Skip to main content

Where are our Writers?

Illustration from Mathrubhumi


The latest short story of celebrated Malayalam writer Zachariah raises some vital questions about the role of writers as well as religionists in contemporary India. Titled ‘Devotional Poet’, the story appeared in Mathrubhumi [Jan 30-Feb 05]. The protagonist is a young man who ekes a living by singing devotional songs. But his livelihood is suddenly brought to an end by contemporary religious zealots who ask him, “Aren’t you ashamed to sit and sing songs while our religion is under attack?” His soothing devotion is replaced by a frenzy pretending to be devotion. “Can you hear?” a friend asks the poet. “There is music in the war cry of the religionists. It is the rhyme of maddened devotion.”

Maddened devotion replaces genuine devotion in Hinduism, Islam and Christianity. The devotional poet gets an opportunity to perform in Delhi, “the spiritual academia of Indians now.” Shouldn’t the protagonist learn a new lesson from this great academia? The question is asked by a group of writers including O V Vijayan (now no more), Gopakumar, and Zachariah himself. Zachariah is a character in the story and quite a villainous one too. He perverts the devotional poet by forcing him to drink Old Monk.

Old Monk becomes the Poet’s constant companion after that. There is an intoxication in it that devotion cannot provide in today’s India. Devotion is frenzy today. Writers are intoxicated. Politicians are thugs. Who will redeem India?

Once upon a time writers were intellectual leaders. They brought truths to people. They questioned injustices and wrongs. Today?

They are bought off. By the government. A government which spends Rs2500 crore a year on advertisements has bought off writers. A government which gets writers arrested on sedition charges. A government that kills writers sotto voce. A government whose courts of justice peddle injustice. A government whose universities teach falsehood, whose police are raiders, whose monuments are sham….

Zachariah’s protagonist becomes a fortune teller in the end.

We are all fortune-seekers now. One way or another. Even our writers are, alas!

Comments

  1. Yamini MacLeanJanuary 27, 2022 at 5:47 PM

    Hari OM
    The perversion of history, not to mention devotion, is ever with us... YAM xx

    ReplyDelete
  2. Sonia dograJanuary 27, 2022 at 10:44 PM

    We've reached a point where the intoxication by religious zealots is so strong that it has become hard to help anyone look beyond petty politics and hate. Why blame writers alone?

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl
47 comments
Read more

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...
18 comments
Read more

The Vegetarian

Book Review Title: The Vegetarian Author: Han Kang Translator: Deborah Smith [from Korean] Publisher: Granta, London, 2018 Pages: 183 Insanity can provide infinite opportunities to a novelist. The protagonist of Nobel laureate Han Kang’s Booker-winner novel, The Vegetarian , thinks of herself as a tree. One can argue with ample logic and conviction that trees are far better than humans. “Trees are like brothers and sisters,” Yeong-hye, the protagonist, says. She identifies herself with the trees and turns vegetarian one day. Worse, she gives up all food eventually. Of course, she ends up in a mental hospital. The Vegetarian tells Yeong-hye’s tragic story on the surface. Below that surface, it raises too many questions that leave us pondering deeply. What does it mean to be human? Must humanity always entail violence? Is madness a form of truth, a more profound truth than sanity’s wisdom? In the disturbing world of this novel, trees represent peace, stillness, and nonviol...
6 comments
Read more

The RSS does not exist

An organisation that has 80,000 branches in India does not exist legally in any document. This is the cover story of The Caravan this month. By the way, The Caravan is one of the very few publications that still continues to exist in spite of being overtly critical of Narendra Modi and his Sangh Parivar. The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) is not registered as an organisation under any of the usual Indian registration laws such as the Societies Registration Act or as a trust or company. It functions as an unregistered voluntary organisation, though it is arguably the largest public organisation in the country. This situation makes the organisation absolutely unaccountable to anyone, argues The Caravan . The RSS is not legally required to file annual returns to the Tax department or disclose its financial details publicly though it deals with thousands of crores of rupees every year especially after Modi became the Prime Minister of the country. The membership of the organisat...
12 comments
Read more

No Problems Only Opportunities

You’ve probably heard this joke. A young man walked into his office one morning and found a beautiful young lady sitting in his chair. He called the MD and said, “Sir, I have a problem.” The MD replied, “Don’t you know our company’s motto, young man? No Problems, Only Opportunities .” When Suchita of The Blogchatter sent me a mail with the topic of this week’s blog hop –  - the first thing that came to my mind was the above joke. I know many people – too many, in fact – who went through terrible problems. My own life was a series of problems in none of which was there the consolation of any beautiful woman. One essential lesson I learnt from life is that life is a series of problems. You solve one and then arises the next one. Now I have reached an age when problems are no more problems: they are life itself. If you ask me what was the biggest problem I ever dealt with, it was my last years in Shillong. I was a lecturer in a college drawing a fat salary stipulated by the U...
13 comments
Read more