Art by Sohana ManzoorCourtesy: Suzanne Kamata Some of our visuals in 2024
As we wait for the new year to unfold, we glance back at the year that just swept past us. Here, gathered together are glimpses of the writings we found on our pages in 2024 that herald a world of compassion and kindness…writings filled with hope and, dare I say, even goodwill…and sometimes filled with the tears of poetic souls who hope for a world in peace and harmony. Disasters caused by humans starting with the January 2024 in Japan, nature and climate change, essays that invite you to recall the past with a hope to learn from it, non-fiction that is just fun or a tribute to ideas, both past and present — it’s all there. Innovative genres started by writers to meet the needs of the times — be it solar punk or weird western — give a sense of movement towards the new. What we do see in these writings is resilience which healed us out of multiple issues and will continue to help us move towards a better future.
A hundred years ago, we did not have the technology to share our views and writings, to connect and make friends with the like-minded across continents. I wonder what surprises hundred years later will hold for us…Maybe, war will have been outlawed by then, as have been malpractices and violences against individuals in the current world. The laws that rule a single man will hopefully apply to larger groups too…
Courtesy: Ratnottama Sengupta Courtesy: Farouk GulsaraSome of our visuals in 2024
Amalkantiby Nirendranath Chakraborty has been translated from Bengali by Debali Mookerjea-Leonard. Click hereto read.
The Mirror by Mubarak Qazi has been translated from Balochi by Fazal Baloch. Click hereto read.
Homecoming, a poem by Ihlwha Choi on his return from Santiniketan, has been translated from Korean by the poet himself. Click here to read.
Pochishe Boisakh(25th of Baisakh) by Tagore (1922), has been translated from Bengali by Mitali Chakravarty. Click here to read.
Nazrul’sGhumaite Dao Shranto Robi Re(Let Robi Sleep in Peace) has been translated from Bengali by Professor Fakrul Alam. Click hereto read.
Jibananada Das’sAndhar Dekhecche, Tobu Ache (I have seen the dark and yet there is another) has been translated from Bengali by Professor Fakrul Alam. Click here to read.
Tagore’sShotabdir Surjo Aji( The Century’s Sun today) has been translated from Bengali by Mitali Chakravarty. Clickhereto read.
A narrative by Rabindranath Tagore thatgives 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.
Suzanne Kamata discusses the peace initiatives following the terrors of the 1994 Rwandan Genocide while traveling within the country with her university colleague and students. Click here to read.
A story by Sharaf Shad, has been translated from Balochi by Fazal Baloch. Click here to read.
Conversations
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.
A conversation with eminent Singaporean poet and academic, Kirpal Singh, about how his family migrated to Malaya and subsequently Singapore more than 120 years ago. Click hereto read.
Title:Let’s Be Best Friends Forever: Beautiful Stories of Friendship
Publisher: Talking Cub, Speaking Tiger Books
From ‘The Tunnel of Friendship’ by Ruskin Bond
I had already started writing my first book. It was called Nine Months, but had nothing to do with a pregnancy; it referred merely to the length of the school term, the beginning of March to the end of November, and it detailed my friendships and escapades at school and lampooned a few of our teachers. I had filled three slim exercise books with this premature literary project, and I allowed Azhar to go through them. He was my first reader and critic. ‘They’re very interesting. But you’ll get into trouble if someone finds them,’ was his verdict.
We returned to Shimla, having won our matches against Sanawar, and were school heroes for a couple of days. And then my housemaster discovered my literary opus and took it away and read it. I was given six of the best with a Malacca cane, and my manuscript was torn up. Azhar knew better than to say ‘I told you so’ when I showed him the purple welts on my bottom. Instead, he repeated the more outrageous bits he remembered from the notebooks and laughed, till I began to laugh too.
‘Will you go away when the British leave India?’ Azhar asked me one day.
‘I don’t think so,’ I said. ‘My stepfather is Indian. My mother’s family have lived here for generations.’
‘Everyone is saying they’re going to divide the country. I think I’ll have to go away.’
‘Oh, it won’t happen,’ I said glibly. ‘How can they cut up such a big country?’
‘Gandhi will stop them,’ he said.
But even as we dismissed the possibility, Jinnah, Nehru and Mountbatten and all those who mattered were preparing their instruments for major surgery.
Before their decision had any effect on our life, we found a little freedom of our own—in an underground tunnel that we discovered in a corner of the school grounds. It was really part of an old, disused drainage system, and when Azhar and I began exploring it, we had no idea just how far it extended. After crawling along on our bellies for some twenty feet, we found ourselves in complete darkness. It was a bit frightening, but moving backwards would have been quite impossible, so we continued writhing forward, until we saw a glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel. Dusty, a little bruised and very scruffy, we emerged at last on to a grassy knoll, a little way outside the school boundary. We’d found a way to escape school!
The tunnel became our beautiful secret. We would sit and chat in it, or crawl through it just for the thrill of stealing out of the school to walk in the wilderness. Or to lie on the grass, our heads touching, reading comics or watching the kites and eagles wheeling in the sky. In those quiet moments, I became aware of the beauty and solace of nature more keenly than I had been till then: the scent of pine needles, the soothing calls of the Himalayan bulbuls, the feel of grass on bare feet, and the low music of the cicadas.
World War II had just come to an end, the United Nations held out the promise of a world living in peace and harmony, and India, an equal partner with Britain, would be among the great nations…
But soon we learnt that Bengal and Punjab provinces, with their large Muslim populations, were to be bisected. Everyone was in a hurry: Jinnah and company were in a hurry to get a country of their own; Nehru, Patel and others were in a hurry to run a free, if truncated, India; and Britain was in a hurry to get out. Riots flared up across northern India.
At school, the common room radio and the occasional newspaper kept us abreast of events. But in our tunnel Azhar and I felt immune from all that was happening, worlds away from all the pillage, murder and revenge. Outside the tunnel, there was fresh untrodden grass, sprinkled with clover and daisies, the only sounds the hammering of a woodpecker, and the distant insistent call of the Himalayan barbet. Who could touch us there?
‘And when all wars are done,’ I said, ‘a butterfly will still be beautiful.’
‘Did you read that somewhere?’ Azhar asked.
‘No, it just came into my head.’
‘It’s good. Already you’re a writer.’
Though it felt good to hear him say that, I made light of it. ‘No, I want to play hockey for India or football for Arsenal. Only winning teams!’
‘You’ll lose sometimes, you know, even if you get into those teams,’ said wise old Azhar. ‘You can’t win forever. Better to be a writer.’
One morning after chapel, the headmaster announced that the Muslim boys—those who had their homes in what was now Pakistan—would have to be evacuated. They would be sent to their homes across the border with an armed convoy.
It was time for Azhar to leave, along with some fifty other boys from Lahore, Rawalpindi and Peshawar. The rest of us—Hindus, Christians, Buddhists, Sikhs and Parsis—helped them load their luggage into the waiting British Army trucks that would take them to Lahore. A couple of boys broke down and wept, including our departing school captain, a Pathan who had been known for his unemotional demeanour. Azhar waved to me and I waved back. We had vowed to meet again some day. We both kept our composure.
The headmaster announced a couple of days later that all the boys had reached Pakistan and were safe. On the morning of 15 August 1947, we were marched up to town to witness the Indian flag being raised for the first time. Shimla was still the summer capital of India, so it was quite an event. It was raining that morning. We were in our raincoats and gumboots, while a sea of umbrellas covered the Mall.
(Extracted from Let’s Be Best Friends Forever: Beautiful Stories of Friendship, with an introduction by Jerry Pinto. Published by Talking Cub, the children’s imprint of Speaking Tiger Books.)
ABOUT THE BOOK
An Afghan trader and a young Bengali girl form a touching connection that transcends cultural barriers in Rabindranath Tagore’s classic story ‘The Kabuliwala’. Jo March and Laurie from Little Women meet at a dull party and become companions for life. L. Frank Baum’s timeless characters Dorothy and Toto adventure around Oz forging magical bonds of friendship.
The brave queen of Jhansi and her ally Jhalkaribai come together to fight for freedom and dignity; Jesse Owens narrates an inspiring tale of sportsmanship and solidarity from his Olympic days; and twelve-year-old Kamala and her friends, Edward, Amir and Amma, endure the Partition riots together in Bulbul Sharma’s heart-warming story.
In these pages you will also meet Nimmi and her best pal, Kabir, whose school misadventures include spirited debates; Sunny, whose love for books leads to a new friendship on a trip to Darjeeling; Cyril and Neil, who face life’s challenges with inventive word games, and Siya, who discovers that true friends can come in the most unexpected forms—even as a cherished doll.
Animal lovers will delight in the escapades of Gillu, the charming squirrel, Harold, the handsome hornbill, Rikki-tikki-tavi, the loyal mongoose, Hira and Moti, the powerful oxen, and Bagheera, the brave panther who looks after the young boy Mowgli.
With stories from beloved and popular authors—Ruskin Bond, Rudyard Kipling, Mahadevi Varma, Jerry Pinto, Shabnam Minwalla, and many more—Let’s Be Best Friends Forever is an enchanting collection that celebrates the universal power and beauty of friendship.
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PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL
In Conversation with Malashri Lal, about her debut poetry collection, Mandalas of Time, Hawakal Publishers
Professor Malashree Lal
Time present and time past Are both perhaps present in time future, And time future contained in time past. If all time is eternally present All time is unredeemable.
‘Mandalas’ means circle in Sanskrit, the root, or at last the influencer, of most of the Indian languages in the subcontinent. Sanskrit belongs to the Indo-Germanic family, which homes Latin and Greek among other languages. Malashri Lal, a former professor in Delhi University, has called her poetry collection Mandalas of Time.
Her poetry reiterates the cyclical nature of the title, loaning from the past to blend the ideas with the present and stretching to assimilate the varied colours of cultures around the world.
Embracing an array of subjects from her heritage to her family — with beautiful touching poems for her grandchild — to migrants and subtle ones on climate change too, the words journey through a plethora of ideas. Nature plays an important role in concretising and conveying her thoughts. In one of the poems there is a fleeting reference to wars — entwined with the Pilkhan (fig) tree:
The Pilkhan tree thinks of its many years Of shedding leaves, bearing inedible fruit, of losing limbs But smiles at his troubles being far less Than of unfortunate humans Who kill each other in word and deed But gather around the tree each Christmas With fulsome gifts and vacant smiles To bring in another New Year.
--Another New Year
Amaltas (Indian Laburnum) or Bougainvillea bind her love for nature to real world issues:
Only the Amaltas roots, meshed underground Thrust their tendrils into the earth’s sinews below. Sucking moisture from the granular sand, desperately. The golden flowers pendent in the sun, mock the traveller Plump, succulent, beacon-like, they tease with The promise of water Where there is none.
--Amaltas in Summer
And…
The Bougainvillea is a migrant tree, blossom and thorn That took root in our land And spread its deception Of beauty.
--Bougainvillea
Her most impactful poems are women centric.
Words crushed into silence Lips sealed against utterance Eyes hooded guardedly Body cringing into wrinkled tightness Is this what elders called ‘Maidenly virtue?’
--Crushed
There is one about a homeless woman giving birth at Ratlam station during the pandemic chaos, based on a real-life incident:
Leave the slum or pay the rent Who cares if she is pregnant, Get out — go anywhere. … Ratlam station; steady hands lead her to the platform. Screened by women surrounding her A kind lady doctor takes control. Pooja sees a puckered face squinting into the first light. "This is home," she mutters wanly, "Among strangers who cut the cord and feed my newborn,”
-- Ladies Special
In another, she writes of Shakuntala — a real-world migrant who gave birth during the covid exodus. She birthed a child and within the hour was on her way to her home again — walking. It reminds one of Pearl S Buck’s description of the peasant woman in Good Earth (1931) who pauses to give birth and then continues to labour in the field.
Most interesting is her use of mythology — especially Radha and Sita — two iconic characters out of Indian lore. In one poem, she finds a parallel to “Sita’s exile” in Italy, at Belisama’s shrine. In another, she finds the divine beloved Radha, who was older to Krishna and married to another, pining after the divinity when he leaves to pursue his life as an adult. And yet, she questions modern stances through poems on more historical women who self-immolated themselves when their husbands lost in battle!
Malashri Lal has turned her faculties post-retirement to literary pursuits. One of her co- authored books around the life of the poet Michael Madhusudan Dutt, received the Kalinga award for fiction. She currently serves on the English advisory board of Sahitya Akademi. In this conversation, Lal discusses her poetry, her journey and unique perceptions of two iconic mythological women who figure in her poetry.
When did you start writing poetry?
Possibly my earliest poetry was written when I was about twelve, struggling with the confusing emotions of an adolescent. I would send off my writing to The Illustrated Weekly which used to have pages for young people, and occasionally I got published. After that, I didn’t write poetry till I was almost in my middle age when the personal crisis of losing my parents together in a road accident brought me to the outpourings and healing that poetry allows.
What gets your muse going?
Emotional turmoil, either my own or what I observe within the paradigms of social change. With my interest in women’s issues, my attention is arrested immediately when I hear or read about injustice, violence, exploitation or negligence of women or girl children. It doesn’t have to be a dramatic or extreme event but even the simple occurrences of decision making by a husband without consulting his wife has me concerned about the dignity and agency of a woman. Some poems like “Escape”, hint at such inequality that society takes for granted. On the other hand, my poems about migrant women giving birth on the long march to a hypothetical village “home” during the pandemic, are vivid transferences from newspaper stories. “Ladies Special” is about Pooja Devi giving birth at Ratlam station; “The Woman Migrant Worker” is based on a report about Shakuntala who stopped by the roadside to give birth to a baby and a few hours later, joined the walking crowd again.
Why did you name your poetry book Mandalas of Time?
To me ‘Mandalas’ denote centres of energy. Each node, though distinct in itself, coheres with the others that are contiguous, thus resulting in a corporeal body of interrelatedness. My poems are short bursts of such energy, concentrated on a subject. They are indicative of a situation but not prescriptive in offering solutions. Hence the spiritual energy of ‘Mandalas’, a term used in many traditions, seemed best suited to my offering of poems written during periods of heightened consciousness and introspection. The poems are also multilayered, hence in constant flux, to be interpreted through the reader’s response. Many of them end in questions, as I do not have answers. The reader is implicitly invited to peruse the subject some more . It’s not about closure but openness. See for instance: “Crushed”, or “Shyamoli”.
Today, I rebel and tug at a Divided loyalty — The feudal heritage of my childhood Fights off the reformist Bengali lineage, My troubled feminism struggling Between Poshak and Purdah White Thaan and patriotism Can one push these ghosts aside?
--Shyamoli *Poshak: Rajasthani dress *Thaan: White saree worn by the Bengali widow
You have written briefly of your mixed heritage, also reflected in your poem dedicated to Tagore, in whose verses it seems you find resolution. Can you tell us of this internal clash of cultures? What exactly evolved out of it?
My bloodline is purely Bengali but my parents nor I ever lived in Bengal. My father was in the IAS in the Rajasthan cadre and my mother, raised in Dehradun, did a lot of social work. In the 1950s and 1960s, Rajasthan was economically and socially confined to a feudal heritage and a strictly hierarchical structure. Rama Mehta’s novel Inside the Haveli (1979), describes this social construction with great sensitivity. Elite homes had separate areas for men and women, and, within that, a layout of rooms and courtyards that were defined for specific use by specified individuals according to their seniority or significance. Such hierarchies existed in Bengal too — the ‘antarmahal[1]’ references bear this out — but the multiple layers in Rajasthan seemed more restrictive.
In my “mixed heritage” of being born of Bengali parents but raised in Rajasthan, I started noting the contrasts as well as the similarities. I recall that when my father went on tours by jeep into the interior villages along rutted roads, I would simply clamber on. At one time I lived in a tent, with my parents, during the entire camel fair at Pushkar. I would listen to the Bhopa singers of the Phad painting tradition late into the evening. So my understanding and experience of Rajasthan is deep into its roots.
Phad paintingBhopa singersFrom Public Domain
Bengal– that is only Calcutta and Santiniketan–I know through my visits to grandparents, aunts and uncles. My cousins and I continue to be very close. I saw a fairly elite side of Calcutta—the Clubs, the Race Course, the restaurants on Park Street, the shopping at New Market, and sarees displays at Rashbehari Avenue. Santiniketan though was different. I was drawn to the stories of the Santhal communities, visited their villages, attended the Poush Mela[2] regularly and knew several people in the university. After Delhi, the wide-open spaces, the ranga maati (red soil), the Mayurakhi River, and the tribal stories were fascinating. I am fluent in Bengali and because of my relatives in Calcutta as well as Santiniketan, I never felt an outsider. My father’s side of the family has been at Viswa Bharati since the time of Rabindranath Tagore. So, I felt comfortable in that environment. And through an NGO called Women’s Interlink Foundation, established by Mrs Aloka Mitra, I had easy access to Santhal villages such as Bonerpukur Danga.
Poush Mela, started by the Tagore Family in 1894Santhali Performance at Poush Mela
However, in summary, though I lived with both the strains of Bengal and Rajasthan, the daily interaction in Jaipur where I received all my education till PhD, was more deeply my world. The fragmented identity that some poems convey is a genuine expression of figuring out a cultural belonging. Poems such as “To Rabindranath Tagore” helped me to understand that one can have multiple exposures and affiliations and be enriched by it.
Do you feel — as I felt in your poetry — that there is a difference in the cultural heritage of Bengal and Rajasthan that leads you to be more perceptive of the treatment of women in the latter state? Please elaborate.
Indeed, you are right. Bengal has a reformist history, and my family are Brahmo Samaj followers. Education for women, choice in marriage partner, ability to take up a career were thought to be possible. My paternal grandmother, Jyotirmoyi Mukerji, was one of the early graduates from Calcutta University; she worked as an Inspectress of Schools, often travelling by bullock carts, and she married a school teacher who was a little younger than her. They together chose to live in Rangoon in undivided India, heading a school there. These were radical steps for women in the late 19th century. My father grew up in Rangoon and came to Rajasthan as a refugee during the Second World War. My grandmother, who lived with us, was a tremendous influence denoting women’s empowerment. But what we saw around us in Jaipur was the feudal system and purdah for women in Rajasthan.
Fortunately, Maharani Gayatri Devi had set up a school in 1943 in Jaipur to bring modern thinking in the women, and I was fortunate to study there till I went to university. Let’s recall that Maharani Gayatri Devi was from Coochbehar (Bengal) and had studied at Santiniketan. She brought Bengal’s progressive ideas to the privileged classes of Rajasthan. My classmates were mostly princesses. I visited their homes and families and delved deeply into their history of feudalism. Without being judgmental, I must say that Rajasthan’s heritage is very complex and one must understand the reasons behind many practices and not condemn them.
You have brought in very popular mythological characters in your poems — Sita and Radha — both seen from a perspective that is unusual. Can you explain the similarity between Sita’s exile and Belisama’s shrine (in Italy)? Also why did you choose to deal with Radha in a post-Krishna world?
Namita Gokhale and I have completed what is popularly known as the “Goddess Trilogy”. After In Search of Sita and Finding Radha, the latest book, Treasures of Lakshmi: The Goddess Who Gives, was launched in February 2024 at the Jaipur Literature Festival, and the Delhi launch was on 8th October 2024 to invoke the festive season.
Version 1.0.0
In answering your question let me say that myth is storytelling, an indirect way of contending with issues that are beyond ordinary logic or understanding. Sita and Belisama coming together is an illustration of what I mean. The backstory is that Namita Gokhale and I had a joint residency at Villa Serbelloni in Bellagio (Italy) and we were revising the final manuscript of our book In Search of Sita. The thrust of that book is to recall the strength of Sita in decision making, in being supportive of other women, in emerging as an independent minded person. Our research had unearthed a lot of new material including oral history and folklore. In Bellagio, we started enquiring about local mythical stories and chanced upon Belisama,[3] a Celtic goddess known for her radiant fire and light, and in the village we chanced upon an old grotto like structure. Unlike in India, where we have a living mythology of commonly told and retold tales, in Italy the ancient legends were not remembered. The poem “Bellagio, Italy” took shape in my imagination bringing Sita and Belisama, two extraordinary women, together.
As to my poems on Radha, I cannot think of a “post-Krishna” world since Vrindavan and Mathura keep alive the practices that are ancient and continuous. Radha is the symbol of a seeker and Krishna is the elusive but ever watchful divine. They are body and soul, inseparable. The stories about “Radha’s Flute” or “Radha’s Dilemma” in poems by those names have an oral quality about them. The craft of writing is important, and for me, the theme decides the form.
Interesting, as both the poems you mention made me think of Radha after Krishna left her for Rukmini, for his role in an adult world. You have a poem on Padmini. Again, your stance is unusual. Can you explain what exactly you mean — can self-immolation be justified in any way?
This is a poem embedded in the larger query about comparative cultural studies. Rani Padmini’s story was written by Jayasi[4] in 1540, and it described a ‘heroic’ decision by Padmini that she and her handmaidens should commit Jauhar (mass self-immolation) rather than be taken prisoners and face humiliation and violent abuse by the men captors. You will note that my poem ends on a question mark: “I ask you if you can rewrite /values the past held strong?” Self-immolation has to be seen in the context of social practices at the time of Padmini (13-14th queen in Mewar, Rajasthan). The jauhar performed by Rani Padmini of Chittor is narrated even now through ballads and tales extolling the act if one goes into oral culture. But there is counter thinking too, as was evident in the controversy over Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s film Padmavat (2018) which stirred discussions on historicity, customary practice and oral traditions. Sati and Jauhar are now punishable offences under Indian law, but in recording oral history can one change the storyline? It’s not just self-immolation that comes under such a category of questioning the past — polygamy, polyandry, child marriage, prohibitions on widows and many other practices are to be critiqued in modern discourse, but one cannot rewrite what has already been inscribed in an old literary text.
This is a question that draws from what I felt your poems led to, especially, the one on Padmini. Do you think by changing text in books, history can be changed?
“History” is a matter of perspective combined with the factual record of events and episodes. Who writes the “history” and in what circumstances is necessary to ask. The narration or interpretation of history can be changed, and sometimes ought to be. To take an obvious case why is the “Sepoy Mutiny” of 1857 now referred to as the “First War of Independence”? In current discussions on Rana Pratap[5] in Rajasthan’s history, there are documents in local languages that reinterpret the Haldighati battle of 1576 not as the Rana’s defeat but his retreat into the forests and setting up his new kingdom in Chavand where he died in 1597. The colonial writers of history—at least in Rajasthan– were dependent on local informers and had little understanding of the vast oral repertoire of the state. Even Col. James Tod’s Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan (1829) about the history, culture, and geography of some areas in Rajasthan, is often reproducing what he has heard from the bards and balladeers which are colourful and hyperbolic renderings as was the custom then. In Bengal, the impact of Tod is seen in Abanindranath Tagore’s[6]Rajkahini (1946), which is storytelling rather than verified facts. I feel history cannot be objective, it is author dependent.
Nature, especially certain trees and plants seem to evoke poetry in you. It was interesting to see you pick a fig tree for commenting on conflicts. Why a Pilkhan tree?
The Pilkhan is an enormous, bearded old fig tree that lives in our garden and is a witness to our periodic poetic gatherings. Mandalas of Time is dedicated to “The Poets under the Pilkhan Tree” because my book emerged from the camaraderie and the encouragement of this group. I see the tree as an observer and thinker about social change—it notes intergenerational conflict in “Another New Year”, it offers consolation against the terrors of the pandemic in the poem “Krishna’s Flute”. It’s my green oasis in an urban, concrete-dominated Delhi. In the evening the birds chirp so loudly that we cannot hear ourselves speak. Squirrels have built nests into the Pilkhan’s wide girth. It’s not a glamorous tree but ordinary and ample—just as life is. By now, my poet friends recognise the joy of sharing their work sitting in the shadow of this ancient giant. There are no hierarchies of age or reputation here. We are the chirping birds—equal and loquacious!
You have successfully dabbled in both poetry and fiction, what genre do you prefer and why?
Mandalas of Time is my first book of poems and it comprises of material written unselfconsciously over decades. During the pandemic years, I decided to put the manuscript together, urged by friends. Meanwhile my poems started appearing in several journals.
As to fiction, I’ve published a few short stories and I tend to write ghostly tales set in the mountains of Shimla. Its possibly the old and the new that collides there that holds my attention. I’ve been urged to write a few more and publish a book—but that may take a while.
Should we be expecting something new from your pen?
Mandalas of Time has met with an amazing response in terms of reviews, interviews, speaking assignments, and online presentations. The translation in Hindi by 13 well known poets is going into print very soon. Permission has been sought for a Punjabi translation. I’m overwhelmed by this wide empathy and it is making me consider putting together another book of poems.
Raja O Praja, an essay by Tagore, has been translated from Bengali as The King and His Subjects by Professor Himadri Lahiri. It formed the lead essay in his book of the same name published in 1908.
Translator’s Introduction: Rabindranath Tagore’s essay “Raja O Proja” was first published in the well-known Bengali periodical Sadhana (Sravana, 1301/1894). It is anthologised in Rabindra Rachanabali (Sulabh Sanskaran) 5th volume (Visva-Bharati, Pous 1394): pp. 727-31. Tagore unravels the nature of the relationship between the colonial masters and the subjugated subject people. Much before Edward Said, Tagore examined how the colonial masters resorted to the practice of stereotyping, a strategy that denies human qualities to the colonised and renders them inferior and uncivilised. Set against the contemporary political background, the essay provides an incisive analysis of the behaviour patterns of both the British colonial government and the subjugated Indian population. It should be considered a significant contribution to the study of colonialism.
The King and his Subjects
When the British civilian, Radice Sahib1, insulted and persecuted a certain zamindar in Orissa by violating laws, Lieutenant-Governor MacDonnell2subjected the offender to a one-year-punishment.
If we reflect on this incident, it should not have surprised us. In reality, however, this act of justice was incredibly startling to the general public. This explains why some naive individuals expressed their unusual delight.
Shortly afterwards, when MacDonnell Sahib was duly replaced by Elliott Sahib3, the latter freed Radice from the punishment by illegally reversing his predecessor’s order and even promoted him to a higher post. Now the same naive people have started expressing their profound sorrows.
The task is accomplished by the will of the master. Only the master knows why he [i.e. Elliott] violated the rule; we are left desperately groping in the dark. It may be that one civilian protected the prestige of another. But the decision was surely inappropriate – this incident dented MacDonnell Sahib’s prestige, and even that of the government.
In course of their conjectures, people are providing different theories; all of these may turn out to be incorrect. On the whole, it may be said that only the government knows the ins and outs of its own policies; we are merely blind puppets being controlled by these policies.
Hence, it is my opinion that driven by our delusions, we instinctively express our happiness and sadness at the moral and immoral decisions of the people at the helm of affairs. Where everything is done at the master’s will, where our good fortune or bad depends greatly on the character and whim of a particular person, there we should consider both the auspicious and the inauspicious, the moral and the immoral as merely momentary, accidental episodes. What MacDonnell Sahib did was the result of his own will, and what Elliott Sahib did was also produced by his own caprice; we are merely ruses.
Even then, we cannot help feeling distressed or shocked by the appalling events or delight at their praise. But we should always remember the specific instances that will make us happy and contribute to our people’s glory.
This can be achieved only when all the common people develop so intense a sense of conscience and alertness that we can feel the pain together in the face of insult and injustice, and also when the government absorbs into its own system an obligation to respect the conscience of the people; only then can we genuinely rejoice.
Usually, our moral conscience, our understanding of our work culture, and our apprehension of vilification all combine to guide us to the path of duties. The principles of responsibilities of our governments are largely determined by moral conscience and work culture. Their connection with the subject people’s ideology of good and evil is very weak.
It is universally known that when conscience comes into conflict with work culture, the latter sometimes prevails. During this conflict, the moral compass of those individuals not involved in the conflict can help reinforce one’s own conscience. When we will find the subject people’s criticism being appropriately reflected in the government’s activities, we will express our happiness.
In the absence of the subject people’s criticism, the sense of moral duty of the British in India imperceptibly slackens and degenerates to such a level that their moral ideals begin to radically differ in nature from those of the native British. For this reason, we find on the one hand, the Englishmen in India hate us, and on the other, they express their utmost intolerance towards their own countrymen’s opinions, as if both were alien to them.
There might be several reasons for this. One reason is that due to the remote location of their country, the British in India forget how social criticism typically motivates or impacts actions of their own countrymen. In addition to this, the Englishman’s relationship with us is primarily based on selfish interest as they do not share any emotional bond that stems from nation-based kinship. Hence, for various reasons, it becomes challenging for the British in India to maintain the same purity of selfless duties towards their subjects. Consequently, a distinct and specific code of duty begins to develop for the colonials in India – this arises from various factors such as their self-interest and pride of power, the moral conscience of the weak, subjugated nation, and the complexities involved in administering a foreign country. The English of England sometimes fail to recognise this distinct code of duty.
Certain talented Englishmen with exposure to colonial India have taken upon themselves the responsibility of effectively introducing this unique object [i.e., this new ideology of difference] in England. By virtue of their talent, they are demonstrating that this new object has its own unique appeal.
Rudyard Kipling’s name may be cited as an instance. He has exemplary power. By invoking that power, he has created in the English imagination an image of the Orient as a cattle pen. He is trying to convince the native Englishmen that the Indian government is, indeed, a circus company. He is skillfully orchestrating our actions as a performance of strange and spectacular animals of various species before the civilised world, implying once the spectators take off their steady gaze, all the animals could immediately spring upon them. The animals are to be observed with intense curiosity, they will have to be kept under control with the proper combination of fear of the whip and temptation of pieces of bone. Of course, certain doses of compassion for animals are also required. But if you raise here issues of principles, love, and civilisation, it will be difficult to keep the circus going, and it will also be dangerous for the proprietors.
The image of strong human animals being controlled solely by willpower and compelled to dance at the mere gesture of the master’s finger is likely to fascinate the English as a curious spectacle of entertainment. This generates in them an interest in the uniqueness of the human animal and also a racial pride. There is also a profound satisfaction in being able to control someone who embodies an imminent threat, and this seems delightful to the inherent nature of the English people.
On another front, the number of Anglo-Indian team members is also increasing day by day. Anglo-Indian literature too is gaining popularity. The influence of Anglo-Indians is gradually finding roots in the English soil, spreading its branches all around. In this context, it should be mentioned for the sake of justice that many Anglo-Indians, after retiring from their assignments in India, have displayed extreme benevolence towards the helpless Indians.
For all these reasons, many native English people are sceptical about whether it would be a quixotic stupidity for them to discharge to the oriental animals those duties usually reserved for themselves, whether this act of showing equality will reveal the civilised islanders’ intellectual narrowness and inexperience, and whether this would also harm animals of various species. English philosophers such as Herbert Spencer believe that it is not only inevitable that moral ideals vary according to the standard of civilisation but also necessary according to the norms of evolution.
The truth of these opinions will be judged on some other occasion. For the time being, I can only say that its (i.e., the practice of treating Indians unequally) consequences are very painful for us. Apprehending an uprising after noticing some posters on trees in the state of Bihar, opinions have been expressed in several English newspapers that a genuine union of love is never possible between Oriental and Occidental races. The former has to be subjugated forcibly by means of fear of threats. All these, it seems, are being expressed more openly these days than ever before.
Our opinion is that even if we admit that the principles of duty in freedom-loving Europe may not be suitable for application in every corner of the ever-subjugated Orient, it is indeed an unrealistic dream for them to maintain the usual rhythm of the Oriental life here for the simple reason that our king is a European. If our country were free, the monarchy that would have evolved in the natural process in this Oriental space would surely have been different in multiple aspects. It may be that, from one perspective, the king’s excessive power would have appeared greater than it is now. Similarly, from another perspective, the subjects, by limiting the king’s authority, would have channelised their own desires in various forms and through multiple avenues. Natural compatibility can be best expressed through natural means. Howsoever they may want, the English cannot achieve that (artificially) just through policy making.
Hence, the Englishmen can behave with us just in the way they do; if they willingly distort it, that will amount to misbehaviour, it will never become an Indian behaviour. They can break their own ideal, but in its stead what will they build and how? However, the English, fallen from their ever-familiar native ideal, may turn out to be big, ferocious animals. From the hints of cruelty, laced with aggression of power, that we can trace in the works of authors like Rudyard Kipling, it seems that man often wishes to jump into the primitive barbarity of wild nature of the forest by ripping through the fine, hundred-threaded strong net of civilisation. On their arrival in India, the Anglo-Indians taste the exquisite wine of power that may create this overwhelming intoxication. The natural, spontaneous embodiment of masculinity in the writings of these loveless, difficult, power-boasting talented men has a kind of extreme fascination. That is literature for the English but for us, it is indeed a recipe for death.
Secondly, the way authors in their contemporary novels represent the Orient as appearing mysterious to the Occident is largely fictitious. There are numerous intersections between us. The similarities of the heart are often overshadowed by external differences. Modern writers tend to apply colour to, and even exaggerate, the unfamiliarity of these external features to please the readers; they do not try to unearth the similarities lying deep within, neither are they capable of doing that.
The significance of making all these statements is simply this: the idea that European values are exclusively meant for Europe is gradually spreading not only in India but also in England. Indians are supposedly so different a race that the civilised values are not completely applicable to them.
Under such circumstances, if our ethical values become strong, the policy of governance cannot go off the right track. When the English are conscious of the fact that their actions are being closely watched by the entire Indian population, they will not be able to do anything by completely disregarding India.
Recently, some evidence of this is being noticed. When India witnesses some misdeeds committed by the English, she begins to call for justice in her own feeble voice, invoking civilisational and moral values. This naturally angers the colonials, but at the same time, they are forced to remain somewhat vigilant.
Even then, full results are yet to be seen. The British consider it an admission of their weakness to adhere to codes of values that exhibit respect towards us all the time and under all circumstances. They find it insulting and harmful if one of them commits a crime against us and is punished by the law. They fear that Indians will perceive it as curtailment of power.
It is impossible for us to identify the nature of thoughts of government officials. However, I feel the untimely promotion of Radice Sahib can be linked to the above policy. This suspicion is reinforced specially when such an event is found to have occurred repeatedly. The government is, as if, silently declaring, it is your audacity to expect an English official to be humiliated for harassing and insulting one of you. Even if we have to violate conventions and neglect the rules of governance to crush that audacity, it will be desirable. The English race is greater than the norms of ethics, they are beyond the jurisdiction of justice!
For the sake of truth, it has to be admitted that the government tends to keep not only the English but also its own employees a notch above the rule of justice. This has been observed in one or two contemporary incidents. In the Baladhan4 murder case, all those involved, right from the English judge to the Bengali police personnel who were openly blamed in the judgement of the High Court, have been rewarded and encouraged by the colonial Bengal government.
We are individuals outside the realm of politics, we are not familiar with its internal complexities. There might be a hidden motive behind it [the government’s decision]. The authorities may believe that the local judge in the Baladhan case did not issue an incorrect ruling – around five to seven individuals should have been hanged in some manner. They might have nurtured a biased opinion that the incident in reality happened despite the lack of concrete judicial evidence, and that only the local judge could have determined the truth which was inaccessible to the High Court judge.
We want to say that openly rewarding, instead of punishing, individuals who have been publicly condemned by the highest court of the country, who have been proven guilty in the eyes of the public, amounts to the disregard of the moral judgment of the public. Everyone’s told we do not feel the need to offer any explanation to you about our duties. The government is not bothered about whether you praise or criticise it – our government is strong enough to withstand such scrutiny!
The governor who demolishes the anguish and moral judgement of the subjects under his shoes, and drowns their feeble, insecure voices beneath the marching sounds of their feet, is indeed a strong ruler in Anglo-India!
It is unnecessary to disclose whether this highlights their power or reveals our utmost weakness. This insolent disregard of the government suggests that, in its view, the moral judgement of the Indians is not strong enough to evoke a feeling of embarrassment in them. Instead, this unapologetic recklessness seems to them as the manifestation of a genuine power over an ever-oppressed nation.
If we can really convince the agents of the government that we do not consider the violation of ethics as bravado, that injustice, however powerful it may appear, is held as equally despicable and reprehensible in our Oriental system of judgement, and that the lack of courage to dispense justice everywhere firmly and impartially is also considered by us as a sign of weakness, only then the English would be forced to respect our norms of duties. The reason is that they will be able to discover the correspondence between our ideal and their own.
When we forget the bitter lessons of our prolonged subjugation, when we decide not to consider the injustice of the powerful as the manifestation of divine will — something that must be endured in silence — when we consider attempts at the redressal of injustice, even if it fails, as our duty, and when for these reasons, we stop being averse to sacrifice ourselves and bear pains, only then the days of true happiness will bloom. At that point, the sense of justice of the British government will never be derailed by any selfish policy and eccentricity of any individual; it will stand like a resolute mountain firmly based on the foundation of the subjects’ hearts. At that time, good gestures of the government will not accidentally be showered on our bowed heads like momentary favours; we will, on the contrary, accrue them as respect. What we are getting as alms today will be received as our rights.
Questions can be raised – offering advice is easy, but what about the solution? To that, we may retort that no proper bliss can be achieved by clever strategies alone; for that we have to pay the entire price due to it. All of us must strive to our utmost potential, proper lessons should be imparted to siblings and children in every household, a strong ideal of justice needs to be established in both the family and society, and careful attention must be paid to one’s own behaviour. Like all good advice, this too is easier to hear, difficult to implement, and is indeed age-old. However, there is no new, short-cut or hidden path other than this long, open, and ancient highway.
Translator’s Notes:
1. Mr. C.A. Radice belonged to the Indian Civil Service cadre during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. He was posted as an Assistant Magistrate and Collector in Murshidabad in 1890 and was “vested with third class powers” (Appt. File 5C—4. Proceedings B. 1—3, Ja. 1890). He was ‘degraded’ for “prosecuting Babu Radha Shyam Nissanta Mahapatra, zaminder of pargana Balinkandi in the district of Balasore” [Judl. File J-1P—113(1-21), Proceedings 134-55, Aug. 1893]. Radice’s ‘reversion’ to 2nd grade became effective in February 1895. [(Appt., File 6C—8(3.8). Proceedings B. 716-21, Feb. 1895)]. The translator of this essay traced these pieces of information in the entry on “Radice, C.A. Mr., I.C.S.—” pp. 1126-1128. Kindly see: https://sadte.wb.gov.in/uploads/pdf/D12/D1224.pdf
2. Antony Patrick MacDonnell (1844–1925) joined the Indian Civil Service in 1865. He was the Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal during the period 1893-1895. MacDonnell was respected as an expert on the Indian land reformation and famine relief. “His sharp temper and unwillingness to tolerate inefficient subordinates earned him the nickname ‘the Bengal Tiger.’” Kindly see the entry on “MacDonnell, Antony Patrick” contributed by Patrick Maume, in Dictionary of Irish Biography. https://www.dib.ie/biography/macdonnell-antony-patrick-a5180.
3. Sir Charles Alfred Elliott (1835-1911) was the Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal during the period 1890-1893. Tagore’s reference to MacDonnell being replaced by Eliott is confusing because Eliott indeed preceded MacDonnell, and did not succeed him.
4. Tagore refers to an incident which is popularly known as “Baladhan Murder Case.” It took place in Baladhan Tea Garden in the Cachar district of Assam on 11 April, 1893. Several persons barged into the manager’s bungalow in the tea garden at night and killed the manager (Mr. Cockburn) and the chowkidar and seriously wounded Mr. Cockburn’s Indian paramour named Sadi. Money and other valuables were looted. Later six Manipuris and a Gurkha were arrested. They were tried by the sessions judge John Clark (and a panel of three Indian assessors) at Sylhet who sentenced four of the accused to death. Babu Kamini Kumar Chanda took up the case to Calcutta High Court which acquitted all the accused (Sanajoba 234). “On December 11, 1893, Calcutta High Court Judges Ameer Ali and H.T. Prinsep acquitted all of the prisoners on account of the many ‘irregularities’ and ‘illegalities’ committed during the police investigation and trial, as well as the lack of corroborating evidence” (Kolsky 145).
See pp.142-48 [in Chapter 4 titled “One scale of justice for the planter and another for the coolie”: law and violence on the Assam tea plantations” (pp. 142-184)] in the book Colonial Justice in British India edited by Elizabeth Kolsky (Cambridge University Press, 2010) and p. 234 of Th. Babachandra Singh’s chapter “The Manipuris in the Politics of Assam” (pp. 213-36) included in the book Manipur, Past and Present: The Heritage and Ordeals of a Civilization, Volume 4 (Pan-Manipuris in Asia and Autochthones), edited by Naorem Sanajaoba, Mittal Publications, 2005. (Google book link: https://books.google.co.in/books?id=CzSQKVmveUC&printsec=copyright&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false)
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Himadri Lahiri retired as Professor of English, the University of Burdwan, West Bengal, India. He is currently teaching English at Netaji Subhas Open University, Kolkata.
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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.
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 bidrohior ‘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.
[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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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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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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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.
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 Storiesedited by Shanta Gokhale and Jerry Pinto. Rakhi Dalal has discussed a translation from Konkani by Jerry Pinto of award-winning writer Damodar Mauzo’sBoy, Unloved. Basudhara Roy has reviewed Trailokyanath Mukhopadhyay’s Tales of Early Magic Realism in Bengali, translated by Sucheta Dasgupta. Bhaskar Parichha has introduced us toThe 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 byRonald 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.
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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