Mridula GHOSH: “Yevhen Hrytsiak can be called, without exaggeration, a Ukrainian Gandhi”

In late February the world is going to see Lesia Ukrainka’s Forest Song in Bengali language. Mridula Ghosh, an Indian human rights advocate; Candidate of Sciences (History); Board Chair, East European Development Institute; who has been living and working in Ukraine for over 20 years, worked on its translation for several years. “The Forest Song is not just Ukrainian demonology, as some may think. It is above territories, somewhere on a metaphysical level,” Ms. Ghosh told The Day.

Ms. Ghosh has been taking a keen interest in the Ukrainian language and literature since her student days and is also aware of the language problem in Ukraine. Last year a collection of Ukrainian poems, Ukraina Alpona (Ukrainian Tracery), translated into Bengali and edited by Ms. Ghosh, was published in India. In an interview with The Day, Mridula Ghosh spoke about her Bengali translations of Ukrainian authors, socio-cultural ties between Ukraine and India, as well as the Indian experience of overcoming the postcolonial syndrome and the role of Gandhi followers in this process.

A collection of Ukrainian poems, Ukraina Alpona, in your Bengali translation was recently published. By what principle did you, the bearer of a different culture, choose poems for this?

“The collection includes 28 poets – from Hryhorii Skovoroda to Ivan Malkovych. I translated the poems I like. If I do not like a poem, even if it belongs to a very well-known poet, I will not translate it.

“I also nurture an idea to translate poems on love from Eastern Europe or some works by East European poetesses. Unfortunately, Wislawa Szymborska, who I was once in touch with and whose works I used to translate, died the other day. I planned to visit Poland and see Ms. Szymborska this year, but, much to my regret, this dream will not come true.”

You work as the Indian daily Ek Din’s own reporter in Ukraine, Eastern Europe, and the CIS. Do you think the Indian media show interest in Ukraine and what image of this country are they shaping?

“They sometimes consider Ukraine part of Russia. There are certain tensions in your relations, and this reflects, naturally, on the relations with India and on the media space. We most often hear about Ukraine in a negative context. I think Ukraine, too, should have its own reporters in India.

“When I was making a report on FEMEN, I looked into asymmetric visa relations. You can easily get a tourist visa to India, whereas Indians are altogether denied tourist visas to this country. Moreover, even high-placed Indians find it difficult to arrive in Ukraine – this happened even to a Supreme Court judge in 2009.

“For Ukraine, India still remains a ‘migration risk country,’ but one should not view every Indian as a potential illegal migrant. Our countries cooperate in the military field, but they are in fact not developing the potential of the economy’s civilian sector, such as regular research and intellectual exchange, humanitarian and cultural cooperation, etc. For example, India has no Ukrainian cultural centers at all, and there is only one Ukrainian embassy on the subcontinent (India and, concurrently, Bangladesh, Nepal, Sri Lanka, and the Maldives). Unless the situation is changed, nobody will ever know the truth about India or Ukraine.”

In 2003 you wrote a wonderful article on the Ukrainian language, which is still topical today. It says, among other things, that a teacher asked you in the 1980s why you needed this provincial language. Incidentally, James Mace used to say that a country will only revive if its language is revived on a national level. What is your vision of this process today?

“There are more speculations than concrete actions around the language problem. There still are people who think that forced Ukrainization is now underway, which poses a threat to the existence of other languages on the territory of Ukraine. This is mostly a reaction from the Russian minority and the people who do not associate themselves with the Ukraine-language milieu. On the other hand, native Ukrainian speakers are often saying that only the Ukrainian language should be developed. We have heard these slogans for 20 years, but what has been done? I think the more translations there are, the richer the language and the wider the expansion will be.”

You say in your publications that before India gained independence, it had been prepared for it and intellectuals overweighed politicians at the time. Is Gandhism, moral resistance, still living in the younger generation of today?

“Moral resistance today is inner intellectual resistance and spiritual upsurge reinforced by social networking activity or street pickets. It is a very contradictory thing. There is a word today – the Internet – where everybody lives without governments or borders. It is an absolutely parallel existence which is in fact uncontrollable no matter how hard Russia or China may try to do so.

“However, there is also another problem – unequal distribution of material resources. The concept of a mixed economy of the Gandhi and Nehru post-colonialist era, when national capital worked for a rigidly protectionist economy, has given way to an open market. In the past 20 years we have seen the rich accumulating wealth and the poor being impoverished throughout the world. It is worthwhile to read Francis Fukuyama’s article ‘The Future of History’ which says that the Socialist Bolshevik system collapsed in the 1990s, while today we can see the crisis of a fundamental, harsh, and vulgar capitalism, where private property is almost equated to a deity. But it is the people, not the owner, who create wealth. For the reason, we hear spontaneous calls for changes – from ‘Occupy Wall Street’ to the anticorruption movement led by Anna Hazare in India.

“The problem is not in rich people but in the ways they have enriched themselves. In spite of all talk about the ‘Indian miracle,’ the latest information says it is India that keeps most of the capital in Swiss banks, followed by China, Russia, and Ukraine. There are no rich or poor countries, but there are rich and poor people.

“As for Gandhism, I would focus not so much on the figure of Gandhi as on culture in a broad context. Gandhism is more than just the figure of the Mahatma. This should be seen in an integrated world. The values of Gandhism are being overshadowed by another problem – corruption – which set all this into motion. How come the resources were distributed this way and not another? People should be aware of their status and try to resist the temptation because big power produces big temptations. Gandhi said: ‘Earth provides enough to satisfy every man’s need but not every man’s greed.’”

L.I.: I would like to recall that Yevhen Hrytsiak, who once led the Norilsk revolt, makes an in-depth analysis of India. He seems to have been always spiritually caring about the problems of your people. In particular, he writes that an Indian yoga, Swami Randev, is on a hunger strike in protest against corruption and 50,000 people have already supported him. It is very good if there are people who set an example and those who are prepared to follow it.

“Yevhen Hrytsiak can be called without an exaggeration the Ukrainian Gandhi. It is a person who made a yoga-self-taught book by himself in the GULAG, and it is yoga that helped him endure all those hardships in a punishment cell. I met him several times. There is a brilliant documentary film about him – The Norilsk Uprising – by Mykhailo Tkachuk.

“In the case of India and Britain, there still was a certain level of democracy: yes, there were tortures and terrible racism, but nobody was summarily executed. But it is the GULAG… One must be a very courageous person to be able to offer resistance in those conditions.”

India had been a colony for a long time, but it has had enough time to overcome the postcolonial syndrome. How did your country manage to do so?

“We are independent, but there still is a question that bothers the average individual: ‘Does the status of the citizen of my country humiliate me?’ I once asked an Indian boy who worked in Ukraine and traveled a lot: ‘How do you feel in independent India?’ He said he would like to see India under British control. ‘With a British passport, I could be traveling wherever I want to, without feeling humiliated on the borders only because I have an Indian passport.’ This is a problem to ponder over and tackle.”