Tag: Bengal

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A Special Tribute

Blazing across the Darkness: Kazi Nazrul Islam

Kazi Nazrul Islam (24th May 1899-29th August 1976)
Why fear destruction? It’s the gateway to creation!
The new will arise and rip through the unlovely.
Hair disheveled and dressed carelessly
Destruction makes its way gleefully.
Confident it can destroy and then build again!
Ring bells of victory!
Ring bells of victory!

-- Prolloyullash (The Frenzy of Destruction) by Nazrul; translated from Bengali by Professor Fakrul Alam

As the world swerves in disarray, Kazi Nazrul Islam, who died the same month as Tagore, leaves behind a treasury of prose and poetry which, if we imbibe into our blood and bones, could perhaps heal dysfunctional constructs made by humans. Given the current situation, one cannot but help recall Nazrul’s lines from his poem, Prolloyullash (The Frenzy of Destruction), hoping for better times. Known as the rebel poet of Bengal, in his poem, Bidrohi (Rebel), he becomes the force that creates the change. His powerful writing and idealism continues to inspire over the decades.

Tagore saw brilliance in him and even wrote a poem for him that Radha Chakravarty has shared in her essay as a tribute on his 48th death anniversary. We also revisit his own inspiring words with translations of his poetry, lyrics and fiction by Professor Alam and Sohana Manzoor, along with the tribute by Chakravarty.

Poetry

Rebel or ‘Bidrohi’ by Nazrul has been translated by Professor Fakrul Alam. Click here to read.

Two Songs of Parting by Nazrul have been translated by Professor Fakrul Alam. Click here to read. 

Prose

The Snakecharmer, Shapuray by Nazrul, has been translated from Bengali by Sohana Manzoor. Click here to read.

The Comet’s Trail: Remembering Kazi Nazrul Islam

Radha Chakravarty pays tribute to the rebel poet of Bengal. Click here to read.

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Essay

The Comet’s Trail: Remembering Kazi Nazrul Islam

By Radha Chakravarty    

 

The many faces pf Kazi Nazrul Islam. From the Public Domain

The abiding image of Kazi Nazrul Islam (1899-1976) is that of the “Rebel Poet,” who defines himself as a fiery comet streaking across the firmament, emblazoning in the sky a message of revolutionary change. Unlike Rabindranath Tagore, Nazrul was not born into social and intellectual privilege. He has been described, in fact, as “the ‘other’ of the elite Kolkata bhadralok”.[1] Born in Churulia village in the Bardhaman district of Bengal, Nazrul was the son of the head of a mosque, studied in an Islamic school, and during his youth, joined a Leto group, a travelling band of local performers. When in high school, he was recruited into the British army, and served in Karachi. Even after he returned to Bengal as a young poet who had already acquired fame and repute, he remained something of an outsider to the intellectually sophisticated world of the literati. It was from this position of an outsider that he fashioned his own image as the bidrohi or ‘Rebel poet’ who challenged the structures of the political, social, cultural and literary establishment with the sheer force of his iconoclastic writings.

Though best known as a poet, composer and revolutionary, Nazrul’s oeuvre also includes novels, essays, stories, editorials and journalistic pieces on a remarkable variety of topics. He was also a lyricist and composer, creator of the iconic genre called “Nazrulgeeti”. Nazrul’s brilliant literary career lasted from 1919 to 1942, when illness brought it to a sudden end. During this short span of time, he wrote on an amazing range of subjects, including politics, nationalism, social change, religion, communalism, education, philosophy, nature, love, aesthetics, literature and music. He saw it as his mission to arouse public awareness about pressing issues, and to jolt them out of their complacency and general apathy. Remembering Nazrul on the 48th anniversary of his death, it is daunting to think about his extraordinary legacy, but also a timely moment to reflect upon his significance for our own times.

In his political stance, Nazrul argued passionately in favour of armed struggle for total independence from colonial rule, rejecting the Gandhian path to advocate a freedom won via armed resistance. The trope of violence recurs in his writings. Yet his apparent espousal of the principle of destruction springs from a utopian dream of constructive change. “Reform can be brought about, not through evolution, but through an outright bloody revolution,” he says in the essay ‘World Literature Today’. “We shall transform the world completely, in form and substance, and remake it, from scratch. Through our endeavours, we shall produce new creation, as well as new creators”.[2]

Nazrul’s ideas on education counter the colonial pattern, advocating instead a curriculum that draws on indigenous contexts and models. He feels that the new education policy should emphasise empathy, inclusiveness and heterogeneity, with a special focus on psychological and emotional development. “It is our desire that our system of education should be such that it progressively makes our life-spirit awakened and alive,” he says in ‘A National Education’, adding: “… We would rather produce daredevils than spineless young men.” [3]

Inclusiveness and acceptance of heterogeneities are central to Nazrul’s vision. During his stint as a soldier in Karachi in his young days, he became interested in Marxist thought. The influence of this line of thinking can be felt in his emphasis on economic egalitarianism, and his passionate support of the cause of the downtrodden peasantry, particularly in his journal Langal. Following the 1926 riots in Kolkata, he expresses his anguish at the communal antagonism between Hindus and Muslims, critiquing different forms of orthodoxy in both religions. In the poem ‘Samyabadi (Egalitarian)’ [4], he declares:

I sing the song of equality—
Where all divisions vanish and barriers dissolve,
Where Hindu-Buddhist-Muslim-Christian
	merge and become one …

Nazrul was also a supporter of women’s rights. In his poetry, he speaks of equality between men and women. In ‘Nari (Woman)’ he argues: “If man keeps woman captive, then in ages to come, / He will languish in a prison of his own making”.[5]

Not surprisingly, Nazrul’s fearless, unconventional attitude aroused hostility in many quarters. His bold, outspoken magazine Dhumketu enraged the British. The journal was banned, and Nazrul condemned to rigorous imprisonment. At his trial in 1923, he delivered a resounding rejoinder in his speech ‘Rajbandir Jabanbandi (Deposition of a Political Prisoner)’.  He remained a thorn in the flesh for the British administration because of his revolutionary views. Nazrul’s religious views also raised many hackles. He married Ashalata Sengupta, or Pramila, who belonged to the Brahmo Samaj. This antagonised conservative Hindus as well as orthodox Muslims.

Nazrul’s success as a writer, especially Rabindranath Tagore’s appreciation of his work, also caused jealousy among contemporary writers. For Tagore had dedicated his play Basanta to Nazrul, and also sent a telegram to him when he was in prison, exhorting him to give up his hunger strike. In 1922, Tagore had written a poem addressed to Nazrul, which appeared in successive issues of the journal Dhumketu[6]:

Come, O shining comet! Blaze
Across the darkness, with your fiery trail.
Upon the fortress-top of evil days,
Let your victory-pennant sail.
What if the forehead of the night
Bear misfortune’s sinister sign?
Awaken, with your flashing light,
All who lie comatose, supine.

Rabindranath Tagore’s recognition of Nazrul’s talent created a lot of envy in literary circles. In 1926-27, parodies of Nazrul’s poetry started appearing in Shanibarer Chithi, a journal published by the Tagore circle. It came to be rumoured that Tagore had not liked Nazrul’s use of the Persianate word khoon (blood) instead of the Sanskritised word rakta, in his composition ‘Kandari Hushiar’. This gave rise to a controversy that became known as khooner mamla (the bloody affair), which drew a strong reaction from a deeply perturbed Nazrul, in the shape of an essay ‘Boror Piriti Balir Baandh” (A Great Man’s Love is a Sandbank)’, in which he blamed Tagore’s followers for the entire misunderstanding. The situation was resolved through the mediation of friends, and relations between Tagore and Nazrul remained cordial. When Tagore died in 1941, Nazrul broadcast a moving elegy, “Robi-Hara”, on Calcutta Radio.

In some ways, Nazrul was ahead of his time. Not many people know that he was aware of environmental issues and the threat of climate change, pressing problems in our own times. In ‘The Day of Annihilation’, he writes in a prophetic vein, of global warming, dissolving ice-caps and a changing ecology, cautioning his readers that if humans exploit the planet, we will eventually be responsible for the destruction of life on earth.

In Nazrul’s life and writings, we encounter the constant pull of contraries. His consciousness was simultaneously rooted in local culture, and infused with a broad transnational spirit. He felt inspired by movements in other parts of the world, such as the Turkish Revolution, the Irish Revolution and the Russian Revolution. In the essay ‘Bartaman Viswasahitya (World Literature Today)’, we discover his awareness about literary developments across the globe. In his political writings he espouses the path of violence, but he also composes exquisitely tender love songs, devotional songs drawing on both Hindu and Muslim imagery, and songs about the beauty of nature.

Nazrul’s style is a volatile mix of colloquial, idiomatic expressions, formal Bengali, Sanskrit and Persianate vocabulary, a smattering of English, and multiple registers of language. His polyglot sensibility also surfaces in his practice as a translator. He translated Omar Khayyam and Hafez from Persian into Bengali. His translations from Arabic into Bengali include 38 verses of the Qu’ran, part of the Mirasun Nagmat (a treatise on Hindustani classical music) and some poems. He translated Whitman’s ‘O Pioneer’ from English into Bengali. He is also known for his innovative ghazals in Bengali.

In 1942, Nazrul suddenly lost his speech. His illness brought his literary life to an abrupt end. All the same, the impact of his writings continued to be felt. In the Bangladesh Liberation War of 1971, the freedom fighters adopted Nazrul’s music as a source of inspiration. He was later declared the National Poet of Bangladesh. Today, while Nazrul’s poems and songs continue to delight and inspire, the true extent of his achievement remains in shadow. It is time for a comprehensive reappraisal of this much underestimated literary genius, because his writings have so much to offer us in our present world.

[1] The Collected Short Stories of Kazi Nazrul Islam, ed. Syed Manzoorul Islam and Kaustav Chakraborty (Hyderabad: Orient Blackswan, 2024), p. xviii. Bhadralok translates to gentleman

[2] Kazi Nazrul Islam, Selected Essays, translated by Radha Chakravarty (New Delhi: Penguin Random House, 2024), p. 137.

[3]  Kazi Nazrul Islam, Selected Essays, trans. Radha Chakravarty (2024), p. 60.

[4] Translation by Radha Chakravarty

[5] Translation by Radha Chakravarty

[6] The Essential Tagore, ed. Fakrul Alam and Radha Chakravarty. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2011, pp. 115-116; Translation mine.

Radha Chakravarty is a writer, critic, and translator. She has published 23 books, including poetry, translations of major Bengali writers, anthologies of South Asian literature, and critical writings on Tagore, translation and contemporary women’s writing. She was nominated for the Crossword Translation Award 2004.

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Tagore Translations

Rabindranath’s Paean to Humanity

Olosh Shomoy Dhara Beye (Time Flows at an Indolent Pace) was part of Tagore’s 1941 collection called Arogya (Healing). In the poem, the poet celebrates the lives of common people over empires.

Painting by Sohana Manzoor
TIME FLOWS AT AN INDOLENT PACE

Time flows at an indolent pace. 
The mind floats in an empty space. 
Into that vast void, images drift.
Over many eons, many have flit 
To the distant past. 
Arrogant conquerors sped fast. 
Pathans rode to satiate their greed. 
Then, Mughals wheeled 
Victories, whipping dust-storms, 
Flying flags for their throngs. 
These empires have left no trace
On the vast void at which I gaze. 
Through ages, the serene sky 
Is with sunset and sunrise dyed. 
Now the might of Britons holds sway
Penetrating new pathways
With the power of steam
And vehicles of fiery steel. 
With vigour, they spread 
Their dominions across the land’s breadth. 
I know their regime will also pass. 
Their empire will crumble at last. 
On the astral plane, despite their strength, 
Their army will not leave a single indent. 


When I look around the Earth, 
An ocean ripples along its girth 
Heaving huge waves of humanity 
Through myriad paths, in myriad coveys, 
Over centuries as their daily needs are met 
In life and in death. 
Forever, they row,  
With their rudders tow, 
Work in fields, plant seeds, 
Their harvests reap.
They work all the time, 
In towns or in wilds. 
Empires decline silencing bugles of war.
People forget histories of battles fought. 
Stories of glory, angst and gore,
Stay concealed in children’s lore. 
They struggle to work hard, 
In Punjab, Bombay and Gujarat, 
In Bengal, in Kalinga, all over the land, 
By the coastline and the riverbank. 
These stories of daily life hum 
Reverberating like drums;
Joys, sorrows, day and night 
Resonate as hymns to our lives. 
Empires are ruined to ashes.
Over eons, they toil as masses.

This poem has been translated by Mitali Chakravarty with editorial input by Sohana Manzoor 

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Review

Remembering the Partition

Book Review by Meenakshi Malhotra

Title: Learning to Remember: Postmemory and the Partition of India

Author: Shuchi Kapila

Publisher: Springer

Shuchi Kapila’s book on Partition focuses on the hinge generation — the one separated by a generation or two from the actual experience of the Partition, but increasingly drawn to analyse its memories in their own lives and its significance for the future. Simply because, the Partition with its trauma and losses remains a huge part of their parental, familial and collective memory.

While Kapila’s book recovers these embedded memories through interesting anecdotes, the fact remains that the historical event of the Partition cast a huge shadow on her parents’ lives, and that of many like her. She, like others (Priya Kumar, Urvashi Butalia) are drawn to excavate and unpack this silence and trauma that impinged upon the parents’ lives and shaped them in umpteen ways.  Such postmemory is described by Marianne Hirsch as “the experience of those who grow up dominated by narratives that preceded their birth, whose own belated stories are evacuated by the stories of the previous generation shaped by traumatic events that can be neither understood nor recreated” (Hirsch 1996, 659, quoted by Kapila). She goes on to write: “It is the largeness of these stories that dominate our psyches even as we often know very little about them, a kind of haunting that is often not understood.”

Like many in this generation, Kapila  was protected from all knowledge of the event by the silence of those who had experienced it directly. At the same time, she strongly felt a compulsion and an ethical imperative to understand the legacy of the Partition on her own terms.

Kapila points out that the flood of writing on the Partition that has emerged since the fiftieth anniversary of independence in India and Pakistan includes scholarly histories, oral histories, feminist studies, and literary and cultural studies of the Partition (which have poured out in a steady stream in the decades after 1997), show a strong inclination to exhume buried and seemingly lost memories. Priya Kumar’s Limiting Secularism, one of the most significant studies of the ethics of remembering, presents a compelling summary of this terrain of ‘return’ to the Partition. She argues that it is not merely that the first generation of Partition migrants is now dying out leading to an understandable anxiety about capturing their voices(as Butalia also voices in her book The Other Side of Silence) but also that the fact that Partition is the “founding trauma” (Dominick la Capra) of the subcontinent to which we must return in constant acts of “avowal” (Kumar 2008, 87).

Kapila’s book then is one such act of return and avowal in exploring again from a post memorial position the travels and travails of Partition memory. The enormity of the Partition— around a million dead, migration of between twelve and fourteen million across the borders of Punjab and Bengal, 75,000 women of different faiths abducted and very few “rehabilitated”– the numbers are mind-numbing.

Given that Partition was a territorial, social, and political division of peoples who had lived together for the previous centuries, there were many who resisted the idea of this division but recognised equally that it was a moment for Muslim self-determination in the formation of Pakistan. A common feeling in this context which prevailed among all communities, Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, was a feeling that the departing colonial powers had betrayed them. With these affects,the act of remembering Partition, the author feels, can never be a single, linear, decisive and discrete fact specific to communities but somewhat fuzzy and porous. It is inevitably marked by the recognition of multiple narratives jostling for attention with all communities involved as perpetrators and victims. The Indian nationalist myth that the Indian Congress party wanted a united India whereas Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the leader of the Muslim League, wanted to divide India and secure Pakistan for Muslims has been interrogated most famously by Ayesha Jalal who argues that literary narratives have also offered scholars the opportunity to think through the ethics of co-existence, which is the focus of Priya Kumar’s study, Limiting Secularism (2008), in which she considers how literary texts imagine possibilities and histories of productive relationships that seemed to have been irrevocably lost with partition.

Another significant area of research opened up was that of  collecting narrative oral histories, a methodology which has been referred to by Ritu Menon and Kamla Bhasin in Borders and Boundaries(1998) and used powerfully in Urvashi Butalia’s The Other Side of Silence(1998). These accounts revealed that women’s lives were deeply impacted by the rape and violence visited upon them during Partition and the silencing of their narratives as a patriarchal state was inaugurated. Jill Didur (2006) reads the silences and ambiguities of women’s stories as an important counter-narrative that unsettles Partition, revealing, for instance, how the agency of abducted women was completely eluded even in the recovery operations to establish a benevolent paternalist state. Given that there is a necessary relationship between the public and private realms of memory, it is unsurprising that some of the same themes can be found in testimonials and oral histories as well. This is the case made by Anindya Raychaudhuri (2019) whose attempt to think through Partition as “a productive event” is very much in line with Kapila’s  effort to highlight the different generational voices of  interviewees (Raychaudhuri 2019,13).

The book also considers private family memory and public institutions like the 1947 Partition Archive and the Amritsar Partition Museum. However, Kapila is aware that both these public institutions are relatively recent developments making it difficult to gauge their impact on private memory. Like literature and cinema, oral histories have also expressed themes of loss, violence, home, childhood, and trauma that appear repeatedly in stories of  Partition migrants. Yet,  as Kapila avers, “despite scholars’ clear understanding of the particularity of each oral history encounter, most studies distill them for themes and documentary evidence rather than as specific performances” based on “the subject position of interviewer and interviewee, time, space, social and regional position.” In contrast to this, Kapila is observant about the processual aspect of memory that are constituted by a more expansive understanding of “the filial and affiliative in each encounter as it rearticulates the nature of family, belonging, and community and while Partition literature and film have coloured narratives and tropes which shape how people remember or narrate,” her focus is on the interaction between the subject position of interviewer and interviewed.

Anjali Gera Roy’s significant work on Partition testimonies works toward an amplification of the historical record, which works by filling in “the personal, sensory, affective memories of both documented and undocumented historical events”(Gera Roy 2019, 24). She describes  her work,  as a “corrective and as supplement” to historical accounts. In the 160 testimonies gathered by her and her research assistants in many cities of North and East India, she unearths the ‘intangible violence’ of Partition.

The questions she poses sheds considerable light both on the processes and workings of memory as well as the methodology of such an enquiry: “How much of my parents’ relationship was structured by a deep and intimate understanding of Partition trauma? How much of their subterranean anxieties about their children were shaped by the experience of Partition? Heeding Marianne Hirsch’s description of postmemory mediated “not by recall but imaginative investment, projection, and creation,” she  asks how we could help in exploring its potential for progressive futures (Hirsch 2012, 5). Family history, though repeated many times and extensively written about is both representative and singular, each experience one more testimony to what millions experienced.

In emphasising a humanistic approach to Partition memory, she explores it not as aggregation of historical or social fact but for the relationship it sets up among post memorial generations and between them and first-generation migrants and the importance of each act of articulation. This book is thus a study of the culture of Partition memory that is being built by post memorial generations through public institutions, research, oral history, and family stories. For these generations, studying Partition is an experience in learning to remember from new socio-political locations not just in South Asia but also in its diaspora in Europe and the United States, and other parts of the world. These acts of memory are significant not only to gain insight into an event, but also ultimately to address the psychological impact of the event.

Kapila’s work is a significant contribution to Partition and memory studies. In revisiting Partition through the lens of memory, her book reminds us about the significance of processing painful memories as a way of approaching the past. The chronology is also significant, coming as it does, more than seventy-five years after Partition. Yet it is precisely this belatedness which makes it significant. In their preface to their edited book on The Psychological Impact of Partition in India, psychiatrists Sanjeev Jain and Alok Sarin (2018), mention the lack of conversation or research material on the psychological impact of Partition in the sub-continent. They flag the urgency of revisiting and processing traumatic memory. Understanding the delayed effects of trauma thanks to their extensive experience as psychiatrists and psychologists, they view the time lapse and belatedness as central to the way memories work.  

Kapila’s book has a chapter on the idea of ‘nostalgia’ for instance and then also on new institutions of memory like the museum. She explores different avenues that have been developing to rectify some of this missing memory of Partition, through extensive interviews.  This is the thrust of the first half of the book—these intergenerational conversations and understandings of Partition. The second half of the book looks more closely at the two physical spaces that have been established to communicate about Partition. These two physical spaces include the Berkeley, California 1947 Partition Archive, which now contains at least 10,000 oral histories of Partition, available for researchers, scholars, and individuals to explore and examine. India has also recently opened the Partition Museum, Amritsar, the first museum of its kind in India. Museums tend to craft particular narratives of events or experiences, and Kapila considers this new museum in that light

Postmemory and the Partition of India: Learning to Remember is a fascinating interrogation of this concept of remembering and memory, and how we craft narratives of our understandings of events through our memories or the memories of others. Ultimately, Kapila is asking the reader to consider how it is we learn to remember, particularly how we learn to remember complex, political events that shape who we are and how we think of ourselves in the world. Focusing on the centrality of processing traumatic memory in order to negotiate our daily lives, Kapila’s work is deeply interdisciplinary. Her scholarship can also be viewed as a labour of love and a tribute to her parents — and their generation — for the considerable emotional labour  they invested to ensure that their children were able to go beyond their own memories of loss.

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Dr Meenakshi Malhotra is Associate Professor of English Literature at Hansraj College, University of Delhi, and has been involved in teaching and curriculum development in several universities. She has edited two books on Women and Lifewriting, Representing the Self and Claiming the I, in addition  to numerous published articles on gender, literature and feminist theory.  Her most recent publication is The Gendered Body: Negotiation, Resistance, Struggle.

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Categories
Editorial

Fly High… Like Birds in the Sky…

Great Wall of China
He sees a barrier where soldiers stand
with rifles drawn, encroachers kept at bay.
A migrant child who holds his mother's hand


— LaVern Spencer McCarthy, Are We There Yet?

There was a time when humans walked the Earth crossing unnamed landmasses to find homes in newer terrains. They migrated without restrictions.  Over a period of time, kingdoms evolved, and travellers like Marco Polo talked of needing permissions to cross borders in certain parts of the world. The need for a permit to travel was first mentioned in the Bible, around 450BCE. A safe conduct permit appeared in England in 1414CE. Around the twentieth century, passports and visas came into full force. And yet, humanity had existed hundreds of thousand years ago… Some put the date at 300,000!

While climate contingencies, wars and violence are geared to add to migrants called ‘refugees’, there is always that bit of humanity which regards them as a burden. They forget that at some point, their ancestors too would have migrated from where they evolved. In South Africa, close to Johannesburg is Maropeng with its ‘Cradle of Humanity’, an intense network of caves where our ancestors paved the way to our evolution. The guide welcomes visitors by saying — “Welcome home!” It fills one’s heart to see the acceptance that drips through the whole experience.  Does this mean our ancestors all stepped out of Africa many eons ago and that we all belonged originally to the same land?

And yet there are many restrictions that have come upon us creating boxes which do not allow intermingling easily, even if we travel. Overriding these barriers is a discussion with Jessica Mudditt about Once Around the Sun: From Cambodia to Tibet, her book about her backpacking through Asia. Documenting a migration more than a hundred years ago from Jullundur to Malaya, when borders were different and more mobile, we have a conversation with eminent scholar and writer from Singapore, Kirpal Singh. Telling the story of another eminent migrant, a Persian who became a queen in the Mughal Court is a lyric by Nazrul, Nur Jahan, translated by Professor Fakrul Alam from Bangla. Ihlwha Choi has self-translated his own poem from Korean, a poem bridging divides with love. Fazal Baloch has brought to us some exquisite Balochi poems by Munir Momin. Tagore’s poem, Okale or Out of Sync, has been translated from Bengali to reflect the strange uniqueness of each human action which despite departing from the norm, continue to be part of the flow.

Among our untranslated poetry is housed LaVern Spencer McCarthy’s voice on the plight of migrants of the current times. Michael Burch gives us poems for Dylan Thomas. We have a plethora of issues covered in poetry ranging from love to women’s issues, even an affectionate description of his father by Shamik Banerjee. Ryan Quinn Flanagan, Kumar Sawan, Prithvijeet Sinha, Gregg Norman, Anushka Chaudhary, Wayne Russell, Ahmad Rayees, Ivan Ling, Ayesha Binte Islam and many more add verve with their varied themes. Rhys Hughes has shared a poem on a funny sign he photographed himself.

We have a tongue in cheek piece from Devraj Singh Kalsi on traveling in a train with a politician. Uday Deshwal writes with a soupçon of humour as he talks of applying for jobs. Snigdha Agrawal brings to us flavours of Bengal from her past while Ratnottama Sengupta muses on the ongoing wars and violence as acts of terror in the same region and looks back at such an incident in the past which resulted in a powerful Bengali poem by Tarik Sujat. Kiriti Sengupta has written of a well-known artist, Jatin Das, a strange encounter where the artist asks them to empty fully even a glass of water! Ravi Shankar weaves in his love for books into our non-fiction section. Recounting her mother’s migration story which leads us to perceive the whole world as home is a narrative by Renee Melchert Thorpe. Urmi Chakravorty takes us to the last Indian village on the borders of Tibet. Taking us to a Dinosaur Museum in Japan is our migrant columnist, Suzanne Kamata. Her latest multicultural novel, Cinnamon Beach, has found its way to our book excerpts as has Flanagan’s poetry collection, These Many Cold Winters of the Heart.

In reviews, Somdatta Mandal has written about an anthology, Maya Nagari: Bombay-Mumbai A City in Stories edited by Shanta Gokhale and Jerry Pinto. Rakhi Dalal has discussed a translation from Konkani by Jerry Pinto of award-winning writer Damodar Mauzo’s Boy, Unloved. Basudhara Roy has reviewed Trailokyanath Mukhopadhyay’s Tales of Early Magic Realism in Bengali, translated by Sucheta Dasgupta. Bhaskar Parichha has introduced us to The Dilemma of an Indian Liberal by Gurcharan Das, a book that is truly relevant in the current times in context of the whole world for what he states is a truth: “In the current polarised climate, the liberal perspective is often marginalised or dismissed as being indecisive or weak.” And it is the truth for the whole world now.

Our short stories reflect the colours of the world. A fantasy set in America but crossing borders of time and place by Ronald V. Micci, a story critiquing social norms that hurt by Swatee Miittal and Paul Mirabile’s ghost story shuttling from the Irish potato famine (1845-52) to the present day – all address different themes across borders, reflecting the vibrancy of thoughts and cultures. That we all exist in the same place and have the commonality of ideas and felt emotions is reflected in each of these narratives.

We have more which adds to the lustre of the content. So, do pause by our content’s page and enjoy the reads!

I would like to thank all our team without who this journal would be incomplete, especially, Sohana Manzoor, for her fabulous artwork. Huge thanks to all our contributors who bring vibrancy to our pages and our wonderful readers, without who the journal would remain just part of an electronic cloud… We welcome you all to enjoy our June issue.

Wish you happiness and good weather!

Thank you all.

Mitali Chakravarty

borderlessjournal.com

Click here to access the content’s page for the June 2024 Issue.

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Categories
Review

Nineteenth-century Bengal and Tales of Early Magic Realism

Book Review by Basudhara Roy

Title: Tales of Early Magic Realism in Bengali

Author: Trailokyanath Mukhopadhyay

Translator: Sucheta Dasgupta

Publisher: Niyogi Books

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.

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[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. 

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PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL

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Celebration

Welcome to Nazrul’s World

I’m a cyclone, a whirlwind,
	I pommel all that lie in my path,
	I am a dance-driven swing,
I dance to my own beat, I’m a free spirit, high on life...

-- Kazi Nazrul Islam, Rebel or Bidrohi, translated by Prof Fakrul Alam.
Young Nazrul

Nazrul’s writing has the power of whirlwind or a tornado — it can break with its force and make with love. His songs are a law unto themselves and called Nazrul geeti. And all this remains popular and still relevant more than a century after he was born.

Kazi Nazrul Islam (1899-1976) was born in Burdwan, a part of the Bengal Presidency that stretched from Bengal to Singapore during colonial times. Nazrul lived through the colonial rule, the independence of the subcontinent, the Partition and the creation of Bangladesh. He was multifaceted — he had tried his hand at soldiering and then settled for being a poet, writer, journalist, and musician. He is now regarded as the national poet of Bangladesh, the Bidrohi Kobi or the rebel poet. 

Nazrul teaching Nazrul Geeti

Here, we have tried to gather flavours of his writing and life. We start with the translation of his lyrics (a Nazrul geeti) on butterflies, translated by Fakrul Alam performed by the legendary Feroza Begum, move on to his response to Tagore’s poetry — they had a vibrant relationship as Somdatta Mandal has reflected in her discussion on Radha Chakravarty’s recent translation of his Selected Essays. It’s followed by more translations of three of his poems by Niaz Zaman, who has also written about Nazrul’s support for women. A searing essay on religious divides and socio economic gaps, translated by Sohana Manzoor, also brings to focus the plight of a beggar woman torn by poverty. A short story , showcasing him as a fiction writer, is borne of his experiences as a soldier. Last but not the least, we have a fiery speech by Nazrul from Chakravarty’s translation.

On Nazrul’s 125th birth anniversary, we welcome you to muse on him and his world…

Poetry

Projapoti (Butterfly) by Nazrul has been translated by Fakrul Alam from Bengali. Click here to read.

Nazrul’s rejoinder to Tagore’s 1400 Saal has been translated by Professor Fakrul Alam. Click here to read.

Three poems by Nazrul have been translated by Niaz Zaman. Click here to read.

Prose

 Deposition of a Political Prisoner: A Speech by Nazrul

A fiery speech by Nazrul from the Selected Essays: Kazi Nazrul Islam, translated by Radha Chakravarty from Bengali. Click here to read.

Temples and Mosques

Kazi Nazrul Islam’s fiery essay translated by Sohana Manzoor. Click here to read.

Hena

A story that grew out of Nazrul’s experiences as a soldier translated by Sohana Manzoor. Click here to read. 

Discussions

Nazrul and His World View

Somdatta Mandal writes about Radha Chakravarty’s translation of Selected Essays: Kazi Nazrul Islam and in the process explores his life and times. Click here to read.

When the Feminist and the Revolutionary Met

Niaz Zaman writes of the feminist leanings of Nazrul’s poetry in context of Madam Roquiah, a contemporary of the poet. Click here to read.

Categories
Nazrul Translations

Projapoti or Butterfly by Nazrul

Projapoti or Butterfly by Nazrul, translated by Professor Fakrul Alam

Projapoti! Projapoti! 

Butterfly, dear butterfly,
From where did you get such colourful wings?
Wings flaming red and blue,
Such sparkling, wavy wings!
I see you getting drunk sipping the honey of wildflowers.
Be my friend; share some of the liquor with me.
Lend me your pollen-tinted golden-silvery wings as well.
My mind doesn’t like the idea of going to school anymore.
Butterfly, dear butterfly—please, please take me along
As your companion. You dance in the wind as you go…
This day, why not share your delight with me too? 
I don’t want to wear the dress I have on anymore.
Let me wear your flaming, sparkling dress from now on!
A rendition of the song in Bengali by a legendary singer, Feroza Begum (1930-2014)

Born in united Bengal, long before the Partition, Kazi Nazrul Islam (1899-1976) was known as the  Bidrohi Kobi, or “rebel poet”. Nazrul is now regarded as the national poet of Bangladesh though he continues a revered name in the Indian subcontinent. In addition to his prose and poetry, Nazrul wrote about 4000 songs.

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Fakrul Alam is an academic, translator and writer from Bangladesh. He has translated works of Jibonananda Das and Rabindranath Tagore into English and is the recipient of Bangla Academy Literary Award (2012) for translation and SAARC Literary Award (2012).

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PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL

Click here to access the Borderless anthology, Monalisa No Longer Smiles

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Review

Mahasweta Devi: Writer, Activist, Visionary

Book Review by Meenakshi Malhotra

Title: Mahasweta Devi: Writer, Activist, Visionary

Editor: Radha Chakravarty

Publisher: Routledge

Mahashweta Devi (1916-2016) was a renowned and much awarded writer-activist-translator who was reputed for her close observation and documentation of tribal life and its marginalisation and willed forgetting by dominant power systems. Among the many awards received by her were the Padma Vibhushan, the Ramon Magsaysay, the Jnanpith and the Sahitya Akademi Award. The stated aim of the present volume — in keeping with the overall objectives of the Writer in Context Series — is to present a more rounded, multidimensional image of Mahasweta Devi. This has been admirably accomplished by Prof Radha Chakravarty who is an eminent translator and academic herself.

In the ‘Introduction’, she unpacks the partial truths that underlie the stereotypical image of Mahasweta Devi as an activist. Highlighting the fact that Mahashweta’s representations of different forms of mar­ginality bring together “the aesthetic and the political in ways that demand a more nuanced reading”, she reinforces the need to read Devi’s oeuvre as literature, and not only as “forms of social documentation or ‘wit­nessing’”. She interrogates the stereotype of the activist-writer and opens up the possibility of re-reading Mahasweta Devi’s life and work in “newer, more unsettling ways”. Further, Chakravarty highlights how her (Devi’s) creative writings in particular emerge as “ambivalent texts, simultane­ously imbued with radical potential and a continued reliance on traditional forms of signification”.

Mahasweta Devi’s writings often demonstrate a tenuous divide between fiction and non-fiction. As a matter of fact, she emphasises on “the historical basis for her creative writings”, which is evident in many of her novels like Mother of 1084 (Hazaar Churashir Maa, 1974), and stories like ‘Draupadi’ and many others, which are based on the Naxalite movement.  Simultaneously however, her literary works display a measure of social realism which, Chakravarty contends, is “offset by a visionary quality that enables the imagining of transformative possibilities.” The contents of this volume testify to the varied, diverse and  sometimes “contradictory dimensions of her multifaceted genius”.

The book under consideration aims to set the record straight for readers outside Bengal whose views are based on the “tiny fraction of her Mahashweta Devi’s work available in English translation”. She was an extraordinarily prolific and versatile writer who wrote in multiple genres, including fiction, biography, drama, children’s literature, memoirs, travel writing, and literary criticism. She also occasionally translated her own work into English.

Chakravarty’s introduction and compilations in this volume foregrounds the aspect  of Mahashweta’s political activism and how her writing itself  becomes a form of resistance. Her early  induction into Marxism was also partially attributable to her family background. Her family included Ritwik Ghatak (her father’s brother was a famed film maker) on her father’s side and on her mother’s, Sankha Choudhuri and Sachin Choudhuri, one a well-known sculptor and the other, the founder/editor of India’s foremost social science journal, Economic and Political Weekly, respectively.

Her early contact with Tagore and education at Santiniketan sensitised her to values of “inclusiveness, self-reliance, freedom of thought and expression, social responsibility, and environmental issues”. There, she also imbibed some of the spirit of the freedom struggle. Through her marriage to Bijon Bhattacharya, she grew familiar with IPTA[1] and the left ideologies. Later, she was associated with different radical movements in Bengal, Manipur, Jharkhand, Bihar, and Rajasthan, which find expression in many of her writings (Mother of 1084, ‘Draupadi’).

Her political commitment to these movements is evident in her use of language.  Local vocabularies become central to the style and subject of Mahasweta’s writings. She wrote in 1983: “Since I remain immersed in indigenous myths, oral legends, local beliefs and religious convictions, I find purely indigenous words very potent and expressive.”

She  was critical of writers in the Bangla literary establishment whose experiments with modernist aesthetics led to disengagement with the socio-political context. All the same, her writings evince special “linguistic, textual, and aesthetic strategies that can be compared to the prac­tices of other writers who were experimenting with new approaches”, using non-linear time. Oral traditions fascinated her and she worked closely with Prof G.N.Devy in her later years, to campaign for the recognition of tribal languages.

She also  translated and edited volumes on Indian folklore. In her own writings, she includes elements from the oral traditions, as in the snatches of local lore in Jhansir Rani (The Queen of Jhansi) or the lines from an untranslated Santhal song in ‘Draupadi’. As Chakravarty points out, “Heteroglossia, the use of language as an indicator of social hierarchies in multivocal, polyphonic texts, functions as a potent literary feature in her writings.” Alongside, many of her texts incorporate multilingual elements, as if to indicate the heterogeneities in South Asian societies and cultures.

The book is an comprehensive introduction to and reappraisal of Mahasweta Devi’s life and work. It is imaginatively conceptualised and organised into different sections, each highlighting diverse aspects of her work and the criticism thereon. Section 1 of the book called ‘Spectrum: The Writer’s Oeuvre’, offers the reader in English an overview of the full range of her oeuvre through brief samples of her literary writings across diverse genres to highlight her versatility. These include Jhansir Rani (1956), a fiction­alised biography of Rani Lakshmibai, Queen of Jhansi, which amalgamates historical sources, folklore, and creative characterisation, to show up the contradictions in different ver­sions of the Rani’s life and Hajar Churashir Ma (The Mother of 1084), her powerful novel about the political awakening of a mother after her son is killed by the police during the Naxalite movement of the 1970s, altered the trajectory of the Bengali novel. The extract from the final pages captures, in a style resembling stream-of-consciousness, the dramatic political power struggles in the outer world and the inner drama of the mother’s psyche.

The short story ‘Giribala’ narrates the plight of a girl married off at 14 to a man who sells their own daughters into the flesh trade to pay for the construction of his dream house. The play Bayen uses modern experimental techniques to present the story of a woman from the caste of Doms (cre­mation attendants), who becomes the victim of collective superstition and scapegoating and yet, in a final act of heroic self-sacrifice, saves the very community that has ostracised her. In a complete change of tone and style,’Nyadosh the Incredible Cow’, a delightful piece of writing for children, offers a witty anecdotal account of the devastating exploits of a cow in the author’s home. The extract from Tarasankar Bandyopadhyay, Mahasweta Devi’s English monograph on the iconic Bengali writer, reveals her incisive­ness as a literary historian and critic and also provides a window to her own literary values.

As Chakravarty clarifies, given the vast body of critical readings on Mahasweta’s writings, a comprehensive compilation is beyond the scope of this book. Instead, the selected essays in Section 2 (‘Kaleidoscope: Critical Reception’) offer the reader (in translation) a sense of the paradigm shifts that mark Devi’s critical recep­tion in Bengal, the rest of India, and in the international domain. Ten­sions, debates, and contradictions are highlighted, and overview of her critical reception over four decades –1957 to 1997 in Bengal is discussed by Arup Kumar Das. An essay by Dipendu Chakrabarti analyses the debates and contro­versies around her work. Dilip K. Basu’s account of Hajar Churashir Ma views itas a pathbreaking text that transformed the course of the Bengali novel in the 1970s.

The essays in English by other Indian critics include Sujit Mukherjee’s classic piece on Mahasweta and Spivak, Jaidev’s account of national alle­gory in Douloti, Arunabh Konwar’s comparative analysis of the creative use of fictionalised biography by Mahasweta and Indira Goswami, Shreya Chakravorty’s study of the politics of translation in the work of Spivak and Samik Bandyopadhyay, Anjum Katyal’s account of Mahasweta as a drama­tist, and Benil Biswas’ reading of the transmutations of Mahasweta’s texts via stage and screen adaptations.

International contributions include an important new essay on Pterodactyl by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, who interprets the rhetorical pointers in the text to speak of it as an activist mediation for the reader to learn about earn­ing the right to intervene. Shreerekha Subramanian’s essay offers a compara­tive study of the discourse on motherhood in novels by three women writers across different languages, locations, and literary traditions: Mahasweta Devi, Toni Morrison, and Amrita Pritam.

Section 3 (‘Ablaze With Rage: The Writer as Activist’) includes some of Mahasweta’s activist writings, such as ‘Tribal Language and Literature: The Need for Recognition’, a passionate demand for the inclusion of tribal languages in official discourse; ‘Palamau is a Mirror of India’, where she critiques what she perceives the failures of the state to address the plight of the oppressed people in post-Independence India; and ‘Eucalyptus: Why?’, a scathing critique of the nexus between local powers and global market forces that have led to the replacement of natural forests in Bengal with eucalyptus plantations that have destroyed the local ecology that sustained human and animal life there. Alongside, in ‘The Adivasi Mahasweta’, Ganesh N. Devy reminiscences about his first encounter with Mahasweta Devi and their subsequent collaborations in activist campaigns and projects. ‘Haunted Landscapes: Mahasweta Devi and the Anthropocene’, by Mary Louisa Cappelli, connects Mahasweta’s activist writings and fiction on the subject of the Anthropocene to indicate the need to take a composite view of her writing and activism as twin manifestations of the same vision.

Section 4, ‘Personal Glimpses: A Life in Words’, includes extracts from Mahasweta’s memoir Our Santiniketan (2022), along with interviews (with Naveen Kishore and Radha Chakravarty) and reminiscences by her family members (Nabarun Bhattacharya, Soma Mukhopadhyay, Sari Lahiri, Ina Puri), friends (writers ‘Anand’ and Anita Agnihotri), and associates (Ranjit Kumar Das ‘Lodha’, Dakxin Bajrange), which highlight different facets of Mahasweta’s life and personality, bringing to life the woman behind the public image.

The book offers a comprehensive overview of Mahashweta Devi’s writing and will be of immense use to students, researchers and to general readers. As Chakravarty reiterates , “New trends in Mahasweta studies continue to evolve, including emphasis on her environmental concerns, ethics, planetarity and the Anthropocene, intersectionality, the use of incommensurate realities and registers of writ­ing, comparative readings, and an emerging focus on her life”.

This is an ambitious attempt to give us an idea of the immense range of her work. While a full biog­raphy and a full bibliography of Mahasweta’s oeuvre is yet to be published, (encompassing the entire corpus of her work, including letters and other unpublished material) this volume is a vital step in that direction. In her excellent Introduction, Chakravarty charts the long-term impact of Devi’s work which continues to resonate in contemporary forms of activism and theatre. Through the actions of the many groups of people she inspired – the women of Manipur whose public protest imitated her fiction, to the per­formances of the Budhan theatre, and the rise to fame of the Dalit Bengali writer, Manoranjan Byapari— “Mahasweta’s impact and influence can be felt in many ways. She survives through the people she struggled to support all her life,”

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.    

[1] Indian People’s Theatre Association founded in 1943

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Dr Meenakshi Malhotra is Associate Professor of English Literature at Hansraj College, University of Delhi, and has been involved in teaching and curriculum development in several universities. She has edited books on Women and Lifewriting, Representing the Self and Claiming the I, in addition  to numerous published articles on gender, literature and feminist theory.   Recently, she co-edited The Gendered Body: Negotiation, Resistance, Struggle.

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PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL

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Categories
Editorial

‘If Winter Comes, Can Spring be Far Behind…’

Where the mind is without fear
…
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments
…
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way
…
Where the mind is led forward by thee
Into ever-widening thought and action…

— ‘Where the Mind is without Fear’ (1910), by Rabindranath Tagore

As we complete the fourth year of our virtual existence in the clouds and across borders, the world has undergone many changes around us, and it’s not only climate change (which is a huge challenge) but much more. We started around the time of the pandemic — in March 2020 — as human interactions moved from face-to-face non-virtual interactions to virtual communication. When the pandemic ended, we had thought humanity would enter a new age where new etiquettes redefining our social norms would make human existence as pandemic proof as possible. But before we could define new norms in the global context, takeovers and conflicts seem to have reft countries, regions and communities apart. Perhaps, this is a time when Borderless Journal can give a voice to all those who want to continue living as part of a single species in this world — where we can rise above our differences to find commonalities that make us human and part of the larger stream of humanity, that has been visualised by visionaries like Tagore or John Lennon — widely different cultural milieus but looking for the same things — humankind living together in harmony and moving towards a world without violence, without hate, without rancour and steeped in goodwill and love.  

Talking of positive values does not make sense in a world that seems to be veering towards darkness… Many say that humankind is intrinsically given to feelings of anger, hate, division, lust, shame and violence. But then we are just as much inclined towards happiness, fun, love, being respectful and peaceful. Otherwise, would we be writing about these? These are inherited values that have also come down to us from our forefathers and some have been evolving towards embalming or healing with resilience, with kindness and with an open mind.  

If you wake up before sunrise, you will notice the sky is really an unredeemable dark. Then, it turns a soft grey till the vibrant colours of the sun paint the horizon and beyond, dousing with not just lively shades but also with a variety of sounds announcing the start of a new day. The darkest hours give way to light. Light is as much a truth as darkness. Both exist. They come in phases in the natural world, and we cannot choose but live with the choices that have been pre-made for us. But there are things we can choose — we can choose to love or hate. We can choose resilience or weakness. We can choose our friends. We can choose our thoughts, our ideas. In Borderless, we have a forum which invites you to choose to be part of a world that has the courage to dream, to imagine. We hope to ignite the torch to carry on this conversation which is probably as old as humanity. We look forward to finding new voices that are willing to move in quest of an impractical world, a utopia, a vision — from which perhaps will emerge systems that will give way to a better future for our progeny.

In the last four years, we are happy to say we have hosted writers from more than forty different nationalities and our readers stretch across almost the whole map of the world. We had our first anthology published less than one and a half years ago, focussing more on writing from established pens. Discussions are afoot to bring out more anthologies in hardcopy with more variety of writers.

In our fourth anniversary issue, we not only host translations by Professor Fakrul Alam of Nazrul, by Somdatta Mandal of Tagore’s father, Debendranath Tagore, but also our first Mandarin translation of a twelfth century Southern Song Dynasty poet, Ye Shao-weng, by Rex Tan, a journalist and writer from Malaysia. From other parts of Asia, Dr Haneef Sharif’s Balochi writing has been rendered into English by Fazal Baloch and Ihlwha Choi has transcreated his own poetry from Korean to English. Tagore’s Phalgun or Spring, describing the current season in Bengal, adds to the variety in our translated oeuvre.

An eminent translator who has brought out her debut poetry book, Radha Chakravarty, has conversed about her poetry and told us among other things, how translating to English varies from writing for oneself. A brief overview of her book, Subliminal, has been provided. Our other interviewee, Rajorshi Patranabis — interviewed by Jagari Mukherjee — has written poetry from a Wiccan perspective — poetry on love — for he is a Wiccan. We have poetry by Luis Cuauhtémoc Berriozábal, Jim Murdoch, Alpana, Baisali Chatterjee Dutt, John Grey, Shahalam Tariq, Saranyan BV, Rex Tan, Ron Pickett with poetry on the season and many more. Humour is brought into poetry with verses woven around a funny sign by Rhys Hughes . His column this month hosts a series of shorter poems — typically in Hughes’ own unique style.

Devraj Singh Kalsi has explored darker shades of humour in his conversation with God while Suzanne Kamata has ushered in the Japanese spring ritual of gazing at cherry blossoms in her column with photographs and narrative. Keith Lyons takes us to the beautiful Fiordlands of New Zealand, Ravi Shankar to Malaysia and Mohul Bhowmick trapezes from place to place in Sri Lanka. Farouk Gulsara has discussed the elusiveness of utopia — an interesting perspective given that we look upto ideals like these in Borderless. I would urge more of you to join this conversation and tell us what you think. We did have Wendy Jones Nakashini start a discussion along these lines in an earlier issue.

We have stories from around the world: C.J.Anderson-Wu from Taiwan, Paul Mirabile from France, Rakhi Pande, Kalsi and K.S. Subramaniam from India. Our book excerpts are from Out of Sri Lanka: Tamil, Sinhala and English Poetry from Sri Lanka and its Diasporas edited by Vidyan Ravinthiran, Seni Seneviratne and Shash Trevett and a Cli-fi book that is making waves, Rajat Chaudhauri’s Spellcasters. Mandal has also reviewed for us Ilse Kohler-Rollefson’s Camel Karma: Twenty Years Among India’s Camel Nomads. Bhaskar Parichha has discussed Mafia Raj: The Rule of Bosses in South Asia by Lucia Michelutti, Ashraf Hoque, Nicolas Martin, David Picherit, Paul Rollier, Clarinda Still — a book written jointly by multiple academics. Rakhi Dalal in her review of Anuradha Kumar’s The Kidnapping of Mark Twain: A Bombay Mystery has compared the novel to an Agatha Christie mystery!

I would want to thank our dedicated team from the bottom of my heart. Without them, we could not have brought out two issues within three weeks for we were late with our February issue. A huge thanks to them for their writing and to Sohana Manzoor for her art too. Thanks to our wonderful reviewers who have been with us for a number of years, to all our mentors and contributors without who this journal could not exist. Huge thanks to all our fabulous loyal readers. Devoid of their patronage these words would dangle meaninglessly and unread. Thank you all.

Wish you a wonderful spring as Borderless Journal starts out on the fifth year of its virtual existence! We hope you will be part of our journey throughout…

Enjoy the reads in this special anniversary issue with more content than highlighted here, and each piece is a wonderful addition to our oeuvre!

Mitali Chakravarty

borderlessjournal.com

Click here to access the content page for the March 2024 Issue.

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