The Twilight Tavern
Suranjana Choudhury/Amitabha Dev Choudhury Ordinarily I sit here. The road on the right hand side of Devdoot Cinema hall approaching Circuit House progressively culminates towards this bar. It is a small bar with eight tables. Each table has four chairs. I sit here when the sun retires down the horizon. Generally during this hour the bar is relatively unoccupied. At least it is not choked with frivolous youth crowd. So it is quiet and restful. I abhor any kind of noise and clamour in the bar. The western side of the bar is enclosed with wall. The entrance through the glass door is on the same side of the wall. I gaze at the reflection of the waning sun on the door and leisurely sip on my drink and wonder, “Do I drink or do I savour life itself?” I was deeply engaged with myself. So in response to the question, “may I sit here?” I delivered a nod of consent out of courtesy without even noting the person who asked this. Then I looked around with a tinge of surprise. All the remaining seven tables were vacant. So why did he have to sit here? I glanced towards room. He appeared handsome, tall, and fair with grey beard, a mix of black and white hair and glasses on. Remnants of a charming youth in its course of retreat lingered on his bearing. He would be around twenty-twenty two years older than me. But why does he drink so fast? I have not yet finished half of my served drink. He has already gulped down more than one pint. “Do you remember your previous life?” I was startled at this question, however, I soon realised that this notion of mine that insane people never needed any liquor was thoroughly wrong. I took around five seconds to transform my sense of wonder into a sardonic edge, “Why would I think of my previous life when I don’t see myself being a man of any consequence in this present life of mine?” and then added, “Do you remember your previous life?” He replied clearly, “Yes I do. There was nothing here where you see this bar now. There used to be tennis hard court where you see Devdoot Cinema Hall now. Sahibs played there. There was a grass court a few yards ahead. Cachar Club housed a bar and library on its ground floor. The first floor had a ball dance room. There was an abundance of trees here. Can you imagine the varieties of birds present during that time? There were many, plenty of them. All varieties comprising birds like Indian starlings, robin, parrot, mynah, munias, bulbuli,wagtails, …. Those white men and women would come every morning and evening to view the birds. Sometimes they would watch bare-eyed and sometimes with binoculars. “What were you then?” “I was a revolutionary then, a freedom fighter. My father ran a huge business in Tulapatty. He dealt in bronze and copper utensils. But I had come under the powerful grip of the revolutionaries connected with Mahaprabhu temple and Saraswat society.” Is he mad? Does a mad person narrate a story so comprehendingly? I asked, “Then?” “I used to look at those Sahibs and Memsahibs. It is quite natural to experience a compelling attraction towards those who we wish to drive away or destroy. During Christmas huge tents were installed surrounding the entire neighbourhood. Those high society white men and women from all nearby tea gardens grouped together to arrive here. The tents were completely inaccessible. We natives were never allowed entry there. If we were ever spotted in the vicinity, they would firmly order us in English to leave the place immediately. We knew their language though it was difficult to negotiate with their accent. However in tennis grass court whenever these people came for bird watching we looked at them clandestinely. One day a little white girl came. She was probably three years younger than me. She looked disarmingly beautiful. She inspected me as if she was watching a species of male hornbill. Then she smiled fixing her eyes on me. “ “What happened then?” “What do you expect to happen after that? Does Christmas last throughout the year? It ends, the celebration too fades away. The Sahibs dislodged the tents and went away. I never saw her again.” “Please tell what happened after that?” “What else could happen dear brother? I got married within a few days. My wife was twelve years old. She was a pretty and petit girl. I grew close to her in no time. But I disliked watching her clad in a sari, especially during nights. One day I gave in to a peculiar fancy of mine. Money was never a problem for me. I bought a very expensive piece of dress material and got it stitched by a Muslim tailor applying my own sense of measurement. The tailor was a skilled professional. He was a specialist in stitching foreign attires. After receiving the stitched dress, I gave it to my wife as a surprise gift just as any Sahib would have done. I assumed my wife would jump with joy at this. But it never happened. Rather she stared at me, her eyes wide open, as though she was witnessing a mad person. Then she opened the door and raced out of the room.” I sat there mesmerised. The inebriation was not induced by any liquor; it was the sheer effect of his story telling. I have only drunk one and half glass, the remaining half is still floating on my glass. The story teller has started his fourth drink. The sun has dwindled away. A semi darkened ambience prevails in the room. It looked as if an artist after having painted the room in water colours has layered it with a single stroke of black shade. The light is not lit yet. “She went straight to my mother’s refuge. My mother didn’t let her come
The Silence of the Lambs: The Case of Presidency University Now
Brinda Bose “My word’s but a whisper, your deafness a shout” Jethro Tull Some serious questions arise from the imbroglio this month at Presidency University, Calcutta, the latest in a series of rumblings and explosions since the end of last year, this latest gone entirely unreported in newspapers (save one damning article in The Telegraph of May 20th) and on television, and mostly unnoticed even on social media other than on the Facebook pages of some current Presidency students. These are bare squeaks where there should have been a cacophony. A few decades ago, in the(then) Presidency College canteen, there was some gratuitous wall graffiti advice for feeble Bengalis that thundered, “Bangali Gorje Othho” (Bengalis, Rise and Roar) under which, in miniscule print, was inscribed “halum” (“meww”). It elicited ironic laughter, in recognition of the Bengali penchant for believing that their race was tiger-like while more often than not, it was lamb-mewlish. But college and university students have universally always proven that they can rise and roar fearsomely and effectively when the occasion demands it, and the history of Presidency, like many other old institutions, has had more than its fair share of instances of anarchic student rebellion, not least famously the one of the late 1960s and early ‘70s in Bengal. So what has become of the institution today, then, that any sign of student protest arouses either astonishment or disgust or rage or scathing criticism in not only its administration (which is to be expected), but across the range of its faculty, its alumnae and the media in the city, and in fact appears to be able to frighten (or convince) the apathetic or the quiet or the ambitious among its student population as well that dissent is anathema to the building of a savvy, snazzy university of the future? If that is what the new movers and shakers of Presidency University aspire for, to mold it into the IIT-IIM-Private University-Finishing School utilitarian model of higher education, then PU is hurtling toward becoming the first symbolic martyr of the public university in India, even as, ironically enough, it is one of the youngest to join the ranks. The questions, then: How do the ‘new’ builders of ‘old’ public institutions – one sees, for example, a certain reverberation between a Valson Thampu of St Stephens College and the VC’s team at Presidency – envisage their responsibility toward their present and future students? To provide a factory of perfect-branding, each student fitted and kitted for the best results and the best placements, whether in foreign universities for further studies or in high-paying branded jobs? To discipline each student with the most efficient work-ethic, 75% attendance in the best or rottenest of classes, so no questions asked, no voices raised, no time off for walking under torn umbrellas down flooded College Street on a monsoon afternoon or singing rousing, thumping-on-the-canteen-table songs on a hazy winter morning, Romantic poetry in the classroom be damned because one was fleetingly living a poem? To instill in each student the fear of being political, so that to find a voice and to look for a say in the processes one is a part of, to seek a democratic functioning, in which teachers and students can engage in dialogues which are honoured by both when the penny drops, is to be the kind of student the university wishes to drop? To manicure students, batch after batch, who will contribute fruitfully to the market economy, never thinking of breaking out of the molds set for them, where thinking ‘out-of-the-box’ is merely management school jargon for innovative marketing ideas for the next global product and could never be about senior students shouting slogans in the university building portico demanding that those who will come after them be tested for admission rather than be judged on state school board examinations which are unreliable at best? If so, there is no conversation possible between those who are shaping these institutions now and the greatest contemporary thinkers on higher education from around the world or from India – which is not so surprising, perhaps; just impossibly, drearily, depressing. I Hunger Strike as Event – and Non-Event ‘The position I want to advance here is one where we retain the idea of the University as something linked intrinsically to a special kind of mobility or, more precisely, to the possibility that fundamental transformations may occur. The important word here, though, is ‘occurrence’: instead of thinking of the University as site-specific plant or as a place, we might think of it as an ‘event’, as something that happens; and it happens (for one example) where we get the kind of high-stakes vigorous debate about the proper conditions of living and of our living together. The University is an idea, so to speak, first and foremost; but it is not just an abstract idea, divorced from material history: it is indeed something that happens or that takes place, and assumes its place in a social formation. If we are lucky, these happenings become systematic and not episodic; and, if we are luckier still, they are systematic in a specific place, the location of the group of intellectuals that constitutes the action that is a University.’Thomas Docherty, For the University: Democracy and the Future of the Institution’ (2011) Eerily enough, if you google ‘Presidency University student on hunger strike’ the only links that appear recall a hunger strike by PU students in November 2014(that had 20 students fasting to protest against the debarring of 180 undergraduate students from taking their end-semester examinations because of low attendance in classes.) In the semester just ended, 230 students were debarred from taking their examinations for the same reason, and 1 student, Amardip Singh (not one of them) was on hunger strike for 8 days this month before he collapsed and was hospitalized, to draw attention to this and many other troubles at PU. As the students insist, the hunger strike was not merely for the examination
Scholar no Intellectual ? : Trends in Humanities Overground
[Trends in Humanities Overground: A HUG survey] ————————————————————- James Turner, in his monumental work Philology: The Forgotten Origins of Modern Humanities (2014) , makes an early distinction: between the scholar and the philosopher/intellectual. Not because each kind cannot delve into the other’s domain but because the methods of reaching their respective goals are different. The scholar is beholden to erudition. The intellectual, on the other hand is seeking wisdom. The scholar must harbour two clear propensities: one, an encyclopedic ambition to amass the details and shades of scholarship, and second, a detached sangfroid to excavate, parse, chisel, interpret and classify information systematically. He must be truly picky with every bit of data that he may garner and then try and join the dots. A scholar’s passion is rigorous source-criticism: to be found only in the minutia of his engaged world. The philosopher, on the contrary, is either seeking truth or trying to interrogate it. He will take a position, which will be argued with passion and logic. He is a man of ideas, unlike the scholar. And he might get into the missionary business of the social and the political, unlike the scholar again. James Turner and a group of scholar-philologists are taking on the tribe of the intellectuals. They are taking on the literary theorists—people who try to marry truth-concepts or terminologies to art, language and the ebb and flow of history. The philologist, by contrast, has an abiding passion for words and the turn of the phrase, in how meaning is conveyed. He respects the delicacy of language. Till 1800, an original unitary philology encompassed not only grammar and syntax but editing and commentary, etymology and lexicography and then anthropology, archeology, biblical exegesis, linguistics, law, art history and literary criticism. Turner’ diachronic and then spatial survey of the Atlantic philological learning eventually leads to the story of England’s global expansion in the 18th century, that occasions lengthy asides on the European appropriation of Sanskrit learning, from the time of Colebrooke and ‘Oriental’ Jones, and the first systematic studies of Native American languages, whose early enthusiasts included Thomas Jefferson. The turn of the next century finds intimations of emerging revolutions in history (e.g. Gibbon), the study of language (Humboldt), biblical philology (J. D. Michaelis), and the edition and interpretation of modern literature (especially Theobald and Dr Johnson on Shakespeare). In a perceptive review of the book, Whitney Cox tells us that the real turning point in Turner’s presentation comes with the emergence of the new knowledge-form of Altertumswissenschaft, beginning in earnest with the publication of Niebuhr’s Römische Geschichte (1812). This new disciplinary formation, reliant upon rigorous source- criticism, was driven by a desire to reconstruct every aspect of a long-vanished human world. Inherent to it and decisive to Turner’s story is the proposition of an inherent difference between the world of the past and that of the modern researcher. This rapidly if controversially extended into the historical criticism of Christian scripture stimulated the study of the material and religious culture. “The process of the gradual reception of German learning into the Anglosphere is one of best set-pieces of Turner’s presentation: cosseted in their High Table otium. ” With this, the departmental structure of a modern liberal arts college or humanities faculty is basically in place, with each discipline by now in possession of its own professional associations, journals, and conferences, and its own sense of specialized problems and jargon. Such an apparent diversity, however, is a sham, Turner declares in his meditation. He laments that it is impossible to imagine a contemporary academic career of a serious philologist, cheerfully careening between Donne and Dante, medieval architraves and early-modern portraiture. Turner’s book is one of a kind, but he is not alone. In the past two decades, there has been a systematic interest in reviving and providing philology with a wider currency. And a simultaneous emphasis on literary historicism is back with a vengeance. The New Philology movement (though still disparate, the votaries hold a lot of sway within the academia) broadens the ambit of its own lineage, say, by not looking at manuscripts from the perspective of text and language alone. Visual images, annotations of various forms like captions, rubrics, glosses and interpolations have now emerged as key areas to explore within philology. The division between a text editor and an art historian is untenable, a new batch of younger scholars feel. Artists and artisans have always been together: poet, scribe, illuminator, rubricator, commentator, all in an act of creation and therefore interpretation, of text/texts. Collective effort and interartistic rivalries interest philologists now. For instance, in medieval studies, there is a remarkable inter-textual possibility when a painted miniature, poetic text, and copies of manuscript (or digital versions now) are studied, placing them alongside. The verbal and visual mediums vie with each other and the scope of parsing and classifying is immense. This is what a contemporary philologist will call the Manuscript Matrix or the Illuminated Matrix. Manuscript matrices are places of radical contingencies—of representation, chronology and perception. They reveal and conceal pulsations of the mystical which are also historical.Such matrix cultivate diversity and variance—an original impulse of philological scholarship. Around thirty years ago Paul de Man, in a prescient essay ‘The Return of Philology’ (collected in The Resistance to Theory, 1986), referred to the scholar Rueben Brower and pronounced: “Mere reading, it turns out, prior to any theory, is able to transform critical discourse in a manner that would appear deeply subversive to those who think of the teaching of literature as a substitute for the teaching of theology, ethics, psychology, or intellectual history. Close reading accomplishes this often in spite of itself because it cannot fail to respond to structures of language which it is the more or less secret aim of literary teaching to keep hidden”. This is what is said, in sheer appreciation about a kind of a transformative philological scholar, by one of the foremost deconstructionists of 20th century. For, de Man is one of the most rigorous
The Nineteenth of May, Selections
Translations: Arjun Chaudhuri —————————————- Feeling the Nineteeth–of Poetry and Resistance Tushar Kanti Nath The Language Movement of 1961 has provided immense enthusiasm to the poets and writers of Barak Valley; it has fostered to a markedly significant degree the progress of the literatures of this region as well. In the eighties decade of the last century, the tone and tenor of Bengali poetry from Barak Valley did take a turn towards a different idiom. The author holds this very turn up to light and attempts to read how the Bengali poets of Barak Valley, after the Language Movement, have strung the consciousness of the Nineteenth of May like a bead into the garland of letters that their poetry is. The very sound of the phrase “Unishe May” (the Nineteenth of May) evokes the image of a red, bloodied day from 1961 in the imagination of the people of Barak Valley. The Nineteenth of May is in itself one long, difficult history, a firm pillar in our cultural consciousness, the cultural consciousness of this region. A history of great strength, fortitude and sacrifice remains embedded within it. The surging political impetus that was seen throughout the entire region of Barak Valley during the Language Movement, and which steered the valley and its people towards an inclusive civil movement for the protection of the dignity of the mother tongue remains till date a very rare example. Through a long and strong resistance, effective protest and unending struggle, the people of this valley have succeeded in protecting their linguistic and cultural identities. As it is, any significant incident in the history of any community, or race, or ethnie will invariably lead towards a surge of inspiration in the hearts of creative people. This impact is felt most in case of the literary and artistic production of the age. Across Barak Valley and in West Bengal, the self sacrifice of the eleven martyrs of the Language Movement of 1961 similarly exerted a major influence in the minds of poets, writers, artists and journalists, and even in all other spheres of the society. Manish Ghatak, Balaichnad Mukhopadhyay (Banaphul), Dakshinaranjan Basu, Ramendra Deshamukhya, Kumudranjan Mallik and other poets of that era had spoken out in their poetry, protesting against the shooting at Silchar Railway Station. The story of the great movement of 1961, the rise of the masses against the state of Assam, and the story of the great martyrdom of the eleven people on 19th May, 1961 did not really garner much attention in the little magazines, or the literature in this region during the sixties decade. In the seventies, there was yet another phase of resistance against the linguistic aggression exerted on ethnic groups in this part of the state. The language movements in the sixties and the seventies did exert a tremendous influence over the poets of Barak Valley, but there was no significant outpouring from them in the pages of the literature produced after that time here. However, the cultural significance of this entire history was great, and ran deep. In reality, what did not happen in the sixties-seventies decades came into existence in the eighties when a group of young writers, through the little magazines they edited and published, and even their individual work, manifested how much the bloodied Language Movement had held sway over their minds, their hearts, their consciousness. And it was in this eighties decade of the last century when another distinct turn in the trajectory of literary thought was noticed in Barak Valley’s literary spaces. This distinct turn was a veering of contemporary poetic expression towards the village, the rural spaces of this region. In this context Dr. Amalendu Bhattacharjee writes: I do believe, and I can also produce evidence to substantiate my belief, that from the second half of the eighties decade, the literature of Barak Valley has turned mostly toward the rural spaces of the region. Those who confer otherwise, and publicise that sort of thought in the mass media do not, it would seem, know the truth, or if they do, they do not wish to acknowledge it. (“Khelaghor”, Sharad anthology 1317 Bengali era: “Samipeshu”, Pg. 2) The reason why the literature of that age became inclined towards a rural space, towards a ‘rural’ idiom was because the people writing at that time were mostly young men and women who originally belonged to those rural spaces. They tirelessly worked for the pursuit of literary production through their little magazines, which they started publishing from those very marginal, rural spaces. What was added to the general character of these little magazines was this – a desire to spread the consciousness of Nineteenth May through the written word, a wish to see the glorious story of Nineteenth May brought to the world outside. The revolutionary zeal of these young writers expressed in their writing advanced the stature of the historical and cultural consciousness of the Language Movement to a new height. The vast lacuna in the poetic idiom of the sixties-seventies decade was brought home to the eagle eyed poets of the eighties decade. In an editorial from the literary magazine Ityadi (Ninth year: Fifteenth edition: 1988) it was said: It can now be concluded without doubt that the poets of Barak Valley writing in this decade have focused in their writing on contemporary society and times, especially on the discontent simmering in the hearts of the people of this region, on outright rebellion, and the fragrance of the earth. This, however, was not noticed at all in the poetry of the previous decade…the poets of the preceding two decades had turned their faces away from the pain and agony of a deprived human existence, from the time they lived in and the society they were a part of, and had continued writing their distanced poetry. In their poetry, we do not see any traces of the tread of the time they lived in; only a smoggy emptiness greets us there. The