Document of Dissent: Goan authors Damodar Mauzo, Vivek Menezes contribute to Pen America’s collection of essays on India

[Frederick Noronha]

16 Aug 2022  |   07:43am IST
Document of Dissent: Goan authors Damodar Mauzo, Vivek Menezes contribute to Pen America’s collection of essays on India
Writers from all across India contribute essays on what India was and what it has become  

Team HeraldMARGAO: With Prime Minister Modi’s ‘Azadi ka Amrit Mahotsav’ and ‘Har Ghar Tiranga’ campaigns injecting a newfound patriotic fervour into the common man this year, Independence Day 2022 was perhaps the grandest and most flamboyant celebration of the national holiday of all time. Even as people across the country and in Goa enthusiastically displayed their patriotism by sporting the tricolour everywhere possible—pinned on their lapels, hoisted high outside their homes and businesses, fluttering from the bonnets of their cars and handlebars of their motorbikes as they drove around town spreading merriment – a large group of India’s premier writers and thinkers, united in their concern for the sad state of Indian democracy, have penned their thoughts on what India was, and ought to be, and what it has instead become. 

To mark India at 75, international organisation Pen America, that champions freedom of expression and defends the liberties of writers worldwide, invited authors from India and the Indian diaspora to write short texts candidly expressing their disillusionment about the state of affairs in India, that will be compiled into a ‘document of dissent’.  

Among names like Salman Rushdie, Jhumpa Lahiri, Anita Desai, Chithra Bannerjee Devkurani and dozens of other celebrated authors, noted Konkani writer Damodar Mauzo and Goa-based journalist Vivek Menezes, who have also contributed to the collection of essays that has been published on Pen America’s website, under a hard-hitting introduction to the project.  

Referring to the country’s 75th Independence Day as a moment of deep despair and reflection, rather than celebration and joy, Pen America says, “India retained many colonial-era laws that restricted freedoms and, over the years, added more such laws, undermining its democracy.... the election in 2014 has transformed India into a country where hate speech is expressed and disseminated loudly; where Muslims are discriminated against and lynched, where Christians are beaten and churches attacked; where political prisoners are held in jail without trial.” 

It goes on to talk about how dissenting journalists and authors are denied permission to leave the country. 

“The institutions that can defend India’s freedoms—its courts, parliament and civil service, and much of the media—have been co-opted or weakened,” says Pen America, explaining the need for this document of dissent. 

Margao-based Mauzo, recipient of the Jnanpith 2022, India’s highest literary award, has penned a profound short story called ‘Sprout’, originally written in Konkani. The piece tells the tale of a man who plants a thought that sprouted in his head, in his neighbour’s garden. The sprout grows into a tree and bears fruit that is soon perceived as a cure-all and people from far and wide travel for a taste of the miraculous fruit that they believe can relieve them of every kind of affliction. However, things go awry when perceptions change, and the fruit ceases to heal. The fruit and the tree are suddenly demonized, and to the horror of the generous neighbour who was distributing the fruit freely to all, a mob attacks him at night and burns the tree to the ground.  

Vivek Menezes on the other hand brings up independence from Goa’s point of view, explaining how the smallest State did not get the famous ‘freedom at midnight’, as “the 451-year-old Estado da India was invaded and conquered only in 1961, after Jawaharlal Nehru finally sent in the Indian Armed Forces.” 

“Instead of the appropriate negotiated merger (as happened with French India), there was only annexation—the official legal term—with all terms imposed directly from New Delhi,” says Menezes, lamenting that statehood and the slew of land, healthcare and educational reforms were not sufficient to stave off the cynical depredations of the 21st century. “The politics of division have taken root in dark and dismaying ways. At this point, the future does not look good at all,” says Menezes in his article for the collection. https://www.heraldgoa.in/Goa/Document-of-Dissent-Goan-authors-Damodar-Mauzo-Vivek-Menezes-contribute-to-Pen-America%E2%80%99s-collection-of-essays-on-India/192967

 

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[Jeanne Hromnik]

I've been reading VS Naipaul's A Wounded Civilisation and, now, An area of darkness. Although one was written in the 60s and the other in the 70s, they give one a perspective on the current situation.

If I remember correctly, these books were not well received in India -- perhaps, part of the problem. India at the time appeared to be in the grips of nationalist fervour. In the words of Dom Moraes 'my country right or wrong', like 'my mother drunk or sober'.

xxj

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[Sandra Lobo]

https://pen.org/india-at-75/

The link to the entire collection of essays on India at 75 published by Pen America

Sandra Lobo

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[Sajan]

Naipaul followed up those two books with A Million Mutinies Now in 1990, which I remember thinking of as a rather dismal prognosis of India's fragmented future but which, The Guardian assures me, is "a very optimistic book on India". 

One doesn't look to Naipaul for optimism. 

Naipaul writes, "Change is present everywhere, India was now a country of million mutinies. A million mutinies, supported by twenty kinds of group excess, sectarian excess, religious excess, regional excess: the beginnings of self-awareness, it would seem the beginnings of an intellectual life, already negated by old anarchy and disorder. But there was in India now what didn't exist 200 years before: a central will, a central intellect, a national idea..." 

He seems to equate, or at least bracket, the beginnings of self-awareness and an intellectual life with the rise of religious extremism. (He famously called the destruction of the Babri Masjid “an act of historical balancing”). All that stuff about "a central will, a central intellect" and "a national idea" was nothing new even in Naipaul's time; it was dealt with at tedious length by Golwalkar and Savarkar. 

It is very unlikely that Naipaul was an unthinking bigot. He was a thinking bigot; and a remarkably crotchety old coot who wrote brilliant prose. His India trilogy is worth re-reading for their language, for their insights, and for their wrong-headedness. 

Sajan

[Eugene Correia]

Those are critical books. You should also read his collection, can't remember the name, and needs to check in my library, which is in a bit of a mess with reshuffling. Read Nirad Chourdhary too, and you will have a good idea of he also thinks of India. In fact, Nirad has touched upon Goa, in his Continent of Circe, which also brought forth a short reply from a Goan writer. Will provide the name. Here is what Antonio Menezes wrote on Goanet, Antonio Menezes Sun, 29 Nov 2009 08:14:19 -0800

There may have been a few Goans who thought they were more Portuguese than
the Portuguese themselves. However, there is one Indian from Bengal who
thinks
he is more of an Englishman than the English themselves. The man, a prolific

writer, is none other than Nirad C Chowduri best known for his book
''Continent
of Circe ''
In this book he was critical of Goan intellectuals  especially in Mumbai
region for
exercising influence in many spheres of life much beyond their numbers in
the
teeming population of India. I had read the book in the sixties but the only
thing
I remember, Nirad babu's suggestion that India would be much off if that
part of
Goa where catholics live , could be detached from Mother India  towed away
and made into an island like Mauritius or Seychelles somewhere in the
South India Ocean

== 

You talk of Dom Moraes, but a person who denounced India in the London Times, on India's takeover of Goa, a piece that supposedly riled the PM, Jawaharlal Nehru, who is said to have called Frank Moraes, who was editor of The Indian Express, to express his anguish. Like Nirad, Dom counted himself as an "Englishman" and shockingly returned to India, supposedly told by Stephen Spender that he could be better off in India as England was no more a fertile ground for him.

Eugene

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[Frederick Noronha]

The name you're looking for is Robert De Souza, who authored Goa, and the Continent of Circe.  His 215-page book was a reply to The Continent of CIrce, and came out in 1973, from Wilco.

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ᐧ

[Jeanne Hromnik]

But Sajan, where does the wrong headedness lie? Could you give us an instance, be specific, before you recommend Naipaul as worth reading for language, insights and wrong headedness. A recommendation, incidentally, that could be applied to you :-)

In this internet age, one is assailed on all sides by opinions, information, misinformation and brilliant prose.

Incidentally, Naipaul has a good description in An area of darkness of mimic Englishmen who, at heart, are Indian and committed to what he calls 'degree' and blind to the horrific spectacle of Indian poverty.

xxj

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[Eugene Correia]

This is what I had writing elsewhere on the discussion on the state of women in India. Things for women are worse in India right now.

___

Naipaul's An Area of Darkness showed India in the right light at the time he wrote, but if he were to write today, he would write about India's dark soul.

___

Naipaul has gone forth and back, and his The Enigma of Arrival, does show. He was caught in two worlds, even unhappy being in England. Reading him is a delight, though one one may not agree with his views.

Eugene

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[Eugene Correia]

Reading Naipaul's The Writer and the World, a collection of essays/reports, can give one a good understanding of Naipauls's thoughts and viewpoints. It's hard to put a label on him, as he would be critical of India as well as endearing of his Indian roots. Like him or hate him, Naipaul is a different territory in the landscape of writing on India. His The Mystic Masseur focus on his native Trinidad, and it would found worthy of portraying on celluloid by Merchant-Ivory team. 

If Raja Rao excelled in providing Gandhian philosophy in his Kanthapura, it was Ved Mehta who wrote vigorously of the India of his time. Born blind, Mehta saw India in a brighter light. That was arch of writing on India that both illuminated and brighten the soul. Till Salman Rushdie came along and turned the applecart.

Eugene 

[Eugene Correia]

Thanks Fred, read that book and have a copy.  It's been a long time I read it.

Eugene

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