Bhalchandra Nemade, 77, has stirred the pot once again. The Marathi writer, among the contemporary icons of the language, is also known as a man of acerbic opinions and stinging sarcasm.
On Friday, at an event in Mumbai the day he was declared the winner of the prestigious Jnanpith award, Nemade directed his ire at fellow men of letters, VS Naipaul and Salman Rushdie. He questioned the worth of their work since it is written in English. Rushdie hit back on Saturday with a tweet calling Nemade “a grumpy old bastard” asking if the Marathi writer had “even read the work” he was attacking.
The exchange had the potential to set off a storm, prompting the champions of Marathi to count off the real and perceived attempts to marginalise the language and giving the Marathi press the opportunity to enthusiastically join the Marathi versus English debate. As it turned out, that did not happen.
Prominent displays
This isn’t to suggest that Nemade was ignored. The Marathi press gave the announcement of the award the lead space on their front pages on Saturday, above Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis’ decision to allow higher buildings to be constructed in Mumbai, a move that brings the real-estate industry gigantic windfalls. After all, Nemade is only the fourth writer in Marathi to get the Jnanpith in its five-decade history. In fact, Loksatta, the Marathi daily from The Indian Express group, devoted an inside page for two successive days to Nemade and his work.
Most Marathi newspapers carried articles about Nemade’s reaction to the award and the usual set of responses from his admirers and critics. A few attempted to explain why his first novel Kosla (1963) is still relevant to a people whose young increasingly prefer English. Other pieces spoke of the irony of a writer who is famously critical of awards accepting the Jnanpith and mentioned his steadfast refusal to grace the annual Marathi literary or theatre festival conferences.
But the articles barely touched upon Nemade’s sharp opinions about Naipaul and Rushdie without taking it into the Marathi-English war zone. There are at least two reasons for this. One, the Marathi world does not make much space for Naipaul and Rushdie. The other is Nemade himself.
His philosophy of nativism (deshivaad in Marathi) has already received as much attention as his admirable oeuvre of work over five decades of writing. The idea has been argued, celebrated, critiqued ‒often fiercely. But it has been only a part of who Nemade is.
Parallel paths
Born in Sangvi village in Jalgaon district in north Maharashtra, Nemade moved to Pune to complete his college education, in English. He earned his postgraduate degree from The University of Mumbai in English literature. Nemade went on to teach English literature in colleges across Ahmednagar, Dhule and Aurangabad, among other towns in Maharashtra. He later spent time at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London.
But to create a fictional world of ideas and characters such as the evergreen Pandurang Sangvikar (Kosla), to imagine a seminal work such as Hindu, to weave a world of thoughts in poetic metres and rhythms, to delve within and express himself, Nemade chose Marathi. The two languages have negotiated parallel paths in his life. He clearly wanted it to be that way.
Through it all, Nemade was never far from espousing his philosophy of nativism. He probably did not see the contradiction that his critics did. If he did, he chose not to explain himself. His trenchant disapproval of English as the language of school instruction – “primary as well as secondary education should be in the mother tongue. What is so great about English?” – when he hit out at Naipaul and Rushdie for “pandering to the West” was, therefore, not surprising, though it is highly incongruous with his own career choice as a teacher of literature written in that language. Perhaps mindful of the occasion, the Marathi press refrained from pointing this out.
Then again, perhaps Nemade was paying back Rushdie in his own coin. After all, Rushdie was famously dismissive of Indian language writing in his foreword to The Vintage Book of Indian Writing in 1997. He had casually declared that Indian writers working in English in the post-Independence period had created a “stronger and more important body of work” than writers in the “so-called vernacular languages”.
Support is essential
Of course, it’s easy to see the necessity for supporting and even underwriting Marathi literature and theatre, as also for encouraging education in the language. But why should this be at the cost of denigrating English and its users?
In the week that Nemade was honoured with the Jnanpith award, the Sahitya Akademi conferred the status of “classical language” on Marathi, bringing it on par with Sanskrit, Tamil, Telugu and Kannada among other Indian languages.
One good thing to come out of this controversy, said Deepak Pawar, political science professor at the University of Mumbai and a firebrand Marathi activist, is that “Rushdie types, Naipaul and Rushdie followers and Englishwallas had to Google to know more about an Indian author".
It’s clear that even Nemade would not have minded the Google research on him – even if it was in English.
We welcome your comments at
letters@scroll.in.
On Friday, at an event in Mumbai the day he was declared the winner of the prestigious Jnanpith award, Nemade directed his ire at fellow men of letters, VS Naipaul and Salman Rushdie. He questioned the worth of their work since it is written in English. Rushdie hit back on Saturday with a tweet calling Nemade “a grumpy old bastard” asking if the Marathi writer had “even read the work” he was attacking.
The exchange had the potential to set off a storm, prompting the champions of Marathi to count off the real and perceived attempts to marginalise the language and giving the Marathi press the opportunity to enthusiastically join the Marathi versus English debate. As it turned out, that did not happen.
Prominent displays
This isn’t to suggest that Nemade was ignored. The Marathi press gave the announcement of the award the lead space on their front pages on Saturday, above Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis’ decision to allow higher buildings to be constructed in Mumbai, a move that brings the real-estate industry gigantic windfalls. After all, Nemade is only the fourth writer in Marathi to get the Jnanpith in its five-decade history. In fact, Loksatta, the Marathi daily from The Indian Express group, devoted an inside page for two successive days to Nemade and his work.
Most Marathi newspapers carried articles about Nemade’s reaction to the award and the usual set of responses from his admirers and critics. A few attempted to explain why his first novel Kosla (1963) is still relevant to a people whose young increasingly prefer English. Other pieces spoke of the irony of a writer who is famously critical of awards accepting the Jnanpith and mentioned his steadfast refusal to grace the annual Marathi literary or theatre festival conferences.
But the articles barely touched upon Nemade’s sharp opinions about Naipaul and Rushdie without taking it into the Marathi-English war zone. There are at least two reasons for this. One, the Marathi world does not make much space for Naipaul and Rushdie. The other is Nemade himself.
His philosophy of nativism (deshivaad in Marathi) has already received as much attention as his admirable oeuvre of work over five decades of writing. The idea has been argued, celebrated, critiqued ‒often fiercely. But it has been only a part of who Nemade is.
Parallel paths
Born in Sangvi village in Jalgaon district in north Maharashtra, Nemade moved to Pune to complete his college education, in English. He earned his postgraduate degree from The University of Mumbai in English literature. Nemade went on to teach English literature in colleges across Ahmednagar, Dhule and Aurangabad, among other towns in Maharashtra. He later spent time at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London.
But to create a fictional world of ideas and characters such as the evergreen Pandurang Sangvikar (Kosla), to imagine a seminal work such as Hindu, to weave a world of thoughts in poetic metres and rhythms, to delve within and express himself, Nemade chose Marathi. The two languages have negotiated parallel paths in his life. He clearly wanted it to be that way.
Through it all, Nemade was never far from espousing his philosophy of nativism. He probably did not see the contradiction that his critics did. If he did, he chose not to explain himself. His trenchant disapproval of English as the language of school instruction – “primary as well as secondary education should be in the mother tongue. What is so great about English?” – when he hit out at Naipaul and Rushdie for “pandering to the West” was, therefore, not surprising, though it is highly incongruous with his own career choice as a teacher of literature written in that language. Perhaps mindful of the occasion, the Marathi press refrained from pointing this out.
Then again, perhaps Nemade was paying back Rushdie in his own coin. After all, Rushdie was famously dismissive of Indian language writing in his foreword to The Vintage Book of Indian Writing in 1997. He had casually declared that Indian writers working in English in the post-Independence period had created a “stronger and more important body of work” than writers in the “so-called vernacular languages”.
Support is essential
Of course, it’s easy to see the necessity for supporting and even underwriting Marathi literature and theatre, as also for encouraging education in the language. But why should this be at the cost of denigrating English and its users?
In the week that Nemade was honoured with the Jnanpith award, the Sahitya Akademi conferred the status of “classical language” on Marathi, bringing it on par with Sanskrit, Tamil, Telugu and Kannada among other Indian languages.
One good thing to come out of this controversy, said Deepak Pawar, political science professor at the University of Mumbai and a firebrand Marathi activist, is that “Rushdie types, Naipaul and Rushdie followers and Englishwallas had to Google to know more about an Indian author".
It’s clear that even Nemade would not have minded the Google research on him – even if it was in English.
