* Lecture and Anecdote!

At the Mohini Mohan Bhattacharyya Memorial Lecture 2011

On 24^th March 2011 at Darbhanga Hall, Calcutta University, I attended the Mohini Mohan Bhattacharyya Memorial Lecture delivered by Professor Dipesh Chakrabarty on “The Human in Postcolonial Criticism”. Prof. Chakrabarty teaches History in the University of Chicago and is the founder member of the Subaltern Studies Collective. Among his important works are the essay “Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History: Who Speaks for ‘Indian’ Pasts?” and the book Provincializing Europe.  Prof. Chakrabarty said that in preparing for this lecture he read about the person in whose memory this lecture is instituted. Mohini Mohan Bhattacharyya was the first Gooroodas Banerjee Professor of English in Calcutta University and his doctoral thesis was on the influence of Plato on Edmund Spenser. The British rule in India made many Indians fall in love with English Literature. Although there is some truth in the statement that English education was used by the Britishers to colonize the Indian mind, it does not explain the concept of love. When Mohini Mohan Bhattacharyya visited John Keats’s lodging in Rome he saw bright flowers of varied colours growing outside the window of the room where Keats breathed his last. When he visited the Protestant cemetery, where Keats was buried, he saw the flowers as pale. Such perceptions cannot be inculcated by colonizing the mind.

Prof. Chakrabarty then went on to his area of specialization and said that history is the study of human affairs where the shadow always falls between theory and performance. It is quite ironical that humanity is no longer a political candidate because in the wake of globalization and global warming the world has come to acknowledge that we all are affected. This is the postcolonial condition, the theorizing of which had begun in the departments of English studies and has brought diverse people like Homi Bhabha and Stuart Hall together. Earlier there was a simple-minded assumption that humans as a subject can exercise rights and the subaltern will one day claim their rights through a revolution. Then there was the advent of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak with her essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” It was only then that the history departments belatedly started investigating postcolonialism. Moreover there is the newly emergent subaltern – no longer just the peasants – the illegal, unrecognized migrants. There is this widening gap between the two categories – the barely human illegal immigrant whose cheap labour force is exploited and the ideal of civic citizen. And there is the grim reality of the impossibility of the former category for civic recognition. No doubt, Europe is littered with detention camps. Prof. Chakrabarty narrated an anecdote about one of his visit to Delhi. It is sometimes seen that when highrises are built the labourers who work in its construction mark their passage by writing obscenities on the walls of the building. In Delhi once when he entered an under-construction building he was surprised to find the writing on the wall in Bengali. He was later informed that Delhi is filled with illegal Bangladeshi migrant workers.

The last part of the lecture dealt with how humans, who are always marked by difference, have now become the new agent of geological change. After the initial phase of denial about global warming brought by human agency, there has appeared three ironical twists to it. The first defence is that the results were unthinkable when the use of fossil fuel started. Secondly, the impetus given to productivity by the use of fossil fuel helped in the creation of free labour. And thirdly, human beings will have to adapt to climate change, which implies that many people will die inevitably. The time of Mohini Mohan Bhattacharyya was when the world was perceived as commensurable but the human in the postcolony is faced with an incommensurable world. 

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An anecdote from school: http://indianblogworld.com/2011/03/one-in-which-i-mention-two-infections/

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Sunetra Gupta has added the link of my interview with her published in Muse India (Issue 31, 2010) in her website - http://sunetragupta.com/reviews.asp

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I am now a member of Pegasus Journal. Visit my page in the journal's website -  http://www.pegasus-press.net/member/amitshankar.htm

* Tagore: Place and Space

Dear Professor Sanjukta Dasgupta,

I know that you are expecting a blog post from me about the International Conference on “Tagore: At Home in the World” organized by the Department of English (DRS SAP – III, Phase – II) and Rabindranath Tagore Centre for Human Development Studies from 10^th to 12^th February 2011 held at CSSH Hall, Alipore Campus. During those three days of the conference you and your team created in that place a space, which was not confined to just listening to paper presentation. In fact being ten floors above the earthly moorings the participants were, in a rather primitive sense, in space. The place / space dynamics is quite interesting as Dr. Debarati Bandyopadhyay pointed out with reference to Tagore’s poem ‘Tal Gach”. The tree’s place is the earth (“Ma je hoy mati tar”) but its space is created by its aspirations ("Moner shad”). The place of the conference had an address but the space of the conference was the conjunction of minds from a diversity of nations, professions, and affiliations. Differences of being presenters, professors, researchers, and students were perceived as sameness under the label of “participants”. You said in your first day’s address that Tagore had anticipated such postmodern dualities and the discourses during the conference amply displayed that. No doubt even UNESCO is celebrating the 150^th birth anniversary of Tagore.

Professor Ana Jelnikar spoke of the Tagore’s universalism in a world of particulars as the moment of becoming indifferent to difference, where all individuals fill the Golden Boat (“Sonar Tari”) with their harvest but themselves stand outside it because the boat is symbolic of the world and life but not the individual. Professor Indranath Choudhuri contended that in Tagore often the self and the universe becomes one. It is perhaps this that helped Tagore, as Professor Krishna Sen argued, to look at the Europeans as people like him and not exactly the other way round. One of the important points of Professor Sen’s paper was that the non-metropolitan locations of Tagore’s writings destabilize postcolonial binaries. She explained that it is more important to study how Tagore looked at the world and theorized it than how the world looked at Tagore and theorized him because Tagore was not just responsive to modernity but constitutive of it. Her comparison of Tagore and Fanon was very interesting because it starkly delineated the West’s distinctive relationships with India and Africa. For Tagore true freedom lay in the freedom of the mind and it is nowhere more apparent that in his signing of the the “Declaration of the Independence of the Mind” charter at Romain Rolland’s invitation, as Professor Chinmoy Guha pointed out. Professor Choudhuri also stated that Tagore understood the fundamental difference between the West and India – the West develops through substitution whereas India develops through accommodation. It was this non-parochial and inclusive notion of nationalism of Tagore that was in disjoint with the prevalent Swadeshi views and the concept of ethnic nationalism. It made Tagore declare, rather rhetorically, that he was not a patriot since he sought his compatriots all over the world. Professor Amartya Mukhopadhyay countered that Tagore was a patriot with a difference because he did not recognize the nation with its impersonality as in the European sense. Instead Tagore’s love for his country was equivalent to his love for his country people, as Professor Subhoranjan Dasgupta emphasized.

Tagore’s inconsistencies are said to be his weakest points but these are not inconsistencies of irrationality but of creativity, and hence are in a sense his strongest points too. Professor Tutun Mukherjee showed how Tagore explored the uncanny in his ghost stories and through his experimentation with planchet. It was Tagore’s creative way of probing the dimensions of reality. Another point of contention was Tagore’s attitude towards gender issues. Professor Sudeshna Chakravarti demonstrated this through Tagore’s debates with his contemporaries like Chandranath Basu. Professor Blanka Knotkova-Capkova too took up the gender question in illustrating how spiritual principles are gendered in Tagore’s poem “Bairagya”. Professor Jharna Sanyal indicated that the irony of hailing Tagore as Bengal’s Ibsen and his “Streer Patra” as the Indian version of The Doll’s House lay in the fact that Tagore always put aesthetics over theory whereas Ibsen did just the opposite.

It is poignant to note that in Germany and East Central Europe Tagore’s reception, though did not have any colonial context, was still mired by his wise man image. Professor Martin Kampchen exquisitely explained through the anecdote of a Gurkha soldier keeping his faith on a German soldier (or was it the other way round) on hearing Tagore’s name on his lips during the First World War. But the mystic East was to fade soon from their imagination and along with it Tagore too. Professor Imre Bangha showed how Hungarian attitude to Asian literature was shaped by the translations of classic Chinese poetry (of poets long dead) juxtaposed with the translations of Tagore (who was still living), thereby pushing Tagore into the tradition of the past.

Professor Uma Dasgupta’s paper was an exposition on Tagore’s conception of Santiniketan and Sriniketan. Tagore wanted to bring about a fruitful conjugation of the urban and the rural. But what came as an inadvertent hindrance towards the realization of his dream was the lack of state support and paradoxically his own high culture. Dr. Amrit Sen in exploring the recurrence of the word “tirtha” as a motif in Tagore’s travelogues could also equate Visva Bharati as Tgore’s “tirtha”. Professor Ramkrishna Bhattacharya observed that Tagore’s later travelogues became a cross between diary and philosophical notes (often written in epistolary form). It was the transcendent aspect of “tirtha” which formulated Tagore’s Santiniketan as “Bhraman Vidyalaya” (travel school). Tagore took as his inspiration the forests schools of the Upanishads. Professor Udaya Narayana Singh in his address made an interesting comparison that in India civilization grew up in nature unlike in the West where civilization grew up within fortified cities. Ramkumar Mukhopadhyay lamented that post the theft of Tagore’s Nobel medallion walls are being erected around Santiniketan. Tagore’s vision of a space for imparting knowledge will now confine itself into a walled place. 

Tagore was against imperialism and all forms of injustice. That is why, as Professor Amiya Bagchi said in the inaugural session, he was not at home in the world he was in. Tagore gave away his knighthood in protest against the Jalianwala Bagh massacre. Tagore refused to go to Canada because of Canadian government’s discriminatory policy towards the immigrants. Professor Bagchi referred to Dr. Binayak Sen’s case to remind us how Tagore’s speech in Town Hall where he said that the strong thinks that the weak has no rights is relevant even today. Professor Probal Dasgupta, in his address on “Tagore’s Book of Consecration, Naibedya”, posited that Tagore reconciled his democratic and anti-authoritarian ideals through his devotion to god. This thesis was also apparent in Professor Madakranta Bose’s beautiful presentation where she showed how Tagore transformed Jayadeva’s divine figures into unambiguous human figures, shifting them form the religious to the secular sphere, without diminishing the aesthetics of Bhakti. 

And when Professor Amita Dutt (Mookherjee) and her disciples employed the dance form to explore Tagore’s songs it became almost divine – a completion of an aesthetic spiritual circle. Professor Moon Moon Majumdar in her paper on Tagore’s Shillong trips had spoken of Tagore’s fascination with Manipuri dance. Dr. Shoma A. Chatterjee too had shown the Manipuri dance form in her presentation on the usage of Tagore’s songs in films. So when Professor Dutt made a fusion of classic dance tradition of Manipur with the folk tradition of Gujarat it came out admirably in the performance with cymbals by her two disciples to the tune of “Dui hate kaler mandira”. It was followed by Professor Dutt’s own performance to ‘Marana re tuhu mama Shyama samana” where she revelled in the “abhinaya” aspect of Kathak. And there was another performance by one of her disciples to the song “Nupura beje jai rini rini”, which came a as  pleasant bonus at the end. I remember Professor Dutt’s performance in the 2006 DRS seminar at Derozio Hall where there was a proper stage but this time round she did not have that advantage. Yet, as she herself said, one should not assume that the viewer lacks imagination. I could not help but compliment her when I met her in the tea lounge.

Prof. Sanjukta Dasgupta with Prof. Amita Dutt

So far I have been telling you what happened officially at the conference, which you already know, and recording these here is my act of minimizing the probability of forgetting them. But there were voices on the sidelines too, which you may not have heard, and I put those too on record. I was strolling in the passage between the lounge and the seminar hall on the third day after lunch.  When Sahila looked at me askance, I told her a half-truth that I was just waiting for the post-lunch session to start. The other half of the truth was that my waiting had become coterminous with watching and listening at the margins. I heard voices that berated that Tagore could never accept Islam as a religion of India; how when Tagore heard that Oxford University Press was going to publish some criticism of his work, he used his stature and his influence to stall such a publication; and how Tagore wrote in pseudonym to newspapers castigating those who criticized him. It was then that I understood how Tagore could return the gaze to the West, which had conveniently put him on a pedestal and as conveniently shoved him into oblivion. It was then that I realized that Tagore could afford to be inconsistent without any loss to his status. That was the human Tagore.

On the sidelines something else too happened. I met for the first time in person Professor Sandipan Sen and Professor Siddhartha Biswas, both of whom I had known for a number of years but only online. [By the way I am now an associate member of Pegasus journal and my page at the journal’s website can be accessed here.] Now if you are wondering why I have employed the epistolary form for this blog post then the blame should squarely fall on Professor Chinmoy Guha anchored and Ladly Mukhopadhyay directed excellent documentary on the letters of Rabindranath Tagore, which implanted the germ in my mind as soon as it was shown in the final session of the conference.

And you don’t have to remind me of your impromptu transformation of the valedictory session into a photo-op for all the volunteers and faculty members who helped to organize the three-day conference so successfully. Your gesture was highly commendable. I can still visualize Saptarshi handing over the conference kit, Sanghita calling for tea, Prasita distributing the participation certificates, and the rest of your team who by their efforts made the participants feel at home during the conference. I personally thank them all. And a special thank goes to you.

Regards,

Amit Shankar Saha

* Criterion!

My research article titled "The Spiritual Sense of Alienation in Diasporic Life: Reading Anita Desai, Bharati Mukherjee, Sunetra Gupta and Jhumpa Lahiri" has been published in The Criterion: An International Journal in English (ISSN 0976-8165) Vol. I. Issue III (December 2010), Ed. Dr. Vishwanath Bite.
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Arekti Premer Golpo! Where it fails?

Is Arekti Premer Golpo a good movie? Yes. Is Arekti Premer Golpo above criticism? No. So, to criticize or not to criticize? – That is the question. The film in question has been basically running a one horse race in the field of films exploring the third space in gender with success (pun intended). Obviously there have been serious films earlier like Fire, Darmiyan, etc. of this third space (and here I don’t take into account non-Indian films like Boys Don’t Cry etc.) but those movies came at a time when the cognizable Indian society was still in the phase of denial and anger at such portrayal. Since the decriminalisation of homosexuality the Indian society has entered the phase of acceptance (though not without a snigger). In fact the film’s name itself vouches for this acceptance phase. So, Arekti Premer Golpo’s focus has to be rather different from the other films and no doubt it is so. But the focus has to give some latitude for extrapolation and it is here that the film fails. I saw the film about a month ago. When I came out of the movie hall I overheard a couple of youngsters – a boy telling a girl that the message of the film is that any relationship with people of the third sex is bound to be unsuccessful and cause pain. I at once felt that the film has failed to convey the right message to the lay person, though it has succeeded in creating an atmosphere of acceptance where such issues can be discussed. In the postmodern world it is the celebratory aspect of the third space that facilitates critical communication with the people at large and it is this celebratory aspect that Arekti Premer Golpo lacks in its content (though not in its production or marketing).

In academics the third space is used as an instrument of deconstruction where binaries like colonizer / colonized, white / black, male / female, etc. are destabilized by inverting the hierarchy of the privileged first term. Does Arekti Premer Golpo destabilize the accepted gender hierarchy? Not very strongly I must say. Basu’s bisexuality appears in as negative light compared to Abhiroop’s homosexuality. Uday’s matter-of-fact liberalism is linked to his Western locale. Abhiroop’s mother-fixation appears and disappears too conveniently. Chapal Bhaduri’s pangs gets too distracted in the cacophonic digressions. The bonding between Rani and Abhiroop could have been so even without Basu’s malevolence. And for the umpteenth time I find a director portrayed in a film typically as manipulative and saddled with a smoking, drinking and constantly English-speaking immediate assistants. One does not need to necessarily complicate matters to problematize an issue especially when the exploration of the third space of gender in films is at a nascent stage and does not have a queer theory background as is present in academics. I may be accused of taking a too critical view of the film but when the credit titles give Rituparno Ghosh’s name as the creative director then I cannot help but have very high expectations from the celluloid treatment. Perhaps the credit only exploited the commercial value of Ghosh’s name and not its critical value.

Sometime back I have been discussing Arekti Premer Golpo with a young friend of mine who said that earlier she had quite a prejudiced opinion about the third sex. But in Arekti Premer Golpo she can sympathize with Abhiroop and Chapal. It was then that I realised that I had grown up at a privileged time – watching films from Dersu Uzala to Amelie on Doordarshan (and not to forget the regional language festival films) and had attained adulthood watching English, August – that freed me of any perceptive biases. Whereas the generations who are still in the process of being initiated did not have such privileges and find themselves baffled by multiple television channels and multiplexes. What came to me by default has now been lost in a gamut of choices presented by the forces of commerce and the newer generations have to make their own wise decisions in choosing. In such a situation if one wants to watch a good film one has only reviews to depend on for guidance. And if a good film gets any kind of criticism, especially from a celebrity reviewer, it becomes a strong discouragement for the potential viewer. Not even the director’s reputation can guarantee a film staying on the screen for more than a week in the face of adverse publicity. The case of Dev Benegal’s Road Movie is a prime example. Maybe that is why Anjan Dutt and Bani Basu have fallen just short of making any incisive criticism of Arekti Premer Golpo in The Telegraph, which may have proved detrimental to the viewership of a good film. Moreover, the film released at a time when Gautam Ghose’s Moner Manush (a movie that explores the third space of society and religion) was running with critical acclaim and commercial success. So there was competition too in the so-called prize-winning film category. Hence the film, finding no safety net (not even of Nandan), had to exploit commercial marketing strategies to the hilt. It seems that the third space created between popular cinema and art-house cinema by off-beat films, where good films could be criticized and still watched, is somehow lost. So, why have I made public my rather unflattering opinions about this good film that might influence people? Primarily, because I am not deluded to think that my opinion counts for much and can have wide influence. Secondarily, since the film already has had a well-deserved commercial success, I find no reason to refrain from making my opinions public any further. 

* Research and Criticism and Palki 10

My short story "Monsoon Sonata" has been published in Palki Issue 10. 

My research article "Defining Selves through Nomenclature: Reading Select Diasporic Fiction of Bharati Mukherjee and Jhumpa Lahiri" has been published in Research and Criticism (Journal of the Department of English, Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi), Volume 1, 2010, ISSN: 2229-3639, Pp. 117-123.

* Muse India - Poems

Read my poems "The Radio" and "Avenue of No Fear" in Muse India Issue 34 (Nov.-Dec. 2010).

* A Book and a Story

My new story "Existence" is published at  Pothi http://pothi.com/pothi/magazine/issue/october-2010/existence

My research article "The Economic Aspect in Diasporic Theory and Literature" has been published in the book Diasporic Consciousness: Literatures from the Postcolonial World. Eds. Dr. Smriti Singh and Dr. Achal Sinha, ISBN No.: 9783639302035, Germany: VDM, Verlag Dr. Müller. 2010. 

The book is available at http://www.gettextbooks.com/search/?isbn=9783639302035+

* A Review and Two Poems

My review of Santiago Roncagliolo's novel Red April has been published in the latest issue of Rupkatha Journal On Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities - http://rupkatha.com/v2n3.php 

Two poems (The Dry Gargoyle and No More) in Ken Again -  http://kenagain.freeservers.com/POETRY.HTML#saha

* Repository

 A Veritable Repository of Knowledge

One day in the rainy month of September (2005), when I was preparing my PhD thesis proposal and had newly acquired my Calcutta University Central Library membership card, I decided to have a look at an actual PhD thesis. I went to the top floor of the Central Library, which then housed the theses collection, and was asked to select the name of a thesis from the catalogue. While browsing through the mammoth index I suddenly came across a familiar name – a name that I distinctly remembered I had heard in the university's staff room as well as seen in the online list of faculty members of the English Department. The name was Sinjini Bandyopadhyay and her thesis was titled "The Novels of Evelyn Waugh: The Art of Paradox". When I got the handsome copy of the thesis in my hands, it was less to get some critical insight into the works of the author of Brideshead Revisited than to have a visual and tactile feel of the hard-bound dissertation itself. That was my first acquaintance with a PhD thesis and the memory of it is still vivid.

Last year (2009) after I finished writing my PhD thesis, I again consulted a few theses from the same repository to garner some technical details. This time I had the online catalogue (http://www.caluniv.ac.in/opac/OPAC3.HTM) to search for the latest theses of the department. I found post-colonial explorations in Sujas Bhattacharya's thesis titled "The Fading of the 'Shadow Lines': Identity and the Fiction of Salman Rushdie, Amitav Ghosh and Bharati Mukherjee". I found feminist concerns in Nayna De's thesis titled "Real and Imagined Women in the Feminist Fiction of Virginia Woolf and Fay Weldon" (the thesis has a number of plates to make it visually rich). One of the latest theses submitted was rather interesting – it was Sanmita Ghosh's thesis titled "Enchanted Spaces: Representations of Female Domains in a Selection of Victorian Fairy Tales by Women Authors". But the one thesis that can vouch for the variety and the range of research work going on in the English Department was Burosib Dasgupta's thesis titled "New Media, New Poetics: The Changing Interface". It argues how the triple pillars of innovation - connectivity, hypertextuality, multimedia – have developed new media and a new society. It raises the question whether the new poetics of globalization, the public sphere and the internet is leading towards new forms of aesthetics.


Now when I am on the verge of appearing for my Viva, I expect my thesis to be added soon to this awe-inspiring storehouse of research work and hence I feel so privileged. Maybe someday some other researcher like me will consult my thesis in turn and feel much the same way as I feel now. I wish that future researcher all the best.

[Researchers can also consult http://indcat.inflibnet.ac.in/indcat/]

* Pegasus!

Research article recently published:


"Two Forms: Exploration of Diaspora in Jhumpa Lahiri", Pegasus: An English Critical Journal, Collection 3, June 2010, ISSN 0975-8488, Eds. Sukanti Dutta and Siddhartha Biswas, Pp. 72-81. 

* Dazzled by Dr. Majumdar’s Erudition

On 29^th March 2005 Dr. Santanu Majumdar read a paper titled “Why is there so little Indian English poetry in contemporary Bengal?” and now more than five years later the paper has been published in a collection of scholarly articles by Pearson, India. The book is titled Indian English and ‘Vernacular’ India and is edited by Professor J. G. V. Prasad and Professor Makarand Paranjape. Unfortunately the book is full of printing mistakes and we can only hope that the second edition of the book will be error-free.

The paper argues that, though Indian English poetry began in Bengal, it has not been able to find favour with readers and writers from Bengal (in contradistinction to fiction writing in English by Bengalis) because mainly due to an indigenous revival of provincial (the term is used in a non-judgemental sense) theme in the dominant stream of Bengali poetry that flourishes today. Cosmopolitanism is no longer a felt need for this dominant stream and so there is little urge to use English, the symbol and instrument of cosmopolitanism. Of course, the stream of poetry written by the former generation of poets like Jibanananda Das, Buddhadev Bose, Sudhindranath Dutta, Bishnu Dey (interestingly all of them were professors of English) was cosmopolitan in nature. They brought the West to Bengal perhaps as a reaction against the likes of Michael Madhusudan Dutta, Rabindranath Tagore, Toru Dutt, Sri Aurobindo, etc. who brought India to the West. Even when someone like Jibanananda Das focussed on rural Bengal the consciousness and sensibility was essentially European. But the subsequent generation of Shakti Chattopadhyay, Sunil Gangopadhyay, and Joy Goswami break away from this cosmopolitan tradition and initiate and make flourish a vigorous ‘provincial’ (again in a non-judgmental sense) tradition. Most of the practising Bengali poets are monolingual and generally with a Bengali medium schooling. Their assertion of Bengali culture is ‘by a consciousness and sensibility that owes little to European norms or tropes, and which shuns and eschews engagement with the pan-Indian and the cosmopolitan dimensions of Bengali life.’ This is true even in their depiction of urban Bengali milieu because, as Dr. Majumdar says, ‘poetry is provincial or cosmopolitan not according to its setting or locale but according to the consciousness or sensibility which engages with the setting or locale.’ It is somewhat a return to the roots of Bengali poetry seen in its historicity but it may as well be an unacknowledged postmodernist celebration of specificity at the cost of universality.

Dr. Santanu Majumdar’s book Dazzled by a Thousand Suns: The Impact of Western Philosophy on Indian Interpretations of ‘The Gita’ (Dasgupta & Co., Kolkata, 2008) has been highly appreciated by Professor J. L. Shaw of Victoria University, Wellington, and will be shortly reviewed in The Australasian Journal of Philosophy. The book is a monograph produced as part of the UGC-assisted DRS (SAP-III) research project of the English Department of Calcutta University. It examines Indian responses to The Bhagabadgita – an ancient and much revered Hindu religious text – under the influence of colonial education and of the familiarity, among major Indian thinkers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with Western philosophy in its technical sense, consequent upon such education. Dr. Majumdar argues that Western education and in particular the fundamental assumptions and procedures of Western Philosophy was an important enabling factor for these thinkers to become interpreters of this sacred text rather than to remain mere commentators. No doubt an interpretation interrogates a text in fundamental ways quite beyond the scope of a commentary. The thinkers treated in this monograph are Bankimchandra Chatterjee, Sri Aurobindo Ghosh, Mahatma Gandhi, Rabindranath Tagore, Lokmanya Tilak, Swami Vivekananda, and Dr. S. Radhakrishnan. Unfortunately, this book is also not free from a number of typos.

* 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.]

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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.