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Voyaging on a paper boat

P V Subraya Padavagodu

The author deals with contemporary issues of social and cultural importance even as he writes literary criticism.

Literary criticism and cultural discourses have seldom been the repertoire of many. Two books by Dr Rajendra Chenni— Of Many Worlds and Speaking for someone are ample testimony to the existence of such a creative oeuvre. Intriguingly contrasting as they are, the books nevertheless reflect a seamless continuity of commitment and a rigid takeover of contemporary issues for critical scrutiny as the author voyages on a ‘paper’ boat from a world of literature to a strife torn world of contemporary society and culture. Chenni perhaps felt an urgent need even while writing literary criticism and short stories to address issues of social and cultural importance. The idiom of literary criticism and imagist preoccupations of being a modern story teller wouldn’t always help.

He was craving as always for a new idiom which he is able to realise in Speaking for Someone. It is like choosing to voyage on calm waters initially and then on a rough sea trying to weather the storm! Chenni is very adept at handling both kinds of waters.

Essays on literature in Of many worlds are myriad and varied. Writing on Kambar, the author questions the proprietory rights of any dramatist, actor or audience over the ‘meaning’ of a play. With every performance or reading, it is a new meaning which again keeps ‘deferring’ to quote Derrida. Kambar’s texts assume multitonal and polyphonic voices in their enactment by reading or staging. In fact all literary texts are essentially polygenic. Kambar is a modernist; though falling back on tradition, folklore and myths with a native idiom, he does not try to retrieve them only to be conserved. On the other hand, he interrogates modernity which ‘is conceived in negative metaphors as a demonic disruptive force’.

He modernises myths and demythifies modernity. But then, he does not nostalgically reconstruct his world of tradition which is why he escapes being trapped listlessly in an archaic world of his own.

Dr Chenni seems to consider Dr Sharma’s poetry ahead of Adiga’s. Sharma ushered in true modernity and took a path less trodden by. He did not fall back on an ‘assured centre of significance’ as did Adiga on his native past.

Adiga is more important because, as Ananthamurthy observes, ‘Adiga’s individual concerns were also concerns of a generation’. Sharma’s poetry doesn’t seem to possess such a phenomenal trajectory.

But for Chenni, Sharma’s poetry represents confronting experience ‘as it is given’ without the exigencies of the past and the compulsions of retrieving it. His is a ‘catholic vision of profound awareness of the limitations of man’.

‘Speaking for someone’ has plenty to offer. Each of the articles here is about one unique mega text of global and communal insidiousness in its different avatars. But then Dr Chenni is not an armchair ideologue weaving convoluted wordy ways for only cadres to tread on. He has been an activist leading the struggle against communalism. Terror in the hills unleashed by communalists or the sharks colonising the park or the arecanut barons chewing money even as the poor chew gutkha and go sick or the terminator seeds terminating a farmer’s life or a cyber oasis in an arid world are an a global language with a lexicon of violence which is too gruesome to be ignored. Dr Chenni dons a new historian’s garb. He shows how history is turned into myth and myth into history. He historicises the text of violence and textualises its history. All communalist discourses have a patented 'text' involving myth and history and when both fail, it is the ‘faith’.

Dr Chenni asks very pertinent questions to the middle class elite turned environmentalists. For whom and from whom should the park be saved? It is only for the fitness savvy health conscious joggers at the cost of Champa’s and Laxmi’s who they think are 'whores'. These 'yuppies' don't want their hegemonised space littered with toxic waste!

Highways are ‘aggressive’ and ‘cocky’. The Agumbe road is a ‘cultural marvel’. Chenni’s cultural map is all inclusive. He constructs metaphors in a cultural space. He searches for a cultural expression in a metaphor. He is a narrator and a discourse analyst at the same time. He would voyage back and forth smoothly if only his paper boat were stronger!