The Haunting of the Uprooting: On the Functionality of Revisiting Chinnamul
Aparajita De “Zaam na, zaam na; kisu teyi zaam naa” (“I won’t leave, I won’t; not for anything else, I won’t leave), forty-three minutes into the first film made on the Partition, Chinnamul (The Uprooted, 1950) rings out close to our collective histories of the anguish that many share from Bengal during the Partition of India (1947). Director Nemai Ghosh (not to be mistaken with his namesake, the legendary Ray photographer) uses the nuance of the expert and the poignance of the storyteller of an epoch, much before Garm Hawa (Hot Winds, M S Sathyu, 1974) or much later, in Supriyo Sen’s documentary Way Back Home (2002). The details that Chinnamul captures are hard to ignore in the context of the then and the now. Pivoted on the travails of Srikanta and Laxmi from Naldanga, Dhaka, as the country is overnight divided and entire communities, lands, and identities vanish as if they never were, the film ultimately becomes metonymic of a country in transition, divided against itself. The local greed of Madhu Ganguly and Muzaffar Khan, one signifying an upper-caste Bengali brahmin and the latter a Bengali Muslim, become symbols of a predatory gentry that cashed on people’s helplessness; and acquired homes at throwaway prices to consolidate their hold over agricultural land and ancestral property. Such a motif of greed and dispossession was beyond caste or religion in the homelessness of a Prasanna, Srikanta, or a nameless sharecropper and Muslim neighbor. There is only one intersecting truth here: a community’s displacement is synonymous with others’ prosperity. There is no greater or lesser violence there except for those affected, their irreconcilable loss, and their inability to believe that known worlds were changing overnight into perilously new ones. But the film does not go into the violence and gore of 1947 and its aftermath, the eventful consequences of which we continue to pay over with more blood, tears, dispossession, and division. It pivots instead on the anguish of people unable to fathom homelessness. It is as if the community literally sleepwalks into an inexplicable apocalypse that makes them refugees within a matter of days, making them occupants of shoddy, makeshift colonies hastily formed of once-landed peasants with homes and addresses. In the faded reels of the unpreserved version on YouTube, the Naldanga refugees in Calcutta (now Kolkata) represent a minor group, amongst many during the time, formed consequent to a complacently drawn line symbolic of the Empire’s regular nonchalance in the fate of the millions it displaced and annihilated. Nevertheless, the film’s closing frame alludes to the hopes and aspirations of ‘going back’ of a return to the homeland that is, at once real and existing, and at the same time, vanished and becoming the stuff of myths. In the tenuous grey of that promise of ‘return,’ India too, began–its “tryst with destiny.” While daunting, the aspirations of a people stepping out of the Empire and its shadows were not flawless, and neither charted along a predetermined path. In experimenting and liberally flirting with a different kind of crisis after Partition, there was a special hostage: memory and its recalibration in Partition conversations. In the film, the country is at once a lived reality and an imaginative remnant which beckons the displaced to a ‘return.’ While the trauma of the Partition is not the focal point in Ghosh, in a broader context, an erasure of collective trauma around the Partition became dominant. What became increasingly amplified was the displacement and oppression of a particular group by another group. In narratives of trauma and loss, shared and transmitted, generational stories of displacement and anger, binarization and a competitive calibration of anguish and loss were normalized. In the afterlife of the seven decades following the largest displacement of humankind in modern history, the depiction, narration, and the retelling of the Partition have also become synonymous with a narrative sustaining hate, Islamophobia, and the demonizing of an antagonist, for the glory of a grand motherland, for the idea of Desh (country) cannot exist without an amorphous other. If not for reimagining, the horror of the terrifying other is commingled with a dangerous pandering to the illusion of the single grand enemy. This results in an idea that metaphorically connects us to the title of the film I began with—it uproots us from who we are, the uprooting of our memories we never reconciled with, the local histories of loss and solidarity we never quite highlighted in the bigger, single grand narrative that eclipsed our shared losses, shared traumas, and shared displacements along with the anguish of a generation that faithfully believed we would be the guardians of the dream they delivered us, their idea of India. Unfortunately, the lack of retrospective understanding that there is no comparative paradigm to reflect on who suffered more or less is colossal in its myopia in sustaining erasure and grand delusion. In revisiting the trauma associated with the Partition, one may start to construct aporetic events between what happened and how/who is affected and to what extent we choose to remember and transmit, and what we choose to forget or erase from collective discursive spaces, that stem from collective, and independent private ruminations. In revisiting the single most eventful historical event, spartan language may not be reserved for even the faint-hearted; for, the density of trauma and displacement needs emotive articulation as much as documentary evidence to record it factually. Significantly, a sense of critical reflection and an eternal vigil should be most dear to our essence of belonging. A continual, critical, reflective, comprehensive, and honest conversation around 1947 and its private memory needs to be revived from the elite corridors of history and brought into public discursive spaces. Stories of resilience, rebuilding, support, and solidarity need to be retold with renewed enthusiasm. Our private traumas are rooted in hatred and misunderstandings for so long that it has dangerously simplified our stories into a single one, with a single enemy and a single moral compass. Consequently, the overwhelming burden of totalitarian realities and selective erasure collapses any possibilities of reconciliation and closure. The
“सच्ची कला चक्कर में डालती है”: An Exchange with Shiv Prasad Joshi
The poet and the essayist Shiv Prasad Joshi has recently written an essay in Pahal about the wellsprings of writing (http://pahalpatrika.com/frontcover/getrecord/321), on the question of holding a perspective and on modes of enunciation. In the essay he has placed front and centre certain ways and tendencies by which art can speak to its audience with honesty and purpose, especially in a time that is uncertain and fuzzy. This conversation with him arises out the concerns he expresses in the essay. _________ Dear Shiv-ji, Namaste. It was really nice to converse with you today. Once again, let me tell you how much I enjoyed your most perceptive observations in Pahal, a collage of thoughts with certain very important threads weaved within. Let me begin by commenting on the very title of the essay: कौन किस सतह से बोलता है. The word ‘satah’ immediately will remind your readers of Muktibodh for obvious reasons. But as we read the essay, it seems to me that ‘satah’ is used in dual senses and sometimes they fuse. One, in the sense of a vantage point, or a level; a sense of understanding and comprehending not only our times but also a sense of having courage (“क्योंकि सुखी नालियां बची रह गयी है और सहस सतह पर आकर किसी गेंद की तरह टप्पे खाता रहता है”). So, the position one takes in life and forms perspective is a matter of a keen sense of perception; but it has also to do with courage and forthrightness, to say things that need to be said. The other meaning of ‘satah’ which I got is a powerful sense of the aesthetic ( musical value, rhythmic quality of life and living). Also perhaps to have a sharp awareness of the uncanny, dark, and convoluted things that lurk in our midst? Your initial choices of Kundera, Kafka and Hemingway show that to me. All three are remarkably honest with life and not afraid to relate the aesthetic to the difficult encounters of life. Also, all of them are highly imaginative artists, needless to say. kalpana and vastvikta (yatharth) must be represented as real, as they do in their art. The fusion becomes too real, ‘the underlying real’ for the reader–as you say later. This you also call: रचना का संघर्ष—the struggle of the composition. Am I thinking on the right track? Best, Prasanta *** नमस्ते प्रशांतो जी, मुझे आपके नाम का उच्चारण कैसे करना चाहिए. ये ठीक से समझ नही आ रहा है इसलिए प्लीज़ गुस्ताख़ी माफ़ करिएगा. आपने इस लेख को सराहा. बहुत ध्यान से और बहुत करीने से पढ़ा. मैं इस बात से अभिभूत तो ही हूं और ये मेरे लिए हार्दिक संतोष की बात भी है लेकिन इससे बढ़कर मैं इस बात का कायल हूं कि आपकी रीडिंग कितनी सूक्ष्म और मर्म तक जाने वाली है. गद्य का ऐसा विलक्षण पाठ बहुत कम दिखता है. ख़ैर.. फिलहाल तो दो चार बाते हैं. जो आपके मेल के जवाब में तो नहीं हैं लेकिन इस लेख के पीछे दो चार चीजें हैं- एक सांगीतिक मूल्य, दूसरी एस्थेटिक इन्टेंशन, और तीसरी वेटलेसनेस, भारहीनता और एक और चीज़ है वो है आख़िर रचना क्यों. वहीं से शुरू होती है बात. ये कोई क्रम नहीं है और इनके साथ अन्य राईटिंग मूल्य भी जुड़े हुए हैैं. मैं ये भी बताना चाहता था कि हम अभी बहुत अच्छे पाठक बनने से बहुत दूर हैं. हिंदी के संबंध में ख़ासतौर पर. और पाठक ही नहीं, एक अच्छे दर्शक, श्रोता के रूप में भी हमें विकसित होना चाहिए. हिंदी में देखता हूं कि एक दीवार से दूसरी दीवार तक आना जाना रहता है. हम टकरा रहे हैं, ये भी हमें नहीं दिखता, महसूस तो क्या करेंगे. बेशक अंग्रेजी भाषा के पास हैरी पॉटर का नैरेटिव है लेकिन हिंदी ने तो अपने लिए वो गनीमत भी नहीं बनायी है. मिसाल के लिए हमारे यहां जो सत्यजित राय का रचना संसार है, इतनी विपुल संपदा. संगीत, कथा, सिनेमा, चित्र. वो आज कहां है किसके पास है. और हिंदी इन नायकों के पास जाने से कतराती है. मुक्तिबोध ये कोशिश कर रहे थे, उन्होंने किसी वजह से ही गुरू रवीन्द्र का नाम लिया था. रघुबीर सहाय के पास ऐसी कोशिशें थीं. जो उनके बाद असद ज़ैदी और मंगलेश डबराल में नज़र आयीं. विष्णु खरे, विनोदकुमार शुक्ल और वीरेन डंगवाल के यहां भी वे चीज़ें बेशक देखी जा सकती हैं. आज की चुनिंदा कवयित्रियों और कवियों में भी वे पोएटिक सतहें हैं. असल में कला बहुत नीचे बैठी रहती है. न दिखना और धूमिल रह जाना उसका एक ख़ास लक्षण रहा है. ये एक ऐसी सतह है जो मैं समझना चाहता हूं. सच्ची आवाज़ें वहीं से आती हैं. लेकिन वे कितनी कम है प्रशांतो जी. और कितनी दूर से आती हुई…धुंधली सी…! हो सकता है ये बातें आगे पुनर्विचार की मांग भी करें. फिलहाल मैं अभी इस पर इतना ही कहूंगा और अगले कुछ रोज़ में आपको थोड़ा और विस्तार से लिखने की कोशिश करूंगा. थैंक्स. अपना ख़्याल रखिएगा. सादर शिव *** Dear Shiv-ji, Prashanto, as you say, is fine. So, do not worry about it. Thank you for the links and the updated version of your essay. I am reading all of them with interest. Thanks also for illuminating the latent and underlying sources from which the concerns about art and politics arise. I could see one of your prime concerns is to address the fundamental issue about the act of writing itself; the urge to record and create. From your previous response, the nature of the quest becomes even clearer. I would like to know more about the term ‘weightlessness’ though in the context of the quest. This sense of restiveness binds the two of us. The inability to fathom the cacophony that surrounds us and these blurry and often clever moves by our interlocutors disturb us. This relentless urge to remain relevant, the fear of being forgotten that marks our time cannot be explained in terms of mere self -consciousness and acute narcissism. Its corrosive power eats the soul. It destroys all relationalities by constantly disguising the sources of our own selves–what you call धूमिल रह जाना. Are we also not implicated in ushering
The Deceased Deer, Spring Moonlight and Shahaduz Zaman’s Jibanananda
# 1927: a young Jibanananda Das musters courage to send his first collection of poems—Jhara Palok—by post to Rabindranath Tagore, requesting the great man for his opinion. Tagore reads the poems and replies to the accompanying note. Few people knew Jibanananda at that time as a poet. But Tagore’s sincerity to respond to his interlocutors is legendary. What Tagore writes can be summed up somewhat like this: “There is no doubt that you are blessed with poetic sensibility. But I do not understand why you should announce a war—jabardasti-with language and words. This eccentricity of gesture becomes needless ostadi. In all large compositions there is always some kind of shantih—surpassing calmness. Wherever I see that element missing, I feel worried about the staying power of such an art form. To show force is not exactly a thing by which one achieves power. Often the opposite happens” (Shahaduz Zaman, 2019). Such a note was surprising coming from Tagore, especially since he was unusually polite or quiet, even with his detractors. Besides, Jibanananda’s ostadi with language did not even begin at that stage! Jibanananda was just an unknown mufassil poet at that time. Anybody would be devastated with such a rude letter, and that too coming from Tagore! Jibanananda did not flinch. With great composure and self-confidence he replies to Tagore: “I am honoured to merit your response. Indeed, young Bengali writers are blessed to have such a great savant-like you blazing bright over the firmament. I am in no way fit for such large bounty coming from you. But I worship a certain writerly shakti and try to connect that to all that is benevolent in the cosmos. Your note has set me thinking. In much high art, I often notice a great thirst for happiness or dukhha—sorrow. The poet often strives to achieve surpassing truth by travelling to the jyotirlok or in the poison infested netherworld—paataal. But even in such places, it does not seem that poetry could achieve calmness or composure. Indeed, serenity is a thing in the Greek universe. But I do not see much of that in Dante or Shelley. Does that make them lesser poets or their art temporary, I wonder? There could be various moods. The sky has so many colours—sometimes darkness deep, flushed with light at other times; endless blue now, earth’s green reflected in it at other moments. Can we say one such hue is more beautiful than the other? Sometimes the changing colour of the kites plays with sky’s changing hues. That seems permanent to me. Perhaps there is some inward tone and lilt to creation? If true creativity is absent, can shantih make such art timeless? I write here what I feel. You will forgive my talkativeness with your largeness of soul. My bhaktipurna pranama to you” (Shahaduz Zaman, 2019). This description appears in one of the most powerful creative biographies written in Bangla in recent times: Ekjon Kamolalebu (Someone, an Orange) by Shahaduz Zaman. The work follows a chronos, but time is weaved through an inner, creative story. The vicissitudes of the poet’s life is woven within the experiences of a most troubled and moving time. And yet there is a constant return and renewal of phrases and ideas, inner turmoil and psychic conditions—as if everything comes together to create a rich palimpsest over the narration. In young Jibanananda, who was financially in a precarious situation at that time and temperamentally deeply taciturn, we detect a man well adept to argue, especially equipped to cite Western instances of artworks in defense of his position. He was an itinerant professor of English literature. We see a man who nurtures a strong sense of creativity and self-confidence about his capacities, though still not recognized and acknowledged by the world. But most importantly, here is a battle that has erupted between two differing sensibilities. A new and restive existential quest is about to interrogate all that is estimated as surpassing, harmonious, and in order in the cosmos. Jibanananda has deftly transferred the onus of art to a variety of frames and dispositions that the artist may nurture with reference to the changing natural and ambient circumstances. The subjectivity of the artist is deeply material and pantheistic. He wants poetry to renew its bonds with blood and grime, with ennui and sexuality, hunger, cruelty, and despair. Following this, there are meanderings through difficult pathways in order to emerge from such states, though not necessarily unscathed. And always: attempts to forge a new language, sieved through the uncanny-everyday, to express such restive thoughts. # Upon acquiring a master’s degree in literature, Jibanananda joins as a junior tutor in City College, Kolkata. Not very adept in the ways and attitudes that the big city demands, he lives in Presidency College boarding house; reads sundry magazines and books. And he writes in his diary “We have no taste for enjoyment…nor have we any instinct for aesthetics. We are content with fourth-hand men and materials…we have no complaints if the chair is bug-ridden and creaking if we can manage to sit on it somehow….We have lost the iconoclast’s spirit” (Shahaduz Zaman, 2019). He feels Kolkata is akin to a prison, where people, zombie-like, move about with no destination. And at this time he loses the City College job. His first book of poetry has not been well received. Jibanananda begins to feel he ‘shall survive’ to see himself ‘impotent and forgotten.’ He begins to come closer to his self. At that point he receives an unexpected piece of news from his father at Barisal: that with the help of a mutual contact, he had managed to procure for Jibanananda a job in the English department of Ramjas College, Delhi. Having no choice as an unemployed man, Jibanananda rushes to Delhi. Delhi proves to be even more inhospitable to him. The chilly winter and loneliness make him go inward. And the Principal and his colleagues are most distant and unforthcoming in nature. Perhaps few were prejudiced against
What Are You Going Through?
Prasanta Chakravarty “Secretum meum mihi: the absence of reticence among many modern writers, the taste for autobiography and confession, the habit of admitting the public to the innermost recesses of an intimacy stripped of all reserve have never failed to surprise and scandalize me.” ~ Gustave Thibon (Introduction to Gravity and Grace) A human body that has surrendered to gravity, and therefore has experienced free fall, is a strange creature—at once a corpse and a throbbing entity. Her will, desire, or outcome is irrelevant once the inevitable routine for the fall is initiated. The significant aspect for the creature in the clutches of force is that even with some kind of a harness, gravity does not go away. Its presence lurks about. A body under gravity realizes that it is subject to forces that are beyond its mastery. The universe, as it were, enters into the body in pain. How do we become mindful of such primal vulnerability without immediately seeking protection that refuses to arrive? Can we sustain corporeal integrity by resisting free fall? Isn’t such falling as natural as the falling of ripe fruits, water, or a meteor? And then the final act of gravity: to be pulverized into utter oblivion. Gravity is an edict. As a response to this conundrum about force, an astounding claim has been made by Weil scholar J. Heath Atchley: “If one could learn to live with the body rather than in it—if one were body through and through rather than a kind of ghost occupying an empty shell—would not that change things, somehow?” Or, in Weil’s own words: “One does not consent to [affliction] with abandon, but with a violence exerted on the entire soul by the entire soul.” This is the sense we get when Weil refers to the soul-killing lacerating force that is manual labour. There is no explanation as to why the labourer was selected for such crushing alienation in thus eking out her life. As a manual worker, Weil herself was left “in pieces, soul and body . . . the affliction of others entered into my flesh and my soul. . . . There [in the factory] I received forever the mark of a slave, like the branding of the red-hot iron the Romans put on the foreheads of their most despised slaves. Since then I have always regarded myself as a slave.” Henceforth, to be marked to lead a life of the afflicted suffuses all her thoughts and pronouncements about love, fairness and justice in a world that is at once callously ruthless and also fated to affliction. Beings are at once perpetrators and sufferers. The Quartering of the Self Fated affliction is one of the faces of the divine. The other face is love. But there is a process of labour through which one might touch such grace. Weil gives it the name of attention. How might attention look like? Here is a clue how Weil thinks about the subject— “Attention consists of suspending our thought, leaving it detached, empty and ready to be penetrated by the object. It means holding in our minds, within reach of this thought, but on a lower level and not in contact with it, the diverse knowledge we have acquired which we are forced to make use of. Our thought should be in relation to all particular and already formulated thoughts as a man on a mountain who, as he looks forward, sees also below him, without actually looking at them, a great many forests and plains. Above all our thought should be empty, waiting, not seeking anything, but ready to receive in its naked truth the object which is to penetrate it” One can detect in the passage the playing out of two movements. The attentive being awaits the object of its attention to penetrate its body and soul. The being itself does not have any agency by which it can petition the object of attention so that it could be granted grace gratis. Instead, grace, if it ever appears, must surprise the beseecher. The other factor is even more crucial: the seeker does not actively seek, but her mind is receptive to waiting. Waiting is the emptying of the self, a manner of ‘spiritual quartering.’ For naked truth to shine forth, grace must penetrate the soul of the receptor, but the receptor herself must remain passive. Using knowledge for understanding has nothing to do with attention. The key is to suspend all thought. Readiness to receive grace means cultivating a kind of severe lateral vision like the man atop the mountain— simultaneously looking forward and below. Such passivity is required in order to counter our self-centeredness, which hopes to protect itself from the privations of body and soul. In such a state, one begins to see things only as one wants to see them or give in to a condition of fear and insecurity. Weil says: “The principal claim we think we have on the universe is that our personality should continue. This claim implies all the others. The instinct of self-preservation makes us feel this continuation to be a necessity, and we believe that a necessity is a right. We are like the beggar who said to Talleyrand: “Sir, I must live,” and to whom Talleyrand replied, “I do not see the necessity for that.” I live by constantly inserting my personality in the world of relevance. To the world that is of little significance. Is there a way to reverse this process and speak incidentally of myself? Attention is this process by which we turn outside, away from our selves. It requires us to alter the direction of our heed and awareness. Attention makes us face the world on an altered gradient. What might we direct our visages to? The act of love is the highest form of attention. In love the creature is gratuitous and generous to the point of being disinterested, oblivious to the presence of the infinite. Is attention that aspect of one’s being which is not tied anymore to the vagaries of necessity