The Shape of a Scar
Can the question of any of the given languages of our world, in these modernist climes, be dissociated from the question of style? Perhaps to disencumber oneself from so amorphous a topic, one can situate the question on the more concrete and identifiable level of a language, a time. I’d like to discuss style in terms of the four entanglements, and dissociations, of twentieth century Hindi. The first dissociation was from Urdu — as has been perhaps adequately mourned by now, Hindi cut itself off from Urdu and a common (even if heterogeneous) north Indian vernacular, and thus Hindi forwent the claim to many of the transparent achievements of Urdu poetry. Though this is a wound that has not healed, the scar has taken on a life (or may one say a style) of its own, and perhaps one ought to be study the proliferate shape of the scar rather than be frozen in the repertoires of mourning. The second association was with Bengali, the precocious language of much modern Indian sensibility, precocious if only because Bengal had a hundred year longer engagement with the colonialists and missionaries than northern India. A correspondence between the Hindi novelists Jainendra and Premchand reveals how much the latter envied Bengali its “feminine” sensitivity, even as the Hindi novelists proclaimed Hindi the masculine, generative language of the future nation to come. Yet this envy was time-bound — it was only with reference to a particular generation of writers (Tagore, Sarat). The sentiment largely vanished after the thirties and the achievements, and refinements of Jainendra himself, as well as the poet and novelist Agyeya, all of which helped move Hindi style beyond this formative referent. Perhaps both Hindi and Bengali lost by their later dissociation — the prose formulations of Manik and, especially, the prose of Jibanananda Das, had more to contribute to Hindi by way of sheer stylistic moodscapes than Tagore and Sarat — and needless to add, Bengali would have profited from incorporating Jainendra and Agyeya. The third linguistic horizon for Hindi was English, and the entirety of Europe and the Americas routed through it — space then, but also time, for what was made suddenly available in the early twentieth century with inexpensive print was a telescoped history from Shakespeare to modernism and the Russian social novel. The last, more elusive, more synthetic, more polemical entanglement Hindi has is to Sanskrit and medieval Hindi, especially Braj — though the poet Pant famously dismissed the midget world (“four-foot Krishnas” as he put it) of interminable longing as having little to offer modern Hindi. The Sanskrit heritage, at least in its entirety, was likely more expansive than Braj, and had more to offer by way of variety of genre, thought and vocabulary. In truth one may claim that Hindi modernism would be substantively diminished without Sanskrit. This might fly in the face of intuition — was not the classical that which had to be cast away for the modern to be? Yet a brief reading of a key modernist text, Sekhar can help give depth and perspective to this stylistic inheritance.
The novel Sekhar, largely memoir-ish, was written by the novelist and poet Agyeya, and I will here treat Agyeya and Sekhar as continuous. Agyeya’s choices and quandaries throw upon a window — windows include the limiting frame — into many of the questions that implicate Hindi modernist style. Agyeya grew up with a bureaucrat father educated in the ways of colonial rationality but also in the traditions of Sanskrit poetry. The father was an archaeologist, and the excavation of ancient India — ancient India made visible in time and mud — rhymed with the chant of Sanskrit poetry that filled Agyeya’s various childhood homes. But this colonialist-Sanskritist father also did not (naturally?) look upon English culture as alien; his children were taught English and Sanskrit (as also, typically enough, Farsi) without a sense, at least for the generation of the father, of their being a disjuncture. For Sekhar (the eponymous protagonist of Sekhar), literary English had to wait till college, but as a child English also functioned as a language of social embarrassment and insularity — he vividly remembered being shamed in a home that insisted on English table manners. This embarrassment was not encountered in his relation to other languages — for his father, as part of his employment, took the family across India, including many regions in southern India. But language took on a different charge to Sekhar as he grew into adulthood and political citizenship. He discovered that the nationalist use of language (nationalist in the sense of dissident) was to be found not so much in Sanskrit (for who could deny the Europeans their rediscovery, and love for it), but rather in an emergent consciousness of Hindi.
In the nineteen twenties, the agitation to make Hindi the national language was at its peak, and even Gandhi endorsed it — though it must be noted that Gandhi endorsed the more tolerant linguistic category of Hindustani. Hence, to write in Hindi, from this time, automatically became an adversarial gesture. This was a troubled gesture — for Hindi, despite a demographic preponderance, really had little high literary culture to call its own, especially after it had mutilated itself by excluding Urdu. The task then was to create ab novo an entire literary style, a voice that would achieve in a few decades a self-sufficiency of culture that presumably had taken European and classical languages centuries to acquire. Hindi had also largely disowned Sanskrit, for the latter, though millennially mature, was still compromised by the fingertips of a century of colonialist-Sanskrit scholarship and had thus remained resolutely pure and remote. The Hindi poetry of the first two decades of the century did try to recapture Sanskrit metres in Hindi — or alternatively, rewrite Sanskrit epics in contemporary, spoken or standard written Hindi. One of the mishaps of this attempted revitalization of Sanskrit was the forgetting of medieval Hindi — Braj was seen as repetitive in its themes of Krishna, and over melodious, lacking the vigorous openness and versatility of themes and styles that the contemporary era of high nationalism required. But the point here is the virtue made of necessity — if modernism is essentially the autonomy of form (whether form is understood in the sense of rhythm and sound, or the abjurment of clear narrative line and the careful arrangement of themes in the epics), literary style is the only card writers of Agyeya’s generation had to compress the centuries of the more stately evolution of style in European languages to the twentieth century’s implosions, dissolutions and multiplications of style that make up modernism. A certain oblivion of history was both imagined and made to be real — the forgetting of Urdu, of medieval Hindi, the re- imagination of Sanskrit. Perhaps it was the very idealization of this re-turn that caused the dramatization of crisis — Sanskrit was found to be (again!) decisively dead. But even a re- cremation is a form, and assassinations can be achieved by cannibalism. Sekhar explored the subjectivity of a political prisoner condemned to hanging. Perhaps the prisoner is Sanskritic self-consciousness itself, for he does introspect and memorate only in a highly Sanskritic vocabulary — there is a split between the introspection (in sanskritised hindi) and the propagandist, simple, standard Hindi of the politics the nationalist prisoner engages in. Sekhar clearly owes its musicality (both in its sonorous and limber manifestations) to Sanskrit, as well as it’s weight and mood. The novel is written in a Hindi whose dosage of Sanskrit is so expertly toxic that it mimics and represents the dissolution of a loaded Sanskrit vocabulary in contemporary Hindi. The dissolution and death of Sanskrit was necessary for a modern Hindi stylistic to be transmitted, created, leveraged. This linguistic assassination via cannibalism was also carried on by several of Agyeya’s contemporaries (most famously Muktibodh and Nirala), who too used and needed Sanskrit even as they mocked Sanskrit’s claims. This accelerated development of Hindi style (using and disavowing Sanskrit in the same half-breath) has been, by now, the labor of several generations of Hindi thinkers and stylists.
Note
We often speak of style as both the marker of an individual and as the characteristic and collective manner of a demographic or period. No doubt these levels are related dialectically: the former is the way individuals refract the latter even while the latter is formed and reformed by that activity in aggregate. My style is how I style the period style, how it styles me. That’s why the American concept of “free verse” is a nonstarter, at least once the dominance of traditional prosody is no longer assumed. Style can be subtractive or additive but can only be either relative to a norm, a rule, and that norm is also a style and subject to change. But this is also why there is in theory some revolutionary horizon at which individual and collective styles would be reconciled, and so style would disappear. We have both utopian and dystopian fictions about what that might look and sound like. Perfect music or enforced silence. Or silence heard as music? One powerful, popular technology for imagining that reconciliation is the vocoder. It literalizes and radicalizes the recuperation of the individual style — the particular voice — back into the normative; auto-tuning makes a style of that recuperation itself, makes us hear phase smearing as a kind of vibrato or portamento. And in that sense the individual and the social (in an alienated form) have changed places; the machine has been called upon to sing.
For me the great parable of the contradictions of style is Kafka’s Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk; a tension between the individual and the collective is already inscribed in the ambiguous “or” of the title. Is it about how the former can stand for the latter or how one must chose between them? It’s unclear why Josephine is renowned.
“The simplest answer would be that the beauty of her singing is so great that even the most insensitive cannot be deaf to it, but this answer is not satisfactory. If it were really so, her singing would have to give one an immediate and lasting feeling of being something out of the ordinary, a feeling that from her throat something is sounding which we have never heard before and which we are not even capable of hearing, something that Josephine alone and no one else can enable us to hear. But in my opinion that is just what does not happen, I do not feel this and have never observed that others feel anything of the kind. Among intimates we admit freely to one another that Josephine's singing, as singing, is nothing out of the ordinary.”
I read Kafka’s inexhaustible parable as about the ultimately undecidable demand placed on the singer: to be a genius — to be exceptional, individual — at singing a collectivity that cannot tolerate that difference. The narrator’s dream for Josephine is that her style “will rise to the heights of redemption and be forgotten.”
Nikhil Govind has a doctoral degree in south asian literature at the University of California at Berkeley. His research focuses on the figure of the revolutionary in the mid century Hindi novel. His poems have appeared in Chandrabhaga and his Haibuns and Haikus have appeared in Pirene's Fountain. A video of him reading poems (with A.B. Spellman) as part of UC Berkeley's Holloway Series in Poetry can be found here. He is currently teaching in the Manipal Center for Philosophy and the Humanities.