Imagine the world envisioned by John Lennon. Imagine the world envisioned and partly materialised by Tagore in his pet twin projects of Santiniketan and Sriniketan, training institutes made with the intent of moving towards creating a work force that would dedicate their lives to human weal, to closing social gaps borne of human constructs and to uplifting the less privileged by educating them and giving them the means to earn a livelihood. You might well call these people visionaries and utopian dreamers, but were they? Tagore had hoped to inspire with his model institutions. In 1939, he wrote in a letter: “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 neighbours 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.” But did we really have a new social order or try to emulate him?
If we had acted out of compassion and kindness towards redefining with a new social order, as Miriam Bassuk points out in her poem based on Lennon’s lyrics of Imagine, there would be no strangers. We’d all be friends living in harmony and creating a world with compassion, kindness, love and tolerance. We would not have wars or regional geopolitical tensions which act against human weal. Perhaps, we would not have had the issues of war of climate change take on the proportions that are wrecking our own constructs.
Natural disasters, floods, fires, landslides have affected many of our lives. Bringing us close to such a disaster is an essay by Salma A Shafi at ground level in Noakhali. More than 4.5 million were affected and 71 died in this disaster. Another 23 died in the same spate of floods in Tripura with 65,000 affected. We are looking at a single region here, but such disasters seem to be becoming more frequent. And yet. there had been a time when Noakhali was an idyllic vacation spot as reflected in Professor Fakrul Alam’s nostalgic essay, filled with memories of love, green outdoors and kindnesses. Such emotions reverberate in Ravi Shankar’s account of his medical adventures in the highlands of Kerala, a state that suffered a stupendous landslide last month. While Shafi shows how extreme rainfall can cause disasters, Keith Lyons writes of water, whose waves in oceanic form lap landmasses like bridges. He finds a microcosm of the whole world in a swimming pool as migrants find their way to New Zealand too. Farouk Gulsara muses on kindness and caregiving while Priyanka Panwar ponders about ordinary days. Saeed Ibrahim gives a literary twist to our musings. Tongue in cheek humour is woven into our nonfiction section by Suzanne Kamata’s notes from Japan, Devraj Singh Kalsi’s piece on premature greying and Uday Deshwal’s paean to his sunglasses!
In translations, we have Nazrul lyrics transcreated from Bengali by Professor Alam and poetry from Korean by Ihlwha Choi. We pay our respects to an eminent Balochi poet who passed on exactly a year ago, Mubarak Qazi, by carrying a translation by Fazal Baloch. Tagore’s Suprobhat (Good morning) has been rendered in English from Bengali. His descriptions of the morning are layered and amazing — with a hint of the need to reconstruct our world, very relevant even today. A powerful essay by Tagore called Raja O Praja(The King and His Subjects), has been translated by Himadri Lahiri.
Our fiction hosts two narratives that centre around childhood, one by Naramsetti Umamaheswararao and another by G Venkatesh, though with very different approaches. Mahila Iqbal relates a poignant tale about aging, mental health and neglect, the very antithesis of Gulsara’s musing. Paul Mirabile has given a strange story about a ‘useless idler’.
A short story collection has been reviewed by Rakhi Dalal, Swadesh Deepak’s A Bouquet of Dead Flowers, translated from Hindi by Jerry Pinto, Pratik Kanjilal, Nirupama Dutt, Sukant Deepak. Somdatta Mandal has written about a book by a Kashmiri immigrant which is part based on lived experiences and part fictive, Karan Mujoo’s This Our Paradise: A Novel. Bhaskar Parichha has reviewed Ayurveda, Nation and Society: United Provinces, c. 1890–1950by Saurav Kumar Rai, a book which shows how healthcare was even a hundred years ago, politicised. Meenakshi Malhotra has reviewed Anuradha Marwah’s novel, Aunties of Vasant Kunj, of which we also have an excerpt. The other excerpt is from Mineke Schipper’s Widows: A Global History. Ratnottama Sengupta converses with Reba Som, author of Hop, Skip and Jump; Peregrinations of a Diplomat’s Wife.
We have more content that adds to the vibrancy of the issue. Do pause by this issue and take a look. This issue would not have been possible without all your writings. Thank you for that. Huge thanks to our readers and our team, without whose support we could not have come this far. I would especially like to thank Sohana Manzoor for her continued supply of her fabulous and distinctive artwork and Gulsara for his fabulous photographs.
Let us look forward to a festive season which awakens each autumn and stretches to winter. May we in this season find love, compassion and kindness in our hearts towards our whole human family.
Publisher: Ebury Press (an imprint of Penguin Random House)
“A debilitating symptom of exile is unfamiliarity with your homeland” – Karan Mujoo
For ages, Kashmir had been defined as a paradise on earth. However, with the advent of insurgency, political unrest, strife, bloodshed, terrorism and insecurity for the past several decades, this picture of the ideal and beautiful place has been largely shattered. This debut novel by a person of Kashmiri origin, now settled near Delhi, is a moving tale of the ground realities that have been taking place in this region for a long time. Adding the suffix of “A Novel” to the title, the author obviously wants to steer clear of all the controversies that might arise because as he himself states in the “Author’s Note” at the end, “the names and places in this book are a mix of the real and the imaginary… Certain incidents in the novel are based on real events. But their details have been imagined. Hence the names of victims and perpetrators have been changed or tweaked.”
The author was acutely aware of the fact that Kashmir is too large a canvas to be contained in a single book or movie, and so he tells the story of two Kashmiri families, one Hindu and the other Muslim. The stories of both families intertwine tragically in the end. In both cases, the boys are at the mercy of forces much larger than them. Both lose their Kashmir, in different ways. The first story is of a Kashmiri Pandit family who, when the narrative begins, is moving half-heartedly from their house in Bagh-i-Mehtab in Srinagar to their new home in Talab Tillo in Jammu, which was just a dilapidated 12×12 foot hovel with a tin roof and crumbling walls. The patriarch Papaji is a clerk in a food cooperative and his wife Byenji is a homemaker. He is very optimistic that all this is a temporary affair. He still believed in the inherent goodness of people, in ties built over generations and that things would soon turn for the better. The narrator is their eight-year-old grandson who is one of the thousands of children of exile who had nothing to do, nowhere to go. He spent his days playing cricket and climbing the tangkul[1]in the garden. Everything is rosy till 1989. But then, propelled by ISI and the Jamaat, a secessionist movement rises and changes everything. There was gun culture everywhere. For the media, too, Kashmiri Pandits became disposable footnotes in a far greater struggle. Slowly they joined the ranks of the forgotten and became a tragedy that could not be prioritised. At the end of the novel, we find that the idea of exile which harboured within it the hope of return, did not apply to them anymore. They were truly displaced.
Mujoo juxtaposes the earlier story with the story of a Muslim family, set in Zogam, a small village in Lolab Valley. There, after years of prayers, a boy named Shahid is born to Zun and her husband in 1968. Quarantined from everyone else in the village, Sahid’s days passed listening to tales and making them up. As a result, he slowly developed into a shy, quiet boy who found it difficult to mingle with others and liked being with nature. Compared to the slick city dwellers, the people of Zogam seemed like wretched beings with no dreams and ambitions. They were content with their lot because they were not exposed to the luxuries and opportunities life held. Sahid gradually grew up in a society where corruption and unemployment were rife. He made friends with Rashid, who believed that the system had to be dismantled. The trajectory of his life changes when he meets Syed Sahab ― an Islamic theologian and rabble-rouser, who wants to overthrow the Indian state. He brainwashes the young boys into believing that the day they made Sharia their lives, their lives would become Jannat[2]. He preached that Jihad[3] was coming to the Valley soon, and everyone should be ready for it.
The next section takes us back once again to the Pandit protagonists and their life story. The year is 1968 and our young narrator gradually turns worldly-wise when he is taken to different places by his young uncle, Vicky, including the Dal Lake and the Sheikh Colony – a settlement of sweepers, scavengers and tanners who were reviled by all Kashmiris. Believing that education would relieve them of all penury and social ostracisation, Vicky becomes their temporary teacher. Without the knowledge of his parents, he gradually gets enmeshed within other radical ideas and different military groups that had emerged in the city. On the other hand, Shahid realised he could either be a clerk and part-time Jamaat[4]sympathiser or a full-time Jamaat worker. In the end, he opts for the latter and believes that he was no longer a poor farmer’s son from Zogam whose life and death were insignificant.
An interesting section of the narrative told in minute details is how the young jihadis[5] are escorted over the difficult mountain terrain by a Gujjar guide and clandestinely taken across the border to makeshift and rudimentary Pakistani camps in Muzaffarabad. The aim was to indoctrinate the boys in orthodox Islamic ideology and impart basic military training. They were brainwashed into believing that the most important thing was to attack all symbols of India: blow up government banks and offices, kill army and police personnel, murder judges, bureaucrats, teachers, politicians, cripple the state, silence all the voices who oppose the Tehreek[6] and instill the fear of Allah in the hearts of all unbelievers. After they are once again brought back to the Indian side, the boys turn into hardcore terrorists and Sahid is no exception. No matter how hard his parents tried, he had simply become one of the thousands of boys who were ready to fight for the cause.
Without giving out further details of the parallel storylines, we can conclude by stating that through this book Karan Mujoo has tried to ask some fundamental questions. How does a boy become a terrorist? How does society crumble? What forces a family to go into exile? To serve this need, to create a picture of these chaotic years, he has attempted a certain sort of distillation. He only hopes that the illusion has been marginally successful. Through the vividly drawn characters whose lives intersect with one another, each navigating their own paths through love and life, the author successfully captures the essence of human experience and the eternal yet illusive search for paradise.
We have been reading fictional and non-fictional accounts of the problems in Kashmir for a long time, but the painstaking way in which this debut novelist has tried to give us the entire scenario in a nutshell is praiseworthy. The book is strongly recommended for all readers who would find the universal quest for happiness really moving, and how the author has blended fact and fiction with remarkable ease.
Several years ago, probably around the 1990s, the critic Nilanjana S Roy had defined the current crop of Indian Writing in English novelists as a ‘Doon School-St. Stephens’ conspiracy’. It was an interesting but true observation since the writers who were popular at that time were all products of these elite institutions and were quite adept at imitating western culture and simultaneously wrote in a style that was quite polished and urban. Upamanyu Chatterjee, belonging to this category, and at present a retired Indian civil servant, had shot into fame way back in 1988 by writing a definitive urban Indian coming-of-age story with his first novel, English August: An Indian Story. Several years later in 2000, he won the Sahitya Akademi Award for Mammaries of a Welfare State. His seventh novel Villany focused on a new class of post-liberalisation, westernised urban Indians who were hitherto ignored in the regional as well as the English fiction of India. This meticulously crafted literary thriller, a riveting story of crime and retribution, now stands at the other end of the spectrum when we read Chatterjee’s latest novel Lorenzo Searches for the Meaning of Life (2024). Narrating the life-story of an Italian Benedictine monk Lorenzo Senesi, who is on a spiritual quest to find the meaning in life, this meticulously detailed story is based on the life of Italian Fabrizio Senesi, an acquaintance of Chatterjee in Sri Lanka for the last few years, who turned out to be “a good friend” of his and who is now a European bureaucrat and a Development expert residing in Phnom Penh leading a successful professional as well as a blissful family life. As Chatterjee states in his foreword, “It is a true story, that is to say, like many true stories, it is a work of fiction.”
Divided into nine chapters, the locale of his story moves from Italy to London and then to Bangladesh. This is how things begin. One summer morning in 1977, nineteen-year-old Lorenzo Senesi of Aquilina, Italy, drives his Vespa motor-scooter into a Fiat and breaks his forearm. It keeps him in bed for a month, and his boggled mind thinks of unfamiliar things: where he has come from, where he is going, and how to find out more about where he ought to go. When he recovers, he enrolls for a course in physiotherapy. He also joins a prayer group, and visits Praglia Abbey, a Benedictine monastery in the foothills outside Padua. Detailing this part of his life we are told how this monastery will become his home for ten years, its isolation and discipline the anchors of his life. The first three chapters are full of quotes from the teachings of Saint Benedictine, the different vocations that Lorenzo follows, and give us details of monastic life as led in different Catholic institutions spread throughout Italy.
In the fourth chapter titled ‘The Visitor at the Abbey’, Lorenzo listens to a talk by one Luca Rossini, a Benedictine monk native of Bergamo, who since 1976 has been staying a little over seven thousand kilometers to the east in a place called Phulbari Para near the town of Khulna in Bangladesh where he runs an ashram as a dependent of the Praglia monastery. So, after eight long years of the introspective silence of a monastery, Lorenzo decides to go to Khulna. But before that he must spend eight months in England attending English-to-Speakers of-Other-Languages courses at an Academy there, till Luca would come to pick him up and take him to Bangladesh.
Upon arriving in Dhaka, the cacophony and different aspects of an alien culture that Lorenzo faces is described very beautifully by Chatterjee in great details. He starts wearing a lungi, eating with the fingers of his right hand, washing his clothes in a public tank along with female strangers, studying Bengali in the library with Luca, and tries to acclimatise with the place, the weather, and the people as quickly as possible. Apart from praying seven times a day, he also spends a lot of time decorating the walls of the chapel with different tempura paintings.
After some time, he visits another ashram called Rishilpi run by Enzo and Laura, an Italian missionary couple in Satkhira, some sixty kilometers away. Seeing the multifarious social upliftment activities that are being undertaken at their place, Lorenzo is intrigued by the idea of worming one’s way into a community and working for its betterment from within. Though remaining a Benedictine at heart, he decides to quit the Order and continue his search for some purpose to his life.
At Rishilpi he joins as Deputy Director, Health Services, and opens a sorely needed physiotherapy clinic that would attempt to instill a little meaning in the lives of the disabled and would educate the rest in matters of hygiene, sanitation, medical care and physical well-being. After surviving quite comfortably without money for the past eleven years and living a strict, disciplined monastic life, Lorenzo gradually undergoes a change when he starts interacting with people from all strata of society. Concealing his religion within his heart, he goes on working with a missionary zeal and after some time realises that even working with women felt marvellous.
In due course, he even falls in love and proposes to Dipti, the Headmistress of the same institution, and thus an ex-priest goes on to marry an ex-nun, both remaining devout Catholics forever. They spend the six happiest years of their lives at Rishilpi, till Lorenzo realises it is also life that is holding him back. With children, his responsibilities increase, he cannot go his own way. He needs money to survive and is called upon more and more often to lecture trainees in Dhaka at the Centre for the Rehabilitation of the Paralysed. In this manner, he slowly broadens his acquaintance with the developing world, and becomes the ideal person to build a bridge between the first world donors and third world recipients.
In the brief concluding chapter of the book, Chatterjee tells us that if one ended Lorenzo’s story here, it is because, even though twenty-nine years have passed since his marriage and he and Dipti are alive and well in Phnom-Penh, he has not in essential changed and he is still in spirit, Benedictine. But what is most interesting is the fact that “he still continues, though, to live his life anti-clockwise, as it were, for (as we have seen) after passing his youth in search of direction for his spirit, he turned outward to the community – and to the joys and responsibilities of the domestic life – only in his mid-thirties; and it was not till his early forties that he properly set about addressing the matter of money. It is – broadly – the trajectory of the typical human life but lived in reverse.”
Chatterjee’s tour-de-force is his storytelling and imaginative prose combined with his trademark wit and attention to detail. In the acknowledgement section he thanks his friend Fabrizio Senesi for providing him innumerable clarifications about life in Italy and in Bangladesh. The long list of books that Chatterjee read and mentioned in the end provides ample proof that he undertook his research rather seriously and this is clearly reflected in the intricate details that he provides of places and people throughout the novel. The book is not a page-turner, and one must read it rather seriously to savour the meticulous effort that Chatterjee made to provide us a fascinating tale about an ordinary human being who finds that a life of service to God is enough, and that it is not enough.
Title: Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder
Author: Salman Rushdie
Publisher: Penguin Random House
More than thirty years ago, a fatwa had been declared by Ayatollah Khomeini on the famous writer Salman Rushdie. The charge of blasphemy was labelled after the publication of The Satanic Verses, and since then the author has been living in asylum at different places because he was not safe in his own country. When it was assumed that the incident had died its natural death, the simmering vendetta and violence upsurged suddenly on 12th of August 2022, when Rushdie had gone to participate in a week of events at the Chautauqua Institution in upstate New York titled “More Than Shelter: Redefining the American Home”, and an unidentified man attempted to murder him on stage with a knife.
This horrific act of violence shook the entire world. No one hoped that they would ever be able to read a single line written by the author once again. He was a totally lost case. Now, one-and-a-half years after the incident, and in unforgettable detail, Rushdie writes this first-person memoir Knife where he relives the traumatic events of that day and its aftermath, as well as his journey towards physical recovery. His healing was made possible by the love and support of his present African American wife Eliza, his family, his army of doctors and physical therapists, and his readers worldwide.
Dedicating the book to the men and women who saved his life, the text is neatly divided into two parts, each containing four sections. The first half of the book titled “The Angel of Death” primarily revolves around ‘despair’, whereas the second part, “The Angel of Life,” narrates a vision of ‘hope’ and optimism and Rushdie’s attempt to return to normalcy once again with his indomitable spirit to fight on against all odds.
The opening chapter called ‘Knife’ begins with the description of a beautiful August morning in detail and how the apparent tranquility was shattered when suddenly violence appeared in the form of an unidentified man who rushed at him on the open stage and stabbed him indiscriminately. Totally flabbergasted, Rushdie obviously didn’t know what to do. So, he narrates the rest of the incidents in the form of a collage, with bits of memory pieced together with other eyewitness and news reports and tells us how that morning he “experienced both the worst and the best of human nature, almost simultaneously.” Though the incident of his attempted murder dragged “that” novel back into the narrative of scandal, Rushdie declares that till date he still felt proud of having written The Satanic Verses.
Apart from the day-by-day narration of how things shaped up after the stabbing incident, three things stand out very clearly in this memoir. First is of course the detailed description of his entire eighteen-day long stay initially at the extreme-trauma ward of the hospital and later at the rehab centre titled ‘Hamot’. Though in extreme pain we are told how doing a few simple everyday things for himself lifted his spirits greatly. So, apart from the rehab of the body, there was also the rehab of the mind and spirit. Spending more than six weeks in two hospitals, he could return to the world and so slowly he started feeling optimistic again.
The chapter called ‘Homecoming’ begins with his leaving the hospital at 3 A.M. as quietly as possible and going back home at that unearthly hour to evade any watching eyes.
Emotionally moved, even though he had lost one eye permanently, he felt “100 percent better and healthier immediately. I was home.”
The incident of homecoming is once again closely related to the second important issue during his convalescence –the love, care and bonding with his present wife Eliza. Dedicating a total chapter titled “Eliza”, Rushdie gives us details of how he met the African American poet Rachel Eliza Griffiths entirely unknown to him, through the eminent American writer, Norman Mailer, and how his friendship grew stronger day by day, leading to a secret marriage based on the realisation that it was a relationship not of competitiveness but of total mutual support. They showed that even in this attention-addicted time, it was still possible for two people to lead, pretty openly, a happily private life till the knife incident changed everything. He tells us how the poetical sensibilities of his wife lent extra support to him in such trying times.
The third most significant aspect of this memoir is the way Rushdie devotes an entire chapter addressed to his assassin –“The A”. And it is really at its imaginative best. In it he has recorded a detailed conversation that never actually occurred between himself and “a man I met for only twenty-seven seconds of my life”. After bringing in several intertextual references about other writers and situations, about other murders being committed in the lives of different personalities, in the fourth and final session of his imaginative conversation, Rushdie states, “You don’t know me. You’ll never know me.” After the imagined conversation is over, he no longer has the energy to imagine the assassin, just as he never had the ability to imagine him. He feels that the purgation is complete, and this chapter of his life is closed once and for all.
Interestingly after half a year of nothingness, Rushdie realises that his writing juices had indeed started to flow again. During his sleepless nights at the rehab, he often thought a lot about The Knife as an idea. Talking about different occasions and purposes when the knife is used, he realized that the knife is basically a tool and acquires meaning from the use we make of it. It is morally neutral, and it is the misuse of knives that is immoral. Then he states that language too was a knife for him, and he would use it to fight back. Here he made a resolution that instead of remaining as a mere victim, he would answer violence with art – “Hello, world, we were saying. We’re back, and after our encounter with hatred, we’re celebrating the survival of love. After the angel of death, the angel of life.” But it was hard for him to write about post-traumatic stress disorder at any time especially when his hand felt like it was “inside a glove” and “the eye… is an absence with an immensely powerful presence.” Returning to New York after a ten-day visit to London, he therefore decided to spend the second chance of his life on just love and work. Since several Muslim entities were still celebrating his pitiable condition, he thought to make it clear to his readers that his worldview about God had not changed a bit and so he declares — “My godlessness remains intact. That isn’t going to change in this second-chance life.”
In the final section ‘Closure?’ Rushdie writes that his own anger faded, and it felt trivial when set beside the anger of the planet. He understood that three things had happened that had helped him on his journey towards coming to terms with what had happened – namely — the passage of time, the therapy, and ultimately the writing of this book. Moving along with time, he felt he was no longer certain that he wanted, or needed, to confront and address his assassin in open court and that the “Samuel Beckett moment” no longer seemed significant at all. This is where art and love overcame all barriers. He has successfully moved on and there was no need to look backwards once again.
Written a few years ago, Rushdie’s Joseph Anton: A Memoir narrated the story of how he was living a disturbed life under the pseudonym of Joseph Anton. But that memoir did not create much impact upon the readers, whereas Knife has brought back the powerful and erudite Rushdie as he has risen phoenix-like from the ashes and revealed his erudition without being parochial. Ordinary readers often shy away from his work as it is full of intertextuality and cross-references. But even those who find his writing to be too high-brow will have no problem in understanding the ‘free-associative way’ in which the mind of this writer works even today. The book is a page-turner no doubt and has brought back the popularity of Salman Rushdie once again. The simplistic yet very appealing cover of the book is an added attraction too.
Somdatta Mandal, critic and translator, is a former Professor of English from Visva-Bharati University, Santiniketan, India.
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PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL
Ratnottama Sengupta muses on the ongoing wars and violence as acts of terror and gazes back to an incident in the past which resulted in a powerful Bengali poem by Tarik Sujat that she has translated here
The world is in the grip of violence, Rabindranath Tagore wrote on March 5, 1927, sitting in the abode of peace – Santiniketan. Full 97 years later, the world is still in the grip of violence?
It’s Gaza today. Ukraine yesterday. Afghanistan some days ago. Sri Lanka not so long ago. Sometimes it is Bosnia. At other times, it’s Vietnam. Lands far flung and near adorn themselves with blood-red mark of hatred. Religion. Self-seeking dictators. Communism. Global lust for power. No matter what is at stake, the pawn is an innocent life. Always. A woman. An elder. An unborn child…
Tagore wrote Hingshay unmatto prithibi[1]– “The world is in the grip of violence as a prayer to the Almighty. The delirium is leading to conflicts, cruel and ceaseless… Crooked is the world today, tangled its philosophy. No bond is sacred.” And the anguish of such a state of affairs? It led even the Eternal Bard of Bengal to pray for a new birth of ‘Him of Boundless Life.’ “Save them,” Tagore had prayed to the Serene, “raise your eternal voice of hope” so that “Love’s lotus, with its inexhaustible store of nectar” may open its petals in His light. In His immeasurable mercy. To wipe away all dark stains from the heart of the continents.
In vain he prayed.
“Forgive them!” Jesus said, for “They know not what they do!” And what did the soldiers do? They gambled for his clothes by throwing dice! (Luke 23:34)
Forgive them? “Have you forgiven those who vitiated the atmosphere and snuffed out light for innocent lives?” Tagore asked the Almighty, in ‘Proshno (Question)‘. Have you forgiven those who deal hate in the secret hours of night? Have you embraced with love those who murder the helpless in broad daylight under the cover of ideology? Don’t you wince when a pregnant Bilkis[2] is gang-raped? Why do you shed silent tears when elected rulers choke people’s voice with furtive use of power?
And like his Prayer, Tagore’s ‘Question’ too has remained unanswered. And dumb sit the messiahs when men with mistaken notion of mission kill, maim, mutilate hostages who become mere numbers in newspaper headlines – until a new dateline wipes it off our collective memory. Thus, once again, the world was shaken by brutalities carried out in the name of God, in Dhaka’s elite neighbourhood, Gulshan.
On July 1, 2016, before the Cinderella hour struck, five militants entered the Holey Artisan Bakery with bombs, machetes, pistols, and opened fire on men and women, from Italy, Japan, India, Bangladesh. Sunrise. Sunset.. Sunrise… unsuccessfully the police tried to secure the hostages. An elite force of the Bangla Army had to raid to put an end to what BBC News described as “the deadliest Islamist attack in Bangladesh”. Meanwhile? The toll had risen to 29 lives, totaling 17 foreigners, three locals, two policemen, five gunmen, and two bakery staff who were trying to earn their daily bread!
Since Gulshan is home to many embassies and high commissions in the capital of the secular nation, the news stirred up the world in no time. And prayers poured in – over cellphones, on Facebook, television and newspapers too. Prayers of wives for their husbands. Prayers of mothers for their sons. Prayers of a niece for her aunt. Prayers of American friends for their Indian batch mate. But once again, prayers went unanswered…
Among those who did not survive to tell the story was Simona Monti of Italy who worked in textiles. Then 33 years of age, Simona was soon to go to her home an hour away from Rome, to deliver the child she had nursed in her womb for five months. But Michelangelo too did not live to breathe in the world vitiated by hatred. When the news reached her brother, he prayed his Simona’s bloodshed would make this “a more just and brotherly world.”
His prayer, too, remains unanswered.
But poets and other men of conscience did not remain silent. Within days of the incident Tarik Sujat wrote Janmer aagei aami mrityu ke korechhi alingan (Even before my birth I embraced death, July 6, 2016). No diatribe in his words, but the muted cry of an unborn being jolts us. That cry left me with a tear in one eye and fire in the other…
On my very first reading I was touched, I was moved, I fell silent. The pensive mood of the embryonic life turned me reflective. Anger, rage, fury was not the answer to hostility, loathing, abhorrence, I realised. So will you, as you go through the poem that was handed out in Magliano Sabino when Simona’s hometown prayed for her eternal rest.
I Embraced Death Before Birth
Even before my birth I embraced death. I have no nation, no speech, No stock of my own. No distinction between Holy-Unholy, Sin and Virtue, Sacred or Cursed. Having seen the ghastly face of life I've swallowed my last drop of tear... My first breath did not pollute The environs of your earth. My last breath was the first gift Of this planet to me!
Maa! You were my only playhouse, My school, and my coffin. I had yet to open my eyes - And still I saw The sharp nails of executioner Ripping apart my naval cord. My ears were yet to hear sound, Still I could catch bells That summon lads to schools... The obscure sound echoed Through churches, temples, And minarets of masjids Until, slowly, it fell silent...
My first bed was my last. My mother's womb was My only home In the unseen world. On that nook too, darkness descended. Floating down the river of blood I groped for my umbilical cord To keep me afloat... My tiny fingers, my soft palm Could find nothing to clutch.
In that Dance of Death My unseeing eyes witnessed Koran, Bible, Gita, Tripitak Bobbing in receding blood. In the achromatic gloom Of my chamber I got no chance to learn A single mark of piety!
Still... I embraced death before I was born. My mother's womb is my Grave, my coffin, my pyre. The world of humans Is enveloped in fire - A few droplets of my meagre body Does not quench its thirst!
(Translated from Tarik Sujat’s Bengali poem by Ratnottama Sengupta)
Why has this portrayal of a tormented soul found voice in French, German, Swedish, Italian, English…? Why has it been translated into 17 languages? In the answer blowing in the wind lies hope for mankind. For, the answer is: Not every man is created in the image of Lucifer. That is why, when Giulia Benedetti learnt that she will never again see her aunt Nadia Benedetti, that “she will not talk, will not comment on fashion, will not sing together again…” she wrote on Facebook: “Do not forget. Do not lose her memory. Do not let crazy people massacre. Do not let them win…”
And I immerse my voice in the Bard’s to say: “Let life come to the souls that are dead…” And I pray, bring harmony, bring rhythm, bring melody in our lives, O Serene! Wipe away every dark cloud from the world yet to dawn!
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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Title: Maya Nagari: Bombay-Mumbai A City in Stories
Editors: Shanta Gokhale, Jerry Pinto
Publisher:Speaking Tiger Books
The very mention of the name Mumbai (or Bombay) brings to our minds a great city in India where the thriving metropolis grows at a rapid speed because people not only flock here from different parts of the country to make quick bucks and survive against all odds, but also because the film industry of Bollywood has also established it as a city of dreams, one that never sleeps and instead creates a mirage-of-sorts — an illusion, rightly labelled by the editors of this anthology as ‘Maya Nagari’. Edited by Shanta Gokhale and Jerry Pinto, this book, comprising twenty-one short stories about Mumbai takes the road less taken to create a non-uniform image of the metropolis. In tune with its multicultural and multilingual nature, we have stories about the city that is a sea of people and speaks at least a dozen languages. There are stories translated from Marathi, Urdu, Gujarati, Tamil, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, and stories written originally in English. Among the writers are legends and new voices—Baburao Bagul, Ismat Chughtai, Pu La Deshpande, Ambai,Urmila Pawar, Mohan Rakesh, Saadat Hasan Manto, Ambai, Jayant Kaikini, Bhupen Khakhar,Shripad Narayan Pendse, Manasi, Krishan Chander, Udayan Thakker, Cyrus Mistry, Vilas Sarang, Jayant Pawar, Tejaswini Apte-Rahm and Anuradha Kumar.
As Jerry Pinto clearly states in the introduction, the stories can be read as we like, we can begin with the first story or the last, or any story in between. The observant reader might notice that he and the other editor Shanta Gokhale have deliberately chosen not to organise the material according to chronology, or geography. This is partly because they believe that the city lives in several time zones and spaces at once, as does India, but also because there is something essentially chaotic about its nature. So, he says, “the stories echo and bounce off each other, they do not collide, but there is a Brownian motion to these patterns” and he hopes to let the readers find it. Here, Mumbai is stripped of its twinkle; it is deglamourised to reveal how it’s the quotidian that lends the city its character—warmth and hostility alike and as inhabitants of the city the editors call ‘home,’ they hope a narrative will emerge.
In the twenty-one stories of this collection, there is the city that labours in the mills and streets, and the city that sips and nibbles in five-star lounges, the city of Ganapati, Haji Malang and the Virgin Mary. What binds the stories together is ‘human muscle’ – the desperate attempts of men and women of all classes and castes to survive in this heartless city amid all odds.
The stories are of different lengths and written in different narrative styles. Of the five or six stories translated by Shanta Gokhale herself from Marathi, one is struck by the excessive length of the so called ‘short’ stories. The very first one “Oh! The Joy of Devotion” by Jayant Pawar, forty-five pages in length, narrates in detail about the Ganapati festival and how it is related to the fate of the local people. Pu La Deshpande’s story “A Cultural Moment is Born”, set in the 1940s, tells stories of people living in chawls [slums] and how they spend their cultural days. Another very long story translated by Gokhale called “The Ramsharan Story” tells us about the rise and fall of a bus conductor by the name of Ramsharan who turns out to become a union leader. Baburao Bagul’s “Woman of the Street”, written originally in Marathi and translated by Gokhale again, tells the story of Girija, a sex-worker trying to collect money to cure her son in the village. The story ends on a disturbing note, as it reaffirms the relativity of success.
Once again, Krishan Chander’s story “The Children of Dadar Bridge” translated from Hindustani by Jerry Pinto is so long that it qualifies to be called a sort of novella. In this powerful story God comes to earth to a chawl and offers food to the first-person narrator. Then, impersonating as a small and innocent child, and along with the child narrator, he moves around different places in the city to witness its activities firsthand — we get to know about behind the scene affairs that take place in the film studios, about satta[1] dens, about bribery, local dons who arm-twist every new hawker to carry on their business after receiving their weekly cut money and more. In “Civic Duty and Physics Practicals”, Malayalam writer Manasi reveals the different experiences one comes across living in a society defined by power equations. Issues of hooliganism, superstition, illegal colonies, corruption, intimidation and violence are explored in a single story where the narrator is struggling, for days, with blaring speakers at a wedding nearby, even as her son tries hard to prepare for his upcoming exams. The story soon takes a dark turn where power trumps over consideration for fellow human beings.
A very powerful story written by Ambai in Tamil called “Kala Ghora Chowk” deals with issues of Marxist ideology, trade unions and the fate of a raped woman called Rosa. Anuradha Kumar’s “Neera Joshi’s Unfinished Book” tells us the life story of one woman who “made the city” and the perennial problems of displaced mill workers when the closed mills give way to high-rise buildings. Some of the stories are of course written in a lighter vein, though they also depict different problems related to city life. As the title of Vilas Sarang’s story “An Afternoon Among the Rocks” suggests, it narrates the plight of a couple trying to make love in the deserted seashore and how they get hijacked by a smuggler! In “The Flat on the Fifth Floor”, Mohan Rakesh writes about two sisters who meet the narrator after one failed love affair. A moving picture of the closing down of cinema halls in Mumbai comes out very beautifully in the Kannada story “Opera House” by Jayant Kaikini, especially narrating the plight of one of the sweepers working there when the declaration of permanent closure is pasted everywhere. Tejaswini Apte-Rahm’s “Mili” tells the story of a man who meets his ex-girlfriend after five years.
Though it is not possible to give the details of each and every story included in this anthology in this review, one must mention some of the stories that were originally written in English. Cyrus Mistry’s “Percy” about a young and lonely Parsi boy is so compelling that it was even made into a Gujarati motion-picture. “House Cleaning” by Jerry Pinto tells the story of a woman cleaner and his son, who talks about the reality of street dwellers. Eunice de Souza’s “Rina of Queen’s Diamonds” is not a straightforward narration at all but offers a collage of different vignettes of life in Bombay.
Though most of the stories portray the seamier side of life and in some ways de-glamourise Mumbai, at the same time they also portray how human resilience can combat all sorts of odds, and the city can be revealed only through shared experiences. Thus, each of the twenty-one stories in this collection tells a different tale of Mumbai, Bombay, Momoi, Bambai, Manbai and many others. As the editors have rightly pointed out at the beginning of their introduction, “You cannot catch a city in words. You cannot catch a city at all.” They felt that “it is not meant to be caught…this city resists even more because it was not designed at all; it just happened and it keeps on happening.” Thus, the four-hundred plus pages of this anthology Maya-Nagari remains a book to be treasured and read now at leisure and also at any time in the future.
‘Chhora or Rhymes’ was written by Rabindranath Tagore in 1941 in Santinketan at his home, Udayan. It was part of a collection called Chhora that was published in the same year.
Udayan (translates to sunrise) Tagore’s home in Santiniketan, where he wrote this poem.
RHYMES
When idleness hovers In twilight’s haunts, A hard day’s work Draws to a halt, Scattered whimsies Float in flocks. I do not know why The dream realm calls, Leaving behind the Chasms of the day — Some are filled with sentiments, Some, run astray — The flow of these imaginings, Lost in their own rhythm, Revel as irrationally as Crickets’ chirp in unison, Or dragonflies gather in dusk To flit spontaneously Into a weak flame that Flickers dimly. In clear light, when I reflect On those lines, I wonder if they were written Intoxicated with wines. Externally, they seem To have an obvious sense, And yet, they seem to conceal mysteries that are dense. Thoughts seem to stream, flow, And drown — Yet, they do not reveal From where they come. They exist I know but the rest Is obscured by darkness — The game is on to tie one With another in coherence. Congruity gives meaning. But they break these constraints, And in an ecstatic frenzy, Dance in emptiness, unrestrained.
This poem has been translated by Mitali Chakravarty with editorial input by Sohana Manzoor
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The Bengali poet, Kazi Nazrul Islam (1899-1976), is widely remembered as the fiery iconoclast who fought against the structures of oppression and orthodoxy. The iconic bidrohi or ‘rebel poet’ of Bengal, Nazrul continues to be loved for his songs and poetry that were aimed at arousing the rebellious spirit of both Hindus and Muslims alike. But what of his prose, his journalism, and his politics? Selected Essays reveals to us the extraordinary versatility of Nazrul as a writer, thinker, and activist. Addressing subjects as diverse as social reform, politics, communal harmony, environmental concerns, education, aesthetics, ethics, and philosophy, this rich collection showcases Nazrul’s dynamic vision and unique use of language as an instrument of change. The essays chart his evolving consciousness as a thinker, writer, and activist, offering vivid glimpses of the ethos of his times, his relationships with leading figures such as Tagore and Gandhi, and his active engagement with social, political, and cultural processes.
Of the forty-one essays selected here, (three undated), the first thirteen are all written in different places all in the year 1920. That was the year Nazrul returned to Bengal after serving in Karachi during World War I as a member of the Bengal regiment of the colonial British army. Reacting to the Jallianwallah Bagh massacre he writes, “May the Dyer monument never allow us to forget Dyer’s memory” because on that occasion Hindus and Muslims embraced each other and wept together as brothers. They shared the same agony as children of the same womb. In ‘Strike’, he praises the social awareness that has swept among the ranks of the labouring class and believes that the “protest is not just a rebellion, but the death-bite of the suffering, moribund class”. When some migrants were fired upon after a clash with the armed police at a place called Kanchagarhi, he asked in ‘Who is Responsible for the Killing of Migrants?’, whether anyone can ever tolerate such injustice towards humanity, conscience, self-respect and independence and states that they are no longer going to passively accept such assaults. ‘Awakening Our Neglected Power’ contends that democracy or people’s power cannot be established in our country because of the oppression inflicted by the Bhadra[1] community.
There are several essays in which Nazrul speaks about the state of National Education, he envisages ‘A National University’, and in a very powerful piece that he wrote from Presidency Jail in Kolkata on 7 January 1923, titled ‘Deposition of a Political Prisoner’ he reveals his self-confidence:
“If anything has struck me as unjust, I have described it as injustice, described oppression as oppression, named falsehoods as falsehood. …For that endless mockery, insults, humiliation and assaults have been rained on me, from within my home and beyond. But nothing whatsoever has intimidated me into dishonouring my own truth or my own Lord. No temptation has overpowered me enough to compromise my integrity or to diminish the immense self-satisfaction gleaned through my own endeavours…. I repeat, I have no fear, no sorrow. I am the child of the elixir of immortality.”
Nazrul grew up in a traditional religious environment, yet in his writings he drew upon both Hindu and Islamic sources, and expressed a faith that transcended the limits of any single religion. In several essays, he harps on the problems of Hindu-Muslim amity and enmity and warns us about “this hideous business of purity of touch and untouchability”. He wants only humans to live in India as brothers and wants everyone to be wary of the terrible deceptions created by both the religions.
In the essay ‘Temple and Mosque‘, he states that both parties have the same leader, and his real name is Shaitan, the Devil. Written in response to the communal riots that broke out in Kolkata on 2 April 1926, he feels that those very same places of worship that ought to have been bridges between heaven and earth are instead causing harm to humanity today, and so those temples and mosques should be broken down. In another essay titled ‘Hindu-Muslim’, penned the same year, Nazrul talks about the question of an internal tail in human beings. He says, “There’s no telling what animal excitement lured the human mind to discover a substitute for tails in the beard or tiki[2]!” He further elaborates:
“Both Hindu and Muslim ways of life can be tolerated, but their faith in tikitwa and daritwa, the orthodox ways of tiki and beard, is not to be borne, for both instigate violence and killing. Tikitwa is not Hindutwa, it is perhaps punditwa, the way of the pundit! Likewise, the beard, too, is not Islamic, it is mullatwa, the way of the mullah. These two types of hair tufts, marked with religious dogma, are precisely the reason for all the conflict and hair-splitting we witness today!”
Though it is not possible to discuss all the different editorials, book reviews, and political pieces that are included in this collection, one must mention at least two essays that speak about literary issues as well. In 1932, Nazrul wrote for Patrika (subsequently reprinted in Bulbul the following year), an interesting piece titled ‘World Literature Today’. In it he states that there are two kinds of writers present in the world today and their different tendencies have assumed immense proportions.
“Ranged on both sides are great war heroes, champion charioteers of the battlefield. On one side are the dreamers, such as Noguchi, Yeats and Rabindranath, and on the other, Gorky, Johan Bojer, Bernard Shaw, Benavente and their ilk.”
But Nazrul’s ire in being ostracized comes out clearly in ‘A Great Man’s Love Is a Sandbank’ (1927), where he criticises the high-handedness of Rabindranath Tagore. He begins by telling us how he was a prisoner of state at the Alipore Central Jail when he was informed by the assistant jailor that Tagore had recognised Nazrul’s talent and dedicated his play Basanta to him. The other political prisoners present there had laughed at him not in joy but in incredulity. For him, the blessing turned into a curse. His very close friends and state prisoners also turned away from him. He realised what massive internal damage this outward gain had caused him. Busy with his political agenda, he didn’t have the time to sit and meditate as advised several times by Tagore. So Nazrul writes, “I find that the brighter my countenance shines in this glory, the darker some other famous poets’ faces seem to appear.” He mentions that he had grown accustomed to police torture but when literary personages begin to torment one, their brutality knows no bounds. “Alas, O youthful new literature!” His crime was that young people celebrated his work. He laments further,
“That Kabiguru[3], revered by both parties like the grandsire Bhisma, should assent to this plot of killing Abhimanyu, is the greatest sorrow of our times. …As for me, I have discarded that topi–pyjama—sherwani–beard look[4], only out of fear of being mocked as a ‘Mia Saheb’. But still there is no respite for me…. Now we get the feeling that the Rabindranath of today is not the same Rabindranath we have always known.”
That the trajectories and beliefs of Tagore and Nazrul went in the opposite direction is well- known. In the essay, Nazrul then further continues his complaints against Tagore. He questions whether they have been considered as his enemies, simply because they didn’t go to him frequently. Also, since the goddess of wealth blessed him, Kabiguru did not know what dire poverty the new writers had to struggle against, languishing in conditions of starvation or semi-starvation. So, he humbly requests Kabiguru not to sprinkle salt on their wounds by mocking the impoverishment that is their singular affliction, for that is one form of heartlessness that they cannot tolerate.
Of the last three essays written in 1960, namely, ‘The Science of Life’(where men “are surrounded by all sorts of travails and sufferings, and many of them cannot be alleviated”), ‘A Point to Ponder’(where the nation faces an immense problem regarding the dispute about the instructions and procedure for the worship of the mother, the Bharatmata, our Mother India) and in ‘What We Need Today’, Nazrul speaks of the necessity of a “vast tumult in India”. Making his readers aware of the vast duplicity and trickery in the name of religion, he warns that unless one avoids the baseness of being subjugated by an external power, there is no prospect of heaven for us, only the grotesqueness of hell. He wants the kalboishakhi, the wild summer storm, to “approach in all its fury, rearing his head like a hooded serpent swimming in the unchecked torrents of an ocean of blood” and sweep everything away.
Before concluding one should also make a few comments on the translation. As a veteran translator, Radha Chakravarty, has successfully managed to transcreate some very difficult Bengali idioms, cultural nuances and analogies that Nazrul used in some of his essays. As she admitted in the Introduction, “[T]ranslating Nazrul’s prose proved to be a challenge, as demanding as it was exhilarating. …The endeavour demanded experiment and creativity rather than mechanical lexical ability and involved some difficult choices…Literal translation has been avoided, with greater focus on the sense, emotion, intellectual import, rhetorical features and stylistic particularities of the Bengali source texts.” She further adds that the present translations stemmed from a desire to bring Nazrul’s essays to a contemporary audience in South Asia and the rest of the world, to draw attention to his literary achievement as well as his significance as a writer, thinker, activist, and visionary. Though a lot of research and translation projects on Nazrul has been going on in Bangladesh for quite some time (where he holds the status of National Poet), in India, especially in West Bengal, the response is still rather lukewarm. Hence this volume is strongly recommended as a collector’s item.
[1] Literally decent but here indicates the bourgeoisie.
Once more, Ratnottama Sengupta explores the contemporariness of Tagore ….
In empathy with Kolkata’s heatwave in April 2024
The continuing heatwave in Kolkata that has defied the geographical reality of Kaal Baisakhi — the norwester that brings relief to sun-scorched beings — prompted me to continuously hum this Tagore song in Brindavani Sarang Raag, written in 1922.
Darun Agni Baaney Re... (Shafts of Fire)
Shafts of fire pour thirst on us -- Sleepless nights, long scorching days, No respite in sight! On withered branches, A listless dove wails Droopy doleful notes... No fear, no scare, My gaze is fixed on the sky, For you will come in the Form of a storm, And shower rain on scorched souls.
And as I kept singing the song first penned in Santiniketan, I marvelled at the creativity of the giant whose words are true to this very day, more than 100 years later!
Kaal Baisakhi, the nor’wester known in Assam as bordoisila, is a localised rainfall and thunderstorm event which occurs in the Indian states of West Bengal, Bihar, Jharkhand, Odisha, Tripura, and Assam as well as in Bangladesh during the summer month of Baisakh (April 15-May 14). This first month of the Bengali calendar also saw the birth of Rabindranath Tagore. These storms generally occur in the afternoon or just before sunset, when thick dark black clouds appear over the sky and then bring gale-speed wind with torrential rain, often with hail, but spanning only a short period of time.
Kalbaisakhi
Tagore’s love for Nature had compelled him to set up in Santiniketan open air classrooms, where students would learn sitting on the ground in the bower, under trees where birds would chirp and gentle breeze would caress their tired brows.
And, his involvement also expressed itself in the 293 songs he wrote in the segment titled Prakriti (nature) Parjaay. There are songs about nature in general. But he himself further classified the songs under subsections — Upa parjaay — that focus on the six seasons: grishma (summer), barsha (Monsoon), sharat( early autumn), hemanta (late autumn or early winter), sheet (winter), basanta (spring).
Tagore clearly was taken up by the wild beauty of monsoon with its dark clouds and thunderous showers. For, he wrote 150 songs on the drops of nectar from the heavens, while summer elicited a tenth of this number! If this is half the number celebrating sharat, the festive season of Durga Puja, it is thrice the number dedicated to hemanta, the confluence of autumn and winter.
I take heart in the fact that Grishma subsection includes Chokkhe aamar trishna, Ogo trishna aamar bakkho jurey… [1]
Thirst fills my eyes, Dear, Thirsty is my heart too... I'm a rain-starved day of Baisakh Burnt by the sun, heat stroked. There's a storm brewing In the ovenated air.. It sweeps my mind into the distance. It rips me of my veil. The blossom that lit up the garden Has withered and fallen. Who has reined in the stream Imprisoned in heartless stone At the peak of suffering?
And then, when it rained? The torrents poured balm on the angry burns. The fleet-footed lightning seared the heart of the cloud-covered darkness and extracted the nectar-like flow…
It assured us that no hardship lasts forever. It reiterated faith in the eternal words, “This too shall pass!” And, for me? It confirmed Tagore’s words that “You will come in the form of a storm and shower rain on scorched souls…”
Tagore lives on, 163 years after he came. In his words. In his imagery. In his empathy with every human situation…
[1] Thirst fills my eyes, Dear, /Thirsty is my heart too…
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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Narrative by Debendranath Tagore, translated from Bengali by Somdatta Mandal
Note from the Translator
Debendranath, Father of Rabindranath Tagore
Born to Dwarkanath Tagore in Shelaidah, Debendranath Tagore (15 May 1817 – 19 January 1905) was a Hindu philosopher and religious reformer. One of the founders of the Brahmo religion in 1848, his journey in the role of ‘Maharshi’, the great ascetic, was an attempt to spread the Brahmo faith and he travelled extensively to various places, especially in different parts of the Himalayas like Mussourie, Shimla, Kashmir, and Dalhousie. He even constructed a house in Bakrota called ‘The Snow Dawn’ where he used to reside for months. Although Debendranath was deeply spiritual, he managed to continue to maintain his worldly affairs — he did not renounce his material possessions, as some Hindu traditions prescribed, but instead continued to enjoy them in a spirit of detachment. His considerable material property included estates spread over several districts in Bengal. Debendranath was a master of the Upanishads and played no small role in the education and cultivation of the faculties of his sons.
In his memoir, Jeevan Smriti [Memories of Life], Rabindranath also narrates in detail about his trip with his father in the Himalayas when he was just eleven years old. Debendranth founded the Tattwabodhini Patrika (1843) as a mouthpiece of the Brahmo Samaj and apart from his autobiography, wrote several other prose pieces which also reveal his wanderlust.
Among the two entries included here, we have ‘Moulmein Bhraman’ which is an interesting travel piece narrating his sojourn in Burma in September/October 1850. In the Chaitra 1817 Saka issue of Tattwabodhini Patrika, a travelogue ‘Mori Bhraman’ narrating Debendranath’s trip to Mori was published. Interestingly, as a prologue to this piece Sri Chintamani Chattopadhyay tells us that he was so enamoured after listening to Debendranath’s oral narration of the trip undertaken 28 years earlier, that he decided to transcribe it for the satisfaction of the readers.
Moulmein Bhraman (Travel to Moulmein)
After a year, the splendour of autumn revealed once again and the desire to travel blossomed in my mind. I could not make up my mind where to go for a trip this time. I thought I would make a trip on the river and so went to the bank of the Ganges to look for a suitable boat. I saw that several khalasis — dockyard workers – of a huge steamer were busy at their work. It seemed that this steamer would soon set sail.
“When would this steamer go to Allahabad?” I asked them.
In reply they said, “Within two or three days this will venture into the sea.”
On hearing that this steamer would go to the sea, I thought that this was the easiest way my desire for a sea journey could be fulfilled. I went to the captain instantly and rented a cabin and in due time boarded that steamer to begin my sea journey.
I had never seen the blue colour of the sea water before. I kept on watching the beautiful sights by day and night amid the continuous bright blue waves and remained immersed in the glory of the eternal spirit. After entering the sea and swaying with the waves for one night, the ship dropped anchor at three o’clock the next afternoon. In front of us, I saw a stretch of white sand and something that looked like human habitation. So, I took a boat and went to see it. As I was wandering about the place, I saw a few Bengali men from Chittagong with charms around their necks coming towards me. I asked them, “How come you are here? What do you do?”
“We do business here. We have procured the idol of Goddess Durga in this month of Ashwin[1],” they replied.
I was really surprised to hear that they celebrate Durga puja here in Khaekfu town of Burma. Durga puja was celebrated even here!
From there, I came back to the ship and started towards Moulmein. When the ship left the sea and entered the Moulmein River, I remembered the scene of leaving Gangasagar Island and going into the Ganges River. But this river did not offer any such good scenery. The water was muddy and full of crocodiles; no one bathed in it. The ship came and dropped anchor at Moulmein. Here a Madrasi resident called Mudeliar came and greeted me[2]. He came on his own and introduced himself. He was a high-level government official and a true gentleman. He took me to his house, and I remained a guest there and accepted his hospitality for the few days I stayed at Moulmein. I stayed very comfortably in his house.
The streets in the city of Moulmein were wide and clean. The shops that lined both sides of the street selling different kinds of things were all manned by women. I bought a box, and some very fine silk clothes from them. Going around the marketplace I went to the fish market at one time. I saw big fish for sale displayed on huge tables.
“What are these big fish called?”
They replied, “Crocodiles.” So, the Burmese ate crocodiles; they spoke verbally about ahimsa and the Buddhist religion, but their stomachs were filled with crocodiles!
One evening when I was wandering on the wide streets of Moulmein, I saw a man walking towards me. When he came close, I understood that he was a Bengali. I was quite surprised to see a Bengali there. From where did this Bengali arrive across the ocean? It seemed there were no places where Bengalis did not go. I asked him, “From where have you come?”
“I was in trouble and so came here,” he replied.
Instantly I understood his trouble[3]. I asked him further, “How many years of trouble?”
“Seven years,” he replied again.
“What did you do?”
“Nothing much. I just duplicated some papers of a company. Now my term is over, but I cannot go home because I do not have the money.”
I offered to give him the passage money. But how will he go home? He had set up a business, had got married, and was living quite comfortably. Would he ever go back to our country to show his shameful black face there?
Mudeliar told me that there was a mountain cave here which people went to visit[4]. If I wished he would accompany me there. I agreed. On the first moon night[5], he brought a long boat during the high tide. There was a wooden cabin in the centre of that boat. That night, Mudeliar, I, the captain of the ship and seven or eight other people boarded the boat and it left at two o’clock at night. We sat up for the whole night in that boat. The foreigners kept on singing English songs and requested me to sing Bengali songs. So, I kept on singing Brahma-sangeet occasionally. No one understood anything. They did not like them and went on laughing. We travelled for about twenty-seven miles that night and reached our destination at four o’clock in the morning.
Our boat reached the shore. Everything was still dark. On the shore I saw a cottage full of trees and creepers from which light was coming out. I got curious and ventured alone to that unknown place in the darkness. On reaching there I found it was a tiny cottage. Inside several bald-headed priests in yellow ochre robes were placing candles in different parts of the room. I was quite surprised to see people resembling the priests of Kashi[6] here. How did they come here? Later I came to know that they were the leaders of the Buddhist monks and known as Phungis. I hid myself and observed them playing with the lamps but suddenly one of them saw me and took me inside. They gave me a mat to sit on and water to wash my feet. I had come to their house, so this was their way of entertaining guests. According to the Buddhists, serving guests was a sacred act.
I returned to the boat at early dawn. The sun rose. Mudeliar and the other invited guests came and joined us. This made us fifty in number. Mudeliar fed all of us there. He had arranged for several elephants; about two or four people got on each elephant and proceeded towards the dense jungle. There were small hills all around and in between was that dense forest. There was no other way of travelling here except on elephant back. We reached the entrance of the cave in the mountain around three o’clock in the afternoon.
We descended from the back of the elephants and started to walk in the jungle where the undergrowth was waist high. The entrance to the cave was small; we had to crawl in. After crawling in a little we could stand up straight. It was very slippery inside and we kept on slipping and falling. So, we started walking very cautiously. It was pitch dark inside. Though it was three in the afternoon it seemed like three at night. I was scared that if we lost our way in the tunnel, we would not be able to come out. We would then have to wander inside the cave for the whole day. So, wherever I went, I kept an eye on the faint light at the entrance of the cave. All the fifty of us spread ourselves in various parts of the cave and everyone had sulfur powder in their hands. Then each person put a little sulfur powder in the little holes in the cave next to where he was standing.
After everyone’s place was defined, the captain lit his share of the sulfur powder. Instantly each one of us lit matches and ignited our portion. Now the cave was lit simultaneously at fifty different places like fireworks, and we could see the inside clearly. What a huge cave it was! On looking up to the ceiling our vision could not gauge its height. We saw the different natural formations that had been caused by rainwater seepage inside and were really surprised.
Later, we came out and had a picnic in the forest and then came back to Moulmein. On our way back we heard different musical instruments being played together. Locating that sound, we went forward and saw a few Burmese people dancing with all kinds of gestures of their bodies. Our captain and the foreigners also joined them and started to dance in a similar manner. They found great pleasure. A Burmese lady was standing at the entrance of her house. She watched the mimicry of the foreigners and went and whispered something in the men’s ears. They stopped their singing and dancing immediately, and all of them suddenly left the scene and disappeared somewhere. The captain went on entreating them to resume their dance, but they did not listen. It was amazing to see how much hold the Burmese women had over their men.
We came back to Moulmein. I went to meet a high-level Burmese official at his house. He received me very politely. There was a huge room and in its four corners sat four young women stitching something.
One of the girls instantly came and handed me a round box full of betel leaves. On opening it I found it to contain different condiments. This was the local Buddhist custom of receiving guests. He then gifted me some excellent saplings resembling the Ashok flower. I had brought them home and planted them in my garden, but they did not survive despite great care. The fruit of this tree is very popular with the Burmese. If someone had sixteen rupees then he would spend the entire amount to buy that fruit. We disliked their favourite fruit because of its smell[8].
Mori Bhraman (Travel to Murree)
On the 10th of Pous, 1789 Saka[9], I abandoned all work and ventured in full earnest to go for a tour in the west. I did not decide where I would go. Just as a confined river feels overjoyed when released, I too left home with equal enthusiasm. Two servants accompanied me. One was a Punjabi Sikh called Gour Singh, the other was Kashi Singh, an Odiya Kshatri. At that time the train went only up to Delhi.
Upon arriving at Delhi, I found out that there was no other way to go except by mail coach. So, I booked a seat on it. My destination was Punjab. The horses of the coach in which I travelled up to a place near Sutlej were not steady. Because of them the coach swayed on both sides. I feared that it might topple, and it did tilt on one side and fell down on the ground.
I got out of the coach through its panel and shouted at the driver in the topmost voice – “You made me fall down, the body is hurt in many places and the nose is bleeding.” The driver had assumed that I had already died under the pressure of the carriage. Feeling assured after hearing my voice he replied, “Baancha to – at least you are alive.” My servant brought some water from a nearby well. I washed my nose. It was almost evening by then. Seeing a rest house nearby, I spent the night there.
Early next morning, I boarded the mail carriage again. It crossed the huge bridge upon the river Sutlej. Upon looking down I saw that the water had a tremendous current. I had never seen such a large bridge before. The wind was blowing fiercely. The strange sound of the waves hitting one another created great pleasure in my mind.
After that I reached an inn near the Beas River. Having our lunch there, I boarded the coach again at four in the afternoon. It was almost evening; we hadn’t progressed far when all of a sudden, a heavy storm rose. The road was just along the river. Sand started blowing to form clouds and cover the surroundings. Nothing was visible in front of us. Sand filled our nostrils and the coach could hardly move. I couldn’t decide where to go and take shelter. We found a settlement a little further ahead. Seeing a two-storied house I got off the coach and spent the night there. The storm continued unabated till three o’clock at night. As soon as it stopped, I boarded the coach again.
In this manner, travelling from one inn to another, I ultimately reached Amritsar. Earlier when I had gone to Shimla, I had spent a few days with great pleasure in Amritsar in an old, dilapidated house located next to a narrow sewer line. Immediately upon reaching Amritsar, I went looking for that beloved house.
I came next to the sewage line but saw that the house did not exist anymore. There wasn’t even a sign of it anywhere. This was an example that nothing was permanent in our lives.
I came back from there in a depressed mood. I rented a small single storied hut next to the road. As a traveller on the road, I stayed there amid the dust in that small room quite stoically but with great excitement. I cannot express in words how much I enjoyed living in such seclusion. The room wasn’t much taller than the road. Unknown travellers would stop by and speak to me in a manner as if we had been acquainted before. I was also happy to interact with them. One of them was a devotee of Hafiz and I too became an admirer. He did not want to leave me and became an earnest friend of mine.
Days went by in this manner. One day a Brahmo gentleman called Shibchandra babu came from the Brahmo Samaj at Lahore. He said that he had been sent by the Brahmos there once they heard that I was here, and I had to go to Lahore. Seeing his eagerness I started for Lahore. Babu Nabinchandra Roy had arranged for my accommodation beforehand in a house located next to a wide road at Anarkali. Once I reached there, the Brahmos came and surrounded me with devotion. During my stay in Lahore, I even had to deliver a lecture in Hindi.
From there the Brahmos arranged for my stay inside a garden. Surrounded by lime trees, the dwelling house was in the middle. With only two servants accompanying me, who was going to cook for me? I developed diarrhoea after eating the hard rotis that were served. Soon, I was also attacked by malaria. The Brahmos informed a Muslim doctor, and he came and saw me. I did not take the medicines prescribed by him. My own medicine was powdered Myrobalan and I took that. The next day there was a lot of emission of blood. I became weak; wanting fresh air I went up to the first floor. There I felt the tremendous heat of the sun and my head started reeling. The very next moment I fainted. Upon hearing this news, two Brahmos came and started feeding me sugar cane and I regained my consciousness after their nursing.
The body was in a miserable condition. The next day I sat wondering where I could go in such a state and that too without a cook. How could I return home in the heat of summer? As I was feeling tense thinking about it and could not decide what to do, my heart suddenly said, “Go to Murree.”
Thinking this to be a god-sent instruction I started preparing to go to Murree. The local Brahmos came to meet me at around two in the afternoon. My body was still very weak, and I didn’t have the energy to even talk much. They asked me what I wanted to do now, and I told them that I had decided to go to Murree and would begin my journey that day itself. After they left, Nabin babu and a few other Brahmos came.
I told them, “I want to go to Murree today so please arrange for a coach.”
They sent Gour Singh and arranged a mail carriage for me. Nabin babu asked me what I would eat on the way. He then gave me two bottles of pomegranate juice. After the coach arrived, I had the two big trunks loaded on its roof and got inside with the two bottles of juice as sustenance. Two servants sat on the roof of the coach. Despite my objection, the Brahmos dismantled the horses and started pulling the coach by themselves. I had to persuade them to stop. The coachmen attached the horses again and started moving.
After travelling a little I realised that the coach was swaying too much, and it was also not strong enough. The Sikh Gour Singh who was sitting on top was very strong, and there were two heavy trunks; if the roof collapsed on my head, there would be nothing I could do. I started feeling scared. Travelling in this manner, I reached a dak bungalow. It was a great relief and I felt that my life was saved. After eating there, I boarded the coach again. Gradually I came to the Jhelum. Gour Singh’s house was located there. He stopped the coach and was pleased to call his relatives and introduce me to them.
In this manner I arrived at Rawalpindi, which was situated in the Murree valley. From this point the road went up and down. Many broken wheels lay scattered here and there as proof of this dangerous road. I became scared on seeing them and kept wondering what would happen to me if the wheels of this unstable coach also broke. But by God’s grace, we overcame all these various hurdles and safely reached another dak bungalow[10]. As soon as I arrived there, the local Bengali gentlemen came to meet me. The pain in my body and the strain of travel made it difficult for me to speak. A gentleman called Dwarik babu started taking special care of me. He went here and there looking for a house, and at last went and requested a Parsi gentleman to allow me to stay in his garden.
I stayed in that garden and a Punjabi doctor came to see me. I told him that milk was my only food, but I could not digest that milk very well. I asked him for some medicines that would help me to digest that milk and was slightly relieved with what he gave me. I had become very weak. At night when I went to bed, I felt that I would not be able to get up the next day.
When Dwarik babu came the following day, I told him that I wanted to go to Murree. He told me that there were still no shops and markets at Murree, and I would find it difficult to stay there. But I went on pestering him. So having no other way he arranged for two basket carriages called dulis that would take me to Murree. I went in one duli and my luggage was put in the other one, while the servants went walking. I reached Murree after three days and a lot of hardship.
It was situated at a height of 7,500 feet. The bearers asked me where I wanted to go, and I told them to take me to the place where the sahibs usually landed. They took me to a huge house which was totally deserted and not a single human being was around.
I told them, “Why did you bring me here? Take me to a bungalow where people are staying.”
So, they took me to another bungalow. But the people there told me that it was a club house and not a place for travellers to stay. So, I could not put up there. I told the bearers to take me back to that same uninhabited house where they had taken me at first. They got annoyed and went back there and said that they would not go anywhere else. They placed my duli under a tree in front of that house. Looking up I saw the sky overcast with clouds. Here in the hills, it doesn’t take long for clouds to gather and rain. I was worried and wondered where to go now. I asked the bearers to take me inside and they carried the duli up to the verandah. I got down and inspected the house. There was no one anywhere. I selected a room and again asked the bearers to bring all by bedding from the carriage and spread it out near the wall so that I could sit up and take some rest. They did that and the very next moment quickly disappeared with their dulis.
A little later it started raining. The servants had not reached till then. Through the windowpanes, I could see that a heavy storm was raging outside. The leafless branches of all the big trees were fiercely swaying and big hailstones started hitting the windowpanes as if they would break them, but nothing happened. I kept on thinking that if I arrived here a little late then I would surely have died inside the duli in this severe hailstorm.
After a while the two servants came shivering. With the cold, the rain, and the hailstorm, they were in very bad shape. After wringing their clothes, they came near me. I told Gour Singh to look for a bearer or the caretaker of this hotel and bring him to me.
So he went and got the chowkidar. I asked him to fetch the furniture for the room, but he said he couldn’t do that till he received orders from the master. I threatened him that if he did not bring the furniture out under my orders and if his owner got to know about it, then he would be instantly dismissed from his job. The man got scared and then brought out a charpoi. I spread out my bedding on that cot and lay down. That night Gour Singh brought me a roti and some water. I could neither eat that hard roti nor drink the ice-cold water of Murree. So, I spent the night without any food. In the morning, I sent Gour Singh to fetch some milk and kept on counting the hours until his return.
It was eight o’clock and still there was no sign of Gour Singh. Those eight hours seemed like eight days. At last, he came back at 9 am with some buffalo milk. Upon drinking it, I found it to be diluted with water and tasteless. I could not digest that milk, and nothing remained in my stomach. The milk just passed out as it was. I covered myself with layers of blankets and shawls and went to sleep in the charpoi in that tremendously cold weather.
While I was lying down, I saw a shivering sahib entering my room. I realised how extremely cold it was outside when I found his teeth were chattering. He lit a fire in the next room and because of that I felt a bit comfortable.
The next day Gour Singh brought such diluted buffalo milk once again. I drank it but again the milk went out of my body as it is. Having starved for three nights I felt almost half-dead on the third night. I laid down quite comfortably on the charpoi with all the warm clothes layered upon my body and did not feel any pain. I felt as if someone like my mother was sitting near my head. I was breathing and along with that breath I saw my friend, Sajuja, also looking at me. Breathing in and out in that manner I spent the whole night doing easy yoga and cannot describe how happy I felt.
Soon the night was over, and it was morning. Once again Gour Singh brought that kind of diluted buffalo milk. I drank it. How strange! I digested the milk that day. Since pure milk was unavailable here, I told Gour Singh that it would be nice if he went looking for a cow. So, he went to Rawalpindi and bought a small cow for thirty rupees. He said that she gave ten seers of milk per day. Now milk has become my staple diet.
After drinking that milk my body became a little stronger. I had been staying in Bekereya Hotel from the beginning but now I decided that it was not feasible to continue staying there any longer. So, I went to look for a rented house. I went up the hill in that extremely weak condition and found an empty house. But it was so cold there that I did not find it suitable. A little lower from that point I found another house and liked it. I rented it for nine hundred rupees and started staying there. The next day the postal peon brought me a letter from my nephew Gnanendranath. I opened it with excitement, and he had included a Brahma-sangeet which read thus:
Gao rey tahar naam Rochito jaar visvadhaam. Dayar jaar nahi biram Jharey abitito dhaarey.
[Sing His name/He who has created this world/Whose blessings endless/Falls continuously on earth]
I had already received His blessings to get back my life from the verge of death; the same blessings that were referred to in this song made me feel excited and my heart leaped with joy. This sort of a letter, and at such a time! How strange! How strange!
In this new house I managed to get a cook. He prepared green moong dal for me, and I liked its taste. It was sufficient for my lunch. After a long time, I felt satiated after an afternoon meal. As my health started improving, I gradually began to increase the quantity of my milk consumption. Early in the morning after the upasana was over, they brought the cow in front of me, and I would immediately send a bowl for the cow to be milked before my eyes. The bowl of milk was brought to me; I drank it and sent the bowl back. The cow would then be milked again, and I would once again drink from the bowl. This procedure was repeated several times and after drinking four or five bowls of milk, I would go for a walk in the mountains. Walking in the fresh cool breeze and under the direct rays of the morning sun, I wandered here and there and then came home. Instantly I would have tea, chocolate, and milk. During lunch I would drink milk again, and in the evening, and before going to bed. In this manner, I would drink about ten seers of milk each day and whatever was left over was made into butter to be consumed with rotis the next morning.
Within seven days, I regained my strength and, feeling exuberated started travelling in the mountains. I started singing songs praising the grace of our creator and there was no end to those songs. For a long time, I had been cherishing dreams of visiting Kashmir and it seemed that our creator would now fulfill it. So, I started enquiring about how to go to Kashmir. By the beginning of May, Murree became full of people and the place took a new look with the red uniform of the British soldiers and the fanciful clothes of the other British men and women. Deserting its shabby look, even nature filled up the place with varieties of flowers. After staying in Murree for three months, I heartily began my journey to Kashmir on the 4th of September.
[ Excerpted from Wanderlust: Travels of the Tagore Family. Translated and Edited by Somdatta Mandal. Kolkata: Visva-Bharati, 2014]
[2] Sri Murugesam Mudeliar was the then Commissariat contractor of the military outpost at Moulmein.
[3] The fact was that the man had been banished here. Usually, political prisoners were interned in Moulmein prior to 1848. But after 1848 Port Blair in the Andaman Islands was made the new place for banishment and imprisonment. This narrative is dated 1850.
[4] The local name of this famous cave was Kha-yon-gu, and Farm Cave in English. It was situated in the northeast part of Moulmein town and was approachable through the Ataran River.
Borderless 