Letters To The Editor
Rabindra Kumar Dasgupta [Professor Rabindra Kumar Dasgupta enjoyed an illustrious academic career, holding numerous academic and administrative positions, including the Tagore Professorship in the Department of Modern Indian Languages in Delhi University. He had a DPhil on a work that closely studied the writings of John Milton and another PhD delving deep into the works of Michael Madhusudan Dutt. 2014 is his birth centenary year. Among other things, he wrote a great number of letters to the editor—in The Statesman and in The Assam Tribune. Those letters have now been collected in a book titled Letters to the Editor (Gangchil). It is one way, as Professor Sourin Bhattacharya, in his opening remarks to the book says, to get round the element of ephemerality. I still recall the frail and benign figure of Professor Dasgupta climbing up the stairs of Jadavpur University in the mid-1990s and in a remarkably lucid fashion, explain to us Plato’s Ion. He would transport us to a different world, week after week. Here are three of his letters. Prasanta Chakravarty (for HUG)] ——————————————————– Dead Weight of Printed Knowledge Sir , –The grand Boi Mela (Book Fair) which gives a new life to our city every year prompts me, a man of 88 years and seven months, stricken with a pernicious bronchial asthma, to speak of Mela Boi (too many books). My grandmother had only three books Krittibasi Ramayana, Kashidasi Mahabharat and Vijay Gupta’s Manasamangal. I remember she had a preference for the Ramayana which she read for an hour before her sleep at noon. I envy my grandmother for her economy of books and in my good days read for many more hours. But what have I gained for possessing so many books and giving so much time to them? Nothing except some academic trappings which I now think are but tinsels and some academic positions to which I have failed to do justice. Perhaps I fancied books just as some women fancy jewellery. I remember K. C. Mukherjee, who taught us Aristotle’s Poetics at Calcutta University, once quoted some two pages from Homer’s Greek and when I asked him how could he remember so much he said—“Young man you read all kinds of rubbish, I read only Homer.” I think the world is now sinking under the dead weight of its printed knowledge. Virgil knew more than Homer, but Homer is the greater poet. Milton knew more than Virgil, but Virgil is the greater poet. There may be some truth in Macaulay’s saying that as civilization advances poetry almost necessarily declines. Ramendrasundar Trivedi almost the same thing in his essay ‘Mahakavyer Lakhshan.’ And towards the end of the first world was Oswald Spengler wrote his The Decline of the West asking us not to write poetry but to produce machines. The world has not stopped writing poetry, but has produced so many machines that the Pentagon has now enough nuclear heads to destroy the world in several hours. It is this which has made the United States a menace to human civilization. Let us begin to realize the symbolism of Aeschylus’s play in which Zeus punishes Prometheus for bringing fire from heaven and giving it to men. Our Faustian lust for knowledge will ultimately reduce the world to ashes. I am now too frail to hold a book for reading and what is worse I begin to doze within five minutes of my taking a book in hand. So lying in bed which is my usual position. I silently recite to myself what odd bits I read in the past. The line which comes to my mind at this time of my life when I have lost so many of my near and dear ones is Goethe’s “ You must do without, you must do without.” I do not love to turn to Shakespeare’s soliloquies although I remember many of them. For me the most stirring words in Shakespeare are Cleopatra’s “ Give me my robe. Put on my crown. I have/Immortal longing in me…? Methinks I hear/Antony call…/Husband I come.” My old eyes are wet with tears when I remember these words. The wily woman became a goddess while leaving the world. The line of Rabindranath which stirs me most is “Thou has made me endless.” But I was never a good teacher. What then makes one a good teacher. It is a sensitive and creative response to the text in hand. A good lecture is an expression of this response. I found it in my teacher of Shakespeare, P.C. Ghosh and two of my colleagues Tarak Nath Sen and Sisir Kumar Das.—Yours, etc., R. K. Dasgupta 17 February 2004. —————————- 150th Year of the Manifesto Sir,–I thought that the Marxist government of West Bengal would mount an exhibition of the various editions of the Communist Manifesto on the occasion of the 150th year of its publication towards the end of February 1848. It is strange that there has not been any function in this city in the more than three months and a half since that memorable date. Our state government has a department of Information and Culture and our Bangla Academy is a wing of that department. It should have been possible to hold such an exhibition and a series of lectures on this classic which is now a great human document. Its value is not in the least diminished by the collapse of the Soviet Union, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the disappearance of Communism from Eastern Europe. As a historic document of human progress it survives these historical events. Let us remember the memorable words of Engels on the Manifesto in his preface to its 1890 German edition: “the history of the Manifesto reflects the history of the modern working-class movement. At present it is doubtless the most widely circulated, the most international product of all Socialist literature, the common programme of many millions of workers of all countries from Siberia to California.” If at all an exhibition