I arrive just as Spring begins — There are the usual songs And dancing which excite, Especially, the merry young.
For oldies, like I, it’s nostalgia. I recall Yeats and his haunting line — The young in one another’s arms — What happened in my life? Where did my youth go?
It’s okay mutters a soft voice — You have other springs to enjoy!
Excerpted from WB Yeats’s ‘Sailing to Byzantium’ (1927)
Kirpal Singh is a poet and a literary critic from Singapore. An internationally recognised scholar, Singh has won research awards and grants from local and foreign universities. He was one of the founding members of the Centre for Research in New Literatures, Flinders University, Australia in 1977; the first Asian director for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize in 1993 and 1994, and chairman of the Singapore Writers’ Festival in the 1990s. He retired the Director of the Wee Kim Wee Centre.
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Tagore would have been 163 years old this year. In fact, he is that old this year. That is because he did not die in 1941. When poets pass away, they merely pretend to die, leaving mortals to bear the weight of their non-passage. In my case, at the age of 66, the happy punishment for being a Bengali is to be tied to a childhood spent in the lap of Tagore’s poems. That lap gets younger as I grow older.
I remember listening to Phagun, haoai haoai[1], Tagore’s ode to the winds of spring, on the radio in the attic of my ancestral village home in West Bengal’s Hooghly district. My home bordered a vast, circular expanse of agricultural land contoured by villages that included mine. Sitting in the third-storey attic, next to a terrace that overlooked the fields, I was transformed by the song. It turned vision into movement. The song’s opening lines speak of the poet making the gift of his carefree and untamed soul to the flow of the eager spring winds. Those lines might have added that Tagore had cast my soul as well to his winds. I leapt out of myself: I gladly yielded to my capture by the elements. I looked out, imagining that the spring winds would carry me across the vast fields into the homes and lives of the people who were participating in the rituals of spring, one of which was Tagore’s song itself.
There were many other songs in the same vein that accompanied me into youth. Among them were Tomar khola hawa[2], where Tagore welcomes a fresh gush of wind to his waiting sails and promises the elements no regret even if his boat sinks; and Nil Digante[3], where the blue horizon catches fire from the rioting colours of flowers and even the sun asks for itself in the brightness of the earth. Such were the poetic conceits that lent the urgency of understanding to the passage of my youthful days. To lead the imaginative life was to consign oneself to the youthfulness of Tagore.
My spring is over: Those days have passed, taking a happy Tagore with them. Now, what appeal to me are his sombre songs that deal with mortality and the divine. Tai tomar ananda amar por[4] is an outstanding example of what I would call the Late Tagore in me. Essentially, Tagore says to God: “You are the Creator only because I am the created.” Can you imagine the degree of self-certainty that allows a human to address God so fearlessly? I do not share Tagore’s devout hubris but I listen to that song over and over again to reassure myself that my days have not been useless because they have been inhabited by God-created hours. And, of course, with Jokhon porbe na more payer chinho[5], Tagore turns death itself into a romance with the endless interplay of time and space that defines life. I stand redeemed by his lines.
But I am growing old. I am not conveyed out of myself by the spring poems any more: I prefer to age, as wildly as health and imagination allow me to, within myself. Tagore accompanies me still, but what confounds me is how young he remains even in his constancy to the maturity of my withering years.
Phagun, haoai haoai: Tagore is exulting in the colours of this spring, this very year, even as I accept my autumnal steps to the final winter.
They delight through their insistence Like some ill found friend, Who doesn’t know lines drawn, Keeping deeper knowing at bay.
These spastic breaths do worry Many, whose heartbeats are dire, Torn between duty and desire Lingering in-between in sadness.
Thus, do I thrust through my days, Keeping both vigil and dreams, Determined to preserve sanctity Of faith and resilience and Truth.
Someday, it’ll all make sense Especially to those who keep mum Fearing repercussions, hiding away Guilt and shame and sorrow.
Such intimate knowing is rare A precious gift to those chosen To know and bear the cross Burying in their end the Truth.
Kirpal Singh is a poet and a literary critic from Singapore. An internationally recognised scholar, Singh has won research awards and grants from local and foreign universities. He was one of the founding members of the Centre for Research in New Literatures, Flinders University, Australia in 1977; the first Asian director for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize in 1993 and 1994, and chairman of the Singapore Writers’ Festival in the 1990s. He retired the Director of the Wee Kim Wee Centre.
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The Kuala Terengganu Skyline. Photo courtesy: Ravi Shankar
The lighting was subtle but magnificent. The transparent minarets glowed red, green, pink, and blue in turn. We were at the Masjid Kristal on the island of Wan Man at Kuala Terengganu in the state of the same name in northern Malaysia.
Majid Kristal
The mosque is among the most photographed monuments in the Islamic Heritage Park, and we could easily guess why. This is the first intelligent mosque in the country with an IT infrastructure and wi-fi connection. We were glad we came. The reflection of the mosque lights on water was enchanting. Getting around KT — as Kuala Terengganu is lovingly called by the locals — could sometimes be tricky without your own vehicle. Ride hailing services may not work optimally in the peak hours of the evening. We were informed by one of the cab drivers that Maxim is the most popular e-hailing app in the city.
The population in KT loves to eat out and in the evenings the restaurants are usually crowded. We were staying at the Intan Beach Resort at Pantai Batu Burok and the eating places by the beach were always crowded. The beach is popular with locals with several attractions and rides during the evenings. There is a three-kilometre walking path by the side of the beach. As we stayed right by the beach, we could enjoy early morning strolls on the soft sand.
Panti Batu Burok: Photo Courtesy: Ravi Shankar
The Kuala Terengganu state museum was huge and is located on over 23 acres of land. The museum was officially opened in 1996 and was designed by a well-known Malaysian architect, YM Raja Dato’ Kamarul Bahrin Shah, who also happens to be related to the royal family of Terengganu. The building is designed in traditionally Malay style and the outer façade was left undecorated. There are nine different galleries, and these include the Royal gallery, the historical gallery, the textiles gallery, the Islamic gallery, the handicrafts, the natural resources, the shipping and trading and the marine resources galleries.
Tha Batu Bersurat. Photo Courtesy: Ravi Shankar
The ‘Batu Bersurat’ (lettered stone) is the museum centrepiece and of great significance to the state. The stone is estimated to be 700 years old and mentions the position of Islam and the application of Islamic laws in the state. The stone is written in the Jawi script using Arabic characters. Jawi script is still used in Terengganu though in many areas Malay is written mostly in the Roman script. In the museum grounds, there is a good collection of different old cars and other vehicles used by the King and Chief Ministers of the state.
The Islamic Heritage Park is a major attraction located on the island of Wan Man. The park has small scale replicas of famous global Islamic monuments. Among the monuments represented are the mosques at Medina and Mecca in Saudi Arabia, Dome of the rock in Jerusalem, the Taj Mahal in India, and a mosque in Aleppo, Syria. The national mosque of Malaysia and mosques in Singapore, Indonesia, Pakistan, Iran, China, Tatarstan, Uzbekistan, and Iraq are also on display. Replicas of these famous monuments were displayed in the vast gardens of the monument. I liked this concept, and the monuments were well maintained except one or two that may require more attention.
The Floating Mosque. Courtesy: Creative CommonsDetails of the Floating Mosque. Courtesy: Ravi Shankar
The sun was hot, and I had to drink copious amounts of water. In the evening, my friend, Binaya, and I went to the floating mosque situated in Kuala Ibai Lagoon near the estuary of Kuala Ibai River, 4 km from Kuala Terengganu Town. The mosque combines modern and Moorish architecture, and is a white structure situated in five acres of land. There is also a floating mosque in Penang.
The next morning, we went to the Science and Creativity Centre. The centre is housed in a huge, modern building. There are multiple galleries to explore. I was fascinated by the stainless-steel exhibit showing the structure of DNA, the blueprint of life. The encounter with the dinosaurs was the highlight of the trip. The dinosaurs were colour coded in red (dangerous), yellow (exercise caution) and green (safe). Tyrannosaurus Rex was the highlight. Raptors, allosaurus and other dinos filled the hall with their cries and screams. The Stegosaurus had scales on the back. When I was young, I was a big fan of Phantom comics created by Lee Falk and Phantom had a stegosaurus as a pet. The inflatable dome on the top floor had a delightful cosmic show and you can see the universe projected above your head. The museum had plenty of things to see and do and is a big hit with children.
Photo Courtesy: Ravi Shankar
The Masjid Sultan Ismail Chendering has delicate artwork and is built entirely in white. The simple design and the beautiful artwork had me mesmerised. The mosque has a long history. The small Lebai Zainal Mosque which could accomodate150 people was first built near the current location of the mosque before being replaced by the Raja Chendering Mosque and then replaced again by a new mosque which is the Sultan Ismail Mosque.
Photo Courtesy: Ravi Shankar
Soon it was time for lunch. There are plenty of food options near our hotel. I enjoyed nasi kerabu, a Malaysian rice dish, in which blue-coloured rice is eaten with dried fish or fried chicken, crackers, pickles and other salads. The blue colour of the rice comes from the petals of Clitoria ternatea flowers, which are used as a natural food colouring.
In the evening, we went to see the Abidin Mosque which is Terengganu’s old state royal mosque built by Sultan Zainal Abidin II between 1793 and 1808. The Royal mausoleum is located next to the mosque. Istana Maziah, the official palace of the Sultan of Terengganu is located close to the mosque at the foot of the mountain, Bukit Puteri. The palace is the official venue for important functions such as royal birthdays, weddings, conferment of titles and receptions for local and foreign dignitaries. We wanted to climb Bukit Puteri, but the place was under renovation and closed.
We continued along the waterfront to the Shah Bandar jetty. A cool breeze was blowing, and many people were strolling along the promenade. We were moving toward the Kuala Terengganu drawbridge constructed in 2019 inspired by the London drawbridge. We waited for the sky to darken so that we could see the lights on the bridge.
Photo Courtesy: Ravi Shankar
Buses from KL take the highway to Kuantan and then bypass the town. The journey continues to the town of Paka and then takes the coastal highway through Dungun. Some parts of this state reminded me of my home state of Kerala in South India. Plenty of coconut trees were seen. Coconut trees grow so well in Kerala and in many areas along the west coast of India.
The expressways in Malaysia are well-designed and maintained. Traveling on these are usually a smooth experience though they get very crowded during major holidays when people leave Kuala Lumpur for their hometowns and villages. KT is about 400 km from KL and takes around eight hours by bus. Malaysia’s northern state on the East Coast can be a good getaway. The town and the state has culture, history, natural beauty, delicious food, and serene beaches. The islands off the coast were still closed. Redang island was mentioned to be one of the most beautiful islands in the world. Hopefully, we will visit these during our next trip. God willing, we shall!
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Dr. P Ravi Shankar is a faculty member at the IMU Centre for Education (ICE), International Medical University, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. He enjoys traveling and is a creative writer and photographer.
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Down with these bloodied walls,
where love is held prisoner,
life’s journey stalls.
Time has no purpose.
Down with these graffitied walls,
where hate binds all pain,
voices imprisoned in
confined spaces echo.
Down with these white-washed walls,
where prejudice abides,
ignorance crawls,
dust never settles.
Down with these bullet-holed walls,
where peace is wanting,
liberty mauled,
humanity cries.
Down with these surrounding walls,
so, birds return to nest,
dreams reinstalled,
and life breathes again,
and souls become songs,
and spirits begin to sing,
and the lame dance,
being alive to the heartbeat,
as the healing begins.
Sanjay C Kuttan, poet, philosopher and writer, was born in Malaysia, lives in Singapore, has his poetry published in Where Fires Rage, In One Breath, Under the Spell of Flickering Lights, Quilted Sails and in other anthologies.
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THE CERAMICIST
For Hong-Ling Wee (arr. 1992)
On a NASA scholarship to map the world,
she walked into a workshop on a whim
to throw a lump of clay on a wheel and feel
a foggy, quiet, pink, revolving world
evolve into an object of the mind
under the body’s pressure, slight and sure,
and, afterwards, surrender to the fire,
not that of fire, but that of accident,
for a ceramic rocket fallen back
to earth. And this she did, for many years,
living on little, explaining less, until
she was surrounded by the fuselage.
When the towers gashed vermilion and buckled,
she was alone at home in Union Square.
The noise expanded as it dribbled off
to meet its echo, second detonation
worse than the first report, in summoning
half-buried images of Hiroshima
and Nagasaki. In a foreign mood,
she heard the phone ring and a female voice,
acclimatised but recognisable
as Singaporean, asked for Wee Hong Ling.
She never tires of telling this story, how
the Consulate located her and every
Singaporean within an hour of disaster,
when a black hole opened but was avoided
because a star had called, a star called home.
She never tires of telling this story, which
I now tell you in my own fanciful way,
each iteration also explanation,
the how developing into the why,
why her pitchers, bowls, vases levitate.
(First published in the Quarterly Literary Review of Singapore and collected in Sample and Loop: A Simple History of Singaporeans in America, Bench Press, 2023)
Jee Leong Koh is a Singaporean writer, editor, and publisher living in New York City. His hybrid work Snow at 5 PM: Translations of an insignificant Japanese poet won the 2022 Singapore Literature Prize in English fiction. His book of poems Steep Tea (Carcanet) was named a Best Book of the Year by the Financial Times in the UK and a Finalist by Lambda Literary in the US. Other honours include being shortlisted twice for the Singapore Literature Prize in English poetry for The Pillow Book and Connor & Seal.
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An introduction and a conversation with Isa Kamari, a celebrated Singaporean writer
Isa Kamari
Isa Kamari is a well-known face in the Singapore literary community. He has won numerous awards — the Anugerah Sastera Mastera, the SEA Write Award and the Singapore Cultural Medallion, the Anugerah Tun Seri Lanang. He has been part of university curriculums and has written for the television. With 11 novels, nine of which have been translated from Malay to English — and some into more languages like Arabic, Mandarin, Urdu and Turkish, French, Russian Spanish — three poetry books, plays and one novella written in English by him, one can well see him as a leading voice in literature on this island that seems to have grown into a gateway for all Asia.
Kamari’s writings dip into his own culture to integrate with the larger world. The most remarkable thing about his works, for me has been the way in which he has brought the history of Singapore from the Malay perspective into novels and made it available for all readers. The most memorable of these actually gives the history of the time around which the Treaty of Singapore was signed between the British and the indigenous ruler in 1819, handing over the port to Raffles, the treaty that was crucial to the founding of modern Singapore. The novel is named after the year of the treaty.
Other novels like Song of the Wind , Rawa and Tweet — all bring into perspective how the local Orang Seletar integrated into the skyscrapers of Singapore. We can see in his writings how the indigenous moved to be integrated into a larger whole of a multi-racial, multi-religious accepting modern city. One of his novels, One Earth (1999), is like an interim almost, set during the Japanese occupation in Singapore. The narrative dwells on the intermingling of races in the island historically. Kiswah and Intercession are novels that cry out for reforms on the religious front.
He also has novels that delve into individual journeys to glance into the maladies of the modern-day world. Whether it is faith, or career, he brings into focus the need to heal. Recently, Kamari has brought out a book of short stories, Maladies of the Soul, to focus on just this. His fifteen short stories centre around the issue mentioned in the title. In the first ten stories, he writes of old age, of mental stress, of compromises made to achieve success, of anxieties just as the title suggests. These are internal conflicts of people in a country where most have enough to eat, a house to live in and access to education for their offsprings. Then in the last five stories, he moves towards not just showcasing such maladies but also resolving, using narratives that are almost surrealistic, or poetic. They are not happy but reflective with the ability to make one think, look for a resolution. They are discomfiting narratives.
One of the last stories is given from the perspective of a silkworm — a powerful comment on the need for freedom to survive. Another has the iconic Singapore Merlion emote to an extent. The writing escapes the flaw of being didactic by its sheer inventiveness. One is reminded that this is a book by an author from a city-state which has resolved problems like poverty to a large extent. That the journey was arduous and full of struggle can be seen in Kamari’s earlier novels. But now, that people have enough to eat and live by, he takes the next step that is necessary. His stories demand not just being familiar with the issues they faced in the past, but also suggest a movement towards resolving the social problems that in a developed country can warp individuals to make them non-functional and make the society lose its suppleness to adapt and progress.
One of the stories like his earlier novel, The Tower, reflects the climb of a careerist, an architect, up a tower he has built, while recalling the compromises made. The interesting thing is the conclusions have a similar impact. And then, there is yet another story that is almost Kafkaesque in its execution, where a man turns into a bull — a comment on stock trading or people’s obsession with money and to compete?
The book needs to be read sequentially to get the full impact of his message. For, he is a writer with a message, a message that hopes to heal the world by integrating the spiritual with modernisation. In this conversation, he discusses his new book and his journey as a writer.
What makes you write? What moves you to write? Why do you write?
I need to be disturbed by events, issues and thoughts before thinking of writing anything. I would then ponder and research on the topics at hand. Only when I have my own tentative resolution of the conflicting elements, I would begin to write. Most often, my views and positions will change as I write further. In that sense writing is a form of discovery and therapy for me.
Tweet in Spanish
Do you see yourself as a bi-lingual writer or a Malay writer experimenting in English? You had written your novella, Tweet, in English. Later it was translated to more languages. How many languages have you been translated into? Do you feel the translations convey your text well into the other language?
Culturally, I think in Malay. English is a language of instruction for me. When I attempt to translate my Malay works into English, the writing sounds and feels Malay. Tweet is a result of a challenge I imposed upon myself to write creatively in English. The result is not bad. Tweet has been translated into Malay, Arabic, Russian, French, Spanish, Azerbaijan and Korean. I wouldn’t know how well the novella has been translated because I do not know those languages. I trust the translators whom I choose carefully.
Throne and Tweet in RussianTweet in French
The stories of Maladies of the Soul first appeared in Malay. Now in English. Did you translate them yourself, being a bi-lingual writer? Tell us your experience as a translator of the stories. Did you come across any hurdles while switching the language? What would you say is the difference in the Malay and English renditions?
Yes, I translated all the stories in the book. I had to overcome my own fear that the stories might end up too Malay in expression and feel. But I told myself to be true to my own voice and not be inhibited by language structure and convention. I would not know exactly the difference between the two renditions. I was just interested to tell the stories.
Is this your first venture into a full-length short story book? Tell us how novels and short stories vary as a genres in your work. How do you use the different genre to convey? Is there a difference in your premise while doing either?
I have produced just one collection of short stories. In each of the short stories, I had to be focussed on expressing concepts and philosophies on a single problem of the human condition. In my novels the concepts and philosophies are varied, expanded, more complex and layered but yet interrelated and weaved around dynamic human experiences facing common predicaments or challenges of an era.
One of the things I noticed about the book was that the stories would convey your premise better if read in order. Is that intentionally done or is it a random occurrence?
The short stories can be weaved into a novel. There is a central spine, which is my observation and philosophy of life which bind them all. The intrinsic sequence or order is not intentional, but perhaps it is the psychological thread and latent articulation of the storyteller.
Some of the stories seem to have echoes in your novels, like Kiswah and Intercession, both of which deal with crises in faith. Did your earlier novels have a direct bearing on your short stories?
I used to transform my poems into short stories, and from those write novels. The genres are just tools for me to express my thoughts and feelings. I use whatever works. I have even experimented on weaving short stories and poems in a novel. I wanted to create prose that are poetic, and poems that are capable of conveying a narrative. My latest novel, The Throne, is a result of this experiment.
Some of your stories touch on the metaphorical, especially the last five. Some of the earlier ones describe unusual or even the absurd situations we face in life. As a conglomerate, they explore darker areas of the human psyche, unlike your novels which were in certain senses more hopeful, especially Tweet. What has changed to bring the darker shades into your writing? Please elaborate.
The stories in Maladies of the Soul have a common theme of alienation in various facets and dimensions of life. As such the expected feeling after reading them is that of gloom and hopelessness. That is intentional as a revelation of the deeper and hidden fallacy of modern life that appears organised and bright on the surface. I wanted my readers to be shaken or at least moved to ponder and reflect on our current, shallow and fractured human condition. There is a better life if we were to look the other way and be more mindful and caring of each other and our environment.
I still recall a phrase from your novel, The Tower, “Festivities celebrating loneliness”. Would you say your short stories have moved towards that?
Exactly.
Why did you choose short stories over giving us a longer narrative like a novel?
It is like giving my readers bite sizes of my exploration and philosophy of life. I leave it to the readers to weave the stories into a whole, and reflect upon their own experiences, thoughts and feelings, perhaps in a more integrated and holistic manner.
What are the influences on your writing?
Life itself. Like I mentioned earlier I do not write in a vacuum. I engage life in my writing as a way of validating my ever-changing existence. I want my life and writing to be authentic and significant. Hopefully, meaningful to others too.
What can your readers look forward from you next?
I have just completed a draft of a novel in Malay, Firasat. As in all my novels, I offer a window towards healing by embracing a rejuvenated Malay philosophy called firasat which is an intuitive, integrated, balanced, lucid, harmonious and holistic way of life.
Thank youfor sharing your time and your writings with us.
(The online interview has been conducted by emails by Mitali Chakravarty)
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Our population crossed the 8 billion mark in November, 2022. As we move towards trying to hunt for alternative domiciles for our ever-expanding population, even in outer space, we still have to take into account the increased movement of people across the Earth in search of alternative homes driven by external circumstances or by personal needs.
Some have lost their homes and lands to war, some to climate emergencies and some moved out out of choice. Here we have collected narratives of past and present migrations, emphasising the fluidity of borders, despite the lines drawn artificially by manmade constructs. In an earlier interview, Anthony Sattin talks of nomadic migrations and the concept of asabiyya, or brotherhood, which tied humans to ideas and ideals instead of a piece of land mooted in Arabia by Ibn Khaldun in the fourteenth century. Has the time come to revive this concept with conflicts and the climate crises becoming real? As weapons, fire and water affect our habitats, one wonders if reverting to the concept of nomadic existence is not becoming a necessity… This small collection of writings will hopefully highlight the concerns.
In Belacan, Farouk Gulsara shares a narrative based on the life of a migrant in 1950s Malaysia. Clickhereto read.
Ujjal Dosanjh, former Minister from Canada and former Premier of British Columbia, talks of his own journey and learning as he migrated out of India to Canada. Click hereto read.
In Mister, They’re Coming Anyway, Timothy Jay Smith writes on the refugee crisis in Lesbos Island, Greece, in 2016 with photographs by Michael Honegger. Click here to read.
An excerpt from Ramy Al-Asheq’sEver Since I Did Not Die, translated from Arabic by Isis Nusair, edited by Levi Thompson. The author was born in a refugee camp. Click hereto read.
May I be so bold as to claim that I travelled in the footsteps of Sir Stamford Raffles? That agent of the East Indian Company’s visit to Calcutta (as it was known then, and for much later, till it resumed the phonetic spelling of its original name), led him to set up Singapore as an English trading settlement in 1819. “Footsteps” would be the wrong metaphor, of course. “Seasteps” would have been accurate, since Raffles travelled to Calcutta by sea and arrived water-borne to Singapura (as it was known then). In my case, however, I arrived in Singapore sky-borne, in an aircraft that conveyed me from what was then home to what would become home. Footsteps, seasteps or airsteps, I arrived in Singapore. The year was 1984. I was 27.
Today, at 65, I remember my passage from back home to this home as if it occurred yesterday. I had worked in Hong Kong briefly in 1984 and had been exposed to life in a successful British colony that was in the throes of its return to Chinese rule. Singapore was different. It had merged with the Malaysian Federation in 1963, had separated from it in 1965, and had gone on to carve out an extremely successful space for itself in the international sphere.
Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew was a household word in Singapore. Not everyone loved him, but no one could deny his singular agency in having created a magnificent city-state that could sustain its independence in spite of its lack of natural resources. To arrive in Singapore was to embrace the possibilities of time.
Calcutta, too, was a historical city par excellence, but its rundown buildings and potholed streets, to say nothing of its potbellied children living on homeless streets, belied the promise of the future. To arrive in Singapore, it appeared, was to have exchanged failure for success.
That was an illusion, of course. All expatriates suffer from a global disease: They latch on to what they love in their countries of arrival by trying to erase what had loved them in their countries of departure. Take the potholed streets of Calcutta, for example. They had conveyed me to College Street on that glad day in 1974 when I joined the English Department of Presidency College. Without that first footfall in the corridors of the greats, I might never have come to Singapore, never got my Chevening Scholarship to Cambridge, my father’s university, and never won the Fulbright to Harvard. The potholes of Calcutta are not as numerous as the culturally blind allege them to be. Nevertheless, they led me on the way to be myself, wherever on earth I would ultimately be.
The way I see it, no matter how far or close wanderings might lead, one migrates ultimately to oneself. Hence, when I left my Calcutta for what would become my Singapore, I did no more than search for a version of my selfhood that would extend my material and imaginative boundaries. In the course of my journey, I discovered that the only borders lie within, borders between being and becoming. In the process of becoming by winnowing the unwanted aspects of being, one returns to a renewed if only autumnal sense of being. Time passes. One passes with it, letting go of the distant past as much as one does the receding immediate past. To live is to gather the passage of time within oneself, hoping that all borders will merge into a lasting apprehension of oneself in the expanding fullness of a single world.
Calcutta and Singapore are two sides of me. These two great imperial cities have outlived their provenance. Calcutta was once the capital city of colonial India: Today it remains the nation’s cultural capital but political power resides in Delhi (naturally) and there are at least two economic capitals, Mumbai and Chennai. This is why I, along with many of my hapless fellow-Bengalis, suffer from an incurable cultural fetish for the past. That was when the Almighty spoke Bengali – He appears to be switching increasingly to Hindi – and was busy creating top-class poets and formidable social reformers in Bengal. The divine supply of poets and composers has not ebbed but the demand-side having moved to Mumbai, many of the best composers have shifted there and to make a name for themselves. Never mind. Their names remain Bengali, and their fame spreads the vintage mystique of Calcutta like a lingering perfume in India and beyond. I feel happy for the Calcutta part of me.
Singapore, a great trading post, is a now a city-state. Statehood has allowed the nascent nationalism of the colonial era to flourish and grow into a genuine sense of political self. Sovereign Singapore was not expected to survive, but it has done so with a definitiveness that makes the prognoses of the 1960s laughable today. The national self-confidence of Singapore gives me confidence in my decision to take up Singapore citizenship in 1999. It had not been an easy decision, but I took it when I realised that I would be giving up my Indian citizenship but not my Indian-ness. My Singapore Identity Card records my race as Indian. I could keep the Calcutta part of me intact while adding to it a new Singaporean me.
So, yes, I am grateful that Raffles travelled to Calcutta to set up Singapore. Obviously, he did not do so with my fortunes in mind, but the umbilical connection that he created between the two great port cities has made it easier for me to migrate from India to Singapore. Ultimately, I have done nothing more than migrate to me.
Title: Smoke and Ashes: A Writer’s Journey Through Opium’s Hidden Histories
Author: Amitav Ghosh
Publisher: HarperCollins India
Amitav Ghosh has been traversing the boundaries between fiction, non-fiction, history, anthropology with ease for a long time. After the publication of his Ibis Trilogy [Sea of Poppies (2008), River of Smoke (2011) and Flood of Fire (2012)] more than a decade earlier, he has been primarily focusing on issues related to environment, global warming and ecology in his later novels like Gun Island (2019), The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis (2021), a non-fiction like The Great Derangement (2016), and two slim volumes of fables, Jungle Nama (2021) and The Living Mountain (2022). Now in his latest book Smoke and Ashes: A Writer’s Journey Through Opium’s Hidden Histories (2023), he blends travelogue, memoir, and historical tract into a multi-textured narrative that tells us about how ‘opium is a historical force in its own right’ and ‘must be approached with due attention to the ways in which it has interacted with humans over time.’ When he began his research for the Ibis Trilogy, he was startled to find how the lives of the nineteenth-century sailors and soldiers he wrote of were dictated not only by the currents of the Indian Ocean, but also by a precious commodity carried in enormous quantities on those currents: opium. Through both economic and cultural history, Ghosh traces the transformative effect the opium trade had on Britain, India and China; the trade and its revenues were essential to the Empire’s survival.
Of the eighteen chapters of the book, the first two enlighten the reader about little knowledge of China and the way tea (cha or chai) became an inevitable part of living both in the West and in India. It was after Ghosh’s first trip to Guangzhou (anglicized later to Canton) that the epiphany occurred about the very subtle influence of China and how the British actually stole the technology of tea plantation to make it flourish in the colonies. Thus ‘tea came to India as a corollary of a sustained contest – economic, social and military – between the West and China.’
From the third chapter onwards Ghosh gives us the history of the opium poppy and how social conventions that had developed through centuries of exposure to opium may have helped to protect some parts of Eurasia from highly addictive forms of opioid use and also how the drug was instrumental in the creation of a certain kind of colonial modernity. We get to know how it was the Dutch who led the way in enmeshing opium with colonialism, and in creating the first imperial narco-state, heavily dependent on drug revenues. But in India, the model of the colonial narco-state was perfected by the British. In the entire region of Purvanchal, the British created a system that was coercive to its core. The growth and cultivation of opium poppy was entirely controlled by them and the drug was mass produced in the two largest factories in Patna and Ghazipur. Though the dangers of opium were certainly no secret to the British government, yet they did not bat an eyelid in exporting the drug to China, knowing fully well it was a criminal enterprise utterly indefensible by the standards of its own time as well as ours.
Ghosh then gives details of the poppy cultivation in Malwa and the western provinces of India. By thwarting the British efforts to impose a monopoly on the trade, Malwa opium sustained Bombay and left a large share of the profits to remain in indigenous hands. Throughout the colonial era therefore, Calcutta and Bombay defined the two opposite poles of India’s political economy; the way in which business was conducted in the two cities were completely different and soon the Parsis turned out to be the maximum number of the non-western merchants who were present in Guangzhou in the years before the First Opium War. Thus, Bombay and its hinterlands benefited from Malwa’s opium in multiple ways. From Mumbai’s Parsis we go to the horticulturists and weavers, potters and painters of China, especially of the great city of Guangzhou. The intricacies of the Parsi Gara saris are traced back to weavers of Guangzhou, and so are the origins of an artistic ferment in Bombay when Jamsetji Tata, the founder of the Taj Mahal Hotel in Mumbai, brought back many paintings to India from China. The idea for an art school in Bombay came to Jamstjee Jejeebhoy after his Guangzhou visits, and the JJ School of Art came about.
Ghosh describes how opium money seeped so deeply into nineteenth century Britain that it essentially became invisible through ubiquity. After Britain, the country that benefited the most from the China trade and therefore, the global traffic in opium, was none other than the United States and the beneficiaries included many of the prominent families, institutions, and individuals in the land. By 1818 Americans were smuggling as much as a third of all the opium consumed in China thereby posing a major challenge to the East India Company’s domination of the market. Known as the Boston Concern, all the rich families from Boston, Massachusetts and the fortunate Americans were a series of names from the Northeastern upper crust — Astor, Cabot, Peabody, and so on. The young returnees from China ploughed their opium money into every sector of the rapidly expanding American economy. Even the opium money used in the railroad industry also came from China. “Opium was really a way that America was able to transfer China’s economic power to America’s industrial revolution”. In the United States the connection between opium and philanthropy has endured till the present day. It also left a distinct stamp on American architectural styles, modes of consumption, interior décor, philanthropy, and forms of recreation. Interestingly, Ghosh’s narrative keeps circling back to the present, when in the US as well in many countries around the world including India, the opioid crisis has reached epic proportions and the American government is bullish about its “War on Drugs”. Ghosh candidly states, “The ideology of Free Trade capitalism sanctioned entirely new levels of depravity in the pursuit of profit and the demons that were engendered as a result that have now so viscerally taken hold of the world that they can probably never be exorcised.”
Ghosh reiterates through the book that binary narratives about countries and culture — like, China is evil — that is entrenched in popular perception is misleading and takes away the historical context of trade relations among nations. “The staggering reality is that many of the cities that are now pillars of the modern globalised economy — Mumbai, Singapore, Hong Kong and Shanghai — were initially sustained by opium.”
There are many places in the book where Ghosh skilfully refers to his actual borrowing of historical details in his Ibis trilogy and these interjections add flavour to the non-fiction narration. Chapter Eight again is a memoir of Ghosh’s own lineage and how that has connections with the opium trade. Moving away from their ancestral home in East Bengal, it was the opium industry that took his ancestors to Chhapra in Bihar and kept them there. Like the millions of people that opium trading affected, uprooted, and dehumanised, his father told him stories of growing up in Chhapra and seeing opium ruin as well as make lives. These digressions add zing to the often-monotonous narration of facts and figures of the opium trade.
Ghosh goes on to devote pages to the nature of grassroots psychoactive substances and how opium was different in this class of psychoactive because it became a mainstay among pharmaceuticals too: “The reality is that all other efforts at curbing the spread of opioids have failed: the opium poppy has always found a way of circumventing them.” Towards the end of the book, after Ghosh finds that the wealthy and powerful people of the world to be suicidally indifferent to the prospect of a global catastrophe vis-s-vis the drug scenario, he asks a seminal question: “In such a world does it serve any purpose to recount this bleak and unedifying story?” Apparently, this question had haunted him since he first started working on the book, many years ago. It was the reason why, at a certain point, he felt he could not go on, even though he had already accumulated an enormous amount of material. It seemed to him then that Tagore had got it exactly right when he wrote: ‘in the Indo-China opium traffic, human nature itself sinks down to such a depth of despicable meanness, that is hateful even to follow the story to its conclusion.’ So persuaded was he of this that he decided to abandon the project: he cancelled the contracts he had signed and returned the advances he had been paid by his publishers.
Now we are happy that the story of the opium poppy had its cathartic effect upon Ghosh and in retrospect, after a period of more than a decade, he could give us the story from multiple perspectives today. Like his other books, this text is also accompanied by voluminous end notes which will deter the layman reader from enjoying the book. The amount of material and the different issues that Ghosh mentions is fit for at least four books but it is to his credit that he manages to present to us this world-roving tale in his signature method of weaving diverse narrative strands together into this book. How Ghosh establishes the interconnectedness of economic agency with geopolitics, a plant with human flourishing and wreckage and produces a narrative as luxuriant as it is painstaking in detail and density is his mastery as a prose writer and thinker.
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Somdatta Mandal, author, academic and translator is former Professor of English at Visva-Bharati, Santiniketan, India.
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