Tag: India

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Musings

In the Grip of Violence

Ratnottama Sengupta muses on the ongoing wars and violence as acts of terror and gazes back to an incident in the past which resulted in a powerful Bengali poem by Tarik Sujat that she has translated here

The world is in the grip of violence, Rabindranath Tagore wrote on March 5, 1927, sitting in the abode of peace – Santiniketan. Full 97 years later, the world is still in the grip of violence?

It’s Gaza today. Ukraine yesterday. Afghanistan some days ago. Sri Lanka not so long ago. Sometimes it is Bosnia. At other times, it’s Vietnam. Lands far flung and near adorn themselves with blood-red mark of hatred. Religion. Self-seeking dictators. Communism. Global lust for power. No matter what is at stake, the pawn is an innocent life. Always. A woman. An elder. An unborn child…

Tagore wrote Hingshay unmatto prithibi [1]– “The world is in the grip of violence as a prayer to the Almighty. The delirium is leading to conflicts, cruel and ceaseless… Crooked is the world today, tangled its philosophy. No bond is sacred.” And the anguish of such a state of affairs? It led even the Eternal Bard of Bengal to pray for a new birth of ‘Him of Boundless Life.’ “Save them,” Tagore had prayed to the Serene, “raise your eternal voice of hope” so that “Love’s lotus, with its inexhaustible store of nectar” may open its petals in His light. In His immeasurable mercy. To wipe away all dark stains from the heart of the continents.

In vain he prayed.

“Forgive them!” Jesus said, for “They know not what they do!” And what did the soldiers do? They gambled for his clothes by throwing dice! (Luke 23:34)

Forgive them? “Have you forgiven those who vitiated the atmosphere and snuffed out light for innocent lives?” Tagore asked the Almighty, in ‘Proshno (Question)‘. Have you forgiven those who deal hate in the secret hours of night? Have you embraced with love those who murder the helpless in broad daylight under the cover of ideology? Don’t you wince when a pregnant Bilkis[2] is gang-raped? Why do you shed silent tears when elected rulers choke people’s voice with furtive use of power?

And like his Prayer, Tagore’s ‘Question’ too has remained unanswered. And dumb sit the messiahs when men with mistaken notion of mission kill, maim, mutilate hostages who become mere numbers in newspaper headlines – until a new dateline wipes it off our collective memory.  Thus, once again, the world was shaken by brutalities carried out in the name of God, in Dhaka’s elite neighbourhood, Gulshan.

On July 1, 2016, before the Cinderella hour struck, five militants entered the Holey Artisan Bakery with bombs, machetes, pistols, and opened fire on men and women, from Italy, Japan, India, Bangladesh. Sunrise. Sunset.. Sunrise… unsuccessfully the police tried to secure the hostages. An elite force of the Bangla Army had to raid to put an end to what BBC News described as “the deadliest Islamist attack in Bangladesh”. Meanwhile? The toll had risen to 29 lives, totaling 17 foreigners, three locals, two policemen, five gunmen, and two bakery staff who were trying to earn their daily bread!

Since Gulshan is home to many embassies and high commissions in the capital of the secular nation, the news stirred up the world in no time. And prayers poured in – over cellphones, on Facebook, television and newspapers too.  Prayers of wives for their husbands. Prayers of mothers for their sons. Prayers of a niece for her aunt. Prayers of American friends for their Indian batch mate. But once again, prayers went unanswered…

Among those who did not survive to tell the story was Simona Monti of Italy who worked in textiles. Then 33 years of age, Simona was soon to go to her home an hour away from Rome, to deliver the child she had nursed in her womb for five months. But Michelangelo too did not live to breathe in the world vitiated by hatred. When the news reached her brother, he prayed his Simona’s bloodshed would make this “a more just and brotherly world.”

His prayer, too, remains unanswered.

But poets and other men of conscience did not remain silent. Within days of the incident Tarik Sujat wrote Janmer aagei aami mrityu ke korechhi alingan  (Even before my birth I embraced death, July 6, 2016). No diatribe in his words, but the muted cry of an unborn being jolts us. That cry left me with a tear in one eye and fire in the other…

On my very first reading I was touched, I was moved, I fell silent. The pensive mood of the embryonic life turned me reflective. Anger, rage, fury was not the answer to hostility, loathing, abhorrence, I realised. So will you, as you go through the poem that was handed out in Magliano Sabino when Simona’s hometown prayed for her eternal rest.

I Embraced Death Before Birth 

Even before my birth I embraced death.
I have no nation, no speech,
No stock of my own.
No distinction between Holy-Unholy,
Sin and Virtue, Sacred or Cursed.
Having seen the ghastly face of life 
I've swallowed my last drop of tear...
My first breath did not pollute 
The environs of your earth.
My last breath was the first gift 
Of this planet to me!

Maa!
You were my only playhouse,
My school, and my coffin.
I had yet to open my eyes -
And still I saw 
The sharp nails of executioner
Ripping apart my naval cord.
My ears were yet to hear sound,
Still I could catch bells 
That summon lads to schools...
The obscure sound echoed 
Through churches, temples, 
And minarets of masjids
Until, slowly, it fell silent...

My first bed was my last.
My mother's womb was 
My only home 
In the unseen world.
On that nook too, darkness descended. 
Floating down the river of blood 
I groped for my umbilical cord 
To keep me afloat...
My tiny fingers, my soft palm
Could find nothing to clutch.

In that Dance of Death 
My unseeing eyes witnessed
Koran, Bible, Gita, Tripitak
Bobbing in receding blood.
In the achromatic gloom
Of my chamber 
I got no chance to learn 
A single mark of piety!

Still...
I embraced death before I was born. 
My mother's womb is my 
Grave, my coffin, my pyre.
The world of humans 
Is enveloped in fire -
A few droplets of my meagre body 
Does not quench its thirst!

(Translated from Tarik Sujat’s Bengali poem by Ratnottama Sengupta)

Why has this portrayal of a tormented soul found voice in French, German, Swedish, Italian, English…? Why has it been translated into 17 languages? In the answer blowing in the wind lies hope for mankind. For, the answer is: Not every man is created in the image of Lucifer.  That is why, when Giulia Benedetti learnt that she will never again see her aunt Nadia Benedetti, that “she will not talk, will not comment on fashion, will not sing together again…” she wrote on Facebook: “Do not forget. Do not lose her memory. Do not let crazy people massacre. Do not let them win…”

And I immerse my voice in the Bard’s to say: “Let life come to the souls that are dead…” And I pray, bring harmony, bring rhythm, bring melody in our lives, O Serene! Wipe away every dark cloud from the world yet to dawn!

[1] The world is crazed with greed

[2] Bilkis Bano was gangraped in 2002 https://thewire.in/rights/in-her-own-words-what-bilkis-bano-went-through-in-2002

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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Categories
Review

Maya Nagari: Stories of Bombay-Mumbai

Book Review by Somdatta Mandal

 Title: Maya Nagari: Bombay-Mumbai A City in Stories

Editors: Shanta Gokhale, Jerry Pinto

Publisher: Speaking Tiger Books

The very mention of the name Mumbai (or Bombay) brings to our minds a great city in India where the thriving metropolis grows at a rapid speed because people not only flock here from different parts of the country to make quick bucks and survive against all odds, but also because the film industry of Bollywood has also established it as a city of dreams, one that never sleeps and instead creates a mirage-of-sorts — an illusion, rightly labelled by the editors of this anthology as ‘Maya Nagari’. Edited by Shanta Gokhale and Jerry Pinto, this book, comprising twenty-one short stories about Mumbai takes the road less taken to create a non-uniform image of the metropolis. In tune with its multicultural and multilingual nature, we have stories about the city that is a sea of people and speaks at least a dozen languages. There are stories translated from Marathi, Urdu, Gujarati, Tamil, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, and stories written originally in English. Among the writers are legends and new voices—Baburao Bagul, Ismat Chughtai, Pu La Deshpande, Ambai,Urmila Pawar, Mohan Rakesh, Saadat Hasan Manto, Ambai, Jayant Kaikini, Bhupen Khakhar, Shripad Narayan Pendse, Manasi, Krishan Chander, Udayan Thakker, Cyrus Mistry, Vilas Sarang, Jayant Pawar, Tejaswini Apte-Rahm and Anuradha Kumar.

As Jerry Pinto clearly states in the introduction, the stories can be read as we like, we can begin with the first story or the last, or any story in between. The observant reader might notice that he and the other editor Shanta Gokhale have deliberately chosen not to organise the material according to chronology, or geography. This is partly because they believe that the city lives in several time zones and spaces at once, as does India, but also because there is something essentially chaotic about its nature. So, he says, “the stories echo and bounce off each other, they do not collide, but there is a Brownian motion to these patterns” and he hopes to let the readers find it. Here, Mumbai is stripped of its twinkle; it is deglamourised to reveal how it’s the quotidian that lends the city its character—warmth and hostility alike and as inhabitants of the city the editors call ‘home,’ they hope a narrative will emerge.

In the twenty-one stories of this collection, there is the city that labours in the mills and streets, and the city that sips and nibbles in five-star lounges, the city of Ganapati, Haji Malang and the Virgin Mary. What binds the stories together is ‘human muscle’ – the desperate attempts of men and women of all classes and castes to survive in this heartless city amid all odds.

The stories are of different lengths and written in different narrative styles. Of the five or six stories translated by Shanta Gokhale herself from Marathi, one is struck by the excessive length of the so called ‘short’ stories. The very first one “Oh! The Joy of Devotion” by Jayant Pawar, forty-five pages in length, narrates in detail about the Ganapati festival and how it is related to the fate of the local people. Pu La Deshpande’s story “A Cultural Moment is Born”, set in the 1940s, tells stories of people living in chawls [slums] and how they spend their cultural days. Another very long story translated by Gokhale called “The Ramsharan Story” tells us about the rise and fall of a bus conductor by the name of Ramsharan who turns out to become a union leader. Baburao Bagul’s “Woman of the Street”, written originally in Marathi and translated by Gokhale again, tells the story of Girija, a sex-worker trying to collect money to cure her son in the village. The story ends on a disturbing note, as it reaffirms the relativity of success.

Once again, Krishan Chander’s story “The Children of Dadar Bridge” translated from Hindustani by Jerry Pinto is so long that it qualifies to be called a sort of novella. In this powerful story God comes to earth to a chawl and offers food to the first-person narrator. Then, impersonating as a small and innocent child, and along with the child narrator, he moves around different places in the city to witness its activities firsthand — we get to know about behind the scene affairs that take place in the film studios, about satta[1] dens, about bribery, local dons who arm-twist every new hawker to carry on their business after receiving their weekly cut money and more. In “Civic Duty and Physics Practicals”, Malayalam writer Manasi reveals the different experiences one comes across living in a society defined by power equations. Issues of hooliganism, superstition, illegal colonies, corruption, intimidation and violence are explored in a single story where the narrator is struggling, for days, with blaring speakers at a wedding nearby, even as her son tries hard to prepare for his upcoming exams. The story soon takes a dark turn where power trumps over consideration for fellow human beings.

A very powerful story written by Ambai in Tamil called “Kala Ghora Chowk” deals with issues of Marxist ideology, trade unions and the fate of a raped woman called Rosa. Anuradha Kumar’s “Neera Joshi’s Unfinished Book” tells us the life story of one woman who “made the city” and the perennial problems of displaced mill workers when the closed mills give way to high-rise buildings. Some of the stories are of course written in a lighter vein, though they also depict different problems related to city life. As the title of Vilas Sarang’s story “An Afternoon Among the Rocks” suggests, it narrates the plight of a couple trying to make love in the deserted seashore and how they get hijacked by a smuggler! In “The Flat on the Fifth Floor”, Mohan Rakesh writes about two sisters who meet the narrator after one failed love affair. A moving picture of the closing down of cinema halls in Mumbai comes out very beautifully in the Kannada story “Opera House” by Jayant Kaikini, especially narrating the plight of one of the sweepers working there when the declaration of permanent closure is pasted everywhere. Tejaswini Apte-Rahm’s “Mili” tells the story of a man who meets his ex-girlfriend after five years.

Though it is not possible to give the details of each and every story included in this anthology in this review, one must mention some of the stories that were originally written in English. Cyrus Mistry’s “Percy” about a young and lonely Parsi boy is so compelling that it was even made into a Gujarati motion-picture. “House Cleaning” by Jerry Pinto tells the story of a woman cleaner and his son, who talks about the reality of street dwellers. Eunice de Souza’s “Rina of Queen’s Diamonds” is not a straightforward narration at all but offers a collage of different vignettes of life in Bombay.

Though most of the stories portray the seamier side of life and in some ways de-glamourise Mumbai, at the same time they also portray how human resilience can combat all sorts of odds, and the city can be revealed only through shared experiences. Thus, each of the twenty-one stories in this collection tells a different tale of Mumbai, Bombay, Momoi, Bambai, Manbai and many others. As the editors have rightly pointed out at the beginning of their introduction, “You cannot catch a city in words. You cannot catch a city at all.”  They felt that “it is not meant to be caught…this city resists even more because it was not designed at all; it just happened and it keeps on happening.” Thus, the four-hundred plus pages of this anthology Maya-Nagari remains a book to be treasured and read now at leisure and also at any time in the future.

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[1] Betting or gambling dens

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

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Categories
Essay

From Place to Place

By Renee Melchert Thorpe

Formative years can imply simply a growing body or the development of a complex outlook on life.   My mother, born Mary Ann Hostetler in Pontiac, Illinois, lived her formative years in colonial India.   Here is what I know about two formative migrations that made her who she was.  She was a quick study, a keen photographer, and resourceful traveler, but she also had an uncanny sensitivity to the need of people to feel welcome anyplace.

She had a deeply fond memory of arriving with her family in West Bengal when she was a mere 2 years old.  On the dock of Calcutta, waiting to greet the Hostetlers, was another Mennonite missionary, a man who would escort the family to the mission compound.  Dispatched aloft by her mother, little Mary Ann absolutely “sailed into his arms”, feeling sincere love and comfort from this steady and attentive new man.  He would sometimes take her for walks in the farms and villages, letting her reach out safely.  There was nothing to fear in this new place, and she was allowed to build her confidence.

Crates and luggage would have been handled by porters, a first lesson in India’s system of echelons, privileges and defenses, which even Anabaptists would adopt. India would embrace Mary Ann with her cacophony and vibrancy.  There was always the conservative life at home and in the classroom, but she could escape into the chowrasta[1], eat street food, and read the discarded letters such food was wrapped in.

From the age of 5, she boarded at a dreary school in the extraordinary altitude of Darjeeling, wintered in the rural outskirts of Calcutta, spoke street dialect like an urchin, and learned to draw from memory a Mercator map of the world showing the borders of all the British colonies.  During school break back in her parents’ mission compound, she and her brother might pass time picking fat ticks from the tender hide of a little bullock her parents kept, but her favourite activity in those warm days was to climb an old mango tree which stood just out of range of her mother’s call and read a book.  Any book.  She was never without one.

She and her family made two returns to the US, the first in 1936 for a Mission Board furlough, and again in 1944, when she had graduated from high school and the war, closing in first on the Straits Settlements, and soon after striking the Calcutta docks, was too close for comfort. 

For that 1936 furlough, the family stayed a few days in Calcutta’s Salvation Army hotel while her mother shopped for items to bring back with them to the States.  Her list would have included a tablecloth and sheeting, cotton yardage, British wool, perhaps a few sandalwood items. These things would not have been exotic souvenirs but rather, practical items for their year ahead enduring America’s Great Depression.  They were, after all, the family of a pastor, disinclined to appear exceptional or proud.

Through their Salvation Army hotel window, my mother gazed down at the Fairlawn Hotel next door, where well-heeled families relaxed with tea service on white rattan furniture, children scattered gleefully on the vast greensward, late afternoon birdsong above, and a distant Victrola warbling from inside the forbidden edifice.  She longed to experience such pleasures, and decades later, she did finally stay a few nights at the Fairlawn in 1992, with me, as I had chosen the hotel without knowing its gnawing maneuvers deep in my mother’s soul.

Checking in, we met the flamboyant and zaftig British redhead in charge of the place, my mother’s very age, daughter of the owner from those last days of the Raj.  That woman could scream gutter Bengali at the top of her lungs, and the next moment turn to my mother and politely ask about some little thing important only to little girls from a faraway garden city.  I watched as these two disparate women embraced and laughed together.    

The day she and her own mother arrived in the Los Angeles port of San Pedro, she was astonished to disembark and hear sweaty stevedores yelling and chattering in English.  This told her more about America and what was purportedly its classless society, than any adult’s own description could have.  She thrilled at this discovery.  She was unconcerned about fitting in with new school mates, got along well with them, even though they whispered amongst themselves about “her brogue.”

She never told me anything about her trip back to India, a year later.  But she would have sailed again, stuffed into Second Class.  I imagine her trying to lose her parents, availing herself of the ship’s library.  But I don’t know.

She graduated from Mount Hermon School as the “Best Girl,” although if you visit there, you can discover that the clueless new headmaster from her graduation year neglected to have the big silver trophy emblazoned with her name for the class of 1944.  Her brother’s is there with the year 1943 on the school’s “Best Boy” cup.  But he simply forgot to put in the engraving order when it was Mary Ann Hostetler’s honor.  My mother harbored few resentments, but this was a sore point, as she had worked very hard at academics.

I have never seen Bombay Harbour, where she finally left India as a young woman, but this is what she has told me.  It was wartime, 1944, but she was full of hope and thrilled to be out of that grim and cold school in the clouds.   

Mary Ann and her family boarded a passenger liner repurposed to carry a large number of troops.  A little sister had been born in India, making the family five, now billeted in what was once a First Class cabin, as were other American families leaving India.  Of course, no monogrammed towels or French milled soaps awaited them, but she relished the luxury of portholes and her own bunk.

The ship left Victoria Dock in April of 1944, mere days before the catastrophic accident of the munitions-laden SS Fort Stikine accidental fire and explosion, which destroyed every vessel in the harbor.  Wartime secrecy held successfully for decades, and my mother never learned of the near miss until many years after the war was over. 

All kinds of security measures were taken, even though the atmosphere on the crowded ship was convivial and relaxed. No flags flew.  And they sailed a zigzag course as a precaution against torpedoes.  They were in a convoy with two other soldier and civilian transports, but never saw the other ships except when in harbour.  One of those harbours was Melbourne, where boarded dozens of Australian war brides, and every last one of those young women, my mother said, had a screaming infant.  Those women shared second class cabins.  Two mother/baby pairs had bunks and one pair slept on their cabin floor.

Everyone aboard seemed to be flirting with the soldiers and welcoming distraction.  My mother and her new girlfriends, and even a few of the young Australian mothers, were nurturing chaste romances and enjoying their youth.  It was so much fun, and so stress-free, that my mother looked down at her wrist one day, where there had flourished for many months a large filiform wart, resembling some sort of fleshy agave plant; it had vanished. 

They went through the Panama Canal, a surprise for everyone aboard as well as for their stateside families.  All had been told by the war department that the convoy would land in San Francisco.  Instead, they went to Boston.  Plans were upset, lives were disrupted, and thousands of families who had made their way to California were now faced with crossing the wide country to meet their loved ones.  Typical instance, my mother said, of the war and the US government inflicting the population with whimsy, wasted efforts, or red tape in the name of national security.

To glimpse at last the American flag flying in Boston harbour gave my mother an indescribable feeling of safety and delight.  Worries carefully buried were truly gone.  The war would end in a little over a year’s time.  She had the rest of her life ahead of her.  

The USA was a safe harbour for a few years of university before she was off again, this time to Japan.  Decades later, with an empty nest, she and my father chose Italy.   Migrations were just part of living, and wherever she went, if she met another person displaced by whatever reason, she had a new best friend.  I knew them, too.  The Finnish dry cleaner, the Salvadorian woman who answered the phone at the Honda repair shop, or the Japanese lady who ran an art supply store: these people came from away, and so had she.

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[1] An intersection of four roads.

Renee Melchert Thorpe has fiction and nonfiction work has appeared in several Asian journals and magazines.

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Categories
Poetry

In Exile

By Rinku Dutta 

“In exile, you are an uprooted tree. Naked.
 
Leafless.
Bloomless. 
Barren.”
 
She drops words, like tears,
Into the urn of our silence.
 
“Look!” she thrusts forward a tattooed wrist,
“In exile, you are a ghost tree: 
No cicadas mating on your bark. No birds nesting,
No birdlings vying to fly. No squirrels scurrying.
 
No soil.
 
Hugging your roots, no solacing 
Moisture.” 
 
“In exile, you are a fish flung from water,”
She rolls up her sleeve and reveals 
A tattoo of a fish, its skeleton.
 
“In exile, you have been picked to the bone
 By Grief -- 
                 Grief has gouged out your pink flesh.
You have no skin. 
                                 You are left with spare spine
And bones;
                Bones, hanging from your backbone.”
 
Turning, she pulls up her shirt: “But see!
Here’s my real secret.”
 
Nestling in the curve of her back,
Another tattooed fish;
A whole fish this one, shimmering silver.
“See! She’s alive! She’s swimming up the river.” 
Says Hanan (whose name means the warm-hearted one)
 “Like salmon, 
She’s battling upstream.
She’ll return one day to her spawning ground.
Trust me. She will. 
Never doubt that. Ever.”

Rinku Dutta is an educator writing about her experiences. Exploring the Roots of Harmony: India and Pakistan Conflict Transformation is a monograph of a selection of her essays. Her poems have been published in RIC Journal.  

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Categories
Editorial

Though I Sang in my Chains like the Sea…

      Time held me green and dying
    Though I sang in my chains like the sea.

Fern Hill by Dylan Thomas (1914-1953)

Perhaps when Dylan Thomas wrote these lines, he did not know how relevant they would sound in context of the world as it is with so many young dying in wars, more than seven decades after he passed on. No poet does. Neither did he. As the world observes Dylan Thomas Day today — the day his play, Under the Milkwood, was read on stage in New York a few months before he died in 1953 — we have a part humorous poem as tribute to the poet and his play by Stuart McFarlane and a tribute from our own Welsh poet, Rhys Hughes, describing a fey incident around Thomas in prose leading up to a poem.

May seems to be a month when we celebrate birthdays of many writers, Tagore, Nazrul and Ruskin Bond. Tagore’s birthday was in the early part of May in 1861 and we celebrated with a special edition on him. Bond, who turns a grand ninety this year, continues to dazzle his readers with fantastic writings from the hills, narratives which reflect the joie de vivre of existence, of compassion and of love for humanity and most importantly his own world view. His books have the rare quality of being infused with an incredible sense of humour and his unique ability to make fun of himself and laugh with all of us. 

Nazrul, on the other hand, dreamt, hoped and wrote for an ideal world in the last century. The commonality among all these writers, seemingly so diverse in their outlooks and styles, is the affection they express for humanity. Celebrating the writings of Nazrul, we have one of his fiery speeches translated from Bengali by Radha Chakravarty and a review of her Selected Essays: Kazi Nazrul Islam by Somdatta Mandal. An essay from Niaz Zaman dwells on the feminist side of Nazrul while bringing in Begum Roquiah. Zaman has also shared translations of his poetry. Professor Fakrul Alam, who had earlier translated Nazrul’s iconic ‘Bidrohi or Rebel‘, has given us a beautiful rendition of his song ‘Projapoti or Butterfly’ in English.  Also in translation, is a poem by Tagore on the process of writing poetry. Balochi poetry by Manzur Bismil on human nature has been rendered into English by Fazal Baloch and yet another poem from Korean to English by Ilwha Choi.

Reflecting on the concept of a paradise is poetry from Michael Burch. Issues like climate, women, humanity, mourning, aging and more have been addressed in poetry by Shamik Banerjee, Ryan Quinn Flanagan, Milan Mondal, Kirpal Singh, Craig Kirchner, George Freek, Michael Lee Johnson and many more. Hughes brings in a dollop of humour with his response to a signpost in verse. Irony is woven into our non-fiction section by Devraj Singh Kalsi’s musing on writers and assailants. Ravi Shankar explores his passion for computers in a light vein. Snigdha Agrawal gives us a poignant story about a young child from the less privileged classes in India. Suzanne Kamata writes to tell us about the environment friendly Green Day in Japan.

Ratnottama Sengupta this month converses with a dancer who tries to build bridges with the tinkling of her bells, Sohini Roychowdhury. Gita Viswanthan travels to Khiva in Uzbekistan, historically located on the Silk Route, with words and camera.  An essay on Akbar Barakzai by Hazran Rahim Dad and another looking into literature around maladies by Satyarth Pandita add zest to our non-fiction section. Though these seem to be a heterogeneous collection of themes, they are all tied together with the underlying idea of creating links to build towards a better future.

Our stories travel from Malaysia to France and India. Farouk Gulsara sets his in futuristic Malaysia, again exploring the theme of utopia as did his earlier musing. Paul Mirabile creates a story where a child tries to create his own idyllic paradise while Kalsi writes of fiction centring around a property tussle. The book reviews feature a couple of non-fiction. Other than Kazi Nazrul Islam’s essays, Bhaskar Parichha reviews Will Cockrell’s Everest, Inc. The Renegades and Rogues Who Built an Industry at the Top of the World. Ajanta Paul discusses Bitan Chakraborty’s The Blight and Seven Short Stories, translated from Bengali by Malati Mukherjee. Malashri Lal has written on Lakshmi Kannan’s Nadistuti: Poems, poems dedicated to Jayanta Mahapatra who the poet reflects lives on with his verses. And that is so true, considering this issue is full of poets who continue in our lives eternally because of their words. That is why perhaps, we recreate their lives as has Aruna Chakravarti in Jorasanko.

In focus this time is a writer whose prose is almost akin to poetry, Rajat Chaudhuri. A proponent of solarpunk, his novel, Spellcasters, takes us to fictitious cities modelled on Delhi and Kolkata. In his interview, Chaudhuri tells us: “The path to utopia is not necessarily through dystopia. We can start hoping and acting today before things get really bad. Which is the locus of the whole solarpunk movement with which I am closely associated as an editor and creator…”

On that note, I would like to end with a couple of lines from Nazrul, who reiterates how the old gives way to new in Proloyullash (The Frenzy of Destruction, translated by Alam): “Why fear destruction? / It’s the gateway to creation!” Will destruction be the turning point for creation of a new world? And should the destruction be of human constructs that hurt humanity (like wars and weapons) or of humanity and the planet Earth? As the solarpunk movement emphasises, we need to act to move towards a better world. And how would one act? Perhaps, by getting in touch with the best in themselves and using it to act for the betterment of humankind? These are all points to ponder… if you have any ideas that need a forum on such themes, do share with us.

We have more content which has not been woven into this piece for the sheer variety of themes they encompass. Do pause by our content’s page and browse on all our pieces.

With warm thanks to our wonderful team at Borderless — especially Sohana Manzoor for her fabulous art — I would like to express gratitude to all our contributors, without who we could not create this journal. We would also like to thank our readers for making it worth our while to write — for all of our words look to be read, savoured and mulled, and maybe, some will evolve into treasured wines.

Thank you all.

Mitali Chakravarty

borderlessjournal.com

Click here to access the content’s page for the May, 2024 Issue

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Categories
Review

Nazrul and His World View

Book Review by Somdatta Mandal

Title: Selected Essays: Kazi Nazrul Islam

Author: Kazi Nazrul Islam

Translator: Radha Chakravarty

Publisher: Penguin Random House

The Bengali poet, Kazi Nazrul Islam (1899-1976), is widely remembered as the fiery iconoclast who fought against the structures of oppression and orthodoxy. The iconic bidrohi or ‘rebel poet’ of Bengal, Nazrul continues to be loved for his songs and poetry that were aimed at arousing the rebellious spirit of both Hindus and Muslims alike. But what of his prose, his journalism, and his politics? Selected Essays reveals to us the extraordinary versatility of Nazrul as a writer, thinker, and activist. Addressing subjects as diverse as social reform, politics, communal harmony, environmental concerns, education, aesthetics, ethics, and philosophy, this rich collection showcases Nazrul’s dynamic vision and unique use of language as an instrument of change. The essays chart his evolving consciousness as a thinker, writer, and activist, offering vivid glimpses of the ethos of his times, his relationships with leading figures such as Tagore and Gandhi, and his active engagement with social, political, and cultural processes.

Of the forty-one essays selected here, (three undated), the first thirteen are all written in different places all in the year 1920. That was the year Nazrul returned to Bengal after serving in Karachi during World War I as a member of the Bengal regiment of the colonial British army. Reacting to the Jallianwallah Bagh massacre he writes, “May the Dyer monument never allow us to forget Dyer’s memory” because on that occasion Hindus and Muslims embraced each other and wept together as brothers. They shared the same agony as children of the same womb. In ‘Strike’, he praises the social awareness that has swept among the ranks of the labouring class and believes that the “protest is not just a rebellion, but the death-bite of the suffering, moribund class”. When some migrants were fired upon after a clash with the armed police at a place called Kanchagarhi, he asked in ‘Who is Responsible for the Killing of Migrants?’, whether anyone can ever tolerate such injustice towards humanity, conscience, self-respect and independence and states that they are no longer going to passively accept such assaults. ‘Awakening Our Neglected Power’ contends that democracy or people’s power cannot be established in our country because of the oppression inflicted by the Bhadra[1] community.

There are several essays in which Nazrul speaks about the state of National Education, he envisages ‘A National University’, and in a very powerful piece that he wrote from Presidency Jail in Kolkata on 7 January 1923, titled ‘Deposition of a Political Prisoner’ he reveals his self-confidence:

“If anything has struck me as unjust, I have described it as injustice, described oppression as oppression, named falsehoods as falsehood. …For that endless mockery, insults, humiliation and assaults have been rained on me, from within my home and beyond. But nothing whatsoever has intimidated me into dishonouring my own truth or my own Lord. No temptation has overpowered me enough to compromise my integrity or to diminish the immense self-satisfaction gleaned through my own endeavours…. I repeat, I have no fear, no sorrow. I am the child of the elixir of immortality.”

Nazrul grew up in a traditional religious environment, yet in his writings he drew upon both Hindu and Islamic sources, and expressed a faith that transcended the limits of any single religion. In several essays, he harps on the problems of Hindu-Muslim amity and enmity and warns us about “this hideous business of purity of touch and untouchability”. He wants only humans to live in India as brothers and wants everyone to be wary of the terrible deceptions created by both the religions.

In the essay ‘Temple and Mosque‘, he states that both parties have the same leader, and his real name is Shaitan, the Devil. Written in response to the communal riots that broke out in Kolkata on 2 April 1926, he feels that those very same places of worship that ought to have been bridges between heaven and earth are instead causing harm to humanity today, and so those temples and mosques should be broken down. In another essay titled ‘Hindu-Muslim’, penned the same year, Nazrul talks about the question of an internal tail in human beings. He says, “There’s no telling what animal excitement lured the human mind to discover a substitute for tails in the beard or tiki[2]!” He further elaborates:

“Both Hindu and Muslim ways of life can be tolerated, but their faith in tikitwa and daritwa, the orthodox ways of tiki and beard, is not to be borne, for both instigate violence and killing. Tikitwa is not Hindutwa, it is perhaps punditwa, the way of the pundit! Likewise, the beard, too, is not Islamic, it is mullatwa, the way of the mullah. These two types of hair tufts, marked with religious dogma, are precisely the reason for all the conflict and hair-splitting we witness today!”

Though it is not possible to discuss all the different editorials, book reviews, and political pieces that are included in this collection, one must mention at least two essays that speak about literary issues as well. In 1932, Nazrul wrote for Patrika (subsequently reprinted in Bulbul the following year), an interesting piece titled ‘World Literature Today’. In it he states that there are two kinds of writers present in the world today and their different tendencies have assumed immense proportions.

“Ranged on both sides are great war heroes, champion charioteers of the battlefield. On one side are the dreamers, such as Noguchi, Yeats and Rabindranath, and on the other, Gorky, Johan Bojer, Bernard Shaw, Benavente and their ilk.”

But Nazrul’s ire in being ostracized comes out clearly in ‘A Great Man’s Love Is a Sandbank’ (1927), where he criticises the high-handedness of Rabindranath Tagore. He begins by telling us how he was a prisoner of state at the Alipore Central Jail when he was informed by the assistant jailor that Tagore had recognised Nazrul’s talent and dedicated his play Basanta to him. The other political prisoners present there had laughed at him not in joy but in incredulity. For him, the blessing turned into a curse. His very close friends and state prisoners also turned away from him. He realised what massive internal damage this outward gain had caused him. Busy with his political agenda, he didn’t have the time to sit and meditate as advised several times by Tagore. So Nazrul writes, “I find that the brighter my countenance shines in this glory, the darker some other famous poets’ faces seem to appear.” He mentions that he had grown accustomed to police torture but when literary personages begin to torment one, their brutality knows no bounds. “Alas, O youthful new literature!” His crime was that young people celebrated his work. He laments further,

“That Kabiguru[3], revered by both parties like the grandsire Bhisma, should assent to this plot of killing Abhimanyu, is the greatest sorrow of our times. …As for me, I have discarded that topi–pyjama—sherwani–beard look[4], only out of fear of being mocked as a ‘Mia Saheb’. But still there is no respite for me…. Now we get the feeling that the Rabindranath of today is not the same Rabindranath we have always known.”

That the trajectories and beliefs of Tagore and Nazrul went in the opposite direction is well- known. In the essay, Nazrul then further continues his complaints against Tagore. He questions whether they have been considered as his enemies, simply because they didn’t go to him frequently. Also, since the goddess of wealth blessed him, Kabiguru did not know what dire poverty the new writers had to struggle against, languishing in conditions of starvation or semi-starvation. So, he humbly requests Kabiguru not to sprinkle salt on their wounds by mocking the impoverishment that is their singular affliction, for that is one form of heartlessness that they cannot tolerate.

Of the last three essays written in 1960, namely, ‘The Science of Life’(where men “are surrounded by all sorts of travails and sufferings, and many of them cannot be alleviated”), ‘A Point to Ponder’(where the nation faces an immense problem regarding the dispute about the instructions and procedure for the worship of the mother, the Bharatmata, our Mother India) and in ‘What We Need Today’, Nazrul speaks of the necessity of a “vast tumult in India”. Making his readers aware of the vast duplicity and trickery in the name of religion, he warns that unless one avoids the baseness of being subjugated by an external power, there is no prospect of heaven for us, only the grotesqueness of hell. He wants the kalboishakhi, the wild summer storm, to “approach in all its fury, rearing his head like a hooded serpent swimming in the unchecked torrents of an ocean of blood” and sweep everything away.

Before concluding one should also make a few comments on the translation. As a veteran translator, Radha Chakravarty, has successfully managed to transcreate some very difficult Bengali idioms, cultural nuances and analogies that Nazrul used in some of his essays. As she admitted in the Introduction, “[T]ranslating Nazrul’s prose proved to be a challenge, as demanding as it was exhilarating. …The endeavour demanded experiment and creativity rather than mechanical lexical ability and involved some difficult choices…Literal translation has been avoided, with greater focus on the sense, emotion, intellectual import, rhetorical features and stylistic particularities of the Bengali source texts.” She further adds that the present translations stemmed from a desire to bring Nazrul’s essays to a contemporary audience in South Asia and the rest of the world, to draw attention to his literary achievement as well as his significance as a writer, thinker, activist, and visionary. Though a lot of research and translation projects on Nazrul has been going on in Bangladesh for quite some time (where he holds the status of National Poet), in India, especially in West Bengal, the response is still rather lukewarm. Hence this volume is strongly recommended as a collector’s item.

[1] Literally decent but here indicates the bourgeoisie.

[2] A tuft of hair at the back of a tonsured head 

[3] Tagore

[4] Cap-pyajama-longcoat – these with a beard were associated with the genteel muslim look – the look of the Mia Saheb

CLICK HERE TO READ THE EXCERPT

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

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Categories
Slices from Life

Sundays are Only for Some…

By Snigdha Agrawal

He is at the door at 10 am on a Sunday.  Sleepy eyed. But all smiles.  A small frame for a twelve-year-old.  Neatly dressed in jeans and a t-shirt, sneakers on his feet, a size too big.  I presume he must have risen early to accompany his parents to their workplace.  A well brought-up lad, as is obvious from his body language, and impeccable manners.  So, unlike other kids I cross in the lift daily, studying in private schools where the annual fees runs into six digits.  

“Good morning, Ma’am,” he says, leaning against the door, while I hand out the laundered clothes for ironing.  I start counting the clothes.  He beats me to it.  One…two…three, right up to twenty-seven.  Bent on his knees he folds the clothes methodically and bundles them in the faded bedsheet, kept specifically for this purpose.  Heaving the bundle on his shoulder, he leaves, assuring the clothes will be ironed and returned by the evening.  Once again repeating the number twenty-seven and the cost of ironing per piece at Rs.7/-, making it obvious, that he is aware of the prevailing rates.  Homework done well. I see him off at the service lift, with many such bundles picked up from other apartments, piled into a trolley, crudely fashioned after luggage trolleys bellboys use in hotels for moving visitor luggage from floor to floor.

It sets me thinking.  Is he ironing the clothes himself?  It can’t be.  How could he ever lift that heavy charcoal iron box[1]?  And if so, does that make it grossly wrong and unacceptable — surmounting to child labour…?

Ironing for livlihood in India
Traditional coal iron used in India

I went to the basement of our apartment complex to search for the designated space allocated to the ‘ironing persons’.  Rent-free with power points, rarely used.  Comfortable with the traditional method. I find him sitting on a plastic stool, jotting down the number of clothes against the apartment number and the amount payable. That puts my fears to rest. 

At the workstation, Manorama, his mother, is busy preparing for the day’s ironing.  A makeshift ironing board of plywood sheets, salvaged from throwaway pieces, assembled to resemble a cabinet, with a tabletop and storage below.  Where was Bhaskar, I asked.  The little guy is quick to respond.  “Sundays… my mother and I take over from my father.  All week, he is busy from 8 am to 8 pm, returning home tired, and ready to hit the bed.” 

I was touched, to say the least.  Here was a caring twelve-year-old boy who was helping out his parents on a Sunday.  Collecting and delivering clothes from apartments, doing the book-keeping without any complaints.  Leaning against the wall, are his school books.  Presumably to catch up on weekend assignments.  To my question “Do you like reading?” his face lights up like a thousand-watt bulb.  His smile with a few missing teeth, stretches from ear to ear.  Okay…that solved a problem I needed to deal with. I decided to surprise him with books that were lying in the house, keepsakes from my childhood. Time to part with them. 

Around 7 pm, he arrives with my bundle, unknots the bedsheet, opening the four folds and proceeds to count the clothes, for his satisfaction and mine.  I can hear his sigh of relief.  Numbers match.  Contents are the same as was handed over.  He is surprised as I hand over the books.  “These are for you to read…I’m sure you will understand and enjoy the stories.  If you don’t, come over whenever you have spare time. I’ll explain.” The smile on his face is priceless.

“So, Mahesh what did your mother cook for breakfast and lunch today?” I ask, worried about his nutritional needs.  

I see the look of confusion on his face, wondering why this old lady was asking so many questions.  Pauses.  He seems to be churning something over in his mind and then says, “Sundays I make breakfast and allow my parents to sleep longer. Today I made lemon poha[2] and filter coffee.  Amma made curd rice for lunch.”   I was moved enough to want to give him a big hug.  Not sure, how he would respond to getting physical, instead gave him a bag of candies.  He was hesitant to accept it, till I pushed it into his little hands.  His pupils dilated and the spark in his eyes said the unsaid.  Admittedly, I was curious. I needed to engage him in conversation to know more about his plans for the future.

To my question, “Do you plan to take over your father’s trade once you are of age?” Pat is his emphatic reply:  “No…Ma’am! I am working hard to secure the qualifying marks for admission into an engineering college to study Computer Science and work in an office.  My parents are saving for my education.  Part of the earnings from ‘ironing clothes’ are kept aside for this purpose.  That is why I help out on Sundays and school vacations.” 

“What happens to your father’s business then?”

“Oh! It has been agreed that it will be discontinued, once I can provide for them.  Another ten years. My grandfather passed away early because of the occupational hazards associated with this profession.  I don’t want my parents to meet the same fate. They deserve a better life.”  That tears me up.  So much wisdom in that little head.  

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[1] In India, there are people who make a living of ironing clothes for the more affluent. They normally use heavy charcoal irons and not electric irons… they could set up a stall under a porch or under a tree…

[2] flattened rice with spices/ flavouring

Snigdha Agrawal (nee Banerjee) is a published author of four books and a regular contributor to anthologies published in India and overseas.  A septuagenarian, she writes in all genres of poetry, prose, short stories and travelogues.

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Categories
Poetry

Poetry by Stephen Philip Druce

Stephen Philip Druce
ADVICE IS FREE BECAUSE IT'S WORTHLESS

Go on a skiing holiday -- it will do you good.

You're a novice that doesn't walk with any
measure of style or grace, so fly off an
icy mountain at seventy miles an hour on
a pair on sticks,

olympic skiers get injured but you're exempt
from such physical injury because you're a
manager of a launderette,

ride a motorbike, it's the freest way to travel,
free to leave the road and land on your head
three fields away,

bungee jump! the ten second thrill 
is worth the trade off - whiplash and
long term spinal damage,

fly on an aircraft as often as you can,
you have more chance of getting struck
by lightning than crashing in an airplane.
Ignore the fact that unless the machine is
in perfect working order you could nosedive
from thirty thousand feet into an ocean bed
that is so deep the creatures there have teeth
shaped like tennis rackets,

undergo plastic surgery!

Put your blind faith in a bogus surgeon who
may consequently render you with half a chin
and no nostrils. Forget the post-op catastrophe,
okay so you entrusted a surgeon with the credentials
that extended to that of a pottery teacher -- he
fled with your cash and now you breathe through
your ears, but give it a go.

Ocean surf!

Take advice from the veteran surfers who lost
all their limbs and torsos to numerous shark 
attacks. They can still roll their heads onto the
surfboard. There is nothing more aesthetically
pleasing than watching a human coconut surf
on a giant pitta bread.

Get a tattoo!

The best way to pamper your soft, elegant, 
silky skin? -- deface it with ink! ink! A substance
that if spilt over your coffee table would spark
a major household crisis, but your precious 
velvety skin? -- screw it, you're good to go and
vandalise yourself with tacky meaningless ink stains.


THE BIG LIGHT

She made a candlelit dinner,
but without thinking he put
the big light on so he could
see what he was eating -- so
she left him,

keeping her happy was like
walking a tightrope for him,
and the night he put the big
light on, he fell screaming,

he hit the ground, unlike
the falling leaf he caught
when he placed it in her
palm and asked her to
make a wish,

he always forgave her, like
a bird forgives another for
stealing its bread,

and as he flew alongside her
he wondered how passing clouds
could find their way home,

he would talk about how the sun
and the rain could make pretty
rainbows - the colours of the flowers
on the mountain he climbed to pick
for her,

but without thinking he put
the big light on so he could
see what he was eating -- so
she left him,

finished her meal,

blew out the candles
and left him.


ANALOGY OF A POLITICIAN

Two schoolboys are summoned
to the headmaster's office for
stealing apples from a tree
belonging to a resident next
to the school field,

One of the boys admits to
stealing an apple, but tells
the headmaster that his friend
didn't take one -- though both
boys took an apple each,

one of the boys is given detention
but the 'innocent' boy escapes unpunished,

the 'innocent' boy tells the headmaster
he is profoundly remorseful for being
present at the scene of the 'crime',
and though regrettable he fully understands
the decision to punish his friend as it isn't
fair on the owner of the apple tree.

The 'innocent' boy is the politician.

Stephen Philip Druce is based in Shrewsbury UK. He is published in the USA, India, the UK and Canada. He’s written for theatre plays in London and BBC 4 Extra.

Contact: Instagram – @StephenPhilipDruce

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Categories
Slices from Life

Hooked for Life and Beyond…

By Ravi Shankar

I was hooked! It was my first exposure to a computer though I had read about these in the newspapers and seen them on television. I think it was a Spectrum personal computer popular in the 1980s. My friend, Sanjay and I did a few simple tasks and played a few games on the computer. The games of the 80’s were slow and clunky by today’s standards. In those days however they were interesting and enticing. BASIC was the most popular computer language then. We also had COBOL and a few others. My good friend, Sanjay Mhatre was a bibliophile and a free thinker, and I often used to visit his place and borrow from his vast book collection. However, even in the 1980s there was uneasiness and opposition to computers and the fear that it would replace people and lead to mass unemployment was often mentioned.

The rise of information technology (IT) and the important role to be played by Indian companies was still in the future. I expect artificial intelligence (AI) will also open new jobs in the future. At my medical college in Thrissur, Kerala, India computers were still rare. Communist Kerala had a love-hate relationship with computers and technology. Maharashtra (a western Indian state) was an early adopter of computers, and my tenth- and twelfth-mark sheets were computerised while my MBBS ones were handwritten. During my postgraduation at Chandigarh, computers gained prominence in our conversations. Our head of the department was gracious enough to offer the services of his secretary for typing our research manuscripts when she was free. The only other option was to pay for the service from outside providers. In those days WordStar and WordPerfect dominated word processing. 

Creating slides for presentations was a challenge. LCD projectors were not available, and we had to create physical slides with cardboard mounting. The slides were created on early versions of PowerPoint and photographed using a camera to create the physical ones. My co-guide, Dr Anil Grover (then a cardiologist) at Postgraduate Institute (PGI), Chandigarh mentioned how computers will become increasingly common and encouraged me to learn the Microsoft package of Word, PowerPoint, and Excel. PGI also started offering email facility on a limited basis. You had to write down the details of your email and take it to the IT section who will send your message. We had modems then, which took a while to connect and made a series of sounds with flashing lights while connecting to the internet.

In Pokhara, Nepal at the beginning of the twenty-first century, internet was still a luxury. Manipal College of Medical Sciences used to charge 10 Nepalese rupees to send a message. Faculty could type their message in Outlook and twice a day, the IT person would send and receive messages. In those days, a floppy disk was the most common external storage device, and I soon had a large and colourful collection of floppies. Floppies were not always reliable and sometimes the data on them could not be read. CD-ROMs were another storage device, but CD writers never became commonplace. At Mahendra Pul in the heart of Pokhara, a new cybercafé came up in the early 2000s offering internet browsing at 150 Nepalese rupees per hour. Compared to what we were previously paying, this was a steal!

The college also had an LCD projector though it was not commonly used by faculty members for teaching-learning. This was a large and clunky device. Earlier versions often had compatibility issues. You create your slides and hope for the best. These may or may not open on the laptop and may or may not be projected. One had to have a backup of the lecture on overhead projector (OHP) transparencies, just in case. We did not yet have easy access to computers or laptops. This came only later when the United States Pharmacopeia (USP) set up a drug information and pharmacovigilance centre at the teaching hospital. We got two excellent Dell computers, and the hospital provided us with internet.

The early computers were slow with a big, bulky, and heavy cathode ray screen. They had a blinking cursor and words appeared slowly after typing. The Hollywood movie, You’ve Got Mail (1998), follows the romance between Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks developed through email. The movie is a good introduction to the early days of the internet.  

We had purchased a home desktop computer in 2001 or 2002. This purchase was a financial disaster. The computer required frequent repairs and drained our finances. Google launched its beta version of email, Gmail in 2004, and I was one of the early adapters. I became a fan of Gmail right from the start. It offered significant advantages over the then dominant Hotmail, Yahoo mail and Rediff mail. The storage was larger and there was no need to delete your old emails. Kist Medical College in Lalitpur, Nepal had purchased Dell desktop computers, and these were among the best ones I had used. Fast and responsive with good memory and speed. These had LCD monitors and looked sleek and modern.  

Computer technology has made significant advances. I read that if cars had made similar advances to computers we could drive to the moon and back on a litre of gasoline. Chips started getting smaller and more powerful and are today fought over by the global technology superpowers. A variety of online applications started making their appearance with the spread of the internet. Some of these eventually became the internet giants of today. In India, internet became widely available, and the costs dropped significantly. Mobile technology also made dramatic advances. In India most people access the internet and carry out online tasks using their mobile phones. For around 12000 Indian rupees today you can get a decent mid-range phone. Today mobiles in the palm of your hands have greater processing power than the giants of the 1950s and 1960s. I remember reading a comic strip where a visitor from the future time travels to the present. He laughs on seeing the supercomputer, the most powerful one on earth. When asked why he shows a small ball and introduces it as a computer from his time with much greater processing power than the humungous supercomputer.

One of the major advances has been cloud computing and cloud services. We have Chromebooks that work on web-based applications and needs the internet to do things. Both Google and Microsoft offer a range of services including storage, meetings, messaging, and applications for text, presentations, and calculations. AI is now an integral part of applications. PowerPoint offers the designer option for slides and creates stunning backgrounds. I recently attended a workshop on Copilot, the AI support software from Microsoft that is fully integrated into all their applications. I like the transcribing option for interviews and focus groups offered by Teams and later by Zoom and this makes my life as a researcher easier.

Star Trek, Futuristic computing

When I was growing up, I had no clue about what would soon become commonplace. The world wide web, the ability to browse libraries and art collections, video conferencing, online work processes, applying for government and other services online, online fund transfer and remittance are now at our fingertips. The COVID pandemic shifted a lot of learning and even assessment online. Presently we mainly interact with computers using a keyboard. I am a fan of the sci-fi series, Star Trek, where people interact with computers mainly using their voice. Voice commands are already available and  steadily improving.

I was slow getting into social media. Their judicious use is to be recommended. Facebook keeps me updated on what my friends, acquaintances and former students are doing. LinkedIn is the professional face I present to the world, Twitter (now X) is a concise way to stay connected and YouTube is a major source of entertainment. Computers have changed our life for ever. At a basic level these are based on the flow of electrons through circuits and on the pioneering work in atomic physics done at the start of the twentieth century.

The last three decades have seen developments and changes at unimaginable speed. Who knows what the next three will bring? Will progress continue at an ever-accelerating pace or will we eventually hit a roadblock? We may have to wait for Father Time to provide the answers!

Dr. P Ravi Shankar is a faculty member at the IMU Centre for Education (ICE), International Medical University, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. He enjoys traveling and is a creative writer and photographer.

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Categories
Review

Thus Flow the Verses…

Book Review by Malashri Lal

Title: Nadistuti: Poems

Author: Lakshmi Kannan

Publisher: Author Press

The title plunges us into the sacrality of resonant words, the Nadistuti sukta being a hymn in the Rigveda in praise of rivers. Poet, novelist and translator Lakshmi-Kaaveri equates the flow of the waters with ‘the flow of poetry’, the quiet mingling of streams of remembrance and phrases that shape into lines of verse. Her book is dedicated to Jayanta Mahapatra ‘who lives on’ and an exordium titled ‘Naman’ offers gentle tribute to H.K. Kaul, who was among the founders of the Poetry Society of India and passed away during the recent pandemic. Nadistuti is a brilliant and thought-provoking collection of poems that charts the timeless continuums while being aware of the fragility of human existence.

The book begins with a prayer to the River Narmada (meaning ‘the giver of pleasure’), which divides the north from the south of India. Yet the rippling waters have no boundary—a philosophical observation that I find marks much of this remarkable volume. Remembering Ganga, Yamuna, Godavari, Saraswati, Narmada, Sindhu, Kaaveri, devotees recite the shloka[1] at their morning bath seeking the blessings of the rivers. Though such rituals are mostly forgotten in modern times, the climate crisis should remind us of the consequences of such amnesia. The invisible Saraswati is possibly a metaphor for such “forgetting” simply because of her partial invisibility. Lakshmi Kannan’s vibrant lines recall the disappearance of the river as also of Saraswati’s appearance in another form as a revered Goddess invoked by “students, writers, musicians, dancers, painters”. From the Nadistuti I learned the word— ‘potomologist’—the study of rivers, but the book is far greater than an academic enquiry—it’s a recognition of the civilisational bloodline that is linked to the ancient rivers which  were the earliest cradles of humankind.

Some extraordinary and innovative aspects Lakshmi’s book deserve special mention. First, the remarkable prose- poem called ‘Ponni Looks Back’ which stretches the boundaries of imagination in a charming manner.   Ponni is the name of the river Kaaveri in classical Tamil Literature.  It flows through Tamil Nadu and Karnataka and is always perceived as a woman. Lakshmi tracks Ponni’s autobiography as though writing a Bildungsroman, the education and growing up of an innocent girl and her experiences along the way. Therefore, Ponni is born as a small unobtrusive stream on the Mysore-Coorg border. Then she becomes prominent and significant, and a vital witness to history—the Hoysala kingdom, the classical arts of Belur, Halibid, Somnathpur, then carrying on further to wrap around the islands of Srirangapatnam and Srirangam and so on. I enjoyed the autobiographical voice of Ponni reveling in her centuries of testimony to all the changes she has observed and imbibed—till we come to the new politics that is destroying rivers and society today. Ponni says, “One day I heard different voices floating over my waters…they sit around tables, shout at each other and refer to me dryly as the Kaaveri dispute, wrenching my waters apart”. Like yet another goddess, Sita, she chooses to end her journey. Ponni merges with her mother, the Bay of Bengal —her love and amity having completed what tasks she could undertake towards humanitarian goals. The world of manmade disasters is a chapter River Kaaveri would rather not participate in.

My question here is: “Do poetry and politics merge?…  Can poets continue to be as Shelley called them ‘the unacknowledged legislators of the world’?”  This brings me to another significant aspect of Nadistuti: Lakshmi’s brand of subtle feminism. Predictably, I am drawn to the poems that argue against son-preference, challenge gender stereotypes, and poke gentle barbs at unenlightened men.

Second, I cite a longish poem called “Snake Woman” from the section titled Chamundi, because it combines rituals, dream imagery, gender prejudice and the paradox of son preference. The ritual is called Nagapuja and has strict rules of abstinence from certain foods like snake gourd, and it entails hours of prayer—the chant being:

Please grant me a male child
Oh, King of Cobras
I will name him Nagaraja
In your honour.

Something strange started happening that the pregnant woman could never dare reveal to the world. She dreamt every night of a female baby cobra wearing jhumkies (long earrings) and a jeweled girdle and sporting a red dot on her forehead. Well, the baby born was female—and the happy mother, though a little fearful, called her Nagalakshmi. The mother-in-law showed acute displeasure: “She can have any name.  Who cares!”

Another pregnancy, again the rituals of Nagapuja—more stringent than before. No dreams this time. And an eagerly welcomed boy-child is born, enthusiastically named Nagaraja. And guess what? As he grows up, he ‘hissed at is mother’, ‘bared his fangs at his father’ and ‘spewed venom on his sister’.  These are poet Lakshmi Kannan’s vivid vocabulary for the revered son! And the snake woman sister, what happened to her? She sloughed off her skin seasonally, grew strong, capable and emerged as a “lustrous one”.

I selected this poem for more than just Lakshmi’s clever reversal of gender prejudice. Snakes have a central place in the folktales and folklore of India. The word used, “theriomorphic”,  denotes  situations, where animals and human beings interchange  bodies and identities. Snakes are not evil—they are often the progenitors of good deeds and the shapeshifting happens for many commendable reasons.  The figuration of the snake as exclusively evil does not derive from Indian mythology. Lakshmi’s poem, this one and several others, tread this beautiful territory of humans and non-humans sharing a common abode, the Earth, and there is an implied lament that we have ignored this vital connectivity.  

And finally, I am delving into the emotive, personal poems that end the collection. Called  ‘Fireside’, it invites   memories of WB Yeats’ classic lines:

When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book…

Lakshmi addresses many members of her family; they are named, thanked and remembered for their acts of love and compassion. Because Lakshmi believes in history and continuities, as we have seen in ‘Ponni Looks Back’, and the Nagalakshmi reference, these too are poems about lineage, heritage, respect and love—the attributes that make life worthwhile. Lakshmi’s mother (addressed in the poems as Amma) was Sharada Devi, an acclaimed painter in Mysore and Bangalore whom the daughter remembers with her easel-mounted canvas gently acquiring colours, the landscapes emerging from the contours of her imagination. Today, Lakshmi Kannan, the poet of Nadistuti, looks at a blank sheet of paper and compares that to her Amma’s canvas—the words will surely incarnate. Another poem has a redolent title ‘In Search of Father’s Gardens’, upturning African American writer Alice Walker’s book In Search Of Our Mothers’ Gardens, but for me it’s a tale reminiscent of Lakshmi’s early novel Going Home that I had reviewed decades ago. It was a book about ancestral homes and families breaking up. In the reconfigurations over time, Nadistuti’s final section presents poems to members of Lakshmi’s immediate family, named, but not too personalised, making this an exemplary template for those who hesitate to present the private in public poetry.  With beauty, grace, gratitude, humour, irony—each person emerges as a tributary in the flow of the poet and writer we know and love as Lakshmi- Kaaveri. The last poem ‘If You Want to Visit’ is deeply poignant.  It’s not a farewell poem—instead it’s an invitation to an eternal companionship:

Come
Visit me now 
I’ll not have a word of complaint
I’ll gather all of these and leave with you.

Here is the confluence of all that Nadistuti says: the day’s prayer in the morning, the Ponni River encapsulating history, the rituals that pass through many generations, and the legacy of a poet’s words embedded in the annals of time. An exquisite and meaningful collection of poems, Lakshmi has introduced concepts of poetic writing that are evocative of the ancient Rigveda and equally provide the guiding lamps for modern choices.

[1] Holy chants

Malashri Lal, Former Professor in the English Department, University of Delhi, has published   twenty one  books of which Mandalas of Time: Poems, and Treasures of Lakshmi: The Goddess Who Gives   are the most recent. Lal has received several research and writing fellowships.  She is currently Convener, English Advisory Board of the Sahitya Akademi.

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