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Interview Review

In Discussion with Rajat Chaudhuri: Spellcasters and Solarpunk

A brief overview of Rajat Chaudhuri’s Spellcasters, published by Niyogi Books, and a conversation with the author.

Spellcasters by Rajat Chaudhuri is a spellbinding fast paced adventure in a phantasmagorical world against the backdrop of climate change and environmental disasters. Chaudhuri, a proponent of solarpunk[1],  has nine books under his belt, including the Butterfly Effect (2018) a few fellowships (like Charles Wallace), and a sense of fun as the characters hurtle through the book gripping the readers with their intensity.

In this novel, Chaudhuri’s universe is run by a council, based on Akbar’s Navratnas[2]. They seem to be people in charge of running a chaotic world. This group — though not drawn from Akbar’s court but from various parts of the world — are known as the ‘Nine Unknown Men’. They are said to host great people from the past in another dimension. As they “fold the dimensions and transform matter from one form to another”, manipulating and yet healing characters like Chanchal Mitra, his protagonist, putting the world to ‘rights’ by destroying villainous capitalists who sport shrunken heads of their enemies and indulge in creating drugs that can lead to annihilation of humankind, there is a fine vein of coherence which gives credibility to Chaudhuri’s imagined world.

The locales are all fictitious but highlight real world problems of climate change, unethical scientific research and uncontrolled economic growth that only pamper the pockets of the rich craving power. He weaves in episodes that had made headlines in Indian media, like Ganesha drinking milk, and Himalayan disasters, a result of interferences by human constructs like dam building and ‘development’. A sensuous mysterious woman with curly hair, Sujata, who sets Mitra back on track and is as good as a Marvel heroine when accosted with villains, adds to the appeal of the book.

He describes a barefoot tribe which seems more idyllic than real. But given that it is a phantasmagorical fantastical novel, one would just accept that as a part of the Spellcasters’ world. However, the import of the message the tribal leader conveys to the characters on the run is astute. “We take little from this land and try to return what it gives us. So did our forefathers and all those who walk this country with the animals. But the settlers in villages and cities never tire of drawing out the last drop of earth’s riches…” A similar take on nomadism and settler communities can be found in nonfiction in Anthony Sattin’s Nomads: The Wanderers Who Shaped our World, who talks of the spirit of brotherhood, or asabiyya, that bound the nomads together, a concept borne in the fourteenth century in the Middle East. One wonders if the Nine Unknown Men who cast spells are also bound by some such law as at the end the ‘Perfect Lovers’ disappear into another adventure in time… perhaps, to resurface in Chaudhuri’s next book?

Chaudhuri is poetic with words. He writes stunning descriptions of storms and climate events: “The rivers are boisterous and overflowing, the skies are being torn apart by forests of lightning. The great snow-capped peaks from where these rivers emerge have vanished behind walls of water tumbling down from the skies.”

The thing that makes his book truly unique is the way his characters seem to internalise or grow out of the miasma that encapsulates the world below the mountains. They seem like an extension of the chaotic external environment with strange happenings. Even in the council meeting held by the Nine Unknown Men, some of the crowd seem to be wisps of mists. Chanchal Mitra has to go above the hovering fog to start healing back to normal. The novel starts in a seemingly dystopian setting. The ending is more of a fantasy. There is a strain of Bengaliness in his wry humour, in small factual details, like we find Jagadish Chandra Bose seated in the council hall, though  LJ drawn from RL Stevensons’ fictional pirate from Treasure Island (1883), Long John Silver, and Caligari from The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1920), have larger and more crucial roles in the novel. Spellcasters is a thriller that entices with words, a gripping plot and suspense — set against a backdrop of strange climate events that are becoming a reality in today’s world, though the characters are more interesting than those drawn from real life.

The novel is written by an author who is compelled by perhaps more than a need to record his times. He has a vision… though not clearly laid out as a didactic message. But it hovers in the fog that is part of the book. One of the things that came across[3] was to create utopia, we need the chaos of dystopian existence…a theme that rebel poet Nazrul addresses in his poem, ‘Proloyullash’ (The Frenzy of destruction): “Why fear destruction? It’s the gateway to creation!”

Rajat Chaudhuri

In a past life, Chaudhuri had been a consumer rights activist, an economic and political affairs officer with a Japanese Mission and a climate change advocate at the United Nations, New York. Working in such capacities could have generated his vision, his worldview. Let us find out more about it by asking him directly:

What made you turn to writing from being an activist and climate change advocate? How long have you been writing fiction? What made you turn to fiction?

I am still involved with activism through my work with NGOs and my writing for popular media and other venues.  However, I have gradually shifted my energies to creative fiction through which, nowadays, I try to engage with climate change and other planetary crises.

I have been writing fiction for nearly two decades now, my first novel, Amber Dusk was published seventeen years ago.  As a full-time activist I have had the opportunity to interact and work with people from various strata of society right from the villages of India to international fora like the United Nations, where I have often noticed a tug-of-war of ideas between big business, sections of civil society, governments and other major groups like women, indigenous people and so on. While watching and participating in these, I had begun to realise how stories can open another flank in our efforts to communicate our ideas.  

Today, you see, storytelling is everywhere. Stories are being recruited for issues big or small, important or completely worthless, even dangerous! In my case, I realised that stories can be an important vehicle for communicating issues surrounding planetary crises to my audience. Stories tend to be sticky — they remain with us for a long time and studies are now showing that well told stories can trigger changes in perceptions, beliefs and ideas. But it took me a long time to transform this realisation into book projects. Before that I had written other books – contemporary fiction, urban fantasy and so on.  

 What made you conceive Spellcasters? How long did it take you to write?

There are two or three strands that came together in the writing of Spellcasters. Most important among these is my interest in psychology and mental disorders and specifically in the fact that the ideas that dominate the world today, you can call them spells too, make us behave like we are affected by some kind of mental illness. Ideas and practices like limitless growth, conspicuous consumption and so on, make us behave as if we have lost our minds as we go on plundering the planet for energy and resources despite the fact that `nature’ is striking back at us with ever-increasing fury. So, our mental illness is causing planetary illness and at the centre of all this are these powerful, mesmerising, false beliefs, which right from the time of the Club of Rome have been known to be dangerous.

So, when I began to plan this novel, all these thoughts were in my mind partly driven by my activism. And at the same time, I had been reading Sudhir Kakar’s works about magic and mysticism in India and the parallels between Indian and western psychology so all of that came together. It took me about five years to complete Spellcasters not at one go, there was other stuff I have worked on in between.  

What kind of research went into making the book?

To create the main character, the journalist Chanchal Mitra, I worked closely with my psychoanalyst friend Anurag Mishra who happens to be a student of Sudhir Kakar. And that research was really intense. We had long face-to-face and online sessions and I read a lot about the varieties and specificities of mental disorder.

Then there is of course that background layer of interest which oftenseeds ideas in your mind. This usually comes from your reading, and I had been interested in reading about the occult traditions of the East and the West for many years. Characters like Mme Alexandra David-Neel[4], the magic healers among indigenous peoples, the power of entheogenic substances like mushrooms have always fascinated me, and some of that came back while researching this book. Writing the climate layer of the story was comparatively easier because of my first-hand activist experience. 

Do you have a vision or a message that you tried to address in this novel? I felt it moved from a dystopian setting to that of a fantasy — though not to utopia. Do you think a dystopian vision is necessary to evolve utopia?

The message is simple, and we all know it: Ideas of limitless growth have affected us mentally and so we behave and act in ways (resource extraction, carbon emission) that are making the planet sick. We are passing on our illness to the planet.  The belief in limitless growth is a zoonotic disease that our species has transferred to the living planet. Still, we do not act because we are under the effect of these powerful ideas, these powerful spells, that’s where the novel gets its name. The message, if we can call it one, is to be aware of this and try to break out of these spells.

The path to utopia is not necessarily through dystopia. We can start hoping and acting today before things get really bad. Which is the locus of the whole solarpunk movement with which I am closely associated as an editor and creator. But `darkness’ can be redeeming too. Jem Bendell writes about this in detail. Grief and sorrow can indeed make us stronger; author Liz Jensen navigates grief and encounters hope in Your Wild and Precious Life, which is a must read for everyone asking these questions. But coming back to Spellcasters it is really neither dystopia or utopia if we are talking about the climate layer of the story, it’s very much set in the present. What might look dystopian are the gothic and magical elements and settings which serve as a counterpoint to the cold logic of the scientist character, Vincent.  

Your novel has broken various barriers by mingling different constructs. So, tell us, how do you combine realism with fantasy, science with literature and create your own world?

It’s not difficult actually. Fantasy, magic and `unreason’ are woven around the borders of the familiar. We see them often without noticing it. Leaping a little higher or using a prescription eye-cleanser can do the trick!

To answer the other part of your question, science and literature or nature and culture were never apart in the first place. They were sundered because of the partitioning project of modernity which goes back to the work of Hobbes and Boyle and has its own history and protagonists. Science fiction as you know does not care much for this division. Climate fiction because of its scaffolding of science and reason needs to bring the two together. As a climate fiction writer, I try to keep the scientific complexities in the background, but they remain as building blocks of the story. In this book however we have a full chapter which is out of a scientist’s journal, and I did that for a change in flavour and in the spirit of experimentation. 

 Are your imaginary locales based on real cities? Please elaborate.

Often so. In Spellcasters the cities of Anantanagar and Aukatabadare modelled on Calcutta and Delhi respectively. A close reader can easily pick out the similarities but then I also enjoy changing some details especially when I am writing mixed-genre work like this one. So, there is no Chinese joint (like the one Chanchal hangs out at) in Calcutta where you can openly smoke weed but there are places quite similar to the one I described and there is indeed a real person with an eye of glass who used to hang out in one of these.

You have spoken of storms on the hills. Do you also see this as an impact of climate change? Do you think building roads, tunnels or hydel power stations on the hills can, over a period of time, have adverse effects on climate or humanity? Can you suggest an alternative to such ‘development’?

The avalanches, the unseasonal rains, especially the cloudbursts are all closely connected to climate change. Having said that, we also have to be careful to avoid climate reductionism. Often it is a concatenation of factors (including carbon emissions and climate change) and processes, their effects amplified by feedback loops, that precipitate disasters. This is very true if we study migration, for which climate change can be one of the driving forces but there could be other factors like economic opportunities, cultural patterns etc implicated in such flows. 

Mindless development which does not take into account the fragility of nature and the interconnections between all beings big and small, microscopic or enormous, animate or inanimate, will set into motion processes that will precipitate crises like climate change. Yes, big dams are definitely a problem and small hydro is always a better option. We often hear that nature is self-healing or that there have been many previous extinctions, and that the planet has made and remade itself, but that’s like telling ourselves, please prepare for suicide while the super-rich and the cults of preppers, especially in the advanced industrialised nations, can escape to their doomsday bunkers.

The alternatives to the current development model is to be found in the ideas of Gandhi, of Schumacher, in solarpunk literature, in Vandana Shiva’s works among plenty of other places. The basic idea is to live in harmony with the planet, cut down on emissions, reduce resource extraction, try community based participatory solutions to problems instead of relying on economic, high-tech or market-based instruments, step back, go slow and let nature cloth and feed us so that we can live with dignity while forsaking greed.   

 In Spellcasters, you show climate change as an accepted way of life at the end. Do you think that can be a reality? Do you think climate change can be reversed?

A novel often presents itself as a bouquet of ideas without the author demonstrating any clear bias for one over the others. But as an activist-writer I usually drop clear hints as to what is more desirable without making it too obvious. There is always this ongoing duel between politics and aesthetics in a novel and the best among us balance the two quite well.

Climate change can of course be engaged with, controlled and reversed, if we can stick to the ambitious targets of the Paris climate agreement with the rich nations facilitating the process with more funds to poorer nations. Both producers and consumers have a role to play here, and we need serious lifestyle changes in the advanced industrial nations (or rather the global North) and a serious focus on climate justice for any meaningful change to occur. Only planting trees and carbon-trading won’t do.

Your language is very poetic. Do you have any intention of trying poetry as a genre?

Thank you. I haven’t ever thought of writing poetry because I am not gifted with the art of brevity which I think is essential there. But I have enjoyed translating poetry from Bengali to English, which was published as a book. I plan to do more of that.

What can we next expect from your pen?

I have been trying to finish a work of non-fiction about climate change and I hope to do this by the end of the year.

Let me also take this opportunity to thank you Mitali and your team at Borderless Journal for your service to literature. You are doing important work here and I am really grateful for your interest in my novel.

Thank you so much for giving us your time and sharing your wonderful book.

.

[1]Solarpunk is a sci-fi subgenre and social movement that emerged in 2008. It visualizes collectivist, ecological utopias where nature and technology grow in harmony. Read more by clicking her

[2]Navratnas or the nine gems were a bunch of very gifted men in his court, like Birbal and Tansen.

[3]The author does not agree to this reading in the interview. He sees his novel evolve out of the solarpunk movement.

[4]Alexandra David-Néel (1868-1969) https://openheartproject.com/the-path-post/alexandra-david-neel/

CLICK HERE TO READ AN EXCERPT FROM SPELLCASTERS

(The online interview has been conducted through emails and the review written by Mitali Chakravarty.)

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

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

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Categories
Tagore Translations

A Trip to the Himalayas by Rabindranath Tagore

‘Himalaya Jatra’ (A trip to the Himalayas) has been excerpted from Jibon Smriti[1] and translated by Somdatta Mandal.

Jibon Smriti by Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941)

After my head was shaved for the upanayan (sacred thread) ceremony, I was seriously troubled thinking how I would go to school. However serious attraction the European boys had towards the bovine race; they did not have that much respect for the Brahmins. So even if they did not throw anything over the shaven head, they would surely make fun of it.

While I was worried with such thoughts, I got a call one day from the room on the second floor. Father asked me whether I would like to go with him to the Himalayas. If I could shout the words “Yes I do” at a sky-rendering tone, then the feelings of my heart would have been suitably expressed. Where was the Bengal Academy and where the Himalayas!

Before leaving, Father assembled everyone in the house and according to his tradition did the upasana – the traditional prayers. After paying obeisance to all the elders I entered the coach along with Father. At my age, this was the first time that clothes had been tailored for me. Father had personally ordered the colour and the quality of the fabric. A round velvet cap with design in zari [2] was also made for me. I held that in my hand because I felt reluctant to wear it on my shaven head. As soon as I entered the coach, Father ordered, “Wear it on the head.” He did not leave any scope for untidiness and so I had to wear that cap over my shameful head. In the train, I would take it off whenever I got an opportunity to do so but that did not escape Father’s notice. So, I had to keep it in its right place.

Right from youth to maturity, all the ideas and work of my father were always perfect. He could not leave anything hazy in his mind and could not do any work in a haphazard manner. For him his duty towards others and the duty of others towards him were defined very clearly. By nature, we are an easy-going people and not concerned when we deviate a little here and there. So, we were always very scared and alert about our behaviour towards him. Though it did not cause any serious damage, he felt hurt if there was any deviation from his agenda. Before making any resolution, he would mentally visualise everything clearly in all its details. So, for any occasion he would plan where each object should be placed, who would be placed in which position, who would be entrusted with which responsibility and to what extent there would be no deviation from that on any account. After the work was complete, he would gather reports from different people. Then he would compare each description and by putting them together in his mind, tried to see everything clearly. In this respect he did not possess our national character at all. There was no chance for the minutest deviation in his resolutions, thoughts, behaviour and performance. For this reason, for all the days I was with him on this trip to the Himalayas, I had plenty of freedom on the one hand but on the other, all my behaviour was determined in such a manner that it could not be transgressed. When he declared a holiday then he would not prevent one doing anything for any reason whatsoever; when he fixed some rules then he didn’t leave any scope for minute lapses.

Before our journey to the Himalayas commenced, we were supposed to stay for some days at Bolpur. Satya had gone there some time back with his parents. No nineteenth century child from any respectable household would ever believe his travel accounts. But we had not yet learnt to decipher the demarcating line between possible and impossible acts. Even Krittibas or Kashiram Das could not help us in this matter. The colourful children’s books and magazines with pictures in them did not warn us beforehand about the difference between fact and fiction. We had to learn the hard way that there was strict discipline in the world.

Satya[3] had told me that boarding the train was a dangerous act and one could not do it if one did not have special abilities for it. There was no way to save oneself if one slipped and fell. Also, when the train would start moving after that, they would need to assemble all the strength in the body and force themselves to sit down otherwise they would be pushed in such a strong manner that everyone would just get thrown out, scattered, and lost. So, I was quite scared when I reached the station. But when I got onto the train so easily, I started doubting whether the actual part of the boarding was yet to take place. After that when the train started to move very smoothly then I became demoralized that there was no sign of danger.

As the train kept on moving rows of green trees, blue bordered fields and shady villages ran past on both sides like a flood of mirages. We reached Bolpur in the evening. As soon as I got inside the palanquin, I closed my eyes. I wanted to discover all the surprises that Bolpur had in store for me only the next morning when I would open my eyes again. If I got a hint of it in this hazy unclear evening, then I would miss the charm of total happiness the next morning.

Early next morning, I came and stood outside with a tremble in my heart. The erstwhile traveller had told me that Bolpur was different from all other places in the world because though there was no roof over the pathway leading from the main house to the kitchen one would not have to face any rain or sunshine. So, I started looking for that strange path. Readers please do not be surprised to know that I have not found that path to date.

Being a city-bred boy, I had never seen paddy fields before and had painted rosy pictures about shepherd boys in my imagination after reading about them in books. Satya had told me that the fields around Bolpur were full of paddy and playing every day with the shepherd boys was a daily affair. The main aspect of this game was to collect rice from the fields, cook it and sit down with them to share that meal.

I looked desperately on all sides. Where were the paddy fields in this desert land? There might be a few shepherd boys in some field somewhere but there was no way to identify them. It did not take long to regret what I could not see because what I saw was enough for me. There was no control by the servants here. The only line of control was the blue line on the horizon which nature had demarcated and so there was no deterrent for me to roam about freely.

Even though I was quite small, Father did not prevent me from moving about freely on my own. At some places in the meadows of Bolpur the sandy topsoil on the ground had eroded in the monsoon rain and below that level created small caves, rivers, streams, and tiny hillocks full of red gravel and different kinds of stones. It was a complete geographical world for young children. The hillocks and pits here were known as the Khoai. From here I collected different kinds of stones in my pockets and took them to Father. He never made fun of this childish effort even for a single day. He would express interest and say, “How nice! From where did you get them?” I would reply, “There are thousands of stones like this. I can bring them for you every day.” He would then say, “That would be nice. Why don’t you decorate this hill with those stones?”

Earlier an attempt had been made to dig a pond but was left midway because the soil was very hard. Part of the soil from that incomplete hole was heaped up on the southern side like a hill. Father would sit there on a wooden stool early every morning for his upasana. The sun would rise from the eastern horizon in front of him. He would encourage me to decorate that hill with those stones. When I left Bolpur I felt very sad because I could not carry that huge collection of stones along with me. I had not realised then that there was a responsibility and cost for carrying any sort of burden. I could not even claim the ownership and maintain relationship with them just because I had saved them. Even today I sometimes fail to realise it. If God then listened to my sincerest prayers and blessed me with a boon, “From now on you will go on bearing the weight of these stones forever,” I would not be able to laugh and make fun of it as I am doing now.

There was a place in the Khoai where water had seeped through the soil and accumulated in a deep hole. This water would sometimes overflow and trickle very slowly through the sand. Near the mouth of that hole, I found many small fish that dared to swim against the flow of that water. I went and told Father, “I have seen a very beautiful stream, and it would be nice if we could get our drinking and bathing water from there.” He added to the excitement by saying, “Is that so? It will be good then.” and then decided to bring water from there just to award a prize to the discoverer.

I would roam around the hillocks and pits of Khoai at any time of the day and would look for discovering something extraordinary. I was Livingstone in this tiny unknown land. It seemed like land on the opposite side of a binocular. The rivers and the hillocks were so small, the scattered wild berry and wild date palm trees were equally stunted. The fish that I had discovered in that tiny river were equally small and of course there was no need to mention that the discoverer was small as well.

To develop my alertness, Father would give me two or four annas to keep and I had to account for it. He also entrusted me with winding his expensive gold watch regularly. He did not think that there was a possibility of damage; his mission was to teach me a sense of responsibility. When he went out for a walk in the morning he used to take me along. If he met a beggar on the way he would instruct me to give him alms. At the end when it was time to submit the accounts, I could never tally the amount received and spent. One day when my funds extended, he said, “I think I will have to appoint you as cashier; money grows in your hands.” I would take great care to wind his watch regularly. But the amount of care was perhaps a little more than required because very soon the watch had to be sent to Calcutta for repair.

When I grew up later, I remembered those days when I had to submit all accounts to him. At that time, he used to live on Park Street.  I had to read the accounts to him every second or third day of the month. He could not read anything by himself then. I had to compare the accounts of last month and last year and place them in front of him. First, he heard the big figures and calculated them mentally. If he had any doubts in his mind, I would have to read out the smaller expenses. Sometimes it had also happened that I had evaded some sections of the accounts which did not tally so that he would not get annoyed but somehow it could never be suppressed. He would sketch the complete accounts in his mind and could detect wherever there were lapses. For this reason, those two days were full of anxiety for me. I have already mentioned how it was his habit to frame a clear picture in his mind – whether it was accounts or any natural scenery or arranging for any celebration. He had not seen the new mandir (prayer hall) and many other things at Santiniketan, but he got the details from different people who went there and then collated the picture in his mind. He had an extraordinary memory and power of assessment. So, once he had something in his mind it could never be erased.

Father had identified certain slokas[4] he liked from the Bhagavad Gita and asked me to copy them along with their Bengali translations. I was an ordinary boy at home, so I basked in the glory of that very serious task assigned to me. In the meantime, I had done away with that tattered blue exercise book and collected a bound Lett’s Diary. To maintain the prestige of a poet my attention was now focused on keeping proper notebooks and other external manifestations. Apart from writing poetry, in my own imagination I tried to establish myself as a poet. For this reason, whenever I wrote poems in Bolpur I would stretch my legs and sit below the small coconut palm tree at the end of the garden and love to fill up my notebooks. This felt quite poetic. Sitting on that grassless stony bed in the heat of the sun I had composed a heroic poem called ‘Prithvirajer Parajoy’ (The Defeat of Prithviraj). Despite having such heroic rasas, that poem could not be saved from destruction. Like its elder sister, the blue notebook, that bound Lett’s Diary also got lost in oblivion.

 Starting from Bolpur we went to Sahebgunj, Danapur, Allahabad, Kanpur, and other places. After halting at some of them, we finally reached Amritsar. On the way one incident remains clearly etched in my mind. The train had halted at some big station. A ticket checker came to verify our tickets and after looking at me once he suspected something but did not dare to mention it. After some time, another checker arrived, and both stood uneasy for some time near the door and then left. The third time probably the station master himself arrived. He checked my half-ticket and asked Father, “Isn’t this boy above twelve years?” Father replied, “No.” I was eleven years old then but had more intelligence compared to my age. Then the station master said, “You will have to pay full fare for him.” My father’s eyes glowed in rage. He took out some notes from his box and gave them. When they deducted the fare and returned the change, Father took the money and threw it on the platform which made a jingling sound on the stone and was scattered everywhere. The station master was ashamed and left immediately. That Father would be lying for such a petty thing just to save money was something that made him bow his head in shame.

I remember the gurdwara[5] in Amritsar like a dream. On several mornings I would walk along with Father to that Sikh temple in the middle of the lake. There worship would go on throughout the day. My father went and sat among the Sikh worshippers and would suddenly start singing the hymns along with them. Listening to this song of praise being sung by an outsider, they got excited and got up to welcome him. On our way back we were given pieces of sugar candy and halwa.

Once, Father invited one of the singers of the gurdwara to our house just to listen to his bhajans[6]. The singer would probably be happy even with the lesser amount of money that was given to him. As a result, there were so many enthusiasts willing to come and sing at our house that a strict arrangement had to be made to prevent their entry. Unable to enter the house, they started attacking us on the street. Every morning, Father would take me along with him for his morning walk. During that time singers with tambourines on their shoulders would suddenly appear from nowhere. Just as a bird gets startled when it sees someone with a gun on his shoulders and thinks he is a hunter, so we would also get scared whenever we saw the tip of a tambourine at a distance. But the prey had become so clever that the sound of the tambourine was merely an empty one; it would chase us far away and couldn’t capture us.

In the evening Father would sit in the verandah in front of the garden. I was then called to sing Brahmasangeet[7] for him. The moon would rise, and moonlight infiltrated through the leaves of the trees and fell on the verandah while I sang a song in the raga Behag:

Without you Lord who is our saviour
Who is our support in this dark world?

I can still recollect that picture – Father sitting quietly in the evening with his head bent low, listening to the song with his palms folded on his lap.

I had mentioned before how Father had heard from Srikantha babu and laughed at the two spiritual poems which I had composed. I could take revenge for that much later when I grew older. Let me mention it here. Once I had composed several songs to be sung at the Maghotsav celebrations in the morning and evening. One song among them was worded, “I cannot see you, but you are there in all our eyes.” Father was then staying at Chinsurah and Jyoti dada and I were summoned there. He asked Jyoti dada to sit at the harmonium and asked me to sing all the new songs one by one. He even asked me to repeat some songs. After that he said, “If the king of this land knew the language of this country and could appreciate her literature, he would reward the poet. Since there is no such possibility for the king to do so, I will have to perform that duty.” Saying these words, he handed me a cheque for five hundred rupees.

Father wanted to teach me English and had carried with him several volumes of the series called Peter Parley’s Tales. Among them he selected for me the biography of Benjamin Franklin. He had thought that the biography could be read like a story, and I would benefit from it. But he realised his mistake soon. Benjamin Franklin was surely an intelligent man, but his religious worldview pained Father. At times while reading the text, he would become very annoyed with the extremely materialistic knowledge and advice of Franklin and could not stop without protesting it. 

Except for learning Mugdhabodh by heart, I had not learnt any Sanskrit before this. Father started teaching me directly from the second volume of Rijupath and along with it asked me to memorize the word formation from Upakramanika. The way we had been taught Bengali helped us in our learning of Sanskrit. He encouraged me to learn Sanskrit right from the beginning. I would reverse all the words I had learnt and created complex sentences on my own by adding grammatical notes wherever I felt like. In this manner I transformed the language of the gods to the language of the demons. But Father did not make fun of my weird boldness even for a day. Besides that, he would explain to me many things about astronomy verbally from the simplified English text of Proctor. I would write them down in Bengali.

Among the books Father carried with him for his own reading I noticed one book in particular. This was Gibbon’s Rome bound in ten or twelve volumes. From their appearance, they did not seem to have any entertainment value. I used to think that since I was a child I had no choice and was forced to read many things but if Father wished he could easily avoid reading this book. Then why this sorrow?

We stayed in Amritsar for about a month. Towards the end of Chaitra [mid-April], we started our journey from there towards the hills of Dalhousie. In Amritsar, time did not seem to pass, and the call of the Himalayas was making me restless. While we were climbing the mountains in a sort of litter used in the hills, the entire region was full of different kinds of seasonal crops which grew in layers on the mountain slopes and looked very beautiful. We would have milk and bread and then leave early in the morning and take a rest at dak bungalows in the afternoon. My eyes did not rest for the whole day; I feared that I might miss noticing something. When we reached a corner of the mountain at the turn of the road, the bearers would put down our basket carriage and take rest under the dense shade of the trees that bent down with the weight of their leaves; a place where one or two streams leapt down over the mossy black stones that resembled playful daughters of the sages sitting at the feet of old meditating ascetics. I would covetously keep on thinking why they did not leave us there as it would be nice to stay at such a place.

Getting acquainted with something new always has its advantages. Till then the mind does not know that there are many more places like that. Once you get to know it, the mind starts saving its attentive powers but when it sees that everything is very rare then it does away with its stinginess and pays full attention to it. Now on some days when I walk on the streets of Calcutta, I imagine that I am a foreigner. Then I can imagine that there are plenty of things to see, but we don’t see them because we don’t have a mind to value them. That is the reason why people go abroad to satiate their visual hunger.

Father had entrusted me with his small cash box for safekeeping. There was no reason to think that I was the most suitable person for that job. A lot of money was kept there to be spent during our travels. He could have been more assured if he gave it to Kishori Chatterjee, but he had a special reason for handing it over to me. One day after reaching a dak bungalow, I had left that box on the table in the room and Father had chided me for that. After reaching the dak bungalow Father would sit on a bench outside. When it was evening and the stars shone brightly in the clear mountain sky, Father would teach me how to identify the planets and the stars and would discuss astronomy.

Our house in Bakrota was on the highest peak of a mountain. Though it was the month of Baisakh, it was very cold. The snow had not melted at many places on the road, especially where the sunlight did not fall directly. Father did not apprehend any danger here and so did not prevent me from wandering in the mountains at my own free will. There was a big pine forest in the valley near our house. I went alone to that forest quite frequently along with my metal-headed stick. The trees along with their shadows stood like giants and were many hundred years old. But they could not even speak a word when a small human child roamed among them. I would get a special touch from those trees as soon as I entered the shadow of the forest. It seemed to have the coldness of a reptile. The light and shade that fell on the dry leaves seemed like various lines drawn on the body of a huge prehistoric reptile.

Sketch of the house ‘The Snow Dawn’ at Bakrota. Photo provided by Somdatta Mandal

My bedroom was right at the end of the house. Lying on my bed at night I could see the faint light of the planets and the brightness of the snow on the mountain peaks through the windows. I don’t know at what hour of the night it was when I saw Father in a red shawl walking silently with a candle in his hand. He was going to the glass-enclosed verandah outside to sit and pray. After another bout of sleep Father shook me and asked me to wake up. The darkness of the night had not gone away completely. That time was fixed for me to learn by heart the “naroh, narou, narah” grammar from the Upakramanika. Getting out of the warm blankets in that cold weather was indeed a sad beginning.

At sunrise, Father finished drinking a bowl of milk after his morning prayers and then made me sit beside him. He would pray once more by chanting mantras from the Upanishads. After that he took me out for a walk. I could not compete with him. I would stop somewhere in the middle of the path and climb up through a short cut to go back to our house.

After Father came back, I had to study English for about an hour. After that a cold-water bath was scheduled at ten o’clock and there was no respite from this. The servants did not dare to mix some hot water against his orders. Father encouraged me by telling me stories about how he used to bathe in intolerably cold water in his younger days.

Drinking milk was another trial for me. Father drank plenty of milk. I wasn’t sure whether I inherited this strength of drinking milk from him or not, but I have mentioned earlier the reason why my eating and drinking habits went in a completely opposite direction. But I had to drink the milk along with him. I had to beg the servants and they took pity on me by filling up the bowl with less milk and more froth.

After lunch Father sat down once again to teach me but it was impossible to keep my eyes open as the spoilt morning sleep would take its revenge now. I would just doze off to sleep. Seeing my condition, Father would let me go but then the sleep would instantly run away. After that it was the turn of the mountains. On some afternoons I would take my stick and walk alone from one mountain to another. Father never expressed his anxiety over it. Till the end of my life, I have seen that he never wanted to restrain our independence. I did a lot of things that were against his taste or will, and if he so wished he could have scolded and prevented me from doing it. But he never did that. He would wait and see whether I performed all my duties from the core of my heart. He did not accept that we followed truth and beauty only as external manifestations; he knew that if we moved away from truth, we could return to it once again but if we were forced to accept truth through false discipline then it would block the path of our return.

At the beginning of my youth, I had the fancy that I would travel by bullock cart on the Grand Trunk Road and go up to Peshawar. No one approved of my proposal and cited various reasons against it. But when I went and told Father about it, he said, “This is a very good idea. Travelling by train is not real travel at all.” Then he narrated tales of how he travelled to different places on foot or in a horse carriage. He never for once mentioned that it would be difficult or dangerous for me to travel in that way.

On another occasion when I was newly appointed as the secretary of the Adi Samaj, I went to his house at Park Street and told him, “I do not like this idea that only Brahmins can become Acharyas at the Adi Brahmo Samaj and non-Brahmins cannot do so.” He then told me, “All right try and bring a remedy to this if you can.” After I received his permission, I realised that I did not have the power to do so. I could only see the deficiency but was unable to create something wholeheartedly. Where was my strength to do so? Where was the ingredient with which I could break something and rebuild something else? He knew that until the right person came forward, it was better to follow the old rules, but he did not discourage me by mentioning any such problem. Just as he had given me the freedom to roam around in the mountains alone, in a similar way he gave me the freedom to find the right path on my own. He was not scared that I would commit mistakes, did not express his doubts so that I would suffer. He just held the ideals of life in front of us but did not use the rod of discipline.

I would often spend time with Father talking about things at home. As soon as I received any letter from home I would go and show it to him. I am sure he got a lot of information from me about things that he did not have the possibility of getting from anyone else. He would also let me read the letters he received from Baro dada and Mejo dada, my elder brothers. In this manner I also learnt the art of writing letters and he knew that I also needed to learn all these external ways and manners as well.

I still remember that in one of Mejo dada’s letters he had used a phrase which meant that he was slogging at his workplace with a rope tied around his neck. Father repeated a few of those words and asked me the meaning of it. He did not approve of my explanation and offered a different meaning to it. But I had such impertinence that I was unwilling to accept it and argued with him for a long time. If it was anyone else, he would surely have scolded me and asked me to stop, but Father listened to all my protests with patience and then tried to make me understand.

Father even told me many funny stories which included stories about the whims of the rich people in those days. Since the border of the sari or dhoti would hurt their delicate skin, some of these fanciful people would tear the border off and then wear the cloth. Since the milkman used to mix water with the milk, a servant was appointed to look after it. Then another inspector was appointed to keep an eye on that servant. In this way the number of inspectors went on increasing while the colour of the milk turned paler and gradually became as crystal clear as water. When asked for an explanation the milkman replied that if the number of inspectors went on increasing then there would be no other way but to add snails, mussels, and prawns in the milk. I really enjoyed listening to this story when I heard it from him for the first time.

After several months passed by in this manner, Father sent me back to Calcutta along with his assistant Kishori Chatterjee.

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[1] An early translation of Tagore’s Jibonsmriti (1911, Memories of Life), entitled My Reminiscences, had been done by Surendranath Tagore in 1916 and was reprinted in 1990 by Mitra and Ghosh Publishers, Calcutta. The translation of this particular section has been done by Somdatta Mandal from the original Bengali text.

[2] Gold or silver embroidery

[3] Satyaprasad Gangopadhyay was the son of his eldest sister, Soudamini Devi, and was a sincere student and brilliant in academics.

[4] Chants

[5] A Sikh temple

[6] Hymns

[7] The songs sung by the people of the Brahmo faith and popularised by Tagore’s father, Debendranath Tagore.

Rabindranath Tagore (1861 to 1941) was a brilliant poet, writer, musician, artist, educator – a polymath. He was the first Nobel Laureate from Asia. His writing spanned across genres, across global issues and across the world. His works remains relevant to this day.

Somdatta Mandal is a critic and translator and a former Professor of English at Visva-Bharati, Santiniketan, India.

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

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

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Categories
Essay

Celebrating the novel… Where have all the Women Writers Gone?

G Venkatesh writes about a book from 1946. What is interesting is no women writers are featured in it despite their being a phrase which he quotes in his essay, ‘a stepdaughter of the Muses’…

Photo graph by G Venkatesh

There is this book published in 1946 in New York, that I picked up at a Red Cross charity shop in Karlstad (Sweden) of late. A compilation of micro-biographies (make that ‘nano’ if you will) of 20 novelists (fiction-writers in other words) from Italy, Spain, France, England, Scotland, the USA, Russia and Ireland, who graced the world of literature in flesh  between the mid-14th and the mid-20th centuries, and will continue to do so, in spirit, forever.

Pillars of fertile imagination, seeded from the idea-realm
Visual by G Venkatesh

I venture in this article to present some gleanings from this little gem of a book, to enlighten, motivate, inspire, educate and rekindle interest in the classics of yore. Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote that all writing happens by the grace of God. We witness that in the lives of the twenty writers profiled in the book. Some had an inborn urge to write, some developed the penchant to do so as if the idea floated in from the idea-realm beyond the astral, and some others were blessed by the Divine to transmute their pain and suffering to the written word that has stood the test of time, and will continue to do so, into the distant future. Condemnation paved the way to commendation for some, while rejections emboldened others to transcend the limits of human judgement and rejoice in the sunshine of hard-earned glory.

At its perigee, the ‘novel’, as observed by Henry and Dana Lee Thomas, is an epitome of philosophy as applied to life. The Thomases ask readers to consider the life of every novelist profiled to be a magnum opus in itself – each adorned with facts stranger than fiction.

Boccaccio, Rabelais, Cervantes

This is an Italian-French-Spanish trio (encompassing the 14th to the early 17th century), and perhaps most of the readers may be familiar only with the third-named. Giovanni Boccaccio was a contemporary of Alighieri Dante (whose biography he wrote). A ‘friendly sinner’, he was a devotee of the here and now, while also being profoundly interested in the hereafter.’ Novelists, well and truly, leave behind accounts of their times, couched in fiction (and that, read alongwith factual history, helps us readers to visualise and understand better how things were in the past). The ‘poets’ in them, simultaneously dwell on and dream about how things can, must and will be in the future. Many of them refrain from including a semi-autobiographical element to their novels, and the Thomases have identified Francois Rabelais as being one such. To the Frenchman, all life was an anecdote with a bitter ending, a truth he based his limited fictional creations on.

Miguel de Cervantes, the Spaniard, is presented as a disappointed, shattered and disgusted man, who was chiefly motivated by his own trials, travails and tribulations to pen the famous Don Quixote. This knight who fought windmills, was perhaps what Cervantes thought himself to be – blessed with the good fortune to live in folly and die in wisdom.  

Defoe, Swift, Sterne

From the simple Quixote and the clumsy Sancho Panza to the resourceful Robinson Crusoe and his helpful Man Friday, characters created by Daniel Defoe in a novel eponymous with the protagonist. Defoe was a paradox of moral integrity and material ambition (if you can visualise one such blend), who by virtue of the fact that he donned the mantles of businessman, pedlar, politician, pamphleteer and spy (not necessarily in that order) in his life, could interpret mankind expertly in his fiction. A kind of ‘been-there, seen-that, done-that, can-write-about-all-with-authority’. Jonathan Swift, of Gulliver’s Travels fame, was gifted with a supreme intellect and a spiritual-religious leaning, but encumbered by physical weakness. God gives but also deprives at the same time, a mystery which humankind has not been able to solve. Fatherless when barely half-a-year old, he was verily a titan (like the character Gulliver he created) among pygmies (like the Lilliputians). He abhorred injustice and thought and prayed forever for the felicity of humankind. He lived to be 78, but contended on the basis of his experiences that the gift of a long life is bought at a very high price.

Laurence Sterne, the preacher-poet Yorkshireman, left behind several nuggets of wisdom in his novels and a couple of them can be cited hereunder:

“I laugh till I cry, and I cry till I laugh” (reminding one of the Yin and the Yang which feed into each other)

“Give me all the blessings of wisdom and religion if you will, but above all, let me be a man.”

Scott, Balzac, Dumas

Sir Walter Scott, while being a prodigy like Swift, also had to contend with physical disabilities like him.  He tided over them marvellously, prudently, gallantly and tirelessly, en route to a knighthood and immortality in the realm of English literature. Dreamy Honoré de Balzac, obdurate and uncompromising, believed that man’s destiny and purpose in life was to “rise from action through abstraction to sight” – a deed-word-thought ascent in other words. “Life lies within us (spiritual), and not without us (material)”, he averred. He never got the glory he deserved when he was alive, and his soul perhaps got the peace it richly merited when fame showed up posthumously.

Athos, Porthos, Aramis and D’Artagnan – characters from The Three Musketeers, a novel by Alexandre Dumas which presents the facts of 19th century France through the medium of fiction – were known to school-goers in the 1970s and 1980s, like yours sincerely. Dumas, as the Thomases have noted, met praise with a shrug and insults with a smile – stoically in other words. However, he had a penchant for sarcasm and trenchant wit which were unleashed whenever required. “I do not know how I produce my poems. Ask a plum tree how it produces plums,” is verily a testimony to his transatlantic contemporary Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “All writing happens by the grace of God.”

Hugo, Flaubert, Hawthorne

Two Frenchman and a New-Englander American comprise this trio. Viktor Marie Hugo, of Les Misérables fame, was born in the same year as Dumas, and was regarded widely as the ‘Head’ of the 19th century to Abraham Lincoln’s ‘Heart’. His crests of hard-won success coincided with the troughs of ill-deserved sorrow (he had to contend with the deaths of his wife and children). The Divine Will strengthened his mind, soul and fingers to move quill on paper, enabling the much-bereaved Frenchman to cope and conquer. “Sorrow,” he wrote, “is but a prelude to joy.” A stoic would however add, “and vice versa”. Quite like Sterne’s “I laugh till I cry, and I cry till I laugh”. Despite all that he had to endure; Hugo always believed in God and the purposes he lays out for human beings in their lives.

Hugo’s friend Gustave Flaubert considered the written word to be a living entity, with a voice, perfume, personality and soul. A concoction of realism and romanticism, if ever there was one, Flaubert was also a peculiar amalgamation of poet-cynic, artist-scientist and humankind’s comforter-despiser.  He ardently believed that though the soul is trapped within a mortal corpus on the terrestrial realm, it (which is the actual identity of a human being) lives in the idea-realm, and finds its rewards therein.

Hawthorne, on the other side of the ocean, was charmed by the sea and surf and sand in his childhood and youth, having spent a lot of time along the New England coast in north-western America. That led him to dwell on the mysteries of the human soul (which continue to be mysteries at the time of writing), while rebelling against the Puritanic influences that had engulfed the region. He was on an eternal quest, an intellectual and moral pathfinder in his own right, and a pioneering rebel with the pen and quill in his arsenal.  

Thackeray, Dickens, Dostoyevsky

William Makepeace Thackeray, readers will be interested to know, was born in Calcutta (now, Kolkata). A sentimental cynic who glimpsed the stupidity of life through the fog of sorrow, he believed that foolishness of the past is a pre-requisite to wisdom in the present and the future – in other words, simply put, we learn from our errors as we move on. ‘Gifted with a bright wit and an attractive humour’, in the words of Charlotte Bronte, he contended that literature was more a misfortune and less a profession. His cynicism helped him to grasp reality, and feel empowered in the process –“How very weak the very wise; how very small the truly great are.” Kind and wise humans often lack the power to change things for the better, while the powerful ones lack the conscience, will and goodness to want to do so.

Thackeray rivalled with Charles Dickens for fame and glory. Dickens, similar to Scott and Swift, had to contend with physical discomfort in his childhood and adolescence, in addition to a father who was not responsible with the money he earned. These experiences would later feed into the stories he churned out prolifically; semi-autobiographical some of them, while informing readers at the same time about the times that prevailed – “the best of times and the worst of times” (A Tale of Two Cities). His humble beginnings made him burn the midnight oil later in life, fuelled by the ambition to succeed, which he sustained all along. Quite like it was Hugo across the Channel, the troughs of torment annulled the acmes of accomplishment. Yet, he remained grateful to God and fellow-humans for the life he lived, and bade one and all a ‘respectful and affectionate farewell’, before ascending to the astral realm.

Reclusive Feodor Dostoyevsky, like Hawthorne in America, struggled to shake off a Puritan upbringing and sought fodder for his literature among the common man – the suffering proletariat who visited liquor shops to drown their sorrows in alcohol. Man, he believed, was responsible for his own salvation…and not God. He however did believe at times that God saved those whom men punished. But then, he also contradicted himself or seemed to do so, when he said that man is saved only because the Devil exists. But perhaps that was not a contradiction after all – God saves man from what he has to be saved from! The meaning of life, according to Dostoyevsky, was the brute-to-angel and the sinner-to-saint transformation of man; quite on the lines of Balzac’s action-abstraction-sight prescription.

NovelistLifespanSelected works
Giovanni Boccaccio1313-1375Filocolo, Filostrato, Teseide, Fiammetta, Amorosa Visione, Ameto, Decameron, Life of Dante
Francois Rabelais1495 – 1553Pantagruel, Gargantua
Miguel de Cervantes1547 – 1616Galatea, Don Quixote, Novelas Exemplares, Persiles y Sigismunda
Daniel Defoe1661-1731The True-Born Englishman, The Apparition of Mrs Veal, Robinson Crusoe, The Dumb Philosopher, Serious Reflections, Moll Flanders
Jonathan Swift1667 – 1745The Battle of the Books, The Tale of a Tub, Gulliver’s Travels Children of the Poor, Directions to Servants, Polite Conversation
Laurence Sterne1713-1768A political romance, Tristram Shandy, Sermons by Yorick, The Sentimental Journey
Sir Walter Scott1771 – 1832The Lady of the Last Minstrel, Ivanhoe, Kenilworth, The Lady of the Lake, Waverley, The Monastery
Honoré de Balzac1799 – 1850The Country Doctor, Eugenie Grandet, Jesus in Flanders, Droll Stories, Louis Lambert, Seraphita, A Daughter of Eve, The Peasants
Alexandre Dumas1802 – 1870The Three Musketeers, The Count of Monte Cristo, The Black Tulip, The Prussian Terror, The Forty-Five, Chicot the Jester, The Queen Margot
Victor Hugo1802 – 1885Les Misérables, The Toilers of the Sea, The History of a Crime, Legend of the Centuries, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, The Supreme Pity
Gustave Flaubert1821 – 1880Madame Bovary, The Sentimental Education, The Temptation of St Anthony, Bouvard and Pécuchet, Salambbô
Nathaniel Hawthorne1804 – 1864Twice Told Tales, The Blithedale Romance, The Scarlet Letter, Mosses from an Old Manse, The Marble Faun, Tanglewood Tales, The Snow Image
William Thackeray1811 – 1863The Great Hoggarty Diamond, Vanity Fair, The Book of Snobs, Henry Esmond, The Virginian, Lovel the Widower, The Newcomes
Charles Dickens1812 – 1870Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby, Barnaby Rudge, David Copperfield, A Tale of Two Cities, Great Expectations
Feodor Dostoyevsky1821 – 1881Crime and Punishment, Poor Folk, The Double, The Landlady, The Family Friend, The House of Death, The Gambler, The Idiot,
Leo Tolstoy1828 – 1910War and Peace, Anna Karenina, Childhood, The Cossacks, Two Hussars, Three Deaths, A Confession, Master and Man, Resurrection, What is Art
Guy de Maupassant1850 – 1893Une Vie, The Ball of Fat, Mademoiselle Fifi, The Necklace, Yvette, Our Heart, Bel-Ami, Pierre and Jean, A Piece of String
Emile Zola1840 – 1902Doctor Pascal, Therese Raquin, The Dram Shop, Nana, Germinal, The Earth. The Dream, Rome, Paris, Fertility, Work, Truth, Justice
Mark Twain1835 – 1910Huckleberry Finn, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Joan of Arc, A Connecticut Yankee, What is Man, The Prince and the Pauper
Thomas Hardy1840 – 1928A Pair of Blue Eyes, Under the Greenwood Tree, Far from the Madding Crowd, The Trumpet-Major, The Mayor of Casterbridge, Jude the Obscure, Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Table: The novelists profiled, and a list of their selected works

Tolstoy, Maupassant, Zola

Leo Tolstoy, also a Russian like Dostoyevsky, unlike Dickens, was not guided onward and forward by ambition. He believed in stooping to conquer and was motivated in his life’s journey by compassion. Orphaned when not yet a teenager, haunted by an inferiority complex pertaining to his ‘unprepossessing appearance’, and disgusted with organised religion (the Orthodoxy which prevailed in Russia), he discovered his purpose in Rousseau’s philosophy and in ridding the human heart of evil and helping it to live in peace, in communion with Nature. His dissent, rebellion and dissatisfaction with extravagance (of the nobility), bigotry (of the clergy) and tyranny (of the royalty), were the seeds, water and fertiliser for his contributions to Russian literature. Readers know that Mahatma Gandhi was inspired by the philosopher-prophet-penman Leo Tolstoy to set up the Tolstoy Farm in South Africa. Some nuggets which will serve as parts of vade mecums for readers:

“Death, blessed brother death, you are the final deliverance.”

“There are millions of human beings on earth who are suffering. Why do you think only of me?”  

Guy de Maupassant was one of those millions who suffered a lot. Reading about the tragic short life led by him, with constant physical and psychological afflictions which led to autoscopy in his 42nd year, and death in the 43rd, makes one sad. It also makes readers turn to his short stories – of which he is known to be a master – more eagerly. Flaubert and de Maupassant knew each other well, the former being a ‘guru’ guiding the latter on from time to time, along his literary journey.

Another Frenchman – Emile Zola – a contemporary of de Maupassant and Flaubert and a good friend of the painter Paul Cezanne, progressed through pitfalls and serendipitous godsends to profile the poor people of France, and ironically rise to richness thereby. A man who defended justice and spoke up against all forms of unfairness, Zola is known for standing up for the French army captain Alfred Dreyfus, a Jew who was wrongly (and knowingly so) accused of treason in 1894, and playing a key role in clearing the Jew’s name in 1906 (four years after Zola passed away). His last written words –“…to remake through truth a higher and happier humanity.”

Twain and Hardy

The man most readers know as Mark Twain, was born Samuel Clemens in America. Though it would not be right to compare and contrast the travails endured by the novelists profiled by Henry and Dana in this book, it can at least be said that a peep into Twain’s life tugs at your heartstrings and the vibrations linger on for a long time. Indeed, as a natural consequence, respect and admiration well up in the heart, for this novelist. He suffered an awful lot, but also learnt to laugh at his own agony as an ‘onlooker’ – the soul observing the pain of the body and the trauma of the mind it enlivens, from a distance, without being affected in any way. Like Hugo on the other side of the ocean, he endured what can be considered as possibly the greatest sorrow a man can face – burying/cremating his own children, one after another. Twain always supported the underdogs while voicing his disgust at the pompousness of the rich and powerful, in his own unique brand of sarcasm. The following words of his may sound cynical, but they are open to interpretation:

“Nothing exists but you. And you are but a homeless, vagrant, useless thought, wandering forlorn among the empty centuries.”

Without letting these words deter you, link them with the other sufferer Viktor Hugo’s “Nothing is as powerful as an idea whose time has come”, and soldier on.

The last of the twenty, Thomas Hardy, is yours sincerely’s favourite (I happen to read all his important works in my twenties, if I remember right). Hardy like his fellow-Britons Swift and Scott was born with a “frail body, strong mind and compassionate soul”. He was compassionate towards and appreciative of the forces and elements of Mother Nature – winds, clouds, bees, butterflies, squirrels, sheep etc., as pointed out by the Thomases. The manner in which he moulded his protagonists in his novels was catalysed by this compassion. Most of them are compassionate themselves, and evoke compassion in the hearts of readers, quite easily. Hardy wanted to teach his fellow-humans how to “breast the misery they were born to”, by using his fictional protagonists as instruments. His life was an exercise in “subduing the hardest fate” and “persistence through repeated discomfitures”. As it often happens with true geniuses, he was much ahead of his times, and the glory that illumined his soul in heaven posthumously, more than compensated for the disappointments which had to be endured when it was encased in his mortal corpus.

Not the last word by any means

Serendipity, it must have been, which made me stride into the Red Cross charity shop in Karlstad in June, wherefrom I purchased this 280-page treasure. To quote Longfellow (who incidentally was a college-mate of Hawthorne’s),

“Lives of great men all remind us/We can make our lives sublime/And departing leave behind us/Footprints on the sands of time.”

The 20 authors profiled in this book represent a huge family of writers who converted fiction from ‘a stepdaughter of the Muses’ to an ‘epitome of the  philosophy of life’, except that there were no ‘daughters or stepdaughters of men’ listed among the novelists in this volume.

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G Venkatesh (50) is a Chennai-born, Mumbai-bred ‘global citizen’ who currently serves as Associate Professor at Karlstad University in Sweden. He has published 4 volumes of poetry and 4 e-textbooks, inter alia. 

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

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

Click here to access Monalisa No Longer Smiles on Kindle Amazon International

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Conversation

Better Roses for a Warming World and Other Garden Adventures

Shantanu Ray Chaudhuri in conversation with M.S. Viraraghavan and Girija Viraraghavan

M.S. Viraraghavan and Girija Viraraghavan

In their new book Roses in the Fire of Spring: Better Roses for a Warming World and Other Garden Adventures (Running Head, 2023), world-renowned rose hybridisers, M.S. Viraraghavan and Girija Viraraghavan, record their journey of over fifty years, creating more than a hundred new rose varieties, in a range of colours, shapes and types. The authors spoke to Shantanu Ray Chaudhuri on their lifelong passion for the rose.

The passion for roses goes back a long way – can you recall the first moments when you realised that this was a ‘calling’ you had to follow? Any epiphanic moment that leaps to the mind?

From quite a young age, Viraraghavan was fascinated with roses, but the epiphanic moment was really when his family spent summer vacations in Coonoor, staying at the government guesthouse within Sim’s Park, which overlooked a rose garden. Every morning, he would wander about this garden which was a blaze of colour of the new roses created from the golden rose of Persia, R. foetida by Pernet Ducher, a great French rose breeder. The brilliant, never-before-seen colours of these roses amazed him – from bright gold and apricot to dazzling oranges and reds. In particular, one of the golden roses took his breath away – ‘Julien Potin’, aptly named for a jeweller – its vivid colour was quite overwhelming for the boy of thirteen, already thrilled with roses. From this came the intoxicating thought: ‘If Pernet Ducher could do it, why not I?’

There’s a delightful little bit about Viraraghavan sir’s viva-voce for the IAS and how his knowledge of roses played an important part in him getting through that. Would you like to share that with our readers?

A difficult part of the IAS examination is the viva-voce, where a panel of senior administrators question the aspirant about various aspects of his or her life and ambitions. Viraraghavan was in the middle of this interview when the Chairman, by chance a learned rose grower, asked him what his hobbies were. ‘Growing roses,’ was the response. The next question was meant to be a googly to confuse a nervous candidate. ‘What roses can you grow in Madras City?’ But Viraraghavan had read the Complete Gardening in India by K.S. Gopalaswamiengar, well-known horticulturist of Bangalore, many times, so my answer was nearly verbatim from the chapter on various kinds of roses which do well in low-to-medium elevations, i.e., warm climates, so he reeled off the different rose classifications: Teas, Noisettes, Bourbons, Chinas, Hybrid Teas, Hybrid Perpetuals. The interview committee then decided it was prudent to go on to other questions rather than get a lecture from a young and seemingly unflurried candidate! But his capacity to master detailed information on various subjects had been noted, and he came through with flying colours (pun intended).

You mention making your presence on the world stage as late as 2000. Please give us a brief account of your work on roses before and after – a potted highlights package, if one can call it.

From the start, our rose breeding focused on creating better roses for warm climates based on the dictum of India’s pioneer rose breeder, B.S. Bhatcharji of Bengal and Bihar, who had stressed the need for a separate breeding line for warm climates as distinct from the Western focus on creating cold-hardy roses suitable for them. Thus, in the early years, our work was with those roses which, though Western, performed well in hot climates, and we had bred many which did well in Hyderabad where we lived. Then, after perusal of many books on roses, we realised the potential in two Indian rose species Rosa gigantea (from northeast India) and Rosa clinophylla (perhaps the world’s only tropical rose species). After getting them with great effort, we began to work with them. At every annual national rose convention in India we would present updates of our work. In 1999, at what happened to be a World Regional Rose Convention, in Jaipur, Viraraghavan’s talk, as always, focused on the breeding with the two rose species mentioned. After the talk, the World Federation of Rose Societies President, Helga Brichet, and Vice-President (South America), Mercedes Villar, came up to him and said they had never before heard of this kind of rose work or of these rose species and invited him to be a speaker at the next World Rose Convention to be held in May 2000 in Houston, Texas.

That was the start of a further phase of rose breeding with the realisation that other than India, several warm parts of the world were also looking for roses that would do well there. These two rose species had been personally collected by us from their native habitat. At Houston, and in other places, people were fascinated by this aspect, which no earlier breeder had undertaken, that is, personally collecting rose species in the wild, at great risk, growing them and using them in creating new roses; starting from scratch as it were. It made sense to them when Viraraghavan explained the dictum of that great German breeder Wilhelm Kordes I who said –‘The soup ladle will only bring out what is already in the tureen’, meaning that fresh genetic input was required if new and different roses are to be created. The enthusiastic response to his ideas strengthened his determination to go ahead with this new rose breeding line. There is nothing as intoxicating as the realisation that the rose world is watching our work with great interest.

One of the most fascinating sections of the book is the one titled ‘The Ones Who Came Before’. Please provide readers with a short account of these legendary influences.

Karrie’s Rose. Photo courtesy: M.S. Viraraghavan and Girija Viraraghavan

We had noticed that invariably roses were named for famous people with often no connection to the world of roses. This made us think: why not name our roses for the intrepid plant-hunters who had discovered roses in the wild, on mountains and in forests, and botanists who had contributed to the knowledge on plants.

One wild Indian rose is R. gigantea, from our north-east, and Myanmar. Three great plant hunters were responsible for collecting this species in the wild – Sir George Watt, General Sir Henry Collett and Frank Kingdon Ward. We decided to name our rose hybrids for all three. Sir George was a medical doctor with an interest in botany, and worked as a surveyor with the British India government. During the course of his work, in the 1880s, he found Rosa gigantea growing on the slopes of Mt Sirohi, now in Manipur, and collected specimens. Almost simultaneously, so did Sir Henry Collett, except in the Shan Hills in what is now Myanmar. Both specimens were identified as being the same and named by the great Belgian taxonomist of the time, François Crepin. Climbing Mt Sirohi in 1990, we came across and collected plants from perhaps the precise location that Sir George had found Rosa gigantea. We named our first hybrid, a creamy yellow climbing rose, for him. We then felt it should be planted near his ancestral home in Scotland. With the help of the Royal Botanic Garden, Edinburgh, we managed to get this new rose planted in the Logan Botanic Garden, very near Sir George’s birthplace. Some years later we embarked on a sentimental journey, along with his descendants and his associates’ descendants, visiting his grave and the hospital he had worked in after retiring from India, to see the rose blooming in Logan.

We named a second seedling we had bred from R. gigantea for General Sir Henry Collett, a rose with big creamy white blooms that has been planted in suitable areas in Britain as well, and, gratifyingly, being grown by some of his descendants. A third rose, a climber with blooms of yellow-suffused pink, was named for Frank Kingdon Ward, the legendary and intrepid plant hunter who collected innumerable new and wild Himalayan plants despite his surprising acrophobia! We then came across a piece by the then BBC 4 gardening anchor, Matthew Biggs, who had visited Kingdon Ward’s grave in Grantchester near Cambridge. He wrote about the neglected condition of the grave of one of the world’s greatest plant explorers. So we decided to make amends by planting ‘Frank Kingdon Ward’ by the wall nearest his grave in the churchyard in a moving ceremony organised by Matthew Biggs, and attended by a number of well-known British horticulturists, as also the family. An urn with the ashes of Sheila Macklin, Kingdon Ward’s wife, for whom he had named a Himalayan lily, and who had died just the previous year, was interred near his grave, and close to where the rose was planted.

We have also named a rose for Leschenault de la Tour, the great French plant explorer who found a beautiful new rose species, called Rosa leschenaultiana after him, in the Western Ghats in the early 1800s; our rose named for him is a climber with pure white blooms.

And of course we have a rose to celebrate the remarkable life and career of the great Indian botanist and cytogeneticist, E.K. Janaki Ammal, who co-wrote the Chromosome Atlas of All Cultivated Plants in 1945. She studied botany at Michigan State University in the 1920s on a full scholarship, later receiving a PhD and DSc honoris causa. Back in India, she played a vital role in creating the ‘Noble’ strain of sugarcane – an extraordinary hybrid of sugarcane and bamboo leading to varieties thick as a man’s arm in contrast to the pencil-thin traditional varieties. But credit was stolen by seniors at the research station, and so she went off to Britain. There she worked at famous institutes, including John Innes, Kew and the Royal Horticultural Society. Later, she met the then Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru on a plane, and he put her in charge of reforming the Botanical Survey of India in Calcutta. But sadly she was a forgotten figure by the time of her death in 1984. Our rose named for her has the same colour hues as the saris she wore – orange yellow and saffron. A plant of this rose was planted in 2020 at the World Regional Rose Conference Kolkata, at the Botanical Survey of India garden. The rose has also been planted in the John Innes Institute, in Kew and the Royal Horticultural Society’s garden in Wisley in the UK.          

If one were to ask you of one moment each – one particular achievement in the journey and one abiding regret – what would these be and why?

There can be no doubt that the moment which was special in our rose breeding career was the moment described above, when Helga Brichet and Mercedes Villar came up to us in Jaipur in 1999, and said they had never heard such a new approach to breeding roses, pioneered by us, of using two Indian rose species to create a new line of warm-climate roses. It was their invitation to speak in Texas launched us on to the world stage of roses.

As for an abiding regret, that’s all too easy to answer. It’s the systematic neglect of Indian-bred roses by the rose-growing public of India, who remain fascinated by roses raised in Europe and the U.S. though they are utterly unsuited for Indian climates. This unreasonable preference for foreign rose varieties is part of the general craze for all things foreign. Fortunately, more recently, there has been a change, and young rose breeders and growers are realising that Indian bred roses do better in the heat and are slowly beginning to grow these.

Give us an insight into the challenges and pitfalls of growing and creating roses in India, as informed by your journey. Interesting story that highlighted these.

The main challenge was getting Indian roses accepted by the Indian rose growing public, as highlighted above. Indeed, now our roses are being grown in India, perhaps because they are being grown around the world! Another thing is one must learn patience. It takes us about eight to nine years to name and release a new rose. It is a long process, of the actual crossing of two roses, waiting for the fruit to ripen, then harvesting the fruit (rose hips), collecting the seeds, stratifying them in the refrigerator (if one lives on the hot plains), sowing the seed, waiting for the seedlings to sprout, growing the plant for a number of years to test its potential, and suitability, and only then finding a name and releasing it, by sending to a rose nursery to make more plants.

Our long career in rose breeding and our connected travels around the world has provided us with many interesting, even hilarious experiences. We were in Japan, at the Sakura Rose Garden. With us was a group of people including our friend, the well-known Japanese plant scientist, Dr Yuki Mikanagi. We were looking at a rose plant, with dark pinkish-red blooms with white on the reverse, bred by us and as yet unnamed. Yuki said she liked this rose very much. We immediately told her that we would name it for her. She said: ‘But this rose is red and white, whereas my name means “snow” in Japanese. Viru’s instant response was, ‘Then we will it name it Blushing Yuki,’ much to the delight of Yuki and everyone.

In his government service days, when we lived in Hyderabad, Viru would tend to his roses, watering and spraying them with fertilizers before leaving for office. There would be a number of telephone calls for him about some official matter. Girija would answer the phone (landline in those days), and when she told the callers he was busy spraying, they would hear it as ‘praying’ and immediately apologise: ‘Please do not disturb him when he is at his prayers’.

Both of us were hands-on gardeners, doing most of the work ourselves and you cannot garden without muddy hands and clothes. Very often visitors would mistake us for the garden help and request us to take them to the master or the mistress of the house. The looks on their faces when they realised who we were would make us laugh.

On one occasion, we were in California to receive the ‘Great Rosarians of the World’ Award. At the ceremony, we both first gave a talk on ‘Roses in India, Past Present and Future’. At the end of the ceremony, an earnest old lady came up to us and asked, in all seriousness, ‘Do roses grow in India?’

For most of us, roses are red and a Valentine’s Day Gift. Appendix 1 of your roses runs to 50 pages! Tell us briefly of some of the interesting ones, in particular the very evocative names you have, for example, Kindly Light, Meghamala/Wine-dark Sea, Twilight Secret. What goes into giving a name to a rose?

Apart from the roses we have named for friends, for other roses we like to give evocative names.

  • KINDLY LIGHT: we named this lovely white shading to soft pink rose after the hymn ‘Lead, Kindly Light’, a favourite of Mahatma Gandhi’s. We have the practice of giving two names to some of our roses, one better understood in India, if it is a Sanskrit word, and one for the West. This rose is named ‘Swami Vinayananda’ in India, for a monk of the Ramakrishna Mission order. He was great plantsman, his book on dahlias is a definitive work on all aspects of dahlia growing and he was very good rose grower.
  • MEGHAMALA/WINE-DARK SEA: One more example of two names for a rose. Meghamala translates as ‘garland of clouds’. The name for our rose was inspired by the purple garland-like pattern, reminiscent of clouds, on the petals of this rose, which otherwise are dark orange-red  in colour. ‘Meghamala’ is from a line by Devulapalli Krishna Sastri, beloved modern poet of the Telugu language, to whom the rose is a tribute. ‘Wine-Dark Sea’ derives from Homer’s epithet, in both the Iliad and Odyssey, of the purple shadows of approaching night on the orange-red waters reflecting the rays of a setting sun on the Aegean Sea.
  • ALLEGORY OF SPRING: We named a very special light-pink rose with intriguing pointed petals after the famous Botticelli painting La Primavera, also called ‘Allegory of Spring’.
  • INCENSE INDIGO: An indigo purple rose with an enticing fragrance was the inspiration for this name.
  • TWILIGHT SECRET and TWILIGHT TRYST: Two purple-hued roses that remind one of the late evening, shadowy light, romantic secrets and trysts.
  • AHIMSA: We gave this name to a golden yellow rose borne on a plant without any thorns (prickles), thinking of the Mahatma’s philosophy of non-violence.
  • KUSABUE’S GUARDIAN ANGELS: Kusabue is the name of a rose garden in Sakura City, Japan, entirely looked after by volunteers, all very senior citizens. This is our tribute to them.
Golden Threshold
Kanyakumari
Photo Courtesy: M.S. Viraraghavan and Girija Viraraghavan

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Shantanu Ray Chaudhuri is a film buff, editor, publisher, film critic and writer. Books commissioned and edited by him have won the National Award for Best Book on Cinema twice and the inaugural MAMI (Mumbai Academy of Moving Images) Award for Best Writing on Cinema. In 2017, he was named Editor of the Year by the apex publishing body, Publishing Next. He has contributed to a number of magazines and websites like The Daily Eye, Cinemaazi, Film Companion, The Wire, Outlook, The Taj, and others. He is the author of two books: Whims – A Book of Poems(published by Writers Workshop) and Icons from Bollywood (published by Penguin/Puffin).

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Categories
Musings

Migrating to Myself from Kolkata to Singapore

By Asad Latif

Sir Stamford Raffles (1781-1826). Courtesy: Creative Commons

May I be so bold as to claim that I travelled in the footsteps of Sir Stamford Raffles? That agent of the East Indian Company’s visit to Calcutta (as it was known then, and for much later, till it resumed the phonetic spelling of its original name), led him to set up Singapore as an English trading settlement in 1819. “Footsteps” would be the wrong metaphor, of course. “Seasteps” would have been accurate, since Raffles travelled to Calcutta by sea and arrived water-borne to Singapura (as it was known then). In my case, however, I arrived in Singapore sky-borne, in an aircraft that conveyed me from what was then home to what would become home. Footsteps, seasteps or airsteps, I arrived in Singapore. The year was 1984. I was 27.

Today, at 65, I remember my passage from back home to this home as if it occurred yesterday. I had worked in Hong Kong briefly in 1984 and had been exposed to life in a successful British colony that was in the throes of its return to Chinese rule. Singapore was different. It had merged with the Malaysian Federation in 1963, had separated from it in 1965, and had gone on to carve out an extremely successful space for itself in the international sphere.

Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew was a household word in Singapore. Not everyone loved him, but no one could deny his singular agency in having created a magnificent city-state that could sustain its independence in spite of its lack of natural resources. To arrive in Singapore was to embrace the possibilities of time.

Calcutta, too, was a historical city par excellence, but its rundown buildings and potholed streets, to say nothing of its potbellied children living on homeless streets, belied the promise of the future. To arrive in Singapore, it appeared, was to have exchanged failure for success.

That was an illusion, of course. All expatriates suffer from a global disease: They latch on to what they love in their countries of arrival by trying to erase what had loved them in their countries of departure. Take the potholed streets of Calcutta, for example. They had conveyed me to College Street on that glad day in 1974 when I joined the English Department of Presidency College. Without that first footfall in the corridors of the greats, I might never have come to Singapore, never got my Chevening Scholarship to Cambridge, my father’s university, and never won the Fulbright to Harvard. The potholes of Calcutta are not as numerous as the culturally blind allege them to be. Nevertheless, they led me on the way to be myself, wherever on earth I would ultimately be.

The way I see it, no matter how far or close wanderings might lead, one migrates ultimately to oneself. Hence, when I left my Calcutta for what would become my Singapore, I did no more than search for a version of my selfhood that would extend my material and imaginative boundaries. In the course of my journey, I discovered that the only borders lie within, borders between being and becoming. In the process of becoming by winnowing the unwanted aspects of being, one returns to a renewed if only autumnal sense of being. Time passes. One passes with it, letting go of the distant past as much as one does the receding immediate past. To live is to gather the passage of time within oneself, hoping that all borders will merge into a lasting apprehension of oneself in the expanding fullness of a single world.  

Calcutta and Singapore are two sides of me. These two great imperial cities have outlived their provenance. Calcutta was once the capital city of colonial India: Today it remains the nation’s cultural capital but political power resides in Delhi (naturally) and there are at least two economic capitals, Mumbai and Chennai. This is why I, along with many of my hapless fellow-Bengalis, suffer from an incurable cultural fetish for the past. That was when the Almighty spoke Bengali – He appears to be switching increasingly to Hindi – and was busy creating top-class poets and formidable social reformers in Bengal. The divine supply of poets and composers has not ebbed but the demand-side having moved to Mumbai, many of the best composers have shifted there and to make a name for themselves. Never mind. Their names remain Bengali, and their fame spreads the vintage mystique of Calcutta like a lingering perfume in India and beyond. I feel happy for the Calcutta part of me.

Singapore, a great trading post, is a now a city-state. Statehood has allowed the nascent nationalism of the colonial era to flourish and grow into a genuine sense of political self. Sovereign Singapore was not expected to survive, but it has done so with a definitiveness that makes the prognoses of the 1960s laughable today.  The national self-confidence of Singapore gives me confidence in my decision to take up Singapore citizenship in 1999. It had not been an easy decision, but I took it when I realised that I would be giving up my Indian citizenship but not my Indian-ness. My Singapore Identity Card records my race as Indian. I could keep the Calcutta part of me intact while adding to it a new Singaporean me.

So, yes, I am grateful that Raffles travelled to Calcutta to set up Singapore. Obviously, he did not do so with my fortunes in mind, but the umbilical connection that he created between the two great port cities has made it easier for me to migrate from India to Singapore. Ultimately, I have done nothing more than migrate to me.  

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 Asad Latif is a Singapore-based journalist. He can be contacted at badiarghat@borderlesssg1

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Categories
Stories

Belacan

Migrant stories of yore from Malaysia by Farouk Gulsara

“There she goes again,” thought Saraswati as she cut vegetables she had never seen in her native country. “Here goes Ah Soh cooking her stinky dish again.”

Ah Soh with Nand Lal, Sarawswati’s son.(Photo taken circa the early 2000s).Courtesy: Farouk Gulsara

Saraswati, Ah Soh and the rest of the pack are people commonly called fresh off the boat. They hail from various parts of China and India. 

The loud beating of a metal ladle against a frying pan, accompanied by the shrilling Chinese opera over the radio and her shrieking at her children, need no guessing whose kitchen ‘aroma’ is coming from. Everyone knows Ah Soh is frying belacan, a fermented Malay shrimp paste. 

A house in the New Village (Photo taken circa the early 2000s). Courtesy: Farouk Gulsara

Ah Soh is Saraswati’s immediate neighbour in a New Village in Ipoh. Ah Soh, by default, is the self-appointed leader of the pack. Since she is one of the oldest occupants of New Village, she leads the group of housewives, all living along the same row of single-story wooden houses. These houses were the brainchild of the British when they wanted to keep the communist at bay in the 1950s. More than ten years into its inception, the houses are still strong and are a catch for many newcomers to Malaya.

Ah Soh and her husband, Ah Leong, hail from Canton, China. Escaping poverty and famine, Ah Leong scrapped the bottom of the barrel to buy himself a one-way ticket to Singapore in the early 1950s, then an up-and-coming international port, to try his luck. 

After trying a few odd jobs here and there, Ah Leong heard of an opening in newly opened tin mines in Ipoh. He made a dash for it and found Ipoh and the work he liked. Soon, he saved enough cash and paid an agent to bring over the newly married wife that he left behind in China. Ah Leong, Ah Soh and later, their two young daughters develop roots in the New Village. 

Life was no bed of roses for Saraswati either. Losing most of her family members to famine, a 13-year-old Saraswati was bundled off to a distant relative’s house in Bihar. Saraswati is pretty sure she was sold off to work as a maid, as she scrubbed and cleaned from dawn to dusk.

Lady Luck manifested most peculiarly. Saraswati was labelled bad luck when many mishaps hit her new family soon after joining them. One of the kids died of diarrhoea, and a big branch of a peepal tree growing in the compound fell on the house, destroying the roof. So, when the family heard of an elderly widower looking for a suitable bride, Saraswati was bundled off yet again. 

Hence, Saraswati’s next phase of life started with her boarding a ship, S Rajula, from Calcutta to Penang, Malaya. She spent an entire month suffering from motion sickness, not only from the ship’s motion but by the various smells of people and their cooking. Starting life as a complete vegetarian, by the time she arrived in Malaya, after overexposure to a plethora of aromas and sights, she had garnered enough courage to taste various types of meat. 

So, Ah Soh’s pungent belacan was tolerable to Saraswati’s smell buds, even though she hails from the Hindi heartland where, by design, everybody in her community was vegetarian.

Saraswati’s husband, Lal, had his own tale of melancholy. After losing his family to famine, he became an orphan and a guardian to his 12-year-old sister. With much difficulty, he somehow, doing odd jobs, managed to sustain his little family to adulthood. He was in the marriage market after getting his little sister happily married off. Unfortunately, three months into his marriage, the young bride succumbed to tuberculosis, then a deadly death sentence to anyone. Even the President of Pakistan had died of TB.

Nursing a heartbreak, he heard the news that some people he knew were going to try their luck in Malaya. The talk around town was that Malaya, the land of milk and honey, was the darling was the Empire and had great job opportunities. So that is how he landed in Malaya. 

Again, after doing whatever work that came by, he landed in a more secure job washing the British Army’s dirty laundry in a camp in Ipoh. Cleaning, starching and ironing kept him busy, but he was happy for the first time. With money in his pocket and regular meals to look for, he ventured out for humble accommodation. That is how this New Village house came about.

He returned to his hometown in Bihar, India and got a bride for himself. So, here he is, with his second wife, Saraswati, and two young boys. 

The New Village is a melting potpourri of people escaping from famine and depravity. If in the 1950s, this place protected the country from communist threat, in the 1960s, it was a pillar of hope for displaced people to start life anew.

Ah Soh had her kind, who hailed from China, and Saraswati had hers hail from various parts of India. It is incredible that despite the skirmishes between the two countries, they were bosom buddies here. These economic immigrants soldiered on, straddled in unfamiliar circumstances, struggling towards an uncertain future with zest in their chests and youth in their limbs. They go on to build their camaraderie, work, mingle, and live in harmony. Graduating from convenient sign language, they have now mastered the art of communication. Like how a cat would communicate with a dog in an adverse situation, such as absconding from the animal catcher, they cling to each other desperately as they go on with life. 

Saraswati’s new home gave them, the newcomers, a simple language that contained many Chinese and Indian words to use. Language or no language, they were still able to communicate and fulfil each other’s needs. If one person from one part of China or India could not connect with a fellow compatriot, here they had a motley crew of economic migrants from these countries speaking, eating and looking out for each other. 

Lal’s contract workers took him to various towns and kept him away from the family for months. An illiterate Saraswati with only street smartness skills would go on to manage the children and household on her own. With the convoy of housewives from New Village, Saraswati would do her marketing and grocery. Pointing and making gesticulating would constitute making an order, and hawkers were honest enough to return correct change. Slowly, she began to develop a liking for Chinese food. 

Monthly grocery was by credit, and things were obtained from Ah Meng’s sundry shop, packed to the brim with everything under the sun. Lal would pay the bills at the end of the month as he returned from numerous contract jobs. 

Besides her Chinese neighbours, Saraswati had neighbours from Punjab, Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh. Ajit Singh had a few dairy cows at the back compound of his house. From Ajit, Saraswati and her children had an uninterrupted supply of fresh milk. 

R-L: Shobha(Saraswati‘s daughter) , Ah Soh(by then in her early 70s), Meela (Sarawati’s daughter), Saraswati and Kamala. (Photo taken circa the early 2000s). Courtesy: Farouk Gulsara

Two doors away from Saraswati’s house was Kamala’s. It was always a hive of activities from day to night. Kamala had so many children that Saraswati had lost count. People came and went as if it were the marketplace, and their main door was always open. There were always people singing, dancing or simply yakking there. 

Ah Soh’s house was next to Devi’s house. Her household was loud, too, at the end of the month, but for a different reason. Devi has five children to show for her seven years of marriage. Her husband, a postman, also had something to offer, a mistress. Somewhere along the way, he picked up drinking, and his frequenting at the local liquor shop introduced him to a dancer. It was a routine that at the end of the month, as everyone received their pay, the neighbourhood would be filled with much noise; the clanging of kitchen utensils from Devi’s, music from Kamala’a and shuffling of mahjong tiles from Ah Soh’s front porch. Devi’s family quarrel noise over money got buried over the rest.

Saraswati has been feeling easily lethargic these days. She realises that her monthlies have been delayed. Her husband’s monthly visit has been productive. She now has to get used to the idea that there will be an addition to the family. 

Maybe it is the pregnancy; she is getting a little pensive these days. She sometimes reminisces about the life that she had. Uprooted from her family by the forces of nature, she started a life as a child labour. Because of superstition, she was packed off again into marriage. Driven by economic hardship, she and her husband crossed the dreaded Black Waters to try their luck in a new land. 

From an illiterate teenager, now she has morphed into a woman who could command leadership in her circle of friends and care for her family. From a meek non-adventurous vegetarian, she has savoured all meats and dishes, some of which her ancestors would have never dreamt of tasting. 

She wonders what the future holds for her, her husband and the three kids she will raise to adulthood in this independent young country called Malaya as it crawls into the mid-1960s.

The foreground: Rohan, Saraswati’s grandson. In the background, Kamala’s son, Raja, in deep conversation with Nanda Lal and Shobha (Saraswati’ kids). The same house they all grew up in, albeit the extensions and refurbishments. (Picture taken circa the early 2000s) Courtesy: Farouk Gulsara

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Farouk Gulsara is a daytime healer and a writer by night. After developing his left side of his brain almost half his lifetime, this johnny-come-lately decided to stimulate the non-dominant part of his remaining half. An author of two non-fiction books, ‘Inside the twisted mind of Rifle Range Boy’ and ‘Real Lessons from Reel Life’, he writes regularly in his blog ‘Rifle Range Boy’.

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Categories
Poets, Poetry & Rhys Hughes

What I Thought I Knew About India When I was Young

Courtesy: Creative Commons

I had a jigsaw of a map of India but it wasn’t a proper map. It had the names of cities on it but it was covered in pictures too, scenes of ‘typical everyday life’ for people who lived in various parts of the country. This jigsaw introduced me to India. I saw lots of elephants and tigers and women picking tea and men drinking the tea and coconut trees and mountains and a few deserts. The trees, elephants, tigers, women and mountains were all the same size. Sri Lanka was included in the map and because it is a much smaller landmass it only had room to show one elephant and one woman picking tea.

This jigsaw was one of several jigsaws that I had in the same series. They were all the same size too, so that I came away with the mistaken impression that India, Australia, New Zealand, Japan and South America were all as large as each other. I have checked just now and I see that these jigsaws were made by Waddingtons and called ‘jig-maps’ and now I also learn that the Indian one didn’t contain Sri Lanka after all. The fallibility of memory! Looking at it for the first time in almost fifty years I discover that Bangalore is represented by a man playing a flute to two cobras in a basket while a wise mongoose looks on. Was Bangalore ever really like that? Was it like that when the jigsaw was made? Clearly a lot has changed in half a century.

The jigsaw was only the starting point of my intellectual discovery of the Indian subcontinent. Films augmented my growing awareness. Films showed me that the meaning of India could be found in elephants, tigers and women picking tea, not to mention men drinking tea, coconut trees, mountains, deserts. The place seemed marvellous. I decided to go there one day. But when? The thing to do was to consult a proper atlas, not a jigsaw, in fact a battered old atlas bound in ripped green cloth that dated from the 1920s and was probably a book once owned by my great-grandfather.

India seemed far away, yes, but not as far as Australia, and because I had cousins in Australia who had come to visit (bringing me a boomerang as a gift), I knew the voyage was feasible. First, I would reach France, that was the first step, and I felt confident I could walk to France. There was the inconvenience of a stretch of open sea between Britain and France, but I believed I could construct a raft from driftwood and sail across without too much trouble. Once I arrived in France the remainder of the journey would look after itself. I equipped myself for the walk. I took a penknife and a flask of orange squash, and I set off. There was woodland near the house where I grew up and I walked for ten minutes or so before meeting a boy I knew who was unsuccessfully trying to climb a tree. He came down with a crash, asked me for a drink and I obliged. Half the squash went down his gullet and I knew I could never hope to reach France on a half empty canteen. I returned home.

But I never abandoned the quest to reach India, I merely postponed it. The country had snakes in baskets! How could I resist that? Where I came from, the only stuff you found in wicker baskets was laundry. Boring in comparison! The snakes in India were musical and loved flute melodies. That also was amazing. It occurred to me that snakes were flute-like themselves and perhaps had even evolved from flutes (or vice versa) which explained the association. What if the strong resemblance led to a flautist accidentally trying to play a snake instead of a flute? The question alarmed me for days.

Maybe the music produced as a result would be the best ever heard by any human ear? Or perhaps it would be the worst! Yet another thing to find out for myself when I got to India. In the meantime, to continue my research, I spent a lot of time with a toy called a ‘View-Master Stereoscope’ that showed images on slides in 3-D. It was a plastic box with two lenses and a lever that rotated a disc on which the images were fixed.

One of the discs in my possession was an arrangement of “spectacular views” from around the globe. It included Banff in Canada, the Golden Horn in Turkey (those are the only other two I remember) and yes, a frontal view of the Taj Mahal. I studied the Taj Mahal carefully. It was vast and white. What clues could I glean from it? I wasn’t sure. Someone told me it was constructed by elephants. I accepted this but wondered what use elephants had for such a grand monument. It wasn’t edible. It wasn’t a bun.

On a school trip I was taken on a bus to Bristol Zoo, which seemed to lie at an extraordinary distance from the small town where I lived. We were shown an elephant and informed by a teacher that it was an Indian elephant, because it had small ears. Those ears looked vast to me and from that moment I had no choice but to regard the teacher as incompetent, a fool who didn’t know the difference between big and small. The incompetence of adults was something I learned the hard way, like most children. For instance, another teacher told us that crude oil was ‘liquid gold’ but I knew he was wrong. Oil was black and gold was golden, they couldn’t be the same. He had neglected to explain it was a metaphor. That might have helped his credibility.

My grandmother knew a little about India because one of her uncles was a sailor and had been there. He came back full of stories about it. People in India were able to levitate cross-legged, he had told her, after studying a thing called yoga. But yoga was dangerous. Some men had tied themselves in knots doing it and couldn’t be untied. They had spent the rest of their lives as a knot. Only the lightest men could levitate as far as the ceiling. Occasionally one of them would go up the chimney and drift away on the breeze. He had sometimes been far out at sea and watched them drifting over his ship. He had waved to them but if they broke their concentration they would come back down and make a splash, so his cheerful greetings were ignored. No offence taken, he said, he understood their predicament. Well, that was India for you.

In Calcutta he had seen a magician with a rope who had thrown it up high in the air and it had become rigid. Then he climbed it and vanished at the top. It was an impressive trick but he couldn’t see the point of it. He preferred the men who slept on nails instead of mattresses. Had he actually seen any of these chaps himself? No, not exactly. Nails grew on trees in that country and during his stay there had been a drought and a bad harvest and there weren’t enough nails to spare and those magic men had to sleep on porcupines instead. It was better than nothing, he supposed. My grandmother passed these tales onto me, uncritically and with evident approval. She always regretted not being born a man and going to sea herself. She wanted to be a pirate.

My grandmother’s uncle knew all about curries but I didn’t and I waited a long time before I tasted my first. It blew off the roof of my mouth, but looking back, I imagine, it was a very mild curry. Like most British men I soon acquired a taste for spices and eventually I became what is known in common parlance as a ‘chilli head’, going so far as to munch on the spiciest raw chillies available and insisting through a forced grin that they were “nothing special”, but that was later. My first curry was an eye opener. On second thoughts, it was more of an eye shutter, as I squeezed back the tears into my ducts. Yet this experience is a necessary rite of passage for all British males. It is the ‘test of fire’ and no less important than ‘the test of liquid’ (one’s first beer in a pub) and the ‘test of hair’ (the first shaving of the chin). These are the three essential tests, although there might be some others of lesser importance.

It must also be admitted, and I don’t say this cheerfully, that Kipling had a deep influence too on what I thought I knew about ‘India’. He is a problematic author now, one who made too many assumptions about how acceptable it was to work within the rigid structures of an imperialist system and only petitioning for greater humanity within that system. We can look back now and chide him for not opposing the system itself, but as a young British boy, I had no thoughts about systems of any kind. I was unhistorical despite my interest in history. The past was a place of knights bashing each other with maces, the distant past was a place where cavemen bashed each other with clubs. The present could never be history because it wasn’t the past, a simple equation in my head, and when Kipling wrote of his contemporary India, I received his impressions in my own time. Therefore, his India became mine too. ‘Gunga Din’ was exactly the sort of chap one might meet in the streets today. It never occurred to me that Kipling was a relic, an antique, for the reason that his books stood on my bookshelves now, and thus had contemporary relevance.

My sister’s best friend at school was an Indian girl, Joya Ghosh by name, but because we lived in a small town in Wales, I don’t think it registered in my mind that her parents had come from elsewhere. I didn’t think about the matter very much, if at all. She was merely a person with a deep laugh, much deeper than the laugh any child ought to have, thinking back on it now. It rumbled. It was the sort of laugh I later came to associate with hearty men with big beards, Captain Haddock or Taras Bulba types. She didn’t have a big beard or even a small one, at least I don’t recall seeing one.

She once courageously interceded in order to stop a pillow fight between myself and my sister. Her diplomacy in maintaining her neutrality as she did so impressed me considerably. But I never asked her anything about India. Maybe she wouldn’t have known much, but that is beside the point. I never even made the attempt. Nor do I remember meeting her parents or siblings, though I surely must have. She was here and India was elsewhere, so no connection could be logically made. The Jungle Book cartoon film filled in all the gaps anyway. I learned that in India wolves held conferences, that monkeys had kings, and that vultures were willing to join forces with humans to frustrate the machinations of tigers. This seemed perfectly reasonable.

When I was 14 years old, a brief article on Buddhism in an encyclopaedia captured my imagination. I wanted to know more about this philosophy. Where should I turn in order to find out more? There were no books on the subject in my local library, which was the only source of reading material in the town, and no adults I asked knew anything about it. The Buddha had found enlightenment under a tree in India. Would I have to travel to India to find enlightenment about his enlightenment? That seemed probable. My grandmother’s uncle hadn’t said anything to her about it, strangely enough, so I had to extrapolate from that one encyclopaedia article. It mentioned reincarnation and I liked this idea. To get an opportunity to be every other animal under the sun! To understand that already I had been many of those animals. Sublime!

The deeper aspects of the philosophy were passed over in that article. But my mind was made up, I would henceforth be a vegetarian, and I have been one ever since. There was familial opposition to my decision, of course. If I was no longer going to eat meat, what would I eat? British food back then was famous for being terrible (some would say it still is) and there was no tradition of tasty vegetarian meals. A vegetarian meal was simply an ordinary meal but without a lump of meat included, in other words a plate of boiled potatoes, boiled carrots, boiled cabbage, sprinkled with salt and pepper. This was years before the Curry Revolution that shook our island nation to the core, threw out our complacency and shattered our culinary blandness.

I now decided that I was a Buddhist and would go to live in a monastery in the mountains when I was older. Unlike my first attempt at walking to India, my second attempt would see me equipped with more than just a penknife and flask of orange squash. I would go equipped with inner tranquillity. That was the idea anyway. If I met with an accident during the journey, savaged by wild beasts or attacked by bandits on mountain slopes, it wouldn’t matter too much because I would be reborn as some other animal, maybe a squirrel or goose, and have an interesting life in a new form. I might even be reborn as an animal with enough strength to turn the tables on my attackers. A rhinoceros or hippopotamus. That would be fun and I regretted that I wouldn’t be there to see what happened, even though in another sense I was there…

But I kept putting off the day of my departure. There were too many other things to do first, such as pass my school exams and save enough pocket money to buy a new bicycle. Also, I didn’t want to shave my head. Time and tide wait for no man, or so they say, and weeks turned into months, months into years, and then I lost interest in walking seven thousand kilometres overland because I had started to go on hiking trips with friends and was learning what distance really meant to legs and feet. My first proper manly hike was 28 Km through forested hills and my feet were blistered on the soles so badly that for the next three days I walked on tiptoes like a conspirator but while making noises that no conspirator would make, “Ouch!” and “Yow!”

I grew up even more than I already had, went to university, graduated and travelled. I had friends who went to India and came back and they told me tales of their adventures. These adventures were suspiciously devoid of canyon rope bridges and cobras swaying to flute music, and equally suspiciously full of ghee-laden sweets and cheap beer. I eventually made it to India, but I went first to Sri Lanka, for reasons too complicated to outline in an article of such a short length. Yes, there were ghee-laden sweets and cheap beer shortly after I landed in Bangalore, but I think that was just coincidence. As for canyon rope bridges I still haven’t encountered any, but I did see an incredibly rickety broken bridge when I went to Coorg, absolutely the sort of thing one finds in old adventure novels or in the films adapted from them.

And now I sit under a magnificent banyan tree and consider how all my current knowledge about India deviates from what I thought I knew about the country in my distant youth. I think I have only really learned one thing, which is that India is simply too large to comprehend. There is too much of it, and it is full of people doing things, and those things are baffling even when explained because the explanations, no matter how lucid they are, are also baffling. This is a complicated way of saying I haven’t found any snakes in my bed yet, no bears in my bathroom, and I still haven’t been eaten by a tiger and reincarnated as a mongoose. But anything at all can happen.

Rhys Hughes has lived in many countries. He graduated as an engineer but currently works as a tutor of mathematics. Since his first book was published in 1995 he has had fifty other books published and his work has been translated into ten languages.

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Paean To Peace Slices from Life

Magic of the Mahatma & Nabendu

Ratnottama Sengupta shows the impact of Gandhi and his call for non-violence on her father, Nabendu Ghosh as she continues to emote over his message of Ahimsa and call for peace amidst rioting

Eka Naukar Jatri (Journey of a Lonesome Boat)
Gandhi. Courtesy: CReative Commons

The ferocity and senselessness of riots — Nabendu Ghosh had personal experience of both. In his autobiography, Eka Naukar Jatri (Dey’s Publication, 2008, Journey of a Lonesome Boat), he writes at length about grappling with the riots that had rocked Calcutta, Bengal — nay, the entire Subcontinent on 16th August 1946. 

The Direct Action Day call was given out by Mohammad Ali Jinnah to press the demand for a separate Muslim State, Pakistan. The epicentre was Calcutta, a flourishing centre of business and education, that had Suhrawardy of Muslim League as its chief minister. On that black Friday, they unleashed unprecedented bloodletting along communal lines. At least 4000 deaths were reported on the very first day of the ‘Great Calcutta Killing’ that continued for more than four days. Many women were raped, many were kidnapped, many killed and hung naked in public areas… Dismemberment, forced conversion, bustees set on fire… Violence spread to Khulna in East Bengal, and Bihar. Within a year the hatred ignited on religious grounds culminated in the Partition of India.

The savagery of the mindless bloodbath had left such a deep dent on the yet-to-be-thirty writer, that he wrote a number of stories and novels on the theme: Phears Lane, Dweep, Trankarta, Ulukhar, ‘Chaaka’(Full Circle), and ‘Gandhiji’.

 Gandhiji builds majorly on the author’s own memories of a darshan[1] of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi while he was passing through Patna, sometime in early 1931. This is how he records his ‘encounter’ with the Saint of Sabarmati who worked magic on the masses with the mantra of Ahimsa, non-violence.

“By 1930 all of India and its British rulers too were uttering one name with awe: Gandhi. One evening it came to my ears that the Mahatma would reach Patna at 7 am the next morning, spend the day in the city and leave by the Punjab Mail at night. 

“I did not sleep well that night. I was up at the crack of dawn and left home at 5 am on the pretext of getting a book from a friend. But I could not get anywhere near the Patna railway station, which was teeming with people who had arrived before sunrise. It was no different along the path he would be driven down. I hung around at one end of the platform, eyes glued to the exit gate. 

“Policemen on horseback trotted past me. A police van was parked close by. Those patrolling the platform carried bayonets and batons. Because of my green years and my small built, I was allowed to inch ahead. From time to time the sky was rent with the cry of ‘Mahatma Gandhi ki jai! Long live the Mahatma!’

“All of a sudden, perhaps to steel myself, I started to whisper: ‘Vande Mataram!  I salute you, my Motherland!’ As if on a cue, the man next to me cried out aloud: ‘Vande Mataram!’ The crowd roared in an echo: ‘Vande Mataram! Vande Mataram!!’

“Suddenly a train rolled in with a long whistle. And people all around me broke into the cries of ‘Mahatma Gandhi ki jai!’ ‘Bharat Mata ki jai!’ ‘Vande Mataram!’ I found myself matching their voice…

“Soon people started saying, ‘There he goes…’ Some cars came forward with Gandhi-topi clad volunteers. And then, there was the face so familiar from the newspapers, peering out of a hood-open Ford. Mahatma Gandhi, clad in a knee-length khadi dhoti, a chadar draped over his bare torso, a volunteer on either side, was greeting everyone with folded hands. What an inspiring image!

“I also broke into the cry of ‘Mahatma Gandhi ki jai!’‘ The crowd had started running behind the moving car. I joined them, without a pause in the slogan. A few paces later, I bumped into someone and fell down by the wayside. As an elderly gentleman lifted me up and soothingly dusted me off. I felt a resolve surface in my thoughts: ‘Freedom must be won!'”

 *

Nabendu Ghosh may or may not have had another prototype for the protagonist Ratan in Gandhiji. But it is said there actually lived close to College Street — where Nabendu lived at the time — a person named Gopal Mukherjee who owned a meat shop. He was a devotee of Subhash Chandra Bose and a critique of Gandhi. Reportedly this ‘paatha‘ — butcher — was funded by some Marwari businessmen and he led his team to retaliate from the fourth day of riots. After Independence, when he was urged to surrender his guns, knives and sword to Gandhiji, he apparently refused, saying, “I would willingly lay down my arms for Netaji, but not for Gandhiji. Why didn’t he stop the killings in Noakhali?”

The author may have woven in some traits of Gopal Paatha but, like a mirror image that is identical yet opposite, his protagonist Ratan is transformed by the iconic personality so that he surrenders his weapons — expressed symbol of violence — at the feet of the Mahatma.

*

As I watched Kamal Hasan’s Hey! Ram (2000), I was reminded of this story, ‘Gandhiji’ that was published in the collection Raater Gaadi (The Night Train) in 1964. Perhaps unknowingly the character played in the film by Om Puri reflects the protagonist Ratan. 

In Hey! Ram, A rioteer who has snuffed out scores of lives walks up to the fasting Gandhi in Beliaghata, throws a roti towards him and says, “I have bloodied my hands with many lives but I will not have your death on my conscience.” He resonates Ratan, the butcher who finds his biggest high in draining out human blood but once he rests his eyes on the frail sage, something happens deep inside him. He who wondered why his taking a life should matter to ‘Gendo’, stakes his own life to protect a Muslim.

*

Nabendu Ghosh experienced the magic of the Mahatma at age fourteen, long years before he became my father. 

I felt the magic of the man whom Rabindranath Tagore gave the name of Mahatma when I was well into my forties, and was doing a Fellowship in Oxford, on a Charles Wallace award, on John Ruskin and his Influence on Gandhi and Tagore. 

Then, almost 20 years later, we were at the critical juncture in time when we were completing 70 years of Gandhi’s passing and approaching his Sesquicentennial Birth Anniversary. That is when I started wondering: “What does Mohandas Karamchand mean to those acquiring voting rights in India now? Is he only the face on every Indian currency note? Is he only ‘M G Road’ — the high street of every city in India? Is he a boring memory who forces every one of his countrymen to shun drinking on his birthday?” 

Or, is there any valid reason to recall what he said — in Natal and Transvaal and Pietermaritzburg; in Kolkata and Noakhali, Chowri Chowra and Dandi, Bombay and Delhi? Is there anything in his actions that can change the lives of not only Indians but everywhere in the world where people are tired of terror strikes and gunshots and discrimination in the name of caste or creed or colour?

For, influence he certainly did, the lives of so many personalities… Not for nothing was Mohandas of Porbandar to become Gandhiji, Mahatma, Bapu, Father of the Nation. 

[1] To go to view a great or holy man

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Ratnottama Sengupta, formerly Arts Editor of The Times of India, teaches mass communication and film appreciation, curates film festivals and art exhibitions, and translates and write books. She has been a member of CBFC, served on the National Film Awards jury and has herself won a National Award. 

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Review

The Shaping of Modern Calcutta through Lottery Sales

Book Review by Somdatta Mandal

Title: The Shaping of Modern Calcutta: The Lottery Committee Years, 1817 – 1830

Author: Ranabir Ray Chaudhury

Publisher: Niyogi Books

If you ask any layman about the city of Calcutta (now rechristened as Kolkata) you will get three major pieces of information — namely, it was founded by Job Charnock in 1690; it was the seat of East India Company and capital of British India till 1911; and that it was divided roughly into two sections — the white English town at the centre and towards the south and the native town in the north. Beyond that, very few people have the idea of how the city developed spatially and how several major arterial roads, tanks and squares were built systematically during the beginning of the nineteenth century and this is where The Shaping of Modern Calcutta: The Lottery Committee Years, 1817 – 1830 by Ranabir Ray Chaudhury gives us plenty of information about the gradual development of Calcutta. This was undertaken by raising money through sale of lottery tickets and implemented by the creation of a Lottery Committee which functioned specifically for thirteen years from October 1817 to 1830.

Under the system then prevalent, the surplus lottery funds remained with the Bank of Bengal which would continue to be involved in the sale of tickets and the payment of prizes but would have nothing to do with other payments. The three senior members of the committee were John Eliot, Charles Trower and Henry Wood who had already looked after the construction of the square and tank at Baparitala (Wellington Square) and the new road being built from Dharamtala Road to Bowbazar. Later officials like Henry Shakespear and Barwell, G. Gordon and A. Colvin were inducted, and featuring in various sub-committees, they were also deeply engaged in the city’s development work.  

In 1830, for all practical purposes, the functions of the committee relating to the improvement of the city ceased effectively. Though the beneficial impact of the committee’s work affected everyone, native and European alike, and there was nothing remotely furtive about it, yet the Directors of the East India Company in London were not happy with what was happening in distant Calcutta on the city-development front, choosing to view the evolving picture in a different light. Keeping in mind the virtues of economy in expenditure, the Company wrote to its Government of Bengal that whenever there was any activity relating to general and public utility, some part of the charges ought to be borne by the inhabitants. Further, the Lottery Committee was handling large sums of money and perhaps there was the Company’s deep-seated skepticism about the sensibility of such expenditure in general and a tendency to conclude that the money was not being spent efficiently. The work done by the committee was phenomenal because the projects conceived and implemented by it still cast a long shadow on life in modern Calcutta. 

It becomes very clear that the city of Calcutta gained immensely from the development work carried out by the Lottery Committee since October 1817. The Strand Road had spruced up the eastern bank of the River Hooghly beyond recognition; the western side of Tank Square (today’s BBD Bagh) down to the Maidan till the West Bengal Legislative Assembly, had been given its modern shape with its grid of streets; pucka drains had been built and upgraded all over the city; the major north-south arterial road extending from Park Street in the south to Shyambazar in the north with four squares along it had been constructed; Free School Street had been made; the entire area south of Park Street up to Circular Road had been transformed into ‘virgin’ land ready to be settled in by the genteel (for the most part, sahib) population of Calcutta; and the modernisation of the Garden Reach area, reaching up to Khidirpur in the north, had been begun.

Among other things, the Lottery Committee built the major arterial roads in the northern and central parts of the city, which in time determined the layout of the contiguous residential areas. Dalhousie Square and the entire ground between Park Street and Circular Road were developed by the committee. Previously, a large part of the ground south of Park Street was low-lying and marshy, generating pestilence all around. Bustee clusters were located here probably because of the availability of Gangajal from Tolly’s Nullah (the Adi Ganga) through the existing network of drains, the river being some way off to the west.

The story of the making of Strand Road is narrated in detail, as with increasing economic activity and population pressure, it would provide the inhabitants with easier access to the river, both for recreation and commerce. The Lottery Committee was also responsible for putting up the first brick-and-mortar decorative balustrade which still adorns the Chowringhee area and Red Road. Thus, in its 13 years of effective functioning (till 1830), the committee had been successful in providing the critical push necessary to transform Calcutta from the topographical shape it had inherited since the years immediately following the landing of Job Charnock at Sutanati in August 1690 into one which, in a manner of speaking, would make the city ready to be launched into the 20th century and beyond.

The interest in reading the book persists throughout because apart from the maps, figures, numbers, statistics, and other logistic details, we get a lot of information of the different hindrances the Lottery Committee faced while implementing their projects. Human nature has not really changed much and so we read about people at that time who flouted the rules to line their own pockets and for whom profiteering was the norm.

The basic premise here is that human nature being what it is, there are some aspects of life and behaviour which are universal in their reach, both temporally and spatially. Another very interesting area of study is how the officials encountered the problem of encroachment, the process of land acquisition and the demand for compensation by native plot holders. The committee was aware of matters affecting the native sentiment and there are instances of how they altered the alignment of a major road to suit the convenience of the natives. Even then in some instances tiffs and legal hassles with local residents in North Calcutta were also recorded. Apart from private property rights, religious considerations too played an important role in the decision-making process of the committee.


Before concluding it is worthwhile mentioning a few lines about the author of this volume. During his quarter-century with The Statesman in Calcutta (1970-94), principally as a leader writer, Ranabir Ray Choudhury became interested in the past of a great city which the East India Company had selected as the nerve centre for its operations in the Indian subcontinent and further to the east, extending to Singapore and beyond. In time, this growing interest led to three compilations – Glimpses of Old Calcutta 1835-1850 (1978), Calcutta a Hundred Years Ago 1880-1890 (1987), and Early Calcutta Advertisements 1875-1925 (1992). He next wrote The Lord Sahib’s House, Sites of Power: Government Houses of Calcutta 1690-1911 (2010). A City in the Making, Aspects of Calcutta’s Early Growth (2016).

This volume under review is his sixth book and thematically is a sequel to the last one. That work ended with the formation of the Lottery Committee in 1817: this book takes up the story from there. From a connoisseur of the city, we get details of its development to a point that a lot of unknown facts are provided to the reader which the author garnered from documents and archival material available at the West Bengal State Archives.

Though he is not a historian, trained or otherwise, the author mentions in the ‘Introduction’ how he faced the constant struggle to avoid getting enmeshed in detail and to refocus attention on the broad current of policy and the effects of its implementation. Attention to the specific problems faced in the day-to-day execution of projects also does help to throw light on the precise nature of hurdles encountered at the grassroots level. The book is therefore highly recommended for scholars of history, architecture, town planning and every layman reader who is interested in Kolkata – a city which has been defined in multifarious ways as a city of joy, a city of palaces, a dead city, and so on.

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Somdatta Mandal, an academic, critic and translator, is a former Professor of English at Visva-Bharati, Santiniketan, India.

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Essay

Epaar Bangla, Opaar Bangla:  Bengals of the Mind

Asad Latif

By Asad Latif 

If nations are imagined (but not therefore imaginary) communities, Bengal is a nation. The reality of nationhood rests on the quality of the imagination that goes into it. 

Calcutta, where I was born in 1957, provided me with a cartographic point of entry into the imagined geography of Bengal. My Bengal began with West Bengal, within which lay a rough face-to-face society rich in visual and oral provenance. The everyday homeliness of rural thatched mud huts were reflected in the high gabled roofs which contoured the spiritual skyline of Dakshineswar. Minstrel bauls walked through the soul, half-starved on their way to seeking salvation for everyone. The very soil of Bengal broke out in bhatiali song. The chau dancers of Purulia dramatised Hindu epics in a language emotively accessible to all. The energy of santhali dances invoked the performative agency of a tribal culture that refused to let pre-industrial and pre-state time lapse into contemporary irrelevance.   

Agricultural West Bengal encompassed the legacy of a land whose grasp was much longer and larger than the social circumference of middle-class life in Calcutta. In my own ancestral village in Hooghly district, a short train journey from Howrah station, boys my age could climb trees and run barefoot and naked across scorching soil, outpacing the shy urbanite in me. Young women, taught to avoid the roving gaze of male strangers, lowered their eyes to the ground in modest contemplation when men passed by. Farmers could bend unbearingly long to till the land, standing upright for only a few minutes before they resumed their toil. No one spoke English. No one needed to. No one needed me. I needed them.

To the west of West Bengal lay the rest of India. The “rest of the Indians” were decipherable. In Bihar and Odisha, once a part of Bengal Presidency, rump Bengal lived on in the linguistic and cultural traces of the colonial past. Farther west, West Bengal vanished into an eclectic Indian nationalism. I must say, though, that on a long train journey from Calcutta to Cochin in Kerala as a teenager, I thought (rightly or wrongly) that the particular shade of green found in the vegetation of West Bengal was lost till it was found in Kerala again. The renewed connection between Calcutta and Cochin made it possible for me to extend my Bengali-ness vicariously all the way to Kerala, making me quite a pan-Indian Bengali, I suppose. The connective nationalism of Indian Railways (like that of the State Bank of India) plays no small part in protecting the unitary reality of contemporary India. 

Farther to the west of the rest of India lay the lands of Islam. They began with forbidden territory: Pakistan. Pakistan embodied the Partition of India, the departure of space from Indian time. For me, West Pakistan was unknown terrain: No one I loved or hated lived there. But if, indeed, there was an “Islamic world”, then I certainly inhabited it subliminally. I was (and am) a Muslim. I belonged to the global efflorescence of a great faith that had spread into my birth and self-recognition. West Pakistan had nothing to do with it. My mother was a practising Muslim (after a fashion), my father was a practising atheist. As a five-day-old, I had been “adopted” by a childless Hindu couple who lived in the same block of flats as my parents. Nilima Kurup (née Bose) took me to temples, and Parameshwara Raghava Kurup, well-versed in the Vedas, stayed away from the Puranas. But no one made me anything but a Bengali indebted forever to the Islamic religiosity of South Asia, Central Asia, the Middle East, and beyond. Certainly, I belonged to the lands of Islam. There was nothing vicarious about this. It is just that West Pakistan had nothing to do with my identity. I respected its existence even as it stayed indifferent to mine (since it had no idea that I existed). That was all.   

East Pakistan was different. I had relatives there on both my mother’s side and my father’s. I remember a childhood visit to my paternal uncle’s home in Narayanganj. It was raining. Unlike West Bengal (where rain falls on people), the people of East Bengal fall on the rain. A female cousin, all of six years old, made an excuse of going to the bathroom: instead, she took a bath in a roomful of rain as wide as the skies outside, within sight of the elders, dancing with the abandon of the water that flowed through her tresses, kissed her eyes, drenched her frock, and caused an uproar that led her to be dragged back to lunch, laughing unrepentantly. Meanwhile, her elder brother wanted to go to the “bathroom” as well. He was held back by his hair and resisted violently, raining cries of recrimination on everyone. Watching my wild bangal (native East Bengali) cousins in righteous ghoti (native West Bengali) awe, I decided that East Pakistan was too Bengali for me. 

But it was not to be. 

Bangladesh

Baker-ul Haque came to live next door to our flat in Nasiruddin Road, Park Circus, Calcutta, in 1971. A year younger, he caught up with me in historical time with vivid stories of how he and his family had escaped Bogra, trudging through forests as the Pakistani air force strafed fleeing civilians, people fell dead on the left and the right, his mother held on his elder sister’s hand, he grasped his younger siblings firmly, his father led on, and all of them made their way — to me. I doubted specific details of his heroic journey, but not his visceral courage. I witnessed it when my pet dog chased him to the fourth-storey terrace, he climbed on to the parapet and kept walking on it calmly, I held the dog back, and I implored Baker to climb down. He smiled at me insouciantly. It was only when he saw tears in my eyes that he relented. Once he was safely down, I wanted to give him a hearty kick, but settled for a rib-shattering hug instead. Epaar Bangla[1]wins when Opaar Bangla[2]is safe. 

Baker and his family lived next door, in the third-storey flat which the writer Syed Mujtaba Ali had occupied briefly earlier. Given his literary reputation, I stayed away from him, but he was rather fond of me, and I invaded his rooms whenever I found the door ajar. The family which stayed with my own family was that of Lutfar Rahman, an Awami League Member of the National Assembly from Khulna. Chachaji[3] smiled a lot but was fierce, chachiamma[4] was benign to a fault, their elder son Ornob took after his mother and their younger son Tulu (his pet-name) took after his father. Both brothers, who were much younger than I was, became mini companions on laughing excursions to the same terrace on which Baker had reduced me to tears.         

The liberation of Bangladesh on December 16, 1971 (which happily and sadly soon saw Baker’s and Lutfar Chacha’s families returning to Bogra and Khulna) was my rebirth as a Bengali. I had been born into the bifurcated mythos of Bengal, which was first partitioned administratively in 1905 in an act rescinded in 1911, and then partitioned along national lines in 1947 to produce Pakistan. The partition of that Pakistan in 1971 produced an independent Bengali nation called Bangladesh. It is only in the years to come that I would understand the reasons for the ontological security of Bangladesh: it is a sated or satisfied nation because its borders guarantee the two conditions of its existence — that it be Bengali and Muslim in co-determinate measure — with provision being made for the rights of non-Bengalis and non-Muslims within its borders. Indeed, so successful has Bangladeshi nationalism been that its majority population finds it unnecessary to seek links with West Bengal to achieve cultural completion. That attitude is reciprocated in West Bengal, whose incorporation into the Indian ethos makes Bangladesh its closest neighbour, but a neighbour nevertheless. 

Yet, to look across the border within Bengal, to see its integrity, is to un-see its divisions. Bengal is named ground: To walk on it, even vicariously, is to recover the insights of Walter Benjamin [5]on his visit to Moscow. Benjamin’s delineation of Russia as named ground (in his Reflections) leads him to proclaim that “you can only see if you have already decided… Only he who, by decision, has made his dialectical peace with the world can grasp the concrete. But someone who wishes to decide ‘on the basis of facts’ will find no basis in the facts”. The facts are always too many. The facts are contested. The facts might not even be facts. But Bengal is decidedly one — not because of its successes but because of its vulnerabilities. 

The Refugee Within

The fragile figure of the refugee straddles the two Bengals. Achintya Kumar Sengupta’s[6] poem, Udvastu[7], rendered unforgettably in the recitation by Kazi Sabyasachi[8], is a part of an aural tradition without which it is impossible to re-imagine the Bengal that existed once. What makes the refugee central to the idea of Bengal as a state of mind is that she embodies the land’s biological unity and integrity in the very act of losing her place in its stolen geography. Bearing the scars of uprooting, dispossession and exile, the refugee socialises the pain which lasts long after the immediate displacement of enforced migration has passed. To seek refuge is to pass from basha to bari. Basha is a temporary place of residence, no matter how long that temporarity lasts. Bari is an inherited abode which is both ancestrally personal and nationally interchangeable with desh, the native land. The udvastu or vastuhara[9] from East Bengal seeking refuge in West Bengal since 1947 had to contend with what Nilanjana Chatterjee calls “epistemological denial in India”, wherein those who had crossed the border were treated as an economic burden. 

The epilogue to the story of the refugees of 1947 was written in 1971, when it was the turn of Bengali Muslims from East Pakistan to join Bengali Hindus in seeking refuge in West Bengal. While the vast majority of refugees spent months in harrowing conditions, professional and other middle-class families were often hosted by middle-class families in West Bengal who could afford to do so. It was not unknown for the family of a Bengali Hindu, who himself had come from East Bengal in 1947, to share its basha with a Bengali Muslim family. The Bengali Muslim knew that he would return home if Bangladesh won the war. His Hindu host kept dreaming of a bari relegated forever to the nostalgic lay of a lost land. 

My family was more lucky. Our first trip to Bangladesh was to Lutfar Chacha‘s home in Khulna across the land crossing in Benapole. Of course, I enjoyed the royal spreads at breakfast, lunch, tea and dinner. But what filled my eyes was the sight of Ornob, Tulu and their little sister (by then), strutting about their home as if it was theirs. It was theirs. Bangladesh restored in me my extended sense of myself, my identity as a resident of Epaar Bangla who sought completion in the autonomy of Opaar Bangla. Soon after, I visited Baker in Bogra. At one dinner, his mother sat down just the two of us together. Naturally, I got the larger piece of fish in a bowl. I cooked up an excuse for Baker to go and look for something. I exchanged the bowls. He returned to eat. When we began with the vegetables, he exchanged the bowls. That insouciant smile again. I hate him. He has outwitted me always inspite of being a year younger.     

The refugee is the first citizen of imagined Bengal. She will also be the last. That is, without Bangladesh and West Bengal being the ultimate refuge of the transitional Bengali self, there will be no Bengal.  

There will be no me.

Birth matters. No one can be born in two places.

In his essay, “Englands of the Mind”, Seamus Heaney[10] registers the birthing role of place in the “interlacing and trellising of natural life and mythical life”; what a land does is to afford a man “nurture that he receives by living among his own”. Bengal forms a similar geography of the mind. It received me among my own. Life was material, which is to say that it veered from the banal to the brutal, but it was redeemed by the furtive companionship of the imagination.  The trellising which Heaney notes does not have to be idyllic. It rarely is. Australian writer Dorothea Mackellar’s[11] poem, “My Country“, written while she was homesick in Britain, captures the native lore of a land that her ancestors supposedly discovered for her. She writes: “I love a sunburnt country,/ A land of sweeping plains,/ Of ragged mountain ranges,/Of drought and flooding rains.” Australia is nothing without its enervating drought and its equally uncaring rain. Mackellar dismisses the pastoral epiphanies of a promised expatriate land, particularly “When sick at heart, around us/ We see the cattle die”. Natural disasters provoke her to reclaim art from nature. She redeems a wayward landscape by offering it refuge in her lines.

I am no Heaney or Mackellar. Bengal has no need to find refuge in my words. May these English words of mine find refuge in the lap of Bengal from which I sprung into life.  

[1] Epaar Bangla: This side of Bengal (West Bengal)

[2] Opaar Bangla: That side of Bengal (East Bengal or Bangladesh)

[3] Father’s younger brother is chacha and ji is an honorific in chachaji

[4] Father’s younger brother’s wife

[5] Walter Benjamin, German-Jewish man of letters and aesthetician (1892-1940)

[6] Achintya Kumar Sengupta (1903-1976), writer and editor in Bengali language

[7] Refugee in Bengali

[8] Kazi Sabyasachi (died 1979), a Bengali Elocutionist, Nazrul’s son

[9] Dispossessed in Bengali

[10] Seamus Heany, 1939-2013, Irish writer

[11]  Dorothea Mackellar, 1885-1962

 Asad Latif is a Singapore-based journalist. He can be contacted at badiarghat@borderlesssg1

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