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."

Sunday, October 06, 2024

१९व्या शतकातील महान चित्रकार शिवलाल यांची राष्ट्रभक्तीने प्रेरित कला ...Great Painter and Patriot Shiva Lal

पटण्यातील अफूच्या कारखान्याची, शिवलाल (साधारण  १८१७-१८८७) यांची १८५७ च्या सुमारास काढलेली  १९चित्रे आहेत. 

अमिताव घोष त्यांच्या कलेबद्दल लिहतात:

"... The war may also have played a part in imparting something else to Shiva Lal’s images: a subtle, almost involuntary, subversiveness that is strangely incongruent with the intense colonial loyalties that he is said to have displayed in 1857. Whereas both Sherwill and Sita Ram had, each in their own way, portrayed the Opium Factory as a testament to Empire, highlighting the buildings and their monumentality, Shiva Lal’s focus is almost exclusively on the workers and the tasks they perform. The built environment seems scarcely to exist, apart from a few walls and doorways in the background. Much of the factory’s work seems to be happening out of doors, in conditions that are all too grimily familiar in India.

Unlike Sherwill and Sita Ram, Shiva Lal is also attentive to the surveillance that was ever-present in the factory: one of his paintings shows workers being checked as they leave the factory. Even more subversive, perhaps, are his depictions of Indians working in the factory’s chemical laboratories. As Childers points out in her insightful article, to portray Indians as skilled technicians working in a laboratory was to flout colonial conventions, which typically represented natives as technologically inept. This was even more pointedly true of opium factories, where chemical tests had a specifically racial dimension in that they were intended to prevent underpaid Indians from adulterating the product. The success of the tests was thus held to be entirely dependent on ‘strict European superintendence’ because Indians ‘could not altogether be relied upon’.

In their simplicity Shiva Lal’s compositions are representative of the firqa genre; in no sense do they aspire to the perspectival grandeur or pictorial complexity of Sherwill’s and Sita Ram’s paintings, even though the artist was by no means lacking in technical proficiency. Yet, it is instructive to compare Shiva Lal’s pictures with later images of the Patna and Ghazipur opium factories

There are several such photographs dating from the late nineteenth century to the 1970s. They mainly show the workers labouring outdoors in grimy, crowded conditions, bare-bodied and clad in dhotis, just as they are in Shiva Lal’s pictures. The buildings that are visible in the background are by no means monumental: they look like low sheds, of the kind that can be seen in any workshop or mill in India. Stranger still, even in the most recent photographs, the processes of production seem to be much like they were back when Shiva Lal painted them.

In short, Shiva Lal’s images may have been exceedingly simple but they were more true to their subject than the highly sophisticated pictures produced by Sherwill and Sita Ram." 

('Smoke and Ashes: A Writer's Journey Through Opium's Hidden Histories')



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