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T.Wignesan
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 The
Asianists' Asia
VOL. V (2008) Special Edition
Edited
by
T.Wignesan
Binding: Paperback (pp:
188) ISBN: 978-81-8253-138-3
Publisher: Cyberwit.net
From the
Editor
The Yi Jing: the Canon of Changes, the
ancient Chinese book of worldly wisdom, describes
life as nothing but conflict; in other words, life
in all its forms cannot be sustained without
conflict of all kinds, be it internal or external
in nature. This might sound like the unending bane
of those who cannot reconcile themselves to a
world without some hope of lasting peace, but an
analysis of any given period in history would
necessarily confirm this Taoist dictum. Conflict,
as everybody knows, engenders violence, whether
extraneous as in natural disasters or brought on
through the agency of self-inflicted acts. Here,
in this issue, we’re inevitably confronted by
the choice of how individuals and nations, leaders
and the led, oppressors and victims have had
recourse to this basic elemental tool to wreak
change in, for instance, self-hood or national
independence, both, by the way, in many cases
being willfully chimerical pursuits. If this state
of never-ending conflictual confrontation were
limited only to the individual, we could see our
way out of difficulty without much damage to the
world at large. Alas, this’s not the case as we
know only too well. The greatest damage - barring
manifestations of Nature’s growing pains - is
primarily inflicted by countries upon other
countries. Countries often form themselves into
blocs of nations, either founded upon religious
affinities and/or ethnicities, or on the other
extreme, based upon secular ideologies. In some
cases, weaker nations, either for the sake of
protection or for fear of encroachment upon their
internal affairs by overly-protective interfering
- but self-justifying - nations, merely attach
themselves to the benefactor bloc. For the better
part of Asia, the bête noire or nemesis
during the past half a century or so has been America
or rather that part of America which has
traditionally concentrated power in the realms of
high finance.
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mere deaths
and the mostly dead: (A Collection of Six Long and Four Short Stories)
 Author:
T.Wignesan Binding: Paperback
(pp: 269) ISBN: 978-81-8253-122-2 Availability: In Stock
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2008 Condition: New
Description:
The author of these short and long
stories spent almost all his adult life in some of
Europe's major cities and towns since the middle
fifties. He has not included all the short stories
he has written or published in this collection.
These stories however chart in some way the author's
parcours through some of the old continent's
major urban centres: London, Heidelberg, Berlin,
Madrid, Paris, and thereabouts. The author does
not wish to mask the fact that he has drawn from
his own experiences to fashion parts of these
narrations, but the finished products are, of
course, fictional in intent, content, and habillement,
even if some of the narrative events may be
founded on anecdotes and incidents vécus.
The frontiers of the réel and the imaginaire
therefore tend to blurr, only in the service of
the enhancement and encirclement of what may
constitute the truth of le vécu.
True, truth is stranger than fiction, but truth
that is exhibited naked - blinds. One
therefore has to rely on the décodeur de la
vérité: the art of dissimulation. Not to
tell the whole truth is tantamount to lying, for
lying distorts, makes irréel what is
tangible. And the reader is none the wiser. Here
is where the adage: there is nothing new to
narrate becomes fictitious. Le contenu
unique still necessarily holds the primal
place in literature. Only, the writer should not
fear the censor or the self-slighted litigant.
Writing is lifelong dedication, not a vocation.
The writer must be prepared to die like a samurai,
though the author doesn't see why he should
in these stories. The long short stories
may be thought of as potential novellas or novels
in gist. The author would have had need of more
time to convert them into novels. The long short
stories were all of them written at one go in 1993
during snatches of moments.
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 The Night Soil Man
Author:
T.Wignesan Binding: Paperback
(pp: 191) ISBN: 978-81-8253-124-6 Availability: In Stock
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Description:
Unlike Mulk Raj Anand's Untouchable,
this satirical novel serves as a scathing
comment on the mindset of so-called middle-caste
Hindus, on the one hand, and the colonial settler
mentality, on the other, by looking at the issue
from across or from the other side of the social
divide. The plot unfolds like cinéma-vérité!
The action takes place during a few days at
a Hindu temple and its environs in the
Malay(si)an capital where a national Hindu
conference brings together the leaders and
representatives of a cross-section of the local
immigrant Indo-Sri-Lankan communities, ostensibly
to discuss and forge unity among themselves in the
face of imminent Independence from the colonial
British administration. The introduction of an
"Untouchable" or "Night Soil
Man" in the midst of so-called higher caste
Hindus disrupts the conference. The plot works up
to this climax with not-so
predictable or likely results, thus
making its claims on the nouveau roman
genre. The link between the ruler and the
ruled is the newspaper reporter Thamby, caught in
the grind between the British master and the
locals who show no signs of mastering themselves.
The characters and events of this story are
entirely fictitious in construction and narration.
Even if the names of the streets, buildings and
lay of the land pinpoint the venue in
Kuala-Lumpur, these are not material to the time
of the action. For instance, there was no
university in the city before Independence was
attained in 1957. At that time, the vast majority
of Hindu Indians in Malaysia and Singapore was
Tamil, and those that constituted the articulate
and educated majority among them were -
disproportionately - from Jaffna in the old
Ceylon. The first nominated "Member" of
Education in the Cabinet was a Jaffnese Tamil, and
the first nominated U.N. Representative was an
Indian Tamil Brahmin. Other more sizeable Indian
communities were made up of Sikhs, Punjabis,
Bengalees, and Malayalees from India. The
conference of Indians or Hindus is an event,
however, not unique to this novel, since Indians
in Malaysia continue to meet on a national level
for various reasons. Any similarity to other such
meetings or living persons is purely coincidental,
with the exception of the character of the Swami
which is founded on a real-life Swami who had a
big role to play at one Hindu conference in Kuala
Lumpur. The venue of one incident at the end,
however, shifts to London in keeping with the
logical movement of the story in a colonial
protectorate. Here reality and the imaginary
intermingle for effect. The novel was
conceived and written in a month during
July-August 1967 in Madrid, Spain. Some slight
changes in the language and style have also been
introduced by the author since then.
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Sporadic
Striving amid Echoed Voices
 Author:
T.Wignesan Binding: Paperback
(pp: 244) ISBN: 978-81-8253-120-8 Availability: In Stock
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Description:
Let me
put it this way right from the start: If
I had had my own way, or rather if I had been in
possession of my senses or in my right mind, I
would never have worked on Malaysian or
Singaporean literatures.
The curious
thing about my encounter with
Malaysian-Singaporean writers and intellectuals is
that I was singularly unprepared to assume the
roles of critic, academic or anthologist over
their productions at a time when their activity
was mainly confined to the University of Malaya in
Singapore. And yet, paradoxically, I became just
that kind of an exegete, owing to a series of
"wilful errors" on my part. Instead of
choosing to settle for a career by qualifying in
Singapore where the region's institutions of
learning, such as, the Raffles College for the
Arts or the King Edward the VIIth College of
Medicine, I opted for Bar Studies at the Inns of
Court School of Law in London as an external
student. After a series of further "abetted
errors", I found myself teaching English (and
American) literature at the University of Maryland
in Heidelberg in 1960-61. The university offered
me a five-year Fullbright to do a Ph.D. in English
(while teaching) at College Park in Maryland, but
then as usual I knew better, and I quite naïvely
accepted a grant from the Congress for Cultural
Freedom, an international cultural
organisation whose siege social was in
Paris, to travel and report during a tour of South
and Southeast Asia. It didn't occur to me then
that I could have kept both, for the grant was for
only a couple of months. To make things even more
difficult for myself, I asked the cultural body
representatives (to whom I was introduced and
recommended by the Thirties poet Stephen Spender),
if they couldn't publish an anthology of writing
by Malay(si)ans and Singaporeans. They said they
would try the Rockefeller Foundation for a
subsidy. The reply: no one was interested in
such a collection, not sufficiently enough to
subsidise such a project. The muddle-head that
I was made me insist that I would go it alone and
on my own steam. I didn't realise I was
heading headlong into mainstream muddled-up
Malaysian politics.
My published
doctoral dissertation: Etude comparée des
littératures nationales et/ou officielles de la
Malaisie et de Singapour depuis 1941, and the
present volume do not therefore constitute areas
of research I would have wanted to probe. They
are accidental fallout instituted by random
circumstances.
Curiously,
or rather not-surprisingly, no Malaysian or
Singaporean has ever acknowledged my contribution
to this field of research. And this is as it
should be, I concur.
T.
Wignesan - Paris - April 23, 2008
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Rama and Ravana at the
Altar of Hanuman : On Tamils, Tamil Literature & Tamil Culture
 Author:
T.Wignesan Binding: Paperback
(pp: 750) ISBN: 978-81-8253-100-0 Availability: In Stock
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Description:
Just a
word to say that even if all the material in this
collection has already been made available to
readers interested in the subject, here the
various articles, essays, critiques, reviews, and
interviews have been brought together in a new and
refreshing format. Typographical errors, the
author hopes, have been put to rights; and where
necessary fresh amalgamations of disparate pieces
on similar themes have been allowed to fuse
together, and a more rigorous layout has been
affixed to old and varied presentations of these
articles in variegated publications. Some
meaningful order, too, has been imposed by
organizing material in separate sections. In
short, everything has been done to try to make
reading easier.
Some
published work on specifically Tamil topics has
not been included in this volume, for, it occurred
to the author, further research on the subject
would have been necessary. On the other hand, in
an essay like "The Exotic in
Aesthetics", a certain amount of the
discussion though seemingly alien to the subject
matter of this publication leads by argument to
the introduction of the treatment of Tamil
proverbs and Tamil classical poetry. The review on
the re-construction of Borobudur finds its place
here for, at the time of its creation, Tamil
know-how and culture reigned in the Indonesian
archipelago.
The author
does not wish to lay claim to being a Tamil
scholar or Tamilologist. He is more than aware
that he has no genuine competence which could be
diligently exercised in the vast and abundant
field of Tamil studies. De bon gré, he
has
produced
these pieces by his own autodidactic effort and
ventures to hope he might have shed some critical
light on some Tamil topics, beliefs, and ways of
life.
He feels
however that the distinguishing feature introduced
in this particular mode of academic publication is
the section, "Commentary via fiction" or
rather "fictionalised comment". Fiction
as a receptacle for ideas and concepts in no way
diminishes academic rigour; if anything, it
enhances receptivity, makes palatable what is
normally dry and difficult.
Of one thing
though he is certain. As a Tamil, he cannot be
discouraged from venturing further in the field of
Tamil studies.
T.Wignesan
- November 14, 2006
Paris, France
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Victorian (pen-in-cheek)
Vignettes
Tales (not so tall) of Timmy, the (not so very polite) Malaya Hall Cat in London
 Author:
T.Wignesan Binding: Paperback
(pp: 223) ISBN: 978-81-8253-107-9 Availability: In Stock
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Description:
The
Victoria Institution, a secondary school founded
in
Kuala Lumpur
in 1893 by the British administration in close
collaboration with the leaders of the three major
communities: Malay, Chinese, and Indian in the
capital, comes closest to upholding the British
public school tradition in the region. Widely recognised
as the "premier school" of the country,
its established traditions and ties have stood, it
might be said, the test of times. The
overwhelming role of former alumni in public life
attests even today - though the school has lost
its former pre-Independence reputation - to
time-honoured British educational policies. This
collection of eleven vignettes by a former pupil
of the school who rebelled against this
"strict inflexible tradition" as
interpreted and transmitted by the local staff, who
had not themselves wholly and intrinsically
imbibed the spirit of the colonial tradition,
borders on satire, expressed in a rebellious debunking
attitude towards his fellow alumni who
mistakenly or otherwise assumed the importance of
their nurture in an older, well-grounded heritage,
both in Malaysia and in England where many or some among
them went to qualify later on. To this end,
Wignesan has even, sometimes, recourse to
ribald language and humour, but always with tongue
in cheek. The vignettes also sketch a veridical toile
of times gone-by when other socio-political standards
held sway in a land still in the making, so to
speak. His insights into his fellow-school mates
and the long-arm reach of a government over its
young in a foreign territory all speak of a
Kafkayesque microcosm and makes one wonder if inculcated
intrinsic cultural values may triumph over a
closed-circuit world of political shenanigans. An
air of earnest light-heartedness pervades
this collection of vignettes, especially the
"not so tall tales" related by Timmy,
the Malaya Hall cat in London; perhaps this
approach might make what is most unpalatable
to the indigene who were/are somehow
deprived of an intellectual life and make them now
more willing to accept criticism or adopt the chastening
habit of being auto-critical.
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POIETICS :
Disquisitions
on the Art of Creation
 Author:
T.Wignesan Binding: Paperback
(pp: 214) ISBN: 978-81-8253-104-8 Availability: In Stock
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Description:
What is Poietics?
The subject of "poietics" (la
poïétique in French),
with its origins
in the Greek word poïein ("to
make with the intellect"), deals with the
science and/or the art or philosophy of creation.
To French academics working in the field, the
subject has variously meant one thing as a
definition and another as a programme of research
- from Valery's probes into the making of a poem
to Passeron's involvement with the creator's
relations with the objet
d'art during the creative act.
In this book, the author attempts to lay the
foundation either for the formulation of a theory
or, contrariwise, for the impossibility at
arriving at any such formulaic circumscription on poietics.
His "Disquisitions on Poietics" serves as a
theoretical inquiry into the subject at large
without, however, limiting itself to the fine
arts. The author adopts an open-ended approach to
the concept of creation. To him, the preparation
of an elaborate dish in the kitchen is as worthy
of attention as the Big Bang itself. As for tools,
he does not exclude the methodology of
experimentation in the laboratory or the
theoretical calculations and observations of the
exact sciences as perfectly valid means by which
to unravel the mysteries of creation. The author
"created" and edited the first academic
bi-lingual journal on the subject:
The Journal of Comparative Poietics/Revue de Poïétique
Comparée in 1989, and in which appeared
articles by Henri Morier, René Passeron, Eric
Mottram, José Augusto Seabra, Ananda K.
Coomaraswamy, Germaine Prudhommeau, Andrew Greig,
Clive Bush, and T.Wignesan.
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Preface
Twenty three
of the thirty-one propositions of the "Disquisitions
on Poietics", together with the articles
on the poïetics of the "pantun", in
French, and the "Yijing" first
appeared in the Journal of Comparative
Poïetics, Vol. II, n° 1 (Paris), 1992. The
article on "Gerard Sekoto" and the
account of "Aintinai: la théorie de cinq
paysages" appeared in JCL, Vol.
I, n° 2 & 3 (Paris), 1991. An earlier version
of the propositions XXIV to XXXI of the
"Disquisitions on Poïetics" first
appeared in Breaking Out: A Critical
Miscellany in 1999. Here, in this volume,
the disquisitions have been brought up to date and
revised. The Mobipocket eBook version does
not contain the same number of articles or some of
the arguments either.
The second
part of the book consists of seven
articles/critiques and an interview - on various
subjects and whose main purpose was to examine the
nature of creativity through each of the topics
discussed. As such, what follows the disquisitions
proper has been entitled: Further
Explorations into the Art of Creation.
Even if the
author has found it necessary to debunk the way
the subject of poïetics has been treated and/or
managed in France (cf. Chapter I: "The Exotic
in Aesthetics: A Case Study of Poïetics as the
Science and Philosophy of Creation"), and
almost subscribes - with certain mostly
unexpressed reservations - to a heretical overview
of the subject's future research possibilities,
he is nonetheless aware of the intrinsically
fundamental properties of the ontological approach
he has undertaken right from the start and which
over time has led him to exploit the subject for a
more general and encompassing overview of life as
revealed by the ancient Chinese Canon of
Changes, the Yijing.
The insights
he has gained by a long and personal experience of
this book has convinced him of the validity of his
convictions and propositions. The substratum of
his ideas is therefore to be found in the basic
concept of the unfolding year in temperate climes.
No book that can foretell the future and advise
the inquirer on how to avoid disaster may be
ignored. He is convinced that countless
generations of Chinese have by the application of
rigorous scientific method and inquiry obtained
the results that have been fused into the imagery
and dicta of the hexagrams and moving lines of the
book. It is only by patiently sifting through
observable phenomena and collating an infinite
number of data, made available through minute
observation of Nature in all its unfolding,
paradigmatic and cyclical aspects, have these
savant Taoists been able to put together a concise
statement of the science and/or philosophy of the
course of human life on Earth. That the language
in which these repetitive behavioural patterns are
couched sometimes or mosttimes eludes
proper evaluation and interpretation is a matter
for education and application. Nothing
is for free in life. If one wants to benefit from
advice, one has first to be able to find the right
wavelength which enables one to listen with
humility. And this is no easy chore as far as the
book is concerned. And, unfortunately for some,
the wondrous music of poesy may even then fall on
hardened ears!
In the Yijing,
the ancient Chinese had already expounded, as far
as the author is concerned, the secrets of the
very art of creation which takes the world for its
laboratory and life in all its forms as the
vehicle of its art form. The present book on
poïetics can only serve as a signpost for the
very first and ultimate book on the
subject.
T.Wignesan
Paris, July 5,
2007
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