THE SOUL OF THE BUSINESS
A PRIVATE   FAITH MADE DANGEROUSLY PUBLIC 
The Making of a Paper
 By SHOMA CHAUDHURY
 In Gratitude
 By TARUN J TEJPAL

The Unbeloved: Uday Prakash Photo Sharad Saxena

His rebellion is a protracted, relentless, proof of spoof; it’s the underbelly of mainline literature, the anti-author versus the establishment author, the threshold versus the accomplishment

The number of universes is endless. Each universe has 10p11 galaxies. Each galaxy has 10p11 planets and stars. Each planet has 10p11 Vinayak Dattatreyas. And each Vinayak Dattatreya has 10p11 woes.
Dattatreya’s Woes, Uday Prakash

Vinayak Dattatreya is not an archetype. He writes Hindi poems. His old typewriter makes a kirr-kirr sound. So whenever he writes a poem, every poet in Delhi is offended by the epical noise. They can’t sleep peacefully. So they throw mud at him, they hit his wife and kids. Finally, they negotiate. This is like Bush negotiating with Saddam. Vinayak Dattatreya should stop writing poetry, they say. So Vinayak Datttreya stopped writing poetry. Now he’s writing stories — but the jarring memories remain… the damned sound...kirr… kirr… kirr.

Uday Prakash has lived on those acidic kirr kirr margins of hard non-conformism and they don’t smell of white roses. Dattatreya is his protagonist. But unlike this fictitious character, Uday’s rebellion is a protracted, relentless proof of spoof; it’s the underbelly of mainline literature, the anti-author versus the establishment author, the threshold versus the accomplishment. There’s an angst (“I never got a job in the academic structure, they divided all the jobs between the Left and the Right”), though he was a passionate young member of the cpi, then grew close to the CPM, till the early 80s.

He’d been to jail several times before he came to jnu and he was trained in the praxis of struggle in Madhya Pradesh. So he would never touch the feet of Hindi literature’s ‘Criticism’s God and Prophet’, Namwar Singh, also in jnu and across the Cosmos, making and breaking literary careers with a stroke of his pen. Uday would shake his hand instead. Hello, who are you chief, from which era of classical feudalism?

That is why Uday Prakash is truly a modern, post-modern, Marxist, anti-Stalinist, anti-dogma, post spiritual beginner — something the ‘official Left’ would obviously hate. “I’d rather go to Hazrat Nizamuddin than to a politician or a big man. I have no faith in them. I have rejected them long ago,” he says. “And what did they do to Anna Akhmatova, Joseph Brodsky, Andrie Tarkovsky in Stalin’s Russia? Stalin killed 1.5 crore farmers who were Bukharin’s supporters. If Bukharin was the eye of the revolution as Lenin said, and Trotsky was the mind of the revolution, then what happens when you eliminate the eye and the mind?” There comes a time when history makes a decisive turn he feels. So the revolution is a moment of great history. What follows is routine politics and sociology. “Stalin was doing just that.”

So let’s not indulge in a long narrative when the story is a long short story, like his collection published by Katha, Short Shorts, Long Shots, translated into English by Robert A. Hueckstedt and Amit Tripuraneni. However, yet another of his literary landmarks’ translated version has hit the pen awards in the US, where Rushdie is one of those who decide the fate of a book. Doesn’t matter if you haven’t read this love story, Pili Chatri Wali Ladki (The Girl with a Golden Parasol), translated into English by Jason Grunebaum, but it’s popular in the Hindi heartland, and it’s a landmark because it’s a landmark.

This is because the acid in Uday Prakash’s writings sometimes melts like slow fever, like the jaundiced eyes of Albert Camus’ alienated characters who refuse to be co-opted. “It’s not the centre which decides the fate of literature or history. It’s the margins,” he says. This is the comfortable space of irreverence which he occupies as the man hated by the “Brahaminic establishment” in Hindi literature. He says with concealed pride, that after Qurratulain Hyder’s legendary epic, Aag Ka Dariya (River of Fire) was first recognised in 1946, The Golden Parasol has pushed the threshold of new writing in the West.

‘I fully support Arundhati Roy rejecting the Sahitya Akademi award. It is a statist institution full of brokers, compromisers, people fleecing the system for personal gain,’ says Prakash

That reminds me of a short story situated in the killing fields of Columbia by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. He says, “My umbrella has a hole. But then I can see the sky.” Uday can say the same thing.

This is the short story writer, in his 50s perhaps. With or without his cap, holding his pictures with his icon’s statue (Bertolt Brecht) at the Berlin ensemble, posing with Karl Marx and Fredrich Engels in Berlin’s main square, asking difficult questions. “The fascists save the fascists. The communists save the communists. But who will save humanity?”

He’s one of the rare writers whose stories have been turned into celebrated plays by youngsters across the spectrum, from ipta, nsd, to college graduates. Warren Hastings and his Bull is one of the most famous. But this writer on the margins is really not on the margins. He has become the centre, a rebel non-conformist centre, but his energy derives from the rejection of the status quo. “I have little faith in the Left or Right establishment. When they bulldoze the homes of the poor, the bulldozers can be Left or Right, it seems the same to me. They’re part of the capitalist structure. I’d prefer to be with the voiceless, the meaningless. I’d rather be with Arundhati Roy, Medha Patkar or Shankar Guha Niyogi, for me they’re the new Left.”

Uday’s margins centre around Bertolt Brecht, Fredrico Garcia Lorca, Ritwick Ghatak, Muktibodh, Nirala. “Satyajit Ray was an excellent master of his craft. But it was Ritwick who taught us that there was no difference with breaking all barriers and great art. He was a member of the ipta but when he questioned the communist party’s dogmatism, they told their cadres, go stone his film. Despite Ray’s greatness, till this day, I’d rather follow Ritwick.”

So does he agree with Arundhati Roy’s rejection of the Sahitya Akademi award? “I fully agree,” he says. “They call the Akademi autonomous, but it’s like what all statist institutions are, full of brokers, compromisers, people fleecing the system for personal gains, awards, recognitions, fellowship holders, those holding plum posts. She speaks her mind, how many of our writers dare to do that against the corrupt, power mafia? She has shown the truth of not only corruption in these institutions, but also how global capital has squeezed us, is squeezing us dry everyday in this new era where everything has become so cruel and money-centric. Where is the voice of the marginals? What happened to the killers of Safdar Hashmi? Where is justice?

So there’s no hope? There is, he says, because people in America know Bush is a “minority president”, and even Blair is now a
“minority prime minister”. “In this civil society, philosophies and ideologies might have been defused, but the urge for justice is eternal.”

That is why Muktibodh is the character looking for justice in his story Mohandass, a mix of Kafka and Brecht, but essentially Uday Prakash, where, finally not the wonderer ‘sage’, but the stationary, visionary, sharp-eyed ‘seer’ can only speak the truth. And who is this man telling the truth? He is the Author. Muktibodh smoking his bidis, dead of a brain haemorrhage, before the final judgment can become a daily reality.

No wonder Uday Prakash, once the young, angry story-teller, filmmaker, TV serial writer, drop-out, freelancer for his daily food and now, the ‘author’, is finally writing his first novel. But who is the protoganist: Vinayak Dattatreya, 9/11?