THE cultural ethos of the Marathi ‘little magazines’, promoting and propagating parallel and innovative literary trends, reflected a kind of mini-Renaissance that helped shape the intellectual discourse, social reform movements and political ideas in Maharashtra for nearly half a century starting from the early years of the 20th century. This literary and cultural efflorescence unfortunately petered out by the end of the 1970s, dealt, one suspects, a decisive blow not merely by the vagaries of the market but more by the shifts in ideological currents, best exemplified by the promulgation of the Emergency. Today, the earlier ethos has survived more as nostalgia for a generation that is now over sixty and as literary fossils and fragments, similar to artefacts in a psycho-cultural museum for gen-next.

While there continue to exist groups experimenting with form and content, style and expression, reflecting a somewhat distant relationship with that mini-renaissance of the first half of the 20th century and the rebellious sixties, their scale is relatively small and the impact limited. It is almost as if that the dedicated readership, and thus the circle of engaged debate associated with the ‘little magazines’, has morphed into virtual self-contained and closed communities on Facebook or web portals. More than the printed word, it is now Marathi theatre and film that has taken a lead to keep aloft the flag of parallel trends.

The little magazine movement which gave many writers, poets, critics and journalists to the mainstream literary activity now stands marginalized, notwithstanding the phenomenal increase in interest in ‘news and views’, be it on the mobile phone platform or on the web. The younger generation, savvy with modern technology, clearly appears more comfortable experimenting with form and appears less confident about evolving new content to both represent and challenge the contemporary. Though sincere and serious, this generation seems to operate in a sort of ideological vacuum. What we see is a journey from parallelism to post-modernism, and from intellectual rigour to inquisitive wilderness.

Interestingly, both phases – the early years of the 20th century and the sixties – reflect a discernible influence of western literary and cultural streams. Less commented upon is the fact that the period between 1910 and 1940 was marked by a kind of cultural schizophrenia. The generation that had come of age was groomed in the Macaulay system, comfortable in English and familiar with Shakespeare and Shelley, Mill and Macaulay. Simultaneously, constituted primarily of upper caste Brahmins, it was equally familiar with the Indian vernacular and Sanskrit classics. It represented, in Macaulay’s words, ‘a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals and in intellect’, though in real life it could not unburden itself of the Indian philosophical traditions and Sanskritized scholarship.

 

Two tendencies emerged as result of this double identity. One stream sought to compare the philosophical contributions of the West with insights contained in Indian texts and demonstrate how the native texts were equal, if not superior, in wisdom and depth of thought to the extant British western scholarship. The second tendency was to underrate if not dismiss the Brahminical scholarship as outdated, likely backward. Those subscribing to the first trend started journals and set up study circles to establish the equality or supremacy of Indian thought, foregrounding the Vedas and texts such as the Bhagavad Gita. On the other hand, those who accepted the ‘superiority of western thought’ highlighted the discomfiting fact that the British, despite being very few in numbers, had nevertheless managed to establish their rule, systems and laws; clear evidence of their ‘superiority’ and Indian ‘inferiority’!

Both these trends played out in the journals and periodicals of the early 20th century, more or less like a parallel media. The former group dug into the past and recovered both scriptures of great philosophical depth as also classical literature. Many in this group were well versed in both Sanskrit and English. The ‘westernized’ school countered them by claiming that even if one accepted the ‘wisdom’ of ancient literature and texts, they were useless as contemporary guides. This initial debate between the so-called ‘Indian tradition versus western modernity’ was never really settled to any degree of satisfaction. In the decades between 1910 and 1940, as the struggle for independence intensified, the debate only became more fierce. In an attempt to promote their ideas, both camps not only started new magazines but also set up educational institutions. The point often forgotten is that both the camps were dominated by Brahmins, often from the same small towns like Pune. Equally that the debate never really reached, far less involved, the ‘masses’.

 

A contrasting but parallel movement to this Brahminical one was started in the mid-19th century under the leadership of Jyotirao Phule. Phule not only wrote plays and poetry, essays and treatises but also organized peasants and lower caste communities to fight the ‘chaturvarnya’, the curse of the caste system imposed by the Brahmins with the help of the Manusmriti. The task, he felt, was to transform society from within. British rule, he thought, could even be regarded as an unintended blessing. Since the rulers in the India princely states had never really bothered about the horribly unjust caste hierarchy, he felt that the British legal system could be used to fight this divisive evil in Indian society.

Later, Jyotirao Phule was publicly honoured as the ‘Mahatma’, decades before Mohandas Gandhi was to be prefixed with that iconized term. In a way, Phule should be seen as a progenitor of this movement of parallel literature, accompanied by protest and militant action. His ‘anti-establishment’ stance was not so much directed against British rule as it was a challenge to the Indian power structure which exploited and oppressed the lower castes, sustained untouchability and maintained the hierarchical status quo.

 

In the early years of the 20th century, even as Brahmin scholars debated and discussed the merits of ‘western and Indian’ philosophies and cultures, Babasaheb Bhimrao Ambedkar took up the baton from Mahatma Phule in an effort to create a just and equal society, free of the curse of upper caste hegemony. Few today recollect that Mahatma Phule had dedicated one of his plays to Abraham Lincoln, for leading the struggle against slavery in a distant land called America, just as he was attempting to organize peasants and lower caste people to fight the Indian version of caste based slavery.

The DNA of the parallel and anti-establishment literary movements thus carries the stamp of Jyotirao Phule, and subsequently Bhimrao Ambedkar who had started a journal titled Bahishkrut (‘socially boycotted’). In many ways the modern Dalit movement and literary expressions can be traced back to Dr. Ambedkar’s writings; conversely, the recent revival of his iconic status can in turn be directly traced to the impact of the Dalit movement. A century after Phule’s confrontation with the Brahminical elite of a caste ridden society, we saw the emergence of the militant organization, Dalit Panthers. Both Phule and Ambedkar were anointed the ideological fountainheads of the Panther movement.

That was in 1972, a couple of years after the Black Panthers were to shake up the American literary scene, as well as take to the streets. It is interesting to note that the popularity of the Dalit Panther movement owes less to an overt political message, and much more to a parallel literary movement. The entire early leadership – Namdeo Dhasal and Raja Dhale, Daya Pawar and many others – were avant garde poets. Indeed, the force of this Dalit literary movement was such that the entire mainstream media, particularly the established ‘liberal, modern and westernized’ cultural magazines, was shaken to the core. This movement introduced a new idiom, new expressions, new experiences and an altogether new language. The challenge to ‘respectable and Brahminical’ Marathi also freed extant Marathi literature from its traditional encumbrances.

 

The hallmark of all parallel literature, even of an upper caste variety, is essentially ‘anti-establishment’. Nevertheless, most participants in this ‘little magazine’ movement did not find themselves on the same page, differing sharply in their understanding of what constituted the ‘establishment’. For some the Congress-led government was the enemy/establishment; for others, the primary ire was directed at the ‘Brahmins and the caste hierarchy’. For many of the new and young writers, Satyakatha, a monthly literary magazine, represented the quintessential establishment. The magazine was modern, liberal and serious, refusing to take positions on any social or political issue. If at all, it was sharply critical of the notion of socially ‘committed’ and ideologically oriented literature or literary criticism. The ‘political’ little magazine movement was keen to demolish the fortress-like, seemingly unassailable, status of Satyakatha. Ironically though, such was the allure of that fortress that many writers of the little magazine movement ended up writing for Satyakatha, and proudly too!

 

Actually, Satyakatha was a path-setter for the new trends. From B.S. Mardhekar, a poet who remains relevant (and controversial) even today, to Gangadhar Gadgil and Arun Kolatkar to Dilip Chitre and C.T. Khanolkar to G.A. Kulkarni, from R.K. Joshi to Vilas Sarang – many writers and poets had challenged the established and prevailing trends. The idealism of V.S. Khandekar, the romanticism of N.S. Phadke, the Gandhian utopianism of Sane Guruji, and the finesse and rhyme of the Ravikiran Mandal poets had set the norms of pre-1950 literature. Satyakatha was to break away from those trends and embrace existentialism, realism and post-modernism.

Even though this may appear paradoxical, before it became the established voice and a school of thought, the new Sahitya-Peeth, as it were, Satyakatha represented a literary rebellion. Soon its status in the literary milieu of Maharashtra was such that without publishing ones poetry, story, criticism or opinion piece in Satyakatha, no writer could be seen as having ‘arrived’. This so-called impregnable fortress was, however, challenged by the little magazines. Though their circulation remained limited, finances meagre, publishing irregular, writers and poets unknown, nevertheless this parallel literature became the talk of the literary circles. In the last few years before it closed down, even Satyakatha had to acknowledge the explosive trends brought forward by the parallel literary movement.

The little magazine movement too was divided in two camps. One group believed in ‘social commitment and transformatory role’ of literature. Some among them took their cue from Ambedkar and Phule, while others from Marxism/Naxalism and from the Maoist Cultural Revolution. Though dismissive of the Stalinist line that ‘writers were engineers of the soul’, many of these literary revolutionaries were of the view that the literary-intellectual community was tasked with not only understanding the world but also changing it! The other school, equally vociferous, was of the view that writers and poets had absolutely no social or political role and objective – they were ‘free souls’.

 

The little magazine movement which had made such a big splash in the decades of the 1960 and 1970, slowly began to lose momentum, and by 1980 had become marginal. One important reason was that mainstream magazines like Sunday, and the special supplements of weekend newspapers, successfully appropriated/co-opted the writers and their content. The other was that the so-called ‘anti-establishment’ tendency lost steam with the defeat of the Congress party and the emergence of the Janata Party to power in 1977. At least in Maharashtra, most of the writers and poets from the parallel streams had ideologically become anti-Congress; many were part of the larger samajwadi parivar or were oriented towards libertarianism. So politics did have an important role to play. After all, the sixties all over the world were the years of the Beatles and hippies, of anti-war youth movements and counter-culture groups, street theatre and new wave cinema, of the feminist and ecological movements, of drugs and sexual liberation, of Woodstock and jazz and black music and so on. All that was to have a major influence on the little magazine movement too.

By the late seventies and early eighties that exuberant mood had begun to fade away as many erstwhile rebels joined the ‘establishment’, even as the very establishment had taken to jeans, bra-less tops, long hair, slang, free relations and new idioms, as described by Tom Wolfe in New Journalism! The so-called baby boomers in America and the burgeoning NGO networks, both originated from the same or similar groups. Little surprise that their rebellion and parallelism too appeared diluted or compromised.

 

In the last couple of decades the change in information and communication technology has changed everything from social discourse to relationships, media and, of course, politics. The very meaning of the left and right in politics and culture has so altered that both sides have begun to use each other’s language. In Maharashtra at least, literature, conventional or parallel, has ceased to be a prime mover of cultural trends. The debate on tradition and modernity has become so skewed that it is difficult to distinguish between the two contending streams. It is worth thinking about the fact that the conservatives now use modernist expressions in an unabashed manner and modernists feel that tradition has ‘modern merits’. The popularity of ayurveda and yoga among the modern, cosmopolitan, liberals has less to do with the positive attributes of those systems, and more with current fashionable trend. The frenzied popularity of the idea of Hindutva among the educated, urban, well-off middle class, and in particular the American NRIs, is also a manifestation of that phenomenon. Identitarian politics in the guise of religion, caste, community and the neo-nationalist mood, is also a product of a confused tradition- modernity discourse.

Globalization, which was supposed to herald the ‘End of History’ and create a ‘borderless world’, is apparently fragmenting the world. The information technology revolution, which gave rise to mobile phones and to social media, far from bringing people and cultures closer together, has instead aggravated global prejudice and hate. The clash of ideologies has been replaced by a clash of civilizations. Contemporary politics now seems without ideology and literature without aim or aesthetics. Unfortunately, this appears to be an apt characterization of the current Marathi literary scene.

It is indeed intriguing that the western powers which not too far back passionately advocated the idea and ideology of globalization with borderless markets, are suddenly finding fault lines in the brave new world. The fight against global communism is being replaced with the armed struggle against global Islam which in the name of war on terrorism. Anti-communism was the creed of post-war capitalism. Anti-terrorism is the slogan of the post-cold war West.

 

The ‘communist god that failed’ was the cause for celebration among the intellectual elite masquerading as the self-styled liberal intelligentsia. But now that the allure of the consumerist market, which tried to replace those gods, is getting exposed as ‘market emperor’ without clothes, the ideologues and their cadre have begun to spread hatred and venom through the new information technology. From Donald Trump to Narendra Modi, from the Ku Klux Klan to the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, from the neo-Nazis to ISIS, we are witnessing a new virtual war, one which has all the potential of degenerating into an actual war and global conflict. The cyber weapons of hate and new trolling armies are fragmenting the world which was supposedly united by markets and media. The confluence of the cultural streams is being systematically poisoned and perverted by an imaginary clash of civilizations.