Chetan ban gaya Classical Author
Delhi University is currently mulling over inclusion of Chetan Bhagat’s
novel Five Point Someone in the
syllabus for second-year undergraduate students pursuing English literature
honours and elective courses under the Choice-Based Credit System (CBCS). Even
a loud thinking on just one point-whether the book merits inclusion in Literature course- condemns one
to face trial by trollers led by the author with his sardonic twitters. The discussion
immediately descends into a polarized debate between elitists and populists-
the former today being more of a pejorative marker. Terms like elitism,
perfectionism, idealism and classicism are frowned upon as promoting binary
class consciousness between patrician and plebian, between high class and
common class(high brow and low brow), invariably leading to a
mockery of those who seek elegance, refinement and rarefied taste in manner,
behaviour and language-subsumed under ‘elitism’. It has become politically astute
to err against elitists even if one’s sympathies are not fully aligned with the
common man.
Universities that always had the singular distinction of promoting
intellectual skills and enabling young minds to develop balance, beauty,
objectivity and rationality have been now forced to concentrate more on
occupational skills and dilute academic standards in order to cater to the humungous number of students admitted to
colleges. It is unfortunate that in a literature course, it is difficult to
keep to canonical literature i.e., literature with standards established and recognized as a model of authority or excellence. In the rush to meet
the demands of the times, all aesthetic and intellectual standards have been diluted
in favour of redressing the difficulties of the vast majority of students, sympathetically
viewed as the victims of historical injustice. The introduction of popular
fiction in literature course is a sign of the times.
Popular fiction can be best described as
airport fiction-novels that are enjoyable and easy to
read, novels that you buy at an airport to read on your flight. Those who wait long hours at the airport, those
who are bored with the same in-flight magazines during flight prefer to read
these novels that are entertaining, easy to read and provide inexpensive
entertainment.
(1)Classics are books one reads and re-reads.
Unlike a classic which with each rereading offers as much of a sense of
discovery as the first reading, popular fiction does not imprint itself on our imagination and in our subconscious. It
is like TV serials whose names even we do not recall after they are over,
unlike a classic cinema that leaves an indelible impression in our minds. We
should understand the distinction between entertainment and enlightenment.
Writing with intellectual supremacy, with a sense of beauty and imagination
have been reduced to writing with social energies, about here and now. What
Chetan Bhagat has written with ease and humour is limited to IIT experience
that is not shared universally beyond India.
(2) A classic is universal and timeless.
A classic is a book which even when we read for the first time gives
the sense of having read it before. We
are able to see cross connections between the past and the present. We are able
to intuit the experience of the characters that we come across in the classics
as they are universal and transcend all boundaries of nationality, race,
culture and tradition. Darcy and Elizabeth are not just the 18th C
characters in Jane Austen’s novel Pride
and Prejudice, but they are present amongst us today as they will be
tomorrow as well. A classic is the term given to any book which comes to represent
the whole universe.
(3)The classic characters are characters
of Creative Truth and not Creative Falsehood.
(4) We label a work as a classic when we can
trace it to classics of earlier times and assign it its rightful place in the
genealogy of classic works.
(5) A book rises to the status of a classic when
it relegates the noise of the present to a background hum. Similarly in any
great work, a classic is present as a background noise and one cannot ignore it.
If Five Point Someone has these Five Point classical characteristics,
certainly it merits inclusion in a Literature course.
No comments:
Post a Comment