I finished reading Cocoon last night. It didn't take long for me to realize that Nemade had created a character that transcends cultural boundaries and generations of years. It was written in India in 1963, but the struggles that the central character has as he tries to find a meaning for his life within his surrounding economic and familial pressures are quite universal.
A young man is sent off to university burdened with the expectations and demands of his family. The novel steers him through a litany of failures and frustrations, only to find him in the end coming to an understanding of himself and his place in the Universe.
And so Mr. Nemade and I have had our cultural exchange ... We have managed to come together via a work of literature first written 45 years ago. I call that one small step for mankind.
Bhalchandra Nemade was born on 27th May 1938 in Sangavi, a small village at the foot of Satpuda mountains in Khandesh, Maharashtra. He wrote his first novel Kosla (Cocoon) in just 15 days and it opened a new vista for Marathi fiction to become a modern classic. Nemade completed his education in Marathi literature, Linguistics and English literature in Pune and Mumbai. He was a doyen of Little Magazines movement that pioneered a new era in Marathi in the 1960s. Having taught at several universities including Aurangabad, Goa and London, he retired from Gurudev Tagore Chair of Comparative Literature, University of Mumbai in 1998.
An active exponent of Desivad (Nativism) in Indian Literature, which emphasizes the value of indigenous sources rather that alien standards and favours a pluralistic culture rather than globalization, Nemade has published 2 collections of poems and several critical works both in Marathi and English. He wrote a tetralogy of novels: Bidhar (On the Move) and Hool (Rumours), 1975; Jarila (Castrato), 1977; and Zool (Caprizon), 1979 - all available in English translation (Sahitya Akademi, New Delhi, 2016). After a gap of 37 years, Nemade completed another tetralogy of novels of which the first volume Hindu has been published (Popular Prakashan, Mumbai, 2010).
Bhalchandra Nemade, with his Kosla, (meaning cocoon), made an unparalleled impact on the Marathi literary scene in 1963. The reasons are not far to seek. In the two decades immediately preceding the publication of Kosla, the Marathi novel was lost in a world of romantic day-dreams. Or it indulged in middle- class pseudo-idealism doling out quotable quotes as profound philosophical truths or as in the early novels of S.N. Pendse, it presented a linear, crude but reader-oriented notion of heroism. A denominator common to all these novelists was an engagement with the reader's interest in literature qua literature and not so much with the nature and quality of life. Artifice was thus more important than experience.
This led in the fifties to the emergence of a formalism which, through the growing influence of critical theories, became a strange conglomeration of Kant and Clive Bell, the aesthetics of Eliot and Pound and the New Criticism of Brooks, Richards and Tate. It also became a hallmark of modernism and appealed to a host of writers who in any case were no longer in touch with the changing realities of post-Independence Maharashtrian culture and society. The formalism and modernism of these writers meant that they derived their notions of literature from literature itself. With a vengeance, inter-textuality became more important than the interface between literature and life.
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