The night has nearly come to an end.
The old year is almost past.
Under this dust, it will lay down
Its worn-out life at last.
Whether friend or foe, wherever you go,
Old wrongs cast
Away. On this auspicious day,
Old grievances shed as the old year parts.
— Nobo Borshe or on New Year by Tagore
Art by Sohana Manzoor
Mid-April, Thailand celebrates Songkran and Cambodia, Thingyan — water festivals like Holi. These coincide with the celebration of multiple New Years across Asia. Sikhs celebrate Baisakhi. Kerala celebrates Bishu and Tamil Nadu, Puthandu. Nepal celebrates Nava Varsha and Bengal Nobo Borsho or Poila Boisakh. A translation of Tagore’s poem on the Bengali New Year in spirit asks us to dispense with our past angst and open our hearts to the new day — perhaps an attitude that might bring in changes that are so needed in a world torn with conflicts, hatred and anger. The poet goes on to say, “I want to tie all lives with love” but do we do that in our lives? Can we? Masud Khan’s poems on love translated by Professor Fakrul Alam explore this from a modern context. From Korea, Ihlwha Choi tells us in his translation, “Loving birds is like loving stars”. But the translation that really dwells on love bringing in changes is Nabendu Ghosh’s ‘Gandhiji’, translated by Ratnottama Sengupta, his daughter. The short story by Ghosh highlights the transformation of a murderous villain to a defender of a victim of communal violence, towering above divides drawn by politics of religion.
Another daughter who has been translating her father’s works is Amna Ali, daughter of award-winning Punjabi writer, Nadir Ali. In ‘Khaira, the Blind‘, the father-daughter duo have brought to Anglophone readers a lighter narrative highlighting the erasure of divides and inclusivity. A folktale from Balochistan, translated by Fazal Baloch, echoes in the footsteps of ‘Emperor’s New Clothes’ — a story that can found in the Andersen’s Fairy Tales published in the nineteenth century. I wonder which narrative had come first? And how did it cross cultures retaining the original ideas and yet giving it a local colour? Was it with traders or immigrants?
That such narratives or thoughts are a global phenomenon is brought to the fore by a conversation between Keith Lyons and Asian Australian poet Adam Aitken. Aitken has discussed his cross-cultural identity, the challenges of travel, writing, and belonging. Belonging is perhaps also associated with acceptance. How much do we accept a person, a writer or his works? How much do we empathise with it — is that what makes for popularity?
Cross cultural interactions are always interesting as Rhys Hughes tells us in his essay titled ‘My Love for RK Narayan’. He writes: “Narayan is able to do two contradictory things simultaneously, namely (1) show that we are all the same throughout the world, and (2) show how cultures and people around the world differ from each other.” The underlying emotions that tie us together in a bond of empathy and commonality are compassion and love, something that many great writers have found it necessary to emphasise.
Mitra Phukan’sWhat Will People say?: A Novel is built around such feelings of love, compassion and patience that can gently change narrow norms which draw terrifying borders of hate and unacceptance. We carry an excerpt this time from her ‘Prologue’. Somdatta Mandal has reviewed Chitra Banerjee Divakurni’s latest , Independence. Starting from around the time of the Indian Independence too is Song of the Golden Sparrow – A Novel History of Free India by Nilanjan P. Choudhary, which has been discussed by Rakhi Dalal. The Partition seems to colour narratives often as does the Holocaust. Sometimes, one wonders if humanity will ever get over the negative emotions set into play in the last century.
Closer to our times, when mingling of diverse cultures is becoming more acceptable in arts, Basudhara Roy introduces us to Bina Sarkar Ellias’s Ukiyo-e Days…Haiku Moments, a book that links poetry to a Japanese art-form. While a non-fiction that highlights the suffering of workers by enforcing unacceptable work ethics, Japanese Management, Indian Resistance: The Struggles of the Maruti Suzuki Workersby Anjali Deshpande and Nandita Haksar has been reviewed by Bhaskar Parichha. The narrative, he writes, “tells the story of the biggest car manufacturer in India through the voices of the workers, interviewed over three years. They give us an understanding that the Maruti Suzuki revolution wasn’t the unmitigated success it was touted to be when they tell us about their resistance to being turned into robots by uncompromising management.” That lack of human touch creates distress in people’s hearts, even if we have an efficient system of management and mass production is well elucidated in the review.
These changes are reflected in our musings too. Sengupta has written on how change is wrought on a murderous villain by the charisma of Gandhi in her father’s fiction, as well as this world leader’s impact on Ghosh and her. Devraj Singh Kalsi addresses food fads with a pinch of sarcasm. From Japan, Suzanne Kamata has written of a little island with Greek influences, a result of cultural ties brought in by the emperor Hirohito. Ravi Shankar takes us to Pokhara, Nepal, and Meredith Stephen expresses surprise on meeting a shipload of people from Colorado in the far reaches of the Southern Hemisphere while on her sailing adventures with beautiful photographs. Stories by moderns reflect diverse nuances depicting change. While Brindley Hallam Dennis writes of the passing of an era, PG Thomas integrates the past into the present to reflect how they have a symbiotic structure in the scheme of creating or recreating natural movements through changes wrought over time in his story. Paul Mirabile explores the darker recesses of the human existence in his fiction. As if in continuation, the excerpt from Rhys Hughes’ The Wistful Wanderings of Perceval Pitthelmseems to step out of darker facets of humanity with a soupçon of wit at its best.
To create a world that endures, one looks for values that create inclusivity as reflected in these lines from Charles Chaplin’s My Autobiography, “Mother illuminated to me the kindliest light this world has ever known, which has endowed literature and the theatre with their greatest themes: love, pity and humanity.” This quote starts off a wonderful essay from film-buff Nirupama Kotru. Her narrative carries the tenor of Chaplin’s ‘themes’ to highlight not only her visit to the actor’s last home in Switzerland but also glances at his philosophy and his contributions to cinema across borders.
Our issue rotates around changes and the need for love and compassion to rise in a choral crescendo whirling with the voices of Tagore, Charles Chaplin as well as that of twenty-first century writers. Perhaps this new year, we can move towards a world – at least an imagined world — where love will wipe away weapons and war, where love will take us towards a future filled with the acceptance of myriad colours, where events like the Partition and the Holocaust will be history, just like dinosaurs.
Huge thanks to all our readers and contributors, some of whom may not have been mentioned here but are an integral and necessary part of the issue. Do pause by our April edition. I would also like to give my thanks to our indefatigable team whose efforts breathe life into our journal every month. Sohana Manzoor needs a special mention for her lovely artwork.
Nirupama Kotru, a film buff renews her acquaintance with Chaplin and, in the process, learns a life lesson.
“In that dark room in the basement of Oakley Street, Mother illuminated to me the kindliest light this world has ever known, which has endowed literature and the theatre with their greatest themes: love, pity and humanity.”
— Charles Chaplin, My Autobiography
He has been called a genius by scientists, philosophers, writers, humanists, film-makers and actors. His films continue to fascinate generations. They are timeless in the true sense of the word. As children, we laughed at the slapstick and the physical humour in his films. As adults, we have learnt to appreciate the world-view that lies behind some of his funniest films. Charlie being sucked into the giant machine in Modern Times (1936) remains one of the indelible memories of childhood. Later in life, one came to appreciate the thought – the causes and consequences of the Great Depression (1929–39) – that went into the writing of the film.
Charlie Chaplin has been an important influence in Indian films. Take celebrated actor-director Raj Kapoor, for instance. Raj Kapoor absorbed the mannerisms associated with Chaplin’s Little Tramp, including the waddle. It is a tribute to Chaplin’s genius that this Indian actor came to be universally recognised as the tramp, with his film Awara (the title of the film means a vagabond or a tramp) becoming a huge hit at home and abroad. Many actors after Kapoor, among them Sridevi (Mr India,1987), Mehmood (Aulad,1968), Kamal Haasan (Punnaigai Mannan,1986), and Chiranjeevi (Chantabbai,1986), channelised their inner Charlie into their performances. But it was Noor Mohammed who first adopted the Chaplin persona, and even used the screen name “Charlie” in films like The Indian Charlie (1933), Toofan Mail (1934) and Musafir (1940).
In November 2022, when I was informed that I would have to travel to Geneva for work, my first reaction was far from enthusiastic. I thought Geneva would be bitterly cold; also I needed to start planning my forthcoming family vacation to the United States. The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), under whose aegis this program of the Intergovernmental Forum on Mining was taking place in Geneva, had asked India to send a women leader in mining.
Over the next four working days, I came to love Geneva Lake Geneve, the beautiful weather, the lovely architecture and the people. But the highlight of my trip was the last day, which I had taken off. The surprising part was that none of my colleagues, including those posted in the three Indian Missions/Consulates in Geneva, had visited the Chaplin Estate (The Manor de Bain). It was sheer luck that I remembered reading about Chaplin spending the last twenty-five years of his life in Switzerland, until his death in 1977. I discovered in the nick of time that Corsier-sur-Vevey was less than a two-hour drive from Geneva. I realised that this was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. A quick booking of tickets on the Chaplin World website and I was off to the Manor de Bain! I decided to combine my Vevey trip with one to Gruyere, the beautiful town which lends its name to a popular kind of cheese.
After a quick trip to Gruyere, I set off for Vevey. My heart started racing as I passed the town square in Vevey which had huge murals of Chaplin on some buildings. Finally, I entered the hallowed portals of the estate where Chaplin spent twenty-five years with his wife, Oona, and his children. Passing through his study in the main living quarters, as I entered the drawing room with its cosy sofas, I came across French windows which overlooked the massive grounds of the estate. I stopped to take a picture. Suddenly, my phone camera froze. I panicked. I tried to close the camera app and switch off my phone, but nothing worked. I thought, this was it, I won’t be able to take any more pictures to remind me of this special day. Dejected, I moved into the dining room. A lady guard came to me and asked me if I would like to write something in the visitor’s book, which I did, sitting down on a chair in the corner.
All this while I was feeling disappointed. Suddenly, I looked up to see a home video playing in a loop, of Chaplin enjoying a meal on a sunny day with family and friends. I thought to myself: Was this a sign? Was Chaplin saying, “Why are you obsessed with taking pictures? You have come so far to see my home; I want you to enjoy my estate, look at my work. Don’t let these modern gadgets rule your life. Slow down.Take it all in.”
The last images on my phone when it froze
I calmed down and went back to those French windows in the drawing room to take in the magnificent view of the estate grounds. A man walked towards me. I asked him if he could help unfreeze my phone. He suggested I switch it off and then on again. I did that, and voila! It worked. Though I was relieved when my phone came back to life, I realised that in those intervening ten-fifteen minutes when my phone was frozen, I was forced to take a breather, to reflect upon the beauty I was surrounded by, and all the blessings which make life worth living. And I went back to the study and foyer of the house to spend some more time reading more about the struggles, trials and triumphs of this great artist.
As I emerged from the main building, I thought of rounding off the visit with a leisurely walk around the grounds. Suddenly I noticed a sign which said “The Studio”. I had deliberately avoided researching on what the visit had to offer, so I decided to just go with the flow and enjoy whatever was on offer. There was a screen outside “The Studio” which said that a film screening was to start in nine minutes. I waited, and finally watched the film, a moving take on Chaplin’s life and work, with ten other viewers.
After the film ended, we were asked to move towards the screen. Suddenly, the screen disappeared and lo and behold, I found myself on a beautifully recreated set from The Kid. We were prompted to go behind the set, and to my bewilderment, what followed was one set after another – The Great Dictator, City Lights, Gold Rush, Limelight, A King in New York, whew! It was such a delight to go through those sets, to see the wax figurines, to sit on the chair from The Gold Rush with Charlie peeping from under a table, to pose next to Charlie in my own bowler’s hat, to sit on the jail bench next to him, to be swallowed by the giant machine from Modern Times. Mercifully, my camera behaved throughout the studio visit and I took many keepsake pictures. After a stroll through the beautiful grounds, I picked up some books, including Chaplin’s autobiography, and other memorabilia. I started reading the autobiography shortly after my visit and it reaffirmed my views about Charlie.
Inside The Studio
During my visit and afterwards, I got a lot of time to reflect upon how Chaplin’s films were deeply concerned with the human condition, with all the miseries and challenges brought upon it by events that the common man has no control over. Chaplin’s work includes The Gold Rush (1925), which drew from real-life events such as the Klondike Gold Rush and the Donner Party, and The Great Dictator(1940), a satire on Adolf Hitler. Limelight (1952), which depicted the frustration of a has-been comedian, can be classified as auto-fiction, as can The Kid (1921), while Modern Times has been hailed as an astute commentary on industrialisation. Levity was Chaplin’s forte, but all his films were deeply rooted in his political and social consciousness. More often than not, he had to pay a heavy price for sticking to his beliefs.
Recollecting the making of The Great Dictator, Charles says in his autobiography, “Halfway through, I began receiving alarming messages from United Artists … But I was determined to go ahead, for Hitler must be laughed at. Had I known of the actual horrors of the German concentration camps, I could not have made The Great Dictator; I could not have made fun of the homicidal insanity of the Nazis.”
The boundary wall of the Manor de Bain. The sounds of cow bells from across the road drifted towards the estate, making for a mesmerising setting.
Chaplin was a genius who understood the power of the audio-visual medium. Since pantomime was his greatest strength, having performed bit roles in theatres during his childhood days of great hardship and penury, he used this technique to convey pathos through humour. Although he was earning quite well as a comedian-writer-director in Hollywood, by 1919, he was so frustrated with the studio system, which did not give him a free hand to write his own scripts, that he co-founded United Artists along with Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford and D.W. Griffith.
His first major hit under his own banner was The Kid, which drew from his childhood experiences. So strong were his convictions about the silent film that he swam against the tide and released City Lights in 1931, well after talkies had completely taken over Hollywood. Slowly, he started warming up to the possibilities of sound in film. He used sound effects in Modern Times but no spoken dialogue. He composed and sang a charming ditty in gibberish, ‘Titine’,with some random words in French, Italian and English thrown in, for Modern Times which never fails to bring a smile to the face, even eighty-seven years after its release
Whether it was silent films or talkies, Chaplin continued to tell his stories of universal values, of hope amidst great suffering. As an artist, he never shied away from speaking truth to power. Like most great artists, he did not accept manmade boundaries. Although he was English by birth, he was criticised for not fighting in World War I. He had long arguments with Winston Churchill about Mahatma Gandhi and the struggle of the Indian people for freedom. In fact, he met Gandhi-ji shortly after meeting Churchill, during a trip to London, and questioned him at length about his abhorrence for machinery. He returned from the meeting with great admiration for Gandhi-ji’s strategies for achieving independence and his principles of non-violence and truth. His conversation with Gandhi-ji influenced his writing of Modern Times, especially the Gandhian theory about modernisation and rapid industrialisation being the cause of unemployment and rising inequality. The fearless artist once made an uncharitable remark about the English royalty, telling Churchill, “I thought socialists were opposed to a monarchy”, to which Winston Churchill replied, with a laugh, “If you were in England, we’d cut your head off for that remark.”
Being wary of the ways of Hollywood where an artist was judged by his or her success at the box office, he made few friends in the film industry. Chaplin was happy spending time visiting his childhood haunts on his trips to London, and also enjoyed wining and dining with film stars, princes and princesses, prime ministers and presidents, scientists, philosophers, poets and writers. He was friends with Mary and Douglas Fairbanks, Albert Einstein, George Bernard Shaw, H.G.Wells, Harold Laski, Aldous Huxley, Theodore Dreiser, et al. He went to Lucerne in Switzerland to meet India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, expressing his surprise at finding him “a small man like myself”. Chaplin invited Pt Nehru to his estate in Vevey for a meal. They had a long chat on the way, which left Chaplin impressed with the “…man of moods, austere and sensitive, with an exceedingly alert and appraising mind”.
Chaplin was a pacifist and a philosopher, and was derided for his views in America – not just mocked, but harassed by the FBI under its founding director, J. Edgar Hoover. In 1952, the country which has historically been considered the land of free speech hounded Charlie out of its borders under the mistaken impression that he was an avowed communist, and told him to never come back. Chaplin even narrowly escaped an assassination attempt in Japan.
Chaplin’s autobiography ends in 1964, on a poignant yet hopeful note, just like Charlie’s films, with Chaplin expressing his sadness at having to leave America, but also describing his happy days in Switzerland, where he befriended several artists who lived in the area. Eight years later, in 1972, Charles Spencer Chaplin was called back to America by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences to receive an Honorary Oscar. After initial hesitation, Chaplin decided to attend the ceremony, which would end his twenty-year exile from America. He went on to receive an unprecedented standing ovation lasting twelve minutes. Cries of “Bravo!” filled the auditorium and Chaplin was clearly overwhelmed. It was an emotional homecoming for the man who had left Los Angeles in extremely unpleasant circumstances in 1952.
Chaplin was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1975, but by then he was frail and had to accept the honour in a wheelchair. He passed away in 1977, but his legacy lives on. I hope cine buffs like me keep rediscovering him, for The Tramp is timeless.
(The photographs have been provided by the author, except for the book cover)
Nirupama Kotru is an officer of the Indian Revenue Service,1992 batch. Ms.Kotru has served in the Income Tax Department at Mumbai, Chennai, Delhi and Pune. On deputation, she served as Director (e Governance) in Ministry of Corporate Affairs and as Director (Films) in M/o Information & Broadcasting, where she looked after policy issues such as censorship, India’s participation in film festivals abroad, archiving, film schools and production of films.
As Joint Secretary in Ministry of Culture she has looked after prestigious national akademis such as Sahitya Akademi and National School of Drama, and national museums such as Indian Museum and Victoria Memorial Hall &Museum. She is presently posted as Joint Secretary& Financial Advisor, Ministries of Coal, Mines & Minority Affairs. She has released an album of bhajans called Upasana. She has also written around thirty articles on cinema and other topics such as parenting. She is currently co-authoring an anthology on Hindi cinema of the 1970s.
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PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL.
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.
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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PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL
Gandhi (1869-1948)The victims of the 1946 riots in Calcutta (now Kolkata)
The sun went down.
One after another the lamp posts in the winding lane sprung to life. Their brilliance was dimmed by the smoke from the homely clay oven, sigri. The darkening sky above got dotted by a glittering star or two. And that is when Ratan’s feet became unruly like a wild steed. Donning a mulmulkurta he got ready to go out for the evening.
Jasoda had entered the room to pick up something. She came to an abrupt halt.
“Off?” she asked, her voice laced with sarcasm. “Can’t stay put at home any longer, can you?”
Solemnly Ratan nodded his head. “Yes, just need to take a round.”
Jasoda knitted her brow, “Just take a round? Chhee! Don’t do that. Pour some down your throat too, okay?”
“Jasoda!”
“Why? Am I saying something wrong, haan[1]? Something not quite done?”
Ratan did not utter a word in reply. He only glared at Jasoda for a second before walking out in rapid steps.
He didn’t stop until he reached Jatin’s house. His friend Jatin who sells fish every morning and evening. He has no family save his aged mother – he had married but his wife died years ago, and he made no attempt to have another after that.
They all gather in his house – Haaru, Potla, Jaga, Radhu and a few others. Since most of them are in the business of selling fish or meat, they have cash in their pockets. They easily turn uproarious as mutton chops and prawn cutlets stream in to enhance the pleasure of downing country liquor.
In a room foggy with fumes of cigarette, they settle down to a few games of card. They play as long as they feel like; when they don’t want to, they storm the cells of Gendi or Bunchi in the dark of the night. Or, when they are told to, they dive into the alleys of the Muslim neighbourhood and toss a few hand grenades.
Yes, the responsibility to curb the riot – a euphemism for hunting down Muslims – has suddenly come to rest on their able shoulders. They didn’t anticipate or expect it to, but it did. All of a sudden the wealthies of their end of the city started to pamper them. They raised funds through donations, to arm Ratan and his friends with small weapons so that they could protect the prestige of the Hindus, and of the womenfolk.
The way things were going, this was bound to happen. They had outdone everyone in severing head from the torso of walking talking men.
*
They were all there. Haaru, Potla, Jaga, Radhu – all of them had showed up. Ratan lent the final touch.
“Come in saala[2], come!” Jatin affectionately welcomed him.
Laughter and banter followed.
There was a sudden lull in the spate of riots that had been on sporadically for a year since the Direct Action Day, and had got a spurt when the country won its freedom on 15th August. But God knows what went wrong? All of a sudden the darkness of hatred started to melt, and the two warring units that had been at each other’s throats, suddenly saw themselves in the mirror: they embraced each other in brotherhood.
Since that day their ‘work’ had gone down. Further calm has descended since Gandhiji appeared in the city. He is camping in Beliaghata. He has been saying that he will not go anywhere until there is peace. Why, he has even staked his life! He will give up his life if he has to, to stop the riots! That is why Ratan and his company are spending more hours in downing liquor and visiting the sluts in the forbidden quarters, singing in their hoarse voice and walking with unsteady steps.
The chops and cutlets from Nitai’s shop were hot off the oven. The air thickened with the smell of blended oil. And their eyes sparkled with the spirit.
“Abey Jatin, get the bottles out…” Ratan urged.
“Haan bey,” Jatin was most willing to oblige.
A bitter-sharp smell spread through the room. The earthen cups filled to the brim were emptied in no time. The world before their eyes started dancing like a flame. Nasha… stupor.
“Bring out one more bottle, saala…” Ratan nudged Jatin.
“Haan bey, I will…”
“Arre call for more chops and cutlets.”
“O-K-K Sa-a-la…”
Jaga suddenly sprung to his feet. “I’m off, bye…”
“Where to?” Jatin wanted to know.
“To Bimli’s…he-he-he…”
“Get back to your chair” – Jatin barked at him. “We will all go in a group.”
Jaga wasn’t too pleased, but he sat down again. “Okay baba, that’s what we will do. Meanwhile let me have a bite of the cutlets…”
The room was filled with the odour of country liquor and smoke. Reddened eyes and numbed responses. Tidbits dropped on the floor, empty bottles and used cups and dishes piled up. Vegetable salad and sauces dripped to stain their clothes. None of them cared to wash their hands, silently they went on downing the liquid fire. Periodically they pulled their faces and uttered satisfaction, “Aah!”
“Hear that?” Ratan turned to gaze at Jatin.
“What?”
“All of you here can hear this?”
Potla shook his head, “How can we hear if you don’t spit it out, saala…”
Ratan crinkled his face, “This Gendo[3] of yours has thrown a spanner in the wheel, re…”
A gentle murmur coursed through the room. Almost as if a gentle breeze had rustled dry leaves.
Gandhi – yes, Gandhi! Superannuated Gandhi, old rascal Gandhi. This Gendo chap is a fraud. He is in cahoots with the Muslims, enemy of the Hindus, foe of the Bengalis…
“Yes, he has thrown us off-gear,” Jatin spoke through gritted teeth. “But for how long can he stymie us? He can’t get away with his bujruki, his hoax …”
Jaga spoke in a tired voice, “I just want to see Bimli for a while…”
“Sit, you owl!”
“Whatever you may say,” Haru spoke in a soft voice, “Gandhiji is a good soul, hanh?”
“Good soul?” Ratan roared out a nasty abuse, “My foot! All of us can sing bhajans and paeans to Ram if we had a life of comfort like him, buddy! And this guy alone is responsible for the Muslims daring to go so far as to demand a separate land. But this can’t go on! Now we have gained Independence. This is Hindustan – we will put an end to the last Muslim standing here!”
“Right! Right you are!!” they chorused in their boozy voice.
“Riot! We must hack every invader, every single Yavan!”
“Listen!” Jatin ran his eyes over them, “What Ratan is saying is hundred percent correct. Gendo can’t have a run of the state. No. D’you know what that chap is up to now? He’s saying he will bring back every single Muslim and rehabilitate them in the bustee[6]at Beliaghata. Why, I ask you dear, why couldn’t you say this to our people? What did you, all told, achieve in Noakhali?”
Ratan nodded in agreement and let out a mouthful of smoke. “No, such humbug will no longer work here. Enough. The guy wants to unite Ishwar and Allah[7]! As if you can do that at will!”
“Shut up bey!” Jatin cackled.
“Tomorrow. We will rake it up tomorrow itself. The Babus had sent for me today – everything is fixed.”
“All fixed?” Ratan’s face brightened at this, “Good. I’m relieved.”
“Oh, good. Come on, baba Jatin…” Haru called out, “bring out another bottle Jatin!”
“Die, you pests!” Jaga stood up and spoke in excitement, “None of you are sober. I’m off to Bimli’s.”
“Saala can’t wait to get there,” Ratan chuckled. “Arre baba, we’ll all go with you…” They all got to their unsteady feet.
*
Ratan couldn’t contain his glee. As he strode forward he kept thinking, “So there’ll be riots again – good!”
The lull in the violence these past few days was most irritating. He simply couldn’t take it anymore. He had tasted blood – and that is a dangerous addiction. For years, he had been a butcher and beheaded goats and lambs. But the thrill of killing a man, a live human being, was something else.
The first day he stabbed a man he understood that this was the king of highs. Day after day, he had sought out Musalmaans and delighted in putting the knife into them – and now it had spread through his veins. Now he felt out of depth on the days when he did not snuff out a life. He felt rather unwell.
He had a faint recollection of one particular afternoon.
He was sipping tea in Bipin’s tea stall.
All of a sudden some boys dragged in a young Muslim fellow. They told Ratan, “Now you have to finish the job Dada[9]. We are exhausted.”
Ratan grinned, “What’s so tough, idiots?”
“You’re mistaken bhai[10]…” the young man broke into tears. “I’m a Hindu!”
“Really?” Ratan laughed uproariously. “I’ll check that out once I’ve finished with you.”
The youth was dragged to a dark end of the lane and done with. After the job was over, a curiosity gnawed Ratan. He was absolutely certain that the kid had claimed to be a Hindu out of sheer fear. Still… He bared the body and checked the genitals of the naked corpse. “Shhuh, I got fooled!! This guy was actually a Hindu…”
They were outside Bimli’s door. There was no one else in the gully but them. The entire city was holding its breath, too scared to breathe in the riot-torn air. And then, it was late in the night. The gaslight was casting eerie shadows. Silence ruled.
*
Jatin’s words came true. The riots broke out the very next morning. And there was severe rioting. But this time around it was the Hindus who were aggressive, not the Muslims. The bombs and sten guns resounded across the sky and the air was rife with fear.
Ratan finished one round and returned home. Aah ! He felt somewhat relieved today.
But Jasoda was furious and would not relent. “So! You do have to come home to Jasoda, yeah? So liquor and sluts are not your cup of tea round the clock!”
“Jasoda!”
“But why are you losing your cool? I’ll get it for you – after all, you have been doing so much work! Boozing… whoring… killing…”
“Jasoda I’ll knock your head off!”
“Don’t I know that?” Jasoda’s fiery eyes bored through him, “The day you will fail to find a human to stab, you’ll twist your knife into me to satisfy your thirst for blood…”
Jasoda walked out of the room.
After a while she sent a khullar[11] of tea through her little boy but she herself stayed away.
Ratan was displeased. He spent the rest of the afternoon sleeping. Let the others take the responsibility to keep the fire aflame; now that it has been lit again, it will spread on its own steam.
That’s exactly what happened. By nightfall the riots took a sinister turn. Tension gripped the air of the city, dread filled the dark of the eyes. There was hardly any footfall in the streets.
*
When they met in the evening, Jatin said, “See how easy it was to rekindle the flame! But…”
“But?”
“It seems that Gendo chap is fasting since morning.”
“Fasting! Really?”
“Yes. Crazy, this man is. He will fast unto death, he won’t eat a morsel until the riots stop, he has said.”
“Arre let him!” Ratan hissed. “Let the oldie die. This is how he has been pampering the Musalmaans. Forget him – he should die!”
“Right you are,” Jatin nodded in agreement, “let him die. You come with me, there’s work to be done.”
A while later the sky lit up with the blaze of a burning slum. The fire brigade rushed to the spot with sirens blaring. The city cowered, trembled with fear, as the sound of bombs rent the air every now and then.
Coming home, Ratan was again subjected to the tongue lash of Jasoda. What is this vixen, a virago? No fear in her soul!
“So you’ll kill him? You will kill Gandhiji?”
“And what if I kill him?”
“What if you kill him! Are you a human being? You’ll kill a sage like him? You’ll rot in hell if you do that, understand? You’ll burn in hellfire…”
“Piss off! Just shut up and go. Get lost — ”
“Chhee! What are you, a man?”
“Jasoda!”
“What? You’ll kill me too? Go ahead, do that!”
But what good was silencing Jasoda? Ratan simply couldn’t sleep that night.
That Gandhi has gone off food?! What stuff is the man made of? If I kill two men, you’ll fast yourself unto death? What a dissembler. But otherwise the man has done so much! That the country has gained independence – it is largely due to this man, they say. So what? Why must he pamper the Muslims to this extent? If he’s really so bothered, why doesn’t he go fast to stop the riots in Punjab? Humbug. Let him rot.
*
The same story repeated itself the next day. The sacrificial fire kept devouring human flesh.
“What a hassle,” Jatin grumbled. “This Gendo simply won’t eat a bite, I hear! He’ll kick the bucket day after if not tomorrow.”
“All this is willed by Goddess Kali, d’you realise Jattye?” Ratan added with a wave of his hand, “It’s best he shuffles off his mortal coil and drops dead.”
Stray incidents filled the day. Then it started to pour. They couldn’t do very much after that. When the rain stopped, Ratan stepped out to stretch his legs. He noticed that people were gathering here and there, reading newspapers, discussing something in a grave voice. Gandhiji, the name, kept recurring. They all looked worried, sounded concerned, crestfallen.
All his countrymen genuinely worshipped Gandhi. He has actually done a lot – gone to great length to gain independence for the people. Not just the Lord Saheb, even the King of the British rulers held him in deference!
Suddenly Ratan hastened his pace. Why not go upto Beliaghata and take a look at Gandhi? To this day he had not set his eyes on this man, what was the harm in sizing him up? Ratan was not enamoured of Gandhi, he didn’t care two hoots whether he lived or died. Still, a peek at the man would do no harm. All said and done, he’d made a name for himself, perhaps even a place in history.
Ratan was overcome by a strange emotion. Inscrutable. Without much thinking he showed up in Beliaghata for the evening prayers. There was a large crowd waiting outside the house. He nudged and pushed to wend his way and find a footing in the front row. After a long wait he got to see Gandhiji.
A short statured, dark complexioned ageing man with the radiance of a child on his face. Bare bodied, Khadi-clad, he had a meditative calm about him. So this was the magnanimous Gandhiji!
A tremor passed through Ratan. It was as if he had suddenly come face to face with a morning sun. As if he was standing on the shore of the Pacific Ocean, as deep as its boundless expanse.
In a flash something happened deep within Ratan. Everything turned topsy turvy as if shaken by an earthquake high on the Richter scale. He realised he had finally encountered a magnificent personality. One who would not bow his head to anything unjust or immoral. One who would not daunted by guns and bullets.
As he looked on, Ratan turned misty eyed. Who said Gandhi was a pygmy? To Ratan he seemed like the Himalayas piercing the sky. Ratan trembled, he panicked, he fled.
All kinds of thoughts beset Ratan and he became restless. He headed straight for Jatin’s house. He felt like settling down with bottles of the fiery stuff. As he felt the liquid sear down his throat, the daze cleared somewhat.
“Know what Jattye?” he tried to draw his friend’s attention.
“Seems a sadhu, right? Yes, the fellow has actually done a lot for the country…”
“That’s what I hear. So many times he has been incarcerated and been to the jail. So much suffering he has put up with…”
“But that one failing! He has spoilt all his good actions by pampering and mollycoddling the Muslims, over-indulging them…”
“You have hit the nail on its head!”
One by one the others joined them. In no time the place was abuzz with food from Bipin’s Stall and bottles of country liquor. Downing the liquid in rapid succession they were quite a boisterous crowd.
“Follow me, Ratnya?” Jatin slurred, “this…”
“Unh?”
“Gendo is fasting, let him. He won’t kick the bucket in a day or two, will he? Old bones are sturdy – he’ll last. Meanwhile, in two days we’ll clear out all the ragheads, won’t we?”
“Yes Jatye, spot on…”
“Here, some more… f-o-r youuu…”
“Yeah… g-i-v-e mee…”
Ratan could not walk straight when he reached home.
“Why?” Jaosoda came at him like a bull at a gate, “Why are you back here? Was there no space for you in Chandravali’s love nest?”
“Shut your trap Jasoda!”
“The frigging bastard won’t let me be in peace.. Maa-go!”
Ratan flopped in his bed and murmured, “Q-u-i-e-t Jasoda! Shut up and keep quiet bhai…”
“Bhai! Bro? Shame upon you, no-good burnt-face monkey! You see a brother in me?”
Jasoda kept on muttering long after Ratan had started snoring.
*
Next morning the rioting picked up in momentum.
Ratan and his chums returned to action big time, complete with sten guns. From the rooftops, on the streets, wherever they were, they kept firing towards the Muslim shanties. After almost three hours there was a lull in the firing. The police and military forces had arrived and by afternoon things were quiet again.
Vans with loudspeakers were blaring that, unless the riots came to a stop, Gandhiji would cease to be. He would end his life.
The peaceniks took out a procession. The violence started to wane.
“That was quite a blast, wasn’t it Ratnya?” Jatin was smiling ear to ear when they met in the evening.
Ratan simply nodded.
Jaga returned from the paan[14] shop with a fresh stock of bidis[15]. “Folks have you heard this? Gendo is about to snuff out!”
“Who said that?” Ratan was startled.
“The newspapers have headlined, it seems, that Gendo has refused to relent in his fasting because there’s no let-up in the riots.”
“Ohh!”
“Arre that’s bullshit!” Jatin reacted. “Two more days of action at this level and all the Mullas will be shown their place.”
“Hunh!” Ratan nodded unmindfully, “but Gandhi is in such a poor shape, he’ll conk out, they’re saying…”
“Arre forget it! Rumour – that’s all it is. Come, let’s have a toast.”
“Well then, let’s go.”
*
Ratan joined Jatin to open a liquor bottle long before sunset. The tumult in the morning had left him exhausted. A few drops of hard core liquor might just be the tonic. But Gandhiji? There’s something about him… a halo. He had touched the heart of thirty crore men and women. Ardently they cried out, “Mahatma Gandhi ki jai [16]!” All-pervading emperors and powerful lords had not succeeded in intimidating him. Mahatma Gandhi!
At this point Madhu ran up to them. “Hey guys, come fast! I’ve cornered one of them…”
“What?!”
“Bastard!”
Suddenly the thirst for blood got the better of him. Sitting bolt upright Ratan said, “Come on Jattye.”
The three of them strode forward. Jaga, Haru and Potla were waiting round the corner, a middle-aged Muslim in their grip. They’d got the better of the man who was walking down the street lost in thought.
“Please let go of me bhai !” the man pleaded.
“Let go of you?” Jaga laughed out loud, “Why? Are you my wife’s brother, saala? Does your sister sleep with me?”
In silence Ratan went up to the man and grabbed him by his hand. Agitation tinted the blood that was coursing through his body. Blood! Unless he spilled blood his head might burst!
“Who’ll twist the knife in – you?” Jatin asked. Ratan nodded, “Yes.”
“How many will this be in your count of heads?”
“Maybe a score and half…”
“Well then, go on. Get over with it.”
“You’ll kill me?” The man wailed out, “Please let go of me baba – I implore you! Believe me, I have a son at home who is critically ill – I came out only to buy some medicine for him…”
“Shut up!”
Just then a voice floated across from a loudspeaker being played from a van: “Gandhiji is in a critical condition…”
Ratan pricked up his ears. Jatin looked towards the van, “Hey, what are they saying?”
“Gandhiji’s priceless life is in your hands today…” the voice was faint but the words were clear. “If you don’t stop killing, Gandhiji will not return to life. Stop now – and bring Gandhiji back to life…”
The voice receded in the distance.
“Go on, finish the job at hand Ratnya,” Jaga spoke, “or leave it to me.”
Ratan looked at the man.
Instantly the man smiled. “You’re determined to kill me, Baba?”
“Abey why are you showing your teeth?” Potla rudely demanded.
“Kill me,” the man said. “But don’t forget, killing me means stabbing Gandhiji.”
“Shut up!” Jaga roared, “not a word more…”
Still the man went on, “Listen to me Baba, now I’m not speaking for myself. Don’t kill me – let Gandhiji live!”
“Enough! Don’t want to hear the devil quote scriptures – hold your tongue.”
“Kick the rascal!”
“Go for it Ratnya!”
‘What’s holding you Ratnya??’
“Go go go…”
Unexpectedly Ratan turned around. He stood in front of the Muslim guy and said in a determined voice, “No.”
“Meaning?!” Jatin was stupefied, “What’re you saying Ratnya?”
“You heard me right Jatye — I’ll let this man walk.”
“Nope.”
“Yes, I’ll let this fella go Jatye. If you try to stop me, you’ll have to fell me first.”
All the others moved back a few steps.
“Have you gone out of your mind ?!” Jatin couldn’t make head or tail of it. “What’s the matter, I say?”
Ratan didn’t reply. Instead he addressed the man, “Come Mian[17], let me take you to the high road.”
The two of them took a few steps forward.
“Bah ! Won’t you even tell us why you’re letting him off? Hey Ratnya?”
“Ratnya! Hey bugger!”
Without a pause in his walk Ratan said, “Don’t call out to me.”
After escorting the fellow to the safety of the main street Ratan headed home.
*
Soon the night set in. The curfew hour started. The roads emptied out. From the lane they could make out that the military trucks and police vans were whizzing around the city. Some light escaped the windows of neighbouring houses. A handful of faces peeped out now and then. Swiftly, a dopey silence engulfed the habitat. The city seemed to be drained of vigour. The yellow gaslights on barren roads imparted a ghostlike ambience. The night deepened.
Jasoda noticed the worry lines on her husband’s visage and frequented her rounds of the room.
Out of the blue she even asked him, “What’s the matter with you, go[18]?”
“What? Nothing!” Ratan responded.
“Today you didn’t down bottles of liquor. Such good fortune!” She grinned at him, then wondered, “Why, you’re not even angry!”
“Hunh !”
“Feeling unwell, are you? So you’re missing your Chandravali Brigade! Care for a cup of tea?”
“Get it.”
Jasoda left to get the tea. Today Ratan was happy to see Jasoda.
Amazing! Something was the matter with him surely. He just could not bring himself to stab the man! One man’s life is so precious? People were correct about him. They worry for him, to protect him. To save his life, they appeal to all and sundry, even to strangers!
Yesterday he had visited that One Man. Short of height, dark of complexion, an octogenarian with a halo about him. A man like the Ocean, like the Himalayas, like the Sun. Boundless his sacrifice; immense his patience, unending his hope. Forgiveness, compassion, truth, love, ahimsa [19]– he defined all these virtues.
Magician, he was! He had crazed thirty crore men and women who chanted in unison ‘Gandhiji Ki Jai! Victory for Gandhiji!’ He has made them fearless, and independent. Yesterday he saw his Ram with his own eyes. It was all rubbish, he was no one’s enemy. He was ajatshatru, his enemy had yet to be born. Everyone in the country was his child, his progeny. He did not punish one for the failings of another. The punishment due to everyone he placed on his own head – a crown of thorn.
The night deepened and darkened.
Lying in his bed Ratan started to leaf through the album of his life. Alcohol, meat, women, neglect of a wife like Jasoda, butchery, rioting and killing more than a score of lives… And that enlightened Old Man? He had won the country, the world, in the brief bracket of a lifetime.
The night rolled on, towards sunrise.
At daybreak Ratan rose from his bed. He searched through his house and pulled out every piece of hand grenade, bullets, knife, and tied them into a bundle. Jasoda was still not up. Ratan cast a silent look at her and stepped out of the house.
The sky had not yet lit up, but the curfew hours were over. A handful of souls had stirred out on the streets here and there. A few cars had set out for some destination.
Ratan took full strides eastward. That’s the direction from which a red sun would rise. But Ratan was not headed towards that sun. He was thinking only of the sun fasting in a dilapidated house in Beliaghata. Ratan would go to him and lay down the bundle of his sins at his feet and pray to him, “Oh sun! Please end the fasting soul within me and light up the inner soul so far deprived of light…”
Nabendu Ghosh’s (1917-2007) oeuvre of work includes thirty novels and fifteen collections of short stories. He was a renowned scriptwriter and director. He penned cinematic classics such as Devdas, Bandini, Sujata, Parineeta, Majhli Didi and Abhimaan. And, as part of a team of iconic film directors and actors, he was instrumental in shaping an entire age of Indian cinema. He was the recipient of numerous literary and film awards, including the Bankim Puraskar, the Bibhuti Bhushan Sahitya Arghya, the Filmfare Best Screenplay Award and the National Film Award for Best First Film of a Director.
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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.
Figments caught straying in whispers of a dream,
Weave together till they form a visible stream,
Filling a void with voices that sing,
With freedom and impunity ring,
Giving credence to a distant, imagined realm.
— Introduction, Monalisa No Longer Smiles: An Anthology of Writings from across the World
As we complete three years of our virtual existence in clouds, connecting, collecting and curating words of ideators, we step into our fourth year with the pleasurable experience of being in bookshops in hardcopy too. Monalisa No Longer Smiles: An Anthology of Writings from across the World, our first hardcopy anthology, takes us into the realm of real books which have evolved over eons in history. This anthology connects us to those who hesitate to step into the virtual world created by technology. And there are many such people – as ingrained in the human heritage is a love for rustling paper and the smell of books. We have had some excellent reviews, praising not just the content but also the production of the book – the cover, the print and the feel. The collection bonds traditional greats with upcoming modern voices. We are grateful to our publisher, Om Books International, Shantanu Ray Chaudhuri, Jyotsna Mehta and their team for giving our book a chance. We do look forward to more anthologies hopefully in the future.
The writings we have collected over the last three years are reflective of diverse voices— some in concurrence with our thought processes and some in discussion or even in divergence. We have a variety of forms — poetry, conversations, fiction and non-fiction. Some are humorous and some serious. We try to move towards creating new trends as reflected in our anthology and our journal. For instance, Monalisa No Longer Smiles starts with an experiment — a limerick was adapted to express the intent of our book and journal; whereas normally this form is used to express light, or even bawdy sentiments. Perhaps, as the limerick says, we will find credence towards a new world, a new thought, a restructuring of jaded systems that cry out for a change.
Borderless Journaldid not exist before 2020. Within three years of its existence, our published pieces have found voices in this anthology, in other books, journals and even have been translated to a number of languages. Our own translation section grows stronger by the day supported by translators like Aruna Chakravarti, Fakrul Alam, Radha Chakravarty and Somdatta Mandal. Our interviews and conversations probe to find similarities and divergences in viewpoints. Our stories tell a good tale rather than indulge in stylistic interplay and our poetry is meant to touch hearts, creating a bond between the writers and anglophone readers. What we hope to do is to expose our readers to writing that they can understand. Writers get lost at times with the joy of creating something new or unique and construct an abstraction that can be intimidating for readers. We hope to host writing that is comprehensible, lucid and clear to the lay person.
What we look forward to homing in the coming months is a mingling of different art forms to birth new ideas that will help our species move progressively towards a world in harmony, filled with peace and love, giving credence to voices like that of Tagore, Nazrul or Lennon. “Imagine there’s no heaven…Imagine there’s no countries…no religion, too…Imagine all the people/ Livin’ life in peace…Imagine all the people/ Sharing all the world…” The need to redefine has been felt and as Lennon says in his last paragraph: “You may say I’m a dreamer/ But I’m not the only one/ I hope someday you’ll join us/ And the world will live as one.” With this hope, we continue our journey into another year – a new adventure that will take us to a universe where heaven can be found on Earth, grounded and real, within the human reach and can be shared without war, greed, hatred and anger.
Here, we share with you a few iconic pieces that have found their way to our pages within the last three years.
Professor Anvita Abbi, a Padma Shri, discusses her experience among the indigenous Andamanese and her new book on them, Voices from the Lost Horizon. Click here to read.
In Conversation with Akbar Barakzai, a ‘Part-time Poet’ in Exile: The last interview of Akbar Barakzai where he says, ‘The East and the West are slowly but steadily inching towards each other. Despite enormous odds “the twain” are destined to “meet” and be united to get rid of the geographical lines…’ Click hereto read more.
Half-Sisters: Sohana Manzoor explores the darker regions of human thought with a haunting psychological narrative about familial structures. Click hereto read.
Rituals in the Garden: Marcelo Medone discusses motherhood, aging and loss in this poignant flash fiction from Argentina. Click here to read.
Navigational Error: Luke P.G. Draper explores the impact of pollution with a short compelling narrative. Click here to read.
Pandies’ Corner: These narratives highlight the ongoing struggle against debilitating rigid boundaries drawn by societal norms, with the support from organisations like Shaktishalini and Pandies. Click here to read.
Dilip Kumar: Kohinoor-e-Hind: Ratnottama Sengupta recollects the days the great actor sprinted about on the sets of Bombay’s studios …spiced up with fragments from the autobiography of Sengupta’s father, Nabendu Ghosh. Click here to read.
Farewell Keri Hulme: A tribute by Keith Lyons to the first New Zealand Booker Prize winner, Keri Hulme, recalling his non-literary encounters with the sequestered author. Click here to read.
Tagore Translations, including translations by Aruna Chakravarti, Fakrul Alam, Somdatta Mandal and Radha Chakravarty. Click here to read.
Nazrul Translations, including Professor Fakrul Alam and Sohana Manzoor. Click here to read.
Gandhi & Robot by Thangjam Ibopishak, translated from the Manipuri by Robin S Ngangom. Click here to read.
Songs of Freedom by Akbar Barakzai, poems translated from Balochi by Fazal Baloch. Clickhere to read.
Give Me A Rag, Please:A short story by Nabendu Ghosh, translated by Ratnottama Sengupta, set in the 1943 Bengal Famine, which reflects on man’s basic needs. Click here to read.
Thanks to our team, contributors and readers for being a part of our journey. Let’s sail onwards…
Abhirup Dhar, a horror writer whose books are being extensively adopted by Bollywood, talks about his journey and paranormal experiences. Click here to read.
Translations
Munshi Premchand’s Balak or the Child has been translated from Hindi by Anurag Sharma. Click hereto read.
Atta Shad’s Today’s Child has been translated from Balochi by Fazal Baloch. Click here to read.
Masud Khan’s History has been translated from Bengali by Professor Fakrul Alam. Click here to read.
Ihlwha Choi translates his own poem,Lunch Time, from Korean. Click here to read.
Tagore’s Somudro or Ocean has been translated from Bengali by Mitali Chakravarty. Click here to read.
“Here with a Loaf of Bread beneath the Bough,
A Flask of Wine, a Book of Verse -- and Thou
Beside me singing in the Wilderness --
And Wilderness is Paradise enow.”
― Omar Khayyám (1048-1131); translation from Persian by Edward Fitzgerald (Rubaiyat, 1859)
I wonder why Khayyam wrote these lines — was it to redefine paradise or just to woo his beloved? I like to imagine it was a bit of both. The need not to look for a paradise after death but to create one on Earth might well make an impact on humankind. Maybe, they would stop warring over an invisible force that they call God or by some other given name, some ‘ism’. Other than tens of thousands dying in natural disasters like the recent earthquake at the border of Turkiye and Syria, many have been killed by wars that continue to perpetrate divides created by human constructs. This month houses the second anniversary of the military junta rule in Myanmar and the first anniversary of the Ukrainian-Russian war that continues to decimate people, towns, natural reserves, humanity, economics relentlessly, polluting the environment with weapons of mass destruction, be it bombs or missiles. The more weapons we use, the more we destroy the environment of our own home planet.
Sometimes, the world cries for a change. It asks to be upended.
We rethink, reinvent to move forward as a species or a single race. We relook at concepts like life and death and the way we run our lives. Redefining paradise or finding paradise on Earth, redefining ‘isms’ we have been living with for the past few hundred years — ‘isms’ that are being used to hurt others of our own species, to create exclusivity and divisions where none should exist — might well be a requisite for the continuance of our race.
Voices of change-pleaders rang out in the last century with visionaries like Tagore, Gandhi, Nazrul, Satyajit Ray urging for a more accepting and less war-bound world. This month, Ratnottama Sengupta has written on Ray’s legendary 1969 film, Goopy Gyne, Bagha Byne: “The message he sent out loud and with laughter: ‘When people have palatable food to fill their belly and music to fill their soul, the world will bid goodbye to wars.’” Shantanu Ray Chaudhuri has given an essay on one of the greatest pacifists, Gandhi, and his attitudes to films as well as his depiction in movies. What was amazing is Gandhi condemned films and never saw their worth as a mass media influencer! The other interesting thing is his repeated depiction as an ethereal spirit in recent movies which ask for changes in modern day perceptions and reforms. In fact, both these essays deal with ghosts who come back from the past to urge for changes towards a better future.
Delving deeper into the supernatural is our interviewee, Abhirup Dhar, an upcoming writer whose ghost stories are being adapted by Bollywood. While he does investigative stories linked to supernatural lore, our other interviewee, Andrew Quilty, a renowned journalist who has won encomiums for his coverage on Afghanistan where he spent eight years, shows in his book, August in Kabul:America’s Last Days in Afghanistan and the Return of the Taliban, what clinging to past lores can do to a people, especially women. Where does one strike the balance? We also have an excerpt from his book to give a flavour of his exclusive journalistic coverage on the plight of Afghans as an eyewitness who flew back to the country not only to report but to be with his friends — Afghans and foreigners — as others fled out of Kabul on August 14 th 2021. While culturally, Afghans should have been closer to Khayyam, does their repressive outlook really embrace the past, especially with the Taliban dating back to about only three decades?
This intermingling of life and death and the past is brought to life in our fiction section by Sreelekha Chatterjee and Anjana Krishnan. Aditi Yadav creates a link between the past and our need to travel in her musing, which is reminiscent of Anthony Sattin’s description of asabiyya, a concept of brotherhood that thrived in medieval times. In consonance with wanderlust expressed in Yadav’s essay, we have a number of stories that explore travel highlighting various issues. Meredith Stephens travels to explore the need to have nature undisturbed by external interferences in pockets like Kangaroo Island in a semi-humorous undertone. While Ravi Shankar travels to the land’s end of India to voice candid concerns on conditions within Kerala, a place that both Keith Lyons and Rhys Hughes had written on with love and a sense of fun. It is interesting to see the contrasting perspectives on Southern India.
Professor Fakrul Alam has also translated poetry where a contemporary Bengali writer, Masud Khan, cogitates on history while Ihlwha Choi has translated his own poem from Korean. A translation of Tagore’s poem on the ocean tries to capture the vastness and the eternal restlessness that can be interpreted as whispers carried through eons of history. Fazal Baloch has also shared a poem by one of the most revered modern Balochi voices, that of Atta Shad. Our pièce de resistance is a translation of Premchand’s Balak or the Child by Anurag Sharma.
This vibrant edition would not have been possible without all the wonderful translators, writers, photographers and artists who trust us with their work. My heartfelt thanks to all of you, especially, Srijani Dutta for her beautiful painting, ‘Hope in Winter’, and Sohana for her amazing artwork. My heartfelt thanks to the team at Borderless Journal, to our loyal readers some of whom have evolved into fabulous contributors. Thank you.
Do write in telling us what you think of the journal. We look forward to feedback from all of you as we head for the completion of our third year this March.
An innovative rap contest between Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Gandhi as a stand-up comedian, his life as a musical, and at least seventeen actors portraying him across numerous films. No other political and spiritual leader has influenced our cultural discourse as much as M.K. Gandhi. This despite Gandhi’s deep-rooted aversion to cinema and theatre. Shantanu Ray Chaudhuri looks at the legacy of Gandhi in films, plays, songs and TV shows.
“Slim be a combination of an actual kamikaze and Gandhi.” This is Eminem, seventy years after the Mahatma was assassinated, in a song from his 2018 album Kamikaze, that also became the theme song of the Marvel film Venom. It is interesting to conjecture what the bhajan-loving apostle of peace and non-violence would have to say about being referenced by the hip-hop rapper in a song whose very next lines talk of killing and use the F-word.
Probably no other political leader anywhere in the world has been part of popular culture – films, songs, music videos, animation shows, graphic novels – as much as Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. Newsreels on him run into hundreds of hours. A China-based journalist, A.K. Chattier, put together one of the first celluloid versions of the Mahatma’s life and times from archival material available, sourcing rare footage. Unfortunately, both the print and the negative have been lost.
Beginning with the American feature documentary Mahatma Gandhi: Twentieth-century Prophet in 1953, to The Gandhi Murder, a conspiracy theory film on the assassination, in 2019, he has been part of at least thirty films. Even the Marvel film Age of Ultron has his footage. As many as seventeen actors have played him onscreen: J.S. Casshyap, Ben Kingsley, Sam Dastor, Jay Levey, Yashwant Satvik, Annu Kapur, Rajit Kapur, Mohan Gokhale, Naseeruddin Shah, Surendra Rajan, Mohan Jhangiani (voiced by Zul Vilani), Dilip Prabhavalkar, Dr Shikaripura Krishnamurthy, Avijit Datta, S. Kanagaraj, Neeraj Kabi and Jesus Sans.
Of these, Sam Dastor featured as the Mahatma in Lord Mountbatten: The Last Viceroy (1986) and Jinnah (1998), while Surendra Rajan has donned Gandhi’s garb as many as six times, in Veer Savarkar (2001), The Legend of Bhagat Singh (2002), Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose: The Forgotten Hero (2005), the TV movie The Last Days of the Raj (2007), the short film Gandhi: The Silent Gun (2012) and Srijit Mukherji’s Gumnaami (2019).
Gandhi and Early Indian Cinema
It was common in the 1930s and 1940s for film hoardings to have life-size pictures of Gandhi over the photographs of the stars. The protagonist of Kanjibhai Rathod’s mythological Bhakta Vidura (1921), the first film to be banned in India, resembled Gandhi, cap and all. Ajanta Cinetone’s Mazdoor (1934), written by Munshi Premchand, too was banned, and promoted as ‘the banned film’, as it dealt with Gandhian principles. Produced by Imperial Film Company and directed by R.S. Chaudhary, Wrath (1931) had a character called Garibdas who fights untouchability. The censors cut out many of its scenes and renamed it Khuda Ki Shaan. Vinayak Damodar Karnataki’s Brandy Ki Botal (1939) took up Bapu’s campaign against liquor and referred to Gandhi as ‘azadi ka devta’.
The Feature Biopics
The most well-known of these is Richard Attenborough’s 1982 film. In the making for over twenty years, it remains, warts and all, the definitive film on Gandhi. And though Attenborough made the cardinal error of falling prey to what Nehru had warned him against at the outset when the director had met him with the proposal in 1963 – “Whatever you do, do not deify him … that is what we have done in India … and he was too great a man to be deified” – there is no doubt that this is an epic labour of love that delivers a series of spectacular set-pieces of great emotional heft.
As the filmmaker himself observed, “It took me 20 years to get the money to get that movie made. I remember my pitch to 20th Century Fox. The guy said: ‘Dickie, it’s sweet of you to come here. You’re obviously obsessed. But who the f***ing hell will be interested in a little brown man wrapped in a sheet carrying a beanpole?’” As it turned out, the whole world was, as was the Oscar committee. And Ben Kingsley set a benchmark for the onscreen Gandhi that has been impossible to top over forty years later. So complete was the identification that a few years later a popular Hindi film, Peechha Karro (d: Pankaj Parashar, 1986), had a character swear by Ben Kingsley instead of Gandhi.
Ben Kingsley
Surprisingly, despite the many incarnations of the Mahatma on cinema, Gandhi is only one of two full-length feature films to deal with his life. The other one being Shyam Benegal’s The Making of the Mahatma (with Rajit Kapoor essaying the role), which as its Hindi title, Gandhi Se Mahatma Tak, suggests, deals primarily with his experiences as a barrister and in South Africa. Several biopics on national leaders of the freedom movement feature Gandhi in important cameos. These include Sardar (d: Ketan Mehta, 1993, Annu Kapoor as Gandhi) and Jabbar Patel’s Dr B.R. Ambedkar (2000, with Mohan Gokhale as Gandhi), probably the first time the Mahatma was shown in a negative light. There was also the 2011 film Dear Friend Hitler, based on his correspondences with Adolf Hitler (played by Raghubir Yadav).
These biographical films include Gandhi, My Father, which deals with his tortured and tumultuous relationship with his son, Harilal Gandhi. Based on the latter’s biography Harilal Gandhi: A Life by Chandulal Bhagubhai Dalal, the film was directed by Feroz Abbas Khan, who had earlier helmed a stage version, Mahatma Vs Gandhi (based on Dinkar Joshi’s Gujarati novel Prakashno Padchhayo), starring Naseeruddin Shah and Kay Kay Menon as Gandhi and Hiralal respectively. The film version starred Darshan Jariwala and Akshaye Khanna as father and son respectively.
The Adversarial Gaze
Existing with the eulogies are a handful of films that portray the world of his adversaries – people like Nathuram Godse and Veer Savarkar, in particular. Unfortunately, none of these have the rigour of the works of Richard Attenborough and Shyam Benegal and have been rightly dismissed as sensationalist. Ashok Tyagi’s 2017 short film Why I Killed Gandhi, which released in early 2022, became controversial for allegedly showing Godse as a hero, forcing its lead actor to apologise for playing the role of Godse. In the same vein is Ved Rahi’s Veer Savarkar (2001). Kamal Haasan’s Hey Ram (2000), a fictional tale of the moral dilemmas facing a would-be assassin of Gandhi, is in comparison a more nuanced take, though Naseeruddin Shah is probably the healthiest Gandhi onscreen ever.
Naseeruddin Shah as Gandhi
But by far the more interesting fiction came close to sixty years ago. In 1963, around the time that Attenborough was talking to Pandit Nehru about his film on Gandhi, Nine Hours to Rama created quite a flutter for its purportedly ‘sympathetic’ take on Nathuram Godse. Narrating the last nine hours of the life of Gandhi’s assassin, this one is a strange beast. Dismissed by academic Ravinder Singh as “a heady concoction of a little history and too much fiction”, the film shows Godse involved in an affair with a married woman and even an encounter with a prostitute. Godse tries to lure the former into sharing a room with him, describing the sexual encounter likely to follow as ‘dessert’ after a meal. No wonder, the film, as well as the novel of the same name by Stanley Wolpert on which it was based, faced protests from both Congress and Godse’s supporters, and an eventual ban.
A laughable enterprise in all respects – the only thing it probably gets right are the three bullets, and even that scene is followed by a ridiculous one where Gandhi forgives Godse who is shown as repenting his act immediately afterwards – what is surprising about it are the credentials of the people involved with the project. The director Mark Robson is well known for Hollywood blockbusters like The Bridges of Toko Ri, The Harder They Hall, Peyton Place and Von Ryan’s Express. The screenwriter Nelson Gidding scripted critically acclaimed ones like The Haunting and Andromeda Strain. And among the cast, we have respected actors such as Jose Ferrer (who essayed the definitive Cyrano de Bergerac on stage and screen) and Robert Morley.
What makes this somewhat of a curio are the smattering of Indian actors in cameos, including David as a policeman, Achala Sachdeva (as Godse’s mother) and P. Jairaj as G.D. Birla. By far the most interesting and innovative aspect of the film is its credit titles – comprising the ticking of an old-fashioned pocket watch – designed by Saul Bass, which is deserving of a full-length article.
The Shadow of Gandhi: Gandhigiri
Gandhi’s life and philosophy have cast long shadows, particularly in Hindi cinema. Almost all films that show a police station invariably have his photograph up there on the wall as part of the background décor. However, it is in the subtle messaging of Hindi cinema that his influence is most strongly felt, particularly the way our films have for the longest time made a virtue of being poor, equating money with all evil.
Possibly the one film that epitomises the enduring legacy of the Mahatma and was instrumental in reintroducing him in popular discourse is Raju Hirani’s Lage RahoMunna Bhai (2006). In a stroke of genius, the filmmakers have a goonda hallucinating about the Mahatma, who inspires him to ‘Gandhigiri’ (the term caught on in a big way, leading to a 2016 film starring Om Puri titled Gandhigiri) instead of gundagiri as a tool to get your way
Munnabhai and Gandhi
Though not as influential as the Munna Bhai film, Jahnu Barua’s Maine Gandhi Ko Nahin Mara (2005) is as important. The film, about a retired professor whose dementia-wasted mind begins to believe that he was accused of killing Gandhi, is a metaphoric exposition of what Gandhi and the values he espoused mean today, how he has been reduced to a statute, a road and a stamp. If Munna Bhai has the two goondas recalling Gandhi only from his photo on currency notes and on account of 2 October being a dry day, Barua’s film highlights how we remember the man only on two days – 2 October and 30 January
Gandhi’s influence on the national psyche has been part of many other films tangentially. The 2009 film Road to Sangam is the story of a Muslim mechanic entrusted the job of repairing an old V8 ford engine, little knowing that the car had once carried Gandhi’s ashes to the sangam for immersion. While Shah Rukh Khan’s character in Swades is named Mohan, and the film, according to Mahatma Gandhi’s grandson Tushar Gandhi, “epitomises Gandhi’s values”, A. Balakrishnan’s Welcome Back Gandhi (2012) imagines the leader returning to contemporary India and dealing with a country he barely recognises.
Girish Kasaravalli’s Koormavatara (2011) tells the story of a government employee who is selected to portray Gandhi in a TV series, owing to his strong resemblance to the leader. Having never acted before and not a believer in Gandhian principles, he resists before reluctantly taking up the assignment. Reading on Gandhi and his philosophies transforms his life as people start flocking to him and he must negotiate the tricky terrain of being regarded as a modern-day Gandhi.
Different Strokes
Imagine Gandhi and and civil rights champion Martin Luther King Jr engaged in a battle of rap! That is exactly what Keegan Michael Key and Jordan Peele did in the popular web series Key and Peele, which has Gandhi and King going the hip-hop way to decide who is the better pacifist.
While the inspiration behind the name of the Canadian punk rock band, Propagandhi, is not hard to ascertain, the animated TV series Clone High, made by Phil Lord, Christopher Miller and Bill Lawrence, imagined teenage versions of legends, among them Gandhi, who is shown as a ‘fun-loving, hyperactive teenage slacker’. An episode in the popular TV show Seinfeld has a character claiming to have met Gandhi and having an affair with him. In the TV series FamilyGuy, Gandhi shows up as a stand-up comedian while South Park has a character meeting Gandhi in hell.
Following in the footsteps of Mahatma Vs Gandhi and Lillete Dubey’s Sammy, from Pratap Sharma’s play (the title derived from the word ‘swami’ which was used by South African whites as a demeaning term for Indian workers), Danesh Khambata went the Broadway-style musical way with his theatrical production, Gandhi: The Musical. The play covers the leader’s life through sixteen songs, a dozen dances, featuring a cast of over forty dancers, incredibly introducing song-and-dance routines into the Mahatma’s life.
The impact that playing Gandhi has on an actor and the process that it involves also need to be explored at greater length as it provides insights on how influential he continues to be. Joy Sengupta, who portrayed Gandhi in Sammy, says, “It changed my perspective in life. I was all revolutionary and fashionably loathing Gandhi. I had even directed a play on Bhagat Singh, taking pot-shots at Gandhi. Sohail Hashmi told me not to do that, as Gandhi was the only and the most powerful secular symbol surviving in India. That kind of opened a few clogs in my head regarding what secularism is, whether it could coexist with spiritualism, etc. Ten years later, Sammy happened. I gave up all mainstream work for four months to focus on the play. I went to every Gandhi institution I could, pored over every photograph to imbibe the body language. Every films division reel to get his body rhythm. Recording of his speeches gave me his intonation and pitch. I switched to a Gandhian diet and lost 12 kg. I travelled by local transport. I took in all the hardships and drew strength from the Gandhian perspective of using your negatives by turning them into your strengths. This is something I had read when I was a kid in a school textbook, and it had remained with me. Now it became my full-blown philosophy – hardships and punishment can go on to make you a better man. I did not go for any complicated process – Gandhi believed in simplicity and executed everything in its simple organic form (something the intellectual Nehru found difficult to understand). It was simple. Be transparent, rely on truth, accept faults and do penance, forgive others, do it yourself, and always look at the poorest and most vulnerable as a consequence of your actions. Most importantly, listen to your inner voice for guidance. If you really mix all that, you get a simple childlike man who was always busy doing simple things to improve his inner being. I aimed for his essence, focussing on catching his spirit on stage and not mimicking him.”
Songs eulogising Gandhi are dime a dozen in India, of course. These include the reverential non-film ‘Suno-suno ae duniya waalon Bapu ki ye amar kahani’(Mohammad Rafi) and ‘Gundham hamare Gandhiji’ (S.D Burman).
While the celebrated ‘De di hamme azadi bina khadag bina dhal, Sabarmati ke sant tune kar diya kamal’ (Jagriti, 1953) spoke of Gandhi as someone to look up to, to emulate, Lage Raho Munna Bhai’s sensational ‘Bande mein tha dum’ made Gandhi cool, a buddy you can count on when in trouble, giving us a Gandhi for Generation Z.
For someone who has been such an integral part of popular culture, and for someone almost deified for his pacifism, Gandhi’s views on cinema are stridently illiberal. In fact, some of his pronouncements almost echo those of the bigoted ‘right’ that keeps calling for bans and boycotts. Describing cinema as a ‘sinful technology’ and a ‘corrupting influence [as bad as] a drinking bout, he said, “If I was made prime minister, I would close all the cinemas and theatres…” and “if I had my way, I would see to it that all cinemas and theatres in this country were converted into spinning halls”.
He watched just two films in his life, and hated both. The first one was Mission to Moscow (1943), which Miraben insisted he watch. The film, based on the memoirs of Joseph Davies, the US ambassador to Russia, featured scantily clad women in a few dancing scene. Horrified, Gandhi admonished the people there ‘for showing such nude dances’ to him. Soon after, he happened to watch Vijay Bhatt’s production Ram Rajya, at the insistence of the film’s art director, Kanti Desai. Extremely reluctant, Gandhi agreed only because, as he said, “I will have to see an Indian film as I have made the mistake of watching an English one.” And contrary to popular opinion, as industrialist Shanti Kumar Morarje mentioned, he disliked it ‘especially because of the shouting and uproar in the film’.
Such was his abhorrence for cinema – “The cinema, the stage, the race-course, the drink-booth and the opium-den – all these [are] enemies of society …” – that industry stalwarts like Khwaja Ahmad Abbas and Baburao Patel wrote open letters and editorials to Gandhi, articulating “the positive contribution of cinema to entertainment and its utility as a tool to further the cause of Indian freedom movement.” Patel wrote: “Let this champion of Daridra Narayan come down and meet us and we shall try to convince him, or be convinced. Surely as workers in the film field, we are not worse than the poor untouchables for whom the old Mahatma’s heart so often bleeds. And if he thinks we are, the more reason why he should come to our rescue.”
But to no avail. Gandhi remained unmoved. As he said, “I refuse to be enthused about [cinema] and waste God-given time [on it] … in Ahmedabad children get headaches, lose power of thinking, get fever and die … The disease is caused by going to cinemas.”
The dislike defied all logic and was so deep-rooted that it probably needs a psychiatric assessment. Or better still, a film that addresses the great man’s aversion to cinema.
(Parts of this essay was first published in The Telegraph)
Shantanu Ray Chaudhuriis 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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Gandhi and his wife, KasturbaGandhi’s statue in AtlantaCourtesy: Creative Commons
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (1869-1948) was an ordinary man who became extraordinary in quest of a just world. With his strong belief in non-violence and truth, Gandhi set out to find freedom, dignity and respect for his compatriots with peaceful weapons he evolved reading greats like Tolstoy, Thoreau and many more. He named these; Ahimsa or non-violence, Satyagraha or the way of truth and civil disobedience or peaceful protest by disobeying an unjust law.
To use these wisely, we needed a certain amount of education and preparation — not in terms of degrees from universities but in terms of spiritual growth. In his An Autobiography or My Experiments with Truth, Gandhi wrote: “A Satyagrahi obeys the laws of society intelligently and off his own free will, because he considers it to be his second duty to do so. It is only when a person has thus obeyed the laws of society scrupulously that he is in a position to judge as to which particular rules are good and just which are unjust and iniquitous. Only then does the right accrue to him to the civil disobedience of certain laws in well-defined circumstances. My error lay in my failure to observe this necessary limitation. I had called on the people to launch upon civil disobedience before they had qualified themselves for it, and this mistake seem to me of Himalayan magnitude.” Have we done anything to rectify his self-professed oversight?
Now as we commemorate his 153rd birth anniversary, in the midst of war, violence, hatred, intolerance, where do we stand in terms of Gandhi’s ideology? For a man lives on only if his ideals survive.
Exploring this issue is an essay by Debraj Mookerjee, who wonders if the man and his values will face complete erasure? Reinforcing this thought is a Manipuri poem by Thangjam Ibopishak, translated by Robin S Ngangom, and a review of a book by Bhaskar Parichha on the conspiracy that led to the assassination of Gandhi. On the other hand is Keith Lyon’s essay on Gandhi’s ‘enduring vision‘ and winding up the prose is Rakhi Dalal’s essay urging us to pursue Gandhi’s vision, titled after the words of a man who did live by Gandhi’s ideals, Martin Luther King, while Aminath Neena gives us an inspirational poem along those lines.
Gandhi & the Robot, a poem relooking at Gandhi’s ideology in the present context, written in Manipuri by Thangjam Ibopishak and translated by RobinS Ngangom. Click hereto read.
“Under this Flag there is no prince and there is no peasant, there is no rich and there is no poor… Whether we be Hindus or Muslims, Christians, Jains, Sikhs or Zoroastrians and others, our Mother India has one undivided heart and one indivisible spirit.” — Sarojini Naidu, poet and political activist, on the resolution on the national flag in the Constituent Assembly, 22 July 1947
The immutability of prodigious speeches and their magnifying impact on people can’t be underestimated. The prize of a great speech comes from pure wisdom that originates from indulgence. These words from Naidu’s speech can work as magic anytime one reads them.
Building A Free India – Defining Speeches of Our Independence Movement that Shaped the Nation by Rakesh Batabyal is just the book you needed to read as India celebrates her 75th year of its independence. It is a thought-provoking assemblage of solicitous speeches delivered by some of the most prominent Indian personalities.
Many of these men and women have made invaluable contributions to India’s coming together as a nation of people and are the pride and honour of the sub-continent. These are people who impacted the lives around them. Their words were the gems that had the power to evoke courage and emotion in countless people and inspire them to make history.
Rakesh Batabyal teaches history, theory, and philosophy of media at the Centre for Media Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University. His The Penguin Book of Modern Indian Speeches is widely accepted as an important work in the genre. He is working on a book on the history of nationalism in India.
Says the blurb: “The new public sphere that emerged in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century India was a space that enabled magnificent public oratory, particularly that which mounted a challenge to colonial rule. From social and political platforms like the Indian National Congress, in the courts of law, or inside legislative bodies, leaders of the freedom struggle gave eloquent and clear-eyed articulations of not only the social, economic, and political problems that faced India and their possible solutions but also the kind of sovereign nation we must collectively aspire to be. India’s democratic ethos was a product of these foundational ideas of the freedom movement.”
Building a Free India brings together these landmark speeches delivered over roughly a century by the leading lights of the national movement—from Dadabhai Naoroji, Surendranath Banerjee, Bhikaiji Cama, Lajpat Rai, and Tilak, to Gandhi, Nehru, Ambedkar, Bose, Sarojini Naidu, and Maulana Azad—as well as a range of lesser-known but equally remarkable figures.
Writes Batabyal in the book: “As the movement progressed—from the economic critique of colonial rule by the early nationalists to the unequivocal demand for Purna Swaraj[1] and the immense moral authority of the Mahatma Gandhi-led resistance—the notion of an equal society that ensured dignity to all—irrespective of caste, class, gender or religion—came to occupy a central place in it. By the time the Constituent Assembly met in December 1946, not just civil rights, but the particular rights of women, of minorities, of the Depressed Classes, and the Adivasis were being articulated and demanded, not as favours but as a matter of course.” As the editor of this volume writes in his brilliant introduction, the effect of the speeches delivered by the leaders of our national movement was to focus “political action towards scripting an ennobling nationalism that would give us a just and equal society”.
A couple of speeches in the book are captivating. This one by India’s philosopher-President Dr Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan on India’s history and legends reads: “Our pledge tells us that this ancient land shall attain her rightful and honored place. We take pride in the antiquity of this land for it is a land which has seen nearly four or five millenniums of history. It has passed through many vicissitudes and at the moment it stands, still responding to the thrill of the same great ideal. Civilization is a thing of the spirit; it is not something external, solid, and mechanical. It is the dream in the people’s hearts. It is the inward aspiration of the people’s souls. It is the imaginative interpretation of human life and the perception of the mystery of human existence. That is what civilization actually stands for.
‘We should bear in mind these great ideals which have been transmitted to us across the ages. In this great time of our history, we should bear ourselves humbly before God, brace ourselves for this supreme task that is confronting us and conduct ourselves in a manner that is worthy of the ageless spirit of India. If we do so, I have no doubt that; the future of this land will be as great as its once glorious past.’
Painstakingly divided into six chapters, each section in the 300-plus page veers around freedom and that itself makes the collection unique. What’s more Batabyal provides a context to every single discourse.
On his way to Noakhali and in the face of the large-scale massacre, to the question ‘Will Partition Change Us Forever?’ Mahatma Gandhi replied: “I have seen more of history than anyone of you, and I tell you that I have known Hindu boys who called Muslims ‘uncle’. Hindus and Muslims used to participate in each other’s festivals and other auspicious occasions. You want to force me to leave this place but you should know that I have never submitted to force. It is contrary to my nature. You can obstruct my work, even kill me. I won’t invoke the help of the police. You can prevent me from leaving this house, but what is the use of your dubbing me an enemy of the Hindus? I will not accept the label. To make me quit, you have to convince me that I have made a mistake in coming here.”
This and many such defining speeches make the collection truly exceptional. The book is not only a priceless history of India’s freedom movement but also of the ideas of universal equality, dignity, and justice that are—and must always remain—at the root of any democracy. The assortment of some sixty communicative moments of oratory would provide the reader with a fresh perspective and evoke feelings of patriotism, motivation, and infinite stimulus.
Bhaskar Parichha is a journalist and author of Unbiased, No Strings Attached: Writings on Odisha and Biju Patnaik – A Political Biography. He lives in Bhubaneswar and writes bilingually. Besides writing for newspapers, he also reviews books on various media platforms.
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