I
Liberalization, Privatization, and Globalization (LPG) have noticeably influenced the dynamics of socio-cultural relations. The effects of their influence are apparently different in rural and urban regions. There is a large influx of rural masses into the towns and cities, obviously in search of livelihood. Small farmers and land labourers, either cannot find the means for livelihood in villages, or are attracted to the cities by the promise of better opportunities. There is a marked growth in the rate of urbanisation. With the accelerated growth of the middle classes, towns are turning into cities and cities continue to grow further by gobbling up surrounding villages. There has been a marked change in the mindset of the middle classes. A distinct division between the oppressor and the oppressed has come into being, both in rural and urban regions. And the middle classes are now clearly on the side of the oppressor. They have started acting as a vehicle of oppression and have voluntarily dropped many of the roles they hitherto cherished. Rural landholding is changing hands and new land mafias are on the rise. Rural politicians are rapidly becoming a part of this race. Common farmers are being constantly uprooted from their heritage and are either committing suicide or finding themselves joining the growing flock of ragpickers in the cities. The rapid growth of service industries in the big cities has drastically changed the lifestyle and functioning of different aspects of public life, eating habits and night life, particularly of the younger generation. There is a considerable strain on the demand and supply relations of energy needs in the domestic, industrial and agricultural sectors. A tremendous increase in production has led to an accelerated increase in the production of wastes of all kinds, the disposal of which is becoming increasingly difficult. Pollution of natural resources like water is on the rise, leading to a drastic decrease in the oxygen content, thereby killing many life forms and destroying ecosystems dependent on them. Drinking water, too, has become a scarce commodity. With the Information Technology boom and the emphasis on the English language at the expense of one’s mother tongue, Marathi-medium schools in the metros are closing down.
The traditional economic and cultural structure of rural Maharashtra is on the verge of collapse with no alternatives in sight. Values like honesty, simplicity, sympathy for the poor and respect for the opinions of others have almost lost their meaning. The buzzword is profit and that too, at any cost. Since greed has become so pervasive, human identity is itself in danger of losing ground as people tend to become increasingly alienated from their lives. The middle classes are in the process of fragmentation, both at the individual and collective levels. As individuals, they have become insensitive to the plight of those poorer than themselves. Everybody seems to be running a race towards unknown and indefinable goals. A middle-class individual, in fact, does not even know the nature of the race or its origins, nor does he care about its irreversible consequences. His or her only fear is of losing the race, a fear of failure and an anxiety about dropping out.
Multinational companies have established themselves in cities and are spreading their tentacles towards the villages. They are aiming at their prime target, which is a mass consumer market, consisting of the emerging middle classes in all geographical locations. The state machinery is disengaging itself from its traditional role and responsibility towards the welfare of the poor. A ruthless political ethos aimed at short-term gains and devoid of ideals, values, and policies cherished for generations, has come into being by replacing humanitarian traditions.
In Maharashtra, the foundation of enlightenment, radical reform and innovative adaptation to social realities was laid by Mahatma Jyotirao Phule, the pioneer of women's education and liberation of the masses from the puritan Brahminical elite through his Satyashodhak movement; Rajarshi Shahu of Kolhapur, who followed Phule's lead; Sayajirao Gaikwad of Baroda, who introduced modern liberal education and local self-government, making citizens out of his ryots; Karmaveer Bhaurao Patil, the educational activist; Punjabrao Deshmukh, the agricultural reformist; Sant Gadgebaba, the saintly activist, who stressed the importance of local sanitation; J.P. Naik, the visionary educationist. The infrastructure they created for a forward-looking, self-reliant Maharashtra has been destroyed by ruthless professionals who do not have an iota of social commitment.
Those who seek the rapid accumulation of wealth and capital assets, through what they like to call professional education, proclaim themselves ‘Shikshan Samrats’ (Emperors of Education) or ‘Shikshan Maharishis’ (Grand Sages of Education) and they are fast replacing the great founders and builders of modern Maharashtra. These new educational industrialists or tycoons enjoy both political clout and economic muscle. However, almost all of them are from humble origins. The cooperative movements of Maharashtra, in sugar production, banking and dairy development had once occupied a place of pride in the state, though virtually uneducated farmers from Western Maharashtra had initiated them. They’ve created some very wealthy and powerful individuals, many of whom are now members of legislative assemblies and councils. All positions of power compliment each other. These people handle their constituencies in a manner similar to those of the rajas and maharajas of the past. Exposure to contemporary corporate culture has come to their aid. For example, they don’t have voluntary workers any more. Instead, they use the services of paid management professionals and ‘fixers’, albeit on a temporary basis. Everyone and everything has its price. Power holders and power brokers are shrewd judges of trends and currents. Their cost-profit equations are uncanny. They can convert anything into cash and cash into everything that yields power.
II
The prevalent political scenario has naturally affected the Marathi literary world. The mindset of writers, readers, publishers and booksellers is changing and many of them have already succumbed to temptations of the growing neo-literate market. Creative writers have started changing their genres, styles, techniques and idioms to adapt to the more entertaining and simple forms of writing. They considerably influence their readership. Literature and culture are tending to become commodities: they are celebrated with nothing to celebrate but brands and packaging. The content and the quality that used to be the stuff of writing have been compromised. Research and investigation are no longer required to support creative writing.
The socio-cultural picture presented so far may sound rather pessimistic to many or might seem overtly one-sided, especially in the light of the profoundly persuasive and euphoric propaganda which positions India as being on the verge of becoming a global superpower, envied around the globe for its expanding knowledge base and its growing techno-scientific competence. But the fact remains that the rich are getting richer by making the poor poorer. The gap between the two is widening at an alarming rate. Poverty is being removed by removing the poor from the new India envisaged by the rich. As Arun Kale, an important poet of the present generation says in his poem titled, ‘You are the motherboard of my computer’:
Now in this era of IT
New software is pouring in
to delete the Dalits.
The middle classes are becoming more affluent and are in the process losing their traditional roles as conscience-keepers of society and the preservers of cultural integrity. Investment is pouring into the stock market from outside the country and its obvious goal is to make more money for the investors abroad. Market forces are gaining momentum and their hegemony overshadows all gifted people including intellectuals, professionals, artists, journalists, and creative writers.
Farming was never treated as a profession in the past. For small farmers, it was a way of life. Things have drastically changed now and farmers find it difficult to cope. They are showing suicidal tendencies, a mass death wish in a world where traditional loan sharks and nationalised banks look and act the same.
The literary creative process has obviously been influenced by these stupendous changes. Many writers of rural origin have expressed their concern for the prevailing crisis faced by small farmers. Sadanand Deshmukh, Bharat Kale, Ashok Kautik Koli, and Vijay Jawle are some of the notable names. The Pune-based novelists, Shyam Manohar and Makarand Sathe express anguish over the fragmentation of individual existence, loss of identity, loss of relationships and the fearsome alienation of individuals from the reality that surrounds them. An exponential increase in the tools of communications has made communication more technical, formal, and software-governed. Writing is rapidly becoming less expressive of the author's autonomy and is increasingly programmed by the tools he or she uses. The existence of the human being as a single unique entity seems no longer tenable.
A poet with a rural background, Shrikant Deshmukh invokes a ‘Deshivadi’ (nativist) response to LPG. In his poems, he tries to derive strength through the traditionally cherished and valued relationship between ‘Kunbis’ (small farmers and farm labourers) and ‘Vithoba’ (the great god of Pandharpur, popular throughout Maharashtra as its presiding spirit) and the bond between the saint-poets of Maharashtra and Vithoba, their ideal, idol and spiritual light. This is a very typical and unique stance taken by a poet who feels that his language and culture is in danger of invasion. In response to the present crisis, he looks back at his literary and cultural roots and tries to gather strength from these sources, which enable him to stay as erect as Vithoba's image in Pandharpur and to counter the invading forces rather than remain a passive victim.
The noted novelist Rajan Gavas, famous for his work on devadasis (the concubines of male deities) and eunuchs (castrated males who worship a female mother goddess). He has a unique understanding of the Gaogada (the village chariot which is the basis of the roles of the twelve micro-communities that run village life, following rules that segregate and integrate them according to assigned functions and responsibilities ). Gavas has come forth with a significant essay on Krishijan Sanskriti (the culture of an agriculturist community). He looks towards tradition and culture from the viewpoint of farmers and the rural gentry in general. He asserts that the knowledge-systems nurtured and developed by generations of framers in all walks of life, including natural and social sciences, their ethical values, and their oral folk traditions have hitherto remained unheeded. He feels that they should be highlighted to provide strength to the Marathi language and its dialects and to Marathi culture as a whole. He seeks to find a method of literary criticism based on these assumptions.. He is in the process of evolving a theory which is rather problematic, since many of his hypotheses are debatable.
The poet Arun Kale uses the contemporary catchwords, signs and images of cyberspace, personal computers and information technology in general as a metaphorical resource for expressing his anguish over the ‘deletion’ of Dalits as a consequence of LPG. An understanding of history and the lyrical traditions of the language, realization of the oppression of the masses and a total commitment to their cause make him an exceptional crusader in their struggle for human rights and dignity. His poetry can be placed on par with any other excellent contemporary Bhasha writing. Kishor Kadam, Prakash Holkar, Pravin Bandekar, Veerdhawal Parab, Ajay Kandar and Vrajesh Solanki are some of the other notable contemporary poets.
Women novelists such as Meghana Pethe and Kavita Mahajan boldly explore a woman's sexual exploitation by men in rural and urban society and the sexual misadventures of both women and men, who treat one another as objects of pleasure in today’s consumer society. Pethe and Mahajan represent the free and unique voice of women as liberated individuals. But such voices are even more poignantly expressed in the poems of Sumati Lande, Mallika Amar Shaikh, Pradnya Lokhande, Neerja and Rajani Parulekar.
There is one more group of writers, mostly Mumbai-based or metropolitan-minded, that proclaims itself to be “post-modern”. Most of them are poets, who started writing in the nineties. It is noteworthy that none of them is a novelist. Scant unfinished pieces of such works by some of them have appeared in little magazines run by them. They don’t recognize any authority other than themselves. Barring one or two exceptions, their reading and understanding of the Marathi literary tradition is doubtful. Based on their pseudo-witty remarks, one tends to feel that writing poetry at deeper levels is not their cup of tea.
One of them, Salil Wagh recently proclaimed—out of the blue—that one good poem is greater than ten novels. How can anyone make such a ludicrous judgment? The understanding of post-modernism as a school of literary theory and practice by poets such as Salil Wagh is also doubtful and debatable. It is difficult to see how in a literary culture, where modernism itself has not been properly internalized and digested, postmodernist writing and thinking could authentically come into being. These are self-styled dons and “Mafiosi”, who live in their own shallow, illusory universe. Obviously, nobody other than themselves and their small coterie has any reason to question their “junky” theories or their “funky” observations. They are their own self-appointed critics and thinkers. They are a new post-1990s band of postmodern flag bearers, who make use of modern means of communication like blogging on the internet or websites of their own. I learned that one poem with the title ‘Mohak’ by Hemant Divate got a favourable response from different parts of the world. An English translation of it was posted on the Internet (it also appeared in NQ161).
These writers enjoy an ambivalent relationship with writers from the 1960s such as Dilip Chitre, Bhalchandra Nemade, Arun Kolatkar, Vilas Sarang, and Vasant Abaji Dahake. However, these very poets and thinkers are also condemned by them as being old-timers and they proclaim themselves as the sole pioneers and flag-bearers of postmodernist expression. (Although I personally enjoy good relations with some of them and have read favourable observations of my work made by them on the Internet, it does not deter me from making these comments).
The contemporary literary era is marked by the presence of writers who are first- and second- generation literates. The other significant emerging group is that of women writers. The importance of the kind of realism that Bhalchandra Nemade proclaimed in the 1960s has made an adverse impact on the literary expression of many writers of the younger generation that followed him; especially on those who have a rural background and are first- or second-generation literates. The strong recommendation of Nemade’s style of realism has obscured the fact that a genre like the novel is imaginative prose and there is ample scope there to find stylistic freedom in an autonomous creative process. The idea of literature as an imaginative construct, based not so much on facts but in the process of its construction, giving rise to new factual structures and formal superstructures, which in turn become a part of the language of life, has been overlooked by most of these new writers.
Women writers will be a force in the future. Although no outstanding work of the quality of Vibhavari Shirurkar or Shanta Gokhale is in sight yet, there is a considerable room for hope. Women writers are redefining boldness; they show an upright and truthful manner of expression and commitment to their own cause.
Apparently there is no collective stance or reaction to LPG by women writers but an intuitive understanding of its influence on life in various forms and at various levels is clearly visible in their work.
In short, it can be said that the work of the new generation of writers shows definite signs of an awareness of the impact of LPG on human life and its core values. But pointing to any specific direction that a collective response would take is difficult to predict. Moreover, defining its precise focus is not, at present, very easy. |
