The Hindu : `Literature under grave attack'

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Wednesday, Feb 26, 2003

Southern States

Southern States - Kerala

`Literature under grave attack'

By Our Staff Reporter

THRISSUR FEB. 25. The secretary of the Kendra Sahithya Akademi, K. Satchidanandan, has said that the young writers of the country had to create literature at a time when the very institution of literature was under attack, and thinkers had started doubting whether it would survive the onslaught of cyber technology.

Presiding over the inaugural session of the national level young poets' meet here today, Prof. Satchidanandan said numbers and quantities seem to have gained an upper hand over the uncertainty of ideas and the mystery of imagination. Even the language, mind and subjectivity that were supposed to have been continuous and unified now appear to be fragmented and discontinuous. History seemed to be following the curves of statistical diagrams rather than the spirals of spirit. Emphasising that the world had turned into a huge market place, Prof. Satchidanandan said, "Even our dreams are auctioned there. No religion is free of blood stain on its hands, they have lost their soul and turned into the most merciless forms of materialism, the venomous hood of intolerant power aspiring to totalitarianism. Language, race, religion, caste, anything can become the argument for a war-mongering fundamentalism.''

Quoting Buddha and Bertolt Brecht, he said, "Our house is on fire. Ideologies have failed to quench this fire. Most of our rivers have dried up and those that are not have been sold to profiteers. The woods that have been our shelter have been chopped down, and those that remain are full of the blood and tears of our orphaned tribal people who are the original owners of the land.''

``Our drawing rooms brim with corpses, strangers whisper in our bedrooms in foreign tongues. Every sign of our identity, every little victory of our culture, our poetry, flowers, our children, everything is being alienated form us. Imperialism is choking our language to death.''

Prof. Satchidanandan pointed out that by the time the young writers started writing, major literary movements had already died down or lost their initial energy. The anti-colonial literature of the 1940s, the progressive literature of the '50s, the modernist movement of the 60s, and the new democratic revolutionary literature of the 70s had stimulated the growth of new ideas, genres and forms. They had given birth to a new ethics and new aesthetics, and a new vision of the man, society and of the world. The Dalit, feminist and eco-centric literature that followed had also tried to remould the perceptions of language and life. But the new writers who had begun to write in the 1980s and '90s had to write in the after-glow of those dynamic movements. Along with the absence of macro-literary movements, big literary personalities and macro-ideologies holding sway over our literature also ceased to be. Even though this had left a vacant space, it was also pregnant with new possibilities. The emancipation from huge movements, authoritarian personalities and hegemonic ideologies can make possible a more open, experimental literature where the solitary individual is set to enquire and conceptualise his or her community, Universe and God simultaneously, giving rise to a new avante-garde that negates the literary establishment. Then, writing will mean naming the nameless, saying what cannot be said, and straying away from the tyranny of statistics and information to encounter the experiences on the borders of language. It will also be an effort to retrieve the words and experiences which have been banished from the memory of individuals and communities, and to rise above platitudes, common-sense notions, day-to-day politics and the all-devouring market. Writers should then be able to see the unseen, hear the unheard, conceive the unborn, and create new values that are ethical and aesthetic at the same time. The new literature should not only criticise the world. but also the way we look at the world, Prof Satchidanandan said.

The Kerala Sahithya Akademi president, Yusaffali Kecheri, who inaugurated the meet, said it was Sanskrit that remained the uniting bond among the diverse language and cultural moorings of India throughout the ages. C V Sreeraman, Vishnunarayanan Namboodiri, D Vinayachandran, P V Krishnan Nair and K K Rahulan were among those who spoke on the occasion.

In all, 32 young writers from different States are attending the two-day conference which is being jointly organised by the Kendra and Kerala Sahithya Akademis. The writer, Sethu, presided over the first story-writers' session.

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