Aruna Chakravarti writes of the Bauls (wandering minstrels) of Bengal and the impact their syncretic thought, music and life had on Tagore
Bauls by Jamini RoyBaul Singer by Jamini Roy Paintings by Jamini Roy (1887-1972). From Public Domain
Religious movements such as Bhakti and Sufi have spanned time and territory and entered Bengal, in successive waves, creating a syncretic culture in which music and poetry are amalgamated. One of the forms in which these movements find creative expression is Baul Gaan —the singing of itinerant minstrels.
Universally recognised as foremost among the oralities of Bengal, the Baul Sampradai is a community for whom singing is synonymous with worship. The Baul expounds a philosophy of humanism which rejects religious orthodoxies and stresses human equality irrespective of caste, class, religion and gender. The Baul sets himself on a spiritual journey, lasting a lifetime, towards discovering his moner manush (man within the heart) thereby alienating the notion of seeking the Divine in external forms such as mosques, temples, images and sculptures. Since God is believed to reside within man, the human body is viewed as the site of the ultimate truth –that which encompasses the entire universe. This tenet of Baul philosophy is known as deha tatwabad—the belief that the soul being pure the body that houses it, together with all its functions, is pure and holy.
Concentrated mostly in Kushthia, Shilaidaha and Sajadpur in East Bengal (now Bangladesh) and Murshidabad and Birbhum in West Bengal, the Baul tradition, though drawing elements from Tantra, Shakta and Sahajiya[1], stems from two main sources — Muslim Sufi and Hindu Vaishnav. Hence the simultaneous presence of Hindu and Muslim bauls in the villages of Bengal and great composers from both streams—Lalon Fakir, Duddu Shah, Madan Baul, Gagan Harkara and Fakirchand. Rejecting religious codes such as Shariat and Shastras, caste differences, social conventions and taboos, which they see as barriers to a true union with God, they sing of harmony between man and man. “Temples and mosques obstruct my path,” the Baul sings, “and I can’t hear your voice when teachers and priests crowd around me.”
Refusing to conform to the conventions of religion and caste ridden Bengali society, Bauls (the word is sourced from the middle eastern bawal meaning mad or possessed) are wandering minstrels who sing and dance on their way to an inner vision. Essentially nomadic in nature walking, for them, is a way of life. “No baul should live under the same tree for more than three days” — the saying seems to stem from the Sufi doctrine of walking an endless path (manzil) in quest of the land where the Beloved (the Divine) might be glimpsed. Bauls live on alms which people give readily. In return the Baul sings strumming his ektara[2] with dancing movements. The songs are rich with symbolism, on the one hand, and full of ready wit and rustic humour on the other. The Baul rails against the hypocrisy of religion and caste and takes sharp digs at the clergy but totally without rancour.
Many of the composite forms found in an older culture of Bengal have become sadly obscured in the present scenario of identity politics. But the one that has not only survived but is gaining in recognition day by day, is the Baul tradition. This is, in no small measure, owing to the intervention and interest taken by Rabindranath Tagore. In his Religion of Man Rabindranath tells us that, being the son of the founder of the Adi Brahmo Samaj, he had followed a monotheistic ideal from childhood but, on gaining maturity, had sensed within himself a disconnect from the organised belief he had inherited. Gradually the feeling that he was using a mask to hide the fact that he had mentally severed his connection with the Brahmo Samaj began tormenting him. And while in this frame of mind, travelling through the family estates in rural Bengal, he heard a Baul sing. The singer was a postal runner by the name of Gagan Harkara and the song was “Ami kothai paabo tare/ amaar moner manush je re[3].”
“What struck me in this simple song,” Rabindranath goes on to say, “was a religious expression that was neither grossly concrete, full of crude details, nor metaphysical in its rarefied transcendentalism… Since then, I’ve often tried to meet these people and sought to understand them through their songs which are their only form of worship.” In his Preface to Haramoni[4], Rabindranath makes another reference to this song. Quoting some lines from the Upanishads— Know him whom you need to know/ else suffer the pangs of death— he goes on to say, “What I heard from the mouth of a peasant in rustic language and a primary tune was the same. I heard, in his voice, the loss and bewilderment of a child separated from its mother. The Upanishads speak of the one who dwells deep within the heart antartama hridayatma[5]and the Baul sings of the moner manush. They seem to me to be one and the same and the thought fills me with wonder.”
A Portrait of Lalon Fakir sketched by Jyotindranath Tagore(1849-1925)
Lalon Fakir’s commune was located in the village of Chheurhia which fell within Rabindranath’s father’s estates. Though there is no authentic record of a meeting between the two, it is a fact that the poet was the first to recognise Lalon’s merit which had the quality of a rough diamond. His inspiration was powerful and spontaneous but, lacking in clarity of expression, lay buried in obscurity till Rabindranath brought it out into the open. Publishing some of the songs in some of the major journals of the time, Rabindranath took them to the doors of the educated elite. Not only that. They gained in popularity from the fact that he, himself, often used Baul thought and melody in his own work. “In some songs,” he tells us in his Manush er Dharma[6], “the primary tunes got mixed up with other raags – raaginis which prove that the Baul idiom entered my sub conscious fairly early in life. The man of my heart, moner manush, is the true Devata[7]. To the extent that I’m honest and true to my knowledge, action and thought — to that extent will I find the man of my heart. When there is distortion within, I lose sight of him. Man’s tendency is to look two ways — within and without. When we seek him without — in wealth, fame and self- gratification — we lose him within.”
But it wasn’t only in his compositions that Rabindranath disseminated Baul ideology. It went deeper than that. The primitive simplicity and freedom of Baul thought and living charmed him so completely that he started imbibing them in his own lifestyle. He grew his hair long, kept a flowing beard and wore loose robes. He created Baul like characters in his plays and dance dramas and enacted the roles himself. And, as he grew older, a restlessness; an inability to stay in one place took hold of him. Leaving the ancestral mansion of Jorasanko he relocated to Santiniketan but even there he could not stay in the same house for more than two months. In the last two and half decades of his life, a tremendous wanderlust seized him. He travelled extensively both within the country and without, earning for himself the sobriquet of ‘roving ambassador for India’.
Perhaps, the most powerful testimony of the evolution of Rabindranath from a princely scion of the Tagores of Jorasanko to the man he finally became is found in Abanindranath’s portrait of his uncle. It depicts an old man with flowing white locks and beard, wearing a loose robe and holding an ektara high above his head. The limbs are fluid in an ecstatic dance movement. It is a significant fact that the painting is titled Robi Baul.
Robi Baul (1916): Painting by Abanindranath Tagore (1871-1951). From Public Domain
[1] Different schools of philosophy and religion. The Sahajiya is a philosophy that embrace nature and the natural way of life.
[3] Translates from Bengali to: “Where will I find Him — He who dwells within my heart”
[4] The Haramoni (Lost Jewels) is 13-volume collection of Baul songs compiled by Mansooruddin to which Tagore wrote the preface for the first volume published in 1931
[5] Translates to ‘innermost part of the heart and soul’
[6] Collection of Lectures by Tagore in Bengali, published in 1932
Aruna Chakravarti has been the principal of a prestigious women’s college of Delhi University for ten years. She is also a well-known academic, creative writer and translator. Her novels, Jorasanko, Daughters of Jorasanko, The Inheritors, Suralakshmi Villa and The Mendicant Prince have sold widely and received rave reviews. She has two collections of short stories and many translations, the latest being Rising from the Dust. She has also received awards such as the Vaitalik Award, Sahitya Akademi Award and Sarat Puraskar for her translations.
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Angshuman Kar has translated some of his shorter Bengali poems to English
Angshuman Kar
RULE
A river wants pebbles on its bosom. Only then the water will get a jolt, the current will be visible.
The wind wants a few trees to stand against it. Only then it will whiz, the speed will become visible.
A word also wants a few antonyms in opposition. Only then can it sparkle like a jewel!
Nature wants opposition
A boss slavery…
GROUP PHOTO
Father is gone. Uncle is gone. Grandma is gone. Tikla is gone. I am still here. Tukai is here. Looking at a forty-year-old group photo, it becomes clear that people take pictures together only to realise, someday, that in a cruel world made of black stone, they are alone.
UMBRELLA
A broken rib. The plastic handle is partly cracked. It holds back the drizzle, but when the rain pours hard, it gives up. From head to toe, I get drenched.
And so, the monsoon comes, the monsoon goes.
Looking at the umbrella, sometimes it seems, it is my father from the distant past.
Always hesitant.
ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE
One can immediately identify the other the moment the two meet.
One understands the other. Understands the pain, the suffering, their causes– everything.
The two drink coffee together. Gossip. Quarrel. Together they watch the young couples pass by.
Boarding the same bus, then, they go back home together.
One solitary man, still, can never become the friend of another.
LOVE
The wind is blowing gently and the leaves of a tree are shivering. It seems a deaf and dumb boy has fallen in love with a girl, deaf and dumb.
THE WIND
Those who think you are a friend are fools. You just touch and pass– A foreigner in every land.
Angshuman Kar, a Bengali poet and novelist, is Professor of English at University of Burdwan, West Bengal. He was also the Secretary of Sahitya Akademi, Eastern Region. Kar is the recipient of several prestigious awards including Paschim Banga Bangla Akademi Puraskar, Krittibas Award, Bangiya Sahitya Parishad Puroskar and Shakti Chattopadhyay Samman. He has read his poems in Scotland, Germany, America and Bangladesh. Wound Is the Shelter is a collection of his poems translated to English.
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Title: Epidemic Narratives: The Cultural Construction of Infectious Disease Outbreaks in India
Author: Dilip K. Das
Publisher: Orient BlackSwan
After the major outbreak of COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, there has been a plethora of studies about epidemic narratives in different kinds of literary and visual forms. Not that the issue had not been dealt with earlier, but somehow it increased manifold times and contends with a reality that is now increasingly becoming our way of life as new infectious diseases break out and older ones resurface almost every year. Drawing from the humanities, medicine and social sciences, and using the approach of interdisciplinary studies, this non-fiction examines stories of epidemic outbreaks in India, from the late-nineteenth century to the present, in the form of fiction, film, memoir, blogs, media reports and epidemiological accounts, to show how epidemics have been represented in social understanding.
Epidemics signify a crisis in society on multiple levels. The author, who specialises in medical humanities and has been meticulously studying and teaching courses in this area for several years, realised that very little is readily available in the nature of theoretical and analytical scholarship of epidemic narratives in general and on Indian narratives in particular and so he decided to write this book.
Divided into ten chapters, the study attempts a close textual analysis and focuses on the subjective experience of people affected by the outbreak. This ranges from the emotional impact of the suffering it causes to socio-political conflicts that it brings to the fore as a collective crisis. It poses two questions: what kind of plot do they employ, and what significances do they attribute to outbreaks as complex human events?
In the first chapter, the author discusses the social understanding of epidemics using a theoretical framework drawing on Charles Rosenberg and several other theorists to show how this understanding both derives from and adds to the biomedical view of disease. It examines how, in pluralistic societies, epidemic reality is constructed through both biomedical and cosmological paradigms, leading to contrary ways of responding to it. Thus, worshipping goddesses like Sitala Mata or Corona Devi and ritualising the event in shows of solidarity exists along with scientific perspectives.
The second chapter is about the impact of pandemic on the nation as a community that imagines itself as healthy yet is vulnerable to the threat posed by pathogens and pathogenic outsiders. The COVID-19 pandemic has made it clear that the future of public health in a rapidly globalizing context depends on how nationalism and internationalism balance mutual interests. Chapters three to ten deal with specific outbreaks. The third chapter discusses two intertextual narratives of the plague outbreak Pune in 1897 which culminated in the assassination of the Plague Commissioner Walter Charles Rand. The first is the autobiography of Damodar Hari Chapekar, who was convicted and hanged for the assassination. It shows how the outbreak was constructed and framed as a political event, marking the emergence of militant nationalism and anticipating the freedom struggle. The second narrative is 22 July 1897, a film made on the same incident by Nachiket and Jayoo Patwardhan.
U. R. Ananthamurthy’s novel Samskara1is usually studied as a text that deals with the themes of caste and religious orthodoxy, the role of tradition in a modernising society, and the tension between allegory and realism. In the next chapter, Das argues that plague not only provides the inspiration for the novel and its point of departure but also serves the function of a focaliser. Samskara is about the question of social order, how a particular code of conduct becomes rigid. In this context the plague outbreak serves as a metaphor for larger social and ethical crises.
Chapter five is about Spanish flu, which broke out in Bombay in June 1918 and was rapidly carried to the rest of the country by soldiers returning from the First World War. It begins with two official reports on the flu by the assistant health officer of Bombay municipality and the sanitary commissioner of India. The author examines newspaper accounts of the outbreak and two literary narratives to show how the outbreak was variously framed as a lapse of colonial public health, a personal tragedy and a cosmological crisis. The final section of the chapter discusses the memory of the Spanish flu a hundred years later with the outbreak of COVID-19.
Chapter six deals with an outbreak of viral hepatitis, a disease that is largely endemic but has occurred intermittently in epidemic form in India in the last hundred years. The author analyses Satyajit Ray’s 1990 film Ganashatru, an adaptation of Henrick Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People, which is about an outbreak of infectious hepatitis in a pilgrimage town in West Bengal. Taking the main theme of asserting commitment to ethics as against manipulation of truth for personal gain, Ray changes the plot, characterisation and context of Ibsen’s story to criticise religious dogma which contradicts rationality and places at risk the health of people.
The next chapter analyses narratives of the HIV/AIDS epidemic which broke out in India in 1986. It examines a range of media articles, literary and cinematic texts and an AIDS awareness video to track changes in the social understanding of the disease and those affected by it. From the stigmatising accounts of risk groups and HIV-positive individuals that was characteristic of the early decades of the epidemic in India, the focus shifted at the turn of the century to empathy for them. The author discusses in details the first commercially released Hindi film on AIDS, Naya Zaher (New Poison,1991) directed by Jyoti Sarup, mentions two human interest stories like Ritu Sarin’s ‘The Outcast’ (1990) and Subhash Mishra’s ‘Damned to Death’ (2000), analyzes a film like Ek Alag Mausam ( A Different Season, 2003) directed by K. P. Sasi, Negar Akhavi’s anthology AIDS Sutra (2008), and Kalpana Jain’s Positive Lives (2002) where the author journeys more than 15,000 kilometers in four months in order to get an idea of the epidemic’ s scale. He also analyses movies like Phir Milenge ( We’ll meet again, 2004) directed by Revathy and Onir’s My Brother…Nikhil(2005) and examines the dialectical relation between social understanding and narrative in bringing about this change.
Aashique Abu’s Malayalam film, Virus, is a fictional reconstruction of the outbreak of the Nipah virus disease in Kerala in the summer of 2018 and deals with biomedical explanations as well as accounts of personal suffering. The eighth chapter therefore shows how the film constructs the event as the disintegration and renewal of community and as a sign of the vulnerability of human life. It also shows how the ending denies any assurance that the crisis is over and will not recur.
The recent outbreak of COVID-19 in India that resulted in a nationwide lockdown in 2020 forms the subject of the next chapter. It discusses stories of the pandemic and the lockdown in terms of the suffering they caused, the loneliness, disruption of everyday life, time-space disorientation, loss of life and livelihood, the lack of institutional support, and the precariousness that resulted from all of these. It focuses on two kinds of stories, those of personal suffering like the video Infected 2030 and the Times of India blog ‘My Covid Story’, and those of collective suffering like Vinod Kapri’s documentary 1232 KMS and the book that followed from it, 1232 km: The Long Journey Home. The lockdown following the COVID outbreak in India disproportionately affected migrant workers who lost livelihoods and were prevented by the police and the local administration from returning to the safety of their villages. The author clearly analyses how the governments were unable to deal effectively with so complex a crisis.
The last chapter attempts to explain why narrative is the genre best suited to represent the experience of epidemic, and why epidemic in turn calls forth narrative as its most suitable mode of representation. We make sense of an outbreak in two ways, as an objective event and as subjective human experience. Narratives bring out both these dimensions, by emphasising emotional responses to disease, death and suffering as well as making cognitive sense of it. The book also contains an interesting epilogue by S. Mukundan who examines a narrative poem Plague Sindhu (1924) by Anthony Pillai recording the outbreak of plague in his home district of Theni in Madras Presidency. The poem is an apt example of how an outbreak of infectious disease comes to be socially constructed in terms of both modern scientific ideas of disease-causation and traditional ideas of disease as divine punishment for wrongdoing.
As mentioned earlier Epidemic Narratives takes as its main theme Charles Rosenberg’s argument that the social reality of disease is constituted in the frames of explanation provided by biomedical, political, cultural and social ideals and practices. Das mentions that the book is about “human suffering and compassion” and it will be of interest to researchers and students of literature, cultural studies, the history of medicine and public health policy.
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Translates to ‘A Rite for a Dead Man’, a Kannada novel written in 1965 ↩︎
Somdatta Mandal, critic and translator, is a former Professor of English at Visva Bharati, Santiniketan.
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Sukanta Bhattacharya (15th August 1926-31st May 1947): Called “Young Nazrul” and Kishore Bidrohi Kobi[1], Sukanta Bhattacharya died at the tender age of twenty of tuberculosis. He, like Nazrul, wrote poetry to protest the colonial atrocities. His poems describe the suffering of common people and looked forward to a world free of exploitation. His writings were anthologised in Sukanta Samagra (Complete Works of Sukanta, 1967), published posthumously, simultaneously in East Pakistan and West Bengal.
The once-paved paths are now vitiated. How can I endure the trauma without divine intervention?
Death, death, everywhere...
Life's earnings must be renounced. When the means become futile, they are best discarded like tattered rags
[1] Youthful Rebel Poet: Nazrul was called the rebel poet of Bengal. He wrote a poem called Bidrohi or Rebel and his poetry had been that of rebellion like Sukanta Bhattacharya’s.
Kiriti Sengupta, awarded the 2018 Rabindranath Tagore Literary Prize and the 2024 Nilim Kumar National Honour, has had his poetry featured in various publications, including The Common, The Florida Review Online, Headway Quarterly, The Lake, Amethyst Review, Dreich, Otoliths, Outlook, and Madras Courier. He has authored fourteen books of poetry and prose, published two translation volumes, and edited nine anthologies. Sengupta serves as the chief editor of Ethos Literary Journal and leads the English division at Hawakal Publishers Private Limited, one of the top independent presses established by Bitan Chakraborty. He resides in New Delhi. Further information is available at www.kiritisengupta.com.
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A discussion with Bhaksar Parichha, author of Cyclones in Odisha, Landfall, Wreckage and Resilience, published by Pen in Books.
While wars respect manmade borders, cyclones do not. They rip across countries, borders, seas and land — destroying not just trees, forests and fields but also human constructs, countries, economies and homes. They ravage and rage bringing floods, landslides and contamination in their wake. Discussing these, Bhaskar Parichha, a senior journalist, has written a book called Cyclones in Odisha, Landfall, Wreckage and Resilience. He has concluded interestingly that climate change will increase the frequency of such weather events, and the recovery has to be dealt by with regional support from NGOs.
Perhaps, this conclusion has been borne of the experience in Odisha, one of the most vulnerable, disaster prone states of India, where he stays and a place which he feels passionately about. Centring his narrative initially around the Super Cyclone of 1999, he has shown how as a region, Odisha arranged its own recovery process. During the Super Cyclone, the central government allocated only Rs 8 crore where Rs 500 crore had been requested and set up a task force to help. They distributed vaccines and necessary relief but solving the problem at a national level seemed a far cry. Parichha writes: “As a result, the relief efforts were temporarily limited. To accommodate the displaced individuals, schools that remained intact after the cyclone were repurposed as temporary shelters.
“The aftermath of the cyclone also led to a significant number of animal carcasses, prompting the Government of India to offer a compensation of 250 rupees for each carcass burned, which was higher than the minimum wage. However, this decision faced criticism, leading the government to fly in 200 castaways from New Delhi and 500 from Odisha to carry out the removal of the carcasses.”
He goes on to tell us: “The international community came together to provide much-needed support to the recovery efforts in India following the devastating cyclone. The Canadian International Development Agency, European Commission, British Department for International Development, Swiss Humanitarian Aid Unit, and Australian Government all made significant contributions to various relief organisations on the ground. These donations helped to provide essential aid such as food, shelter, and medical assistance to those affected by the disaster. The generosity and solidarity shown by these countries underscored the importance of global cooperation in times of crisis.” They had to take aid from organisations like Oxfam, Indian Red Cross and more organisations based out of US and other countries. Concerted international effort was necessary to heal back.
He gives us the details of the subsequent cyclones, the statistics and the action taken. He tells us while the Bay of Bengal has always been prone to cyclones, from 1773 to 1999, over more than two centuries, ten cyclones were listed. Whereas from 1999 to 2021, a little over two decades, there have been nine cyclones. Have the frequency of cyclones gone up due to climate change? A question that has been repeatedly discussed with ongoing research mentioned in this book. Given the scenario that the whole world is impacted by climate disasters — including forest fires that continue to rage through the LA region in USA — Parichha’s suggestion we build resilience comes at a very timely juncture. He has spoken of resilience eloquently:
“Resilience refers to the ability to recover and bounce back from challenging situations. It encompasses the capacity of individuals, communities, or systems to withstand, adapt, and overcome adversity, trauma, or significant obstacles. Resilience involves not only psychological and emotional strength but also physical resilience to navigate through hardships, setbacks, or crises.
“Resilience is the remarkable capacity of individuals to recover, adapt and thrive in the face of adversity, challenges, or significant life changes. It is the ability to bounce back from setbacks, disappointments, or failures, and to maintain a positive outlook and sense of well-being despite difficult circumstances.
“Resilience is not about avoiding or denying the existence of hardships, but rather about facing them head-on and finding ways to overcome them. It involves developing a set of skills, attitudes, and strategies that enable individuals to navigate through difficult times and emerge stronger and more capable.”
He has hit the nail on the head with his accurate description of where we need to be if we want our progeny to have a good life hundred years from now. We need this effort and the ability to find ways to solve and survive major events like climate change. Parichha argues Odisha has built its resilience at a regional level, then why can’t we? This conversation focusses on Parichha’s book in context of the current climate scenario.
Bhaskar Parichha
What prompted you to write this book?
Odisha possesses an unfavorable history of cyclones with some of the most catastrophic storms. People suffered. My motivation stemmed from documenting this history, emphasising previous occurrences and their effects on communities, infrastructure, and the environment.
What kind of research went into this book? How long did it take you to have the book ready?
The idea for the book originated more than a year ago. It was intended for release to commemorate the twenty-fifth anniversary of the 1999 Super Cyclone and the cyclones that followed. Having witnessed the disaster first-hand and having been involved in the audio-visual documentation of the relief and rehabilitation initiatives in and around Paradip Port after the Super Cyclone, I gained a comprehensive understanding of the topic. The research was largely based on a thorough examination of the available literature, which included numerous documents and reports.
Promptly after you launched your book, we had Cyclone Dana in October 2024. Can you tell us how it was tackled in Odisha? Did you need help from the central government or other countries?
Cyclone Dana made landfall on the eastern coast on the morning of October 25, unleashing heavy rainfall and strong winds that uprooted trees and power poles, resulting in considerable damage to infrastructure and agriculture across 14 districts in Odisha. Approximately 4.5 million individuals were affected. West Bengal also experienced the effects of Cyclone Dana. After effectively addressing the cyclone’s impact with a goal of zero casualties, the Odisha government shifted its focus to restoration efforts, addressing the extensive damage to crops, thatched homes, and public infrastructure. The government managed the aftermath of the cyclone utilizing its financial resources.
Tell us how climate change impacts such weather events.
Climate change significantly influences weather events in a variety of ways, leading to more frequent and intense occurrences of extreme weather phenomena. As global temperatures rise due to increased greenhouse gas emissions, the atmosphere can hold more moisture, which can result in heavier rainfall and more severe storms. This can lead to flooding in some regions while causing droughts in others, as altered precipitation patterns disrupt the natural balance of ecosystems.
What made people in Odisha think of starting their own NGOs and state-level groups to work with cyclones?
The impetus for establishing non-governmental organisations and state-level entities in Odisha is fundamentally linked to the region’s historical encounters with cyclones, which have highlighted the necessity for improved community readiness. Through the promotion of cooperation between governmental agencies and civil society organisations, Odisha has developed a robust framework that is adept at responding to natural disasters while simultaneously empowering local communities.
What are the steps you take to build this resilience to withstand the destruction caused by cyclones? Where should other regions start? And would they get support from Odisha to help build their resilience?
Building resilience to withstand the destruction caused by cyclones involves a multi-faceted approach that encompasses infrastructure development, community engagement, and effective disaster management systems. Odisha has established a robust model that other regions can learn from. Odisha’s experience positions it as a potential leader in sharing knowledge and best practices with other regions. The state has demonstrated its commitment to enhancing disaster resilience through partnerships with international organisations and by sharing its model of disaster preparedness with other states facing similar challenges. Odisha can offer training programs and workshops based on its successful strategies, guide in implementing early warning systems, building resilient infrastructure and also collaborating with NGOs and international agencies to secure funding for resilience-building initiatives in vulnerable regions.
You have shown that these cyclones rage across states, countries and borders in the region, impacting even Bangladesh and Myanmar. They do not really respect borders drawn by politics, religion or even nature. If your state is prepared, do the other regions impacted by the storm continue to suffer…? Or does your support extend to the whole region?
Odisha is diligently assisting its impacted regions through comprehensive evacuation and relief initiatives, while adjacent areas such as West Bengal are also feeling the effects of the cyclone. The collaborative response seeks to reduce damage and safeguard the well-being of residents in both states. Odisha’s approach to cyclone response has garnered international acclaim.
Can we have complete immunity from such weather events by building our resilience? I remember in Star Wars — of course this is a stretch — in Kamino they had a fortress against bad weather which seemed to rage endlessly and in Asimov’s novels, humanity moved underground, abandoning the surface. Would you think humanity would ever have to resort to such extreme measures?
The idea of humanity seeking refuge underground, as illustrated in the writings of Isaac Asimov, alongside the perpetual storms on Kamino from the Star Wars franchise, provokes thought-provoking inquiries regarding the future of human settlement in light of environmental adversities. Although these scenarios may appear to be exaggerated, they underscore an increasing awareness of the necessity for adaptability when confronted with ecological challenges. The stories from both Kamino and Asimov’s literature act as cautionary narratives, encouraging reflection on potential strategies for human resilience in the future.
With the world torn by political battles, and human-made divisions of various kinds, how do you think we can get their attention to focus on issues like climate change, which could threaten our very survival?
A comprehensive strategy is crucial for effectively highlighting climate change in the context of persistent political conflicts and societal rifts. Various methods can be utilised to enhance public awareness, galvanise grassroots initiatives, promote political advocacy, emphasise economic prospects, frame climate change as a security concern, and encourage international collaboration.
Can the victims of weather events go back to their annihilated homes? If not, how would you suggest we deal with climate refugees? Has Odisha found ways to relocate the people affected by the storms?
Individuals affected by severe weather events frequently encounter considerable difficulties in returning to their residences, particularly when those residences have been destroyed or made uninhabitable. In numerous instances, entire communities may require relocation due to the devastation inflicted by natural disasters, especially in areas susceptible to extreme weather conditions. Odisha’s proactive stance on disaster management and community involvement has greatly improved its ability to address challenges related to cyclones. The state’s initiatives not only prioritise immediate evacuation but also emphasize long-term resettlement plans to safeguard its inhabitants against future cyclonic events. For instance, residents from regions such as Satabhaya in Kendrapara district are being moved to safer locations like Bagapatia, where they are provided with land and support to construct new homes. This programme seeks to reduce future risks linked to coastal erosion and flooding.
Thanks for your book and your time.
(This review and online interview is by Mitali Chakravarty.)
The sun often shone brightly in the small, quiet town of Uttarpara,[1] illuminating the newly laid asphalt-lined streets and vibrant gardens in front of most houses. But for Gowri, an elderly woman of seventy-eight, the light had dimmed to a dull flicker. Outside her window, life bustled, yet she felt it was happening on a different planet.
Once she had been the mover in her community—a fierce advocate for women’s empowerment, engaging them in revenue-earning activities, through pottery, painting, cooking, and weaving, supported by her husband Shekhar, a well-known and respected member of the society.
After her husband’s untimely death, the warmth in her home began to fade. She sought the warmth from her artist friends. This did not sit well with her children. They objected to her carrying on with the social activities she was involved with. Well-meaning yet misguided, they insisted it was for her safety. They believed that the world had grown too dangerous for someone of her age. So, they began the process of isolating her, one layer at a time.
At first, it was simple. “Mom, why don’t you let us help with the groceries? We’ll just do a quick online order,” they suggested. That meant not going out. Gowri, though reluctant, acquiesced. Next came the visits that grew fewer and further apart, their busy lives seeming to expand while her own contracted.
Then, her virtual connections crumbled. “We think it’s best if you take a break from social media, and all online activities” her daughter said, her voice filled with concern. “It’s so easy to get duped. There are scammers out to make a quick buck. We will handle all your banking activities, and promise to call more often.” Once the financial control was in their hands, the calls dwindled as the months rolled by, replaced by a suffocating silence.
Gowri found herself trapped in a house that felt like a cage. The once vibrant laughter of her friends at the local art complex, housed in a garage, was replaced by echoes of memories. The absence of touch—of a hand on her shoulder, the embrace of a friend—left her feeling ghostlike, a shadow of her former self. She missed visits to the Sunday haat [2] where her line of pottery drew large crowds, crafted from mud collected from the Hooghly River.
As weeks turned into months, the isolation seeped into her mind, entwining itself with her thoughts. She felt as if she were part of a macabre dance, orchestrated by her family’s misguided affection. Each step in this dance led her further from the world, pulling her deeper into a solitude that echoed with the whispers of the past.
One night, Gowri stood by the window, gazing at the moonlit street. She could see the neighbours laughing, children playing, and couples walking hand in hand…a replay of vignettes from her life when she was younger strolling with her husband behind their skipping kids. She felt punched in the belly wrapped in insufferable loneliness that old age had brought on.
She was unprepared for the awakening that followed. The local community centre hosted an art exhibition, and for the first time in months, Gowri felt a flicker of hope. She longed to see her friends, to share in their laughter and creativity. Summoning her courage, she decided to venture out, despite the concerns of her family. They would have no inkling of her movements being so far removed from her home in Uttarpara.
With a look of determination, she stepped outside, dressed in her favourite cream with red border jamdani [3] saree, which Shekhar had bought from Dhaka on one of his official visits.
When she entered, the warmth enveloped her like a long-lost embrace. Friends turned, eyes widening in shock and delight. “Gowri!” they exclaimed, rushing to her side, their voices filling the air with the vibrant hues of life. At that moment, the dance of death that had surrounded her began to unravel, replaced by a lively rhythm of connection and joy. The spark in her eyes returned as she mingled with them, admiring the work put up for the exhibition. Her last painting rested on the easel occupying centre stage. This gesture made her feel she was never truly alone. A feeling of empowerment suffused her being.
Gowri realised that old age should not be a reason for isolation. It should not mean living in a cocoon, separated from the vibrant life that pulsed just beyond her door.
As she lay in bed, a smile crept across her face. The initiation into the dance of death had not claimed her; instead, she had stepped back into the dance of life, refusing to let anyone dictate the music. In the embrace of her memories and her friends, Gowri found a spark of defiance, a whisper of hope that would guide her forward.
The dance of death was only one story; the dance of life was hers to write anew.
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[1] City in West Bengal
[2] farmer’s market
[3] saree woven in Dhaka (Bangladesh)
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Snigdha Agrawal (nee Banerjee) is a published author of four books and a regular contributor to anthologies published in India and overseas. A septuagenarian, she writes in all genres of poetry, prose, short stories and travelogues.
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PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL
Title: The Collected Short Stories of Kazi Nazrul Islam
Editors: Syed Manzoorul Islam and Kaustav Chakraborty
Publisher: Orient Blackswan
He dons many mantles. Kazi Nazrul Islam (1899 – 1976), the national poet of Bangladesh, was a prolific Bengali poet, revolutionary, essayist, journalist, editor, activist and composer of songs. The very mention of his name conjures up the figure of a fiery iconoclast who fought against the structures of oppression and orthodoxy in society to bring about progress and change. In fact, his self-styled image as the volatile bidrohior ‘rebel poet’ overshadows his other literary achievements and that is how ordinary people still remember him.
This unique volume presents all twenty of Kazi Nazrul Islam’s short stories for the first time in English translation. Done by different hands, they feature rich imagery, evocative landscapes, references to music, classical poetry, folktales and more. The prominent characteristics of these stories are simplicity, vivacity and emotionality. They have been sourced from different anthologies. The first six stories are from the collection Harvest of Sorrow1. The opening story of the collection titled “Harvest of Sorrow”, is a collage of tales narrated by the three characters: Dara, Bedoura and Saiful Mulk. Dara, located in Iran’s Golestan, narrates his tale of love, separation and devotion to his motherland through a series of reminiscences. After that, we hear the same set of events narrated from Bedoura’s perspective. Then follows the account narrated by Saiful Mulk, portrayed as a sinner who tempted Bedoura into losing her virginity. Overcome by guilt, he joins the freedom struggle where he encounters Dara. What follows is a tale of redemption loss and transcendence of physical love to a more spiritual kind of love. “Hena”, the second story of the collection, is narrated by Sohrab, and its theme is also love and war – both internal and external battle. “In the Relentless Rain” is basically a story of love between strangers. The author doesn’t provide us the names of the lovers – rather both are addressed as dark-skinned. The next story, “Half Asleep”, is divided into two parts: Azhar’s story and Pari’s story. Azhar’s story is mainly about his sacrifices and why he favours detachment from the sensuousness. His renunciation of carnal pleasures towards attaining greater contentment ends his relationship with Pari, whose marriage he arranges with one of his friends. He ensures that Pari remains confined within the household structure. By making Pari assert that she will not betray her role as a loving wife without pretending to erase the love that she has for her former lover, Nazrul offers a critique of the conventional notion of ‘loyalty’ of wives to serve their husbands. The first-person narrator of “Insatiate Desire” soliloquizes on a saga of disunited love where the narrator falls in love with his childhood friend, feigns disinterest in her when her marriage is arranged to another man, and characterises his own actions as stemming from the most noble impulses. The final piece of the volume, “Letter from a Political Prisoner”, is an epistolary story of a political prisoner who has also been diagnosed with fatal tuberculosis. The story is addressed to the lady of his dreams, Manashi, who does not seem to have reciprocated his love.
The title story of the next section is from an anthology of the same name, The Agony of the Destitute2. The story centres around the glorification of war but in the process, it also raises questions related to war and gender. In sharp contrast to the narrator-protagonist of this narrative who detaches himself from domesticity to join the war, the protagonist of the very next story, “Autobiography of a Vagabond” suffers a tragic end to his domestic life and thereafter joins the army and eventually dies while fighting in Baghdad. “Meher Negar”, the third story of this section, is another tale of war and conflicts in love. Yusuf Khan, the protagonist, is a Pathan from the mountains of Waziristan who meets Meher Negar (whose actual name is Gulshan) after reaching a distant land to learn music. Later he joins the War of Independence for Afghanistan. Unable to forget her, he visits Meher Negar one last time only to discover that she is no more. As an allegorical piece of writing, “Evening Star” is about a man’s love for a distant beloved that is ultimately futile because of the probable demise of the beloved.
“Rakshasi” is written in the language spoken by the Bagdi community of the Birbhum district in West Bengal in which the speaker Bindi is a woman who complains to her friend about how society has stigmatized her as a demoness because she has killed her husband to save him from abandoning her and getting remarried to a notorious girl.“Salek” is a short moral story where, through a series of events, a dervish (later revealed to be Hafiz) shows an arrogant Kazi the path to salvation; the former becomes the latter’s salek or the one who shows the way. In “The Widow”, Begum, the narrator, speaks of her sorrowful youth, her happy married life and the miseries of her widowhood to her friend Salima. The story challenge multiple stereotypes that are often associated with the women of South Asia. The concluding tale of this volume is titled “The Restless Traveller” which is an impressionistic story centered round the urge towards finding freedom by restless youth.
The four stories that comprise the third volume of Nazrul’s stories and the next section, called The Shiuli Mala3, speak about Nazrul’s ecological sensitivity. The opening story “The Lotus-Cobras” is about Zohra and her human and non-human intimacies. As the editors rightly point out, “In the portrayal of Zohra’s attachment with her serpent sons, Nazrul seems to be very close to the essence of posthumanism where radical posthuman subjectivity is understood on the basis of an intersectional ethics of plurality”. “The King of the Djinns” is a tragicomic story about how Alla-Rakha, the protagonist, resorts to a series of tricks to get married to Chan Bhanu, the woman he desires. “The Volcano” deals with the disaster that is caused by the sudden eruption of repressed anger and egotistic pride in Sabur, the humble, helpful and uncomplaining protagonist of the story. It is a study of the anxiety of manliness. “The Shiuli Mala”, the concluding story of this section, is a testimony to Nazrul’s love for the trope of separated lovers or unrequited love. Set in Shillong, it primarily deals with a platonic and disunited love between Azhar, a well-known chess player, and Shiuli, the daughter of another brilliant chess player, Professor Chowdhury. Structured as a flashback, Azhar narrates the story to his friends who are part of a regular chess adda.
Two unanthologised stories end the collection. “Letter from a Lost Boy” is an epistolary account of a boy who writes to his mother about some incidents in his life that have occurred since he had left her until the time of his return. The story is a critique of child marriage and the consequent early widowhood that brings never-ending misery in the life of a woman. “The Hawk-Cuckoo from the Woods” tells the story of a marital discord between Dushasan Mitra and his wife Romola. Their friction widens after Romola becomes too attached to an injured hawk-cuckoo and her husband feels agitated by her gradual disconnect from their conjugal life. The story ends with Romola flaying her husband for throwing the bird away, finding and hugging the dying bird to her heart and plunging into the waters of the Padma.
All these twenty stories invite the reader to re-evaluate the ‘rebel poet’ as an empathetic humanitarian who also excelled in human relationships. Nazrul is essentially multilingual – he uses Hindi, Urdu, Arabic and Persian words along with Bangla. This book is the outcome of a project sponsored by the Nazrul Centre for Social and Cultural Studies, Kazi Nazrul University, Asansol, West Bengal. The volume is a transnational, collaborative labour of love bringing together the editors and translators from Bangladesh and India. Most of them are academics and have taken up the challenge to translate the stories, which in their infinite variety, is indeed a difficult task. The stories are accompanied by a timeline of Nazrul’s life and a detailed critical introduction that not only provides foundational context for the stories, but also highlights Nazrul’s attempt to counter majoritarianism and various hegemonies by dismantling hierarchies and celebrating intimate pluralities. In fact, at the end of their introduction, the editors Syed Manzoorul Islam and Kaustav Chakraborty ask two very pertinent questions. “In which category can we place Nazrul? Is there a need to formulate a different category altogether in order to position him?” The answers of course lie with the readers of the translated stories to decide. All said and done, this volume of short stories is strongly recommended for all classes of readers who are keen to discover the multi-faceted genius of Kazi Nazrul Islam and who could not earlier savour their uniqueness because they were only written in Bangla.
Byathar Daan (Harvest of Sorrows) published in March 1922 ↩︎
Rikter Bedon (Agony of the Destitute) published in January 1925 ↩︎
Shiuli Mala (Garland of Jasmines) published in October 1931 ↩︎
Somdatta Mandal, critic, academic and translator, is a former Professor of English at Visva-Bharati University, Santiniketan, India.
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Raja O Praja, an essay by Tagore, has been translated from Bengali as The King and His Subjects by Professor Himadri Lahiri. It formed the lead essay in his book of the same name published in 1908.
Translator’s Introduction: Rabindranath Tagore’s essay “Raja O Proja” was first published in the well-known Bengali periodical Sadhana (Sravana, 1301/1894). It is anthologised in Rabindra Rachanabali (Sulabh Sanskaran) 5th volume (Visva-Bharati, Pous 1394): pp. 727-31. Tagore unravels the nature of the relationship between the colonial masters and the subjugated subject people. Much before Edward Said, Tagore examined how the colonial masters resorted to the practice of stereotyping, a strategy that denies human qualities to the colonised and renders them inferior and uncivilised. Set against the contemporary political background, the essay provides an incisive analysis of the behaviour patterns of both the British colonial government and the subjugated Indian population. It should be considered a significant contribution to the study of colonialism.
The King and his Subjects
When the British civilian, Radice Sahib1, insulted and persecuted a certain zamindar in Orissa by violating laws, Lieutenant-Governor MacDonnell2subjected the offender to a one-year-punishment.
If we reflect on this incident, it should not have surprised us. In reality, however, this act of justice was incredibly startling to the general public. This explains why some naive individuals expressed their unusual delight.
Shortly afterwards, when MacDonnell Sahib was duly replaced by Elliott Sahib3, the latter freed Radice from the punishment by illegally reversing his predecessor’s order and even promoted him to a higher post. Now the same naive people have started expressing their profound sorrows.
The task is accomplished by the will of the master. Only the master knows why he [i.e. Elliott] violated the rule; we are left desperately groping in the dark. It may be that one civilian protected the prestige of another. But the decision was surely inappropriate – this incident dented MacDonnell Sahib’s prestige, and even that of the government.
In course of their conjectures, people are providing different theories; all of these may turn out to be incorrect. On the whole, it may be said that only the government knows the ins and outs of its own policies; we are merely blind puppets being controlled by these policies.
Hence, it is my opinion that driven by our delusions, we instinctively express our happiness and sadness at the moral and immoral decisions of the people at the helm of affairs. Where everything is done at the master’s will, where our good fortune or bad depends greatly on the character and whim of a particular person, there we should consider both the auspicious and the inauspicious, the moral and the immoral as merely momentary, accidental episodes. What MacDonnell Sahib did was the result of his own will, and what Elliott Sahib did was also produced by his own caprice; we are merely ruses.
Even then, we cannot help feeling distressed or shocked by the appalling events or delight at their praise. But we should always remember the specific instances that will make us happy and contribute to our people’s glory.
This can be achieved only when all the common people develop so intense a sense of conscience and alertness that we can feel the pain together in the face of insult and injustice, and also when the government absorbs into its own system an obligation to respect the conscience of the people; only then can we genuinely rejoice.
Usually, our moral conscience, our understanding of our work culture, and our apprehension of vilification all combine to guide us to the path of duties. The principles of responsibilities of our governments are largely determined by moral conscience and work culture. Their connection with the subject people’s ideology of good and evil is very weak.
It is universally known that when conscience comes into conflict with work culture, the latter sometimes prevails. During this conflict, the moral compass of those individuals not involved in the conflict can help reinforce one’s own conscience. When we will find the subject people’s criticism being appropriately reflected in the government’s activities, we will express our happiness.
In the absence of the subject people’s criticism, the sense of moral duty of the British in India imperceptibly slackens and degenerates to such a level that their moral ideals begin to radically differ in nature from those of the native British. For this reason, we find on the one hand, the Englishmen in India hate us, and on the other, they express their utmost intolerance towards their own countrymen’s opinions, as if both were alien to them.
There might be several reasons for this. One reason is that due to the remote location of their country, the British in India forget how social criticism typically motivates or impacts actions of their own countrymen. In addition to this, the Englishman’s relationship with us is primarily based on selfish interest as they do not share any emotional bond that stems from nation-based kinship. Hence, for various reasons, it becomes challenging for the British in India to maintain the same purity of selfless duties towards their subjects. Consequently, a distinct and specific code of duty begins to develop for the colonials in India – this arises from various factors such as their self-interest and pride of power, the moral conscience of the weak, subjugated nation, and the complexities involved in administering a foreign country. The English of England sometimes fail to recognise this distinct code of duty.
Certain talented Englishmen with exposure to colonial India have taken upon themselves the responsibility of effectively introducing this unique object [i.e., this new ideology of difference] in England. By virtue of their talent, they are demonstrating that this new object has its own unique appeal.
Rudyard Kipling’s name may be cited as an instance. He has exemplary power. By invoking that power, he has created in the English imagination an image of the Orient as a cattle pen. He is trying to convince the native Englishmen that the Indian government is, indeed, a circus company. He is skillfully orchestrating our actions as a performance of strange and spectacular animals of various species before the civilised world, implying once the spectators take off their steady gaze, all the animals could immediately spring upon them. The animals are to be observed with intense curiosity, they will have to be kept under control with the proper combination of fear of the whip and temptation of pieces of bone. Of course, certain doses of compassion for animals are also required. But if you raise here issues of principles, love, and civilisation, it will be difficult to keep the circus going, and it will also be dangerous for the proprietors.
The image of strong human animals being controlled solely by willpower and compelled to dance at the mere gesture of the master’s finger is likely to fascinate the English as a curious spectacle of entertainment. This generates in them an interest in the uniqueness of the human animal and also a racial pride. There is also a profound satisfaction in being able to control someone who embodies an imminent threat, and this seems delightful to the inherent nature of the English people.
On another front, the number of Anglo-Indian team members is also increasing day by day. Anglo-Indian literature too is gaining popularity. The influence of Anglo-Indians is gradually finding roots in the English soil, spreading its branches all around. In this context, it should be mentioned for the sake of justice that many Anglo-Indians, after retiring from their assignments in India, have displayed extreme benevolence towards the helpless Indians.
For all these reasons, many native English people are sceptical about whether it would be a quixotic stupidity for them to discharge to the oriental animals those duties usually reserved for themselves, whether this act of showing equality will reveal the civilised islanders’ intellectual narrowness and inexperience, and whether this would also harm animals of various species. English philosophers such as Herbert Spencer believe that it is not only inevitable that moral ideals vary according to the standard of civilisation but also necessary according to the norms of evolution.
The truth of these opinions will be judged on some other occasion. For the time being, I can only say that its (i.e., the practice of treating Indians unequally) consequences are very painful for us. Apprehending an uprising after noticing some posters on trees in the state of Bihar, opinions have been expressed in several English newspapers that a genuine union of love is never possible between Oriental and Occidental races. The former has to be subjugated forcibly by means of fear of threats. All these, it seems, are being expressed more openly these days than ever before.
Our opinion is that even if we admit that the principles of duty in freedom-loving Europe may not be suitable for application in every corner of the ever-subjugated Orient, it is indeed an unrealistic dream for them to maintain the usual rhythm of the Oriental life here for the simple reason that our king is a European. If our country were free, the monarchy that would have evolved in the natural process in this Oriental space would surely have been different in multiple aspects. It may be that, from one perspective, the king’s excessive power would have appeared greater than it is now. Similarly, from another perspective, the subjects, by limiting the king’s authority, would have channelised their own desires in various forms and through multiple avenues. Natural compatibility can be best expressed through natural means. Howsoever they may want, the English cannot achieve that (artificially) just through policy making.
Hence, the Englishmen can behave with us just in the way they do; if they willingly distort it, that will amount to misbehaviour, it will never become an Indian behaviour. They can break their own ideal, but in its stead what will they build and how? However, the English, fallen from their ever-familiar native ideal, may turn out to be big, ferocious animals. From the hints of cruelty, laced with aggression of power, that we can trace in the works of authors like Rudyard Kipling, it seems that man often wishes to jump into the primitive barbarity of wild nature of the forest by ripping through the fine, hundred-threaded strong net of civilisation. On their arrival in India, the Anglo-Indians taste the exquisite wine of power that may create this overwhelming intoxication. The natural, spontaneous embodiment of masculinity in the writings of these loveless, difficult, power-boasting talented men has a kind of extreme fascination. That is literature for the English but for us, it is indeed a recipe for death.
Secondly, the way authors in their contemporary novels represent the Orient as appearing mysterious to the Occident is largely fictitious. There are numerous intersections between us. The similarities of the heart are often overshadowed by external differences. Modern writers tend to apply colour to, and even exaggerate, the unfamiliarity of these external features to please the readers; they do not try to unearth the similarities lying deep within, neither are they capable of doing that.
The significance of making all these statements is simply this: the idea that European values are exclusively meant for Europe is gradually spreading not only in India but also in England. Indians are supposedly so different a race that the civilised values are not completely applicable to them.
Under such circumstances, if our ethical values become strong, the policy of governance cannot go off the right track. When the English are conscious of the fact that their actions are being closely watched by the entire Indian population, they will not be able to do anything by completely disregarding India.
Recently, some evidence of this is being noticed. When India witnesses some misdeeds committed by the English, she begins to call for justice in her own feeble voice, invoking civilisational and moral values. This naturally angers the colonials, but at the same time, they are forced to remain somewhat vigilant.
Even then, full results are yet to be seen. The British consider it an admission of their weakness to adhere to codes of values that exhibit respect towards us all the time and under all circumstances. They find it insulting and harmful if one of them commits a crime against us and is punished by the law. They fear that Indians will perceive it as curtailment of power.
It is impossible for us to identify the nature of thoughts of government officials. However, I feel the untimely promotion of Radice Sahib can be linked to the above policy. This suspicion is reinforced specially when such an event is found to have occurred repeatedly. The government is, as if, silently declaring, it is your audacity to expect an English official to be humiliated for harassing and insulting one of you. Even if we have to violate conventions and neglect the rules of governance to crush that audacity, it will be desirable. The English race is greater than the norms of ethics, they are beyond the jurisdiction of justice!
For the sake of truth, it has to be admitted that the government tends to keep not only the English but also its own employees a notch above the rule of justice. This has been observed in one or two contemporary incidents. In the Baladhan4 murder case, all those involved, right from the English judge to the Bengali police personnel who were openly blamed in the judgement of the High Court, have been rewarded and encouraged by the colonial Bengal government.
We are individuals outside the realm of politics, we are not familiar with its internal complexities. There might be a hidden motive behind it [the government’s decision]. The authorities may believe that the local judge in the Baladhan case did not issue an incorrect ruling – around five to seven individuals should have been hanged in some manner. They might have nurtured a biased opinion that the incident in reality happened despite the lack of concrete judicial evidence, and that only the local judge could have determined the truth which was inaccessible to the High Court judge.
We want to say that openly rewarding, instead of punishing, individuals who have been publicly condemned by the highest court of the country, who have been proven guilty in the eyes of the public, amounts to the disregard of the moral judgment of the public. Everyone’s told we do not feel the need to offer any explanation to you about our duties. The government is not bothered about whether you praise or criticise it – our government is strong enough to withstand such scrutiny!
The governor who demolishes the anguish and moral judgement of the subjects under his shoes, and drowns their feeble, insecure voices beneath the marching sounds of their feet, is indeed a strong ruler in Anglo-India!
It is unnecessary to disclose whether this highlights their power or reveals our utmost weakness. This insolent disregard of the government suggests that, in its view, the moral judgement of the Indians is not strong enough to evoke a feeling of embarrassment in them. Instead, this unapologetic recklessness seems to them as the manifestation of a genuine power over an ever-oppressed nation.
If we can really convince the agents of the government that we do not consider the violation of ethics as bravado, that injustice, however powerful it may appear, is held as equally despicable and reprehensible in our Oriental system of judgement, and that the lack of courage to dispense justice everywhere firmly and impartially is also considered by us as a sign of weakness, only then the English would be forced to respect our norms of duties. The reason is that they will be able to discover the correspondence between our ideal and their own.
When we forget the bitter lessons of our prolonged subjugation, when we decide not to consider the injustice of the powerful as the manifestation of divine will — something that must be endured in silence — when we consider attempts at the redressal of injustice, even if it fails, as our duty, and when for these reasons, we stop being averse to sacrifice ourselves and bear pains, only then the days of true happiness will bloom. At that point, the sense of justice of the British government will never be derailed by any selfish policy and eccentricity of any individual; it will stand like a resolute mountain firmly based on the foundation of the subjects’ hearts. At that time, good gestures of the government will not accidentally be showered on our bowed heads like momentary favours; we will, on the contrary, accrue them as respect. What we are getting as alms today will be received as our rights.
Questions can be raised – offering advice is easy, but what about the solution? To that, we may retort that no proper bliss can be achieved by clever strategies alone; for that we have to pay the entire price due to it. All of us must strive to our utmost potential, proper lessons should be imparted to siblings and children in every household, a strong ideal of justice needs to be established in both the family and society, and careful attention must be paid to one’s own behaviour. Like all good advice, this too is easier to hear, difficult to implement, and is indeed age-old. However, there is no new, short-cut or hidden path other than this long, open, and ancient highway.
Translator’s Notes:
1. Mr. C.A. Radice belonged to the Indian Civil Service cadre during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. He was posted as an Assistant Magistrate and Collector in Murshidabad in 1890 and was “vested with third class powers” (Appt. File 5C—4. Proceedings B. 1—3, Ja. 1890). He was ‘degraded’ for “prosecuting Babu Radha Shyam Nissanta Mahapatra, zaminder of pargana Balinkandi in the district of Balasore” [Judl. File J-1P—113(1-21), Proceedings 134-55, Aug. 1893]. Radice’s ‘reversion’ to 2nd grade became effective in February 1895. [(Appt., File 6C—8(3.8). Proceedings B. 716-21, Feb. 1895)]. The translator of this essay traced these pieces of information in the entry on “Radice, C.A. Mr., I.C.S.—” pp. 1126-1128. Kindly see: https://sadte.wb.gov.in/uploads/pdf/D12/D1224.pdf
2. Antony Patrick MacDonnell (1844–1925) joined the Indian Civil Service in 1865. He was the Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal during the period 1893-1895. MacDonnell was respected as an expert on the Indian land reformation and famine relief. “His sharp temper and unwillingness to tolerate inefficient subordinates earned him the nickname ‘the Bengal Tiger.’” Kindly see the entry on “MacDonnell, Antony Patrick” contributed by Patrick Maume, in Dictionary of Irish Biography. https://www.dib.ie/biography/macdonnell-antony-patrick-a5180.
3. Sir Charles Alfred Elliott (1835-1911) was the Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal during the period 1890-1893. Tagore’s reference to MacDonnell being replaced by Eliott is confusing because Eliott indeed preceded MacDonnell, and did not succeed him.
4. Tagore refers to an incident which is popularly known as “Baladhan Murder Case.” It took place in Baladhan Tea Garden in the Cachar district of Assam on 11 April, 1893. Several persons barged into the manager’s bungalow in the tea garden at night and killed the manager (Mr. Cockburn) and the chowkidar and seriously wounded Mr. Cockburn’s Indian paramour named Sadi. Money and other valuables were looted. Later six Manipuris and a Gurkha were arrested. They were tried by the sessions judge John Clark (and a panel of three Indian assessors) at Sylhet who sentenced four of the accused to death. Babu Kamini Kumar Chanda took up the case to Calcutta High Court which acquitted all the accused (Sanajoba 234). “On December 11, 1893, Calcutta High Court Judges Ameer Ali and H.T. Prinsep acquitted all of the prisoners on account of the many ‘irregularities’ and ‘illegalities’ committed during the police investigation and trial, as well as the lack of corroborating evidence” (Kolsky 145).
See pp.142-48 [in Chapter 4 titled “One scale of justice for the planter and another for the coolie”: law and violence on the Assam tea plantations” (pp. 142-184)] in the book Colonial Justice in British India edited by Elizabeth Kolsky (Cambridge University Press, 2010) and p. 234 of Th. Babachandra Singh’s chapter “The Manipuris in the Politics of Assam” (pp. 213-36) included in the book Manipur, Past and Present: The Heritage and Ordeals of a Civilization, Volume 4 (Pan-Manipuris in Asia and Autochthones), edited by Naorem Sanajaoba, Mittal Publications, 2005. (Google book link: https://books.google.co.in/books?id=CzSQKVmveUC&printsec=copyright&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false)
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Himadri Lahiri retired as Professor of English, the University of Burdwan, West Bengal, India. He is currently teaching English at Netaji Subhas Open University, Kolkata.
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“If Washington goes to Dhaka, there’s a chance that Paris might make it to Stockholm. And of course Moscow would be moved to Geneva!?”
Sounds like gibberish? But this is a piece of the speculative conversation on transfers and postings that is regular in the drawing rooms of embassies and consulates, Dr Reba Som found out on her very first posting after her marriage with Himachal Som.
Both were Presidency graduates pursuing higher careers — he in Foreign Service, she on the threshold of a doctorate. But life as the wife of an ambassador wasn’t only about glamour postings, fancy holidays and brush with celebrities. It was a mixed bag of blessings, as the woman who had grown up in Kolkata with a grounding in Tagore’s music would soon conclude. For, there were the dark clouds of life away from ageing parents and school going children; from the comfort of familiar food and mastered language; from developing your potential and crafting your own identity in the world out there.
In recent years we have read accounts of retired ambassadors and career diplomats’ experiences in diplomatic life. In her memoirs, Hop, Skip and Jump; Peregrinations of a Diplomat’s Wife, Dr Som’s is a woman’s voice, abounding in stories and observations about how the spouses keep a brave front in alien surroundings to hold up the best image of her country. In this conversation, she voices outmore about her encounters with racism, with political emergencies and exigencies. In short, about her lessons in a borderless world of multicoloured humanity.
You went to Brazil (1972), then to Denmark (1974), then Delhi (1976), Pakistan (1978), New York (1981), Dhaka (1984), then Ottawa (1991), Laos (1994), Italy (2002). Please share your gleanings from these lands.
The roller coaster ride was a saga of discovery. Travelling across expanses of the planet earth that we had seen only on the pages of geography books and atlases was a great learning experience. I gained an understanding of diverse cultures, imbibed social customs, became proficient in languages, and was exposed to exotic cuisines. At the same time I faced homesickness. Each posting entailed the challenge of uprooting oneself, finding schools for children, and reinventing oneself every time.
A large part of this life was in the years that had no mobile phones, no video calls, no social media, no internet communication. What did you thrive on?
Continents and hemispheres away from home, the only link with family and friends then was the diplomatic bag. The weekly mail service ferried across oceans by the ministry in Delhi contained letters and parcels from home. We were asked to judiciously use the weight allowed to bring spices, tea, condiments, clothing and other necessities. It became a ritual to write long letters and send them weekly by the diplomatic bag to Delhi from where they would be posted to respective destinations throughout India.
Along with letters would come bundles of magazines and newspapers. These brought us news of home from which we were truly cut off. With no television or internet or phone calls, we were in the dark about all news, be it political, social or entertainment. Every week on the bag day we waited anxiously to receive the newspapers – and the letters, which had instructions, news, recipes, advice, gossip. All of these were crucial for nurturing our souls.
One telegram from my father in 1973 carried the cryptic message: ‘Reba, solitary First class.’ These were the MA results of Calcutta University which were out after a delay of two years.
I was most taken up by the understated humour of some of your encounters in your memoir. Please recount some of them.
On our very first posting, to Brazil, not only our unaccompanied baggage but also our accompanied baggage did not arrive. Eventually when the lost luggage showed up, Himachal’s ceremonial bandhgala[1]was steeped brown — in the colour of the gur[2] my mother had lovingly packed in!
In Brazil, we found the people to be fun loving but too flamboyant. They made tall claims that their institutions were the biggest in the world. But reality often proved the claims to be hollow. Such was the Presidential bid to make the tallest flag pole in the world in Brazil’s new capital, Brasilia. A very tall flag mast was indeed built but the huge flag atop it was torn to shreds since the engineers had not factored in the wind speed at that height. Brazilians mirthfully called it the President’s erection!
And at Denmark. we were surprised by a sudden news of our posting to Mozambique. We had long realised that we were mere players on the chessboard of postings – we could be shunted off across continents at the whims of the powers that be. By the same token, a couple of phone calls by the newly arrived ambassador undid the mischief. We were happy to unpack and settle down again. The only guilt I felt was when I met the owner of Anthony Berg chocolates: I had in no time demolished the entire carton of chocolates he had sent as farewell gift!
You are among the few I know who have mothered in different continents. So how different is it to become a mother away from India?
I always felt that the best way to get to know certain nuances of a country’s cultural tradition was to have babies in them. My elder son, Vishnu was born in Copenhagen and Abhishek, the younger one, in New York — and my experiences each time couldn’t be more different.
In Copenhagen, a social democrat country, hospital visits for full term pregnant women were fixed on a certain day of the week. On the preceding day they had to collect their urine in a jerry can and present it for lab examination. I was confounded and not a little embarrassed to meet other mothers-to-be, swinging their jerry cans like designer bags without fail on the appointed day. I learnt only later that, from the urine examination doctors would note the condition of the placenta and not unnecessarily rush patients into childbirth with caesarean and surgical intervention!
In NY, on the day of my discharge, the hospital staff were highly excited because Elizabeth Taylor had come in for one of her facelifts. I could not forgive them their magnificent obsession when, along with a goodbye hamper, they wheeled in a bassinet with a different baby. On my protestation the nurse rudely shouted, “Can’t you read… the tag says Som Junior?” Shocked by the implication I said, I could not only read but also see! And it was not my child. While everyone was looking on in disbelief another nurse wheeled in my little one. The babies had their diapers changed and were put back in the wrong bassinet.
Years later, we discovered in an informal meeting with an American ambassador that Abhishek was indeed an American citizen. Because, at the time of the child’s birth Himachal was posted not to the embassy in Washington but to the consulate in New York. Only consulate children were given the privilege. This discovery, rechecked by State Department Records, gave our son the US passport. It was a windfall as Abhishek went on to graduate summa cum laude from a prestigious management school in the US and enter Wall Street as an investment banker.
I must also share another truth about birthing away from India. Before Vishnu’s birth, my parents had come to Copenhagen. When I was discharged from the hospital I received their care and being fed Ma’s cuisine was the best gift I could have. So, when phone calls came from hospital, followed by visits enquiring about my state of depression, I was totally confused. I realised how many mothers suffered from postpartum depression in a society bereft of nurturing family care.
How could you master languages as removed as Portuguese from Lao and Italian from Urdu? Is a flair for languages the key to this proficiency or the training imparted before each posting?
I enjoy learning languages. My stint at learning French at Ramakrishna Mission Golpark stood me in good stead in grasping Portuguese in Brazil, French in Ottawa and Italian in Rome — all Latin languages. But there was also the hazard of mixing up some phrases and words, so similar yet so different! Like Bon Appetit in French and Bueno Appetito in Italian. Or Amor in Portuguese; amore in Italian and amour in French.
Sometimes though, I accidentally learnt how language travels. My mother had packed in many petticoats to match with my saris but without their cord. We went to a store that promised to hold all we need but all my sign language did not bring what I needed. “Phita is obviously not available here,” I told Himachal, preparing to leave. Suddenly the storekeeper perked up. ‘Fita, si senhora!” he said and produced bundles of cord.
In due time I found out that janala, kedara and chabi – Bengali for window, chair and keys – had travelled from India to become janela, cadeira and chavi.
What did Dhaka mean to one raised in West Bengal – per se the Ghoti-Bangal[3]divide, your roots or the cultural side with Firoza Begum and Nazrul Geeti?
Dhaka was a great posting in so many ways. It was a hop, skip and jump away from my home town Kolkata, with the same language and culture and yet was a foreign posting with foreign allowances!
As you know, there’s a subtle cultural difference in East and West Bengal. Both speak Bengali but in East Bengal, it’s a colloquial rustic dialect while West Bengal speaks its refined cultural form. This formed the infamous ‘Ghoti-Bangal’ divide: Urban Calcuttans looked askance at their country cousins from the East.
The difference extended to the palate. East Bengalis flavoured their dishes with more chillies and West Bengalis, with a pinch of sugar. For the fish loving people, the two iconic symbols are Hilsa and Prawns, for East and West. Emotions soared high in Kolkata when the supporters of the football teams, East Bengal and Mohun Bagan, clashed, after intensely fought matches that spurred deadly arguments and bets.
Given this background, Himachal created a minor storm by announcing to his parents from Chinsurah, Hooghly in West Bengal that he would marry a girl whose parents were from Dhaka and Faridpur in East Bengal. Ghoti-Bangal feud remained the subject of much friendly banter between Himachal and me until we were posted in Dhaka. There, in a diplomatic turnaround, Himachal played down his Ghoti background to announce that his mother’s family was from Chittagong and he was born in the principal’s bungalow in Daulatpur, Khulna, where his grandfather was posted.
To give a bit of Himachal’s family background: Dr Pramod Kumar Biswas, the first Indian doctorate in Agricultural Sciences from Hokkaido University in Japan, had settled in Dhaka as principal of the Agricultural College. His charming daughter Kana won the heart of Dr Rabindranath Som, a veterinarian who weathered the predictable Ghoti Bangal storm to win her hand in marriage.
When my parents Jyotsnamay and Manashi Ray visited us, we couldn’t visit Patishwar in Rajshahi district, where my maternal grandfather Atul Sen had worked with Rabindranath Tagore before he was arrested for revolutionary activities with Anushilan Samiti, and exiled to Kutubdia, an isolated island in the Bay of Bengal. As a headmaster, he had given shelter to Jatirindranath Mukherji, popularly known as Bagha Jatin[4].
It was a breezy day when my octogenarian father revisited Faridpur Zilla School. The colonial bungalow had acquired a fresh coat of terracotta paint. Finding his way to the headmaster’s room, he announced with a lump in his throat that history had been rewritten, boundaries redefined and new national identities forged since 1923, the year he had matriculated.
The headmaster, delving through yellowing files, fished out the matriculation results for that year. My father’s face was that of an excited school boy impatient to show off his prowess: “Look at my maths marks! Oh yes, my English scores were a trifle lower than expected because I had a touch of fever, but look at Jasimuddin’s marks in English! Thank God, he passed it.” We looked around in hushed surprise. This isn’t The Jasimuddin, the beloved poet of Bangladesh? “But of course,” my father responded. “Jasim’s weakness in English was my strength!”
Dhaka was also personally fulfilling as my doctoral studies, which I had carried across three continents, found fruition at last! On another front, I met with success in gaining the confidence and blessings of Firoza Begum, the legendary exponent of Nazrul Geeti.
The songs of Kazi Nazrul Islam were a great favourite of my father. He often hummed those made famous by Firoza Begum. Since I had trained in Tagore songs from age five, I never aspired to master the distinctly different style of rendition. A chance encounter with the golden voice revived this desire. Firoza Begum bluntly refused. When I persisted, she wanted to hear me sing a few Tagore songs.
One morning I mounted three flights of steps, harmonium on my driver’s shoulder, to enter her flat with apprehension. At her bidding, I sang four songs of Tagore. She heard me without any comment, then she asked why I hadn’t been singing for Bangladesh television. My relief was palpable! I had passed her test.
Over the next two years, my weekly classes with her extended well beyond the music lessons to serious discussions on life itself and the meaning of religion. What began as a guru-shishya[5]relationship, transcended to deep friendship. She declined any remuneration and dearly wished that I should cut a disc. This wish of hers came true only when Debojyoti Mishra heard me and decided to record my Nazrul-songs for Times Music in 2016.
Food is perhaps the first face of culture. So please share with us some of your culinary adventures. Or should I say ‘fishy’ stories?
Adventures? I could talk about the chapli kebabs in Pakistan, or about putting samosas in Bake Sales. I could tell you about making rasgullas from powder milk. I could even tell you about our gardener in Laos who merrily collected every scorpion and caterpillar that came his way, “for snacks,” he told me. But let me focus on fish.
The very first party I hosted at home in Brazil led me to seek substitutes for Indian ingredients. Fish of course had to be on the menu, mustard fish at that. I had already learnt from the Brazilian ambassador in Delhi that surubim, being boneless, was the most suited for curries. So surubim it was for months until the day I had to go to the fishmongers – and found it was a monster of a whale!
In Pakistan, traversing the arid countryside of Sind, the train would stop at stations where fillets of pala were being shallow fried on large skillets. Savouring its delicate flavour we went into a discussion on the merits of pala versus hilsa. Both have a shiny silver body with thin bones, both swim upstream against current. The taste of hilsa steam-cooked in mustard sauce is a super delight in both Dhaka and Kolkata. There of course the discussions are on the merits of the hilsa from Padma and Ganga respectively.
In Laos I once called the plumber to ease the draining of the bathtub since the pipe had got clogged. He arrived with a live fish in a plastic bag and promptly emptied it into the pipe. It would eat through the slush as it travelled through the pipe, he assured me!
Post retirement, Himachal settled to honing his culinary skills. Cooking, which he had started in Ottawa, became his lasting hobby. He would shop for fish in C R Park or INA Market[6]. He would pore over cookbooks and plot innovative recipes. “Cooking,” he was quoted in Outlook magazine, “is art thought out with palate.” And his piece de resistance was the salmon baked whole.
Which was your most cherished, or striking, brush with celebrities in world history?
At one of the finest dinners in Copenhagen I found myself seated next to a countess. She invited me to visit her since she lived in the neighbourhood. The next day a liveried man arrived to escort us to an imposing manor house. We were welcomed with sherry and we had to select a card from a silver salver with the name of our partner for the dinner. I was escorted by a handsome young man who floored me when we exchanged names. He was the descendent of Count Leo Tolstoy!
Another memorable encounter was with a person straight out of the history books. I was strolling in a forested park outside Copenhagen. I noticed with a shock that I was looking into a glass topped coffin. The aristocratic face inside had an aquiline nose and a goatee that lent a refinement to the visage that still sported a faint smile. The starched lace collar was held in place by a jewelled button that showed impeccable taste. But the elegant hands tapered off to skeletal fingers, and the feet too had become skeletal.
The plaque at the bottom of the coffin informed us that this was James Hepburn, the Earl of Bothwell, with whom Mary, Queen of Scots had fallen in love. It was a fatal attraction since both were married. But soon her husband, Lord Darnley, the father of her son James, the future king of Scotland and England, was mysteriously burnt down in a manor, and Bothwell was granted a divorce. However, their marriage incensed Catholic Europe, so Mary gave herself up to buy the release of Bothwell, who fled to Denmark.
‘Whoever marries your mother is your father’: this dictum defines the acceptance of whatever political dispensation you are forced to live with, at home or abroad.So how did you cope with a turmoil like Emergency or antagonism in Islamabad?
We had returned to Delhi in the midst of Emergency. We felt some relief to see trains running on time and punctuality being maintained in government offices. Corrupt officers were being hauled up and over-population being addressed. But the atmosphere was sombre and conversations hushed. The deep scar left by the Emergency saw Indira Gandhi being swept out of power the following year.
In Islamabad tension had mounted when I arrived over the imminent execution of Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto[7]. Our residence had become the favourite watering hole for Indian and international journalists who knew Himachal from his Delhi days. Animated discussions over drinks were followed by quick despatches typed out on my rickety typewriter. Unending speculations on the unfolding drama had kept us on tenterhooks. Then one morning in April 1979, the phone rang to say, “It’s done.” [8]
How did Italy change your life?
Italy was easily the best posting of my life in embassies, not only because of its rich history. There I found Italian artists painting inspired by Tagore’s lyrics, and singers like Francesca Cassio singing Alain Danielou’s translations. What made them take it on? The question led me to rediscover Tagore.
My singing of Rabindra Sangeet also found recognition in Rome. My first CD album was released there. I was in many concerts. It was so fulfilling when my translation of Tagore’s lyrics into English found appreciation. Tagore himself believed that his songs were ‘real songs’ with emotions that speak to all people. I began translation in earnest. And that led me to write Rabindranath Tagore: The Singer and his Song (Penguin 2009). The book, with my translation of 50 Tagore songs, was considered very useful to many performing artistes who could understand and represent Tagore better in their art forms.
Please tell us about growing up with Tagore.
Like many girls in Kolkata I began learning Rabindra Sangeet from the age of five. Over the years the songs grew on me. The unique lyrics conveying a gamut of emotions spoke to me when I was far away on postings abroad. I continued my practice of the music through the years and felt vindicated when I got the opportunity to perform to appreciative audiences abroad and back in India.
Why did you work on his songs rather than his poems or stories?
There’s something compelling about Tagore songs. Remember that Gitanjali, which won him the Nobel, was a collection of ‘Song Offerings.’ Songs had given Tagore the strength to ride over the tragedies that had beset his life. They not only helped him express his grief over the deaths and suicides in his family, they were also his mode of expressing his frustration over the political situation that obtained then. And he felt his songs would help others too. “You can forget me but not my songs,” he had written.
Did you ever feel the need to jazz up the songs for Western audiences?
Tagore’s songs are like the Ardhanariswar[9] – the lyrics and the music are inseparable. The copyright restrictions that prevailed after this death did not allow translations. And that was a handicap since his music cannot be appreciated without comprehending his lyrics which are an expression of his creative thoughts.
I would say his songs have near-perfect balance between evocative lyrics, matching melody and rhythmic structure. And the incredible variety of his musical oeuvre touches every emotion felt by any human soul, without jazzing up.
Tagore’s songs are the national anthem of India and Bangladesh, and have also inspired that of Sri Lanka. But will his internationalism hold up with the change of order indicated by the recent developments on the subcontinent?
Tagore was known to be anti-nationalistic. He believed no man-made divisions can keep people segregated. He did not agree with the Western concept of ‘nation,’ he was an internationalist who accepted the ideals of democracy – ‘aamra sabai raja’[10], of gender equality – ‘aami naari, aami mohiyoshi’[11]; indeed, in equality of humans. What he wrote in lucid Bengali suited every mood. Georges Clemenceau, who was the Prime Minister of France for a second time from 1917 to 1920, had turned to Gitanjali when he heard that World War I had broken out. Even today people can relate to what he wrote.
How did all the hop skip and jump shape the feminist within Reba Som?
The wives of Foreign Service officers are often seen as decorative extensions of their spouses. People only saw the glamour we enjoyed on postings abroad, not the heartbreaks and disappointments we battled. Despite their qualifications the wives were not allowed to work abroad. Instead they had to be perfect hostesses: clad in colourful Kanjeevarams they had to prepare mounds of samosas and gulab jamuns.
But there was little recognition, appreciation or compensation by the Ministry of External Affairs of all the hard work and struggle they put in. To settle down in different postings in rapid succession. To host representational parties where they had to conjure Indian delicacies with improvised ingredients. To raise disgruntled children on paltry allowances.
Once, as the Editor of our in-house magazine, I had floated a questionnaire to all the missions abroad asking about the changing perceptions of the Foreign Service wives. That had opened a Pandora’s Box. Eventually in response to our requests the Ministry relaxed service conditions and allowed the wives to work abroad if they had the professional qualifications and received the host country’s permission. This was a veritable coup!
My own act of rebellion was accepting the Directorship of the Tagore Centre ICCR Kolkata (2008-13) after we returned to Delhi on Himachal’s retirement. It became a challenge for me to try and get the Tagore Centre on the cultural map of Kolkata, proving to myself and my disbelieving family in Delhi that it was possible!
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
The air hummed with an enchanting melody, and the sun tipped below, casting long shadows that danced like playful spirits along the path. I boarded a small wooden boat, it’s hull adorned with intricate carvings that seemed to tell ancient tales of the forest that glides across the still waters.
The mangroves that appeared tiny from afar now rose like towering sentinels, their twisted roots reaching down into the depths. Under the canopy rising up like a vast green cathedral, the sunlight dappled into a mosaic of varied hues. The boatman, a weathered old soul with eyes that gleamed with ancient wisdom, guided us through the labyrinthine channels with a steady hand. He spoke in a hushed tone, weaving tales of forgotten gods and spirits that dwelled within the heart of the forest,
Suddenly, the boatman pointed ahead to the other side, his voice barely more than a whisper through the mist. I saw it as a portal hidden among the tangled roots of an ancient tree. As they drew closer, the earth drummed with power, and I felt a sense of wonder wash over me.
With a gentle nudge from the boatman, we passed through the portal and into another realm entirely. The world around us shifted swirling colours, blending and merging into more hues. It seems strange but wonderful, the way nature’s law seemed to bend and twist, defying all logic and reason.
The trees danced with joy, their branches swinging in time to an unseen melody, while the leaves of the green mangrove stretched out in every line, shining in the sun as they unfurled like delicate works of art.
As we ventured deeper into the heart of the mystical realm, I could almost envision Lord Shiva himself taking on the form of Nataraja, the cosmic dancer. In the shifting shadows and shimmering light, I could see the divine figure gracefully moving amidst the swaying trees and swirling mist. His celestial dance seemed to echo through the very fabric of the universe, a mesmerizing display of cosmic energy and divine grace. With each step, he breathed life into the world around him, weaving together the threads of creation and destruction in a harmonious symphony of movement. It was as though the entire forest had become his sacred stage and I, a humble witness to the timeless dance of the cosmos.
All too soon, the journey came to an end. The boatman guided us back through the portal, and we emerged into the familiar world of the mangroves. I felt a pang of sorrow tug at my heart. I longed to stay in that magical realm forever, to lose myself in its wondrous embrace.
As we made our way back to the shore, the world around me seemed somehow different. The trees whispered secrets as we passed, their voices soft and melodic. The journey into the heart of the Pichavaram Forest[1] had changed me permanently, and I could feel the hum of unseen forces in the air.
And though I may never fully understand the mysteries that dwell within its depths, I will always carry with me the memory of this magical journey.
The journey made me conscious of the endless beauty the earth has to offer and revealed to me that real magic is found in the unending beauty of nature, not in spells and incantations.
Borderless 