One of the few joys of the past pandemic-inflicted months has been walking. In the face of gym closures, endless Zoom calls, OTT binges, doom scrolling and the temptations of a well-stocked fridge, I have taken to walking for hours. Last month I averaged about 150 minutes a day!
One may walk by oneself, but one never walks alone. If lucky enough, one could be walking with nature, in the company of greenery, under the great blue sky, accompanied by birdsong and like.
I am stuck walking the compound of a Mumbai multistory while needing to ward off some unwelcome walking companions, including the multiple stresses of the day's numerous Zoom meetings, the doom and gloom that the daily news brings and once-in-a-while a neighbour who can, unlike me, both chat and walk.
So I walk in a bubbly, so to speak, engaged with my imagination. Some days it is music that lifts me out of myself and makes my tread lighter. Some days it is a podcast that stimulates the mind and adds to the calories burnt. But on most days, I find myself with an audiobook.
Because I see when I walk with a book, an entire world walks with me.
After some experimentation with music and podcasts, I decided that my best option is to revisit or strike up an acquaintance with great books by listening to their audio versions.
Audible, the Amazon-owned App, offers a great selection at affordable prices (the India version translates the USD price to INR at purchasing-power-parity rates instead of the nominal exchange rates).
The production is usually of the highest quality. And the world of audiobooks has its stars - the voices that read the book.
Over the past months, I have listened to three classics.
- The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer narrated by his son John Buffalo Mailer
- Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky, translated from the Russian by Constance Garnett narrated by Anthony Heald
- Godaan bu Munshi Premchand in the original Hindi narrated by Sameer Goswami
I had read the first two books as a teenager, and Godaan was my introduction to Munshi Premchand.
As a teenager, "The Naked and The Dead" and "Crime and Punishment" were heavy going, and I do not remember whether they had a significant impact on me. However, both the books blew me away this time around and left me with world-view impacting insights.
Was it that the mature mind gets more out of literature than a callow teenager? It has more to do, perhaps, with the power of the spoken word without the distraction and anxiety of engaging with it visually.
That lets the mind conjure the world evoked by the words with that much more clarity and colour.
Coming to Godaan, I have always rued my unfamiliarity with Hindi literature (in the original or translations) and literature in other Indian languages. I knew this lacuna contributed to a lack in my cultural gestalt.
I have, on my previous occasions, tried to read Hindi literature in the original. I did read a few pages of Godaan a couple of years ago. But found it hard going because of my unfamiliarity with written Hindi. However, listening to Samir Goswami's riveting narration of Godaan was a pleasure because I am very familiar with the rhythms and cadences of spoken Hindi.
I have promised myself that I will now listen to all available audiobook version of Hindi literature. Alas, as of now, not much is extant.
This lack of well-produced audiobooks and translations of Indian language literature, I guess, is a chicken and egg problem. There is not enough demand because there is not enough supply.
I guess this will change as younger generations emerge that are not "Macauly's children" as many of my cohort of the well-heeled and "well-educated" are.
I usually, for this blog, write about the books I have recently read and liked.
Here is a very brief comparative review of the three books mentioned above.
"Crime and Punishment", published in the 1850s, is set in Tsarist Russia. Its protagonist Raskolnikov is among the most tortured individuals portrayed in literature. And the fact is that the prime torturer of Raskolnikov is Raskolnikov himself! Dostoevsky's brilliance lies in how he conveys the dread Raskolnikov feels as being independent of the plot details. Early in the novel, Raskolnikov commits a senseless double murder and then proceeds to give himself away in equally meaningless ways. Be that as may be, Raskolnikov, one could conclude, be equally angst-ridden even in the early sylvan days of the garden of Eden! Though existentialism as philosophy got traction only in the 1930s and 40s, to mind, "Crime and Punishment" is a thoroughly existential novel. Sartre's saying, "Hell is other people." could have no better exegesis than "Crime and Punishment."
"The Naked and the Dead", published in 1948, is set on a small Pacific island during a WWII operation by a US Army Division that executes and succeeds in a campaign to drive out a Japanese division from it. However, by no means is it a war novel. Its underpinnings are also existential. However, while the outlook of "Crime and Punishment" is essentially Russian, in that it sees the meaninglessness of life as a source of agony and captivity, 'The Naked and the Dead" is essentially American in its existentialism. It translates meaninglessness into self-centeredness and freedom. War and death are as meaningless as domestic life back home is, but through it all, the quintessential American point-of-view is "So what? All it means is I do it my way because nobody and nothing else matters."
Does the difference in outlook in some way explain the contrast between the modern history US and Russian? Perhaps, in some ways, it does
Godaan is rooted in its social milieu. It eschews the interiority -the relentless depiction of an individual's internal landscape at the core of both "Crime and Punishment" and "The Naked and the Dead".
The protagonist of Godaan is no single person. Instead, it is the social and class system that drives the narrative. The arc of the book moves towards a denouement. In that sense, Godaan is classical storytelling.
Godaan does not yet have a place in the modern canon of any respectable literature department in universities across the world. It is not the lack of translation that prevents it from becoming so. A 1968 translation titled "A Gift of A Cow" by Gordon C. Roadermel is considered, in some circles, a classic by itself.
The reason for its non-inclusion in the canon of world literature could be two-fold. The first reason is structural: "It is plot-driven! This thing happened, and then that thing happened! Come on! That's a beach read, not literature" The second reason goes a little deeper. Accepting social constraints and working within a system is a purely Eastern way of looking at life. And the world of recognition and awards is, as of now, governed by Western mores.
The East sees the world through the "us" lens, the West through the "me" lens.
Over the past three centuries, the "me" lens has given the world science, technology, and abundance along with inequality, loneliness, dread, and excess.
The "us" lens once gave the world its spiritual underpinnings - Vedas, Confuscious, Buddha, Jesus and many more. Still, it got lost in navel-gazing and involuted dogma that allowed the West to conquer and subjugate.
Is the worm about to turn? Could it be that the three C's - Covid, Climate Change and China- the harbinger of a paradigm shift back to the "us" lens. That is grist for another day, another post.
