never new—that Calcutta was born to look more or less as I saw it as a child.I’m not referring here to an air of timelessness; the patina that gave to Calcutta’s alleys, doorways, and houses their continuity and disposition is very different from the eternity that defines mausoleums and monuments. It’s this quality I’m trying to get at when I speak of “modernity.”
Let me provide an example. In the Courtauld Gallery in London hang several exceptional Cézannes, among which is one of the painter’s several viewings of the Montagne Sainte-Victoire, and the fairly empty countryside (barring a few houses nearby) before it. This view is framed by a large pine tree, its branches flailing against space, but not quite obscuring the view of the mountain. On the right-hand side, at the bottom of the mountain, where the empty yellow stretches and rectangular patches of greenery end, you notice something horizontal—except that it’s rising very slightly at an angle—with dark arches, like a bridge. It is a culvert. The curator’s small note points out that by including the culvert in the scene Cézanne is marking the incursion of modernity into the world of nature, or words to that effect. My first response was to disagree. For “nature,” in keeping with the simmering abandon of the time, and reminiscent of his younger contemporary Gauguin, is painted by Cézanne with a palette of incongruous colours, with pinks, oranges, and yellows: the scene, far away from the city, crackles with Parisian newness. The culvert, once you notice it, is the only thing that looks genuinely, deeply, old: instinctively, Cézanne paints it an organic, faded brown. Its colour is identical to the rocks on that side of the mountain; the rest of the Montagne Sainte-Victoire has iridescences of pink. Cézanne is telling us, with great delicacy, that modernity in the nineteenth century is indistinguishable from nature; perhaps it is nature—in some ways, the culvert, which has emerged from the rock, seems more of its place than the mountain itself. The shadows etched under the arches are mysterious, like a womb’sdarkness; and since Cézanne himself is a progeny of the modern, how can he not feel that it’s older and darker than the earth and the mountain?
I spoke about my rebirth as a writer in the mid-eighties—which would lead me to start writing my first novel in 1986. About this time, India, too, was having a rebirth. But the two births weren’t coeval or connected; they took place near each other without being affected by that proximity in any way. I noticed, in a surly, suspicious fashion, the nation’s second birth, though I became aware of it as such only in retrospect; the nation, naturally, didn’t notice mine.
Mine was a sort of event that’s perhaps unsurprising in the lives of poets, but incongruous for a yet-to-be novelist. Allen Ginsberg describes it occurring in his life as an episode—in the late forties, he was masturbating (“jacking off”) in Harlem, his life having plumbed a new low, while (speaking of incongruities) he had a book of Blake’s poems open at his side. On that page, fortuitously, was “Ah, sun-flower”—“Ah, sun-flower! weary of time,/Who countest the steps of the sun:/Seeking after the sweet golden clime,/Where the traveller’s journey is done.” Ginsberg had just come, and was lying in a stupor—“that state … of hopelessness, or dead end”—his eyes “idling” over the poem, which he’d read so many times that “it didn’t make any particular meaning”—when he suddenly understood it was addressed to him; he was the sunflower. And, almost at once, he heard a “deep earthen grave voice”: “I didn’t think twice … [it] was Blake’s voice … so completely tender and beautifully … ancient.” And then a thought arrived: “I suddenly realised that this existence was it !” I’m especially struck, in this story, by Ginsberg’s account, in the light of
Let me provide an example. In the Courtauld Gallery in London hang several exceptional Cézannes, among which is one of the painter’s several viewings of the Montagne Sainte-Victoire, and the fairly empty countryside (barring a few houses nearby) before it. This view is framed by a large pine tree, its branches flailing against space, but not quite obscuring the view of the mountain. On the right-hand side, at the bottom of the mountain, where the empty yellow stretches and rectangular patches of greenery end, you notice something horizontal—except that it’s rising very slightly at an angle—with dark arches, like a bridge. It is a culvert. The curator’s small note points out that by including the culvert in the scene Cézanne is marking the incursion of modernity into the world of nature, or words to that effect. My first response was to disagree. For “nature,” in keeping with the simmering abandon of the time, and reminiscent of his younger contemporary Gauguin, is painted by Cézanne with a palette of incongruous colours, with pinks, oranges, and yellows: the scene, far away from the city, crackles with Parisian newness. The culvert, once you notice it, is the only thing that looks genuinely, deeply, old: instinctively, Cézanne paints it an organic, faded brown. Its colour is identical to the rocks on that side of the mountain; the rest of the Montagne Sainte-Victoire has iridescences of pink. Cézanne is telling us, with great delicacy, that modernity in the nineteenth century is indistinguishable from nature; perhaps it is nature—in some ways, the culvert, which has emerged from the rock, seems more of its place than the mountain itself. The shadows etched under the arches are mysterious, like a womb’sdarkness; and since Cézanne himself is a progeny of the modern, how can he not feel that it’s older and darker than the earth and the mountain?
I spoke about my rebirth as a writer in the mid-eighties—which would lead me to start writing my first novel in 1986. About this time, India, too, was having a rebirth. But the two births weren’t coeval or connected; they took place near each other without being affected by that proximity in any way. I noticed, in a surly, suspicious fashion, the nation’s second birth, though I became aware of it as such only in retrospect; the nation, naturally, didn’t notice mine.
Mine was a sort of event that’s perhaps unsurprising in the lives of poets, but incongruous for a yet-to-be novelist. Allen Ginsberg describes it occurring in his life as an episode—in the late forties, he was masturbating (“jacking off”) in Harlem, his life having plumbed a new low, while (speaking of incongruities) he had a book of Blake’s poems open at his side. On that page, fortuitously, was “Ah, sun-flower”—“Ah, sun-flower! weary of time,/Who countest the steps of the sun:/Seeking after the sweet golden clime,/Where the traveller’s journey is done.” Ginsberg had just come, and was lying in a stupor—“that state … of hopelessness, or dead end”—his eyes “idling” over the poem, which he’d read so many times that “it didn’t make any particular meaning”—when he suddenly understood it was addressed to him; he was the sunflower. And, almost at once, he heard a “deep earthen grave voice”: “I didn’t think twice … [it] was Blake’s voice … so completely tender and beautifully … ancient.” And then a thought arrived: “I suddenly realised that this existence was it !” I’m especially struck, in this story, by Ginsberg’s account, in the light of
Similar Books
