Ideal & Waste?
Amiya Dev We know that Châr Adhyây (Four Chapters) was Rabindranath’s second political novel. We also know that like Ghare-Bâire (The Home and the World), 1916, the first, it fared ill with nationalists, and that one special reason for that had been his reference to Brahmabandhab Upadhyay (1861-1907) in the preface in a supposedly derogatory way. We further know that Rabindranath withdrew that preface from the second edition, though it had been purportedly a ‘cue’ (‘âbhâs’) to the novel, for it related how his one-time friend and associate Brahmabandhab, Hindu-Catholic turned nationalist revolutionary, editor of the fiery daily Sandhyâ, had suddenly visited him one day in 1907 and while leaving after a little conversation turned around at the doorstep and said: ‘Rabibabu, I have fallen grievously’ (‘âmâr khub patan hayechhe’).1 Nationalism had had such hold over the readers that the spirit of the episode was utterly lost on them, the sensitivity unfelt; and even today, over a hundred years after Brahmabandhab’s death (October 27, 1907) the righteousness of 1934 might not have been fully exhausted. We may not do unwisely to recall the words that followed in the preface: ‘After he said this, he did not wait; he just left. I understood clearly then that he had come just to say these heart-rending words. By then the net of his activities had closed tightly around him; there was no chance of escape.’2 That was Rabindranath’s last meeting with him and the last conversation. Anyway, my concern is not with Châr Adhyây’s immediate reception, nor with the full implications of Brahmabandhab’s confession, whether it hadn’t also hinted at a recent falling off his noble mission of adapting Catholicism to Vedânta. Had his brand of svadeúî been in the way of his truth, cherished with great ascetic fervour in the teeth of the dominant politics of then Indian Christianity? Nor is it my concern to test Châr Adhyây out against the latter-day svadeshiî of the early 1930s, branded ‘terrorism’, that claimed a great many young idealist lives. In a moving essay, written in fifteen days of Pritilata Waddedar’s heroic suicide in 1932 after leading a successful attack on Chittagong’s European Club and sustaining a wound herself, her preceptor ‘Masterda’ recalled her with great fondness, almost sentimentally, and bid her goodbye as he would bid goodbye to Goddess Durga on the day of her immersion.3 He also recalled many others that he had inspired to brave death or incarceration across the seas. How many mothers he had bereaved of their children, what emptiness he had brought about in home after home! All for a great cause no doubt, yet was it right? Would he be forgiven? Iron-willed Surya Sen was pierced by doubt. That Tagore, who had moved away from his svadeúî involvement during the agitation over Bengal Partition (1905) before long, was pierced by more than doubt and had absolute disapproval of ‘terrorist’ violence leading to tragic waste, was once again proved by his reaction to the attempt on the Bengal Governor’s life at Darjeeling in May 1934 involving a few youths’ blighted future; but I am not going to look for its contemporary transcript in Châr Adhyây. I shall reread Châr Adhyây as a crucible of the time I have lived and the time I am living. Whoever has read Câr Adhyây a second time will not miss its design as a virtual drama in four acts. Whatever gathers is mainly by means of dialogue. The attendant narration is sharp and subtle, except in the prelude, so to speak, the prastâvanâ. The description too is sparse, as if only meant to lay the scenes. Also, the usual slow pace of a novel is missing along with the co-temporality of spaces. Novel readers will find more pleasure notwithstanding its triple perspective in Ghare-Bâire, let alone Gorâ or Jogâjog (Relations). Time-propelled, it seems to be rushing, without a hint of space coming in the way of time. Ghare-Bâire’s twin Chaturaaga (1916) too is time-bound, but being a quartet it also carries four squares of space. Though this may sound overstated, Châr Adhyây is indifferent to space. WE recall Tagore’s defence of it as a love story, which it is to a large extent, but which by no means exhausts it. The three Ela-Atin dialogues that form the bulk of the novel have a clear crescendo, ending on a merging of love and death, a kind of Liebestod. But the ‘star’ that ‘crosses’ their love is the ideal to which they are bound, no less voluntarily than involuntarily. Ela is Indranath’s recruit, sworn betrothed to the svadeœ; but Ela is also Indranath’s means of instilling the spirit of sacrifice in his boys and keeping their morale high, above all, of pulling Atin to the cause of svadeœ. Over Ela-Atin’s love is cast Indranath’s shadow in the name of svadeœ; thus what turns out to be Liebestod is the eventual strategy of liquidation: Ela must go, for she has become vulnerable through her desperate love taken advantage of by turncoat machinations. That Ela must go at Atin’s hand is Indranath at his most ‘unattached’: the sound of the distant whistle that closes the novel is the surrogate arrow cutting through the air. Tagore’s critics of the time found such fiction unfounded on svadeshî ideals. Ela would probably swallow cyanide before spilling out secrets. Ela surely would, but that is not the point. The point is: is the risk worth taking? Is she indispensable? Is anyone indispensable? Is there any room for love in the political underground? At the end of the third chapter, after Atin has been packed off to a safer underground, beyond Ela’s and through Ela’s, any other’s ken, Indranath suddenly appears on the scene and scolds Ela for thus yielding to her eros and risking their safety, saying: ‘If I could I would have straightaway killed you.’ There is an impelling dehumanisation that Rabindranath is trying to trace, arising out of the underground’s own logic. It is obvious that he is
London: What Cities Tell Late at Night
Akhil Katyal During late evenings, just before the cemetery closed for the public, you could always notice guys cruising each other. Often returning home on a bus, if you took the fun ‘long-cut’ through Abney Park, you could have guys ask you local addresses as very improbable conversation starters. Imagine being asked by someone for ‘146 Manor Road’ when he is sitting on a bench bang in the middle of a cemetery with no particular hurry to go anywhere. All this was far too exciting for a place, whose founders had after all, in their long train of inspirations, taken their cue from the Irish writer Oliver Goldsmith’s dreary pastoralism in his 1770 ‘The Deserted Village’. A few years back during my Lit Hons years in Delhi, I had suffered his ‘Sweet Auburn, loveliest village of the plain / where health and plenty,’ he fantasized, had ‘cheered the laboring swain’. Those who set up the cemetery in Massachusetts, model for Abney Park behind my house, had very consciously cited Goldsmith’s poem in its architecture, flora and landscaping. Now in a strange turn, my room window looked onto Goldsmith’s dreamland, twice-removed. At nights, I heard its many birds and a rare guy or two who must have jumped the gates to get in. During those nights when I called my friends, I joked about living next to a cemetery and laughed about my own room with a view. Over the next two years, I had moved to the inner city Kings Cross. Although it is synonymous with its two arterial rail stations, till the late 80s it had also been ‘notorious’ as a run down red light district, as a place where it was very easy to get drugs and as a site where the British pop scene had thrived in the now defunct 80s clubs. Till large scale regeneration projects began to give a face-lift to Kings Cross, and litter it with a boring office architecture, it had a look of a post-industrial district, with vacant lots, disused goods and redistribution yards, some social housing and obsolete tube stations. Not for very long now, if you walk north of the station, you can very easily notice the imprint of the second world war, of a city that was oncebombed out. That is now rapidly changing. In its revamp mode for the 2012 Olympics, London is a paradise for the developers’ lobby. Billions of pounds are being invested to make the semi-derelict parts of Kings Cross into a commissioned sort of haven for mainstream culture and commerce, introducing tens of new streets and squares, pushing for a well-packaged vision of an affluent urbanness. An insular, instant city is being culled out of a haphazard history of dereliction, poverty and cultural experiment in Kings Cross. The last set of my late night walks in this city take place in this fast transforming neighborhood, mostly in the parts immediately north of the two stations. They take me past this specific landscape of London that is now disappearing in a city poised on the verge of a mega-budgeted sports event. A sort of event that even as it inspires a superficial cover of a very old kind of nationalism in its host nations, even as it pushes obscure sports and athletes into limelight, what it really does and depends on, especially since the mid-70s, is activating a very global circuit of corporate finance, of high-end property developers and of international broadcasters fighting over television rights. The games themselves pose as a national crisis-point, and policies and public expenditure that any other time would not go uncontested, are steamrolled in a rush of preparation. They become a rallying point for a very untimely national pride. And cause displacement among poorer communities, ejects squatters, have a questionable impact on sports among the lower-class youth and spend outrageous amounts of public money on projects whose benefits rarely trickle down below the developers lobby, the well-advertized sponsors and those few who can afford the white elephants after the games. My last set of night-walks happen in a city that is itself dream-walking into this giant spectacle of the Olympics. This often takes me along the course of the inner city Regents Canal, about two hundred years old, whose waters, long obsolete now for ferrying goods after railways and lorries, are used as a coolant for the high voltage electricity cables that run alongside it and power the inner city. The canal meanders through the heart of Kings Cross’s regeneration project, with the construction sounds now spilling over into the several moored houseboats. People jog or cycle along the path till late in the evening, avoiding it at night for fear of mugging. It was on this particular path, on an early June night this year, that I had noticed a rough-sleeper using a plastic sheet, probably the material of some publicity banner, as a blanket. Her sheet had a large imprint of that spaced-out 2012 Olympic logo on it. Its raw lines and colours had settled in the shape of the sleeping body, moving slightly with her breathing. For the longest time, I had thought that the cities look their most beautiful at night, peaking at dawn. Lately, it has begun to look like that during nights our cities become more difficult, more agitated. Night time isolates the pressure-points of the city, where it is hurting the most. And just before dawn, it seems, it poses these starkest challenges to us. Akhil Katyal is a poet and writer from Delhi, now working from London. He is also finishing his doctoral work at S.O.A.S., UK. adminhumanitiesunderground.org
Sputnik in Russian Cultural History
Ethan Pollock Sputnik sent shockwaves through the United States and around the world, but it did not have to be that way. Rocket scientists on both sides of the Iron Curtain had hoped to launch an artificial satellite at some point during 1957 or 1958 as part of an internationally coordinated programme to study the earth and upper atmosphere. They also knew that the Soviet Union was capable of being the first. When the President of the US National Academy of Sciences sent a congratulatory letter to the head of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, calling Sputnik “a brilliant contribution to the furtherance of science for which scientists everywhere will be grateful”, he was reflecting enthusiasm for what many saw as an international breakthrough, not a particular nation’s chance to gloat. Even the Soviet propaganda machine seems to have played down its significance. Pravda’s announcement of the launch was relatively mild, below the fold, and emphasized basic technical facts. Above the fold? An article titled “Preparation for Winter is an Urgent Task”. These even-handed assessments of Sputnik’s significance did not take into account the symbolic benefits to the Soviet Union of having beaten the US to the punch. Those who saw Sputnik in the context of Cold War competition, and who played up the military threat posed by the Soviet breakthrough, found a storyline with much greater staying power. The nuclear physicist and weapons designer Edward Teller warned on national television that “The US has lost a battle more important and greater than Pearl Harbor”. Newsweek added that “man’s greatest technological triumph since the atom bomb [has been accomplished by] the controlled scientists of a despotic state”. The Soviet press soon caught the wave. Almost a week after the launch, Pravda declared Sputnik “A Great Victory in the Global Competition with Capitalism”. As the first draft of history, such accounts established a number of claims about Sputnik that have gone practically unchallenged since 1957. Almost all analysts have accepted that Sputnik was an accomplishment of centralized science, of Marxism-Leninism’s technological utopianism, and of an educational system that stressed applied science and practical knowledge in service to the state. Until now. Asif A. Siddiqi, the foremost scholar of the Soviet space programme writing in English, has set out to revise this history. Taking full advantage of the copious archival and published material made accessible since the 1990s, he argues, in The Red Rockets’ Glare, that Sputnik’s origins must be understood in the context of Russian cultural history and the informal networks of space enthusiasts formed long before 1917. The Cold War was the setting for Sputnik’s launch, but it does little to illuminate its origins. In Siddiqi’s interpretation, fantasy is intertwined with technology, while mysticism and public fascination with space are more central than Marxism. The result is a book that forces a reconsideration not just of Sputnik, but of the broader categories of Soviet science and socialist science that dominated professional scholarship on both sides of the Iron Curtain during much of the Cold War and beyond. Siddiqi begins by showing the ways in which popular science, science fiction, scientific societies and independent publishers contributed to a large, decentralized preoccupation with space travel and to some key technological breakthroughs. The space fad continued through the 1920s, even though the Soviet state showed no particular interest in the topic. Yakov Perelman and Nikolai Rynin, for instance, published hundreds of easily accessible books and articles on space travel before and after 1917. Their enthusiasm shaped popular interest in the cosmos more than any official ideological endorsement. Siddiqi is particularly strong when untangling the various legends surrounding Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, the “patriarch” of Soviet cosmonautics, who in 1903 mathematically showed that space flight was possible using liquid propellants. According to almost all previous accounts, Tsiolkovsky was ignored until 1917, when the Bolsheviks recognized the importance of his work, honoured him with membership in the Socialist Academy, and then offered him a lifetime pension in 1921. He has stood at the heart of attempts to show that the Soviet state had a far-sighted understanding and natural ideological affinity for space research. But Siddiqi painstakingly and convincingly reveals that despite the outward appearance of official interest, Tsiolkovsky struggled for recognition, received little or no financial support from the State, and even suffered from physical deprivation in the 1920s. In essence, his fanciful and mystical musings made him persona non grata to the established Soviet scientific community; instead, he emerged as a hero in unofficial circles. For Siddiqi, the significance of what happened in the 1920s – and the importance of Tsiolkovsky for the Soviet space programme – has less to do with technological advance or the establishment of state priorities than with the deep public interest in space reflected and amplified by artists, writers and filmmakers. Siddiqi shows, for example, how Yakov Protazanov’s film Aelita (1924), based on Alexei Tolstoy’s science-fiction novel of the same name, about a trip to Mars, gained great popularity in part for its depiction of the technologies of space travel. At the time, most scientists – and the State – dismissed space flight as the naive fantasies of the uninformed, leaving the field to marginal scientific actors and those with no formal education in the natural sciences. Only in the 1930s, when the Cultural Revolution ushered in official anti-elitism and the search for home-grown Russian heroes, did Tsiolkovsky’s outsider status and autodidactic background make him an ideal candidate for Soviet hagiography. Even then, his scientific contributions were publicly praised but privately denigrated – none of his countless designs for airships was ever built. His more utopian ideas were even more out of step with the Party’s renewed emphasis on practical work and the immediate construction of socialism. Tsiolkovsky became a national hero just as the enthusiasm for space he had helped create fell victim to an expanding state and party. This shift has obscured a point that Siddiqi does not want us to miss: “the modern rocket with its new
Ousted from your Poplars
Jack Mapanje The Seashells of Bridlington North Beach (for Mercy Angela) She hated anything caged, fish particularly, Fish caged in glass boxes, ponds, whatever; ‘Reminds me of prisons and slavery,’ she said; So, when first she caught the vast green view of Bridlington North Beach shimmering that English Summer day, she greeted the sight like A Sahara girl on parched feet, cupping, cupping, Cupping the water madly, laundering her palms, Giggling and laughing, then rubbing the hands On her skirt, she threw her bottom on the sandy Beach and let the sea breathe in and out on her As she relaxed her crossed legs – ‘Free at last!’ She announced to the beach crowds oblivious; And as the seascape rallied and vanished at her Feet, she mapped her world, ‘The Netherlands We visited must be here; Norway, Sweden there; Beyond that Russia!’ Then gathering more seashells And selecting them one by one, she turned To him, ‘Do you remember eating porridge from Beach shells once?’ He nodded, smiling at another Memory of the African lakes they were forced to Abandon. ‘Someday, perhaps I’ll take that home To celebrate!’ She said staring into the deep sea. Today, her egg-like pebbles, her pearls of seashells Still sparkle at the windowsill; her wishes still ring, ‘Change regularly the water in the receptacles to Keep the pebbles and seashell shinning – you’ll See, it’s a lot healthier than feeding caged fish!’ ********************* After Celebrating our Asylum Stories at West Yorkshire Playhouse, Leeds So, define her separately, She is not just another Castaway washed up your Rough seas like driftwood, It’s the nameless battles Your sages burdened on her People that broke her back; Define him differently, He is not another squirrel Ousted from your poplars, It’s the endless cyclones, Earthquakes, volcanoes, Floods, mud and dust that Drafted him here; define Them warmly, how could Your economic émigré queue At your job centres day after Day? If you must define us Gently, how do you hope To see the tales we bear When you refuse to hear The whispers we share? ********************************** Ken Saro-Wiwa’s Pipe Still Puffing (Ten Years On) Yesterday, I stopped at another Shell petrol station and recalled how you’d have loved to puff from your pipe there, for your Ogoni people and land; I did not, of course, stop to fill up with petrol, definitely not! I stopped merely to have a good pee, as promised I would when they got you executed. Today, I thought, well, why don’t we treasure the moment we once shared? *************************************** Jack Mapanje , from Malawi, currently teaching Creative writing at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, is the author of 5 collections of poetry, the editor of several more, and the recipient of awards including the Rotterdam Poetry International Award and the African Literature Association (USA) Fonlon-Nichols Award. He studied in England, before returning to Malawi, where he became the Head of Department of English, University of Malawi at Chancellor College, a position he held until his book Of Chameleons and Gods was banned and he was incarcerated for almost four years as a political prisoner in Mikuyu prison. # Copyright © Fonthouse Ltd. and respective copyright owners. adminhumanitiesunderground.org