Kanu Sanyal: the last Naxalbari legend

Journalists who has reported the death of Krishna Kumar Sanyal, popularly known as Kanu Sanyal, couldn’t fail to describe two things. That he lived in a thatched two-room mud hut at Hatighisa village in Naxalbari where a worn out reed mattress and some plain rugs lay on the floor. His only other possessions were few books, clothes and utensils. The other thing they have noticed are the framed black and white portraits of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin and Mao that hung on the mud wall. This description is given to confirm the simple yet ideologically dedicated lifestyle of the legendary Naxal leader who has committed suicide on 23 March. For the last one year, the undisputed leader of the Naxalbari uprising was ailing after a brain hemorrhage and had become too feeble to move outside his home. But even so, he refused treatment from any government hospital in Kolkata. How could he approach the State when he is fighting it? – Kanubabu used to argue. “I was popular once,” he bitterly stated in one of his last interviews, “I have lost my popularity. I am unwell. That is the reason I cannot organize the masses anymore.” Former comrade-in-arms Azizul Haque believes that his suicide is symbolical – a protest against “the slaughter of innocent people in the villages in the name of Maoism and its counter-measures”. Kanubabu was known to be severely critical about the Maoists who often torture and kill poor and innocent villagers for refusing to join their movement or for turning against it. “In this respect, I do not approve of today’s Naxals,” was his sharp and clear remark. The reason behind his suicide remains an enigma. Did he take the extreme step because he could not bear the pain of his diseases anymore? Was he depressed and frustrated by the current form of revolutionary extremism in the country? We can speculate whatever we like but the real truth will never be known.

Charu Mazumdar, Kanu Sanyal and Jangal Santhal were the three famous leaders of the Naxalite rebellion that sparked off at Naxalbari on March 1967 when sharecroppers armed with conventional weapons rose in revolt against the local jotedars (landowners) and forcefully occupied farmland. On May 23, when a police force raided a troubled village in the area, armed peasants attacked them and killed a police Inspector. The police hit back two days later, by firing upon a crowd of villagers killing ten, including six women and two children. This event became a flashpoint and soon the movement spread like wildfire all over the land. Kanu Sanyal and Jangal Santhal were the grass-root leaders who practically led the Naxalbari peasant uprising. While the two were involved with the day-to-day struggle, trying to spread the movement among the peasants and mobilizing them, the 49-year old Charu Mazumdar who was basically an ideologue was providing the theoretical guidelines. At some point during the incidence, the idea of capturing State power through an armed struggle was born in Mazumdar’s mind as he perceived that “there was an excellent revolutionary situation in the country with all the classical symptoms”.

Mazumdar had even predicted that Indian people will complete “the great epic of liberation” by the end of 1975. How did he predict this specific time limit? In a speech published as “March Onward, Day of Victory is near” in the September-December, 1970 issue of the Naxalite mouthpiece Liberation, Mazumdar explicates: if the idea of armed struggle that had originated in his “revolutionary consciousness” in 1967 could seep into the minds of ten million people by 1970, “why is it impossible then for those 10 millions to rouse and mobilize 500 million people of India in a surging war by 1975?” A brilliant prediction indeed! Mazumdar’s argument sounds infantile and awful today but during those days his fiery clarion call to “Make the 70s the Decade of Revolution” found wide response among the youth, especially among college and university students from affluent families. Ignited by the “romanticism” of an armed revolution, they jumped into the revolutionary fray to pursue Charu Mazumdar’s mistaken dream. In May 1969, on the hundredth birth anniversary of Lenin, Kanu Sanyal formally announced the formation of CPI(ML) at a rally in Kolkata’s Shahid Minar.

In a 2007 interview, Mazumdar’s erstwhile lieutenant Kanu Sanyal passed a caustic remark to strongly counter the popular belief that Charu Mazumdar was instrumental in initiating the Naxalbari movement. “Charu Mazumdar was never directly attached to the Naxalbari Movement. When the Naxalbari uprising took place, Charuda was bedridden at his Siliguri home, with a severe heart ailment,” Kanubabu bluntly declared in that interview. He further went on to affirm that Mazumdar’s “role was limited to providing the philosophical base for the Naxalbari uprising”. (Source) According to Kanubabu, while all the grass-root leaders of the uprising including him were underground, the radical minded people who became excited by the news of the uprising and wanted to join the movement was only able to approach Charu Mazumdar since he lived in the adjoining town Siliguri and was easily accessible. Mazumdar’s infectious, unequivocal and sharp rhetoric promptly induced and convinced the radicals to fight for the great cause of liberation.

There was serious difference of opinion among the leaders on the strategy of armed struggle from the initial stage of the movement. Mazumdar propagated for instant armed struggle by forming small and mobile guerrilla units which will annihilate individual “class enemies” and take over the lands. Completely ignoring the need of mass movements or mass organizations to build up popular support, Mazumdar announced that “guerrilla struggle is the only form of class struggle” and annihilation was its “higher form”. He thought that the “actions” will instantaneously lit fire among the masses and awaken them to revolt against the system. Though leaders like Kanu Sanyal too believed in armed struggle, yet they stressed on building up mass movement involving the entire working class and peasantry as the primary task before forcefully taking possession of farmlands owned by big landlords. Deploring Mazumdar’s treatise of individual killing, Kanubabu later sarcastically said, “Charuda never missed the opportunity to preach his line of ‘individual terrorism’, labeling it as the spirit of the Naxalbari Movement.” He further argued that, “In a people’s movement, individual feeling, individual anger must first become crystallized for a people’s movement to succeed.” Armed revolution cannot be forced on the people if the objective conditions are not present.

Charu Mazumdar who coined the slogan “China’s Chairman is our Chairman” had even gone to the extent to proclaim that, “He who had not dipped his hand in the hands of class enemies can hardly be called a Communist”. Infatuated by Mazumdar’s incendiary ideas, the Naxalites went ahead to accomplish India’s liberation and started killing landowners, their associates and agents, money lenders, petty businessman and police informers. Initially, the strategy had borne some fruits. Due to the fear of getting killed by the Naxals, many from the oppressor class in the remote villages either fled or knelt down before them creating a power vacuum in the areas to fill by the “revolutionaries”. The Naxals loved to call those areas as “liberated zones”. In numerous cases individual murders were perpetrated by local criminal and lumpen elements those who had silently infiltrated among the Naxalite rank and file. The top Naxal leadership soon started to access the revolutionary triumph and its spread by the number of class enemies killed by them. Jubilant by this initial “success” in some small pockets of a vast country, Charu Mazumdar and his followers started exaggerating their so-called revolutionary achievement, completely underestimating the mighty State power and also the imminent white terror backlash perpetrated by armed goons of the Congress Party.

Mazumdar committed another serious blunder when he granting full sway to the Naxal action squads to plan and execute their own programmes. The squads started to function independently without any coordination between each other which intensified reckless violence and more bloodshed. Instead of creating confidence among the masses, Mazumdar’s erroneous strategy of revolutionary terror largely alienated the masses from the movement. Soon the State forces swung into aggressive action. Kanu Sanyal was captured along with 37 comrades by the police from his northern Bengal jungle hideout on August 1970. Charu Mazumdar was arrested in Kolkata on 16 July 1972. Twelve days later he died in police custody. The movement collapsed into shambles after being brutally crushed by a massive State repression called “Operation Steeplechase”.

Charu Mazumdar desired for an instant revolution – he was literally in too much hurry. His deteriorating health condition could be the vital reasons why the man became so frenetic to achieve the liberation of Indian masses by 1975. Whatever might be the reason, his ultra left-adventurism and revolutionary romanticism was primarily responsible for the heavy losses of precious lives within and outside the movement. Making a pointed attack on Charu Mazumdar’s tactical eccentricity, Kanubabu had stated, “…with arms in hand, youths tend to believe they can bring about a revolution by using bullets alone. But the reality is, they simply can’t. Without a solid mass base, all efforts will be futile.” In his later years, Kanubabu became an unabashed critic of the common perception that gun-culture is the ultimate identity of a communist revolutionary and continued to say that acts of terror can only damage popular movements and alienates the masses.

After his release from Visakhapatnam jail where he was imprisoned for seven years, Kanubabu took the initiative to form the Organizing Committee of Communist Revolutionaries (OCCR) to assimilate splinter Naxal groups. In May 1985, OCCR merged with the Communist Organization of India (Marxist-Leninist). In June 2003 he formed a new CPI(ML) and kept his political activities confined in north Bengal region. Taking up local issues, he continued working quietly among the peasants and tea garden trade unions. Kanubabu was a severe critic of the Left Front government’s industrialization policy as he felt that the policy will only benefit the imperialists. He had also firmly voiced his opposition to the land acquisition methods in Singur and Nandigram. At the same time he was very much skeptical about Mamata Banerjee and the rainbow alliance led by her party, the Trinamool Congress. He had no doubt in his mind that the alliance “lacks the political will to work for the common people”. On a June 2009 interview Kanubabu had also spoken about his disapproval of the Lalgarh agitation. He considered the Lalgarh agitation “strictly an ethnic insurrection by the Adivasi community”. Condemning the Maoists for exploiting the Adivasis to carry forward their agenda of individual terrorism, he had thundered that, “Lalgarh is certainly not a Communist uprising”. (Source)

Since he had openly repudiated the ruthless violence of the neo-Naxals, popularly known as the Maoists, it is quite natural that their backers will consider Kanu Sanyal’s viewpoint as stale and redundant. A soft and lenient Kanubabu was indeed a disappointment for them in comparison to the fire eater Maoists. While Kanubabu lived and died inconspicuously in a remote north Bengal village and has certainly failed to develop into a “collector’s item”, the smart, crafty and “successful” Maoists have attracted the glossy attention of mainstream Indian media and ensured a high-profile, luxury position in it. The Maoist leadership and the neo-liberal media are equally comfortable when the image of a half-naked sexy model is presented next to the stunning image of a gun wielding grim faced Maoist women. For the Maoist leadership, it is free propaganda. For the media, both the images are sensational and thus a highly saleable commodity.

Highbrow intellectuals and celebrity activists who are singing the same tune to sanctify the Maoists and propagate their cause believes like Arundhati Roy that the noteworthy rebels are keeping “hope alive for us all” by creating “the possibilities for an alternative”. In a recent essay-cum-travelogue of her sponsored journey into the Maoists' hotbed Dantewada, Arundhati Roy writes, “Charu Mazumdar was a visionary in much of what he wrote and said. The party he founded (and its many splinter groups) has kept the dream of revolution real and present in India. Imagine a society without that dream. For that alone, we cannot judge him too harshly.” She wonders if Charu Mazumdar could have ever imagined that the tribals turned Maoist cadres of Dantewada are “the ones on whose shoulders his dreams would come to rest”. Roy is fascinated by the “superbly organised, hugely motivated” Maoist guerrilla fighting force and its members, those who always carry “a weapon and a smile”. She writes emotionally about one Comrade Kamla who told her that she likes watching “Sirf ambush video (Only ambush videos).”

Roy even endorses a Maoists' version of tribal history and shares it with her readers since in her warped “outlook” she measures the tribal people’s struggle for rights and the deceiving politics of the Maoists' as equivalent. Her opposition to the government’s anti-Maoist offensive “Operation Green Hunt” leads her to bizarrely eulogize the total militarization of everyday tribal life, the killing of a village panchayat president because he was a “Tata’s man” and the Maoists' Jan Adalat (kangaroo court) where they regularly try and execute their adversaries. Lionizing the ultra left movement, the believer Roy gets prompted to write, “Each time, they have re-emerged, more organised, more determined and more influential than ever”. (Source)

Kanu Sanyal was counted out long before his mortal death; today’s neo-Naxals do not need a Charu Mazumdar either. And possibly they never really needed Mao! They just want apostles like Roy to spread their blood thirsty politics under the disguise of a noble intention.

History appears first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. It seems that an over-enthusiastic and obsessive Roy has completely forgotten this basic lesson.

Image Courtesy: hindu.com

Charles M. Schulz – visionary and humanist: Part Two

Umberto Eco believes that Charles Schulz is essentially a poet and Peanuts is nothing but poetry in graphic form. In his 1963 essay The World of Charlie Brown, Eco has observed that the strip has an extraordinary capacity of “carrying tenderness, pity, wickedness to moments of extreme transparence” and a distinctive eminence where readers are accustomed to “…identify with the surface of things, a revelation that causes us to touch the depth of things.” Panel after panel Schulz’s artistic mastery is manifested in the graceful way he had moved from one kind of role to another. He can effortlessly drift from a funny cartoonist to a lyrical poet, from a keen social observer to a visionary philosopher almost unnoticed. Eco has also found that regardless of the diverse role he plays while creating the strip, Schulz’s art essentially remains “his version of the human condition” produced from everyday events. Peanuts can be read on several levels due to this assorted appeal and Schulz could create a pensive mood by infusing a tempting optimism and hope within the milieu of despair. Quite obviously, unrequited love became a central theme of Peanuts. The narrative has also given emphasis to various Christian themes. Even if the strip has distinctly represented the American way of life and Schulz had undoubtedly transpired himself into America’s conscience, the strip’s sheer chemistry of blending social and moral subjects with complex themes and ideas, its appealing characterization and lucid dialogues has touched million hearts across the globe. Readers have found it easy to relate themselves with the characters.

Although Peanuts featured only the children, the strip is certainly not about childhood. The losses, rejections and disillusionments faced by the children are mostly related with the psychosomatic torments of the modern industrial society. “Happiness,” Schulz had pointed out, “does not create humor.” According to David Michaelis, the author of Schulz’s recent biography, “In Peanuts, the game was always lost, the football always snatched away … the kite was not just stuck in a tree, it was eaten by it; the pitcher did not just give up a line drive, he was stripped bare by it, exposed.” The genius of Schulz lies in shattering the delusion about childhood inside the adult psyche. The children in Peanuts are actually representing the epitome of human life confronting all the unavoidable complexities of the adult world – depression, loneliness, melancholy, humiliation, struggle to succeed, fear, failure, anxiety and self-doubts. Schulz himself had hinted on the real essence of the strip by saying, “Anybody who says Peanuts is cute is just crazy.”

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Through the years, the strip has skillfully addressed various socio-political issues with a dry sense of humor. Reading Peanuts in a socio-political context can uncover interesting aspects of the strip. An early strip had lampooned present-day consumer culture by showing Charlie Brown getting disempowered by the false needs of consumerism. Charlie Brown purchases a wastebasket, unpacks it, and feels gratified by the usefulness of his purchase after throwing the useless wrapping paper into it. In a 1957 strip, Snoopy is seen holding his fist in the air and moving around like the fascist dictator Mussolini to suggest Lucy’s fascistic temperament. In a July 1970 episode, Snoopy gets trapped and tear-gassed with the rest of the crowd while delivering a speech at Daisy Hill Puppy Farm. The trouble was caused by a riot that broke out during a demonstration against dogs being sent to Vietnam, and then not getting back. In another remarkable episode, Charlie Brown’s African-American friend Franklin reveals that though he had three good memories once, he has forgotten all of them. Franklin’s revelation comes after the opening panels where Schulz had related “good memories” with “hope”.

The crabby Lucy’s psychiatric booth is another superb idea conceived by Schulz to ridicule the neurosis of modern civilization and its citizens. Lucy, who probably achieves tranquility through her insensitivity, councils the alienation, fear, anxieties and frustration of any patient, “who has a problem and a nickel,” with her aggressive psychobabble. In one of the episodes, Lucy counsel Charlie Brown to develop a personal philosophy which will carry him through times of stress. After thinking hard, Charlie Brown finds one: “Life is like an ice cream cone…you have to learn to lick it” which caused a stunned Lucy to yell, “That’s the most stupid philosophy I’ve ever heard!” In an early 1958 strip, Lucy’s tousle-haired brother Linus gets terrified after he mistakenly interpreted snowfall with nuclear fallout. In another episode, Linus finds a note carrying several parental advices in his lunch packet and anxiously reads it. When Charlie Brown inquires about his lunch menu, Linus replies, “Carrots, Peanut butter and Guilt”. A 1969 series show Linus’s teacher Miss Othmar losing her job for participating in an ongoing teacher’s strike. In a parody of the space race hype, Snoopy imagines himself as the first beagle to land on the moon and feels jubilant for “beating Russians”.

The strip had also carried an interesting number of popular culture references. Charlie Brown wears a Davy Crockett hat and is seen surrounded by Crockett merchandise, Linus turns depressed because Bob Dylan was about to turn thirty. Peppermint Patty tells Marcie “Has anyone ever told you that when you're mad, you look just like Billie Jean King?” and refers to Marcie’s “Billie Jean King glasses”. Snoopy imitates Mickey Mouse and leans against a wall putting on black glasses to resemble Joe Cool. There are many other popular culture references like pop singer Pat Boon, rock king Elvis Presley, baseball star Duke Snider, comedian Mort Sahl, the popular children television show Howdy Doody, The Beat Generation and sci-fi movies that can also be found scattered in the strip. In a 1958 strip Charlie Brown asks Lucy, “How did you ever get to be such a fuss-budget?” Lucy explains her source of inspiration by displaying all the “fuss” titled books she has studied. Every of the titles were a distorted version of actual popular book titles of that time. Lucy’s favorite title I Was a Fuss-Budget for the F.B.I. was derived from I Was a Communist for the FBI, a radio show and later film based on an undercover agent infiltrating communist organizations.

Charlie Brown’s baseball team had three regular girl members Lucy, Marcie, and Violet on the side – an ideal example of gender equality. He even refused sponsorship for his team because the sponsor objected having girls or dogs on the side. Toy piano prodigy Schroeder with his obsession with Beethoven becomes the symbol of cultural snobbism. Pig Pen is always dirty and messy but when his companions accuse him for his filthy appearance, Pig Pen loudly proclaims that he has clean thoughts and an immaculately clean conscience. When Charlie Brown laments after losing a baseball game, “How can we lose when we’re so sincere”, he epitomizes all the misfits of a human society gone paranoid. This superb dialogue is a testimony of why Charlie Brown is called “the most sensitive child ever to appear in a comic strip”.

Charlie Brown’s little sister Sally’s school building has a habit to drop bricks on people it didn’t like. Sally loves to talks with the building and frequently questions its authoritative existence. Burdened with numerous complains and criticism, the building collapses from depression. While presenting a report on rain in her class Sally reads, "This is my report on rain. Rain is water which does not come out of faucets...after a storm, the rain goes down the drain, which is where I sometimes feel my education is also going". Sally also considers her a good evangelist because she was able to “convince” a classmate about the superiority of Christianity – by hitting him with her lunchbox. In an obvious display of the darker side of his humor, Schulz once showed Lucy’s “still on the bottle” baby brother Rerun Van Pelt getting involved in a gambling scandal while playing for Charlie Brown's baseball team. But Rerun has a point. How will he know that gambling is wrong when he is “still new in the world”? Besides, he had only bet a nickel. “What else can you do with a nickel these days?” baby Rerun candidly spells out.

“I want to remind adults of the pressures children are always being put under,” Schulz once said. In various instances his calm observation has revealed several absurdities of the modern world. In a 1988 interview with Michael Barrier, Schulz had spoken about the strip’s relation to social issues:

I think the social issues that I deal with are much more long-lasting and more important than losing the White House…..People say, “Don’t you ever deal in social issues?” “Well, don’t you read the strip?” If you read the strip every day, you’ll see that I deal with more social issues in one month than some of these deal [with] in a whole year. But you have to be a little more sensitive to it. (Source)

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In the year 1968, Schulz introduced the little African-American kid Franklin in Peanuts. Franklin is the first African-American character to feature in a mainstream American comic strip. From the introductory episode located at a public beach, Franklin informs Charlie Brown that his father is fighting over in Vietnam. They quickly become friends and Charlie Brown invites Franklin to visit him at this house. Schulz had never emphasized on Franklin’s racial background and denied any political motivation behind this character. But showing Franklin at a racially integrated beach at the time when the presence of African-American families on American public beaches was rare, Schulz might have made an effort to express his view on race discrimination with his characteristic subtlety.

At the time when the civil rights movement was at its peak, the introduction of Franklin was obviously controversial. Schulz received a letter of objection from a Southern editor for showing Franklin sitting in the same row in school with Peppermint Patty. United Features too didn't like to see an African-American child inviting his white friend to come on over to his house and asked Schulz to change it. In the same Michael Barrier interview, Schulz had expressed his displeasure against the syndicate for objecting Franklin’s introduction into the strip. The dispute on the issue finally ended after Schulz threatened United Feature's President Laurence Rutman: “Either you print it just the way I draw it or I quit.” Schulz continued to draw Franklin attending school with his white friends.

Franklin is a thoughtful and sensitive kid who frequently quotes from the Old Testament. He is an active and serious student who reads psychology books and refuses to play a game of marbles after school because “I have a guitar lesson at three-thirty…right after that I have little league, and then swim club, and then dinner and then a ‘4H’ meeting.” He can ingenuously ridicule Lucy’s psychiatric booth by calling it a lemonade stand. He is the center fielder of Peppermint Patty’s baseball team and has a common subject to converse with Charlie Brown – about his grandfather. Unlike the other characters, Franklin has the least anxieties and obsessions but when Peppermint Patty cries after she is forced by the school principal to wear shoes that hurts her, Franklin comments, “All I know is, any rule that makes a little girl cry has to be a bad rule!”

Schulz had sought to depict the character in an unprejudiced manner and refused to make any overt political statement through him. Franklin was naturally accepted into the integrated milieu of the strip, treated as any other character and his existence was as normal as the other members of the gang. But still Schulz could not avoid being impaled by critics for showing Franklin as a “token black” character who had “no personality traits at all”. (Source) He had never addressed the ‘race issue’ openly because he believed that race was not his subject. He didn’t want to draw things unless he really understood them. Though on occasions, race did appear as an issue in the strip. While watching Franklin practicing ice-hockey to “become a great hockey player”, Peppermint Patty asks him, “How many black player in the NHL, Franklin?” Readers are divided on whether this is a racial comment or a question addressed to white America. (Source) In the animated film A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving, a particular scene became the subject of severe criticism due to its “casual racism on display”. In that scene, seven members of the gang, including Snoopy, joins together to celebrate Thanksgiving and Franklin is shown sitting alone on one side of the table, on a fragile beach chair below the level of others. The scene has been read by critics as a subtle but insidious depiction to ascertain Franklin as a “racial outcast”. (Source) Whether this one-off example proves anything about Schulz’s race outlook remains arguable. But Schulz’s handling of Franklin is definitely different from the typical African-American stereotype depicted in American comics.

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Charles M. Schulz had “changed the entire face of comic strips” thinks Bill Watterson, the author of Calvin and Hobbes. Watterson further acknowledges that “there's not a cartoonist who's done anything since 1960 who doesn't owe Schulz a tremendous debt.” The Times called the Peanuts characters “international icons of good faith”. The New York Times editorial defined Peanuts as “an ongoing parable of contemporary American existence”. Garry Trudeau called it, “the first (and still the best) postmodern comic strip”. The strip continues to receive heaps of praise and gratitude even today. But there is also a growing school of thought that wants to remove the visor of appreciation and read the strip differently.

Like all great art, Peanuts also must be read objectively; with extreme care and attention. There are skeptics who believe that a genius with a tremendous mastery on medium can also elusively intoxicate minds and push people towards the realm of fabricated believes. How a comic strip that is devoted to failure did achieve such a universal success? Is Peanuts successful because it has worked like a palliative in the mind of the readers and diverted them from the rigors of their daily survival? Does Charlie Brown’s inability to establish meaningful relationships, his guilt, futility and subjection somehow create an off-putting feel about the complexities of life? Was there an innate but generous escapist feel that worked silently within the brilliant ideas of Peanuts? Did Schulz deliberately underestimate the social powers that controls life and ignored to expose them? Did he instead, accentuated too much to comprehended and explain psychological and emotional aspects through funny episodes involving funny looking children? For a genuine evaluation of Schulz and his creation, these awkward questions need to be debated.

(Return to Part One)

References:
1. Chip Kidd edited: The Art of Charles M Schulz
3. Charles M Schulz: You really don’t look 50 Charlie Brown
4. Charles M Schulz: The Complete Peanuts 1969-1970 (Vol. 10)
4. Comics.com website
5. Annotations of The Complete Peanuts
6. Umberto Eco: The world of Charlie Brown (reprinted in the collection of essays Apocalypse Postponed)
7. Calvin Harlan: Visions and Invention, an introduction to art fundamentals

Image Courtesy: tributes.com

Charles M. Schulz – visionary and humanist: Part One

When Charles M. Schulz died in February 2000 after a battle with cancer, he was already famous and richer than any other comic strip artist in the world. He had achieved this phenomenal commercial success after a quiet start and became the highest paid newspaper cartoonist in the history of the medium. Over the course of fifty years till his death at the age of 77, Schulz had grown into a cultural icon of his era along with his creation Peanuts, reaching the peak of recognition between 1965 and 1982. The licensing agency United Features Syndicate Inc. earns billion dollars every year from Peanuts merchandise and paraphernalia. Schulz is the only American comic strip artist who was honored by Louvre with a retrospective show in 1990 – a rare honor for a cartoonist, keeping in mind that comic strips are generally considered as a trivial art form and hence not taken seriously by connoisseurs of art. Peanuts has introduced some of the most loving fictional characters of the twentieth century and is considered to be amongst the greatest comic strips of all time. While this strip has primarily dealt with the daily conflicts, complexities and torments of human life through a filter of innocence, the deeply insightful work cannot be tagged just as a bleak representation of every day reality. Schulz’s intention was to deliver dignified humor to his readers; he wanted to see them happy. He gradually developed a sensitive but highly personal language that spoke with absolute integrity and depth. His simple looking art was able to connect with his worldwide readers emotionally, equally charming innocent children and complex adult minds. The central theme of Schulz’s art was relationship – a timeless subject having a universal appeal.

Schulz had a rare ability to overcome all sorts of professional constrains and obstacles rising from the contradictions of a profit driven industrial-commercial production cycle. Instead of falling to its prey he had excellently converted them into his advantage. His artistic efforts and humanistic style has deeply inspired and influenced many of his fellow travelers who have passionately admitted to be greatly indebted by him for expanding the possibility and dimension of the art form. One among them is Doonesbury creator Garry Trudeau. While paying a warm homage, Trudeau explained how Schulz had, “... completely revolutionized the art form, deepening it, filling it with possibility, giving permission to all who followed to write from the heart and intellect.”

The creative journey of Charles M. Schulz started in 1947 with Sparky’s L'il Folks, a single-panel weekly comic strip. United Features soon changed the strip’s title into Peanuts which made its debut in seven newspapers on October 2, 1950. All through his life Schulz never ceased to loathe the new title imposed on his strip as he always considered it as the “worst title ever thought up for a comic strip”. However, the production manager from United Features who was responsible for the title later tried to justify himself with the claim that he had to name the strip without actually seeing it! The four panel format carrying Schulz’s highly expressive drawings ran everyday on 2,600 newspapers in seventy-five countries and reached to more than 355 million readers. The strip got translated into twenty-six languages and was merited to be the world’s most widely read comic strip during its heyday. Even today, Peanuts continues to appear in most of the newspapers that was publishing the strip when Schulz was active and alive. According to the United Features website, the strip “consistently ranks at the top of newspaper readership polls worldwide.”

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The foremost appeal of Peanuts is certainly its unique visual style. The extremely funny, simple looking yet highly sensitive drawings have always provided a rare freshness to the 17,897 strips that Schulz had created during his lifetime, all by his own hand. One can imagine how difficult it was to create a comic strip each day for fifty long years – the “never-ending burden of having to do something day after day after day”, to regularly generate new ideas and maintain a high level of quality. Schulz had to repeat his motifs and few basic themes time and again but was largely successful to preserve the magical quality of his strip all the way through. This is undoubtedly a phenomenal achievement.

It is well-known that Schulz had worked on every part of the strip alone, carrying out all the drawings with lettering, inking the backgrounds and writing the immaculate dialogues. He even drew the sheet music in the strips by hand. The apparent ingeniousness of his child-like drawings is in fact extremely sophisticated and formal in nature. Lucy leaning on Schroeder’s toy piano, Linus holding his security blanket, Charlie Brown hitting or pitching in his game outfit, a running, dancing or flying Snoopy, Peppermint Patty snoozing on her school desk, the typical somersaults and falls – all look fairly simple as a form but not really easy to draw. Schulz succeeded as a pictorial storyteller because his eyes were able to recognize the minimum clues that can express maximum message.

While drawing the strip, Schulz used pencil mock-ups as less as possible – only “to get the heights and space right”. He drew the faces directly from a 914 Radio crow-quill nib. The inward and outward pressure of the nib has provided a free linear rhythm and spontaneity to his strikingly beautiful drawings. As a pictorial composition, the panels of Peanuts are a spectacle of playful, expressive, polyphonic and tectonic line elements with directional contrasts. Schulz could inject a rare energy and grace in his tender and neatly rendered line drawings with remarkable variety, inventiveness and wit. On many occasions these drawings have achieved their expressive extremes to create visual poetry.

The linear tension of a Schulz composition is limited within the boundary of a square or a rectangle. These flat formats have an inherent psychological and physical peculiarity. The two-dimensional surface of a square or rectangle has a strange compatibility with the three-dimensional concept of the viewer’s mind. A diagonal line placed on a flat surface can project forward and backward depth instantly. When a line or a shape is placed upon a flat surface, the eye instead of focusing only on the line or shape is more likely to create a sense of pictorial depth. This perceived depth enhances the quality and scope of the given surface and converts it into a lively pictorial space. The perceptual forces are also relatively easy to control within the fixed boundaries of a square of rectangular panel space. Schulz became extremely aware of this phenomenon and cleverly used the perceptual relation between objects, shapes and figures as a structural and expressive advantage while drawing his strip.

There are some unique features in his cartooning style. Graphic marks are the indispensable property of a Schulz drawing. Juxtaposed or detached placement of dots, inverted commas, hyphens, a spiral, a little curve or wavy line became the graphic shorthand of Schulz that could lucidly express all sorts of human emotion – wonder, gloom, happiness, annoyance, grief, adoration or weariness. Most of the panel space is filled by one or two figures and their speech bubbles. The remaining space is either left empty or divided by using bare minimum props and settings. In several panels, only a horizontal or vertical stroke of line is sufficient to create the illusion of perspective. Except the speech bubbles, Schulz never required a voice-over narration to tell his story. A master with an economy of expression, Schulz can magnetize the readers by repeating a horizontal wall or a fence and two talking heads in every panel of an entire strip without being dull for a moment. Through this form of graphic simplicity Schulz continued to produce funny looking expressions and endearing gestures. A minimalist approach, sensible meandering of line, insightful use of pictorial space and a cinematic medium-shot viewpoint, all with impressive economy, has contributed the trademark visual style of the strip to stand out from the rest.

Peanuts took a long time to develop its readers. It also took many years for Schulz to mature from a draftsman to a highly skillful artist. He gradually eliminated all the aesthetic deficiencies from his artwork. The enormous round head of Charlie Brown in the early drawings were scaled down and fine tuned to get the perfect proportion and balance. The forehead of the figures flattened; the body curves became loose, wavier lines was introduced to enhance the design impact of the drawings. The beagle Snoopy deformed brilliantly to stand on his hinder legs from a four-legged semi-realistic beginning. Schulz later confessed that every time he drew Snoopy “he probably changes a little bit”. The naturalistic birds of the earlier strips transformed into Woodstock. The personalities of all Peanuts characters too developed alongside the transformed visual aspects of the strip. But under no circumstances did Schulz ever depart from his primary objective of drawing cartoons – the objective to draw funny pictures.

Schulz was conscious that he cannot draw the children from an adult perspective and so brought his viewpoint down to the level with children. His sarcastic humor rose from the everyday struggles of life as it passed through a filter of innocence. The eminence of sarcasm is noticeable in the way the strip has depicted the losses, cruelty and rejections of life in an apparently placid tone. Schulz, who was also a gifted writer of remarkable skill, knew how to effectively express all the complex ideas through his eloquent prose. Through words and graphic images he had created an illuminating and aesthetically refined language of his own. Italian novelist and semiotician Umberto Eco has found his prose “almost courtly, in a language worthy of Harvard”. Eco has correctly observed that “these children rarely laps into slang or commit anacoluthon.” The Peanuts children were never seen to use an offensive word stronger than “Good grief!” while expressing their feelings even during the most despondent situations. The use of dignified verbal language with sparkling laconic wit is an indisputable feature of the strip.

(Part Two)

Title image: Poster of the 1990 Schulz retrospective at the Louvre Museum, Paris; curated to commemorate the 40th anniversary of Peanuts.

Image courtesy: rubypersson.com

The failure of “My Name is Khan”

Karan Johar’s over-hyped film My Name is Khan (MNIK) has dealt with a challenging subject – a subject that is extremely serious, pensive and political. The film has attempted to focus on a number of crucial socio-political issues and tried to make a humane statement concerning racial-religious discrimination and stereotyping. But the wide scope offered by the subject was purposely diminished by the director-producers of the film. The story of Rizwan Khan ended up being another feel-good film depicting Bollywood style heroism, romance and eye-wetting brash emotion – all embedded into a fairy tale arrangement. Based on a political subject, the film deliberately moves out of the political arena to engender flimsy humanism and fails terribly to emerge as a politically conscious film. A pseudo-real, fantasy like milieu and an escapist approach to life are the weakest aspects of the film. The self-styled “sensitive” performance by Shah Rukh Khan in the role of Rizwan, burdened with make believe mannerisms, have not only failed to cover-up these shortcomings but has actually become an integral part of it. By exaggerating on the “just a good man in love” side of the character, Shah Rukh’s celebrity presence has diluted the sternness of the subject as well as the film. A hoopla manufactured by the infamous idiots of the Thackeray clan surrounding MNIK’s release, the grand presence of Shah Rukh Khan and Kajol – super-hit duo of Indian mainstream cinema, the arty efforts of a bubbly director or the genuine technical excellence could not lift MNIK from its mediocre rank.

Good people, bad people

There is little doubt that the September 11 attacks were a huge turning point for millions of Muslims living in America. Impact of this catastrophic event had generated a significant amount of hostility towards the Muslims in general and had sharply polarized the American society down to street level. Islam and the Muslims turned into a subject of grave concern for the American state and became an important political issue. Though anti-Muslim bias and prejudices had existed before September 11, the attitude to connect the Muslim community to terrorism and perceiving the entire community as a threat, as a grave security risk, has intensified drastically following the incident. Post September 11, it became more difficult to be a Muslim in America. Non Muslim Americans became haunted by Islamophobia – a common parlance diversely applied today to define the discrimination faced by Muslims or to convey anti-Muslim sentiments. The response of common non-Muslim Americans towards Muslim minorities and their anti-Islamic hostile attitudes against them were also fuelled by certain sections of the mainstream media and political establishment, which had frequently used the term and popularised it among the scared masses. Muslims living in America including the women faced religiously motivated harassment; the Arabs were particularly singled out as objects of suspicion and became victims of official and societal discrimination, especially the younger Muslims who are more exposed to anti-Muslim bias than their parents. They were told to become “good citizens”, instructed to integrate into the multi-religious, multi-cultured American society, reprimanded for exhibiting hate and violence and were strictly warned to keep away from radical activities and extremist influences. The first targets of the American government’s anti-terrorism overdrive were obviously the softest ones – the immigrant Muslims who has arrived in the “land of freedom” virtually from all over the world.

The ambitious screenplay of MNIK had tried hard to depict this turbulent time and the condition of American Muslims. The film opens with the awful airport frisking scene where villain-like security men hounded the hero Rizwan Khan as a terror suspect because he was found to mutter verses from the Holy Koran while standing in a queue. Khan is portrayed in the film as a devoted and duty bound believer. In the backdrop of riot ridden Bombay he has learned from his mother that there are only two kinds of people in the world – good people and bad people. One holds a stick and the other holds a lollipop. In the entire film, Rizwan Khan actually tries to establish himself as the one who belongs to the lollipop holding “good people” class. In the film he is depicted as an extremely devoted Muslim, a loving husband, a caring papa, an innate humanist and ultimately a “good citizen” of America. The film has overstuffed a lot of issues and mishandling them badly. But at the end, it remained principally focused on establishing the “good citizen” aspect of the hero. The director was abetted by an oversimplifying attitude, twisting and fantasising the grim subject into a droopy romantic tale.

American Muslim, Bollywood Muslim

By law, the Census Bureau of America does not count adherents of a particular religious identification. Hence, the account of how many Muslims live in America differs widely in various estimates – from 1.3 to 7 million. This population with its vastly different ethnicity, culture, race and sectarian diversity have constituted a microcosm of the Muslim world. Immigration wave in America has increased rapidly after the American immigration law was reformed in 1965. Between 1989 and 2004, 15.5 million legal immigrants have entered the country. The number of Muslim immigrants is little less than one percent of America’s national population but constitutes the majority of the total Muslim population. Two-third of them is foreign-born, coming from South Asia, Iran, and the Arabic-speaking countries. The single largest group of Muslim immigrants among them are from the three South Asian countries of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Destitution, ethnic- religious discrimination, class repression, Islamism or anti-Islamism and war are some of the major reasons why Muslim immigrants seek refuge from their respective countries to “smell freedom” in the paradise of America.

All immigrants are not necessarily from the socio-economically marginalized class. A large number of them belong to the wealthy and middle class elite group. They are enticed by the candour of American life, the span of opportunities for a better livelihood, superior professional facilities, socio-political freedom and economic rewards. Immigrants in general are aggressive job seekers and hard-working due to their economical motivations. Likewise, immigrant Muslims are also inclined to resolutely focus on their professional and entrepreneurial careers and many of them possess good educational standards. As a result of these qualities they have achieved considerable economic success over time. Muslims in America today appears to be more educated and affluent than the country’s national average. This affluent economic situation could also be a vital reason behind the post September 11 anti-Muslim bias rather than their religious believe. After September 11, the employment-population ratio among Muslims had declined considerably. The arrogant anti-terrorism policy of the government under President Bush has caused enough humiliation and suffering to Muslim communities living across America. Race and ethnicity became deciding factors for opening an investigation against the Muslims. Mosques were raided to find out suspected terrorists. Surveillance and detention without warrant became a commonplace affair that had created an aura of endless fear within the community.

Where does Rizwan Khan fit here? He arrives in San Francisco after his mother’s death to live with his younger brother and his compassionate wife. Though Rizwan has a super ability to repair any broken machines from his early days, the jealous brother forced him to accept the job of an herbal cosmetics salesman. Rizwan is not economically motivated and dislikes his job. Instead, he gets more involved and occupied in winning the love of a Hindu hairstylist named Mandira. In fact, the director is not interested to focuses on the privations and struggles an immigrant usually comes across in a foreign country, particularly if the immigrant is a mentally challenged person. But privation does not sell! The film is thus packaged with lollipop emotion of love and longing, a utopia of its own kind, far away from the hard reality an immigrant might face in a foreign land. Rizwan Khan belongs to the moderate section of Muslims but at the same time he is also a dutiful practitioner of the laws of Islam – carrying a handful of pebbles to throw upon the devil, muttering scriptures and offering namaz wearing his prayer cap. If read in a different way, one might discover that Rizwan Khan’s religious behaviours are fairly deliberate, and at the same time exceedingly provocative.

One must not forget that Rizwan Khan is actually a Bollywood Muslim in America. Bollywood has its own unique way of characterising Muslims, even in the changed times. Syed Ali Mujtaba has observed in an article that, “Bollywood might be coming good in reaching out to the world but when it comes to creating Muslims on screen it’s closed to a dangerous time warp. Cinematic subtleties, community's sensitivity and societal realism are all thrown overboard. What quickly lapped up is, dirty stereotypes and reckless cliche while sketching Muslim characters.” In the same article he has further noted that, “no one likes to disturb the apple cart of set formulas that Bollywood mindlessly follow while making movies.” (Source)

Bush, Obama and Rizwan Khan

At least on one occasion George W Bush was absolutely sincere when he stated that, “the world has changed after September the 11th”. The twin tower attacks had significantly changed America’s relation and dealing with the world, particularly with the antagonistic Islamic nations. Just four weeks after the attacks, the “war president” and war hawks within his “war administration” had unleashed their infamous “war on terror” and successively destroyed the two sovereign countries Afghanistan and Iraq in cold blood. Although for eighteen long years, from 1980 to 1998, successive American governments were romancing the Taliban in Afghanistan. The attack on Iraq in particular, had nothing to do with the attack on the twin towers except oil interests of America’s business mafia. According to the book Plan of Attack by Bob Woodward, the CIA had already concluded that the hard-nut Saddam Hussein could not be removed from power except through a war. This CIA finding along with “pressure from advocates of war inside the administration” led to the secret planning for military action against Iraq. The September 11 incidence made it politically feasible for the coterie to stupefy public opinion and launch a “pre-emptive attacks against countries believed to be a serious threat to the United States”.

America’s war against Afghanistan has helped the film’s storyline to advance further. Rizwan and Mandira Khan’s American neighbour Mark, a journalist by profession, gets killed in Afghanistan while covering the war. The death of Mark changes the attitude of his grieving son Reese who develops racial hatred against his once dear friend Sam – Rizwan Khan’s sweet step-son. Sam gets involved in a brawl with him and dies of his injuries. A devastated Mandira holds Rizwan culpable for her son’s death. She indicts her husband that Sam was dead only because “his name was Khan”. The distressed and irate wife then tells her husband to depart from her life till he is able to ensure the people and the President of America that he is not a terrorist. Dumped by Mandira, Rizwan starts tracking after President Bush across the country to notify him: “My name is Khan, and I’m not a terrorist”.

Although the Afghanistan war is a vital resource to unfold MNIK's storyline, it is surprising that the name of Iraq was never mentioned in the film. When Rizwan Khan was travelling around the country to “fight against the disability that exists in the world”, American military was invading Iraq on phoney grounds “to free its people, and to defend the world from grave danger”, bombarding the country and its people into pieces. No “weapons of mass destruction” was ever unearthed from Iraq; no al-Qaeda–Saddam Hussein nexus could ever be proved. America’s Iraq misadventure is completely ignored in the film. Instead, the filmmakers were keen to concentrate on Rizwan Khan’s ultimate goal of fixing the broken relation with his beloved wife. They were less concerned about America’s corporate and military greed. The Iraq war was too insignificant an issue for them to be bothered about.

During his long journey across America, Rizwan Khan lands in a poor African-American neighbourhood in Georgia and finds refuge and console from an affectionate woman, Mama Jenny, who has lost her solider son in Afghanistan. Thus, in one stroke an African-American and an Indian immigrant’s grief becomes one and the same. Sharing the common grief, Rizwan joins the chorus in Mama Jenny’s community church to sing the civil rights anthem We Shall Overcome. From here the story rolls faster to its desired end. Rizwan Khan gets arrested while trying to meet Bush and is tortured in jail as a terror suspect, gets noticed by Indian-American journalists who put him on national news which Senator Obama watches with deep interest. In a mosque he confronts a jihadi doctor, vehemently opposes his devilish views by throwing pebbles at him and immediately informs the FBI. The film has to confirm that in spite of everything Rizwan is essentially a “good citizen” of America! He even performs a superman act to dramatically appear as a saviour at Mama Jenny’s hurricane devastated village to repair the lives of the devastated dwellers. The media follows and make a hero out of him. All of a sudden a disciple of the jihadi doctor stabs him in front of his repentant wife, accusing him for betrayal. But typically, he survives in style.

Rizwan Khan finally succeeds to deliver his message to the President of America. Not to Bush but to the newly elected Barak Hussein Obama who promptly assures him that “he is not a terrorist”. Here the director has clearly made a statement by projecting Obama as a responsive President against Bush. This is a loose statement and one should not read too much from it. The Obama effect or the colour of his skin might have also inspired the director and screenwriter to give prominence to the African-Americans and favorably linking Rizwan with them in the film.

This focal point seems to be essential for a film which is marketed and distributed by Fox STAR Entertainment, a joint venture between Twentieth Century Fox and STAR. Trade news has suggested that MNIK is selling extremely well across the globe through its lollipop message to “repair the world with love”. In America it has “turned out to be the largest weekend grosser Bollywood film ever”. (Source) The film has earned Rs 150 crore from its first week of release in India and abroad.

Everyone looks good against the pathological liar and hypocrite George W Bush. But what are those steps the populist Obama is taking that are significantly different from Bush policies? This is the pertinent question which doesn’t have an easy answer. And the problem with MNIK is that, it has not even attempted to raise any pertinent question. The world has gradually started to taste Barak Obama’s “audacity of hope”. “I think people are dazzled by Obama's rhetoric,” observed eminent historian Howard Zinn who has passed away recently, “and that people ought to begin to understand that Obama is going to be a mediocre president – which means, in our time, a dangerous president – unless there is some national movement to push him in a better direction.” (Source)

Rain Man syndrome

The makers of MNIK were definitely aware of the huge success of Barry Levinson’s 1988 Hollywood film Rain Man where Dustin Hoffman gave a fabulous performance as an autistic savant. To authentically portray the autistic-like traits of his character, Shah Rukh Khan spoke with an emotionless intoning voice, walked in mincing steps, always has his head tilting sideways and never makes eye contact with his addressee – not even in romantic scenes. All these mannerisms can’t help but remind us about Hoffman’s performance as Raymond Babbitt in Rain Man. A critic has objected about comparing Hoffman and Shah Rukh’s performance. The comparison, according to the critic, is “childish and naïve” because “Hoffman plays a highly gifted autistic savant while Khan is just a good man, in love, who happens to have Asperger’s Syndrome”. (Source) This point of view is certainly not of a film critic. It can only be a humble opinion by an ardent fan of Bollywood's “de facto super-star”.

Depicting the hero Rizwan Khan with Asperger’s syndrome, a form of autism spectrum disorder, did not really help to carry any lofty message except for raising high-pitch sympathy and emotion for the character in the audience’s mind. The idea to portray the hero as an autistic is basically a discreet commercial formula applied by the makers of MNIK. People with Asperger’s have significant difficulties in social interaction and communication which includes “a failure to develop friendships or to seek shared enjoyments or achievements with others”. Throughout the film, Rizwan Khan acted quite the opposite. Just like a regular Bollywood hero, he had absolutely no problem to stalk and woo the single-mother heroine, to become close and friendly with her son and develop a deep affectionate relationship with an African-American family in up-country Georgia. Here, the director Karan Johar and his screenwriter Shibani Bhatija’s typical Bollywood mindset have prevailed. They have deliberately twisted the basic aspects of the disorder to fit them into a popular Bollywood schema. Asperger’s syndrome became a marketing tool to sell the film. Carried away by this fantasizing feint of MNIK, a mainstream critic has claimed that the film “uses familiar devices to create new meaning”. (Source)

The film has indeed created a “new meaning” of king-size profiteering by effectively exploiting many disabilities of the post-modern world to achieve record-breaking box office success.

NYT image courtesy: brothersjuddblog.com

MNIK poster courtesy: filmicafe.com

Jyoti Basu and his ‘respectful’ detractors

Jyoti Basu, the nonagenarian patriarch of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) was seriously ill for the last few months. He was also too old. So, the news of his death initially did not arouse much shock but a profound sadness. This sadness will gradually creep dip by dip into the minds of the masses, from the poor countryside to affluent cities, those who have admired and respected the man and repeatedly brought him and the Left Front back to power. With every passing day, the reality of his absence will be felt more and more among his admirers as well as his critics. Beginning from the early 40’s till the recent times, the towering persona of this legendary leader of the Communist movement in India has marked an enduring imprint on the socio-political life of the nation in many significant ways, particularly in the collective psyche of an entire generation of post independence Bengal. However, he had strongly dismissed the view that he had played any special role from an individual capacity and affirmed that, “What I was and what I am is because of the party. The CPM leadership had assigned a role to me which I carried out with help from innumerable comrades.” (Source) He was a true Marxist committed to the ideology. Like a true communist he had tirelessly served his people symbolizing their aspirations, struggles and sacrifices for six decades till his last breath. Even after his death he continued to serve them by donating his eyes and body for the benefit of patients and medical science. He had learned from Lenin that democracy is indispensable to socialism and genuinely believed that “it is people, and people alone, who creates history”. He was the last living icon of a spectacular era. Now with his demise, the era has permanently come to its end. Comrade Jyoti Basu has become history himself.

The subject of this post is not about Comrade Basu or his legacy. This blogger is too minuscule to write anything about the impressive feats of this illustrious life. This post will only present the undulating media extravaganza which has followed from his final illness till his death. The post is arranged by eclectically picking up gems from the “respectful” media “homage” offered to this extraordinary man.

On one hand, a wide spectrum of the mighty Indian press has pursued its standard populist agenda by sensationalizing the persona of Jyoti Basu, flattering him as a colossus, a stalwart, an astute but bhadralok (gentleman) politician and what not? Did they hold a similar attitude for Jyoti Basu when he was at the helm of the government? It must be noted with some conviction that during his tenure, the dominant section of the Bengal press, Bengali as well as English, left no stone unturned to regularly disparage him, his government and his party by distorted or twisted news and views. Jyoti Basu was made the prime target of this hostile and contemptuous criticism that has many times gone beyond all limits of journalistic decorum towards plain impropriety. Before every election in Bengal, Chief Minister Basu and the Left Front were written off by these mischief-makers and an aura of ‘hope’ use to be propagated in favor of the opposition. This tendency became a commonplace phenomenon in Bengal just like the winning streak of the Left Front. To them, as Ashok Mitra has recently written, the communist party was a nuisance and Jyoti Basu was an integral part of that nuisance. Even when he had voluntarily retired from office, he was not spared and was subjected to ill-concealed acrimony.

All the praise and admiration that has been promoted after his death are therefore nothing but sheer duplicity. The way in which the tributes and honors are published displays an inherent design beneath. It is actually designed to ridicule the present Left leaders, particularly Prakash Karat. Corporate media loves to hate the CPI(M) general secretary. The intention is to show them as dwarfs by comparing them with the “pragmatic communist” who was free from the ‘muddle of ideology’. The ignominious tone of this media ‘homage’ is evident from the high pitch exposition of the so called ‘historic blunder’ when the “upstart” leaders of CPI(M) Polit Bureau and Central Committee opposed him to lead a coalition government in 1996. Though, the stateliness in which he had accepted his party’s decision is obviously downplayed. It looks as if Jyoti Basu as the Prime Minister of India was a much anticipated desire of these superficial media folks.

On the other side, a wide range of reproach has been planned through contract analysts and senior political pundits to bash the man from all possible angles, by any means. We find a hoard of elite ex-Kolkata denizens lamenting about their ex-Kolkata “paradise” that was turned into a hell – “a place time forgot” due to the politics exercised by Jyoti Basu and his party. Speaking on behalf of the “entire generations of educated middle-class Bengalis” who were “forced to seek refuge in other States or migrate to America” these detractors grieve for the genius Bengalis who became a prey of the “Stalinist rule” of Jyoti Basu regime and became “refugees from Bengal” due to “a contraction of opportunities, educational and economic, and a closing of the Bengali mind”. (Source) Besides, who are these well-wisher crooks who are purposely wheedling about their Kolkata days before the communists came to power and shedding crocodile tears for the “brainy” Kolkata middle-class diaspora from safer and cozy distance? They are essentially representatives of the Indian affluent class promoting its odious anti-Left values. They surely feel grateful, pleased and satisfied to be able to join the creamy section of Indian society. In their tapered vision, Kolkata embody the whole of Bengal.

From both the sides the intentions behind the tributes are similar. A candid statement like “the present history of Bengal is largely the story of Jyoti Basu” is fundamentally contemptuous. The comment is intended not really to glorify him but as a deliberate attempt to get nearer to the real point of attack – to ascertain that the story of Jyoti Basu is actually “a story of unmitigated disaster,” the story of Bengal’s pathetic “decline and decay” from “a hub of industrial and intellectual activity” into an “economic and professional backwater”. To validate their point, established analysts of the neo-liberal media have thus unambiguously relied on the phony findings of Bibek Debroy & Laveesh Bhandari, the “duty bound” economist duo infamous for their dubious study Transforming West Bengal – Changing the Agenda for an Agenda for Change. This bogus and ostensible “study” was commissioned and funded by Dinesh Trivedi, then Rajya Sabha MP from the Trinamul Congress. It was a purposeful effort on the eve of 2009 Lok Sabha polls to illustrate Bengal’s “pathetic decline” caused by “overall governance failure”. Putting the purpose behind the study into perspective, Economic Policy Editor Vivan Fernandes of CNBC-TV18 has uncovered that “the Business Standard and Economic Times quoted it as if it were an independent study. By tracing West Bengal’s decline from the 1960s, than from 1977, when the Left Front assumed power, by comparing it selectively with peers Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu and by ignoring achievements in agriculture, the authors seem anxious to prove that West Bengal is indeed, as they say, the most miserable state in India.” (Emphasis added) Fernandes found that the study was “deliberately provocative when it asserts the Left Front government is like Gangrene. It cannot be cured, and must be excised out.” (Source)

Like the above stated iniquitous report, Jyoti Basu’s death has brought out the savage teeth and nail of a variety of editors, commentators and experts who are principally anti-Left. Some among them are rather clever to present their contentions under a politesse veil. According to their sarcastic depiction, Jyoti Basu was just “a member of Calcutta’s privileged,” who wanted to “do something for the downtrodden”. A bhadralok who wore “glistening white” clothes and “invariably polished” shoes, who was fond of “good food and the sundowner” and whose only memorable contribution was to spearhead agitational politics that “resulted in the flight of capital, a complete erosion of work culture and irresponsible trade unionism.” (Source) Some among them have also tried to suggest how the persona of Jyoti Basu, previously committed to his party and the ideology, began to change “once he became firmly entrenched in power” and “acquiesced in the loot of state sources” along with party functionaries. (Source) There are also others, intensively raw and crude, those who have virtually crossed every limits of civility while lambasting Basu. Their calumny is decorated with abusive language and based on imaginary stories, fabricated reminisces, street gossips and unadorned lies. It also includes malicious personal attack by putting imaginary dialogues into selective mouths. (Source) Their style is fairly similar to the despicable approach popularized by the Trinamool chieftain Mamata Banerjee who while expressing her doubt upon Basu’s retirement had commented, “He will never retire till he expire.”

Any fool can criticize, condemn and complain and most fools do. But can these so call experts be dubbed as fools when they cunningly avoid mentioning the stride in the Bengal countryside achieved under Jyoti Basu’s leadership? The pathbreaking achievements of Operation Barga – the land reforms and redistribution program initiated by the Left Front government is either completely ignored or referred in a diminutive and inconsequential way while assessing his contribution in the obituaries,. This example is sufficient to expose the precise objective of these deceitful pundits. How can they establish their points if they focus on the unmatched achievements of Jyoti Basu government’s panchayat program that has decentralized power to the grassroot and greatly empowered the rural peasantry? Since Independence, Bengal has accounted for 22.6 per cent of the total land distributed in India as a whole, and 54.5 per cent of the total number of gainers from land distribution programmes in the entire country. Land reforms and redistribution is the single most important contributor to rural poverty reduction and in this regard Bengal’s performance is the best among any state in the country. These policies occupied the centrestage of the Left Front government’s pro-people administrative initiatives and thus have significantly improved the status of the poor, giving them a sense of social dignity. Even in recent years, as V.K. Ramachandran has observed, “the extent of agricultural land distributed under land reform in West Bengal as a proportion of land distributed in the country as a whole is 22.6 per cent.” Ramachandran has also observed that “the total number of gainers from land distribution programmes in the country, more than half – a full 54.5 per cent – are from West Bengal.” (Source) But as Paranjoy Guha Thakurta has pointed out, “Historians have selective memories. Who cares today about Operation Barga or the empowerment of panchayats?” (Source)

By delicately applying their biases and prejudices, the pundits talk about Bengal’s poor growth compared to the rest of India. These pundits will never draw attention toward Bengal’s phenomenal agricultural growth which has grown at an annual rate of 2.7 per cent – double the national rate. Instead, they prefer to vociferously babble on the ‘gherao culture’ as the foundation of industrial stagnation in Bengal but never utter that Bengal’s industrial turn down was primarily caused by the central government policies of freight equalization and industrial licensing. Doesn’t it astonish us today that it took 13 years for the Congress government at the center to clear the flagship Haldia Petrochemicals project? Since the days when the license-permit raj were lifted and liberalization opened new possibilities, from 1990s Bengal was one of the fastest growing states in India. The pundits also endlessly emphasize on the worst condition of poverty and hunger in rural Bengal compared to most other states. But the planning commission figures show an entirely different picture. Percentage of persons below poverty line in rural Bengal has declined from 73.2 per cent in 1973-74 to 28.6 per cent in 2004-05 compared to the national average of 56.4 per cent in 1973-74 to 28.3 per cent in 2004-05. Urban poverty in Bengal is 14.8 per cent compared to the national average of 25.7 per cent – the performance is even better than fast-growing states like Maharashtra and Gujarat. The Eleventh Plan document has noted that Bengal is one of the five major states that have succeeded in reducing the absolute number of the poor in rural areas over the three decades from 1973 to 2004-05.

Protecting the rights and privileges of the poor, creating the possibility for a better socio-economic condition and achieving it to some reasonable extent are certainly the most significant contributions of Jyoti Basu’s rule. There are also other social sectors where Bengal has performed well. The state has registered the lowest death rate and maternal mortality rates among all the major states and has achieved notable reductions in fertility rate. It is the first state to lower the voting age to 18, first to introduce reservation for women in elected bodies. Jyoti Basu must also be credited for his firm commitment to secularism that has established an unwavering atmosphere of communal harmony and secularism in the state.

However, responding to the new aspirations and popular demands that has emerged from the successful agrarian reforms is a far more difficult and time-consuming task. It is a fact that the Left Front government’s response in this aspect was relatively slow. The government has also somewhat failed to achieve success in areas like education, infrastructural developments and the state of the economy. Long stint in power have also developed bureaucratic habits among a section of the Left Front leadership and detached them from the people. Jyoti Basu was quite aware about these shortcomings and negative developments. He had persistently spoken about the necessity of going to the people, listening to them, explaining the reasons behind the shortcomings and sincerely admitting the mistakes. Jyoti Basu himself has done it all through his life.

All his positive achievements, and there were many, is overshadowed or ignored by the bombastic and dismissive media rhetoric which is more engrossed to focus on the “egregious blemishes” of Jyoti Basu and his tenure. Viewed objectively, most of them will turn into plain deception. Jyoti Basu’s death has once more proved the myth of media objectivity and manifested an emergent trend of corporate journalism in India. A depressing trend that deceives millions of people and indoctrinates them by promoting personal bias towards the Left in the name of “balanced reporting”. It is a dangerous trend that encourages flak criticism to disgrace an exemplary politician – one of the country’s most illustrious leaders and statesmen.

Image Courtesy: aajkaal.net

The significance of Franz Kafka

Franz Kafka rarely smiles in the photographs. His penetrating eyes gaze out with an inherent sadness. “My life is a hesitation before birth,” he had noted down in his diary. From the early childhood a profound inferiority complex and guilt shaped his inner psyche. Hermann Kafka, his demanding and autocratic father found fault with him for almost everything and had stifled the childhood and youth of his only living son, while the loving but timid mother Julie Löwy usually took the father’s side. "Timidity," Kafka wrote, is “accounted noble and good because they offer little resistance to other people’s aggressive impulses.” Though he equally loved and hated his father “who was so tremendously the measure of all things” and struggled to live up to his father’s expectations, he could never overcome this difficult relationship with his parents and several times felt a deep desire to break away from them. Later in his life, the tormented son spilled out his emotional feelings on this disturbed father-son relationship in A Letter to his Father – a hundred page long epistle which never reached its addressee. Excepting his beloved sister Ottla, he could seldom connect or communicate with his family members though he spent a major part of his life living with them. This dichotomy is intrinsic in Kafka, whether in his personal life or in the characters of his novels and stories who are besieged with feelings of guilt and culpability. He had to be dragged to school because he hated going to, had a nervous breakdown once due to consistent pressures from his studies. Even if he was not a bad student, right through his student life he was always doubtful about his own ability. His only solace was reading and he wanted to be a writer. Kafka once wrote in his diary, “Everything has been subordinated to my desire to portray my inner life.” In an attempt to represent his ‘dreamlike’ inner universe, he had dedicated himself to the art of fiction writing and tried to do something entirely new – even though he could seldom write a single joyful page in his entire literary career. While being a competent and successful lawyer in his later life, literature became his “way of understanding, interpreting and putting order into the world”. Interlacing his creative imaginations with reflections of ineradicable guilt, anxiety, torments and repulsion, his fictions have revealed modern man’s vulnerability from repressive social forces and the constant struggle between individual and the society. His fictional output was not large. Yet, works like The Metamorphosis and The Trial has been universally recognized as modern literary cornerstones and has exerted an indelible influence on modern literature. Though died young and relatively unknown at the age of forty, this Czech author is held in high regards today for his remarkably relevant body of work that has helped to define the madness and the angst of modern age.

“The tremendous world I have inside my head”

In a conversation with Milan Kundera, Gabriel García Márquez had expressed how Kafka has showed him that “it’s possible to write another way.” What Márquez meant by another way was to write breaking the plausibility barrier – not by escaping the real world but by apprehending it better. Kafka’s attentiveness, observation, sensitivity and apprehension of the real world are evident from the manner through which he had captured the spirit of the century he lived. In his art he had pointed out towards some of the most enduring concerns of the age. The enigmatic quality of Kafka’s prose, as Albert Camus had aptly suggested, “offers everything but confirms nothing”. His allegorical narrative never really wanted to spell out the full account or let the reader to arrive to any definite conclusions. But if looked circumspectly by breaking through the surface details, all his works contain some common thematic threads and basic motifs.

His first novel Amerika (1911) traces the struggles of sixteen-year-old Karl Rossmann who was forced to immigrate to America to escape the scandal of his seduction by a housemaid. After many strange encounters and aimless wanderings, Karl finally finds a job in the ‘almost limitless’ Nature Theatre of Oklahoma as a technical worker where the narrative abruptly ends here. In The Trial (1914), Kafka weaves the story of a man Joseph K. who is formally charged and arrested by a mysterious court with some kind of terrible but unnamed crime and never knows his exact offense. Throughout the narrative, Joseph K. struggles through the strange circumstances and a whirlpool of bizarre events to learn his place with regard to the law and the world. He fails miserably to prove his innocence and is finally stabbed to death like a dog. Kafka’s unfinished novel, The Castle (1922) depicts the arrival of a professional land surveyor in a village as a result of a bureaucratic error. The village is governed by ‘The Castle’ which is in fact “a dismal collection of innumerable small buildings packed together” as Kafka has described it. No matter how hard the man attempts to penetrate the Castle or try to communicate and acquire recognition from the Castle authorities – every time he fails to overcome the ‘flawless’ bureaucratic hurdles and remains an outsider.

The Metamorphosis (1912) is the nightmarish story of a young traveling salesman Gregor Samsa who is the only earning member of a family of four – his father, mother, sister and himself. He works to clear his disapproving father’s outstanding debt and to maintain the family. He wakes up one day and finds himself transformed into a gigantic insect. Even after the bizarre beginning, the story moves ahead in a rather equable manner till the end when Gregor dies in his room relieving the family from all the troubles and worries. The relieved parents take a ride into the countryside, discuss about their prospects and notice that their daughter has blossomed into an attractive girl. Then they start thinking that the time was coming to find a nice husband for her. In the Penal Colony (1914) revolves around an explorer who tours a tropical penal colony where he is invited by the officer in charge to witness the execution of a soldier who has broken the law. The convict will be put in a monstrous torture machine that inscribes the text of the law on the body of the convicts. The convict has not been granted any trial because the guiding principle of the colony’s judicial system is “Guilt is never to be doubted”. Neither does he know about the nature of his crime. However, when the explorer asks if the convict knows his sentence, the officer smilingly replies, “He'll learn it on his body”. In a dramatic end of the story, the officer in charge himself is executed by the machine.

The Judgment (1912) is a story about the strange relationship and mortal conflicts between a resentful father who have lost control of the family business and a tender son. The father finally accuses, condemns and punishes the son and sentences him to die by drowning. A Hunger Artist (1924) is the story of a professional fasting artist whose act is to starve himself in front of an audience for the cause of art. But the people have started losing interest about fasting art and hunger artists. To reestablish his lost fame and talent, he performs a marathon spell of fasting and dies in his cage. A young, lively panther now occupies his cage and the delight the spectators. The cage’s previous occupant is completely forgotten. The Burrow (1923-24) depicts the secret life of a mole like creature that spends most of his time modifying and fixing structural faults of the massive burrow it has built. Moving through the burrow’s passageways, the creature dreams or imagines all kind of preoccupations and also constantly worries about its possible destruction from the fearsome outside forces. Kafka’s final work Josephine the Mouse Singer (1924) is set among a mice community. The mouse Josephine has the rare ability to sing and therefore is both adored and loathed by the community that gathers round to listen to her devotedly. Though all mice must work in order to survive, Josephine constantly demanded to be excused from the daily struggle for existence since the very beginning of her artistic career on account of her singing. Does Josephine really sings or pips like any other mouse? This doubt remains unsettled in the story. When she disappears, the narrator tells us that Josephine will eventually be forgotten as the mice community does not have historians to record their lives.

Despite the general morose atmosphere he creates while writing about isolation, solitude, insensitivity and cruelty, Kafka in fact had an immense sense of humor – apparently subtle and claustrophobic but with piercing complexity. Yet associating Kafka’s oeuvre with humor might appear contradictory. Kafka biographers tell us that while he read out the first chapter of The Trial to his friends, he with his listeners both have laughed out loudly. The powerful black humor interwoven in the morbid dimensions of his prose has mostly been thinned down by a section of Kafka exponents by exaggerating the bleakness of Kafka’s world as well as introducing and circulating the cliché of ‘Kafkaesque’ into the contemporary vocabulary. Kafka’s humor comes from the absurd situations, encounters and comic horrors experienced by his characters. The parody of bureaucracy depicted in several episodes of The Castle, the strange tribunals in The Trial, the tragic situation of a man being transformed into an insect in The Metamorphosis and the ludicrous ambiance of his parables – they all are infused with intense black humor and satirical wit. Kafka used it to express the absurdity and paradoxes of the situations and to further exemplify the anguish of his characters. The tragic experiences and absurd encounters that the characters in Kafka’s fiction go through are actually in close proximity to the experiences of modern lives. They are dismal but at the same time their inherent absurdity and silliness give them a funny look.

“A cage went in search of a bird”

Kafka wrote about the contradictions and anxieties of his time but the central theme of his works, indisputably, is the theme of alienation. Alienation is a complex subject which is linked with its vast historicity from the Judeo-Christian beginnings. To understand alienation in Kafka’s works, it is essential to understand its foundation within a socio-economic context of the modern society. In this regard, Karl Marx and his theory of alienation can help steering our way.

The human society, as Marx had stressed in the Grundrisse, “does not consist of individuals; it expresses the sum of connections and relationships in which individuals find themselves”. Human beings therefore cannot exist independently of the society but are shaped by the society they live in. Human lives are dominated by natural and impersonal forces that control society to a great extent. While studying the nature and functioning of the capitalistic form of production Marx had discovered the uniqueness of human labor: “At the end of every labor-process, we get a result that already existed in the imagination of the laborer”. This physical and intellectual labor of man has resulted in the collective development of the productive forces and subsequently became capable of producing a surplus. By taking over control of the means of production, a particular minority class of people adroitly set themselves free from the need to produce directly and live on the labor of others. The rise of industrial capitalism witnessed the majority of the people losing control over their labor as well as the process of production since modern science and technology has invented machinery “with the wonderful power of shortening and fructifying human labour” and substituted them. Human beings must produce in order to survive. Productive activity is therefore the foundation of human consciousness. For transforming the world, human labour is the highest decisive factor. As a result of losing control over the process of production, man starts getting alienated from the product of their labor. Production activity turns into an alienated activity and further develops into alienation of consciousness. The cycle finally gets completed when men reach the stage of self-alienation from the very nature of human beings and is also alienated from other human beings. Individuals are unable to understand each another – alienation becomes a way of life. Alienation affects individuals of every class but as Marx has noted, experience their alienation in different ways. The propertied class “feels at ease and strengthened in this self-estrangement” while the proletariat class “feels annihilated, this means that they cease to exist in estrangement; it sees in it its own powerlessness and the reality of an inhuman existence.”

In short, the social relations of production under capitalism have ensured the creation of the modern alienated man. Capitalism has taught mankind to consider “other human beings as competitors, as inferiors or superiors” and see other people “through the lens of profit and loss”. Marx had brilliantly described the capitalist process that leads towards alienation:

It is true that labour produces marvels for the rich, but it produces privation for the worker. It produces palaces, but hovels for the worker. It procures beauty, but deformity for the worker. It replaces labour by machines, but it casts some of the workers back into barbarous forms of labour and turns others into machines. It produces intelligence, but it produces idiocy and cretinism for the worker.

A feeling of suffocation, isolation and solitude, the ‘unconscious condition of mankind’, is therefore a systemic result of the industrial age and capitalism. Thus it is obvious that capitalistic alienation will be reflected in every form of reciprocal human trends and actions – in the practice of religion, philosophy, art, law and politics.

In Kafka’s writings, the source of alienation appears in form of a social state which is dominated by artificial and obdurate laws. Kafka’s paradox and contradictions are actually the inherent paradox and contradictions of capitalism. Alienation, as exemplified by Marx, is not just a mental state but actually has its roots deeply permeated into the society. The reality of the alienated individual’s life is determined by social relations. He had painted a world where “hopes of the morning are buried in the afternoon” and tender relations between family, office, friends, woman are converted into imaginary illusions under the institutions of authoritarian power that mindlessly controls the whole. Kafka uses the character of a salesman, a key envoy of the capitalist economic system, as a metaphor to articulate a similar message of anomie. He puts forward Gregor Samsa as both the voice and victim, a psyche pathetically crushed by the ruthless struggle for survival within the realm of capitalism. Gregor’s anxiety, guilt, desolation, solitude and subjugation to the social forces are the archetypal symbols of the modern man. What remains as the closest truth, Kafka writes, is “beating your head against the wall of a windowless and doorless cell.” If Kafka’s world seems dark, suffocating, melancholic and bizarre, it is only because the world he so sensitively observed was like that. This is why Kafka smilingly tells Max Broad that there is “plenty of hope, an infinite amount of hope – but not for us.” In his outstanding study of Kafka, Walter Benjamin has rightly observed the essence of Kafka’s aesthetic complexity: “…modern man lives in his body; the body slips away from him, is hostile towards him. It may happen that the man wakes up one day and find himself transformed into a vermin.” Benjamin has further noted that, “Kafka’s real genius was that he tried something entirely new: he sacrificed truth for the sake of clinging to its transmissibility”.

An insurance lawyer by profession, Kafka wrote a number of reports for the Workers’ Accident Insurance Institute in Prague, where he worked for fourteen years. In one of his reports ‘On Mandatory Insurance in the Construction Industry’, he had categorically written about the need for insurance in protecting construction workers and their families in the occurrence of any accident. While preparing the reports he must have clearly obtained an insight concerning the plight of workers under a pitiless system and came to realize that “the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” From a genuine concern for the people he represented, he had filed lawsuits against business owners who illegally withhold the workers insurance premiums, appealed for improving their safety conditions and took initiative to implement various safety measures and methods to save their lives and livelihoods. At the same time, the very nature of his job gave him enough exposure on how an unfathomable bureaucracy works to accelerate the engine of the capitalistic system by feeding upon the rights of the people. Industrial capitalism required its bureaucratic apparatus to penetrate deeper into the societal ambiance. To fulfill the appetites of the system, it was compulsory to bureaucratize society in every aspect through a pure force of domination – the rule of law. A stringent critique of bureaucratic power, Kafka’s major achievement was to identify and express the bureaucratic system’s morbid, monotonous, agonizing and neurotic image.

In The Trial, the warder explains to a bemused Joseph K.: “That is the law. How could there be a mistake in that?” Later in the novel, a priest tells him, “One does not have to believe everything is true. One only has to believe it is necessary.” Here Kafka sarcastically pointed out that what really matters regarding the law is its capability to control and shape individuals and their social relations effectively – even if this legality lacks logic and wisdom or dehumanizes the entire society with its absurd form of justice. In Kafka’s world, “an attraction existed between the law and guilt”. The concept of justice and injustice, sin and guilt are intimately related with each other.

“From hall to hall there is one doorkeeper after another”

Many of the important themes that Kafka's had covered in his entire body of work have appeared in the parable Before the Law. A man from the country waits in front of the gateway of the law pleading admission. Even though the door stands wide open, the man is denied entry by an inflexible doorkeeper. To gain access, the man attempts to convince and change the doorkeeper's mind, tries bribing him but all without success. The doorkeeper accepts the bribes and continues to assure the man about the possibility of his admittance but whenever the man approaches him, he constantly impedes him by saying, “not at the moment”. Instead of forcing his way through the gate, the man decides to sit and wait before the gate. Just before the man was about to die after waiting before the door of law for days and years, he asks the doorkeeper, “How is that in these many years no one except me has requested entry?” and receives the answer, “this gate was made only for you. I am now going to shut it”. With this perfectly ludicrous note, the parable ends.

In Before the Law, Kafka had initiated a universal argument involving the concepts of justice vs. injustice, success vs. failure and truth vs. untruth. Is the path to truth always obstructed and hence inaccessible? Is life essentially nothing but a paradox, just an absurd and clueless journey, where there is no real progress? Is the search to discover the meaning of the Law destined to fail? Does the ‘law’ that determines our existence in the world really has any meaning or just a pure abstraction? Is it really possible to understand the workings of the Law? Whether “the world is really darker” or the “eyes are only deceiving” us? Is it virtually impossible to step in or out of the man made laws, to find out what lies prior or beyond its abstract dialectic? Is the Law made to guard high life and kept inaccessible for ordinary people like ‘the man from the country’? Should we agree with the priest that “doubting the doorkeeper’s worthiness would imply doubting the Law itself” or argue like Joseph K. that the doorkeeper has misled the man by denying his lawful rights of entry? Is the tale confirming about the futility of efforts, hopelessness or regress? Kafka held the view that, “To believe in progress is not to believe that progress has already happened. That would not be a belief.” By mocking the logical proclivity, Kafka in his unique way had explored the utter helplessness of mankind under social forces, watched over by powerful social doorkeepers of all kind.

Simplistic interpretations and over-interpretation both will always miss the significant features that sparkle in Kafka’s art. The essential quest of Kafka’s aesthetic journey, as Walter Benjamin had pointed out, was to discover how life and work are organized in human society. In Before the Law, Kafka had woven a stunning metaphor of the modern capitalist array by mixing elements of mythology and Christian themes with Jewish and Chinese fables. The profound sense of pessimism that evokes while reading this tale is the pessimism of life under capitalism, the entrapment of human life paralyzed beneath a supreme but unseen bureaucratic power from which the individual has no escape but to fall as a victim to it. The parable is a mirror that reflects the absurdity, despair and psychological tensions of the perplexing situations created in an unjust world, controlled by a labyrinthine and faceless bureaucratic system.

It is also important to note the agonist in Kafka who was by and large skeptical about religion from his childhood. He was never an orthodox Jew. With the exception of his interest in Yiddish theater, his involvement with the Jewish community was minimal. “What do I have in common with the Jews?” he once wrote in his diary. In no way Kafka’s oeuvre can be perceived as the quintessence of religious impulse. He surely believed that the imperative truths of life cannot be found in religious faith but into the very nature of mankind, their living conditions and relationships. Hence all his characters live in a godless world. Kafka wrote parables, but the writings can neither be measured as religious canons nor can be assessed within the limits of religious discourse. He had borrowed the language of religion while writing the parables, but as Walter Benjamin has noted, “he did not found a religion”. Man’s relation to his world was what Kafka considered important and not what is beyond it.

Why read Kafka?

A lot has been written about Kafka’s famous instruction to his dear friend Max Brod to burn all his unpublished works after his death. A promise, thankfully, Brod refused to comply. Kafka scholars as well as popular feature writers has consistently carried out full volume psychological and clinical analysis about his ambiguous sexuality, about his sexual discontents and frustrated desires, about the crisis he faced to balance his attraction and antipathy about sex. Too much emphasis has been given to relate his morbidity, physical limitation and fretfulness with the pessimism, absurdity and gloominess of his language. There is also a tendency to regard Kafka as a prophetic visionary who had predicted the Nazi holocaust. These trendy methods of appreciation can barely comprehend the inner vitality of Kafka’s art.

Kafka believed that a book must be “the axe for the frozen sea within us”. His own creation works in the minds of his readers in an equal manner. His gripping prose and unforgettable imageries “shake us awake like a blow to the skull” by epitomizing modern man’s alienation, fear and cerebral anguishes in an amazing way. His books certainly do not make us happy but slits open the absurdity of the material existence and values. This is why Kafka has not become stale. We return to his works again and again and soak our minds in his so called ‘morbid’ prose dappled under autobiographical reminiscences. Reading Kafka gives us the indispensable ‘bite and sting’ that illuminates us about the spurious reality surrounding our everyday life.

In one of his diary entries Kafka had superbly expressed the creative struggle of a writer:

Anyone who cannot come to terms with his life while he is alive needs one hand to ward off a little his despair over his fate – he has little success in this – but with his other hand he can note down what he sees among the ruins, for he sees different (and more) things than the others; after all, dead as he is in his own lifetime, he is the real survivor. This assumes that he does not need both hands, or more hands than he has, in his struggle against despair.

Kafka’s illuminating works are largely about the “different (and more) things” he had observed “among the ruins”. He was never an exponent of gloom and doom but a true artist who had keenly observed the society and its systems he lived in. However, it will be a blunder to reduce his works to a political doctrine or ideology of any kind. His objective yet sensitive observations of the impacts of capitalism on the individual and his critique of the totalitarian structure of society are the real facets of his art that will continue to excel from generation to generation.

References:
1. Franz Kafka: The Diaries (1910-1923)
2. István Mészáros: Marx’s Theory of Alienation
3. Judy Cox: An Introduction to Marx's Theory of Alienation
4. Walter Benjamin: Illuminations
5. Milan Kundera: Testaments Betrayed: An Essay in Nine Parts