A translation from Nabendu Ghosh’s autobiography, Eka Naukar Jatri(Journey of a Lonesome Boat), translated by Dipankar Ghosh, from Bengali post scripted by Ratnottama Sengupta. Clickhereto read.
Ueharaby Kamaleswar Barua has been translated from Assamese and introduced by Bikash K. Bhattacharya. Clickhere to read.
Kurigram by Masud Khan has been translated by Professor Fakrul Alam from Bangla. Clickhere to read.
Bonfire by Ihlwha Choi has been translated from Korean by the poet himself. Clickhere to read.
In Indian Pale Ale, Rhys Hughes experiments with words and brews. Click here to read.
Conversation
Being fascinated with the human condition and being vulnerable on the page are the two key elements in the writing of fiction, author and poet Heidi Northtells Keith Lyons in a candid conversation. Clickhere to read.
In Multicultural Curry, Suzanne Kamata reflects on mingling of various cultures in her home in Japan and the acceptance it finds in young hearts. Clickhere to read.
Ratnottama Sengupta explores the poetry in lyrics of Bollywood songs, discussing the Sahityotsav (Literary Festival) hosted by the Sahitya Akademi. Clickhere to read.
Imagine a world without wars, without divisions, where art forms flow into each other and we live by the African concept of Ubuntu — I am because you are’ — sounds idyllic. But this is the month of March, of poetry, of getting in touch with the Dionysian elements in ourselves. And as we have said earlier in the introduction of Monalisa No Longer Smiles: An Anthology of Writings from across the World, what could be a better spot to let loose this insanity of utopian dreams than Borderless Journal!
Having completed three years of our Earthly existence on the 14th of March, we celebrate this month with poetry and writing that crosses boundaries — about films, literature and more. This month in the Festival of Letters or Sahityaotsav 2023, organised by the Sahitya Akademi, films were discussed in conjunction with literature. Ratnottama Sengupta, who attended and participated in a number of these sessions, has given us an essay to show how deep run the lyrics of Bollywood films, where her father, Nabendu Ghosh, scripted legends. It is Ghosh’s birth month too and we carry a translation from his Bengali autobiography which reflects how businessmen drew borders on what sells… After reading the excerpt from Nabendu’s narrative translated by Dipankar Ghosh and post-scripted by Sengupta, one wonders if such lines should ever have been drawn?
Questioning borders of a different kind, we have another piece of a real-life narrative on a Japanese Soldier, Uehara. Written by an Assamese writer called Kamaleswar Barua, it has been translated and introduced by Bikash K. Bhattacharya. The story focusses on a soldier’s narrative at his death bed in an alien land. We are left wondering how his need for love and a home is any different from that of any one of ours? Who are the enemies — the soldiers who die away from their homes? What are wars about? Can people live in peace? They seemed to do so in Kurigram, a land that has faded as suggests the poem by Masud Khan, brought to us in translation from Bangla by Professor Fakrul Alam, though in reality, the area exists. Perhaps, it has changed… as does wood exposed to a bonfire, which has been the subject of a self-translated Korean poem by Ihlwha Choi. Tagore’s poem, Borondalatranslated as ‘Basket of Offerings’, has the last say: “Just as the stars glimmer / With light in the dark night, / A spark awakens within/ My body. / This luminosity illuminates / All my work.” And perhaps, it is this luminosity that will also help us find our ideal world and move towards it, at least with words.
We have a book review by Aruna Chakravarti of Bornali Datta’sIn A Better Place: A Doctor’s Journey, a book that is set amidst immigrants and takes up certain social issues. Baba Padmanji’s Yamuna’s Journey, translated from Marathi by Deepra Dandekar, one of the oldest Indian novels has been discussed by Somdatta Mandal. Bhaskar Parichha has told us about S.Irfan Habib’s Maulana Azad – A Life. Basudhara Roy has brought out the simplicity and elegance of Robin Ngangom’sMy Invented Land: New and Selected Poems. He writes in the title poem that his home “has no boundaries. / At cockcrow one day it found itself/ inside a country to its west,/ (on rainy days it dreams looking east/ when its seditionists fight to liberate it from truth.)”. We also carry an excerpt from his book. Stories by Jessie Michael, Brindley Hallam Dennis, Sangeetha G and Shubhangi bring flavours of diversity in this issue.
Our journey has been a short one — three years is a short span. But, with goodwill from all our readers and contributors, we are starting to crawl towards adulthood. I thank you all as caregivers of Borderless Journal as I do my fabulous team and the artists who leave me astounded at their ability to paint and write — Sohana Manzoor, Gita Vishwanath and Pragya Bajpai.
Thank you all.
Looking forward to the next year, I invite you to savourBorderless Journal, March 2023, where more than the treasures mentioned here lie concealed.
Borondala(Basket of offerings) was written by Tagore in 1928 and published in a collection called Mahua in 1929.
Mahua(1929), named after Madhuca Longifolia, a tropical treeBorondala or basket offerings. Courtesy: Creative Commons
BASKET OF OFFERINGS
Today, in this quiet bower,
Within my being
My offering has grown
Into a garland of light.
In this spring, with climbers
Of leaves and flowers,
My verses waft in the dawn
Of the golden rays.
My whole being dances
Swinging with rhythm.
If this song doesn’t find form
I will die of shame.
Oh beloved, my body reverberates
To the beat.
I have not got you an
external offering,
My prayer flows from my own
Being like a stream.
My heart leaps
Free of my being
Impatiently pleading
A meeting with you.
Just as the stars glimmer
With light in the dark night,
A spark awakens within
My body.
This luminosity illuminates
All my work.
This poem has been translated by Mitali Chakravarty with editorial input from Sohana Manzoor & Anasuya Bhar
PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL
Poem for Joseph
It is never too late to come home.
But I must first find a homeland
where I can find myself,
just a map or even a tree or a stone
to mark a spot I could return to
like an animal lifting his leg
even when there’s nothing to return for.
Although it’s true
that in my native land
children had crawled out of burrows
they had gouged under their hard beds,
long after the grownups had fled
and roofs came apart
like charred heads.
You said you didn’t regret
how ethnic cleansers had palmed
your newly-built home off on a people
well on their trail back to unique blood,
you didn’t mind leaving behind
objects of desire
you had collected over twenty-five years,
or, how you came to live in a rented room
with your wife and children
in dog-eat-dog Imphal,
among the callous tribe
I call my own.
Only the photographs you mourned,
the beloved sepia of a family tree,
since you’re the reason why your fathers lived;
but who’ll believe now
that you lived at all?
After ‘Jashn-e-Azadi’
(a film on Kashmir by Sanjay Kak)
The kite transforming into smoke lacing
the chinars is not a symbol.
The rose has migrated from the garden of paradise.
Freedom will never come
poured into goblets waiting to be raised,
Martyrdom is a handout from the hagiographer.
Only poetry of ruins is real.
The incoherent rose still blooms
from some beloved breast torn open.
The First Rain
The first rain like the first letter of May
brings news to the hills.
Perched like the houses on the edge of a cliff
I’ve lived more days in exile
than years of my poor childhood.
As a fumbling fifteen-year-old
I abandoned my forward-looking native people
who entrusted terror, drugs and
a civilized plague to children.
Is it better to rejoice and forget
or to remember and be sad?
Only a foolish boy cannot wait to be a man,
adores winter, and leaves home to write poetry.
After the holocaust became a touchstone
we can indict an erring people
and make culture and carnage co-exist.
If I told you how babies have been shot down
from their mothers’ breasts
you would put it down to a poet’s overworked heart
but we like to believe in leaders who flock to the capital
An animal threatened with extinction
needs a lair for his mate and his young,
I’m not different.
I need the morning for its bright blood
and I need to seize the night.
There was not a day that changed my days.
When I listen to hills
I hear the voices of my faded life.
Whisky and Mehdi Hassan and Billie Holiday
make for strange fruit on nondescript evenings.
They can stop us but not our thoughts
from coming out into the streets,
they can shoot us but cannot kill the air
which carries our voices.
O my love, you are still asleep
when the rain carries the night till dawn.
After lying down with dreams of you
I awake in another day of bread and newspapers.
I’m banished to the last outpost of a dying empire
whose keepsakes have become the artefacts of the natives:
necklaces, pianos, lace and tombstones.
I’ve pursued horoscopes and
only promises and maledictions pursue me.
One day Venus was mine, joy and honey,
another day Saturn would not be propitiated.
I found a moment’s peace
in my little daughter’s face.
Before I met you
my dreams were limited by ignorance.
Sometimes at night
I put two drops of our past in my eyes
but they refused to close.
Can poetry be smuggled like guns or drugs?
We’ve drawn our borders with blood.
Even to write in our mother tongue
we cut open veins and our tongues
lick parchments with blood.
I read my smuggled Neruda
and sometimes listen to the fading fiddles
and the mourning voices of my land.
I’m the anguish of slashed roots,
the fear of the homeless,
and the desperation of former kisses.
How much land does my enemy need?
O my love, why did you fade
into the obscurity of my life
and leave me to look long at the mountain?
I’m the pain of slashed roots
and the last rain is already here.
I’ll leave the cracked fields of my land
and its weeping pastures of daybreak.
Let wolves tear our beloved hills.
I’ll leave the bamboo flowering
in the groves of my childhood.
Let rats gnaw at the supine map
of what was once my native land.
Native Land
First came the scream of the dying
in a bad dream, then the radio report,
and a newspaper: six shot dead, twenty-five
houses razed, sixteen beheaded with hands tied
behind their backs inside a church…
As the days crumbled, and the victors
and their victims grew in number,
I hardened inside my thickening hide,
until I lost my tenuous humanity.
I ceased thinking
of abandoned children inside blazing huts
still waiting for their parents.
If they remembered their grandmother’s tales
of many winter hearths at the hour
of sleeping death, I didn’t want to know,
if they ever learnt the magic of letters.
And the women heavy with seed,
their soft bodies mowed down
like grain stalk during their lyric harvests;
if they wore wildflowers in their hair
while they waited for their men,
I didn’t care anymore.
Extracted from My Invented Land: New and Selected Poems by Robin S. Ngangom. Published by Speaking Tiger Books, 2023.
About the Book
Robin S. Ngangom’s poetry is the poetry of feeling, which draws the reader deep into the poet’s world. The poems in My Invented Land showcase Ngangom’s remarkable range—tracing his poetic arc from the deeply personal to the political, from chronicles of private joys, sorrows and everyday epiphanies to the poetry of witness that gazes unflinchingly at the realities that haunt the Northeast, his native land.
About the Author
Born in 1959 in Imphal, Manipur, Robin S. Ngangom is a bilingual poet and translator who writes in English and Manipuri. After completing his high school in Imphal he studied English literature at Shillong’s St Edmund’s College and the North-Eastern Hill University where he currently teaches. His first collection, Words and the Silence, was published in 1988 and since then, he has published two more volumes of poetry and a book of translations. He was invited to the UK Year of Literature and Writing in 1995, has read his poems at literary events in India and abroad, and his poems have appeared in several prestigious anthologies and magazines. He has also co-edited two significant anthologies of poetry from Northeast India.
Click here to read the review
PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL.
Into the myriad-doored faith of poetry, there are manifold ways to arrive. Some come to it for respite, some for resuscitation, some for refuge. To a lot of us, poetry is therapeutic; to many others, an arsenal; to yet others, an immortal witness. Through what door one seeks admission into poetry’s realm is important for the way poetry will speak to us and the kind of poetry we will, in turn, create.
To Robin Ngangom, poetry manifests itself as both companion and quest, currency in circulation and archive, vision and the language to communicate the thought. “Poetry cannot help anyone to get on in life,” he writes, “or make a successful human being out of anyone. But poetry should move us; it should change us in such a manner that we remain no longer the same after we’ve read a meaningful poem.” (‘Introduction’) As necessary, as native, and as effortless to him as breath, Ngangom’s poetry bespeaks an honest and wholehearted engagement with life that is rare.
My Invented Land: New and Selected Poems recently brought out by Speaking Tiger Books is Ngangom’s fourth poetry collection. Containing an admirable selection of his work from his three earlier collections Words and the Silence (1988), Time’s Crossroads (1994) and The Desire of Roots (2006) along with more than thirty new poems, this volume brings to us a fascinating diachronic document of Ngangom’s steady journey in and with poetry over the last thirty-five years. For readers familiar with his work, this volume is an asset. For those who wish to make an acquaintance with it, the book will be indispensable and an immensely appealing starting point.
In reading Ngangom’s poems, one is pleasantly startled, each time, by his distilled sensibility, his linguistic finesse and his inimitable lyrical fecundity. Simplicity is the catchword of these poems. One would be hard put to identify any posturing in Ngangom’s poetry. There are no mirages here, no postmodernist obsession with camouflage, no cautious construction of the self or deliberated distance between poet-observer-speaker. Personality, in fact, is such an important accompaniment of these poems that it casts each poem in the resolutely warm light of its familiarity, meeting in poem after poem, an expectation unarticulated but answered.
Self, land and poetry constitute an essential thematic triangle in My Invented Land – each theme inevitably leading to the other. For Ngangom, there is no poetry apart from the existential rootedness of the self in (home)land, this relationship being both a prism and a prison through which his sensibility is reflected upon the world – “But where can one run from the homeland,/ where can I flee from your love?” (‘The Strange Affair of Robin S. Ngangom’) In the best of times, this bond with the land becomes one of gratitude; in spans of torment, a burden he cannot do without; and during moments of reflection, an agonising search as in ‘Poem for Joseph’:
It is never too late to come home.
But I must first find a homeland
where I can find myself,
just a map or even a tree or a stone
to mark a spot I could return to
like an animal lifting his leg
even when there’s nothing to return for.
Even love and its exploration through adolescence into manhood which is an important concern in Ngangom’s poetry, finds its expression in the distinct foreground and background of the landscape, so much so that be(love)d and land become one:
Maternal earth,
generous and callous.
You untouchable then,
and invulnerable now;
all your instincts
rearranged with
your scattered hair.
Were I to trace
my name on your frosted mirror
you would quickly efface it with your breath. (‘Age and Memory’)
There is no denying the sharp political edge of this poetry, its inveterate honesty and its essential inability to water down the truth with fancy or idealism. In ‘To Pacha’, a moving elegy to Pacha Meetei, one of Manipur’s finest writers, Ngangom writes:
There are no more tears to shed
in this withered country where they
kill pregnant women and children; its
nipples have long gone dry, and leering
death walks your homeland.
In ‘The Strange Affair of Robin S. Ngangom’, patriotism is “admiring the youth who fondles grenades,/ patriotism is proclaiming all men as brothers/ and secretly depriving my brother,/ patriotism is playing the music of guns/ to the child in the womb.” ‘My Invented Land’ writes home as “a gun/ pressed against both temples/ a knock on a night that has not ended/ a torch lit long after the theft/ a sonnet about body counts/ undoubtedly raped/ definitely abandoned/ in a tryst with destiny.” The uneasiness between homeland and nation is a palpable presence in the telling use of the phrase ‘tryst with destiny’ as it is in many of the poems in this book. The golden jubilee of the nation’s independence becomes, in ‘15 August 2008, Northeast India’, “fifty years of discrimination festering in the periphery/ with another anniversary of murder and disappearances.” In ‘My Invented Land’, the homeland “has no boundaries./ At cockcrow one day it found itself/ inside a country to its west,/ (on rainy days it dreams looking east/ when its seditionists fight to liberate it from truth.)”
But this is not poetry of writing back, of witness, of resistance or of conscious activism. My Invented Land is poetry of observation, of quiet but ceaseless self-exploration and self-assessment (the land being an inalienable unit of the self and vice-versa), of lament and of agonis
ed truth-seeking with “only one pair of shoes/ but many roads” (‘Saint Edmund’s College’). One marvels at the beauty of the title, an apposite image for a body of poems that is invested so completely in poetry as this essentially nourishing collection of eighty-two poems is. This invented land, one realises, is as much Imphal or Manipur or Shillong or the Northeast of India as it is the land of memory, imagination, hope, language and poetry.
One must take special note of Ngangom’s deftness with language in this collection, his mastery over its opulence and crisis, its headiness and its insomnia, its velocity and meditativeness. Much of his poetry is pointedly and joyously literal with little need of metaphor to expand or accentuate his ideas. However, his language arrives from such depth in the soul that lyricism and beauty are innate to it, deluging the reader with an unsurmised assertion of its grandeur in a poem like ‘Laitlum’ for instance:
I want to be converted amongst houses kneeling
in the thick of firs of former lives,
randomly built without electricity.
It is characteristic of Ngangom to lift what would be, in most hands, a random assortment of prosaic moments and to elevate it, with his heightened attention, into iridescent poetry. Observe the following lines from ‘Street Life’:
I’ve had decadence forced on me.
I let the rain waste my day, and arriving
at streets that do not even know my name
I take off just like that, waving to silhouettes,
buying drinks for anyone, even primates
for whom I have no great regard, hating the houses
which warn of dogs instead of welcoming me.
The new poems in this collection, while retaining a spiritual connect with the poet’s earlier work, branches off into greater profundity. Marked by the loneliness, uncertainty and despair of the Pandemic, the language has grown quieter and more serene so that a metaphysical restlessness animates these poems, quiet unlike the earlier ones – “All voyages will be inward from now,” (‘September’) The language of realism mutates here into unexpected symbols and uneasy images that haunt. ‘Postcard’ written for Jayanta Mahapatra finds “ghosts leaving friends on the road”; in ‘Home’, a river swirled with “brown waters/ until it died, strangled by garbage”; in ‘Flight’, “The most vulnerable will sell bodies./ Because in spite of the landmines/ they still shared limbs.”
But despite Ngangom’s disquiet with the world and his unceasing inquest into its maladies, love remains his avowed and timeless panacea. It is in and through love that human life acquires redemption and as one moves through the collection, one perceives it watermarked by love of many kinds – amorous, passionate, seductive, lustful, nostalgic, mythic, idyllic, ecological, fraternal and forgiving. Every despondency, for the poet, springs from an absence of love and can find an effective resolution in love – love for the beloved, for the homeland, for one’s brethren, for humanity, for poetry, and above all, for love itself. “…someone who cannot love is always alone,” he writes in his ‘Introduction’. In ‘Day’, he prays for the Pandemic’s end so that “a primeval need/ may be restored to us:/ the ability to hold another/ before the day ends.” The all-embracive and sustaining religion of love that leads him to fashion each word “from a private hurt”’ (‘Introduction’) can alone right the balance. In ‘January’, for instance, he believes that “If anyone were so much as to mention a word like ‘love’/ everything will fall quietly again as snow.”
Poetry, according to Ngangom, “should not merely amuse us or make us think: it should comfort us, and it must heal the heart of man.” (‘Introduction’) With a brilliant introductory essay by the poet (that makes one desperately wish there were more such essays by Indian English poets on their vision and craft) and its timeless verses, My Invented Land accomplishes this and more with poise, grace and an unquestionable claim to the glory of its writer in the canon of Indian English poetry, his committed pilgrimage in verse promising to be an inspiration for many poets to come.
Basudhara Roy teaches English at Karim City College affiliated to Kolhan University, Chaibasa. Author of three collections of poems, her latest work has been featured in EPW, The Pine Cone Review, Live Wire, Lucy Writers Platform, Setu and The Aleph Review among others.
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PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL
Ratnottama Senguptaexplores the poetry in lyrics of Bollywood songs and scans the title song of the Hindi film, Guide, to conclude that a film song can be more than a lyric, a screenplay…
“If you want to be famous, do not write screenplays,” Jean Claude Carriere once told film students in a workshop. The legendary screen writer could have just as well said, ‘Do not write for films!’ For, it is the same story for lyricists as well. The better a film and performance of the actors, the less people remember the writer. Similarly, the better the rendition of a song, listeners remember it by the voice that rendered it — the singer; the man who scored the music, the actors who embodied the persona; or the film for which it was written. Seldom do people remember or even know who had penned the ditty that has got woven into the warp and weft of not only the script but, over time, of our life!
Festival of Letters 2023. Photo: Ratnottama Sengupta
So where’s the question of according them the literary status of a poet? Yet, speaking in Sahityotsav 2023 – the Festival of Letters hosted March 11-16 by Sahitya Akademi, India’s national council for literature, Tamil lyricist Vairamuthu refuted that there is no literary value in writing for cinema. “Yes, in a commercial art like cinema, everything cannot be literature, but surely literature is not utterly absent!” The seven times National Film Award winner admits that all movie songs are not poetry but he is ready to tussle with those who demean songs by saying they do not have the charm or aesthetic of poetry.
Kavithaigal Vairamuthu at Sahityotsav. Photo: Ratnottama SenguptaRatnottama Sengupta chairing the session on Cinema and Literature. Photo provided by the author
The role of songs in cinema is different, and therefore the aesthetics is different from that of poetry, the celebrated song-writer elaborates. “Lyrics are written to fit into a script; a character; and a social clime. So a lyricist has to bow to politics, humanities and sociology. And still a film song becomes a feast for the tastes of common people, because it contains in its folds the seeds of nuanced literature.” When a poet becomes a lyricist, he does not have the same freedom: his imagination is bound by the barriers of melody. He has the added responsibility of creating poetry by overcoming the constraints of the situation and the tune scored to heighten the emotion of the moment. When the lyrics of a song transcends these constraints it attains the heights of aesthetics, not necessarily of poetry but of its own particular identity. “Why must banana be described as poor man’s apple?” Vairamuthu poses.
*
I can recall countless songs that fit the bill of poetry. But, as I prepared to speak to Film Appreciation students of the Film and Television Institute of India on Literature in Cinema, it struck me that some songs track a different course and go on to presage the yet-to-unfold narrative, or even the final resolution of the film. And, in doing so, they sometimes equate the screenplay. Here I can readily mention two songs, both penned by Shailendra for two films released in 1966. One is the Mahua Ghatwarin song from Teesri Kasam (The Third Vow). In it Hiraman, a bullock-cart driver, recounts the story of Mahua who is sold off for money by her own family to Hirabai, the Nautanki dancer, who eventually defies that fate. The second is the title song of Guide, directed by Vijay Anand with Dev Anand and Waheeda Rehman leading the cast, which I will scan today.
Published in 1958, won the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1960
… A book brought out by film scholars and admirers of the film
R K Narayanan’s masterpiece was a rather unusual story for a Hindi film made so many years ago. The fact is that it started as a Hollywood venture. Pearl S Buck, the first woman to win the Pulitzer award with The Good Earth, was the screen writer for the English version. Unfortunately, that reached neither here nor there. The Hindi version, on the other hand, turned out to be a cult film – particularly for its unmatched songs and dances that were shorn off for the Hollywood version. Just goes to show how integral song and dance are to Indian life.
Genius, they say, always evokes admiration and provokes curiosity. My attention to this song was drawn when a handful of cine lovers got together to understand why its unconventional profiling of adultery succeed in tradition-bound India when it failed miserably in the ‘advanced’ society that is Hollywood? Both the versions had the same plot, nearly the same cast and crew, and yet the difference was stunning. Their urge to analyse its extraordinariness led Blue Pencil to publish Guide The Film: Perspectives. And, while answering interviewer Antara Nanda Mandal, I realised how Wahan kaun hai tera is unique in the way it knits the past with the future of the character, grafting a seamless flow of flashbacks and offering a glimpse of the narrative as it will unravel on its way to the finale…
The story goes that Dev Anand and his brother Vijay Anand had approached Shailendra when the film was almost ready. Not being in a particularly obligatory mood, he demanded a fortune– Rs 1 lakh. Nearly 60 years ago, this was indeed a king’s ransom but without batting an eyelid, the producer-director duo of Navketan Films agreed – after all, they needed a mounting fit for the epic that was at once radical and traditional. And, set to music by Sachin Dev Burman, what a memorable number it turned out to be!
A brief synopsis of the film based on a 1958 novel: Freelance guide Raju meets Rosie, the daughter of a nautch girl married to Marko, a wealthy archaeologist who is a philanderer. But dancing in public was not only infra dig back then, it was an absolute no-no. Dancers were regarded as social outcasts, little better than prostitutes. One day, after a showdown with her womanising husband, Rosie seeks relief in a burst of Kalbelia, the dance of Rajasthan’s snake charmers, in the marketplace. As Raju watches her hypnotic passion, he is convinced that dance is Rosie’s calling, and he convinces her to leave Marko and move in with him. The repercussions? His mother leaves home, he is ostracised in the small town, he starts losing customers. But acting as her manager, Raju establishes Rosie as a star on the dance stage. However, without the bonding of marriage to hold them together they start to drift apart. Raju feels insecure because of her fame and fortune, and is jealous when Marko sends a cheque for her. To keep him away, he forges Rosie’s signature and is forced to go to jail.
Thus far is a ‘flashback’ – the film opens on the day of his release. Both Rosie and his mother arrive only to learn that he was released six months before his term. Narayanan’s multi-layered narrative now follows Raju who, disillusioned by Rosie’s reluctance to protect him, had set off by himself on an uncharted course towards a bleak future. Along the way he joins an itinerant group of sadhus and travels till he reaches a small village that spent many monsoons facing drought. There he finds shelter in a derelict temple, and the unshaven wanderer is mistaken for an ascetic. The simple villagers flock around him to unburden their woes as he offers them the wisdom rising out of his churnings. That becomes their solace, and soon they believe he’s a Sadhu sent for their deliverance. This takes the form of an announcement: the Saint will starve himself until the skies relent and relieve the villagers from the scourge of drought!
Will Raju, an outcast with a criminal past, now act like a mere mortal and devour the offerings for the gods? Or will he live up to their faith and find redemption by making possible the impossible? Let’s study how the title song prepares the viewers for this mature narrative to unspool.
The song opens with one single string of sitar that goes on playing almost discordant notes. So you are not lured in by a melodious tune or tarana until the signature voice of Sachin Dev Burman breaks in, forcing you to follow the words. They don’t necessarily match the action on the screen which has a man coming out of a jail, pausing at a crossroad that points to the city, then walking in the opposite direction that gradually leads him into an unknown terrain of wilderness and desolation.
As the protagonist keeps walking and the titles appear, the song goes into its successive paras, and you realise that it is a song that could not have belonged to any other film. Nor was it an add-on number that you could take out if you so wished, without impacting the film negatively. For, the song is a planned part of the script and serves as an index to the narrative that will unfold in the next couple of hours.
It strings together glimpses of the past, the present and perhaps the future, in a way that resembles joining a musafir, a traveller, on the highway, to keep pace with him, strike up a conversation, and before long, you have plunged into his life. Your curiosity is aroused and you want to know why he was jailed and what will befall now when a criminal is mistaken to be a Swami, a sage, who must prove himself to be a saint, no less, so as not to destroy the faith of the trusting villagers. In doing so, the song becomes an index for the actions that will make the characters.
What is a more, it prepares the viewer for an unconventional structuring of the narrative which opens with the Epilogue, where the convicted becomes Conscience keeper; resorts to the flashback technique and reverts to the prologue, where a frustrated Rosie repeatedly attempts suicide; and then arrives at the main drama between the Guide and the Dancer. He, who helped her come out of her failed marriage and ride the crest of success in her dream career; She, who fails to plumb the depth of emotion in the man who loved her so much that he commits a crime rather than risk losing her to her legal husband.
Anyone waiting for you out there?!
Oh wanderer
Which way are you headed?
Come, rest a while here,
This bower's a shelter of greens
You will find nowhere...
Days untold have passed.
Those fleeting moments, those
Boundless nights of love,
They're but a dream
They've forgotten...
Why not you??
Those encounters, trysts of love!
Pitch dark, as far as your eyes go...
Where are you headed, wayfarer?
Not a soul's watching out for you.
No eye's on the winding road
Waiting for a sight of you.
No one squirmed when
You were in pain,
Not an eye shed tears...
So who is your dear,
Drifter? Where to...??
You guided them on their way.
Now you, Guide,
Have lost your way?!
You eased the knots in their lives,
Now you are twined in threads!
Why, oh why??
Why swings the charmer,
Not the serpent,
To the music of the Been?
Words of wisdom from the ancients:
This world's but a writing
On the face of a stream!
Watch 'em all, know it all but
No, don't belong to One...
Bonding is not for you, nor for me
Ambler... Where are you off to?
(Transliteration by Ratnottama Sengupta of the original lyrics by Shailendra that can be found below)
Wahan kaun hai tera, Musafir, jayega kahaan?
Dum le le, dum le le ghari bhar, Yeh chhaiyya payega kahan...
Beet gaye din pyar ke palchhin, Sapna bani woh ratein...
Bhool gaye woh, tu bhi bhoola de, Pyar ki woh mulaqatein!
Sab door andhera, Musafir, jayega kahaan?
Koi bhi teri raah na dekhe, Nain bichhaye na koi,
Dard se tere koi na tarpa, Aankh kisi ki na roi...
Kahe kisko tu mera, Musafir, jaayega kahaan?
Tuney toh sabko raah bataayi, Tu apni manzil kyoon bhoola?
Suljha ke raja, auron ki uljhan, Kyoon kachhe dhaagon mein bhoola?
Kyoon naache sapera, Musafir, jaayega kahaan!
Kehte hain gyaani, duniya hai paani, Paani pe likhi likhaai,
Hai sab ki dekhi, hai sab ki jaani, Haath kisi ke na aayi...
Kuchh tera na mera, Musafir jaayega kahaan?
Here, I must stress that Guide would not be the evergreen film it is sans the songs and dances. In particular, this opening number places the story in its context. Everytime it plays.
Sapna bani woh raatein… the dizzy heights of love, fame, riches that did not last, alas! Night is what Rosie will celebrate when she sings, Raat ko jab chaand chamke, jal uthe tan mera… And Raju will lament, Din dhal jaaye haay, raat na jaaye…
Koi bhi teri raah na dekhe, bhool gaye woh tu bhi bhoola de… endless roads, journeys on bus, on tonga, on foot, over hills, dales, and forests… matching his state of mind.
Dard se tera koi na tarpa, aankh kisi ki na roi… One word of denial from Rosie and he would not have been convicted of forgery, but she simply watches him being taken into custody! Later, this would be echoed in the divergent perspectives of the twin numbers – Kya se kya ho gaya bewafa tere pyaar mein, Oh what have I not undergone by falling in love with a loveless woman, he sings while she dances to Mosey chhal kiye jaay, haay re haay! Saiyaan beimaan, Oh how he fakes love, my faithless lover!
Tuney toh sabko raah dikhaayi, tu apni manzil kyoon bhoola … Raju guide, how could you – who took others to their destination – forget your own and get waylaid?! For plain love?
And then the remarkable twist: Kyoon naache sapera! The snake swings to the tune of the snake-charmer; how come your tale is reversed? It could be the voice of destiny commenting on what has transpired in the life of the guide. This imagery in particular is so unique that celebrated lyricist Javed Akhtar is reported to have said, “The day I pen a line like this, I will become a poet!”
Then, look at the layers within these three words. Both naach and sapera will be seen to be crucial motifs in the film. Rosie, born to a dancer, sought respectability through marriage but is stifled because it takes dance out of her life. The guide realises her passion when she dances the snake dance in the market; Raju establishes Rosie as a star performing artiste and not a mere homemaker, his ghar ki rani...
For me, the ultimate irony lies in the words, Kehte hain gyaani, duniya hai paani, paani mein likhi likhaayi.. The temporal world is ephemeral, much like words written on water. So, belong not, to anyone! And yet, it is the want of this very element — water — that will put his will to test, and ultimately claim his life. For, Swami must expiate for Raju Guide’s lapses, and when his followers are praying Allah megh de, paani de/ Send us the clouds, the rains, the droplets of water O Lord, he must fight the temptation to devour even a morsel, and be rewarded for it by a downpour in the parched land.
How remarkably does philosophy dovetail into poetry!
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Ratnottama Sengupta, formerly Arts Editor of The Times of India, teaches mass communication and film appreciation, curates film festivals and art exhibitions, and translates and write books. She has been a member of CBFC, served on the National Film Awards jury and has herself won a National Award.
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(On the day slavery was abolished members of the armystarted to climb Le Morne Brabant with the intentionof telling the slaves that they were free [1]but—)
Gasping between egg-like boulders on the mountain cliff,
she could hear the rustling in the forest again. Thoughts
of recapture tortured her. Her dreams panicked.
When she heard a stick snap under one officer’s boot,
bondage stabbed at her bosom—bluer, bitterer.
The rustling came closer. Far too close.
She leapt gracefully to meet the other eight
who had showered into The Valley of Bones*
like cold raindrops, wishing to wake up
somewhere else, anywhere else.
Her legs pedalling, her shout
bold and free, blissful and final,
her unborn baby safe under her rugged rags,
she was about to splash on the ground like a rotten pumpkin.
It was a mistake, an aberration. She
boomeranged to the cliff like a rocket
and stopped those who jumped before and after her.
They tasted the news of their freedom together.
She then recovered her husband cocooned in a cave
and they fast-forwarded to Trou Chenille**
where the soil turned into a hut, the hut into
ripples of relief that sank into their scars.
Waking up to the sea changing into the sky,
she watched him build the crab trap,
smiling, straw-hatted, growing younger day by day.
And their evening often hatched into a sega
of unheard agonies, of unfelt pleasures,
their child playing hide and seek with her friends,
ever curious about her mother’s soft, bulging belly.
* Where slaves who jumped off Le Morne’s western cliff face met their end
** The first village to be inhabited by freed slaves
Amit Parmessur is from Quatre-Bornes, Mauritius. He spent his adolescence hating poetry before falling in love with its beauty. His poems have appeared in several online magazines, namely The Rye Whiskey Review, Night Garden Journal, Hobo Camp Review, Ann Arbor Review and Ethos Literary Journal.
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TEARS
Lacrimal glands creating
Basal, emotional, and reflex tears
They say are good for your eyes.
The hypostases of three
In a washtub of emotional water
Overflowing with sad memories.
The misery of life within,
when a memory of you evaporates like
Leaves migrating in the wind.
Your name on my lips, aching
to talk to you again in the
Quiet moods when I forgot the words.
ABANDONED
I see you everyday
Standing alone, a roadside sentinel
Quiet, lonely and unassuming
In a psychological time
Of lived and remembered
Experiences long ago
Hulking awkwardly and
Out of place
Ravaged by nature and neglect
The sun plunging down
Into empty windows as
Ghosts peer out
In the darkness
Pressed from the
Inside calling the spectators
Decaying in slow drips
On a cruel timeline marching
Onward to becoming forgotten.
ATARAXIA
Time to enter the Epicurean Garden
A buffer to the Zephyrs blowing of
Obscurantist voices impregnating
The innocents huddled in ignorance.
Tranquil pleasures-
Procreative purpose-
In an atomic swerve
Filling desolate emptiness
Looking for less what’s there
Then what was truly missing.
BLUE HORNS
Georgian avant-garde experimentation
Intricate words constructed
As the great purge continued in
A fire burning rain of hopelessness.
A coterie of youthful hands
Joined at the pens of doom.
Symbolist Revolutions ringing with
Attacks on the flag of Realism.
Sonorous prophet, verses evaporating.
In the Soviet frozen sins evoking
Death sentences, suicides,
Resurrected in a poetic afterlife.
One survived, one for us
Honour his name, in the literary cemetery.
Giorgi Leonidze entered into
His eternal time for rest.
{The Blue Horns was a group of Georgian Symbolist poets and prose-writers which dominated the Georgian literature in the 1920s. It was founded in 1915 and was suppressed under the Soviet rule early in the 1930s.
The only member of the Blue Horns movement who has survived the Great Purge was Giorgi Leonidze.}
Carl Scharwath has appeared globally with 175+ journals selecting his writing or art. Carl has published three poetry books and his latest book “Playground of Destiny.”
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From Nabendu Ghosh’s autobiography, Eka Naukar Jatri / Journey of a Lonesome Boat, translated by Dipankar Ghosh, post scripted by Ratnottama Sengupta
Eka Naukar Jatri or Journey of a Lonesome BoatNabendu Ghosh at work. Photo provided by Ratnottama Sengupta
By now it had become common knowledge in the Bombay film community that Bimal Roy had brought along a “writer” with his group, and apparently he was quite a decent writer. Just as, at one time, Urdu writer Sadat Hasan Manto had come to Bombay Talkies, and Urdu writer Krishan Chander too had come on the scene. There was a feeling that there might be a chance of acquiring a decent storyline from Nabendu Ghosh. Naturally, for a while quite a few producers and film directors contacted me. Story sessions were held at Van Vihar, or at the offices of the producers concerned. but there seemed to be a lack of appreciation from these people to stories that came from the mind of an alumni of the Progressive Writers Association. They were all of the opinion, “The idea is great Ghosh Babu, but it is too idealistic. Dada we want to make movies with Dev Anand and Geeta Bali, accompanied by Johnny Walker and Yakub (comedians of the time). Please tell us stories where we can incorporate them, rather than literary stories.”
Realisation soon dawned on me that the Hindi ‘filmy kahani’ was a different genre of stories. What kind of stories? In short, stories that would be appreciated by 90 percent of viewers from different states, with different tastes, all over India. Hence even a highly educated producer like S Mukherji heard the story of Baap Beti and said: “It’s a nice story but I won’t make it – I’m a businessman”! In other words the businessman had a different slant on dramatic arts: they might well say that “Bicycle Thieves is a great film but an undoable story, I’m a businessman.”
Later, on one occasion I had asked Mr Mukherjee, “You said ‘No’ to Baap Beti, yet you wanted to film the literary story, Mrit Pradip. Why was that?” Mr Mukherjee laughed. “If there is an indication of high literary merit in a story then it might well be conducive to our business, and might turn a ‘hit’ picture into a superhit.” I asked, “Does that mean a ‘hit’ is quantifiable?”
“Of course it is!” he replied. “Just as any tasty dish needs some specific spices to make it tasty.”
“But what about the healthiness of the dish? Isn’t that a consideration?”
“Nabendu Babu, I am not into the medical business.”
“Does it follow that you will cater to the mass’s addiction for entertainment without upholding the essential ideals of life?”
“I do that Nabendu Babu but in very low doses,” said S.Mukherjee. “I follow the principles of dramatic arts as laid down in Natya Shastra but I don’t profess to be a saintly sadhu. I am a very ordinary person in pursuit of happiness.”
He guffawed loudly for a bit. Then he said, “The spices I need for my ‘cinema-dish’ are these. First, the story: usually should be about love. Second: five or six memorable ‘love scenes’ or warm situations, full of fun, lovers tiffs, misunderstanding, separation and reunion. Third: obstacles to love, by a person, family or enemy. That contributes to tension or anxiety. Fourth: four to five moments of suspense: some conspiracy, someone chasing the lovers, trying to kill them. Fifth: comic moments, not mildly humorous but uproariously funny so that people roll around in bouts of laughter. Sixth: moments of tear-jerking sadness. Seventh: Fight scenes, each being individual in itself. Eighth: five to six melodious songs, of which two or three should be such that even persons with no music sense can sing them. Ninth: appropriate selection of actors and actresses. Tenth: a good director and a good music director. Finally: the right planetary configuration for audience’s applause.” Mr Mukherjee laughed out loud.
His words got entrenched in my mind. The successful ‘formula’ for a Hindi film! In other words it was the formula of a Hindi village Nautanki, no different from the Jatra formula of rural Bengal. Of a hundred films made by that formula, even if two managed to enlighten the mind or uplift the spirit, that would be an icing on the golden cake – “sone pe suhaga”. And if there was no icing, the gold that clinked in would be good enough gain, and two and a half hours will pass away in laughter and tears, in suspense and romance, with joyous humming of a few bars of melody as viewers return home to deep slumber, dreaming of the handsome features of a hero or heroine that will tickle their fancy and prove the worth of the newly invented form of art – cinema. In particular, the magic of Hindi movies.
Therefore, I decided to write or adapt stories and ideas to comply with the mandates of the Formula. Whatever good ideas came along, whether in five pages or five hundred, I would fit into two and a half hours, either by extending or shortening in a fast flowing format that would leave the viewer wondering what’s next at every turn. In other words, I would write screenplays of a different kind.
And since I was unable to uphold the higher ideals of literature on the silver screen, I would compensate for it by writing for literature. I would thereby absolve myself of my sense of guilt.
In 1952, when Nabendu Ghosh was narrating his story, Baap Beti, Sashadhar Mukherjee (1909-1990) was a highly successful producer who had set up Filmistan Studios in 1943 along with his brother-in-law, the legendary actor Ashok Kumar; Rai Bahadur Chunilal, father of music director Madan Mohan; and Gyan Mukherjee, director of the superhit Kismet. These personalities had broken away from Bombay Talkies after the death of its founder, Himanshu Rai.
Later in the 1950s, S Mukherjee independently started Filmalaya, noted for films like Dil Deke Dekho (1959), Love in Simla (1960), Ek Musafir Ek Hasina (1962) and Leader (1964). He is also recognised as the patriarch of the distinguished Mukherjee clan of Bollywood that boasts actors like Joy Mukherjee, Deb Mukherjee, Tanuja, Kajol, and Rani Mukherjee.
And Baap Beti? It got made into a film produced by another highly successful producer of the times, S H Munshi. Directed by celluloid master Bimal Roy, it had brought a host of child artistes who went on to become big names of the Hindi screen: Tabassum (1944-2022), who passed away in November; Asha Parekh (2 October 1942), who was bestowed with the Dadasaheb Phalke Award last year, and Naaz (1944-1995), besides Ranjan (1918-1983), the swashbuckling actor from the South.
As he writes in his autobiography, after this conversation Nabendu Ghosh took a conscious decision to write his own realisations as literature, and to adapt stories by other writers for the screen. That is why we find that less than 10 per cent of the films he scripted are from his own stories. But some major directors did draw upon his stories – as Bimal Roy did for Baap Beti; Gyan Mukherjee for Shatranj (1956), Satyen Bose for Jyot Jale (1973), Mohan Sehgal for Raja Jani (1972) and Ajoy Kar for Kayahiner Kahini (1973). Only one classic that used his story but did not credit it to Nabendu Ghosh was Guru Dutt’s Kaagaz Ke Phool (1959).
Nabendu Ghosh with his son, Dipankar Ghosh, & daughter, Ratnottama Sengupta
Nabendu Ghosh’s (1917-2007) oeuvre of work includes thirty novels and fifteen collections of short stories. He was a renowned scriptwriter and director. He penned cinematic classics such as Devdas, Bandini, Sujata, Parineeta, Majhli Didi and Abhimaan. And, as part of a team of iconic film directors and actors, he was instrumental in shaping an entire age of Indian cinema. He was the recipient of numerous literary and film awards, including the Bankim Puraskar, the Bibhuti Bhushan Sahitya Arghya, the Filmfare Best Screenplay Award and the National Film Award for Best First Film of a Director.
Dipankar Ghosh (1944-2020) qualified as a physician from Kolkata in 1969 and worked as a surgical specialist after he emigrated to the UK in 1971. But perhaps being the son of Nabendu Ghosh, he had always nursed his literary side and, post retirement, he took to pursuing his interest in translation.
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I don't want to die, not any more than
anyone else, but in my Sunday
School class are ten-year-old girls who say they
can't wait and would can themselves except that
they'd go to Hell and burn forever, what
they want is to die and live with Jesus
and when they asked me if I do as well
I said Well, maybe, if I won't get bored
and one got angry and said You're going
to fry in Hell for that someday and her friend
added in the oil of your own skin yet
you'll never be consumed completely and
I said Well, I'm not afraid and she said
We're more afraid for you than you are so
I said How about a kiss? That killed me.
No one wants to die--well, I take that back:
My Sunday School teacher’s sure keen on death
and talks about it every class, she knows
that we're all getting older and some day
we'll all die though probably not the same
day and same way but make no mistake, death
is unavoidable so prepare ye
now to be good enough at least to go
to Heaven and dwell there for eterni
-ty instead of Hell (ditto for Eter
-nity) and we never know when God will
snatch us from life back to Heaven to be
judged a saint or sinner and I want to
see you all in Heaven with me someday.
I added If you go. She has good teeth.
Gale Acuff has had hundreds of poems published in a dozen countries and has authored three books of poetry. He has taught tertiary English courses in the US, PR China, and Palestine.
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Borderless 