http://www.mumbaimirror.com/
At lit fest, Karnad questions Naipaul’s lifetime achievement
Playwright launches scathing and unexpected attack on, among other things, Sir Vidia’s stance on the Indian Muslim
Mumbai Mirror Bureau
Posted On Saturday, November 03, 2012 at 10:09:38 AM
| A master class by Girish Karnad on
his ‘life in theatre’ at a Mumbai lit festival on Friday took a
dramatic turn when the playwright launched an unexpected and scathing
attack on Nobel laureate V S Naipaul, who was awarded the festival’s
Lifetime Achievement Award on October 31. The crowd of around 80, which included actor Naseeruddin Shah and writer Farrukh Dhondy, at the Experimental Theatre at NCPA, was stunned when Karnad accused Naipaul of mis-characterising Indian history, Islam, and the riots sparked in Mumbai after the Babri Masjid demolition. But after the initial awkwardness, the audience seemed to enjoy his well-worded assault. Festival director Anil Dharkar said that, although controversies were an acceptable part of a literary festival, he was taken aback by Karnad’s attack. “I told him it was unfair to say this about someone who wasn’t present, and who was bestowed a Lifetime Achievement award by us after considering his whole body of work. But when Girish criticised even the Nobel Prize that Naipaul received, I couldn’t argue much. I just felt when we gave him a platform to talk on a particular subject, to criticise Naipaul was out of place.” Dhondy said, “Karnad implied that Naipaul received the Nobel Prize because he is anti-Muslim. This sounds like a conspiracy theory from an American ghetto, as misplaced as saying George Bush brought down the Twin Towers. Naipaul’s wife is a Muslim and so are his children. Karnad was being unfair and he was voicing Chinese whispers without knowing the truth. Girish doesn’t know Naipaul. I do.” Excerpts from Karnad’s speech: “The award ceremony held on the 31st of October coyly failed to mention that Naipaul was not an Indian and has never claimed to be one. But at no point was the question raised, and the words Shashi Deshpande, the novelist, had used to describe the Neemrana Festival conducted by the ICCR in 2002 perfectly fitted the present event: ‘it was a celebration of a Nobel Laureate …whom India, hopefully, even sycophantically, considered an Indian.’ “Apart from his novels, only two of which take place in India and are abysmal, Naipaul has written three books on India and the books are brilliantly written - he is certainly among the great English writers of our generation. They have been hailed as a continued exploration of India’s journey into modernity, but what strikes one from the very first book, A Wounded Civilization, is their rabid antipathy to the Indian Muslim. The ‘wound’ in the title is the one inflicted on India by Babur’s invasion. Since then Naipaul has never missed a chance to weigh in against the ‘invaders’, accusing them of having savaged India for five centuries, of having brought, among other dreadful things, poverty into it and destroying the glorious ancient Hindu culture. “A point that strikes one immediately about these books is that there is not a single word in any of them on Indian music. And I believe that if you cannot respond to music, you cannot understand India. Music is the defining art form of the Indian identity. Naipaul’s silence on the subject when he is exploring the whole of modern Indian culture suggests to me that he is tone deaf - which in turn explains his insensitivity to the intricate interweaving of Hindu and Muslim creativities, through the Bhakti and Sufi movements, that gave us this extraordinary heritage, alive in the heart of every Indian home. “What Naipaul’s virulence against Indian Islam conceals, however, is that he has borrowed his model of the history of Indian culture from the British musicologists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, like William Jones. “…They decided that this once pure - and - glorious music must have been, at some point during the course of its long history, corrupted and mauled - and they found the villain in the invading Muslim. So, according to them, once upon a time there was a pristine Indian musical culture, which the Muslims had disfigured. They therefore ignored the music that was being performed around them and went in search of the true Hindu music. In his analysis of Indian culture Naipaul simply borrows this line of argument and reemploys it - as his original perception. And not for the first time. “Naipaul accuses R.K. Narayan of being indifferent to the destruction and death symbolized by the ruins of Vijayanagar, which to him was a bastion of Hindu culture destroyed by the maurauding Muslims. But again he gets this interpretation of the history of Vijayanagar readymade from a book by Robert Sewell called A Forgotten Empire, published in 1900. Naipaul, as always in awe of his colonial sources, simply accepts this picture as the unadorned truth and recycles it wholesale as his own. “…Of the Taj, probably the most beloved of the monuments in India, Naipaul writes, ‘The Taj is so wasteful so decadent and in the end so cruel that it is painful to be there for very long. This is an extravagance that speaks of the blood of the people.’ He brushes off historian Romila Thapar’s argument that the Mughal era saw a rich efflorescence of the mixture of Hindu and Muslim styles, by attributing her judgment to her Marxist bias and says, ‘The correct truth is the way the invaders look at their actions, They were conquering. They were subjugating.’ To Naipaul, the Indian Muslim remains an invader for ever, forever condemned to be condemned, because some of them had invaders for their ancestors. It is a usage would yield some strange results if applied to the USA. “As for Naipaul’s journalistic exploration of modern India, mainly in the form of a series of interviews conducted with Indians right across the board, one must confess they are supremely well written and that he is a master in drawing sharp and precise visuals of the people he talks to and of the places he visits.” “…(but) How reliable are the conversations he records? In a well-known essay, Naipaul describes his visit to the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad, where he stayed with his friend, Ashoke Chatterjee, the director of the Institute. In a recent email to me, Mr Chatterjee said, that Naipaul’s essay was ‘a scenario that could have been but was not what he actually saw. Fragments of reality selected and put together, into a collage of pure fantasy.’ Chatterjee’s friendship with Naipaul came to an abrupt end when Chatterjee told Naipaul that his book, A Wounded Civilization, should be classified as fiction. “In a recent book, Naipaul takes up for examination the autobiography of Munshi Rahman Khan, who emigrated to Suriname at the end of the nineteenth century, and contrasts it with Gandhi’s. Sanjay Subrahmanyam, the historian, has reviewed the essay in the London Review of Books and it doesn’t take him much effort to establish that Naipaul could only have read a third-hand, truncated translation of the text. ‘It is as if a reader in Gorakhpur was reading Naipaul in Maithili after the text had passed through a Japanese translation.’ That doesn’t prevent Naipaul from commenting even on the style and linguistic usage of Rahman Khan. “…One of the first things Naipaul did on receiving the Nobel Prize was to visit the office of the BJP in Delhi. He who had earlier declared that he was not political, ‘that to have a political view is to be programmed’, now declared that he was happy to be politically ‘appropriated’. It was then that he made his most infamous remark: ‘Ayodhya’, he said, ‘is a sort of passion. Any passion is creative. Passion leads to creativity.’ “…In cold blood, Naipaul was glamorizing these events as ‘passion’, as ‘a creative act’. “Salman Rushdie’s response was that Naipaul was behaving like ‘a fellow-traveller of Fascism and (that he) disgraces the Noble Prize.’ “…Landmark and Literature Alive who have announced this Award have a responsibility to explain to us where exactly they stand with regard to these Naipaul remarks. Naipaul is a foreigner and can make pronouncements as he wishes. But do they mean to valorize Naipaul’s stand that Indian Muslims are raiders and marauders? Are they supporting his continued insistence on Muslim buildings in India being monuments to rape and loot? Or are they by their silence suggesting that these views do not matter? The Award givers have much to answer for.” ----- www.livemint.com
Girish Karnad lashes out at VS NaipaulPlaywright Girish Karnad, speaking at the Tata Literature Live! festival in Mumbai on Friday, took the audience aback with his unexpected criticism of V.S. Naipaul for his “rabid antipathy towards Indian Muslims”, and asked for an explanation from the festival’s organizers on why they had honoured the author with the festival’s Lifetime Achievement Award. Naipaul was awarded the honour at a function on Wednesday night at the National Centre for the Performing Arts (NCPA), the festival’s venue. Karnad’s remarks came as a surprise at his session, which was scheduled to be a 1hour masterclass of sorts, on his life in theatre. Extemporizing from his notes, Karnad spent 40 minutes of his hour-long speech putting a bend in the river of gushing Naipaul tributes. “Apart from his novels, only two of which take place in India and are abysmal, Naipaul has written three books on India. The books are brilliantly written,” Karnad said. “He is certainly among the great English writers of our generation. But right from (India:) A Wounded Civilization, he has never missed a chance to weigh in against Muslims, accusing them of having savaged India for five centuries.” Karnad’s remarks covered a range of Naipaul’s writing, from his characterization of the history of Hampi to his views on the Mughals. “Naipaul won the Nobel Prize in 2001. In London in 2000, word was that Naipaul would never get the Nobel because of what he’d written about Indian Muslims,” Karnad said. But he pointed out that Naipaul was awarded the Nobel barely months after the 9/11 attacks. Naipaul’s political and social opinions have divided his audiences before. Most recently, in 2011, controversy broke out over Naipaul’s remarks on women writers, all of whom, he said, were sentimental and unequal to him. His views on Islam have also drawn repeated criticism in the past. Karnad recalled, in particular, that Naipaul attended a Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) meeting in New Delhi in 2004, where, on being asked about the Babri Masjid demolition, he is reported to have said, “Ayodhya is a sort of passion. Any passion is to be encouraged. Passion leads to creativity.” In this context, Karnad said, it was particularly dubious to honour a writer in Mumbai, a city where more than 1,500 Muslims had been murdered in the riots following the demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992. Karnad’s remarks were met with applause, but clearly displeased the festival’s organizers. “This was supposed to be a masterclass, and you are not a master on Naipaul,” said festival director Anil Dharker. “We expected to hear you speak as a playwright. To use this stage for this purpose was rather impolite.” “I’m imitating Naipaul,” Karnad responded. “We came here to hear about theatre, sir, not about Babri Masjid,” called out an unidentifiable audience member. Karnad spent the remainder of his session speaking off the cuff about the nature and history of theatre in India. Novelist Farrukh Dhondy, who accompanied Naipaul to the BJP cultural wing meeting from where his remarks on Ayodhya were reported, says they were “a complete misquotation. He had no views on the Babri Masjid, and said only one thing about it then, that building it was an act of hubris”. Dhondy, a friend and frequent interviewer of Naipaul, was in conversation with him on the night of his award, but did not have a chance to respond to Karnad in public. “I want to put to bed the notion that Vidia is against Muslims,” Dhondy said. “Islam, as he’s said before, is not his business. He has explored, among others, the phenomenon of Islamic conversions, by a legitimate form of inquiry. He’s never written anything about it in his novels.” “Vidia has strange opinions, but he doesn’t deserve the sort of character assassination he’s received. For a distinguished playwright to link his Nobel Prize to the aftermath of 9/11 is stupid.” |
No comments:
Post a Comment