Friday, December 13, 2013

Heart-wrenching Account of a Household----- MAINSTREAM, VOL LI, NO 49, NOVEMBER 23, 2013

Heart-wrenching Account of a Household                
 Fahmida Riyaz 
BOOK REVIEW Ghar by Vibhuti Narain Rai (Hindi novel to be published in Urdu in Pakistan).

 I was twenty, I won’t let anyone say those are the best years of your life.                                       —Paul Nizan in Eden Arabie
 Reading Ghar, the first novel by Vibhuti Narain Rai, first published in 1983, my mind was reflecting on several questions. As I turned the leaves of this heart-wrenching and captivating account of a household, an aged pensioner and his three youthful progenies, in Eastern Uttar Pardesh in independent India in the indecisive decade of the seventies, like the standing opaque water in a pool that gives little clue of what it may be nurturing in its depths, I was thinking about the difference between the development of the genre of novel in Hindi and in Urdu, its sister language, separated from it by wars and two different scripts, regretting the loss it has caused to Urdu literature. I remembered the few Hindi novels I had the chance to read earlier, Maila Anchal by Phaneshwar Nath Renu, Rag Darbari by Shrilal Shukla and Kolkatta Bypass by Alka Sarogi, and contemplated that such novels have not been written in Urdu after independence. I was also marvelling at the impact of the evocative, brief sentences in Ghar, describing locale and recording the seemingly rambling observations of the author, a yawn, a tattered piece of newspaper that has changed hands the whole day in a tea shop, a cup of tea gone cold, adroitly exposing the inner depths, the desperate struggle in the souls of the characters wherein lies the real story of Ghar. But, above all, I continuously thought about La Conspiration, by the legendry French author Paul Nizan, not for similarities, but the amazing contrast between the two literary offerings. La Conspiration (The Conspiracy in English translation) was published between the two World Wars, in 1938, with the famous Foreword by Jean Paul Sartre, Nizan’s long-time friend since they were schoolmates in a Parisian Lycee, Lois-le-Grand. Paul-Yves Nizan (born 1905) was a member of the French Communist Party (Vibhuti has always proclaimed to be a Marxist), though he had resigned from the Party after hearing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact in 1939. Nizan was killed in the Second World War in 1940, fighting against the German Army in the Battle of Dunkirk. He wrote The Conspiracy focusing a five young Parisians, with the vigour and fresh receptivity of a 33-year-old European, round about the same age at which V.N. Rai, a sensitive and insightful citizen of a post-colonial India, wrote Ghar. Both the novels are about young people. That is where the similarities end. In Ghar, you enter the world of Vibhuti, standing so distinctly apart! The inner landscape of the heart and mind, the concerns, the choice of young characters, tell you a different story. La Conspiration is about the lives of revolutionary bourgeois youth, whereas Vibhuti is writing about the crumbling lives of the white-collared poverty-stricken young people in the qasbati India. It is the painful story of an impoverished white-collared family teetering on the brink of destitution, hanging on to appearances with the skin of its teeth through the tenuous threads of pretences and transparent deceptions, a story of the humiliation, indignity, betrayal, heart-break and the ominously brewing violence inherent in the struggle of this family to restore itself to the status of the middle class from which it has been ousted by deteriorating economic conditions. It is difficult to describe what the story of Ghar focuses upon. It is a slice of life in qasbati India of the decade of the seventies, a largish village, complete with the shop of a Bania, the rich grocer Shankar, who lets the poverty stricken neighbours buy grocery on credit to exploit them to the hilt, where unemployed youth and criminals roam the streets, where lives Munshi sahib, with an unmarried young daughter Rajkumari, an unemployed, college-educated son, Vinod and a younger son Puppo, who has gone wayward, who plays truant with his school and steals money from his own home. With small detals, the young V.N. Rai recreated it all; The two-roomed house where Munshi sahib lives with three young progenies, where everyone knows everything about one another but must pretend that they have not noticed. The pain of Pappo’s years of adolescence, where time and again he is caught red- handed in the unmentionable act of self-pleasure, the compulsion to send Rajkumari to the grocer because Shankar would not allow credit to any of his boys, knowing full well that in that shop Rajkumari has to constantly defend herself against the lecherous advances of Shankar. This house of smouldering shame is also a house of dreams. As night falls, its four occupants dream of a better future. Rajkumari dreaming of a Rajkumar, who will come and take her far, far away, Vinod, the elder son, a sensitive and romantic young man dreaming of getting a job suitable for his capability and getting married to the girl next door with whom he is having a budding romantic relationship, a shameful taboo in the village ambience, and Puppo, the adolescent, his burning sense of impotence making him dream of armed robbery in Shanker’s shop, his youthful face growing more and more tense as the dream proceeds, of watching the heartless plunderer of the neighbourhood, trembling fearfully and pleading for mercy. The favourite part of Puppo’s dream is when, having snatched a fat wad of currency notes from Shankar, just as he is leaving the shop, he would remove his mask to let Shankar see his face and recognise the brother of the hapless girl whom he tried to disgrace every day in this very shop. The awning over these young dreams is the dream of Munshiji, also lying awake for hours, just pretending to be asleep like the rest of the members of his family, each one fully aware of each other’s faking slumber. Munshiji, smouldering with shame, watching his patriarchal role crumble as he sees his power to provide for the family disintegrating, dreaming of a job for Vinod, of arrangement of dowry for his daughter, the dowry that a daughter-in-law could bring in, making possible a befitting wedding for Rajkumari, the sources he could manipulate still, the distaste of giving two rupees worth of bribe to the clerk who distributed the pension money, two rupees out of hundred rupees of his pension, the endless calculation of the bills, the rent, the milkman, the newspaper, an English newspaper! Giving the family a higher class status in the neighbourhood! Heart-wrenching are also the desperate attempts of the characters caught in the web of circumstances to draw or cross some lines to cling to self-respect, hard choices between compelling needs and respectability, Rajkumari in her twentyeighth year succumbing to try to draw some sexual satisfaction from a mere child entering his teens, his inexperience and childish, weak physique making him fail helplessly, of Puppo, getting trapped in the clutches of the village ruffian, on the promise of showing him and letting him touch a real pistol, agreeing to be physically abused by him but insisting that he will not be shared by the friends of the ruffian, yet the ruffian sharing him with his friends, again and again. And Munshiji, lying to his walking companions in the park about the fiancé of his daughter who would come for the wedding when he would get leave from his strict employers, coming home and hitting Rajkumari, then lie down, covering his face and choke over his sobs. A certain club or organisation in the qasbah is also mentioned in Ghar, that trains the bitter and seething adolescents of the dispossessed classes to build their muscles and increase physical strength. The boys in the school show their arms muscles to each other and ridicule those among them who are physically weaker. The author does not give this organisation a name, yet the reader senses the potentials of militancy, being carefully nurtured for the future when it could be given a religious signboard. Quoting Nizan, Sartre writes about the youth in The Conspiracy: “Propelled to act by bad conscience, they are that essence in motion, which is youth, a sham age, a fetish...Their fatal light-mindedness and aggressive futility are due to the fact that they have no duties.” “(for them ) youth is the age of resentment, not of the great anger of men who suffer....what they want above all is to give their parents a bit of trouble.” And on the suicide of Bernard Rosenthal, one of the young characters of Nizan’s novel, Sartre comments: “The agony of death alone will show him—that he has missed love.” In V.N. Rai’s Ghar, the “home”, which could be the home of several strata of the white- collared middle classes, so idolised by the subcontinental traditionalists, is a hell-hole where the family members have to pretend to be blind and deaf and remain tongue-tied towards one another. The youth is suffocated, dreaming of escape from their home. But they are tied to it and to each other, by the most unlikely bond in this situation, a bond of love and respect, and a deeply rooted sense of responsibility towards one another. Vinod fantasises about leaving the house, that “like an octopus wrapped its hundreds of legs around him, sucking his blood “, but he will not follow this fantasy, because it could mean the corpse of a pregnant Rajkumari in the depths of a well, of Puppo ending up in a jail, of Munshiji humiliated on the streets by his creditors. And Rajkumari will go on putting aside some food for Puppo who will always come too late to eat. She will keep getting up past midnight, sharing her quilt with her adolescent brother, saving him from the severe cold of the freezing December in the plains of eastern Uttar Pardesh, there being no extra quilt in the house for him, and Puppo would quietly steal out of his bed, preferring to shiver through the night rather than begin to fantasise about the womanly body of his sister sharing his bed. Marxist social scientists have been pointing out since the Second World War that the dispossessed strata of the middle classes are the bedrock for aggressive, blood thirsty despotism. Ghar reveals the why and how of this deduction. But it also identifies certain possibilities through the struggle in the suffering of its characters that may yet save India from the silently creeping clutches of the final triumph of fascism. Jean Paul Sartre, in his charming outpouring of philosophical abundance, remarks in the Foreword of The Conspiracy: “Can a Communist write a novel?”, then answers the question: “I am not convinced of it. He does not have the right to make himself the accomplice of his characters.” But Sartre was writing about a different world. A good deal of life was elsewhere. The colonisers left behind them a ruin and a roadmap to a treasure in India. The Indian novelist seems to handle and tackle both confidently and in his own way. I am not sure if Vibhutiji even consciously used a “technique” in this first novel of his, except writing about what really happens in real life. Reading Ghar, all that this reader felt was the thoughtful but compelling thrust of the narrative, and that, I think, was enough to make it an intense, personal, emotional and intellectual experience for me. The author, a noted Pakistani poetess, was recently in India.

दंगा कराने वालों को सजा देना जरूरी- 13 दिसंबर 2013

   
                  
 कुछ वर्षों पहले जब मैं एक फेलोशिप पर सांप्रदायिक दंगों के दौरान भारतीय पुलिस की निष्पक्षता की अवधारणा पर काम कर रहा था ,  दो तथ्यों ने विशेष रूप से मेरा ध्यान आकर्षित किया था। सबसे पहले तो इस सच्चाई से  मेरा साबका पड़ा कि गंभीर से गंभीर सांप्रदायिक हिंसा की घटनाओं में भी कानून और व्यवस्था के रखवालों को लगभग न के बराबर दण्डित किया गया था। अहमदाबाद (1969 और 2002) सिक्ख विरोधी दंगे (1984) या बाबरी मस्जिद का ध्वंस और उसके बाद के दंगों (1992 ‌‌,1993) जैसे गंभीर मामलों में भी जहाँ न सिर्फ राज्य की मशीनरी पूरी तरह से असफल हो गयी थी बल्कि कई मामलों में तो इस मशीनरी को बलवाईयों का सक्रिय समर्थन करते हुये देखा गया, उनमें भी किसी दण्डित अधिकारी को चिन्हित कर पाना बहुत मुश्किल था। दूसरा महत्वपूर्ण मुद्दा था हिंसा के दौरान हुयी जान माल की की क्षति के लिये राज्य द्वारा दी जाने वाली मुआवजा राशि में पूरी तरह से अराजक विवेक की उपस्थिति ।इन दोनों स्थितियों के लिये  मुख्य रूप से जिम्मेदार भारतीय कानूनों में किसी तरह के अंतर्निहित सांस्थानिक प्राविधानों का अभाव है।
  सांप्रदायिक हिंसा के विरूद्ध प्रस्तावित बिल इन्हीं दोनों मुद्दों को ध्यान में रखकर बनाया गया है।
अपने अध्ययन के दौरान मेरा साक्षात्कार एक बहुत ही बेचैन कर देने वाली सच्चाई से हुआ था और उसी के संदर्भ में मुझे लगता है कि यह बिल सबसे महत्वपूर्ण है। 1961 में आजादी के बाद पहला बड़ा सांप्रदायिक दंगा जबलपुर में हुआ और उसमें एक ऐसा पैटर्न उभरकर सामने आया जो दुर्भाग्य से बाद के लगभग सभी बड़े दंगों में बार‌ बार दिखायी पड़ता है। इन दंगों में मरने वालों की संख्या पर अगर हम दृष्टि डालें तो लगभग हर जगह एक ही कहानी दोहरायी गयी दिखायी देती है। मरने वालों में न सिर्फ मुसलमानों की संख्या अधिक होती है बल्कि ज्यादातर में तो तीन चौथायी से अधिक वही होते हैं। गिरफ्तारियाँ , तलाशियाँ या निरोधात्मक  कार्यवाहियों जैसी राज्य की प्रतिक्रिया भी अमूमन मुसलमानों के खिलाफ ही होती है । मैंने आजादी के बाद हुये बड़े दंगों में राज्य की असफलता के लिये जिम्मेदार पुलिस एवं प्रशासनिक अधिकारियों के विरुद्ध की जाने वाली कार्यवाहियों को खंगालने की कोशिश की तो मुझे आमतौर से निराशा ही हाथ लगी। ज्यादातर मामलों में किसी भी अधिकारी को दण्डित नहीं किया गया था और अगर दण्ड दिया भी गया था तो वह महज लीपापोती या खानापूरी ही था। मसलन किसी अधिकारी का स्थानांतरण कर दिया गया और कुछ दिनो बाद उसे वापस महत्वपूर्ण तैनाती दे दी गयी और कई मामलों में तो आपराधिक रूप से असफल अधिकारी/ कर्मचारी वापस उसी स्थान पर नियुक्त कर दिये गये ।कुछ को निलम्बित किया गया और थोड़ा समय बीतने के बाद जब मामला ठंड़ा पड़ गया  तो उन्हे बहाल कर दिया गया ।1984 के सिक्ख नरसंहार जैसे कई मामलों में जहाँ जांच कमीशनों नें दोषी अधिकारियों को चिन्हित भी किया, किसी को दण्डित नही किया गया ।  इस प्रस्तावित बिल में सांप्रदायिक हिंसा के दौरान आपराधिक लापरवाही दिखाने वाले कर्मियों को दण्डित करने का सांस्थानिक प्रयास किया गया है।   
  राज्य का यह सबसे महत्वपूर्ण दायित्व है कि वह अपने सभी नागरिकों को बिना किसी भेदभाव के जानमाल की सुरक्षा प्रदान करे। इस महत्वपूर्ण उत्तरदायित्व को निभाने में असफल रहने पर उसे पीड़ितों को पर्याप्त एवं उचित मुआवजा देना चाहिये। दुनिया भर में सभी सभ्य सरकारें ऐसा ही करतीं हैं। भारत में कोई कानूनी बाध्यता न होने के कारण अदालतें और राज्यों के मुख्यमंत्री  अपने विवेक के अनुसार मुआवजे की राशि निर्धारित करतें हैं और यह हजारों से लेकर लाखों तक में हो सकती है । कई ममलों में तो निर्धारण पीड़ित  की जाति या धर्म को ध्यान में रखकर किया जाता है।  प्रस्तावित बिल में पहली बार एक ऐसा सांस्थानिक प्रयास किया जा रहा है जिसके तहत हर पीड़ित को मुआवजा देना राज्य के लिये अनिवार्य होगा। मुझे लगता है कि यह बिल यदि कानून बना और इसे ईमानदारी से लागू किया गया तो यह आजादी के बाद बने सबसे महत्वपूर्ण कानूनों में से एक होगा।
  इस बिल के कानून बन जाने के बाद देश से सांप्रदायिकता की समस्या समूल नष्ट हो जायेगी ऐसा सोचना अति सरलीकरण का शिकार होना होगा।मुझे याद है कि एक गोष्ठी में जिसमे कुछ वर्षों पूर्व इस बिल के स्वरूप पर विचार हो रहा था, अवकाश प्राप्त मुख्य न्यायाधीश जे.एस. वर्मा ने एक महत्वपूर्ण प्रश्न उठाया था।उनके अनुसार सांप्रदायिक दंगों के दौरान होने वाली हिंसा से उत्पन्न सभी अपराधों से निपटनें के लिये वर्तमान भारतीय कानूनों में पर्याप्त प्राविधान हैं। समस्या यह है कि इन कानूनों को लागू करने  और इनके अनुरूप दोषियों को दंडित करने के लिये राज्य में पर्याप्त इच्छा शक्ति का अभाव है। यदि नया कानून बनने के बाद भी राजनैतिक नेतृत्व उसे लागू करने में दिलचस्पी न दिखाये तो क्या किया जा सकता है? यह एक महत्वपूर्ण सवाल है और इसका समाधान तभी हो सकता है जब इस कानून में सरकारी अधिकारियों के अतिरिक्त उस राजनैतिक नेतृत्व की भी जिम्मेदारी निर्धारित की जाय जिसे सांप्रदायिक हिंसा के दौरान निर्णायक फैसले लेने होतें हैं। उदाहरणार्थ यदि जिला मजिस्ट्रेट और पुलिस अधीक्षक को दंड़ित किया जा सकता है तो यह अपेक्षा  भी उचित है कि सांप्रदायिक हिंसा को रोकने में असफल मुख्यमंत्रियों और गृहमंत्रियों का भी दायित्व निर्धारित किया जाना चाहिये।
  प्रस्तावित कानून में कई प्राविधान ऐसे हैं जो भारत के संघीय ढांचे में परिकल्पित केंद्र-राज्य सम्बंधों के संतुलन को बिगाड़ सकतें हैं। ऐसा संभवत: इसलिये किया गया है कि यदि कोई राज्य सरकार कानून व्यवस्था के अपने बुनियादी फर्ज को नहीं निभा पाती है तो केंद्र को उसमें हस्तक्षेप करने का अधिकार होना चाहिये। पर 2002 में गुजरात में हुये नरसंहार के दौरान तो राज्य और केंद्र में एक ही दल की सरकार थी। भविष्य में यदि यह कानून अस्तित्व में आ भी गया तब भी यदि 2002 के गुजरात वाली में क्या होगा , कह पाना मुश्किल है ।राजनैतिक इच्छा शक्ति का महत्व तो हमेशा बना रहेगा पर इतना तो हो ही जायेगा कि कानून बनने के बाद पीड़ित मुआवजे के लिये अथवा आपराधिक लापरवाही के दोषियों को दण्ड़ित कराने के लिये अदालत की  शरण ले सकते हैं । 


                               विभूति नारायण राय