Stories
Murder of Marx Based on what Mohit Aggarwal told
to Giriraj Kiradoo
1
He was unusually
sad. Unusual was the way in which he was sad as to find him sad was
not unusual at all. In those days, he was one of those artists who
believe an artist, a modern artist has to have an eternally gloomy
face. Sadness was his persona, his modernist mask, the ultimate
signifier of his modernity and he as an artist and as a person was
always the perfect signified. Being truly modern is no fun, he often
reminded others and oftener to himself. His very 'private' concept of
modernism told him that art should not resemble life, but life should
resemble art. He was always his self-image. He was what he painted and
the characters he painted were fictional because they resembled him
and whenever I entered his studio I found so many sad Dheeraj
Benjamins lost in themselves but lost so imposingly that the moment I
would enter his studio a terribly profound sadness would seduce and
seize me.
But three days prior to the Christmas, on a very regular winter day,
it was a different, unknown sadness and it reminded me the day I first
saw him.
2
He was doing his Bachelors in Mechanical Engineering and my cousin
introduced us. She was two years his junior at their college in Kota.
I didn't take him seriously and thought that he must be making some
very real-like landscapes with the fascinating Chambal flowing zigzag
across the canvas or some imaginary tigers horrifying a few moghulis.
But within a few seconds he was describing his latest 'creation',
Fucault’s Pendulum. I was almost shocked and it was the moment I first
experienced his terrifying sadness. 'Did your Fucault invented
pendulum?’ I tried to blast the grave sadness. I prayed he would laugh
at me but he grew more solemn and sadder. 'It's a novel by an Italian
and Fucault discovered something more valuable than anybody ever did
in Mechanics,' he was explaining in a serious tone and seemed to be
very confident of my pitiable ignorance. I knew from that very moment
he was incapable to understand any thing so obviously humorous, yes, I
knew he could never laugh nor could survive a laughter, and yes, I
knew his sadness would terrify and seduce me.
Soon, I had lost all my friends and foes and Dheeraj Benjamin was the
only person I desired to see. I longed to be taken over.
3
He wore his brilliant, designer sadness most enviably on the morning
his first solo exhibition opened at Jawahar Kala Kendra, Jaipur. I had
been taken over and I wrote his brochure. I remember walking up to
Anshu in her pink pullover, sitting forlorn on the grass outside. She
asked in a dry tone, 'Did you see us?'
'Did his
awful sadness seduce you?' I tried to combat the dryness of her tone.
'He and sadness! Awful sadness! Bhole Bhaiya, he's the funniest person
I ever knew.' Anshu broke into a laughter that steered the grass and I
realized his sadness was terrible only because it was laughable. Anshu
took me inside and pointed her finger towards Dheeraj Benjamin who was
explaining his The Phenomenology of Eroticism to a young art student
who was to become his wife a year later. She was christened Shabnam
Shergill that very moment when Anshu, with her finger still pointed at
him, broke into a louder laughter.
The laughter hit the iron shield of sadness and boomeranged. Anshu
decided to leave her studies, her Bhujia khandan and town, her
Kadinsky and said yes to a Calcutta-based Marvari suitor, arranged by
her Buaji, only because he dealt in softwares. A year later, when she
gave birth to the first of her three daughters, she e-mailed me asking
a name for the child and wrote at the bottom of the page:
'Who is/was
Kadinsky anyway?'
'Kadinsky was the one I saw with you. Now he is Haider Hussain.'
'Call her Amrita (not Shergill but Pritham).'
4
Anshu Akhmatova was sitting on my writing table with her legs spread
wide. He was stroking hard and I, standing at window, watched how my
little apartment was turned into a big bedroom, how my
ever-so-innocent-faced cousin Anshumita Aggarwal dubbed Anshu
Akhmatova by her genius Kadinsky had the courage to use me for her
erotic adventure and more surprisingly how playful Anshu could get
with him. I was facing Anshu and could see his body rather awkwardly
adjusting as Anshu whispered something or other. Watching from behind,
his body seemed prosaic but I wanted to see his face. I rushed to the
opposite windows and as his face, more prosaic than his body, appeared
closer with a stroke; I stumbled and with a disturbing noise fell to
the ground.
With a funeral face he was making love to my dear, innocent cousin.
'Its only a cat,' he said with an unbearably elegiac firmness and
stroked even harder. He had seen me.
5
In the Paris of August 1844, a twenty six year old German
revolutionary, after being forced to leave journalism, met a factory
owner from Manchester. By the end of the autumn they had co-authored a
book which challenged Hegel and his intellectual sons; the German
himself was one of them and so the book was not just patricide, it was
also a self-murder. The passionate German bisected his father; half of
him he buried and the other half became his own reincarnated self.
Four years later the two friends took part in revolutions in Germany
and France. You know them. They were Karl Marx and Frederick Engels.
If you don't know them, come and see MaRkS aNd AnGeLs: A cHiLd'S
rEvOlUtIoNs series in Shri Ratan Prasad Aggarwal's private collection.
Ratan Tauji is Anshu's father and he was sold this masterpiece in Rs.
fifty thousand. Dheeraj Haider Hussain, as a child, heard the names of
great Marx and Engels long before he saw them written on their
wonderful books. As a child Marx was Marks and Engels was Angels for
him. So in this masterpiece which 'deals with the infant stage of the
great dialectical materialism', the poor Bruno Bauer and Co. is a
bunch of malnutritioned children knocked out by the two bullies and a
bleeding, bisected Hegel resembles a martyred knight. Ratan Tauji had
never bought a modern painting and because he paid fifty thousand he
started believing that a modern art is a really valuable thing and is
there any other Bhujia Exporter who can boast of having such an art?
Dheeraj Benjamin deserted Anshu Akhmatova and married a Shabnam Usta
but MaRkS aNd AnGeLs: A cHiLd'S rEvOlUtIoNs is hung proudly in Ratan
Tauji's bedroom.
6
I had forgiven him and Anshu for everything but dragging Anna
Akhmatova's dear, holy name in their mundane affair though it was the
time I was calling my girlfriend Manisha Tsvetayeva and it was not a
sublime affair either.
7
I confess I could never understand modern painting. For me it existed
in theory, in those borrowed histories I read so passionately and
painstakingly during my college days when I was expected to become an
economist or at least a lecturer in Economics and I read Marx only as
an 'important' question they always asked in those 'set' papers. Even
then, Marx confused and seduced and his name still- under a Postsoviet
sky- had the authority to certify anybody as modern and progressive.
Marx made me Marxist. Not by his confusing books but by his sad,
bearded face reproduced so unaesthetically (I doubt the publisher
hated Formalism) in our course books. In those days I often compared
the mystic attributes of Tagore's face with the scientific sadness on
his immortal face. But Dheeraj Benjamin was a self-trained modernist
and it was a beautiful irony that I wrote his brochures without ever
understanding what he painted and without ever confronting him. Later
when I secretly became a post-modern and had found the same sadness
inscribed on faces like Derrida's and Lacan's, Dheeraj Benjamin was
rediscovering Dadaism and Cubism. Away from him, he was laughable but
when staring at me he was still my master and his face still had that
authoritative sadness. Away from him I was playful but before him, my
General Secretary, a charmed comrade waiting for next orders.
And then, in the heydays of my secret postmodernism, he came with a
gifted bottle of vodka and scorned, 'You are living in a present which
has already become a past. Your Derrida lied to all and now he is
confessing it. I always warned you Marx is the only future.' He handed
me a speech but before reading it I knew I had lost both, my Marx and
my Derrida. Dheeraj is stronger than both of them.
At his
ambitious first in Bombay, I rewrote, reconstructed Dheeraj Benjamin
and yes, I found he was always a very devoted Marxist and I nothing
but a dispensable pawn, not even that, but only a shit, a poor,
colonized hindi kavi born to a Bhujia manufacturer and prone to all
forms of sadness. I confess I could never understand Marxist paintings
as well and I was there in Bombay only to see his art studio and its
caretaker Shabnam Usta whose father dealt in Jaipuri handicrafts.
8
When Upanyas Samrat Munshi Prem Chand presided over the Pragatisheel
Lekhak Sangh's Sammelan and declared that literature is a torch, I
doubt he knew anything about the patricide and self-murder commited in
1844, I doubt he ever read the Das Capital or any of those confusing
treatises by Marx and Engels, but he knew one thing: it was essential
to be Progressive, from top to toe. And he was right. Mahakavi Nirala
and Komalkant Pant were latecomers. They came unreserved and had to
sit on the roof of the train to Future. Hindi's literary Marxism is in
fact a story determined by these two classic conversions. Did Pant or
Nirala know the poor Bruno Bauer and Co.?
9
With Amrita and Vasantpriya (her second daughter with a name suggested
by me again), Anshu Pugalia knocked that very apartment of mine. She
looked fat, and contended. I thought this place still meant something
for her and I will witness her searching for something over the
writing table, on the floor and beyond that window. But she was
sitting as if she had come there for the first time. In saree, she
reminded me of Manisha Tsvetayeva, not of Anshu Akhmatova. Manisha had
a body that Anshu now had and Anshu had a saree that Manisha then had.
Ignited by this discovery, I went closer to Anshu and started kissing
her. She looked shocked but allowed me to do it.
At midnight I received an SMS: u did it as Kadinsky did.
10
I had published two collections of progressive poetry and the evening
I was receiving the Muktibodh Samman, Shabnam rang me and insisted I
should come to Bombay. After promising her to come, I returned to
deliver my speech. I said, 'Muktibodh is my father but I am a poor
son.' And I said what I felt and survived superstar Namvar Singh's
humor, 'In independent India there has never been harmony between
fathers and sons. And the greatest example is of the super father-
Bapu- and his sons- the Gandhians.' Back in my Bhujia town, I decided
to abort my secret, hideous affair with Derrida and Co., the unholy
family.
11
It was an ordinary room with no writing table, but full of books.' You
won't survive this', this is how Anshu remarked at my new place. This
was the only sentence we exchanged that afternoon. Silence-the shy,
rare and almost lost goddess- obliged us. I was weeping when she
stepped in and on an iron khat, with tears in my eyes and fear
in hers, we made love. Late in the evening she SMSed me: you did it as
I did it to Kadinsky.
12
The month, between the day I witnessed Dheeraj Benjamin’s unusual
sadness in Bombay and the day I declared publicly that Muktiboth was
my father, changed my life, I believe, forever. I read that speech-
The Spectres of Marx- Dheeraj had handed me so scornfully, I realized
that my attempts at declassing myself were romantic and I was still an
unaltered bourgeois, I left the apartment I inherited from my great
Dadaji -the pioneer of modern Bhujia industry -and most importantly I
felt, as Raghuveer Sahay did, that when there is more art, there is
less change. I knew Raghuveer Sahay only echoed Marx: when there is
more philosophy, there is less change. To change the world Marx
changed the philosophy. To change India, a bourgeois democracy,
Raghuveer Sahay changed hindi poetry. To change myself I rediscovered
Marx. I managed to find my old course book and that damp, withered
face of his looked sadder and I was weeping when Anshu Pugalia
knocked.
13
In his preface to Muktibodh's posthumously published first collection
of poems, legendary Shamsher never calls him a Marxist though very
casually, and only once, he mentions that Muktibodh picked Marxist
philosophy out of the Progressivism. But in the same line he declares
that Muktiboth transcended all isms and all parties. This declaration
was obvious for a man who himself championed this transcendence. But
it is striking that, in his valuation of Shamsher, Muktibodh never
calls him Marxist either. This coincidence is stranger than it seems,
as both call each other humanist. What is the mystery? Who is a
humanist? I have always resisted, not because of any learnt problem
but because I have always found it abstract, this term- humanism- but
when Shamser calls Muktibodh a humanist, it becomes a new word. Who is
a humanist? If any proper noun can ever be offered as an answer to
this question, it is Shabnam Usta.
14
I often imagine Muktibodh as a Private Detective; not a spy but a
private detective.In his diary he often speaks of poets playing a
certain role, wearing a mask, making a well disguised appearance in
their writing. So its no surprise for Muktiboth when a person with a
bourgeois lifestyle wears a progressive countenance in his or her
poetry. Muktibodh detected me as such a player, a bourgeois bohemian.
Had I not read him, I would have remained my determined, obvious
persona. He stripped me off my mask but while doing it he obliged me
to see his own. In his poetry, he wore the mask of a Private
Detective. But who hired him? His consciousness? His striving for his
Param Abhivyakti Durnivar? No. Marx, his spectre, hired him. Muktibodh
was not a reviewer of modern civilization but a hired private
detective. He did not imagine this modern civilization as a universe
but as a diverse – tooti hui bikhari hui –rhythm, system formed
of fragmented units, the classes. His Andhere Mein, the magnum opus of
a PD, is a marchpast of these classes further fragmented into types
and individuals. I know I am one of those walking in darkness.
Muktibodh had seen me. I fear he had no torch in his hands, he himself
was walking along me in the darkness, hiding his face, his ID card and
his camera. The only thing alit was the beedi in his mouth.
15
It has been a long time since Shabnam painted anything. She seems to
have forgotten her days at Jaipur School of Arts just as most of us
forget our BAs and BScs. Her regular, almost punctual calls always
kept me in touch with her little family. They named their son Gautam.
Once she sent me a portrait of a two year old Gautam. That is the only
thing she has painted since her marriage. In his portrait, Gautam
smiles at onlookers and that's the only thing he has inherited from
his mother otherwise he is a replica of his father. He has no traces
of that fabulous sadness that seduced his mother and me. When I first
saw him in real, a year later, he was a replica of his portrait. 'Tumhara
hi naam Gautam hai na?’ I asked him with my eyes fixed at his
mother. He didn't reply. After a few seconds Shabnam said in a frozen
voice, 'He can not speak nor can he listen.' I looked, for the first
time, at the boy. He was smiling as he did in his portrait.
16
We were victims of proper nouns, of great, authoritative names.
Dheeraj, Anshu, her daughters, Shabnam, Gautam, Manisha and me, we all
had names but had a greater namelessness. We wore great names like
Kadinskys and Shergills as our namelessness wore us. We didn't parody
them. We only wore their names. Anshu never read Anna Akhmatova,
Manisha never knew Tsevetayeva. Amrita, Vasantpriya, Kishori (Anshu's
third daughter) and Gautam could never have the slighest idea of what
their names echoed. In fact Dheeraj, Shabnam and I were the only
conscious players. When Shabnam received me at the Dadar railway
station she called me Muktibodh. She would never know what it is to be
a Muktibodh but she uttered this name with a deliberately visible
disgust. No, it was not because she had any grudge for Marxism or
Muktibodh. It was a deepsettled feeling for all hindi kavis and
lekhaks. She thought they were all sentimental and unbearably ignorant
and that there was nothing original in hindi since Kabir and Meera.
While driving back home, she informed, 'I am leaving Dheeraj.'
17
I couldn't recognize Dheeraj Benjamin.He wore a new look: a
clean-shaven head and a long, dark brown cloak. I thought he was
entering that necessary spiritual phase of his career, which often
characterizes the graph of bourgeois intellectualism. I found it
amusing because I had predicted it for him. He then had advised me to
read Plekhanov on the religious seekers in Russia, particularly
Tolstoy and Gorky. For me it was even a news that except revolution or
socialism Gorky had anything to seek. I did obey Dheeraj and did seek
Plekhanov.
Now, finally, you are absolutely original. Hindustani painter ka
dadhiyal hona bhi ek modernist ritual hai.' As always, he
didn't listen to my humor and with that unknown, different sadness I
mentioned at the beginning he made the most laughable presentation of
his solid seriousness, ' I am a Dalit and I have decided to be one.'
'But you always knew you were a Dalit. It shouldn't be anything new.'
I wanted to burst with laughter.
'No. Its a Revelation.' The additional, emphatic sadness he attached
to the dramatic word 'Revelation' was ridiculously serious and to
avoid any fruitless confrontation I pressed my mobile's ring tones
option and excused myself out of the room. His sadness on that day,
three days prior to the Christmas, was exceptional and unusual because
it had found its proper other, the ridiculousness.
For me it
was the moment of independence from an eight year long spell. I went
to the other room, packed my belongings and said good bye to Gautam
who in reply smiled as he always did. I was to know later that Shabnam
had witnessed the whole farce from an overhead window.
18
I am leaving for Calcutta this afternoon. Before Anshu came up with
this proposal, I had no idea that Durga Aggarwal, the editor of
Party's literature annual and a Rajya Sabha member, was one of Anshu's
five jethanis though I did know that the great and only Jankavi of the
Bhujia town, Karmeshji, is her father.
(19)
Twenty minutes before the Jodhpur-Howrah left the Delhi Junction; I
was staring at two photographs in an English daily. One showed Dheeraj
with a clean-shaven head, in a long brown choga and the other
reproduced his Murder of Marx from an ongoing group show in the
capital. As I have already confessed, I could never understand
whatever he painted and I did not understand this one either. And
anyway it was too abstract for me. I concentrated on Dheeraj's
picture. A stern political sadness. I waited to see if it could resume
its spell. I really gave it one, final opportunity to overwhelm me.
But when it didn't, I spread my poori-sabjee over it and broke into a
laughter louder than that of Anshu Akhmatova.
Boloji.com is owned and managed by
Boloji Media Inc Privacy Policy |
Disclaimer No part of this Internet site may
be reproduced without prior written permission of the copyright holder.
