Under Tiger-striped Skies

Parimal Bhattacharya ‘I don’t know how fear, like an enzyme, triggers a chemical reaction of memory and imagination. Perhaps it plays such tricks: it not only paralyses the present and casts long shadows on the future, but also cuts up the past and exhumes strange phantoms. Fear alters the past in more insidious ways than a battery of lathi-wielding fanatics in a museum…’ [Excerpted and adapted from Dyanchinama.] Thamma, my grandmother, would sometimes talk about Sajid Mian who visited the house every winter to sell gur, date palm jaggery. A landless farm worker, he lived in the village of Bhabagachhi, around eight kilometers from our ancestral home. Sajid Mian took the date palms around his village on lease before the onset of winter, tapped their juices and thickened them in slow wood fire to make gur. He was, according to Thamma, the finest gur maker in the district. Like most members of her tribe, my grandmother too was a great storyteller who could bring to life the quotidian things of a lost world. The way she described it, we could almost taste the sweet, granular, amber-coloured liquid that Sajid Mian supplied to our house in slender terracotta pots. But how could Thamma, an orthodox Brahmin widow, allow in the kitchen, let alone taste, a food item prepared by a Muslim is a mystery. Perhaps the holy edicts that guided all her actions exempted gur from the list of polluted food since it contained no cereal. It never occurred to my mind to ask her. During the Great Bengal Famine of 1943, Sajid Mian visited our house along with his family, his wife and five children. They were skeletons wrapped in skins, Thamma used to say, the skins so dark and wrinkled that they resembled burnt paper that could be blown away. Following that visit, his wife would come to our house every evening, trekking the eight kilometers from their village, carrying a terracotta pot, to collect the watery starch of boiled rice. But after a few weeks, as the famine peaked, her visits ceased. Our family too had stopped eating rice. Bengalis had had their first taste of rooti – flattened bread and a frail cousin of North Indian roti – made of wheat that had begun to arrive in ship-loads from Australia. Did Sajid Mian take his family to the city? One could never know. Every day, endless streams of famished village people were turning up on the streets of Calcutta. Feeble voices begging for runny rice starch buzzed in neighbourhood lanes through the day; as night fell, barking street dogs fighting with humans for scraps of food in garbage dumps rent the air. The city people could catch some sleep early in the morning, when it grew quiet, when the phantom men and women died silently in footpaths and parks. Packs of jackals came from the vast eastern wetlands, their teeth and nails flecked with the first rays of the sun, before the municipal dumper trucks could clear away the bodies. Nobody knew where Sajid Mian had vanished. Grandmother never touched gur for the rest of her life. *** In the year 1943, the joint family of my late grandfather and his brothers split up. They continued to remain in the same large ancestral house, but the running of the household was separated along fraternal lines. Thamma, recently widowed, and her seven children got a separate kitchen. A mysterious incident from that period has since become part of our family lore. It was an unbearably muggy evening in the autumn of that year. Under the dim light of a castor oil lamp (kerosene had vanished from the market due to the war, and electricity was yet to come to our house) my little uncles and aunts were trying to do their homework. A few of them were listless, from hunger and heat, had even turned in on the floor. My father, the eldest of them, was not at home. The dinner was yet to be cooked. Chhotopisi, my youngest aunt, had started to speak a few words that summer. She was toddling around her siblings, prattling to herself, scrawling on the floor with a piece of chalk. The oil lamp flickered and cast big shadows of hunched children on the walls, coils of smoke hung in the still air. Chhotopisi crept up to a window that opened to a tiny, weed-choked garden. There, in pitch-darkness, fireflies danced and crickets chirped in arum bushes around a ditch. Chhotopisi, it has been said, stood there gazing out of the window for a long time, holding the window bars, and intoned softly: ‘Fear!’ The word, that she uttered for the first time in her life, set off a frenzy. My uncles and aunts began to scream hysterically and thrash their limbs on the floor. One of the aunts had a convulsive fit: her jaws were locked and lips turned violet. People gathered in no time carrying sticks and lanterns, and the garden was thoroughly searched. But nothing could be found there. All the uncles and aunts were very young then. Father, the oldest of them, was barely seventeen. War and famine, followed by the split in the joint family, had forced him to give up his studies and enroll as an ARP (Air Raid Precaution) warden. People were fleeing Calcutta fearing Japanese bombs dropping from the skies. As an ARP warden, my father’s job entailed patrolling the streets after the air raid sirens rang in the evenings, carrying a torch and a whistle that he would blow if lights were seen in the windows. In the city and its suburbs, people waited with bated breath in their darkened homes for the sirens to sound all clear. All the government buildings were painted black. During the Indo-Pak war in 1971, pieces of black paper were pasted on the window panes in our house. Streetlights, too, were put out. Swarms of fighter jets scrambled from nearby Palta airbase and flew
No Phallus, No Death

Udayan Ghosh Choudhury Tarpan (i) baba had said: however tall you grow, let your feet be grounded since then i am standing with my two legs on the ground ma, tell me how do i now wear my pants? (ii) in case the son does not earn enough, the father looks for a dark girl and then, tries to explain to others why we call her ‘krishnakoli’ (iii) after a certain age when ma still keeps saying “travel safe,” it feels like a pleasant announcement at the railway station “may you have a safe journey” such mechanical and disciplined telling and hearing is our destiny Truth’s Triad Once humans know, they don’t speak the truth. For instance, at last year’s party in our housing complex, the most sensuous woman’s two-and-a-half-year-old kid announced pop that her mother’s breasts are actually broken, that she is a broken woman. The woman managed with some rolling laughter and we carried on looking for the sherbet-kiosk. Unless one is disgusted, humans don’t ever speak the truth. For instance, in the biology lab, the girl, roll number 11, once told me: “Even dog’s piss is more precious than your trousers.” At that time, I used to have only one pair of trousers; used to wear it six days a week. Humans never deal in truth unless shielded behind glass. As we tried to free Baba’s body from the morgue, Chintu suddenly came up with this: “Poetry and all that jazz is bullshit! The real succour for man comes with Cerelac and saline.” Before flying to Canada, Kobita invited him to the terrace only to slap him hard. Come, let me tell you something about Snakes (i) We do not trust snakes even when they are teetering on the edge oftheir own death. We never think that just like the wing-torn butterfly, the snake too has a sweet heart, which is wailing, holding the last straw so that it can live a few more heartbeats. Rather, we feel joyously relieved that there will be none anymore to run after our sense of sinning—papabodha. No one will inject venom into our conscience. As we put the remnants of the snake’s body into the crepitating fire, we bluster: “You know, it is me who killed this one…” (ii) It’s our smiling face and the style of turning our heads that distinguishes each one of us from the other. Or else, come to think of it, blood-bones-flesh and procreation—whatever is a bird is also a snake. (iii) After trees die, no bird comes to it, no traveller. Only an emaciated snake sometimes comes enquiring after its well being. (iv) Have you heard of a sickly snake ever? Have you read? Nope. Nowhere sir! Because snakes live a very happy and contented life. There is no chapter on violence in the psychology of snakes. Kalipada-Syar On Saturdays, just short of noon, a three-wheeled tin cart would arrive at the school playing-ground. My caricatures and cartoons on the cover of ‘Kisholoy’ would all go haywire. Commotion, leaps, and our rushing, forming a cordon around gari-kaku. Nonchalant, raising the corner of his lungi, he would wipe sweat from his face and Kalipada-syar would not hit us with his talpata-fan; he would just scare us with it. We would stand at a safe distance and with eyes like the reporter’s camera, would catch a glimpse of that magical tin cart opening up its belly and breads, one after another, falling from it. Just like heroines at award functions—thrilling, attractive, proud. Kalipada-syar used to be fond of me and I used to love slightly burnt reddish brown breads. When syar would hand me one, on a thriving day, I would feel that I was holding a bonus, a gift of a dream. One day Kalipada-syar took me to a distance and with a face like a criminal, whispered: “See, you all are now in Class IV. Big boys! You understand things, isn’t it? Today, there is a shortage of breads. So, let us first divide that among the kids. And if there are still some left, you all will get.” We did not get. That day, while returning home, I was fuming at the road, at Kalipada-syar, at gari-kaku too. I could not understand how we had become big boys so soon! Actually syar, these days I comprehend a bit of that. To turn big means to turn yourself a little small every passing day, bit by bit… ——————————————— adminhumanitiesunderground.org
Cannibal Manifesto

Oswaldo de Andrade Cannibalism: An Introduction to “Cannibal Manifesto” The starting date for the Brazilian modernist movement, which advocated a return to the soil, is usually given as 1922, when the major impulse was given by the Week of Modern Art. This revolutionary approach was announced by a woman painter, Anita Malfatti, “the protomartyr of modernism,” whose forward-looking paintings in her second exhibition, in 1917, were derided by Monteiro Lobato (He claimed that she simply contributed her own “-ism” in her paintings where a horse and rider fall over: “I call this genre topple-ism”). But he himself had a great influence on Brazilian modernism’s most celebrated text, Oswald de Andrade’s “Cannibal Manifesto” of 1928. Also called the “Brazilwood Manifesto,” because it champions the use of native material and turns against artifice, this manifesto takes its name from the cannibalistic Tupi Indians of Brazil who disposed gastronomically of an unloved Bishop. It is outrageously satirical, reading in part: “Only cannibalism unites us… Tupi or not tupi, that is the question.” The manifesto shares the title of a Dada publication of two issues, Cannibale, whose lively primitivistic spirit is joined to the Russian Rayonists, with their Why-We-Paint-Our-Faces manifesto against the sophisticated and over-civilized society. Andrade’s preface to Seraphim Ponte Grande is another modernist manifesto that repudiates Modernism: “The Modernist Movement, culminating in anthropophagous measles, seemed to indicate an advanced phenomenon.” Elsewhere, he distinguishes between the two: “Simultaneity is the coexistence of things and events at a given moment.Polyphony is the simultaneous artistic union of two or more melodies which have the fleeting effect of clashing sounds as they contribute to a total final effect.” ————————————- Cannibal Manifesto Only Cannibalism unites us. Socially. Economically. Philosophically. The unique law of the world. The disguised expression of all individualisms, all collectivisms. Of all religions. Of all peace treaties.Tupi or not tupi that is the question. Against all catechisms. And against the mother of the Gracos. I am only interested in what’s not mine. The law of men. The law of the cannibal. We are tired of all those suspicious Catholic husbands in plays. Freud finished off the enigma of woman and the other recent psychological seers. What dominated over truth was clothing, an impermeable layer between the interior world and the exterior world. Reaction against people in clothes. The American cinema will tell us about this. Sons of the sun, mother of living creatures. Fiercely met and loved, with all the hypocrisy of longing: importation, exchange, and tourists. In the country of the big snake. It’s because we never had grammatical structures or collections of old vegetables. And we never knew urban from suburban, frontier country from continental. Lazy on the world map of Brazil. One participating consciousness, one religious rhythm. Against all the importers of canned conscience. For the palpable existence of life. And let Levy-Bruhl go study prelogical mentality. We want the Cariba Revolution. Bigger than the French Revolution. For the unification of all the efficient revolutions for the sake of human beings. Without us, Europe would not even have had its paltry declaration of the rights of men. The golden age proclaimed by America. The golden age. And all the girls. Filiation. The contact with the Brazilian Cariba Indians. Ou Villegaignon print terre. Montaigne. Natural man. Rousseau. From the French Revolution to Romanticism, to the Bolshevik Revolution, to the Surrealist Revolution and the technological barbarity of Keyserling. We’re moving right along. We were never baptized. We live with the right to be asleep. We had Christ born in Bahia. Or in Belem do Pata. But for ourselves, we never admitted the birth of logic. Against Father Vieira, the Priest. Who made our first loan, to get a commission. The illiterate king told him: put this on paper but without too much talk. So the loan was made. Brazilian sugar was accounted for. Father Vieira left the money in Portugal and just brought us the talk. The spirit refuses to conceive spirit without body. Anthropomorphism. Necessity of cannibalistic vaccine. For proper balance against the religions of the meridian. And exterior inquisitions. We can only be present to the hearing world. We had the right codification of vengeance. The codified science of Magic. Cannibalism. For the permanent transformation of taboo into totem. Against the reversible world and objectified ideas. Made into cadavers. The halt of dynamic thinking. The individual a victim of the system. Source of classic injustices. Of romantic injustices. And the forgetfulness of interior conquests. Screenplays. Screenplays. Screenplays. Screenplays. Screenplays. Screenplays. Screenplays. Cariba instinct. Death and life of hypotheses. From the equation I coming from the Cosmos to the axiom Cosmos coming from the I. Subsistence. Knowledge. Cannibalism. Against the vegetable elites. In communication with solitude. We were never baptized. We had the Carnival. The Indian dressed as a Senator of the Empire. Acting the part of Pitt. Or playing in the operas of Alencar with many good Portuguese feelings. We already had communism. We already had a surrealist language. The golden age. Catiti Catiti Imara Notia Notia Imara Ipeju* Magic and life. We had relations and distribution of fiscal property, moral property, and honorific property. And we knew how to transport mystery and death with the help of a few grammatical forms. I asked a man what was Right. He answered me that it was the assurance of the full exercise of possibilities. That man was called Galli Mathias. I ate him. The only place there is no determinism is where there is mystery. But what has that to do with us? Against the stories of men that begin in Cape Finisterre. The world without dates. Without rubrics. Without Napoleon. Without Caesar. The fixation of progress by means of catalogues and television sets. Only with machinery. And blood transfusions. Against antagonistic sublimations brought over in sailing ships. Against the truth of the poor missionaries, defined through the wisdom of a cannibal, the Viscount of Cairo – It is a lie repeated many times. But no crusaders came to us. They were fugitives from a civilization that we are eating up,