British Museum – Borderless

By Sohana Manzoor

The first thing I realised while walking around London is that not a single one of all the people I had known who had been to England, told me how charming the city is. The buses with open tops, the red telephone booths, Big Ben, the London Bridge and all those pretty buildings simply fascinated us. So, before heading out for Haworth, we walked around in London and took Duck’s tour and saw some really enchanting stuff.

We spent a large part of a day at the famed Tower of London, which is literally a thousand years old, first built by William the Conqueror in the 11th century. Our visit began with a tour by a Beefeater (also known as a Yeoman Warder), who gave us a general overview of the Tower’s history. He had a wicked sense of humor and kept making puns like “Let’s be heading this way.” We saw Tower Hill, the site of public executions on the scaffold, and also Tower Green, where Anne Boleyn and Lady Jane Grey were executed – the spot is now commemorated by a glass sculpture with a pillow on top. The tour ended at the Chapel Royal of St Peter ad Vincula where those executed on Tower Green (including Boleyn and Jane Grey) are buried. Afterwards, we took a picture with the Beefeater outside the chapel.

Next, we went to the building that houses the Crown Jewels. Our eyes were dazzled by the rich display of crowns, scepters, and orbs bejeweled with diamonds, rubies, sapphires, and every kind of precious stone possible in the vault. We also saw the famed Kohinoor diamond, set in the Queen Mother’s crown, as well as the crown worn by the late Queen Elizabeth II. After the crown jewels, there was also a section of gold plates, serving dishes, goblets, wine jugs, etc. that were used for ceremonial occasions by various monarchs. We will probably never again see such a display of wealth, and perhaps there is no other place with so much wealth on display in one place. However, all the gold and perhaps some of the obnoxious histories attached with the splendour on display started to make me feel nauseous, so I was glad to get out into the open air.

We looked around in the White Tower, which stands in the center with a display of military equipment and history. Then we went to the Beauchamp Tower, which is known for the graffiti on the walls left by various prisoners, including some very high-profile ones. At one point, when I saw the graffiti attributed to Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, I stood rooted to the spot. It was incredible to think we were standing in the same room where such illustrious prisoners once lived, carving their convictions into the walls.

We walked around the grounds, taking pictures, and then came across some costumed characters, including James Scott, Duke of Monmouth, who posed with me graciously for a picture. The costumed characters put on a dramatic reenactment of James trying to claim the throne. James Scott is the fellow who required several blows of the axe, followed by a butcher knife, during his beheading on Tower Hill by the half-drunk Jack Ketch. The Beefeater told us the story in all its gory detail, though the reenactment, thankfully, included the trial but not the execution.

We took pictures, including one of Nausheen posing with a raven. These birdsare kept and bred on the grounds of the Tower. Apparently, they have kept at least half a dozen ravens since the time of Charles II, who thought the Tower would fall and the empire disintegrate if he did not always keep ravens there. There is even one beefeater whose job it is to feed and take care of the ravens! Finally, we also saw the room where Sir Walter Raleigh was imprisoned for many years, and the place where he used to walk back and forth (now called Raleigh’s Walk), and I got goose bumps.

Our day ended with a brief stop at Tate Modern, which is just across the river from the Tower. I’m not really into modern art, and as I paused in front of a famous painting by Picasso, I had to admit that I understood nothing about its greatness. To me it looked like a misshapen human figure lying on its side. Nausheen kept on dancing around the pieces and went on explaining what she had learnt in conjunction with modern poetry.

Next morning, we passed Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament on our way to Westminster Abbey where kings and queens are still coronated, and where many notable historical, political, and literary figures are buried. It was very crowded, but also a very solemn kind of place – kind of dark and gloomy, with tombs and effigies all around, and Latin epitaphs everywhere. Many of England’s kings and queens are buried here, and we saw the tombs of Henry VII, Elizabeth I, Bloody Mary, and Mary Queen of Scots. The tomb of Queen Elizabeth felt unreal – almost as if it was part of a dream I had nurtured for long.

Eventually, we made our way to the Poets’ Corner, which Nausheen was especially eager to see. She got excited seeing the tomb of Chaucer, who was the first to be buried in the Poets’ Corner. We both patted the tomb in homage to the great man. We also saw tombs of various other poets and writers, such as Austen and Dickens, and memorials to writers who are buried elsewhere, but commemorated here nonetheless, such as Shakespeare and the Brontës. Finally, we stopped at the museum shop to buy some souvenirs.

The afternoon saw us at the Tate Britain. We took a tour with one of the museum guides, who took us through the Turner wing. It was really great that they have an entire wing devoted to Turner, since his work is familiar to me from my dissertation supervisor, Dr. Collins’s course. There were also paintings by Constable and Gainsborough, but of course, Turner’s are the most dramatic and majestic. There was also a smaller wing dedicated to Blake’s prints, paintings, and engravings. However, the ones that are most familiar to us, from Songs of Innocence and Experience, are mostly elsewhere, such as in the British Museum, so there were only a handful of those.

The next day was cold and gloomy and we decided to stay in. We made plans of visiting Hampstead, the home of the young Romantic poet John Keats the day after. I knew days would be bad as I was developing a fever. But I could surely rest for one day.

Sohana Manzoor is an Associate Professor at the Department of English and Humanities at ULAB, a short story writer, a translator, an essayist and an artist. This essay was previously published in The Daily Star in January 2019.

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Whispers of Stones

When the mountains and grass
had life, stones whispered
how the world came to be…

'Stonehenge', Daily Star

And as the world came to be, there was war — war that seems to rage in some part of the world or other. The British Museum has an exhibit which states the first battle was staged 13,000 years ago… in what is now Sudan, long before the advent of written history. This was even before the advent of people who built the ancient Stonehenge which was constructed around 3000-2000 BCE. And battles still continue to rage. The Jebel Sahaba casualties in Sudan 13000 years ago were less than 100. But the current conflicts claim in terms of tens of thousands which prolonged could stretch to millions. The last world war (1939-1945) which lasted for six years had a total of 75-80 million persons who perished. Ukraine-Russia conflict has within five months had a casualty count of more than 14000. And yet weapons and nuclear arms continue to proliferate decimating humanity, nature and towns, destroying homes, erasing ruthlessly and creating more refugees. The only need for such battles seem to be to satiate the hunger of the warlords secure in their impenetrable fortresses while tens of thousands are annihilated and natural or nurtured landscapes lie emaciated, mutilated and polluted.

What would be a good way of ending such wars?

Tagore sought the development of better instincts in humankind as an antidote. He wrote in the last century: “Any teaching concerning man must have human nature for its chief element. How far it will harmonise with human nature is a matter of time.”

With wars getting deadlier and more horrific, we can only try to awaken, as Tagore suggests, the better nature in man to move towards a peaceful world. What would be a more effective way of doing it than writing with the hope of a kinder and accepting future?

For that let us start with translations of the maestro Tagore himself. We have a song about the season — monsoon, ‘Monomor Megher Songi (My Friends, the Clouds)’, translated by Professor Fakrul Alam, a painting by Sohana Manzoor interpreting the lyrics and a transcreation of ‘Nababarsha or New Rains’ was shrunken into a popular Rabindra Sangeet and reduced to twenty lines in English by Tagore himself. The connect with nature is an important aspect that enables humans to transcend petty concerns leading to dissensions of different kinds as evidenced in the maestro’s humorous feline skit, translated by Somdatta Mandal. A translation of Dalip Kaur Tiwana’s ‘The Bus Conductor’ from Punjabi by C. Christine Fair adds zest to this section. Fazal Baloch has translated a folktale from Balochistan involving the supernatural and Ihlwha Choi has taken on the cry for peace on behalf of Ukraine while translating his own poem in Korean. The Nithari column has a story by Jishan in Hindustani, translated to English by Grace M Sukanya, showcasing the struggle of a youngster during the pandemic – rather a sad narrative, which though fictitious has its roots in reality.

Our poetry section touches upon the timelessness of dissensions and darkness with Michael R Burch’s poem on Stonehenge and Supatra Sen’s poem on Ukraine. This has been allayed by love poetry by Maid Corbic from Bosnia. George Freek’s poem ruffles with its reflective lines. And in the midst of it all, is poetry by Ryan Quinn Flanagan reflecting on the seven stages of man. Will the process of aging or human nature ever change? I wonder if Rhys Hughes can find an answer for that in humorous verses as he has shared in this issue. In his column, Hughes has written about an imagined anthology of short stories.

Our short story section has echoes of humour around felines by Manzoor, somewhat in tune with the mind frame seen in Tagore’s skit on this issue. Humour rings tinged with an apparition in Erwin Coombs’s narrative – should one call it dark humour or is it just his style? Paul Mirabile goes for gothic darkness in his meanderings around Italy.

Strangely, we seem to have a focus on short stories this time. Keith Lyons has interviewed Steve Carr, a journalist, a publisher and writer of 500 short stories who is questing to create a ‘perfect short story’. Reading out excerpts from her short story at a literary festival in Simla, Bollywood celebrity, Deepti Naval, was in conversation with eminent film journalist, Ratnottama Sengupta. She spoke of her literary aspirations while unveiling her autobiography in verse, A Country Called Childhood. This conversation has been shared by Sengupta with Borderless. It is interesting to see how Naval’s reactions to social malaise contrasts with that of the film director, cinematographer and actor, Goutam Ghose, who was present during the unveiling of her book. He had responded to communal violence by making a film on Lalan Fakir extolling virtues of love and kindness, called Moner Manush (2010) and then made a book on the film called, The Quest (2013) which has beautiful translations of Lalan Fakir’s lyrics by Sankar Sen.

Our non-fiction sections seem to be hosting multiple travel stories across UK by Mike Smith, along the Australian coastline by Meredith Stephens, on the Himalayas with Ravi Shankar and an unusual visit by Hema Ravi to a farm in US where animals that had been used in Disney films in the past are homed. Our environmental columnist, Kenny Peavy, actually wrote about his cycling trip from Thailand to Indonesia on a bamboo cycle made by a Singaporean! And from Japan, Suzanne Kamata explored a museum in the neighbouring town of Mure. The museum on a hill hosts the art of American Japanese Artists, Isamu Noguchi.

We do have non-fiction that moves away from travel: noir humour by Devraj Singh Kalsi and an essay by Candice Louisa Daquin on a very interesting subject – ‘Is it Okay to be Ordinary?’ Is it? Dan Meloche has written a literary essay on Canadian novelist Andre Alexis’s award-winning novel, Fifteen Dogs: An Apologue (2015). While Meloche spoke of how the novel departed from Orwell’s Animal Farm, his narrative brought to my mind a novel closer to our times set in England by Jasper Fforde called Constant Rabbit (2020) – this a science fiction while Alexis’s was an apologue or an animal fable. Fforde did use the rabbits rather well to highlight the current times.

We have book excerpts of two recent books that I would call really outstanding. One of them is Aruna Chakravarti’s The Mendicant Prince, which is being released this week, and is based on the evergreen contentious case of the prince of Bhawal that has even been explored even in cinema. The other, Dadamoni: The Life and Times of Ashok Kumar by Nabendu Ghosh, has been published posthumously and is not a translation from Bengali but written in English originally by this trilingual writer.

Called ‘Dadamoni’ affectionately, iconic actor Ashok Kumar is regarded as “the one personality who symbolises Indian cinema’s journey from Bombay Talkies to Bollywood”. This book has been reviewed by Indrashish Banerjee, who calls it ‘a reflection on the Hindi film industry’ as well as a biography. Rakhi Dalal has reviewed Booker winner Geetanjali Shree’s Mai, Silently Mother, a Sahitya Akademi winning translation of her Hindi novel by Nita Kumar, reiterating the dialogue that had been kindled on motherhood last month by Rinki Roy Bhattacharya and Maithili Rao’s The Oldest Love Story (2022). Bhaskar Parichha has reviewed Prosanta Chakrabarty’s Explaining Life Through Evolution plotting how life evolved on earth. Parichha tells us: “Meaningful, wide-ranging and argumentative, this is a must-read book. It will propel us to imagine and reimagine life around us.” Another book that sounds like a must-read has been reviewed by Meenakshi Malhotra, Tagore’s Gleanings of the Road, translated by Mandal. She tells us: “ ‘Gleanings’ represents the quintessential Tagore…Ably introduced and translated by Somdatta Mandal, a renowned Tagore scholar, the translation captures the iridescent and luminous quality of Tagore’s prose and its chiaroscuro effects.”

There is more to tempt. Please stop by on our contents page and take a look.

We would like to hugely thank all our contributors and readers for being with us and helping us grow. I would like to thank my team, who despite hurdles they face, always lend a helping hand and wonderful words from their pens or computers to get Borderless on its feet. I apologise for the delay and thank you all for your patience. Special thanks to Sohana Manzoor for her fabulous artwork.

I wish you all a wonderful July and peace in a war-torn world. We are all affected by the ongoing conflicts. Let us hope for peaceful and just resolutions.

Thanks.

Mitali Chakravarty

borderlessjournal.com