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Review

Decoding Foreign Dreams

Book Review of A Dictionary Of Foreign Dreams by Slovakian Poet Pavol Janik by Sarita Jenamani

Fall of Berlin Wall thirty years ago had marked the end of an era in the European history: the division between capitalist West and the satellite states of Russia, that is, the East Europe. The cold war and the iron curtain had pushed the entire East Europe into obscurity. On both sides of this divided world narratives of East vs West were quite black and white, however, still a number of writers from East Europe like Milan Kundera, Bruno Schulz, Bohumil Hrabal, Danilo Kiš, Ismail Kadaré, Nobel Lauret Herta Müller, Ágota Kristóf, László Krasznahorkai, Czesław Miłosz, Zbigniew Herbert had secured their place in the world literature, but unfortunately voices of many poets and their work still remain hidden from Anglophone readership.

Apart from its marvelous creative innovations, literature of this period is significant also because it provides a parallel and more insightful perspective on the politico-cultural landscape of the twentieth-century Europe.  This part of the world, the so-called East-European region, is, however, more of a psycho-geographical concept and an imagined construct of the cold war. It represents a peculiar constellation of micro-regions, an amazing amalgamation of cultures, languages and tradition that are highly different from each other.  

Slovakia, among the West Slavic group of nations, is the least-known country and this holds also true of its poetry. The reasons are mainly historical. The Slovak nation dates its establishment to the ninth-century Moravian Empire that included the territory of the former Czechoslovakia, southern Poland, parts of Austria, and parts of Hungary. In tenth century, the Moravian Empire was defeated by the Magyars (the Hungarians), and Slovakia became a part of the Kingdom of Hungary, afterwards it was a part of the Austrian Empire and in the wake of the Second World War it went under the influence of USSR.

The Modern Period of Slovakian literature has been shaped on one hand by the increasing influence of foreign literary trends, well as by the ideological influence of the former Soviet Union. However, you can find here, as in many parts of the East Europe, a place of unexpected cosmopolitanism that lies buried away from the view of Anglophone readership.

Slovakian poet, dramatist, prose writer, translator, publicist Pavol Janik is a typical example of this phenomenon, a wonderful voice from the little country Slovakia who seems to find its place beyond its border.

His book The Dictionary of Foreign Dreams is a collection of his poems in English translation. This poetry speaks of ordinary and mundane with an extraordinary poetic twist. It has a strong sense of regionalism yet at the same time it appeals to the readers who are not familiar to it. The opening poem of the book: ‘I am carrying you, morning’ written in 1975 paints a perfect landscape of desperation and hope.

Behind the horizon the light is spraying.

The sky trembles like a tear.

The winged summer wilts.

Through the algae’s lonesome dew slides.

.

Trees hold empty nests in their hands.

I quietly sing birds psalms.

In the empty night, empty star is falling.

Empty gaze of water is still cloudy.

.

I read an exclamation of silence

and drink the morning blood stream aloud.

The morning is taking deep breaths.

The peculiar phenomenon of the East European confusion of identities that somehow binds these countries is also reflected in the lines of his poem, ‘The report from the end of the cold war’.

How much is the Czechoslovak crown worth here

in the capital of the ugliest women in the world

where the only chance for survivor

is your photograph?

.

An English poet,

who thinks that Bratislava is in Yugoslavia,

but knows that Dubcek lives there,

is only interested if Havel is free.

His rhymes, inspired by London and by other such European cities written about the size and dimensions of his desk could as well stayed on his noble table. He seems to be a poet who is gifted with the talent of or propensity to getting extraordinary poetic experience from ordinary things. Putting in other words, his is poetry concerned with enlivening the ordinary. Existential notions of nothingness and authenticity are explored here as they pertain to a poetics of the mundane. His poem ‘Bad Habit’ provides a telling proof of this tendency.

Every day

I go to work

for my wife, Olga,

so she has enough for shopping.

.

I must make an effort.

The weekend approaches

and the children would like to eat on Sunday.

We still have not succeeded

in breaking this bad habit.

.

The poem ‘At the table’ portrays this phenomenon in a different way.

.

An infirmary of flowers of the field

in a vase.

So many of the white

that the blood inside our veins stiffens.

.

Thus we wither together

torn away from

life.

Some of Pavol’s poems are written with the acumen and approach of a cinematographer. Pavol, a dramatist, a keen observer, purposefully juxtaposes images and here a combination of theater language and specialized reading experience is made accessible in an adroit fashion that takes his poetry to new level of specificity and concentration; the subject fades away, allowing the poetic record to speak on its behalf. As the poem “summer” shows us:

The sun smashes our windows.

An urgent song reaches us from the street.

.

On the cellophane sky

steam condenses.

Unconfirmed reports are reproduced

about the wind.

.

The trees are the first to begin to talk

about the two of us.

At times the poet appears to be offering life in a way that is combined with humor and the self-irony: humorously, his poetry asks questions about the dark unspoken conditions that rule our world – a world where we knowingly or unknowingly follow the set rules without asking their relevance and this is a juncture where a writer should make his/her readers aware of this uncanny game. In his poem “New York” he writes:

Where does the empire of glass and marble reach?

Where do the slim rackets of the skyscrapers aim?

.

God buys a hot dog

at the bottom of a sixty-storey street.

.

God is a black

and loves the grey colour of concrete.

.

His son was born from himself

in a paper box

from the newest sort of slave.

Pavol Janik is a widely published poet whose literary works have been published not only in home country, Slovakia, but also in a number of other countries, and it is indeed solacing to know that such powerful voices are not getting lost behind an imagined iron curtain but finding their due space in global literary field.  

The poem that gives the books its title ‘A Dictionary Of Foreign Dreams’ opens up with a dream as well as with a little sense of confusion over the vastness of this globe.

At the beginning it was like a dream.

She said:

“Have at least one dream with me.

You’ll see – it’ll be a dream

which you’ve never dreamt about before.”

.

Descend deeper with me,

dream from the back,

dream retrospectively

in a labyrinth of mirrors

which leads nowhere.

 A Dictionary Of Foreign Dreams is a wonderful poetry collection that not only provides you a sneek peek of Pavol Janik’s poetry in particular and Slovakian poetry in general but also leaves you craving for more such poetry.

Sarita Jenamani is a poet of Indian origin based in Austria, a literary translator, anthologist, and editor of a bilingual magazine for migrant literature – Words & Worlds – a human rights activist, a feminist and general secretary of PEN International’s Austrian chapter. She has three collections of poetry. She writes in English, Odia and translates to and from German. Sarita translated Rose Ausländer, a leading Austrian poet, and an anthology of contemporary Austrian Poetry from German into Hindi and Odia. She has received many literary fellowships in Germany and in Austria including those of the prestigious organizations of ‘Heinrich Böll Foundation’ and ‘Künstlerdorf Schöppingen’.  She studied Economics and Management Studies in India and Austria where she works as a marketing manager.

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Review

The Circle of life: The Silence of Motherhood

A review of the movie Hazaar Chaurasi ki Ma (Mother of 1084), based on a book by Mahashweta Devi by Prithvijeet Sinha

Bengal, long considered to be the literary, artistic and social fuel for India’s colonial and post- colonial demeanours, has particularly fascinated cinema’s conscious annals. Satyajit Ray, Aparna Sen, Ritwik Ghatak, Mrinal Sen, Gautam Ghose, Tapan Sinha and their likes all found a level playing field here to sound timely sirens and orchestrate photoplays celebrating its collective regional character, with finesse of the highest caliber.

Mainstream Hindi cinema, too, has often turned to Bengali talents like Hrishikesh Mukherjee, Bimal Roy and Shakti Samanta apart from several stellar musicians, to find beacons of time-tested reverberations in its hundred year sojourn and counting, with the flint of creative risk taking crossing thresholds of language and alighting corners of the mind deep in slumber.

Mahasweta Devi’s Hajaar Chourashir Ma in Bengali (1974)

Hazaar Chaurasi ki Ma (Mother of 1084, released in Hindi in 1998) based on iconic Bengali writer Mahashweta Devi’s eponymous novel, is another betokened facilitator of Bengal’s political and social gravity, veering towards its not so distant Naxalite past and post-communist undertow. Director Govind Nihalani’s power-packed screenplay is a further rejoinder to the porcelain vapidity of educated middle classes and is a heartfelt diagnosis of personal loss and extermination of identity, finding its bruised heart in actress Jaya Bachchan’s tacitly mounted well of emotional ebbs and lows.

***

Structurally, Hazaar Chaurasi ki Ma uniquely evinces the ‘coming of age’ trope for Sujata Chatterjee (Jaya Bachchan) in a manner few works are meant to do. She is a solitary wanderer trudging along life’s thorny paths, right from the initial shot of her younger self walking in to the maternity centre in time for her delivery for her youngest child, all alone. Within the seemingly genteel but cloistered, moth-balled utopia of the bhadralok, the quintessential Bengali gentleman, she has been assigned her status, in observing the holy rite of passage necessary for survival: to observe the vow of silence, almost akin to a ritual.

Owing to this, she has spent years building walls of inconspicuous silence around her, hidden behind iron curtains of her household’s clashing beliefs and veneer of respectability. Bachchan’s essentially benign yet melancholic look sheds light on her feeble social standing that has been overruled by materialism and of course patriarchy. We have all been in the throes of this reality and so we recognise it on the part of our mothers.

A corollary to this is the gender specific clutches of egoist hubris which hold sway over her husband Dibyanath (Anupam Kher), a man ruling his family with an iron fist. On one end of the spectrum, Sujata is financially independent in terms of her designation of a working woman (she is shown to work in a bank) but it’s a consolatory one and deeply ironic to her general station in life. On the other end, her life-force rests in the lively spirit and unimpeachable trust she shares with her youngest son Brati (Joy Sengupta), a bond oblivious to the Chatterjee’s stiff posturing and restricted worldviews.

He is like a ray of sunshine falling over a wilting flower, giving Sujata the opportunity to fully breathe rather than gasp for her moment of reckoning. So, it’s natural that Brati is looked down upon as a black sheep by his father and siblings. His opinions and unorthodox bent of thought question the rest of the family’s air of ‘liberal conservatism’ in which their worldly desires cloud their larger humanity. This relationship is, hence, one where both mother and son plot a diurnal escape from their bleak personal realities, present in the conversations they have and look of mutual fondness being showered on each other.

Brati is more so at a crossroads in his young graduate years where all that he can dream of is to change the world and bridge social gaps. It’s this ideology which ends up becoming his mortal enemy and bites him in the face, in a culture where regimentation abet conformity while iconoclasm of any kind is brandished as another substitute for a death sentence. A breach in the bond between Brati and Sujata ensues as a result of his secretive identity and the appendage of the Naxalite movement’s heyday spreads like a wildfire in the Chatterjee household.

Set as it is in the timeline of the seventies, Sujata’s world comes crashing down when she is helplessly made to receive the painful title of Hazaar Chaurasi ki Ma, a mark of Brati’s dead body, his last remnant. In view of this realization, Sujata traces the grey alley of moral complexities where she has to negotiate the blanks left as open wounds by her beloved son, now a disgraced individual and rebel trampled upon by society functioning on selfish resignation. She questions her silent, muffled existence, the Naxalite cause as a transmogrifier of an intensely clustered class hegemony and the mindsets prepared on a whetstone of rage and dissatisfaction.

As she negotiates these agendas peculiar to her predicament now, she attempts to find her true calling as a woman of reserved strength, with an unfaithful husband and a thankless coterie to boast. Nandini (Nandita Das), Brati’s sweetheart and fellow revolutionary and Seema Biswas, as his slain friend Somu’s mother, authenticate the undulating, challenging terrain of personal awakening for Sujata as mother, guardian of her son’s lost dignity and posthumous legacy. In the process, the sequencing vocalises the resurgent and still fledgling voice of reason, especially one accorded by females.

***

The colour red; red of the Communism epoch of Bengal, red of the young fervour of Naxals, red of a hapless woman’s external shringaar (make-up) and the circle of life symbolized by the bindi on her forehead, then becomes a visual signifier of great agency.

There are a volley of questions the movie bounces off its omnibus and in the mesh of political churning, there is a grave personal tragedy simmering inside Sujata’s crestfallen demeanour. She is a woman of the world, beaten down by words and decrees of society and yet traverses the unfamiliar land of discovery in her middle age to make a breakthrough. This cinematic adaptation thus is genuinely propulsive though a bit long-drawn and in its performances, mines gold out of its socio-political concerns.

However, above all, it is the actress Jaya Bachchan, whose silences speak the language of passive melancholy. I reiterate that its a reality we recognise as we see in all our mothers.

Prithvijeet Sinha is a writer who belongs to the multicultural, literary hub of Lucknow, an artistic haven since centuries. A student of literature having completed his M. Phil two years back, he has been writing and publishing his poetic works and essays on the worldwide community Wattpad since 2015 and since June 2018 has been contributing his articles on various facets of cinema and culture on his WordPress blog An Awadh Boy’s Panorama. His works of various hues including poetry, film and book reviews, travel pieces, letter to the editor and opinion pieces have appeared in journals and magazines like Reader’s Digest, Gnosis Journal, Cafe Dissensus Magazine, Cafe Dissensus Everyday Blog, Confluence Magazine, Thumbprint Magazine, The Medley, Wilda Morris’ Poetry Blog. He has been published on Cafe Dissensus Everyday, The Medley, Screen Queens and Confluence in 2020 so far. Poetry is his first love and judicious defence against mediocrity while cinema and music are bulwarks to guard his conscience.

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Review

‘A rich tapestry of narratives’

      Book Review by Meenakshi Malhotra

Title: Suralakshmi Villa

Author: Aruna Chakravarti

Publisher: Pan Macmillan, 2020

Suralakshmi Villa (2020) is a novel based on a short story in a previous collection of short stories by Aruna Chakravarti. In the afterword to the novel, the author explains how the novel came about: Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, on whose fiction Chakravarti had done her Ph.D thesis many years ago, commented how the short story had possibilities of being extended into a novel. In doing so, the author’s redoubtable skills have come to the fore yet again.

In Suralakshmi Villa, Aruna Chakravarti has woven a rich tapestry of narratives of human interest, focusing particularly on women(which is the author’s strong suit)  intertwined with narratives of Bengal’s Hindu and Muslim culture, history , religion art, architecture, myths and folklore in a fusion which can be described as syncretic. All these elements are woven into the narrative in a seamless way, which is in no small  measure  a testament to the author’s immense  storytelling skills.

The novel is essentially plot driven with a diverse and complex cast of characters; it intersperses the main plot of Suralakshmi’s  seemingly inexplicable decision to leave her flourishing career as a gynaecologist, her marriage and life in Delhi with the subplots of a fairly large set of characters, spanning about 6-7 decades across most of the twentieth century. The story narrates the varying fortunes of the family of ICS officer Indra Nath Chaudhuri who chooses to settle in South Delhi, in a milieu which is relatively free of the stranglehold of traditional family norms and customs, along with his wife and five daughters, Mahalakshmi, Kanaklakshmi, Suralakshmi,Dhanalakshmi and Rajlakshmi.  For  all his professional stature, Indra Nath is putty in the hands of his larger-than-life wife, Lakshmi, who rules the roost . Prostrated by depression after the premature widowhood of her sixteen-year-old daughter, Mahalakshmi, she decides to educate her daughters rather than prioritise or focus on their marriages and have them choose their husbands, if at all, in their own time. This decision has varying repercussions. Suralakshmi decides to marry a married man seventeen years older than her, that too at the age of 31.     

Suralakshmi’s  story however is not the only plotline in the novel; in the tangled skein of the novel is also the disparate-but-intertwined story of Eidun and her family, which links this story of domestic abuse with a rescue and redemption narrative of sorts. It also maps the story of Indra Nath’s nephew, Pratul, his coming of age and marriage with Nayantara and  that of their children– Kinshuk and Joymita.  

For a story with such a large cast of characters, the parallel plots are juggled with amazing skill and dexterity. What also redounds to the author’s credit is her handling of the complex timelines as well, as the novel loops back and forth chronologically, covering the better part of the twentieth century from the 1930s to 1998. The plot works in a cyclical and circular way, as it spirals and hurtles  towards its final conclusion, which seems random until its causality is made evident.  There is a conscious and carefully calibrated  structure and architectonics involved in the apparent seamlessness of the novel.

The predominance of the plot and the large cast of characters however come at a cost, albeit a minor one, in the light of what the novel achieves. Chakravarti does not explore the interior psychology of most of her characters barring a few crucial briefly sketched in character traits. Characterisation  is often done through a mirroring effect where the response of other characters convey character traits; also, analogues, contrasts and conversations are used  to convey the varied workings of people’s minds. Thus , Suralakshmi’s decision to marry a philandering bigamist Moinak Sen is conveyed through the outrage of her sisters and her stubbornness and intransigence comes up in the course of Pratul’s conversation with his docile wife, Tara or Nayantara. Her impulsiveness is conveyed but  not the inner-workings of her mind and both her ‘love’ and the conjugal bliss that follow are not entirely  convincing.

In a different register, while Eidun and her sisters-Ojju, Meeru and Jeeni’s stories are convincing in their depiction of the oppression  and  travails  of women in impoverished Muslim families, the tale of domestic abuse raises some questions. There is of course the generational aspect of it with the saga of dispossession  portrayed  in the stories of their mother, Ruksana  and the grandmother, Zaitoon-Bibi` as well, but the depiction of the Muslim male as depraved and amoral does leave one with an edge of discomfort. It seems too stereotypical, too pat and cliched,  too two-dimensional. While misogynistic patriarchies and toxic masculinity is not restricted  to  one religious group, in the novel it is one religious group that bears a disproportionate burden of it. The uneducated lower class Muslim men hardly bear comparison with the educated  upper class Bengali men (mostly Hindu) in the novel, and while this disjunction may have  been  created by the exigencies of the plot, it does leave one with a niggling sense of discomfort.

Having said that, Suralakshmi Villa is a tale well told, on almost every count. The unsentimental treatment of motherhood is worth commenting on and when Suralakshmi decides to leave Kinshuk in Delhi with his father, we are made to realise her alienation and her affiliations. She comes across as a dignified and idealistic figure, in her steadfast commitment to protect Eidun, a responsibility she has taken on herself. Even if Suralakshmi’s — and others’ — lives are embedded in a web of materiality, her decision, dignified and noble, transcends her immediate material conditions.

Suralakshmi’s decision to go away and start a charitable hospital in Malda, is depicted in the novel as an act of conscious choice, although it  is  a choice which elicits surprise from others since she leaves her house to Moinak, her errant husband and his offspring. 

Suralakshmi goes away with Eidun, leaving  her son  Kinshuk in the care of his father, with no evident sign of regret or a backward glance.  Her decisiveness here comes as no surprise since it chimes  in with what we know of her already. Even if there is no formal separation, we (and the characters in the novel) are left in no doubt about her intentions. I would go so far as to describe her choice — and her power to choose and live by her choices as feminist, since,  there is definitely an element of agency in the way she decides on a significant moment of transition and then goes ahead with its execution.

Suralakshmi Villa is definitely a welcome addition to the canon of women’s writing in India, multi-textured and multi-layered. Its complexity does not take away from its readability but  adds to its depth and power to attract and hold the attention of the reader.    

    Dr Meenakshi Malhotra is Associate Professor in English at Hansraj College, University of Delhi. She  has edited two books on Women and Lifewriting, Representing the Self and Claiming the I, in addition  to numerous published articles on gender and/in literature and feminist theory. Some of her recent publications include articles on lifewriting as an archive for GWSS, Women and Gender Studies in  India: Crossings (Routledge,2019),on ‘’The Engendering of Hurt’’  in The State of Hurt, (Sage,2016) ,on Kali in Unveiling Desire,(Rutgers University Press,2018) and ‘Ecofeminism and its Discontents’ (Primus,2018). She has been a part of the curriculum framing team for masters programme in Women and gender Studies at Indira Gandhi National Open University(IGNOU) and in Ambedkar University, Delhi and has also been an editorial consultant for ICSE textbooks (Grades1-8) with Pearson publishers. She has recently taught a course as a visiting fellow in Grinnell College, Iowa. She has bylines in Kitaab and Book review  

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Review

‘The Cultural Ambassdor of India’

Book review by Bhaskar Parichha

Title: Critical Lives: Rabindranath Tagore

Author: Bashabi Fraser

Publisher: Reaktion Books Ltd- /Speaking Tiger, 2020

Almost even eighty years after his death, Rabindranath Tagore continues to be written about. Any biographical account of Tagore’s life and works — whether it is in Bengali, English or any other language — is attention-grabbing and is received with awe and admiration. Indeed, for the bard whose immortal lines echo even today – Jodi tor daak shune keyo na ashe, tobe aakla cholo re (If no one answers to your call, walk alone) — no number of books is enough to have another look at his great mind, make another study of his brilliance.

Emeritus Professor, co-founder, and Director of the Scottish Centre of Tagore Studies (ScoTs) at Edinburgh- Napier University, Bashabi Fraser’s newest book on Tagore ( Reaktion Books, London/Speaking Tiger Publishing, New Delhi) is a brilliant account of the Kobiguru simply for the reason that it is both enlightening and at the same time perceptive. This discerning and sophisticatedly brought out a book of 250 pages gives a unique insight to Tagore’s life, his experiences in India, Europe, China, and Japan and cites numerous incidents from his life that directly influenced some of his great works.

Says Fraser in the introduction of her book: “this biographical study reassesses the Renaissance man, a polymath, who embodies the modern consciousness of India, engaged as he was in nation-building and contributing to the narrative of a nation.”

Part of the series ‘Critical Lives’ of leading cultural figures of the world in the the modern period, this biography explores the life of the great artist, writer philosopher in relation to his creations.

As the blurb says, “polymath Rabindranath Tagore was the first non-European to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, in 1913. But Tagore was much more than a writer. Through his poems, novels, short stories, poetic songs, dance-dramas, and paintings, he transformed Bengali literature and Indian art. He was instrumental in bringing Indian culture to the West and vice versa, and strove to create a less divided society through mutual respect and understanding, like his great contemporary and close friend, Mahatma Gandhi.”

Even though Annie Besant was the first to call Gandhi a ‘Mahatma’, Tagore made the name popular. In the author’s view, “both Tagore and Gandhi, who were and still remain India’s greatest intellectual and political minds, respectively, continued to depend on each other for mutual support until Tagore’s death in 1941. Both believed that man needed to rely on his inner resources, on truth, love, and compassion to find full freedom to realize himself and fellow human beings as brethren.”

But, then, she sees a difference between the two great men: “While Gandhi was against technological advancement and science, Tagore, as a modernist believed that science and humanities were needed for holistic education and social advancement.”

Divided into a dozen chapters (‘The Tagores of Jorasonko’, ‘Growing up in the Tagore Household’, ‘English Interlude’, ‘Journey to the Banks of Padma’, ‘The Abode of Peace’, ‘From Shantiniketan to the world Stage’, ‘The renouncement of Knighthood’, ‘Where the World Meets in a Nest’, ‘The call of truth’, ‘Waves of Nationalism’, ‘Tagores’ Modernity and The legacy: At Home and the World’) the book has more than thirty illustrations — culled out from various albums.


Besides making a timely re-evaluation of the poet’s life and work, Fraser weighs up Tagore’s “many activities and shows how he embodies the modern the consciousness of India”. She examines in great detail Tagore’s ties with his childhood in Bengal, his role in Indian politics and his interests in international relationships, as well as addressing some of the misreading of his life and work through a holistic standpoint.

Fraser says, “India’s debt to Tagore is immense, and together with Mahatma Gandhi, he remains one of the architects of modern India and India’s primary soft power. Tagore’s liberal humanism and modernity make him relevant today and his place in world literature can be endorsed by a close study of his life, times, and work.”

This intuitive and charmingly written biography of a man who transcended all sorts of borders is a must-read. For someone who is interested in knowing the events which shaped Tagore’s literary career, this concise and yet critical book will be of immense help. More than anything else, the present volume is an indispensable and resourceful guide to know all that Viswakobi Rabindranath Tagore stood for. 

Bhaskar Parichha is a Bhubaneswar-based  journalist and author. He writes on a broad spectrum of  subjects , but more focused on art ,culture and biographies.His recent book ‘No Strings Attached’ has been published by Dhauli Books. 

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Review

Sita Under the Crescent Moon: A Travelogue in Syncretism

Book Review by Bhaskar Parichha

Title: Sita Under the Crescent Moon

Author: Annie Ali Khan

Publisher: Simon & Schuster India, 2019

There is a poignant tale to this book. Before the manuscript could see the light of the day, its author Annie Ali Khan died in an accident in Karachi. Annie was merely thirty years at the time of death. A brilliant journalist with a master’s degree in journalism from Columbia University, she was a writer, a photographer with works published in Caravan, Marie Claire and The Herald. She had won Pakistan’s national photojournalist award for her story on truck art.

In the epilogue, Annie’s friend Manan Ahmed Asif writes equally touchingly about the events leading to the final publication of the book. Asif calls her a ‘fearless reporter of Pakistan’ and no journalist before had dared to do a newspaper story on a Hindu Pilgrimage in Pakistan. In reality, it is from this article that the book has originated.

Sita Under the Crescent Moon – A Woman’s Search for Faith in Pakistan is a dazzling account of a tradition purely for the reason that it combines spirituality with travel. The blurb says it all: “In present-day Pakistan, in the far corners of Lyari in Karachi, or Hingol in Balochistan, or Thatta in Sindh, tightly knit groups of women keep alive the folklore, songs, and legends of Sati—their name for Sita in the Ramayana.”

Annie traveled with women devotees on pilgrimages to retrace the way they worship the goddess. She followed “healers, heretics, seekers, wives, mothers, sisters, grandmothers and believers”. These journeys intensely throw light on a veiled and obscure world. With loads of empathy, love, and self-sacrifice, the author listens to the stories of these women. She writes them down — word for word in some cases — capturing their dilemmas, the violence and the outfits they belong to.

Her exploration doesn’t stop there. She eats, rests, sleeps, prays, and lives with them. She was adopted by some as their daughter. Some even relied on her knowledge of the world to help show them the way of the government and the benefits therein.

The book lays bare, meaningfully, how worship has changed mind-sets and altered many of the mores of the land. While the sacral sites, made up of clay and thread grant a woman power and autonomy to fight her wretched conditions, the narrative demonstrates the pliability of women and depicts how, under the shadow of militant majoritarianism, women are keeping alive the memories of Sita’s exile, and her ultimate sacrifice.

The travelogue also tells Annie Ali Khan’s own journey. From her memories of Durga in the house of her grandfather’s friend to her own experience before Durga Mata in Hinglaj, the book is a chronicle of a woman in search of healing power. Hinglaj is a Hindu Pilgrimage in Balochistan which is the quiescent place of Hingula Devi, locally called Nani Pir. This is one of the 51 Shakti Peethas*of Sati, wife of Shiva. Meeting Durga at Hinglaj ‘inspires her to explore the way of the Satiyan, the seven sacred sisters, and also to look for Sita.’

Take a look at the narrative: “At Hub Chowki, a historic-city-turned-transit-town is now the gateway between Sindh and Balochistan. Those traveling through are greeted by a road sign that reads ‘Mundra’ – a Sanskrit word meaning temple or place of worship or chasm – overshadowed by a larger sign with a new name, proclaiming, in bold Arabic script, ‘Seerat’, meaning inner beauty, heavenly light hidden from view, veiled. These are the many paths to the sacred and the beautiful that abound in the Islamic Republic of Pakistan. May the goddess protect us!”

Next, she delves into the geography of the sub-continent: “Hinglaj, in the heart of the province, is as sacred as it is remote. The ancient temple is located along an endless terrain following a coastal route that reaches beyond the Malabar region in south India and extends further up north, past Rajasthan, then the coastal cities of Iran. I read somewhere that the road between the sea-facing shrine of Abdullah Shah Ghazi in the port city of Karachi and the shrine of Haji Ali, half-submerged in the sea in Bombay, was once a route well-traveled by pilgrims of the Sufi order – before the borders got in the way.”

The book is replete with a wide range of socio-political events — the uprising in Balochistan, clashes between Shia and Sunni sects, activities of Jamiat-e-Ulema-e-Islam.

There are also cultural references and quaint factoids: about the Odh people specializing in building homes of mud and straw; descriptions of the traditional quilt, rally; Makli being the city of a hundred thousand graves; women smoking chillum and Capstan cigarettes at shrines; use of “bird water” for healing; hierarchical relationships between the Sindhi and Baloch communities; the Chaaran community; the Meghwars being denied cocaine on grounds of their low caste status; the “Hanging Mela”; the “Ram Bagh” metamorphosing into “Aaram Bagh”; the Benazir Fund and her husband, Asif Ali Zardari, being known as “Mr. Ten Percent” for demanding a cut in all governmental deals, and so on.

Annie’s exploration of faith is once more syncretic: “I was accompanying a family of yatris on a pilgrimage to the temple, entering the heavily patrolled and policed borders of the province with them. It was also the last night of Navratri, the festival celebrating the victory in the battle of the goddess Durga over a demon buffalo to restore dharma, the order of the cosmos. Sati’s suffering and sacrifice and the joy of her victory were remembered like Moharram, like Mohabbat; love in the heart, eternal and ever-flowing like the suffering that was life on earth.”

The three-hundred-page travelogue Sita under the Crescent Moon is a remarkable tribute to Pakistani women who have always been the custodians of small traditions. It is their songs, folktales, and legends that become powerful mediums of transmission of traditions and faith in the absence of higher psychical goals.

Dedicated to Quratulain Ali Hyder, Sita under the Crescent Moon is not only a breathtaking documentation of a spiritual journey, but it is also a gender- gaze. Conspicuously, so many entities come up for closer investigation in the book – nationality, community, ethnicity et al.

Bhaskar Parichha is a Bhubaneswar-based  journalist and author. He writes on a broad spectrum of  subjects , but more focused on art ,culture and biographies.His recent book ‘No Strings Attached’ has been published by Dhauli Books. 

*Shakti Peeth are shrines and pilgrimage destinations in Shaktism, a school of Hinduism which worships the mother goddess.

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Review

‘Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls’

A review of Shankhachil – 2016 Bengali film by Gautam Ghose By Abhinandan Bhattacharya

In the surging ripples of the meandering river one is most likely to hear the symphony of the universe. Does the river understand the definition of state or country borders? Can any force stop the flow of the river or refuse to accept the waters of the river because it flowed in from the other side of the border? The map of the biggest delta in the world has undergone a complete change with the water bodies gradually wiping out many differences set by human beings. The tigers and crocodiles have eaten their way into the geography of the region only to remind their human counterparts that there is more to life than engaging in conflicts on grounds of caste, gender and religion.

Shankhachil, one of the most brilliant Bengali films that I have watched in the recent times, is midwifed into existence from the Indo-Bangladesh dispute after the Partition touching upon the very fabric of the sensitive Hindu-Muslim religious bigotry. Dangling on the philosophy of ‘borderless border’, acclaimed Director Gautam Ghose has wonderfully echoed the appeal of ‘Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls’. Extremely well-spun montages have emphasised yet once again that we need to rise above our religious differences and start considering one another as human beings.

A poignant narrative of how a helpless father is compelled to cross border illegally just to get proper treatment for his twelve-year old daughter who is born with a congenital heart disorder. As a respectable school teacher, Muntasir Chaudhury Badol (Prosenjit Chatterjee) lives in his humble dwelling with his wife, Laila (Kusum Sikder) and daughter, Roopsha (Shajbati) in a little hut along the majestic Ichamati River that connects Bangladesh to India. Shankhachil (or Brahminy Kite in English) is a bird symbolizing freedom, a thought which, sadly, resides in a poet’s imagination only. Badol is a true Mussalman preaching about peace and silently sobbing in the face of communal violence that tends to tear the society apart.

A fine specimen of a crossover film and winner of the National Film award in the category of the Best Feature Film in Bengali, Shankhachil, talks painfully of the plight of the immigrants not because of the Partition but because of the prejudiced mindset of the so-called civilised and literate society who derive some sadistic pleasure in inciting communal hatred instead of finding ways to plant a proper pacemaker (read ‘peacemaker’). Muntasir and Laila lose their innocent Roopsha while navigating through this heart of darkness. But he is a proud father as he lost his daughter who had won in a different battle.

All countries look the same. Human beings respond to various stimuli in the same manner in all countries. Must we respond to communal hatred and indifference too in the same manner? Isn’t life too short to engage in such petty things? Does it cost a single penny to speak forth words of love without thinking about your and my religion? Isn’t everyone on earth ‘fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapon, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer’?

It’s time to introspect. It’s time to reflect. It’s time to be educated. Once again.

Abhinandan Bhattacharya is a Secondary school teacher of English Language and Literature training students at the CAIE and IBDP levels at JBCN International School, Oshiwara, Mumbai. He has been honoured with several professional merits in the form of Nation Builder Award by the Rotary Club of Mumbai and the Dedicated Teacher Award 2019 by Cambridge University Press in a campaign run by the University of Cambridge and CUP witnessing more than 40,000 nominations from across 150 countries worldwide. He is a published poet and writer winning the National level Poetry Writing Competition in 2019 organised by Story Mirror Schools Writing Competition. Today, he is a certified teacher trainer and mentor not only to his learners but to countless teachers as well.

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Review

What can Stones Say?

Book Review by Namrata

Title: The Speaking Stone, A Collection of Poems

Author: Pravat Kumar Padhy

Publisher: Authorspress, 2020

Poetry is the language of the soul. As the world battles with a global pandemic which has no end in sight, poetry is perhaps the only respite we have to help us stay sane and survive during these trying times.

The Speaking Stone by Pravat Kumar Padhy is a poetry collection that makes you ponder and reanalyse everything around us including all that we have taken for granted till now – the environment, nature, our planet Earth and most importantly our lives. Spread across forty-two poems, Padhy manages to string together various emotions and brings forth the magic of the enigma called life, beautifully. 

Pravat Kumar Padhy is an award-winning poet whose work has been showcased across the world. With seven collections of verses to his credit, he also holds a place of honour in World’s Who’s Who.

Flipping through these poems, you realise the deep value Padhy has for art and literature. His writings reflect the strong urge to redefine life and its magnanimity. The title The Speaking Stone seems to have taken inspiration from the old adage — “What if the stones/ rocks could speak?”  Taking this saying further, Padhy has penned down the plethora of answers possible, if the stones could speak. What would they tell us and why — is the gist of the whole collection.

The poems featured in this collection range widely from human life to nature, from love to survival instinct, from greed to necessity and from merely existing to living. Some of his poems recount how one should cease to exist within the narrow boundaries of the society and explore life beyond those predefined boundaries. Others question the very existence of a man.

“In the string of evolution

We all are living particles of vibration

Musing the time to an infinite point

As time has neither a beginning nor an end.”

After reading some of the works of Padhy, one cannot help but wonder at the materialistic hunger which consumes a human being to an extent that it threatens to lead to self-destruction and yet refuses to die. What is that pushes a man to keep chasing goals? How much is enough? Is money the ultimate power which makes a man truly invincible or is it power? Are some of the questions that haunt you long after the book is over.

Life has different meaning for different individuals and still, at the core it remains an enigma for all of us. Moving beyond the parameters of religion and philosophy, Padhy tries to indulge in a genuine conversation with the reader which is both, stimulating and evocative.

“The sun never differentiates

Whether it is north or south

East or west.

It blazes itself to enlighten the world.”

Amidst all of this, he doesn’t fail to remind us, how in the eyes of the Almighty creator we are one. Beyond the barriers of caste, creed, religion and colour, lies one thing that binds us all – a heart full of love and hope.

“The sense of belonging

Is rusted under his skull

In the crowd of diversities,

We are busy nailing

Nameplates of rich and poor,

Forgetting oneness

Of the entire human being.”

At a time, when we stand divided into fragments by our own thoughts, this collection is an imperative read. It urges us to look deeper within ourselves and explore the larger definition of life. Padhy motivates us to move beyond the ordinary and look for that extra, which can make our lives extra-ordinary. His powerful verses remind us the biggest religion above all is that of humanity. And his words denote the power of kindness and empathy, the much-needed elements for survival in today’s scenario.  To conclude, it is a read that shakes you, moves you and leaves you convinced that love alone, shall triumph at the end of it all.

Namrata is a lost wanderer who loves travelling the length and breadth of the world. She lives amidst sepia toned walls, fuchsia curtains, fairy lights and shelves full of books. When not buried between the pages of a book, she loves blowing soap bubbles. A published author she enjoys capturing the magic of life in her words and is always in pursuit of a new country and a new story. She can be reached at privytrifles@gmail.com.

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Review

Lines across the Ocean: Love and the Impossibility of Words

Book Review by Soni Wadhwa

Title: Lines Across Oceans

Authors: Nalini Priyadarshni and D. Russel Micnhimer

A few days before this Valentine’s Day, Nalini Priyadarshni urged her friends on Facebook to  “consider getting a book of love verses for your sweetheart this Valentine”. The book is Lines Across Oceans: Intercontinental Love Verses which she has co-written with the late poet D. Russel Micnhimer, also a winner of Poet Laureate award in India. To those who love poetry and those who have been in love, Priyadarshni’s mischievous call to action invoked nothing less than a gleeful sentiment of “ooooh… another one” tinged with “oh no – not again!” It is a sentiment that gushes out of a lover/beloved every time a note of pleasure comes close enough to unfold aspects of loving.

While the book was published three years ago, it was a perfect moment to discover how the two poets from different continents would reinvent ways of understanding, expressing love and talking about it. The book does two wonderful things for the readers — it begins with Rumi and then somewhere in the middle declares what lovers already know about the impossibility of syncing love with speech:  

Listen if you must

Not my words, for they may be unbefitting

Listen to my silence in pure intent

My pauses bring forth what my words couldn’t 

If you don’t get my silence, my words were a waste

Anything that can be explained away in sounds and signs

can neither be deep nor abiding 

Eternal and elemental, the absolutely best in us

expresses itself as much in black as in white fire

Love cannot be spoken about, and yet, lovers continue to speak about it. Priyadarshni and Micnhimer affirm the paradox of writing about silence in love and so one can peacefully move on to enjoying the way of words that have the audacity to express being in love:

Words born in the recesses of your heart, I treasure 

Even before they rise in your throat 

Or find release from your lips 

I know them from another place, another time 

The refrain “another place, another time” throughout the piece concedes that being in love is being resonant with the idea of love that precedes the lovers in question. Hence, Rumi. Hence, poetry. Hence, reading. Hence, writing. This idea of another time, another place constitutes the iconography of love at the hands of Priyadarshni and Micnhimer:

We pour ourselves out to make room

For the best is yet to come.

What’s love poetry without the snapshots of togetherness? Here is an instance of the mood of the Valentine from the book:

Morning Ritual of shared coffee 

with a tea person should make you wary . . . . 

Mightn’t be the coffee they are after 

but coffee flavored kisses

One wants to blush at the thought of being outdone by the beloved thus. And then one wants to know how the beloved will walk the path of passion:

Knead me as a loaf with your fingers jaan . . . .

– I am growing, expanding, soaking 

in the joy of your laughter’s leavening 

overlapping the edges of meeting hearts. 

The eroticism spread throughout the book brings one back to words as the units constituting the idea of love:

How can I make my words taste as good as ice cream on a hot day 

make them tremble in your ears as they tumble from my tongue?

Lines Across Oceans is interesting for the way it weaves the idea of being together with that of writing together. This laying bare of the cohabitation in the text makes the collection of poems apt as more than a Valentine’s Day read. Sample the lines that articulate this: 

When you write poems for me

and I string my words together 

to write about you and us

we do more than make love

to each other with our words

we bestow each other with 

a slice of eternity

The book appeals to the right spot called desire – desire, that sits perched delicately on the suture between the pleasures of writing, loving, and being loved. In the ritual of reading a collection of love poetry, desire begins to linger on all rituals of living and making sense of life. 

While general readers will be able anchor their experience of love in the light and intense moments in Lines Across Oceans, “serious” and regular readers of poetry will find interesting for its experiments at the formal level in the way it incorporates less known forms of poetry – katuata, sedoka, choka and so on. A ‘choka’, for instance, works very tightly with a form organized around the alternating lines of five and seven syllables:

Let nights and days of

Our loving playfulness, stretch

Into forever

Love is about opening one’s self and shrinking it too. Each number in the book reflects that opening and shrinking in different ways. The collection affirms that love and poetry are so alike. 

Do pick it up — even though the Valentine’s Day is gone, the Valentine is still around.

Soni Wadhwa is an academician based in Mumbai. Her work can be found on Asian Review of Books and Deccan Herald, some of which has also got republished in Scroll and South China Morning Post. 

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Review

‘What’s true of all the evils in the world is true of plague as well. It helps men to rise above themselves’: The Plague by Albert Camus

Book Review by Rakhi Dalal

Title: The Plague (1947)

Author: Albert Camus

Camus’ La Peste has never been out of print. In the wake of pandemic that now sweeps the entire world, its sale has seen a surge quite unlike at any other time since its publication in 1947. What else can be a greater proof of the relevance of a work that seems to be an ageless parable of human condition.

The novel, most of which he wrote in confinement, away from his family due to his acute illness, is the story of a town suffering from bubonic plague. But this novel can also be seen as an allegory of human crisis brought about by moral contagion.

Camus belonged to a generation which was born either before or during the First World War, reached adolescence during the worldwide economic depression and turned twenty the year of Hitler’s rise to power. Next they saw the civil war in Spain, the Munich Agreements, the start of another World War in 1939, the fall of France in 1940 and four years of enemy occupation and underground struggle.

All of this, in his opinion, resulted in a human crisis where most people, disillusioned by religion or nationalism and wary of the traditional morality imposed upon them, lived in contradiction. They accepted war and violence which was given to them, which they had never wanted but from the consequences of which they could not escape. It was as if the entire generation was plagued by an indifference which led people to accept human suffering as a banal reality.

In one of his lyrical essays, The Almond Trees (1940), Camus wrote:

“I do not have enough faith in reason to subscribe to a belief in progress or to any philosophy of history. But I do atleast believe that men have never ceased to grow in the knowledge of their destiny. We have not overcome our condition and yet we know it better. We know that we live in contradiction, but that we must refuse this contradiction and do what is needed to reduce it. Our task as men is to find those few first principles that will calm the infinite anguish of free souls. We must stitch up what has been torn apart, render justice imaginable in a World which is so obviously unjust, make happiness meaningful for nations poisoned by the misery of this century.”

He believed in human kindness and solidarity. He believed that if in the face of a crisis people could rise and act, not out of some heroic courage expected of them, but with reason and optimism, then it would be possible to reduce human suffering.

Written in the given context, the novel quite pertinently, became a tale of a persisting contradiction and subsequent human actions in overcoming the condition.

“What’s true of all the evils in the world is true of plague as well. It helps men to rise above themselves.”

In the novel, after initially rejecting the plague, the people of Oran are forced to go into isolation and quarantine. In fact the whole city is closed down and its borders are sealed. There are people suffering from the disease, people in exile – away from their loved ones, people serving those ridden with disease and also people trying to make more money by smuggling goods. Here the depiction of illness, loneliness and separation is quite vivid – much that we can relate to as well at present?

Dr. Rieux, the one who detects the illness, assumes his responsibility and does what he must. He is an ordinary man doing extraordinary things, not out of a notion of valour but out of simple decency and a sense of moral obligation. His character personifies individual moral responsibility essential to make effective public choices in a society. At one point, he says:

“When you see the suffering it brings, you have to be mad, blind or a coward to resign yourself to the Plague.”

Rambert, a young journalist who is exiled in Oran, tries to escape the city initially but later he realises that he shares a common fate with rest of the people and joins in serving those afflicted.

Then one fine day, the plague disappears as mysteriously as it had appeared but not without playing havoc with the lives of people. Later when the people celebrate in the streets of Oran, Dr. Rieux observes:

“The plague bacillus never dies or vanishes entirely, it can remain dormant for dozens of years in furniture or clothing, it waits patiently in bedrooms, cellars, trunks, handkerchiefs and old papers, and perhaps the day will come when, for the instruction or misfortune of mankind, the plague will rouse its rats and send them to die in some well-contented city.”

Camus knew that even if a contagion, whether biological or moral, ends – one couldn’t be too sure of its absolute extinction. So in the absence of a clear moral lesson from this book, what is it that makes the book still relevant?

In the face of the present pandemic which lurks in the corners of our cities and stares at us from outside the windows of our isolated homes, this book not only brings to our notice the horrors such plagues can inflict but also the human will, solidarity and collective resistance that remain instrumental in overcoming such disasters. It puts our focus back where it should be – on assuming moral responsibility as individuals — on each act of kindness, on goodness which when collective not only helps combat a pandemic but also rouses our alertness lest our laxity make us miss the signs of an impending darkness. 

Rakhi Dalal is an educator by profession. When not working, she can usually be found reading books or writing about reading them. She writes at https://rakhidalal.blogspot.com/ . She lives with her husband and a teenage son, who being sports lovers themselves are yet, after all these years, left surprised each time a book finds its way to their home.

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Review

The Eyes of Darkness: Was it all predicted?

By Mitali Chakravarty

Title: The Eyes of Darkness

Author: Dean Koontz

Publisher: Pocket Books, USA, 1996

One of the passages from a thriller that has been  circulating the social media circles during COVID 19 is how the Wuhan virus was evolved in a lab in the United States with a  Chinese refugee’s help, one who had defected to US “carrying a diskette record of China’s most important and dangerous biological weapon in a decade.” The book, The Eyes of Darkness by Dean Koontz, is listed as a thriller, mystery, suspense and horror. It has been republished with a few changes in 1996, post-Glasnost and post-Tiananmen incident.

In the novel, the virus, called Wuhan 400, was said to have been developed in a lab in the outskirts of Wuhan. It “afflicted only human beings”. The fictitious virus had an incubation period of less than twenty-four hours. We are told, “It destroys part of the brain that controls the autonomic functions. The victim simply ceases to have a pulse, functioning organs, or any urge to breathe.” People died within a few hours of the infection.

The corona, luckily for mankind, does not affect the brain – only the lungs and most recover with mild flu-like symptoms and some have no symptoms at all.

The Wuhan 400 has been shown to be so infectious that one single panic-ridden, irresponsible, contaminated scientist infected a huge batch of boys and their teachers, who were on a trip that would teach the youngsters survival skills. Ironically, except for one child, the rest die. What gave the child the resilience to survive becomes the source of study for scientists in the middle of a deserted spot in Texas. The story revolves around how the child is rescued by his mother and her boyfriend who fly incognito all the way from Las Vegas to Reno and then into the wilds.

The book has a touch of the paranormal.  The author tells us in an ‘Afterword’: “The Eyes of Darkness was one of my early attempts to write cross- genre novel mixing action, suspense, romance, and a touch of the paranormal.” And the title is based on the paranormal activity. The paranormal activity is a little eerie and the descriptions are just frightening to the right degree.

The Eyes of Darkness had been revised in 1996 and republished. This is the version that is doing the rounds of the social media platforms. The earlier 1981 version was authored by Dan Koontz under the pen name of Leigh Nichols. In the 1981 version, the virus was called Gorki 400 virus and developed in Russia. This was before Mikhail Gorbachev used the terms perestroika(restructuring) and glasnost to indicate an openness in the Soviet Union which was its first step towards democratisation. Then in 1991, Boris Yeltsin moved towards a loose federation of Russian states. In 1989, the terrifying incident of Tiananmen Square killed thousands of innocent protestors.

In the 1996 edition, Dombey, a scientist in the facility which housed the research tell us , “The Russians… they’re now supposed to be our new friends, but they keep developing bacteriological weapons, new and more virulent strains of  viruses, because they are broke, and this is a lot cheaper than other weapons systems…” That the paranoid of weaponists and security experts obviously knows no bounds anywhere in the world is well borne out by the narrative. This has nothing of the conspiracy theories to wipe out the world. It is a thriller like a James Bond! It does not dwell on Machiavellian concepts quoted in Dan Brown’s thriller, Inferno:

“When every province of the world so teems with inhabitants that they can neither subsist where they are nor remove elsewhere, every region being equally crowded and over-peopled, and when human craft and wickedness have reached their highest pitch, it must needs come about that the world will purge herself in one or another of these three ways: floods, plague and famine”

Dan Brown has something similar in Inferno where the world is threatened by a conspiracy to decimate the population based on Machiavellian and Malthusian principles by a villain who is more colourful and dramatic than Koontz’s and weaves the story in the city of Florence.

The story of Inferno, located in Italy, is interesting and perhaps can be the subject of another review. I enjoy a Dan Brown thriller more because it is woven around history and philosophy.

The Eyes of Darkness is simpler lore — with shooting, bars, the glamorous world of casinos, racing from place to place, helicopter and fast car rides, homes getting blown up, strange paranormal activities that wreck a room and bomb blasts from which the protagonists escape. The villain is perhaps a little less colourful than Dan Brown’s or the Joker from Batman — but weird none the less. The plot is intriguing! Take a plunge and see — it is a good and easy read while you wait out the virulence of the real COVID 19! 

Mitali Chakravarty is a writer and the founding editor of borderlessjournal.com.