Category: Know the Writer

In remembrance: Somendranath Bandopadhyay

~ Bhaswati Ghosh ~ Leave a comment
Somendranath Bandyopadhyay (1926-2022)
Prof. Somendranath Bandyopadhyay taught Bengali Language and Literature in Visva-Bharati, Santiniketan during 1957–1991. His subject was mainly Rabindranath Tagore. He wrote several books on Bengali poetry, art, philosophy and literature. In 2011, the Rabindra Bharati University, Kolkata awarded him the D. Litt. The following is my personal tribute to him. 

1986 — A teacher’s visit

I am in Class 7 and we have moved to Chittarajan Park, South Delhi’s very own Bengali pocket, only a year ago. It’s 7 or perhaps 7:30 in the evening, a busy time for our family of six. I and Dada, my brother, are hunched over our schoolwork — homework, preparing for a class test and such. Dadubhai, my grandfather, is coaching me as usual. In the kitchen, my grandmother and mother, both tired from a day’s work at their respective offices, are hustling to get dinner ready. Suddenly, there’s a knock on the door. We have no telephone (cell phones haven’t been born yet) and aren’t expecting any visitors in particular. When the door is opened, two tall gentlemen, one of them in pristine white dhuti and panjabi, are found standing. The gentleman in white, the older of the two, asks for my mother, and when she comes to the door, she, and the rest of us, are startled beyond words. Professor Somendranath Bandopadhyay, her teacher from Visva-Bharati, Santiniketan, where Ma went to study for her MA in Bengali, has come to visit her. The last time the two of them had seen each other was more than a couple of decades ago, while my mother was his student.  Back in her student days, he had shown extraordinary compassion to help her get through a difficult academic patch.

They had kept in touch through letters, and that year, as a student of class 7, when I witnessed this incredible moment, I realized why my mother held this teacher in such high regard. Professor Bandopadhyay was visiting relatives in Chittaranjan Park and mentioned that he wanted to meet his former student, who also lived in the neighbourhood. The conversation that followed through the evening is a blur to me, but I remember helping my mother sift whole wheat flour through a soft cotton cloth in the kitchen to ‘make’ refined flour as Ma and Grandma got busy making luchi, a delicacy that had to be served to a special guest. I remember my grandfather, a man of few words, expressing amazed delight that a teacher had taken the trouble of tracing his student’s house and visiting her. I remember that we were all amazed. I remember how a teacher’s visit had changed the complexion of a weary city evening. Over the next many decades, we would receive letters from him on postcards with beautiful line drawings depicting flowers, leaves, and nature on them.

2007 — Visiting a teacher

The author in Santiniketan; Photo © Bhaswati Ghosh

After working for many different bosses for more than a decade, I finally decide to work for myself and become a freelance writer-editor. Working my own hours gives me the reward of finding more time to do the things that bring me joy — write, cook, travel. I plan a long vacation to West Bengal with my mother. We spend the bulk of our time in Kolkata, but also have Santiniketan and Bishnupur on our itinerary. At Santiniketan, when we seek accommodation at the in-campus guest house, we’re turned away, with no vacancy offered to us by way of explanation. We put up at a lodge close to the campus. That evening, when Ma and I visit Professor Bandopadhyay, now Somen Mama to me, she tells him about our lodging woes, and he chides her saying she should have called him right from the guest house. He asks us how long we plan to stay for, and when he learns it would be the next three days, he calls up the guest house to get us a room there. We move back into the campus, a pilgrimage for me, where she would wake up to, as she did in her days as a student, to the calls of doel, the oriental magpie and bou-kotha-kao, the Indian cuckoo. I would discover mornings that sounded sweeter than anything I’d ever experienced in my existence as a city-bred. 

At Somen Mama’s house for breakfast one morning, his affectionate wife, Boudi to all students, and Maami to me, treats us to a deliciously elaborate spread, complete with luchi, torkaari, chop (croquettes), mishti and her signature vanilla pound cake that I’ve come to relish. We sit at the low jol-chowkis in the dining area of this aesthetically pleasing and inviting house as Mama talks to us about Tagore’s worldview and the radical relevance of the Buddha’s teachings. Now and again, a humorous vein emerges, and he breaks into a laughter — resonant, uninhibited, completely disarming. We drift back to the living room for tea and more stimulating conversation. He then brings a copy of his latest book — Shilpi Ramkinkar Alaapchari — that he signs for my mother as a gift. He gives me a beautiful pair of polished burgundy wooden chopsticks that he’d gotten from his visit to Japan. I spend some quiet moments in their beautiful garden outside, soaking in the prettiness of flowers — clusters of Ashok and hibiscus in several colours.

Flower arrangement at Somen Mama’s house; Photo © Bhaswati Ghosh

Back in Delhi, my mother reads the book and keeps nudging me to do the same. I politely keep telling her I will, until I can’t put it off any longer. I’m barely into the first paragraph when I realize I wouldn’t be able to put it down before devouring every last sentence, every last word of it. The book’s format is deceptively everyday — it’s a series of conversations between two neighbours. Only, in this case, both the interviewee — the artist-sculptor Ramkinkar Baij and his interviewer — Somendranath Bandopadhyay are so much in synchronicity that the reader couldn’t ask for two better conversationalists. 

Shilpi Ramkinkar Alaapchari

By simply describing the living quarters of the renowned artist who he found as his neighbour, Somen Mama, draws me in. I am transported to the Santiniketan of Baij’s student and work life, to his world of mud and plaster, of studying from other artists, both at home and globally, of his interactions with Rabindranath Tagore who encourages him to chart his own course without looking back, of deeply empathizing with and drawing inspiration for his work from the Santhal Adivasis living in the area, and most of all, of living a passionate, feisty, and fiercely creative life on his own terms. The book is not merely a gift to my mother, to us, I realize; it’s a gift to all who can read the Bengali language. I am so taken by it that I want to tell the world about it and excitedly write a blog post and translate a few favourite parts. Later that year, I send my proposal for translating this remarkable book to an international translation fellowship. It gets accepted. 

2008-2012 — A teacher for life

I am back in Santiniketan with Ma to meet with Somen Mama, to give him the good news, to seek his permission to translate the book. He talks about having heard of a certain blogger from Delhi who had translated parts of the book; then he realizes that person is me. So far he’s only known me by my pet name, so it has taken him a while to make the connection. While we’re here this time, I ask Somen Mama, now my author, lots of questions regarding the book’s technical aspects. He takes out big tomes from his study and patiently answers each one of my queries. I also spend my time looking more closely at Ramkinkar Baij’s sculptures spread across the open campus — Sujata, Santhal Family, Mill Call. My seeing is now informed by the history and context of these iconic works, captured with vivid sincerity by Somen Mama. 

I travel to Norwich, UK, the site of my fellowship and complete translating the book. Over the next year, I look for publishers for the book and fortunately, the book finds a home. A journey that began with my mother’s master’s education in Santiniketan comes full circle as my name appears below his on a book cover. Shilpi Ramkinkar Alaapchari becomes My Days With Ramkinkar Baij in English. 

2022 — The final adieu

On a March day, we receive the sad news of Somen Mama’s final departure. It’s still difficult to think of him in the past tense. As I reflect on this wonderful human being and the fullness of his life that enriched so many of us, I know what I will remember of and receive as blessings from him the most — humility and grace, a childlike zeal for exploring new realms, and above all, a deep, empathetic compassion for those around us. 

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‘Jago Hua Savera’: Recalling a Cinematic Manifesto for the Dawn of Hope

~ Bhaswati Ghosh ~ Leave a comment
First published in The Wire

Night falls on a river. The village around it thickens with darkness. Not the river. On its breast, distant lights flicker like inextinguishable fireflies. The glow comes from the boats of the fishermen sailing on its waves. A majhi (boatman) sings a drawn-out tune and the river’s water folds into its haunting essence with every splash of the oar.

This is how the 1959 Pakistani film, Jago Hua Savera (The Day Shall Dawn) unfolds as does Padma Nadir Majhi (The Boatman of Padma), the novel it’s adapted from. An enthralling flute amplifies the aural impact of Jago Hua Savera’s opening scene even more, holding the viewer in a delicate trance. A synthesis of the work of stalwarts like Faiz Ahmed Faiz who wrote the songs, dialogues and story; music director, Timir Baran and Academy Award winning cinematographer, Walter Lassally – this first scene establishes the tenor of the film’s sensitive and neo-realist aesthetic.

That the night isn’t pitch-black isn’t insignificant. Like the Padma itself, it is mysterious and pregnant with possibility. Of light. Of dawn. It has to be that way. For the Padma is as unforgiving to the fisherfolk edging its banks as it is giving.

When Manik Bandopadhyay wrote Padma Nadir Majhi, his sparkling novel chronicling the lives of East Bengal’s fishermen, India was under British rule and the Second World War was still three years away. When director A.J. Kardar adapted it for the screen, Partition had split India, and Faiz’s reworked story reflected the region’s altered geopolitics. Filmed on location at Saitnol on the banks of the Meghna River in what was then East Pakistan, the film’s story marks a significant, and arguably necessary, departure from the novel.

The biggest change is also the most awkward one – the fisherman’s tongue. Instead of the regional Bangla dialect of the book, the characters in Jago speak in colloquial Hindustani. It’s not an A for B transposition, though. For me, a Bengali married to a Sikh, the ingenious workaround Faiz and Kardar employed to get around the language hurdle struck a personal resonance. Despite speaking fairly respectable Hindi all my unmarried life in Delhi, my hometown, with my husband, I started speaking in a deliberately incorrect tongue, upturning verb conjugations – a pattern absent in Bengali.

The fishing villagers of Jago speak a similar broken Hindustani, their vocabulary sparse and uncluttered. When the viewer is least expecting it, fragments of Bengali float into her ears – a kid begging his father to spare “duto poisa,” another telling his uncle, “Miyan boddi anchhe,” (the miyan has brought a traditional doctor), and then a full exchange in Bangla between two sisters, Tripti Mitra playing the younger of them.

An idiom for celluloid

One would be mistaken, however, in attempting to locate the film’s vocabulary in a particular vernacular. From the first scene to the concluding one, the elements that dominate both the stylistic and utilitarian purposes of Jago are wordless – the music, the ambient sounds, the silence. In the opening scenes, the viewer gets a sense of a sound peculiar to Padma’s boatmen as Bandopadhyay describes it:

“From the heart of the river afar, a call is heard, a faint sound of human voice…This is a language known only to the boatmen of East Bengal. There are no words in this language, only undulating vocalization. Across unbounded horizons spreading over the river, this sound travels long distances, becoming fainter in volume, but unchanged in its ripples.” [From Padma Nadir Majhi, translated by the author.]

The depth and breadth of Timir Baran’s prowess as a composer are on full showcase here, not just in the three songs that a boatman sings, all carrying the resilient poise of Faiz’s poetry, but also in the music director’s unusual choice of the classical veena – to overlay everyday village scenes with a sedate composure.

Then there are atmospheric sounds – the Padma’s waves, of course, but also the chatter of kids playing on its banks, the cawing of crows, the buzz of a bustling fish market and, later in the film, the big city’s honking automobiles, hawking porters and tinkling bicycles – that lend the narrative a compelling immediacy.

Lassally’s mature camerawork makes it even easier for the director to stick to verbal minimalism in the film. From the first frame, the camera moves with eloquence to capture both nature and man. While the Padma’s expanse and excitability are made almost palpable for the viewer, the close-ups of the characters’ faces strike one as archives of an ancient sadness.

In Jago, the majority of the villagers are Muslims as opposed to the Hindus in the novel. The characters and the plot are a lot less complex, too, making this nearly an original story, written for a new audience.

Most noticeable among the revised characters is that of Bandopadhyay’s Hossain Miya, an enigmatic man of wealth who could be caring or ruthless, depending on the situation. In Jago, he becomes the unidimensional Lal Miyan, a moneylender like any other, stripped of complexities.

The other big character swap is that of the protagonist’s sister-in-law’s. The novel’s Kapila is Mala in the film, played with sensual charm by Tripti Mitra. As in the book, she retains her flirtatious ways, but instead of enticing Miya, her brother-in-law, is seen to attract the attention of Kasim, Miya’s brotherly friend. Bangladeshi acting legend, Khan Ataur Rahman not only plays the role of Kasim with self-assurance, but also sings the film’s songs with tender facility. Particularly enduring is his rendition of “Beet chali hai raat/ab chhoro gham ki baat,” (The night is about to end, my friend/Let go of your songs of sorrow), a spirited nazm by Faiz that Baran has set – to an electrifying effect – to a traditional bhatiyali tune.

Of deprivation and the dawn of hope

There is less gossip and innuendo in the film, too, the extent of it being Lal Miya pointing fingers at Kasim and Mala’s open show of affection for each other. Yet, despite all these deviations, the film remains faithful to Bandopadhyay’s work in a fundamental way – in its politics.

At the core of Padma Nadir Majhi is the social discrimination, ostracism and extreme poverty the fishermen suffer. Their destitution is naked, for they have little to cover it with. But it’s still not without dignity. Miya pulls a fragile cover over his newborn son and helps his invalid wife lie down beside him with the gentlest touch. When his daughter’s leg is fractured, Kasim lifts her in his arms and takes her for treatment to the city hospital – a long and arduous journey he undertakes without a blink. Ganju, obsessed with buying a new boat off Lal Miyan, saves every penny for it despite seeing tuberculosis sniffing the life out of him.

Despite its affirmative title, Jago Hua Savera is rooted in reality. Ganju will acquire his boat but not live long enough to enjoy it. Miya will not be able to buy it, not even after collecting all his life’s savings, including the money his wife has been saving for their daughter’s wedding, the pennies in his son’s piggy bank and Kasim’s offered savings. Wistfully, and in his torn vest, he’ll keep his gaze on the treasured boat as it floats on Padma’s bosom.

And still the fisherfolk will wrest their dawn from the night – the Padma will hold them in her sway again, Miya will approve of Kasim’s relationship with Mala, and Kasim and Miya will return to the fishing boat. And the glow of its lantern.

This is a dawn that’s as unremarkable as the fishermen’s’ lives. It is still a savera, nonetheless.

Jago Hua Savera is a landmark film, not only because of its international cast and crew or the way it draws inspiration from the best of world cinema. But because it reinvents a classic in its own, cinematic, idiom.

[The Day Shall Dawn (1959) was selected as the Pakistani entry for the Best Foreign Language Film at the 32nd Academy Awards, but was not accepted as a nominee. It was also entered into the first Moscow International Film Festival where it won a Golden Medal. Days before the film was to premier, the new government of Pakistan (under Ayub Khan) asked the film’s producer, Nauman Taseer not to release the film. The writer, Faiz Ahmad Faiz, was later imprisoned by the government for his communist beliefs. Anjum Taseer, son of the producer, had the film fully restored in 2010.]

The Whore as a Metaphor for a City

~ Bhaswati Ghosh ~ Leave a comment

Bombay Stories by Saadat Hasan Manto 
Translated by Matt Reeck and Aftab Ahmad
Vintage International

First published in The Beacon

Sudhir Pattwardhan. “Street Corner” 1985

Mention Saadat Hasan Manto’s name and a landscape of tragedy unravels in all its grotesqueness. That he has become almost a Siamese twin of the Partition stories he wrote is a minor tragedy in itself. In both age and disposition, there is an altogether different Manto who predates his avatar as a chronicler of the Partition. Bombay Stories introduces one to this earlier Manto, and with him, the city that built his reputation as a writer. The same city that enabled him to become an indubitable annotator of “lowlifes.”

Manto’s Bombay (yes, still very much Bombay), part of pre-independence India, boils with cosmopolitan chaos. As a pot that melted extremes, the city became a home for everyone, from the business tycoon to the migrant labourer and the prostitute. The last group drew Manto’s literary imagination with an intensity bordering on obsession. Nearly every tale in Bombay Stories features a prostitute, even if she isn’t the central character. The skin-brushing proximity Manto evinces in projecting the lives of sex workers raised many an eyebrow in his lifetime. He had been accused of employing obscenity in his stories. One can see why. Manto presents the prostitute in her grimy and broken hovel, stripping her of exaggerated fancies of glamour and lust. The realism apart, the bigger surprise Manto packs in these stories is his not-so-hidden feminist agenda.

When Kanta opens the door to him stark naked, Khushiya, a pimp, is shocked and asks why she doesn’t have any clothes on.

          Kanta smiled. “When you said it was you, I thought, what’s the big deal? It’s only my Khushiya, I’ll let him in…”

The woman’s brazenness hits Khushiya as a whack of insult. It torments him that she could consider him so insignificant as to think nothing of appearing naked in front of him. This weird conflict in the pimp’s mind is a projectile of writerly brilliance. Who would think that a prostitute’s nudity — her most lascivious and prized offering — could be turned on its head and into a weapon to injure the male ego?

Manto’s prostitutes are the axiomatic flesh-and-blood, but they are more. They have beautiful minds of their own, which they exercise despite the compulsion of being tied to the body to pay for food.

The most visceral demonstration of this happens in The Insult, where Saugandhi, a sex worker kicks patriarchy in its shins instead of remaining in its bubble wrap of faux security. Ironically, Saugandhi’s provocation comes not from sexual exploitation but rejection from a potential customer. A man with whom her pimp sets her up says “Yuhkk,” in apparent revulsion and dashes away in his car. In the man’s single meaningless utterance, Saugandhi (literally, fragrant-smelling) decodes a lifetime of humiliation that masculinity has heaped on her. It is in her getting even that Manto concentrates the story’s greatest force. Shortly after the rejection episode, Madho, Saugandhi’s leeching “lover” reappears with his need for money. She rips his photos from her walls and throws them out of the window uttering, “Yuhkk. That is how she seizes her moment of showing Madho — and through him, every man — his place.

In Ten Rupees, Sarita, a young girl, is forced into prostitution by her mother. The story breaks one’s heart before enthralling and finally healing it — with twists as sharp as the ones Kifayat, the driver in the story – makes his car swerve to. Ten Rupees is evidence of the perversion of depraved men looking to sexually exploit a young girl. It is also proof of what the alchemy between a writer’s masterly imagination and his sensitivity can do to kindle the softest core of the human heart, no matter how savage. Ten Rupees is a fantastical story, electrifyingly so because of a young girl who is just that and the Hindi film songs she breaks into unbidden. It’s also an extraordinary story. Although almost a fairy tale, over the brief wingspan of its flight, it holds out the hope of coming true somewhere at some point in time.

In his depiction of prostitutes, Manto is somewhere between an exploiter and a benefactor – more like an ally. His vision has a diving mask that takes him beyond the prostitute’s essential physical territory. Accompanying him to their shanties allows the reader to see them, really see them — the way they live and dream, quarrel with or negotiate their fate. It isn’t difficult to find in Manto’s whores a metaphor for the Bombay of the 1940s. Like her, the city welcomed in a businesslike way anyone willing to pay for the pleasures it offered them. There were no strident calls for keeping outsiders out and the place teemed with characters from different regions, religions and communities.

Only one other character could possibly make the prostitute envious with the consistency of its appearance in Bombay stories. That of Manto’s. Most of the stories are in the first person, and the narrator refers to himself simply as Manto. It is tempting to take this as the author’s real-life persona, but one is well advised to read this character within the fictional framework of the stories. As translator, Matt Reeck informs us in his detailed notes, the Manto of the stories isn’t really a mirror image of the real-life Manto. Still, this self-depreciating, temperamental persona is close enough to the real Manto, one suspects. This is particularly true when he shares vignettes from the Hindi film industry, where he worked as a writer. He delights the reader with an insider’s view of the film industry, at once an enigma and an imperishable field of gossip fuel.

Consider this principle from a ten-point list Narayan, who works in the film industry draws up for working in the studio. #3: If you fall in love with an actress, don’t waste time dilly-dallying. Go meet her in private and recite the line, “I, too, have a tongue in my mouth.” If she doesn’t believe you, then stick the whole thing out. And#6, which rings so true, one could have written it today. Remember that an actor has an afterlife too. From time to time, instead of preening before a mirror, get a little dirty. I mean, do some charity work.” [Janaki]

The translators, Matt Reeck and Aftab Ahmad have rendered these stories into English with compelling credence without over-anglicising the text. The distinct Indian-ness of the narration is well preserved for the most part as is Manto’s signature sarcasm and wry humour.

One reads Manto not just for the stories he wrote but also because of the way he embalms each story with his deep humanity, his acerbic wit and his near-allergic impatience for masks — semantic or societal. In Mozelle, technically the only “Partition” story in the collection is also arguably the most brilliant in form, content and technique. It depicts the horrors of the communal tensions of the time with such vividness and neurotic pace that the reader is stunned into a suffocating silence. This one story is also an eerie foreboding of the departure of Manto himself from his beloved Bombay, which he had to leave following Partition and from the pluralistic freedom it offered him.


Bombay Stories is therefore, is an important collection to understand not only a city but its author who, tragically, died not in but of Partition.

The Art of Solitude: In Rabindranath Tagore’s letters, the gifts of a life in solitude

~ Bhaswati Ghosh ~ Leave a comment

First published in Scroll

After a week of rain, hail and non-seasonal arctic chills, a balmy sunshine and a breeze carrying whispers of spring indulge us in the Southern Ontario suburb where I live with my husband. With a book in my hand, I step out into the backyard and find it to be the venue of an unrehearsed celebration of this climatic turnaround. All our immediate neighbours are out – the daughters of our next-door neighbours yell hellos to their school friends in the backyard across theirs; our other next-door gardener neighbour is busy tending to her perennials; my husband readies the soil for his impending vegetable garden.

Human hums and giggles enter me along with the constant chirp of the backyard birds. As I open my book Chhinnapatrabali – Rabindranath Tagore’s collection of letters, written for the most part to his niece, Indira Devi Chaudhurani, I don’t miss the rare synchronicity this moment brings, especially in our current physically distanced world. The cover of my reading material is beginning to tear up, evidence of the book’s confidant-like association with me through the decade of my life outside India.

Tagore wrote a lot of these letters from his family estate in East Bengal, which he’d been tasked to manage in his youth. While opening a window to his literary talent and creative process, the letters also serve as a manifesto of living in and celebrating solitude and its many gifts. A shift away from the human-centric way of life is one of these gifts. In letter after letter, Tagore speaks of how, whenever he lands in the rural environment of his estate from the industrially-rushed Calcutta, he senses centrifugalism of the humankind. “There’s less of man and more of earth here,” he notes in a letter and adds, “when in the village, I cease to see man as an independent entity,” likening mankind’s journey to that of rivers coursing their way through forests and cities.

Chhinnapatrabali also endears itself to me because of the way it reveals the everyday Rabindranath, shorn of his career accolades and their accompanying weight. With gentle humour and uncensored vulnerability, the letter writer brings out his deepest loves and anxieties, his humanism shining through them like the sun gleaming in our rain-sodden backyard.

In reading the letters nestled in this volume, I learn, recurrently, the need to take a pause from the staged antics of a mechanized life. For, as Tagore shows, true viewing – whether of blackbirds and squirrels in my backyard, or the rivers and trees, boatmen’s songs and women’s banter, cows chasing flies away with their tails, a silent full moon night in a Bengal village – calls for rest and repose. Not only of the outer eye that sees. But of the inner eye that makes, out of one, a seer.

Letter photo source: The Daily Star

A People Ravaged: Peeling off the Many Layers of Partition Trauma

~ Bhaswati Ghosh ~ Leave a comment
First published in The Wire

Literature, Gender, and the Trauma of Partition: The Paradox of Independence
Debali Mookerjea-Leonard
Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2017

In writing my first novel, whose protagonist is a young refugee woman from East Pakistan, I employed the device of coincidence to achieve a happy ending. Doing so wasn’t a sudden rush on my part to end what had become a protracted writing project but a well thought-out conclusion. It was not to be. When they read it, two of my trusted beta readers quashed it summarily, citing it as lazy and escapist. Even though incredible incidents can happen in real life, one of them advised, in a work of fiction, coincidences are hard to pull off convincingly.

An incident Debali Mookerjea-Leonard mentions in the preface to Literature, Gender and the Trauma of Partition: The Paradox of Independence starkly bears out this paradox.

Shortly after the All India Muslim League’s call for Direct Action in Calcutta in 1946, the author’s grandfather was stranded in Howrah station as public transport had been suspended in the wake of the sectarian clashes. He eventually got a ride from a kind Muslim family who had a private car, but had to climb on the footboard as the vehicle was full. To ensure his safety, he was given a flag of the Muslim League and advised to shout “Pakistan Zindabad” when passing through Muslim neighbourhoods. He did, and reached his home safely.

The insanity that gripped the subcontinent a year later when India was partitioned has been arduously chronicled in historical archives. In the privileging of journalistic reportage and record-keeping, personal histories surrounding the traumatic event haven’t received much attention until recently. The initiatives of Urvashi Butalia, Ritu Menon, Kamla Bhasin, and Jashodhara Bagchi, among others come to mind.

Mookerjea-Leonard’s book is an important intervention in this regard, not only because of its meticulous research and compelling arguments but because it sits in that nebulous middle – a no man’s land if you will – of fact and fiction. The author examines with incisive rigour fictional works on Partition and juxtaposes them against factual information and recent recordings of oral histories. As someone not directly affected by the event, hers is a lens that is both objective and earnest.

The works discussed in Literature, Gender and the Trauma of Partition are mostly from Bengal, which the author calls the “neglected shelves” of Bengali literature, written by writers from both sides of the Radcliffe divide. As she mentions in the Preface, this book is her tribute to her city, Calcutta. It is also a conscious effort to shine a light on the sufferings of those at the eastern end of the divide, as the tragedy of Partition in Bengal has been either underrepresented or misrepresented when compared to Partition in Punjab. This could well be attributed to, as Mookerjea-Leonard is cognisant of, the predominant and recurrent theme ofdisplacement in the east as opposed to that of horrific violence in the west.

Read the rest in The Wire.

Flickering embers in verse: Of venereal sores and poems that kill: The fiery legacy of Namdeo Dhasal and Amiri Baraka

~ Bhaswati Ghosh ~ Leave a comment
First published in DNA

 

By delving into the poetic oeuvres of Namdeo Dhasal and Amiri Baraka, two towering voices representing the marginal, one comes closer, in a somewhat unsettling way to the lives of the oppressed and the outrage such an existence can cause. With both poets, the blaze of words often leaps off the printed page to singe the reader — with guilt, violence and even catharsis. The similarity doesn’t end there.

Dhasal, the Marathi “underground” poet and Baraka, the Black Arts revolutionary poet, playwright, music historian, find much of their literary ammunition in the life and surroundings in which they are rooted. Poetry for them isn’t about romanticising in tranquillity. Nor is it separate from activism.

“…we want ‘poems that kill’./ Assassin poems, Poems that shoot/ Guns.” — Black Art, Amiri Baraka

Dhasal echoes this idea of poetry being a weapon of protest, without caring much for labels such as political or social poetry. . “…As long as there remain contradictions and conflicts between individual and collective life that affect my feelings, my poetry will be about them,” he says. This rootedness, a sense of where they come from is the constant even as the two men evolve in or deviate from their affiliation to different ideologies over the course of their lives.

In Pur-Kanersar, the village where Dhasal was born and spent part of his childhood, even water — elementally unrestricted — had been divided. The up-river portion of a small river that ran through the village was the exclusive reserve of the privileged castes while the village’s oppressed untouchables were allowed to draw water from only the down-river part.

“Upstream, the water is all for you to take/ Downstream, the water is for us to get/ Bravo! Bravo! How even water is taught the caste system.” — Water, Namdeo Dhasal.

Though separated in age by more than a decade and born in different countries, both Dhasal and Baraka represent larger traditions within their own milieus — traditions of oppressed and dehumanized peoples. Their dissent is not theirs alone — it is a pastiche, if a dissonant one — of the anguished cries, pent up for centuries, within millions belonging to their tribes.

This irrepressible need to break the silence and galvanize the voices of the silenced led these two iconic men to establish socio-political platforms. Disillusioned with the existing framework of racial discourse in America, Baraka became a founding member of the Black Arts Movement, which would lead to many an African-American artist gaining traction in that country’s literary thoroughfare.

“We are beautiful people/ With African imaginations/ full of masks and dances and swelling chants/ with African eyes, and noses, and arms/ tho we sprawl in gray chains in a place/ full of winters, when what we want is sun.” — Ka’Ba, Amiri Baraka

Dhasal’s watershed moment would arrive in 1972. That year Golpitha, his first collection of poems, broke new ground in Marathi poetry, by smashing linguistic and idiomatic barriers, written in, what Dilip Chitre, Dhasal’s long-time translator and friend calls, “an idiolect fashioned in the streets of the red light district of central Mumbai, and from the Mahar dialect…his (Dhasal’s) native tongue.” In the same year, Dhasal also founded Dalit Panther, an organization on the lines of America’s Black Panther, to politically unite Dalits.

The poems in Golpitha sear with rage against suppression on the one hand and the helplessness of those on the receiving end of such systemic oppression on the other. In a tone mnemonic of Baraka’s outburst in Black Art, Dhasal unleashes his furore on the page in Man, You Should Explode.

“F**k the mothers of moneylenders and the stinking rich/ Cut the throat of your own kith and kin by conning them; poison them, jinx them”

Using ostensibly brazen and often crude language, the long poem lambasts symbols of effete aesthetics cherished by the privileged castes and calls for a complete breakdown of existing civil and social norms and structures. All this upheaval isn’t without hope though — in the form of the resulting implosion.

“After this all those who survive should stop robbing anyone or making others their slaves/ After this they should stop calling one another names — white or black, brahmin, kshatriya, vaishya or shudra;… One should regard the sky as one’s grandpa, the earth as one’s grandma/ And coddled by them everybody should bask in mutual love.” — Man, You Should Explode, Namdeo Dhasal

Both Dhasal and Baraka are credited with developing new lexicons geared towards and representing their particular audiences. They both played a seminal role in redrafting the manifesto of their respective agendas — equality for Dalits and that for Blacks.

“If you ever find/ yourself, some where/ lost and surrounded/ by enemies/ who won’t let you/ speak in your own language/ who destroy your statues/ & instruments, who ban/ your omm bomm ba boom/ then you are in trouble/ deep trouble/ they ban your/ own boom ba boom/ you in deep deep/ trouble/ humph!” — Wise I, Amiri Baraka.

Indeed Baraka and Dhasal have both been pioneers in carving out a space for literature from the margins. However, they too had other influential figures to guide them in their quest. If for Baraka it was Malcolm X, whose assassination triggered the Black Arts Movement, for Dhasal, the overarching impact of Dr BR. Ambedkar, himself a Dalit and a champion of equality, is a constant. Time and again, Dhasal invokes Ambedkar in his poems, lamenting how much of what the visionary statesman dreamed still remains unfulfilled.

“You are that Sun, our only charioteer,/ Who descends into us from a vision of sovereign victory, / And accompanies us in fields, in crowds, in processions, and in struggles;/ And saves us from being exploited.” — Ode to Dr Ambedkar, Namdeo Dhasal

Rooted yet restless, armed with deep convictions yet manifesting puzzling contradictions, these two poets of protest have come under criticism for their debatable ideological stances from time to time. Baraka’s pronounced homophobic and anti-Zionist utterances have unsettled readers and critics as much as Dhasal’s support for Indira Gandhi, the Shiv Sena and even the RSS shocked his friends and admirers.

For all the controversy both these poets courted, the depth of their words — smouldering embers in verse — makes them not only significant but indispensable chroniclers of the history, trauma and defiance of the repressed. Even if that entails disturbing refined sensibilities.

“I am a venereal sore in the private parts of language.” — Cruelty, Namdeo Dhasal

“My color/ is not theirs. Lighter, white man/ talk. They shy away. My own/ dead souls, my, so called/ people. Africa/ is a foreign place. You are/ as any other sad man here/ american.” — Notes For a Speech, Amiri Baraka

"I relived my last 25 years while writing this book"

~ Bhaswati Ghosh ~ 4 Comments
Interview with Abhay K, author of River Valley to Silicon Valley. To visit Abhay’s blog, click here:

What inspired you to write River Valley to Silicon Valley? Please share the experience of writing the book with us.

AK: I had made a promise to myself that I should have my own book before I turn 25. I was going to turn 25 on 1st March 2005 and I was so anxious to tell the world that how Indian democracy and economic reforms that are taking place in India are bringing real and concrete changes in the Indian society by citing example of three generations of my own family. I wanted to write this book at this stage of my life and not later because I feared that I’ll lose my innocence and simplicity after getting immersed into the bureaucratic world of which I had become a part after passing the Civil Services Exam in 2003. I also wanted to share my family’s story with millions of young Indians who were in the schools, colleges and universities and inspire them to dream big. I wanted to gift a book to my young friends in India and abroad who struggle every day for a better tomorrow, who do not have a level playing field, who want to move forward overcoming all obstacles.

I wrote this book between November 2005 and February 2006 in Moscow, mostly post mid-night when the city went off to sleep, and I could peacefully take a journey back in time. Those days I was learning the Russian language at the Center of International Education at the Moscow State University and I had to do a lot of assignments everyday. The only spare time I was left with was after the mid-night. I wrote this book almost regularly for four months except the last ten days of December 2005 and a few days in the beginning of January 2005 when I was traveling in Europe with my friends.

There is a saying that writers live twice and I completely agree with that. I relived my last 25 years while writing this book, as flashes of my past played in mind and turned into words on my notebook. Just to add, I was highly inspired by “The Outsider” by Albert Camus and “The Old Man and the Sea” by Ernest Hemingway, not only by the content of these books but also by their size. Both these books have around 100 pages each and are easy to read and carry. I too wanted a small book that was easy to read so that a normal reader would not get scared just looking at its size and had the psychological satisfaction of finishing the book in a few days. Somehow, unnecessary details in some novels irritate me and make the whole experience of reading a very boring for me. What really attracts me is a rich story with a flow without unnecessary details unconnected with the story. This is what I wanted to bring out in my book. I must share with you how overjoyed I felt the day I completed my book even while I had no idea whether it will ever be published. I felt triumphant as perhaps there is no greater joy in life than the joy of creating something. Writing itself can be such a joy if it comes from inside, if one has the feeling that one must write.

I felt the book should be read by every young Indian who dares to dream big. What feedback have you received from the book’s young readers? This would include your brother and your friends.

AK: I have received very encouraging comments and reviews about the book from across the globe. In fact I have collected their comments and reviews like precious diamonds and put them together on my website (www.abhayk.com) for readers. One may read all the comments by clicking on the following link-
http://rivervalleytosiliconvalley.blogspot.com/2007/05/readers-comments-about-river-valley-to.html

Link for the Book Reviews- http://www.abhayk.com/Books.php

Have your parents read the book? If yes, what did they have to say?

AK: The book is dedicated to my great father who passed away in July 2006, but he knew all along about this book. In fact, he is the silent narrator of first few pages as all that I came to know about the life of the first and the second generation of my family was through him. He was a great story teller like my grandma. Sadly, he could not see its publication and release.

My mother is waiting for the Hindi translation of the book to read it. Professor Pushpesh Pant from JNU is working on the Hindi translation, and it should be ready by the end of this year.


How are you marketing the book?

AK: These days I am posted in St. Petersburg as Consul of India, far away from my country and I have left it to the publishers to market the book. A thousand copies of the first edition of the book was printed out of which 500 copies have already been sold.
The book can be ordered from anywhere in the world from Linuxbazar.com clicking at the following link http://www.linuxbazar.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=33_82&products_id=18713
The book can also be purchased from the major bookshops in the big cities of India or can be ordered by writing to Bookwell India at the following address- 24/4800,Ansari Road,Darya Ganj, New Delhi-110002, India, Ph-91-1123268786.

I am thinking of bringing out a second edition of the book with a different publisher by the beginning of the next year. I would welcome suggestions from readers to market “River Valley to Silicon Valley” in a better way.

What other writing/publishing projects are you working on these days?

AK: I have written more than a hundred poems during the last two years of my stay in Moscow. I have sent publishing proposals to a number of Poetry publishers in UK, USA and India. I am still waiting for their reply.

Currently, I am working on two books. They deal with different themes. The first book is based in India and tells the chilling story of a young girl from the beginning to the end. The second book is based in the post-Soviet Russia and explores the psychological undercurrents of the Russian society in recent years.

How did you get your book published?

AK: First time writers have always difficulties in publishing their work, and I had to wait for more than a year after writing the book to get it published. I sent the manuscript of my book to many publishers in India who are still kind enough to receive the book directly from the authors unlike in UK or USA where they only receive manuscripts through literary agents. Most of the publishers in India and literary agents in UK turned it down because they could not find anything sensational in my book. Finally, Bookwell India decided to publish 1,000 copies for of the book in April 2007.

The publishing industry has its own business interests in mind. so for them good writing or average writing do not make a difference if the writing can bring in good money. Thus, today the world may never get to know many good writers and poets whose precious works keep biting dust for years until they are discovered or forever if not discovered. The influence of big budget publishing houses do distort the writing trend in the world as more and more people want to write that has the commercial value and not essentially humane values.

How is “River Valley to Silicon Valley” being received outside India?

AK: The book has been translated into Russian and soon a thousand copies will be printed for young Russian readers.
The book has generated interest in UK, USA, Australia, Poland and South Korea. It is also being translated into Korean by a young Korean who wants to share this Indian story with young South Koreans.

Wole Soyinka

~ Bhaswati Ghosh ~ 2 Comments
Came across a good interview of Wole Soyinka in The Hindu. The Nigerian Nobel laureate makes a couple of thought-provoking points. One: Real writers write, no matter the circumstances they are in or their state of mind at any given point of time. And two, intellectual analysis of a writer’s isolation or persecution often becomes an exercise in fantasizing reality.

He also makes an interesting, if debatable, point on responding to violence with violence.

Read the full interview here.

Subodh Ghosh: Master of Shorts

~ Bhaswati Ghosh ~ 3 Comments
Great storytellers often tell stories that can be adapted for big and small screens. Some write with that idea in mind, others just spin the yarns they must. While the unceasing debate on how sincere the moving picture adaptation is to the written work carries on, I have to admit, I came to know quite a few writers via the moving images. Subodh Ghosh is one of them.
As a regular follower of a televised series of short stories by different Bengali writers aired on one of the Bengali channels here, I noticed the stories that particularly drew me had one thing in common—their author. Subodh Ghosh’s stories would prick the psyche for days, even while other stories had an impression life of just a few hours. Thhagini or The Con Girl was the first of these stories. When I saw it, the story stunned me for its original approach to the oft-done theme of deception. In the story, a father-daughter duo lives off deceiving unsuspecting victims. Their trick is simple—they pose as a family facing abject penury, the father unable to wed his very marriageable daughter. They keep changing neighbourhoods, carrying along the same story. In every area, some kind man takes pity to their situation, and the girl gets married, usually to a prosperous man. Within the next couple of days, she smartly flees the place, not without the cash and jewelry she begets as the new bride. This keeps happening, and even as the police are desperate to catch the father and daughter, Sudha, the girl, actually falls prey to the love of her third “husband”. In bittersweet irony, she flees again and deceives again—only this time, she runs with her husband and cheats no one else, but her father.

Although I thought Thhagini was the first Subodh Ghosh story that moved me to read more of his work, it turns out he had made an impression on me long ago. In the form of Ijazat, Gulzar’s sensitive adaptation of Ghosh’s Jatugriha (Lac House). Later, of course I would watch the Bengali screen version of the film directed by Tapan Sinha, starring Uttam Kumar, equally sensitive and closer to the original story. And years before that, the thoughtful Bimal Roy made one of the finest films out of Sujata, a novel by Ghosh of the same name. To date, Sujata, the film, remains one of my favourites for its perceptive handling of the issue of caste prejudice and for Roy’s delicate portrayal of a woman’s emotions.

Not just Tapan Sinha, Bimal Roy, and Gulzar, but even Ritwik Ghatak turned to Subodh Ghosh’s work for one of his films—Ajantrik. As little as I have read of Bengali literature, Subodh Ghosh got my vote, thanks to the wonderful screen adaptations of his stories by these brilliant directors.

As I read through an anthology of Subodh Ghosh stories, I am impressed by the realism, the extraordinary insight into the quirks of human nature and the way they play out in relationships, and one of the best weapons of a writer–a deft touch of irony.