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...
19 comments
Read more

India in Modi-Trap

That’s like harnessing a telescope to a Vedic chant and expecting the stars to spin closer. Illustration by Gemini AI A friend forwarded a WhatsApp message written by K Sahadevan, Malayalam writer and social activist. The central theme is a concern for science education and research in India. The writer bemoans the fact that in India science is in a prison conjured up by Narendra Modi. The message shocked me. I hadn’t been aware of many things mentioned therein. Modi is making use of Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan’s Centre for Study and Research in Indology for his nefarious purposes projected as efforts to “preserve and promote classical Indian knowledge systems [IKS]” which include Sanskrit, Ayurveda, Jyotisha (astrology), literature, philosophy, and ancient sciences and technology. The objective is to integrate science with spirituality and cultural values. That’s like harnessing a telescope to a Vedic chant and expecting the stars to spin closer. The IKS curricula have made umpteen r...
8 comments
Read more

Joys of Onam and a reflection

Suppose that the whole universe were to be saved and made perfect and happy forever on just one condition: one single soul must suffer, alone, eternally. Would this be acceptable? Philosopher William James asked that in his 1891 book, The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life . Please think about it once again and answer the question for yourself. You, as well as others, are going to live a life without a tinge of sorrow. Joyful existence. Life in Paradise. The only condition is that one person will take up all the sorrows of the universe on him-/herself and suffer – alone, eternally. What do you say? James’s answer is a firm no . “Not even a god would be justified in setting up such a scheme,” James asserted, knowing too well how the Bible justified a positive answer to his question. “It is expedient that one man should die for the people, so that the nation can be saved” [John 11:50]. Jesus was that one man in the Biblical vision of redemption. I was reading a Malayalam period...
14 comments
Read more

The Real Enemies of India

People in general are inclined to pass the blame on to others whatever the fault.  For example, we Indians love to blame the British for their alleged ‘divide-and-rule’ policy.  Did the British really divide India into Hindus and Muslims or did the Indians do it themselves?  Was there any unified entity called India in the first place before the British unified it? Having raised those questions, I’m going to commit a further sacrilege of quoting a British journalist-cum-historian.  In his magnum opus, India: a History , John Keay says that the “stock accusations of a wider Machiavellian intent to ‘divide and rule’ and to ‘stir up Hindu-Muslim animosity’” levelled against the British Raj made little sense when the freedom struggle was going on in India because there really was no unified India until the British unified it politically.  Communal divisions existed in India despite the political unification.  In fact, they existed even before the Briti...
16 comments
Read more