony were devices to bring about social change.

There was the practical aspect as well: since Shaw’s plays were all about middle-class family troubles, they only required a living room set. This was in contrast to company theatre, which demanded elaborate sets and scenery, costumes, accompanying music, and so on. Plays in Shaw’s style were affordable to middle-class organizers of performances. The middle-class audience could relate to them since they were seeing on stage the problems of their own living rooms, and it was palatable to them since it was sugar-coated with humour.

In Marathi, beginning with the generation of playwrights that moved away from the company tradition to write exclusively for cultured audiences – Mama Varerkar, P.K. Atre, Mo Ga Rangnekar – and continuing into my own generation – Vasant Kanetkar and Vijay Tendulkar – almost every play was written in this style. In Kannada, it was Kailasam and Sriranga who wrote plays in this tradition.

As a result, our epics and the puranas found no place in contemporary urban theatre. To this ‘modern’ sensibility of theatre, stories from the puranas or our folk literature were not only ridiculous but also politically regressive. At a 1956 seminar on Indian theatre organized by the Sangeet Natak Akademi, left-leaning critics branded traditional forms and literature a regressive temptation that would take us away from contemporary reality...."

('This Life At Play: memoirs', २०२१) 

वरील मराठी नाटककारांत एक नाव नाहीये : 'ती फुलराणी' ह्या शॉ यांच्या Pygmalion  वर आधारित प्रचंड लोकप्रिय नाटकाचे लेखक पु ल देशपांडे. 

हे वाचून मी थक्क झालो. किती खुजेपणा हा की त्याने आपले लोकसाहित्य, महाकाव्ये आणि पुराणे झिडकारले...आणि पुरोगामी,  ज्या शॉ चा उदोउदो करत होते , ते शॉ कसे होते, या बद्दल जॉन ग्रे लिहतात :

“…For George Bernard Shaw, Nazi Germany was not a reactionary dictatorship but a legitimate heir to the European Enlightenment….”

“…Shaw’s view of Nazism was not so far-fetched. It chimed with Hitler’s self-image as a fearless progressive and modernist. 

Shaw viewed both the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany as progressive regimes. As such, he held, they were entitled to kill off obstructive or superfluous people. Throughout his life, the great playwright argued in favour of mass extermination as an alternative to imprisonment. It was better to kill the socially useless, he urged, than to waste public money locking them up…” (‘Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals’, 2002)

 "...In a speech to the Eugenics Education Society in 1910, Shaw declared: “A part of eugenic politics would finally land us in an extensive use of the lethal chamber. A great many people would have to be put out of existence simply because it wastes other people’s time looking after them.” Here Shaw was not speculating about a hypothetical future society. In his introduction to Sidney and Beatrice Webb’s English Prisons Under Local Government (1921), he explicitly advocated large-scale use of the lethal chamber as an alternative to imprisonment. In The Crime of Imprisonment (1946), he reiterated his view of how anti-social elements should be treated: “If they are not fit to live, kill them in a decent human way.”

Shaw’s belief that many human beings were “not fit to live” was a recurring theme among early-20th-century progressive thinkers...." (‘A History of the Future: how writers envisioned tomorrow’s world’, New Statesman, November 12 2017)

 'Pygmalion and Galatea' by Ernest Normand

जीएंची भिंतीतून जाणारा माणूस... Marcel Aymé's Le Passe-muraille

 The passer-through-walls (French: Le Passe-muraille), translated as The Man Who Walked through Walls, The Walker-through-Walls or The Man who Could Walk through Walls, is a short story published by Marcel Aymé in 1941.

मी हे शोधले की ह्या कथेवर आधारित जी. ए. कुलकर्णी यांनी "भिंतीतून जाणारा माणूस" या नावाची कथा लिहली आणि ती सत्यकथेत १९५२ साली प्रसिद्ध झाली. (पहा 'आकाशफुले', आवृत्ती तिसरी, २०१०)

जीए मोघम म्हणतात "मध्यवर्ती कल्पना परकीय", त्याचे एक कारण कदाचित मूळ कथा प्रकशित होऊन अवघी अकरा वर्षें झाली होती. कॉपीराईट् चा गुंता होऊ शकला असता. 

मी  जीएंची कथा वाचली. विनोद अत्यंत बेताचे आहेत. बाकी (मराठीत रूपांतरित) कथा ठीक आहे. 

फ्रेंच कथेचा सारांश विकिपीडिया वर असा आहे :

"A man named Dutilleul lived in Montmartre in 1943. In his forty-third year, he discovered that he possessed the ability to pass effortlessly through walls. In search of a cure he consulted a doctor, who prescribed intensive work and a medicine. Dutilleul made no change to his rather inactive life, however, and a year later still retained his ability to pass through walls, although with no inclination to use it. However, a new manager arrived at his office and began to make his job unbearable. Dutilleul began using his power to annoy his manager, who went mad and was taken away to an asylum. Dutilleul then began to use his ability to burgle banks and jewellery shops. Each time, he would sign a pseudonym "The Lone Wolf" in red chalk at the crime scene, and his criminal exploits soon became the talk of the town. In order to claim the prestige and celebrity status "The Lone Wolf" had gained, Dutilleul allowed himself to be caught in the act. He was put in prison, but used his ability to frustrate his jailers and repeatedly escape.

He then fell in love with a married woman, whose husband went out every night and left her locked in her bedroom. Dutilleul used his power to enter her bedroom and spend the night with her while her husband was away. One morning, Dutilleul had a headache and took two pills he found in the bottom of his drawer. His headache went away, but later that night, as he was leaving his lover's house, he noticed a feeling of resistance as he was passing through the walls. The pills Dutilleul had thought were aspirin were, in fact, the medicine his doctor had prescribed for him a year earlier. As he was passing through the final outer wall of the property, he noticed he was no longer able to move. He realized his mistake too late. The medicine suddenly took effect, and Dutilleul ended up trapped in the wall, where he remains to this day."

जीए यातील अनेक कल्पनांचा वापर करतात (active life, बँकेवरील दरोडे, तरुणीच्या प्रेमात पडणे, शेवटचे गोळी खाणे आणि भिंतीत अडकणे वगैरे), फक्त हे सोडून : "spend the night with her while her husband was away". 

ह्या कथेला चित्र काढले होते दीनानाथ दलालांनी.  (कै. दलाल यांच्या कार्याच्या कॉपीराईट होल्डर्सचे आभार)

चित्रकार : दीनानाथ दलाल

Aymé is so well known in France that a much-photographed statue of him in front of his former home in Montmartre pays hommage to his most famous story. Amazingly, the sculpture was created in 1989 by none other than Jean Marais (1913-1998), the dashing star of Cocteau’s La belle et la bête and Ophée (and thus no stranger to crossing through dimensions himself).

 

 

बाळ गंगाधर टिळक, जपानची मेजी राज्यघटना आणि १८९५चे स्वराज बिल...How Meiji Constitution Moved B. G. Tilak

Linda Colley, 'The Gun, the Ship, and the Pen: Warfare, Constitutions, and the Making of the Modern World', 2021:  

“…There was yet another massive Asian empire in constitutional flux at this time – British India. Unlike the others, it did not erupt into revolution in the decades immediately before 1914. But levels of activism and resistance increased, and so did the production of innovative constitutional texts. Pressure for change and reform had been growing here since the repression of the Indian Revolt of 1857. Some of the military rebels that year had themselves produced a twelve-point political document, the Dastur-ul Amal, an embryonic constitution. There were also attempts from the 1860s onwards in some of the Indian princely states to draft local written constitutions. But the first major, though unofficial, attempt at writing a full-scale political constitution for the Indian subcontinent as a whole was the Swaraj (or Self-rule) Bill of 1895.

This text seems to have been mainly the work of Bal Gangadhar Tilak, an educationalist and journalist from western India, who was deeply conservative on the matter of women’s rights but influential in his early nationalism, and from 1890 a member of the Indian National Congress. Tilak planned that – were his Swaraj Bill to pass – the resulting act would be called the ‘Constitution of India Act’. Moreover, as the draft introduction to the bill made clear, this legislation was to extend ‘to the whole of India’. Its 110 articles included broad provisions for rights. There was to be freedom of speech and written expression in India. There was to be a right to petition, equality before the law and free state education. And, as in the Meiji constitution, all citizens (which in practice meant men) were to enjoy equal access to public employments, and to have a duty to bear arms if need be.

Indian historians have yet to investigate the echoes between these and other provisions in the Swaraj Bill of 1895 and the Meiji constitution six years earlier. Yet that these should have existed was hardly surprising. The detailed commentary published on Japan’s constitution in 1889 had been issued in an English translation, while the text itself was widely reported on and extracted in the British and Indian press. A highly educated man like Tilak would have found it easy, and, given his interests and ambitions, irresistible, to familiarise himself with a pioneering east Asian example of engineered constitutional reconfiguration, along with British and American political and legal writings.

 Recognising this helps to explain why the Swaraj Bill strives for some of the compromises between modernity, conservatism and tradition that also appealed to the Meiji elite. In Tilak’s plan there was to be a bicameral parliament for the ‘Indian nation’, just as Itō Hirobumi and his allies had sought a bicameral parliament to give expression to a remodelled and reinvigorated Japanese nation. But, as in Meiji Japan, formal sovereign power in Tilak’s reformed India was to be invested in a monarch, in this case, the Empress of India, Britain’s Queen Victoria. Like the emperor in Japan, she was to function in India as a still point in a fast evolving realm….”

 Meiji Constitution promulgation, 1889 by Toyohara Chikanobu