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."

Tuesday, February 21, 2023

Jane Eyre and Women in India & in the Civilisation of Islam

तुम्ही Jane Eyre, १८४७ वाचले किंवा पहिले असेल तर ह्या पोस्ट ची जास्त मजा येणार आहे...

त्या पुस्तकाचा आधार Christopher de Bellaigue यांनी त्यांच्या 'The Islamic Enlightenment - The Struggle Between Faith and Reason, 1798 to Modern Times', २०१७ सालच्या पुस्तकासाठी घेतला आहे.

त्यांच्या introduction ह्या प्रकरणात ते सुरवातीस लिहतात:

"... And yet, for Jane to see her scheme to its conclusion, she needs the help of certain features of modern England. Without the provincial newspaper, the post office and finally, when it comes to making the journey to Thornfield Hall, a wheeled conveyance trundling along one of the turnpike roads, safe enough for a woman to take on her own, she will be able to do nothing.

Perhaps more important than any of these things, Jane will need society to agree that she is sovereign over her own destiny – an unmarried woman free to climb aboard a post-chaise and go wherever she pleases, at no risk to her reputation.

Now I want to take up this picture of Georgian England and put it into a quite different setting. Imagine that the Jane Eyre of Charlotte Brontë’s novel has been transposed to a non-European situation. By the standards of nineteenth-century globalisation this new environment is not very distant – to get there merely involves crossing the Mediterranean. There one meets the close sibling of the Judaeo-Christian world inhabited by Jane, a civilisation built on the third and most recent of the Hebraic monotheisms and influenced by Greek patterns of thought.

This is the civilisation of Islam. How would this civilisation have dealt with Jane Eyre and the vistas of personal fulfilment preventing her from closing her eyes at night? Would it approve or wrinkle its nose? Would Islam ‘get’ Jane Eyre?..."

ह्या छोटाश्या अवतरणात अनेक गोष्टी आपल्या आहेत पण सर्वात महत्वाचे म्हणजे स्त्रियांची परिस्थिती.

ह्याच गोष्टी १९व्या शतकातील भारताबद्दल सुद्धा तुलनात्मक रित्या लिहता येतील. पण इथे खोलवर जाणवते ज्या स्त्री आणि पुरुष समाजसुधारकांनी ह्या बाबत कार्य केले त्यांचे महत्व.

१८व्या- १९व्या शतकातील कोणत्या जातीतील स्त्रिया हे सुद्धा मला कमी महत्वाचे वाटते*....स्त्री शिकली (अनके स्त्रिया शिकल्या), घराबाहेर पडली, गाव सोडून नोकरी पकडली, चारित्र्याला डाग न लागता प्रेम केले ... ह्या सगळ्या गोष्टी मला अतिशय महत्वाच्या वाटतात...

एक खाजगी गोष्ट नमूद करतो- २३ वर्षांची माझी आई, STC -CPED पुण्यात शिकलेली, लग्न आणि एक नुकतेच मूल झालेली, बस मध्ये बसून, मुलाबरोबर एकटी, मिरजेला, १९६०च्या सुमारास, कन्याशाळेत नोकरीला गेली होती.. तिला मिरजेचा अनुभव (नोकरीतला चांगला होता) इतका सुखकारक नव्हता, पण तरी हे जगातील बहुतेक देशांपेक्षा चांगले होते हे कबुल केलेच पाहिजे

* Keshav Meshram केशव मेश्राम, a prominent Dalit and ex-president Marathi Sahitya Sammelan, has written about qualities of Shripad Krishna Kolhatkar’s literary work as well as his vision. Meshram quotes what Kolhatkar said after reading H N Apte ह ना आपटे’s “Pan Lakshat Kon Gheto पण लक्षात कोण घेतो”: ”If Mr. Apte could tell the story of misery of backward caste people (Dalits) the way he has told of (Brahmin) women, such a novel would be second in revolutionary qualities only to ’Uncle Tom’s Cabin’”. (“Shabdavrat" शब्दव्रत, by Keshav Meshram).