A good translation is a sorcery of desire, determination, and language. It opens a portal into not just another culture, reminding us of the texts, subtexts, contexts and conned texts richly underlying words but involves an admission into a whole new world that the reader would have missed altogether had it not been for the sincere striving of a visionary translator.
For, indeed, all translation is built around a vision that extends beyond that of giving life to a work in another language. There has to be a rationale as to why this reincarnation should, at all, be necessary or worthwhile, a logic as to how this can be effectively worked out in the asymmetrical arena of languages, and a dream as to what can be accomplished through this.
In Sucheta Dasgupta’s case, the translation of Trailokyanath Mukhopadhyay’s Tales of Early Magic Realism in Bengali stems from a desire to introduce readers of English to the wide, vibrant, unusual and remarkably fabulist world of the author as a pioneering attempt in the field of global speculative fiction.
Speculative fiction as a genre, is an umbrella term that stands for all modes of writing that depart from realism. It includes myth, fable, fantasy, surrealism, supernaturalism, magical realism, science fiction, and more. Being a speculative fiction writer herself, Dasgupta finds in Trailokyanath’s world an interesting attempt at “creating these genres and bending them in Bengali, in nineteenth-century United Bengal” which, to her, was a revelation of sorts.
Her intention to bring Trailokyanath Mukhopadhyay to the attention of a wider international audience has helped to add to our understanding of the rich and diverse society of nineteenth-century Bengal and its conflicting intellectual inheritance. This translation, in vital ways, also does service to Bengali literature in which Trailokyanath’s reputation has remained eclipsed and which, following Tagore’s estimation, has mostly looked upon him as a children’s writer.
A mere glance, however, at the six interesting translations in Tales of Early Magic Realism in Bengali will clarify that they are far from yarns meant for children. Driven by a clear vision to make sense of their times by negotiating between two distinct epistemologies – the native and the colonial, these are essentially narratives of ideas that speak to the confused public conscience of the age.
The tales, in question, are ‘Lullu’, ‘Treks of Kankabaty’, ‘Rostam and Bhanumati’, ‘The Alchemist’, ‘The Legend of Raikou’ and ‘When Vidyadhari Lost Her Appetite’. These are, properly speaking, ‘tales’ that stem from and echo a fecund oral tradition of storytelling and answer to no formal conceptions of the short story genre. They are indiscriminate with regards to length, plausibility, fineness, and intention and except for the last story which exemplifies a certain tightness of plot and effect, these tales are characterised by a clumsy looseness which marks oral forms.
Rich in description and sensory detail, each of these stories has its own distinct style and flavour. While ‘Lullu’ and ‘Treks of Kankabaty’ are pure fantasy, ‘Rostam and Bhanumati’ and ‘The Legend of Raikou’ weld elements from myth and folklore. ‘The Alchemist’ attempts to combine moral treatise and scientific history together while ‘When Vidyadhari Lost Her Appetite’ sticks to realism, emerging as the most well-told tale in the collection terms of both craft and cultural representation.
How far it is justified to call these six narratives ‘tales of early magic realism’ remains a question well-raised in the ‘Foreword’ to the book by Anil Menon where he points out that the bringing together of realism and fantasy sans the socio-political context of the twentieth century seems inadequate. “What we can say is that there is a magic realist reading of such-and-such work. The classification refers to the relationship between the reader and text, and not to some essence in the text itself.”
Trailokyanath’s world, whether realist or fabulist, is the world of a robust, liberal, discerning intellectual who is well aware of the various currents and counter-currents of native and colonial reflection of his times, all of which he adroitly conjures in his fiction to offer readers sumptuous food for thought. While these tales might want in artistry and unity of effect, they revel in ideas and the multiplicity of points of view which offer readers today a very faithful portrait of nineteenth-century Bengal and the intellectual debates that actively ranged on issues such as religion, widowhood, sati, women’s education, fashion, the codes of marriage and remarriage, caste, family, and economy.
Dasgupta makes sincere efforts to offer as honest a translation as possible, (“I fully intend my work to be the ‘same text in a different language’ and not a transcreation”, she points out in her ‘Translator’s Note’.) retaining native words where there are not acceptable substitutes and offering a well-researched and nuanced glossary at the end of each tale to point out Bengali meanings and usages. The prose style of the book, following the original, tends to be ornate at places but the humour and satire that gives sinewy form to these tales is unmissable.
In ‘Lullu’, for instance, Aameer insists that the only qualification for an editor of a newspaper is the ability to curse and his purpose in choosing to appoint a ghost as editor was that “…all the curse words known to man have been spent or gone stale from overuse. From now on, I will serve ghostly abuse to the masses of this country. I will make a lot of money, I am sure of it.” In our own times, the experience of sensational headlines and of fake news, and the sight of bickering spokespersons and screaming anchors in newsrooms makes us smile at Trailokyanath’s foresight.
In ‘Treks of Kankabaty’ which attempts to be a Bengali adaptation of Lewis Caroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), a mosquito informs the protagonist that the true purpose for which humans have been created is so that mosquitoes “can take a drink of their blood”. “All mosquitoes,” states Raktabaty “know that humans have brains, but no intelligence. The foolish amongst us are called humans in the pejorative sense.”
A comic geographic, cosmic and karmic purpose for the traditional religious prohibition on travel for Indians emerges in this tale:
“India is surrounded by the black waters on three sides while on the other, there are gargantuan mountain ranges. Just as animals are kept inside a paddock, so, too, we had kept Indians enclosed by the means of these natural fences. By staying in India, Indians so far had remained at our service and humbly donated their blood for the purpose of our nourishment. Not so any longer. Today, some of them are waging attempts to cross the high seas and conquer the mountains. That if they behave thus and deprive us of their blood, they commit a great sin is common knowledge.”
Again, on hearing that “the British have banned the custom of sahamaran[1]”, the monster Nakeshwari says:
“Well, the British did ban the custom, but do you know what the young and educated Bengali men believe today? They believe in restarting old customs in the name of Indian pride. They have gone stir-crazy in the name of throwing their grief-stricken mothers and sisters into the burning fire. And we, monsters, heartily support them in their mission.”
In ‘When Vidyadhari Lost Her Appetite’, humour aligns with stark realism in this argument between two maids:
“One day, Rosy addressed Vidyadhari, ‘Have you lost your judgement? Just this morning, you went to the confectioner’s shop and bought Sandesh for the master. Before serving it to him, you let the brahmin lick at it twice and then you, yourself, gave it ten good licks. When did you say to me, “Rosy, why don’t you, too, give it a couple of licks?” If one attains something, one’s duty is to share it with others.”
Common to all these tales is the empowering of the marginalised, a challenge to status quo, and a sustained intention to speak the truth for empowerment. In that sense, these narratives are all anti-authoritarian and disrupt various forms of hegemony to establish a vision of life that is swift, changing, capable of responding to oppression with wit, and where the spoken word has sacral value. That is why in ‘Lullu’, Aamir’s thoughtless remark ‘Le Lullu’ to frighten his wife actually summons a ghost called Lullu who spirits her away. Similarly, in ‘Treks of Kankabaty’, the moment Kankabaty’s father says, “…if a tiger appears in this very moment and asks for Kankabaty’s hand, I shall give it to him”, a roar is heard and a tiger appears seeking her hand in marriage.
Language, in its diverse potential, becomes an important thematic link in these tales and in this immensely polyphonic text that unleashes a host of voices, human and non-human, to capture a reality that operates on multiple axes and can be best appreciated through the third eye of the imagination.
.
[1] Dying together — A wife(or Sati) was burnt in the funeral pyre of her husband. This custom was banned in India by the British in 1829 and continues banned.
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.
.
PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL
Baraf Pora (Snowfall) by Rabindranath Tagore,gives a glimpse of his first experience of snowfall in Brighton and published in the Tagore family journal, Balak (Children), has been translated from Bengali by Somdatta Mandal. Clickhere to read.
Himalaya Jatra( A trip to Himalayas) by Tagore, has been translated from his Jibon Smriti (1911, Reminiscenses) by Somdatta Mandal from Bengali. Click here to read.
Bhumika (Introduction) by Tagore has been translated from Bengali by Ratnottama Sengupta. Click here to read.
The Fire-grinding Quern by Manzur Bismil has been translated from Balochi by Fazal Baloch. Clickhere to read.
The Tobacco Lover by Ihlwha Choi has been translated from Korean by the poet himself. Clickhere to read.
Pochishe Boisakh(25th of Baisakh) by Tagore(1922), has been translated from Bengali by Mitali Chakravarty. Click here to read.
Pandies Corner
Songs of Freedom: Dear Me… is an autobiographical narrative by Ilma Khan, translated from Hindustani by Janees. These narrations highlight the ongoing struggle against debilitating rigid boundaries drawn by societal norms, with the support from organisations like Shaktishalini and pandies’. Click here to read.
Paul Mirabile gives a gripping tale about a young pyromaniac. Click hereto read.
Conversation
Ratnottama Sengupta in conversation about Kitareba, a contemporary dance performance on immigrants, with Sudarshan Chakravorty, a choreographer, and founder of the Sapphire Dance Company. Click here to read.
Centuries ago, April was associated with spring induced travel… just as pilgrims set out on a journey in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Some of the journeys, like to Mecca, become a part of religious lore. And some just add to the joie de vivre of festivities during different festivals that punctuate much of Asia during this time — Pohela Boisakh (Bengali), Songkran (Thai), Navavarsha (Nepali), Ugadi (Indian), Vaisakhi (Indian), Aluth Avurudda (Sri Lankan) and many more.
A hundred years ago, in April 1924, Tagore had also set out to journey across the oceans to China — a trip which, perhaps, led to the setting up of Cheena Bhavan in Vishwa Bharati. Recently, Professor Uma Dasgupta in a presentation stated that Tagore’s Nobel prize winning Gitanjali, and also a collection called The Crescent Moon (1913), had been translated to Chinese in 1923 itself… He was renowned within China even before he ventured there. His work had been critically acclaimed in literary journals within the country. That arts connect in an attempt to override divides drawn by politics is well embodied in Tagore’s work as an NGO and as a writer. He drew from all cultures, Western and Eastern, to try and get the best together to serve humankind, closing gaps borne of human constructs. This spirit throbbed in his work and his words. Both towered beyond politics or any divisive constructs and wept with the pain of human suffering.
This issue features translations of Tagore’s writings from his childhood — both done by professor Somdatta Mandal — his first trip with his father to the Himalayas and his first experience of snow in Brighton. We have a transcreation of some of his lyrics by Ratnottama Sengupta. The translation of his birthday poem to himself — Pochishe Boisakh(his date of birth in the Bengali calendar) along with more renditions in English of Korean poetry by Ihlwha Choi and Manzur Bismil’s powerful poetry from Balochi by Fazal Baloch, add richness to our oeuvre. Bismil’s poetry is an ode to the people — a paean to their struggle. It would seem from all the translations that if poets and writers had their way, the world would be filled with love and kindness.
Yet, the world still thunders with wars, with divides — perhaps, there will come a time when soldiers will down their weapons and embrace with love for, they do not fight for themselves but for causes borne of artificial human divides. It is difficult to greet people on any festival or new year, knowing there are parts of the world where people cannot celebrate for they have no food, no water, no electricity, no homes and no lives… for many have died for a cause that has been created not by them as individuals but by those who are guided solely by their hankering for power and money, which are again human constructs. Beyond these constructs there is a reality that grows out of acceptance and love, the power that creates humanity, the Earth and the skies…
Humour is brought into non-fiction by Devraj Singh Kalsi’s narrative about being haunted by an ancient British ghost in Kolkata! Suzanne Kamata adds to the lightness while dwelling on modelling for photographs in the Japanese way. Ravi Shankar plunges into the history of photography while musing on black and white photographs from the past.
Tagore again seeps into non-fiction with Professor Fakrul Alam and Asad Latif telling us what the visionary means to the Bengali psyche. Starting with precursors of Tagore, like Michael Madhusudan Dutt, and post-him, Sarojini Naidu, Mandal has shared an essay on Bengaliness in contemporary poetry written by those born to the culture. Jared Carter has given discussed ‘the lyric temper’ in poetry — a wonderful empathetic recap of what it takes to write poetry. Exploring perspectives of multiple greats, like Yeats, Keats, George Santyana, Fitzgerald, Carter states, “Genuine lyricism comes only after the self has been quieted.”
Sengupta has conversed with a dance choreographer, Sudershan Chakravorty, who has been composing to create an awareness about the dilemmas faced by migrants. An autobiographical narrative in Hindustani from Ilma Khan, translated by Janees, shows the resilience of the human spirit against oppressive social norms. Our fiction has stories from Lakshmi Kannan and Shevlin Sebastian urging us to take a relook at social norms that install biases and hatred, while Paul Mirabile journeys into the realm of fantasy with his strange story about a boy obsessed with pyromania.
“It is an ironical reflection on our times that a prolific and much awarded Indian writer– perhaps deserving of the Nobel prize — should be excised from the university syllabus of a central university. This move has, perhaps paradoxically, elicited even more interest in Mahasweta Devi’s work and has also consolidated her reputation as a mascot, a symbol of resistance to state violence. A timely intervention, this volume proves yet again that a great writer, in responding to local, regional, environmental ethical concerns sensitively, transcends his/her immediate context to acquire global and universal significance.”
There is more content than I mention here. Do pause by our current issue to take a look.
I would hugely like to thank the Borderless team for their unceasing support, and especially Sohana Manzoor, also for her fantastic art. Heartfelt thanks to all our wonderful writers and our readers. We exist because you all are — ubuntu.
Hope you have a wonderful month. Here’s wishing you all wonderful new years and festivals in March-April — Easter, Eid and the new years that stretch across Asian cultures.
Looking forward and hoping for peace and goodwill.
It is clear that English is employed here not as a language on loan, but as the rich, spluttering resource of the marrow and the bloodstream.-- Arundhathi Subramaniam.
At the outset, let me make a candid statement. I am a very prosaic person, someone who in her long teaching career and academic writing as well as translation, has never ventured to write poetry myself. I might seem like the odd woman out, but somehow, I have been closely following the recent trends in which Indian Poetry in English has been rapidly spreading its wings and with new volumes being published every other day, it is now a force to be reckoned with.
Tomb of Henry Louis Vivian Derozio at the South Park Street Cemetery, Kolkata.
Recapitulating literary history briefly, it is well known that Indian English Poetry (or often called Anglophone poetry in India) is the oldest form of Indian English literature. Beginning roughly from 1850 to 1900, it went through the ‘imitative’ phase when Indian poets were primarily ‘romantic’ and tried to imitate the British masters. Beginning with Derozio[1], many poets of the time — namely Rabindranath Tagore, Sri Aurobindo, Sarojini Naidu, Michael Madhusudan Dutt, Toru Dutt — were also Bengalis by birth. The poetry written between 1900 to 1947 belonged to the ‘assimilative’ period and often questions were asked why the poets didn’t write in their ‘own’ languages. Post-independence poetry was primarily experimental, and when we come to contemporary Indian English poetry, we find it becoming wholly urban and middle-class. The poets are realistic and intellectually critical in the expression of their individualised experience. They go in for precision at all levels and do not stick to one genre but experiment with multiple poetic forms.
Interestingly, I realised that a whole host of Indian English poets writing at present (some have several volumes of poetry published already, whereas others have just given birth to one or two), but coincidentally many of them happen to be Bengalis — Bashabi Fraser, Sudeep Sen, Kiriti Sengupta, Sanjukta Dasgupta, Mitali Chakravarty, Angshuman Kar, Shyamasri Maji, Basudhara Roy,Radha Chakravarty, and others. It is not a complete list at all, and what makes this study more interesting is that except for a couple of them, all these poets come from an English literature background. It is also not a coincidence that most of them teach English as their profession. So, whether it be personal lyrics, free verse, memories, experiences, observations, or even translation, the English muse therefore gives them the impetus to experiment with all forms, and at the same time helps them to move away from themes like nationalism, nature, Indian culture, love etc. that dominated Indian English Poetry in earlier times.
Bashabi Fraser receiving her CBE (2021 The Queen’s New Year Honours) from Prince Charles, now King Charles III.
Bashabi Fraser is an Indian-born Bengali and a Scottish academic, editor, translator, and writer. She is a Professor Emerita of English and Creative Writing at Edinburgh Napier University. Fraser’s work traverse continents in bridge-building literary projects. She was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2021 New Year Honours for services to education, culture and cultural integration in Scotland, in particular for her projects linking Scotland and India. Among her several volumes of poetry the Bengal and Bengali connection comes out in volumes like From the Ganga to the Tay: a poetic conversation between the Ganges and the Tay (2009), Letters to My Mother and Other Mothers (2015), My Mum’s Sari (2019), and Lakshmi’s Footprints and Paisely Patterns: Perspectives on Scoto-Indian Literary and Cultural Interrelations (2023). Fraser has worked extensively on a project about the Bengal Partition and the angst resulting from this divide expresses itself in the following poem.
This Border Can shadow lines on the earth’s surface divide language and literature, rituals and customs, rivers…and memories?
There was a time when you and I Chased the same butterfly Climbed the same stolid trees With the fearless expertise That children take for granted Before their faith is daunted Do you remember how we balanced a wheel Down dusty paths with childish zeal Do you remember the ripples that shivered As we ducked and dived in our river Do you remember what we shared Of love and meals, and all we dared Together – without fears Because we were one In all those years Before we knew that butterflies Were free to share our separate skies That they could cross with graceful ease To alight on stationary trees On either side of this strange line That separates yours from mine For whose existence we rely Entirely on our inward eye This border by whose callous side Our inert wheel lies stultified This border that cuts like a knife Through the waters of our life Slicing fluid rivers with The absurdity of a new myth That denies centuries Of friendships and families This border that now decrees One shared past with two histories This border that now decides The sky between us as two skies This border born of blood spilt free Makes you my friend, my enemy.
Another well-established poet is Sudeep Sen who studied in New Delhi and in the United States and is a global citizen, so to say. Sudeep’s literary output is enormous and some of the titles of his volumes of poetry have subtle references to Indianness and Bengaliness embedded in them as well. Mention may be made of volumes like Leaning Against the Lamp-Post (1983), The Man in the Hut (1986), Kali in Ottava Rima (1992), Postmarked India: New & Selected Poems (1997), and several others. Though he might not do it consciously, his Bengaliness remains embedded in his psyche.
Kiriti Sengupta who has been awarded the Rabindranath Tagore Literary Prize (2018) for his contribution to literature, is a poet, editor, translator, and publisher. What is more significant is that along with Bitan Chakraborty, he mans the publishing house Hawakal, which has already carved a niche for itself as the largest publisher of Indian Poetry in English. Several poets mentioned in this essay have seen their creations see the light of the day through Hawakal Publishers and they have done yeomen service in this regard. As an established poet, Sengupta has several volumes of poetry to his credit. His collection from 2019, called Rituals, is very different from the work readers usually read in that there is a narrative thread in many poems that is not there simply to tell a story but to ultimately present a meditation on an aspect of life and the modern world that they haven’t considered before. “Fleeing the house and leaving the doors ajar. Is it perversion or fallacy?”
In an earlier volume entitled Solitary Stillness (2018), Sengupta does not give away the traits that have pervaded his poetry, he has not forgotten his Bengali roots, and has once again drawn his poetry on the canvas of the time that has been rooted in Calcutta. As he elaborates upon this point in his professional website, here, he makes a reference to Lapierre, and indeed, the ‘city of joy’ tag sounds fake just as we read that particular poem, which is so natural, that it almost appears to have been spoken by a resident of a city, one who is not a poet. According to him, that person who complains about water logging or that person for whom any tag of romanticism about the city is bourgeois, it is nothing but a label that’s needed to promote consumerism.
Mitali Chakravarty, the indefatigable editor of Borderless Journal, wrote to me saying that she is happy I feel she belongs to Bengal, “I call myself a Bengali and a human”. Though a non-resident Bengali, her perception of her own work and Bengali cultural identity is clearly revealed in a poem published in The Daily Star (Bangladesh)[2].
Confused
I am mixed up – cannot help English and Bengali under my belt
I can read a bit of Hindi Cannot understand much of French A little Chinese …low class, they said… I am mixed up – cannot help English and Bengali under my belt
I grew up thinking I will find a way But now pidgin is all that I can say I write in English – the language borrowed from the West The language that taught us or brought us unrest The language that through The Raj spread Importing Nationalism in its tread I am mixed-up – cannot help English and Bengali under my belt
But my life is that of the non-English A probashi Bengali at best
People say I am not typical, not quite the right type A mixed-up Bengali – I said Culture is something I dread at every tread Because what Culture I have is mine - Not of a Race, a Country or Religion – Human Being is the only race to which I belong
Help protect my home, the Earth – its every drop, its every stone
In a world of 7.7 billion, can I be alone? I am mixed up – cannot help English and Bengali under my belt
Though she has been writing poetry for a long time, Mitali’s first poetry collection, Flight of the Angsana Oriole: Poemswas published by Hawakal only in October 2023. In the ‘Introduction’ to this volume, she states that her random collection of poems “are sometimes of the past” as she knew it and “sometimes of the present. And sometimes in quest of a future or a dream that she hopes will go to create a more hopeful future than the world presents to us currently.” The poems in this volume are personal; some talk of her journey through life, the world as she sees it, some even influenced by her travels across the world. She further states: “Inherent in each line is not just the influence of my experiences in many countries but the nurturing I had in India, where I was born, educated and spent the first two decades of my earthly existence.” So, poems like ‘Death of Lalon’, ‘Shivratri’, ‘Kali Rise’, ‘Shraddha‘ [last respects] and a few others do convey the subconscious Bengaliness embedded in her psyche, irrespective of where she physically resides now.
Radha Chakravarty, a prolific writer and translator, Former Professor of Comparative Literature and Translation Studies at Ambedkar University, Delhi, has recently joined the bandwagon of Indian Poetry in English with her debut collection of poems Subliminal published by Hawakal Publishers in 2023. In a detailed interview given to Mitali Chakravarty for the March issue of Borderless Journal[3], she tells us about her aims and ambitions as a poet and how most of the poems in Subliminal are independent compositions, not planned for pre-conceived anthology.
My poetry actually delves beneath surfaces to tease out the hidden stories and submerged realities that drive our lives. And very often, those concealed truths are startlingly different from outward appearances. I think much of my poetry derives its energy from the tensions between our illusory outer lives and the realities that lurk within.
Many of Radha Chakravarty’s poems express the feeling of Bengaliness in different perspectives. We read about the typically soft quilt called kantha in Bengali in the poem ‘Designs in Kantha‘ thus:
Sewn into soft, worn layers, forgotten fabric of grandmother tales – patterns of the past, secret memories, hidden designs, intriguing patterns in silk strands dyed in delicate dreamy shades— embroidered storylines in exquisite, dainty kantha-stitch.
When Mitali Chakravarty asks her why she writes in English though it isn’t her mother tongue, she answers:
Having grown up outside Bengal, I have no formal training in Bengali. I was taught advanced Bengali at home by my grandfather and acquired my deep love for the language through my wide exposure to books, music, and performances in Bengali, from a very early age. I was educated in an English medium school. At University too, I studied English Literature. Hence, like many others who have grown up in Indian cities, I am habituated to writing in English. I translate from Bengali, but write and publish in English, the language of my education and professional experience. Bengali belongs more to my personal, more intimate domain, less to my field of public interactions…. Both Bengali and English are integral to my consciousness, and I guess this bilingual sensibility often surfaces in my poetry. In many poems, such as ‘The Casket of Secret Stories,’ ‘The Homecoming’ or ‘In Search of Shantiniketan’, Bengali words come in naturally because of the cultural matrix in which such poems are embedded.
Of course, the poet also mentions that all her poetry is not steeped in Bengali. In fact, in most of her poems, Bengali expressions don’t feature at all, because the subjects have a much wider range of reference. As a globe trotter, Radha has written about different places and journeys between places.
Another debut book of poems that Hawakal Publishers brought to light in December 2023 entitled Forgive Me, Dear Papa and other poems is written by Shyamasri Maji, an Assistant Professor of English teaching at Durgapur Women’s College, West Bengal. Dedicating this collection of poems to her “incurably romantic self,” Maji feels that “being ‘romantic’ in this context is being imaginative, reflective, puerile, rebellious and emotional.” The poems are a mixed bag, belonging to different thematic issues. Some focus on a woman’s radical views on the gender hierarchies in our society, in some nature plays the role of mediator between the narrator and the world, the idea of loss of love, which is closely linked with thoughts of death, while a few poems also represent an interpersonal dialogue between the self and the other. Some of Maji’s poems focus on the role of memory whereas some are experimental in the sense that they portray a woman’s comprehension of a man’s thoughts. Stressing upon the fluidity of identities, she shows how love, pain, pandemic, separation and grief affect all human beings irrespective of an individual’s gender and sexual orientation.
Six books of published poems and twenty-five years of creative journey has been a consistent exploration by the poet Sanjukta Dasgupta as she tries to find the path of freedom from among the misleading mesmeric mazes that threaten and stifle both sense and sensibility. As a woman poet with a strong feminist stance, Dasgupta admits in an online interview given to Basudhara Roy[4]:
Though I read Bangla poetry since my schooldays, I wrote my poems in English. It was an unconscious choice. Much later I learnt that I should have been embarrassed about writing in English rather than in my home language, my mother tongue Bangla. The poems written in English kept on being born on the page with embarrassing regularity.
Writing poetry is an irrepressible urge for me. It is, in a way, far more intense than the biological labour pain. This labour pain of creativity leaves me restless till the words are born on the page. But the creative process allows endless revisions; a biological production is largely about acceptance, neither revision nor deletion are considered ethical practices. In the case of poetry, it is not about choice, it is a compulsion which is intense and gratifying and multiple revisions often lead to the emergence of the perfect product.
The title of Dasgupta’s poetry book Lakshmi Unbound (Chitrangi, 2017) is very significant. Lakshmi being an intrinsic part of the fabric of Bengali culture, the radicality and dissidence of the idea of ‘Alakshmi[6]’ will require no explanation to a Bengali reader.
She thinks the core agenda in Lakshmi Unbound is a defiant, determined search for freedom. So, it is not just deconstruction, it is an endeavour to call attention to the need to destabilize the deep-rooted stereotypes that have controlled the minds and mobility of women. In Sita’s Sisters (Hawakal, 2019), she crafts a revisionist feminist mythology by taking up familiar figures like Sita, Lakshmi, Kali, Mira and attempts to free these mythic figures from their claustrophobic space so that they can be re-invented in sync with the contemporary times.
Residing in Jamshedpur, in the state of Jharkhand, Basudhara Roy is an established poet and has several books and publications to her credit. In her own website, is stated: “Committed to an undying affair with words, Basudhara finds in poetry an epistemological and existential skylight. She writes because she feels she must test words on her tongue, pulse, moods, agitation, abstraction and satire. She is convinced that words can change the world and hence, she works at them in her own culinary way – washing, peeling, grating, pounding, baking, sautéing, kneading, roasting, often flaming them for what they might yield.”
The following poem from Stitching a Home (Red River, 2021) considers the eternal problem of a woman that plagues women writers a lot.
The Right Kind of Woman
The right kind of woman will inspire affection, regard, trust. Not promiscuity, never lust.
Bred by a mother equally right, she knows to avert her eyes to innuendoes, telling smiles.
In crowded buses, shops, streets, she knows to shut tight, bud-like, relinquish space, circumscribe limbs.
Above all, she knows the prudence of holding her tongue, of choosing silence’s worth over wordy rebellion.
Schooled to surrender in dark rooms, she knows, unasked, to feign desire, moan, stifle, sigh on cue.
On her forehead, she had a third eye to emit fire, take sides, rake storms. Last night, its lid rusted
with disuse fell out, and the right kind of woman laughed herself to death over all she had left undone, unsaid.
“Writing poetry is an isolation exercise” says Angshuman Kar, an established Bengali poet who by profession is also an English Professor at a university in West Bengal. His book of poems Wound is the Shelter (Hawakal, June 2023) is unique and different from the other volumes discussed here because the poems are all translated by the poet himself from his original Bengali poems. In the ‘Introduction’, Kar tells us that authors who translate themselves often seem to be unhappy about the task of translating their own works. The Marathi poet Arun Kolkatkar likens it to incest, — “like making love to your own daughters.” Critics of translation studies have both supported and criticised self-translation. Those who support it argue that the author knows their work the best and hence s/he is the best translator of their own work. Those who oppose self-translation argue that the author-translator takes too much liberty while translating his/her own work; thus, the translation hardly remains faithful to the original. In such a situation Kar says, “Without being critical, I must say that I love self-translation. I enjoy translating my own work, I love committing incest. It makes me a better poet…. As a self-translator, I find incest healthy. It makes me a better poet – il miglior fabbro.“
Coming to the individual poems in Wound is the Shelter, it need not be reiterated that most of them portray universal feelings but at the same time are seeped in Bengali culture as well. In “My Poems” Kar talks about Jungle Mahal, the three districts of West Bengal that are full of jungles; in “World,” he writes about blooms of a sal tree and shiuli flowers; in “Memory Card” he talks about a bus ride to reach his maternal uncle’s house in Bankura from where he went to the studio to take a family photograph — “Grandma in the middle/On either side we – three brothers, two sisters and a cousin”. In “Father” he mentions how his father’s bereavement fades with time and how his portrait adorns the wooden throne in which gods and goddesses are kept and he stands with Kali, Shiva and Durga. In “Neelkantha” he refers to Shiva; in “Park” he states how man forgets grief when he comes to a park, “That is why in a city as sad and lonely as Kolkata the number of parks is always high.” The five-part poem “Tiger” is also very powerful, “there is a tiger inside every human being” he states. Kar also mentions about the mask of a demon of Chhou dance of Purulia, the aal path in paddy fields, the Chandi mandap[7] of a small village, the man called Bhagaban Das who labours in a factory, and the man called Shubhasis Babu who rents him cars, whose voice he hears but has not seen him. Thus, even in his transcreated poems, Kar’s Bengaliness expresses itself overtly.
It is not possible to analyse the poems of each of the Bengali poets that I have mentioned above within the purview of this single essay, and so I have just selected a few of them (especially the poets who have one or two volumes to their credit at present). As mentioned earlier, though Bengali by birth, all the poets rendering their emotions in English, do often consciously or unconsciously express multicultural elements, Bengali cultural nuances, and idiomatic force in their poems. As the trend for providing glossary is passe now, much is left to the readers’ imagination, but still certain occasional Bengali words and phrases make their poems even more appealing.
After sharing my random thoughts about Indian Poetry in English in general and selectively mentioning a few Indian English poets who also happen to be Bengali and often unconsciously exude a sort of Bengaliness in some of their poems, without attempting to sound rather parochial, I wholeheartedly wish to see more volumes of their poetry being published in future. I conclude by quoting a very salient observation made by Arundhathi Subramaniam who is not wholly optimistic about the situation, but believes that despite hurdles in publishing, the voices of Indian poets writing in English would be heard [8]:
Despite the clunky discourse that continues to hover around it, however, Indian poetry in English endures, even flourishes, seventy years after Independence. Publishers may be few and far between, the royalties meagre, the critical climate thick with indifference or theoretical bluster, and the poets themselves bewildered by disputes over their identity, even their existence. But poetry, in its mysteriously resilient fashion, continues to be written, shared and discussed (if sometimes with more passion than discernment). … I am not ecstatic about the state of Indian poetry in English. (But then I am not ecstatic about poetry; only, at times, about poems.) What I do know is that Indian poetry in English is alive. And like all things alive, it engages, it annoys, it provokes, it excites. On several occasions, it has given me the jolt of wonder for which I turn to poetry in the first place.
Considering the slightly mellow tone in Subramaniam’s observation, I personally feel Indian English Poetry has become a significant force in the literary arena at present and will grow stronger with time. Seasoned poets who have several volumes of poetry published already, as well as the fresher ones whose debut volumes promise a lot more to come in future, can all look forward to seeing their ‘spontaneous overflow of powerful emotions’ in print and carry on the legacy of Indian Poetry in English to newer heights. And sure enough, the sub-genre of Bengali Indian English poetry can be researched in greater details in future.
.
[1] Henry Louis Vivian Derozio (1809–1831), poet and assistant headmaster of Hindu College, Calcutta, a radical thinker and started the Young Bengal Movement.
Title: Out of Sri Lanka: Tamil, Sinhala and English Poetry from Sri Lanka and its Diasporas
Editors: Vidyan Ravinthiran, Seni Seneviratne, Shash Trevett
Publisher: PenguinIndia (Vintage)
What makes poems in a collection belong to each other? Their shared spirit, one believes, would be the foremost — the way they thematically and stylistically accentuate each other, enter into conversation, deliberate, disturb, demand, and defend. Another significant consideration would be the commitment with which they collectively lay bare a social concern — unpacking it for public attention and discussion, and offering myriad points of entry into its dense complexity. Good poetry, by nature, offers a kind of prescience that is based on empathy, understanding, and the possibility of communication. A good anthology, by its sound aesthetic and social vision, effectively multiplies these virtues by the number of poems it showcases and ensures that the sum is always greater than its parts.
At a time when anthologies of poetry, worldwide, are mushrooming and often questionable in their inarticulate raison d’etre, it is rejuvenating to come across an anthology that exactly knows what it is up to and proceeds to execute its vision with ideological clarity and ineluctable grace. Out of Sri Lanka: Tamil, Sinhala and English Poetry from Sri Lanka and its Diasporas edited by Vidyan Ravinthiran, Seni Seneviratne, and Shash Trevett is the most comprehensive and perhaps, one of the most representative anthology of post-independence poetry in English to emerge from Sri Lanka. Bringing together almost a hundred and forty poets and more than four hundred poems written originally in English or translated into English from Tamil and Sinhala, both from within the country and its scattered diaspora, the book articulates the rich and scarred multicultural heritage of Sri Lanka, what it means to claim belonging to this contested land, and the spirit of belonging itself.
The tiny waterdrop-shaped island of Sri Lanka located on the southern tip of India has always been historically significant. Colonized first by the Portuguese, then by the Dutch and finally by the British, it became an independent nation-state in 1948, the transfer of power there being peaceful and orderly, unlike the gory turbulence witnessed in the mainland of the Indian subcontinent. Ceylon, as it was known then and until 1972, showed every promise of securing a more stable statehood and better standards of socioeconomic development among the many new decolonized states across Asia and Africa. But the trajectory of Sri Lanka’s post-independence history, its fatal walk toward ethnic democracy and the violent consequences of such deep antagonisms are well-known.
The twenty-six-year civil war in the island between the Sinhalese-dominated government (mostly Buddhist) and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (mostly Hindu) has been one of the most intense, brutal, and protracted ethnonational conflicts in global politics, the economic and human costs of which have been enormous. Acts of violence and ethnic cleansing by the LTTE against Muslims, Sri Lanka’s third-largest ethnic community have also occupied a significant place in its history. Added to these pogroms have been the ravages of nature in the tsunami of December 2004 which left the island totally uprooted and its severe economic crisis in recent times.
Waves of migration from the island, both voluntary and forced, have led to the creation of a group of expatriates and refugees who refuse to acknowledge their identity as Sri Lankans. How do a people find themselves under such circumstances? How do they lay claim to belonging and community? How do they resurrect for themselves a sense of tradition out of the debris? Out of Sri Lanka attempts a searching answer to all these questions and more as it brings to us, from all sections of its diverse society, voices that have, over the years, negotiated with all these crises in order to craft a narrative of resilience which, as the editors hope, will enable it to “take control of its destiny”.
The extremely articulate and well-researched introduction to the book is, in many ways, an intellectual treasure as it places poetry from the country and its diaspora within its seasoned and sensitive political and linguistic contexts, and offers an entry through it, into the fluid and dynamic nature of postcolonial poetry as a whole. The editors’ decision to not compartmentalise the poets in the collection on the basis of the languages they choose to write in but to showcase them in alphabetical order has been, by far, one of the most pertinent editorial decisions in keeping with the vision of this anthology. Given the linguistic grounds on which the political history of the island has been repeatedly fractured, the representation of poets as a cohesive group of witness-bearers regardless of their language and the ethno-ideological affiliations that a language is likely to connote, is a major step toward the envisioning of a more equitable and egalitarian society.
Again, as the editors observe, the traditions of Tamil, Sinhala, and English poetry on the island have rarely rubbed shoulders with one another with the result that their growth, development, and stylistic manifestations have remained rather insular. This book is an attempt to break that insularity by bringing poems from various linguistic heritages and frameworks in dialogue with one another and the results, as any conscientious reader will affirm, are spectacular. One confronts, here, a canvas of multiple arcs of intimacy, fear, insecurity, estrangement, acceptance, accusation, longing, loss, but above all, belonging. Resplendent throughout the book is the idea of identity – gender, territorial, ethnic, linguistic, national, transnational and human.
The editors tell us: “The explosiveness of Sri Lankan history, its cavalcade of events seeming to demand a response, produces a situation where deeply felt and meaningfully shaped poems are often not written by ‘poets’ as we understand that role as a profession supported by publishers, festivals and academic institutions. Instead, we find poems written by photographers, government workers, novelists, journalists – people for whom the luxury of considering themselves one of Shelley’s unacknowledged legislators of the world was never available, but who were pressed by extraordinary circumstances toward a lyric recognition of complexities otherwise beyond understanding.”
Here, in other words, is an urgent poetics, a rupturing into poetry by the incision of circumstance. For the editors, this anthology represents “a human rights intervention.” It is an act of commemoration, a historical acknowledgement of its tumultuous past, “a matter of putting things on record”. In ‘My Land [1981]’ by Cheran (translated from Tamil by Lakshmi Holmstrom) the pre-Civil War Sri Lanka is conjured with heartwarming admiration: “I stand on a hundred thousand shoulders/ and proclaim aloud: This is my land./ Across the seven seas,/ overcoming the rising waves,/ the wind shouts it everywhere:/ My land/ My land.” And yet, as the decades advance, pain bitterly takes over. “Like an unwritten poem/ you itch/ inside my head” goes the poem ‘No. 16’ by Mahagama Sekera (translated from Sinhala by Ranjini Obeyesekere) and the figurative density of the poem, as one would notice, travels from the personal to the political. In ‘Loose Change’, Ru Freeman writes: “…keep it keep/ the change keep the change keep/ all the noise-making metal Give us the rest/ whatever that is in this every man an island/ country of deceit We are far from home”
“…the time is right – the moment is now – for the world to know Sri Lanka better: its beauty and its pain” assert the editors of Out of Sri Lanka and one cannot but agree with them. A monumental work of literary activism, rigorous and laborious archival, and passionate commitment, this is more than a collection of poems. It is an act of rehabilitation, an attempt toward community-building, an unforgiving appraisal of the past, and a clear-eyed gaze into the future. Every nation must, at some time, stop to listen to itself and to speak of itself. One is glad that for Sri Lanka that time is here.
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.
.
PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL
Ratnottama Sengupta talks to Ruchira Gupta, activist for global fight against human trafficking, about her work and introduces her novel, I Kick and I Fly. Click here to read.
The White Lady by Atta Shad has been translated from Balochi by Fazal Baloch. Click here to read.
Sparrows by Ihlwha Choi has been translated from Korean by the poet himself. Click here to read.
Tagore’s Dhoola Mandiror Temple of Dust has been translated from Bengali by Mitali Chakravarty. Click here to read.
Pandies Corner
Songs of Freedom: What are the Options? is an autobiographical narrative by Jyoti Kaur, translated from Hindustani by Lourdes M Supriya. These narrations highlight the ongoing struggle against debilitating rigid boundaries drawn by societal norms, with the support from organisations like Shaktishalini and pandies’. Click here to read.
Ratnottama Sengupta travels back to her childhood wonderland where she witnessed what we regard as Indian film history being created. Click here to read.
Aditi Yadav explores the universal appeal of the translation of a 1937 Japanese novel that recently came to limelight as it’s rendition on the screen won the Golden Globe Best Animated Feature Film award (2024). Click here to read.
Love is a many splendoured thing and takes many forms — that stretches beyond bodily chemistry to a need to love all humankind. There is the love for one’s parents, family, practices one believes in and most of all nurtured among those who write, a love for words. For some, like Tagore, words became akin to breathing. He wrote from a young age. Eventually, an urge to bridge social gaps led him to write poetry that bleeds from the heart for the wellbeing of all humanity. Tagore told a group of writers, musicians, and artists, who were visiting Sriniketan in 1936: “The picture of the helpless village which I saw each day as I sailed past on the river has remained with me and so I have come to make the great initiation here. It is not the work for one, it must involve all. I have invited you today not to discuss my literature nor listen to my poetry. I want you to see for yourself where our society’s real work lies. That is the reason why I am pointing to it over and over again. My reward will be if you can feel for yourself the value of this work.”
And it was perhaps to express this great love of humanity that he had written earlier in his life a poem called Dhoola Mandirthat urges us to rise beyond our differences of faith and find love in serving humankind. In this month, which celebrates love with Valentine’s Day, we have a translation of this poem that is born of his love for all people, Dhoola Mandir. Another poet who writes of his love for humanity and questions religion is Nazrul, two of whose poems have been translated by Niaz Zaman. Exploring love between a parent and children is poetry by Masood Khan translated from Bengali by Fakrul Alam. From the distant frontiers of Balochistan, we have a poem by Atta Shad, translated from Balochi by Fazal Baloch, for a fair lady — this time it is admiration. Ihlwha Choi translates poetry from Korean to express his love for a borderless world through the flight of sparrows.
Suzanne Kamata writes a light-hearted yet meaningful column on the recent Taylor Swift concert in Tokyo. Aditi Yadav takes up the Japanese book on which was based a movie that won the 2024 Golden Globe Best Animated Feature Film Award. Sohana Manzoor journeys to London as Devraj Singh Kalsi with tongue in cheek humour comments on extracurriculars that have so become a necessity for youngsters to get to the right schools. Snigdha Agrawal gives us a slice of nostalgia while recounting the story of a Santhali lady and Keith Lyons expresses his love for peace as he writes in memory of a man who cycled for peace.
In reviews, Somdatta Mandal has explored Tahira Naqvi’s The History Teacher of Lahore: A Novel. Srijato’s AHouse of Rain and Snow, translated from Bengali by Maharghya Chakraborty, has been discussed by Basudhara Roy and Bhaskar Parichha has reviewed Toby Walsh’s Faking It: Artificial Intelligence in a Human World. News and Documentary Emmy Award winner (1996) Ruchira Gupta’s daring novel born of her work among human traffickers, I Kick and I Fly, has been brought to our notice by Sengupta and she converses about the book and beyond with this socially conscious activist, filmmaker and writer. Another humanist, a doctor who served by bridging gaps between patients from underprivileged backgrounds, Dr Ratna Magotra, also conversed about her autobiography,Whispers of the Heart — Not Just a Surgeon: An Autobiography, where she charts her journey which led her to find solutions to take cardiac care to those who did not have the money to afford it,
We have fiction this time from Neeman Sobhan reflecting on how far people will go for the love of their mother tongue to highlight the movement that started on 21st February in 1952 and created Bangladesh in 1971. Our stories are from around the world — Paul Mirabile from France, Ravi Shankar from Malaysia, Sobhan from Bangladesh and Ravi Prakash and Apurba Biswas from India — weaving local flavours and immigrant narratives. Most poignant of all the stories is a real-life narrative under the ‘Songs of Freedom’ series by a young girl, Jyoti Kaur, translated from Hindustani by Lourdes M Supriya. These stories are brought to us in coordination with pandies’ and Shaktishalini, a women’s organisation to enable the abused. Sanjay Kumar, the founder of pandies’ and the author of a most poignant book about healing suffering of children through theatre, Performing, Teaching and Writing Theatre: Exploring Play, writes, “‘Songs of Freedom’ bring stories from women — certainly not victims, not even survivors but fighters against the patriarchal status quo with support from the organisation Shaktishalini.”
While looking forward in hope of finding a world coloured with love and kindness under the blue dome, I would like to thank our fabulous team who always support Borderless Journal with their wonderful work. A huge thanks to all of you from the bottom of my heart. I thank all the writers who make our issues come alive with their creations and readers who savour it to make it worth our while to bring out more issues. I would urge our readers to visit our contents’ page as we have more than mentioned here.
Author: Srijato, translated from the Bengali by Maharghya Chakraborty
Publisher: Penguin Random House
“I believe I would want nothing else if I am allowed to just think. If it were a real job, I would be the first to get it. The only problem then would be that I would have to think on someone else’s command. Now I am free to think whatever I want.”
A quiet tenderness beckons the reader to A House of Rain and Snow. The title suggests everything generous and hospitable. Once inside the cosy house of this novel set in days before the internet revolution, there is, indeed, no disappointment. A translation of Srijato’s[1]Prothom Mudran, Bhalobasha[2]from the original Bengali into English by Maharghya Chakraborty[3], the novel offers, on the face of it, a simple coming-of-age story but such simplicity is only deceptive. Churning within the novel’s agonised romantic spirit are vital interrogations of the relationship between life, living, and livelihood, art and the market, the value and significance of art to life, and the question of integrity in both.
A Künstlerroman[4] that primarily focuses on Pushkar’s journey from an aspiring poet to a published artist, the novel frames more narratives than one. There is the story of Pushkar’s parents – Abanish and Ishita, of his friends, Abhijit and Asmita, and that of his mentor, Gunjan (and Parama), each constituting a mirror of the narrative prism in which Pushkar, the reflected subject, kaleidoscopically understands himself and his journey better. But Pushkar is not alone. Journeying with him in spirit are Nirban and his circle of poet-friends, the girl he is in love with – Saheli, and his most cherished friend and ‘confession box’, the milkwood tree.
Where does art come from? For Srijato, art is not extraneous to life but intrinsic to the very fabric of living. Every character in the world of the novel needs art, in one form or another, to survive. Not everyone, however, can become an artist. This privilege and responsibility is offered to the chosen few — those who can step out of their self-obsessed private worlds to establish a sincere relationship with the wider currents of life. Pushkar, for instance, tells the milkwood tree:
“…solitude is entirely a relative thing, silence too. I cannot understand myself without the immense tumult of this city, that’s where my silence lies. Unless I am standing in this swiftly moving crowd, I cannot find any solitude.”
Art, as the novel seems to assert, cannot be born except within life’s chaotic womb. A house of rain and snow can only be a nursery, a protected locale to nurture vision and aspiration. For the artist to grow, an engagement with the wider world would be mandatory.
But how does one engage with the world? Would the world even be worth engaging with? Is art a means of engagement or retreat, activism or escapism? No clear-cut answers to these questions are possible but A House of Rain and Snow attempts, as all worthy stories do, to shine its own light upon them. The novel’s world is divided into two kinds of people — those who view art as an existential end and those who, like Parama or Sumit Dastidar, view it only as a means or an avenue to something else. Those who see art as an end in itself understand that commitment in art does not necessarily guarantee accomplishment. Neither does accomplishment guarantee material success. As an aspiring artist, one can only bring all of one’s life and living to art without expecting anything in return, the fact of journeying being the artist’s only receipt.
There is very little physical action here. The journeys in A House of Rain and Snow, as the reader will observe, are all psychological. Place and time are important coordinates in this movement. The city of Kolkata emerges evocatively as inspiration and muse, its descriptions exuding a clear eye for detail, a deep sense of cultural nostalgia, a delineation of not just place but of spirit, and a documentation of the city’s multifarious, shapeshifting life — its strength, tenacity, and bustling beauty. Concrete yet shapeless, definite yet blurred, prosaic yet poetic, the city firmly anchors this novel as both stage and ship, contouring its artists’ perspectives on life and art.
The idea of time, in the novel, is as fluid as that of space. There is the constant sense, awareness, and reminder of its passage and yet, in Srijato’s fictional world, time refuses to be linear with the past, present, and future merging frequently through hallucination, dream and memory:
“Today, Gunjan notices the newspaper, he has never seen one in the moonlight. He bends over to pick it up from the mosaic floor gleaming under the light of the moon and, instead of the paper, comes back up with a tiny doll that had fallen on the ground a little while ago. A little more than seven years, to be precise.”
There is a strong visual quality about Srijato’s writing, intricately woven cinematographic effects which, had they been of any significance to the plot, might have amounted to magic realism. But being strictly organisational and descriptive in function, this cinematic quality is instrumental to the novel in other ways — it insulates the narrative from realism, liberates it from answerability to everyday logic, defamiliarises the familiar, and renders the strange intimate. Most importantly, it creates a surrealist impression, reminding us of all that remains constant in our consciousness in the most bizarre of circumstances, and manifests itself in the novel as an artist’s specialised and idiosyncratic way of relating to the world. Examine the windows of rain and snow, for instance:
“No one other than Pushkar knows about this, neither does he wish to tell anyone. There are two windows in his room, side by side, one almost touching the other. Outside one of them it rains the entire day and snows throughout outside the other. On the days this happens, Pushkar finds himself unable to leave the house.”
It is worth noting that it is not Pushkar alone who has such experiences. Other characters like Abanish and Gunjan also experience such strange reconfigurations of time and space — expansion, compression, repetition, alternation, all of which can be interpreted at a symbolic level.
Surcharged with intense lyrical passages, A House of Rain and Snow is quintessentially an exploration of the aching need for art in life. Life, in the pages of the novel, is almost unliveable without the solace of art. Art, in turn, can be born only out of love, the kind of love that Pushkar can extend to the milkwood tree and the world around him:
“He, Pushkar, is in love. A little too much, with everything. …Why, he is not sure. How, he is not sure either. All he knows is that at this very moment, it is love that is becoming his language, his constant recourse. Love. Not just for the people close to him or his writings or his own life. Love for everything. Everything happening around him at this moment, the moving earth, every incident everywhere in the world, the forests, the oceans, the mountains, the plains, the cities, the sky, even the vast outer space beyond earth.”
The translation wonderfully captures the linguistic nuances of Bengali in the English language, its semantic eccentricities, syntactic pace, and its lush images, making the novel a rich and rewarding read. A number of images linger steadily in the reader’s mind long after the book has been read – a tall, wet milkwood tree, an idol-maker shaping a goddess out of clay, and a young boy lifting his exhausted father on his palm.
[1] Srijato, one of the most celebrated Bengali poet-lyricists of our times, is the recipient of Ananda Puroskar in 2004 for his book Udanta Sawb Joker (All Those Flying Jokers).
[2] Literal translation from Bengali: First Gesture of Love
[3] Maharghya Chakraborty is a well-known translator. He teaches at St Xavier’s College in Kolkata.
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.
.
PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL
A conversation with the author,Afsar Mohammed, and a brief introduction to his latest book, Remaking History: 1948 Police Action and the Muslims of Hyderabad. Click hereto read.
A conversation with Meenakshi Malhotra over The Gendered Body: Negotiation, Resistance, Struggle, edited by Meenakshi Malhotra, Krishna Menon and Rachana Johri and a brief introduction to the book. Click hereto read.
In His Unstable Shape, Rhys Hughes explores the narratives around a favourite nursery rhyme character with a pinch of pedantic(?) humour. Click here to read.
Mother & Child by Jamini Roy (1887-1972)Mother and Child by Picasso (1881-1973)
‘Victory to Man, the newborn, the ever-living.’ They kneel down, the king and the beggar, the saint and the sinner, the wise and the fool, and cry: ‘Victory to Man, the newborn, the ever-living.’
This is the month— the last of a conflict-ridden year— when we celebrate the birth of a messiah who spoke of divine love, kindness, forgiveness and values that make for a better world. The child, Jesus, has even been celebrated by Tagore in one of his rarer poems in English. While we all gather amidst our loved ones to celebrate the joy generated by the divine birth, perhaps, we will pause to shed a tear over the children who lost their lives in wars this year. Reportedly, it’s a larger number than ever before. And the wars don’t end. Nor the killing. Children who survive in war-torn zones lose their homes or families or both. For all the countries at war, refugees escape to look for refuge in lands that are often hostile to foreigners. And yet, this is the season of loving and giving, of helping one’s neighbours, of sharing goodwill, love and peace. On Christmas this year, will the wars cease? Will there be a respite from bombardments and annihilation?
We dedicate this bumper year-end issue to children around the world. We start with special tributes to love and peace with an excerpt from Tagore’s long poem, ‘The Child‘, written originally in English in 1930 and a rendition of the life of the philosopher and change-maker, Vivekananda, by none other than well-known historical fiction writer, Aruna Chakravarti. The poem has been excerpted from Indian Christmas: Essays, Memoirs, Hymns, an anthology edited by Jerry Pinto and Madhulika Liddle, a book that has been reviewed by Somdatta Mandal and praised for its portrayal of the myriad colours and flavours of Christmas in India. Christ suffered for the sins of humankind and then was resurrected, goes the legend. Healing is a part of our humanness. Suffering and healing from trauma has been brought to the fore by Christopher Marks’ perspective on Veronica Eley’s The Blue Dragonfly: healing through poetry. Basudhara Roy has also written about healing in her take of Kuhu Joshi’s My Body Didn’t Come Before Me.Bhaskar Parichha has reviewed a book that talks of healing a larger issue — the crises that humanity is facing now, Permacrisis: A Plan to Fix a Fractured World, by ex-British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, Nobel Laureate Michael Spence, Mohamed El-Erian and Reid Lidow. Parichha tells us that it suggests solutions to resolve the chaos the world is facing — perhaps a book that the world leadership would do well to read. After all, the authors are of their ilk! Our book excerpts from Dr Ratna Magotra’s Whispers of the Heart – Not Just A Surgeon: An Autobiographyand Manjima Misra’s The Ocean is Her Titleare tinged with healing and growth too, though in a different sense.
The theme of the need for acceptance, love and synchronicity flows into our conversations with Afsar Mohammad, who has recently authored Remaking History: 1948 Police Action and the Muslims of Hyderabad. He shows us that Hyderabadi tehzeeb or culture ascends the narrow bounds set by caged concepts of faith and nationalism, reaffirming his premise with voices of common people through extensive interviews. In search of a better world, Meenakshi Malhotra talks to us about how feminism in its recent manifestation includes masculinities and gender studies while discussing The Gendered Body: Negotiation, Resistance, Struggle, edited by her, Krishna Menon and Rachana Johri. Here too, one sees a trend to blend academia with non-academic writers to bring focus on the commonalities of suffering and healing while transcending national boundaries to cover more of South Asia.
That like Hyderabadi tehzeeb, Bengali culture in the times of Tagore and Nazrul dwelled in commonality of lore is brought to the fore when in response to the Nobel laureate’s futuristic ‘1400 Saal’ (‘The year 1993’), his younger friend responds with a poem that bears not only the same title but acknowledges the older man as an “emperor” among versifiers. Professor Fakrul Alam has not only translated Nazrul’s response, named ‘1400Saal’ aswell, but also brought to us the voice of another modern poet, Quazi Johirul Islam. We have a self-translation of a poem by Ihlwha Choi from Korean and a short story by S Ramakrishnan in Tamil translated by T Santhanam.
Our short stories travel with migrant lore by Farouk Gulsara to Malaysia, from UK to Thailand with Paul Mirabile while chasing an errant son into the mysterious reaches of wilderness, with Neeman Sobhan to Rome, UK and Bangladesh, reflecting on the Birangonas (rape victims) of the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation war, an issue that has been taken up in Malhotra’s book too. Sobhan’s story is set against the backdrop of a war which was fought against linguistic hegemony and from which we see victims heal. Sohana Manzoor this time has not only given us fabulous artwork but also a fantasy hovering between light and dark, life and death — an imaginative fiction that makes a compelling read and questions the concept of paradise, a construct that perhaps needs to be found on Earth, rather than after death.
The unusual paradigms of life and choices made by all of us is brought into play in an interesting non-fiction by Nitya Amlean, a young Sri Lankan who lives in UK. We travel to Kyoto with Suzanne Kamata, to Beijing with Keith Lyons, to Wayanad with Mohul Bhowmick and to Langkawi with Ravi Shankar. Wendy Jones Nakanishi argues in favour of borders with benevolent leadership. Tongue-in-cheek humour is exuded by Devraj Singh Kalsi as he writes of his attempts at using visiting cards as it is by Rhys Hughes in his exploration of the truth about the origins of the creature called Humpty Dumpty of nursery rhyme fame.
Poetry again has humour from Hughes. A migrant himself, Jee Leong Koh, brings in migrant stories from Singaporeans in US. We have poems of myriad colours from Ryan Quinn Flanagan, Patricia Walsh, John Grey, Kumar Bhatt, Ron Pickett, Prithvijeet Sinha, Sutputra Radheye, George Freek and many more. Papia Sengupta ends her poem with lines that look for laughter among children and a ‘life without borders’ drawn by human constructs in contrast to Jones Nakanishi’s need for walls with sound leadership. The conversation and dialogues continue as we look for a way forward, perhaps with Gordon Brown’s visionary book or with Tagore’s world view of lighting the inner flame in each human. We can hope that a way will be found. Is it that tough to influence the world using words? We can wish — may there be no need for any more Greta Thunbergs to rise in protest for a world fragmented and destroyed by greed and lack of vision. We hope for peace and love that will create a better world for our children.
As usual, we have more content than mentioned here. All our pieces can be accessed on the contents’ page. Do pause by and take a look. This bumper issue would not have been possible without the contribution of all the writers and our fabulous team from Borderless. Huge thanks to them all and to our wonderful readers who continue to encourage us with their comments and input.
Here’s wishing you all wonderful new adventures in the New Year that will be born as this month ends!
Borderless 