Valmiki – Borderless

Book Review by Meenakshi Malhotra

Title: In Your Eyes A River: Poems

Author: Radha Chakravarty

Publisher: Hawakal Publishers

Radha Chakravarty is a writer, critic and translator and has now added poetry to her already considerable oeuvre. Her achievements as an academic are impressive. She has co-edited The Essential Tagore and edited Shades of Difference: Selected Writings of Rabindranath Tagore (Social Science Press, 2015). She is the author of Feminism and Contemporary Women Writers (Routledge, 2008) and Novelist Tagore: Gender and Modernity in Selected Texts (Routledge, 2013). She has translated a wide range of literary works by Rabindranath Tagore and works by Bankimchandra Chatterjee and Mahasweta Devi. She has edited Bodymaps: Stories by South Asian Women and co-edited Writing Feminism: South Asian Voices and Writing Freedom: South Asian Voices. She has published poetry widely online and in print.

Professor Chakravarty’s second book of poems, In Your Eyes A River, brings together poems which evoke both real, travelled to and imagined worlds, aiming to bracket and highlight traces of the extraordinary within the ordinary aspects of human experience. They demonstrate a keen and keenly documented awareness of the profound realities that lie beneath the fabric of our daily lives.

The poems in In Your Eyes A River are replete with memories and infused with traces of nostalgia. Particularly moving is the seemingly autobiographical poem about her father, the titular poem: You never left Shyamsiddhi./In your heart you carried a home, / in your eyes a river, in the soles of your feet,/ the swing and shift of a bamboo sanko,/ narrow bridge of precarious crossings/…..the lost ground of your birth,/forsaken foundations of your fast-transforming self, the absent source of mine.”The poem moves towards a sense of closure as she writes: “I stand face to face with your impossible story,/ and find at last the missing opening lines of mine.” The poem is suffused by a sense of nostalgia for a place hardly visited except through the act of imaginative recreation, the mind’s eye.

Some of the poems in this collection demonstrate the poet’s experimentation with some short haiku-like forms and even single-word lines occasionally to create a sharper focus and emphasis. A lot of poems are ample evidence of her meticulous attention to details of the art and craft of poetry. Thus her poem, ‘Blue Gold’ on indigo not only unfolds not only contrapuntally[1] but also encapsulates within itself the dark history of colonialism, slave labour and human suffering.

One poem which particularly resonated with me is about the slowing down of the frenetic pace of life, presumably after years of active service: “no setting the alarm for crack of dawn/no scanning the TV for breaking news /no boiling water for morning tea/ no opening curtains, shaking out sheets/no tidying, dusting, cleaning up/no ironing creases, putting out trash/no catching the train, no rushing to work,/no chasing the tight deadline/no putting on a public mask/to face the measuring gaze.” By the next stanza, the idea of change between two different phases of life acquires an existential dimension. In a changed routine, the poetic persona finds herself moulting and changing, facing and acknowledging her ever changing, unpredictable self, “the mutating stranger that is me.”

In yet another poem, the poetic persona assumes the voice of a renowned female scholar from ancient India, Gargi ,who “thirsts to know” about the “weave of life and the warp that holds all forms of being,/ from the remotest realms of abstract divinity to the limit of human knowing ” muses about posing “the impossible question.”

The figure of the transgressive, rebellious and recalcitrant woman who breaks the mould re-appears in the next poem as well. It draws from a women’s retelling of the Ramayana, that poses a counter narrative to dominant narratives of the epic. In this powerfully and poignantly reimagined poem, ‘Another Story’, the poet draws on the narrative of the 16^th century poet Chandrabati, who “questions the unquestionable”, thereby interrogating the hegemonic narrative of Valmiki and the Tulsidas Ramayana. The story narrated by Chandrabati centres around the figure of Sita, telling the reader about Sita’s miraculous birth and later story, instead. Sita’s story is not for “the men in royal courts” “but a “folk song for women in six brief parts.” a song which “shuns the epic scale.” In this version of the epic, Rama is not a divine hero, but a fallible man and a “jealous husband.” Chandrabati’s narrative questions where heroism really lies, whether in warfare and violence or the sustenance of everyday life. Moreover, even if women’s voices have been erased from history, there are women’s songs where “my version of Sita’s story lives on.” Chandrabati’s “unfinished song” also arouses the “critics’ ire” who dismiss it as a fragment, since the male critics police the boundaries of the literary establishment and often become (self-appointed) custodians of it.

Additionally, there are poems of tourism and travel, some of them set in Italy. Tourist spots are visited and reflected on, often providing fuel to fire the imagination. From sunrise in the hills of Kanchenjunga to her visit to Darjeeling, to the volcanoes of Etna and Vesuvius, are all skilfully assimilated into Chakravarty’s poetry.

Chakravarty’s poetic persona is also a witness to history and its outrages. In the poem ‘Wounded Walls’, “scarred walls remember the shots/that brought down the dead.” Yet, it does not “quite go as planned” since a the past resurfaces as a commemorative “unwelcome ghost” who rises from the dead to “haunt the present with/undead questions.” Elsewhere, the poetic persona , battle scarred but resilient, documents “lingering inscriptions/on memory’s skin”, of “battles fought/wounds that healed.” Questions pertinent to the present time are raised as in the poem ‘Ceasefire’: “If captives walk free, will our hearts still/hold us hostage in wild tunnels of hate? If bombs stop dropping, will the shrapnel/of memory vanish, from festering wounds? If the bloodbath halts, will it staunch the grief/that oozes from hearts lately bereaved?”

Sensitively written and meticulously crafted, Radha Chakravarty’s collection of poems is sure to resonate with all those who have struggled, suffered loss and displacement. Her poems help define that which is essentially and indubitably human, in the middle of climate chaos and war, tumult and change. Attentive to history and mindful of its excesses, the poems assert a vision of sanity and of shared humanity, much needed at this point when the global order has descended into chaos and seems to be teetering on the verge of immeasurable destruction.

[1] A contrapuntal poem is one which can be read individually and together, vertically or horizontally simultaneously as a single harmonious or dissonant piece.

Meenakshi Malhotra is Professor of English Literature at Hansraj College, University of Delhi, and has been involved in teaching and curriculum development in several universities. She has edited two books on Women and Lifewriting, Representing the Self and Claiming the I, in addition to numerous published articles on gender, literature and feminist theory. Her most recent publication is The Gendered Body: Negotiation, Resistance, Struggle.

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Ratnottama Sengupta, eminent journalist and daughter of Bengali writer Nabendu Ghosh, has been a force behind translating Bengali literature and bringing it to the doorstep of those who do not know the language. In this exclusive, she discusses how translations impact the world of literature.

I have often been asked, “Nabendu Ghosh was a literary figure and a screenwriter. How much importance did he place on translation?” Truthfully, because he was a literary person, my father placed a lot of importance on translations which, as he once pointed out, has given us access to almost all the first books in a bevy of Indian languages.

Let me elaborate. Adi Kavi Valmiki, the harbinger poet in Sanskrit literature, composed the original – ‘mool’ – Ramayan long before the first century BC. But Krittibas Ojha’s 15^th century rendition in Bengali ‘Panchali’ style is not merely a rewording of the original epic, it gives a description of Bengal’s society and culture in the Middle Ages. It also explores the concept of Bhakti which later contributed to the emergence of Vaishnavism in the Gangetic belt.

This is said to have had a profound impact on the literature of the surrounding region. In Bihar of 16^th century Goswami Tulsidas heightened the Bhakti quotient as he retold Ramayan in Hindi, as Ramcharit Manas. The same happened in Orissa. Earlier it had been adapted, with plot twists and thematic adaptations, in the 12^th century Tamil Ramavataram; 14^th century Telugu Sri Ranganatha Ramayanam; several Kannada versions, starting in 12^th century; Ramacharitam in Malayalam; into Marathi also around this time.

My father had inculcated in us this love for multiple languages when I was about ten. As we all sat around after dinner, he would read from these texts – Valmiki’s Ramayan, Tulsi’s Ramcharit Manas, The Old Testament from the Bible, Buddhist Jataka Tales, and Sri Sri Ramakrishna Kathamrita wherein Mahendra Nath Gupta recounts, word for Bengali word, the conversations and activities of the 19^th century Indian mystic. Published in five volumes between 1902 and 1910, this work summing up the life philosophy of Ramkrishna Paramahans through simple anecdotes and parables, has been translated into English and Hindi.

Before that, at the young age of nine, I was also initiated into the crème de la crème of world literature – Tolstoy, Gorky, Mark Twain, and Shakespeare too – through translations into Bengali. Abridged versions of Crime and Punishment, Mother, Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Blue Bird, and Hamlet, Lear, Othello, Romeo and Juliet were published by Deb Sahitya Kutir — among other Bengali publishers — for young readers. Later in life, as a student of English Literature, I realized that our understanding of the ways and woes of our world would be so much poorer if Iliad and Odyssey had remained confined to Greek readers; if Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House had not crossed the frontiers of Norway; if Don Quixote were to be read only in the Spanish that Miguel Cervantes wrote in; if The Hunchback of Notre Dame was meant only for those raised in French, or if Faust were to be played only to German viewers.

And, talking of viewers: how would the world have known about the Russian Sergei Eisenstein, the Japanese Akira Kurosawa, the Greek Theo Angelopoulos, the Italian Michelangelo Antonioni and Federico Fellini, the French Jean Luc Godard and Francois Truffaut, the Swedish Ingmar Bergman, the Polish Andrzej Wajda, the Czech Jiri Menzel, the Argentinian Fernando Solanas, the Turkish Yilmaz Guney, the Chinese Zhang Yimou, the Iranian Abbas Kiarostami, or our very own Satyajit Ray? Unthinkable, the world of cinema without subtitles in this day and age when Hollywood films come with subtitles in not just English and Hindi – the two official languages of India – but also in its umpteen regional languages to reach viewers in pockets that speak only Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Marathi, Bengali…

The importance of translation is best exemplified by the Song Offerings. If Rabindranath Tagore had not translated the poems of Gitanjali, Asia would have had to wait longer for its first Nobel Prize. Incidentally the central theme of this work too is devotion – and it is part of UNESCO’s collection of Representative Works. And it is my belief that no other Nobel for literature has come to India because we have not come up with any worthy translation – say, of Bibhuti Bhushan Bandopadhyay? At least, not until recent years, nor in a big way.

Also, it is my own experience that only after Me and I — translated from the Bengali original, Aami O Aami by Devottam Sengupta — was published by Hachette India that a major international publishing house got interested in translating Nabendu Ghosh into French.

That brings me to the frequently asked question: “Why are you translating Nabendu Ghosh rather than publishing his Bengali originals?” The answer takes me back to 1940s when Baba’s Phears Lane was translated into Urdu and published in Lahore. Clearly Nabendu Ghosh was a ‘star’ in Bengali literature then. Allow me to quote Soumitra Chatterjee, the thespian who we lost so recently and was a Master in Bengali: “I had known about Nabendu Ghosh even before I took to studying Bengali literature, since Daak Diye Jaai (The Clarion Call) was a sensation even when I was in school. His writing was not confined to urban setting and city life. He went to the villages and wrote about the man of the soil too. His characters were always flesh and blood humans.”

But the Partition of India had halved the market for books and films in Bengali, dimming the prospects of even established directors and writers who sought a new opening on the shores of the Arabian Sea. Thus, when Bimal Roy – a celluloid star after his meteoric debut with Udayer Pathey ( In the Path of Sunrise, 1943) — left for Bombay in 1950 to make a film for Bombay talkies, Nabendu Ghosh joined his unit. However, in Bombay he found that his kind of writing did not have as much of a prospect in films which were made primarily for the entertainment of an amorphous mass. So, he decided to write scripts based on other people’s stories, and his own thought-provoking stories — which he described as ‘fingers pointing at what ails society’ — he continued to write as pure literature, in Bengali, and send to publishers in Kolkata.

This oeuvre bears the distinct stamp of his outlook towards life, society, or state. As a critic wrote, “There is deep empathy for human emotions, layers of meaning that add to the depth of the spoken words, subtle symbolism, description of unbearable life paired with flight in the open sky of imagination.” But this aspect of the writer got buried under the glamour of screen writing, and even in Bengal people thought of him only as the screen writer of successful films. Small wonder, since he wrote more than eighty scripts, for directors like Bimal Roy, Guru Dutt, Hrishikesh Mukherjee, Basu Bhattacharya, Vijay Bhatt, Sultan Ahmed, Dulal Guha, Lekh Tandon, Phani Majumdar, Satyen Bose, Shakti Samanta, Sushil Mazumdar, among others. Most of them are considered classics of the Indian screen: Sujata, Bandini, Devdas, Parineeta, Aar Paar, Majhli Didi, Teesri Kasam, Chaitanya Mahaprabhu, Ganga Ki Saugandh, Khan Dost, Baadbaan, Insaan Jaag Utha, Lal Patthar …

But Baba was saddened that even his colleagues in the filmdom did not know his literary pouring as only a handful were translated into Hindi and none into English. This is what I have tried to rectify through Chuninda Kahaniyaan (2009), Me and I (2017), and That Bird Called Happiness (2017). Mistress of Melodies (2020) you could say is a part of a continuum that started with River of Flesh (2016) and comes after That Bird Called Happiness. Nabendu Ghosh would read up volumes — books, news items, dictionaries and encyclopedia — when he fleshed out his characters. Perhaps that is why they play out their lives before you, like moving images. It was no different when he was writing Song of a Sarangi/ Ekti Sarengir Sur, included in Chaand Dekhechhilo that won him the Bankim Puraskar.

But above all, the reason for putting my energy in this art is to take a part of my heritage to the world. Because, as the celebrated Bengali writer Shirshendu Mukherjee said about Nabendu Ghosh, he is a writer who deserves to be read. Allow me to finish with a quote from him as he talked about his senior’s continuing relevance, to readers of Bengali literature and outside.

“Nabendu Da’s use of language was remarkable. He starts one of his stories with the word ‘Bhabchhi / (I’m) Thinking.’ It is a single word, that is also a complete sentence, and it has been used as a para in itself. One of his stories, Khumuchis, explores the secret language used by pickpockets. Bichitra Ek Prem Gatha (A Wondrous Love) – published to mark 2550th year of the Buddha — uses a vocabulary that is devoid of any word that would not have existed before the advent of Islam.

“He had an amazing sense of the optimum in this matter — he never overdid it. Not many writers of his time were into such experiments. Nabendu Ghosh did. He stood apart from his contemporaries in this respect. A part of his mind always ticked away, thinking of how his characters would speak. This added to the readability of his novels and stories. It quickened the pace of unfolding the narrative. They were all so racy! So fast paced, so real, so full of conflict and its resolution… Exceptional is the only word to describe it.

“And this was because of his language/ vocabulary. He was always pushing the boundaries of the language. His ‘throw’ was such that it turns into an eternal emotion which continues to cast its spell.

The same focused development of a plot shorn of every trivial and expendable branch, razor sharp emotions, whirlwind passion — I feel writing itself was a passion for him. He did not write with his head alone, his heart bled for the human condition.

“And this is why he never dated. His writing is the stuff that makes a story universal, eternal. For today’s readers he is a lesson in how to write — they can master how to write a narrative that flows like a boat down a rapid stream. In terms of language, structure, characters and situation, he is a writer who would be relevant to the young readers of not only Bengal but worldwide.”

Translations of Nabendu Ghosh novels initiated by Ratnottama Sengupta in recent years

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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