Art by Sohana ManzoorCourtesy: Suzanne Kamata Some of our visuals in 2024
As we wait for the new year to unfold, we glance back at the year that just swept past us. Here, gathered together are glimpses of the writings we found on our pages in 2024 that herald a world of compassion and kindness…writings filled with hope and, dare I say, even goodwill…and sometimes filled with the tears of poetic souls who hope for a world in peace and harmony. Disasters caused by humans starting with the January 2024 in Japan, nature and climate change, essays that invite you to recall the past with a hope to learn from it, non-fiction that is just fun or a tribute to ideas, both past and present — it’s all there. Innovative genres started by writers to meet the needs of the times — be it solar punk or weird western — give a sense of movement towards the new. What we do see in these writings is resilience which healed us out of multiple issues and will continue to help us move towards a better future.
A hundred years ago, we did not have the technology to share our views and writings, to connect and make friends with the like-minded across continents. I wonder what surprises hundred years later will hold for us…Maybe, war will have been outlawed by then, as have been malpractices and violences against individuals in the current world. The laws that rule a single man will hopefully apply to larger groups too…
Courtesy: Ratnottama Sengupta Courtesy: Farouk GulsaraSome of our visuals in 2024
Amalkantiby Nirendranath Chakraborty has been translated from Bengali by Debali Mookerjea-Leonard. Click hereto read.
The Mirror by Mubarak Qazi has been translated from Balochi by Fazal Baloch. Click hereto read.
Homecoming, a poem by Ihlwha Choi on his return from Santiniketan, has been translated from Korean by the poet himself. Click here to read.
Pochishe Boisakh(25th of Baisakh) by Tagore (1922), has been translated from Bengali by Mitali Chakravarty. Click here to read.
Nazrul’sGhumaite Dao Shranto Robi Re(Let Robi Sleep in Peace) has been translated from Bengali by Professor Fakrul Alam. Click hereto read.
Jibananada Das’sAndhar Dekhecche, Tobu Ache (I have seen the dark and yet there is another) has been translated from Bengali by Professor Fakrul Alam. Click here to read.
Tagore’sShotabdir Surjo Aji( The Century’s Sun today) has been translated from Bengali by Mitali Chakravarty. Clickhereto read.
A narrative by Rabindranath Tagore thatgives a glimpse of his first experience of snowfall in Brighton and published in the Tagore family journal, Balak (Children), has been translated from Bengali by Somdatta Mandal. Clickhere to read.
Suzanne Kamata discusses the peace initiatives following the terrors of the 1994 Rwandan Genocide while traveling within the country with her university colleague and students. Click here to read.
A story by Sharaf Shad, has been translated from Balochi by Fazal Baloch. Click here to read.
Conversations
Ratnottama Sengupta talks to Ruchira Gupta, activist for global fight against human trafficking, about her work and introduces her novel, I Kick and I Fly. Click here to read.
A conversation with eminent Singaporean poet and academic, Kirpal Singh, about how his family migrated to Malaya and subsequently Singapore more than 120 years ago. Click hereto read.
Nazrul’s Tumi Shundor Tai Cheye Thaki(Because you are so beautiful, I keep looking at you) has been translated from Bengali by Professor Fakrul Alam. Click here to read.
Hotel Acapulco, has been composed and translated from Italian by Ivan Pozzoni. Click hereto read.
Farouk Gulsara pays a tribute to a doctor and a friend. Click hereto read.
Musings of a Copywriter
InBecoming a ‘Plain’ Writer, Devraj Singh Kalsi explores the world of writer’s retreats on hills with a touch of irony. Clickhere to read.
Notes from Japan
In Educating for Peace in Rwanda, Suzanne Kamata discusses the peace initiatives following the terrors of the 1994 Rwandan Genocide while traveling within the country with her university colleague and students. Click here to read.
Bijoy K Mishra writes of cyclones in Odisha, while discussing Bhaskar Parichha’s Cyclones in Odisha – Landfall, Wreckage and Resilience. Clickhereto read.
Landscape of Change by Jill Pelto, Smithsonian. From Public Domain
Hope is the mantra for all human existence. We hope for a better future, for love, for peace, for good weather, for abundance. When that abundance is an abundance of harsh weather or violence wrought by wars, we hope for calm and peace.
This is the season for cyclones — Dana, Trami, Yixing, Hurricanes Milton and Helene — to name a few that left their imprint with the destruction of both property and human lives as did the floods in Spain while wars continue to annihilate more lives and constructs. That we need peace to work out how to adapt to climate change is an issue that warmongers seem to have overlooked. We have to figure out how we can work around losing landmasses and lives to intermittent floods caused by tidal waves, landslides like the one in Wayanad and rising temperatures due to the loss of ice cover. The loss of the white cover of ice leads to more absorption of heat as the melting water is deeper in colour. Such phenomena could affect the availability of potable water and food, impacted by the changes in flora and fauna as a result of altered temperatures and weather patterns. An influx of climate refugees too is likely in places that continue habitable. Do we need to find ways of accommodating these people? Do we need to redefine our constructs to face the crises?
Echoing concerns for action to adapt to climate change and hoping for peace, our current issue shimmers with vibrancy of shades while weaving in personal narratives of life, living and the process of changing to adapt.
An essay on Bhaskar Parichha’s recent book on climate change highlights the action that is needed in the area where Dana made landfall recently. In terms of preparedness things have improved, as Bijoy K Mishra contends in his essay. But more action is needed. Denying climate change or thinking of going back to pre-climate change era is not an option for humanity anymore. While politics often ignores the need to acknowledge this crises and divides destroying with wars, riots and angst, a narrative for peace is woven by some countries like Japan and Rwanda.
Suzanne Kamata recently visited Rwanda. She writes about how she found by educating people about the genocide of 1994, the locals have found a way to live in peace with people who they addressed as their enemies before… as have the future generations of Japan by remembering the atomic holocausts of 1945.
In translations, we have poetry from varied countries. Ihlwha Choi has self-translated his poem from Korean. Ivan Pozzoni has done the same from Italian. One of Tagore’s lesser-known verses, perhaps influenced by the findings of sensitivity in plants by his contemporary, Jagadish Chandra Bose (1858-1937) to who he dedicated the collection which homed this poem, Phool Photano(making flowers bloom), has been translated from Bengali. Professor Alam has translated Nazrul’s popular song, Tumi Shundor Tai Cheye Thaki (Because you are so beautiful, I keep gazing at you).
Stories travel around the world with Paul Mirabile’s narrative giving a flavour of bohemian Paris in 1974. Anna Moon’s fiction set in Philippines gives a darker perspective of life. Lakshmi Kannan’s narrative hovers around the 2008 bombing in Mumbai, an event that evoked much anger, violence and created hatred in hearts. In contrast, Naramsetti Umamaheswararao brings a sense of warmth into our lives with a story about a child and his love for a dog. Sreelekha Chatterjee weaves a tale of change, showcasing adapting to climate crisis from a penguin’s perspective.
Trying something new, being out of the box is what helped humans move out from caves, invent wheels and create civilisations. Hopefully, this is what will help us move into the next phase of human development where wars and weapons will become redundant, and we will be able to adapt to changing climes and move towards a kinder, more compassionate existence.
Thank you all for pitching in with your fabulous pieces. There are ones that have not been covered here. Do pause by our content’s page to see all our content. Huge thanks to the fantastic Borderless team and to Sohana Manzoor, for her art too.
Mists in Shillong. Photo Courtesy: Luke Rimmo Lego
There’s something about Shillong that clings to you long after you leave. Perhaps it’s the way the mist rolls down from the hills, soft and heavy, wrapping everything in a cool, damp embrace. Or perhaps it’s the scent of pine that seems to seep into your very bones, mingling with the smell of wet earth and firewood. Well, for me, it’s the scent of the hot-dog cart right across my school gate. Needless to say, Shillong is the kind of place that stays with you, even when you’re miles away, even when the bustling streets of a big city like Delhi try to drown out the echoes of your childhood.
I always find myself thinking about Shillong on quiet afternoons, especially when the weather here in Delhi turns cold, but never quite cold enough to feel like home. Shillong was never just a place; it was a feeling—a mix of crisp mountain air, the distant sound of school bells ringing through the fog, and the soft, rhythmic drizzle of rain that seemed to fall endlessly. It’s funny how places like that can stay with you, like a song stuck in your head or a scent that reminds you of something just out of reach.
I still recall that day vividly — we were in fourth or fifth grade then. She always arrived early outside my school, waiting for her younger brother, who studied at my school too. Her school was right across the street, an all-girls convent nestled among the hills, its blue-tiled roof barely visible through the trees. She used to sit on those giant stone slabs by the gate, her feet barely touching the ground, swinging back and forth as she hummed some tune only she knew. At first, we didn’t speak much—just exchanged glances, maybe a shy smile here or there. But one day, she was the one who broke the silence.
“Do you think the clouds ever touch the ground?” she asked out of nowhere, her voice soft and curious, as though the mist around us might hold the answer.
I blinked, caught off guard. “What?”
“The clouds,” she repeated, pointing up at the sky, where the gray-white mist hung low, almost grazing the tops of the trees. “Do you think they ever come down all the way?”
I laughed, not really knowing how to answer. “I guess they do sometimes. It feels like it, doesn’t it?”
That was all it took. From then on, those quiet afternoons outside the school turned into our own little world. We would sit on the cold, rough slabs, waiting for our parents to come pick us up, talking about everything and nothing. The clouds became our constant companions, always there, floating lazily through the hills, sometimes so close that it felt like we could reach out and touch them. We talked about school, the weird things our teachers said, the dreams we had of growing up and leaving this tiny town behind.
But even then, I think we both knew that Shillong had a way of holding onto you. No matter how far we went, it would always be there, waiting in the mist.
Shillong was unlike any other place. It wasn’t just the scenery, though the hills were beautiful—lush green peaks rolling in every direction, cradling the city in their embrace. It wasn’t just the weather either, though the cool air that always smelled faintly of rain and pine was unforgettable. It was something deeper, something that I cannot just say by words, it’s what wraps around you like the mist that never quite cleared.
I remember the streets vividly, even now. Narrow and winding, they seemed to have no real direction, just curling their way through the hills, bordered by little shops and homes that clung to the slopes like they were a part of the landscape. Shillong wasn’t loud or hurried. It was the kind of city where the mornings started slowly, with the sound of crows echoing through the fog and the soft clatter of people sweeping their front steps. And in the evenings, the world seemed to settle into itself, as the clouds rolled in, draping everything in a thick, quiet blanket.
The air tasted clean, with a sharp, cold bite that felt refreshing after the endless humidity of summer. You could hear everything in Shillong—the chirping of birds, the rustling of leaves as the wind whispered through the pine trees, the distant clink of cowbells as farmers led their herds down the narrow roads. The town had a rhythm, a steady hum of life that moved at its own pace, never in a rush.
And there was always the mist. It was as much a part of Shillong as the people themselves, thick and ever-present, curling around the hills and streets, softening the edges of everything. It made the town feel like it existed in its own little bubble, a place suspended in time, where the rest of the world seemed far away and unimportant.
Sitting on those slabs, she’d lean back, watching the clouds drift by, her hair frizzing in the damp air. We’d talk about all sorts of things—small things, big things, things that made sense only to us. Sometimes, I’d bring a bag of pinecones I’d collected from the hill behind our house, and we’d throw them into the road, seeing who could roll theirs the farthest down the slope. We made up little games, shared snacks, and every now and then, we’d make pinky promises about things we both knew we could never control.
“Promise me you’ll always remember this, no matter where you go,” she said one evening, holding out her pinky with a serious expression on her face.
I grinned, hooking my pinky around hers. “I promise.”
Then, I left. My family moved to Delhi when I was in the sixth grade, and suddenly, those afternoons on the stone slabs were gone. Delhi was everything Shillong wasn’t—loud, chaotic, hot. The streets were wide and crowded, filled with the constant honking of cars and the clamour of people always in a hurry. The air was thick with dust and petrol, and the clouds, when they appeared, were just smudges of grey against the relentless silver sky.
I missed Shillong terribly. I missed the mist and the cool air, the way the town felt like a hidden secret tucked away in the hills. I missed the slow mornings, the smell of rain-soaked earth, and the way everything seemed softer there, quieter. I missed her too—her laughter, her teasing bets, the way she’d swing her feet just above the ground, like she was waiting for something.
Years passed, and I settled into life in Delhi. But Shillong never really left me. Every now and then, something would remind me of it—a particularly cool breeze, the distant smell of wet leaves, or the sight of a tree-lined street disappearing into fog. And in those moments, I’d find myself back there, sitting on the stone slabs, talking about clouds and pinky promises, as if no time had passed at all.
Then one day, as I sat in Nehru Park—one of the few places in Delhi that felt quiet, even peaceful—I heard a familiar voice.
“I thought you said you’d always remember Shillong.”
I looked up, and there she was. The same grin, the same frizz in her hair from the humidity, the same spark in her eyes that I remembered from all those years ago. For a moment, I couldn’t speak, couldn’t move, as if the fog from Shillong had somehow followed her to Delhi, wrapping us both in the memory of that little town in the hills.
“I promised, didn’t I?” I finally managed to say, standing up to meet her.
We laughed, and suddenly, it was like nothing had changed. We spent the rest of the afternoon walking through the park, talking about everything and nothing, just like we used to on those stone slabs. But this time, the air was warm, and the clouds were nowhere to be seen. Still, in some strange way, it felt like we were back in Shillong, as if the mist and the pine trees had followed us, whispering their secrets in the wind.
And as we walked, I realised something—no matter how far you go, some places never really leave you. Shillong was one of those places. It was the smell of pinecones, the feel of cool stone beneath your hands, the sound of laughter carried on the wind. It was the town that lived in the clouds, a place of pinky promises and afternoons spent waiting for something that never came but always felt just within reach.
I never really left Shillong. And neither did she.
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Luke Rimmo Minkeng Lego is a biomedical engineering student passionate about Biomimetics, CRISPR, language preservation, and research. He enjoys leaf collecting, reading, biking, badminton, Tottenham, and debating diverse topics.
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PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL
We all know that Christmas Day, the night that Jesus came to earth, bringing with him peace and love for all humanity, is celebrated by Christians all around the world with great enthusiasm and merriment. Interestingly, for a multicultural country like India, Christmas is equally celebrated — not only as a religious festival but also as a cultural one. For a country where less than three percent of the population is Christian, the central celebration is the birth of a child, but it takes on new meaning in different Indian homes. Known in local parlance also as “Burradin”[big day] Indians from all classes and communities look forward to this day when they can at least buy a cake from the local market, shower their children with stars, toys, red Santa caps and other decorative items, and go for a family picnic for lunch, dine at a fancy restaurant or visit the nearby church. This syncretic cult makes this festival unique, and for Jerry Pinto and Madhulika Liddle editing this very interesting anthology comprising of different genres of Indian writing on the topic – essays, images, poems and hymns, both in English and also translated from India’s other languages is indeed unique.
Mary and Jesus’ a painting by Sister Marie Claire. (Picture courtesy: SMMI Provincialate, Bengalaru) ‘Adivasi Madonna’, a painting by Jyoti SahiImages from Indian Christmas: Essays, Memories, Hymns
In his introduction which he titles “Unto All of Us a Child is Born,” Jerry Pinto reminisces how he was surprised when he saw his first live Santa Claus. He was a figure in red that Akbarally’s, Bombay’s first department store, wheeled out around Christmas week. “He was a thin man, not very convincingly padded… seemed to be from my part of the world, someone who would climb up our narrow Mahim stairs and leave something at the door for us at three or four a.m., then take the local back to his regular job as a postman or seller of second-hand comics. The man in the cards and storybooks preferred London and New York. And a lot of snow. … Today, it is almost a cliché to say that Christmas, like every other festival, is hostage to the market.”
The other editor, Madhulika Liddle in her introduction “Christmas in Many Flavours” states, “According to the annals of the Mambally Royal Biscuit Factory bakery in Thalassery, Kerala, its founder Mambally Bapu baked the first Christmas cake in India”. It was way back in 1883, at the instance of an East India Company spice planter he set about trying to create a Christmas cake. Liddle wondered what that first Christmas cake tasted like; how close it was to the many thousands of cakes still baked and consumed at Christmas in Kerala? She also writes about the situation in India, where instead of wholesale and mindless importing of Christmas ideas, the people have been discerning enough to amalgamate all our favourite (and familiar) ideas of what a celebration should be and fit them into a fiesta of our own.
Images from Indian Christmas: Essays, Memories, Hymns: dressed up as Santa Claus leave for school in Punjab. (Picture courtesy: Ecocabs,Fazilka).
There are several other aspects of Christmas celebrations too. The Christmas bazaars are now increasingly fashionable in bigger cities. The choral Christmas concerts and Christmas parties are big community affairs, with dancing, community feasts, Christmas songs, and general bonhomie. Across the Chhota Nagpur area, tribal Christians celebrate with a community picnic lunch, while many coastal villages in Kerala have a tradition of partying on beaches, with the partying spilling over into catamarans going out into the surf. In Kolkata’s predominantly Anglo-Indian enclave of Bow Bazar, Santa Claus traditionally comes to the party in a rickshaw, and in much of northeast India, the entire community may indulge in a pot-luck community feast at Christmas time. Thus Liddle states:
“Missionaries to Indian shores, whether St Thomas or later evangelists from Portugal, France, Britain, or wherever brought us the religion; we adopted the faith, but reserved for ourselves the right to decide how we’d celebrate its festivals.”
Apart from their separate introductions, the editors have collated twenty-seven entries of different kinds, each one more interesting than the other, that showcase the richness and variety of Christmas celebrations across the country. Though Christianity may have come to much of India by way of missionaries from Europe or America, it does not mean that the religion remained a Western construct. Indians adopted Christianity but made it their own. They translated the Bible into different Indian languages, translated their hymns, and composed many of their own. They built churches which they at times decorated in their own much-loved ways. Their feasts comprised of food that was often like the ones consumed during Holi or Diwali.
Thus, Christmas in India turned to a great Indian festival that highlighted the syncretism of our culture. Damodar Mauzo, Nilima Das, Vivek Menezes, Easterine Kire, Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar, Nazes Afroz, Elizabeth Kuruvilla, Jane Borges and Mary Sushma Kindo, among others, write about Christmas in Goa, Nagaland, Kerala, Jharkhand, Delhi, Kolkata, Mumbai, Shillong and Saharanpur. Arul Cellatturai writes tender poems in the Pillaitamil tradition to the moon about Baby Jesus, and Punjabi singers compose tappe-boliyan about Mary and her infant. There are Mughal miniatures depicting the birth of Jesus, paintings by Jyoti Sahi and Sister Claire inspired by folk art, and pictures of Christmas celebrations in Aizawl, Bengaluru, Chennai and Kochi and these visual demonstrations enrich the text further.
Seventeenth-century painting depicting Mary and Joseph travelling to Bethlehem. From a Mir’at al-quds of Father Jerome, 2005, Cleveland Museum of Art. (Wikimedia Commons) ‘Mother Mary and Child Christ’. Mid-eighteenth century, late Mughal, Muhammad Shah period. National Museum of India, New Delhi (Wikimedia Commons)Images from Indian Christmas: Essays, Memories, Hymns
Interestingly, the very first entry of this anthology is an excerpt from the final two sections of one of Rabindranath Tagore’s finest long poems, inspired by the life of Jesus Christ. Tagore wrote the poem “The Child” in 1930, first in English and translated it himself into Bengali the following year, titling it “Sishutirtha.” But many years even before that, every Christmas in Santiniketan, Tagore would give a talk about Christ’s life and message. Speaking on 25 December 1910, he said:
“The Christians call Jesus Man of Sorrow, for he has taken great suffering on himself. And by this he has made human beings great, has shown that the human beings stand above suffering.”
India celebrates Christmas with its own regional flair, its own flavour. Some elements are the same almost everywhere; others differ widely. What binds them together is that they are all, in their way, a celebration of the most exuberant festival in the Christian calendar.
Apart from the solemnity of the Church services, there is a lot of merrymaking that includes the food and drink, the song and dance. The songs often span everything from the stirring ‘Hallulujah Chorus’ to vibrant paeans sung in every language from Punjabi to Tamil, Hindi to Munda, Khariya and Mizo tawng.
Among the more secular aspects of Christmas celebrations are the decorations, and this is where things get even more eclectic. Whereas cities and towns abound in a good deal of mass decorating, with streets and public places being prettied up weeks in advance, rural India has its own norms, its own traditions. Wreaths and decorated conifers are unknown, for instance, in the villages of the Chhota Nagpur region; instead, mango leaves, marigolds and paper streamers may be used, and the tree to be decorated may well be a sal or a mango tree. Nirupama Dutt tells us how since her city had no firs and pines, she got her brother’s colleague to fetch a small kikar tree as kikars grew aplenty in the wild empty plots all over Chandigarh. In many entries we read about how Christmas decorations were rarely purchased but were cleverly constructed at home.
A very integral part of the Christmas celebrations of course is music. In many Goan Catholic neighbourhoods, Jim Reeves continued to haunt the listeners in his smooth baritone: “I’ll have a blue Christmas without you/ I’ll be so blue thinking about you/ Decorations of red on a green Christmas tree/ Won’t mean a thing, dear, if you’re not here with me.” Simultaneously, the words and music of “A Christmas Prayer” by Alfred J D’Souza are as follows: “Play on your flute/ Bhaiyya, Bhaiyya/ Jesus the saviour has come./ Put on your ghungroos/ Sister, Sister/ Dance to the beat of the drums!/ Light up a deepam in your window/ Doorstep, don with rangoli/ Strings of jasmine, scent your household/ Burn the sandalwood and ghee,/ Call your neighbour in, smear vermillion/ Write on his forehead to show/ A sign that we are one/ Through God’s eternal Son/ In friendship and in love ever more!/ Ah! Ah!” But the most popular Christmas song was of course “Jingle bells, jingle bells, jingle all the way….”
In “Christmas Boots and Carols in Shillong”, Patricia Mukhim tells us how the word ‘Christmas’ triggers a whole host of activities in Meghalaya and other Northeastern states that have a predominantly Christian population. Apart from cleaning and painting the houses, everything looks like fairyland during Christmas, a day for which they have been waiting for an entire year. She particularly mentions the camaraderie that prevails during this time:
“Christmas is a time when invitations are not needed. Friends can land up at each others’ homes any time on Christmas Eve to celebrate. Most friends drop by with a bottle of wine and others pool in the snacks and the party continues until the wee hours of morning. It’s one day in the year when the state laws that noise should end at 10 p.m. is violated with gay abandon. …Shillong [is] a very special place on Planet Earth. Everyone from the chief minister down can strum the guitar and has a voice that could put lesser mortals to shame. And Christmas is also a day when all VIPism and formalities are set aside. You can land up at anyone’s home and be welcomed in. It does not matter whether someone is the chief minister, a top cop, or the terrifying headmistress of your school.”
One very significant common theme in all the multifarious entries is the detail descriptions provided on food, especially the makeshift way Christmas cakes are baked in every home and the Indian way meat and other specialties are being prepared on the special day. There are several entries that give us details about the particular food that was prepared and consumed at the time along with actual recipes about baking cakes. “Christmas Pakwan[1]” by Jaya Bhattcharji Rose, “The Spirit of Christmas Cake” by Priti David, and “Armenian Christmas Food in Calcutta” by Mohona Kanjilal need special mention in this context. Liddle in her introduction wrote:
“Our Christmas cakes are a reflection of how India celebrates Christmas: with its own religious flair, its own flavour. Some elements are the same almost everywhere; others differ widely. What binds them together is that they are all, in their way, a celebration of the most exuberant festival in the Christian calendar.”
Later in her article “Cake Ki Roti at Dua ka Ghar[2],” the house where they lived in Saharanpur, Uttar Pradesh, she wrote how her parents told her that ‘bajre ki tikiyas’, thin patties made of pearl millet flour sweetened with jaggery, used to be a staple at Christmas teatime at Dua ka Ghar[3], though she has no recollection of those. She of course vividly recalls the ‘cake ki roti’. This indigenisation of Christmas is something that’s most vividly seen in the feasting that accompanies Christmas celebrations across the country. While hotels and restaurants in big cities lay out spreads of roast turkey (or chicken, more often), roast potatoes and Christmas puddings, the average Indian Christian household may have a Christmas feast that comprises largely of markedly regional dishes.
In Kerala, for instance, duck curry with appams is likely to be the piece de resistance. In Nagaland, pork curries rich in chillies and bamboo shoots are popular, and a whole roast suckling pig (with spicy chutneys to accompany it) may hold centre stage. A sausage pulao, sorpotel and xacuti would be part of the spread in Goa, and all across a wide swathe of north India, biriyanis, curries, and shami kababs are de rigueur at Christmas.
This beautifully done book, along with several coloured pictures, endorses the idea of religious syncretism that prevails in India. As a coiner of words, Nilima Das came up with the idea that ‘Christianism’ in our churches is after all, a kind of ‘Hinduanity’ (“Made in India and All of That”). This reviewer feels guilty of not being able to mention each of the unique entries separately that this anthology contains, so it is suggested that this is a unique book to enjoy reading, to possess, as well as to gift anyone during the ensuing Christmas season.
Translations bridge borders, bring diverse cultures to our doorstep. But here is a translation of a man, who congealed diversity into his very being — Syed Mujtaba Ali (1904-1974), a student of Tagore, who lived by his convictions and wit. Like his guru, Mujtaba Ali, was a well-travelled polyglot, who till a few years ago was popular only among Bengali readers with his wide plethora of literary gems that can never be boxed into genres precisely. People were wary of translating his witty but touching renditions of various aspects of life, including travel and history from a refreshing perspective, till Nazes Afroz, a former BBC editor, took it up. His debut translation Mujtaba Ali’s Deshe Bideshe as In a Land Far from Home: A Bengali in Afghanistan in 2015 was outstanding enough to be nominated for the Crossword Prize. Recently, he has translated another book by Mujtaba Ali, Tales of a Voyager (Joley Dangay[1]), a book that takes us back a hundred years in time — a travelogue about a sea voyage to Egypt and travel within.
This narrative almost evokes a flavour of Egypt as depicted by Agatha Christie’s Death on the Nile (1937) or The Mummy (film, set in 1932), simply because it is set around the same time period. Afroz in his introduction sets the date of Mujtaba Ali’s travels translated here between 1935 and 1939. The book was published in 1955. This book is a treasure not only because it gives a slice of historic perspective but also weaves together diverse cultures with syncretism.
Mujtaba Ali has two young travel companions, Percy and Paul, who despite being British (one of them is on the way to study in Oxford) seem to have a fair knowledge of Indian lore and there is the inimitable Abul Asfia Noor Uddin Muhammad Abdul Karim Siddiqi, who almost misses a train while trying to argue about the discrepancies shown in the time between his Swiss watch and the clock at Cairo. The description is sprinkled with tongue-in-cheek humour.
The voyage starts at Sri Lanka and sails through the Arabian Sea to Africa, where the ship pauses at Djibouti. Here, Mujtaba Ali expands his entourage with the addition of the long-named Abul Asfia, well-described in the blurb as a man who “carried toffees, a gold cigarette case, and other sundry items in his capacious overcoat pocket and who had the answer to all problems though he barely spoke a word ever.” Afroz himself has given an excellent introduction to the writer and the book — almost in the style of Mujtaba Ali himself. This is a necessary addition as it highlights Mujtaba Ali’s perspectives and gives his background to contextualise the relevance of this translation.
Mujtaba Ali’s style is poetic and humorous. It demystifies erudition and touches the heart simultaneously. His ability to laugh at himself is inimitable. He tells us a story about how the giraffe from Africa was introduced to China by a king from Bengal. At the end, he and his companions reflect about the tallness of this tale!
Mujtaba Ali contends: “‘…One of my friends is learning Chinese in order to read Buddhist scriptures in that language. Possibly you know that many of our ancient scriptures were destroyed with the decline of Buddhism in India. But they are still available in Chinese translations. My friend came across this story while searching for Buddhist scriptures. He had it translated and published in Bengali with the copy of the painting in a newspaper. Or else Bengalis would never have known of this because there is no mention of it in our history books or documents in the archives in Bengal.’”
The irony is not lost that Buddha is of Indian origin and yet an Indian has to learn Chinese to read the scriptures. The narrative continues with more dialogues:
“Percy said, ‘But sir, it didn’t sound like history. It [the giraffe’s story] exceeds fiction.’
“I [Mujtaba Ali] replied, ‘Why, brother? There is the saying in your language, ‘Truth is stranger than fiction.’
“And my personal opinion was that if the narrative of an event could not rouse interest in someone more than fiction, then that event had no historical value. Or I would say that the narrator was not a true historian. In our land, most of our historians are such dry bores.”
As Mujtaba Ali’s renditions are colourful – is he a ‘true historian’ by his own definition? Such narratives dot the travelogue, generating curiosity about major issues in a light vein and linking ancient cultures with the commonality of human needs, creating bridges, taking us to another time, finding parallels and making learned, hard concepts comprehensible by the simplicity of his observations.
Similarly, he says of the rose: “The Mughal-Pathan era of India ended a long time ago, but can we say for how long the roses brought by them will continue to give us fragrance?”
Some of his renditions are poetic and beautiful. Mujtaba Ali watches the sunrise by the pyramids and describes it: “Streaks of light were gradually lighting up the liquid darkness. The white parting in the middle of black hair was becoming visible. There was a light daubing of vermillion on that.”
Borrowing from diverse cultures, Mujtaba Ali skilfully weaves the commonality of cultures, customs and countries into his narrative under the umbrella of humanity. Afroz with his journalistic background and a traveller himself, is perhaps the best person to translate this narrative of another traveller from the past. The depth of erudition simplified with humour has been well captured in this translation too. In this interview, Afroz discusses more about the author, his new translation and the relevance of the book in the present context.
Nazes Afroz
You have translated two books by Mujtaba Ali. Is he essentially an essayist? Were there many essayists and travel writers at that point, especially from within Bengal? Where would you place him as a writer in the annals of Bengali literature?
I don’t think that ‘essentially an essayist’ is the right description of Mujtaba Ali. Of course he wrote many essays but his repertoire included novels, short stories, funny anecdotal pieces based on his experiences (in Bangla they are called romyorochona) and stories from his travels, his encounters with extremely interesting people across the globe. He was deeply interested in culinary experiences. So he wrote a lot about food habits, multitude of cuisine and also gave recipes. Hence, it is difficult to box him into one genre of writing. With the publication of his first book, Deshe Bideshe, (serialised in 1948 in Bangla literary magazine Desh and as a book in 1949) he instantly occupied a significant place in Bengali literature.
Syed Mujtaba Ali
His Bangla prose, steeped in effortless and seamless multilingual and multicultural references, swept the discerning readers of Bangla literature off their feet. It was not only the prose that he created but the breadth and depth of subjects his pen touched was unparalleled. No author in Bangla language has been able to write on such a wide range of topics till date.
Coming to the other part of the question about travel writers and essayist in Bengal in early part of the twentieth century: the short answer is, yes there were many. Travel writing has been an important genre in Bangla literature. Bengalis had been travelling – for pilgrimage, for rest and recuperation following illnesses, or just for pleasure since the middle of the nineteenth century, which was the time of Bengal renaissance. Writers who undertook such journeys, wrote about their travels too. So Mujtaba Ali is no exception in that regard. He followed in the footsteps of his predecessors and also his peers.
You have called the book ‘Tales’ of the Voyager — would you say that some of the stories are like tall tales here — perhaps tales to convey an idea or a thought which in itself would be larger than history in explaining the truth of a civilisation, like the tale of the giraffe? Would you see this as a comment on the gap between popular and documented narratives in history and on the different interpretations of history?
Ali was an excellent raconteur. He was also gifted with an almost eidetic memory. This allowed him to learn a dozen languages – some with native proficiency. He was a voracious reader too. So, not only did he read tomes on history and philosophy in many languages across cultures but also he gathered fascinating tales from many corners of the world as he loved storytelling. Whenever opportunities came, he masterfully wove those stories into his writing. Thus the tale of the giraffe’s journey from Africa to China via Bengal found its way in this book as he was narrating stories from the east coast of Africa. There is another thing that makes Ali’s writing attractive. He weaves in fascinating quirky funny stories while discussing something apparently dense and dry. I have not come across many writers who have done that. I don’t know whether to name it as his comment on bridging the gap between popular and documented history. There’s no evidence to prove that he was trying to achieve that as he never mentioned it. We could only conclude that it was a style that he invented and mastered in an effort to engage with his readers.
A writer that came to mind while reading this book of Mujtaba Ali is, one who is really more entertaining than accurate –Marco Polo. We know he lived five centuries before Mujtaba Ali. Mujtaba Ali of course is erudite, a scholar, but he seems to have a similar fire within him, a wanderlust. Do you think he would have been impacted by the writings of Marco Polo? Was wanderlust not a very typical phenomenon that was part of the culture that had evolved in Bengal post the Tagorean renaissance? Did Mujtaba Ali also travel for wanderlust?
Reading Ali’s books, one may think that he had wanderlust in the true sense. It will be correct to assume that he was fidgety; he refused to settle down; he moved jobs; he moved cities and even continents. But to be truly smitten by wanderlust, one has to enjoy the travel, which wasn’t possibly the case for Ali. His son told me that even though he travelled extensively, Ali didn’t enjoy travelling much. There had been many, of his time, who were really smitten by wanderlust — like Rahul Sankrityayan (1893-1963, walked to Tibet twice and wrote only in Hindi), Bimal Mukherjee (1903-1996, a true globetrotter who cycled to London from Kolkata), Umaprasad Mukhopadhyay (1902-1997, who crisscrossed the Himalayas from one end to another), Probodh Kumar Sanyal (1905-1983, his travelogues of the Himalayas), Premankur Atorthi (1890-1964, author of Mahasthobir Jatok) — to name a few. While these authors were inherently bohemian and were drawn towards travelling only for the sake of it, Ali was more of an unsettled soul who travelled with a particular purpose and wrote about his experiences as he had picked up fascinating stories and observed connections between cultures. Because he loved to tell stories and also because he was infused with the idea of internationalism that he inculcated from Tagore, there was no way he could escape but narrating the stories and cultural experienced from his travels.
Tales of a Voyager takes us on a sea voyage to Egypt. Did you travel to Egypt while translating the book? Would you say that the Egypt of those times still resonates in the present day — especially after the 2011 uprising?
Even before his one night stopover in Cairo that he narrated in Tales of a Voyager, Ali had previous experience of Cairo where he spent a year as a post-doctoral scholar in 1933-34 at the Al-Azhar University. So there are many short pieces on Cairo and Egypt by him in his other books. He raved about the café-culture of Cairo and came to the conclusion that Egyptians surpassed the Bengali in terms of adda—hours of the purposeless sessions of chitchat and chinwag. I have been to Cairo at least half a dozen times and realised how acute his observation was. I witnessed in person why Ali mentioned that this was a city that never slept. The cafes and shops were open all night and the streets were full of people with families including children until well past midnight.
Late night, a cafe in Cairo. Photo Courtesy: Nazes Afroz
As expected, the political landscape that you mention in the question, would be completely different between Ali’s time in the 1930s and in 2010 when I started visiting Cairo. When Ali first went to Cairo in 1933, Cairo had just gained full independence from the forty years of British occupation (not as an annexed state but more of a protectorate). So there are some references of the political figures like Sa’ad Zaghloul Pasha[2] in his various writings but the main focus was on its cultures.
When I started travelling to Cairo from 2010, I witnessed some similarities in the cultural traits as elaborated by Ali. But politically by then, Egypt had moved far from where it was in the 1930. It had become an architect of the Non-Aligned Movement in the 1950s. It was the most prosperous country in North Africa and an important leader among the Arab nations. But it was also reeling under the oppression of one party rule and the youth were bubbling to break away from that. This is something we witnessed unfolding from 2011.
What were the challenges you faced while translating this book? Was it easier to handle as it was the second book by the same author?
The main challenge of translating Mujtaba Ali is transposing his unique language steeped in multi-lingual references into English. Also to get his oblique sense of wit and puns from Bangla into another language, which at times, may not have the right words for them. Translating the second book of the same author doesn’t make it easier as the challenges I just mentioned remain for every book.
Tell us what spurs you on to continue translating Mujtaba Ali. Please elaborate.
Syed Mujtaba Ali’s writing had a huge influence on me from my young age. His writing shaped my worldview, planted the seeds of curiosity about many societies, taught me how to make friends in distant lands and start making connections between cultures. So what I’m today is largely due to his writing. As an avid reader of his texts, I felt that it was my duty to introduce him to a wider readership. That’s the motivation of my taking up the translation of Ali. It is also a tribute to a writer who had such an impact on me.
In your introduction you have written of Mujtaba Ali and his writing. What had he written to be put on the Pakistani watchlist in 1950s?
He had penned an essay opposing the imposition of Urdu as Pakistan’s national language on the Bengalis who were in majority in the newly created East Pakistan. He even predicted how the Bengalis would rebel against such a policy, which came true in 1952 in the form of the Language Movement. He wrote this when he was the principal of a government college in Bogura. So he drew wrath of the Pakistani leaders and an arrest warrant was issued against him. That was the time when he left Pakistan and returned to India in 1949.
There also the other difficult personal situation. His wife (married in 1951) who was from Dhaka and was working in the education ministry, continued to live in East Pakistan with their two sons while he lived in India working for the Indian Government. So Pakistanis always thought he was an Indian spy while he was under suspicion in India that he was on the side of Pakistan!
Did Mujtaba Ali participate in the political upheaval between Pakistan and Bangladesh? Please elaborate if possible.
Ali was hugely affected in 1971 because of his personal situation as I just mentioned. I don’t know how deeply he was involved with the liberation war in Bangladesh but he wrote a novel, Tulonaheena (his last novel), against that backdrop – based in Kolkata, Shillong and Agartala and told through the story of a lover couple – Shipra and Kirti. So it is likely that he was involved in some capacity with the war efforts.
Tulonaheen( Incomparable), Syed Mujtaba Ali’s last novel Gurudeb and Santiniketan by Syed Mujtaba AliMore books by Syed Mujtaba Ali
Mujtaba Ali studied in Santiniketan — that would have been in the early days of the university. Would he have been influenced by Tagore himself and the other luminaries who were in Santiniketan at that time? Can you tell us how? And did that impact his work and outlook?
The simple answer is: it was huge. Tagore was the polar star for Mujtaba Ali, which he acknowledged every now and then in his writing. This experience also decided his life’s journey. He imbibed humanism and internationalism as a direct student of Tagore in Santiniketan. He also developed deep apathy towards all sorts of bigotry. So it was not surprising that he would find it very difficult to accept a country that was created on the basis of religion.
Do you find him relevant in the present-day context? Is your writing influenced or inspired by his style?
I feel that his relevance will never fade. His ability to create cultural connection from different corners of the world will continue to fascinate readers for generations. Yes, in this globalised world when information from around the world are at our finger tips with the click of a button but one also needs to learn how to look at those information beyond mere facts and go deep underneath to make a sense. Apart from being fun and entertaining read, I feel his writing is one such training tool to learn how to make cultural connections. This way, if one wants, one can truly become a global citizen.
As for me, my outlook towards the world is massively influenced by Ali’s writing but not my writing style. It’s simply because I’m not a polyglot like him! I’ll not be able to come anywhere close to his style even if I try.
Well, that is for the reader to judge I guess! You have books on Afghanistan. But you do travel with your camera often. Will you write of your own travels at some point — like Mujtaba Ali but in English?
I have only one book on Afghanistan – a cultural guide book that I co-authored with an Afghan friend. I was working on my own book on Afghanistan, which would have capture one decade of Afghan history and interspersed with my own direct experiences of the country between 2002 and 2015. But the research got stalled for lack of funding. I hope to revive it at some point. And, yes I would like to do my own writing from my travels. That’s there in the wish list.
What are your future plans as a journalist, writer and photographer?
Travel more, see the world more, make more friends and photograph more!
Thanks a lot for giving us your time and the wonderful translation.
[1] Literal translation from Bengali, In Water and On Land
[2] 1857-1957, Egyptian revolutionary and statesman
Shesher Kobita(1928-29)Translation of Shesher Kobita by Radha Chakravarty (2011)
Romance and reality inevitably clash. While Tagore is not unconvinced about the existence of conjugal love in some of his stories, conjugality and romance make uneasy bedfellows inFarewell Song. Marriage is rooted in the humdrum, quotidian, everyday but romantic love dwells on another astral plane. It is the realisation of the gap between the two that informs the novel/la, a realisation that never the twain shall truly meet, manifesting itself in the pages of this complex narrative that folds into itself a romantic love story, social satire and literary criticism. The multiple strands are brilliantly woven into the plot of this novel, which could be classified as a prose-poem. Its very title, “Shesher Kobita”, literally meaning last poem and translated by Professor Radha Chakravarty as Farewell Song, is evocative of its lyricality.
Shesher Kobita is primarily a love story between two young people, Amit Raye and Labanyalata, both of whom express their love in the most lyrical vein imaginable. Labanya, like many of Amit’s compatriots in Calcutta, is an avid reader and staunch admirer of Rabindranath Tagore’s writing, and her familiarity with Tagore’s work is evident in much of her conversation and in many of her perceptions. Amit, on the other hand, persists in citing the words of a ‘modern’ poet, Nibaran Chakrabarti, who is a persona created by Amit himself, to express his views about poetry. Readers see through this ruse quickly enough, and the third person narrative , often allows space for narrative commentary. As the translator, Radha Chakravarty points out, “Two schools of Bengali poetry, pro and anti-Tagore, are pitted against each other through the dialectic of the Amit-Labanya encounter.” Tagore cleverly plays out and into the literary /poetic debates of his later decades (1920s onwards) in order to prove his contemporary relevance and above all, the modernity of his work.
Amit, the protagonist, is from an elite and rich family, privileged enough to have gone to Oxford and wealthy enough to be under no compulsion to earn immediately. He’s a dilettante who is interested in the vagaries of style, which is seen as being a notch higher than fashion. Brilliant but restless, mercurial as quicksilver, he cannot commit himself to any one thing or relationship. Yet, getting away from the highly artificial social life of Kolkata, to the relatively pristine and pastoral world of Shillong, he falls deeply, unequivocally in love, with the quiet, studious but unassuming young girl, Labanyalata and establishes a soul-connection, as it were, with her. Yet this deep commitment pales and collapses in the face of the demands of the everyday social world. It is this space–“habitus”– which is occupied by Amit’s sister’s friend, Ketaki (Katy) Mitra. To quote from Radha Chakravarty’s introduction to her translation of the book, “Two forms of love are presented through Amit’s involvements with Katy Mitter and Labanya-one rooted in the material and the social, the other, embedded deep within the soul”
The expression of this soulful love dips into and is expressed through not only Bangla literature and poetry but is steeped in the idioms of English poetry, from Shakespeare to the metaphysical poets. Seeing a book of John Donne’s poems on Labanya’s table, Amit quotes, “for God’s sake, hold your tongue and let me love.” And yet, his intense love seems doomed as an idealistic ephemeral bliss, to be swept away by the ‘real’. Not a keen observer of nature, Amit seems to indulge frequently in “pathetic fallacy”, appropriating aspects of the landscape in order to express his moods and feelings. The landscape is often symbolic with Amit and Labanya meeting for their trysts at the site of a waterfall, always a significant feature of Tagore’s landscapes. Mita (meaning friend) and Banya (of the forest) –the lovers’ names for each other– create a world of their own, full of poetry and lyricality. And yet, inevitably, inexorably, the social, material, everyday world presses upon them and the lovers part. And yet, as the novel draws to a close, we do not experience this parting/ estrangement as a tragedy but almost as much of a resolution and closure that the novel could offer.
For Amit Ray/e is an embodiment of the modern split subject, the divided self. He has made up a world of words, and it is in this world that his heart and mind dwell. It is this inner space-the still centre of the turning world (to quote from another modern poet) that Labanya inhabits. And this is what Labanya, intelligent and perceptive, realises. Labanya, in her own way, is the new woman- independent and emotionally self-reliant, reminding one of Kalyani in ‘Aparichita‘, translated by Aruna Chakravarti as ‘The Stranger‘. They are women who dream of a life beyond domesticity and conjugal felicity. For them marriage would be a slippery slope, not a nesting ground. In these versions of ‘modern’ love, each person, especially the women, are complete and self-assured in themselves. This is particularly true of Kalyani, where we get a sense that she towers over the suitors in her life.
Labanya is able to connect to connect with Amit as a friend. to Amit, the friendship acts as an anchor, a stay against the vacuousness of his urban existence. Such a soulful connection belongs to the realm of dreams and these connects are what dreams are made of. However, dreams often shatter, or worse, fester. When Amit is asked whether in marriage, partnership and companionship cannot combine, his reply is illuminating. Marriage is the finite to the infinity of love and romance. He compares his relationship to the westernised Ketaki/Katy, his girlfriend in England who later becomes his wife, after the interlude with Labanya. “My initial relationship with Katy was indeed based on love but it was like water in a pitcher, to be collected daily, and used up everyday.” In contrast, his love for Labanya “remains a lake, its waters not be carried home but meant for” his “consciousness to swim in”. This realisation creates no inner conflict because he also glimpses that Labanya is someone who lives in his dreams, “in the twilight of gleams and of glimpses” (Tagore’s lines from Gitanjali, a basket of song-offerings). In a serendipitious resolution, Labanya also finds her companion in domesticity, her father’s brilliant student Shobhanlal, who has yearned for her for years, only to be spurned. Thus the story becomes not a tragedy of betrayal, but an extended musing and discussion on love, romance and marriage of the modern subject, in a world where the ground beneath the feet of the characters is constantly shifting.
It is this sense of a world in flux and its nuances that Radha Chakravarty’s translation deftly captures. Translating a novel of discussion requires a constant awareness of key concepts and multiple contexts — literary, social, cultural and philosophical. As a skilled translator and litterateur with an extensive repertoire and many years of experience, the editor-translator has brought her many accomplishments to the task of translation. Translating poetry and its nuances is challenging; here, the translation conveys immense wealth of meaning and richness of detail. The novel, in a sense, is a plea for romantic yearning and aspiration, for reaching out to those “unheard melodies” that are far sweeter than those which are available for the asking.
Unlike Bankim, who had depicted the new woman in an unflattering light a few decades earlier, Rabindranath was essentially sympathetic to women. Women were often among his closest associates and companions, and his friendship with women like the Argentinian Victoria Ocampo not only spurred him into song , but made him rethink the contours of modern cosmopolitan womanhood. Well-read and accomplished, women like Labanya not only challenge traditional ideas of womanhood, but is reflexive and aware enough not to judge Katy Mitra. Torn between the pull of intellectual independence and the desire for surrender, Labanya also represents the emergence of the female subject in modern Bangla literature.
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Dr Meenakshi Malhotra is Associate Professor of English Literature at Hansraj College, University of Delhi, and has been involved in teaching and curriculum development in several universities. She has edited two books on Women and Lifewriting, Representing the Self and Claiming the I, in addition to numerous published articles on gender, literature and feminist theory.
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Poem for Joseph
It is never too late to come home.
But I must first find a homeland
where I can find myself,
just a map or even a tree or a stone
to mark a spot I could return to
like an animal lifting his leg
even when there’s nothing to return for.
Although it’s true
that in my native land
children had crawled out of burrows
they had gouged under their hard beds,
long after the grownups had fled
and roofs came apart
like charred heads.
You said you didn’t regret
how ethnic cleansers had palmed
your newly-built home off on a people
well on their trail back to unique blood,
you didn’t mind leaving behind
objects of desire
you had collected over twenty-five years,
or, how you came to live in a rented room
with your wife and children
in dog-eat-dog Imphal,
among the callous tribe
I call my own.
Only the photographs you mourned,
the beloved sepia of a family tree,
since you’re the reason why your fathers lived;
but who’ll believe now
that you lived at all?
After ‘Jashn-e-Azadi’
(a film on Kashmir by Sanjay Kak)
The kite transforming into smoke lacing
the chinars is not a symbol.
The rose has migrated from the garden of paradise.
Freedom will never come
poured into goblets waiting to be raised,
Martyrdom is a handout from the hagiographer.
Only poetry of ruins is real.
The incoherent rose still blooms
from some beloved breast torn open.
The First Rain
The first rain like the first letter of May
brings news to the hills.
Perched like the houses on the edge of a cliff
I’ve lived more days in exile
than years of my poor childhood.
As a fumbling fifteen-year-old
I abandoned my forward-looking native people
who entrusted terror, drugs and
a civilized plague to children.
Is it better to rejoice and forget
or to remember and be sad?
Only a foolish boy cannot wait to be a man,
adores winter, and leaves home to write poetry.
After the holocaust became a touchstone
we can indict an erring people
and make culture and carnage co-exist.
If I told you how babies have been shot down
from their mothers’ breasts
you would put it down to a poet’s overworked heart
but we like to believe in leaders who flock to the capital
An animal threatened with extinction
needs a lair for his mate and his young,
I’m not different.
I need the morning for its bright blood
and I need to seize the night.
There was not a day that changed my days.
When I listen to hills
I hear the voices of my faded life.
Whisky and Mehdi Hassan and Billie Holiday
make for strange fruit on nondescript evenings.
They can stop us but not our thoughts
from coming out into the streets,
they can shoot us but cannot kill the air
which carries our voices.
O my love, you are still asleep
when the rain carries the night till dawn.
After lying down with dreams of you
I awake in another day of bread and newspapers.
I’m banished to the last outpost of a dying empire
whose keepsakes have become the artefacts of the natives:
necklaces, pianos, lace and tombstones.
I’ve pursued horoscopes and
only promises and maledictions pursue me.
One day Venus was mine, joy and honey,
another day Saturn would not be propitiated.
I found a moment’s peace
in my little daughter’s face.
Before I met you
my dreams were limited by ignorance.
Sometimes at night
I put two drops of our past in my eyes
but they refused to close.
Can poetry be smuggled like guns or drugs?
We’ve drawn our borders with blood.
Even to write in our mother tongue
we cut open veins and our tongues
lick parchments with blood.
I read my smuggled Neruda
and sometimes listen to the fading fiddles
and the mourning voices of my land.
I’m the anguish of slashed roots,
the fear of the homeless,
and the desperation of former kisses.
How much land does my enemy need?
O my love, why did you fade
into the obscurity of my life
and leave me to look long at the mountain?
I’m the pain of slashed roots
and the last rain is already here.
I’ll leave the cracked fields of my land
and its weeping pastures of daybreak.
Let wolves tear our beloved hills.
I’ll leave the bamboo flowering
in the groves of my childhood.
Let rats gnaw at the supine map
of what was once my native land.
Native Land
First came the scream of the dying
in a bad dream, then the radio report,
and a newspaper: six shot dead, twenty-five
houses razed, sixteen beheaded with hands tied
behind their backs inside a church…
As the days crumbled, and the victors
and their victims grew in number,
I hardened inside my thickening hide,
until I lost my tenuous humanity.
I ceased thinking
of abandoned children inside blazing huts
still waiting for their parents.
If they remembered their grandmother’s tales
of many winter hearths at the hour
of sleeping death, I didn’t want to know,
if they ever learnt the magic of letters.
And the women heavy with seed,
their soft bodies mowed down
like grain stalk during their lyric harvests;
if they wore wildflowers in their hair
while they waited for their men,
I didn’t care anymore.
Extracted from My Invented Land: New and Selected Poems by Robin S. Ngangom. Published by Speaking Tiger Books, 2023.
About the Book
Robin S. Ngangom’s poetry is the poetry of feeling, which draws the reader deep into the poet’s world. The poems in My Invented Land showcase Ngangom’s remarkable range—tracing his poetic arc from the deeply personal to the political, from chronicles of private joys, sorrows and everyday epiphanies to the poetry of witness that gazes unflinchingly at the realities that haunt the Northeast, his native land.
About the Author
Born in 1959 in Imphal, Manipur, Robin S. Ngangom is a bilingual poet and translator who writes in English and Manipuri. After completing his high school in Imphal he studied English literature at Shillong’s St Edmund’s College and the North-Eastern Hill University where he currently teaches. His first collection, Words and the Silence, was published in 1988 and since then, he has published two more volumes of poetry and a book of translations. He was invited to the UK Year of Literature and Writing in 1995, has read his poems at literary events in India and abroad, and his poems have appeared in several prestigious anthologies and magazines. He has also co-edited two significant anthologies of poetry from Northeast India.
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