UNTIMELY KAMALKUMAR: A CAMPAIGN FOR A WRITER
Debraj Dasgupta ___________________ Please, no more snippets of memories. Please, we don’t want to hear anymore about portrayals. Allow us a respite from the very refinements of “hearing”. ———— The first literary work of Kamalkumar Majumdar [Lal Juto] was published approximately in 1937. His signature-novel Antarjali Yatra saw the light of the day in 1959 but we had to wait till 2005 for the first comprehensive analysis of Kamalkumar’s literature (which arrived with Raghab Bandyopadhyay). Yet we are very much embedded within the practice of biographical criticism as far as this man is concerned. It is high time that we liberate the spirit of Kamalkumar from the spectral-coop of biographical criticism. We know that a certain kind of grove about him had already been prepared even before the initiation of this particular campaign. A certain aperture initiated from the heading itself, on the printed pages through a assiduous back-end lattice: and we can name that as “Kamalkumar Majumdar”—a tautology, a name unto himself. About which more shortly. A signifier, a referent which has been sealed inside the insulated box of Bengali culture haunts us; a signifier that continuously shuttles from one alleyway of a Bengali cultural hub to another—like an industrious, engrossed rabbit. And from such an avowed thesis on Kamalkumar, numerous questions constantly trail such writing. Why Kamalkumar? Why Kamalkumar again? Is it his birthday today? The centenary of Antarjali Yatra perhaps? If nothing, then why read him;why this out of season tease with l’affaire Kamalkumar? Yes, can’t we simply disregard these questions? No doubt these questions have merit; they come from sundry fountainheads. We can look for and garner an assorted arsenal of replies. We can posit counter-questions too: Why always make neat little boxes of our reading of literature? Why this exigency of a classroom or a birthday or a performance for literature to arrive? Why are our habits of reading so purposeful (and therefore so woefully regularizing)? Besides this, in the case of Kamalkumar, there are other disquiets as well. After the birth centenary of Kamalkumar Majumdar, his (alchemical) cult turned truly popular. Is such an untimely remembrance falling into the trap of populism? If not, then why such brisk, hurried commemorations everywhere? Or is it a celebration of an essentialist, Bengali chauvinist, religious figure—trying to force an ally for our inner selves? Undoubtedly, things are not so simple. It is an attempt to conjure up an unseasonable, inexpedient entry. The writings of Kamalkumar require an untimely meditation, simply and foremost to establish that his work did not arrive from Mars. Perhaps quite unfortunately, he wrote within and about our society, our world. A stupid array of adjectives like isolated, irreplaceable, incomparable, unparalleled, unknowable, and incomprehensible (therefore untouchable) and a consistent, restless exercise of non-analysis gradually converted Kamalkumar into a myth, like the Mayan civilization—we sometimes forget whether it was historical or mythical! As if there is no possibility of dispersing Kamalkumar within the hubbub of everydayness. And without being a bunch of hypocrites, let’s admit that certainly we never wanted to get him into that hubbub. As we do to an introverted-bachelor—shun him and make him special at the same time! People just love to say: don’t disturb him, ‘let him be alone’ (ah, make him ‘untouchable’). And then essentially, as in our past, we have kicked Kamalkumar again and again on his arse. Nowadays we are also doing the same in a sophisticated manner by making him into some kind of God. Can you imagine how banal and blunt our habits are? And after this whole pseudo-progressive callousness of decades, we still have a desire to appropriate his singularity within the high conservative environment of the classroom of Bengali literature. In addition, in the classrooms, inane literate clowns with clever faces repeatedly try to understand him as some extraterrestrial phenomenon. And as they do so, I really think that they should not forget that cutting statement of Kamalkumar – “শিক্ষকতা একটি ছিনাল জীবিকা” (the act of teaching is a whorish profession). No, this is not only about Kamalkumar but also about the mountebank reading public of Bengal. We do need an untimely reading of Kamalkumar’s writing in order to take on the humbug morality of the Bengali reading public. Our entry points could be many. One could start from a not so well known articulation from Suhasinir Pometom: ‘সুহার কোলে স্তূপীকৃত দারিদ্র – ইহা হইতে চোখ তুলিয়া সে অন্ধকারের প্রতি চাহিল, রাত্রে আয়না দেখিতে নাই, অধুনা তাহার ঐ অন্ধকারের প্রতি চাহিয়া কেন জানি – গ্রাম্যবালকদের মত বলিতে সাধ হয় “ওগো ডাক পিওন করি নিবেদন মালিক ভিন্ন চিঠি দিও না কখন”…’ ‘Poverty, bunched up, accrues in Suha’s lap – and from there, towards the darkness, she turns up her eyes. At night no one should look at the mirror. Presently, gazing at the darkness, who knows why, like callow village youth she wishes to blurt out “O my postman, an appeal: hand over this letter to none except the master.” If we had not begun from these phrases, we could have started from an infamous preface of a novel by Pierre Guyotar, titled Eden Eden Eden, which was published in 1970. The preface was written by Roland Barthes: ‘A single sentence which never ends’… said Barthes, about that work. Or we could start from— ‘সময়কে flattery করা তোমারও যদি মনোবাসনা হইত, তুই আমি সকলেই অন্তত দারুণ কথা শিল্পী হইতে পারিতাম – তোমার ও আমার মত নগণ্যর এই দোষ যে আমরা পাঠককে ভোট-দাতা বা ইউনিয়ান করে বলিয়া ভাবি নাই ‘। “If you had also willed to flatter our time, at least you and I could have become great wordsmiths; the mistake that poor people like us made was that we didn’t imagine the reader as a voter or union man.” Or, ‘কৃষকচৈতন্যের অন্বেষণ নয় – কৌমজীবন মন্থন করে লুপ্তপ্রায় সাংস্কৃতিক চিহ্নগুলি, তার সাংকেতিক লিপি উদ্ধারও কমলবাবুর অন্যতম কৃত্য’। (রাঘব বন্দ্যোপাধ্যায়) ‘Not a hunt for peasant-consciousness, but the salvaging of the obsolete signifiers of community-life and its scriptures through the excavation of it is