Keith Lyons interviews Asian Australian poet Adam Aitken about cross-cultural identity, and the challenges of travel, writing, and belonging. Click here to read.
Translations
Gandhiji, a short story by Nabendu Ghosh, has been translated from Bengali by Ratnottama Sengupta. Click here to read.
Khaira, the Blind, a story by Nadir Ali, has been translated from Punjabi by Amna Ali. Click here to read.
Clothes of Spirits, a folktale, has been translated from Balochi by Fazal Baloch. Click here to read.
Many Splendored Love, four poems by Masud Khan, have been translated from Bengali by Fakrul Alam. Click hereto read.
Birds are Alive, has been written and translated from Korean by Ihlwha Choi. Clickhere to read.
Nobo Borshe or on New Year, Tagore’s poem on the Bengali New Year, has been translated from Bengali by Mitali Chakravarty for the occasion this April. Click here to read.
Ratnottama Sengupta shows the impact of Gandhi and his call for non-violence on Nabendu Ghosh as she continues to emote over his message of Ahimsa and call for peace amidst rioting. Click here to read.
The night has nearly come to an end.
The old year is almost past.
Under this dust, it will lay down
Its worn-out life at last.
Whether friend or foe, wherever you go,
Old wrongs cast
Away. On this auspicious day,
Old grievances shed as the old year parts.
— Nobo Borshe or on New Year by Tagore
Art by Sohana Manzoor
Mid-April, Thailand celebrates Songkran and Cambodia, Thingyan — water festivals like Holi. These coincide with the celebration of multiple New Years across Asia. Sikhs celebrate Baisakhi. Kerala celebrates Bishu and Tamil Nadu, Puthandu. Nepal celebrates Nava Varsha and Bengal Nobo Borsho or Poila Boisakh. A translation of Tagore’s poem on the Bengali New Year in spirit asks us to dispense with our past angst and open our hearts to the new day — perhaps an attitude that might bring in changes that are so needed in a world torn with conflicts, hatred and anger. The poet goes on to say, “I want to tie all lives with love” but do we do that in our lives? Can we? Masud Khan’s poems on love translated by Professor Fakrul Alam explore this from a modern context. From Korea, Ihlwha Choi tells us in his translation, “Loving birds is like loving stars”. But the translation that really dwells on love bringing in changes is Nabendu Ghosh’s ‘Gandhiji’, translated by Ratnottama Sengupta, his daughter. The short story by Ghosh highlights the transformation of a murderous villain to a defender of a victim of communal violence, towering above divides drawn by politics of religion.
Another daughter who has been translating her father’s works is Amna Ali, daughter of award-winning Punjabi writer, Nadir Ali. In ‘Khaira, the Blind‘, the father-daughter duo have brought to Anglophone readers a lighter narrative highlighting the erasure of divides and inclusivity. A folktale from Balochistan, translated by Fazal Baloch, echoes in the footsteps of ‘Emperor’s New Clothes’ — a story that can found in the Andersen’s Fairy Tales published in the nineteenth century. I wonder which narrative had come first? And how did it cross cultures retaining the original ideas and yet giving it a local colour? Was it with traders or immigrants?
That such narratives or thoughts are a global phenomenon is brought to the fore by a conversation between Keith Lyons and Asian Australian poet Adam Aitken. Aitken has discussed his cross-cultural identity, the challenges of travel, writing, and belonging. Belonging is perhaps also associated with acceptance. How much do we accept a person, a writer or his works? How much do we empathise with it — is that what makes for popularity?
Cross cultural interactions are always interesting as Rhys Hughes tells us in his essay titled ‘My Love for RK Narayan’. He writes: “Narayan is able to do two contradictory things simultaneously, namely (1) show that we are all the same throughout the world, and (2) show how cultures and people around the world differ from each other.” The underlying emotions that tie us together in a bond of empathy and commonality are compassion and love, something that many great writers have found it necessary to emphasise.
Mitra Phukan’sWhat Will People say?: A Novel is built around such feelings of love, compassion and patience that can gently change narrow norms which draw terrifying borders of hate and unacceptance. We carry an excerpt this time from her ‘Prologue’. Somdatta Mandal has reviewed Chitra Banerjee Divakurni’s latest , Independence. Starting from around the time of the Indian Independence too is Song of the Golden Sparrow – A Novel History of Free India by Nilanjan P. Choudhary, which has been discussed by Rakhi Dalal. The Partition seems to colour narratives often as does the Holocaust. Sometimes, one wonders if humanity will ever get over the negative emotions set into play in the last century.
Closer to our times, when mingling of diverse cultures is becoming more acceptable in arts, Basudhara Roy introduces us to Bina Sarkar Ellias’s Ukiyo-e Days…Haiku Moments, a book that links poetry to a Japanese art-form. While a non-fiction that highlights the suffering of workers by enforcing unacceptable work ethics, Japanese Management, Indian Resistance: The Struggles of the Maruti Suzuki Workersby Anjali Deshpande and Nandita Haksar has been reviewed by Bhaskar Parichha. The narrative, he writes, “tells the story of the biggest car manufacturer in India through the voices of the workers, interviewed over three years. They give us an understanding that the Maruti Suzuki revolution wasn’t the unmitigated success it was touted to be when they tell us about their resistance to being turned into robots by uncompromising management.” That lack of human touch creates distress in people’s hearts, even if we have an efficient system of management and mass production is well elucidated in the review.
These changes are reflected in our musings too. Sengupta has written on how change is wrought on a murderous villain by the charisma of Gandhi in her father’s fiction, as well as this world leader’s impact on Ghosh and her. Devraj Singh Kalsi addresses food fads with a pinch of sarcasm. From Japan, Suzanne Kamata has written of a little island with Greek influences, a result of cultural ties brought in by the emperor Hirohito. Ravi Shankar takes us to Pokhara, Nepal, and Meredith Stephen expresses surprise on meeting a shipload of people from Colorado in the far reaches of the Southern Hemisphere while on her sailing adventures with beautiful photographs. Stories by moderns reflect diverse nuances depicting change. While Brindley Hallam Dennis writes of the passing of an era, PG Thomas integrates the past into the present to reflect how they have a symbiotic structure in the scheme of creating or recreating natural movements through changes wrought over time in his story. Paul Mirabile explores the darker recesses of the human existence in his fiction. As if in continuation, the excerpt from Rhys Hughes’ The Wistful Wanderings of Perceval Pitthelmseems to step out of darker facets of humanity with a soupçon of wit at its best.
To create a world that endures, one looks for values that create inclusivity as reflected in these lines from Charles Chaplin’s My Autobiography, “Mother illuminated to me the kindliest light this world has ever known, which has endowed literature and the theatre with their greatest themes: love, pity and humanity.” This quote starts off a wonderful essay from film-buff Nirupama Kotru. Her narrative carries the tenor of Chaplin’s ‘themes’ to highlight not only her visit to the actor’s last home in Switzerland but also glances at his philosophy and his contributions to cinema across borders.
Our issue rotates around changes and the need for love and compassion to rise in a choral crescendo whirling with the voices of Tagore, Charles Chaplin as well as that of twenty-first century writers. Perhaps this new year, we can move towards a world – at least an imagined world — where love will wipe away weapons and war, where love will take us towards a future filled with the acceptance of myriad colours, where events like the Partition and the Holocaust will be history, just like dinosaurs.
Huge thanks to all our readers and contributors, some of whom may not have been mentioned here but are an integral and necessary part of the issue. Do pause by our April edition. I would also like to give my thanks to our indefatigable team whose efforts breathe life into our journal every month. Sohana Manzoor needs a special mention for her lovely artwork.
R.K. Narayan gives me a ‘warmer’ feeling than any other novelist. This doesn’t mean that his books make life seem easy. On the contrary, his work is absolutely committed to dealing with the travails of existence, but there is a deep humanity about his style that strongly appeals to my better nature, and I love immersing myself in his world. I feel that no more genuine and sincere guide can be found to our common reality than this author.
He was an author I was aware of for a long time before I actually read him. I planned to read his books one day, but most things that are postponed until that magical ‘one day’ seem never to happen. Finally, I dipped into a very small book of his short stories when I had a bout of flu. This was a sampler volume, pocket sized and easy to race through, but I paced myself at one story a day. They were a gift to an unwell man. I loved them. Nearly all of them had a twist at the end, but the twists didn’t feel at all contrived.
There was some other quality about them that intrigued me. They seemed to display not the slightest trace of self-consciousness. They reminded me of the authors I had most enjoyed when I first discovered the joys of literature, Robert Louis Stevenson, the early H.G. Wells, some Dickens. They allowed me to be a pure reader again, rather than an aspiring writer who was always on the lookout for ways to improve his own technique.
Hot lemon tea and short stories just like these are what a man needs when the flu takes hold of him. I finished the slim volume and recovered my health. I now knew that Narayan was an author who strongly appealed to me. Therefore, it was necessary to seek out his other books. I went to the local library, a library that happens to be one of the best I have ever visited, but all the Narayan books were already on loan. However, there was another author with an Indian name on the shelf very near where Narayan should be. I decided that he might act as a temporary substitute and I took out a volume at random. It turned out to be the very first book of V.S. Naipaul, certainly an Indian writer, but one who was also a writer from Trinidad, on the opposite side of the world to India. I read it, loved it, found it very different from Narayan.
Miguel Street is a brilliant collection of linked stories. These tales are set in one street in Port of Spain, the capital of Trinidad, and written in a deceptively simple style that Naipaul claims was inspired by the author of the old picaresque novel Lazarillo de Tormes, published in 1554 and probably written by Diego Hurtado de Mendoza, a book I read a few years ago with great enjoyment. But there is a rhythmic music to Miguel Street that clearly has little to do with that earlier work. It is a funny book, but behind the comedy is a certain measure of pain, and behind that pain is more comedy, and so on. The stories are therefore multi-layered, and this concealed complexity of form works as a very satisfying contrast to the singsong language of the telling. But these tales are hard. They aren’t as warmly embracing as Narayan’s.
I came to the conclusion, one I think I still hold, that Naipaul and Narayan are opposites, that they represent two poles on one spectrum of literature, that the first is hard and cynical, the other yielding and benevolent. Naipaul always seems to be a pessimist, and even in optimistic passages he is pessimistic about the worth of optimism. Narayan always seems to be an optimist, and even when things go wrong for his characters, he is optimistic about their pessimism. More to the point, their pessimism doesn’t endure, it dissipates rapidly. I admire both authors immensely, but I would much prefer to meet Narayan and drink coffee with him than meet Naipaul over any drink.
After I finished Miguel Street I returned it to the library, and now Narayan was back on the shelves, so I helped myself to The Bachelor of Arts, a novel that flows with incredible smoothness. It tells of Chandran, who graduates from college and falls in love with Malathi, a girl he sees on the river bank one fateful evening. His yearnings for her lead to the most dramatic adventure of his youth, as he impulsively but bravely decides to reject the world when he is unable to have her as his wife. But that is only one extended incident among many. The story is delightful, charming, innocent, but it also has elements of melancholy. It is humorous and yet serious. Reading it, I fully understood why Graham Greene said that Narayan was his favourite writer in the English language. Greene also claimed that Narayan had metaphorically offered him a second home in India, and that was exactly the way I felt too.
Then I learned that The Bachelor of Arts was one volume in a loose trilogy, and I obtained the other two books linked to it. Swami and Friends turned out to be almost as engrossing and fascinating, though a little simpler in structure. The English Teacher, on the other hand, was much more sombre in tone, with a plot concerning an English teacher who loses his new wife to typhoid. Narayan lost his own wife to the same disease. The sadness and poignancy of certain scenes in this novel are thus intense, yet the author never allows his narrator to become self-indulgent and the ending of this novel is beautiful. This is a trilogy that can be regarded as authentic, and what I mean by this is that there is no sense that the truth is being operated on by the tools of the writer’s trade for effect. Truth here is unadorned and more effective as a result. It takes gentle courage to write this way and succeed so admirably.
I do feel with Narayan that he is befriending the reader as well as relating a narrative. As I have already said, Narayan gives me a warm feeling that no other writers do to the same degree. His style is perfect for the needs of readers who wish to forget about the technical aspects of literature and feel exactly the same way they did when they were young and launching themselves into the mighty universe of literature for the first time.
Narayan is able to do two contradictory things simultaneously, namely (1) show that we are all the same throughout the world, and (2) show how cultures and people around the world differ from each other. And although other authors can pull off this trick, with Narayan it doesn’t feel like a trick at all but a natural expression of his being. It is true that I have enjoyed some of his books less than others, he is far from being the perfect writer. Talkative Man, for example is one of the weaker works, a short novel, more of a novella really, set in the fictional town of Malgudi as are most of his books, and it is charming and humorous and a little bit haphazard, a semi-picaresque in which the action always seems to be episodic and wide-ranging but in fact is firmly grounded in that one small town in a sleepy backwater of Southern India.
But it lacks bite, for although Narayan’s novelistic bite is gentle, unlike the bite of Naipaul, it is a bite all the same. The Painter of Signs bites, and although there are some slapdash passages in this novel (as there are in Talkative Man) they are easy to forgive, thanks to the compelling soft force of the poignant story about two individuals who despite being on different life-paths, meet and become deeply involved with each other.
Yet there is one Narayan book that is supreme above all his others, at least in my opinion, and it is a collection of stories I took with me when I travelled to East Africa and wanted a companion light enough to carry in my small rucksack and amusing enough to make each mosquito-filled night pass smoothly. The one quality possessed by Narayan that makes him such an agreeable companion on a long journey is that he never lectures or talks down to the reader but invites him to share his world, his vision. His fictional town of Malgudi feels absolutely real to me, so much so that it is my favourite invented location in all literature, and I always accept the invitation to stroll its dusty streets.
Malgudi Days is the title of this wondrous volume. I read it in Mombasa. It is a collection that displays enormous variety within the compass of its fictional setting, the remarkable town of Malgudi, only occasionally venturing outside it, into the countryside or the jungle where tigers and angry gods cause difficulties for the people who stray into their domain. Most of the time, the people settled in Malgudi, or just passing through it, devise deeply human strategies for coping with the difficulties thrown at them by circumstance and fate, often making their own difficulties through the accretion of actions over years. Despite the warmth of Narayan’s prose style, the gentle mood he evokes, the benign ambience of the setting, there is suffering and guilt here too.
Characters are not infrequently criminals who have fled the scene of their misdoings and have relocated to Malgudi in order to start afresh. Not always can they leave behind their pasts. And yet there are no simple morality lessons here, the resolutions are often chaotic, ambiguous, the stories of some lives are left hanging. Narayan is in control of his material but not of life and life bowls balls that his characters can’t always bat…
It is difficult for me to enthuse too precisely about this collection without ending up saying things I have no wish to say. The individual stories are superb, but the sum is greater than its parts. To choose individual tales to praise seems a mild insult to the integrity of the whole, though I am aware that it is perfectly acceptable to pick out particular pieces and talk about them. The collection was not designed as a whole anyway but amalgamated from two existing collections and updated with a handful of new stories.
I am merely delighted that I discovered R.K. Narayan and I fully intend to read everything he published. And there are districts of Bangalore and Mysore that evoke some aspects of Malgudi and are there to be explored without having any specific ‘sights’ to seek out. Ambience is everything. Friendship within that ambience is a blessing. Narayan is a friend on a shelf, a genuine friend, and the black ink of his words on the white pages of his books are like reversed stars on a night sky that is as radiant as daylight.
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Rhys Hughes has lived in many countries. He graduated as an engineer but currently works as a tutor of mathematics. Since his first book was published in 1995 he has had fifty other books published and his work has been translated into ten languages.
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PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL
Ratnottama Senguptaexplores the poetry in lyrics of Bollywood songs and scans the title song of the Hindi film, Guide, to conclude that a film song can be more than a lyric, a screenplay…
“If you want to be famous, do not write screenplays,” Jean Claude Carriere once told film students in a workshop. The legendary screen writer could have just as well said, ‘Do not write for films!’ For, it is the same story for lyricists as well. The better a film and performance of the actors, the less people remember the writer. Similarly, the better the rendition of a song, listeners remember it by the voice that rendered it — the singer; the man who scored the music, the actors who embodied the persona; or the film for which it was written. Seldom do people remember or even know who had penned the ditty that has got woven into the warp and weft of not only the script but, over time, of our life!
Festival of Letters 2023. Photo: Ratnottama Sengupta
So where’s the question of according them the literary status of a poet? Yet, speaking in Sahityotsav 2023 – the Festival of Letters hosted March 11-16 by Sahitya Akademi, India’s national council for literature, Tamil lyricist Vairamuthu refuted that there is no literary value in writing for cinema. “Yes, in a commercial art like cinema, everything cannot be literature, but surely literature is not utterly absent!” The seven times National Film Award winner admits that all movie songs are not poetry but he is ready to tussle with those who demean songs by saying they do not have the charm or aesthetic of poetry.
Kavithaigal Vairamuthu at Sahityotsav. Photo: Ratnottama SenguptaRatnottama Sengupta chairing the session on Cinema and Literature. Photo provided by the author
The role of songs in cinema is different, and therefore the aesthetics is different from that of poetry, the celebrated song-writer elaborates. “Lyrics are written to fit into a script; a character; and a social clime. So a lyricist has to bow to politics, humanities and sociology. And still a film song becomes a feast for the tastes of common people, because it contains in its folds the seeds of nuanced literature.” When a poet becomes a lyricist, he does not have the same freedom: his imagination is bound by the barriers of melody. He has the added responsibility of creating poetry by overcoming the constraints of the situation and the tune scored to heighten the emotion of the moment. When the lyrics of a song transcends these constraints it attains the heights of aesthetics, not necessarily of poetry but of its own particular identity. “Why must banana be described as poor man’s apple?” Vairamuthu poses.
*
I can recall countless songs that fit the bill of poetry. But, as I prepared to speak to Film Appreciation students of the Film and Television Institute of India on Literature in Cinema, it struck me that some songs track a different course and go on to presage the yet-to-unfold narrative, or even the final resolution of the film. And, in doing so, they sometimes equate the screenplay. Here I can readily mention two songs, both penned by Shailendra for two films released in 1966. One is the Mahua Ghatwarin song from Teesri Kasam (The Third Vow). In it Hiraman, a bullock-cart driver, recounts the story of Mahua who is sold off for money by her own family to Hirabai, the Nautanki dancer, who eventually defies that fate. The second is the title song of Guide, directed by Vijay Anand with Dev Anand and Waheeda Rehman leading the cast, which I will scan today.
Published in 1958, won the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1960
… A book brought out by film scholars and admirers of the film
R K Narayanan’s masterpiece was a rather unusual story for a Hindi film made so many years ago. The fact is that it started as a Hollywood venture. Pearl S Buck, the first woman to win the Pulitzer award with The Good Earth, was the screen writer for the English version. Unfortunately, that reached neither here nor there. The Hindi version, on the other hand, turned out to be a cult film – particularly for its unmatched songs and dances that were shorn off for the Hollywood version. Just goes to show how integral song and dance are to Indian life.
Genius, they say, always evokes admiration and provokes curiosity. My attention to this song was drawn when a handful of cine lovers got together to understand why its unconventional profiling of adultery succeed in tradition-bound India when it failed miserably in the ‘advanced’ society that is Hollywood? Both the versions had the same plot, nearly the same cast and crew, and yet the difference was stunning. Their urge to analyse its extraordinariness led Blue Pencil to publish Guide The Film: Perspectives. And, while answering interviewer Antara Nanda Mandal, I realised how Wahan kaun hai tera is unique in the way it knits the past with the future of the character, grafting a seamless flow of flashbacks and offering a glimpse of the narrative as it will unravel on its way to the finale…
The story goes that Dev Anand and his brother Vijay Anand had approached Shailendra when the film was almost ready. Not being in a particularly obligatory mood, he demanded a fortune– Rs 1 lakh. Nearly 60 years ago, this was indeed a king’s ransom but without batting an eyelid, the producer-director duo of Navketan Films agreed – after all, they needed a mounting fit for the epic that was at once radical and traditional. And, set to music by Sachin Dev Burman, what a memorable number it turned out to be!
A brief synopsis of the film based on a 1958 novel: Freelance guide Raju meets Rosie, the daughter of a nautch girl married to Marko, a wealthy archaeologist who is a philanderer. But dancing in public was not only infra dig back then, it was an absolute no-no. Dancers were regarded as social outcasts, little better than prostitutes. One day, after a showdown with her womanising husband, Rosie seeks relief in a burst of Kalbelia, the dance of Rajasthan’s snake charmers, in the marketplace. As Raju watches her hypnotic passion, he is convinced that dance is Rosie’s calling, and he convinces her to leave Marko and move in with him. The repercussions? His mother leaves home, he is ostracised in the small town, he starts losing customers. But acting as her manager, Raju establishes Rosie as a star on the dance stage. However, without the bonding of marriage to hold them together they start to drift apart. Raju feels insecure because of her fame and fortune, and is jealous when Marko sends a cheque for her. To keep him away, he forges Rosie’s signature and is forced to go to jail.
Thus far is a ‘flashback’ – the film opens on the day of his release. Both Rosie and his mother arrive only to learn that he was released six months before his term. Narayanan’s multi-layered narrative now follows Raju who, disillusioned by Rosie’s reluctance to protect him, had set off by himself on an uncharted course towards a bleak future. Along the way he joins an itinerant group of sadhus and travels till he reaches a small village that spent many monsoons facing drought. There he finds shelter in a derelict temple, and the unshaven wanderer is mistaken for an ascetic. The simple villagers flock around him to unburden their woes as he offers them the wisdom rising out of his churnings. That becomes their solace, and soon they believe he’s a Sadhu sent for their deliverance. This takes the form of an announcement: the Saint will starve himself until the skies relent and relieve the villagers from the scourge of drought!
Will Raju, an outcast with a criminal past, now act like a mere mortal and devour the offerings for the gods? Or will he live up to their faith and find redemption by making possible the impossible? Let’s study how the title song prepares the viewers for this mature narrative to unspool.
The song opens with one single string of sitar that goes on playing almost discordant notes. So you are not lured in by a melodious tune or tarana until the signature voice of Sachin Dev Burman breaks in, forcing you to follow the words. They don’t necessarily match the action on the screen which has a man coming out of a jail, pausing at a crossroad that points to the city, then walking in the opposite direction that gradually leads him into an unknown terrain of wilderness and desolation.
As the protagonist keeps walking and the titles appear, the song goes into its successive paras, and you realise that it is a song that could not have belonged to any other film. Nor was it an add-on number that you could take out if you so wished, without impacting the film negatively. For, the song is a planned part of the script and serves as an index to the narrative that will unfold in the next couple of hours.
It strings together glimpses of the past, the present and perhaps the future, in a way that resembles joining a musafir, a traveller, on the highway, to keep pace with him, strike up a conversation, and before long, you have plunged into his life. Your curiosity is aroused and you want to know why he was jailed and what will befall now when a criminal is mistaken to be a Swami, a sage, who must prove himself to be a saint, no less, so as not to destroy the faith of the trusting villagers. In doing so, the song becomes an index for the actions that will make the characters.
What is a more, it prepares the viewer for an unconventional structuring of the narrative which opens with the Epilogue, where the convicted becomes Conscience keeper; resorts to the flashback technique and reverts to the prologue, where a frustrated Rosie repeatedly attempts suicide; and then arrives at the main drama between the Guide and the Dancer. He, who helped her come out of her failed marriage and ride the crest of success in her dream career; She, who fails to plumb the depth of emotion in the man who loved her so much that he commits a crime rather than risk losing her to her legal husband.
Anyone waiting for you out there?!
Oh wanderer
Which way are you headed?
Come, rest a while here,
This bower's a shelter of greens
You will find nowhere...
Days untold have passed.
Those fleeting moments, those
Boundless nights of love,
They're but a dream
They've forgotten...
Why not you??
Those encounters, trysts of love!
Pitch dark, as far as your eyes go...
Where are you headed, wayfarer?
Not a soul's watching out for you.
No eye's on the winding road
Waiting for a sight of you.
No one squirmed when
You were in pain,
Not an eye shed tears...
So who is your dear,
Drifter? Where to...??
You guided them on their way.
Now you, Guide,
Have lost your way?!
You eased the knots in their lives,
Now you are twined in threads!
Why, oh why??
Why swings the charmer,
Not the serpent,
To the music of the Been?
Words of wisdom from the ancients:
This world's but a writing
On the face of a stream!
Watch 'em all, know it all but
No, don't belong to One...
Bonding is not for you, nor for me
Ambler... Where are you off to?
(Transliteration by Ratnottama Sengupta of the original lyrics by Shailendra that can be found below)
Wahan kaun hai tera, Musafir, jayega kahaan?
Dum le le, dum le le ghari bhar, Yeh chhaiyya payega kahan...
Beet gaye din pyar ke palchhin, Sapna bani woh ratein...
Bhool gaye woh, tu bhi bhoola de, Pyar ki woh mulaqatein!
Sab door andhera, Musafir, jayega kahaan?
Koi bhi teri raah na dekhe, Nain bichhaye na koi,
Dard se tere koi na tarpa, Aankh kisi ki na roi...
Kahe kisko tu mera, Musafir, jaayega kahaan?
Tuney toh sabko raah bataayi, Tu apni manzil kyoon bhoola?
Suljha ke raja, auron ki uljhan, Kyoon kachhe dhaagon mein bhoola?
Kyoon naache sapera, Musafir, jaayega kahaan!
Kehte hain gyaani, duniya hai paani, Paani pe likhi likhaai,
Hai sab ki dekhi, hai sab ki jaani, Haath kisi ke na aayi...
Kuchh tera na mera, Musafir jaayega kahaan?
Here, I must stress that Guide would not be the evergreen film it is sans the songs and dances. In particular, this opening number places the story in its context. Everytime it plays.
Sapna bani woh raatein… the dizzy heights of love, fame, riches that did not last, alas! Night is what Rosie will celebrate when she sings, Raat ko jab chaand chamke, jal uthe tan mera… And Raju will lament, Din dhal jaaye haay, raat na jaaye…
Koi bhi teri raah na dekhe, bhool gaye woh tu bhi bhoola de… endless roads, journeys on bus, on tonga, on foot, over hills, dales, and forests… matching his state of mind.
Dard se tera koi na tarpa, aankh kisi ki na roi… One word of denial from Rosie and he would not have been convicted of forgery, but she simply watches him being taken into custody! Later, this would be echoed in the divergent perspectives of the twin numbers – Kya se kya ho gaya bewafa tere pyaar mein, Oh what have I not undergone by falling in love with a loveless woman, he sings while she dances to Mosey chhal kiye jaay, haay re haay! Saiyaan beimaan, Oh how he fakes love, my faithless lover!
Tuney toh sabko raah dikhaayi, tu apni manzil kyoon bhoola … Raju guide, how could you – who took others to their destination – forget your own and get waylaid?! For plain love?
And then the remarkable twist: Kyoon naache sapera! The snake swings to the tune of the snake-charmer; how come your tale is reversed? It could be the voice of destiny commenting on what has transpired in the life of the guide. This imagery in particular is so unique that celebrated lyricist Javed Akhtar is reported to have said, “The day I pen a line like this, I will become a poet!”
Then, look at the layers within these three words. Both naach and sapera will be seen to be crucial motifs in the film. Rosie, born to a dancer, sought respectability through marriage but is stifled because it takes dance out of her life. The guide realises her passion when she dances the snake dance in the market; Raju establishes Rosie as a star performing artiste and not a mere homemaker, his ghar ki rani...
For me, the ultimate irony lies in the words, Kehte hain gyaani, duniya hai paani, paani mein likhi likhaayi.. The temporal world is ephemeral, much like words written on water. So, belong not, to anyone! And yet, it is the want of this very element — water — that will put his will to test, and ultimately claim his life. For, Swami must expiate for Raju Guide’s lapses, and when his followers are praying Allah megh de, paani de/ Send us the clouds, the rains, the droplets of water O Lord, he must fight the temptation to devour even a morsel, and be rewarded for it by a downpour in the parched land.
How remarkably does philosophy dovetail into poetry!
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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
I mostly read commercial fiction and novels the first eight to ten years after I started reading. At that time, I was not familiar with the concept of genres and didn’t know – much less cared – about them. I was taking my first steps into the world of books and reading a new novel and finishing it was all that mattered. A decade or so later, now much more comfortable in the bibliographic world, I started experimenting with other types of books. Freakonomics (2005) by Steven Levitt was my first foray into non- fiction. Then I experimented with a few more history non-fiction books (history was one of subjects in graduation) mainly by William Dalrymple and Jawaharlal Nehru but also by other writers. Keen on territorial conquests of another kind, I experimented with Khushwant Singh, Anita Desai, RK Narayan and a few works by a few more Indian writers. Further from home, I tried out Charles Dickens (had read some abridged versions of his novels in school), Thomas Hardy, EM Forster and more. I read their novels, short stories and essays whatever I found.
I had travelled very far from where I had started many years ago, crisscrossing genres. But my idea of what makes a good read had hardly changed. Whether it came to fiction or non-fiction, contemporary or classic, it still revolved around ‘a story well told’. Of course, some characteristics had changed. I had become more patient with slower narratives, more adept at handling complex narratives, more comfortable with narrative calisthenics and more at ease with diverse types of writing. I had also developed an understanding about the basic differences between literary and commercial works. Even so, my idea of a good read had remained resistant to transformative changes, engendering the question in my mind: “Do genres really matter?”
The answer is both yes and no. Genres help categorise books based on what the reader can expect of them. There are millions and millions of books in the world and just imagine there being no basis to separate one book from another. The reader would have to go from the beginning to end of a book to understand what it was all about or start a journey without knowing what lay ahead. As much as it could be a delightful experience, it would bring in its own challenges. One of them would be to market the book.
Even if we don’t want to overlook the importance of commerce to art, let’s admit that no two things in the world treat each other with as much suspicion. Be that as it may, writers have, from to time, expressed their derision for genre. Kazuo Ishiguro, who has written many genre benders, once said in an interview that genres have no profound literary purpose or any substantial contribution to literature. They are creations of book marketers and their purpose is solely to sell books.
But is literary genre’s relevance to literature only archival and commercial? Maybe a minor digression will bring in a new perspective.
In Hindustani music, genre plays a vital role: it adds variety and richness. There are multiple gharanas (schools) in Hindustani music. Their identity is based on their geographical regions (Lucknow gharana, Carnatic gharana) they come from, the distinct musical heritage and ancestry they represent and the musical form they practice. However, the uniqueness of each gharana is determined by the raga it engineers by combining several suras (pitches). There are seven suras (notes) in Hindustani music.
Film genres contribute to films, of course, in terms of variety but also by creating slots based on audience preferences, social anxieties, aspirations and various other factors which allow filmmakers to address the associated emotions by placing their films in the predefined categories which helps to find a ready audience. Film genres are more fluid than Hindustani music genres. They come and go and also get clubbed creating a hybrid genre where different genres are built into one narrative to appeal to a wider audience.
On the other hand, traditionally, book genres have had rigid boundaries with very minimal or no cross-genre exchanges. In fact, the boundaries have been so rigid that authors of one genre have never shied away from expressing their disdain for their counterparts in another genre. Broadly speaking, the two warring factions have been literary and commercial fiction.
In The Naive And The Sentimental Novelist (2011), Orhan Pamuk says commercial novels (detective, crime, romance, sci fi novels) lack a ‘centre’ – a profound reflection on the meaning of life – which is integral to literary novels. This absence of a centre in commercial novels makes almost all of them same with nothing substantial separating one genre novel from another except their characters, plot twists and the murderer. This lack of substance makes it important for genre novels to always provide excitement to their readers, he alleges. On the contrary, according to Pamuk, a literary novel is a constant quest for the centre not just for the reader but also for the writer.
Some writers may not know the centre to start with discovering it while writing the novel as an act of serendipity. Some may structure their plots such as to illuminate the centre. Tolstoy had to change War and Peace (written in 1869, Translated in 1899) many times to discover its centre. Pamuk informs that Dostoyevsky had suffered epileptic attacks, after writing The Devils (1871-72, translated 1916), when he had realised that he had made a mistake leading to the sudden appearance of a new plan. And he had changed everything radically, Dostoyevsky had claimed.
Howevee, in The Miraculous Years, Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky’s biographer had said Dostoyevsky was exaggerating. The new plan had indeed changed the novel from a mediocre novel with one dimensional characters to a brilliant political one, but Dostoyevsky hadn’t changed more than forty pages of the 250 pages he had written the previous year. Apparently, it’s the ‘centre’ of the novel the great writer had referred to when he had said he had radically changed it, Pamuk concludes.
In The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable, Amitav Ghosh blames this obsession of serious literature with daily humdrum, or the ordinariness of life has traditionally kept it away from dealing with subjects which are not considered ‘serious’ leaving them for the humbler genre fiction. Climactic events like a gale flattening a town or massive rains drowning it were considered too incredulous, not making the cut for nineteenth century literary gravitas.
Until 19th century the division between fiction and non-fiction was fuzzy. In the 19th century, thanks to Industrial Revolution, there was a profusion of factories – moving workforces from unorganised, ruralized setups to more disciplined and controlled environments. What followed was people constructing their lives around their workplaces. This transformed rural and agricultural societies into orderly and urbanised ones bringing about a new kind of society which was far more cloistered, sober and unexciting than earlier societies which, being agricultural and rural, were far rougher and exposed to vagaries of life and nature. The colourful stories of pre 19th century couldn’t adequately capture this new reality; it needed a new kind of literary tool. In came the serious fiction or what we call today the literary novel.
Pamela by Samuel Richardson (1740), Shamela by Henry Fielding (1741) and Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne (1760) were the first attempts at literary novel dealing with such solemn themes as social differences, inner conflicts and women’s sexual autonomy. This style of writing travelled far and wide. Among others, it was adopted by Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, among the earliest practitioners of the novel in India, digressing from the earlier traditions of storytelling in India, the Jataka tales and so on, informs Amitav Ghosh in The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable.
Over a period of time, puritanism around contours of literary fiction set in, and it’s difficult to say when the wall between serious and literary fiction collapsed – in fact one can say it never did. But just as literary novels had emerged to accommodate a new kind of reality in 19th century, breaking away from genre fiction, genre benders have accounted for another kind of changing reality which is presenting challenges hitherto unimagined within the conventional boundaries of human life, like the effects of climate change and technological advances like artificial intelligence and machine learning.
To capture the idiosyncrasies of modern life, many literary writers have flouted the boundary between literary and genre novels by setting their plots in the genre format while retaining the treatment of literary fiction. In Kazuo Ishiguro’s When We Were Orphans (2000), Christopher Banks, now a private detective in London, sets out to investigate how his parents disappeared from Shanghai during the Second Sino-Japanese War. The novel is about life’s profundities like memory, nostalgia at its heart, although it’s written like a detective novel. The plot constantly moves from one incident to another keeping the reader waiting for the end, even as it draws a detailed picture of Shanghai society during the war. In Ishiguro’s recent book – Klara And The Sun (published in 2021) – he explores what separates human from robot even after the robot has acquired human-like intelligence. The book has a children’s book like element to it which is its main charm.
Many writers have experimented with multiplicity of forms, but among the notable books are Kobo Abe’s 1950s novel, Inter Ice Age 4, which starts as a hardwired sci fi but slowly evolves into a political thriller and Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller (1979) whose plot bifurcates into two in the middle of the novel. There on, in some chapters, the reader is solving literary mysteries while the other chapters are the first chapters from other novels of varied styles.
The novel like any other art form has survived and moved ahead through adoption from within its various forms or external influences. When a new form arrives as a reaction to a social change or occurrence or an enterprising writer pushing back the boundaries, puritanism sets in to preserve the form in its purest state if it achieves literary acceptance and fame. Novels with magic realism and migration are some examples. When the form outlives its utility or is made obsolete by emerging trends or excessive repetition, it gets subsumed by another form and survives as part of it or slowly dies out. And thus, a new form, a mix of the two or many more, emerges. And the novel lives to fight another day.
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Indrasish Banerjee has been writing and publishing his works for quite some time. He has published in Indian dailies like Hindustan Times and Pioneer, and Café Dissensus, a literary magazine. Indrasish is also a book reviewer with Readsy Discovery. Indrasish stays and works in Bangalore, India.
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PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL
A fresh morning with a generous sun awaited me on the balcony outside. It was flooded with birdsongs — the caws of the crows, the chirps of the sparrows and the continual trills of a magpie. As my south-facing balcony door opened on a pond and a meadow that stretched up to the street lining it, leaving at least 90 feet to 100 feet in between, I had no dearth of morning breeze or late afternoon gusts of wind in summer. The time of this corona-scare was quiet and soundless. All these birdsongs, whoosh of a car-engine on the road 70-100 feet off my balcony were soothing to my ears.
As I stay alone, there is no one to talk to me. Sometimes, just to feel companionable, I talk to my nephew, imagining his presence beside me, mostly the ‘little nephew’ who was my constant company almost 10 years ago, when he was just 4-5 years-old, a wisp of a boy. You may regard this as a sign of being an inmate in bedlam, but this conversation refreshes me, keeps me healthy and going. This does not however mean that I crave company. On the contrary, when after my usual hours in the college, I come back to my apartment, I love to enjoy my own company, clicking away on my laptop — a story, a poem, a personal piece or just scholarly writing.
I do not even have the need to call anyone up and while away my private hours by talking my heart out. That I hardly do. I sit with a mug of coffee by my writing desk, a wheeled one, which I love to drag to the balcony, especially on peaceful Sundays. It overlooks the greenery of the open space, facing it and whiffs in the pleasant presence of the feathered beings with whom I have already struck friendship since the last four years. In fact, I chose to buy this home, only because of this south-facing balcony and this open space. A few of my friends objected to my buying this flat, as I would be staying alone and this serenity, they felt, could compromise my security[!] and again, this tranquility would give a fillip to my solitariness. I could not make them understand that I am a private person and I love to commune with the calm nature outside my balcony. My solitariness is not ‘so-called loneliness’ but my aloneness, which I love madly and would never compromise with anything, however precious that may be.
I am just trying to say that this imposed isolation, during lockdown, is something I love. I feel cocooned in the warmth of my home. In the afternoon, I gave in to an occasional siesta. In the evening, I get up fresh, have a cup of tea and go into meditation for some few minutes.
The glow of the evening outside is really alluring, and hence, I to stand in the balcony for some time. One day as I returned to my bedroom, adjacent to the balcony, I found a gecko-like lizard, hanging from the wooden beam on the balcony door. I was so terrified to see its enormous size that I rushed into my bathroom and came armored with my mosquito-repellent spray. I sprayed it and to my utter surprise, found the creature giving in to its poison. In an hour, it writhed on the floor and breathed its last. I felt so guilty! However, I had a skimpy supper and went to my desk to read a few pages from Literary Occasions by V.S. Naipaul.
Lockdown is really a blessing in disguise to me! I am getting to read so many books, which I kept aside for reading but could not read as my regular schedule on a work day with all the commuting left me fatigued. I was really disturbed to find Naipaul’s take on R.K. Narayan, one of my favourite authors. I love his narration, his way of describing things, his making inroads into the hearts of his characters. I love him blindly. In my class too, I praise Narayan to the skies. Even some years ago, I taught The English Teacher by him! But times have changed, old three-year-graduation structure has been replaced by semester system. And, UGC (University Grants Commission) is keeping an eye on the ‘quantity’ rather than quality of teaching. Everything said and done, I cannot downplay ‘quality’ of my teaching. Hence, be it Narayan or Lewis Carroll, I try to put forward my best. Anyway, let me stop the digression and give you Naipaul’s observation on Narayan is something I will share with you.
To Naipaul, he (R.K. Narayan) ‘appeared to be writing from within his culture…He truly possessed his world. It was complete and always there, waiting for him.’ But that world proved on closer examination to be static. Narayan’s characters seemed to Naipaul ‘oddly insulated from history’– a history of defeat and subjection that was so oppressively present in India that Narayan’s fictional world could only reveal itself as ‘not, after all, as rooted and complete as it appears.’ As Naipaul saw it, the novel in India, and specifically Narayan, could ‘deal well with the external of things’ but often ‘miss their terrible essence’.
What do you think?
Ketaki Datta is an Associate Professor of English at Bidhannagar Government College, Kolkata, India. She did her Ph.D. on Tennessee Williams’s late plays and later it was published, titled, “ Black and Non-Black Shades of Tennessee Williams”. She has quite a few academic publications along with two novels, two books of poems and quite a few translations. She had been interviewed by Prof. Elisabetta Marino, University of Rome, archived by Flinders University, Australia. She won grants for working at American Studies Research Centre[1993,1995], Hyderabad, India. She presented academic papers at IFTR Conference[Lisbon], University of Oxford and University of California, Santa Barbara. Her debut collection of poems, Across the Blue Horizon, had been published from U.K. with the aid of Arts Council, England. Her latest poetry-book, Urban Reflections: A Dialogue Between Photography and Poetry has been published by KIPU, University of Bielefeld, Germany, with Professor/Photographer Wilfried Raussert [photographs of Street Art of Americas]. She has interviewed American novelist, Prof. Sybil Baker, recently for Compulsive Reader. She is a regular reviewer of poetry volumes with Compulsive Reader, USA. She interviewed poet Lucha Corpi of San Francisco, in 2018. She is the Regional Editor, India, of thetheatertimes.com, headed by Prof. Magda Romanska, Emerson College, Boston, U.S.A.
Borderless 