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Interview Review

The Subliminal World of Radha Chakravarty’s Poetry

In conversation with Radha Chakravarty about her debut poetry collection, Subliminal, published by Hawakal Publishers

Radha Chakravarty

Words cross porous walls
In the house of translation—
Leaf cells breathe new air.

We all know of her as a translator par excellence. But did you know that Radha Chakravarty has another aspect to her creative self? She writes poetry. Chakravarty’s poetry delves into the minute, the small objects of life and integrates them into a larger whole for she writes introspectively. She writes of the kantha — a coverlet made for a baby out of soft old sarees, of her grandmother’s saree, a box to store betel leaves… Her poetry translates the culture with which she grew up to weave in the smaller things into the larger framework of life:

Fleet fingers, fashioning
silent fables, designed to swaddle 
innocent infant dreams, shielding
silk-soft folds of newborn skin
from reality’s needle-pricks, 
abrasive touch of life in the raw.

--'Designs in Kantha’

She has poignant poems about what she observes her in daily life:

At the traffic light she appears 
holding jasmine garlands
selling at your car window for the price 
of bare survival, the promise 
of a love she never had, her eyes 
emptied of the fragrance
of a spring that, for her, never came.

--‘Flower Seller’

Some of her strongest poems focus on women from Indian mythology. She invokes the persona of Sita and Ahalya — and even the ancient legendary Bengali woman astrologer and poet, Khona. It is a collection which while exploring the poet’s own inner being, the subliminal mind, takes us into a traditional Bengali household to create a feeling of Bengaliness in English. At no point should one assume this Bengaliness is provincial — it is the same flavour that explores Bosphorus and Mount Everest from a universal perspective and comments independently on the riots that reft Delhi in 2020… where she concludes on the aftermath— “after love left us    and hate filled the air.”

The poems talk to each other to create a loose structure that gives a glimpse into the mind of the poetic persona — all the thoughts that populate the unseen crevices of her being.

In Subliminal, her debut poetry book, Radha Chakravarty has brought to us glimpses of her times and travels from her own perspective where the deep set tones of heritage weave a nostalgic beam of poetic cadences. Chakravarty’s poems also appear in numerous journals and anthologies. She has published over 20 books, including translations of major Bengali writers such as Rabindranath Tagore, Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, Mahasweta Devi and Kazi Nazrul Islam, anthologies of South Asian writing, and several critical monographs. She has co-edited The Essential Tagore (Harvard and Visva-Bharati), named ‘Book of the Year’ 2011 by Martha Nussbaum.

In this conversation, Radha Chakravarty delves deeper into her poetry and her debut poetry book, Subliminal.

Your titular poem ‘Subliminal’ is around advertisements on TV. Tell us why you opted to name your collection after this poem.

Most of the poems in Subliminal are independent compositions, not planned for a pre-conceived anthology. But when I drew them together for this book, the title of the poem about TV advertisements appeared just right for the whole collection, because my poetry actually delves beneath surfaces to tease out the hidden stories and submerged realities that drive our lives. And very often, those concealed truths are startlingly different from outward appearances. I think much of my poetry derives its energy from the tensions between our illusory outer lives and the realities that lurk within. In ‘Memories of Loss’, for example, I speak of beautiful things that conceal painful stories:

In a seashell held to the ear
the murmur of a distant ocean

In the veins of a fallen leaf
the hint of a lost green spring

In the hiss of logs in the fire,
the sighing of wind in vanished trees

In the butterfly’s bold, bright wings,
The trace of silken cocoon dreams

So, when and why did you start writing poetry?

I can’t remember when I started. I think I was always scribbling lines and fragments of verse, without taking them seriously. Poetry for me was the mode for saying the unsayable, expressing what one was not officially expected to put down in words. In a way, I was talking to myself, or to an invisible audience. Years later, going public with my poems demanded an act of courage. The confidence to actually publish my poems came at the urging of friends who were poets. Somehow, they assumed, or seemed to know from reading my published work in other forms, that I wrote poetry too.

Did being a translator of great writers have an impact on your poetry? How?

Yes, definitely. In particular, translating Tagore’s Shesher Kabita (as Farewell Song), his verses for children, the lush, lyrical prose of Bankimchandra Chatterjee (Kapalkundala) and the stylistic experiments of contemporary Bengali writers from India and Bangladesh (in my books Crossings: Stories from India and Bangladesh, Writing Feminism: South Asian Voices, Writing Freedom: South Asian Voices and Vermillion Clouds) sensitised me to the way poetic language works, and how the idiom, rhythm and resonances change when you translate from one language to another. Translating poetry has its challenges, but it also refined my own work as a poet. Let me share a few lines of poetry from Farewell Song, my translation of Tagore’s novel Shesher Kabita:

Sometime, when you are at ease, 
When from the shores of the past, 
      The night-wind sighs, in the spring breeze, 
	The sky steeped in tears of fallen bakul flowers,
Seek me then, in the corners of your heart, 
    For traces left behind. In the twilight of forgetting,
	Perhaps a glimmer of light will be seen,
The nameless image of a dream.
	And yet it is no dream,
For my love, to me, is the truest thing …

What writers, artists or musicians have impacted your poetry?

For me, writing is closely associated with the love for reading. Intimacy with beloved texts, and interactions with poets from diverse cultures during my extensive travels, has proved inspirational.

Poetry is also about the art of listening. As a child I loved the sound, rhythm and vivacity of Bengali children’s rhymes in the voice of my great-grandmother Renuka Chakrabarti. She has always been a figure of inspiration for me, a literary foremother who dared to aspire to the world of words at a time when women of her circle were not allowed to read and write. A child bride married into a family of erudite men, and consumed by curiosity about the forbidden act of reading, she took to hiding under her father-in-law’s four-poster bed and trying to decipher the alphabet from newspapers. One day he caught her in the act. Terrified, she crept out from her hiding place, and confessed to the ‘crime’ of trying to read. Things could have gone badly for her, but her father-in-law was an enlightened individual. He understood her craving to learn, and promised that he would teach her to read and write. Under his tutelage, and through her own passion for learning, she became an erudite woman, equally proficient in English and Bengali, an accomplished but unpublished poet whose legacy I feel I have inherited. Subliminal is dedicated to her.

As a child I absorbed both Bengali and English poetry through my pores because in our home, poetry, and music were all around me. I was inspired by Tagore and Nazrul, but also by modern Bengali poets such as Jibanananda Das, Sankho Ghosh and Shamsur Rahman. In my college days, as a student of English Literature, I loved the poetry of Shakespeare, Donne, Yeats, T. S. Eliot and the Romantics.

Later, I discovered the power of women’s poetry: Emily Dickinson, Sylvia Plath and Adrienne Rich, to name a few. I am fascinated by the figure of Chandrabati, the medieval Bengali woman poet who composed her own powerful version of the Ramayana. Art and music provide a wellspring of inspiration too, for poetry can have strong visual and aural dimensions.

You translate from Bengali into English. How is the process of writing poetry different from the process of translation, especially as some of your poetry is steeped in Bengaliness, almost as if you are translating your experiences for all of us?

Translation involves interpreting and communicating another author’s words for readers in another language. Writing poetry is about communicating my own thoughts, emotions and intuitions in my own words. Translation requires adherence to a pre-existing source text. When writing poetry, there is no prior text to respond to, only the text that emerges from one’s own act of imagination. That brings greater freedom, but also a different kind of challenge. Both literary translation and the composition of poetry are creative processes, though. Mere linguistic proficiency is not enough to bring a literary work or a translated text to life.

English is not our mother tongue. And yet you write in it. Can you explain why?

Having grown up outside Bengal, I have no formal training in Bengali. I was taught advanced Bengali at home by my grandfather and acquired my deep love for the language through my wide exposure to books, music, and performances in Bengali, from a very early age. I was educated in an English medium school. At University too, I studied English Literature. Hence, like many others who have grown up in Indian cities, I am habituated to writing in English. I translate from Bengali, but write and publish in English, the language of my education and professional experience. Bengali belongs more to my personal, more intimate domain, less to my field of public interactions.

Both Bengali and English are integral to my consciousness, and I guess this bilingual sensibility often surfaces in my poetry. In many poems, such as ‘The Casket of Secret Stories,’ ‘The Homecoming’ or ‘In Search of Shantiniketan’, Bengali words come in naturally because of the cultural matrix in which such poems are embedded. ‘The Casket of Secret Stories’ is inspired by vivid childhood memories of my great-grandmother’s  daily ritual of rolling paan, betel leaves stuffed with fragrant spices, and arranging them in the metal box, her paaner bata[1]. When she took her afternoon nap, my cousins and I would steal and eat the forbidden paan from the box, and pretend innocence when she woke up and found all her paan gone. Of course, from our red-stained teeth and lips, she understood very well who the culprits were. But she never let on that she knew. It was only later, after I grew up, that I realised what the paan ritual signified for the housebound women of her time:

In the delicious telling,
bright red juice trickling
from the mouth, staining
tongue and teeth, savouring
the covert knowledge
of what life felt like in dark corners 
of the home’s secluded inner quarters, 
what the world on the outside looked like 
from behind veils, screens, 
barred windows and closed courtyards
where women’s days began and ended,
leaving for posterity
this precious closed kaansha* casket,
redolent with the aroma of lost stories

*Bronze

But I don’t agree that all my poetry is steeped in Bengali. In fact, in most of my poems, Bengali expressions don’t feature at all, because the subjects have a much wider range of reference. As a globe trotter, I have written about different places and journeys between places.

Take ‘Still’, which is about Mount Everest seen from Nagarkot in Nepal. Or ‘Continental Drift’, about the Bosphorus ferry that connects Asia with Europe. Such poems reflect a global sensibility. My poems on the Pandemic are not coloured by specific Bengali experiences. They have a universal resonance. I contributed to Pandemic: A Worldwide Community Poem (Muse Pie Press, USA), a collaborative effort to which poets from many different countries contributed their lines. It was a unique composition that connected my personal experience of the Pandemic with the diverse experiences of poets from other parts of the world. The poem was nominated for the Pushcart Prize. I guess my poems explore the tensions between rootedness and a global consciousness.

What are the themes and issues that move you?

I tend to write about things that carry a strong personal charge, but also connect with general human experience. My poems are driven by basic human emotions, memory, desire, associations, relationships, and also by social themes and issues. Specific events, private or public, often trigger poems that widen out to ask bigger questions arising from the immediate situation.

Sometimes, poetry can also become for me what T. S. Eliot calls an “escape from personality,” where one adopts a voice that is not one’s own and assume a different identity. ‘The Wishing Tree’ and the sequence titled ‘Seductions’ work as “mask” poems, using voices other than my own. This offers immense creative potential, similar to creating imaginary characters in works of fiction.

There are a lot of women-centred poems in Subliminal. Consider, for example, ‘Designs in Kantha’, ‘Alien’, ‘River/Woman’, ‘That Girl’, ‘The Severed Tongue’ and ‘Walking Through the Flames’. These poems deal with questions of voice and freedom, the body and desire, and the legacy of our foremothers. Some of them are drawn from myth and legend, highlighting the way women tend to be represented in patriarchal discourses.

The natural world and our endangered planet form another thematic strand. I am fascinated by the hidden layers of the psyche, and the unexpected things we discover when we probe beneath the surface veneer of our exterior selves. My poems are also driven by a longing for greater connectivity across the borders that separate us, distress at the growing hatred and violence in our world, and an awareness of the powerful role that words can play in the way we relate to the universe. ‘Peace Process’, ‘After the Riot’ and ‘Borderlines’ express this angst.

How do you use the craft of poetry to address these themes?

Poetry is the art of compression, of saying a lot in very few words. Central to poetry is the image. A single image can carry a welter of associations and resonances, creating layers of meaning that would require many words of explanation in prose. Poems are not about elaborations and explanations. They compel the reader to participate actively in the process of constructing meaning. Reading poetry can become a creative activity too. Poems are also about sound, rhythm and form. I often write “in form” because the challenge of working within the contours of a poetic genre or form actually stretches one’s creative resources. In Subliminal, I have experimented with some difficult short forms, such as the Fibonacci poem, the Skinny, and the sonnet. Take, for instance, the Skinny poem called ‘Jasmine’:

Remember the scent of jasmine in the breeze?
                   Awakening
                    tender
                   memories
                  bittersweet,
                   awakening
                    buried
                    dormant 
                    desires,
                   awakening,
in the breeze, the forgotten promise of first love. Remember?

The last two lines of the poem use the same words as the beginning, but to tell a different story. The form demands great economy.

I pay attention to the sound, and even when writing free verse, I care about the rhythm.  Endings are important. Many of my poems carry a twist in the final lines. I mix languages. Bengali words keep cropping up in my English poems.

Are your poems spontaneous or pre-meditated?

The first attempt is usually spontaneous, but then comes the process of rewriting and polishing, which can be very demanding. Some poems come fully formed and require no revision, but generally, I tend to let the first draft hibernate for some time, before looking at it afresh with a critical eye. Often, the final product is unrecognisable.

Which is your favourite poem in this collection and why? Tell us the story around it.

It is hard to choose just one poem. But let us consider ‘Designs in Kantha’, one of my favourites. Maybe the poem is important to me because of the old, old associations of the embroidered kantha with childhood memories of the affection of all the motherly women who enveloped us with their loving care and tenderness. Then came the gradual realisation, as I grew into a woman, of all the intense emotions, the hidden lives that lay concealed between those seemingly innocent layers of fabric. The kantha is a traditional cultural object, but it can also be considered a fabrication, a product of the creative imagination, a story that hides the real, untold story of women’s lives in those times. Behind the dainty stitches lie the secret tales of these women from a bygone era. My poem tries to bring those buried emotions to life.

As a critic, how would you rate your own work?

I think I must be my own harshest critic. Given my academic training, it is very hard to silence that little voice in your head that is constantly analysing your creative work even as you write. To publish one’s poetry is an act of courage. For once your words enter the public domain, they are out of your hands. The final verdict rests with the readers.

Are you planning to bring out more books of poems/ translations? What can we expect from you next?

More poems, I guess. And more translations. Perhaps some poems in translation. My journey has taken so many unpredictable twists and turns, I can never be quite sure of what lies ahead. That is the fascinating thing about writing.

Thank you for giving us your time.

[1] Container for holding Betel leaves or paan

(The online interview has been conducted through emails and the review written by Mitali Chakravarty.)

Click here to read poems from Subliminal.

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Contents

Borderless, February 2024

Art by Sohana Manzoor

Editorial

Finding Godot?… 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 Ratna Magotra, a doctor who took cardiac care to the underprivileged and an introduction to her autobiography, Whispers of the Heart: Not Just a Surgeon. Click here to read.

Translations

Two poems by Nazrul have been translated from Bengali by Niaz Zaman. Click here to read.

Masud Khan’s poetry has been translated by Fakrul Alam. Click here to read.

The White Lady by Atta Shad has been translated from Balochi by Fazal Baloch. Click here to read.

Sparrows by Ihlwha Choi has been translated from Korean by the poet himself. Click here to read.

Tagore’s Dhoola Mandir or Temple of Dust has been translated from Bengali by Mitali Chakravarty. Click here to read.

Pandies Corner

Songs of Freedom: What are the Options? is an autobiographical narrative by Jyoti Kaur, translated from Hindustani by Lourdes M Supriya. These narrations highlight the ongoing struggle against debilitating rigid boundaries drawn by societal norms, with the support from organisations like Shaktishalini and pandies’. Click here to read.

Poetry

Click on the names to read the poems

Rhys Hughes, Maithreyi Karnoor, Luis Cuauhtémoc Berriozábal, Sivakami Velliangiri, Wendy Jean MacLean, Pramod Rastogi, Stuart McFarlean, Afrida Lubaba Khan, George Freek, Saranyan BV, Ryan Quinn Flanagan, Sanjay C Kuttan, Peter Magliocco, Sushant Thapa, Michael R Burch

Poets, Poetry & Rhys Hughes

In City Life: Samples, Rhys Hughes takes on the voice of cities. Click here to read.

Musings/Slices from Life

Ratnottama Sengupta Reminisces on Filmmaker Mrinal Sen

Ratnottama Sengupta travels back to her childhood wonderland where she witnessed what we regard as Indian film history being created. Click here to read.

Suga Didi

Snigdha Agrawal gives us a slice of nostalgia. Click here to read.

Healing Intellectual Disabilities

Meenakshi Pawha browses on a book that deals with lived experiences of dealing with intellectual disabilities. Click here to read.

Musings of a Copywriter

In Hobbies of Choice, Devraj Singh Kalsi explores a variety of extra curriculums. Click here to read.

Notes from Japan

In Becoming a Swiftie in my Fifties, Suzanne Kamata takes us to a Taylor Swift concert in Tokyo. Click here to read.

Essays

Walking about London Town

Sohana Manzoor takes us around the historic town. Click here to read.

How Do You Live?

Aditi Yadav explores the universal appeal of the translation of a 1937 Japanese novel that recently came to limelight as it’s rendition on the screen won the Golden Globe Best Animated Feature Film award (2024). Click here to read.

The Magic Dragon: Cycling for Peace

Keith Lyons writes of a man who cycled for peace in a conflict ridden world. Click here to read.

Stories

A Night at the Circus

Paul Mirabile tells a strange tale set in Montana. Click here to read.

Echoes in the Digital Expanse

Apurba Biswas explores a futuristic scenario. Click here to read.

Two Countries

Ravi Shankar gives a story about immigrants. Click here to read.

Chadar

Ravi Prakash writes about life in an Indo-Nepal border village. Click here to read.

Just Another Day

Neeman Sobhan gives a story exploring the impact of the politics of national language on common people. Click here to read.

Book Excerpts

An excerpt from Nabendu Ghosh’s Journey of a Lonesome Boat( Eka Naukar Jatri), translated from Bengali by Ratnottama Sengupta. Click here to read.

An excerpt from Upamanyu Chatterjee’s Lorenzo Searches for the Meaning of Life. Click here to read.

Book Reviews

Somdatta Mandal reviews The History Teacher of Lahore: A Novel by Tahira Naqvi. Click here to review.

Basudhara Roy reviews Srijato’s A House of Rain and Snow, translated from Bengali by Maharghya Chakraborty. Click here to read.

Bhaskar Parichha reviews Toby Walsh’s Faking It : Artificial Intelligence In a Human World. Click here to read.

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Click here to access the Borderless anthology, Monalisa No Longer Smiles

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Editorial

Finding Godot?

Discard all prayers,
Meditation, hymns and rituals. 
Why do you hide behind 
Closed doors of temples?
....
There is no God in this house. 

He has gone to visit the
Farmers who plough the hard ground, 
The workers who break rocks ...


— Tagore, Dhoola Mandir or Temple of Dust (1910)

Love is a many splendoured thing and takes many forms — that stretches beyond bodily chemistry to a need to love all humankind. There is the love for one’s parents, family, practices one believes in and most of all nurtured among those who write, a love for words. For some, like Tagore, words became akin to breathing. He wrote from a young age. Eventually, an urge to bridge social gaps led him to write poetry that bleeds from the heart for the wellbeing of all humanity.  Tagore told a group of writers, musicians, and artists, who were visiting Sriniketan in 1936: “The picture of the helpless village which I saw each day as I sailed past on the river has remained with me and so I have come to make the great initiation here. It is not the work for one, it must involve all. I have invited you today not to discuss my literature nor listen to my poetry. I want you to see for yourself where our society’s real work lies. That is the reason why I am pointing to it over and over again. My reward will be if you can feel for yourself the value of this work.”

And it was perhaps to express this great love of humanity that he had written earlier in his life a poem called Dhoola Mandir that urges us to rise beyond our differences of faith and find love in serving humankind. In this month, which celebrates love with Valentine’s Day, we have a translation of this poem that is born of his love for all people, Dhoola Mandir.  Another poet who writes of his love for humanity and questions religion is Nazrul, two of whose poems have been translated by Niaz Zaman. Exploring love between a parent and children is poetry by Masood Khan translated from Bengali by Fakrul Alam. From the distant frontiers of Balochistan, we have a poem by Atta Shad, translated from Balochi by Fazal Baloch, for a fair lady — this time it is admiration. Ihlwha Choi translates poetry from Korean to express his love for a borderless world through the flight of sparrows.

Love has been taken up in poetry by Michael Burch. Borne of love is a concern for the world around us. We have powerful poetry by Maithreyi Karnoor that expresses her concern for humanity with a dash of irony or is it sarcasm? Luis Cuauhtémoc Berriozábal expresses his admiration for the poetry of Italian Poet Antonia Pozzi (1912-1938) in poetry. We have poems by Stuart McFarlane, Pramod Rastogi, Afrida Lubaba Khan, George Freek, Saranyan BV, Ryan Quinn Flanagan and many more. Rhys Hughes brings humour into poetry and voices out in his column taking on the persona of two cities he had lived in recently. There is truth and poignancy in the voices of the cities.

Suzanne Kamata writes a light-hearted yet meaningful column on the recent Taylor Swift concert in Tokyo.  Aditi Yadav takes up the Japanese book on which was based a movie that won the 2024 Golden Globe Best Animated Feature Film Award. Sohana Manzoor journeys to London as Devraj Singh Kalsi with tongue in cheek humour comments on extracurriculars that have so become a necessity for youngsters to get to the right schools. Snigdha Agrawal gives us a slice of nostalgia while recounting the story of a Santhali lady and Keith Lyons expresses his love for peace as he writes in memory of a man who cycled for peace.

Ratnottama Sengupta also travels down the memory lane to recall her encounters with film maker Mrinal Sen as he interacted with her father, Nabendu Ghosh. She has translated an excerpt from his autobiography to highlight his interactions with Ghosh. The other excerpt is from Upamanyu Chatterjee’s latest novel, Lorenzo Searches for the Meaning of Life.

In reviews, Somdatta Mandal has explored Tahira Naqvi’s The History Teacher of Lahore: A Novel. Srijato’s A House of Rain and Snow, translated from Bengali by Maharghya Chakraborty, has been discussed by Basudhara Roy and Bhaskar Parichha has reviewed Toby Walsh’s Faking It: Artificial Intelligence in a Human World. News and Documentary Emmy Award winner (1996) Ruchira Gupta’s daring novel born of her work among human traffickers, I Kick and I Fly, has been brought to our notice by Sengupta and she converses about the book and beyond with this socially conscious activist, filmmaker and writer. Another humanist, a doctor who served by bridging gaps between patients from underprivileged backgrounds, Dr Ratna Magotra, also conversed about her autobiography, Whispers of the Heart — Not Just a Surgeon: An Autobiography , where she charts her journey which led her to find solutions to take cardiac care to those who did not have the money to afford it,

We have fiction this time from Neeman Sobhan reflecting on how far people will go for the love of their mother tongue to highlight the movement that started on 21st February in 1952 and created Bangladesh in 1971. Our stories are from around the world — Paul Mirabile from France, Ravi Shankar from Malaysia, Sobhan from Bangladesh and Ravi Prakash and Apurba Biswas from India — weaving local flavours and immigrant narratives. Most poignant of all the stories is a real-life narrative under the ‘Songs of Freedom’ series by a young girl, Jyoti Kaur, translated from Hindustani by Lourdes M Supriya. These stories are brought to us in coordination with pandies’ and Shaktishalini, a women’s organisation to enable the abused. Sanjay Kumar, the founder of pandies’ and the author of a most poignant book about healing suffering of children through theatre, Performing, Teaching and Writing Theatre: Exploring Play, writes, “‘Songs of Freedom’ bring stories from women — certainly not victims, not even survivors but fighters against the patriarchal status quo with support from the organisation Shaktishalini.”

While looking forward in hope of finding a world coloured with love and kindness under the blue dome, I would like to thank our fabulous team who always support Borderless Journal with their wonderful work. A huge thanks to all of you from the bottom of my heart. I thank all the writers who make our issues come alive with their creations and readers who savour it to make it worth our while to bring out more issues. I would urge our readers to visit our contents’ page as we have more than mentioned here.

Enjoy our February fare.

Mitali Chakravarty

borderlessjournal.com

Click here to access the content’s page for the February 2024 Issue.

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Stories

Just Another Day

 By Neeman Sobhan

These days, it seems to sixty-year-old Husna that the past is clearer than the blur of her mirror…

The black Morris had come to a halt near the major crossing on Top-Khana road. In the back seat, feeling as plump as the upholstery, Husna was sweating and dabbing her pretty twenty-year-old face and neck with the anchal end of her cotton Jamdani sari.

Pregnancy had made it hard for her to fit into the long tunics and gathered pants of her hitherto comfortable shalwar-kameez outfits. Beside her lay the folded newspaper that Baba, her father Dr. Rahman, had left behind that morning, when he got dropped at the Dacca Medical College. She picked it up to fan herself. It was the Bengali language daily, Azad[1], dated February 20, 1952. The headlines wafted back and forth, screaming in print the news of the continuing agitations around Dacca, East Pakistan, on the language issue.

Without needing to look at the paper, she knew about the meeting that day of the Language Action Committee from her youngest brother Shonju, the student activist. She knew that they were meeting to discuss a nationwide hartal[2] scheduled for tomorrow, a general strike against the government’s repressive policies and disregard for the legitimate demand of the people that their mother language be given its rightful place as one of the two state languages of the country.

Since January, when she had returned home from West Pakistan for her confinement, all the discussion around the family dinner table involved the Prime Minister Khwaja Nazimuddin’s reiteration of Governor-General of Pakistan, Jinnah’s enraging declaration of two years ago that “Urdu, and only Urdu shall be the state language of Pakistan.” 

She glanced at driver Rashid Miya. The middle-aged man seemed unaffected by the heat, unlike Husna. She was due for delivery in a “matter of days”, as Daktar Chacha[3], her father’s MD friend, had promised during the last check-up, patting her head as if she were still the teen-aged, newly married bride, who had left for West Pakistan a year ago with her banker husband, Jamil.

In a way she was glad that Jamil and she had left their familiar world of Dacca immediately after their arranged marriage, helping two newlywed strangers to bond over the shared adventure of starting life as Bengalis new to the quasi-foreign, Urdu-speaking territory of Karachi in West Pakistan.

Not that Urdu was unfamiliar to Husna. Despite problems with gender in the language, she could manage basic social conversation (though, it annoyed her that she never found any Urdu speaking Pakistani who could utter even a word of Bengali, or tried to). But she was proud that just by listening to the radio she had learnt to sing the popular film ghazals of her favourite Indian playback singer Talat Mahmood, or Noor Jahan, now a Pakistani singer, who migrated to Lahore recently, after the Partition of India five years ago.

It was a bit disappointing that Jamil preferred her to sing the Tagore and Nazrul songs her music teacher had taught her since childhood, when all along her heart hummed with film songs. Songs from Bengali and Hindi films that her strict mother had seldom allowed her to see, unless escorted to the cinema halls by friends and relatives, and on special occasions, like Eid.

She had hoped to right this wrong immediately upon getting married. After all, Ma always said, “Do whatever you wish….after you’re married.” And Jamil did take her to the cinema, though, mostly to see English films. Matinees or late shows at the Rex or Ritz, or an early show at the Odeon followed by dinner in a hotel like Beach Luxury. Once she had seen a belly dancer from Beirut or Cairo perform there and had felt embarrassed yet fascinated by the lissom female body, the unfettered, uninhibited moves. She had felt a dizzy sense of freedom just watching the dancer.

She sighed, running her hand over the watermelon that was her belly! Today she didn’t feel like that bright eyed young girl in Karachi anymore. Nor even a mother-to-be. She just felt like a bloated animal, she sulked looking out of the car window. They were at a standstill for what seemed like an hour. Minutes crawled like the runnels of sweat under Husna’s new high-necked blouse, inspired by the popular Indian Bengali actress Suchitra Sen. She dabbed the constant beading of her nose and upper lip that Jamil always said he found endearing.

She started a mental reply to his last letter. “Dearest one. . . ” She began, then floundered. This would be her third letter to him since she arrived in Dacca, but she was still not convinced about how to address him in writing. Some of her Urdu-speaking female acquaintances in Karachi called their husbands by name, though often using the polite pronoun “aap[4].” Ma always called Baba “Ogo[5]” or “Shuncho?” as in “Are you listening?” That was funny because even if Baba were not listening, Ma would chatter on.

She felt awkward and insincere mimicking the spontaneous affection in Jamil’s letters, calling her “Beloved” and his “Myna bird” and so many other endearments, while she was unable to address him in a way that felt comfortable and not a lie. As usual, she settled for no salutations but an outright “Kemon acho?”

How’re you? I’m as well as can be expected. It’s only February and already Dhaka is uncomfortably warm. How is Karachi? Here, it’s not just the weather that’s heating up, but the political environment as well. The ‘bhasha andolon’, which the English newspapers refer to as ‘the Language Movement’ is going on full force. Baba and Ma are always worrying about Shonju, who is out on the streets every day and in student meetings at all hours. He creeps home late and stores all his protest posters and fliers under my bed and fills me in on what’s going on. I often have to cover for him to the family….”

She pulled forward the end of her sari and tried to cover her belly and wipe her glistening face. Oh! Pregnancy was so boring; and this heat was claustrophobic. If only she could be like Shonju, free to just come and go, walk the streets or ride the cycle or take a rickshaw.

“Ki holo, Rashid Bhai? What’s up?” she asked, as she wound the window all the way down.

“Apa[6], I think there’s a procession approaching. I feel we should take a side street. This road is blocked.” Rashid was already turning the steering wheel.

“Oh! Then, no New Market today? I wanted to collect my harmonium that I left for tuning.” Husna’s voice was lost in a volley of shouts that came from somewhere ahead. Meanwhile, a rickshaw edged close to the car, and two boys, possibly students, with cloth bags hanging from their shoulders, started throwing pamphlets through the windows of a few buses and into other rickshaws that were milling around.

One pamphlet landed on Husna’s lap like the silly, anonymous love-note she had once received while being driven to college, just two years ago. She smiled. She had often wished the author had been her elder brother’s friend and her girlhood crush, Farid. But he was hardly the type to write something romantic to her. Certainly not “Beloved one” or “My Myna bird.” No, it was hard to imagine that serious, brooding, good-looking face bent over anything but medical books. 

Rashid stopped to make way for a group of demonstrators, banners folded under their arms. Some raised a slogan and the rest joined in. “Manbo na! Manbo na! Never will we accept!”  Husna’s heart pumped. Ah! Unlike her, these boys dared to proclaim that they rejected whatever was being imposed on them. Was this possible? She wished she could get out of the car and walk with the boys, raise her voice in slogans. Unthinkable and unladylike, of course; plus, she was a waddling, pregnant beast.

Rashid Miya swung the car around and they entered a narrow street that led out to a wider road. He braked to give way to a truck that sped past, full of khaki-uniformed police, their rifles flashing in the sun. “Too many demonstrations today near the university, Apa. I hope tomorrow, your father will not go to Medical College. And our Shonju Bhaiyya should be careful. He and his friends were getting on a rickshaw at the gate this morning, when I was wiping the car, and they were talking about processions tomorrow. I kept hearing the date. 21st…Ekushey February. God only knows what will happen!”

“We better go home, Rashid Bhai. Shall we pick up Baba?”

“No, it’s only past 5. I’ll come for him later. Let me drop you first.”

Suddenly, preceded by the rumble of microphone, a van came into view. As it crawled past, it left the sputtering debris of words in crackling Bengali. She could decipher only: Section 144 imposed in the city… for 30 days…a ban on gatherings of more than 4 people in public places…processions or demonstrations to be severely punished…

Husna grew restless for Shonju. She prayed he would come home safely and not get embroiled in something foolhardy. He usually confided in her. At least, he used to till Husna got married. They were the closest among their many siblings. Even on the eve of her wedding, it was he and not one of her sisters who had insisted that if she had any doubts about this arranged marriage, it was not too late to speak up.

But she had never mustered enough courage. Or conviction. After all, Farid had not really confessed his feelings for her, and, from what she discovered about Jamil, he was a perfectly decent human being. In fact, she had no complaints about her husband, except that he was not the one her heart had chosen. If only she had met him on her own, and he had not been imposed on her, as if by state decree: “Jamil, and only Jamil shall be your husband!” And… if only elusive Farid had been clear about his feelings. Even if it were non-reciprocal, she would have felt free. Her heart would not now feel so mute.

Why was the language of the heart so complicated, so hard to decipher? It was as if its familiar truths, which could be accessed non-verbally, instinctively, were now locked in a foreign alphabet that she had to relearn in order to decode their meanings. Almost like that ridiculous proposal in the Legislative Assembly two years ago that Shonju had laughed with her about, regarding the use of Arabic script to write Bengali!

“Just imagine, Bubu, the word ‘mother’ would still be pronounced ‘Ma’ but not written ‘moye-akar’ but ‘meem-alef’! Our Brahmi script curling and prancing forward gracefully from left to right would be attacked from right to left by the slanting arrows of the Nastaliq squiggles, and then both colliding explosively in the middle!”

Nastaliq
Bengali script

Oh! Shonju was so dramatic! A laugh escaped Husna, then she fell silent.

They were driving past the Ramna Racecourse. Her baby shifted in her womb. Later. . . many years later, she would think that her son Azeem knew that they were passing what in two decades would be a historical spot: the pulse point of an unprecedented political gathering on a March morning in 1971. On the seventh day of that month, a voice would rise like a colossal bird filling the Dhaka sky with its fateful, uncompromising call, announcing that the time had come “for the ultimate struggle, the struggle for freedom”: Ebarer shongram, shadhinotar shongram!  

Had she been clairvoyant, known that the heady creature would swoop down and snatch her son and hurl them all into the whirlpool of destiny, perhaps she would have told Rashid Miya to change route, take another road. But would that have changed the course of history, erased the scribbling of fate?

For the moment, the Black Morris like a rigid pen on paper drives inexorably forward, and the future is drowned out by the sporadic shouts in the distance of “Rashtro bhasha Bangla chai! We demand Bangla for national language!”

The baby came early. In fact, the very evening after she returned from her outing, the pains started. There was no time to shift her to the maternity ward of the private clinic of Daktar Chacha, so he sent a nurse over to help deliver her baby at home. Early in the morning of February 21, her baby son arrived.

A trunk call was made to Karachi to give Jamil the good news. Then there was much rejoicing in the house with relatives dropping in to see the baby. By late afternoon, however, the atmosphere in the house became subdued as disturbing news from the streets filtered through.        

The police had opened fire on protesting students. There were hushed discussions so she would not hear. But she overheard the day nurse telling the night nurse before she left that injured students had been taken to the Medical College. The very next day, Husna’s elder brother, the final year medical student, Monju Bhaijan, had come to the breakfast table shouting in rage that a student had succumbed to his wounds, and the body of another had been found on the floor behind the Anatomy room. Baba confirmed it with sadness.

Even Jamil’s letter to her after the joy of the news of Azeem’s birth contained a postscript: “Stay safe. These are volatile times. Worried about Shonju. The Dawn newspaper here carried an editorial saying that the people of West Pakistan have no objection to Bangla getting a status equal to Urdu. Why is there always such a divide between the wielders of political power and the populace?”

A few days later, Husna wasn’t sure if it was the 25th or 26th, Ma and the nurse had just taken away the baby when Shonju arrived. He was carrying a box of sweets. “Moron Chand and Sons” it said on the box. Inside were her favourite sweets: the soft, creamy white, renin-based balls of rose-scented pranhara-shondesh.

Ma must have bought the sweets and forced him to come visit his newborn nephew. Husna breathed a sigh of relief, seeing her brother, who paced restlessly, refusing to sit.

“I saw the baby in Ma’s room on my way in. Looks like Dulabhai.”

“Really? I think he has our family nose.”

“Poor kid! Hope not.” Shonju finally grinned, but his mind was elsewhere. He was wearing a black badge of mourning on his white kurta sleeve.

Husna stretched her arm and took his hand: “My heart aches for those who died, Shonju. But I’m so grateful you are okay.”

He didn’t let go of her hand but turned his angry face away.

“We students are still in battle mode. It will continue, the andolon, the protests, the confrontation. The Shaheed Minar memorial we constructed outside Medical College was destroyed, but we will rebuild it.”

“Shabdhan[7], Shonju!” Husna cautioned.

He pulled his hand away, clicking his tongue: “Oh! Don’t worry. Nothing will happen to me. When you fight for a cause you feel superhuman, invincible. The collective spirit strengthens us, makes us feel immortal. We are more than an individual life. What will our enemies do? Kill or wound one person, right? But the cause… they can’t defeat that. We are the multitudes… ”

“Uff!  Stop this speechifying!” Husna rolled her eyes. “Mothers don’t want multitudes. They just want their sons. Sisters want their brothers. Yes, even though you’re a moron, I’d rather have you than a street full of heroes.”

Shonju laughed. “In that case, Bubu, you better start speaking only in Urdu. Sell your mother tongue to these politicians.”

After Shonju left, the nurse brought the baby to be fed. Husna touched baby Azeem’s toes, his petal-like fingers. Once, she had laughed at her elder sister for her incessant baby talk when her son was born. Now it spilled out of her, and she felt no embarrassment. Soft, mashed up balls of Bengali words lisped with maternal love, sweeter, and more tender than the pranhara in the box.

Was that how all mother tongues started? With silly, besotted mothers cooing to the babies in their language? She realised that if she had to make up baby talk in another language, she probably couldn’t do it. There was something about expressing oneself in one’s own tongue, heard from infancy. It was the home that one carried within, because the earliest memories of the mother’s voice absorbed from the womb animated it. It was a birth right that no one could be permitted to take away or undermine.

But was it worth dying for? Worth being martyred like the student the police had shot on Thursday, the twenty-first?

A week later, after lunch, the house suddenly filled with voices. Shonju entered, followed by Monju Bhaijan, and Farid. Husna looked at him surreptitiously. His face was impassive and he gave her a distracted nod. What else could he do, or say, Husna could understand. After all, there she was, much married and a mother, to boot.

Loudly ordering tea to be served, sounding like a housewife, she left the room, disappointed in herself that despite her show of poise and indifference, her heart still ached in a dim way.

She asked herself, if, in the past, she and Farid had been granted the opportunity and the courage to express to each other what she was certain was a mutual attraction, would her life be different? Would the knowledge that her feelings were requited, or not, have made a difference to her sense of self?

When Jamil’s proposal of marriage came to her parents, and they had accepted on her behalf. It was too late. Farid was not around, having gone to visit his parents in Barishal, so nothing had been acknowledged. There had been no beginning, and subsequently, no closure. 

During her impending wedding she had to make sure her feelings did not go into a Bhasha Andolon of sorts within her, agitating and demanding the right of her heart’s true language to be respected. Instead, she had gagged her heart, imposed on herself another language: a formal, emotionally correct, and socially acceptable language. The vocabulary of wedded propriety appropriate to an obedient daughter and daughter-in-law. An official language, foreign to her, like Urdu.

She sighed. Language supposedly empowered humans and differentiated them from animals. But if, despite the ability to verbalise, people could not make their wishes known or heard, were they not equal to dumb beasts? What use was the mother tongue when ones’ own mother had not understood her daughter’s unspoken wish just because she could not speak out: “I don’t want to marry, yet. I want to wait! Manbo na! Manbo na!” And what use was language when Farid too, had failed to use his tongue, express himself at the right time, ask her clearly to wait and not accede to the arranged marriage.

*

No, it was better that the Bengalis had spoken out. It was better that they had taken to the streets. This andolon would lead them to express their rights and desires, claim what was true. Of course, it would take four more years for Bengali to be constitutionally recognised as a state language of Pakistan, along with Urdu. But time was a tiny link in the cosmic chain of historical and personal events. Obviously, this last was not something thought up by Husna at the time, but by the Husna of today, watching her past self.

Today, she observed herself through the telescope of time, on the first day the young mother Husna nursed her baby son. Surely, she was unaware at that moment that everything was connected: her breast milk and baby talk in Bangla nourished not just her child, Azeem, but through him later, Shonju’s “multitudes” of a future generation, as a whole nation journeyed from Ekushey or twenty-first, to Ekattor or seventy-one: from the upheaval for language of February 21, 1952 to claiming a home for it in the war of independence of 1971. All were linked, even if separated by time and generation. In the end, everything existed in a grand NOW, where past and present simmered together.

Needless to say, all this was what she would think many years later, as an older sixty-year-old woman, looking back on her life as she wrote her journal, sitting in her room in her daughter’s suburban home in Maryland, in the US.

She dusted the photo frames on the painted bureau. Her doting late husband Jamil, and her gentle yet impassioned elder son Azeem looked at her from the distance of lost eras. One was gone in 1966 in a helicopter crash. The other in 1971, as a freedom fighter.

Farid, unframed, was a forbidden, almost forgotten memory. Lost like an unspoken language. Lost, because she had never fought for him.

She has a fanciful wish: in some after life she would like to ask those who had agitated and fought for a cause, and even laid down their life for it: in the end, was the sacrifice worth it?

“Today is February 21, 2002. Commemorated as Omor Ekushey in Bangladesh. But just another day here…” She wrote in her diary in Bangla, a language that her grandchildren could not speak.

She pulled out from under her bed the harmonium her daughter had recently bought for her from an Indian family that was moving back to India. She sat down on the rug, stroking the black and white keys with one hand and pumping lightly on the bellows at the back of the instrument.

On top of her harmonium lay open her old songbook, marked and written on by the music teacher of her childhood. She was a trained singer, and in 1950, she with a group from her school had performed some mass anthems and marching songs on what was then Radio Pakistan Dacca. There, they had met a musician named Abdul Latif, who would later put to melody a poem written by a journalist named Abdul Gaffar Choudhury for the student who had died on February 21. Later, the song would be recomposed by a noted composer named Altaf Mahmud and emerge as an anthem for what became Mother Language Day.

For her, of course, the day had a different and personal significance. It was the sacred anniversary of her motherhood that she had entered so reluctantly. On this day, every year, she sang to the son who had taught her the ultimate lesson of love and sacrifice and of never forgetting.

She started to hum the familiar refrain as she tried out a few chords.

Her granddaughter Zainab peeked through the door.

“What’re you singing, Nani[8]?” She said in her American accent.

“It’s a song about love, sweetie. About loving one’s language.”

“Which language, Nani?”

“Any language that you love, sweetheart. For me it’s Bangla, which you hear me speak with your mom.”

She sang the first lines. Zainab sat down beside Husna, gazing at her moving fingers.

“Cool! It’s like a portable piano! Can I learn to play it?”

“Well, only if you also learn to sing this song with me.”

“Deal!”

In bed that night, Husna wrote in her journal: “Today is February 21. International Mother Language Day. Today Zainab learnt to sing the Ekushey song, especially the refrain ‘Ami ki bhulite pari?’ And when I tested her on what it meant, she got it right as she ran away giggling and yelling: ‘Can I ever forget it?’

So, today turned out to be. . . not just another day, after all.”

Husna closed her eyes with a smile on her face. Just before she fell asleep, she felt as if she understood the world not with the uttered meanings of any language, but like an unborn baby breathing in the womb its mother’s voice, dreaming his or her first spoken word.

Dreaming in whatever language would become their home, their motherland.

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[1] Literal translation of Azad is free

[2] Strike, translated from Bangla

[3] Doctor uncle, translated from Bangla

[4] Formal way of addressing in Urdu or Hindi — You

[5] Informal way of addressing a husband in Bangla as taking a husband’s name was seen as disrespectful and harmful

[6] Elder sister

[7] Careful, translation from Bangla

[8] Maternal grandmother, translation from Bangla

Neeman Sobhan is an Italy based Bangladeshi writer, poet, columnist and translator. Till recently, she taught Bengali and English at the University of Rome. She has an anthology of columns, An Abiding City: Ruminations from Rome; fiction collection: Piazza Bangladesh; Poetry: Calligraphy of Wet Leaves. Armando Curcio Editore is publishing her stories in Italian. This short story was first published in Ekhushey Anthology 1952-2022, edited by Niaz Zaman, writers.ink in 2022.

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Categories
Interview Review

In Conversation with a People’s Doctor

An introduction to Ratna Magotra’s Whispers of the Heart: Not Just a Surgeon (Konark Publishers) and a conversation with the doctor who took cardiac care to the underprivileged.

“I slept and dreamt that life was joy. I awoke and saw that life was service. I acted and behold, service was joy?”— Tagore, Whispers of the Heart: Not Just a Surgeon by Ratna Magotra

“There are at least five estimates of the number of poor people in India, which put the number of poor in India between 34 million (equivalent to the population to Kerala) to 373 million (more than four times the population of West Bengal). This puts the number of the poor between 2.5% of the population to 29.5%, based on different estimates between 2014 and 2022.”

— Scroll India, 5/5/2023, Nushaiba Iqbal, IndiaSpend.com

How are the healthcare needs of the poverty stricken met in a country with a vast number who are unable to foot their daily food, housing, and potable water needs? This has been a question that confronts every doctor in cities where labourers who build housing for the middle class are themselves homeless just like the street side immigrants who beg. Even dwellers of shanties that spring up around colonies of the well-to-do to provide informal labour to the affluent are hardly any better off. Few in the medical profession move towards finding solutions to bridge this gap.

Dr Ratna Magotra, who moved from Jammu to find a career in healthcare in Mumbai, is one such person. Recently, she wrote an autobiography which has consolidated the work being done by cardiologists to bridge this gap. In her book, Whispers of the Heart: Not Just a Surgeon, while identifying this divide, she writes: “Poverty, inequality, deficient primary healthcare, unequal access, and the escalating commercialisation of medical care were causing an angst that I found difficult to make peace with. As medical practitioners, our expertise lies in providing treatment, but we often overlook the broader social factors underlying ill health. It might escape the attention of a surgeon performing intricate heart surgery that a child who survived a complex heart surgery could succumb to diarrhoea due to the lack of access to clean drinking water. Issues like malnutrition, skin infections, superstitious beliefs, and poverty may be the harsh realities in the patient’s actual living conditions beyond the confines of sanitised medical environment. /Medical training, regrettably, seldom includes the connection between poverty and disease.”

The land reforms laws that followed post-Partition[1] led to her family losing their wealth. But Magotra bears no ill-will or scars that have crippled her ability to contribute to a world that needs to heal — of taking healthcare to those who can’t afford it. She starts her biography with vignettes from her childhood: “I recall that the agricultural land we owned in our village in Jammu was considered very fertile with the best Basmati rice grown there. Though I was very young, I have faint memories of the house amidst lush paddy fields and a small stream that we had to cross to enter the village. It was very close to the international border between India and Pakistan. The way my mother was respected reflected the high esteem that villagers had for my father. Though their tenant status had changed to that of being landowners, the villagers visited the house as they did before and received generous gifts from her. /They would indulge us children with home-made sweets made of peanuts, jaggery and spices. Rolling in heaps of post-harvest grains piled up in open fields was great fun.”

She lost all that and her father. But with supportive family and friends, drawn to healthcare, she became a doctor in times when women doctors were rare. If they at all specialised, it was mainly in gynaecology. She chose cardiac surgery trained in UK and US. She made friends where she went and with a singular dedication, found solutions to access the underprivileged. She elaborates: “The quantum leap in India’s healthcare sector occurred during the 1990s following the economic reforms and the liberalisation of the economy. The end of the licence raj system facilitated the imports of advanced technology and medical equipment. Specialists, who had long settled abroad, began contemplating a return to India.”

While she attended an International Course in Cardiac Surgery at Sicily to update her skills, she tells us: “During our interactions, some German surgeons raised questions about the rationale behind a developing country like India engaging in an expensive speciality like cardiac surgery. I realised how biased opinions can be formed and spread, though rooted in ignorance. /By this point, however, I had grown accustomed to explaining the paradox — why it was essential for India to advance in specialised care alongside its priorities in basic healthcare and poverty alleviation.”

She cites multiple instances of cases that she dealt with from the needy rural population, for who to pay prohibitive costs would mean an end to their family’s meals. Magotra writes, “I had seen numerous poor heart patients who suffered not only from the ailment itself but also from financial burden of the treatment. The medical expenses incurred for a single family member affected the well-being of entire household, depleting their limited resources and savings. Unfortunately, medical education does not include health economics as a subject. As a result, doctors, especially specialists, trained in a reductionist approach to diseases tend to move away from a holistic perspective. They readily embrace new technological advances, often neglecting proven and cost-effective treatment options. This, in turn, drives up healthcare costs and makes it unaffordable for the common man.”

Living through a series of historical upheavals, she brings to light some interesting observations. She came in contact with Jinnah’s personal physician while looking for a placement in Mumbai. There she mentions that many wondered if the Partition of India could have been averted if this doctor had shared the information that Jinnah had limited life expectancy as he had advanced tuberculosis. She has lived through floods in Mumbai and riots and wondered: “I was staring at the blood on my clothes, which had come from multiple patients. In that quiet moment, I couldn’t help but wonder if there was a ‘test’ to distinguish between a Hindu blood and a Muslim blood.” She joined the anti-corruption movement started by Anna Hazare and fasted! She has travelled and watched and collected her stories and she jotted these down during the pandemic to share her world and her concerns with all of us. In the process, recording changes in health care systems over the years… the historic passing of an era that documents the undocumented people’s needs.

Dr Ratna Magotra

An award-winning doctor for the efforts she has made to connect with people across all borders and use her experience, she talks to us in this interview about her journey and beliefs.

What made you write this book? Who were the readers you wanted to reach out to?

I had asked myself the same questions before I started and even while I was writing:  Why and for whom?

Some younger friends and family members would find the anecdotes and stories, I would relate to them from time to time, interesting. They would often prod me to write about these. People, situations, my travels to places — not the usual popular tourist destinations, invoked further curiosity in them to know more about my life. As such I like to write my thoughts (usually for myself) and have been contributing small articles to newspapers, magazines, and Bhavan’s Journal for their special Issues. The pandemic provided me an opportunity to contemplate further when I seriously considered about writing an autobiographical narrative.

As I progressed with my account, I envisaged a wider readership outside the medical community as multiple facets emerged about places, people and events of varying interests. 

What were the hurdles you faced while training as a doctor — in terms of gender and attitudes of others?

Fortunately, I can’t recall any specific hurdle or adverse experience because of my being a woman. Studying for MBBS degree at Lady Hardinge Medical College (LHMC), made it a normal affair as LHMC was an all-women medical college.

The struggle that I faced in getting PG admission in Bombay also had nothing to do with gender. The problem was being an outsider in Bombay when number of seats were limited. Students from local medical colleges and rest of Maharashtra had first preference for selection to PG courses. Anyone in my place would have had to go through a similar grind as I did.

Once PG admission was secured, it was smooth sailing through training and working alongside male colleagues! I asked for no concessions being a woman and worked as hard as they did or may be little more. We had a very close and harmonious working relationship with healthy mutual respect leading to lasting friendships.

What made you choose cardiac surgery over other areas of specialisation?

The decision to become a doctor and a surgeon was firmed very early in life. Interest in Cardiac surgery was acquired much later when I started working with Dr Dastur in Bombay. Seeing and touching a beating heart was fascinating and at the same time very challenging at that time. I was tempted to take it up for further specialisation. And yes, it was a very glamorous specialty at that time with names like Denton Cooley[2] and Christiaan Barnard [3]making waves in mainstream conversations!

Cardiac surgery was perceived by some as the forte of the rich, but you have shown how many villagers also had the need for the same specialised care. So, what was it that made you realise that? What could be seen as the incident that made you move towards closing social gaps in your horizon?

Heart disease affects the rich as also the poor. In fact, in earlier times when lifestyle diseases were not as common, it was the poor who suffered more from many afflictions including heart disease. Rheumatic heart disease was the bane of the underprivileged, living in overcrowded spaces with repeated streptococcal throat infections that eventually ravaged their heart valves. Congenital heart disease was common though not diagnosed as often. While the rich and affluent could afford to travel abroad to get treatment, in turn costing precious foreign exchange to the nation, others had to make do with whatever was available. Indian surgeons stretched their resources, skills and imagination to fill the gaps in the infrastructure.

Working in teaching hospitals, I saw the suffering and helplessness of the poor from very close.  Inadequacies in healthcare stared at us every day. Moreover, those days cardiac surgery was being performed only in 4-5 teaching hospitals in the country.

I tried looking beyond the patient, connecting their illness with the social and economic environment they came from.  Their personal courage, resilience and faith in overcoming difficult moments of life stirred something inside me. One such incidence involved a patient, Ahir Rao, from interiors of Maharashtra. His surgery at KEM and my subsequent visit to his home opens the chapter on ‘Reaching the Unreached’ in my book.  

Ironically flip side of development and changing economic status, is that lifestyle diseases like hypertension, diabetes and heart disease are affecting less affluent even more. Lack of awareness about diet, and rapidly adopting urban fads have changed the rural-urban spectrum of heart disease.

The prejudices and biases of the developed countries influenced many in the country also to question a developing country like India from investing in super-specialty like cardiac surgery instead of focussing on providing basic amenities to the people.

It was amusing to see the BBC presenters asking the chronic questions as recently as the landing of Chandrayaan on moon in August 2023 — whether India should have space missions? Persistence of same mind set exposed their ignorance about the benefits the technology and the science bring to common man as also reluctance to accept the progress India has made!

How did your travels to other countries impact your own work and perspectives?

Traveling is a great education to broaden one’s horizon. My travels in India and to different countries contributed towards my personal growth by helping me connect to the geography, nature as also the people belonging to different cultures and sensibilities.  Different foods, attires or attitudes but with one common underlying bond of humanity with similar aspirations. 

Professionally, going to advanced centres exposed me to a work culture that was very different from ‘chalta hai’ [4] attitude back home.  Staying ahead with the best research, better working conditions, new technology were just the stimulants I needed in doing better for our patients.

There were many people you have mentioned who impacted you and your work. Who would you see as the persons/organisations who most inspired and led you to realise your goals?

I owe so much to so many people, whom I met at different stages of my life and who influenced my thinking, values and my work. It is difficult to pick one or two, however, if asked to narrow down to three or four most important individuals, these would be my mother and Prof Rameshwar in early years, and Dr K. N Dastur in my professional choice and career. However, biggest influence in my later life has been my Guru, Swami Ranganathananda — who imparted the wisdom of practical vedanta giving ultimate message of oneness and freedom of thought and action for universal good as propagated by Swami Vivekananda.  

Why did you join Anna Hazare and his organisation? How did it impact you? What were your conclusions about such trysts?

I had heard of Anna Hazare as an anti-corruption crusader and had met him once at his village while accompanying Dr Antia. It was very admirable the way he had motivated the village people to participate voluntarily in the economic and social development making Ralegaon Siddhi a model village. This simple rustic person could stand up to the high and mighty and often made news in local newspapers; the politicians took his protests seriously at least in Maharashtra. When India Against Corruption (IAC) came into existence in 2011, I didn’t think twice before joining the unique coming together of civil society to fight corruption in the highest corridors of power. I was personally convinced that corruption had eroded and marred the dream of India keeping the common people poor and backward even as the corrupt flourished. As an individual, one could not do much beyond complaining and paying a price for a principled life. It required the civil society to stand up collectively to oppose the corrupt who were (are) actually very powerful!

There was nothing personal to gain by joining the protest but only lend my voice to the common objective of checking, if not eradicating, the menace of corruption.

The experience, highs and lows of the movement form a chapter in my book. The movement becoming political and losing the momentum of a countrywide movement was a big disappointment.

What would be the best way of closing the divides in healthcare?

There has been some forward movement in healthcare at grass root levels in last two decades or so. These gains need to be streamlined as at present we have islands of excellence with vast areas of dismal healthcare — the imbalance needs correction.  

Increased spending by the State for healthcare, forward looking national health policy keeping in mind the diverse needs of such a vast country, rural urban realities are the way forward. Investment in medical and nursing education, primary health care, paramedics, rational use of appropriate technologies — all these need to be considered in totality and not in isolation. 

Lot of the healthcare work is bridged by NGOS as per your book. Do you think a governmental intervention is necessary to bring healthcare to all its citizens?

My narrative belongs to the eighties and nineties when NGOs were vital in taking basic medical services to remote places where none existed. These organisations did a herculean task and several continue to be a significant provider even as the governments, both at the Centre and State level, have initiated many schemes that include healthcare besides general rural development.  I personally think that the NGOs too need to retune their earlier approach of being stand-alone providers seeking funding from government and foreign donors to remain relevant.  NGOs, though a vital link between the governments and the communities, have traditionally taken adversarial position to the governments. While keeping their independence of work, maybe they should strive to avoid duplication of services; provide authentic data, and create awareness. These along with constructive criticism and cooperation would benefit the communities and the stakeholders alike. Health education, women empowerment, strengthening the delivery of healthcare integrated with holistic rural development are best done by NGOs working at ground level.

What reform from the government would most help bridge these gaps and can these reforms be made a reality?

The question has been partially answered as above. Increase in budgetary allocation and intent are the prime requirement with focus on nutrition, clean drinking water, sanitation (end of open defecation, provision of toilets, is a major reform) and clean cooking fuel impact public health at grassroots substantially, especially that of women and children. These alone should reduce the load of common diseases and prevent 70 to 80 percent of maladies in a community. This is similar to what Dr Antia used to advocate — “People’s health in People’s hands”. No medical specialists are required, and community health workers would be fully capable of taking care of routine illness. The gains would need to be evaluated periodically to see the impact by way of reduced infant mortality, maternal health, reduction in school dropouts and increase in rural household incomes. Use of technology is an important tool to connect the masses with healthcare centres for more advanced care.

More thought is necessary for specialist oriented medical care. I am aware that we have some very wise and thinking people at the top deciding on national medical policy that should actually map the number of specialised centres and the doctors in each specialty and super specialities (SS) required over say next 10 years. The number of training programmes should be tailored accordingly.  It is saddening to know that so many seats for post-doctoral training continue to remain vacant. It is specially so in surgical SS like cardiovascular, pediatric, and neurosurgery that are seeing less demand with interventional treatment making roads in treatment.

The change in the attitudes of administration as also the medical community is important. The benefits should be harvested with honest appraisals for course correction where needed for better planning in consultations with doctors, civil society, and the NGOs working in the rural areas. 

Another idea close to my heart has been to motivate or even incentivise the senior medical practitioners to serve the rural areas for 2-3 years prior to their retirement from active service. They would carry experience and wisdom to manage medical needs even with limited resources as compared to enforced bonds for fresh graduates who are short of practical experience, anxious about their future and that of the families. Seniors on the other hand have fulfilled their responsibilities and may be really looking forward to satisfaction of giving back to the society.  Having secured their future and relatively in good health, can be very useful human resource for the governments and the communities. This should be entirely out of volition and not under any pressure from the authorities.

Now that you have retired, what are your future plans?

Life is unpredictable at my age. I would, however, wish to remain in reasonable health to be able to be a useful citizen. I have no firm plans and will go where the life takes me like I have done so far.

 I am aware that the age would no longer allow me to continue with specialised and highly technical profession I am trained for. Modern communication has narrowed the distances and made it possible to stay connected.  I should be satisfied if I can provide any meaningful inputs, retain the attitude of service and remain contended in my personal being.

[1]JAMMU AND KASHMIR AGRARIAN REFORMS ACT 1976

https://law.uok.edu.in/Files/5ce6c765-c013-446c-b6ac-b9de496f8751/Custom/local%20laws%20(4%20files%20merged).pdf. With the end of Dogra rule in 1947, a historical legislation called the Jammu and Kashmir Big Landed Estate Abolition Act was passed in 1950. The Act abolished the large, landed estates by fixing the ceiling area.

[2] American cardiothoracic surgeon (1920-2016)

[3] South African thoracic surgeon (1922-2001)

[4] Casual attitude that anything works

CLICK HERE TO READ AN EXCERPT FROM WHISPERS OF THE HEART

(The online interview has been conducted through emails and the review written by Mitali Chakravarty.)

PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL. 

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Categories
Editorial

‘Imagine all the People, Sharing All the World’

Art by Sohana Manzoor

Let’s look forward to things getting better this New Year with wars tapering off to peace— a peace where weapons and violence are only to be found in history. Can that ever happen…?

Perhaps, all of us need to imagine it together. Feeling the need for peace, if we could dwell on the idea and come up with solutions, we could move towards making it a reality. To start with, every single human being has to believe firmly in the need for such a society instead of blaming wars on natural instincts. Human nature too needs to evolve. Right now, this kind of a world view may seem utopian. But from being hunter-gatherers, we did move towards complex civilisations that in times of peace, built structures and created art, things that would have seemed magical to a cave dweller in the Palaeolithic times. Will we destroy all that we built by warring – desecrating, decimating our own constructs and life to go on witch-hunts that lead to the destruction of our own species? Will human nature not evolve out of the darkness and chaos that leads to such large-scale annihilation?

Sometimes, darkness seems to rise in a crescendo only to be drowned by light emanating from an unknown source. This New Year — which started with an earthquake followed the next day by a deadly plane collision — was a test of human resilience from which we emerged as survivors, showing humanity can overcome hurdles if we do not decimate each other in wars. Bringing this to focus and wringing with the pain of loss, Suzanne Kamata, in her column tells us: “Earthquakes and other natural disasters are unavoidable, but I admire the effort that the Japanese people put into mitigating their effects. My hope is that more and more people here will begin to understand that it is okay to cry, to mourn, to grieve, and to talk about our suffering. My wish for the Japanese people in the new year is happiness and the achievement of dreams.”

And may this ring true for all humanity.

Often it is our creative urges that help bring to focus darker aspects of our nature. Laughter could help heal this darkness within us. Making light of our foibles, critiquing our own tendencies with a sense of humour could help us identify, creating a cathartic outcome which will ultimately lead to healing. An expert at doing that was a man who was as much a master of nonsense verses in Bengal as Edward Lear was in the West. Ratnottama Sengupta has brought into focus one such book by the legendary Sukumar Ray, Abol Tabol (or mumbo jumbo), a book that remains read, loved and relevant even hundred years later. We have more non-fiction from Keith Lyons who reflects on humanity as he loses himself in China. Antara Mukherjee talks of evolving and accepting a past woven with rituals that might seem effete nowadays and yet, these festivities did evoke a sense of joie de vivre and built bridges that stretch beyond the hectic pace of the current world. Devraj Singh Kalsi weaves in humour and variety with his funny take on stocks and shares. Rhys Hughes does much the same with his fun-filled recount on the differences between Sri Lanka and India, with crispy dosas leaning in favour of the latter.

Humour is also sprinkled into poetry by Hughes as Radha Chakravarty’s poetry brings in more sombre notes. An eminent translator from Bengali to English, she has now tuned her pen to explore the subliminal world. While trying to explore the darker aspects of the subliminal, David Skelly Langen, a young poet lost his life in December 2023. We carry some of his poems in memoriam. Ahmad Al-Khatat, an Iraqi immigrant, brings us close to the Middle East crisis with his heart-rending scenarios painted with words. Variety is added to the oeuvre with more poetry from George Freek, Ganesh Puthur, Ron Pickett, Stuart McFarlane, Urmi Chakravorty, Saranyan BV, JM Huck and many more.

Our stories take us around the world with Paul Mirabile from France, Ravi Shankar from Malaysia, Srinivasan R from India and Rebecca Klassen from England, weaving in the flavours of their own cultures yet touching hearts with the commonality of emotions.

In conversations, Ratnottama Sengupta introduces us to the multifaceted Bulbul Sharma and discusses with her the celebrated filmmaker Mrinal Sen, in one of whose films Sharma ( known for her art and writing) had acted. We also have a discussion with eminent screenplay writer Gajra Kottary on her latest book, Autumn Blossoms and an introduction to it.

Somdatta Mandal has reviewed Sudha Murty’s Common Yet Uncommon: 14 Memorable Stories from Daily Life, which she says, “speaks a universal language of what it means to be human”. Bhaskar Parichha takes us to Scott Ezell’s Journey to the End of the Empire: In China Along the Edge of Tibet. Parichha opines: “The book evokes the majesty of Tibetan landscapes, the unique dignity of the Tibetan people, and the sensory extremity of navigating nearly pre-industrial communities at the edge of the map, while also encompassing the erosion of cultures and ecosystems. Journey to the End of the Empire is both a love song and a protest against environmental destruction, centralised national narratives and marginalised minorities.” Meenakshi Malhotra provides a respite from the serious and emotional by giving us a lively review of Rhys Hughes’ The Coffee Rubaiyat, putting it in context of literature on coffee, weaving in poetry by Alexander Pope and TS Eliot. Rakhi Dalal has reviewed a translation from Punjabi by Ajeet Cour and Minoo Minocha of Cour’s Life Was Here Somewhere. Our book excerpts from Anuradha Kumar’s The Kidnapping of Mark Twain: A Bombay Mystery introduces a lighter note as opposed to the intense prose of Srijato’s A House of Rain and Snow, translated from Bengali by Maharghya Chakraborty.

Translations this time take us to the realm of poetry again with Fazal Baloch introducing us to a classical poet from Balochistan, the late Mulla Fazul. Ihlwha Choi has self-translated his poetry from Korean. Niaz Zaman brings us Nazrul’s Samya or Equality – a visionary poem for the chaotic times we live in — and Fakrul Alam transcribes Masud Khan’s Bengali verses for Anglophone readers. Our translations are wound up with Tagore’s Prarthona or Prayer, a poem in which the poet talks of keeping his integrity and concludes saying ‘May the wellbeing of others fill my heart/ With contentment”.

May we all like Tagore find contentment in others’ wellbeing and move towards a world impacted by love and peace! The grand polymath always has had the last say…

I would like to thank our contributors, the Borderless team for this vibrant beginning of the year issue, Sohana Manzoor for her fabulous art, and all our readers for continuing to patronise us.

With hope of moving towards a utopian future, I invite you to savour our fare, some of which is not covered by this note. Do pause by our contents page to check out all our fare.

Mitali Chakravarty

borderlessjournal.com

Click here to access the contents page for the January 2024 issue

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READ THE LATEST UPDATES ON THE FIRST BORDERLESS ANTHOLOGY, MONALISA NO LONGER SMILES, BY CLICKING ON THIS LINK.

Categories
A Special Tribute

Abol Tabol: No Nonsense Verses of Sukumar Ray

Ratnottama Sengupta relives the fascination of Sukumar Ray’s legendary Abol Tabol, which has  just completed its centenary

Sukumar Ray (1887-1923)
Abol Tabol

Sukumar Ray, the creator of Abol Tabol[1], came into my life long before Upendra Kishore Roy Chowdhury, the author of Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne. Pather Panchali, the timeless novel, cast its spell when I outgrew the ghost stories penned by the father for kishore-kishoris, the young adults of Bengal. And Satyajit Ray, Sukumar’s son, became an icon only after I got my primary lessons in film viewing. 

But, to go back to the beginning: I was a pravasi toddler growing up in Bombay when I would lisp, Baburam Sapure, kotha jaas bapu re/ Where are you off to, snake-charmer Baburam! And I’d recite, Ramgarurer chhana, haanste taader maana[2]! No no no no, we shall not laugh, I’d say, trying to choke my own laughter at the thought of forbidding laughter. For, by now, I would also fondly spout, Maasi go maasi, pachhe haansi – Neem gaache tey hocche seem… Aunt dear Aunt, I’m rolling in laughter that broad beans are growing on the neem tree! The mushroom wants to be an umbrella for the elephant, and a crow’s hatching the egg of a stork! Yes, I would laugh too as I recited these lines. For I had learnt that contradictions are funny.

Ramgarur
Hunko Mukho Hyangla
Illustration made by Sukumar Ray in Abol Tabol

There were other poems that I learnt by rote without knowing they were limericks, not mere rhymes. Some, I later realised, told stories; some were satires aimed at Sukumar’s own Banga samaj – the Bengali society – and some were oblique critiques of the Imperialists then Lording over his land. Hunko mukho hyangla, bari taar Bangla, do you know his dour-faced compatriot? And have you encountered the three pigs maathay jaader neiko tupi? The three pigs wearing no hat! 

But most of all, his critique of his compatriots comes through in Sat Patra, A Suitable Boy. I won prizes for reciting it, long before I understood the critique of a Bengali father’s keenness to marry off his daughter to a ‘suitable boy’ – even if the proposed groom is dark or deaf, drunkard or devil…

It took years of growing up, in the literary family of Nabendu and Kanak Ghosh, to realise that some of the lines I heard every day were not abol tabol katha, mumbo jumbo words spewed out perfunctorily. So, my mother never took ‘No’ for an answer: “Utsahey ki na hoy, ki na hoy chestaay?” She’d quote Haaturey to say, “what can not be achieved by enthusiasm and effort?” And if I screamed to protest, she’d simply smile and ‘admire’ like the he-owl, “Khasa tor chechani, how sensationally you scream!”  While Baba, come winter, would keep repeating, “Kintu sabar chaitey bhalo, powruti aar jhola gur[3]!” Who would have thought of clubbing the daily bread of the rulers with the winter delicacy of the ruled rustics!

When I visited Kolkata, I often heard the phrases “Narad! Narad! (let the fight begin)”, “Gechho Dada (here now, off again now)”, and “Nyara beltala jaay ka baar (how often does a bald-pated man walk under the wood-apple tree).” And I wondered, did Sukumar Ray weave poems around the phrases, or did they become part of our colloquialism, thanks to Abol Tabol?

It was Baba who brought me alive to the literary merits of the verses sans sense. And even as I studied Edward Lear as a student of literature, I recognised that Sukumar Ray pulled off the harnessing of contradictions with as much ease as he surprised us with his endings. Ei dekho notebook, pencil e haatey,/ Ei dekho bhara sab Kil bil lekhatey[4]. Yes, Ray’s Kheror Khaata – handmade rough red cotton cloth wrapped scroll book — was overflowing with thoughts, words and illustrations. If he was talking of the lack of coherence in God’s own country, Shib thakurer aapan deshe, he was also making fun of Ekushey Aiin, The Law of 21, whereby Karur jodi gof gajaay, a man would have to pay a hefty tax for even the natural occurrence of whiskers! And Abaak Kando! How strange that he ate with his hand, se naaki roj haat diye bhaat maakhey!

Like Satyajit Ray’s reading of his granddad’s Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne, Larai Khyapa has nuggets hidden in the lines to protest the war mongering of nations. So, Saat German, Jagai eka, tabuo Jagai larey! And Paanch byata ke khatam karey Jagai Dada molo! Jagai, a homegrown brawny, alone takes on seven strapping Germans! And breathes his last only when the last of them is dead!

To conclude, I will quote Bujhiye Bola [5]and say, Ki bolchhili, esab sudhu abol  tabol bakuni? Bujhtey holey magaj laagey, bolechhilam takhuni![6]

Didn’t I tell you, you need to read and re-read Sukumar Ray, to understand the truth lining his nonsense poems?

*

Khuror Kol
Gonf Churi
Drawings of Sukumar Ray from Abol tabol

“Sukumar Ray’s drawings are a unique part of our art tradition. And Swapan Maity has dared to give sculptural forms to those two-dimensional line drawings.” It is tough to put in words the significance of these miniatures in terracotta, of those humour-induced fun-filled drawings of the quirky protagonists of Abol Tabol, said Partha Pratim Deb. The former Dean, Faculty of Visual Art at Rabindra Bharati University, Kolkata was speaking at the inauguration of ‘Ajab Kumar’, a weeklong exhibition of reliefs and miniatures in terracotta along with portraits of Sukumar, his father Upendra Kishore, his son Satyajit Ray, and grandson Sandip  – each of them a legend in their own right. What made the portraits so special was that they were all done in a single stroke of one unbroken line.

Sukumar Ray – born October 30, 1887; died September 10, 1923 — is easily identified as a pioneer in Bengal’s literary art. His father was not only a writer, he played the violin, he painted, he dabbled in composing music, he was an amateur astronomer, and he was an entrepreneur in printing technology. Upendra Kishore Ray studied block-making, conducted experiments and set up a business in making blocks. His sister, Mrinalini, was married to Hemen Bose, elder brother of pioneer scientist Jagadish Bose, who was an entrepreneur of renown.

Sukumar too grew up to be an expert in Printing Technology. To master that, he travelled to London on a scholarship to train in Photography and Printing Technology at the School of Photo Engraving and Lithography. On his return, he worked to further the family firm, M/s U Ray and Sons, where he was involved with his brothers, Subinay and Subimal. And his sisters, Sukhalata Rao and Punyalata, too were involved in the magazine published by Upendra Kishore Ray,  Sandesh[7], which carved a distinct place in the realm of children’s literature in Bengali.

Sandesh covers. The Journal was started in 1913

Born at the peak of the renaissance in Bengal when literature to art, religion to fashion, were all experiencing a regeneration after coming in contact with European lifestyle and industrial revolution, Sukumar had among his friends the literary genius Rabindranath Tagore, the scientists Jagadish Chandra Bose and Prafulla Chandra Ray, composer Atul Prasad Sen. Multitalented like his father, Sukumar was adept at photography and had joined the Royal Photographic Society. And apart from limericks, he wrote the stories of Pagla Dashu[8], technical essays on the new methods he had developed in halftone block-making in journals like the Penrose Annual, plays like Abaak Jalpan (The Curious Thirst), a wealth of literature for young readers in Khai Khai[9]. And within days of his passing was published Abol Tabol – mumbo jumbo that etched his name in the mind and heart of every child born to the language spoken by Tagore and Bankim, Nazrul and Sarat Chandra.

Pagla Dashu
Khai Khai

*

The year was 1993. Swapan Maity, thirty years ago, was a student in the Visual Art Department of Rabindra Bharati University on the campus housed in the ancestral residence of the Tagores at Jorasanko. When his other batchmates spent time singing, playing, painting or simply leg pulling their friends, Maity would tirelessly bury himself in crafting figurines in clay. Some of these figures had naturally different tint – pink or red earth – determined by their source, Ganga in Kolkata or the clay of Rangamati near his hometown Midnapore.

Once satisfied with the finish, the learner would lay them out in the long corridors of the heritage architecture to let them dry in the sun. Even his friends who teased him over his ceaseless devotion to sculpture were left speechless when they recognised the life-like recreation in lifeless mud of the snake charmer, Baburam Sapure; of Uncle’s Contraption, Khuror Kal; of Kumro Potash, the Pumpkin Prince; of the Theft of the Whiskers in Gonf Churi.

Kumro Potash
Baburam Sapure
Art of Sukumar Ray in Abol Tabol

The expressive miniatures have added volume to the body of illustrations imaged by the genius of Sukumar Ray. The miniatures, unique then, are still a marvel. Reviewed in the popular magazine Desh [10]of April 9, 1994, they were exhibited in the closing month of 2023 – at Kolkata’s celebrated Academy of Fine Arts – to mark the completion of a hundred years of their creation in a Bengal – nay, an India that was ruled by the imperialist government in the name of King George V of Britain.

Along with the miniatures Maity – whose statue of Don Bosco is a landmark of Kolkata’s busy Park Circus area – had added a few relief sculptures to encapsulate the entire range of the satire robed in rhymes that amazingly continue to be repeated decade after decade by generation after generation, and still are so pertinent.

The Expressive miniatures of Sukumar Ray’s world by Swapan Maity in ‘Ajab Kumar’, a weeklong exhibition of reliefs and miniatures in terracotta. Photos provided by Ratnottama Sengupta

[1] Literal translation from Bengali: Mumbo Jumbo. First published on 19th September 1923

[2] Literal translation from Bengali: Ramgarur’s children, they are not allowed to laugh

[3] Bengali literal translation: But the most supreme food is bread with liquid molasses…

[4] Bengali literal translation: See the notebook, pencil in hand,/ See it filled with all squiggly writing

[5] Bengali literal translation: Explaining clearly

[6] Bengali literal translation: Were you saying this is all nonsensical talk? You need brains to understand what I was saying…

[7] A traditional Bengali desert

[8] Mad Dashu

[9] Literal Bengali Translation: Eat, Eat.

[10] Literal Bengali Translation: Country

Ratnottama Sengupta, formerly Arts Editor of  The Times of India, teaches mass communication and film appreciation, curates film festivals and art exhibitions, and translates and write books. She has been a member of CBFC, served on the National Film Awards jury and has herself won a National Award. 

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PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL

Click here to access the Borderless anthology, Monalisa No Longer Smiles

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Poetry

The L-o-s-t Bengal Project 

By Isha Sharma

The year is 1905

The tunes of Tagore’s Amar Sonar Bangla* flower in the streets of Bengal

Curzon calls the Partition to create a divide

However, ‘culture’ thrives 

As Muslims and Hindus, unite

 

The year is 1947

Bloodshed and madness pick up as 

Radcliffe creates new lines

People leave ‘homes’

To find new ones 

Violence slices humanity 

How could Bengal survive?

 

The year is 1965

Bengal has two sons, one -- West Bengal 

The second,  ‘East Pakistan’ 

As conflicts flare again, the memory of the lost home revives

Women adorning sarees sing the lyrics of that Rabindra Sangeet 

 

The year is 1971

Liberation calls are made

As women get raped

A new nation is born but the legacy of the past still prospers

 

A woman in Bangladesh teaches her daughter tunes of Tagore’s song written in 1905 --

Amar Sonar Bangla may have been lost but is it fully forgotten?

It still hums ...somewhere 



* The national anthem adopted by Bangladesh in 1971. It was written by Tagore to unite Bengalis together to oppose the 1905 Partition.

Isha Sharma is passionate about the process of translating emotions into verses. Her works, including articles and poems, have been published in Borderless Journal, Kitaab International, The Indian Literary Review, The Indian Periodical, The Indian Express, Indus Women Writing Newsletter, The Feminist Times, and The Tribune (Student Edition).

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PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL. 

Click here to access the Borderless anthology, Monalisa No Longer Smiles

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Greetings from Borderless

We wish You a Happy New Year

The year 2023 seemed to have been hard on all of us. Wars in the post-pandemic world, weapons and armies that destroy innocent civilian lives have taken the centre stage, vying with climate disasters, refugees, senseless shootings and unrest.  Amidst this gloom and doom, we need hope — a gleam of light to help us find solutions towards a peaceful world. Let us give the newborn 2024 a fair chance towards its own wellbeing with cheer and laughter. Let’s laugh away our troubles and find the inner strength to move forward towards a better future where people live in harmony… perhaps to hum and recall Paul Mc Cartney’s wise words in ‘Ebony and Ivory'(1982)…

We all know that people are the same wherever you go 
There is good and bad in ev'ryone
We learn to live, when we learn to give 
Each other what we need to survive, together alive

A solution to find that hidden strength within us is given to us by a bard who we cherish, Rabindranath Tagore. He suggests a panacea in his poem, Tomar Kachhe Shanti Chabo Na (I Will Not Pray to You for Peace): 

....
Amidst this wave of conflict, 
In the haze of the games you script, 
            I will swing towards my own dream. 

            Let the breeze blow off the lamplight,
            Let storms thunder in the sky —
Every moment in my heart,
I can sense your footfall. 
             In darkness, I strive to find my stream.

In that spirit, we look inward not just to find our dreams and materialise them, but also into the treasure chests of Borderless Journal to find writings that bring a smile to our lips. Tagore, translated by Fakrul Alam and Somdatta Mandal, leads the way as we start with humour and wonder in poetry and meander into a few prose pieces that evoke laughter, at times upending our current stream of thoughts or values. We move on to our three columnists, Rhys Hughes, Devraj Singh Kalsi and Suzanne Kamata, who bring laughter and uncover the nuances of the world around us on a monthly basis. Included also are the pieces by our travelling granny, Sybil Pretious, whose spirited travels prove that age is just a number. Capturing the spirit of diversity with a tinge of laughter, let us usher in the new year to a more hopeful and sturdy start.  

Poetry

Giraffe’s Dad by Tagore: Giraffer Baba (Giraffe’s Dad), a short humorous poem by Tagore, has been translated from Bengali by Professor Fakrul Alam. Click here to read.

Dangermouse by Ryan Quinn Flanagan. Click here to read. 

A Poem About Mysore by Rhys Hughes. Click here to read.

Voice of the Webb by Ron Pickett.  Click here to read.

The Writer on the Hill by Kisholoy Roy.  Click here to read.

Philosophical Fragments by Don Webb. Click here to read.

A Blob of Goo? by Wilda Morris. Click here to read.

Dino Poems by Richard Stevenson.   Click here to read.

Rani Pink by Carol D’Souza. Click here to read.

Walking Gretchums by Saptarshi Bhattacharya. Click here to read.

The Decliner by Santosh Bakaya. Click here to read.

Prose

Travels & Holidays: Humour from Rabindranath: Translated from the original Bengali by Somdatta Mandal, these are Tagore’s essays and letters laced with humour. Click here to read.

Humbled by a Pig: Farouk Gulsara meets a wild pig while out one early morning and muses on the ‘meeting’. Click here to read. 

Leo Messi’s Magic Realism: Sports fan Saurabh Nagpal explores the magic realism in famous footballer Messi’s play with a soupçon of humour. Click here to read.

I am a Jalebi: Arjan Batth tells us why he identifies with an Indian sweetmeat. Click here to read why.

A Day at Katabon Pet Shop , a short story set amidst the crowded streets of Dhaka, by Sohana Manzoor. Click here to read.

Columns

Poets, Poetry & Rhys Hughes… Click here to read.

Musings of a Copywriter by Devraj Singh Kalsi … Click here to read.

Adventures of a Backpacking Granny by Sybil Pretious… Click here to read.

Notes from Japan by Suzanne Kamata … Click here to read.

Categories
Festive Special

Goodwill and Peace on Christmas

Nativity of Christ, painted in the Mughal empire, around 1800 AD

“The central celebration is the birth of a child. There is no culture that does not celebrate this event, because all of us who belong to the human race can see our collective future in the pudgy little face. We marvel at this conjuring act, the miniature miracle, at its tiny fingernails and budlike nose.” — Jerry Pinto, Indian Christmas: Essays, Memoirs, Hymns, an anthology edited by Jerry Pinto and Madhulika Liddle

Christmas centres around the birth of a child who impacted a large part of the world and urged us to love others despite differences, to be kind, to embrace those who suffered… and that is the spirit that continues to unite humankind to move towards a future where people thrive in harmony, with love in their hearts. Despite all the darkness that broods over the world, Christmas has come around. The sun still moves forward in time and at some point, the darkness will give way to light. Perhaps, Christmas will remind people of the values they need to uphold to live in a world that is not filled with fear, greed or the lust for power and they will stop killing ruthlessly and without any sense of coherence. With that in mind, we have tried to evoke the spirit of Christmas cheer by presenting writings that talk of celebrations.

This is a season that should be filled with hope, goodwill, peace and love. The celebrations — depicting variety, a departure from conventional norms — by writers who reach across borders and time, rekindle our belief in the wonder created by these values, which is what Christmas is all about. We start with Tagore, a Brahmo by religion but his poem in English dwells on the wonder he feels at the idea of this unique birth of Christ. Our other writers from across the world pitch in with what Christmas means to all of them, whether it creates a sense of goodwill, nostalgia, invokes curiosity or just evokes plain laughter. Hopefully, we can all join together to ring the bells of kindness, love, humanitarian help and peace this year!

Poetry

An excerpt from Rabindranath Tagore’s ‘The Child‘ a poem originally written in English by the poet to celebrate Christmas. Click here to read.

One Star by Ihlawha Choi. Click here to read.

Christmas Cheer by Malachi Edwin Vethamani. Click here to read.

Prose

Indian Christmas: Essays, Memoirs, Hymns, an anthology edited by Jerry Pinto and Madhulika Liddle has been discussed by Somdatta Mandal. Click here to read.

In I Went to Kerala, Rhys Hughes treads a humorous path while exploring Christmas in Kerala. Click here to read.

In Hold the Roast Turkey Please Santa , Keith Lyons writes from New Zealand, where summer solstice and Christmas fall around the same time. Click here to read.

In My Christmas Eve “Alone”, Erwin Coomb has a strange encounter on Christmas eve… Is it real? Click here to read. 

Nativity, a fresco by Italian artist Boticelli, created around 1467