Slogan Literature Festival

God did not send him into the world to be a poet. Upon his ignoble mind, laying her hand in false benediction, a corpulent woman bestowed her curse of blessing: be unbearable. Drink without restraint, swear loudly, scream with abandon, revel in animal joy, become brute and bony like a creature of sheer vertebrae. Do everything under the sun, but for heaven’s sake, do not write poetry. So wrote John Dryden in one of his satirical verses. And whenever I look upon the state of contemporary Bengali literature today, Dryden’s mocking lines return to me with unnerving relevance. Why is it that I stand opposed to poetry festivals or story festivals, yet speak in favor of film festivals, drama festivals, recitation festivals? Why do I resist government interference in the arts? Why do I believe that art, and the artist, must never sit in the counting house of industrialists, tallying profit and loss outside the realm of beauty’s purpose?
 
The festivals of slogan-shouting, factionalism, and hollow morality — these so-called “story festivals,” “poetry festivals” — have become nothing but vulgar exhibitions. In their spectacle I feel the aptness of Dryden’s satire pierce like a blade. For applied arts such as cinema, music, drama, recitation, or painting, festivals have meaning — since performance requires stage, space, and the gathering of many spectators. But for poetry and prose, what relevance do such festivals carry? Next to none. For literature, the book fair already exists. A good film cannot be enjoyed like a TV serial, sitting casually at home. As French filmmaker Godard said: without darkness and silence one cannot enter the essence of cinema. For that, a darkened hall is indispensable. Films require the exhibition space, just as singers and reciters require the stage — for their art remains incomplete unless brought alive before at least one listener. Without an audience, actors in a play would go mad; the theatre itself would become a madhouse. One solitary spectator turns the delirium of performance into art. But prose and poetry stand apart from these. The poet or storyteller writes in solitude, in silence, birthing the work in secrecy. Once born, it leaves the creator’s hand entirely, carried by the press into pages and letters, spreading to readers in countless shapes. And when the reader encounters it, it must be in quietude, in stillness, in utter immersion. Reading is intimacy; festivals are noise. The ecstasy of literature arises in the heart and mind through the medium of language, not through the funnel of sound thrust into the ear by amplifiers. What astonishing ignorance, then, to reduce literature to a noisy show! In this age of digital media, indeed, every art may be consumed privately at home — yet music or cinema is first born in performance, recorded in its act. Literature is different. Neither ear nor mouth nor eye in spectacle is its medium; its sole vessel is language. One must accept this reality. Think of Tolstoy’s War and Peace being “read aloud” from a stage — what grotesquery would that be! In adaptation as film or play it may still acquire life, though personally I dislike such transfigurations, for the director selects and shapes at whim. Yet at least in the hall one may respect his interpretation. But prose reading? What greater absurdity exists? Poetry may still be recited; but story-reading is a travesty.
 
When government coffers pour out lavish sums to wrench literature from its throne and dress it up as applied art, it becomes a kind of desecration. Without belittling performance arts, I must say: when a writer thunders into a microphone from stage, hollering his story into the ears of a reluctant audience, I can only think him diminished. The crowd cannot receive him as literature. And thus, while film festivals, music concerts, or drama fairs draw spontaneous audiences, the so-called poetry or prose festivals limp on only under the crutches of government patronage — burning the people’s money as oblations, feeding flatterers to keep the spectacle alive year after year.
 
A sycophantic prose-writer, facing near-empty chairs, sprays forth a fountain of five thousand words that no human mind can endure. Ask a listener what the tale was about — he will be dumbstruck. In a country where sixty percent are unemployed, two hundred and fifty prose-writers walk away with two-thousand-rupee cheques each, a packet of snacks, and the relish of gossiping about one another. Floods devastate the land, yet in the name of relief, one hundred and fifty poets gather to recite poems on a grand stage. Fifty sit in the audience, all of them poets too, waiting for their turn at the microphone. Each collects two thousand rupees. What noble patriots of poetry! And then, in sharp contrast, memory returns to me — that damp, frozen cell in St. Petersburg where Dostoevsky penned The Idiot; or to Jibanananda Das, weary and worn, who chose the cold tramline in the night.
 
Witnessing all this, one wonders: why would anyone read the pretentious scribblings of these hollow charlatans? Better the simple romances, song-and-dance, or brawling spectacles of cinema, for at least the masses know that actors and singers wear no masks of duplicity. These “literary intellectuals” preach socialism on stage, professing solidarity with workers and peasants; but once the meeting ends, they pocket their cheque and slip into their Mercedes or Maruti. They live, or aspire to live, like American industrialists — yet on stage play the part of comrades. Doctors, bureaucrats, editors, proofreaders, liquor merchants, soda-sellers, politicians, wheeler-dealers — all in this Leftist age have donned the mask of poet or writer. And under the intoxication of state sponsorship, literature itself has been turned into the dance of a courtesan. Propaganda proclaims the government as literature’s patron. But what should patronage mean? It should mean grants to publish fine literature irrespective of ideology, the lifting of Bengali writing into national and global light, the translation of countless works into English, the involvement of poets and writers in education, the preservation of Bengal’s literary heritage. Do we see these? Not at all. What we see instead is token honorariums to Left-leaning writers, used to broadcast the Party line. Rewards: to appear on stage, to publish in Ganashakti and a thousand little magazines, to strut in the Bengali Academy, to give speeches for the Party in rural fairs. And when I say “a thousand magazines,” do not think a hundred thousand readers. The writers, editors, and readers are the same small circle, trading favors — one publishes the other’s work in return. No little magazine exists in Bengal without the editor of another little magazine inside it. A small clique patting one another’s backs, with a few from larger dailies thrown in, granting them special prestige since they can sneak an unknown Leftist’s writing into print. The people, thankfully, have turned away from these weeds of literature. Sales of Bengali books have plummeted to abysmal depths. New writers publish on their own money, printing fifty or a hundred copies, hawking them to newspaper offices in hope of a review. Books that not a single soul has bought or read still get reviewed, thanks to connections. Meanwhile, major publishers, even when they print established authors, tremble at pressing a thousand copies. At the same time, every book fair sees fresh editions of Sarat, Bibhutibhushan, and Rabindranath churned out, for publishers near College Street must survive on their legacy. Thus the cage of the literary world: the very writers who shout poems and stories from stage cannot sell even a dozen copies of their books. This, perhaps, is poetic justice.
 
One might ask — did no true poet or prose-writer attend these festivals barren of audience? Among the living, a handful of greats remain, those who may have written one or two timeless works; the rest is rubbish serialized in Puja Numbers. Even they come, for who dares defy a government request? The state needs them on stage so that the petty scribblers, standing beside, can bask in reflected glory. A tiny five percent of writers are anti-government — some tied to private institutions, some solitary, many with sharp and excellent writings. Naturally, they remain outcasts. Some apolitical writers earn well through honest readership, without servitude to any party — and they are never invited, or when invited, they decline to partake in such buffoonery. The government’s aim is clear: place a few genuine names alongside the cadres, so that the line between good and bad blurs. Evil gains dignity, good loses it. The writer who sees this truth stays a hundred yards away from such festivals.
 
The great virtue of the Left is the institutionalization of lies. A thousand intellectuals repeat the same falsehood until it hardens into truth. Just as Leftist historians have twisted India’s past, so Leftist intellectuals twist literature. They proclaim, again and again, that Manik Bandopadhyay surpasses Bibhutibhushan. By this propaganda, mediocre Manik is elevated beside Tarashankar and Bibhutibhushan. The Goebbelsian echo bewilders the masses. Party-worker Sukanta Bhattacharya is inflated into a towering poet, his ashes published in collected works though much of it unreadable. Jibanananda Das, meanwhile, is painted falsely as a Communist. That they never learn from history is evident. Maxim Gorky is no longer placed with Tolstoy or Dostoevsky in world literature. He is not worthless, but the importance he enjoyed under the Bolsheviks vanished with them. Remember the court-poet of Louis XVI? His name slips my mind — but such idols made for propaganda always fade. The Left refuses to see that one day no one will remember their statues either. In Eastern Europe, Marx, Lenin, Stalin are being toppled one by one. Bengal too will see it. It is only a matter of time.
 
The government’s so-called story festival is in truth a Slogan Literature Festival — like watering down a pot of milk until it is but white liquid tinged with two drops of cream. Its hidden engine: keep poets, writers, and intellectuals loyal before elections, so that they churn out long poems and essays proclaiming why the Left must win again for the sake of Bengal’s “literary culture.” And to blind the people, the rulers place upon their eyes the tinted spectacles of intellectual opinion.
 
Those who dance upon the stage can never be the creators of timeless literature. Why does Bengal no longer give birth to another Bibhutibhushan, another Tarashankar, another Jibanananda? The most reasonable answer is this: literature itself has been destroyed in West Bengal. And so, in the end, the corpulent woman’s curse comes true — for the man whom God never made a writer, it is opportunism that has crowned him as one. Contemporary “literati” have become everything else under the sun, except genuine writers.