Quite A Few Struggles Remain Local
Vyomesh Shukla (for Pranay Krishna) ————————————— A statement about a place means reaching that place. Only they understand the statement of that place whose place it is. The statement about one’s place reaches one’s place. At an empty place a man helps sprout a chakbad shrub in a beautiful modern arrangement. Colourful butterflies, as they begin to assemble there, hang and flutter in such a fashion around the man’s head and shoulders as if such an arrangement does not even exist. It cannot be that this is for outside this place and it can be that it is for this place. Certainly for the butterflies this is what it is. Local people are of the opinion that the beast that arrives like a beast in tales and stories is, after all, not that beastly. For the people beyond the place, the beast is as dangerous as it has been described. Within the place, it is a common sight during summer evenings that a hundred snakes come to drink water from an embankment. As the snakes drink water from the place, from outside of the place it seems that a hundred sticks have been stacked closely, side by side. A place is such a place where snakes feel thirsty. Heaven knows what lies outside of the place that there the snake does not feel thirsty anymore and turns into a stick. People outside of the place are continually scared, confusing sticks with snakes. Outside of the place a man has a few eunuch friends. They do not pester him for money, do not badger him, do not consider him a eunuch and yet they are friends with him. They do not meet always but whenever they do, meetings happen in a friendly manner. Within the place people speak with each other, remember each other when they are unable to meet and are friends with each other. One cannot meet outside of the place. There are neither friends, nor people, neither existence, nor non-existence. बहुत सारे संघर्ष स्थानीय रह जाते हैं ( प्रणय कृष्ण के लिए ) जगह का बयान उसी जगह तक पहुँचता है। वहीं रहने वाले समझ पाते हैं बयान उस जगह का जो उनकी अपनी जगह है। अपनी जगह का बयान अपनी जगह तक पहुँचता है। एक आदमी सुंदर आधुनिक विन्यास में एक खाली जगह में चकवड़ के पौधे उगा देता है तो रंगबिरंगी तितलियाँ उस जगह आने लगती हैं और उस आदमी को पहचान कर उसके कन्धों और सर पर इस तरह छा जाती हैं जैसे ऐसा हो ही न सकता हो। ऐसा नहीं हो सकता यह जगह के बाहर के लिए है और ऐसा हो सकता है यह जगह के लिए। तितलियों के लिए तो ऐसा हो ही रहा है। किस्सों-कहानियों में ख़तरनाक जानवर की तरह आने वाले एक जानवर के बारे में जगह के लोगों की राय है कि वह उतना ख़तरनाक नहीं है जितना बताया जाता है। जबकि जगह के बाहर वह उतना ही ख़तरनाक है जितना बताया जाता है। जगह के भीतर का यह अतिपरिचित दृश्य है कि गर्मियों की शाम एक बंधी पर सौ साँप पानी पीने आते हैं। जगह में जब साँप पानी पी रहे होते हैं तो जगह के बाहर से देखने पर लगता है कि बंधी से सटाकर सौ डंडे रखे हुए हैं। जगह एक ऐसी जगह है जहाँ साँप को प्यास लगती है। जगह के बाहर न जाने क्या है कि साँप को प्यास नहीं लगती और वह डंडा हो जाता है। जगह के बाहर लोग डंडे जैसी दूसरी-तीसरी चीज़ों को सांप समझ कर डरते रहते हैं। जगह के बाहर एक आदमी के कई हिजड़े दोस्त हैं। वे उससे पैसा नहीं मांगते, उसे तंग नहीं करते, उसे हिजड़ा भी नहीं मानते, फिर भी उसके दोस्त हैं। वे उससे कभी-कभी मिलते हैं लेकिन जब मिलते हैं दोस्त की तरह। जगह में लोग एक-दूसरे से बात करते हैं, मुलाकात न हो पाने पर एक-दूसरे को याद करते हैं और एक-दूसरे के दोस्त होते हैं। जगह के बाहर मुलाकातें नहीं हो सकतीं। न दोस्त होते हैं, न लोग होते हैं, न होना होता है, न न होना होता है। **** Vyomesh Shukla is a distinct and deep voice from Varanasi. This prose-poem was first published in Sabad (vatsanurag.blogspot.com) in April 2009 and had won the Bharat Bhushan Agarwal Award for that year. adminhumanitiesunderground.org
The Letter Box
[A letter to the editor published in the Bangla Magazine, Arek Rokom—আরেক রকম, Volume 16. 2013. Our gratitude to poet Mridul Dasgupta for bringing this to our notice.] ———————————– Your first year’s first publication, dated January 1, 2013 has recently reached me here at Cell No. 10, Raipur Central Jail. As I was reading it I felt society’s call will not go unheeded; your multifaceted effort will be rewarded. That it is possible to bring together under one banner people of divergent beliefs and ideas is evident from the list of your contributors and from the welcome variations and originalities of the subject matter of the writings. After a lot of struggle and tussle with jail authorities, I have got the permission to read legitimate and kosher books and journals written in the Bangla language. There is no regularity though. My age is 70 at this time. I wish to keep myself active by maintaining my regular reading habits. I get to know very little of the world outside. The newspapers that the authorities give are so scratched and scraped in the name of censoring that one does not even feel like touching them, let alone reading them. I do not know whether you will consider me a political prisoner. I am a member of the Indian Communist Party (Maoist). On April 30, 2011, I was arrested from Katihar. After being incarcerated in Bhagalpur Jail for a year, they deported me here to Raipur Central Jail. I feel that they will keep on moving me around from one jail to another all my life. I am writing this note with a lot of caution and wariness. But it is a happy fortuity that there is no dearth of well-wishers. This letter proves that. The bottom-line is that it is my earnest request to you that in the name of Social Study Trust, if you would kindly keep sending me journals, magazines, essays, fiction and poetry books in English, Bangla and even in Hindi, I shall be ever grateful. I am writing under strict vigilance; so please ignore all my errors and mistakes. My nephew visits me once every two or three months. He will again come in July. I shall ask him to pay off your subscription cost when he arrives. One final request: it would be really nice if you could sometimes think of those imprisoned far away in jails. Purnendusekhar Mukhopadhayay Raipur Central Jail adminhumanitiesunderground.org
About A Song: The Use And Abuse Of ‘Shopno Dekhbo Bole’
Moushumi Bhowmik On 27 August I was at a workshop on copyright and the traditional arts at the West Bengal National University of Juridical Sciences (NUJS) on our E.M.Bypass. They wanted me to take part both in my capacity as singer and writer with some published work, and as someone who has been involved since 2003, in a field recordings-based project in Bengal, covering parts of eastern India and Bangladesh, called The Travelling Archive, with sound recordist Sukanta Majumdar. There is our non-commercial website based on that project and we are responsible for all the material that we put up on it. Besides, we also have our own record label now, which we call Travelling Archive Records, and which gives us another set of experiences and entrusts us with another set of responsibilities as producer/publisher. Legal matters are not easy to deal with. Questions of tradition, rights, protocol, cultural expression and cultural expectation, communal (meaning, of the community) ownership, acknowledgment and so on can be extremely complex, and they vary from place to place, and from situation to situation. I told Ruchira Goswami, sociologist and one of the workshop convenors, that I could only talk about my experiences, as I could not always understand legalities, nor did I necessarily live by them. If there was anything which had a more abiding role in my life, then it was a personal politics—my own sense of what is right and what is not. Of course it isn’t something exclusive to me, there are others too who live in their little worlds guided by similar principles. We know and know of some; others we have not yet met. Ruchira said that that was apparently what they were expecting to hear from me. I was a bit wary of what would happen at this meeting but the night before, I looked through my writings, our field recordings, my field notes, my own albums—the original ones and the bootlegs—our records from Travelling Archive Records, old emails, remembering forgotten details of things which have happened over the past two decades of my active working life. At the workshop the next day, to my pleasant surprise, there was much that we learned from one another, and shared, and I came home feeling quite stimulated. I had my own stories to tell and some of my most interesting ones are about this song which I wrote a long time ago—a song (in fact, often the only song) by which many people identify me—which is ‘Shopno Dekhbo Bole’, beginning with the line ‘Ami shunechhi shedin’. Or, they do not know me at all, but know the song. My friend and colleague Oliver Weeks had once told me, this song is a bit like Elton’s ‘Candle in the Wind’; just that you haven’t earned as much money from it! And we had laughed. So I told them at this workshop about how I might be calling someone and then I hear my own song playing as the ringtone, and it is a funny feeling. And we laughed again. I said, maybe I could do something about it all, but then I don’t really have the wish or the time. My priorities are different. I could have won a case perhaps, but that would mean I would not be doing all these other things which matter to me. They understood, but then Anirban Mazumder, Intellectual Property Rights specialist at NUJS, said later that maybe we also need to take up some issues in order to create a precedence. Well, to me I think it depends on who is standing on the other side of the battleline. I did confront Tara Muzik once for a telefilm in which Parambrata goes about singing my song, which I do not mind, then he messes up the words, and even that is pardonable. But then there is not any credit given to me. I complained, and the director did respond with grace and humility. Actually, not every gain can be quantified. Once in 2008, we were waiting for the boat in a small and old river-port called Markuli Bazar, in Habiganj district of the Sylhet region of Bangladesh. In that tiny market by the old ghat, as we sat and sipped sweet tea thickened with condensed milk, we heard ‘Shopno Dekhbo Bole’ playing on the radio in a shop across the road. Did that make me think of my rights as an artist or about unholy transactions? Wasn’t there more to the story than that? There is another one very dear to me. This was around 2002 or 03, in London. Srikanta Acharya and Arna Seal were visiting, as Srikanta was giving a concert at the Bhavan, which is an important Indian cultural centre of the city. So, I went to listen (I was based in London at the time), as they are very old friends of mine. There was to be a dance by some local talent before the actual concert. So I sat there with my friends—Arna’s mashi, her friend, their daughters and so on. Now, the curtain begins to part in slow motion and there is smoke on the stage. Clouds filling up the space. And I hear the strumming of the guitar. It sounds kind of familiar. The more the curtain parts, the more familiar the music sounds but I just can’t place it. I have heard this music, I tell my friends. What is it? There half-hidden in the clouds, is a girl dressed as an apsara in white, dancing away. Then of course it predictably begins, ‘Aa, aa aa aa. . .’ And one of my elderly friends becomes super excited! Hey, that’s your song! I understand the reason behind the clouds—it is a song about dreams and dreaming after all! The question indeed is one of who is standing on the other side of the battleline. By a strange coincidence, only five days after this consultative workshop at NUJS, I had a phone call from
The Crossover Is In The Mind
Prasanta Chakravarty The Filter People are mostly helpless, mostly tangled and messy. Irresponsible with our lives. With others’ lives too. We repeatedly falter. This, our human condition. This word—irresponsibility, and its consequent aftermath: failing, is what art concerns itself with. Not all art. But some—the majestic ones, which also respect immediacy of experience. I mean the full panoply of experience, warts and all. Mostly warts. Festering wounds, jetsam of our deviancy and our punishments. Majestic because only such art is able to bridge the gap between the fantastic and the material. In such forms, our dreams and nightmares get stitched with our hourly slavishness, our moments of hard toil. Those who are immersed in this endeavour—artists and connoisseurs, may seem detached and unmoved at first glance. But actually their canvasses throb with life—with life’s abandonings, ennui, and its brute moments. And then sometimes, only sometimes, a heroic rising from that sense of acute pessimism by letting oneself and one’s creations pass through the abject. Always by passing. There is no shortcut. This passing is like a purgatory, a filter if you like. This is a streak—in Aeschylus and in Dante, in Gauguin and Ramkinkar we see this work. When it was alleged his plays revealed the Eleusinian mysteries, Aeschylus took refuge in the altar of Dionysius. And The Libation Bearers would announce: “But, as a beam balances, so/Sudden disasters wait, to strike/Some in brightness, some in gloom.” In Muktibodh and Binoy Majumdar, in different ways, we witness a distilled version that emerges after traversing life’s purgatories. Taslima Nasreen, with her many failings, will live because she squares her sense of social justice with an equal sense of squeezing out the last drop of life’s bounties. A full life and a fuller expression of that living. Her poetry is a particular case in point: “জন্মের দায়, প্রতিভার পাপ নিয়ে/নিত্য নিয়ত পাথর সরিয়ে হাঁটি–The toll of life, bearing this talent-sin/This trudge, dislodging stone after stone, every single day.” A real artist will square with herself, with a restlessness that develops out of a sense of being always at historical and personal crossroads, which at times is also a performance of sorts. You do not commit treachery with this urge to square. The fallout, the art object that arises out of such a steeling process, is where reality shimmers with a certain incandescence. It appears suddenly in front of us in its grandeur and ugliness. Stark. That is what disturbs all order. The starkness of Antigone’s acts. Or Blake’s Laocoon, when its re-coding of the struggling contortions and agony, bursts forth into that terrible prophecy. There is no distortion of historical reality in such art—just a refracted form of it, with an excess force that is hard to map, but its power felt and striking. For the social sciences, which consist of responsible people, fairness is the chief concern. Even when one deals in social and political unfairness—the issue of justice is hard to avoid. It is a significant concern, but it falls short of addressing our relentless, inevitable back and forth between what is social and what is asocial, antisocial and finally cosmic. The Institutions No way can one justify the pursuit of art with any form of success. So, first of all let us keep that aside. Unambiguously. As I have said, art and literature nourish a dogged pursuit to fail, dwindle and vanish. To be with those who are destined to lose. This drive affects art, even while indulging in more surpassing moulds of pleasure (catharsis, jouissance). Institutions, on the other hand, will always have a sense of success and responsibility imbued within them, howsoever public and democratic their raison de etre might be. In the West, that starts with Aristotle’s Lyceum—which had a serious social aim. There are similar aims in other great visionaries who have given a lifetime to the creative imagination—Tagore, Ivan Illych, Romain Rolland. The Medicis or the Habsburgs in Vienna have been exemplary in this regard. Or at a slight remove, even Lenin or Nehru in the last century patronized culture. On a more subterranean level, the influence of royal, princely aesthetics and a cosmopolitan ‘collector’s sensibility’ on Indian cinema, tourism and popular culture has been enormous. So, at one end of the spectrum, the politics of art is connected with a certain kind of institutionalizing of art. Chapels and temples and sangharams and their patrons have tried to harness the artistic impulse. Universities, libraries, theatres and coffeehouses made art polite, rational, virtuous and therefore, detached from its gravity and levity alike. We have moved at best from churches to charitable foundations and endowments. These changes did secularize things and made the ‘discourse’ critical but the price of that very criticality has been to look askance at art’s power, which is actually political in a far wider sense. Pronounced social aim, paradoxically, has often diminished art’s excesses and silences. The whole edifice stands on a singular idea: commitment to culture, which has little to do with art. For instance, rhetoric as a political tool is vital for any litterateur or an orator. This, an ideologue might overlook or be suspicious of. Art is not a discourse or a field where we intervene, save in a very limited sense. See, artists are often poor people—literally. So they need patrons—state or market or plain philanthropy. The financiers have their own motive—responsibility, commissioning, profit, display. We cannot so easily be judgmental about money or fame. In fact, many great artists knew exactly how to do well in life—Shakespeare being the greatest example. He bought multiple houses and further property in and around Stratford. Competition and social climbing among artists is a given just like in any another conglomerate. We really have to be careful before we get on the high horse of political righteousness. But politics is about taking a principled partisan position regardless, not plain expediency. It is also not about personal enmity or grudge or scheming. In this context, the word poverty also comes with a