Translated from Bengali by Debali Mookerjea-Leonard
Nirendranath Chakraborty (1924 – 2018) was born in united Bengal. A poet, translator and novelist, he was awarded the Sahitya Akademi Award for his poem based on the Emperor’s New Clothes in 1974, voicing the need to reacquaint with the innocence of childhood. The same year he was also awarded the Ananda Puraskar. Nirendranth Chakraborty translated Hergé’s comics into Bengali. Calcutta University bestowed on him an honorary Doctor of Literature degree. Amalkanti is one of his well-known poems, again critiquing societal trends.
AMALKANTI*
Amalkanti is my friend, We had been at school together. He came late to class every day, lessons unprepared. When asked verb-declensions, He gazed at the window in such amazement, That we felt sorry for him.
Some of us aspired to be teachers, some, doctors, others, lawyers. Amalkanti didn’t want any of that. He aspired to be sunshine. The blushing sunshine after the rains, in the late-afternoon of cawing crows, Sunshine that lingers on the leaves of the rose-apple and bell fruit Like a momentary smile.
Some of us became teachers, some, doctors, others, lawyers. Amalkanti couldn’t become sunshine. Today, he works in a dark printing press. And he visits me from time to time; Drinks a cup of tea, chats a little, then he says, “I’ll be off.” I see him to the door.
The one among us who is a teacher today, Could easily have been a doctor, The one who aspired to be a doctor, Would have also done well as a lawyer. Somehow, we all got our wishes, all except Amalkanti. Amalkanti couldn’t become sunshine. Musing and musing, musing and musing Upon the sun’s unflawed radiance, He had once aspired to become sunshine.
*(lit. “unflawed radiance”; also used as a name)
A Bengali recitation of Amalakanti by Shamshuzzoha, a poem by Nirendranth Chakraborty.
Debali Mookerjea-Leonard is the Roop Distinguished Professor of English at James Madison University. Together with research and teaching, she also translates Bengali poetry and fiction. Debali has the permission to publish this translation.
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In conversation with Isa Kamari, a celebrated writer from Singapore, with focus on his latest book, Maladies of the Soul. Click here to read.
Translations
A Hunger for Stories, a poem by Quazi Johirul Islam, has been translated by Professor Fakrul Alam. Click here to read.
A Hand Mill, a story by Ammina Srinivasaraju, has been translated from Telugu by Johny Takkedasila. Click here to read.
Kiyya and Sadu, a part of this long ballad on the legendary lovers from Balochistan, has been translated from Balochi by Fazal Baloch. Click hereto read.
In Tintin in India, Rhys Hughes traces the allusions to India in these iconic creations of Hergé while commenting on Tintin’s popularity in the subcontinent. Click hereto read.
Meredith Stephens shares the response of some of the Californian community to healing after the 2020 forest fires with a narrative and photographs. Click hereto read.
An Indian newspaper published an article about adults who still read Tintin and I realised that although I would have liked to be interviewed for that article, my qualifications were inadequate, for there is no ‘still’ in my particular case. I only began reading the comic when I was grown up. In fact, I only read it properly in the past few years, and I am more than half a century old. True, I did read one or two of his adventures when I was young, but I read them half-heartedly, I don’t know why, instead of with unalloyed delight, as they ought to be read. Possibly they were too elaborate for me back then.
Yes, Tintin is elaborate, but this doesn’t mean it isn’t simple. Yet it has the kind of simplicity that seems complex to the very young reader. There are plots and subplots, conspiracies and clues, and all of this is perhaps a bit much for the mind of a child more familiar with the primitive antics of Dennis the Menace or The Bash Street Kids from The Beano. Each of Tintin’s exploits seemed beyond reasonable length to me, too adult and requiring a heavy investment of my time and intelligence. I speak, naturally enough, only from a personal perspective. In some households, Tintin was read by minds younger than mine, understood and enjoyed too. I was clearly a late developer.
Thanks to a remarkable bookshop in Bangalore, I have been able to obtain the comic books in omnibus editions and catch up with what I missed out on. It intrigued me to learn that the elements I had regarded as impossibly modern in my youth are now quaintly dated. Tintin’s adventures are not hugely dissimilar in tone and setting to the adventure stories of John Buchan1 and they even put me in mind of Somerset Maugham2 at his most sensational, with their heavy reliance on seaplanes and tramp steamers and open-topped automobiles. The pacing is as fast as The Thirty-Nine Steps or Greenmantle, the atmosphere as exotic-colonial as The Moon and Sixpence or The Narrow Corner. There are differences too, of course, but the differences are less surprising.
The pacing is incredibly fast and Tintin blunders his way into scrapes and pickles almost as if destiny has chosen him for the role of spanner in the cogs of the workings of villains, which in a way it has (if we regard Hergé as Fate). He is highly competent most of the time, but can also be inefficient and even inept, often hampered as well as helped by his dog, Snowy. But no quantity or quality of hampering can keep him down for long, he is deft at seizing the opportunities of coincidence that extreme contrivance throws his way. He is fully the equal of any ancient hero from legend or mythology.
And he is mentally strong: no amount of trauma, no near-death incidents or hair-breadth escapes affect him psychologically. He falls out of an aeroplane, an assassination attempt by a dastardly pilot, and his parachute malfunctions. A flat character on a flat page is about to be flattened on the flat ground, but no, he has the singular good fortune to land in a hayrick being transported on a cart. There are no broken bones and no gasping for breath. He picks himself up, dusts off a few straws, resumes his mission with perfect aplomb. One might even say he is inhuman in his attitude to danger. A touch of psychopathy, perhaps? But he is a friend of goodness, an enemy of criminality.
He is also weirdly tolerant of the pompous ineffectiveness of all the sundry supporting characters who populate his existence. Thomson and Thompson, the detectives who never get it right but always take credit for cases solved in their vicinity, provide comic relief, which justifies itself, but even a cursory analysis of their deeds raises a few awkward questions. How on earth are they entrusted continually with missions requiring the utmost delicacy, tact and cunning? They are negative factors in the field of detection, hindrances rather than boons, a pair of slim buffoons (we normally regard buffoons as portly) with a strange sartorial taste and peculiar speech patterns, dramatically underperforming sleuths who are prone to take what they are told at face value. They are worse than useless; they are beneficial to the continuance of evil.
It was a long time before I was able to tell them apart but now, I know they are doubles rather than twins, and that the one with the drooping moustache is Thompson and the one with the flaring moustache is Thomson. In the original French, they were Dupont and Dupond, which is a little less confusing but not much. Tintin ought to have nothing to do with them, but he is always delighted to see them and treats them as highly competent and valuable colleagues. This is a symptom of his own occasional incompetence. But this has nothing to do with India and so we must regretfully forget them.
Tintin travels to India on several occasions. In Egypt, he daringly escapes a firing squad, requisitions an aeroplane, a 1929 de Hallivand DH-80 Puss Moth, one of the highest performing aircraft of its time, with a 130 hp (97 kW) Gipsy Major engine (this aircraft is also notable for being the first to cross the Atlantic from east to west, in 1932) and he courageously, some might say foolishly, sets off for India. Unlike the pilot Nevill Vintcent3, who flew the exact same aircraft from Britain to Sri Lanka (Ceylon, as it once was) without crashing, Tintin runs out of fuel and comes down in the jungle.
Although extremely absurd, the idea of piloting such a plane so far isn’t as implausible as it might appear. We should remember Maurice Wilson4, that very noble but eccentric mystic who planned to climb Mount Everest solo in 1934, forty-six years before Reinhold Messner5 managed the feat, and of course it was inevitable that he would fail, for all the odds were against him. Despite his lack of flying experience, he purchased a de Havilland DH.60 Moth, a more rickety aircraft than the one Tintin used, and flew it from Britain to India in a series of hops. It was a lunatic thing to attempt and yet he succeeded. His failure was on the mountainside, not in the air. Therefore, we have established that Tintin really could have flown to India from Egypt.
Tintin, after his crash landing, meets elephants in the jungle and he wishes to solicit their aid but he doesn’t know their language. He decides to learn it and improvises a trumpet in order to do so, carving the instrument from a block of wood with a penknife, an amazing feat of carpentry (but in Land of the Soviets he creates a new propeller in a similar manner). Now he can fluently talk to all elephants in their own tongue, for elephants apparently speak in a kind of jazz. It is good to have such magnificent animals on your side. One elephant is worth a dozen human friends when it comes to strength and endurance. And they will never forget a service rendered. That, as far as I’m aware, was Tintin’s first visit to India, but he had another a little later.
Tintin in Tibet, often regarded as his finest adventure, finds Tintin visiting Delhi in the company of Captain Haddock, that boisterous, drunken, bumbling, loquacious master mariner who frequently makes matters worse rather than better. They admire the Qutab Minar, as I did, awestruck, when I was in Delhi. I have since learned that the Qutab Minar was based on a tower in Afghanistan, the Minaret of Jam, which must be the most marvellous name ever devised for a tower. I imagine it is made from apricots and strawberries and I lick my lips as I contemplate it. But this has nothing to do with Tintin, who after leaving Delhi travels to Kathmandu and then overland into the mountains. He meets a Yeti and scares it off with the flash of his camera.
The Tintin comics always had a very substantial fanbase in India and letters from Indian readers often were mailed to Hergé. It is therefore unfortunate that a Tintin adventure set entirely in India doesn’t exist. Personally, I would be happy to see one set in Goa. In the 1990s, a nameless artist designed a series of t-shirts bearing images that are parodies of the Tintin book covers with the title “Tintin in Goa” on them. They show the intrepid reporter doing nothing intrepid at all, simply lounging about the beach or going for a joy ride on a motorcycle. Even a comic character as psychologically resolute as Tintin needs a holiday once in a while. What better place for a relaxing stay?
John Buchan ((1875–1940), Scottish peer, writer and editor ↩︎
Neville Vintcent (!902-1942), South African aviator ↩︎
Maurice Wilson (1898-1934), British soldier, mystic and aviator, who died trying to climb Mt Everest solo ↩︎
First mountaineer to ascend Mt Everest solo, without oxygen in 1970 ↩︎
Rhys Hughes has lived in many countries. He graduated as an engineer but currently works as a tutor of mathematics. Since his first book was published in 1995 he has had fifty other books published and his work has been translated into ten languages.
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