Landscape of Change by Jill Pelto, Smithsonian. From Public Domain
Hope is the mantra for all human existence. We hope for a better future, for love, for peace, for good weather, for abundance. When that abundance is an abundance of harsh weather or violence wrought by wars, we hope for calm and peace.
This is the season for cyclones — Dana, Trami, Yixing, Hurricanes Milton and Helene — to name a few that left their imprint with the destruction of both property and human lives as did the floods in Spain while wars continue to annihilate more lives and constructs. That we need peace to work out how to adapt to climate change is an issue that warmongers seem to have overlooked. We have to figure out how we can work around losing landmasses and lives to intermittent floods caused by tidal waves, landslides like the one in Wayanad and rising temperatures due to the loss of ice cover. The loss of the white cover of ice leads to more absorption of heat as the melting water is deeper in colour. Such phenomena could affect the availability of potable water and food, impacted by the changes in flora and fauna as a result of altered temperatures and weather patterns. An influx of climate refugees too is likely in places that continue habitable. Do we need to find ways of accommodating these people? Do we need to redefine our constructs to face the crises?
Echoing concerns for action to adapt to climate change and hoping for peace, our current issue shimmers with vibrancy of shades while weaving in personal narratives of life, living and the process of changing to adapt.
An essay on Bhaskar Parichha’s recent book on climate change highlights the action that is needed in the area where Dana made landfall recently. In terms of preparedness things have improved, as Bijoy K Mishra contends in his essay. But more action is needed. Denying climate change or thinking of going back to pre-climate change era is not an option for humanity anymore. While politics often ignores the need to acknowledge this crises and divides destroying with wars, riots and angst, a narrative for peace is woven by some countries like Japan and Rwanda.
Suzanne Kamata recently visited Rwanda. She writes about how she found by educating people about the genocide of 1994, the locals have found a way to live in peace with people who they addressed as their enemies before… as have the future generations of Japan by remembering the atomic holocausts of 1945.
In translations, we have poetry from varied countries. Ihlwha Choi has self-translated his poem from Korean. Ivan Pozzoni has done the same from Italian. One of Tagore’s lesser-known verses, perhaps influenced by the findings of sensitivity in plants by his contemporary, Jagadish Chandra Bose (1858-1937) to who he dedicated the collection which homed this poem, Phool Photano(making flowers bloom), has been translated from Bengali. Professor Alam has translated Nazrul’s popular song, Tumi Shundor Tai Cheye Thaki (Because you are so beautiful, I keep gazing at you).
Stories travel around the world with Paul Mirabile’s narrative giving a flavour of bohemian Paris in 1974. Anna Moon’s fiction set in Philippines gives a darker perspective of life. Lakshmi Kannan’s narrative hovers around the 2008 bombing in Mumbai, an event that evoked much anger, violence and created hatred in hearts. In contrast, Naramsetti Umamaheswararao brings a sense of warmth into our lives with a story about a child and his love for a dog. Sreelekha Chatterjee weaves a tale of change, showcasing adapting to climate crisis from a penguin’s perspective.
Trying something new, being out of the box is what helped humans move out from caves, invent wheels and create civilisations. Hopefully, this is what will help us move into the next phase of human development where wars and weapons will become redundant, and we will be able to adapt to changing climes and move towards a kinder, more compassionate existence.
Thank you all for pitching in with your fabulous pieces. There are ones that have not been covered here. Do pause by our content’s page to see all our content. Huge thanks to the fantastic Borderless team and to Sohana Manzoor, for her art too.
Phul Photano (Making Flowers Bloom) by Tagore was first published in 1906 in Kheya (Ferrying), a collection of 55 poems. The book was dedicated to the Indian scientist, Jagadish Chandra Bose (1858-1937), who discovered plants can feel pleasure, pain, understand affection and make sounds of distress.
From Public Domain
MAKING FLOWERS BLOOM
You cannot force, Force flowers to bloom. Whatever you say or do, However hard you try, Day and night, excitedly Striking the stem — None of you can force, Force flowers to bloom.
You can repeatedly Fatigue with your glances. You can tear the bunches, And throw them in the dust — In such extreme chaos, If they break their silence, Their colours could spill, Their perfumes could overwhelm. None of you can force, Force flowers to bloom.
He who can make flowers bloom, Does so on his own. He radiates With his eyes rays Of the lifeforce To enchant the stem. He who can make flowers bloom, Does so on his own.
Just his breath, seems To make the flowers yearn to fly. With wings made of leaves, They waft in the breeze. Vibrant varied hues bloom Like the heart in a swoon. Many are drawn to them, Allured by the scents. He who can make a flower bloom, Does so on his own.
This poem has been translated from Bengali by Mitali Chakravartywith editorial input from Sohana Manzoor
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PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL
A brief overview of Rajat Chaudhuri’s Spellcasters, published by Niyogi Books, and a conversation with the author.
Spellcasters by Rajat Chaudhuri is a spellbinding fast paced adventure in a phantasmagorical world against the backdrop of climate change and environmental disasters. Chaudhuri, a proponent of solarpunk[1], has nine books under his belt, including the Butterfly Effect (2018) a few fellowships (like Charles Wallace), and a sense of fun as the characters hurtle through the book gripping the readers with their intensity.
In this novel, Chaudhuri’s universe is run by a council, based on Akbar’s Navratnas[2]. They seem to be people in charge of running a chaotic world. This group — though not drawn from Akbar’s court but from various parts of the world — are known as the ‘Nine Unknown Men’. They are said to host great people from the past in another dimension. As they “fold the dimensions and transform matter from one form to another”, manipulating and yet healing characters like Chanchal Mitra, his protagonist, putting the world to ‘rights’ by destroying villainous capitalists who sport shrunken heads of their enemies and indulge in creating drugs that can lead to annihilation of humankind, there is a fine vein of coherence which gives credibility to Chaudhuri’s imagined world.
The locales are all fictitious but highlight real world problems of climate change, unethical scientific research and uncontrolled economic growth that only pamper the pockets of the rich craving power. He weaves in episodes that had made headlines in Indian media, like Ganesha drinking milk, and Himalayan disasters, a result of interferences by human constructs like dam building and ‘development’. A sensuous mysterious woman with curly hair, Sujata, who sets Mitra back on track and is as good as a Marvel heroine when accosted with villains, adds to the appeal of the book.
He describes a barefoot tribe which seems more idyllic than real. But given that it is a phantasmagorical fantastical novel, one would just accept that as a part of the Spellcasters’ world. However, the import of the message the tribal leader conveys to the characters on the run is astute. “We take little from this land and try to return what it gives us. So did our forefathers and all those who walk this country with the animals. But the settlers in villages and cities never tire of drawing out the last drop of earth’s riches…” A similar take on nomadism and settler communities can be found in nonfiction in Anthony Sattin’s Nomads: The Wanderers Who Shaped our World, who talks of the spirit of brotherhood, or asabiyya, that bound the nomads together, a concept borne in the fourteenth century in the Middle East. One wonders if the Nine Unknown Men who cast spells are also bound by some such law as at the end the ‘Perfect Lovers’ disappear into another adventure in time… perhaps, to resurface in Chaudhuri’s next book?
Chaudhuri is poetic with words. He writes stunning descriptions of storms and climate events: “The rivers are boisterous and overflowing, the skies are being torn apart by forests of lightning. The great snow-capped peaks from where these rivers emerge have vanished behind walls of water tumbling down from the skies.”
The thing that makes his book truly unique is the way his characters seem to internalise or grow out of the miasma that encapsulates the world below the mountains. They seem like an extension of the chaotic external environment with strange happenings. Even in the council meeting held by the Nine Unknown Men, some of the crowd seem to be wisps of mists. Chanchal Mitra has to go above the hovering fog to start healing back to normal. The novel starts in a seemingly dystopian setting. The ending is more of a fantasy. There is a strain of Bengaliness in his wry humour, in small factual details, like we find Jagadish Chandra Bose seated in the council hall, though LJ drawn from RL Stevensons’ fictional pirate from Treasure Island (1883), Long John Silver, and Caligari from The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1920), have larger and more crucial roles in the novel. Spellcasters is a thriller that entices with words, a gripping plot and suspense — set against a backdrop of strange climate events that are becoming a reality in today’s world, though the characters are more interesting than those drawn from real life.
The novel is written by an author who is compelled by perhaps more than a need to record his times. He has a vision… though not clearly laid out as a didactic message. But it hovers in the fog that is part of the book. One of the things that came across[3] was to create utopia, we need the chaos of dystopian existence…a theme that rebel poet Nazrul addresses in his poem, ‘Proloyullash’ (The Frenzy of destruction): “Why fear destruction? It’s the gateway to creation!”
Rajat Chaudhuri
In a past life, Chaudhuri had been a consumer rights activist, an economic and political affairs officer with a Japanese Mission and a climate change advocate at the United Nations, New York. Working in such capacities could have generated his vision, his worldview. Let us find out more about it by asking him directly:
What made you turn to writing from being an activist and climate change advocate? How long have you been writing fiction? What made you turn to fiction?
I am still involved with activism through my work with NGOs and my writing for popular media and other venues. However, I have gradually shifted my energies to creative fiction through which, nowadays, I try to engage with climate change and other planetary crises.
I have been writing fiction for nearly two decades now, my first novel, Amber Dusk was published seventeen years ago. As a full-time activist I have had the opportunity to interact and work with people from various strata of society right from the villages of India to international fora like the United Nations, where I have often noticed a tug-of-war of ideas between big business, sections of civil society, governments and other major groups like women, indigenous people and so on. While watching and participating in these, I had begun to realise how stories can open another flank in our efforts to communicate our ideas.
Today, you see, storytelling is everywhere. Stories are being recruited for issues big or small, important or completely worthless, even dangerous! In my case, I realised that stories can be an important vehicle for communicating issues surrounding planetary crises to my audience. Stories tend to be sticky — they remain with us for a long time and studies are now showing that well told stories can trigger changes in perceptions, beliefs and ideas. But it took me a long time to transform this realisation into book projects. Before that I had written other books – contemporary fiction, urban fantasy and so on.
What made you conceive Spellcasters? How long did it take you to write?
There are two or three strands that came together in the writing of Spellcasters. Most important among these is my interest in psychology and mental disorders and specifically in the fact that the ideas that dominate the world today, you can call them spells too, make us behave like we are affected by some kind of mental illness. Ideas and practices like limitless growth, conspicuous consumption and so on, make us behave as if we have lost our minds as we go on plundering the planet for energy and resources despite the fact that `nature’ is striking back at us with ever-increasing fury. So, our mental illness is causing planetary illness and at the centre of all this are these powerful, mesmerising, false beliefs, which right from the time of the Club of Rome have been known to be dangerous.
So, when I began to plan this novel, all these thoughts were in my mind partly driven by my activism. And at the same time, I had been reading Sudhir Kakar’s works about magic and mysticism in India and the parallels between Indian and western psychology so all of that came together. It took me about five years to complete Spellcasters not at one go, there was other stuff I have worked on in between.
What kind of research went into making the book?
To create the main character, the journalist Chanchal Mitra, I worked closely with my psychoanalyst friend Anurag Mishra who happens to be a student of Sudhir Kakar. And that research was really intense. We had long face-to-face and online sessions and I read a lot about the varieties and specificities of mental disorder.
Then there is of course that background layer of interest which oftenseeds ideas in your mind. This usually comes from your reading, and I had been interested in reading about the occult traditions of the East and the West for many years. Characters like Mme Alexandra David-Neel[4], the magic healers among indigenous peoples, the power of entheogenic substances like mushrooms have always fascinated me, and some of that came back while researching this book. Writing the climate layer of the story was comparatively easier because of my first-hand activist experience.
Do you have a vision or a message that you tried to address in this novel? I felt it moved from a dystopian setting to that of a fantasy — though not to utopia. Do you think a dystopian vision is necessary to evolve utopia?
The message is simple, and we all know it: Ideas of limitless growth have affected us mentally and so we behave and act in ways (resource extraction, carbon emission) that are making the planet sick. We are passing on our illness to the planet. The belief in limitless growth is a zoonotic disease that our species has transferred to the living planet. Still, we do not act because we are under the effect of these powerful ideas, these powerful spells, that’s where the novel gets its name. The message, if we can call it one, is to be aware of this and try to break out of these spells.
The path to utopia is not necessarily through dystopia. We can start hoping and acting today before things get really bad. Which is the locus of the whole solarpunk movement with which I am closely associated as an editor and creator. But `darkness’ can be redeeming too. Jem Bendell writes about this in detail. Grief and sorrow can indeed make us stronger; author Liz Jensen navigates grief and encounters hope in Your Wild and Precious Life, which is a must read for everyone asking these questions. But coming back to Spellcasters it is really neither dystopia or utopia if we are talking about the climate layer of the story, it’s very much set in the present. What might look dystopian are the gothic and magical elements and settings which serve as a counterpoint to the cold logic of the scientist character, Vincent.
Your novel has broken various barriers by mingling different constructs. So, tell us, how do you combine realism with fantasy, science with literature and create your own world?
It’s not difficult actually. Fantasy, magic and `unreason’ are woven around the borders of the familiar. We see them often without noticing it. Leaping a little higher or using a prescription eye-cleanser can do the trick!
To answer the other part of your question, science and literature or nature and culture were never apart in the first place. They were sundered because of the partitioning project of modernity which goes back to the work of Hobbes and Boyle and has its own history and protagonists. Science fiction as you know does not care much for this division. Climate fiction because of its scaffolding of science and reason needs to bring the two together. As a climate fiction writer, I try to keep the scientific complexities in the background, but they remain as building blocks of the story. In this book however we have a full chapter which is out of a scientist’s journal, and I did that for a change in flavour and in the spirit of experimentation.
Are your imaginary locales based on real cities? Please elaborate.
Often so. In Spellcasters the cities of Anantanagar and Aukatabadare modelled on Calcutta and Delhi respectively. A close reader can easily pick out the similarities but then I also enjoy changing some details especially when I am writing mixed-genre work like this one. So, there is no Chinese joint (like the one Chanchal hangs out at) in Calcutta where you can openly smoke weed but there are places quite similar to the one I described and there is indeed a real person with an eye of glass who used to hang out in one of these.
You have spoken of storms on the hills. Do you also see this as an impact of climate change? Do you think building roads, tunnels or hydel power stations on the hills can, over a period of time, have adverse effects on climate or humanity? Can you suggest an alternative to such ‘development’?
The avalanches, the unseasonal rains, especially the cloudbursts are all closely connected to climate change. Having said that, we also have to be careful to avoid climate reductionism. Often it is a concatenation of factors (including carbon emissions and climate change) and processes, their effects amplified by feedback loops, that precipitate disasters. This is very true if we study migration, for which climate change can be one of the driving forces but there could be other factors like economic opportunities, cultural patterns etc implicated in such flows.
Mindless development which does not take into account the fragility of nature and the interconnections between all beings big and small, microscopic or enormous, animate or inanimate, will set into motion processes that will precipitate crises like climate change. Yes, big dams are definitely a problem and small hydro is always a better option. We often hear that nature is self-healing or that there have been many previous extinctions, and that the planet has made and remade itself, but that’s like telling ourselves, please prepare for suicide while the super-rich and the cults of preppers, especially in the advanced industrialised nations, can escape to their doomsday bunkers.
The alternatives to the current development model is to be found in the ideas of Gandhi, of Schumacher, in solarpunk literature, in Vandana Shiva’s works among plenty of other places. The basic idea is to live in harmony with the planet, cut down on emissions, reduce resource extraction, try community based participatory solutions to problems instead of relying on economic, high-tech or market-based instruments, step back, go slow and let nature cloth and feed us so that we can live with dignity while forsaking greed.
In Spellcasters, you show climate change as an accepted way of life at the end. Do you think that can be a reality? Do you think climate change can be reversed?
A novel often presents itself as a bouquet of ideas without the author demonstrating any clear bias for one over the others. But as an activist-writer I usually drop clear hints as to what is more desirable without making it too obvious. There is always this ongoing duel between politics and aesthetics in a novel and the best among us balance the two quite well.
Climate change can of course be engaged with, controlled and reversed, if we can stick to the ambitious targets of the Paris climate agreement with the rich nations facilitating the process with more funds to poorer nations. Both producers and consumers have a role to play here, and we need serious lifestyle changes in the advanced industrial nations (or rather the global North) and a serious focus on climate justice for any meaningful change to occur. Only planting trees and carbon-trading won’t do.
Your language is very poetic. Do you have any intention of trying poetry as a genre?
Thank you. I haven’t ever thought of writing poetry because I am not gifted with the art of brevity which I think is essential there. But I have enjoyed translating poetry from Bengali to English, which was published as a book. I plan to do more of that.
What can we next expect from your pen?
I have been trying to finish a work of non-fiction about climate change and I hope to do this by the end of the year.
Let me also take this opportunity to thank you Mitali and your team at Borderless Journal for your service to literature. You are doing important work here and I am really grateful for your interest in my novel.
Thank you so much for giving us your time and sharing your wonderful book.
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[1]Solarpunk is a sci-fi subgenre and social movement that emerged in 2008. It visualizes collectivist, ecological utopias where nature and technology grow in harmony. Read more by clicking her
[2]Navratnas or the nine gems were a bunch of very gifted men in his court, like Birbal and Tansen.
[3]The author does not agree to this reading in the interview. He sees his novel evolve out of the solarpunk movement.
Ratnottama Sengupta relives the fascination of Sukumar Ray’s legendary Abol Tabol, which has just completed its centenary
Sukumar Ray (1887-1923)Abol Tabol
Sukumar Ray, the creator of Abol Tabol[1], came into my life long before Upendra Kishore Roy Chowdhury, the author of Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne. Pather Panchali, the timeless novel, cast its spell when I outgrew the ghost stories penned by the father for kishore-kishoris, the young adults of Bengal. And Satyajit Ray, Sukumar’s son, became an icon only after I got my primary lessons in film viewing.
But, to go back to the beginning: I was a pravasi toddler growing up in Bombay when I would lisp, Baburam Sapure, kotha jaas bapu re/ Where are you off to, snake-charmer Baburam! And I’d recite, Ramgarurer chhana, haanste taader maana[2]! No no no no, we shall not laugh, I’d say, trying to choke my own laughter at the thought of forbidding laughter. For, by now, I would also fondly spout, Maasi go maasi, pachhe haansi – Neem gaache tey hocche seem… Aunt dear Aunt, I’m rolling in laughter that broad beans are growing on the neem tree! The mushroom wants to be an umbrella for the elephant, and a crow’s hatching the egg of a stork! Yes, I would laugh too as I recited these lines. For I had learnt that contradictions are funny.
RamgarurHunko Mukho HyanglaIllustration made by Sukumar Ray in Abol Tabol
There were other poems that I learnt by rote without knowing they were limericks, not mere rhymes. Some, I later realised, told stories; some were satires aimed at Sukumar’s own Banga samaj – the Bengali society – and some were oblique critiques of the Imperialists then Lording over his land. Hunko mukho hyangla, bari taar Bangla, do you know his dour-faced compatriot? And have you encountered the three pigs maathay jaader neiko tupi? The three pigs wearing no hat!
But most of all, his critique of his compatriots comes through in Sat Patra, A Suitable Boy. I won prizes for reciting it, long before I understood the critique of a Bengali father’s keenness to marry off his daughter to a ‘suitable boy’ – even if the proposed groom is dark or deaf, drunkard or devil…
It took years of growing up, in the literary family of Nabendu and Kanak Ghosh, to realise that some of the lines I heard every day were not abol tabol katha, mumbo jumbo words spewed out perfunctorily. So, my mother never took ‘No’ for an answer: “Utsahey ki na hoy, ki na hoy chestaay?” She’d quote Haaturey to say, “what can not be achieved by enthusiasm and effort?” And if I screamed to protest, she’d simply smile and ‘admire’ like the he-owl, “Khasa tor chechani, how sensationally you scream!” While Baba, come winter, would keep repeating, “Kintu sabar chaitey bhalo, powruti aar jhola gur[3]!” Who would have thought of clubbing the daily bread of the rulers with the winter delicacy of the ruled rustics!
When I visited Kolkata, I often heard the phrases “Narad! Narad! (let the fight begin)”, “Gechho Dada (here now, off again now)”, and “Nyara beltala jaay ka baar (how often does a bald-pated man walk under the wood-apple tree).” And I wondered, did Sukumar Ray weave poems around the phrases, or did they become part of our colloquialism, thanks to Abol Tabol?
It was Baba who brought me alive to the literary merits of the verses sans sense. And even as I studied Edward Lear as a student of literature, I recognised that Sukumar Ray pulled off the harnessing of contradictions with as much ease as he surprised us with his endings. Ei dekho notebook, pencil e haatey,/ Ei dekho bhara sab Kil bil lekhatey[4]. Yes, Ray’s Kheror Khaata – handmade rough red cotton cloth wrapped scroll book — was overflowing with thoughts, words and illustrations. If he was talking of the lack of coherence in God’s own country, Shib thakurer aapan deshe, he was also making fun of Ekushey Aiin, The Law of 21, whereby Karur jodi gof gajaay, a man would have to pay a hefty tax for even the natural occurrence of whiskers! And Abaak Kando! How strange that he ate with his hand, se naaki roj haat diye bhaat maakhey!
Like Satyajit Ray’s reading of his granddad’s Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne,Larai Khyapa has nuggets hidden in the lines to protest the war mongering of nations. So, Saat German, Jagai eka, tabuo Jagai larey! And Paanch byata ke khatam karey Jagai Dada molo! Jagai, a homegrown brawny, alone takes on seven strapping Germans! And breathes his last only when the last of them is dead!
To conclude, I will quote Bujhiye Bola [5]and say, Ki bolchhili, esab sudhu abol tabol bakuni? Bujhtey holey magaj laagey, bolechhilam takhuni![6]
Didn’t I tell you, you need to read and re-read Sukumar Ray, to understand the truth lining his nonsense poems?
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Khuror KolGonf ChuriDrawings of Sukumar Ray from Abol tabol
“Sukumar Ray’s drawings are a unique part of our art tradition. And Swapan Maity has dared to give sculptural forms to those two-dimensional line drawings.” It is tough to put in words the significance of these miniatures in terracotta, of those humour-induced fun-filled drawings of the quirky protagonists of Abol Tabol, said Partha Pratim Deb. The former Dean, Faculty of Visual Art at Rabindra Bharati University, Kolkata was speaking at the inauguration of ‘Ajab Kumar’, a weeklong exhibition of reliefs and miniatures in terracotta along with portraits of Sukumar, his father Upendra Kishore, his son Satyajit Ray, and grandson Sandip – each of them a legend in their own right. What made the portraits so special was that they were all done in a single stroke of one unbroken line.
Sukumar Ray – born October 30, 1887; died September 10, 1923 — is easily identified as a pioneer in Bengal’s literary art. His father was not only a writer, he played the violin, he painted, he dabbled in composing music, he was an amateur astronomer, and he was an entrepreneur in printing technology. Upendra Kishore Ray studied block-making, conducted experiments and set up a business in making blocks. His sister, Mrinalini, was married to Hemen Bose, elder brother of pioneer scientist Jagadish Bose, who was an entrepreneur of renown.
Sukumar too grew up to be an expert in Printing Technology. To master that, he travelled to London on a scholarship to train in Photography and Printing Technology at the School of Photo Engraving and Lithography. On his return, he worked to further the family firm, M/s U Ray and Sons, where he was involved with his brothers, Subinay and Subimal. And his sisters, Sukhalata Rao and Punyalata, too were involved in the magazine published by Upendra Kishore Ray, Sandesh[7], which carved a distinct place in the realm of children’s literature in Bengali.
Sandesh covers. The Journal was started in 1913
Born at the peak of the renaissance in Bengal when literature to art, religion to fashion, were all experiencing a regeneration after coming in contact with European lifestyle and industrial revolution, Sukumar had among his friends the literary genius Rabindranath Tagore, the scientists Jagadish Chandra Bose and Prafulla Chandra Ray, composer Atul Prasad Sen. Multitalented like his father, Sukumar was adept at photography and had joined the Royal Photographic Society. And apart from limericks, he wrote the stories of Pagla Dashu[8], technical essays on the new methods he had developed in halftone block-making in journals like the Penrose Annual, plays like Abaak Jalpan (The Curious Thirst), a wealth of literature for young readers in Khai Khai[9]. And within days of his passing was published Abol Tabol – mumbo jumbo that etched his name in the mind and heart of every child born to the language spoken by Tagore and Bankim, Nazrul and Sarat Chandra.
Pagla DashuKhai Khai
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The year was 1993. Swapan Maity, thirty years ago, was a student in the Visual Art Department of Rabindra Bharati University on the campus housed in the ancestral residence of the Tagores at Jorasanko. When his other batchmates spent time singing, playing, painting or simply leg pulling their friends, Maity would tirelessly bury himself in crafting figurines in clay. Some of these figures had naturally different tint – pink or red earth – determined by their source, Ganga in Kolkata or the clay of Rangamati near his hometown Midnapore.
Once satisfied with the finish, the learner would lay them out in the long corridors of the heritage architecture to let them dry in the sun. Even his friends who teased him over his ceaseless devotion to sculpture were left speechless when they recognised the life-like recreation in lifeless mud of the snake charmer, Baburam Sapure; of Uncle’s Contraption, Khuror Kal; of Kumro Potash, the Pumpkin Prince; of the Theft of the Whiskers in Gonf Churi.
Kumro PotashBaburam SapureArt of Sukumar Ray in Abol Tabol
The expressive miniatures have added volume to the body of illustrations imaged by the genius of Sukumar Ray. The miniatures, unique then, are still a marvel. Reviewed in the popular magazine Desh[10]of April 9, 1994, they were exhibited in the closing month of 2023 – at Kolkata’s celebrated Academy of Fine Arts – to mark the completion of a hundred years of their creation in a Bengal – nay, an India that was ruled by the imperialist government in the name of King George V of Britain.
Along with the miniatures Maity – whose statue of Don Bosco is a landmark of Kolkata’s busy Park Circus area – had added a few relief sculptures to encapsulate the entire range of the satire robed in rhymes that amazingly continue to be repeated decade after decade by generation after generation, and still are so pertinent.
The Expressive miniatures of Sukumar Ray’s world by Swapan Maity in ‘Ajab Kumar’, a weeklong exhibition of reliefs and miniatures in terracotta. Photos provided by Ratnottama Sengupta
[1] Literal translation from Bengali: Mumbo Jumbo. First published on 19th September 1923
[2] Literal translation from Bengali: Ramgarur’s children, they are not allowed to laugh
[3] Bengali literal translation: But the most supreme food is bread with liquid molasses…
[4] Bengali literal translation: See the notebook, pencil in hand,/ See it filled with all squiggly writing
Ratnottama Sengupta, formerly Arts Editor of The Times of India, teaches mass communication and film appreciation, curates film festivals and art exhibitions, and translates and write books. She has been a member of CBFC, served on the National Film Awards jury and has herself won a National Award.
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PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL
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