* An Interview, A Story & 3 Poems

"Sunetra Gupta – In Conversation with Amit Shankar Saha" published in Issue 31 (May-June 2010) of Muse India: A Literary e-Journal.

Read my short story "The Blue Sky" in Open Salon.

Poems "The Infant", "The Youth" and "The Aged" published in Kritya: A Journal of Poetry (Volume V Part XI May 2010).

* A Memoir as a Tribute

To Dr. Chinmoy Guha on his Knighthood

It was a day in the early summer of 1991 between the First Gulf War and the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi when I first read that article. Remember it was also the year when there was a massacre in East Timor and civil war in Somalia; the year when Nadine Gordimer won the Nobel Prize, Ben Okri the Booker and John Updike the Pulitzer; and the year when Salman Rushdie’s Imaginary Homelands was first published. And it was a time when Calcutta was still called Calcutta and The Statesman was still read more than The Telegraph. In the Miscellany supplement of The Statesman of 12^th May, 1991, the article appeared titled “Tagore and Perse By Chinmoy Guha”. I was then a dreamy-eyed teenager in school quite unaware of the toil of the man clearing away the fog that shrouded the literary bridge between Bengal and France. So when I encountered Rabindranath Tagore and Saint-John Perse on that bridge arched in newsprint my imagination was seized. Fascinated and with an uncanny prophetic insight for a thirteen-year-old, I collected that piece of paper and stored it discretely.

Almost a decade and a half passed by in the innumerable vagaries of life that smothered all precociousness. But that other man by the name of Chinmoy Guha went on to lecture in the universities of Paris, Oxford, Manchester, Warwick, Lyon, Avignon, and Maison des Sciences de l’ Homme; to translate Moliere, Flaubert, Gide, and Rolland; and write many books including Where the Dreams Cross and The Tower and the Sea. Until suddenly by a quirk of fate, in 2006 at a seminar in Calcutta University that name got a face. It pricked the grey cells but the well of the mind was too deep to draw out from it the watered memory of years ago. But once fate had started conspiring there was to be no stop. Many a machinery was perhaps put into motion to produce the circumstance that brought to my hands the book Tagore and Modernity in the British Council Library. There it was in that book the almost-forgotten newspaper article, miraculously recreated in the form of an essay titled “The Golden Harp: Tagore and Saint-John Perse By Chinmoy Guha”. It prodded the warmth-giving but hidden ember in my mind to burst into flame and in its light was retrieved the sepia-ed newsprint.

It has been nineteen years now and still that piece of paper has not ceased to delight. And ever so more, whenever I chance to see that man, who wrote that article, I feel simultaneously a teenage awe and a mature affinity. The thick black hair, the wide-rimmed glasses, the bright-eyed glance, the welcoming demeanour, and the baritone voice all seem to invite and yet it is the stature of the man that daunts. So now when he has been conferred the Knighthood of the Palmes Académiques by the French government, he appears like a colossus placed in my vicinity. But for me, and maybe for many like me, he will rather remain a bust of inspiration through his writings. How privileged are those students who get the chance to study under him in Calcutta University! Today I pay my tribute to him through this memoir. My best wishes go to him. Mes salutations et mes félicitations à vous.

* The School of Athens and A Story!

The School of Athens

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In continuation of the previous post Prologue to an International Conference on “Connecting Cultures: Translation and Texts” (24^th – 26^th February, 2010, CSSH Hall, Alipore Campus, Calcutta University).

Let’s start at the very beginning, which is no doubt a very good place to start. But that reminds me of Professor Alok Bhalla’s Cheshire grin. In the first day keynote address Professor Bhalla had explored the multiple meanings the very word “beginning”. So, perhaps, a better place to start is at the end, because as Professor Chinmoy Guha said, evoking T. S. Eliot, in the valedictory session, that in our end is our beginning. But Professor Guha also wondered whether a person, who has never translated a text, can he theorize on translation. Professor Sanjukta Dasgupta objected to nothing else except to the assumption made that the translator is a male. Professor Guha’s apprehension makes me take it as a commandment: Thou shalt not theorize! And the very idea freezes my pen.

So the best place to start is after all in the middle. Yes Professor Dasgupta we are taking postmodernism really seriously. I plunge in medias res and find myself watching musical chairs being played at the high table during lunch hour on the first day. And I overhear a couple of colleagues, who lost out on their seats at the high table, dissect on their lunch plates Otala and Dasyudamana the Oriya phonetic translations of Othello and Desdemona as mentioned by Dr. Anasuya Guha in her paper in the morning session. Dr. Anasuya Guha also said that in many Bengali translations of Shakespeare’s plays the names of characters and settings are changed to suit the culture of Bengal (and example being Vidyasagar’s Bhranti Bilas). This raises the question of fidelity. But then the presentation went on to Bratya Basu’s Hemlat: The Prince of Garanhata where the play within the play is in fact Hamlet and it produces such intertextuality that justifies “fidelity in betrayal”. This though leaves a question on connecting cultures still unanswered: Which is more transcultural – a faithful translation which makes the translated text a window to a different culture or a cultural transcreation that brings a foreign text within one’s culture?

On the third day, which was dedicated to students’ papers, such questions were even raised by students like Soumit Basu (CU). In fact the third day’s keynote address by Professor Udaya Narayana Singh had the polemical thesis that all translations are original creations and vice versa. He argued that since human languages are subjected to changes and decay, splits and mergers, has allowance for falsity and manipulations, reflexivity and recursion, there is a kind of double patterning. A text is first produced in the mind of the author and then is recreated as a physical text for the readers’ consumption. In the process there is more likelihood of a mismatch between the temporal text and the physical text just as a translation is not an exact match of the original. Thus modifications and prevarications are bound to happen and it is this creativity that makes translation time-bound and original. Raktim Mukherjee’s (CU) paper on cognitive associations stands in comparison here. In this respect it is appropriate when Derrida’s theory gives translation the status of literature. Derrida’s view that translation is both necessary and impossible was expounded by Arka Chattopadhyay (JU).

[I fear that I cannot help but produce here micro-texts of lengthy papers and perhaps bring my prejudices in approximating and appropriating them. Such a charge was rightly levelled by Professor Jharna Sanyal against the doomed Macmillan translation project, especially with regard to the Macmillan’s translation of Ashapurna Devi’s Subarnalata, in her paper. So to absolve myself of any charge of infidelity and micro-texting in my translation of the events of those three days of conference into words here, I declare that this is not a report but rather an opinion piece that I am writing. Hence everything that I state here are coluured by my perceptions.]

So, where was I? Anyway, let’s plunge again in medias res, this time at the second day’s keynote address by Professor Indranath Choudhuri on “Towards an Indian Translation Theory”. As Professor Sanjukta Dasgupta called out “present sir” to Professor Choudhuri’s searching eyes from the dais, the speaker thanked her for inviting him to the conference. Professor Choudhuri said that India provides an ideal translation substratum of Indo-Aryan literature for the development of a translation theory. Ancient India’s polyglottism gave a platform for translators to treat both the source language and the target language as their own languages. Although Sanskrit dominated in the past, there are evidences like Gunadhya’s Brihat Katha, which was not written in Sanskrit but was later translated into Sanskrit (partly in Somadeva’s Kathasaritsagara). Even Kalidasa’s Abhijnan Shakuntalam was originally written in a combination of Sanskrit and Prakrit. India’s translation history from Vatsyayan’s “lokepichanubad” (translatability) to Faizi to Aurodindo’s theory to Ayyappa Paniker’s concepts helped the development of “translating consciousness” (Suniti Kumar Chatterjee). Guru Nanak’s “unhad nada” (unstruck sound) can metaphorically mean the “unheard voice” or “inner speech”, which can be discovered through translation. This makes texts like Gyaneshwari Gita (in Marathi) with its five dialogic tensions plausible, as Professor Choudhuri stressed. He stated that often deviations should not be seen as distortions. In Biblical exegesis translation is often seen as an exile – taking away from the original – but it not be perceived so in the Indian tradition.

Professor Choudhuri pointed out that in the scene where Bottom’s head is changed into a donkey’s head in the play A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Shakespeare gives the accompanying speech as “Thou art translated”. Change, adaptation, interpretation all become the various facets of translation. Dr. Tirtha Prasad Mukhopadhyay paper analysed the peculiarities of the translation of the Bible in Bengali. Dr. Santanu Majumdar discoursed on how Bankimchandra’s translation of Gita functions as interpretation. Sanghita Sanyal (CU) brilliantly presented how the empire strikes back when Shakespeare becomes Sheikh Piru in Kalyan Ray’s Eastwards. This phenomenon of writing back started since the colonial times when Michael Madhusudan Dutt mimicked the colonial masters in translating Dinabandhu Mitra’s Nil Darpan, as Saranya Sen (CU) explained. Charuchandra’s Bengali translation (1910) of Robinson Crusoe also contributed towards the phenomenon, as Milan Mondal (CU) discoursed.

Moreover the interface of translation between English and Bengali helped in the development of Bengali language as Dr. Sanjukta Das pointed out. The problems faced by the translators in this interface in today’s world were illustrated by Dr. Niaz Zaman. Dr. Radha Chakravarty’s paper on “The Rainbow Bridge: Translating across Cultures” was equally poignant in this matter. Saptarshi Mallik (CU) said that a translator can decode, demystify but not defamiliarize the source text. Often words from the source language, both translatable and untranslatable, are kept as it is – a kind of “white noise” in the target language text as stated by Sayan Aich Bhowmick (JU) in his paper on Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide. Anuparna Mukherjee (Presidency) said that a translator has to be both bilingual and bicultural. But often in a bilingual, bicultural society cross-connections between languages and cultures occur. Rituparna Das (CU) gave the example of how a Class-3 student of hers said to her, “I am falling on your feet” to mean “Tomar paye pori”. Professor Sanjukta Dasgupta during the interaction added another anecdote of how having bestowed on a student the epithet “gyanpapi” she found that the student had taken it to mean “a puppy named Gyan”.

Professor Linda Dittmar, in her discourse on American minority women’s fiction assigned translation as a destabilizing force. Professor Margery Fee showed how becoming bilingual in Quebec was akin to becoming cosmopolitan. On the other hand, Godhuli Goswami (CU), in her paper on translation of Spanish texts into English, stressed on the concept of localization. Professor Tapati Gupta showed how Ibsen’s A Doll’s House was adapted and acculturated for the Bengali stage by Sombhu Mitra as Putul Khela. Whereas Priyanka Chatterjee (CU) showed that Putuler Sansar, the Bengali translation of the English translation of Ibsen’s play, was staged in Bengal during colonial times with the characters in European costumes. Professor Gupta made an interesting observation that even in Oslo Ibsen is taught in English. Abin Chakraborty (CU) presented a study of Amalesh Chakraborty’s Punorujjiban as a translation of Ibsen’s When We Dead Awaken.

A very exciting feature of the conference was the number of students’ papers on celluloid adaptations as translations. Amrita Basu (CU) and Anindita Basu (CU) considered the various movie adaptations of Hamlet. Pranamita Roy’s (CU) paper was on Vishal Bharadwaj’s Maqbool where the original Macbeth becomes the point of departure. Debarati Banerjee (CU) showed how Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali veered from and kept faith with Bibhutibhusan Bandyapadhyay’s original. Dibyabibha Roy (CU) explained how in Peter Brooke’s Mahabharata the director becomes the translator of Carriere’s English translation. On the first day there was also a screening of a part of Krittibas and his Ramayana (Director Debojit Ghosh). Anindya Sundar Paul’s (CU) presentation on “Tonic Translations” (Auld lang Syn / Purono Sei Diner Katha, Old Man River / Bistirno Dupare, Summer Holiday / Lal Nil Sobuj, etc.) deserved to be heard for its sheer auditory pleasure. And Professor Tirthankar Bose’s presentation on illustrations of Milton’s Paradise Lost deserved to be seen as much for its visual pleasure. Professor Bose made a crucial point about how early artists were merely illustrators whereas later artists (especially William Blake) were interpreters of Paradise Lost.

In matters of painting, Dr. Reba Som revealed how the Italian artist Nike Borghese made a series of paintings inspired by listening to Tagore’s songs and reading the translations. Yes we have come back to Tagore, the one we left behind at the end of the Prologue. Rabindranath Tagore dominated the conference with six papers on him. Professor Fakrul Alam and later Anirban Guha Thakurta (CU) and Saranya Sen (CU) discoursed on the internationalism and spectacular success of Tagore’s English Gitanjali. Madhurima Neogi (Presidency) made an interesting point that during the early days of Tagore translation, none of his comedies were translated. Perhaps they were thought to not suit an English speaking culture. The last paper of the conference was by Rupsa Mukherjee (CU) on William Radice’s translation of Tagore’s poem “Shahjahan”, which seemed to be quite a fitting conclusion.

In the valedictory session, when Professor Margery Fee, Professor Ed O’ Shea, Dr. Sinjini Bandyopadhyay, and Professor Sanjukta Dasgupta came together how beautifully it evoked Raphael’s The School of Athens where Averros and Socrates conversed freely, as mentioned by Professor Alok Bhalla in his opening keynote address. Even though Professor Fakrul Alam disagreed with Professor Indranath Choudhuri’s thesis whereas Professsor Chinmoy Guha vociferously supported it, that the three of them could come together and “start a dialogue”, in the Chief Guest Dr. Dhrubajyoti Chattopadhyay’s (Pro-VC, Academic) terms stated in his inaugural speech, was good enough. After the three days of the conference how apt seems Professor Bhalla’s metaphorical imagery that all languages have their roots in the sky and their branches reach us below. I now feel so invigorated and my mind so ignited that I want to give a personal vote of thanks to all who made this conference possible. So starting form the Head of the Department of English Dr. Sinjini Bandyopadhyay, to the DRS Coordinator Professor Sanjukta Dasgupta, the DRS Deputy Coordinator Professor Chinmoy Guha, the whole DRS team (including Dr. Dipannita Datta, Prasita Mukherjee, Sanghita Sanyal, Saptarshi Mallik) to all the volunteers and even the audience, I thank you all.

[What’s missing from this narrative, apart form my naïve theorizing, are the micro-narratives of a missing abstracts brochure (fortunately restored), a missing guest (advised against travelling by the doctor), a missing presenter (being indisposed), missing tea breaks (Breaking News), and a gnawing sense of missing academia. Is an epilogue in the offing? Maybe.]

*********************

Read my short story "Who's Where?" in Vol. 3 No. 7 • March, 2010 issue of Word Catalyst Magazine. 

* Palki 9 published and Prologue to a Seminar

Read my poem "Love Pastiche" in Issue 9 of Palki at http://calcuttans.com/palki/love-pastiche-poem-by-amit-shankar-saha/

The poem also appears at Anjuman.

Prologue to an International Conference on “Connecting Cultures: Translation and Texts”

The topic of next week’s conference (24th - 26th February, 2010) under the UGC-assisted DRS SAP III Phase II programme of the Department of English, Calcutta University, has urged me to write a prologue to it in anticipation of gleaning a rich crop of knowledge over the three days of the seminar. Additionally, my PhD thesis is on “The Indian Diaspora in Transition” and one aspect of transition is the cultural self-fashioning, which at some level can be interpreted as connecting cultures. Although translation is different from transition, it is the prefix “trans” that has come in vogue as the tool of critical exploration. According to Aihwa Ong, “trans” stands for both moving through spaces or across lines as well as changing the nature of something. In case of translation that “something” is the text and the change is the change in language or in medium (primarily into films) whereby cross-cultural connections are established.

The primary form of literary translation is from one language into another because without it, as the eminent translator Ketaki Kushari Dyson once said in a panel discussion on “Tagore in Translation” (2004-05), “communities do not get to know each other’s literary treasures.” Post translation what is produced is not essentially one text in two languages but rather two texts, albeit related, but having their own separate existence. The translated text should not merely correspond to the original text but should somehow dissolve the original text and attain a direct correspondence with what the original text represents or depicts. The French poet Saint-John Perse once wrote about Rabindranath Tagore’s translation of Gitanjali that it “is the only poetical work worth its name n English for a long time” (Ref. “Tagore and Perse” by Chinmoy Guha in Miscellany supplement of The Statesman, Kolkata, May 12, 1991). Perse, despite knowing that Gitanjali is a translation in English of Bengali original, took it as a poetical work in English. Buddhadeva Bose in his book An Acre of Green Grass acknowledged that “Gitanjali is more than a great work in English; it is the work of a great English poet.” Ketaki Kushari Dyson says that “every language is a way of looking at the world,” so in that perspective translations are the different ways of looking at the same world. But she also adds that “every language has its own culture” and hence while translating from one culture to another one has to “deal with references” and hence “some scholarly apparatus is necessary.” Otherwise pitfalls are there. As Ketaki Kushari Dyson recalls from her childhood how she used to break down the name Rainer Maria Rilke in Bengali as “Rhine nodir maria ril ke” to mean “dedicated to Maria Ril who dwelt on the banks of the Rhine.” Thus she illustrates her magical relationship with language.

According to Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, a translator has to surrender to the text. True. But what if the author is the translator? Like Tagore. Tagore, instead of translating literally the poems of Gitanjali, transforms them. Hence “sravana thala” becomes “golden basket” and not “golden plate” because basket is a better visual image in English (Ref. Bose). “Nilaj nil akas” becomes “ever-wakeful blue sky” and not “immodest blue sky” because the associations of “lajja” cannot be conveyed by any English word (Ref. Bose). “Nibid megh” becomes “a thick veil” and not “spreading heavy clouds” because cloud begets different images in Bengal and England (Ref. Bose). Thus Buddhadeva Bose has written about Gitanjali: “as if the poem never suffered the grill of translation, but came straight from the poet’s heart.” Tagore had once commented that words are the daughters of affluent families; they bring along with them a lot of wealth – “artha” in Bengali means both wealth and meaning (Ref. Jharna Sanyal’s essay “Postscripting Modernity: Reading Tagore’s Punashcha in Context” in the book Tagore and Modernity, Eds. Krishna Sen and Tapati Gupta). Buddhadeva Bose says that minor poems translate well but great poetry is obstinate, maybe because the diction of the latter is rich with associations.

Tagore also translated some of his prose works. In Naukadubi (The Wreck) he appends in-line glosses at some places to convey the Bengali meanings in English. When Ramesh tells Hemnalini, “tell me that you will never distrust me,” Tagore adds, “It was the first time that he had used the “thou” of close intimacy in addressing Hemnalini.” Tagore had to add beside “Kayastha” the words “or writer caste, inferior only to Brahmans in Bengal.” He had to gloss beside “luchi” in brackets “fried cakes.” And when Kamala tells Sailaja about the golden bracelets she had given Umi – “You can have them cut up and made into a necklace for her,” (my italics) it sound rather silly. Bengali has a gamut of untranslatable words like “abhiman,” “biroho,” “kerani,” “dharma” etc. That is why Indira Chowdhury in translating Ashapurna Debi's Pratham Pratisruti (The First Promise) writes: “I have left untranslated all terms that do not have conceptual or material equivalents, relying instead on a glossary.” She adds that she has “chosen Indian English equivalents over British or American colloquialisms… Thus ‘ojha’, commonly translated as ‘witch doctor’ and reminiscent of the colonial vilification of indigenous systems of healing, is translated here as “folk healer.” A pithy comparison with Tagore gets to the point – Tagore uses the word “kedgeree” in his translation of Naukadubi whereas Indira Chowdhury uses the word “khichri” in her translation of Pratham Pratisruti and explains its meaning in the glossary. Perhaps their target readerships were different but therein also lies the cultural context.

* New Year - New Writings

Read my short story "Mr. Sen" in Issue 29 of Muse India.

Read my poems "A Bust Called Tagore", "The Statue of a Dancing Damsel" and "Heavily Pockmarked Floor" in Vol. V Part VIII of Kritya: A Journal of Poetry.

Also read my poems "Malaise" and "The Swing" in the January 2010 issue of Pens On Fire.

* WritingRaw

Read my poem "Sanctum Sanctorum" at Writing Raw.
Also at Muse India (Your Space)

Update: I have submitted my PhD thesis, titled "The Indian Diaspora in Transition: Reading Anita Desai, Bharati Mukherjee, Sunetra Gupta and Jhumpa Lahiri", in Calcutta University for adjudication.

And I am indebted to my three English guides:

1. Mr. Steve Menezes (Secondary and Higher Secondary levels)
2. The British Council Library, Kolkata (Graduate and Post-graduate levels)
3. Dr. Santanu Majumdar (Doctoral level)

Saddened that with the end of Shri Gopal Krishna Gandhi's tenure as the Governor of West Bengal, he no longer remains the Chancellor of Calcutta University.

* Rupkatha

Read my scholarly article "Exile Literature and the Diasporic Indian Writer" in Volume 1, Number 2, Autumn 2009 issue of Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities: An Online Open Access E-Journal, ISSN 0975 – 2935, Ed. Dr. Tirtha Prasad Mukhopadhyay, here.

The article also appears in Directory of Open Access Journals - http://www.doaj.org/doaj?func=abstract&id=528383&recNo=8&toc=1 and in Google Scholar - http://scholar.google.co.in/scholar?hl=en&q=amit+rupkatha&btnG=Search&as_sdt=2000&as_ylo=&as_vis=0

Read my poem "Mountain Stream" in the November 2009 issue of LSS: Long Story Short - An Ezine for Writers here.

Read my poem "Full Moon" at PoemHunter.com

* Chicken Soup for the Indian Teenage Soul!

Read my publication, "Remembering a Room and an Age", in Chicken Soup for the Indian Teenage Soul (New Delhi: Westland Publishers, 2009). The unedited version of the anecdote can be read in my blog at Sulekha.com


Also read "How This Dussehra Became Memorable For Me" here.


Read the short story "On aTramcar" in Palki 8.

* Humanicus

My latest publications -

" The Problem of Personal Identity: A Philosophical Survey through the Selected Fictions of Anita Desai, Bharati Mukherjee, Sunetra Gupta, and Jhumpa Lahiri in the Context of the Indian Diaspora", Humanicus: Academic journal of humanities, social sciences and philosophy, Issue 3, Summer 2009, ISSN 1803-7836, Ed. Srdjan Jovanovic, Czech Republic, Pp. 60-74, <http://www.humanicus.org/global/issues/humanicus-3-2009.pdf>

"So Good in Black by Sunetra Gupta: Bespoke Ethics", MuseIndia: A Literary e-Journal, Issue 27, September-October 2009, ISSN 0975-1815, <http://www.museindia.com/showcurrent16.asp?id=1417>

* I have recently updated my website http://www.angelfire.com/poetry/ss0/

* Amartya Sen!

Read Re-visiting Amartya Sen’s Lecture on “Justice – and India” at IndianBlogWorld.com and also at Sulekha.com

* Stratagem

Read "The Stratagem" at IndianBlogWorld.com

* Palki and Many Midnights

Read the short story A Ghost Story at Many Midnights.

Read the poems Diasporic Voices and The Migrant at Palki 7.

* May

Read my review of Sanjukta Dasgupta's latest collection of poems More Light... at www.Boloji.com

Read my essay "The Psychological Sense of Exile and Alienation: A Selection from Anita Desai’s Fictional Characters" at www.Boloji.com

My poem "Let Our Lives Resonate with Music" now also appears in my blog at Sulekha.com

My poem "Love in the time of Fear" now also appears at AparnaOnline.com

* Approved

My PhD pre-submission Departmental seminar is over. The synopsis of my thesis is approved with some valuable suggestions.

* Sunetra Gupta

Finished conducting an email interview with Sunetra Gupta.

Join my Orkut Community on Sunetra Gupta -
http://www.orkut.co.in/Main#Community.aspx?rl=cpp&cmm=60519046

Sunetra Gupta's website: http://sunetragupta.com/

Her recent interview: http://www.wildriverreview.com/spotlight_GUPTA.php

* So Good in Black!

Read my poem "Love in the Time of Fear" at Sulekha.com

Recently met Sunetra Gupta in Kolkata at the launch of her latest novel So Good in Black and am currently reading the new book...

* Reflections!

My first print-publication in an academic journal is out -
"Parent-Child Relationship in Diasporic Life: Engagement with the issue by Anita Desai, Bharati Mukherjee, Sunetra Gupta, and Jhumpa Lahiri", Families: A Journal of Representations , Vol 5 No 2 & Vol 6 No 1, 2008, Ed. Sanjukta Dasgupta. (more)

Read the book review of Jhumpa Lahiri's Unaccustomed Earth published in the literary e-journal MuseIndia (Issue 23, Jan-Feb 2009).

My Three Guineas: Reflections on a Seminar

CSSH Hall: I sit clenching my palms into fists in excitement and listen to the presenters as they speak on the topic “Breaking the Silence: Reading Virginia Woolf, Simone de Beauvoir, and Ashapurna Devi" (Alipore, 15^th & 16^th January, 2009). For company I have a venerable audience populated by the likes of Prof. Bani Basu, Pushpa Renu Roy (daughter of Ashapurna Devi), Dr. Nupur Gupta (daughter-in-law of Ashapurna Devi), and many more.

Home: I relax and open out my palms to find three guineas there. Dr. Barnita Bagchi had spoken of Three Guineas of Virginia Woolf and as if miraculously the three Woolfian guineas have come to manifest in my palms. What do I do with them? Should I give them to anti-war efforts, but there isn’t any war; or should I give them to build women’s colleges, but there are many women’s colleges; or should I spend them for the advancement of professional women, but what about my profession? So, whom should I give the guineas to?

CSSH Hall: Ashapurna Devi (1909-1995) was never allowed to go to school by her grandmother, but was encouraged by her mother to read books. After her marriage at a tender age, she made writing as her profession. Her profession helped her to buy the proverbial “room” of her own and she filled the room with domesticity. Prof. Sanjukta Dasgupta’s phone rings and an eminent writer calls her to tell that, compared to the feminism of Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) and Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986), Ashapurna Devi is regressive. The seminar goes on. Feminism was not what Ashapurna Devi chose but feminism was that she chose. Ashapurna Devi is regarded as the writer of the “antahpur” (often derogatorily called “kitchen writer”). If Virginia Woolf had known Ashapurna Devi, she may well have understood the impediments that prevented her to write a War and Peace. But Prof. Jashodhara Bagchi pointed out that social transformations do begin from within domestic space. In the opinion of Dr. Shoma A. Chatterji, the confined spaces, like the “ghomta” or the bedroom, are symbolic “antahpurs” and it is these mute chambers that provide the seeds of articulation. A woman under the “ghomta” may silently mock at society's strictures. But why is the muteness? It is because Ashapurna Devi’s world is totally different from say Simone de Beauvoir’s world. Unlike Ashapurna Devi, de Beauvoir could have a live-in relationship with Jean-Paul Sartre without causing a major scandal in France, which is quite inconceivable even in today’s India. On the other hand Ashapurna Devi lived in the world where often writing was prohibited for women, as reiterated by Dr. Mallika Sengupta in her paper titled “Creativity versus Domesticity.” What is common between the two societies is the overbearing patriarchal order. Simone de Beauvoir despite her canonical text The Second Sex is recognised as an intellectual with the epithet “woman” attached in front. Virginia Woolf despite creating her polemic alter-ego in Judith Shakespeare had to follow her doppelganger towards a similar fate in death. Coming back to Ashapurna Devi’s world it is seen that the patriarchal order is so stringent that even breaking silence is a form of revolution, as Dr. Laxmi Parasuram clarified. Prof. Jharna Sanyal went on to explain different forms of silences in Ashapurna Devi’s narratives. There is not only the silence of women (housewives, widows, etc.) but equally the silences of the men-folks. In Pratham Pratisruti (The First Promise) the silence of Satyabati’s husband Nabakumar, or her father Ramkali are conspicuous in front of the questioning female. Prof. Jharna Sanyal further stressed that silence can be a token of power. In one of Ashapurna Devi’s short story (I fail to recall the title) the wife of a man, who has been missing for a long time, gets the news of his death. She hides the news and attends to her sick father-in-law. In a few months when her death-bed-bound father-in-law dies, she reveals the secret to all and accepts the societal norms of sparse life of widowhood. The widow temporarily suspends time so that her old and ailing father-in-law might be spared the pain of knowing the death of his son during his last days. In another of Ashapurna Devi’s short story titled “Amay Kshama Karo” (Please Forgive Me) a man accidentally kills his brother and runs away leaving his wife behind. He goes missing for years and his wife lives a derided existence at her in-laws’ place. But just before the fugitive husband is to be declared dead he returns secretly to his wife to take her to a place where he has acquired a new identity and amassed substantial wealth. The wife perhaps for the first time in her life faces a choice to determine her own future. She decides not to elope with her husband despite knowing that soon she will have to live the miserable life of a widow. She will have to suspend time perhaps permanently. Why does she make such a choice? The answer lies in the psychology of the mind that has been constantly deprived of decision-making opportunities. Such a mind, on getting the least chance of volition, will exercise its enormous pent-up capacity to produce the greatest impact. The protagonist’s decision indicts her husband, who had left her in a lurch without even seeking her opinion many years ago; it indicts her in-laws, who will keep taunting her without knowing that by not disappearing she has kept the family name untarnished; and it indicts the society, which will unduly impose unfair norms of widowhood on her. This is precisely her revolt – a kind of Camusian absurdism. In Ashapurna Devi’s world a more radical revolt is escapism (Lalita & Tharu). At best there can be a dream – Padmalata’s Dream (“Padmalatar Swapno”). As Dr. Anasuya Guha remarked that the Amazonian warrior is utopia.

Home: I give my first guinea to these three writers, namely Virginia Woolf, Simone de Beauvoir, and Ashapurna Devi.

[Aside: Why does a speaker asks to be excused / permitted when s/he includes Bengali passages in an English oration? Is it only a matter of courtesy and decency? Then why is the same courtesy / decency not shown when interpolating French or even Sanskrit within English speech? It seems that English discourse “goes up” to French but “comes down” to Bengali as if the Bengali language is not academic enough.]

CSSH Hall: The bringing together of these three writers raises a fair amount of problem as explicated by Prof. Ratnabali Chatterjee. Virginia Woolf comes into reckoning primarily through mainstream English Literature as studied in traditional English departments of universities established by the colonial rulers. Simone de Beauvoir mainly finds focus through gender studies in the relatively newly established social sciences departments. Ashapurna Devi enters the debate still more obliquely through the study of Bengali creative writings in the vernacular department. Moreover Ashapurna Devi never considered herself a feminist as pointed out Dr. Dipannita Dutta. Dr. Mohar Daschaudhuri stressed that there are people like Madhu Kishwar who do not call themselves feminists but still champion the cause. It is so because, according to Dr. Murari Prasad, there are various forms of feminism – theoretical, creative, and so on. Virginia Woolf and Simone de Beauvoir fall well within the groove of theoretical feminists but not Ashapurna Devi. Feminism through creative writing is a matter of hermeneutics. That is why gender can be historicized by feminist re-interpretations of ancient texts. Prof. Nrisinha Prasad Bhaduri gave examples of ancient Indian Sanskrit writers who were women. He also recited compositions of male versifiers like Jayadeva and Chaitanya to show how their minds are “feminized” (in the sense of having acquired female sensibilities). That Kunti and Draupadi of The Mahabharata have become feminists mouthpieces, implicitly credits the male author Vyasa to some degree. But the female voices in the Vedas, which are supposed to be authentic female oracles and not “feminized” male voices, are preoccupied with regressive rituals (puberty rites, warding off husband’s consort, etc.). The depiction of the “sejuti” custom in Ashapurna Devi’s Pratham Pratisruti is nothing but an echo of the Vedic ritual. Such women’s texts perhaps can be read, in Dr. Mitali Goswami terms, as “cultural critiques.” The arguments are true even for ancient Western texts with its fertility myths and heroic legends as Prof. Blanka Knotkova-Capkova depicted. According to Dr. Naina Dey, the sex of the writer should not determine the sexuality of the text. Her paper “Speaking through the Androgyne” dealt with instances of the fictional Orlando, the real-life Sackville-West, and adhered on the “queer” of The Well of Loneliness, to show the search for a “neutral narrative.” In the Indian traditions there are Androgyne in the symbolisms of “Haragouri”, “Ardhanariswar”, “Shivashakti”, etc. But as Prof Sanjukta Dasgupta pointed out such symbolisms are convenient escapist modes of masculine orthodoxy because they do not purport equality – it is always the female in the male (Shakti in Shiva) and never the other way round. In this context the Hegelian dictum, as quoted by Prof. Sudeshna Chakravorty, becomes relevant: “Every consciousness desires the death of another.” It becomes even more resonant if the word “another” is replaced by “Other” for in the masculine world the feminine consciousness is the perennial Other. The male consciousness desires the death of this Other. It is perhaps the violence inherent in this state that is depicted in the statistics of atrocities committed against women as read out by Prof. Chinmoy Guha. Thus gender study is literary, social, historical, philosophical, political, cultural, and many more fields all at once. And here lies the need for an interdisciplinary approach for holistic knowledge as Prof. Banita Aleaz explained.

Home: I give my second guinea to the organisers of this interdisciplinary seminar, namely the Department of English, the Women’s Studies Research Centre, and their parent body the University of Calcutta.

CSSH Hall: As Prof. Pabitra Sarkar reminded the audience of the missing balcony, so cherished by Ashapurna Devi’s eponymous heroine Subarnalata, it reminded me of Prof. Sanjukta Dasgupta’s short story “A Room of His Own.” Here the male protagonist, Raja, buys for his family a four-bedroom apartment with five bathrooms. The fifth bathroom is his cherished private space where he won’t be disturbed. But the family finds the fifth bathroom as unnecessary and remodels it into the “Pooja room” while Raja is away on an official trip. So when Raja returns he is shocked to find that the least space that he had fashioned and desired as a room of his own is missing. His predicament and that of Subarnalata apparently become the same. Simone de Beauvoir belonged to a school of philosophy whose summation is found in Sartre’s famous statement: Existence precedes essence. Taking this cue Simone de Beauvoir formulates that a woman exists first before she becomes a woman. If psychologically womanhood is a becoming then it is contingent upon social circumstances. So any individual who has an awareness or experience of continuous deprivation of will, decision-making capacity, choices, and the peremptory say in one’s future is capable of identifying and being in empathy with the women’s predicament. In the valedictory session of the seminar the only male speaker on the podium was Prof. Chinmoy Guha. He was seen as the “other” in the group but he was not so because he has not been othered. His case is a matter of being and not of becoming. He may possibly be the white tiger (though not of the Balram Halwai variety) in the pack – rarity being his prime essence. In the same sense, and in the world where the male minds constantly ply their omnibuses over the female imagination, for once I want to be positively discriminatory, and instead of calling myself man, I call myself a rare woman.

Home: I give my third guinea to myself. I put it in my pocket and find the all-pervading presence of Mrs. Ramsay inspiring me to journey to the lighthouse.

Links: Calcutta University, Dept. of English, DRS (SAP III), WSRC.

* Of Note...

Visit my Book Shelf at www.Shelfari.com

Read "The Other Terrorism"

Read "Killing India From Within!"

* Lights and Amorous Verse

Read my poem "Lights" in November 2008 issue of www.PensOnFire.com

Read my poem "Amorous Verse" at www.Creative-Poems.com

* A Bookcase and a Tram

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My Bookcase

Tram Ride During Durga Puja

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* Pens on fire

Read my poem "Mind and Thought" in September 2008 issue of www.PensOnFire.com

* August!

Read the story "Murder, she thought" in Issue 10 of Clockwise Cat
Read at Sulekha.com
1) The Birth of Myths and Commonness Across Civilizations
2) Diversity in Vedic India and Internal Evidence from the Rig Veda

* Unaccustomed Earth

Read my short review of Unaccustomed Earth at Desijournal.com

My poem "The Nymph in My Garden" has been selected from Your Space of MuseIndia.com and published in its latest Issue 20, 2008.

My poem "New Year - New Beginning" has been published in the latest issue of Boloji.com

My poem "In a Happy Mood" has been published in Issue 1 of the little magazine The Calcutta Sky.

Read my short story (fictional monologue) "Fortune Revisited" at Sulekha.com

* Memoir!

Read the article titled Revisiting Deoghar After Twenty Years at Sulekha.com

Read the article titled THE GREAT DEBATE at Sulekha.com

Also re-read the poem Let Our Lives Resonate with Music
at Boloji.com

* Nymph

Read my poem "The Nymph in My Garden" at MuseIndia (Your Space)