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, December 08, 2024

डी डी कोसंबी, शाम लाल, आणि सेतु माधवराव पगडी...D D Kosambi, Sham Lal and S M Pagdi

 Sham Lal reviewed Kosambi's 'An Introduction to the Study of Indian History' for the Times of India May-June 1957.

"...History is "the presentation, in chronological order, of successive developments in the means and relations of production". This defines his creed as well as his method.

The lack of disguise puts off many readers. Yet it in no way excuses the bad manners of the critic who after reading the book said: "time marxes on." Marx is not dismissed by a schoolboy joke. Perhaps more than Kosambi's method what gets on the reader's nerves is the cramp in the professor's personality. He is too cold and stern. Not for a second does he warm up to his subject. He is too proud and perpendicular. He never stoops to shake hands with anyone who differs from him. Invariably, he turns his face away. He will not let the sleeping dogs lie and gives them a kick whenever he can.

May be there is a touch of malice in all this..."

"...Who spoke of the "golden age" of the Guptas? Not Kosambi. It is true, he tells us, that we have more gold coins from the Gupta period than from any other, but gold coins don't make an age golden

What about Kalidasa? we mumble. And Arya Bhatta and Varahamihira? And those who painted the murals in caves 1 and 2 and 16 and 17 at Ajanta and carved the face of the Sarnath Buddha? Kosambi dismisses these questions with a shrug of the shoulder. "I know all that and much more," he says in effect. "But bejeweled Avalokitesvaras and faintly smiling Buddhas don't make an age golden either. Look at the languishing cities, a more hidebound caste system and the idiocy of life in the stagnating villages." We are not convinced. There must be something more to it than the idiocy of village life, we say to ourselves. How could so much idiocy sustain so much sophistication in both art and thought?..."

"...So we take leave of the learned professor. We don't feel relaxed. But then history is not fiction, he reminds us in his voice, sour and stern. It is all the more so where the relevant facts are so patchy and can be manipulated easily to suit the conscience of a historian who also happens to be a staunch ideologue as insensitive to symbolic language as to transcendental reflections prompted by the human condition which preoccupies some of the best poets and thinkers even in this hi-tech age."


 (पृष्ठ २२१, 'अलाहाबाद १९३०-१९३३', जीवनसेतु, सेतु माधवराव पगडी, १९६९-२०००)

डी डी कोसंबी,  शाम लाल, आणि सेतु माधवराव पगडी

 

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