While both the title of the seminar and the concept note are slightly over-the-top for me, I wish to start by saying that in art and in literature, the self gets transmuted into the end product — poem, play, painting, sculpture — through the imagination. I am only stressing the obvious when I say that it is the imagination which forms the chief component of a poem or story or painting. Supposedly, the same could be said of the manner in which a dance is choreographed and performed.

But there are other things besides imagination. There’s the environment firstly, the times we live in, the social and political currents prevailing. Remember Wallace Stevens:

It is equal to live in a tragic land
To live in a tragic time.

The exterior world can’t be wished away, it is there like the air. I have my doubts about ‘absolute literature’. I am sure even Franz Kafka, more sensitive by far than others, was influenced by the times he lived in; or how would he have written what he wrote? What I am trying to say is that even the imagination doesn’t flower or wither away in a vacuum. Nor do our anxieties, fears, phobias, our dreams and aspirations. They too are in a way a product of the times. So even as we prate about the self, let us not forget the shadow which our times cast on us.

Every artist or writer has his raw material in front of him, the clay which is going to be turned into a finished product. By this I mean beliefs, myth, history, events. So Tolstoy had his Napoleonic invasion, and Pasternak the Bolshevik Revolution. Rushdie took us on a splendid tour starting 1947. The renaissance artists drew on myths — adoration of the Magi, Calvary, Ecce homo and a gaunt-faced Jesus carrying his cross uphill. And there was the cornucopia of Greek myth. So you have Botticelli’s “Birth of Venus” and numerous other paintings. It was an age of worshipping beauty and Platonic beauty. Today paintings like those would be treated as pastiche. Today, as Pound said, “the age demanded an image of its accelerated grimace,” and the Spanish Civil War produced Picasso’s Guernica.

The self is an ambiguous word. One would not like to mix that up with the issue of identity because that would truly bugger up the seminar. I was re-reading Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children and came across a passage on page 440, 441. Saleem Sinai says “… I no longer want to be anything except who I am. Who am I? My answer: I am the sum total of everything that went before me, of all I have been seen done, of everything done-to-me. I am everyone everything whose being-in-the-world affected and was affected by mine. I am anything that happens after I have gone which would not have happened if I had not come. Nor am I particularly exceptional in this matter; each “I”, every one of the now-six-hundred-million-plus of us, contains a similar multitude. I repeat for the last time: to understand me, you’ll have to swallow a world.” There is a hidden interrogative here. We need to answer this question — whether the self is an isolated organism, or a sum total — heritage, collective or racial memory.

I talked of the exterior world. I have talked often of the inner and outer realities. But they mingle. In one respect you can say they are the same. There is a very thin line demarcating the two. Observation itself is sieved through the self or selves. What you observe may be denied to me. We, each one of us, are a reality, so we perceive reality and imbibe it our own way. What we imbibe, filters into our consciousness and our subconscious. From that comes our poetry or fiction or plays.

One could have had a philosophic seminar on the ‘self’. I would have loved to see the existentialists and the grammarians and the Marxists battle it out. The self is not self contained. It runs over, spills over. The self in me is different from what it was ten years back. I can’t think of a better quote here than some lines from my favourite poet, Anna Akhmatova. (“Northern Elegies”)

Just like a river,
I was deflected by my stalwart era
They swapped my life: into a different valley,
past different landscapes, it went rolling on.
And I don’t know my banks or where they are.

That was spoken like a true poet, and a great poet. We minor fry know where our banks or our limitations are. The era deflects, she says — we hearken back to Wallace Stevens’s quote. What you imbibe from the times you transform, or translate. All this happens unconsciously, most of the time. By all this I am not trying to underplay our individuality, one’s soul or imagination.

Of course beneath it all is love that runs like an underground river — love of people, country, language, of cadence and rhyme, of adventures and fictional heroes you have read about in childhood. And crafting a devious plot for a novel or a story also comes out of love — what can equal a challenge for the mind?

I feel this is an occasion for writers/artists to talk about their craft, how they tackled their problems and gave shape to their poetry or fiction. So I am going to turn this paper into something crassly personal. I have always shied away from the autobiographical because you need a lot of gumption to talk in public about your own sordid self. I will try it out for this once, for that, as I understand, is what this conclave is all about.

To start with, I will take up the first poem of my first poetry volume, Under Orion (1970) and the first story of my initial short fiction book Sword and Abyss (1979). In 1961 October, I was controlling a bad communal riot. At the same time my father was dying. He had a cerebral stroke. I wrote the poem in 1969, when P. Lal asked for a manuscript from me. I am eternally grateful to him. Now, especially in those days, when I had just started getting published, one never consciously thought of ‘crafting’ a poem. Looking back at the poem now, I notice how the filtering and the ‘translation’ process functioned. (They are the flip sides of a coin. Filtering is essential). The poem starts with:

Blood and fog
are over half the town
and curfew stamps along the empty street.

Incidentally these lines have elicited one of the most backhanded compliments I’ve ever had. An editor says, “However external reality may have damaged the poet’s eardrums, it has, at least here, left the part sensitive to verse pattern intact. The pattern, a cretic followed by two iambic lines, seems to have come of its own, instinctively; also the third line’s alternating monosyllabic and disyllabic words follow the very pace of weary soldiers marching through empty streets. But Daruwalla, who is more prospector than goldsmith, is not always so lucky.”

The point I am making is different. I will quote the next few lines of the poem:

A thinning drizzle
has smeared the walls
giving moss and fungus a membrane of bile.
Your headlights rake the walls,
barracuda eyes
searching for prey
among nocturnal glooms.
Gears shift and change with the streets.
Wild eyes track you
from behind shuttered doors:
fish-eyes following you from a reef crack.

Later, even when describing a small Indian town, a “tumour growth of mud and concrete,/ houses back to back, streets back to front, walls bulging/ towards each other in a half embrace,” I still bring in the aqueous imagery:

Lanes branch tentacular, you prowl,
an octopus on its beat.

Now to say that I crafted the poem this way would be false. This poem is from my first book. I was writing whatever came to my mind because P.Lal, God bless him, had offered me a book! Yet I had changed the riot I had been through totally. Later in the poem, I make the scene more dreadful, the word used these days is ‘hyper’. In the riot I faced we had patrolled the town three nights on foot and not one stabbing took place. Yet unconsciously or consciously, I crafted the poem in a certain way and that’s how.

One lived through the Emergency and one wrote. I have an entire poetry volume out on the Emergency. Looking back, of course, I find a lot of my poetry bleak. Why, I wouldn’t know, for I had a pretty happy life, as happy as anyone else’s. Though the earlier section of the Winter Poems are about winter and landscape (and winter in our context is not a metaphor for frigidity and death) the melancholy peeps in.

Let’s adjust to shifts of light and shifts of shadow
We have come of age
the dreams which grew up with us
have already started dying.

There’s an odd coupling of middle-age with death here. I look at things much more positively now. Before coming to the section dealing with the Emergency, I had a whole section on drought. I had travelled with the then PM, and hopped from one arid district to another in a chopper all across India. Later, I was told by an MP that Gujarat was asking for rice specials. Instead, Mrs. Gandhi was sending the CRP. A poem, Rhapsody on a Hungry Night emerged. I will quote the first few stanzas.

We move to Satara
Gulbarga, Goalpara?
or some place in Sahara
several nightmares
removed from reality.

We are moving in freight cars
loaded with rice stocks,
This is our mandate
no food bandit
must get near the freight cars.
At wayside flag stations
profiteers offer us
ten thousand per wagon.
waif women are offered
ten bucks for a roll.

Instead of water
splashed shades of the jujube;
instead of crops
crab grass and fern.
We’ll match other planets
crater for crater
as we move to the outer
membranes of the finite,
as we move towards
the gouged face of the moon.

As for the section called Variations, while there were strident poems like ‘Curfew 2’ and ‘Walking to the Centre’, in one short poem I copied the technique used by Yannis Ritsos, who, under the rule of the Colonels, would just mention objects he saw and document them. I did that. But I was explicit enough even in that poem.

Everything is in place,
the prisoner in his night suit
still fighting his hangover,
the hurriedly passed statute,
the assize assembled
through staff cars and printed invitations.
Everything gazetted, notified
passed by the finance,
endorsed by the Law ministry.
This is order,
the corpse and the coffin-maker
at their appointed places.

I may add that I had the book published in 1980, after Mrs. Gandhi came back to power.

I wish to speak of some short stories in brief, and one in particular. Piety, heresy, scriptures have always fascinated me. Reading Rumi I came across a reference to a place called Saqsin. My search led me nowhere. (This was prior to the days of the Internet.) The lines went:

What is to be done, O Moslems? For I do not recognize myself.
I am neither Christian, nor Jew, nor Gabr, nor Moslem.
I am not of earth, nor of water, nor of air, nor of fire;
I am not of the empyrean, nor of dust, nor of existence, nor of entity.
I am not of India, nor of China, nor of Bulgaria, nor of Saqsin.

There must have been a place called Saqsin, or why should Rumi have written about it? So I decided to write a story about Saqsin and relate why and how the place was wiped out. It was a challenge and my fascination with heresy led me on to the story.

A Research student once told me that when the cloth from Manchester and Leeds was set on fire in Gandhiji’s presence, a lawyer from Gorakhpur who had promised to throw his gown into the fire, reneged. When the day came he chickened out. A myth went round that, after his betrayal, whenever food was placed before him, it would turn to shit. I changed that. In my story “When Gandhi Came to Gorakhpur” the lawyer, Shadilal, does get worried because he is threatened by the English magistrate. He takes a train and gets down at Khalilabad, where he spends the day. When he returns to Gorakhpur in the evening, he finds that his wife gave away the gown and the bar license to the volunteers who had come to collect it. To save face before his wife he doesn’t get annoyed, and next morning goes to Gandhi to pay his regards. Gandhi thinks the lawyer was shy, hence he had not come personally to throw his clothes in the fire. As he goes for his walk, he leans on the lawyer’s shoulders and walks out with the great man.

Finally I come to the story I talked about initially, “The Tree.” We had a tragedy in the family in 1974. My brother went missing. For days we had no news, and then, at last, we found he had died in a road accident — a truck ran over him. It could have been suicide as well, because he had gone to waste. His body was not identified and sent to a medical college. Anyway, I got the last rites done. After some months I had to get this out of my system. Slowly, the plot for a story emerged. (Of course, it had no relation to what had occurred with my brother.) The language had to be lyrical, and the landscape a swamp — for I was talking of someone going to weed, if that’s the proper word. Even in an experimental story, it is not easy to make a man turn into a tree. I went about it this way:

For five years the wife looks for this man who has turned into a sort of wandering sadhu and left. She takes in another man. Then she gets news about her husband from a village in the swamp. Immediately she asks the man to leave. “You must leave. Marriage is one thing. But widowhood should be pure, spotless.” She leaves for the village. The story starts with the lines: “She reached the village even as the fog came in, low like crane-flight, a great wet silent bird that covered the swamp with its grey shadow.” She asks where the tree is. “Why, you are sitting right under it.”

“Her eyes focused on the tree and she recognized it. It was him! Under the thin membranous bark she could clearly see the tattoo marks, all sorts, stars, trishuls, temple-spires.” The footloose sadhu stayed in the village, “the months crunched past him like dry leaves, wind-swept in April… His eyes turned rheumy, nothing lucid was left there.”

The story ends with the following passage:

“Even when he talked to himself now his lips did not move. His mind wandered like an unhinged planet that has lost all consciousness of its orbit. Affection, attachment, nostalgia — nothing broke through the outer shell to stir his depths. And one day he ceased to notice the sun spread itself on the broad leaved sagun, the mongoose scuttling into the shadows. Nothing sprouted on the branches of his perception. He could not even reach out to his old dreams now. They hung like dead bats strung on a high tension wire. Yet imperceptibly, the trunk he leaned against seemed to have become a part of his spine. His body became fibrous with age, and merged into the tree like ivy in a rotting beam. One could not make out if his legs were prop roots which had touched the ground or a freak stem, cleft even as it emerged from the ground. What was his beard if not a fungus growth on the higher branches?

“His dying was an event of non-motion, of silence.”