Where the mind is without fear … Where the world has not been broken up into fragments … Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way … Where the mind is led forward by thee Into ever-widening thought and action…
As we complete the fourth year of our virtual existence in the clouds and across borders, the world has undergone many changes around us, and it’s not only climate change (which is a huge challenge) but much more. We started around the time of the pandemic — in March 2020 — as human interactions moved from face-to-face non-virtual interactions to virtual communication. When the pandemic ended, we had thought humanity would enter a new age where new etiquettes redefining our social norms would make human existence as pandemic proof as possible. But before we could define new norms in the global context, takeovers and conflicts seem to have reft countries, regions and communities apart. Perhaps, this is a time when Borderless Journalcan give a voice to all those who want to continue living as part of a single species in this world — where we can rise above our differences to find commonalities that make us human and part of the larger stream of humanity, that has been visualised by visionaries like Tagore or John Lennon — widely different cultural milieus but looking for the same things — humankind living together in harmony and moving towards a world without violence, without hate, without rancour and steeped in goodwill and love.
Talking of positive values does not make sense in a world that seems to be veering towards darkness… Many say that humankind is intrinsically given to feelings of anger, hate, division, lust, shame and violence. But then we are just as much inclined towards happiness, fun, love, being respectful and peaceful. Otherwise, would we be writing about these? These are inherited values that have also come down to us from our forefathers and some have been evolving towards embalming or healing with resilience, with kindness and with an open mind.
If you wake up before sunrise, you will notice the sky is really an unredeemable dark. Then, it turns a soft grey till the vibrant colours of the sun paint the horizon and beyond, dousing with not just lively shades but also with a variety of sounds announcing the start of a new day. The darkest hours give way to light. Light is as much a truth as darkness. Both exist. They come in phases in the natural world, and we cannot choose but live with the choices that have been pre-made for us. But there are things we can choose — we can choose to love or hate. We can choose resilience or weakness. We can choose our friends. We can choose our thoughts, our ideas. In Borderless, we have a forum which invites you to choose to be part of a world that has the courage to dream, to imagine. We hope to ignite the torch to carry on this conversation which is probably as old as humanity. We look forward to finding new voices that are willing to move in quest of an impractical world, a utopia, a vision — from which perhaps will emerge systems that will give way to a better future for our progeny.
In the last four years, we are happy to say we have hosted writers from more than forty different nationalities and our readers stretch across almost the whole map of the world. We had our first anthology published less than one and a half years ago, focussing more on writing from established pens. Discussions are afoot to bring out more anthologies in hardcopy with more variety of writers.
In our fourth anniversary issue, we not only host translations by Professor Fakrul Alam of Nazrul, by Somdatta Mandal of Tagore’s father, Debendranath Tagore, but also our first Mandarin translation of a twelfth century Southern Song Dynasty poet, Ye Shao-weng, by Rex Tan, a journalist and writer from Malaysia. From other parts of Asia, Dr Haneef Sharif’s Balochi writing has been rendered into English by Fazal Baloch and Ihlwha Choi has transcreated his own poetry from Korean to English. Tagore’s Phalgun or Spring, describing the current season in Bengal, adds to the variety in our translated oeuvre.
Devraj Singh Kalsi has explored darker shades of humour in his conversation with God while Suzanne Kamata has ushered in the Japanese spring ritual of gazing at cherry blossoms in her column with photographs and narrative. Keith Lyons takes us to the beautiful Fiordlands of New Zealand, Ravi Shankar to Malaysia and Mohul Bhowmick trapezes from place to place in Sri Lanka. Farouk Gulsara has discussed the elusiveness of utopia — an interesting perspective given that we look upto ideals like these in Borderless. I would urge more of you to join this conversation and tell us what you think. We did have Wendy Jones Nakashini start a discussion along these lines in an earlier issue.
I would want to thank our dedicated team from the bottom of my heart. Without them, we could not have brought out two issues within three weeks for we were late with our February issue. A huge thanks to them for their writing and to Sohana Manzoor for her art too. Thanks to our wonderful reviewers who have been with us for a number of years, to all our mentors and contributors without who this journal could not exist. Huge thanks to all our fabulous loyal readers. Devoid of their patronage these words would dangle meaninglessly and unread. Thank you all.
Wish you a wonderful spring as Borderless Journal starts out on the fifth year of its virtual existence! We hope you will be part of our journey throughout…
Enjoy the reads in this special anniversary issue with more content than highlighted here, and each piece is a wonderful addition to our oeuvre!
In conversation with Radha Chakravarty about her debut poetry collection, Subliminal, published by Hawakal Publishers
Radha Chakravarty
Words cross porous walls In the house of translation— Leaf cells breathe new air.
We all know of her as a translator par excellence. But did you know that Radha Chakravarty has another aspect to her creative self? She writes poetry. Chakravarty’s poetry delves into the minute, the small objects of life and integrates them into a larger whole for she writes introspectively. She writes of the kantha — a coverlet made for a baby out of soft old sarees, of her grandmother’s saree, a box to store betel leaves… Her poetry translates the culture with which she grew up to weave in the smaller things into the larger framework of life:
Fleet fingers, fashioning silent fables, designed to swaddle innocent infant dreams, shielding silk-soft folds of newborn skin from reality’s needle-pricks, abrasive touch of life in the raw.
--'Designs in Kantha’
She has poignant poems about what she observes her in daily life:
At the traffic light she appears holding jasmine garlands selling at your car window for the price of bare survival, the promise of a love she never had, her eyes emptied of the fragrance of a spring that, for her, never came.
--‘Flower Seller’
Some of her strongest poems focus on women from Indian mythology. She invokes the persona of Sita and Ahalya — and even the ancient legendary Bengali woman astrologer and poet, Khona. It is a collection which while exploring the poet’s own inner being, the subliminal mind, takes us into a traditional Bengali household to create a feeling of Bengaliness in English. At no point should one assume this Bengaliness is provincial — it is the same flavour that explores Bosphorus and Mount Everest from a universal perspective and comments independently on the riots that reft Delhi in 2020… where she concludes on the aftermath— “after love left us and hate filled the air.”
The poems talk to each other to create a loose structure that gives a glimpse into the mind of the poetic persona — all the thoughts that populate the unseen crevices of her being.
In Subliminal, her debut poetry book, Radha Chakravarty has brought to us glimpses of her times and travels from her own perspective where the deep set tones of heritage weave a nostalgic beam of poetic cadences. Chakravarty’s poems also appear in numerous journals and anthologies. She has published over 20 books, including translations of major Bengali writers such as Rabindranath Tagore, Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, Mahasweta Devi and Kazi Nazrul Islam, anthologies of South Asian writing, and several critical monographs. She has co-edited The Essential Tagore (Harvard and Visva-Bharati), named ‘Book of the Year’ 2011 by Martha Nussbaum.
In this conversation, Radha Chakravarty delves deeper into her poetry and her debut poetry book, Subliminal.
Your titular poem ‘Subliminal’ is around advertisements on TV. Tell us why you opted to name your collection after this poem.
Most of the poems in Subliminal are independent compositions, not planned for a pre-conceived anthology. But when I drew them together for this book, the title of the poem about TV advertisements appeared just right for the whole collection, because my poetry actually delves beneath surfaces to tease out the hidden stories and submerged realities that drive our lives. And very often, those concealed truths are startlingly different from outward appearances. I think much of my poetry derives its energy from the tensions between our illusory outer lives and the realities that lurk within. In ‘Memories of Loss’, for example, I speak of beautiful things that conceal painful stories:
In a seashell held to the ear the murmur of a distant ocean
In the veins of a fallen leaf the hint of a lost green spring
In the hiss of logs in the fire, the sighing of wind in vanished trees
In the butterfly’s bold, bright wings, The trace of silken cocoon dreams
So, when and why did you start writing poetry?
I can’t remember when I started. I think I was always scribbling lines and fragments of verse, without taking them seriously. Poetry for me was the mode for saying the unsayable, expressing what one was not officially expected to put down in words. In a way, I was talking to myself, or to an invisible audience. Years later, going public with my poems demanded an act of courage. The confidence to actually publish my poems came at the urging of friends who were poets. Somehow, they assumed, or seemed to know from reading my published work in other forms, that I wrote poetry too.
Did being a translator of great writers have an impact on your poetry? How?
Yes, definitely. In particular, translating Tagore’s Shesher Kabita(as Farewell Song), his verses for children, the lush, lyrical prose of Bankimchandra Chatterjee (Kapalkundala) and the stylistic experiments of contemporary Bengali writers from India and Bangladesh (in my books Crossings: Stories from India and Bangladesh, Writing Feminism: South Asian Voices, Writing Freedom: South Asian Voices and Vermillion Clouds) sensitised me to the way poetic language works, and how the idiom, rhythm and resonances change when you translate from one language to another. Translating poetry has its challenges, but it also refined my own work as a poet. Let me share a few lines of poetry from Farewell Song, my translation of Tagore’s novel Shesher Kabita:
Sometime, when you are at ease, When from the shores of the past, The night-wind sighs, in the spring breeze, The sky steeped in tears of fallen bakul flowers, Seek me then, in the corners of your heart, For traces left behind. In the twilight of forgetting, Perhaps a glimmer of light will be seen, The nameless image of a dream. And yet it is no dream, For my love, to me, is the truest thing …
What writers, artists or musicians have impacted your poetry?
For me, writing is closely associated with the love for reading. Intimacy with beloved texts, and interactions with poets from diverse cultures during my extensive travels, has proved inspirational.
Poetry is also about the art of listening. As a child I loved the sound, rhythm and vivacity of Bengali children’s rhymes in the voice of my great-grandmother Renuka Chakrabarti. She has always been a figure of inspiration for me, a literary foremother who dared to aspire to the world of words at a time when women of her circle were not allowed to read and write. A child bride married into a family of erudite men, and consumed by curiosity about the forbidden act of reading, she took to hiding under her father-in-law’s four-poster bed and trying to decipher the alphabet from newspapers. One day he caught her in the act. Terrified, she crept out from her hiding place, and confessed to the ‘crime’ of trying to read. Things could have gone badly for her, but her father-in-law was an enlightened individual. He understood her craving to learn, and promised that he would teach her to read and write. Under his tutelage, and through her own passion for learning, she became an erudite woman, equally proficient in English and Bengali, an accomplished but unpublished poet whose legacy I feel I have inherited. Subliminal is dedicated to her.
As a child I absorbed both Bengali and English poetry through my pores because in our home, poetry, and music were all around me. I was inspired by Tagore and Nazrul, but also by modern Bengali poets such as Jibanananda Das, Sankho Ghosh and Shamsur Rahman. In my college days, as a student of English Literature, I loved the poetry of Shakespeare, Donne, Yeats, T. S. Eliot and the Romantics.
Later, I discovered the power of women’s poetry: Emily Dickinson, Sylvia Plath and Adrienne Rich, to name a few. I am fascinated by the figure of Chandrabati, the medieval Bengali woman poet who composed her own powerful version of the Ramayana. Art and music provide a wellspring of inspiration too, for poetry can have strong visual and aural dimensions.
You translate from Bengali into English. How is the process of writing poetry different from the process of translation, especially as some of your poetry is steeped in Bengaliness, almost as if you are translating your experiences for all of us?
Translation involves interpreting and communicating another author’s words for readers in another language. Writing poetry is about communicating my own thoughts, emotions and intuitions in my own words. Translation requires adherence to a pre-existing source text. When writing poetry, there is no prior text to respond to, only the text that emerges from one’s own act of imagination. That brings greater freedom, but also a different kind of challenge. Both literary translation and the composition of poetry are creative processes, though. Mere linguistic proficiency is not enough to bring a literary work or a translated text to life.
English is not our mother tongue. And yet you write in it. Can you explain why?
Having grown up outside Bengal, I have no formal training in Bengali. I was taught advanced Bengali at home by my grandfather and acquired my deep love for the language through my wide exposure to books, music, and performances in Bengali, from a very early age. I was educated in an English medium school. At University too, I studied English Literature. Hence, like many others who have grown up in Indian cities, I am habituated to writing in English. I translate from Bengali, but write and publish in English, the language of my education and professional experience. Bengali belongs more to my personal, more intimate domain, less to my field of public interactions.
Both Bengali and English are integral to my consciousness, and I guess this bilingual sensibility often surfaces in my poetry. In many poems, such as ‘The Casket of Secret Stories,’ ‘The Homecoming’ or ‘In Search of Shantiniketan’, Bengali words come in naturally because of the cultural matrix in which such poems are embedded. ‘The Casket of Secret Stories’ is inspired by vivid childhood memories of my great-grandmother’s daily ritual of rolling paan, betel leaves stuffed with fragrant spices, and arranging them in the metal box, her paaner bata[1]. When she took her afternoon nap, my cousins and I would steal and eat the forbidden paan from the box, and pretend innocence when she woke up and found all her paan gone. Of course, from our red-stained teeth and lips, she understood very well who the culprits were. But she never let on that she knew. It was only later, after I grew up, that I realised what the paan ritual signified for the housebound women of her time:
In the delicious telling, bright red juice trickling from the mouth, staining tongue and teeth, savouring the covert knowledge of what life felt like in dark corners of the home’s secluded inner quarters, what the world on the outside looked like from behind veils, screens, barred windows and closed courtyards where women’s days began and ended, leaving for posterity this precious closed kaansha* casket, redolent with the aroma of lost stories
*Bronze
But I don’t agree that all my poetry is steeped in Bengali. In fact, in most of my poems, Bengali expressions don’t feature at all, because the subjects have a much wider range of reference. As a globe trotter, I have written about different places and journeys between places.
Take ‘Still’, which is about Mount Everest seen from Nagarkot in Nepal. Or ‘Continental Drift’, about the Bosphorus ferry that connects Asia with Europe. Such poems reflect a global sensibility. My poems on the Pandemic are not coloured by specific Bengali experiences. They have a universal resonance. I contributed to Pandemic: A Worldwide Community Poem (Muse Pie Press, USA), a collaborative effort to which poets from many different countries contributed their lines. It was a unique composition that connected my personal experience of the Pandemic with the diverse experiences of poets from other parts of the world. The poem was nominated for the Pushcart Prize. I guess my poems explore the tensions between rootedness and a global consciousness.
What are the themes and issues that move you?
I tend to write about things that carry a strong personal charge, but also connect with general human experience. My poems are driven by basic human emotions, memory, desire, associations, relationships, and also by social themes and issues. Specific events, private or public, often trigger poems that widen out to ask bigger questions arising from the immediate situation.
Sometimes, poetry can also become for me what T. S. Eliot calls an “escape from personality,” where one adopts a voice that is not one’s own and assume a different identity. ‘The Wishing Tree’ and the sequence titled ‘Seductions’ work as “mask” poems, using voices other than my own. This offers immense creative potential, similar to creating imaginary characters in works of fiction.
There are a lot of women-centred poems in Subliminal. Consider, for example, ‘Designs in Kantha’, ‘Alien’, ‘River/Woman’, ‘That Girl’, ‘The Severed Tongue’ and ‘Walking Through the Flames’. These poems deal with questions of voice and freedom, the body and desire, and the legacy of our foremothers. Some of them are drawn from myth and legend, highlighting the way women tend to be represented in patriarchal discourses.
The natural world and our endangered planet form another thematic strand. I am fascinated by the hidden layers of the psyche, and the unexpected things we discover when we probe beneath the surface veneer of our exterior selves. My poems are also driven by a longing for greater connectivity across the borders that separate us, distress at the growing hatred and violence in our world, and an awareness of the powerful role that words can play in the way we relate to the universe. ‘Peace Process’, ‘After the Riot’ and ‘Borderlines’ express this angst.
How do you use the craft of poetry to address these themes?
Poetry is the art of compression, of saying a lot in very few words. Central to poetry is the image. A single image can carry a welter of associations and resonances, creating layers of meaning that would require many words of explanation in prose. Poems are not about elaborations and explanations. They compel the reader to participate actively in the process of constructing meaning. Reading poetry can become a creative activity too. Poems are also about sound, rhythm and form. I often write “in form” because the challenge of working within the contours of a poetic genre or form actually stretches one’s creative resources. In Subliminal, I have experimented with some difficult short forms, such as the Fibonacci poem, the Skinny, and the sonnet. Take, for instance, the Skinny poem called ‘Jasmine’:
Remember the scent of jasmine in the breeze? Awakening tender memories bittersweet, awakening buried dormant desires, awakening, in the breeze, the forgotten promise of first love. Remember?
The last two lines of the poem use the same words as the beginning, but to tell a different story. The form demands great economy.
I pay attention to the sound, and even when writing free verse, I care about the rhythm. Endings are important. Many of my poems carry a twist in the final lines. I mix languages. Bengali words keep cropping up in my English poems.
Are your poems spontaneous or pre-meditated?
The first attempt is usually spontaneous, but then comes the process of rewriting and polishing, which can be very demanding. Some poems come fully formed and require no revision, but generally, I tend to let the first draft hibernate for some time, before looking at it afresh with a critical eye. Often, the final product is unrecognisable.
Which is your favourite poem in this collection and why? Tell us the story around it.
It is hard to choose just one poem. But let us consider ‘Designs in Kantha’, one of my favourites. Maybe the poem is important to me because of the old, old associations of the embroidered kantha with childhood memories of the affection of all the motherly women who enveloped us with their loving care and tenderness. Then came the gradual realisation, as I grew into a woman, of all the intense emotions, the hidden lives that lay concealed between those seemingly innocent layers of fabric. The kantha is a traditional cultural object, but it can also be considered a fabrication, a product of the creative imagination, a story that hides the real, untold story of women’s lives in those times. Behind the dainty stitches lie the secret tales of these women from a bygone era. My poem tries to bring those buried emotions to life.
As a critic, how would you rate your own work?
I think I must be my own harshest critic. Given my academic training, it is very hard to silence that little voice in your head that is constantly analysing your creative work even as you write. To publish one’s poetry is an act of courage. For once your words enter the public domain, they are out of your hands. The final verdict rests with the readers.
Are you planning to bring out more books of poems/ translations? What can we expect from you next?
More poems, I guess. And more translations. Perhaps some poems in translation. My journey has taken so many unpredictable twists and turns, I can never be quite sure of what lies ahead. That is the fascinating thing about writing.
Let’s look forward to things getting better this New Year with wars tapering off to peace— a peace where weapons and violence are only to be found in history. Can that ever happen…?
Perhaps, all of us need to imagine it together. Feeling the need for peace, if we could dwell on the idea and come up with solutions, we could move towards making it a reality. To start with, every single human being has to believe firmly in the need for such a society instead of blaming wars on natural instincts. Human nature too needs to evolve. Right now, this kind of a world view may seem utopian. But from being hunter-gatherers, we did move towards complex civilisations that in times of peace, built structures and created art, things that would have seemed magical to a cave dweller in the Palaeolithic times. Will we destroy all that we built by warring – desecrating, decimating our own constructs and life to go on witch-hunts that lead to the destruction of our own species? Will human nature not evolve out of the darkness and chaos that leads to such large-scale annihilation?
Sometimes, darkness seems to rise in a crescendo only to be drowned by light emanating from an unknown source. This New Year — which started with an earthquake followed the next day by a deadly plane collision — was a test of human resilience from which we emerged as survivors, showing humanity can overcome hurdles if we do not decimate each other in wars. Bringing this to focus and wringing with the pain of loss, Suzanne Kamata, in her column tells us: “Earthquakes and other natural disasters are unavoidable, but I admire the effort that the Japanese people put into mitigating their effects. My hope is that more and more people here will begin to understand that it is okay to cry, to mourn, to grieve, and to talk about our suffering. My wish for the Japanese people in the new year is happiness and the achievement of dreams.”
And may this ring true for all humanity.
Often it is our creative urges that help bring to focus darker aspects of our nature. Laughter could help heal this darkness within us. Making light of our foibles, critiquing our own tendencies with a sense of humour could help us identify, creating a cathartic outcome which will ultimately lead to healing. An expert at doing that was a man who was as much a master of nonsense verses in Bengal as Edward Lear was in the West. Ratnottama Sengupta has brought into focus one such book by the legendary Sukumar Ray, Abol Tabol (or mumbo jumbo), a book that remains read, loved and relevant even hundred years later. We have more non-fiction from Keith Lyons who reflects on humanity as he loses himself in China. Antara Mukherjee talks of evolving and accepting a past woven with rituals that might seem effete nowadays and yet, these festivities did evoke a sense of joie de vivre and built bridges that stretch beyond the hectic pace of the current world. Devraj Singh Kalsi weaves in humour and variety with his funny take on stocks and shares. Rhys Hughes does much the same with his fun-filled recount on the differences between Sri Lanka and India, with crispy dosas leaning in favour of the latter.
Our stories take us around the world with Paul Mirabile from France, Ravi Shankar from Malaysia, Srinivasan R from India and Rebecca Klassen from England, weaving in the flavours of their own cultures yet touching hearts with the commonality of emotions.
In conversations, Ratnottama Sengupta introduces us to the multifaceted Bulbul Sharma and discusses with her the celebrated filmmaker Mrinal Sen, in one of whose films Sharma ( known for her art and writing) had acted. We also have a discussion with eminent screenplay writer Gajra Kottary on her latest book, Autumn Blossoms and an introduction to it.
Somdatta Mandal has reviewed Sudha Murty’s Common Yet Uncommon: 14 Memorable Stories from Daily Life, which she says, “speaks a universal language of what it means to be human”. Bhaskar Parichha takes us to Scott Ezell’s Journey to the End of the Empire: In China Along the Edge of Tibet. Parichha opines: “The book evokes the majesty of Tibetan landscapes, the unique dignity of the Tibetan people, and the sensory extremity of navigating nearly pre-industrial communities at the edge of the map, while also encompassing the erosion of cultures and ecosystems. Journey to the End of the Empire is both a love song and a protest against environmental destruction, centralised national narratives and marginalised minorities.” Meenakshi Malhotra provides a respite from the serious and emotional by giving us a lively review of Rhys Hughes’ The Coffee Rubaiyat, putting it in context of literature on coffee, weaving in poetry by Alexander Pope and TS Eliot. Rakhi Dalal has reviewed a translation from Punjabi by Ajeet Cour and Minoo Minocha of Cour’s Life Was Here Somewhere. Our book excerpts from Anuradha Kumar’s The Kidnapping of Mark Twain: A Bombay Mysteryintroduces a lighter note as opposed to the intense prose of Srijato’s AHouse of Rain and Snow, translated from Bengali by Maharghya Chakraborty.
Translations this time take us to the realm of poetry again with Fazal Baloch introducing us to a classical poet from Balochistan, the late Mulla Fazul. Ihlwha Choi has self-translated his poetry from Korean. Niaz Zaman brings us Nazrul’s Samya or Equality – a visionary poem for the chaotic times we live in — and Fakrul Alam transcribes Masud Khan’s Bengali verses for Anglophone readers. Our translations are wound up with Tagore’s Prarthonaor Prayer, a poem in which the poet talks of keeping his integrity and concludes saying ‘May the wellbeing of others fill my heart/ With contentment”.
May we all like Tagore find contentment in others’ wellbeing and move towards a world impacted by love and peace! The grand polymath always has had the last say…
I would like to thank our contributors, the Borderless team for this vibrant beginning of the year issue, Sohana Manzoor for her fabulous art, and all our readers for continuing to patronise us.
With hope of moving towards a utopian future, I invite you to savour our fare, some of which is not covered by this note. Do pause by our contents page to check out all our fare.
Sewn into soft, worn layers, forgotten fabric of grandmother tales – patterns of the past, secret memories, hidden designs, intriguing patterns in silk strands dyed in delicate dreamy shades— embroidered story-lines in exquisite, dainty kantha-stitch.
Years of laughter, heartache, bliss, tears and yearning, rage, despair— worked by artful needle into guileless fictions of innocence, pure and tender baby love.
Fleet fingers, fashioning silent fables, designed to swaddle innocent infant dreams, shielding silk-soft folds of newborn skin from reality’s needle-pricks, abrasive touch of life in the raw.
(Previously published in Journal of the Poetry Society of India. Vol. 31 & 32, 2020-2021)
UPROOTED
Fallen tree on concrete sidewalk – thirsty roots clawing the air, screaming silently for the succour of your own familiar soil, where all these years I saw you live and grow, blossom and bear fruit, and spread your shade while, in your green branches, joyous songbirds nested—
Fallen tree, forgotten forbear, uprooted to make way for the merciless coldness of concrete— your plight robs me of my breath. I remember now my human ancestors, uprooted, like you, from native soil, by the concrete-hard harshness of a land divided, under foreign rule, displaced persons forced to find new homes, on alien, unfamiliar soil— in a different world, indifferent to the fate of trees or men who stand in the way of progress, the high road of history— dispensable, left to live or die, in a world where the climate has changed.
Fallen tree, your exposed roots lay bare the callousness of our world, which destroys trees, fish, birds, people, and our own ancestral roots, to build in steel, concrete and plastic its developing story of growth, even as it blindly digs its own grave.
[From Subliminal: Poems, Hawakal, 2023]
Radha Chakravarty is a poet, critic and translator based in Delhi, India. Her new book of poetry, Subliminal: Poems, has recently been published by Hawakal. Her poems also appear in numerous journals and anthologies, including Journal of the Poetry Society of India, Contemporary Major Indian Women Poets, Narrow Road Journal, Soul Spaces, Culture Cult, The Poet (Lockdown 2020), Krishna in Indian Thought, Literature and Music and Indian Poetry through the Passage of Time. She has published over 20 books, including translations of major Bengali writers such as Rabindranath Tagore, Bankimchandra Chatterjee and Kazi Nazrul Islam, anthologies of South Asian writing, and several critical monographs. She has co-edited The Essential Tagore (Harvard and Visva-Bharati), named Book of the Year 2011 by Martha Nussbaum. She contributed to Pandemic: A Worldwide Community Poem (Muse Pie Press, USA), nominated for the Pushcart Prize 2020. She was Professor of Comparative Literature and Translation Studies at Ambedkar University Delhi.
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PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL
Vincent Van Gogh written is different scripts. Courtesy:Creative Commons
The whole world opens up in the realm of ideas that have existed wafting and bridging across time and space. Sometimes they find conduits to come to the fore, even though they find expression in different languages, under varied cultural milieus. One way of connecting these ideas is to translate them into a single language. And that is what many have started to do. Celebrating writers and translators who have connected us with these ideas across boundaries of time and place, we bring to you translated writings in English from twenty eight languages on the International Translation Day, from some of the most iconic thinkers as well as from contemporary voices.
Prose
Tagore’s short story, Aparichita, has been translated from Bengali as The Stranger by Aruna Chakravarti. Click hereto read.
Nadir Ali’s The Kabbadi Player has been translated from Punjabi by Amna Ali. Click here to read.
Kamaleswar Barua’s Uehara by has been translated from Assamese and introduced by Bikash K. Bhattacharya. Click here to read.
S Ramakrishnan’s Muhammad Ali’s Singnature has been S. Ramakrishnan, translated from Tamil by Dr B. Chandramouli. Click here to read.
PF Mathews’Mercy, has been translated from Malayalam by Ram Anantharaman. Click here to read.
Road to Nowhere, an unusual story about a man who heads for suicide, translated from Odiya by the author, Satya Misra. Click here to read.
An excerpt from A Handful of Sesame by Shrinivas Vaidya, translated from Kannada by Maithreyi Karnoor. Click hereto read.
Writings from Pandies’ Cornerhighlight the ongoing struggle against debilitating rigid boundaries drawn by societal norms. Each piece is written in Hindustani and then translated by a volunteer from Pandies’ in English. Clickhere to read.
Rakhamaninov’s Sonata, a short story by Sherzod Artikov, translated from Uzbeki by Nigora Mukhammad. Click hereto read.
Of Days and Seasons, a parable by the eminent Dutch writer, Louis Couperus (1863-1923), translated by Chaitali Sengupta. Click here to read.
The Faithful Wife, a folktale translated from Balochi by Fazal Baloch. Click hereto read.
An excerpt from Ramy Al-Asheq’sEver Since I Did Not Die, translated from Arabic by Isis Nusair, edited by Levi Thompson. The author was born in a refugee camp. Click here to read.
Poetry
Two songs byTagore written originally in Brajabuli, a literary language developed essentially for poetry in the sixteenth century, has been translated by Radha Chakravarty. Click here to read.
Rebel or ‘Bidrohi’, Nazrul’s signature poem, ‘Bidrohi‘, translated from Bengali by Professor Fakrul Alam. Click here to read.
Banlata Sen, Jibananada Das’s iconic poem, translated from Bengali by Professor Fakrul Alam. Click here to read.
Professor Fakrul Alam discusses his new book of Tagore translations, Gitabitan: Selected Song-Lyrics of Rabindranath Tagore, published by Journeyman Books, Dhaka
Professor Fakrul Alam
Professor Fakrul Alam translates Tagore songs with a passion, refers to them as ‘song-lyrics’. In a recent essay, he claimed his favourite book is the Gitabitan, which houses 2232 songs by Tagore. The first edition of the book was published in 1931 and 1932 in three volumes. Over a period of time, Vishwa Bharati combined the three into one single volume.
During the pandemic, Professor Alam — a translator who has been lauded for his translation of Jibananda Das and also something as diverse from poetry as the autobiography of the founding father of Bangladesh, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman — took to translating Tagore songs to make a 300 strong collection, which has been published recently. When asked what was the basis for his selection of the songs, he responded: “What was the basis of my selections? Most important was my love for them. I listen to Rabindra Sangeet, that is to say, the songs of Rabindranath Tagore, every day without fail, unless I am travelling outside Bangladesh. Over the years, some songs by a few singers became so much a part of me that I began translating them. As was the case with my Jibanananda Das translations, you could say that translation was an act of homage as well as a way of coming really close to what you love. It strikes me also that many of the songs I ended up translating are by my favourite Tagore song singers — artistes like Debabrata Biswas and Kanika Bandhopadhyay for instance. Once again, translation as an act of possession!”
Professor Alam has been the recipient of both the Bangla Academy Literary Award for translation and the SAARC Literary Award. He has published around a hundred translations of Tagore songs and poems, edited and translated The Essential Tagore with Radha Chakravarty and lectured in a number of countries about Tagore. In his recently published translation, Gitabitan: Selected Song-Lyrics of Rabindranath Tagore, he brings to us a wide variety of songs which he has grouped into different sections. In this interview, he discusses his translated works, especially his new book.
You have translated Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, and Jibanananda Das, Nazrul and Tagore. What turned you towards translating poetry from prose?
Actually, I translated poetry first and then switched to translating prose. The first literary pieces I translated were poems by Jibanananda Das—surely the greatest Bengali poet of the twentieth century, if we leave aside Rabindranath Tagore who, of course, began writing poems towards the end of the nineteenth century and stood out among Bengali poets till his death in 1941. I then turned to translating some Tagore poems and songs for The Essential Tagore (2011) that I co-edited with Radha Chakravarty.
Also, from the time my book of translations of Das’s poems came out I either ventured into translating some poems by contemporary Bangladeshi poets from time to time either because I felt like doing so, or as responses to requests of a few poets to translate their verse. An example is Masud Khan, some of whose poems you have published in my translations in Borderless.
What moved you into translating?
I have to begin answering this question by once again naming the person I mentioned at the beginning of my answer to your previous question—Jibanananda Das. It was when I came across his works in Abdul Mannan Syed’s selection of his poems in the mid-1990s, and was so swept away by them, that I felt like translating Das’s verse. This was translation as an act consequent to being possessed—or if you like—gripped. Poems like “Banalata Sen” or “Abar Ashibo Pheere[1]” or “Bodh[2]” or “Aat Bachor Age Ek Deen[3]” seemed to want me to translate them. In fact, my translation of the word “Bodh” for the English poem is “Overwhelming Sensation” and that is how I would say I was taken by these works. And once I started with these poems I felt like translating a whole lot more.
You have a book of Das’s poetry and many poems of Tagore in various anthologies and sites. What made you decide to do a book of Tagore translations?
Rabindranath, of course, is the summit as far as Bengali poetry and song-lyrics are concerned. Because I grew up in a house where his songs were either being performed on the radio or on television, or sung by one of my sisters, in retrospect it appears to me that I was destined to translate them sooner or later. Once I had published Jibanananda Das: Selected Poems in 1999, I began to translate a poem or song by Rabindranath every once in a while. When I heard some of Rabindranath’s songs being sung by a singer like Debabrata Biswas or Kanika Badopadhyay, I felt I had to translate them. And that is how I ended up with the nearly 300 songs that constitute Gitabitan: Selected Song-Lyrics.
Is translating Tagore different from translating other poets?
Of course, and inevitably! Almost every great poet writes differently from his predecessor or contemporary poets and composes uniquely. As the great American critic, Harold Bloom, has put it in talking about Western canonical poets, they suffer from “the anxiety of influence” and must destroy all vestiges of their predecessor poets in them. They may begin conventionally but will soon find their distinctive voice or voices. They will as well move away from their earlier works all the time and not get stuck with one style. Thus, Tagore kept experimenting and, so to speak, shifting gears and taking new routes in versifying all the time. This is also true of Jibanananda. That makes the early Tagore or Das different from the later versions of these poets. In Tagore’s case, let me stress that he was particularly polymathic and kept opting for distinct poetic directions all the time. But as far as I can tell what makes him truly different is the musician in him. In particular, the songs have melodic components that take them away from established poetic forms. In fact, I would be happier with the term “song-lyrics” for his songs. Only in his later verses, did he move away from a melodic base towards relatively free verse or prose-poems. And so a translator of Tagore must strive to capture the music in his poetry, especially the songs, which makes the task of translating him quite a distinct as well as challenging task.
Tell us about this new book of Tagore translations. Are the translations a collection of your earlier publications or do you have new songs?
My new book is the result of years and years of translating the song-lyrics, something I do mostly during weekends. A few of them I published in Bangladeshi English language newspapers and a few came out in periodicals like Six Season Review, which I co-edited.
A few in have come out in Borderless. But all these years, I translated not with a definite plan but unsystematically. It was during the enforced period of home confinement during the pandemic years, however, that my translations of the songs gained momentum. I began at around this time to post my translations on FB regularly, hoping that the comments I receive would include constructive ones that would enable me to revise my work, if and when necessary. Nabila Murshed, an ex-student now living in the United States, then came up with the idea of forming a FB group called “Gitabitan in Translation” for not only my translations of the songs but also those of others who might be interested in contributing their own translations, or sharing their responses to the translated songs posted. She also decided to complement the translations with recorded versions of the songs that she collected from YouTube. All these things eventually led me to the idea of publishing a full book of translations.
I then hired an ex-student as a kind of assistant to sort out the songs I had been translating, according to the divisions and sequencing Tagore imposed on them in his collection. There are thus 13 divisions in my book, one of which, “Prokriti” or “Nature”, is itself divided into six sections following the six seasons of the Bengali calendar. But to sum up my answer to your question, the majority of the song-lyrics are going to see in print for the first time. I would say no more than 100 of them have been printed before.
Sometimes, your republications change from the earlier publications. The words change. Have you done that in this anthology too?
Occasionally. As I said previously, I translate a song when I hear it on YouTube. I might listen to the same song a couple of years later and feel like translating it again, forgetting at times that I had translated it before. This led occasionally to 2 or 3 versions of the same songs. Inevitably, while these versions would be close to each other, they would never end up being exactly similar. For the final round of selections for my book, however, I have chosen only one version of what I did, that is to say, the one I think was definitive. And, of course, I revised what I had done for the final print version.
Would you consider translating Tagore’ prose?
Of course. And I have translated a few already. For The Essential Tagore I translated “Hindus and Muslims” and “The Tenant Farmer”. And for Shades of Difference: Selected Writings of Rabindranath Tagore, I translated “The Co-operative Principle” and “The Divinity of the Forest.” As these titles indicate, Rabindranath is a writer whose works you can mine for topics that have continuing thematic relevance. That is why all translators will go back to him every now and then for essays and prose extracts relevant for our time.
Would you like to bring out a book of Nazrul translations too?
Who knows? I have translated about 12 of his poems and a short story by this great Bengali writer, who is also Bangladesh’s national poet. But at present I feel more inclined towards going back to Jibanananda Das and will continue to translate more of Rabindranath’s song-lyrics. This is because around the time I published my translations of his poems at the turn of the century, a trunk full of new poems by Das were discovered. Most of them have been published by now. If and when I can, I would like to bring out a new edition of my Das poems, incorporating some of these newly discovered ones. This is because I have already come across some that are truly memorable and deserve to be translated. Certainly, he is a poet the best of whose unpublished as well as published works need to be introduced everywhere.
Tagore is unique in as much he was socially committed to improving the lot of the villagers in Bengal. He practically created Santiniketan and Sriniketan. At a point, he wrote: “My path, as you know, lies in the domain of quiet integral action and thought, my units must be few and small, and I can but face human problems in relation to some basic village or cultural area. So, in the midst of worldwide anguish, and with the problems of over three hundred millions staring us in the face, I stick to my work in Santiniketan and Sriniketan hoping that my efforts will touch the heart of our village neighbors and help them in reasserting themselves in a new social order. If we can give a start to a few villages, they would perhaps be an inspiration to some others—and my life work will have been done.” This was in a letter in 1939 to Leonard Elmhirst, an agricultural scientist who helped him set up Sriniketan. Has any other poet done work of this kind in Bengal? What do you see as his greatest contribution —poetry or his ideals of human excellence and the work he did to realise his ideals?
Very few writers can come close to Tagore as far as the variety of his works are concerned. Such a polymath dedicated to the world of the spirit and the mind as well as human welfare is surely rarely to be found anywhere in any period of world history. Once he took charge of his father’s estates in what was then East Bengal and is now Bangladesh, Tagore plunged into work for the betterment of the people there and the surrounding areas. But he kept writing poems, fictional and nonfictional prose, plays and wrote all sorts of things for the amelioration of his people as well as his own need to articulate beauty and depict the Sublime in all its manifestations. And he would combine theory with practice, carrying out experiments and introducing new ideas for his tenants and others to implement in their farms and lives. His greatest contribution, however, was not only his poetry and prose but also his contribution to Bengali language and literature. I remember Dryden on Chaucer at this point: “He [Chaucer] found it [English writing] brick and left it marble.”
Thank you for giving us your time.
(The online interview has been conducted by emails by Mitali Chakravarty)
Tagore articles & Translations by Professor Fakrul Alam
Fakrul Alam brings to us Tagore songs in translation and in discussion on the season that follows the scorching heat of summer months. Click here to read.
Monomor Megher Songi (or The Cloud, My friend) has been translated by Professor Fakrul Alam. Click hereto read.
Giraffe’s Dad by Tagore: Giraffer Baba (Giraffe’s Dad), a short humorous poem by Tagore, has been translated from Bengali by Professor Fakrul Alam. Click here to read.
Oikotan(Harmonising) has been translated by Professor Fakrul Alam and published specially to commemorate Tagore’s Birth Anniversary. Click here to read.
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[1] Fakrul Alam translates this as ‘Beautiful Bengal’, but lietrally, it means I will return again
[2] Fakrul Alam translates this as ‘An Overwhelming Sensation’, but literally, it means sensation.
ProfessorFakrul Alam brings to us Tagore songs in translation and in discussion on the season that follows the scorching heat of summer months. Clickhereto read.
“May is pretty, May is mild,
Dances like a happy child…”
Annette Wynne (Early twentieth century)
Each month is expressed in a different form by nature in various parts of the world. In the tropics, May is sweltering and hot — peak summer. In the Southern hemisphere, it is cold. However, with climate change setting in, the patterns are changing, and the temperatures are swinging to extremes. Sometimes, one wonders if this is a reflection of human minds, which seem to swing like pendulums to create dissensions and conflicts in the current world. Nothing seems constant and the winds of change have taken on a menacing appearance. If we go by Nazrul’s outlook, destruction is a part of creating a new way of life as he contends in his poem, ‘Ring Bells of Victory’ — “Why fear destruction? It’s the gateway to creation!” Is this how we will move towards ‘dancing like a happy child’?
Mitra Phukan addresses this need for change in her novel, What Will People Say — not with intensity of Nazrul nor in poetry but with a light feathery wand, more in the tradition of Jane Austen. Her narrative reflects on change at various levels to explore the destruction of old customs giving way to new that are more accepting and kinder to inclusivity, addressing issues like widow remarriage in conservative Hindu frameworks, female fellowship and ageing as Phukan tells us in her interview. Upcoming voice, Prerna Gill, lauded by names like Arundhathi Subramaniam and Chitra Divakaruni, has also been in conversation with Shantanu Ray Choudhuri on her book of verses, Meanwhile. She has refreshing perspectives on life and literature.
Devraj Singh Kalsi has written a nostalgic piece that hovers between irony and perhaps, a reformatory urge… I am not quite sure, but it is as enjoyable and compelling as Meredith Stephen’s narrative on her conservation efforts in Kangaroo Island in the Southern hemisphere and fantastic animals she meets, livened further by her photography. Ravi Shankar talks of his night hikes in the Northern hemisphere, more accurately, in the Himalayas. While trekking at night seems a risky task, trying to recreate dishes from the past is no less daunting, as Suzanne Kamata tells us in her Notes from Japan.
May hosts the birthday of a number of greats, including Tagore and Satyajit Ray. Ratnottama Sengupta’s piece on Ray’s birth anniversary celebrations with actress Jaya Bachchan recounting her experience while working for Ray in Mahanagar(Big City), a film that has been restored and was part of celebrations for the filmmaker’s 102nd Birth anniversary captures the nostalgia of a famous actress on the greatest filmmakers of our times. She has also given us an essay on Tagore and cinema in memory of the great soul, who was just sixty years older to Ray and impacted the filmmaker too. Ray had a year-long sojourn in Santiniketan during his youth.
Eulogising Rabindrasangeet and its lyrics is an essay by Professor Fakrul Alam on Tagore. Professor Alam has translated number of his songs for the essay as he has, a powerful poem from Bengali by Masud Khan. A transcreation of Tagore’s first birthday poem , a wonderful translation of Balochi poetry by Fazal Baloch of Munir Momin’s verses, another one from Korean by Ihlwha Choi rounds up the translated poetry in this edition. Stories that reach out with their poignant telling include Nadir Ali’s narrative, translated from Punjabi by his daughter, Amna Ali, and Aruna Chakravarti’s translation of a short story by Tagore. We have more stories from around the world with Julian Gallo exploring addiction, Abdullah Rayhan with a poignant narrative from Bangladesh, Sreelekha Chatterjee with a short funny tale and Paul Mirabile exploring the supernatural and horror, a sequel to ‘The Book Hunter‘, published in the April issue.
All the genres we host seem to be topped with a sprinkling of pieces on Tagore as this is his birth month. A book excerpt from Chakravarti’s Daughters of Jorasankonarrates her well-researched version of Tagore’s last birthday celebration and carries her translation of the last birthday song by the giant of Bengali literature. The other book excerpt is from Bhubaneswar@75 – Perspectives, edited by Bhaskar Parichha/ Charudutta Panigrahi. Parichha has also reviewed Journey After Midnight – A Punjabi Life: From India to Canadaby Ujjal Dosanjh, a book that starts in pre-independent India and travels with the writer to Canada via UK. Again to commemorate the maestro’s birth anniversary, Meenakshi Malhotra has revisited Radha Chakravarty’s translation of Tagore’s Farewell Song. Somdatta Mandal has critiqued KR Meera’sJezebel, translated from Malayalam by Abhirami Girija Sriram and K. S. Bijukuma. Lakshmi Kannan has introduced to us Jaydeep Sarangi’s collection of poems, letters in lower case.
There are pieces that still reach out to be mentioned. Do visit our content page for May. I would like to thank Sohana Manzoor for her fantastic artwork and continued editorial support for the Tagore translations and the whole team for helping me put together this issue. Thank you. A huge thanks to our loyal readers and contributors who continue to bring in vibrant content, photography and artwork. Without you all, we would not be where we are today.
There is no bar to losing myself in an imaginary world.
I can soar high on the wings of a song in my mind.
-- Tagore, Losing Myself
Painting of Rabindranath Tagore (7th May 1861- 7th August 1941) by his nephew, Gaganendranath Tagore (1867-1938). Courtesy: Creative Commons
Soaring on imaginary wings, on Rabindranath Tagore’s 162nd birth anniversary, we explore his vision for a better world while trying to recreate in English the first poem the maestro wrote for his own birthday which was later made into a song, his last birthday celebration as imagined by Aruna Chakravarti in her historical novel, Daughters of Jorsanko, and also the translation of the last song he wrote for the occasion.
As a change-maker, the maestro tried to close gaps by both his actions— Santiniketan and Sriniketan — and by his writings. The translations of the birthday songs written by the maestro himself brings to the fore what he looked forward to and prayed for. The fiction explored here creates fantastically independent women Tagore visualised, breaking the boundaries of social conventions. The characterisations can be seen both in the short story translated by Aruna Chakravarti especially for this issue and also in the novel Farewell Song, translated by Radha Chakravarty. This has been brought to attention in Meenakshi Malhotra’s review of the novel. Both the short story and the novel show the emergence of the new independent woman of Tagore’s imagined world. A hundred years later, are we able to accept women as independent as visualised by Tagore? As progressive?
And to round up our section is Professor Fakrul Alam’s musing on seasonal songs of Tagore as he translates the lyrics and discusses their relevance. These also reflect on the maestro’s need to close social gaps as Alam translates in one of the songs:
Rain streams down incessantly
Alas wayfarer; alas disabled, homeless ones!
The wind moans on and on.
In Farewell Song: Revisiting Tagore’s Vision of Modern Love, Meenakshi Malhotra revisits Tagore’s Shesher Kobita, translated by Radha Chakravarty and reflects on the modern woman and romance as shown by Tagore by bringing in a brief comparison between the women leads of Aparichita and the novel. Click here to read.
In Rabindranath’s Monsoonal Music, ProfessorFakrul Alam brings to us Tagore songs in translation and in discussion on the season that follows the scorching heat of summer months. Clickhere to read.
Shesher Kobita(1928-29)Translation of Shesher Kobita by Radha Chakravarty (2011)
Romance and reality inevitably clash. While Tagore is not unconvinced about the existence of conjugal love in some of his stories, conjugality and romance make uneasy bedfellows inFarewell Song. Marriage is rooted in the humdrum, quotidian, everyday but romantic love dwells on another astral plane. It is the realisation of the gap between the two that informs the novel/la, a realisation that never the twain shall truly meet, manifesting itself in the pages of this complex narrative that folds into itself a romantic love story, social satire and literary criticism. The multiple strands are brilliantly woven into the plot of this novel, which could be classified as a prose-poem. Its very title, “Shesher Kobita”, literally meaning last poem and translated by Professor Radha Chakravarty as Farewell Song, is evocative of its lyricality.
Shesher Kobita is primarily a love story between two young people, Amit Raye and Labanyalata, both of whom express their love in the most lyrical vein imaginable. Labanya, like many of Amit’s compatriots in Calcutta, is an avid reader and staunch admirer of Rabindranath Tagore’s writing, and her familiarity with Tagore’s work is evident in much of her conversation and in many of her perceptions. Amit, on the other hand, persists in citing the words of a ‘modern’ poet, Nibaran Chakrabarti, who is a persona created by Amit himself, to express his views about poetry. Readers see through this ruse quickly enough, and the third person narrative , often allows space for narrative commentary. As the translator, Radha Chakravarty points out, “Two schools of Bengali poetry, pro and anti-Tagore, are pitted against each other through the dialectic of the Amit-Labanya encounter.” Tagore cleverly plays out and into the literary /poetic debates of his later decades (1920s onwards) in order to prove his contemporary relevance and above all, the modernity of his work.
Amit, the protagonist, is from an elite and rich family, privileged enough to have gone to Oxford and wealthy enough to be under no compulsion to earn immediately. He’s a dilettante who is interested in the vagaries of style, which is seen as being a notch higher than fashion. Brilliant but restless, mercurial as quicksilver, he cannot commit himself to any one thing or relationship. Yet, getting away from the highly artificial social life of Kolkata, to the relatively pristine and pastoral world of Shillong, he falls deeply, unequivocally in love, with the quiet, studious but unassuming young girl, Labanyalata and establishes a soul-connection, as it were, with her. Yet this deep commitment pales and collapses in the face of the demands of the everyday social world. It is this space–“habitus”– which is occupied by Amit’s sister’s friend, Ketaki (Katy) Mitra. To quote from Radha Chakravarty’s introduction to her translation of the book, “Two forms of love are presented through Amit’s involvements with Katy Mitter and Labanya-one rooted in the material and the social, the other, embedded deep within the soul”
The expression of this soulful love dips into and is expressed through not only Bangla literature and poetry but is steeped in the idioms of English poetry, from Shakespeare to the metaphysical poets. Seeing a book of John Donne’s poems on Labanya’s table, Amit quotes, “for God’s sake, hold your tongue and let me love.” And yet, his intense love seems doomed as an idealistic ephemeral bliss, to be swept away by the ‘real’. Not a keen observer of nature, Amit seems to indulge frequently in “pathetic fallacy”, appropriating aspects of the landscape in order to express his moods and feelings. The landscape is often symbolic with Amit and Labanya meeting for their trysts at the site of a waterfall, always a significant feature of Tagore’s landscapes. Mita (meaning friend) and Banya (of the forest) –the lovers’ names for each other– create a world of their own, full of poetry and lyricality. And yet, inevitably, inexorably, the social, material, everyday world presses upon them and the lovers part. And yet, as the novel draws to a close, we do not experience this parting/ estrangement as a tragedy but almost as much of a resolution and closure that the novel could offer.
For Amit Ray/e is an embodiment of the modern split subject, the divided self. He has made up a world of words, and it is in this world that his heart and mind dwell. It is this inner space-the still centre of the turning world (to quote from another modern poet) that Labanya inhabits. And this is what Labanya, intelligent and perceptive, realises. Labanya, in her own way, is the new woman- independent and emotionally self-reliant, reminding one of Kalyani in ‘Aparichita‘, translated by Aruna Chakravarti as ‘The Stranger‘. They are women who dream of a life beyond domesticity and conjugal felicity. For them marriage would be a slippery slope, not a nesting ground. In these versions of ‘modern’ love, each person, especially the women, are complete and self-assured in themselves. This is particularly true of Kalyani, where we get a sense that she towers over the suitors in her life.
Labanya is able to connect to connect with Amit as a friend. to Amit, the friendship acts as an anchor, a stay against the vacuousness of his urban existence. Such a soulful connection belongs to the realm of dreams and these connects are what dreams are made of. However, dreams often shatter, or worse, fester. When Amit is asked whether in marriage, partnership and companionship cannot combine, his reply is illuminating. Marriage is the finite to the infinity of love and romance. He compares his relationship to the westernised Ketaki/Katy, his girlfriend in England who later becomes his wife, after the interlude with Labanya. “My initial relationship with Katy was indeed based on love but it was like water in a pitcher, to be collected daily, and used up everyday.” In contrast, his love for Labanya “remains a lake, its waters not be carried home but meant for” his “consciousness to swim in”. This realisation creates no inner conflict because he also glimpses that Labanya is someone who lives in his dreams, “in the twilight of gleams and of glimpses” (Tagore’s lines from Gitanjali, a basket of song-offerings). In a serendipitious resolution, Labanya also finds her companion in domesticity, her father’s brilliant student Shobhanlal, who has yearned for her for years, only to be spurned. Thus the story becomes not a tragedy of betrayal, but an extended musing and discussion on love, romance and marriage of the modern subject, in a world where the ground beneath the feet of the characters is constantly shifting.
It is this sense of a world in flux and its nuances that Radha Chakravarty’s translation deftly captures. Translating a novel of discussion requires a constant awareness of key concepts and multiple contexts — literary, social, cultural and philosophical. As a skilled translator and litterateur with an extensive repertoire and many years of experience, the editor-translator has brought her many accomplishments to the task of translation. Translating poetry and its nuances is challenging; here, the translation conveys immense wealth of meaning and richness of detail. The novel, in a sense, is a plea for romantic yearning and aspiration, for reaching out to those “unheard melodies” that are far sweeter than those which are available for the asking.
Unlike Bankim, who had depicted the new woman in an unflattering light a few decades earlier, Rabindranath was essentially sympathetic to women. Women were often among his closest associates and companions, and his friendship with women like the Argentinian Victoria Ocampo not only spurred him into song , but made him rethink the contours of modern cosmopolitan womanhood. Well-read and accomplished, women like Labanya not only challenge traditional ideas of womanhood, but is reflexive and aware enough not to judge Katy Mitra. Torn between the pull of intellectual independence and the desire for surrender, Labanya also represents the emergence of the female subject in modern Bangla literature.
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Dr Meenakshi Malhotra is Associate Professor of English Literature at Hansraj College, University of Delhi, and has been involved in teaching and curriculum development in several universities. She has edited two books on Women and Lifewriting, Representing the Self and Claiming the I, in addition to numerous published articles on gender, literature and feminist theory.
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