Literary genius Dilip Chitre dies of cancer
अश्वमित्रः
Literary genius Dilip Chitre dies of cancer
Posted: Friday , Dec 11, 2009 at 0104 hrs
Pune
Celebrated Marathi poet, author, critic and filmmaker Dilip
Purushottam Chitre also known as Deepu Chitre passed away after a
prolonged illness in Pune early Thursday. Chitre, 71, who was
suffering from cancer passed away at around 3.30 am on Thursday.
He is survived by wife Viju Chitre. The duo had lost their son Ashay
Chitre in 2003 in a domestic fire. Ashay was also affected by the
Bhopal gas leak in 1984. Chitre was cremated at the Yerawada
crematorium around 12.30 pm on Thursday.
Born in 1938, Dilip Chitre was one of the foremost Indian writers and
critics to emerge in the post-independence era. Apart from being an
important bilingual writer, he was also a painter and filmmaker. His
film Godam had won Prix Special du Jury award at the Festival des
Trois Continents at Nantes in France in 1984. Besides he had received
a number of awards such as Ministry of Human Resource Development’s
Emeritus Fellowship, the University of Iowa’s International Writing
Program Fellowship, the Indira Gandhi Fellowship, Villa Waldberta
Fellowship for Residence given by the city of Munich, Bavaria, Germany
and so on.
His Ekun Kavita or Collected Poems published in the nineties in three
volumes were awarded Sahitya Akademi Award (1994) for Ekoon Kavita-1.
Travelling in the Cage is his collection of English poems. He had also
edited An Anthology of Marathi Poetry from 1945-1965 . His most famous
translation is of the celebrated 17th century Marathi saint - Tukaram,
published as Says Tuka that won the Sahitya Akademi Translation Prize
in 1994.
... contd.
अश्वमित्रः
ज्येष्ठ कवी दिलीप चित्रे यांचे निधन
पुणे - संत तुकारामांच्या अभंगांचा इंग्रजी अनुवाद करून त्यांचे कवित्व
जगासमोर नेणारे ज्येष्ठ कवी, साहित्यिक, चित्रकार आणि समीक्षक दिलीप
पुरुषोत्तम चित्रे (वय 71) यांचे येथे गुरुवारी पहाटे कर्करोगाने निधन
झाले. त्यांच्या मागे पत्नी विजया आणि नातू असा परिवार आहे. चित्रे
यांच्या पार्थिवावर येरवडा येथील स्मशानभूमीत दुपारी बारा वाजता
अंत्यसंस्कार करण्यात आले. या वेळी साहित्य, चित्रकला, शिल्पकला, चित्रपट
क्षेत्रातील मान्यवर उपस्थित होते.
बंडखोर लेखक म्हणून आयुष्यभर नावाजलेले चित्रे हे गेल्या दीड वर्षांपासून
कर्करोगाशी झुंजत होते. निवासस्थानी असतानाच गुरुवारी पहाटे त्यांना
त्रास झाला आणि त्यातच त्यांची प्राणज्योत मालवली. चित्रे यांच्या
निधनाचे वृत्त समजताच त्यांच्या चाहत्यांनी अंत्यदर्शन घेण्यासाठी येरवडा
परिसरातील हर्म्स हेरिटेज सोसायटी येथे गर्दी केली होती.
स्वातंत्र्योत्तर काळातील प्रयोगशील लेखक असा लौकिक असलेले चित्रे यांचा
जन्म 17 सप्टेंबर 1938 रोजी बडोद्यात झाला. वयाच्या चौदाव्या वर्षापासून
लेखनाला सुरवात करणारे चित्रे यांनी पत्रकार म्हणूनही काम केले. मराठी
साहित्य विश्वातील मान्यताप्राप्त "लिटल मॅगझिन मूव्हमेंट'मध्ये त्यांचा
मोलाचा वाटा होता. अरुण कोलटकर आणि रमेश समर्थ यांच्यासमवेत त्यांनी
"शब्द' हे लघुनियतकालिक चालविले. भाऊ पाध्ये आणि हमीद दलवाई यांच्याशी
त्यांचा स्नेह जुळला. त्यानंतर इथिओपियात त्यांनी शिक्षकाची नोकरी केली.
तेथून तीन वर्षांनी परतल्यावर ते जाहिरात एजन्सीमध्ये काम करू लागले.
जाहिरातींच्या "कॉप्या' करताना आणि चित्रीकरण पाहून त्यांनी बाराहून अधिक
लघुपट आणि अनुबोधपटांची निर्मिती केली.
चित्रे यांचा "कविता' हा पहिला कवितासंग्रह मौज प्रकाशनने प्रसिद्ध केला
होता. "कवितेनंतरच्या कविता', "एकूण कविता भाग एक, दोन आणि तीन' हे
कवितासंग्रह, पावलो नेरुदा या ब्राझील कवीच्या कवितांचा "दहा बाय दहा' हा
अनुवाद, "ऑर्फियस' आणि "चतुरंग' हे कथासंग्रह, "मिठू मिठू पोपट' हे नाटक
अशी चित्रे यांची ग्रंथसंपदा आहे. त्यांनी "सकाळ'मधून "तिरकस व चौकस' आणि
"शतकाचा संधिकाल' ही सदरे लिहिली. नंतर त्यांची त्याच नावांनी पुस्तके
प्रसिद्ध झाली. तुकारामांच्या अभंगांवर आधारित मार्मिक विवेचनासह चित्रे
यांनी लेखन केलेले "तुका म्हणे' आणि "सेज तुका' हा इंग्रजी अनुवाद यामुळे
तुकारामांचे कवित्व केवळ मराठी भाषकांपुरतेच न राहता जागतिक स्तरावर
अधोरेखित झाले. "सेज तुका'ला साहित्य अकादमीचा पुरस्कार लाभला.
"ट्रॅव्हलिंग इन ए केज', मराठी कवितांचा इंग्रजी अनुवाद असलेला साहित्य
अकादमीने प्रकाशित केलेला "अनुभवामृत', "द माउंटन', "नामदेव ढसाळांच्या
कविता', "ऍज इज व्हेअर इज' आणि "शेष' या मराठी कवितांचा इंग्रजी अनुवाद
असे अनुवादाचे काम करून त्यांनी आधुनिक मराठी साहित्याची जगाला ओळख करून
दिली. "गोदाम' आणि "नारायण सुर्वे' हे त्यांचे अनुबोधपट गाजले. शशी
कपूरनिर्मित "विजेता' चित्रपटाची कथा-पटकथा चित्रे यांचीच होती.
चित्रे यांच्या पार्थिवावर येरवडा येथील स्मशानभूमीत अंत्यसंस्कार
करण्यात आले. पॉप्युलर प्रकाशनचे रामदास भटकळ, संतसाहित्याचे अभ्यासक डॉ.
सदानंद मोरे, प्रसिद्ध नाटककार सतीश आळेकर, "आयुका'चे माजी संचालक डॉ.
नरेश दधीच, डॉ. प्रमोद तलगेरी, अभिनेते डॉ. मोहन आगाशे, विक्रम गोखले,
गजानन परांजपे, दिग्दर्शक अतुल पेठे, कादंबरीकार श्याम मनोहर, लेखक अशोक
शहाणे, मुकुंद टाकसाळे, कवी मंगेश काळे, संतोष पद्माकर पवार, गणेश
विसपुते, नचिकेत पटवर्धन, सुजित पटवर्धन, चित्रकार भास्कर हांडे आणि
मॅक्समुल्लर भवनचे संचालक मायकल फ्लुक्ट या वेळी उपस्थित होते.
Sid Harth
Antara Dev Sen
Thursday, December 17, 2009 0:33 IST
Death is no news but it is always a bad surprise for the living,"
wrote Dilip Chitre, who passed away on December 10.
His death was a very bad surprise. Never mind that he was 71 and had
cancer, you didn't expect Dilip to die. In spite of all his recent
poetry about death, especially after his son Ashay passed away in
2003. And the disturbing images in his recent paintings. You believed
in his trust in new technology, in the cyberknife that had zapped his
liver tumour this summer, in his being forever Dilip, the rebel, the
whizkid.
The one who was "reluctant to die/or to accept my ageing with grace."
The one who epitomised the possibilities of life, who could be --and
was -- anything he wished to be: poet, painter, filmmaker, editor,
critic, translator, teacher, journalist, copywriter, music director,
screenwriter, lover, father, husband, grandfather, friend. And "the
would-be author of that still unwritten masterpiece/ Making Love Like
a Hindu/ a profane wanderer of the sacred universe."
Dilip's wandering in the sacred universe was an exploration of the
self and the world. He wasn't particularly religious but his poetry
sparkled with the spirituality of the believer. A fierce critic of
sectarianism, he was so comfortable with his personal belief and his
deep understanding of the Bhakti tradition that he could be
irrepressibly irreligious, often making fun of constructed divinity,
as he did of practically everything else.
Take this poem Chitre, which starts off all serious, "Chitre's forte
is Indian ink," and goes on to declare, "He's tired, is Dilip/ He
wants to go to sleep/... Just rest his bones; no prayer on his lips./
His quill tranquil, his ink going dry/ His eyes about to open on the
ultimate sky/ Have mercy on him, O troubled ancestors,/ angry
contemporaries, disturbed near ones,/ Dilip would like to retire
unsung/ Where the Lord sucketh His own thumb." But he does claim his
rights: "And Chitre, after all, is some sort of Hindu/ And like every
Hindu/ he expects his karma's due." Elsewhere, he asks: "Will I ever
find heaven's f--- light?"
Dilip was a communicator. He connected through his poetry in Marathi
and English, his films, paintings, photography. And he was hungry for
new ways of communicating. My email is full of 'Dilip Chitre wants to
connect with you' messages -- inviting me to keep up with him on
Facebook, on Twitter, ibibo, indyrocks, friendster, bigDevil, xanga
and netlog.
I tried to explain to him that I have difficulty keeping up with
friends in real life, that I didn't have his energy or his enthusiasm,
in short, that I clearly was not as young as him. The venerable
communicator continued through SMS messages, phone calls and most of
all emails with copies to others, sharing thoughts, giving news,
inviting views. Sometimes with a quick apology for the round-robin
mail: "I'm now getting older and must conserve energy and save time."
To Dilip, language was just another tool of communication, between the
writer and the reader, the writer and his thoughts. So he wore his
multilingualism lightly. Sure, he wrote in two languages and spoke a
couple more, but all Indians are multilingual, he would shrug. It's
just the way we are. And he used his natural command over English to
translate Marathi poetry and share it with the non-Marathi world.
From medieval saint poets like Tukaram to his contemporaries like
Dalit writer Namdeo Dhasal to the young poets of today like Hemant
Divate, Dilip took their voices across the language barrier. And his
films on contemporary poets introduced language writers to an all-
India audience. Yet there was loneliness in this sparkling
communicator that perhaps only his wife Viju could touch. Now that is
over. As Dilip wrote: "This universe is now closed." But his thoughts
will remain, in poetry, art, film and memory.
http://www.dnaindia.com/opinion/column_a-versatile-genius-who-loved-to-communicate_1324522
Not to belittle Dilip Chitre's memory, here is acollection of some of
the best Marathi poems in the last century. Dilip Chitre is not
included.
marathi_k...pdf
...and I am Sid Harth
chhotemianinshallah
Farewell Dilip bhai
RANVIR SHAH
Remembering a personal relationship with poet-translator Dilip Chitre
who passed away recently.
INTENSE AND MOVING:Dilip Chitre's work left an indelible impression.
PHOTO: R. RAGU
Undoubtedly the passing away of Dilip Chitre, poet, translator,
filmmaker, teacher, mentor, artist and most importantly humanist is an
irreparable loss in the world of poetry and letters.
Noted for his work from the time he published his first collection of
Marathi poetry, Kavita in 1960 Chitre straddled the world of Marathi
and English poetry like a colossus, doing along the way many wonderful
projects that coloured his world view and broadened his bandwidth of
fans, followers and ‘groupies' as they are now called.
Influential
To be fluent and followed in both languages was indeed something this
influential bilingual poet himself thought deeply about and said of
it. “A bilingual writer's literary orientation is assumed to be like
the erotic orientation of a bisexual – dangerously ambiguous and
oblique. Somehow, on either side of the language divide, one's loyalty
to one's audience is held suspect”. This, however, was not the case
with him since in both worlds he and his work were regarded with great
respect.
Dilip was also interested in films. His movie “Godam” and then a
series of short films on poets are also the first of their kind. He
painted too and recently held a show with great success where many
well known artists bought his work. Then there was also a deep abiding
interest in the mytho- religious and cultural landscape of
Maharashtra. Tukaram, the 17 {+t} {+h} Century Marathi mystic, was the
inspiration for one of his most loved and famous translation projects
called Says Tuka. It won him the Sahitya Akademi Award for translation
in 1994. Coincidentally it was the year he won the Sahitya Akademi
Award for poetry as well for his first volume of three, of his
collected Marathi poems called Ekoon Kavita.
My encounters with Dilip bhai, as I chose to respectfully call him,
occurred in recent times and were few. However, they left an indelible
impression and created a rare intimacy. I felt privileged. He arrived
in Chennai in August 2007 for a reading and discussion of his
translation of Namdeo Dhasal, the Dalit poet's work. In a luminous
evening of reading, talking about Dhasal with noted Mumbai playwright
Ramu Ramanathan, Dilip bhai made Dhasal's world come alive for the
audience. Conversation followed, deep, intense and moving. In Pune
later that year at a conference, I dropped in for lunch and spent an
entire afternoon getting to know the story of his life and times.
Frank and honest about the personal daemons he encountered, the way he
ingested grief and then excavated it from the deep regions of his
psyche were, for me, a window into the workings of his art and craft
but mostly the sharing of an adventure on the journey of life. He was
most ably supported by his wife Vijaya (Viju), who gave up an art
career to nurture and support his.
Doors of coincidences open and shut/Therefore we met and behind us/All
doors disappeared…. We remained together…./Supportless, surprised we
held each other's hands/ That remained in our hands…… life was over!
(“Doors of Coincidence Open and Shut” Dilip Chitre )
Encounters
He advised me on poets to invite to the Poetry with Prakriti Festival
and friends to meet who would in turn inspire me. Prominent amongst
these were G.N. Devy and his work in Gujarat with his alternative
university, reminisces of Ebrahim Alkazi in the old days and J.
Swaminathan of the Bhopal Bharat Bhavan.
In the winter of 2008 he came as the star senior poet at the Poetry
with Prakriti Festival and stayed a few days in my home in Chennai and
established a rapport with my family. We planned his art exhibition
and other collaborative projects. Since he left I had not had much
news until last month when I called his wife for some poems for an
anthology that we were putting together. That is when she told me of
his failing health.
Something in her voice made me anxious and a week later I was with
them in Pune. We had lunch. Dilip bhai would sit up for a few moments
chat in incandescent passages and lie down from exhaustion. We made
plans again… Of exhibitions, book in translation, travel to his
friend's farm in Portugal, he talked of the light there! He reminisced
again about his role in setting up Bharat Bhavan in Bhopal, knowing
the German Indologist Gunther Sontheimier and also Anne Feldhaus. His
wife made him autograph a small poem book she had published of his
encounter with a German poet/artiste at Somavati Amavasya (no moon
monday) held by the Karha. I opened it again after I heard of his
death. Strange words, premonitory, given in trust to me, a poetic
summa.
“This is not about light but the lightness of one's last breath/This
is not about the dark but the moment of seeing it all./This is not
about death but the memory of the beginning/Or the beginning of memory
and structured time./The prosody death dictates holds between its bars/
The delicate flow of every felt ripple,/The shiver in the spine, the
lightning in the brain,/The pain that shatters windows and brings down
the door/At which we stood for a lifetime.”
Dilip Chitre died here on a No Moon Monday/In a cloud of turmeric
dust.
The writer is the curator of the Poetry with Prakriti Festival. E-
mail:ranvi...@hotmail.com
Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Sunday, Dec 20, 2009
http://www.hindu.com/mag/2009/12/20/stories/2009122050070200.htm
Sid Harth
Tribute
The Unmonumental Chitre
Making sense of the work and life of a man who went against many
conventional notions of what literature is, who is a writer, and how a
writer should conduct himself in society.
Anjali Nerlekar on Dilip Chitre
In his well-known poem, “Ambulance Ride,” Dilip Chitre wrote:
We must talk together sometime
Sometime we must have
A drink together again
And you will tell me precisely
How death presses its shutter
How its flash smiles blindingly
How the negative takes it all
How the roll is wound
How they process it in the lab...
Now that death has pressed its shutter on Chitre, and as we try to
process what it means, I do not want to package his life for easy
consumption. I do not want to tie a pink ribbon over his work and
present it as a uniform, boxed, contained oeuvre. And I do not want to
diminish the insistent throwaway quality that Chitre emphasized about
his work even as he took his vocation most seriously. But I do want to
make sense of the work and life of a man who went against many
conventional notions of what literature is, who is a writer, and how a
writer should conduct himself in society.
Dilip Chitre is rightly celebrated for his monumental work of
translating Tukaram. But not enough is said about the unmonumental
aspect of his craft, the throwaway aspect of his vision. I use the
term “throwaway” deliberately because one way to look at his work is
through the idea of Wittgenstein’s ladder. Wittgenstein said of his
own philosophy that one who understands his work is he who “must so to
speak throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.” There is
this notion of the transitory, or the ever-changing about Chitre’s
work and life that I as a reader find valuable because it indicates
the unassuming nature of the poet’s life and work.
In an article in The Hindu, one that could be seen as his artistic
credo, Chitre said that he rarely, if ever, revisited his written
work:
"By some cerebral mechanism, I tend to forget my poems once they are
written and cannot recite them at will. ... My poems do not make me
wistful or nostalgic. Their present meaning to me is different from
the meaning they had when they were written."
They are mementoes of a feeling once experienced, an idea once
encountered, but they are not seen forever frozen in the same place as
when they were written by the poet. It is surprising yet refreshing to
see an artist as unassuming about his creation as this.
Nor is Chitre overly conscious about the large volume of his writing
either. One of the ways the world judges the work of a writer is based
on the selectivity of his work. Many writers jealously guard their
writerly reputation in the public sphere by controlling what is seen
of their art. He is aware of this himself:
“My output tells a story by itself. My collected poems in Marathi form
1954 to the present day occupy nearly 1000 pages. My English poetry is
about 50 per cent of that volume; and my translation of poetry would
fill another 700 pages. This is embarrassingly large; but since poetry
is what I principally do in life, I can hardly apologise.”
This tendency to document his poetic thoughts, all of them, is in
keeping with the expansive nature of the man and poet, who valued the
momentary significance of the ephemeral gesture or word or poem. A
particular poem or phrase or word could be forgotten later, as the
poet himself did, or maybe thrown aside for something more timely, but
these poems document in a democratic fashion and without prejudice,
the passing and the impermanent. It is this idea that lies behind the
style and structure of his best work, like his poem “Father Returning
Home.” Here, there is a recording of the mundane actions of the tired
father as he comes home at night—going to the toilet, eating a stale
chapati, and in one of the best images of the poem, washing his hands.
The poet notes:
The cold water running over his brown hands,
A few droplets cling to his greying hairs on his wrists.
It is this refusal to ignore those droplets on the grey hair on the
wrists that is the hallmark of his writing style and also of his
philosophy.
In a different way, the throwaway is also the characteristic of his
diction in poetry. Here the throwaway is what the world considers as
useless or crude or dirty. As one would say in Marathi, he declares
his credo in a “chhatiThok” manner when he calls Tukaram “bhenchod”
for dragging him into the “morass” (“daldal” in Marathi) of poetry.
His poetry abounds in bodily references that are normally seen as
inappropriate for use in poetry. In this, he is in the illustrious
tradition of Tukaram and Mardhekar and shares this sympathy with his
contemporaries like Namdeo Dhasal and Arun Kolatkar (no wonder he
translated one and made a documentary on the other). The urge to use
such language (he uses words like “cunt” unblinkingly in his work) is
part of the larger project of making visible the ordinary, the lowly
and also of the anger at the exclusionary vision of much of middle-
class propriety. As he says in one of his Marathi poems “'दहा बाय दहा'
मधील तीन कविता" (“Three poems from ‘Ten by Ten”):
यातना तर बसू शकतात
चवदा ओळीत सुद्धा
सभ्य सुनीतासारख्या
The anguish or pain can, very easily and graciously, be accommodated
in the fourteen lines of a gracious sonnet, says the poet but, as his
own poetry shows, he is not interested in such polite writing.
दारिद्र्याच्या रोगाला
कवितेची लक्षणं फुटतात
असाध्य जखामांसारखी.
Poetry emerges like a symptom of the disease of poverty, like so many
bodily sores, says he. There is a coalescence of poverty, disease,
festering sores and poetry in this very powerful poem from the ‘Ten by
Ten’ location in Bombay and it denies any comfort or joy in such
emergence. This anger and frustration is evinced in the language, the
imagery and the voice of most of his poems. Such language and imagery
shocks, unsettles, and reminds one of large sections of the populace
that are not part of the usual readership of poetry, the throwaway
people. And the world muscles its way into the pristine halls of art
in such work.
As a reader, then, it is his egalitarian outlook, his refusal to
select, elect, weigh and judge that is most refreshing and new to me.
He wrote about the ordinary and the unsingular, he presented an oeuvre
that celebrated the passing and the momentary, he used language that
was non-elitist, and he tried to do this in multiple genres and art
forms. As he said himself,
“For me, poetry is not a monogamous marriage with an art form. I paint
and make films as well; I write fiction and plays and translate prose
and poetry. Though journalism is not exactly an art form, I was once a
journalist by profession and still write for newspapers and edit a
quarterly journal. These are all parts of my praxis and they make my
feelings, thoughts, concerns, and my entire awareness of the world
visible and palpable to audiences unknown to me.”
He laid himself and his world open to the reader without censorship.
In the same essay, he finally asked,
“Do I, as a poet, have a fixed identity and a permanent address in the
world of poetry?”
He perhaps knew that it was this very lack of fixity, this throwaway
quality of his work, that makes his work so different and valuable.
Anjali Nerlekar is Assistant Professor at Ithaca College, NY
http://outlookindia.com/article.aspx?263430