Painting by Georges Seurat(1859-1891). From the Public Domain.
Parasols? Seriously? Such were my thoughts when I first arrived in Japan one summer over twenty years ago. How quaint, I thought. How old fashioned! If a lady was worried about preserving her lily-white complexion, why not just slather on sunscreen and wear a hat?
In South Carolina, where I’d just come from, the only time I ever saw women wielding parasols was when I visited antebellum mansions. There, tour guides flounced around plantations in hoopskirts, twirling parasols as part of their period costumes. In real life, no one used them.
Back then, many of my friends spent hours laying out in the sun, in pursuit of the perfect tan. In the United States, people found my skin to be too pale, but in Japan women wore long white gloves and smeared their faces with whitening cream. And they carried parasols to ward off the sun.
Parasols have actually been in use in the Middle East and Asia for a very long time. They are depicted in ancient art in India, Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Greece, and are mentioned in a divination book from the Chinese Song Dynasty printed in 1270. Although alternative uses have been discovered for the parasol – for example, in 1902, ladies were advised by The Daily Mirror to use their parasols to fend off ruffians — the basic design is much the same as that of first century China.
A postcard from the turn of the 20th century. From the Public Domain
The only parasol I’d ever owned was a bright red one made of paper, bought from a souvenir shop in Southeast Asia, which I displayed in a corner as an ethnic accent to my home décor. I never thought of using it outside.
Parasols were fussy and cumbersome, I thought. How could you do anything with your hands if you were holding one? They were a nuisance, and yet when I went to a baseball game with my mother-in-law in mid-summer, and the hot sun beat down upon us, I was grateful to share the shade of her black umbrella.
Ever conscious of my carbon footprint, I walk to the neighbourhood store with my eco-bags. One sweltering day last summer, I started to reach for my hat on my way out the door, but grabbed an umbrella instead. It really was cooler underneath! And carrying a parasol helps cut down on the new freckles. Today I browsed online for a new parasol. A number of new vendors have popped up in the West offering a variety of designs – Battenburg Lace for outdoor weddings, solid team colours for stadium sports, and more. Could it be that the parasol is about to come into fashion again in my native country? Here in Japan, it has never gone out of style.
From the Public Domain
Suzanne Kamatawas born and raised in Grand Haven, Michigan. She now lives in Japan with her husband and two children. Her short stories, essays, articles and book reviews have appeared in over 100 publications. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize five times, and received a Special Mention in 2006. She is also a two-time winner of the All Nippon Airways/Wingspan Fiction Contest, winner of the Paris Book Festival, and winner of a SCBWI Magazine Merit Award.
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I hear the scents whisper. Familiar fragrances of clove and cinnamon, imbued with spicy notes of pepper and eucalyptus beckon and tease. Elusive murmurs of mysterious oils and herbs tinge the air as I walk along a narrow-paved lane in Old Dhaka, overshadowed by looming walls on either side. I ignore the press of prying eyes and inquisitive bodies that accompany my passage. The call of the scents is irresistible, and I feel strangely unafraid of what lies before the next turn in the path ahead. These were the scents of my childhood — of summer afternoons spent secretly exploring the forbidden depths of my grandmother’s closet, the kaancher almarih[1] where her medicines were stored in shiny glass bottles with peeling labels.
The narrow lane spills into a small courtyard hemmed by buildings on three sides. Everything is closed because it is Friday, the day of prayer in Bangladesh. Peering through grimy windows, I see gigantic iron cauldrons, cavernous kansa kadhais[2], their gold gleaming in glimpses amidst sooty splatters, huge ladles and enormous tongs. Some vessels perch on hand-crafted mud stoves, their sides smoothened and baked by fires. Wooden logs are stacked in the corner along with bulging sacks of coal. Nearby, some large pieces of cloth, perhaps used for straining, are hung out to dry. In the shadowy recesses, shelves stacked with glass bottles glisten with reflected light. It seems almost staged, like a theatrical representation of a medieval kitchen and yet the evidence of daily use is undeniable.
The fourth side of the courtyard has an open doorway. A sudden urge, an inexplicable pull, lures me towards it. I feel I know what lies beyond its brink. Yet how could that be? In this alien city, situated in a land scarred by a brutal Partition, from where does this knowing come? Concentrating on lifting the edge of my saree as I step across the threshold, it takes me a moment to lift my eyes to see what lies ahead. A painting of a pot-bellied man seated cross legged on an asana[3], a sacred thread adorning the vast expanse of his chest, looks solemnly back at me. Before me was the same face I’d seen on countless bottles in that medicine cupboard of my childhood — the same glossy hair, oiled and parted with precision, the same curled moustache, the same narrow bordered white dhoti[4].
The author with her great grandfather’s portrait in Dhaka. Photo Courtesy: Ranu Bhattacharyya
I find myself before a life-size portrait of my great grandfather, Mathura Mohan Chakraborty, founder of Shakti Aushadhalaya, the Ayurvedic pharmacy famed in the streets of Dhaka, Calcutta, Patna, Benaras and Rangoon at the turn of the 19th century. The kitchen behind me was the pharmacy’s karkhana[5] to prepare medicines of his formulations. His portrait hung before the inner sanctum of the temple he had dedicated to the revered Bengali saint, Lokenath Baba. Legend claimed that the mystic had whispered the recipe of the first medicinal formulation to his most faithful disciple — my great grandfather.
Ever since I arrived in Dhaka as an expat, I had been searching for the Shakti Aushadhalaya premises. Everyone knew of the company; yet nobody seemed to know where it was located. I was introduced everywhere as a young scion of the family. And though whispers followed me at gatherings and smiles broadened on hearing I was the great granddaughter of Mathurababu, my questions regarding the whereabouts of the company drew blank stares and confused responses. In horticulture, the word scion, refers to the detached living part of a plant that is cut to be grafted onto another plant. The sundering of this particular scion had been so complete, over so many generations, through such a series of violent events that it seemed my search for the original plant would remain elusive.
It was only through persistent enquiry that I found myself in Swamibagh Road in Old Dhaka where the manufacturing unit of Shakti Aushadhalaya was located. Mathurababu had founded the company in Patuatuli, Dhaka, in 1901. Family lore suggests Lokenath Baba inspired him to venture far from his origins as a schoolteacher in Bikrampur. The ascetic recognised his potential, unusual in those times, as a graduate versed in three languages — Bengali, Sanskrit and English. Starting from humble beginnings in the family kitchen, peddling hair oil and tooth powder in his neighbourhood, Mathurababu’s prescient business acumen saw his enterprise flourish. The company produced and supplied quality Ayurvedic medicines at low prices. Mathurababu also established an Ayurvedic institute, attached to his manufacturing unit to popularise Ayurvedic knowledge. The institute taught Ayurveda and philosophy in Sanskrit. Students were offered free tuition, boarding, and lodging.
Ayurveda, considered the oldest existing health science in the world, is believed to have originated in India 5000 years ago. The journey of Ayurveda from ancient times to its present incarnation is a fascinating story that follows several simultaneous trajectories, embracing geopolitics and history, trade and commerce, science and industry, technology and travel.
It is with a sense of wonder that I encounter my great grandfather’s name in journals and books that describe the history of Ayurveda in India. He was among the earliest entrepreneurs to transition towards production of Ayurvedic drugs for the market. Directly involved in all aspects of his company, Mathurbabu immersed himself in the study of Ayurveda and had an extensive library of rare treatises on ancient Indian medical traditions, including a prized copy of Susruta Sanhita[6].
He noticed that Western medicines advertised their products in newspapers and journals. Following this model, he embraced a similar practice for his own company. An advertisement published in Muhammadi in February 1940 included endorsements from freedom fighter Chittaranjan Das, Lord Lytton, the Viceroy of India, and Lord Ronaldshay, the Governor General of Bengal. In the vintage advertisement, Lord Lytton wrote: “I was very interested to see this remarkable factory which owes its success to the energy and enthusiasm of its proprietor Babu Mathura Mohan Chakravarty B.A. The preparation of indigenous drugs on so large a scale is a very great achievement. The factory appeared to me to be exceedingly well managed and well equipped &c. &c.” In the same advertisement, in Bengali, Chittaranjan Das endorsed that nothing could surpass the production processes for medicines at Shakti Aushadhalaya.
Since the mid-19th century, several eminent leaders of the Indian freedom struggle visited Mathurbabu’s factory in Dhaka. On June 6, 1939, in the company’s visitor’s book, Subhash Chandra Bose wrote, “I visited the Sakti Oushadhalaya[7], Dacca, today and was very kindly shown around the premises. Indigenous medicines are prepared here on a large scale and in accordance with Ayurvedic principles. The institution reflects great credit on Babu Mathura Mohan Chakravarty, whose enterprise has brought Ayurvedic medicines within the reach of the poor. I wish him all success to the institution which he has built up after so much enterprise and hard labour for a long period. The success of Sakti Oushadhalaya, Dacca, means the popularity of Ayurveda throughout the country and this in its turn means the relief of suffering humanity.”
When my parents visited us in Dhaka a year after our arrival, we went back to Swamibagh Road. Our visit included a trip to the shop where the medicines of Shakti Aushadhalaya were sold.
Despite being taken over by the Pakistan government in 1971 and subsequently acquired by a private entrepreneur, the company remains operational in Bangladesh to this day with 37 branches nationwide. Though Mathurababu’s portrait is no longer on the medicine bottles in the shop, the names of the formulations inscribed, are still recognised by my mother. As we browse through the offerings, a crowd begins to form around her, hailed and welcomed as Mathurababu’s direct descendant. Much to my mother’s delight, the crowd guided her to his house, a now derelict mansion hidden in the by-lanes of Old Dhaka.
We entered the property through an ornamented gatehouse that opened to a large courtyard. On one side was the Baithakghar, the public receiving room with the Nat Mandir, the family temple in front of us. On the other side was the majestic mansion with tall columns, topped with ornate capitals. Next to the Nat Mandir was a small doorway that led to a shaded courtyard with a well, meant for the family’s private use. Beyond was yet another courtyard, enclosed with buildings on three sides.
Parts of the ancestral home. Photo Courtesy: Ranu Bhattacharyya
As I climbed the stairs leading to the second floor, I had a feeling of déjà vu. I felt I had been here before through my grandmother’s stories. Her small feet must have climbed these stairs. There was the arched windows she had said she gazed out of, and the vast veranda with colonnades, where she played with her eight siblings. Wandering through the rooms, I hear her voice narrating tales of her childhood — kite races on the terrace, indolent boat rides on the Padma, and the indulgence of choosing sarees from the weavers who came all the way from Benaras.
The house is now home to several families who regard our arrival with wary welcome. “Where are the Italian painted tiles?” I ask eagerly. The story of the tiles imported by her father from Italy were amongst the kaleidoscope of stories that my grandmother had shared with me. Whisperings and murmurings ensue amidst the crowd and then a hefty cupboard was pushed aside to reveal the tiles in all their faded glory.
Slowly it dawns upon me that the silent bottle in my grandmother’s cupboard had encoded stories that belied its seemingly mundane materiality. To uncover these lost stories, I embark on a renewed search for those old medicine bottles of my childhood. Their fragrance lingers at the edges of my memory, offering tantalising glimpses to fragments of knowledge. The sense of smell is our oldest sense. My memories of stories narrated by my grandmother were inextricably connected to the scents locked in that bottle. Would holding the bottle in my hand peel back the layers of my memory, answer some unanswered questions about my grandmother’s roots, help me map the route of our family’s journey? But alas! Those bottles are lost to time. My grandmother’s generation is gone and I search among Mathurababu’s scattered grandchildren and great grandchildren to no avail.
My grandmother left Dhaka in 1936, never to return. Mathurbabu’s house on Calcutta’s Central Street was completed that year, and it is there he moved with his wife and three youngest unwed daughters, including my grandmother. His older son remained in Dhaka to oversee the factory and drug production, while Mathurbabu focused on controlling the distribution from a central office in Calcutta. Till his death in 1942, despite his ailing health and flagging energy, he visited the company’s distribution centres spread across Calcutta everyday, accompanied by his faithful retainer Nathu. Probing for reasons for this abrupt migration, my uncle gave me a solitary clue. He recalled that my great grandfather had felt his family was unsafe in Dhaka. With this obscure clue in hand, I delved into history books for elaboration. I read about the rise of communal tensions in Bengal from the mid-1920’s. The Dhaka riots of 1930 targeted several well-established businessmen and involved loot and arson of their business and personal properties.
In 1947, there was yet another wave of migrations far more existential and grimmer. After the borders were drawn between the newly formed nations of India and Pakistan, the remaining family fled Dhaka overnight, leaving behind the factory, the mansion, in fact, all their material possessions in a land suddenly hostile to their continued habitation. Unable to exercise control over their properties in East Pakistan, there was an initial attempt by Mathurbabu’s heirs to establish a factory in Chandernagore. Without my great grandfather at the helm, this nascent enterprise floundered and ultimately sank. Cut from its moorings in Dhaka, Mathurbabu’s inheritors could not keep the business afloat in India. Slowly his legacy dissipated. The Shakti Aushadhalaya head office in Calcutta’s Beadon Street closed and the shops in Calcutta, Karachi, Kabul, and Colombo lowered their shutters.
Through generations of migration and resettlement, we are left with only scattered memories and fragmented stories. These intangible remains are my inheritance today. These intangibles are bound neither by form, nor by time. Instead, they offer limitless possibilities for exploration, crafting and archiving. Memory, nourished by the repeated telling of stories, provides continuity. These intangible wisps of legacy — a remembered glimpse of a peeling label, the stories heard from my grandmother, the whispered whiff of a familiar fragrance, open a door to the past and invite me to connect it to the present. “Listen to us,” the scents call. “Let us tell you our story.”
Ranu Bhattacharyya, author of The Castle in the Classroom: Story as a Springboard for Early Literacy, Stenhouse, 2010, is an educator and writer who has lived and worked across the world, exploring and archiving narratives that connect people and cultures.
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Tillandsia, A plant with herbal roots. From Public Domain
Once, on a dark snowy day in a strange land, I metamorphosed to an air plant. First, I lost my tongue; then I lost my limbs; My brown trunk swirled into itself. A crusty mossy green veneer over my fern-like body. I lay still, a green cocoon– I am going back.
This chip based plastic card is my DNA barcode. It lets the rootless ausländer reside in this land, to breathe it's AQI certified perfect-for-a walk air for these exact contractual work years. It keeps me safe -- a new sample specimen, well preserved in a laboratory bell jar. A permit -- a hermit immersed in nirvana liquid. I gaze outside through the transparent glass -- everything magnified, everything distorted. An enticing pool of sunlight at the far end of the lab, beyond the windows, there are patches of green. I look for familiar faces, long lost cousins and neighbours -- Is that the rabbit-ear-leafed* herb? (the long wanderings on monsoon mornings to cure the little one’s cough) the small-flowery-leafed* one? (the herbal decoction for feverish nights) the crawl-on-the-ground-palm* and down-the-stream-gooseberry*? (a folk song, a ritual, the cure for yellow-fever) The patches of green remained as aloof as they were. They denied my identification procedure – “Wir bist nicht deine ‘name-place-animal-thing’, we are google lens-approved rational scientific botanic beings, we were featured in Systema Naturae and we are alien to your wobble-gobble”.
I swayed away and stared at the supermarket herbs section for hours. Familiar fragrances -- dried and powdered and renamed. And the authentic all-rounder -- “Indische Curry-Englisch style” Black pepper from my backyard would disown me for this affair. I reside, breathe in and breathe out the AQI verified air. I reside, observe and wait, in this permitted residence of mine. To live -- to live and thrive one should go back or grow roots. (And then, herbs are no longer a supermarket section they are an image of your soul in green, a fibrous embrace that warms your blood.)
*Literal translations of medicinal herbs from author’s mother tongue
Lakshmi Chithra is a PhD student at the University of Augsburg, Germany. When academic life allows she welcomes her writer-ego to take over. She is from Kerala and is a lover of the monsoon, the Arabian Sea and Chai.
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Several years ago, probably around the 1990s, the critic Nilanjana S Roy had defined the current crop of Indian Writing in English novelists as a ‘Doon School-St. Stephens’ conspiracy’. It was an interesting but true observation since the writers who were popular at that time were all products of these elite institutions and were quite adept at imitating western culture and simultaneously wrote in a style that was quite polished and urban. Upamanyu Chatterjee, belonging to this category, and at present a retired Indian civil servant, had shot into fame way back in 1988 by writing a definitive urban Indian coming-of-age story with his first novel, English August: An Indian Story. Several years later in 2000, he won the Sahitya Akademi Award for Mammaries of a Welfare State. His seventh novel Villany focused on a new class of post-liberalisation, westernised urban Indians who were hitherto ignored in the regional as well as the English fiction of India. This meticulously crafted literary thriller, a riveting story of crime and retribution, now stands at the other end of the spectrum when we read Chatterjee’s latest novel Lorenzo Searches for the Meaning of Life (2024). Narrating the life-story of an Italian Benedictine monk Lorenzo Senesi, who is on a spiritual quest to find the meaning in life, this meticulously detailed story is based on the life of Italian Fabrizio Senesi, an acquaintance of Chatterjee in Sri Lanka for the last few years, who turned out to be “a good friend” of his and who is now a European bureaucrat and a Development expert residing in Phnom Penh leading a successful professional as well as a blissful family life. As Chatterjee states in his foreword, “It is a true story, that is to say, like many true stories, it is a work of fiction.”
Divided into nine chapters, the locale of his story moves from Italy to London and then to Bangladesh. This is how things begin. One summer morning in 1977, nineteen-year-old Lorenzo Senesi of Aquilina, Italy, drives his Vespa motor-scooter into a Fiat and breaks his forearm. It keeps him in bed for a month, and his boggled mind thinks of unfamiliar things: where he has come from, where he is going, and how to find out more about where he ought to go. When he recovers, he enrolls for a course in physiotherapy. He also joins a prayer group, and visits Praglia Abbey, a Benedictine monastery in the foothills outside Padua. Detailing this part of his life we are told how this monastery will become his home for ten years, its isolation and discipline the anchors of his life. The first three chapters are full of quotes from the teachings of Saint Benedictine, the different vocations that Lorenzo follows, and give us details of monastic life as led in different Catholic institutions spread throughout Italy.
In the fourth chapter titled ‘The Visitor at the Abbey’, Lorenzo listens to a talk by one Luca Rossini, a Benedictine monk native of Bergamo, who since 1976 has been staying a little over seven thousand kilometers to the east in a place called Phulbari Para near the town of Khulna in Bangladesh where he runs an ashram as a dependent of the Praglia monastery. So, after eight long years of the introspective silence of a monastery, Lorenzo decides to go to Khulna. But before that he must spend eight months in England attending English-to-Speakers of-Other-Languages courses at an Academy there, till Luca would come to pick him up and take him to Bangladesh.
Upon arriving in Dhaka, the cacophony and different aspects of an alien culture that Lorenzo faces is described very beautifully by Chatterjee in great details. He starts wearing a lungi, eating with the fingers of his right hand, washing his clothes in a public tank along with female strangers, studying Bengali in the library with Luca, and tries to acclimatise with the place, the weather, and the people as quickly as possible. Apart from praying seven times a day, he also spends a lot of time decorating the walls of the chapel with different tempura paintings.
After some time, he visits another ashram called Rishilpi run by Enzo and Laura, an Italian missionary couple in Satkhira, some sixty kilometers away. Seeing the multifarious social upliftment activities that are being undertaken at their place, Lorenzo is intrigued by the idea of worming one’s way into a community and working for its betterment from within. Though remaining a Benedictine at heart, he decides to quit the Order and continue his search for some purpose to his life.
At Rishilpi he joins as Deputy Director, Health Services, and opens a sorely needed physiotherapy clinic that would attempt to instill a little meaning in the lives of the disabled and would educate the rest in matters of hygiene, sanitation, medical care and physical well-being. After surviving quite comfortably without money for the past eleven years and living a strict, disciplined monastic life, Lorenzo gradually undergoes a change when he starts interacting with people from all strata of society. Concealing his religion within his heart, he goes on working with a missionary zeal and after some time realises that even working with women felt marvellous.
In due course, he even falls in love and proposes to Dipti, the Headmistress of the same institution, and thus an ex-priest goes on to marry an ex-nun, both remaining devout Catholics forever. They spend the six happiest years of their lives at Rishilpi, till Lorenzo realises it is also life that is holding him back. With children, his responsibilities increase, he cannot go his own way. He needs money to survive and is called upon more and more often to lecture trainees in Dhaka at the Centre for the Rehabilitation of the Paralysed. In this manner, he slowly broadens his acquaintance with the developing world, and becomes the ideal person to build a bridge between the first world donors and third world recipients.
In the brief concluding chapter of the book, Chatterjee tells us that if one ended Lorenzo’s story here, it is because, even though twenty-nine years have passed since his marriage and he and Dipti are alive and well in Phnom-Penh, he has not in essential changed and he is still in spirit, Benedictine. But what is most interesting is the fact that “he still continues, though, to live his life anti-clockwise, as it were, for (as we have seen) after passing his youth in search of direction for his spirit, he turned outward to the community – and to the joys and responsibilities of the domestic life – only in his mid-thirties; and it was not till his early forties that he properly set about addressing the matter of money. It is – broadly – the trajectory of the typical human life but lived in reverse.”
Chatterjee’s tour-de-force is his storytelling and imaginative prose combined with his trademark wit and attention to detail. In the acknowledgement section he thanks his friend Fabrizio Senesi for providing him innumerable clarifications about life in Italy and in Bangladesh. The long list of books that Chatterjee read and mentioned in the end provides ample proof that he undertook his research rather seriously and this is clearly reflected in the intricate details that he provides of places and people throughout the novel. The book is not a page-turner, and one must read it rather seriously to savour the meticulous effort that Chatterjee made to provide us a fascinating tale about an ordinary human being who finds that a life of service to God is enough, and that it is not enough.
Landslide at Wayanad: Photo Courtesy: Countercurrents
On the morning of July 30, a huge landslide occurred at Mundakkai, in the mountainous district of Wayanad, Kerala, India. 282 people have been confirmed dead and many hundreds are still missing. It is the worst landslide in the history of Kerala and perhaps one of the worst in the history of India. A whole village was washed away in the flood and the flow of earth and rocks. A government higher secondary school and a bridge also got washed away. The rescue operations are still going on.
According to data released by India Meteorological Department Wayanad district received as much as 7% of its entire seasonal rainfall in 24 hours (from Monday morning to Tuesday morning). The Mundakkai region received 572 mm of rainfall in the past 48 hours prior to the landslide. This clearly points to an extreme climate change-induced disaster.
Experts like Madhav Gadgil are saying that it was due to the environmental degradation that the disaster occurred. The fact of the matter is that the landslide happened inside a deep forest which was not affected by human intervention.
The disaster area belongs to the Western Ghats, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, which is a very fragile ecologically sensitive area. This is also a region prone to frequent landslides. The Western Ghats starting from the Southern tip of the Indian subcontinent to the Konkan region is home to about 50 million people. In the parts belonging Kerala alone at least 5 million people live. Human habitation has caused a lot of ecological damage to the region. After the liberalisation of Indian economy, tourism has become a major industry in the region. Lots of tourist resorts have come up in the last 30 years, leading to stone quarrying in a major way. The stones from Western Ghats are used to build new roads, bridges, houses even in the lower land area and even the Adani port in Vizhinjam, Trivandrum.
If you look at the history of the Kerala part of Western Ghats, it was the Britishers who started huge tea, coffee and rubber plantations starting from late 19th century. It has caused huge environmental degradation in the region. Tata and Harrison Malayalam are the big planters now in the region. They behave like feudal lords, giving paltry sums in lease to the government and even encroach government lands to plant monocrops. The landslide affected Mundakkai also is a tea estate area owned by Harrison Malayalam company.
The farmers migrated to Wayanad and other parts of the Western Ghats of Kerala during the independence period due to the acute famine of that time. The government also promoted the migration of farmers. It is the descendants of these farmers who are killed by the landslide. They are the unsuspecting victims of unchecked development model and climate change caused by the Global North.
No place can withstand the kind of rain that was received in the landslide area. Yes, of course, wrong development model and environmental degradation has contributed to the disaster but it is not the root cause. It is the climate change caused by global warming for which the Global North is primarily responsible.
Present CO2 level in the atmosphere is 421 parts per million (ppm), which is similar to the CO2 level of Pliocene Epoch was a period in Earth’s history that lasted from 5.333 million to 2.58 million years ago. During the Pliocene epoch, CO2 levels in the Earth’s atmosphere were between 380 and 420 (ppm) during the warmest period. The global mean sea level during the early Pliocene Epoch was around 17.5 ± 6.4 meters which means that we are locked in for a sea level rise of at least 6.5 meters, 17 meters being the upper limit. Also CO2 levels in the atmosphere are rising 2.9 ppm per annum. This also means that we are moving into an unchartered territory in the climate crisis.
Most of our coastal cities will be under water very soon. Kerala which has one third of the landmass very close to the sea will be submerged under water. As the ocean warms more and more drastic climate events like Mundakkai will be a regular phenomenon. As Himalayan glaciers melt, the rivers originating from the Himalayas will dry up. Most of North India will be a desert. As the permafrost melts in the Arctic, Methane which is 28 times more potent than Carbon Dioxide will be released into the atmosphere and we will lead to a feedback loop, meaning more and more greenhouse gases will be released into the atmosphere without any human intervention. Another dangerous scenario is that as the permafrost melts, viruses and bacteria buried millions of years ago will be released into the atmosphere causing pandemics like COVID. Forest fires will be a regular occurrence in the dry seasons.
Do you think that climate change would be just weather events? No. Not at all. It will spread into social relations and human relations. We might see water wars, famines, and even civil wars in the name of nationality, ethnicity, language etc. Do you think that the present population of 8 billion people will survive the coming climate catastrophe? I think it will not. Many researchers are saying that we are in the middle of the Sixth Great Extinction. The sixth great extinction, also known as the Holocene extinction, is an ongoing mass extinction event that is caused by human activity. It is thought to be the sixth mass extinction event in Earth’s history, following the Ordovician–Silurian, Late Devonian, Permian–Triassic, Triassic–Jurassic, and Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction events.
Courtesy: Countercurrents
In the beginning of the 20th Century, the human population was only 2 Billion. Now we are 8 Billion. The huge spike in population growth that we saw recently is an aberration in human history. Nature will correct itself. That means we are going to see millions or even billions of deaths, if not in our lifetime, definitely in the lifetime of our children and our grandchildren. That means thousands of Mundakkai events will play in a loop in front of our eyes! What is most devastating is that there would be some of our dear and near ones too.
What happened in Mundakkai, Wayanad is not an aberration. It’s the new normal. It’s the beginning!
Binu Mathew is the Editor of Countercurrents.org. He can be reached at editor@countercurrents.org. This article was first published in Countercurrents.org.
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Disclaimer: The opinions expressed are solely that of the author and not of Borderless Journal.
As the author of Jorasanko and Daughters of Jorasanko, which map the life of the greatest visionaries of the world, Aruna Chakravarti gives us a brief summation of the genius of Rabindranath Tagore.
Young Tagore in 1870sTagore in 1886Photos from Public Domain
Rabindranath Tagore was born in 1861 in the throes of the Bengal Renaissance. A unique movement which took place during the latter half of the nineteenth century, it saw the germination and the slow stirring into life of a social and religious consciousness and the emergence of a middle class that idealised British rule and used its support to usher in considerable social change. The revolutionising of values and the social, political and literary awakening that followed gradually came to encompass the whole of India.
The Bengal Renaissance, like its European counterpart, swung precariously for a while, between two worlds. One old, decrepit and dying by degrees — the other struggling to be born. A host of great personalities emerged during this time; household names to this day.
All were protagonists engaged in battle. Some to keep alive and perpetuate the old; some to hasten its death and bring about the birth of the new. Needless to say, it was the latter who prevailed. Bengal saw an upsurge of activity, the like of which had never been seen before, in fields as diverse from each other as politics and religion to literature and the performing arts. In this, Bengal’s close contact with the British served as a catalyst.
Yet the same movement, in its latter years, saw the first stirrings of resentment against British domination. India’s acceptance of English education and her faith in the scientific discoveries of the West was countered by a new revivalism. An assertion of political independence and the growth of a nationalist consciousness. A need for introspection became the call of the hour. Rabindranath was among the first to articulate this need. In an essay, entitled Byadhi-o-pratikar[1]written in the early years of the twentieth century Rabindranath expressed his doubts regarding the changed Indian psyche wrought by the West. Reflecting on the French Revolution, the efforts to abolish slavery and the upsurge of literary activity in Europe he wrote: “Western civilisation seemed to proclaim an inclusiveness for all humanity irrespective of race and colour. We were spell bound by Europe. We contrasted the generosity of that civilisation with the narrow mindedness of our own and applauded the West.” He goes on to say, however, that the scales had fallen from the nation’s eyes. The supposedly Western ideal had failed Indians. European education and adoption of its values hadn’t helped them to achieve equality with the white race.
Thus, the movement came full circle. Rabindranath had not been part of it from its inception. Yet, if one were to look for and identify a single persona in whom the entire Bengal Renaissance may be said to be epitomised, it would, without doubt, be the persona of Rabindranath Tagore.
Poet, playwright, novelist, painter, composer, educationist, nationalist and internationalist, Rabindranath was not only a myriad minded genius but a Renaissance Man in the truest sense of the word. In fact, the dawn or awakening of Rabindranath’s creative inspiration is synonymous with the awakening of a whole nation.
The cultural identity of India and the place in it of religion, caste, class and gender which much of Rabindranath’s prose and poetry explores, continue to retain their relevance even today, a hundred years later, in a post-colonial time frame. His novels offer masterly insights and analyses of the complexities of Indian life with its teeming contradictions; its rootedness in tradition as well its ability to assimilate and accommodate change.
Rabindranath Tagore and Pratibha Devi (his neice) performing in his dance-drama, Valmiki-Pratibha (The Genius of Valmiki) 1881. Photo from Public Domain
Rabindranath, however, is best known as a poet. His poetry, drawn from ancient cultural memory as well as the immediate present, is in a class of its own. For there is a third dimension to it. He not only wrote of what he saw and remembered but what he saw only in his mind — a world that lay a vast space away from reality. ” There are two kinds of reality in the world,” Rabindranath said[2] of his paintings. “One of them is true; the other truer.” He could have said this of his poetry too. The real and surreal quality of his images in the vast span of his poems and lyrics; their indefinable nuances and evocative power are comparable to the works of the great Impressionists.
Interestingly, Rabindranath arrived at the canvas through his poetry. The calligraphic erasures and corrections with which he embellished many of his poems became sketches of a special kind. “I try to make my corrections dance,” he said[3] once, “connect them in a rhythmic relationship and transform accumulation into adornment.”
Later, in the last thirteen years of his life he threw himself into frenzied bouts of painting leaving behind more than two thousand and five hundred art works. Strange, haunting faces with eyes that look deep into one’s soul; surreal landscapes the like of which were never seen this side of the horizon; trees and flowers painted in violent colours that erupt from the artist’s palette in volcanic bursts — his paintings, as an artist once said, reflect “emotions recollected more in turmoil than in tranquillity.”
Art of Rabindranath Tagore. Photos from Public Domain
Yet, though famed the world over for his poetry and painting, it is as a music maker that Rabindranath has stayed entrenched in the hearts of his own people. His songs, loved and sung by generations of Bengalis, range in theme from celebrations of nature and yearning for freedom to love of God and Man. They convey the poet’s profound philosophy of life, his deep faith in humanity and his sensitive exploration of the Universe, often touching on the quest of the unattainable. Rabindranath once said that, though he could not predict how future generations would receive the rest of his work, he was confident that his songs would live. The increasing popularity of Rabindra Sangeet, both in India and abroad, bears ample testimony to the fact that his prophecy was based on a certainty born out of self-knowledge. Vast and varied though his genius was — music was its mainspring. He wrote of his songs: “I feel as if music wells up from within some unconscious depth of my mind; that is why it has a certain completeness.”
[2] Quoted from Tagore’s Galpa Salpa (Conversations) by Soumendranath Bandopadhyay in Expressionism and Rabindranath
[3] Quoted in An Artist in Life by Niharranjan Ray
Aruna Chakravartihas been the principal of a prestigious women’s college of Delhi University for ten years. She is also a well-known academic, creative writer and translator with fourteen published books on record. Her novels Jorasanko, Daughters of Jorasanko, The Inheritors, Suralakshmi Villa have sold widely and received rave reviews. The Mendicant Prince and her short story collection, Through a Looking Glass, are her most recent books. She has also received awards such as the Vaitalik Award, Sahitya Akademi Award and Sarat Puraskar for her translations.
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As the newspaper forecasts rain, and a dozen weather applications predict a shower, I cancel my plan to visit an expensive cafe and reminisce about the June rains from two decades ago The afternoon gets a dusky look, Swallows the sun and belches out clouds, Transforms the hot loo into a cool breeze I find myself waiting expectantly for The rain that will hopefully wash away the burdens brought by an early summer, A summer that stole a blissful winter, From children who wouldn’t know much about leather jackets and warm gloves The wilted flowers look like they would never bloom again with vibrant hues The tenderness of rain passes by swiftly with soft pressed feet, and I don’t even notice it amidst the tangles of a busy day Unforgiving glare of the sun cuts through the curtains, and I realise that this month too, the paper boats of hope may not sail
Mitra Samal is a writer and IT Consultant with a passion for both Technology and Literature. She mostly writes poems and short stories. Her works have been published in Poetry Society (India), Muse India, Borderless Journal, Madras Courier, The Chakkar, and Kitaab among others. She is also an avid reader and a Toastmaster who loves to speak her heart out. She can be found as @am_mitrasamal on Instagram.
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Title: Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder
Author: Salman Rushdie
Publisher: Penguin Random House
More than thirty years ago, a fatwa had been declared by Ayatollah Khomeini on the famous writer Salman Rushdie. The charge of blasphemy was labelled after the publication of The Satanic Verses, and since then the author has been living in asylum at different places because he was not safe in his own country. When it was assumed that the incident had died its natural death, the simmering vendetta and violence upsurged suddenly on 12th of August 2022, when Rushdie had gone to participate in a week of events at the Chautauqua Institution in upstate New York titled “More Than Shelter: Redefining the American Home”, and an unidentified man attempted to murder him on stage with a knife.
This horrific act of violence shook the entire world. No one hoped that they would ever be able to read a single line written by the author once again. He was a totally lost case. Now, one-and-a-half years after the incident, and in unforgettable detail, Rushdie writes this first-person memoir Knife where he relives the traumatic events of that day and its aftermath, as well as his journey towards physical recovery. His healing was made possible by the love and support of his present African American wife Eliza, his family, his army of doctors and physical therapists, and his readers worldwide.
Dedicating the book to the men and women who saved his life, the text is neatly divided into two parts, each containing four sections. The first half of the book titled “The Angel of Death” primarily revolves around ‘despair’, whereas the second part, “The Angel of Life,” narrates a vision of ‘hope’ and optimism and Rushdie’s attempt to return to normalcy once again with his indomitable spirit to fight on against all odds.
The opening chapter called ‘Knife’ begins with the description of a beautiful August morning in detail and how the apparent tranquility was shattered when suddenly violence appeared in the form of an unidentified man who rushed at him on the open stage and stabbed him indiscriminately. Totally flabbergasted, Rushdie obviously didn’t know what to do. So, he narrates the rest of the incidents in the form of a collage, with bits of memory pieced together with other eyewitness and news reports and tells us how that morning he “experienced both the worst and the best of human nature, almost simultaneously.” Though the incident of his attempted murder dragged “that” novel back into the narrative of scandal, Rushdie declares that till date he still felt proud of having written The Satanic Verses.
Apart from the day-by-day narration of how things shaped up after the stabbing incident, three things stand out very clearly in this memoir. First is of course the detailed description of his entire eighteen-day long stay initially at the extreme-trauma ward of the hospital and later at the rehab centre titled ‘Hamot’. Though in extreme pain we are told how doing a few simple everyday things for himself lifted his spirits greatly. So, apart from the rehab of the body, there was also the rehab of the mind and spirit. Spending more than six weeks in two hospitals, he could return to the world and so slowly he started feeling optimistic again.
The chapter called ‘Homecoming’ begins with his leaving the hospital at 3 A.M. as quietly as possible and going back home at that unearthly hour to evade any watching eyes.
Emotionally moved, even though he had lost one eye permanently, he felt “100 percent better and healthier immediately. I was home.”
The incident of homecoming is once again closely related to the second important issue during his convalescence –the love, care and bonding with his present wife Eliza. Dedicating a total chapter titled “Eliza”, Rushdie gives us details of how he met the African American poet Rachel Eliza Griffiths entirely unknown to him, through the eminent American writer, Norman Mailer, and how his friendship grew stronger day by day, leading to a secret marriage based on the realisation that it was a relationship not of competitiveness but of total mutual support. They showed that even in this attention-addicted time, it was still possible for two people to lead, pretty openly, a happily private life till the knife incident changed everything. He tells us how the poetical sensibilities of his wife lent extra support to him in such trying times.
The third most significant aspect of this memoir is the way Rushdie devotes an entire chapter addressed to his assassin –“The A”. And it is really at its imaginative best. In it he has recorded a detailed conversation that never actually occurred between himself and “a man I met for only twenty-seven seconds of my life”. After bringing in several intertextual references about other writers and situations, about other murders being committed in the lives of different personalities, in the fourth and final session of his imaginative conversation, Rushdie states, “You don’t know me. You’ll never know me.” After the imagined conversation is over, he no longer has the energy to imagine the assassin, just as he never had the ability to imagine him. He feels that the purgation is complete, and this chapter of his life is closed once and for all.
Interestingly after half a year of nothingness, Rushdie realises that his writing juices had indeed started to flow again. During his sleepless nights at the rehab, he often thought a lot about The Knife as an idea. Talking about different occasions and purposes when the knife is used, he realized that the knife is basically a tool and acquires meaning from the use we make of it. It is morally neutral, and it is the misuse of knives that is immoral. Then he states that language too was a knife for him, and he would use it to fight back. Here he made a resolution that instead of remaining as a mere victim, he would answer violence with art – “Hello, world, we were saying. We’re back, and after our encounter with hatred, we’re celebrating the survival of love. After the angel of death, the angel of life.” But it was hard for him to write about post-traumatic stress disorder at any time especially when his hand felt like it was “inside a glove” and “the eye… is an absence with an immensely powerful presence.” Returning to New York after a ten-day visit to London, he therefore decided to spend the second chance of his life on just love and work. Since several Muslim entities were still celebrating his pitiable condition, he thought to make it clear to his readers that his worldview about God had not changed a bit and so he declares — “My godlessness remains intact. That isn’t going to change in this second-chance life.”
In the final section ‘Closure?’ Rushdie writes that his own anger faded, and it felt trivial when set beside the anger of the planet. He understood that three things had happened that had helped him on his journey towards coming to terms with what had happened – namely — the passage of time, the therapy, and ultimately the writing of this book. Moving along with time, he felt he was no longer certain that he wanted, or needed, to confront and address his assassin in open court and that the “Samuel Beckett moment” no longer seemed significant at all. This is where art and love overcame all barriers. He has successfully moved on and there was no need to look backwards once again.
Written a few years ago, Rushdie’s Joseph Anton: A Memoir narrated the story of how he was living a disturbed life under the pseudonym of Joseph Anton. But that memoir did not create much impact upon the readers, whereas Knife has brought back the powerful and erudite Rushdie as he has risen phoenix-like from the ashes and revealed his erudition without being parochial. Ordinary readers often shy away from his work as it is full of intertextuality and cross-references. But even those who find his writing to be too high-brow will have no problem in understanding the ‘free-associative way’ in which the mind of this writer works even today. The book is a page-turner no doubt and has brought back the popularity of Salman Rushdie once again. The simplistic yet very appealing cover of the book is an added attraction too.
Somdatta Mandal, critic and translator, is a former Professor of English from Visva-Bharati University, Santiniketan, India.
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They tell you one must learn to let go to remain sane. What they miss out telling is how much it takes to forget and let go people who make a whole city in your life. A city that is not home still, the only home you know; A home that consumes and yet the only place that sustains you; A sustenance that holds but offers no release. When you have lived long in such a city, your hopes are entangled with the unyielding forces of knots difficult to untie.
THE OFFERING
I despair when things don’t go as I planned. I forget to breathe, and lament the spaces around for smothering me. I forget time is as mercurial as the fancies of my mind. I forget it only takes as much warmth as that bestowed by a weak winter sun to step out and begin from the beginning.
Resilience makes itself every day appear from unexpected places. We are shown in abundance if we stop to notice amidst the muddle beget by ordinary ordeals. A shoot emerging from the stem of a withered plant in your balcony, long after you thought it had died because you forgot to water it for months, tells you life clutches tightly after all. And pushes forth with might through everything it is denied.
Rakhi Dalal writes from a small city in Haryana, India. Her work has appeared in Kitaab, Scroll, Borderless Journal, Nether Quarterly, Aainanagar, Hakara Journal, Bound, Parcham and Usawa Literary Review.
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Titles: The Poisoner of Bengal/The Prince and the Poisoner
Author: Dan Morrison
Publishers: Juggernaut (India)/ The History Press (UK)
November1933:HowrahStation
For most of the year, Calcutta is a city of steam, a purgatory of sweaty shirt-backs, fogged spectacles, and dampened décolletage. A place for melting. In summer the cart horses pull their wagons bent low under the weight of the sun, nostrils brushing hooves, eyes without hope, like survivors of a high desert massacre. The streets are ‘the desolate earth of some volcanic valley’, where stevedores nap on pavements in the shade of merchant houses, deaf to the music of clinking ice and whirring fans behind the shuttered windows above.
The hot season gives way to monsoon and, for a while, Calcuttans take relief in the lightning-charged air, the moody day- time sky, and swaying trees that carpet the street with wet leaves, until the monotony of downpour and confinement drives them to misery. The cars of the rich lie stalled in the downpour, their bonnets enveloped in steam, while city trams scrape along the tracks. Then the heat returns, wetter this time, to torment again.
Each winter there comes an unexpected reprieve from the furious summer and the monsoon’s biblical flooding. For a few fleeting months, the brow remains dry for much of each day, the mind refreshingly clear. It is a season of enjoyment, of shopping for Kashmiri shawls and attending the races. Their memories of the recently passed Puja holidays still fresh, residents begin decking the avenues in red and gold in anticipation of Christmas. With the season’s cool nights and determined merriment, to breathe becomes, at last, a pleasure.
Winter is a gift, providing a forgiving interval in which, sur- rounded by goodwill and a merciful breeze, even the most determined man might pause to reconsider the murderous urges born of a more oppressive season.
Or so you would think.
On 26 November 1933, the mercury in the former capital of the British Raj peaked at a temperate 28°C, with just a spot of rain and seasonally low humidity. On Chowringhee Road, the colonial quarter’s posh main drag, managers at the white- columned Grand Hotel awaited the arrival of the Arab-American bandleader Herbert Flemming and his International Rhythm Aces for an extended engagement of exotic jazz numbers. Such was Flemming’s popularity that the Grand had provided his band with suites overlooking Calcutta’s majestic, lordly, central Maidan with its generous lawns and arcing pathways, as well as a platoon of servants including cooks, bearers, valets, a housekeeper, and a pair of taciturn Gurkha guardsmen armed with their signature curved kukri machetes. Calcuttans, Flemming later recalled, ‘were fond lovers of jazz music’. A mile south of the Grand, just off Park Street, John Abriani’s Six, featuring the dimple-chinned South African Al Bowlly, were midway through a two-year stand entertaining well-heeled and well-connected audiences at the stylish Saturday Club.
The city was full of diversions.
Despite the differences in culture and climate, if an Englishman were to look at the empire’s second city through just the right lens, he might sometimes be reminded of London. The glimmer- ing of the Chowringhee streetlights ‘calls back to many the similar reflection from the Embankment to be witnessed in the Thames’, one chronicler wrote. Calcutta’s cinemas and restaurants were no less stuffed with patrons than those in London or New York, even if police had recently shuttered the nightly cabaret acts that were common in popular European eateries, and even if the Great Depression could now be felt lapping at India’s shores, leaving a worrisome slick of unemployment in its wake.
With a million and a half people, a thriving port, and as the former seat of government for a nation stretching from the plains of Afghanistan to the Burma frontier, Calcutta was a thrumming engine of politics, culture, commerce – and crime. Detectives had just corralled a gang of looters for making off with a small fortune in gold idols and jewellery – worth £500,000 today – from a Hindu temple dedicated to the goddess Kali. In the unpaved, unlit countryside, families lived in fear of an ‘orgy’ of abductions in which young, disaffected wives were manipulated into deserting their husbands, carried away in the dead of night by boat or on horseback, and forced into lives of sexual bondage.
Every day, it seemed, another boy or girl from a ‘good’ middle- class family was arrested with bomb-making materials, counterfeit rupees, or nationalist literature. Each month seemed to bring another assassination attempt targeting high officials of the Raj. The bloodshed, and growing public support for it, was disturbing proof that Britain had lost the Indian middle class – if it had ever had them.
Non-violence was far from a universal creed among Indians yearning to expel the English, but it had mass support thanks to the moral authority of Mohandas Gandhi. Gandhi, the ascetic spiritual leader whose campaigns of civil disobedience had galvanised tens of millions, was then touring central India, and trying to balance the social aspirations of India’s untouchables with the virulent opposition of orthodox Hindus – a tightrope that neither he nor his movement would ever manage to cross.
And from his palatial family seat at Allahabad, the decidedly non-ascetic Jawaharlal Nehru, the energetic general secretary of the Indian National Congress, issued a broadside condemning his country’s Hindu and Muslim hardliners as saboteurs to the cause of a free and secular India. Nehru had already spent more than 1,200 days behind bars for his pro-independence speeches and organising. Soon the son of one of India’s most prominent would again return to the custody of His Majesty’s Government, this time in Calcutta, accused of sedition.
It was in this thriving metropolis, the booming heart of the world’s mightiest empire, that, shortly after two o’clock in the afternoon on that last Sunday in November, well below the radar of world events, a young, slim aristocrat threaded his way through a crowd of turbaned porters, frantic passengers, and sweating ticket collectors at Howrah, British India’s busiest railway station.
He had less than eight days to live.
About the Book:
A crowded train platform. A painful jolt to the arm. A mysterious fever. And a fortune in the balance. Welcome to a Calcutta murder so diabolical in planning and so cold in execution that it made headlines from London to Sydney to New York.
Amarendra Chandra Pandey, 22, was the scion of a prominent zamindari family, a model son, and heir to half the Pakur Raj estate. Benoyendra Chandra Pandey, 32, was his rebellious, hardpartying halfbrother – and heir to the other half. Their dispute became the germ for a crime that, with its elements of science, sex, and cinema, sent shockwaves across the British Raj.
Working his way through archives and libraries on three continents, Dan Morrison has dug deep into trial records, police files, witness testimonies, and newspaper clippings to investigate what he calls ‘the oldest of crimes, fratricide, executed with utterly modern tools’. He expertly plots every twist and turn of this repelling yet riveting story –right up to the killer’s cinematic last stand.
About the Author:
Dan Morrison is a regular contributor to The New York Times, Guardian, BBC News and the San Francisco Chronicle. He is the author of The Black Nile (Viking US, 2010), an account of his voyage from Lake Victoria to Rosetta, through Uganda, Sudan and Egypt. Having lived in India for five years, he currently splits his time between his native Brooklyn, Ireland and Chennai.
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Borderless 