गिरगावामुळे पुसट प्रबोधन....Energized By the Squalor...M. N. Srinivas@100

Today November 16 2016 is 100th birth anniversary of M. N. Srinivas (16 November 1916 - November 30 1999)

बा सी मर्ढेकर:

"गोंधळलेल्या अन् चिंचोळ्या

गिरगावांतिल गल्लीमधें

चिमण्या अंधाराचें चाले

पुसट प्रबोधन-

..." (४५, कांही कविता, मर्ढेकरांची कविता, १९५९/१९७७) 

  

"जिथें  मारती  कांदेवाडी

टांग जराशी ठाकुरद्वारा,

खडखडते अन्  ट्रॅम वाकडी

कंबर मोडुनि, चाटित तारा ;

..." (३, आणखी कांही कविता, मर्ढेकरांची कविता, १९५९/१९७७) 

"...SHAE: This city stinks Like dead bodies.

TYRION: A bit corpsey, yes.

SHAE: And shit.

Shae hops down from the balcony, and walks back into the room.

TYRION: I thought you wanted to come here.

SHAE: I love it.

TYRION: You love the smell of dead bodies and shit?

SHAE: And cum and garlic and rum.

TYRION: You can smell cum from the balcony?

SHAE: I love the stink. I love the noise. Cities make me want to fuck..."

(Game of Thrones, Season 2, Episode 1)

Steven Johnson, ‘The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic - and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World’, 2006:

“...By 1851, the subdistrict of Berwick Street on the west side of Soho was the most densely populated of all 135 subdistricts that made up Greater London, with 432 people to the acre. (Even with its skyscrapers, Manhattan today only houses around 100 per acre.) The parish of St. Luke’s in Soho had thirty houses per acre. In Kensington, by contrast, the number per acre was two.

But despite—or perhaps because of—the increasingly crowded and unsanitary conditions, the neighborhood was a hotbed of creativity. The list of poets and musicians and sculptors and philosophers who lived in Soho during this period reads like an index to a textbook on Enlightenment-era British culture. Edmund Burke, Fanny Burney, Percy Shelley, William Hogarth—all were Soho residents at various points in their lives. Leopold Mozart leased a flat on Frith Street while visiting with his son, the eight-year-old prodigy Wolfgang, in 1764. Franz Liszt and Richard Wagner also stayed in the neighborhood when visiting London in 1839–1840.

“New ideas need old buildings,” Jane Jacobs once wrote, and the maxim applies perfectly to Soho around the dawn of the Industrial Age: a class of visionaries and eccentrics and radicals living in the disintegrating shells that had been abandoned a century ago by the well-to-do. The trope is familiar to us by now—artists and renegades appropriate a decaying neighborhood, even relish the decay—but it was a new pattern of urban settlement when Blake and Hogarth and Shelley first made their homes along the crowded streets of Soho. They seem to have been energized by the squalor, not appalled by it. Here is a description of one typical residence on Dean Street, penned in the early 1850s:

[The flat] has two rooms, the one with the view of the street being the drawing-room, behind it the bedroom. There is not one piece of good, solid furniture in the entire flat. Everything is broken, tattered and torn, finger-thick dust everywhere, and everything in the greatest disorder.… When you enter the… flat, your sight is dimmed by tobacco and coal smoke so that you grope around at first as if you were in a cave, until your eyes get used to the fumes and, as in a fog, you gradually notice a few objects. Everything is dirty, everything covered with dust; it is dangerous to sit down.

Living in this two-room attic were seven individuals: a Prussian immigrant couple, their four children, and a maid. (Apparently a maid with an aversion to dusting.) Yet somehow these cramped, tattered quarters did not noticeably hinder the husband’s productivity, though one can easily see why he developed such a fondness for the Reading Room at the British Museum. The husband, you see, was a thirty-something radical by the name of Karl Marx...”

And now read this....

Nakul Krishna,  ‘Seeing Like a Sociologist: The Making of M N Srinivas’, The Caravan, March 1 2016:

“...He longed for Bombay, a city he had come to love. As he put it in an essay written in 1941 for his friend RK Narayan’s short-lived little magazine Indian Thought:

Girgaum, that synonym for dirt and noise and crowd—I felt a homesickness for it. The trams and buses going their noisy way, men and women jostling one another for want of space. The brilliant neon signs, hoots of motor horns, the cries of gharry wallahs … Solitude and loneliness are attractive to those who don’t know either … The beauty of a crowd on Chowpatty sands—I felt I would not exchange it for all the beauty of nature.

We have some of the conventional markers of modernity here—trams, neon signs, the estrangement from “the beauty of nature”—but what Srinivas craved were the sights, the sounds, the smells of the human. Anthropology for Srinivas was a sweaty, unromantic business; it was no profession for those who like their solitude...”

Sibel Kekilli as Shae and Peter Dinklage as Tyrion Lannister in Game of Thrones Season 2 Episode 1

Courtesy: HBO and others