CU-BA-Eng-SEM-V-English literature-V-Second Draft

BACHELOR OF ARTS ENGLISH SEMESTER-V ENGLISH LITERATURE-V

First Published in 2021 All rights reserved. No Part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without permission in writing from Chandigarh University. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this book may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. This book is meant for educational and learning purpose. The authors of the book has/have taken all reasonable care to ensure that the contents of the book do not violate any existing copyright or other intellectual property rights of any person in any manner whatsoever. In the event, Authors has/ have been unable to track any source and if any copyright has been inadvertently infringed, please notify the publisher in writing for corrective action. CONTENT 2 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

Unit - 1: Literary Text: Stories Part I ..................................................................................... 4 Unit - 2: Literary Text: Stories Part II.................................................................................. 22 Unit - 3: Silence! The Court Is In Session By Vijay Tendulkar ............................................ 43 Unit - 4: Robinton Mistry :Such A Long Journey ................................................................ 59 Unit - 5: Literary Forms And Terms :Part –II ...................................................................... 83 Unit - 6: Literary Forms And Terms: Part II ...................................................................... 149 3 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

UNIT - 1:LITERARY TEXT: STORIES PART I STRUCTURE 1.0 Learning Objectives 1.1 Introduction 1.2 Life And Works Of Saadat Hasan Manto 1.3 Toba Tek Singh –The Base Of The Story 1.4 Toba Tek Singh –Text 1.5 Themes In Tobe Tek Singh 1.6 Identity of a Person Linked to Place 1.7 Summary 1.8 Keywords 1.9 Learning Activity 1.10 Unit End Questions 1.11 References 1.0LEARNING OBJECTIVES After studying this unit, you will be able to:  Explain the life and work of Saadat Haans Manto  State the problems that came during the partition  Discuss the story of Toba Tek Singh  Outline the themes related to the story and author 1.1 INTRODUCTION Time and again it is supposed that, ‘Literature is the mirror of society’ and it is very apt statement. The incidents happened in society have better reflected in the works of literature. The Indian independence movement, the partition of India and its aftermaths have very aptly represented in the various genres of literature especially in fictions of various partition novelists. Several historians of mainstream of India by and large are in agreement that the Indian English literature has represented partition and politics in superior form. For instance, the noted historians Ayesha Jalal and Sugatha Bose, in their book on south Asian history, have depicted that: The colossal human tragedy of the partition and its continuing aftermath has been better conveyed by the more sensitive creative writers and artists- for example in Saddat Hasan Manto’s short stories and Ritwik Ghatak’s filmsthan by historians. The 4 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

politico-historical incident, the partition of India was a grave shock for the millions of people across the Indian subcontinent. The diabolic episode of division of India and the communal riots that followed were affected the millions of people in the Indian subcontinent. Neither a religion, nor a community remains untouched to this horrible incident. There are several partition affected men and women who chose the theme of partition for their inscriptions in Indian English literature. These men of letters with different backgrounds, different religions, castes, creeds, sects and different nationalities have selected themes of partition of India, Communal riots in post-partition period in India and Pakistan, politics of communal leaders, politics of national leaders, the brutal anguish of inhabitants of Indian subcontinent, the suppression of women…etc. These men of letters especially the Indian English fiction writers have preferred the theme of Partition and politics of partition for their fictions. The Partition of India is an output of various kinds of politics co-operated by political organizations, religious institutions, individuals, and international agents mentioned in the selected novels. Politics could not be kept aisde and separated from the incident of partition of India. Each country has its own political background in which every writer shapes his or her own ideology. All the novelists or men of letters cannot be escaped from their existed political background. Politics is an inseparable part of human existence throughout the human civilization. Each individual is a product of his or her socio-political set up of society. The novel which has themes of politics or political consciousness is called as political novel or topical novel. The selected novels for the present research work have themes of politics of different kinds. 1.2LIFE AND WORKS OF SAADAT HASAN MANTO During his lifetime, Saadat Hasan Manto was charged with obscenity six times in India and Pakistan for his writings. Of his writing, he said, ''If you cannot bear these stories then the society is unbearable.'' Manto was a prolific Indo-Pakistani writer who published 22 short stories collections and other writings during his career. Manto often wrote about societal issues that he felt hindered humanity. This lesson touches on his life and major works. Life On May 11, 1912, Saadat Hasan Manto was born in British India in the small Punjab village of Samrala. He was a Kashmiri, an ethnic group of the Kashmir Valley in India. He was born into a family of Sunni Muslims. Kashmiri are known for their lighter complexions. Many details about his youth are missing, but it is known that his family was in law, with his father being a judge. In his early twenties, Manto began reading French and Russian authors at the insistence of his mentor Abdul Bari Alig. The books he read inspired him to start several translation projects, including the translation of The Last Day of a Condemned Man by Victor Hugo. He translated it into Urdu. For many years, he worked on translations of famous Russian and French books into Urdu. 5 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

In 1934, after working for a small news publication, he attended Aligarh Muslim University in India. He studied writing and literature, meeting several important influences along the way. He became friends with Ali Sardar Jafri, an Urdu writer. During his time in college, he wrote short stories, with one being published, ''Inqlaab Pasand.'' It was until the 1940s that Manto became a driving force in India. He wrote all types of stories including radio plays. Between 1941 and 1943, he produced four volumes of radio plays. He also began pushing out short story collections. By 1945, he had written and published the short stories ''Dhuan,'' ''Kaali Shalwar,'' and ''Bu,'' which would later be collected in twenty-two short story volumes. Each of these publications led to charges for obscenity in India. Of the charges, Manto said, ''If you find my stories dirty, the society you are living in is dirty. With my stories, I only expose the truth.'' Manto saw the government interfering with his work as evidence that the society didn't want to talk about underlying issues such as religious and political strife that plagued the country. Manto relocated to Lahore, Pakistan, because of the obscenity charges and the Partition of India, which created the two modern countries Pakistan and India. In Lahore, he met many literary colleagues and the group often met at the Pak Tea House to talk about literature, society, and politics. From 1950-1955, Manto wrote countless short stories, personal essays, plays, and screenplays. His work, which almost always talked about sex, lust, drug addiction, and political corruption, garnered him further negative attention from the Pakistani government. He was accused three more times for obscenity while living in Pakistan. It wasn't a secret that Manto was an alcoholic. In his essay, ''Letters to Uncle Sam'', he explains that he spent all of his money on 'locally distilled whiskey', which left him with no money to own a home. His drinking caught with him at age 42. On January 18, 1955, he died of liver cirrhosis. Manto was far ahead of his time and as such courted controversy in his short but prolific career. He faced several court cases both in India and Pakistan for ‘obscenity and pornographic content’ in his writings. The five short stories for which Manto was tried were Kali Shalvar, Dhooan, Boo, Thanda Ghosht and Upar, Niche Aur Darmiyan. Manto penned his experience of his trial in Upar, Niche Aur Darmiyan in an evocative piece called the Fifth Trial. After being fined Rs 25, the judge said to him, “Manto sahib, I consider you a great short- story writer of our time. The reason I wanted to get together with you was that I didn’t wish you to go back thinking that I am not an admirer.” Manto then asked: “If you’re an admirer, sir, then why did you fine me?” The judge smiled and replied: “Why? I’ll give you my answer after a year.” 6 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

Manto courted controversy for talking about prostitutes in Kali Shalvar. In Boo and Thanda Ghosht, he talked about sexual perversions like necrophilia. Most of his short stories asserted that Partition had brought out the worst in people. On Partition In one of his earliest works, A Tale of 1947, Manto wrote about the grim reality of Partition. “…the Hindus who murdered one hundred thousand Muslims may rejoice at the death of Islam when actually Islam has not been affected in the least bit. Those who think religion can be hunted down with guns are stupid. Religion, faith, belief, devotion are matters of the spirit, not of the body. Knives, daggers, and bullets cannot destroy religion,” he wrote. 1.3 TOBA TEK SINGH –THE BASE OF THE STORY ‘Toba Tek Singh’ was, is and will continue to remain one of the most revered famous short stories written by the celebrated Urdu writer Saadat Hasan Manto. Remembered for the incomprehensible babble of the Sikh asylum inmate, Bishen Singh, who cursed both India and Pakistan in the same breath, the story questions the twisted dogmas of both nations even today. Ironically, Manto shared a reciprocal turmoil with his protagonist - both coped with an incurable void after being displaced from a nation they called home, and both died searching for an identity \"on a bit of earth, which had no name.\" Resplendent with anecdotal chapters about Saadat Hasan Manto's growing up years in Amritsar, his adulthood tales in Bombay, and his understanding of partition, is historian Ayesha Jalal's new biography of her uncle, 'The Pity of Partition: Manto's Life, Times, and Work across the India-Pakistan Divide'. An unconstrained access to Manto's papers sowed the idea of a book in Jalal's mind long time ago but it was only after she was invited to deliver a series of Lawrence Stone lectures at Princeton that the concept took shape. \"The letters and photographs in the Manto archives were especially helpful in establishing his relationship with key family members, including his mother and sister, as well as key literary figures and film personalities with whom he met in Amritsar, Bombay, New Delhi and Lahore and forged significant friendships. The letters were also useful in providing evidence of the kinds of responses Manto received from his readers in his lifetime from across the subcontinent. I found them especially illuminating in throwing light on social attitudes at the time on issues like obscenity, prostitution and anti-colonialism, to name just a few,\" she says. Jalal's decision to focus on Manto's stories about partition demonstrates her familiarity with the subject. His stories, most certainly, are laudable as a literary body of work but Jalal's understanding of him is more than just a unique writer. Manto, in h er book, comes across as an epitomical literary figure. Naturally, she is quick to defend him 7 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

when questioned about Manto's obscenity trials, \"while Manto was booked on obscenity charges in both colonial India and post-colonial Pakistan, he was never formally indicted. This suggests that colonial laws on obscenity notwithstanding, the attitudes of the judiciary in that period were still relatively accommodating and liberal.\" Responding to a question on how, according to her, would the present day moral police react to his stories reflecting the anarchy in present day politics, religion and society, she says, \"In the current environment when moral advocacy, loosely defined, serves narrow political ends, Manto’s audacious choice of themes would almost certainly incur the wrath of the self-styled guardians of morality, whether religious or secular, in both India and Pakistan.\" Daring has forever been associated with modern, thanks to the guild of Progressive Writers' Association (PWA) that emerged in the pre-partition British-India with writers like Ismat Chughtai, Rajinder Singh Bedi, Krishan Chander, Faiz Ahmed Faiz and Manto himself. These were people who advocated equality and attacked social injustice and orthodoxy through their writings. We may choose to believe that times have changed and the nation has indeed progressed, but in reality, the demand for change in mindset of the nation as a whole will always remain. Commenting on the acceptance of 'modern writing' in Pakistan, Jalal says, \"There are se gments of the reading public that have taken to ‘modern writing’ with alacrity while others, more hidebound, remain averse to the new directions Urdu literature is taking. There are several contemporary authors in Pakistan who continue to comment on its contemporary woes, most notably Intezar Hussain, Bano Qudsia, and Anwar Maqsood. And if you include writings in regional languages and English, the list extends much further.\" India and Pakistan share a common episode in history that evokes memories, mostly bitter and biased. But Manto’s depiction of the partition and its consequences through his stories is evocative of the loss that both nations suffered. He lets the modern -day reader go back in time to experience the six-decade-old massacre and chaos. On being questioned about how greatly he is revered outside India and Pakistan, Jalal says, \"Manto has occupied a distinctive niche across the 1947 divide in the absence of any kind of state patronage in either Pakistan or India. Even as the two sub-continental neighbours are in the grip of rising social conservatism sparked by a surge in outward religiosity, Manto’s writings have been gaining greater recognition and a wider following. The trend is likely to grow as translations of his works become available in the different regional languages of the subcontinent.\"Saadat Hasan Manto wrote in Urdu and most of what we’ve read of him are translations of his original works into English and other languages. Nevertheless, every story with every read stirs up the intended reaction. “Translation is an art that not everyone can engage in successfully, simply because they are proficient in two languages. And often, the nuances and turns 8 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

of the phrases which are simply impossible to capture in English are lost in translation,” says Jalal. Ayesha Jalal is an historian and the director of the Center for South Asian and Indian Ocean Studies at Tufts University, Massachusetts. This is her fifth book. 1.4TOBA TEK SINGH –TEXT Two or three years after Partition, the governments of Pakistan and India decided to exchange lunatics in the same way that they had exchanged civilian prisoners. In other words, Muslim lunatics in Indian madhouses would be sent to Pakistan, while Hindu and Sikh lunatics in Pakistani madhouses would be handed over to India. I can't say whether this decision made sense or not. In any event, a date for the lunatic exchange was fixed after high level conferences on both sides of the border. All the details were carefully worked out. On the Indian side, Muslim lunatics with relatives in India would be allowed to stay. The remainder would be sent to the frontier. Here in Pakistan nearly all the Hindus and Sikhs were gone, so the question of retaining non-Muslim lunatics did not arise. All the Hindu and Sikh lunatics would be sent to the frontier in police custody. I don't know what happened over there. When news of the lunatic exchange reached the madhouse here in Lahore, however, it became an absorbing topic of discussion among the inmates. There was one Muslim lunatic who had read the newspaper Zamindar every day for twelve years. One of his friends asked him: \"Maulvi Sahib! What is Pakistan?\" After careful thought he replied: \"It's a place in India where they make razors.\" Hearing this, his friend was content. One Sikh lunatic asked another Sikh: \"Sardar ji, why are they sending us to India? We don't even speak the language.\" \"I understand the Indian language,\" the other replied, smiling. \"Indians are devilish people who strut around haughtily,\" he added. While bathing, a Muslim lunatic shouted \"Long live Pakistan!\" with such vigor that he slipped on the floor and knocked himself out. There were also some lunatics who weren't really crazy. Most of these inmates were murderers whose families had bribed the madhouse officials to have them committed in order to save them from the hangman's noose. These inmates understood something of why India had been divided, and they had heard of Pakistan. But they weren't all that well informed. The newspapers didn't tell them a great deal, and the illiterate guards who looked after them weren't much help either. All they knew was that there was a man named Mohammed Ali Jinnah, whom people called the Qaid-e-Azem. He had made a separate country for the Muslims, called Pakistan. They had no idea where it was, or what its boundaries might be. This is why all the lunatics who hadn't entirely lost their senses were perplexed as to whether 9 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

they were in Pakistan or India. If they were in India, then where was Pakistan? If they were in Pakistan, then how was it that the place where they lived had until recently been known as India? One lunatic got so involved in this India/Pakistan question that he became even crazier. One day he climbed a tree and sat on one of its branches for two hours, lecturing without pause on the complex issues of Partition. When the guards told him to come down, he climbed higher. When they tried to frighten him with threats, he replied: \"I will live neither in India nor in Pakistan. I'll live in this tree right here!\" With much difficulty, they eventually coaxed him down. When he reached the ground he wept and embraced his Hindu and Sikh friends, distraught at the idea that they would leave him and go to India. One man held an M.S. degree and had been a radio engineer. He kept apart from the other inmates, and spent all his time walking silently up and down a particular footpath in the garden. After hearing about the exchange, however, he turned in his clothes and ran naked all over the grounds. There was one fat Muslim lunatic from Chiniot who had been an enthusiastic Muslim League activist. He used to wash fifteen or sixteen times a day, but abandoned the habit overnight. His name was Mohammed Ali. One day he announced that he was the Qaid-e-Azem, Mohammed Ali Jinnah. Seeing this, a Sikh lunatic declared himself to be Master Tara Singh. Blood would have flowed, except that both were reclassified as dangerous lunatics and confined to separate quarters. There was also a young Hindu lawyer from Lahore who had gone mad over an unhappy love affair. He was distressed to hear that Amritsar was now in India, because his beloved was a Hindu girl from that city. Although she had rejected him, he had not forgotten her after losing his mind. For this reason he cursed the Muslim leaders who had split India into two parts, so that his beloved remained Indian while he became Pakistani. When news of the exchange reached the madhouse, several lunatics tried to comfort the lawyer by telling him that he would be sent to India, where his beloved lived. But he didn't want to leave Lahore, fearing that his practice would not thrive in Amritsar. In the European Ward there were two Anglo-Indian lunatics. They were very worried to hear that the English had left after granting independence to India. In hushed tones, they spent hours discussing how this would affect their situation in the madhouse. Would the European Ward remain, or would it disappear? Would they be served English breakfasts? What, would they be forced to eat poisonous bloody Indian chapattis instead of bread? One Sikh had been an inmate for fifteen years. He spoke a strange language of his own, constantly repeating this nonsensical phrase: \"Upri gur gur di annexe di be-dhiyan o mung di daal of di lalteen.\"2 He never slept. According to the guards, he hadn't slept a wink in fifteen years. Occasionally, however, he would rest by propping himself against a wall. 10 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

His feet and ankles had become swollen from standing all the time, but in spite of these physical problems he refused to lie down and rest. He would listen with great concentration whenever there was discussion of India, Pakistan and the forthcoming lunatic exchange. Asked for his opinion, he would reply with great seriousness: \"Upri gur gur di annexe di be- dhiyana di mung di daal of di Pakistan gornament.\"3 Later he replaced \"of di Pakistan gornament\" with \"of di Toba Tek Singh gornament.\" He also started asking the other inmates where Toba Tek Singh was, and to which country it belonged. But nobody knew whether it was in Pakistan or India. When they argued the question they only became more confused. After all, Sialkot had once been in India, but was apparently now in Pakistan. Who knew whether Lahore, which was now in Pakistan, might not go over to India tomorrow? Or whether all of India might become Pakistan? And was there any guarantee that both Pakistan and India would not one day vanish altogether? This Sikh lunatic's hair was unkempt and thin. Because he washed so rarely, his hair and beard had matted together, giving him a frightening appearance. But he was a harmless fellow. In fifteen years, he had never fought with anyone. The attendants knew only that he owned land in Toba Tek Singh district. Having been a prosperous landlord, he suddenly lost his mind. So his relatives bound him with heavy chains and sent him off to the madhouse. His family used to visit him once a month. After making sure that he was in good health, they would go away again. These family visits continued for many years, but they stopped when the India/Pakistan troubles began. This lunatic's name was Bashan Singh, but everyone called him Toba Tek Singh. Although he had very little sense of time, he seemed to know when his relatives were coming to visit. He would tell the officer in charge that his visit was impending. On the day itself he would wash his body thoroughly and comb and oil his hair. Then he would put on his best clothes and go to meet his relatives. If they asked him any question he would either remain silent or say: \"Upri gur gur di annexe di be-dhiyana di mung di daal of di laaltein.\" Bashan Singh had a fifteen-year-old daughter who grew by a finger's height every month. He didn't recognize her when she came to visit him. As a small child, she used to cry whenever she saw her father. She continued to cry now that she was older. When the Partition problems began, Bashan Singh started asking the other lunatics about Toba Tek Singh. Since he never got a satisfactory answer, his concern deepened day by day. Then his relatives stopped visiting him. Formerly he could predict their arrival, but now it was as though the voice inside him had been silenced. He very much wanted to see those people, who spoke to him sympathetically and brought gifts of flowers, sweets and clothing. 11 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

Surely they could tell him whether Toba Tek Singh was in Pakistan or India. After all, he was under the impression that they came from Toba Tek Singh, where his land was. There was another lunatic in that madhouse who thought he was God. One day, Bashan Singh asked him whether Toba Tek Singh was in Pakistan or India. Guffawing, he replied: \"Neither, because I haven't yet decided where to put it!\" Bashan Singh begged this \"God\" to resolve the status of Toba Tek Singh and thus end his perplexity. But \"God\" was far too busy to deal with this matter because of all the other orders that he had to give. One day Bashan Singh lost his temper and shouted: \"Upri gur gur di annexe di be-dhiyana di mung di daal of wahay Guru ji wa Khalsa and wahay Guru ji ki fatah. Jo bolay so nahal sat akal!\" By this he might have meant: \"You are the God of the Muslims. If you were a Sikh God then you would certainly help me.\" A few days before the day of the exchange, one of Bashan Singh's Muslim friends came to visit from Toba Tek Singh. This man had never visited the madhouse before. Seeing him, Bashan Singh turned abruptly and started walking away. But the guard stopped him. \"He's come to visit you. It's your friend Fazluddin,\" the guard said. Glancing at Fazluddin, Bashan Singh muttered a bit. Fazluddin advanced and took him by the elbow. \"I've been planning to visit you for ages, but I haven't had the time until now,\" he said. \"All your relatives have gone safely to India. I helped them as much as I could. Your daughter Rup Kur . . .\" Bashan Singh seemed to remember something. \"Daughter Rup Kur,\" he said. Fazluddin hesitated, and then replied: \"Yes, she's . . . she's also fine. She left with them.\" Bashan Singh said nothing. Fazluddin continued: \"They asked me to make sure you were all right. Now I hear that you're going to India. Give my salaams to brother Balbir Singh and brother Wadhada Singh. And to sister Imrat Kur also . . . Tell brother Balbir Singh that I'm doing fine. One of the two brown cows that he left has calved. The other one calved also, but it died after six days. And . . . and say that if there's anything else I can do for them, I'm always ready. And I've brought you some sweets.\" Bashan Singh handed the package over to the guard. \"Where is Toba Tek Singh?\" he asked. Fazluddin was taken aback. \"Toba Tek Singh? Where is it? It's where it's always been,\" he replied. \"In Pakistan or in India?\" Bashan Singh persisted. Fazluddin became flustered. \"It's in India. No no, Pakistan.\" Bashan Singh walked away, muttering: \"Upar di gur gur di annexe di dhiyana di mung di daal of di Pakistan and Hindustan of di dar fatay mun!\" 12 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

Finally all the preparations for the exchange were complete. The lists of all the lunatics to be transferred were finalized, and the date for the exchange itself was fixed. The weather was very cold. The Hindu and Sikh lunatics from the Lahore madhouse were loaded into trucks under police supervision. At the Wahga border post, the Pakistani and Indian officials met each other and completed the necessary formalities. Then the exchange began. It continued all through the night. It was not easy to unload the lunatics and send them across the border. Some of them didn't even want to leave the trucks. Those who did get out were hard to control because they started wandering all over the place. When the guards tried to clothe those lunatics who were naked, they immediately ripped the garments off their bodies. Some cursed, some sang, and others fought. They were crying and talking, but nothing could be understood. The madwomen were creating an uproar of their own. And it was cold enough to make your teeth chatter. Most of the lunatics were opposed to the exchange. They didn't understand why they should be uprooted and sent to some unknown place. Some, only half-mad, started shouting \"Long live Pakistan!\" Two or three brawls erupted between Sikh and Muslim lunatics who became enraged when they heard the slogans. When Bashan Singh's turn came to be entered in the register, he spoke to the official in charge. \"Where is Toba Tek Singh?\" he asked. \"Is it in Pakistan or India?\" The official laughed. \"It's in Pakistan,\" he replied. Hearing this, Bashan Singh leapt back and ran to where his remaining companions stood waiting. The Pakistani guards caught him and tried to bring him back to the crossing point, but he refused to go. \"Toba Tek Singh is here!\" he cried. Then he started raving at top volume: \"Upar di gur gur di annexe di be-dhiyana mang di daal of di Toba Tek Singh and Pakistan!\" The officials tried to convince him that Toba Tek Singh was now in India. If by some chance it wasn't they would send it there directly, they said. But he wouldn't listen. Because he was harmless, the guards let him stand right where he was while they got on with their work. He was quiet all night, but just before sunrise he screamed. Officials came running from all sides. After fifteen years on his feet, he was lying face down on the ground. India was on one side, behind a barbed wire fence. Pakistan was on the other side, behind another fence. Toba Tek Singh lay in the middle, on a piece of land that had no name. 1.5 THEMES IN TOBE TEK SINGH TRAGEDY 13 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

The story is set in the background of the biggest tragedy and episode of violence in the history of independent India. The communal venom and bloodshed marred the whole event and had consequences for the entire populations of the two countries. The tragedy and its note are loud and clear all through the text of the story. We recapitulate the event through the perspectives of different people, be it the authority or the prisoner. SEPARATION Partition brought separation of families and nationalities. People became stranger in their won houses and land overnight. This was particularly true for Bishen Singh who could not even find his town of Toba Tek Singh because no one knew in which country it would end up. He had his house in Pakistan but his home was in India as his entire family had relocated to India. This conundrum and conflict is something that generations after Independence had to counter and heal from. Partition of the subcontinent into two separate geographical entities was that calamitous event in its history that changed not only its physical boundaries forever but also altered the lives of its people in an irrevocable manner. The horror, the madness, the bestiality, the violence, arson, looting and rape that followed in the wake of the political decision was unprecedented. Suddenly, overnight, all those secure walls of a shared tradition, shared culture, shared history came crumbling down. People of different communities, who till then had led a harmonious and peaceful co-existence, now turned into enemies. Reason was the first casualty and fear and then rage were its outcome. Neighbours who till yesterday would have died for each other nowthirsted for one another’ss blood simply because they belonged to different communities. Scenes of senseless carnage were witnessed everywhere. A communal frenzy, a hypnotic obsession with violence overtook the people on both sides of the dividing line. It was ironical that the people of the same country who had set an example of winning a struggle in a non- violent manner, following the ideals of Gandhi and had thrown off the yoke of British subjugation, would now turn against each other. Certainly these were demented times when people had no consideration for either young or old, child or woman and all suffered a horrifying fate. If any managed to escape physical violence or torture, the memory of what they witnessed scarred their minds forever and none emerged unscathed from the holocaust. For writers who wrote around that time it became almost an inward compulsion to write about the Partition of the country. For most of them the memory of what they had suffered or witnessed was too recent to allow for objectivity in their writings about it. There was an obsessive preoccupation with violence as they had been sufferers, eye-witnesses and tragic participants in the horrendous events. The horrors suffered and witnessed had become a part of their experiential world. They were too near and too much involved in the holocaust. The stories that were written immediately after the Partition, therefore, tend to recreate the horror 14 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

in all its details without many attempts at objectivity or an imaginative rendering of the events being described. These stories could not even offer any historical explanation nor see any political necessity for the suffering. They are marked by a sense of rage and helplessness and also a sense of incomprehensibility of it all due to its utter meaninglessness. Instead of just numbers — so many dead, so many wounded, so many raped, so many homeless—these fictional historical narratives tried to show the actual suffering that lay behind each face, each number. For a historian the holocaust of 1947 can perhaps be covered in two volumes of objective recording. For the fiction writer, however, the sad event threw up unlimited possibilities of delineation and treatment as there were innumerable faces of grief and an equally limitless number of questions that erupted from the sudden barbarism and bestiality of man to man. The writers tried to grapple with their fractured psyches with the basic question ‘why’? Why did the shared social, cultural, traditional and historical fabric collapse? Why did we turn killers and violators? Why did we forget the past? Why did we give in to rage rather than reason— the questions are endless. The fictional writings took up these questions in one story after another, in one novel after another, looking for answers but failing to find any. Fictional historical narratives about the Partition developed basically on two lines. There were those who re-evoked the senseless carnage, the horrifying brutalities and the numbing meaningless violence that the different communities perpetrated on each other. Then there were those narratives that focused on the fear, the agony, the insanity which resulted from the sudden dislocation of people, uprooting them cruelly from places which had been home to them for generations, only to be thrown into a strange alien land and told that henceforth this was their home. The suffering and anguish that resulted from being wrenched away from familiar surroundings forever, is sensitively delivered in these stories. Manto’s “Toba Tek Singh” deals with the theme of Partition concentrating on the tragedy of dislocation and exile. The madman Bishan Singh who hails from a small village in Punjab, Toba Tek Singh, is unable to take in the fact that the division of the subcontinent requires him to cross the border line and forget his homeland forever. In the story, we shall see shortly, how the man becomes the place and Bishan Singh refuses to comply with the orders, preferring to give up his life instead. What emerges from this story is the realization that geographical divisions are possible but how can one divide a shared history, a shared memory and a shared consciousness? It is obvious that the decision makers never took the ordinary man into account and what the Partition would do to him. Thus, they could never anticipate the great human tragedy that followed in the wake of their political decision. IDENTITY Bishan Singh was a Sikh who was born in Pakistan belonged to India. This was an example of the crisis of identity that resulted from the 1947 partition. There were millions like Bishan Singh who either lost their land, their families, their religion or their life, just in the name of political independence and declaration. 15 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

The partition itself was based on religious identity but it was never justified by religion itself. The political war demolished the natural identities of millions of people and made them refugees in their own countries in matter of seconds. Sanity Manto plays cleverly with the idea of sanity in this story. The world outside the asylum is represented as chaotic and insane whereas the world inside it is made out to be calm and rational. The clinical insane seemed to be more receptive of each other’s differences and difficulties whereas the bright minds on the political stages seemed to be baying for blood of the ‘other nation’. Arguably, it is their ideology which is often arbitrary and expedient. The idea of madness and sanity is something that is often not discussed as it seems so clear and well defined but in fact it is anything but that. Sanity and rationality are determined by perspectives. Hence, to a mental patient like Bishan Singh the blazing worlds of India and Pakistan seemed illogical and insane against the simple idea of peaceful home in Toba Tek Singh. 1.6 IDENTITY OF A PERSON LINKED TO PLACE The last section of the story is a logical progression of the plot. Having familiarized us with the situation Manto is now going to work towards a climax and then a resolution. In the preceding sections Manto has been able to bring out the intensity of feelings that a man can have towards the place where he belongs and comes from. Even though Bishan Singh has been locked up in the asylum for the past fifteen years, yet it is crucial for him to know where Toba Tek Singh lies now; here or there, in Pakistan or Hindustan and he asks the same question to the concerned official when the Hindu and Sikh madmen are taken to Wagah, the border between the two countries for an exchange with those Muslim madmen who wait on the other side to be transferred to Pakistan. This time, however, Bishan Singh gets a definite answer and the official laughs and says that Toba Tek Singh is in Pakistan. The description that follows is almost heart rending even though the narrative tone remains dispassionate and detached. Like a trapped animal Bishan Singh refuses to go to the other side and runs back to where his friends were. When the Pakistani policeman catches hold of him and tries to lead him back to the other side he starts shouting at the top of his voice, ‘Opar di rumbletumble di annexed of the thoughtless of the green lentils of Toba Tek Singh and Pakistan.’ The two however are divided here because though Toba Tek Singh is in Pakistan yet Bishan Singh cannot be a Pakistani since he is a Sikh, notwithstanding the fact that all his life he has lived in Toba Tek Singh. For some Muslims their religious identities did become their national identities but what about those countless millions like Bishan Singh for whom the same didn’t happen? This is the very crucial question being implicitly asked in the apparent gibberish of the mad Bishan Singh. 16 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

The Person Becomes the Place In a skillful and obtrusive manner, Manto has succeeded in investing the identity of a person with the identity of a place. Bishan Singh and Toba Tek Singh have almost become synonymous and interchangeable by the time we come to the last two paragraphs of the story. The plot is gradually moving towards its climax wherein after should also lie a resolution. The climax does take place but the resolution which should have followed inevitably in its footsteps evades the dialectic of the story. Bishan Singh refuses to be coaxed into believing that Toba Tek Singh will be moved where he wants it to be moved. He runs and stands firmly at a spot in the middle of the two countries refusing to be stirred. The narrator observes that since he was a harmless enough fellow, the officials let him remain where he was and carry on with the rest of the proceedings. It is just before dawn that everyone hears a piercing cry coming out of Bishan Singh. The man, who had stood on his legs day and night for all of fifteen years spent in the asylum, now lies face down on the ground. On one side of him lay Hindustan and on the other lay Pakistan: ‘In the middle on a strip of no man’s land lay Toba Tek Singh.’ In his death Bishan Singh succeeds in avoiding the exile that stares him in the face. In his death too he is able to determine where Toba Tek Singh lay for him. The person and the place merge into one. • The Unresolved Questions The person ultimately becomes the place. But does anything get resolved in the larger contest of things? Can everyone have the freedom of making a choice and a decision as that available to Bishan Singh? Is he the one who is mad in choosing death over being uprooted and humiliation and a severance from all that was familiar or are those mad who choose to flee to a strange land to turn into refugees just to escape the slaughter. These are the questions that the ending of the story leaves unanswered. Partition itself is rejected completely in the protest lodged in the physical death of Bishan Singh. Madness thus becomes a metaphor for sanity in one sense and for Partition itself in the other because the incomprehensibility that attends dementia is the same as the one that was ubiquitous in the division of the two countries. The whole Partition was an act of insanity which undoubtedly damaged the psyche Black Ice Software LLC Demo version 79 of the people driving some to despair while others to rage which blinded them to all feelings of compassion and kinship. A severance from ones roots, a sudden displacement from familiar surroundings was enough to drive a man insane because a place was not just physical surroundings of the four walls of one’s house or the lanes and by lanes of one’s neighbourhood. It was much more than that. It was the security of the known and the familiar, it was the deep roots of tradition and culture that one carried wherever one might go. It was impossible to sever these ties overnight. Such a severance can only lead to madness. Manto himself went through this experience when he migrated to Pakistan against his will. 17 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

1.7SUMMARY  Manto’s writing in general, and “Toba Tek Singh” in particular, was coloured by his own mental health problems, namely alcohol addiction and possibly depression.  Even the choice to use a mental asylum to reflect the “madness” of partition was intimately related to his experience. However, more than just this, “Toba Tek Singh” and the character of Bishan Singh is a symbolic commentary on the psychological trauma of the human displacement brought about by partition; perhaps also the author’s own displacement and uncertainty about identity.  The specific subcontinental context was important in terms of attitudes towards, and treatment of, the mentally ill around the time of partition. Importantly, Manto’s work started a trend of writing about mental illness and partition; later authors followed suit.  This may have helped audiences to go some way towards processing their psychological trauma. Although this analysis has focused specifically on “Toba Tek Singh,” references to mental illness and psychological distress are prevalent in many of Manto’s other stories, “Khol Do” being just one example.  The broad range of Manto’s corpus of work now needs to be examined from this angle in order to shed further light on the relationship between his literature and mental illness in the Indian subcontinent. 1.8 KEYWORD  Psychological - of, affecting, or arising in the mind; related to the mental and emotional state of a person.  Trauma -a deeply distressing or disturbing experience.  Communal venom – negative news spread by the people which goes against religion.  British subjugation - the act of defeating people or a country and ruling them in a way that allows them no freedom 1.9LEARNING ACTIVITY 1. What do you learn about partition through this book? ___________________________________________________________________________ ___________________________________________________________________________ 2. State the psychological pain of the prisoners. 18 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

___________________________________________________________________________ ___________________________________________________________________________ 1.10 UNIT END QUESTIONS A. Descriptive Questions Short Questions 1. Why was partition a curse for people? 2. Write short note on the life of the author. 3. Elaborate the themes of this novel. 4. Write about the atmosphere in the prison. 5. How is identity important here? Long Questions 1. Pains fill the hearts of the people. Explain through the story. 2. Describe connection of the personal life and the psychology of the story. 3. Describe the themes of the story Toba Tek Singh. 4. At the end of the story, how does Bishan Singh try to resolve his frustration? Is he successful? Explain. 5. The nonsense phrase, which Bishan Singh utters from time to time, changes during the course of the story. What is the significance of the words that are changed? B. Multiple Choice Questions 1.Manto shared a -----------------------------------------with his protagonist - both coped with an incurable void after being displaced from a nation they called home a. reciprocal turmoil b. depression c. Psychological problem d. Historical views 2. The ----------------------------------and bloodshed marred the whole event and had consequences for the entire populations of the two countries. a. communal venom b. depression c. Psychological problem d. Historical views 3. There was one fat ---------------------------------------from Chiniot who had been an enthusiastic Muslim League activist. 19 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

a. Book on partition b. letters and photographs c. Muslim lunatic d. jailor 4. Bishan Singh was a Sikh who was born in Pakistan belonged to India, this was an example of the --------------------------------------------that resulted from the 1947 partition. a. Historical views b. depression c. crisis of identity d. logical progression 5.Manto’s writing in general, and “Toba Tek Singh” in particular, was coloured by his own mental health problems, namely ---------------------------------------and possibly depression. a. depression b. compensation c. logical depression d. alcohol addiction Answers 1-a, 2-a, 3-c. 4-c, 5-d 1.11REFERENCES References book  Akhtar, Salim and Leslie A. Fleming. 1985. “Is Manto Necessary Today?” Journal of South Asian Literature 20 (2): 1-3.  Alter, Stephen. 1994. “Madness and Partition: The Short Stories of Saadat Hasan Manto.” Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics 14:91-100.  Hasan, Khalid. 1984. “Saadat Hasan Manto: Not of Blessed Memory.” Annual of Urdu Studies 4:85-95.  Hashmi, Ali M. 2012. “Manto: A Psychological Portrait.” Social Scientist 40 (11/12): 5-15.  Hashmi, Ali M. and Muhammad, A. Aftab. 2013. “The Touch of Madness: Manto as a Psychiatric Case Study.” Pakistani Journal of Medical Sciences 29 (5): 1094-1098.  Ispahani, Mahnaz. 1988. “Saadat Hasan Manto.” Grand Street 7 (4): 183-193. 20 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

 Jain, Sanjeev and Alok Sarin. 2012. “Partition and the Mentally Ill.” Economic and Political Weekly 47 (29): 4.  Jalal, Ayesha. 2013. The Pity of Partition: Manto’s Life, Times, and Work Across the India-Pakistan Divide. Princeton: Princeton University Press.  Manto, Saadat H. 1955. “Toba Tek Singh,” In Phundne, edited by Saadat Manto, 7- 20. Lahore: Maktabah-e-Jadid.  Saint, Tarun K. 2012. “The Long Shadow of Manto’s Partition Narratives: ‘Fictive’ Testimony to Historical Trauma.” Social Scientist 40 (11/12): 53-62. 21 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

UNIT - 2: LITERARY TEXT: STORIES PART II STRUCTURE 2.0 Learning Objectives 2.1 Introduction 2.2 The Card shaper’s daughter –Analysis 2.3 Life and works of Vaikom Muhamad Basheer 2.4 Vaikom Muhamad Basheer –The political view 2.5 Summary 2.6 Keywords 2.7 Learning Activity 2.8 Unit End Questions 2.9 References 2.0 LEARNING OBJECTIVES After studying this unit, you will be able to:  Explain the writings ,themes  State the themes and the symbols in the story  The life and works of the author 2.1 INTRODUCTION ‘Indian English literature (IEL) refers to the body of work by writers in India who write in the English language and whose native or co-native language could be one of the numerous languages of India. It is also associated with the works of members of the Indian diaspora, such as V. S. Naipaul, Kiran Desai, Jhumpa Lahiri, Agha Shahid Ali, Rohinton Mistry and Salman Rushdie, who are of Indian descent.’ Dean Mahomet, an Indian traveler, surgeon and entrepreneur, is the first Indian writer to have published a book in English, The Travels of Dean Mahomet in (1794). Lord Macaulay played a major role in introducing English and western concepts to education in India. Macaulay's Minute on Education, February 2, 1835, recommended the use of English as the medium of instruction in all schools, and the training of English-speaking Indians as teachers. Though this was for the benefit of the Britishers, to help them have English speaking people who could help their rule in India, it also was responsible for the establishment of schools and higher education institutions in many parts of the country. Even Universities modelled on the University of London and using English as the medium of instruction were established in Bombay, Calcutta and Madras. K. R. Srinivisa 22 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

Iyengar termed English language as the Suez Canal, which connected the intellectual contact between India and England. In his book Indian Writing in English K.R. Srinivas Iyengar said that there were variety of writers in English. “First, those who have acquired their entire education in English schools and universities. Second, Indians who have settled abroad, but are constantly in touch with the changing surrounding and traditions of their country of adoption. And finally, Indians who have acquired English as a second language.” 2.2THE CARD SHAPER’S DAUGHTER –ANALYSIS As mentioned earlier, ‘The Card Sharper’s Daughter’ belongs to the group of stories known as the Sthalam stories. All the features of a Sthalam story discussed above are therefore quite evident in this story too. The ‘humble historian’ makes an early appearance in the story and states in a mock serious tone that he is going to relate the history of how the arch card sharper Poker was done in by the slow-witted Muthapa and how the latter thus succeeded in winning the hand of Zainaba who is Pokker’s daughter There is the same exaggeration of a small event which lays bare its triviality when considered against the grandiose style used for narrating the same. We witness the use of the whole rigmarole of historical writing in the narrativization of this small event and we are also consistently exposed to a parody of political discourse throughout the narrative The narrator remains an amused observer merely recording objectively the ‘essential facts’ concerning the debunking of Poker by Muthapa. Yet the emphasis placed on ‘essential facts’ springs from the desire to give a resemblance of history to the narrative. In a tongue-in-cheek manner Basheer has a dig at Marxist learnings when he describes Zainaba and Muthapa’s love affair as a people’s movement and makes a liberal use of the Marxist terminology in describing people and situations so that the small village, the Sthalam becomes a microcosm of a polity. Irony, satire and humor are all present in a deliberate parodying of not only historical fiction but also romantic conventions and political discourse. Let us look at the story in detail to see how this is achieved. Detailed Analysis The First Person Narrator The sense of the teller and the tale is created right from the first sentence itself and the ‘performance’ of the story begins. From the manner in which an emphasis is placed on ‘the moral’ of the story the teller’s apparent aim seems to be didactic. A sense of curiosity is aroused by placing hints that the story may go against the fair sex since ‘girls will find it neither amusing nor enlightening.’ Sweeping statements however, put the reader on guard — why murder all daughters in cold blood? We might well ask ourselves this question. The first person narrator, who has set the ball rolling, now makes his appearance as the ‘I’ of the story and indicates that what he has just said is not a matter of personal opinion. He implies that he is the narrator as well as the writer here for he mentions his lady readers who might get incensed by his ‘blatantly misogynist observations’ and he hopes they would not 23 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

condemn him ‘to eternal damnation’. The sense of the teller and the tale is going to be present throughout. The point of view is going to be that of this narrator who is will observe the action and the characters and present the same to us. The story proper has not been launched yet. Till now the narrator has merely laid the ground for the narrative to unfold and has succeeded in implying that the subject of the story is a serious one. Yet you cannot fail to notice that the tone he adopts is a mock serious one and in the same mock serious tone he introduces the main characters of the story in one go. Characterisation Ottakkannan Poker is introduced as the ‘tragic protagonist’ and the narrator tells us that all ire of his lady readers should be directed at this figure rather than him for it is Pokker who had made the misogynist observation mentioned earlier. The other characters are Mandan Muthapa and Zainaba who is Poker’s daughter. Muthapa begins as a villain in the story but attains a heroic stature as the story progresses and ends up a chivalrous knight where he takes up arms against Poker. Zainaba proves to be his ‘comrade in arms’. Once again the manner in which these charac ters have been introduced, builds up expectations for a serious story, grand in ‘theme and heroic in statutre. There is talk about a ‘battle’ about ‘comrades in arms’ about ‘chivalry’ about ‘tragedy’. A steady elevation of an event is being effected through a deliberate use of these terms that are drawn from romantic literature about knights and ladies when according to conventions battles are fought by these chivalrous knights for the love of their ladies. Yet a sudden deflation occurs when it turns out to be not a grand tale about knights and ladies but an amusing story about a few simple people in a small village in Kerala. The prosaic fact is mentioned soon after the gradiose introduction of the three main characters. This device of inflation and then deflation creates the mock serious tone in the story. The style is akin to the mock-epic style where grand themes are applied to puny subjects and the disparity makes for humour. Other characters in this Saga are next introduced and we have the two police constables who are called ‘Stooges of the Tyrannical regime’. These are Thorappan Avaran and Driver Pappunni, the two master rogues. Then Anavari Raman Nair and Ponkurissu Thoma, who are referred to as ‘the bigwigs of the local criminal fraternity’ and then there is Ettukali Mammoonhu who is their protege. Apart from these there are about 2200 other villagers and they are all ‘peace lovers’ and have nothing to do with ‘war-mongering reactionaries’. Notice that the main characters all have sobriquets prefixed to their names which in turn describe either some physical feature, a character trait or links them with a past event Thus Ottakkannan means one-eyed; Mandan means slow-witted, Thorapan is the mole, Anawari is the elephant-grabber and Ettukali is the spider. Prefixing desscriptive sobriquets to a person’s name is a regional specificity as it is a common practice in Kerala. These sobriqüets however, also link these characters to other stories in the group because at times they refer to the events that have already occurred in an earlier story e.g.; Anawari Raman Nair is called. Anawari, the elephant-grabber, because he had once mistaken a dung heap for an elephant and had 24 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

stealthily tried to grab it. Similarly Thoma is known as Ponkurissu Thoma because Ponkurissu is a cross made of gold and the sobriquet got attached to Thoma’s name because he had once stolen a gold cross from the Church. Some of these sobriquets work as visual aids and help us imagine what a character may look like eg: Ettukali who is called a spider because of his small head and long drooping moustache. At other times a prefixed sobriquet determines our opinion about a character even before we are given a chance to form one eg: Muthappa is called Mandan, the slow-witted and we begin by precluding that he is a fool. The whole story however is directed at proving that he is no fool after all for he succeeds in outwitting the arch card sharper Pokker whose sobriquet Ottakkannan simply informs us that he is one-eyed. You must have noticed that the world we have just been introduced to is an anti-world peopled by characters who are the dregs of society being rogues and criminals all. They are the marginalised beings and Basheer’s technique of characterization is such that not even for a moment are we made to feel that he is criticizing them or moralizing through them. In fact his attitude towards them is an indulgent one which accepts them along with all their failings. You may recall at this point that Basheer had himself come in close contact with such people on innumerable occasions, especially while being incarcerated along with their likes. He had had the chance to observe them with a humane eye rather than a judgemental one. He had looked at them just as human beings and consequently when he included these characters in his stories, he delineated them with the same indulgence and acceptance. The Event as History Having introduced the main characters and laid the ground for the story to unfold, the narrator comes to the verge of beginning the narrative but not before he has made it clear that what we are about to read is the narrativization of a historical event. Thus the narrator refers to himself as ‘the humble chronicler’ and uses the textual apparatus of historical writing. This is the reason why he draws our attention to procedure. Like a historian he has given us ‘the essential facts’ and again like a historian he is going to base his narrative on these facts as well as whatever other data he has collected from ‘interviewing major characters’. Ultimately he concludes by saying that he is now going to record the whole event for the ‘benefit of students of history’ thus driving the point further. The whole procedure of modern academic historiography will therefore be mobilized in this narrativization of a historical event. Yet the idea itself is undermined and debunked by the fact that the event is of no historical importance at all. It is in fact at best a small event having just local reverberations rather than national or international ones. The triviality of the event exposes and thus parodies the structuring of historical narrative. This parodic debunking of historical writing and also historical explanation is carried on throughout the story. Notice that the narrator makes a very clever use of political rhetoric and leans towards Marxist terminology for describing people and situations. By doing so, while he is depicting the popularity of Marxist ideology, he is also presenting a critique of it by applying it to 25 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

trivial matters like a domestic conflict. Thus the two constables are described as representatives of the ‘tyrannical regime’ meaning the government, the village big-wigs are also named but it is pointed out that they are all peace lovers and have nothing to do with ‘war reactionaries.’ Phrases like ‘tyrannical regime’ and ‘reactionary’ are lifted straight from Marxist terminology. By applying the same to people and situations that have no grandeur or no importance to merit such treatment, Basheer succeeds in making a travesty of the politically charged atmosphere of Kerala which at the time was reeling under the influence of a lot of slogan shouting and political happenings. Laying the Ground for the Narrative to Unfold Having introduced the characters by name, Basheer moves on to now describe them and begin with Ottakkannan Pokker and then proceeds with the descriptions of Zainaba and Muthapa. It is made evident that these three are going to be the main protagonists of the story. In these descriptions a lot of emphasis is placed on the visual, so, while Pokker’s complexion is fair Muthapa is jet black in comparison. If Pokker is ‘one-eyed’ Muthapa ‘is ‘cross-eyed’. Pokker’s teeth are stained red since he is a voracious betel chewer whereas Muthapa’s smile is always charming. Both are therefore almost opposites of each other. Both are known by their respective professions, so, Pokker is called ‘Ottakhannan Pokker, the card-sharper’ while Muthapa is called ‘Mandan Muthapa, the pick pocket’. Pokker’s wife is dead whereas Muthapa’s parents too have both passed away. Zainaba, Pokker’s daughter is the village beauty- and being nineteen years of age is all set to be married off ‘to some hard working young man.’ Pokker is working very hard to collect the money needed for marrying off his daughter. In a racy colloquial style Basheer continues to bring us up to date with the situation and we are next informed of how the one hundred and twenty rupees that Pokker had collected over the years, are already lost. But nobody had stolen it so where had the money gone? In a chatty tone, where the narrator enters the narrative in first person, refreshing the sense of the teller and the tale, he asks the reader to be patient. Thus suspense and curiosity, two important ingredients of a short story, are both brought into play. The build up to the main narrative is however not over yet. It is not sufficient for Basheer to simply mention the respective professions of the arch rivals Pokker and Muthapa. He gives us an in-depth look at how card-sharping or pick pocketing works. As mentioned earlier Basheer had modelled many of the characters in his Sthalam stories on the various ‘jail-birds’ he had met while incarcerated along with them. His behind-the-scenes knowledge about card- sharping and pick- pocketing, could very well spring from the same source. Like any other profession, Basheer gives due respect to these too and in a style which is typically Basheerian, he proceeds to give us an objective description of them. He is not a conscious social reformer, therefore, while he tells us about professions which run against the law, he neither condemns them nor valorizes them in any way. He remains objective as well as slightly amused, using his device of inflation and deflation to create irony, satire as well as humour. Thus, while on the one hand he tells us that card sharping requires brains as well as 26 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

capital, in the next breath we are told what that ‘capital’ is — ‘pack of cards, an old issue of Malayala Manorama and a handful of small stones.’ Any inflated expectations that might have sprung up from the imposing word ‘capital’ are immediately punctured in a manner where the tone remains dead-pan and there is no obvious laughter. An amused smile however, cannot be pushed away. Basheer’s humour therefore is not the raucous kind. In fact, it is very subtle. With Pokker’s cry of ‘Hai Raja ....,’ Basheer makes the card-sharping language come alive for his readers. At this point you must remember that Basheer was writing at a time and place when the literary scene was riddled with conventions of Sanskritized Malayalam writings. In such a milieu he intrudes with not only the colloquial everyday speech of the villagers, but also the language of card sharpers and pickpockets. Basheer believed that each profession creates its own language and the same is very evident in Pokker’s speech as he entices customers to come and play his game. The cry rings in our ears and we can almost visualize him shouting at the top of his voice “Hai Raja.... Come on everybody.... Double your money folks . . . two for one, four for two, the joker makes your fortune. Never mind if you place your money on the numbered cards. It’s your alms for a poor man... hai raja!” The translation can capture the rawness of this language only partially. It would deliver its crispy effects better in the original. As pointed out in the annotations to your text, Basheer used the Mappila dialect of the Malayalee Muslims which was interspersed with-Arabic words. The dialect cannot be reproduced in an English translation exactly but we have come as close as possible in capturing the briskness of the card-shaper’s language. Both Pokker and Muthapa are called artists and Basheer describes in detail how they practice their art. There is a lot of emphasis on the visual and minute observations go in to make up the descriptions of both. The humour is sardonic, tongue- in-check and can be glimpsed in the way Basheer first describes in detail how Pokker cheats his clients and then ends by saying ‘There was no fraud in it really!’ and finds nothing ‘demeaning’ in the profession of a pickpocket. Basheer treats pickpocketing as he would treat any other profession -- in his world there seems to be no disrespect attached with cheats and swindlers and the lies they indulge in. The tone of righteous indignation is entirely missing in Basheer’s narrative for the simple reason that he is not here to sit in any moral judgement on his characters. He is merely an amused observer, a humble chronicler. While the tone is ironic in this sense, at the same time it is mischievous. He seems to take delight in the fast-paced human drama that he records for us here. The sheer energy of life and its celebration by the inhabitants of this village affect our detached observer too and it seems difficult for him to remain detached for long. He is irresistibly drawn towards the ups and downs, the small domestic conflicts the rumours, the gossip, the exaggerations, the posturing of these people. In the process of noting these various things Basheer manages to recreate for us a very realistic picture of an Indian village in Kerala complete with its bustling market day; the mounds of tapioca, coconuts, bananas, and vegetables waiting to be unloaded from the boats at the landing; the obscure little coffee shop 27 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

which serves coffee with jaggery; restaurants which serve tea with boiled black gram, appam, Vada and bananas; buyers and sellers who jostle with one another for best bargains and villagers who feel it their duty to be involved with the issue of Zainaba’s marriage to Muthapa. Visual details, like the ancient silk cotton tree under which Pokker conducts his daily business, also make up the realistic dimension of the village picture we get in this story. In a manner similar to his description of the profession of card-sharping, Basheer describes- for us the modus operandi of a pick-pocket. Having thus generated a suitable interest in both the protagonists he next fans our curiousity further by mentioning that the tale he is now about to unfold describes how ‘Mandan Muthapa, the nitwit, vanquished his nimble witted adversary and won the hand of’ and he leaves us teetering on the edge of suspense. Till this point in the story Basheer has just managed to introduce his characters and set the stage for the action to begin. Unlike the modem short story where character and scene are revealed or implied through dialogue Basheer, like Premchand’s ‘Holy Panchayat’, has devoted a lot of time and space for giving us detailed descriptions regarding both. Can you guess the reason for this? Well, the reason lies in the fact that in telling the story Basheer is following the oral tradition He is writing this story as it would have been narrated by a story teller to his audience. That is why the sense of the teller and the tale was created right in the beginning from the first sentence itself. The conventions of the oral tradition demand that listeners be told about the characters and the setting. They fall in line with the tradition of stories which begins ‘Once upon a time there lived a king. ’The modem element in Basheer’s story however is, that instead of kings and queens or princes and princesses or knights and ladies he talks here about the marginalized sections of society, the thieves, the pickpockets, criminals and so on. And. he talks about them, not with a sense to reform but with sympathy and acceptance. The Plot Having enlightened his readers about the characters and the situation, Basheer is now ready to unfold the main narrative which is about the debunking of the arch card-sharper by the dim-witted Muthapa. At the same time however, the narrative is also about the romantic involvement of Zainaba and Muthapa and about their struggle to get married. The two are linked because it is Zainaba, who helps Muthapa to out-with her father Pokker and Muthapa in turn does so because he wants to marry Zainaba. Keeping true to the parodic mode of the narrative Basheer uses the love affair of Zainaba and Muthapa to make a deliberate mockery of the romantic conventions and the tragic conventions of romantic love stories. He raises their struggle to mock epic heights. With characteristic irony he presents here a love between two riff-raff of society — a pick-pocket and the daughter of a swindler who is caught in the act of stealing a bunch of bananas herself by her lover. Once again her modus operandi is described with interesting details and without any admonition or indignation on the part of the narrator. In this world of criminals and cheats, it is entirely possible to have your lady- 28 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

love too indulging in such nefarious activities. Yet quite characteristically, the event is recorded objectively rather than it being used as a moral platform. The romantic conventions which talk of perfection in their lovers are thus made to stand on their head by the realist Basheer. He seems to be saying here that the love between these two crooks yields as well to romantic treatment as any grand and lofty passion between the knights and ladies of conventional romances. He raises the affair to mock-epic heights and presents it as a people’s movement with the whole village getting involved in Muthapa’s struggle-to win Zainaba’s hand, despite opposition from her father. In such a scenario Pokker comes to represent a reactionary force while Muthapa’s supporters are the radicals. The evet is presented as the narrativization of history and ‘the humble chronicler’ intrudes into the narrative with a reminder that he is narrating a history here. The implements used in historical writing are mobilized once again and it is implied that whatever is being recounted here has emerged from the fact-finding mission of the humble historian. This mission included his interviews of the main characters Muthapa and Zainaba. So he writes: ‘Muthapa testifies to all these facts — Zainaba however, refused to reply when she was con- fronted by this chronicler and asked whether she loved Muthapa. But she was quite certain that Muthapa was not a mandan ‘“Bapa says that out of spite,” she said.’ The rhetorical devices of the grandiose Tone on the one hand and of the undercutting of that grandeur by the triviality of the event at the centre on the other are both at play in this narrativization. The insignificant and the trivial are elevated to the significant and grand heights. A pompous tone is developed and the event becomes a battle for Zainaba’s heart. Yet at the centre of it all, the event is a small event, not one to have any far reaching ramifications. The whole rhetoric therefore serves to expose the triviality of the event which is at the centre of the narrative. Thus, the narrativization becomes a deliberate travesty of the process of historicization of events. Linked to this factor of academic historiography is the use of elements from the discourse of political analysis of historical events. The same is a very common practice in academic historiography and more often than not political ideologies and political rhetoric are a part of the textual apparatus of the historicization of events. In the case of Zainaba and Muthapa, their struggle is presented as a people’s movement with the whole village becoming involved. Muthapa becomes ‘the universally acclaimed leader of the masses’ while Pokker is denounced as a hoarder, a black- marketer and above all ‘a bourgeois reactionary.’ There is a lot of slogan shouting in keeping with the politically charged atmosphere in the village. Basheer is having a dig at the Marxist leanings of the people of Kerala and in a sardonic, tongue-in-cheek manner presents burlesque at its best by applying these grand terms to insignificant and unimposing subjects. With Zainaba’s help Muthapa is able to connive and beat Pokker at his own game. The secret however, is not revealed till the end and Basheer’s talent as a raconteur par excellence is evident in the manner in which he is able to keep his readers and his listeners riveted to the 29 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

narrative in order to find out how Muthapa could win each time he placed a coin on one of Pokker’s cards. The involvement of the onlookers catches on to the readers too as they witness the undoing of the clever Pokker by the slow witted Muthapa. While the crowd applauds Muthapa’s luck, we have an ironic comment from our humble chronicler: ‘There was absolutely no connection between card sharping and luck. Pokker knows this too and is at his wit’s end. Zainaba’s connivance in the game is complete for she offers a lame explanation that probably by now everyone has caught on to the trick. But what this trick is Basheer still withholds from us, whipping our curiosity further and thus maintaining our interest in the narrative till the end. Quite ingeniously Muthapa has hit upon the best method in making Pokker concede to his demand “let me marry Zainaba and I’ll quit card shaping for good.” The ‘valiant villagers’ were firm on this compromise formula. Ultimately Pokker is left with no option and the lovers win. Yet the mystery rankles in Pokker’s flesh like a thorn. He is almost driven mad thinking how Muthapa could beat him at his own game. Eventually, Muthapa reveals the secret and we have a perfect epiphanic moment in the story when everything falls into place. It was Zainaba’s brain-wave and Pokker understands everything in a flash. is left Zainaba who had revealed her father’s secret to Muthapa so the latter could adopt the same strategy at cardsharping and drive her father up against the wall. Ultimately Pokker would have to relent and agree to their marriage. Thus the battle for Zainaba’s heart is won not by any knights in shining armour but by wiles and deceit. Once again there is a deliberate parody of romantic conventions and the humble chronicler has no answer for Pokker when he asks ‘Can you ever trust your daughter?’ The wheel has come full circle and the gets connected to the beginning where the narrator had begun by stating a generality that all daughters ought to be murdered in cold blood! Step by Step he has brought us to the point where we now understand why, such anger against daughters. Being familiar by now with the style and tone we can take the comment with a pinch of salt. While Basheer has presented a parody of romantic conventions in his delineation of the romance between Muthapa and Zainaba, he has at the same time also presented a burlesque of the tragic conventions as well. We witness here not the conventional fall of a prince or king but the fall of the clever card sharper who is beaten at his own game. 2.3LIFE AND WORK OF VAIKOM MUHAMMAD BASHEER Vaikom Muhammad Basheer (21 January 1908 – 5 July 1994) was a Malayalam fiction writer from the state of Kerala in India. He was a humanist, freedom fighter, novelist and short story writer. He is noted for his path-breaking, disarmingly down-to-earth style of writing that made him equally popular among literary critics as well as the common man. He is regarded as one of the most successful and outstanding writers from India. Translations of his works into other languages have won him worldwide acclaim. His notable works include Balyakalasakhi, Shabdangal,Pathummayude Aadu, Mathilukal, Ntuppuppakkoranendarnnu, 30 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

Janmadinam and Anargha Nimisham. He was awarded the Padma Shri in 1982. He is fondly remembered as the Beypore Sultan. Basheer, born in Thalayolaparambu (near Vaikom) Kottayam District, he was the eldest child of his parents. His father was in the timber business as a contractor, but the business did not do well enough for his large family to live in anything approaching luxury. After beginning his education at the local Malayalam medium school, he was sent to the English medium school in Vaikom, five miles away. While at school he fell under the spell of Mahatma Gandhi. He started wearing Khaddar, inspired by the swadeshi ideals. When Gandhi came to Vaikom to participate in the Vaikom Satyagraham (1924) Basheer went to see him. He managed to climb on to the car in which Gandhi travelled and touch his hand, a fond memory Basheer later mentioned in many of his writings. He used to visit Gandhi's Satyagraha Ashram at Vaikom daily. In the book ormakkurippu he has mentioned that he touched Gandhiji and he held Gandhiji’s wrist. And at the evening he told to his mother \"Umma I touched Gandhiji \"And also, he was punished for being late that morning. He resolved to join the fight for an independent India, leaving school to do so while he was in the fifth form. Basheer was known for his perfectly secular attitude, and he treated all religions with respect. Though he used to make comments about other religions in his writings, and used to address his friends as Hindus, or even by using their cast names – reference to his work Manna and Shanka- nobody ever felt any insult because of that. Since there was no active independence movement in Travancore or Kochi – being princely states – he went to Malabar to take part in the Salt Satyagraha in 1930. His group was arrested before they could participate in the satyagraha. Basheer was sentenced to three months imprisonment and sent to Kannur prison. He became inspired by stories of heroism by revolutionaries like Bhagat Singh, Sukhdev and Rajguru, who were executed while he was in Kannur jail. He and about 600 political prisoners then at Kannur were released after the Gandhi-Irwin pact of March 1931. Freed from prison, he organised an anti-British movement and edited a revolutionary journal, Ujjivanam ('Uprising'). A warrant was issued for his arrest and he left Kerala. Having left Kerala, he embarked upon a long journey that took him across the length and breadth of India and to many places in Asia and Africa for seven years, doing whatever work that seemed likely to keep him from starvation. His occupations ranged from that of a loom fitter, fortune teller, cook, newspaper seller, fruit seller, sports goods agent, accountant, watchman, shepherd, hotel manager to living as an ascetic with Hindu saints and Sufi mystics in their hermitages in Himalayas and in the Ganges basin, following their customs and practices, for more than five years. There were times when, with no water to drink, without any food to eat, he came face to face with death. After doing menial jobs in cities such as Ajmer, Peshawar, Kashmir and Calcutta, Basheer returned to Ernakulam in the mid-1930s. While trying his hands at various jobs, like washing 31 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

vessels in hotels, he met a manufacturer of sports goods from Sialkot who offered him an agency in Kerala. And Basheer returned home to find his father's business bankrupt and the family impoverished. He started working as an agent for the Sialkot sports company at Ernakulam. But he lost the agency when a bicycle accident incapacitated him temporarily. On recovering, he resumed his endless hunt for jobs. He walked into the office of a newspaper Jayakesariwhose editor was also its sole employee. He did not have a position to offer, but offered to pay money if Basheer wrote a story for the paper. Thus Basheer found himself writing stories for Jayakesari and it was in this paper that his first story \"Ente Thankam\" (My Darling) was published in the year 1937. A path-breaker in Malayalam romantic fiction, it had its heroine a dark-complexioned hunchback. His early stories were published between 1937 and 1941 in Navajeevan, a weekly published in Trivandrum in those days. At Kottayam (1941–42), he was arrested and put in a police station lock-up, and later shifted to another lock up in Kollam Kasba police station. The stories he heard from policemen and prisoners there appeared in later works, and he wrote a few stories while at the lock-up itself. He spent a long time in lock-up awaiting trial, and after trial was sentenced to two years and six months imprisonment. He was sent to Thiruvananthapuram central jail. While at jail, he forbade M. P. Paul from publishing Balyakalasakhi. He wrote Premalekhanam (1943) while serving his term and published it on his releaseBaalyakaalasakhi was published in 1944 after further revisions, with an introduction by Paul. He then made a career as a writer, initially publishing the works himself and carrying them to homes to sell them. He ran two bookstalls in Ernakulam, Circle Book house and later, Basheer's Bookstall. Once India achieved control of its destiny after obtaining Independence from British rule, he showed no further interest in active politics, though concerns over morality and political integrity are present all over his works. Well into his forties, he surprised many of his acquaintances by marrying a woman much younger than him (Fabi Basheer) and settling down to a life of quiet domesticity with his wife and two children, Anees and Shahina, in Beypore, on the southern edge of Kozhikode. During this period he also had to suffer from mental illness and was twice admitted to mental sanatoriums. He wrote one of his most famous works, Pathummayude Aadu (Pathumma's Goat), while undergoing treatment in a mental hospital inThrissur. The second spell of paranoia occurred after his marriage when he had settled down at Beypore. He recovered both times, and continued his writings. He died in Beypore, on 5 July 1994. Basheer is fondly called as Beypore Sultan (Sultan of Beypore). Though his works have been translated to English and eighteen Indian languages, the peculiarity of the language he uses makes the translations lose a lot of sheen. Basheer is known for his unconventional style of language. He did not differentiate between literary language and the language spoken by the commons and did not care about the grammatical correctness of his sentences. Initially, even his publishers were unappreciative of the beauty of this language; they edited out or modified conversations. Basheer was outraged 32 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

to find his original writings transcribed into \"standardized\" Malayalam, devoid of freshness and natural flow, and he forced them to publish the original one instead of the edited one. Basheer's brother Abdul Khader was a Malayalam teacher. Once while reading one of the stories, he asked Basheer PATTI, \"where are Aakhyas and aakhyathas (related with Malayalam grammar) in this...?\". Basheer shouted at him saying that \"I am writing in normal Malayalam, how people speak. and you don't try to find your stupid 'aakhya and aakhyaada' in this\"!. This points out to the writing style of Basheer, without taking care of any grammar, but only in his own village language. Though he made funny remarks regarding his lack of knowledge in Malayalam, he had a very thorough knowledge about Malayalam. Basheer's contempt for grammatical correctness is exemplified by his statement Ninte Lodukkoos Aakhyaadam! (\"Your 'silly stupid' grammar!\") to his brother, who sermonises him about the importance of grammar (Pathummayude Aadu). An astute observer of human character, he skillfully combined humour and pathos in his works. Love, hunger and poverty, life in prison are recurring themes in his works. There is enormous variety in them – of narrative style, of presentation, of philosophical content, of social comment and commitment. His association with India's independence struggle, the experiences during his long travels and the conditions that existed in Kerala, particularly in the neighborhood of his home and among the Muslim community – all had a major impact on them. Politics and prison, homosexuality, all were grist to his mill. All of Basheer's love stories have found their way into the hearts of readers; perhaps no other writer has had such an influence on the way Malayali’s view of love. The major theme of all Basheer stories is love and humanity. In the story Mucheettukalikkarante Makal (The Card sharp's Daughter), when Sainaba comes out of the water after stealing his bananas, Mandan Muthappa says only one thing: \"Sainaba go home and dry your hair else you may fall sick.\" This fine thread of humanism can be experienced in almost all his stories. Almost all of Basheer's writing can be seen as falling under the heading of prose fiction – short stories and novels, though there is also a one-act play and volumes of essays and reminiscences. Basheer's fiction is very varied and full of contrasts. There are poignant situations as well as merrier ones – and commonly both in the same narrative. There are among his output realistic stories and tales of the supernatural. There are purely narrative pieces and others which have the quality of poems in prose. In all, a superficially simple style conceals a great subtlety of expression. His literary career started off with the novel Premalekhanam, a humorous love story between Keshavan Nair – a young bank employee, an upper caste Hindu (Nair) – and Saramma – an unemployed Christian woman. Hidden underneath the hilarious dialogues we can see a sharp criticism of religious conservatism, dowry and similar conventions existing in society. This was followed by the novel Balyakalasakhi – a tragic love story between Majeed and Suhra – which is among the most important novels in Malayalam literature in spite of its relatively small size (75 pages), and is commonly agreed upon as his magnum opus work. In his 33 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

foreword to Balyakalasakhi, Jeevithathil Ninnum Oru Aedu (A Page from Life), M. P. Paul brings out the beauty of this novel, and how it is different from run-of-the-mill love stories. The autobiographical Janmadinam (\"Birthday\", 1945) is about a writer struggling to feed himself on his birthday. While many of the stories present situations to which the average reader can easily relate, the darker, seamier side of human existence also finds a major place, as in the novel Shabdangal (\"Voices\", 1947), which faced heavy criticism for violence and vulgarity. Ntuppuppakkoranendarnnu (\"My Gran'dad 'ad an Elephant\", 1951) is a fierce attack on the superstitious practices that existed among Muslims. Its protagonist is Kunjupathumma, a naive, innocent and illiterate village belle. She falls in love with an educated, progressive, city-bred man, Nisaar Ahamed. Illiteracy is fertile soil for superstitions, and the novel is about education enlightening people and making them shed age-old conventions. Velichathinentoru Velicham (a crude translation can be 'brightness is very bright!') one of the most quoted Basheer phrases occurs in Ntuppuppaakkoraanaendaarnnu. People boast of the glory of days past, their \"grandfather's elephants\", but that is just a ploy to hide their shortcomings. Mathilukal (Walls) deals with prison life in the pre-independence days. It is a novel of sad irony set against a turbulent political backdrop. The novelist falls in love with a woman sentenced for life who is separated from him by insurmountable walls. They exchange love- promises standing on two sides of a wall, only to be separated without even being able to say good-bye. Before he \"met\" Naraayani, the loneliness and restrictions of prison life was killing Basheer; but when the orders for his release arrive he loudly protests, \"Who needs freedom? Outside is an even bigger jail.\" The novel was later made into a film with same name by Adoor Gopalakrishnan with Mammootty playing Basheer. Sthalathe Pradhana Divyan, Anavariyum Ponkurishum, Mucheettukalikkarante Makal and Ettukali Mammoonju featured the life of real life characters in his native village of Thalayolaparambu (regarded as Sthalam in these works). New application on Basheer named Basheer Malayalathinte Sultan is now available as an iPad application which includes eBooks of all the works of the author, animation of his prominent works like Pathumayude Aadu, Aanapuda, audio book, special dictionaries encloses words used by Basheer, sketches of characters made by renowned artistes and rare photos among others. On his 110th birth anniversary, legendary Malayalam writer Vaikom Muhammad Basheer's name is almost forgotten in his hometown, Thalayolaparambu in Kottayam district. His legacy, as much as his characters – most of them real people he met and grew up with – is slowly dying, says Prof A Kusuman, secretary of Basheer Smaraka Trust, an organization for Basheer enthusiasts in his hometown.Since 2008, Basheer Smaraka Trust has constituted an award, named after the writer, to the best work of fiction in Malayalam. Apart from this annual award, not much has been done here or anywhere in Kerala to preserve the legacy of Muhammad Basheer, feels A KusumanIt is at this point The Basheer Smaraka Trust have 34 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

decided to undertake an ambitious plan to digitally document Basheer’s life in Thalayolaparambu. The Trust with the help of visual story tellers will create a documentary to map Basheer’s surviving characters, landscapes of his hometown featured in his works and the activist that he was.“We have found at least 15 living characters from Basheer’s works in and around Thalayolaparambu. We hope to document all of them”; says Prof. A. Kusuman. The project, which will begin this April, is claimed to be a seminal work on Basheer’s literary world. The headway of the project however is in limbo due to the paucity of funds and The Basheer Trust is asking a financial support from Kerala government. Documenting Basheer’s life involves many challenges. First and foremost, there remain not many people from the old generation who could recount the writer. Many of his characters have either died or were too young when they were appeared in his novels. Probably the oldest person in Basheer’s family who remembers the writer is his 95-year-old cousin Pathumma. 2.4VAIKOM MOHAMMED BASHEER –THE POLITICAL VIEW Vaikom Mohammed Basheer belonged to that rare genre of artists who love the world with all its imperfections rather than to those who go on trying to change it since they can love only a perfect world. It was this understanding of evil as an organic part of creation and the identification with the outcastes, even those the world considers clowns, idiots, cheats and villains whom his magic wand converted into lovable human beings that helped Basheer redraw the map of Malayalam fiction many decades ago. He used to say he was never sure about the Malayalam alphabet; this apparent inadequacy compelled him to invent an idiom that is closest to the everyday life of Malayalis that revolutionised the art of storytelling in the language. He could make his fictional world possible only by radically altering the status quoist vocabulary. Ordinary words picked up from the streets and the inner courtyards of Malabar homes gained a new vibrancy and artistic aura when Basheer employed them in his fresh narrative contexts. His seemingly artless manner had behind it an unarticulated yet profound theory about the use of language in contemporary fiction that taught different lessons to future writers. While the detached humour in O.V. Vijayan, V.K.N [V.K. Narayanankutty Nair], M.P. Narayana Pillai and Paul Zacharia belongs to Basheers lineage, the stylistic simplicity and lyrical quality of Madhavikkutty (Kamala Das), M.T. Vasudevan Nair and M. Mukundan writers very different from Basheer can be traced to the same unique narrative heritage. Of the many stories Basheer told, his own, as told in his autobiography, Ormayude Arakal (The Chambers of Memory), is perhaps the most exciting. Trained in Arabic at home by a musaliyar, he learnt his Koran by the age of eight. Then he studied Malayalam and English, and read his first storybooks from a friend, one Potti, which might have stirred in him the 35 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

desire to tell stories. The names of Mahatma Gandhi and other leaders of the freedom struggle excited the young boy. Basheer has given an account of him literally touching Gandhiji during the Mahatmas visit to his land for the historic Vaikom Satyagraha in March 1924 demanding, for the so-called lower castes, the right of entry into the temple. The call of freedom took Basheer to Malabar, the centre of the nationalist activities in Kerala. He joined the Al-Amin newspaper run by the patriot, Muhammad Abdu Rahman. Basheer participated in the Salt Satyagraha on the Kozhikode beach that landed him in jail. Now he began to feel that Gandhis peaceful ways would not earn freedom for India; he was fascinated by Bhagat Singh and his comrades and moved over to Ujjeevanam (Rejuvenation), which had now turned from a Congress journal into the mouthpiece of the armed struggle against the colonisers. Basheer had to go underground to evade arrest. That was the beginning of seven years of wanderings in a variety of disguises: as a Hindu mendicant, a palmist, a magician’s assistant, an astrologer, a private tutor, a tea shop owner. He also went to meet the film-maker V. Shantaram in an outlandish outfit hoping to join the film industry. Shantaram asked him to learn Marathi and come back. Before he could learn Marathi, a certain Gajanan, impressed by his language skills, employed him as a tutor. He was asked to teach mathematics, and Basheer had no choice but to leave the job and move to Bombay (Mumbai) where he became a physician’s assistant in Kamatipura, the haunt of sex workers, transgender persons and thieves. Next, he ran a night school in Bhindi Bazaar, teaching basic English. It was then the sea called him and he found himself sailing as a khalasi on SS Rizvani carrying Haj pilgrims to Jeddah via the Red Sea. On the way back he landed in what are now parts of Pakistan. He served in a hotel in Karachi and then as a proofreaders copyholder in the Civil and Military Gazette. Basheer had also a pilgrim in him; he visited several holy places of Hindus, Muslims and Christians during his wanderings that made him truly secular. He lived among Hindu sanyasins and Sufis while in North India to discover, in his own words, that aham brahmasmi and anal haq pointed to the same Truth. Ajmer, Peshawar, Kashmir, Kolkata: the vagrants travels ended at Ernakulam (Kochi) in Kerala where he became an agent of sports goods for a firm in Sialkot. The family had gone bankrupt by now as his fathers timber business had declined. An accident saw Basheer deprived of his job too; on recovery he began writing stories for a paper called Jayakesari. His first story Ente Thankam (My Thankam/darling) was typical: it had a dark-complexioned hunchback as its heroine. He also wrote patriotic essays in Rajyabhimani (The Patriot) besides indignant articles and satirical narratives against the Dewan of Travancore. Still unsatisfied, he launched a weekly, Pauranadam (The Citizens Voice), to vent his ire against the system. Again the police were after his blood; he went underground along with K.C. George, a Communist leader. By now he had befriended some major writers of the period, Thakazhi Sivasankara Pillai, S.K. Pottekkat, Uroob [P.C. Kuttikrishnan], Joseph 36 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

Mundassery and Changampuzha Krishna Pillai, among them. Finally, he surrendered to the police on the suggestion of a friendly police officer. The experiences in the lock-up at Kollam gave him plenty to write about. His Premalekhanam (Love-letter), a love story in the lighter vein, was a response to the requests of his fellow prisoners, bored to death reading the Ramayana and the Bible umpteen times. Mathilukal (The Walls), an intense narrative of love and desire in the prison that even forces the protagonist to demand in vain an extension of his jail term, based on which Adoor Gopalakrishnan later made a film, was another product of this jail life. After a stint in Madras (Chennai) with the Jayakeralam weekly, he came back to Ernakulam to run the Circle Book House, later renamed Basheers Book Stall, and to write a popular column for the cartoon magazine Narmada. He had already established his fame as a novelist with Balyakalasakhi (The Childhood Friend), a poignant story of childhood love that won praise from critics such as M.P. Paul. Then followed a break of six years caused by acute insanity, to use Basheers own phrase. Pathummayude Adu (Pathummas Goat) was written in 1959 while he was still under treatment for nervous breakdown. He now found an understanding partner in Fatima Bi, Fabi to him, and shifted to Beypore, where he lived, earning the affectionate nickname Beypore Sultan his own usage turned into a cliche by his readers until his demise at the age of 86 in 1994. He wrote little in the last three decades of his life; he would sit sipping sulaimani (tea) under the shade of his pet mangostein tree, listen to ghazals and keep talking to the pilgrims, who found this frail icon easier to handle than the restless full man in his creative frenzy and wrote endlessly and monotonously about their trip to meet him. Basheers fans would not permit any interrogation of the details of the hagiography built around the cult figure as was proved when N.S. Madhavan, one of the finest contemporary fiction writers of Malayalam and an admirer of Basheer himself, once dared question, on the basis of chronology, the veracity of some of the stories woven around the Sultan in an article. Basheers fictional world is almost indistinguishable from the factual world in which he lived: an autobiographical subtext is always inherent in his fictional discourse. The author himself has traced Anuragathinte Dinangal (The Days of Intimacy) to the diary he had kept of a Hindu girls love for him frustrated by the objection from her parents and Basheers refusal to hurt them; Balyakalasakhi to a real childhood friendship; Pathummayude Adu to people and incidents at home and around; and Mathilukal to an experience in the prison. His works are autobiographical not merely because they recount real episodes from his life, but are the honest records of the turmoil of his mind ever beset with conflicts that he refused to yield to. Outwardly, most of his stories deal with the lives of Kerala Muslims, but it will be a grave mistake, as some foreign scholars such as Ronald Asher, his first English translator, has done, to reduce Basheers fiction to its ethnic content. At the deeper level, they are tales of men and women everywhere, trapped in the ironic irrationality of the human condition. That is why 37 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

even the English translations of Basheers stories done by various translators from Asher to Vanajam Ravindran, while retaining little of their dialectal poetry, still manage to capture their ultimate human appeal. Asher himself has spoken about the structural and stylistic challenges posed to translators by Basheers narratives which the author used to revise and polish even after publishing them with their quaint humour, expressive use of the spoken language, understatement and suggestiveness. Thakazhi Sivasankara Pillai was perhaps a better surveyor of social reality and a more analytical student of the history of communities, but Basheer far excels him as a stylist who insisted on the propriety of each word and chiselled his sentences to perfection a quality one notices in later writers such as O.V. Vijayan, Zacharia and N.S. Madhavan and in some stories by their younger contemporaries such as V.R. Sudheesh, Subhash Chandran, Sitara and Santosh Echikkanam. Basheers language is not literary if literary means deliberately sophisticated and packed with Sanskrit words; it is not philosophical if philosophical means filled with strained thoughts and ideas and references, as exemplified by some writers celebrated as philosophical. But it is precisely by being non-literary easy, natural and deceptively simple that Basheer distinguishes himself from ordinary writers who strain after effects even while saying the most trivial things. It is by appearing non-philosophical that Basheer achieves a visionary quality that is inaccessible to those who pack their fiction with borrowed or inane ideas. Basheers optimism comes from a robust acceptance of tragedy, and not from the avoidance of confrontation with the embarrassing contradictions of existence. Basheers humour too springs from his grasp of the paradoxes of existence. He combines a cartoonists eye with a philosophers vision in portraying his characters as in Ntuppuppaakkoranendarnnu (My Granddad had an Elephant), Sthalathe Pradhana Divyan (The Most Important Holy Man of My Place), Mucheettukalikkarante Makal (The Card- Sharpers Daughter), Aanavariyum Ponkurisum (Aanavari and Ponkurisu nicknames for Raman Nair and Thoma), Viswavikhyatamaya Mookku (The World-renowned Nose) and other stories. He was one with the progressive writers in empathising with the hapless and in upholding hope in man and the possibility of change, but he went beyond them while looking at the human condition in its many hues and dimensions, including the spiritual that remains an unstated undercurrent in his narratives of life. Basheer belonged to a generation fed on rigid ideologies and arid experiences, but he picked up his tales from the throbbing warmth of lifes poetry. During about half a century of his creative career, he published only 30 books from Balyakalasakhi (1944) to Sinkidimungan (1991) but every one of these 2,200 pages is world-class literature. He created his own language within language (having abandoned English in which he had attempted his first novel), polished, edited and re-edited each line he wrote until it shone like crystal: clear, sparkling, many-faced. 38 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

Basheer was a modernist who perhaps never knew he was one. He broke new grounds quite casually and unselfconsciously, just by recounting his varied experiences of the world in his own crisp and inimitable style. He shunned the big canvas; what mattered to him was the sheer depth and intensity of the narrated event. He hated none; thieves, gamblers, homosexuals, pimps, sex workers: everyone had a seat in Basheers heaven. The fallen, he knew, were the victims of unkind circumstances. They are also the chosen in his world illuminated by the beams of a sacred love from the other side of material life. Critics have compared Kafkas a Hunger Artist with Basheers Janmadinam (The Birthday) as also Jimenezs Platero and I with Basheers Pathummayude Adu in an attempt to prove he is both modern and universal. But Basheers modernism and his transnational humanism came from his intense rootedness in the soil of his land and community and the hells and heavens he came across in his gypsy-like wanderings. Basheer, while having ardent admirers such as M.T. Vasudevan Nair, M.N. Vijayan and M.A. Rahman, who has done a beautiful documentary on him, was not without detractors either: they stamped his Sabdangal (Voices) and Pavappettavarude Vesya (The Prostitute of the Dispossessed) obscene; they objected to his Ntuppuppaakkoranendarnnu being made a textbook; one even went to the extent of publishing a book to prove the whole Basheeriana trite and insignificant. Basheer met all of them with his Sufi detachment and refused to immortalise them by not taking up the gauntlets. Basheer has narrated an experience he once had in a frontier province. He had his lunch in a restaurant and found his wallet missing while preparing to pay. The shop owner had him stripped and would have gone further had a man not suddenly emerged offering to pay the bill for Basheer. Afterwards, the man showed Basheer several wallets and asked him to pick up his he was a pickpocket. Here is the source of Basheers unflinching faith in man’s basic goodness. While a prisoner, Basheer used to cultivate roses on the jail courtyard. This dispassionate activity of generating fragrance for the unfortunate trapped in their dark destinies is symbolic of his whole oeuvre, his great human he would say divine mission. 2.5 SUMMARY  Human Resource Management (HRM) is the function within an organization that focuses on recruitment of, management of, and providing direction for the people who work in the organization.  It is a pervasive force, action-oriented, individually-oriented, development-oriented, future-focused, and integrative in nature and is a comprehensive function.  HRM is moving away from traditional personnel, administration, and transactional roles, which are increasingly outsourced.  HRM is now expected to add value to the strategic utilization of employees and that employee programs impact the business in measurable ways. 39 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

 HRM aims at achieving organizational goals meet the expectations of employees; develop the knowledge, skills and abilities of employees, improve the quality of working life and manage human resources in an ethical and socially responsible manner.  Effective HRM enables employees to contribute effectively and productively to the overall company direction and the accomplishment of the organization's goals and objectives. 2.6 KEYWORDS  Makaram- a month in the Indian solar calendar.  Anna–a coin used as money  Mundo- A garment consisting of a rectangular cloth that is wrapped around the waist, worn by men chiefly in Kerala  Dosai – a south indian food  Marxism - Marxism is a social, political, and economic philosophy named after Karl Marx. It examines the effect of capitalism on labor, productivity, and economic development and argues for a worker revolution to overturn capitalism in favor of communism.  Communalism- a principle of political organization based on federated communes. 2.7 LEARNING ACTIVITY 1. Define communalism ___________________________________________________________________________ ___________________________________________________________________________ 2. State the principles of Marxism in the story. ___________________________________________________________________________ ___________________________________________________________________________ 2.8 UNIT END QUESTIONS A. Descriptive Questions 40 Short Questions 1. What role did Zainaba play in the story the card Sharpers daughter? 2. Write the character sketch of Madan Muthppa. 3. Describe characters that are portrayed in the story. 4. Describe the part which shows the silver lining in the story. CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

5. Explain why this style is considered as mock epic. Long Questions 1. Birthday is the stark of realism that Basheer practices. Explain. 2. Describe the narrative style of the story. 3. This dispassionate activity of generating fragrance for the unfortunate trapped in their dark destinies is symbolic of his whole oeuvre, his great human he would say divine mission. Explain. 4. Describe the life and work of the author, Vaikom Muhammad Basheer 5. Explain the political scenario in the story. B. Multiple Choice Questions 1.Basheers language is not literary if literary means deliberately sophisticated and packed with ------------------------------------------ a. Sanskrit words b. Malayalam words c. Devangiri script d. Kannada language 2. Ottakkannan Poker is introduced as the ‘-----------------------------------------’ and the narrator tells us that all ire of his lady readers should be directed at this figure a. tragic protagonist b. communal leader c. fatherly love d. cruel Antagonist 3.He is fondly remembered as the----------------------------------. a. Basheer b. Communal leader c. Sultan d. Beypore Sultan 4. The call of freedom took Basheer to Malabar, the centre of the ---------------------------in Kerala. a. nationalist activities b. Marxist c. Communal differences d. non cooperation 41 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

5. He was awarded the -------------------------------in 1982. a. Literary Award b. Padma Shri c. Padma Bhushan d. Dada shaheb phalke Award Answers 1-a, 2-a, 3-d, 4-a, 5-b 2.9REFERENCES References book  Morality and Ethics in Public Life by Ravindra Kumar  Essays on Indian Society by Raj Kumar  Sentinel, The (4 December 2014). \"Documentary film, books on Bhabananda–Nalini Prava\". Archived from the original on 24 September 2015. Retrieved 24 December 2014.  \"Indian Literature Through the Ages\". Ccrtindia.gov.in. Archived from the original on 15 May 2013. Retrieved 22 April 2013.  Jyotsna Kamat. \"History of the Kannada Literature-I\". Kamat's Potpourri, 4 November 2006. Kamat's Potpourri. Retrieved 25 November 2006.  \"Declare Kannada a classical language\". The Hindu. Chennai, India. 27 May 2005. Archived from the original on 5 January 2007. Retrieved 29 June 2007.  Choudhary, R. (1976). A survey of Maithili literature. Ram Vilas Sahu.  Barua, K. L. (1933). Early history of Kamarupa. Shillong: Published by the Author. 42 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

UNIT - 3: SILENCE! THE COURT IS IN SESSION BY VIJAY TENDULKAR STRUCTURE 3.0 Learning Objectives 3.1 Introduction 3.2 Life and Work of Vijay Tendulkar 3.3 Influence Of His Brother And Nationalism 3.4 Initial Years of Writing 3.5 Role of Vijay Tendulkar as a Screenwriter 3.6 Characteristics of his Drama 3.7 Literary Elements in the Play 3.8 Analysis of the play 3.9 Female characters and their significance 3.10 Summary 3.11 Keywords 3.12 Learning Activity 3.13 Unit End Questions 3.14 References 3.0 LEARNING OBJECTIVES After studying this unit, you will be able to:  Describe the study of female characters in the play  Identify importance of the social issues that are highlighted  Study and know the author and its contribution  State the story along with literary elements 3.1 INTRODUCTION Vijay Dhondopant Tendulkar was born on January 6, 1928 in a Bhalavalikar Saraswat Brahmin family in Kolhapur, Maharashtra [citation needed], where his father held a clerical job and ran a small publishing business. The literary environment at home prompted young Vijay to take up writing. He wrote his first story at age six.He grew up watching western 43 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

plays, and felt inspired to write plays himself. At age eleven, he wrote, directed, and acted in his first play.At age 14, he participated in the 1942 Indian freedom movement, leaving his studies. The latter alienated him from his family and friends. Writing then became his outlet, though most of his early writings were of a personal nature, and not intended for publication. Vijay Tendulkar was a leading Indian playwright, movie and television writer, literary essayist, political journalist, and social commentator primarily in Marathi. He is best known for his plays, Shantata! Court Chalu Aahe (1967), Ghāshirām Kotwāl (1972), and Sakhārām Binder (1972).Many of Tendulkar's plays derived inspiration from real-life incidents or social upheavals, which provides clear light on harsh realities. He provided his guidance to students studying “Playwright writing” in US universities. For over five decades, Tendulkar had been a highly influential dramatist and theater personality in Mahārāshtra.Vijay Tendulkar died in Pune on May 19, 2008, after five weeks at the Prayag Hospital battling the effects of myasthenia gravis. 3.2 LIFE AND WORK OF VIJAY TENDULKAR Tendulkar’s drama highlights the complexity of human relationships and contains a latent critique of modern Indian society, Tendulkar’s plays like Shakespeare’s plays are neither moral, nor immoral in tone but may rather be seen amoral. Vijay Tendulkar was a leading dramatist of twentieth century. He was playwright, screen and television writer, literary essayist, political journalist, one act play writer, novelist, short story writer and social commentator. After 1950, he has been the most influential dramatist and theatre personality for next five decades in Marathi. Marathi is the principle language of the state of Maharashtra. Marathi language has a continuous literary history since the end of classical period in India. Tendulkar was born in 1928 and brought up in the heart of Bombay City in Kandewadi, a small lane in Girgaon. A lower middle class community crowded its elements. The men were mostly shopkeepers and clerks. Vijay Tendulkar’s father Dhondopant Tendulkar was head clerk at a British Publishing Company called ‘Longmans’. Tendulkar’s brother Raghunath and sister were many years older than him. In his childhood Tendulkar was a sickly child having persistent cough and asthmatic wheezing. This made his 76 parents over protective. Though Tendulkar had two younger brothers, he remained the favourite of his parents. Tendulkar’s father was an enthusiastic writer, director and actor of amateur plays in their mother tongue, Marathi. He would take young Tendulkar to the rehearsals of his plays. They were presenting a kind of magic show for the young child of four. He was wonderstruck when persons change into characters. At that time women’s roles were presented by men and young Tendulkar was greatly amazed to see men actors suddenly changing their voice and movements to become women. As a child Tendulkar never saw any theatre except his father staged. Tendulkar’s brother Raghunath used to act like his father. Raghunath had interest in literature too. Different writers often comes their home to meet Tendulkar’s father. Thus Tendulkar grew up in a kind of literary atmosphere. On Sunday 44 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

morning his father would take him to a large bookshop owned by his publisher friend. Young Tendulkar wandered among the shelves and picked up a good collection of children’s books in Marathi. His father bought them all for him and would often tell him stories from them. When Tendulkar grew up Raghunath his brother used to take him to English movies by cutting school. Tendulkar developed interest in watching English films and they had made abiding influence in his career as a playwright. Tendulkar had early primary education from Bombay. Later on his father migrated to Kolhapur, where Tendulkar took his education from 5th to 7th standard. Then his father moved to Pune. Tendulkar has taken his matriculation exam certificate from ‘Nutan Marathi Vidyalaya’ at Ramabag in Pune. 77 During his school days, Tendulkar cut school and spent time watching English plays and rest of the time at the city library where he read a lot. Later when he became a journalist, he was surprised at the amount of reading he had put in while at school. Tendulkar had two role models who had influenced him while he had in Pune. Both were well known names in Marathi literature. They were Dinkar Balkrishna Mokashi and Vishnu Vinayak Bokil. The former was a radio mechanic but fine writer; the latter was Tendulkar’s Marathi teacher at school whose stories often turned into successful films. Early in his carrier Tendulkar dedicated one book to Bokil master. Bokil master sent him a letter saying that Tendulkar wrote better than he himself did. Tendulkar preserved that letter considering it the greatest honour that he has ever received. 3.3 INFLUENCE OF HIS BROTHER AND NATIONALISM Tendulkar’s brother Raghunath brought the fiery spirit of nationalism into their house. He was inspired by Mahatma Gandhi. He got a charka, wore only Khadi and attended congress meetings. He was black listed in college for his activities. Tendulkar’s mother, Susheela told him stories about Mahatma Gandhi and Bal Gangadhar Tilak. She was witness of Tilak’s rousing speeches during Ganapati festivals in Bombay. This all atmosphere instilled the spirit of nationalism in the mind of Tendulkar and his formal education came to close in 1942, during, ‘the Quit India movement’ when he answered Gandhiji’s call to boycott school. Tendulkar had written his first story when he was six years old. When he was eleven, he wrote, directed and acted his first play. He acted in two Marathi films as a child artist. He had three volumes of stories on his credit before he ventured into his first play. 78 Tendulkar’s first job was in a printing press. Then he moved to journalism. He served as sub - editor on the daily ‘Navbharat’. He was also executive editor of magazines ‘Vasudha’ and ‘Deepavali’. Some years he was appointed as sub editor on daily Maratha. Tendulkar spent some years as public relations officer for the Chowgule group of Industries before being appointed assistant editor of the daily ‘Loksatta’ in 1968. His varied professional experience put him in touch with peoples of all classes; his most convincing male characters come from the middle class to which he and his circle belonged. Hence his plays are on this class and often addressed to these peoples. 45 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

3.4 INITIAL YEARS OF WRITING Although he was doing different jobs, during all these years he had been writing, starting with short stories. He himself found that his short stories include more dialogues than narrative; he switched to writing one act plays and finally full length plays. His first play, Grihasti had come out in 1955 and last plays completed in 1992. His plays have given Indian theatre a rich and challenging heritage. Tendulkar has written original scripts for film makers like Shyam Benegal and Govind Nihalani. His plays and film scripts are penetrating studies of violence, power and repression in different forms in that contemporary Indian society. It suites to Tendulkar’s creation as Plato says, the invention of dramatic art and of the theatre seems a very obvious and natural one. Man has a great disposition to mimicry; when he enters vividly into the situation, sentiments, and passions of others, he voluntarily puts on a resemblance to them in his gestures. Tendulkar’s Manus Navache Bet was staged in 1956. Here, we see Tendulkar broke away from the three-act convention. Tendulkar along with Girish Karnad changed the dramatic mould by demolishing three act structure of the well- made play and giving it a new mould appropriate to the performance tradition. His plays sometimes used the expressionistic technique of dramatic make believe of dreams within the framework of naturalistic play. Chimaniche Ghar Hote Menache (1960) was a play, which battled the audience with its farcical element, interspersed with lyrical movements. In Kavalyachi Shala (1963) Tendulkar used the farcical element to highlight the tragedy of middle class ambition. In Madlya Bhinti and Ek Hoti Mulgi are more than the ‘family dramas’. As the time passes, Tendulkar has become more and more concerned with the intrigues of power and the effects of oppression, especially in plays like Shantata! Court Chalu Aahe (1968) and Ghashiram Kotwal (1972) Tendulkar broke away from certain traditions of Marathi theatre that had been dominated by family melodramas centered on the middle class. Sakharam Binder a study of human violence and terror amounted to a powerful dramatic statement. There are some lighter plays too, like the light-hearted fantasy of Ashi Pakhrey Yeti, created by Tendulkar. After ‘Ghashiram’, Tendulkar turned to the naturalistic theatre with two very contemporary themes. Kamala (1982) and Kanyadaan (1983) are this two plays in this style. Kamala is a study of marital status, of the motives behind the popular investigative journalism, as well as study in many layers of exploitation. Kanyadaan is a complex play about the cultural and emotional upheavals of a family. It deals 80 with the violence in the subconscious of Dalit poet who is married to the daughter of native socialist. Tendulkar has been active in the new theatre in Maharashtra, through his involvement with groups like Rangayan and Avishkar, and others, remains an activist in the ongoing struggle for democratic rights and civil liberties. Once he said, ‘My creative writing, including plays and films have written mostly deals with or tried to deal with contemporary social reality. Tendulkar has been a witness to many social movements and has travelled to remote parts of the country. And yet, as an artist, he was never tempted to use his information for photographic representation of social reality. His sensation as a human being goes deeper 46 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

than that. His dramas present social reality. But his characters are imbued with dramatic power. He has created raw theatre language for his ape characters. Tendulkar chose themes, characters and situations from the contemporary life except some historical plays. His material for plays comes from the observation of life. Tendulkar have interest in violence in society, the human response to violence, and individual freedom, has manifested itself in many ways. He has made various studies, worked at the Tata Institute of social sciences as a visiting professor. He turned around the country 81 to see prisons. His all observations have found way in literary writings, which bear testimony to his keen perceptiveness, and his compassion for the common man’s daily struggle for survival. According to Plato, Drama is deeply associated with inner consciousness of human race that it has rightly been regarded as the best means for the exploration of human nature in all its varieties and manifestations.4 This opinion fits to Tendulkar and his dramatic art. Tendulkar also involved in the translations of his contemporary dramatists from other Indian languages. He translated Tughlaq by Girish Karnard and Aadhe Adhure by Mohan Rakesh in 1971. He also translated Tennessee Williams A street car named Desire in Marathi. Most of Tendulkar’s plays have been translated and performed in Hindi and number of other regional languages winning him recognition at the national level. Tendulkar was a lifelong resident of Bombay city. He is author of thirty full-length plays and twenty-three one-act plays, several of them have become classics of modern Indian Theatre. Among these is Silence! The Court is in session (1967), Sakharam Binder (1972), Kamala (1981), Kanyadan (1983). Ghashiram Kotwal, a musical play, combines Marathi folk performance style and contemporary theatrical techniques, Ghashiram, one of the longest-running plays in the world. It has six thousand performances in India and abroad. Tendulkar’s treasury includes eleven plays for children, four collections of short stories, one novel and five volumes of literary essays and social criticism. He is important translator in Marathi, having translated nine 82 novels, and two biographies into native language as well as five plays, among which are Mohan Rakesh’s Aadhe Adhure (Hindi), Girish Karnad’s Tughlaq (Kannada) and Tennessee Williams A Street car named Desire (English). 3.5ROLE AS A SCREENWRITER Vijay Tendulkar is also original writer of screen plays for eight plays in Marathi including Samana (1975), Simhasan (1979) and Umbartha (1981). The Cart is a ground breaking feature film on women’s activism in India. Tendulkar has also worked as screen-writer in Hindi, India’s majority language and the preferred medium to the world’s largest film industry. During the 1970’s and 1980’s, he wrote the original script and dialogue for eleven Hindi films among them are Nishant (1975), Manthan (1977), Akrosh (1980), Ardha Satya (1983) and Aghat (1986). These all paved the pattern for the ‘middle class cinema’ movement. Tendulkar has written and directed discussions on current social issues for Indian television in Hindi too. Tendulkar’s dramatic output and theatrical activities in Marathi and his work in Hindi cinema have received wide recognition in Maharashtra and India for four 47 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

decades after 1950. The Maharashtra State government brought him awards in 1956, 1969 and 1973. He also received the Sangeet Natak Academy Award in 1971; he also bagged Film Fare Award for the best original screenplay. The government of India’s Padma Bhushan Award in 1984, the Maharashtra Gaurav Puraskar in 1990, the Janasthan Award in 1991, The ‘Kalidas Samman’ Award in 1992, the Saraswati Samman in 1993, the Maharashtra Foundation Award in 1998, the Pandit Mahadeo Shastri Joshi Award in 1999, and the Dinanath Mangeshkar Award in 2000; all these stand testimony to his lifetime achievement 83 in literary and performing art. Among his other awards include a Nehru Fellowship (1973- 74), An Honary Doctorate from the Ravindra Bharati University, Calcutta in 1992, and a lifetime fellowship from the national academy of the performing Arts, New Delhi 1998. Tendulkar is co-founder and president of the experimental theatre group, Avishkar (Bombay) and served on the Board of Directors of the National scales of Drama (New Delhi), and Bharat Bhavan Rangmandal (Bhopal). He had been member of the Advisory council of Shriram centre of the Arts (New Delhi), a trustee of the National Book Trust (New Delhi), as well as the president of the National Centre for Advocacy Studies (Poona). Thus this is the brief outline history of Vijay Tendulkar and his creations. Tendulkar’s major concerns expressed in his plays in short. Wadikar comments about Tendulkar’s characters, Most of the characters in Tendulkar’s play seen as defeated or frustrated since they acquire deformed personalities. They seem to have a tragic dimension. Deformity of one sort or another such as gender, social, political, physical, mental and spiritual is perceptible in Tenulkar’s characterization. He seeks to project men and women, not in their brighter, but in their darker aspects. Mostly, they are shown life-like, i.e., as what they are but, at times, they are shown worse than what they are in actuality.5 The first major work that set Tendulkar apart from previous generation of Marathi playwrights was Manus Navache Bet. It gave expression to the tormenting solitude and alienation of a modern individual in an urban, industrialized society. Tendulkar’s dramatic 84 genius eminently suited the newly emerging, experimental Marathi theatre of the time. The plays that followed Manus Navache Bet were, Madhlya Bhinti, Chimnicha Ghar Hota Menache, Mee Jinklo Mee Harlo, Kavlyachi Shala and Sari Ga Sari. These all plays set the trend of avant-garde for Marathi theatre. Check your progress: 1. Write a short note about his plays. 2. Write a short note about Vijay Tendulkar as a screen playwright. 3. How did he contribute as a translator? 3.6 CHARACTERISTICS OF HIS DRAMA In all his early plays Tendulkar is concerned with the middle class individuals set against the backdrop of a hostile society. And another distinctive feature of these plays is that the 48 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

absence of any easy solution. Tendulkar presents modern man in all its complexities. He portrays life as it is from different angles without moralizing or philosophizing in any way. Most of his dramas are endowed with his characteristic dialogue, which is jerky, half finished, yet signifying more than what it says. Another important quality of his plays is treatment of characters, his sympathy for ‘little big man’. Play of Tendulkar variously deals with the different dimensions of man’s cultural deformity and brings out its evil consequences on human body, mind, and spirit. His feminist approach is also praise worthy. Biologically as well as culturally, human beings are divided into two classes; men and women. This division is farther accentuated by the roles they are assigned to play in the making of family. Man is the head of the family, governing and controlling all its affairs. Woman is entrusted with household responsibilities, particularly those of cooking food and rearing children. This leads to the formation of exploitative and oppressive society of men as against the exploited and oppressed society of women. Simon De Beauvoir rightly observes; 85 One is not born but rather becomes a woman... It is civilization as whole that produces this culture... which is described as feminine. Six Tendulkar seems agree with above statement. Hence Shailaja Wadikar describes his plays as; Tendulkar’s plays bring a turning point in Indian theatre as they shock the sensibility of the conventional audience by projecting the reality of life, human relationship, and existence. His plays are revolutionary in the sense that they bring about a transformation in the audience’s mindset. They depict the doomed or lost generation of the post-independence India, where people are victims of willful monstrosity. 3.7LITERARY ELEMENTS OF THE PLAY Satirical Attack in The Title Tendulkar satirically attacks on the society with the title “Silence! The Court is in Session.” There is no silence or discipline in the court, and even the wife of the judge Mrs. Kashikar disturbs the court all the time. Thus, in this way, the word “Silence” seems more impactful. The title, “Silence! The Court is in Session” is a powerful satire on modern society. The famous critic N. S. Dharan points out that –It is the imposed silence on Benare that gives the title its uniqueness and tells us about the mockery in the title. So, here, the title can be justified as a satirical attack on the people of modern society. Judicial Register: The First Title Vijay Tendulkar chooses Judicial Register as the title of his play to make a powerful comment on a society with a heavy patriarchal bias that makes justice impossible. A Judicial court is supposed to be a seat of justice seriousness and decorum. Throughout the play, he makes a review of the present day court procedures, and points out the problem of the court. Ideally justice can be provided only if the judge and the judicial system are 49 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

objectively detached. But the same objective detachment can become the face of a very repressive and dehumanized system if the people involved in the process of justice are themselves devoid of human value and compassion. As for all these, the title “Judicial Register” suits perfectly; but at last, “Silence! The Court is in Session” remains for the play. Significance of The Title Silence! The Court is in Session is originally a Marathi play. So, the original title of the play is “Shantata! Court Chalu Ahe.” The title indicates absolute authority of the judge in the court where the judges pronounce such words to bring back manners or discipline of the people. In the present play, we find how Benare becomes the victim of sadism of his male counterparts. The audience is made to witness a mere enactment of what is a rehearsal of sorts of a mock- trial to be staged later in the day. But what begins as a harmless game begins to assume a grim aspect before long. When Benare wants to protest she is ordered to be silent because the court is in session. Again when she keeps silent she is ordered to break the silence in the name of law and threatened with contempt of court. She is driven to despair and attempts suicide. In such a grim scenario, every word of the title SILENCE THE COURT IS IN SESSION assumes symbolic significance. The word \"Silence' symbolizes the patriarchal conspiracy to silence the voice of a woman in the name of social justice and ideology. And therefore, the title is appropriate for the play. 3.8 ANALYSIS OF THE PLAY In the play, “Silence! The court is in session” with three acts Tendulkar initiates a theatre group called “The Sonar Moti Tenement (Bombay) Progressive Association”. In it we get a group of teachers who were preparing to stage a play in a village. It so turned out that one of the members of the cast didn’t shown. A local stagehand was asked to change him. A practice was set and a mock trial was performed on the stage to make him understand the procedure of the court. A mock accuse of infanticide was leveled against Miss. Benare one of the members of the show. Then the imagine play abruptly turned into a gloomy charge and it emerged from the witness that Miss. Benare did kill an unlawful child by Prof. Damle, the missing member of the cast. Miss. Benare is cross varified in the court with full contempt by the male vultures around her. Witness after witness, charge upon charge is mound upon her and her private life is exposed. He in this play describes how a young woman is made a casualty to conventions and disgraceful insincerity of the middle class male dominated society. Miss. Leela Benare, the heroine character of the play is an educated woman of about 34 years old and by profession she is school teacher. She loves life and is full of feelings. She believes that her life is her own and nobody has got the right to obstruct with it – “My life is my own. I haven’t sold it to anyone for a job.” Miss. Benare has spent through a very complicated stage in her life. She exposes the insincerity of some men who pulled up her plant of life. She tells how she was deflowered by her own maternal uncle at the age of fourteen years: “Why, I was barely fourteen! I did not 50 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)