There is a power in pain that gives sight. A person in torment can be a visionary.
‘Shekhar: A Biography’, which is the product of ten years of my effort—it’s actually not quite ten years yet, but then again the ‘Biography’ isn’t finished either! An attempt to put into words a vision seen in merely one night of intense pain.1
You might think this arrogance. I’m not trying to say that I completed this massive manuscript in a single night. No, read my words again carefully—‘Shekhar’ is an attempt to put into words a vision seen in merely one night of intense pain.2
It’s possible that you might want to know what that night was like. But it’s not possible to explain such intimate details, nor would it be of any use to you. The only thing that could have an explanation and a meaning for you is that I saw this particular vision. All I can tell you about how I came to regard that night is that when the police hauled me away in the middle of the night, like bandits, and made me a prisoner, and then shortly thereafter—after I had spoken to, and then yelled at, and then got beaten up by senior police officials—it seemed to me that my life was quickly coming to its end.
I didn’t think of myself as someone deserving to be hanged, and I still don’t; but it didn’t seem impossible on account of the circumstances then and my state of mind. Rather, I was firmly convinced that I was staring directly at my fate. I said earlier that serious torment can make someone a visionary; I can say here that grave hopelessness makes one dispassionate and thereby readies one to be a visionary. It was as if my condition escaped the bounds of feelings and presented itself to me in the form of a problem—if this was going to be the end of my life, then what was the value of that life, what was its meaning, what did it accomplish—for the individual, for society, for humanity? . . . My life slowly opened up to the dispassionate heartlessness of this curiosity and the omniscience of torment, not in the shape of a personal and irrelevant anomaly, but in the shape of a phenomenon, in the shape of a social fact; and gradually the formulas of cause-and-effect disentangled themselves and began to come to hand . . .
As dawn broke, the picture had changed entirely. I had a hold of several meaningful truths, but it was as if my body was spent, had turned to dust. I fell asleep exhausted but having found peace and remained asleep for two or three days.
That’s all I can tell you about that night. For a month after that, nothing happened. A month later when I was transferred from Lahore Fort to Amritsar Jail, and I obtained things to write with, I wrote down in four or five days the meaning and purpose of life that I had understood on that night. The three hundred or so pages written in pencil are the foundation of ‘Shekhar: A Biography’. I’ve spent more than nine years forming a body for that life-spark. To form a body—because that kind of intensity3 cannot be reproduced solely in the imagination, and when it is found in life, the imagination can only restrain it, straitjacket it.
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If you have studied the lives of revolutionaries, you will notice that a hard determinism lies hidden beneath all of the works of those tireless, energetic souls. Revolutionaries, ultimately, are a breed of determinists. But this determinism is not the sterile fatalism that makes one powerless or useless, rather it makes them more dispassionate and inspires them to action. In this, it is one step ahead of the karma yoga—or the dispassionate fulfilment of one’s duties—of the Bhagavad Gita, because it does not reduce the actor to a mere instrument. And if you think of it this way, that a revolutionary’s determinism is not satisfied with an unchanging destiny, that he has a firm (but amorphous) faith in the scientific chain of cause-and-effect that governs life, I believe that the majority of the scientists today are determinists in a similar way.
So the hero of ‘Shekhar: A Biography’ has attempted to understand the formulas of this destiny in his life. Because to understand them is to understand life itself, to understand its meaning. Whatever God does is good, and so each event is its own purpose—that’s one way to see things; but this can be another solution to make life bearable for the individual who cannot accept this line of reasoning. So you will find in the first part of ‘A Biography’ that Shekhar also recalls small episodes from his childhood. The study of childhood has its own importance, and several foreign artists have studied and sketched portraits of childhood, but a study is not feasible in ‘A Biography’. It is only the means to discover the formulas, which exist in every life, but which we never have the ability to see—which is only possible when life is illuminated from the wound of some event, or when a person becomes all-seeing through the intensity of suffering . . . I don’t have the right to speak about my composition, but bearing in mind the relation between ‘Shekhar’ and me, it seems to me that this is what is great in his life and at the same time what is wretched. Great because his curiosity possesses passion, faith; wretched because this intensity keeps him from becoming a true seeker and leaves him a mere sophist and his sophistry (rationalization)4 begins to seem pitiful and pathetic . . .*
So in a nutshell, this is the story of the origin of ‘Shekhar: A Biography’. You might say that this is not a vision, it’s a system of logic, a philosophy. But I believe that philosophy is ultimately a revelation, a vision—and to strengthen my case I will take recourse to the Hindi name for philosophy—darshan, or vision!
Is this ‘Biography’ an autobiography? This question will certainly be asked. Or perhaps it won’t even be asked, since a reader will march ahead with the notion fully formed. In Hindi, where every poet apparently uses his wife as inspiration for his writing, where a poem about separation seems to provide incontrovertible proof that so-and-so wrote it after his wife’s death, it seems pointless to hope that ‘Shekhar’, which is not only a biography, but a biography delivered orally by an individual, will not be seen as the autobiography of its writer. I remember, three years ago when I had published a poem ‘Second’, several readers wrote me sympathetic letters and one went so far as to write, ‘I am totally sympathetic to you; as someone in the same situation, I can completely understand what you are going through.’ The editor of the paper, too (although as a joke), asked me, ‘You have never been married, so how could you quarrel with your second wife so?’ If such people are offered proof that I have written about a second marriage without ever having been married a first time, they will think that they have been deceived. It pains me to say it—but it is still true—that the majority of Hindi literature and criticism is built on a misconception; that the narration of self-formation (and not self-realization, because you can have realization without formation) is the best and truest kind. Few writers in Hindi seem to understand or accept that the proof of a writer’s power is to be able to use the imagination or sensibility to enter into another’s experiences, and while doing so, to be able to suspend the assumptions and ideologies of self-formation, to be objective. On the contrary, you will find several such writers who will call such realization (and I repeat that self-formation alone is not self-realization but that formation can be self-realization if we are able to be open to the possibility) foreign, second-hand, and therefore, shoddy and untrue. For such people, T.S. Eliot’s phrase, which is really the only response, would have no meaning: There is always a separation between the man who suffers and the artist who creates; and the greater the artist the greater the separation.5
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But this has become a long digression, and I have to admit that I could become an important artist by relying on the things Eliot has said. There is not a single character in ‘Shekhar’ who is not by and large a composite character,6 although my experiences and my pain are irrigating Shekhar. And the irrigation is such that saying, ‘ultimately, all literary fiction is at its root autobiographical, if not a sketch of one’s own life then a projection,7 the story of one’s own possibility’ will not free it from the charge. There is too much of me in ‘Shekhar’; I was unable to follow Eliot’s example (whose importance I concede). ‘Shekhar’ is doubtlessly one individual’s record of personal suffering,8 although it is simultaneously a reflection of that individual’s life struggles. It is not so personal or peculiar that you could dismiss its claims by saying ‘this is the personal matter of a single man’; it is my insistence that my society and my age speak through it and announce that it is a symbol of mine and Shekhar’s age. But even after all of that I know that if the beginnings of this novel had happened under different circumstances and in a different way (and perhaps by different, more capable hands!), then this introduction would be unnecessary . . . Nor could a reader completely disregard it and have the occasion to say: forget about the events that happen in ‘Shekhar’, even the settings are uncannily similar to the writer’s own journeys (although to say that, a reader would have to be especially familiar with me).
Let me say something about this last equation. In order to preserve the truth of the picture of the child-man, I took scenes from my own life for the early parts of ‘Shekhar’, and then gradually the life and emotional world of a maturing Shekhar drifted apart from my life and emotional world, so much so that I felt as if I were the witness and chronicler of an independent human being, I had absolutely no power over him. Whether it is appropriate for the creator of a character to say that or not, whether a character can really have that much of an independent existence or not, whether a character can ever not be a puppet in a writer’s hands but also make a writer dependent on him or not, those who are interested in such esoteric questions can consult Pirandello.9
I have already said what I needed to propose about the origins of ‘A Biography’ and how a reader should approach it. But perhaps there is still more that remains to be said, since the reader will receive this introduction with only the first part of the biography, and what about the other two?
‘Shekhar: A Biography’ is divided into three parts.10 Even though all three parts are woven together with the same narrative threads, they remain complete works independent of each other. It could be said that the biography is really the sequence of three independent novels. But even if this weren’t the case, it would still be possible to publish them separately, but since it is the case, there is no need to offer a defence. It is not necessary for those who do not wish to read the second part after completing the first to believe that they have wasted their time on an unfinished story. They could consider the first part to be a complete novel, and they could justifiably base their judgement on the first part alone. I won’t complain about biases.
But it wouldn’t be a digression to offer a defence here to those readers who want to know why they should read the remaining parts while reading the first or want to know what assumptions they should make about the other parts. For those readers I want to say that if you look at the three parts of ‘Shekhar’ from the perspective of purpose—and if I can be so arrogant as to say from the perspective of meaning!—there is a singular solitariness; a monochromatic warp holds together and bears the fat and strong individual strands of yarn from a multihued weft to form a carpet, and similarly the multicoloured verses of the three parts of life form a single fibre of my desires and my words, which is singular, indivisible, and which to me is both a criticism and a worship of a life. In forging ‘A Life’ I have tried to forge a plot; as a result, no matter how it turns out I cannot approach the reader as a supplicant, but I will say this: if you have the daring to sit in judgement, at least have the decency to read the whole thing first.
Having introduced you to Shekhar, I now step away—then you can familiarize yourself with him directly. Shekhar is not an important man, nor is he a good man. But he is trying honestly to find himself in the light of humanity’s collective experience. He might not even be a good companion, but you won’t harbour him any ill will after walking with him to the end, I have full faith in that. And who knows, when we are all composite characters in the world today, then you might discover that somewhere within you, too, is a Shekhar, who is not important, nor good, but awake and independent and honest—deeply honest!