Over two sittings, it became clear that attention to detail is what makes Sunil a master of his craft.[break]
Sunil becomes a student and a teacher rolled into one while the story is being read out. He listens carefully, cajoles his actors and technical colleagues to ask questions, and then makes important suggestions ever so subtly to the author.
He is so focused on transforming the narrative into slices of life suitable for the stage that he hardly has any time to notice wordplays. He is suitably modern to believe in minimalism, but doesn’t abstain from planning theatrics to make his presentations memorable.
At the first reading session, suggestions are limited to technical aspects of presentation. Apparently, actors need break between scenes if they have to be in a different getup.
Some dialogues have to be stretched, or new characters need to be introduced to maintain the flow of the presentation. The dress designer wants to know what kind of cloth would be appropriate for a character.
The stage manager is interested in the locale of unfolding events so that a close approximation can be recreated. The person responsible for the sound would have to be told about the surroundings.
Music is an important component of staged presentations and so is dance. Historic placement of the story is important for the director to match the music with trends of the period.
Dance forms have to be improvised according to locations, backgrounds and moods of the characters. In such discussions, the author concerned becomes a witness to mutilations being planned for his work.
The second reading session is often more interesting—and challenging—for the writer. The director wants that dialogues be short, succinct and sensible. The language has to match the background, age, education and passions of a character.
It is possible for a peasant to utter a few words in English or recite a shloka in Sanskrit, but it would need some explanation if a cowherd were made to quote Shakespeare.
An urban professional, unless drunk, would probably abstain from using swear words in public. These peculiarities are so obvious that they often get ignored when a writer is in the flow of unfolding events in his story.
Sunil is never very demanding. All he wants is that the writer change an arcane phrase here or replace a quaint word there. Sessions with his team are full of lessons in appreciating the art and craft of theater, use of language, and figures of speech being just a few of them.
Language matters
People of similar economic, educational and social status from comparable backgrounds differ in the way they use the same language. Even though Dr. Prakash Chandra Lohani and Dr. Ram Sharan Mahat are erudite, articulate and market-friendly politicos with largely rural constituencies in Nuwakot, the Bahun is good at wit while the Chhetri prefers sarcasm, which has nothing to do with policies of the parties they belong to.
Chitra Bahadur KC and KP Oli speak alike in rustic similes while a similar background doesn’t stop Kamal Thapa and Sharat Singh Bhandari from using different rhetorical devices to get their message through.
Theorization can’t be done on the basis of anecdotal evidences, but it is possible to argue that speech is often a more reliable predictor of class—sometimes it may also reveal caste or community—than the dress and mannerism of a person. Nobles are good listeners and are economical with words.
Underlings interpret intentions of the high and mighty so that they can then take the flak if something were to go wrong due to the words spoken by their masters.
A little lower down the rung, aristocrats prefer to speak in a patronizing manner. Meritocracy entitles professionals to put on airs of learnedness. They are verbose and garrulous.
Nuances are the devices they use to confuse their audience. Pundits are prone to hedging their bets and religiously cite their sources as some form of escape route.
That could be the reason an American president failed to find a one-handed economist. An exasperated President Harry S. Truman is reported to have muttered, ‘Give me a one-handed economist! All my economists say “on the one hand...on the other.”’
Pretentiousness makes the middle class intrinsically argumentative and members of the petty bourgeoisie invariably begin from a position of negation. Groucho Marx reveals their conceit in a memorable stanza: “I don’t know what they have to say, / It makes no difference anyway, / Whatever it is, I’m against it. / No matter what it is or who commenced it, / I’m against it.”
Op-ed pages, vox pops and talk shows are brimming with the kind of know-all commentators so full of themselves that there is no space for any other point of view in their presence.
The upper crust in Nepal had an early start in formal education. When literacy rate in the country was less than one percent before the 1950s, only Bahuns, Chhetris and Newars got to read Sanskrit scriptures, English literature and Hindi periodicals.
They wrote in Gorkha Bhasha and established hegemony over what would be considered knowledge.
These clans of the ruling community have since maintained their monopoly over standards of propriety and continue to manufacture consensus over acceptable forms of expression.
They are the ones who proclaim that whatever Ang Kaji Sherpa, Raj Kumar Lekhi or even Mahanth Thakur say is invariably inflammatory. Clansmen of the ruling community reserve the moral authority to condemn voices of aspiration as communal or condone patently communal statements of denunciation as merely retaliatory.
Gasps and grunts
Over a period, slaves and subjects get so accustomed to responding—with their heads down, of course—only when spoken to that they lose the capacity to verbalize their own thoughts in a proper way.
Perhaps this was what made a keen observer of behavior of oppressed groups comment that the language of the marginalized population resembled the communication medium of the animal world. Whether the subaltern can speak or not then becomes a diversionary question; the point is whether they can make others understand what they want to convey.
There was a time when a lord passing through his domain on a horseback would randomly whip any serf who would then boast to other slaves that the master had noticed him. Supplication was the only language that subjects could use in those days.
Interestingly, a new royalist website urges its visitors to write to the former king of Nepal in similar manner. It is possible to refine even traditions of subjection into an art form as it has been done in Thailand and Japan.
However, acceptance of humiliation as a marker of sophistication is understandable only to those who can appreciate its charms.
The road to freedom is long, and the process of emerging out of serfdom can be excruciatingly painful. A commoner learns to imitate the mannerism of his former masters to reclaim his dignity.
Perhaps this is the impulse that propels Madheshis and Janajatis, barely out poverty, to teach their children speak Nepali even at home. Master’s language is the ladder not only to success, but more importantly, a reliable medium of gaining acceptance into higher social echelons.
The neo-literate youths of the subaltern—cut off from their roots, thrown into circles where they are looked at with disdainful tolerance, and turned down from every door on grounds of community, caste or class when looking for employment—then have to choose between conformism and confrontation.
Devoid of passion, the language of conformists becomes colorless. The confrontationists create idioms that are transformed into clarion calls for change.
Expressed in words, burning rage can be devastatingly brutal. In the Indian state of Bihar, Lalu Prasad Yadav thundered, “BhuRaBaL Ukhad Pheko,” which can roughly be translated into an exhortation to root out Bhumihars, Rajputs, Brahmins and Lalas. Mayawati in Uttar Pradesh was even more direct: She urged her supporters to beat sacred-thread-wearing higher caste Hindus repeatedly with shoes. In comparison, Sherpa, Lekhi, and Thakur are epitomes of restraint.
In the USA, the Black rage has been expressed in much more explosive terms. Imamu Amiri Baraka thunders in Black dada nihilismus, “Come up, black dada nihilismus. / Rape the white girls. / Rape their fathers. Cut the mothers’ throats. /” But denunciations and calls for reprisal were not from Whites. Black girls deplored the song. Black fathers condemned the call. Black mothers stood up for their White sisters.
The song has since become a marker of derangement that blind rage can induce. Surprisingly however, it also had a cathartic effect upon long subjugated sections of externalized population.
When speaking at a media forum, Sherpa was shouted out in foul language. But the rage that is building up inside would find its own outlet. It would be necessary for the ruling community to accept that humiliation thrust upon externalized sections of the population is brimming full.
It is sure to overflow. Retaliatory denunciations, couched in sanctimonious sermons, are unlikely to be helpful. Meanwhile, defilement of the ‘sacred language’ does serve a purpose: It acts like a ‘group therapy’ for people who are tired of being talked to in condescending, if not downright spiteful, manners.
The more ‘intelligent people’ try to paint Messrs Sherpa, Lekhi, and Thakur as villains, the more they appear like valiant saviors of dignity of their respective communalities.
It will take some time for dialogues to begin on equal footing between guardians of the nation and claimants of their country. Till then, the linguistic landscape shall remain cacophonous.
Lal contributes to The Week with his biweekly column Reflections. He is one of the widely read political analysts in Nepal.
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