John Maxwell Coetzee, a South-African, won the Nobel prize for literature announced yesterday. Apart from writing on the apartheid theme, he also takes an interest in Indian writers and issues. In his book "Stranger Shores", he wrote a piece on his interpretation of Salman Rushdie and his "The Moor's Last Sigh" in particular and India in general. Some passages from the piece:
" The notion of personal identity has dramatically narrowed in our times. Identity has become in the first place a matter of group identification: of claiming membership of a group, or being claimed by a group...."
"Moraes's grandfather Camoens had believed in Nehru but not in Gandhi. In the village to which Gandhi appealed, Camoens saw forces brewing that spelled trouble for India's minorities: "In the city we are for secular India but the village is for Ram... In the end I am afraid the villagers will march on the cities and people like us will have to lock our doors and there will become a Battering Ram". His prophecy begins to fulfill itself in Moraes's lifetime when the doors of the Babri mosque at Ayodhya are battered down by a crowd of fanatical Hindus...."
"Camoensis prescient but ineffectual. Aurora, an activist as well as an artist, is the only Da Gama with the strength to confront the dark, intolerant forces of village India. When the festival procession of the Elephant-headed God Ganesha, an annual show of Hindu fundamentalist triumphalism, passes by their home, she dances in view of the celebrants, dancing _against_ the god, though, alas, her dance is read by them as part of the spectacle (Hinduism notoriously absorbs its rivals). Every year she dances on the hillside; dancing at the age of sixty-three, she slips and falls to her death..."
" Raman Fielding, rising star of the Hindu movement, is a caricature of Bal Thackeray, Bombay leader of the fundamentalist Shiv Sena Party. Closely linked with Bombay's criminal underworld, Fielding is "against unions...against working women, in favor of sati, against poverty and in favor of wealth... against 'immigrants' to the city... against corruption of the Congress [Party] and for 'direct action', by which he meant paramilitary activity in support of his political aims". He looks forward to a theocracy in which his particular variant of Hinduism will predominate..."
" Alas, he proceeds, in a complex joke that conflates Indian Indians, whom Columbus set off to find, with American Indians, the Indians he in fact found," in Indian country there was no room for a man who didn't want to belong to a tribe, who dreamed... of peeling off his skin and revealing his secret identity-- the secret, that is, of the identity of all men-- of standing before the war-painted braves to unveil the flayed and naked unity of flesh..."
--- Seems like he suffers from a rather virulent form of Rushdie-itis and Naipaul-fever.:-) On the flip side, an Indian from Bihar was named winner of the Ig-Noble peace prize.
The prize was awarded to " Lal Bihari, of Uttar Pradesh, India, for a triple accomplishment: First, for leading an active life even though he has been declared legally dead (http://www.time.com/time/asia/asia/magazine/1999/990719/souls1.html); Second, for waging a lively posthumous campaign against bureaucratic inertia and greedy relatives (http://fecolumnists.expressindia.com/full_column.php?content_id=25367); and Third, for creating the Association of Dead People(http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2003/08/05/wind05.xml).
WHO ATTENDED THE IG NOBEL CEREMONY: Madhu Kapoor, on behalf of Lal Bihari. "
I think this prize is co-sponsored by Harvard Univ.
-------------------- Rajen Barua barua25 at hotmail.com wrote:
Rajen Barua saw this story on BBC News Online and thought you should see it.
** Coetzee wins Nobel literature prize **
Distinguished South African writer JM Coetzee is awarded the 2003 Nobel Prize for Literature.
< http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/em/fr/-/1/hi/entertainment/arts/3158278.stm >
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