Some more reflections on a Saturday afternoon…I

There is a serious concern among many in India that Narendra Modi may become the next Prime Minister. This concerns stems primarily because of his unapologetic advocacy of the Hindutva ideology and his resolute refusal to apologize (or be remorseful) for the massacre of Muslims in Gujarat in 2002.

The media was abuzz all of last week as some of the biggest names of India’s business world gathered together to shower encomiums on him for his “spectacular achievements,” with the Congress spokesperson reminding the world that the German corporate sector shared a similar fascination for Hitler in the 1930s, and while doing so conveniently forgetting the party’s instrumentality in at least two equally gruesome massacres in the past.

The social media was fervently discussing ‘isms’. A particularly interesting debate involved capitalism and how the “capital class” in India by endorsing Modi is encouraging communalism.

The ideologies that espoused class struggle became obsolete because they fell short of two fundamentals requirements of human life – freedom and development.

The proponents of the ideologies claim that they remain relevant even today and protest that it was the practice of these ideals that subverted freedom and failed to deliver the promise of development.

Perhaps, they are not wrong.

Individual freedom is at the heart of this debate, and was at the basis of the differences between two eminent French writers Andre Gide (1869-1951) and Roman Rolland (1866-1944).

Both supported communism – Gide briefly and Rolland during his lifetime.

Rolland is known in India because of his association with Mahatma Gandhi and Rabindranath Tagore, and because Swami Vivekananda’s interpretation of the Vedanta influenced him. Along with Leo Tolstoy and Gandhi, Rolland was a firm believer in non-violent non-cooperation.

Rolland was an early advocate of the Soviet Union and its form of communism. He remained a lifelong supporter (surprisingly) even of Joseph Stalin.

It may said in his defense – if it is necessary – that the worst excesses of Stalinism remained concealed until Rolland’s death, and the West took note of the autocratic intolerance of the Soviet state only after the Second World War ended. 

On the other hand, Gide supported Soviet Communism for a brief period but rejected it after a visit to Soviet Union in 1937.

Frederick John Harris’s Andre Gide and Romain Rolland Two Men Divided details the differences between these two French writers over many issues including the most crucial one – the interpretation of what constitutes art.

The book also discusses the different interpretation they gave to the role of the individual and individual morality in a society, and how the communist ideology as practised in the then Soviet Union dealt with this crucial question.

Harris notes, “…both believed that the communist revolution would necessarily achieve harmony and the general well-being of humanity, for this was mankind’s destiny and its truth. Both recognized the value and the necessity of liberty in a well-developed society, and both knew before going to Russia that Soviet society would not in all respects live up to their own personal aspirations. Rolland, however, returned convinced just as he was before his departure, that despite all, Soviet Russia was on the right track; Andre Gide returned with the impression that the Soviet experiment had derailed somewhere along the line.”

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Some more reflections...II

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Rolland went to Russia in 1935 on invitation of Maxim Gorky and upon his return to France wrote that while his body had returned, his spirit was still in Russia. Harris observes, “He was contemptuous of the Western press, which he accused of not appreciating the greatness of what was happening inside Russia.”

Gide visited Russia in 1936 and a day after his arrival (17-June) Maxim Gorky died. In November 1936 he published Retour de l’ URSS and bluntly stated: 

“Three years ago I declared my admiration and my love for the USSR…if I was mistaken at first, the best thing is to recognize my error as soon as possible; for I am responsible here for those the error leads on. No conceit is valid in this case; and besides I have very little. There are some important things than the USSR: humanity, its destiny, its culture.”

The following passage explains Gide’s aversion for the many ways in which communism throttled individualism:

“When I write that I am unwilling to recognize as essentially irreconcilable a “properly understood” communism and a “properly understood” individualism, I mean such as I understood them myself. I must therefore explain how I understand them. It is certain that I do not see an equalitarian communism, or at least that I see equality of conditions only at the outset; that for each person it would imply merely equal chances but in not a uniformity of qualities, a standardization that I consider at one and the same time impossible and hardly desirable, for the individual as well as for the mass. And, likewise, an internationalization of economic interests would not imply the suppression and ignoring of racial or geographical peculiarities, the happily irreducible differences among cultures and traditions. The very diversity of the players makes the wealth and beauty of the symphony, and wishing that all the instruments, brasses, violins, oboes, or clarinets, produced the same sound would be as absurd as to think that each instrument would play better if it broke away from the ensemble of the orchestra and ceased following the measure.”

Eventually, individualism triumphed over the collective in the war between communism and capitalism. Even if democracy and capitalism may have emerged as the only acceptable political and economic models in the present century, the struggle to redefine them continues. The gathering storm over the political and economic rights of the indigenous people is a good example of this struggle as is the Occupy Movement.  

Today even the most die hard proponents of the capitalist way agree that there is a dire need to modify it to make it work justly. And the proponents of individualism are unable to explain the growing rise of individual violence (read Ashish Nandy’s analysis of how individualism has contributed to a violent society: Shadows of New Violence).

An aside: I bought the book many years – actually decades ago – from Bombay's Smoker's Corner. The book tangentially talks about the thriving art and literary community in Paris in the 1920 and 1930s (no, not of the expatriate writers and artists who became famous subsequently and beautifully depicted in Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris) but of the French and European writers – Rolland and Gide, and also Paul Valery, Rainer Maria Rilke, Stephan Zweig and Emile Verhaeren.

Of Tagore, Tolstoy & translations - I

A week ago, I attended a play reading organised by Sally Jones (Rasik Arts) of Rabindranath Tagore’s The Post Office. 

We read from the translation published by St. Martin's Press, New York in 1996. The play is translated by Krishna Dutta and Andrew Robinson with woodcut illustrations by Michael McCurdy).

In her introduction of the play in this edition, Anita Desai, says, “In appearance the play is as modest as a dewdrop, in effect it is as profound as the ocean.”

Tagore’s Nobel laureate status notwithstanding (or perhaps because of the intimidating effect that status has on most lovers of literature), his work remains largely unknown to non-Bengali audiences.

Lyricist Gulzar explained the reason for this succinctly in an interview recently to Calcutta’s The Telegraph, “Tagore was and is still looked upon as a Bengali poet. He is our national poet but is identified as a regional poet. There should be a feeling in every Indian, whether he is Marathi or Punjabi or Tamilian, that Tagore is our poet. But what happened was... yeh Bangalion ka jo Tagore hai, woh bahut bada shayyar hai. We as a nation have always had a bad habit of living in fragments...It’s true. Bengalis have been very, very proud of Tagore but also very possessive about him. That’s because he is part of the culture of every home. Every child starts with Tagore and then moves on to other Bengali poets. The possessiveness about him in Bengalis, I mean in a positive way. But it’s also true that there were too many restrictions on translating Tagore. You had to get permission from Visva-Bharati and then you had to get the translation approved. Not just translation, even film adaptations.”

On the other hand, The Post Office has a universal and enduring appeal, having been translated in several languages. 

In the Translators’ Preface to The Post Office Krishna Dutta and Andrew Robinson observe, “Each artist coming to it has made it speak afresh to his own place and time in his own idiom. Its Spanish translator, the celebrated poet Juan Ramon Jimenez wrote of ‘my hand that helped to give our Spanish form to the rhythm of Tagore’s immense heart.’ In 1940, the evening before Paris fell to the Nazis, Andre Gide’s French translation was read over the radio. 

"And in 1942, in Warsaw ghetto, a Polish version was the last play performed in the orphanage of Janusz Korczak. When, after the performance, Korczak was asked why he chose the play, he answered that ‘eventually one had to learn to accept serenely the angel of death. Within a month, he and his children were taken away and gassed.”

Perhaps one of the reasons why Tagore’s creative genius remains largely unexplored even as the world celebrates his sesquicentennial is the indifferent quality of translations of his work, especially his poetry.

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Gide & Rolland: Two Men Divided

Smokers Corner in Mumbai is an unusual bookshop. I don’t remember when I visited the place last. Many years ago. 

But a couple of decades back, I was a regular visitor. It offered a good bargain, and very unusual books. Books difficult to find elsewhere.

One of the books that I bought from there was Andre Gide and Romain Rolland – Two Men Divided by Frederick Harris.  

I was familiar with both Gide and Rolland, but had not read their writings. I haven’t even today. Rolland is much admired among a particular set of Indian history aficionados because of his biography of the Mahatma. 

Gide was a major Marxist intellectual.

Both are Nobel Prize winners for Literature. Rolland in 1915 and Gide in 1947. 

Rolland's book came to our house via a rather strange route. Meghnad had managed to get the book from N.J. Lakdawala. Lakdawala was the father of my father’s colleague at his workplace, and the entire 

Lakdawala library came to us for reasons which I’m not familiar with. But it had incredible books. The six-volume history of World War II by Winston Churchill, for instance.

Gide's books came from Meghnad's uncle Prabodhchandra (Nanu-kaka; more about him a little later). Gide was a regular Marxist and a staunch supporter of Soviet Russia for a considerably long time.

Nearly two decades after Communism’s comprehensive failure, I often wonder what was it about this tendentious philosophy that so fascinated the French intellectual giants of the mid 20th century (1930-1970). Rolland, Gide, Sartre are names we are all familiar with.

Both Rolland and Gide were proud of their Marxist leanings, but developed differences in the manner in which the Soviet Union curbed personal freedom. 

Harris’s book is an interesting account of the differences between them over this and other issues.

The thing about these giants of the last century was the erudition with which they expressed their views, and the civilized manner in which they engaged in a debate over differences. 

Rolland and Gandhi correspondence is legendary, as is the correspondence between Tagore and Gandhi. Rolland's and Gide's differences are also of a similar nature. 

We are in an age when leaders seem so diminished in comparison. Obama’s articulation seems so refreshing and all together old-worldly.