Geek Sublime

by Vikram Chandra

  Memory too can be gendered. If the past is a foreign country, in modernity’s view it is a feminine one. In that essential text of literary modernism, Heart of Darkness, as Marlow steers his boat up the river, he goes backwards into the past and into a teeming, liquid fertility that is enormously dangerous and seductive. The figure most emblematic of this womb-like wilderness is the “wild-eyed and magnificent” woman who guards Kurtz, “the barbarous and superb woman” who stands “looking at us without a stir, and like the wilderness itself, with an air of brooding over an inscrutable purpose.”53 Of course, in Conrad’s story, she does not get to speak. Chinua Achebe pointed out that Conrad does not give Africans the faculty of speech, they make “a violent babble of uncouth sounds,” and even among themselves they communicate with “short grunting phrases.”54

  So we are at a point of origin, a state of lesser development. The irony here is that apart from the African languages that Conrad reduces to “babble,” the frightening “throb of drums” that Conrad refers to several times contains a sophisticated artificial language rich in metaphor and poetry. The drummers carried on conversations with each other, made announcements, broadcast messages. James Gleick tells us that this language of the drums metamorphosed tonal African languages into “tone and only tone. It was a language of a single pair of phonemes, a language composed entirely of pitch contours.” The drum language let go of the consonants and vowels of spoken speech and made up for this information loss by adding on additional phrases to each word. “Songe, the moon, is rendered as songe li tange la manga—’the moon looks down at the earth.’”55 Listeners would hear entire phrases; the drum language dropped information but “allocated extra bits for disambiguation and error correction.”56 “Come back home” would be rendered as:

  Make your feet come back the way they went,

  make your legs come back the way they went,

  plant your feet and your legs below,

  in the village which belongs to us.57

  The past and the present speak to us in languages we refuse to hear.

  9 THE LANGUAGE OF LITERATURE

  An injured monkey regains consciousness, and begins typing the story of his past life.

  The past retelling itself in the present—it seems like an obvious enough image, but the image came to me first, not its suggestiveness. Did I create the image, or did the dhvani make it and I find it? Writers are full of themselves, and therefore ask these kinds of annoyingly mystical questions, but they are also full of echoes of what is not in themselves. On my good days I feel like I can hear and catch these fleeting reverberations. Bind them into language before they disappear.

  Sometimes the sheer vastness of what I want to put into fiction terrifies me. I survive by not thinking about the whole. I write my four hundred words this day, and then another four hundred words the next. I find my way by feeling, by intuition, by the sounds of the words, by the characters’ passions, by trekking on to the next day, the next horizon, and then the next. I pay attention to the tracks of narratives I leave behind, and I look for openings ahead. I make shapes and I find shapes. I retrace my steps, go over draft after draft, trying to find something, I am not sure what until I begin to see it. I am trying to make an object, a model, a receptacle. What I am making will not be complete until I let go of it.

  When I write fiction, I create an object that I hope will be savored by an imagined someone, somewhere. I show my ongoing work to my wife, my friends, my family, but my real collaborators are always the sahrdayas of the future, the same-hearted ones who will allow my words to reverberate within them. And each person who reads my story will inevitably read a different story, or rather, will create a different story. Anandavardhana insists that

  In this boundless saṃāra of poetry,

  the poet is the only creator god.

  …

  A good poet can transform insentient things

  into sentient,

  and sentient into the insentient, as he likes.

  In poetry the poet is free.1

  But I am only half a god.

  Perhaps this is why I have always turned to coding with such relief: I can see cause and effect immediately. Write some code, and it either works or it doesn’t. If it doesn’t, re-factor—change it, rewrite it, throw it away, and write new code. It either works or it doesn’t.

  Poetry has no success or failure. Poetry waits to manifest.

  And then there is language itself, malleable, slippery, all-powerful and yet always inadequate. Or perhaps it is my craft that is incapable of manifesting completely the reality of the worlds inside me. I am always translating, always bringing from one realm to another, and always there is something left out, something that drifts outside my reach.

  I write in English. The language of the conquerors is the language of my marga, and it is one of the languages of my interior. English—sprinkled with Hindi, Tamil, Punjabi, Gujarati—is what my schoolmates and I spoke to each other during recess, what we used to call out to each other, to curse and to cajole. Some of our great-grandfathers learned Persian, perhaps, in their pathshalas. And before that, their ancestors chanted Sanskrit.

  And so, in Red Earth and Pouring Rain, my poet tries to speak in English:

  Sanjay moved his head, shut his eye, tried to speak but found his throat blocked tightly by something as hard as metal; he did not know what it was he wanted to say but knew that he couldn’t say it, what was possible to say he couldn’t say in English, how can in English one say roses, doomed love, chaste passion, my father my mother, their love which never spoke, pride, honour, what a man can live for and what a woman should die for, can you in English say the cows’ slow distant tinkle at sunset, the green weight of the trees after monsoon, dust of winnowing and women’s songs, elegant shadow of a minar creeping across white marble, the patient goodness of people met at wayside, the enfolding trust of aunts and uncles and cousins, winter bonfires and fresh chapattis, in English all this, the true shape and contour of a nation’s heart, all this is left unsaid and unspeakable and invisible, and so all Sanjay could say after all was: “Not.”

  And yet, even if “Neti, neti” is enough for philosophers, a poet cannot only say “Not this, not this.” A poet must say, “This, this, and also this.” And by speaking, make English say things it cannot say.

  I grew up in a Brahmin family, but without Sanskrit. During the second millennium CE, many of the Sanskrit-speaking Hindu regimes that patronized scholarship and poetry were replaced by Muslim kingdoms that used Persian as a court language. This did not necessarily mean neglect—many of these new rulers continued to sponsor poets, schools, and translations; the immense prestige of the language and its role in the sanctification of kingship and power were attractive to the new establishments. Muslims wrote scientific and poetical works in Sanskrit. Many of the Prakrits developed their own thriving literary and critical cultures, but these regional flowerings in the desha were engaged in a vital and mutually revivifying conversation with the marga. During this “vernacular millennium,” Yigal Bronner and David Shulman write:

  the peculiar expressive power of Sanskrit [is] still vital and available … True, Sanskrit is now but one of several literary options. But it brings with it unique assets such as the direct verbal and thematic continuities that transcend local contexts and that, for that very reason, enable a powerful articulation of the regional in its true fullness … Interacting with these vernaculars, Sanskrit is itself continuously changing, stretching the boundaries of the sayable, thinking new thoughts, searching for ways to formulate this newness.2

  So on the eve of colonialism in the early eighteenth century, there was still a thriving—if diminished—cosmopolis. Sheldon Pollock writes:

  The two centuries before European colonialism decisively established itself in the subcontinent around 1750 constitute one of the most innovative epochs of Sanskrit systematic thought (in language analysis, logic, hermeneutics, moral-legal philosophy, and the rest). Thinkers p
roduced new formulations of old problems, in entirely new discursive idioms, in what were often new scholarly genres employing often a new historicist framework; some even called themselves (or, more often, their enemies) “the new” scholars (navya).3

  This ancient, widespread transmission was finally fractured by the establishment of English as the language of colonial politics and commerce, and the institutionalization of new dispensations of morality, knowledge, and power. The upper castes—especially the Brahmins—devoted themselves energetically to adapting to the new networks of wealth and meaning, to converting their social capital into economic capital. Many in the colonial legislative systems thought that Indian knowledge was flawed materially and morally, and that the only “cure” for the ills of the culture was the enforcement of change through European education. The early awe with which the eighteenth-century Orientalist scholars regarded Indian thought and art gave way, Vasudha Dalmia tells us:

  to a marginalization of this knowledge and the degradation of the bearers of it to native informants. The Pandits had to deliver the raw material so to speak, the end products were to be finally manufactured by the superior techniques developed in Europe. In other words, their knowledge became valuable only once it had gone through the filter of European knowledge … The loss of authority … was not due to the intrinsic worth of either system, it was occasioned by the weightage awarded to Western scholarship by the political power it commanded.4

  Great works in the sciences and arts continued to be written well into the nineteenth century, but the Indian intellectual tradition was almost wholly removed from the educational system.5 After Independence, the new Indian state’s official policy of “technology-centric modernization” resulted in the entire native scholastic heritage being described “as ‘traditional’ in opposition to ‘modern’ and, therefore, understood as retrogressive and an obstruction in the path of progress and development which had been given a totally materialistic definition.”6 In my early childhood, I heard Sanskrit only in temples or at weddings; in both cases, Pandits chanted verses that the majority of us—children and adults—couldn’t understand. In sixth grade, I began to learn Sanskrit as a compulsory subject at school, and a vast, stifling boredom engulfed me immediately. It wasn’t just the endless rote learning of verb conjugations and vocabulary lists; Sanskrit came to us surrounded by a thick cloud of piety and supposed cultural virtue. Immediately after Independence, a passionate national debate took place over the institution of a national language for the Indian nation state. English was of course a foreign tongue, but southern speakers of Tamil and Malayalam objected to Hindi as the national language because it would put them at a disadvantage in the competition for jobs and advancement. In this context, the eternal language of the cosmopolis was presented as a good choice by some because it now was equally alien to everyone, because it was nobody’s “mother tongue”: “I offer you a language which is the grandest and the greatest,” said Naziruddin Ahmad during a debate in the Constituent Assembly, “and it is impartially difficult, equally difficult for all to learn.”7

  Others insisted that Sanskrit was a source of moral virtue, that its verses

  breathe a high moral tone and display a precious note of what might be called High and Serious Enlightenment. Persons who are attuned to this spirit through an acquaintance from early childhood with verses of this type … have a balanced and cultured outlook upon life … The message of Sanskrit read or chanted is that of sursum corda, “lift up your hearts.”8

  Eventually, Hindi was installed as the national language, but Sanskrit was accorded official status by the Constitution and taught in school. Our Sanskrit lessons were replete with High and Serious Enlightenment; the characters in our readers were pompous prigs of every age and gender who went on and on about Right Action and Proper Behavior. The vast irony was that every Indian child of my generation and after has voraciously consumed the brightly colored pages of the Amar Chitra Katha comic books, which re-create “Immortal Picture Stories” from India’s vast storehouse of narrative. In these comics, much is taken from Sanskrit literature, and in them, muscled epic heroes behave badly, lop off limbs and heads, tangle with monsters, and go on quests; queens launch intricate intrigues; beautiful women and men fall in love and have sex; goddesses bless and create havoc; great sages spy on voluptuous apsaras and inadvertently “spill their seed” and thereby cause dynastic upheavals and great wars. In short, the beloved Amar Chitra Katha comics contain all the gore and romance dear to a twelve-year-old’s heart, but we could read them only in Hindi or Tamil or English, never in Sanskrit.

  And of course nobody ever told us about Tantric Sanskrit, or Buddhist Sanskrit, or Jain Sanskrit. By the beginning of the second millennium CE, Sanskrit had “long ceased to be a Brahmanical preserve,” but it was always presented to us as the great language of the Vedas.9 Sanskrit—as it was taught in the classroom—smelled to me of hypocrisy, of religious obscurantism, of the khaki-knickered obsessions of the Hindu far-Right, and worst, of an oppression that went back thousands of years. As far as I knew, in all its centuries, Sanskrit had been a language available only to the “twice-born” of the caste system, and was therefore an inescapable aspect of orthodoxy. At twelve, I had disappointed my grandparents by refusing to undergo the ritual of upanayana, the ceremonial investiture of the sacred string which would signal my second birth into official Brahmin manhood. This was not out of some thought-out ethical position, but from an instinctive repulsion at the sheer, blatant unfairness of a ceremony and a system predicated on the randomness of birth. Now Sanskrit was being forced on me, with all its attendant casteism, its outdated and hidebound and chant-y ponderousness. As soon as I was offered a choice—a chance to learn another contemporary language to fulfil requirements—I fled from Sanskrit and never looked back, until I had to ask, for the premodern poet in my novel: What makes a poem beautiful?

  The poet Kshemendra—Abhinavagupta’s student—left this advice:

  A poet should learn with his eyes

  the forms of leaves

  he should know how to make

  people laugh when they are together

  he should get to see

  what they are really like

  he should know about oceans and mountains

  in themselves

  and the sun and the moon and the stars

  his mind should enter into the seasons

  he should go

  among many people

  in many places

  and learn their languages10

  I have a sabbatical coming up. My plan is: (1) write fiction; (2) learn a functional programming language; and (3) learn Sanskrit.

  In Red Earth and Pouring Rain one of the characters builds a gigantic knot. “I made the knot,” he says.

  I made it of twine, string, leather thongs, strands of fibrous materials from plants, pieces of cloth, the guts of animals, lengths of steel and copper, fine meshes of gold, silver beaten thin into filament, cords from distant cities, women’s hair, goats’ beards; I used butter and oil; I slid things around each other and entangled them, I pressed them together until they knew each other so intimately that they forgot they were ever separate, and I tightened them against each other until they squealed and groaned in agony; and finally, when I had finished, I sat cross-legged next to the knot, sprinkled water in a circle around me and whispered the spells that make things enigmatic, the chants of profundity and intricacy.

  When I wrote that book, when I write now, I want a certain density that encourages savoring. I want to slide warp over woof, I want to make knots. I want entanglement, unexpected connections, reverberations, the weight of pouring rain on red earth. Mud is where life begins.

  Like palm-leaf manuscripts, the worlds the writer creates will finally be destroyed, become illegible. At least until they are re-excavated and become alive again within the consciousness of a future reader. I don’t worry too much about whose work will “last,” and if mine won’t. I do thi
nk endlessly about the shapes of stories, about the tones and tastes that will overlay each other within the contours. I don’t much like perfect symmetry, which always seems inert to me. The form of art rises from impurity, from dangerous chaos. When I can find perfection and then discover the perfect way to mar that perfection, I am happy. As a creator, I want to bend and twist the grammar of my world-making, I want crookedness and deformation, I want to introduce errors that explode into the pleasure of surprise. In art, a regularity of form is essential, but determinism is boring. When I am the spectator, the caressing of my expectations, and then their defeat, feels like the vibration of freedom, the pulse of life itself.

  Abhinavagupta’s assertions about rasa-dhvani may remind Western readers of T. S. Eliot’s objective correlative:

  The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding … a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked.11

  This may not be simply a case of two thinkers separated by centuries coming independently to similar conclusions; Indians like to point out that Eliot read substantially in classical Indian philosophy and metaphysics during his time at Harvard, certainly enough to have encountered rasa and dhvani. In 1933, Eliot wrote:

  Two years spent in the study of Sanskrit under Charles Lanman, and a year in the mazes of Patanjali’s metaphysics under the guidance of James Woods, left me in a state of enlightened mystification. A good half of the effort of understanding what the Indian philosophers were after—and their subtleties make most of the great European philosophers look like schoolboys—lay in trying to erase from my mind all the categories and kinds of distinction common to European philosophy from the time of the Greeks. My previous and concomitant study of European philosophy was hardly better than an obstacle. And I came to the conclusion …