Hema Upadhyay: Untitled
Ashwani Kumar
Autopsychography of Mohandas
Guards on Persian horses, Jersey cows and Mew-Mew cats
Fence the nascent borders, freshly painted with windborne
Pink, white, violet lilies burning in
Theological luminosity of weekend kisses of Mistress of riots.
There were also holy gardens
With eyes of slaughtered babies in stones,
Telling thousands of unheard stories of love and lust between estranged
cousins.
I am afraid
It was a miracle, no one believed
Except for our Mohandas, only child of sacred Aleph and Virgin Mary.
Laughing at the violence of yo-yo fitness tests,
Refugees in giant travel bags arrived in the capitals of new nations.
Crossing the fake boundaries, some listened to Beethoven’s funeral symphony
Others took cooking lessons from Captain Cook but most
Joined Dead Poet’s Society to watch Mohandas’s Gujarati plays in the refugee
camps.
****
Trained in the fantasy Fuehrer class and
Marx’s ghost seminaries in the municipal town of Oranges,
Old Revolutionaries and young commissariats,
Chanting Kafka, Kafka, Kafka,
Install odourless- bronze statue of Mohandas at India Gate
Coronate him as the new Imperial King of the land
Vacated by King Georg V- in- absentia.
After the sun-dried funeral prayers for few days
The innocent, teary-eyed bankers in Mint-road,
Print sacred pictures of the Patron- Saint
On chocolate- brown government currencies
And spit over his rimmed- glasses.
Village after village
Right-leaning, perfectly dressed Aryans-
Rape common law wives,
Elope with Mohandas’s statues in various shapes and
Bury his starched linen langoti in the imperial courtyards.
In the frozen- winter rains in Delhi
Mohandas’s friend Virachand Raghav also joins the revolt of clerks of
Ministries
Who fart and piss on files stamped with his pickled- pictures.
With swollen black-tongues, Mohandas’s socialist disciples-
Dreaming insurrection of cattle and coolies
Clutch rotting torsos of Tolstoy, Ruskin, Thoreau, Emerson
In the book shelves of government libraries.
Tell us Mohandas
Why do you excite so much treacherous love and compassion
-a deliberate crime or a childhood mischief?
****
As a child I read stories of partition violence-
death before death, and death after death.
I also read of memory-loss in the Great Darkness
Or how we would have been re-born as Humans and Hobbits
After the blood-bath ended.
I am told Mohandas
you survived after your death as a lovable, boring Grandfather,
Drinking Nimbupani instead of Indian made Campa-Cola, foster-brother of
Coca Cola.
You did drugs in school and failed the course in Vedic mathematics right?
You married Miss KMK when you were 13,
You loved her for the first time in the Chinese Noodle-maker’s shop in
Sabarmati,
After making love with her, you smashed the pot of Gold and breathed like a lion.
Every animal-ants to elephants- loved the strange, unpleasant smell of freedom,
Wafting from all parts of your body, an alabaster tomb of illiterate Angels.
No wonder, aging Satyagrahis-Snowball and Napoleon- followed your smell
everywhere;
In clean toilets, in vegetarian kitchens,
In seminars against growing criminalization, uneven development,
or corruption in your Ashram
And hid adult responsibilities in their linen-skirts.
You remember Mohandas
Your assassin Nathu-ram called you father before he fired at you.
Was he really angry with you ?
Or was he just revulsed by your body smell?
Your killer was baptized in saffron -hatred
Wanting to save his Sanskrit Atlas from a lunatic lawyer.
What, say it again, Ah lunatic?
I don’t know if it is true
Simon Bolivar’s mother heard 3 or what, 4 gun shots?
She also heard
You cried meekly- ‘Hey Ram’ in Hindi, Gujarati and Urdu,
No one heard it in Spanish though.
****
“The Human body is the best picture of the soul”
Said Ludwig Wittgenstein, and
Philosophy is the slave of young queens of the underworld, believed Buddha.
The last time I saw you at my Jorasanko Thakur Bari,
You were frightened while playing with my turtle-pets.
You talked night- long about my poem “the wicked postman”
and your father’s letters. I carried you downstairs in the ghost-colored candle-
light,
Leaned my hand upon you, you wept owl-blind in the blood of paradise.
Mohandas, you remember
In your first and the last appearance on the radio you announced
You were shot-dead at 5:17 pm by a Beretta pistol 606824.
Terrified alcoholics in noisy bistros in Parel poured old-monk rum over
Frenzied sound- images of your blood-stained, wrinkled, knotted body
In their intoxicated prayers for saving the smell of freedom in cotton wool.
Since there was nothing else to do except for the daily ritual of
Counting bullet marks on your body
I kissed Nathu-ram’s flaccid ass and
Knifed all copulating monkeys in South Block.
Two Bollywood lover-politicians
Surviving on insulin shots of memories of partition days
Arrested me for the crime of selling genitals of your favourite goats
In the INA market of the capital
And lynched me at the gate of the Black Buddha’s shrine.
I am surprised Mohandas
You halo remains intact, sinless and powerless
And I beg for sedition in your beggardom.
****
A computer programmer in NASA predicts
Everyone will be happy who reads your travel diaries, especially
Your travels through Gulliver’s land- more of the same, again and again.
Some unhappy followers of King of Hobbits-
Amte, Hazare, and Sunderlal colour their hair, bomb the happy-souls in the
cities
With 3-D posters of rebel women plucking poisonous apples
From home-grown tress, and stopping office -goers
With fast-unto- death prayer meetings at traffic lights.
On the death anniversary of Marilyn Monroe,
Mohandas, suffering from skin burns, broken bones and various infestations is
Released from the prison for the unsolved crime of his own murder.
Once out of the prison, Mohandas started wearing quaint second-hand blue
Jeans
khadi kurta a, carried a Jhola
And sold used copies of Hind Swaraj in the Chor-bazar.
Dancing with Old Benjamin, Rabindranath’s donkey,
And tough-speaking Polish solidarity leaders in Boxer shorts,
Mohandas puffed sermons on veterinary science, medicine,
Horticulture, science of rains, cooking, and also translated
Indian language erotica into Arabic, Persian and Turkish.
Inspired by Percy Jackson’s adventures into the secret Underworld
Notorious gang of Lady Shiva in leather jackets
Rides motorbike RX Yamaha in the rainforests,
Fights for the rights of village roosters and whoring rivers in the depthless
holes of earth.
Mohandas, I don’t know if you know
Your irresponsible friends Khan Abdul Gaffar Khan, Nelson Mandela and Arundhati
Floated a party of the ragamuffins and now teaching children of Mumba Devi
Art of turning nuclear entablements into cabbage factories.
Mohandas, were you surprised?
Your friend Sigmund Freud at Birla House drank black-dog whisky,
Talked about your toilet habits and made a fool of himself
Eating saffron rice with beef curry.
There was hardly any salt in the food.
You told him to eat again, this time, your words.
In chronological order, smiling criminal nations collapsed one after another when
Barefooted, and singing ‘Beasts of England’, Sigmund Freud walked to Dandi
beach
Broke the unjust laws, and made his own salt-
Mohandas Salt- for the Golden future of Pax-Indiana!
****
An Imaginary Coda: Mohandas and Repressed Rewriting
R
evolving around an unreal but not untrue character Mohandas, this prose poem is an audacious attempt to re-write Ashis Nandy’s seminal essay on the ‘four Gandhis’ who have survived Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi’s death. Originally published as “Gandhi after Gandhi” in The Little Magazine (May 2000), [reprinted here in The Beacon], Nandy in his masterly psychological analysis of the political presence(absence) of Gandhi in post-Independent India notes that “all the four Gandhis are troublesome, but they trouble different people for different reasons and in different ways”. Further, elaborating doppelganger or double of Gandhi, Nandy avers that “they are also useable in contemporary public life in four distinct ways. I say this not in sorrow, but in admiration. For the ability to disturb people — or, for that matter, be useable — one hundred and thirty years after one’s birth and fifty years after one’s death is no mean achievement”. Undoubtedly, Gandhi continues to hold the promise of a multiple and complex mix of admiration and admonition. That the promise or madness that Gandhi is dead is utterly- butterly false. He has fascinated herds of revolutionaries- mostly unprofessional, underpaid ones- generation after generation and also disappointed some and repulsed few as well. Though lately radicals have naggingly and unavoidably pitted ‘the Doctor against the Saint’, Gandhi’s allure shows no signs of fading partly because he has entered into our collective memory rather shyly and slyly; this remembered history of Gandhi is enduring and also problematic. His friends and foes have fabricated various labels for him, all of them partially true. Gandhi’s passions for diluting purity of all sorts led him to a life-long search for ‘anti political politics’- an ars poetica to abhor regimes of repression, primary or secondary. Everyone wears a mask, but Gandhi wore many masks, unmasking each with arbitrary turns of circumstances in his life. He was not a technically accomplished virtuoso but he could really talk in poetry and music. Gandhi not only sang bhajans and prayers, often in his mother’s tongue, he also loved Beethoven. While studying for law in London, he spent three pounds to buy a violin and started to learn notes and beats of western classical. Part of Gandhi’s strange success and failures in pursuing the path of non -violence might be attributed to this unexpected presence of music in his life. And this might have helped Gandhi to cope with being lonely in the self-destructive politics of partition at the time of India’s independence. In the rancid interiors of violent nationalism, Gandhi pulsated with a luminous light, defying ‘darkening of sky’. And he paid the price for this, choosing to die at the hands of his assassin, who claimed him as foster father, less biological than social, whose skeletons still await a decent burial.
Revolving around the idea of heteronym pioneered by Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa, I attempt a verse rendering of the imaginary conversations with shape-shifting, heteronyms of Gandhi to reflect on the contemporary politics and ideologies of nation and pseudo- nationalism in India. Taking unlicensed liberty with Nandy’s original essay, I discard his Weberian ideal types of Gandhi. I am aware of many inconsistencies and also imperfections in this re- writing but this also makes it quite Gandhi -like, whimsy, and impractical. Perhaps it does not matter if you believe in Gandhi or not. What matters is to disrupt the lure of fascist fantasies of pure and ideal image -repertoire. Gandhi (with or without Mahatma honorific) often resisted the temptation of being defined by simple binaries or singular pseudonyms. His horoscope, often illegible and illegitimate, is created out of messiness of contradiction of our lives. Imagine his image as ‘a dangling martyr’ or ‘a romantic vendor of false utopias’ in our social imaginary. No wonder, everyone including Gandhi’s assassin claims kinship with him. Following Ashis Nandy, I claim I am no Gandhian, much less I resemble Gandhi in any way. Neither I am a believer in Gandhism because ideology inevitably results in pursuit of power that Gandhi rejected lock, stock and barrel. However, there is something that bothers me when I think of Gandhi. In my existential half-life of poet, I often feel as if I were living his life and manipulating his so-called eccentric tastes, temperaments and life-choices for making up my shortcomings. Laid on the fictional couch of Kildonan Castle ship, I imagine it might be possible that I am a schizoid neonate and living Gandhi’s life secretly. Whenever I experience terror of primordial unconscious, I manually excavate phantom memories of many selves of Gandhi to cure myself. If his mysterious delicacies have seduced me into believing the power of non-violence, his silences on Les Misérablesdalits have led to a burning rage in my soul. This is despite the fact that Gandhi has neither denied humanity of anyone nor condoned crimes of humanity. In short, I’m less real than him and have separate existence but can’t resist auto-remembering of his memories for resisting all forms of oppressive power. In this paradox of being and un-being Gandhi lies my imaginary heteronyms of Gandhi. And they are also not fully separate from each other, often colluding, colliding with each other at ‘the edge of psychology’. Writing across multiple timelines, I am aware that the imaginary conversations in the verse essay are mine, and yet not mine ‘because I lay no claim to originality’ as Gandhi said famously in his iconic text ‘Hind Swaraj’. I am told rewriting is an honourable tradition among poets. Let’s see if it helps my skills of improvising “passive aesthetic of mirrors and the active aesthetic of prisms”. (Jorge Luis Borges in his “Ultra Manifesto”). I must confess that my conversations with Mohandas are actually with ‘four Gandhis’ and also Ashis Nandy, his most famous unofficial, unwarranted, and unbidden biographer. In other words, Gandhi comes across more of a destabilizing fantasy, a dream of liberation from the ‘tyrannical honesties’ of evil. In this prose poem, I play with different memories of Gandhi ‘for different times for the same purpose of fighting injustices’ as Nandy reminds us. These different personas of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi are not contradictions but populate the theatre of private and social memories we have inherited from ‘Gandhi after Gandhi’. True, ‘this is the era of the Assassins’ as cult French symbolist poet Arthur Rimbaud warned us but some heteronyms (not pseudonyms) of Mohandas will surely survive the saffron bullets , or Black Shirt Assassins, hired publicly or privately. Before you begin to hear many voices of Gandhi in the Autopsychography of Mohandas, I mildly caution with a disclaimer that any resemblance to reality in the Autopsychography is a pure coincidence as the cliché goes!
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Notes From Ashwani Kumar’s forthcoming "Ayodhya and the Other", the second of his “Banaras” trilogy. Visual: Hema Upadhyay: Untitled | Acrylic, Gouache & Photograph on Paper Courtesy: Vadehra Art Gallery. New Delhi
Ashwani Kumar is a poet and Professor of development studies at Tata Institute of Social Sciences (Mumbai) His books include My Grandfather’s Imaginary Typewriter (Yeti Books) and Community Warriors (Anthem Press) among others. His poems, reviews and columns are widely published. He has also been a visiting scholar at London School of Economics, German Development Institute, Korea Development Institute, University of Sussex & North West University in South Africa. Presently, he is a Senior Fellow of Indian Council of Social Science Research and researching for a manuscript on welfare regimes in India.
More by this author in The Beacon.
Scattered Circumstances,Odd Geographies: A Life in Epigraphs.
Wonderful