Humanities Underground

The Circle of Tyrants (selections from Caligulan)

Ernest Hilbert _________________ Siege of Fort Mifflin (Battle of Mud Island) A squadron of the vaunted British empire Fell prey to mud, to wind and vengeful fire. A ship-of-the-line ran aground and burned here, Bombed by batteries on shore. Seeking to retire, A sloop named Merlin stuck fast in the mire, As Isis, Roebuck, and Pearl circled near.   Today, sparkling like swirls of fish spawn, Undulating armadas of plastic— Unsinkable cups, trays, strips, and bottles, Restless, as if alive. When we are gone, Will these tokens foretell drastic Efforts to win new kinds of battles?   The air is heavy and wet, and I stand Uneasily in this humid marshland. I float in the aura of a gas giant, Cast in its corona, watching vacant Spacecraft cluster like trash into orbit, Like casings of shells that failed in flight. *** Save Earth We thought they came from distant moons. We couldn’t tell at first if they had eyes, But we learned they have mouths. Big ones. Good God! A storm of great worms squirms across the skies. We wondered if they were loosed by ancient runes Or slithered through some blurry dimensional door. Then we thought maybe earth, that they had clawed From a blistering crack in the seafloor.   Now we know they were planted eons ago, Right here, and come to claim their rightful place. They pour into our wrecked cities and grow. They smash bridges, dams, and soon this very base. They’ve neutralized our weapons, but we’re one Step from being saved! Behold, Mr. President, One of these will save us. Just one, and they’re done. We’re ready. We need only your permission To deploy, and drive these things away, But we have to do it now, now, before they . . . *** Apparition at Moss-Hanne Ospreys orbit here, ruling as lords Their drowned domains. We row watercourses Through miles of lily pads, hoards Of hemlock, spruce groves, and grim fortresses Of alder swamp. Millions of years flood This place, where salamanders slide in mud. Our Depression-era log cabin warms When we return in rain. As the storm passes, We stir fire from damp wood. It squirms and thirsts In muggy air, struggles up and catches barks. The pit smokes. A winding helix of sparks Climbs when a wet log pops and bursts Its musty treasure of grubs to the furnace. Above, a colonnade of oak glows and forms Like candles on cathedral triforia. The flames are my phantasmagoria. Higher, a cloud, like a skull, with a grin Too mild to scare, masks the moon. It sheers Apart in light to frost, feather, fin— A thing that never slows and always nears. *** The Victory Stele of Narām-Sîn This lecture insults the king. Is he merely One more item to be addressed as if not Present or no longer alive? His force Is renewed by death. He knows what is yearly Replanted will grow best from mud and rot, What pours long enough returns to a source. The surly king storms out, eager for rebirth, Quick dawn from darkness, but this equinox Is one of misalliance, disarray. There is no eclipse. No magic is worth This much. No longer the waking and long walks, No longer the sun to etch the skies, weigh The hours with consequence, mark the slow End of things. Not now. His is a sour star, A sick land, thimble ziggurats by which flow Veins of black space, singing, and no longer far. *** Circle of the Tyrants Unscrew the metal pegs that spur the stock. The strings go slack and spool from courses, Unwind and curl useless as railway track Pulled up by an army. Embrace the neck And swab from fret to saddle, feel forces Vanished but yearning always to fly back. For now, tuneless, the black body stretches Like a swan murdered on a muddy bank, Songless until restrung. Unleash new strings. Pull high E to a finger joint. It etches Small lines in skin, thin enough to kill. Still lank, Low E, gold wound for kings, binds like a ring; The strings are tools, tribute to horse and swan, Till, tensed and tuned, transmuted to weapon. *** Caligulan Your bank calls. Events begin to register Some unwelcome forecast. The dreamy nurses Switch to Goodfellas on the overhead TV. The omens come and signs are sinister. Texts go unreturned. You’re out of coffee. The Olympian Jupiter curses. In sleep, a great toe kicks you back to earth. The slaves stage a play about the Under World. The smoke alarm fails, and your computer crashes. Your favorite gladiator is lashed For theft, lightning blackens your temple, thunder Sinks your song, because, like the day of birth, The day you’ll wake and have your death is set, But just hasn’t, just hasn’t happened yet. *** Unlorded Behind us all an ancient king gone blind, Who gropes at books, beside a queen who’s lost Her once-worshiped beauties, her taunting songs, And all her appetites, save that for sleep. Conceits as well have dimmed, lost hawk and hind, And what was spent is only felt as cost. They find they hear no more the wind that long Ago propelled their fields to drought, put sheep Into the earth, when rainfall loosened soil, And, if they still recall our names and days We took the games and shook the eaves with roars, And laughed until we were emptied of breath, They know we carried with us hurt and toil, And voyaged far to get where flocks could graze, Found humor, even happiness, in wars, And kindness, as well, and life, in kind, in death. *** Ice Dwellers Watching the Invaders The ship is locked beneath frozen mountains. It crunches by inches against white floes. Its masts are bare cold poles of long-stripped tents, Its silhouette a stalagmite, its rows Of furled sails, half-mast, sagging like bellies Over the black pedestal of the hull. Five seals splash and plunge near the icy shore.

Songs from 26H: humanitiesunderground speaks to Moushumi Bhowmik, On Her New Album

Songs from 26H, Home recordings of Moushumi Bhowmik–with Oliver Weeks, Satyaki Banerjee and Sukanta Majumdar releases soon. After a long hiatus of fifteen years, this is Moushumi’s fourth album/audio essay. This is also the third production of Travelling Archive Records, which is a shared, ongoing journey, a shared space of listening. In this sense, this is an inclusive album, trying to record multiple voices within a sound-space. This, for Moushumi, is a political locus about an aesthetic journey. humanitiesunderground spoke to Moushumi recently about this forthcoming work, the idea of overlapping selves and threads, about an ongoing nurturing of a shared platform and also about the musical and archival transportations of this amorphous but growing collective into the future. Here is the audio recording of the interview: The album will be available on the February 11, 2017, 5:00 pm, at the Vivekananda Hall, Jadavpur University. Also available, upon inquiry, at info@thetravellingarchive.org and travellingarchiverecords@gmail.com. In Kolkata, the album will be available at Dhyanbindu (College Street), Abar Baithak  (Jodhpur Park) and Cafe Kabira (Jadavpur). Delhi and Goa: People Tree. Dhaka: Pathak Samabesh, Chattagram: Batighar, Sylhet: Boipotro. London: Brick Lane Bookshop. Price: Rs. 400 _________ adminhumanitiesunderground.org

एक गुमनाम गुरुकुल—A Nondescript Gurukul

HUG takes an early (and limited) look into Anil Yadav’s book सोनम गुप्ता बेबफ़ा नहीं है—Sonam Gupta is Not Unfaithful (Antika Prakashan, 2017). _____________________     Life oozes in small doses in Anil Yadav’s collection of viewpoints—in his just published book सोनम गुप्ता बेबफ़ा नहीं है—Sonam Gupta is Not Unfaithful (Antika Prakashan, 2017). In its full, frontal grandeur and starkness life circulates, drifts and accrues. We travel. And we expand. Anil is a recorder par excellence of our times; a witness to the rapid changes that have been taking place in the last two decades in the northern parts of India. He is also a cutting raconteur. And in that process of recounting tales, he makes some claims. No claim is abstruse. None taken in vain. Though the whole book is divided into several rubrics, let us just concentrate on two sections—the one on Literature and the other, called Life. Literature The section on literature is about a certain optimism about the profession of the writer and the craft of writing that can only come if one is fully immersed and true to one’s experiences and trustful of one’s interlocutors as a writer. He commands respect foremost through his recordings of life. Everything else is secondary. And Anil makes it clear that instead of blaming the readers and students and the middle class for their backwardness and ennui, it is the writer’s responsibility to create readers and create situations for discussion and debate. There indeed are certain glass ceilings and internecine struggles (खेमों, गिरोहों, उपगिरोहों के युयुत्सु शिबिरों) but there are ways to overcome such limitations.  One has to reach the readers directly and without any armour. The readers, especially the young readers of Hindi, are intelligent, sensitive and thoughtful human beings of flesh and blood. They are not to be hoodwinked by abstractions that come from a life that is not experienced. The first thing is to admit that the litterateur is given a very low status by the society. This is bound to happen since literature itself has turned into an auxiliary form of enterprise. Once you come to terms with these realities you are able to free yourself from all expectations of greatness and can simply keep on penning whatever you see and feel. In order to fortify his claims, Anil gives us a few snippets.  One such is about Srilal Shukla. Why is Shukla so universally feted? He did not care for this or that camp or ideology. His confidence, right from his initial days of writing, came from, in Anil’s luminous phrase: दीप्त ख़ामोशी (radiant silence). The respect and continuous readership that Raag Darbari enjoys is not because of any literary conscience or some such drivel, but because Shukla could show the readers their own lost battles and misadventures. In the early days Shukla was considered to be an upcountry bumpkin by many established authors of Hindi and his greatest work not even considered a novel proper. The respect that accrued to Shukla over the decades owes less to his craft of satire (which is present, no doubt) but more to the hopes of a million readers whose lives go unnoticed and unrecorded. He breaks the traditional romantic idea of our rural existence and shuns all sentimental flab. The readers have not missed this feature. Indeed the burgeoning readership is a certificate to hope itself. In a similar vein he introduces us to Adam Gondvi who weaves the sharpest of couplets and songs, especially those that are politically searing, like this one: प्लेट में है काजू व्हिस्की गिलास में/ उतरा है रामराज विधयक निवास में.  This otherwise tentative and lost soul will time and again return to reality with such clarity that the listener will be simultaneously embarrassed and enlarged immeasurably by the utterances. The reason why the general reader has gone to pulp fiction (in which readers have sought refuge forever anyway!) and accessible versifiers and pop gurus is because the other breed is unable to mirror to them life’s inner dynamics.  At least the lugdi (pulp) world is accessible and even gives you some direction in life. Plus those books do not harbor any illusion of a grand vision. And Anil limns the book with his characteristic deadpan sense of humour, of course: ऊपर से आधा किलो का मोटा उपन्यास भी सिर्फ बीस रूपए में मिल जाता है—besides, you get a fat, half a kilogram worth of novel only for Rs.20/-! There is a searing column on Rajendra Yadav of Hans in this section—part anecdote, part reflective. In fact it is less about Yadav who had been hounded by a sexual scandal towards the end of his life. Anil begins by a personal anecdote and presents to us Yadav and himself as two people taking about women, over booze, in the former’s Mayur Vihar apartment.  In a matter of fact way Anil lays bare two men who are talking about women. Finally Yadav, albeit in a exaggerated fashion, simply declares that he is a ठरकी बुड्ढा—lascivious old man. Anil ends the first section with a parallel of ठरक in Bhojpuri: हिरस—a kind of beastly, ever-burning sexual urge. With this note he comes to the main argument of the essay: that perversion, sexual domination, rape and molestation is never going to even diminish one bit, let alone be eradicated, unless we come to terms first with what is going on in the minds of men and women in a repressed society like ours. The woman concerned here too played by the false social claims and christened her relationship with Yadav as filial. No law is going to be able to address this attitude. How come the likes of Manto, Chugtai, Ugra, Kashinath Singh, Rajkamal Chowdhury meet life’s stark realties with a certain directness, a rare humour and a purpose that we are unable to do at this point of time?  In Anil’s searing words: हमारे लेखक की हालात हिंदी भाषी देहाती महिला से भी गई बीती है जो स्त्री रोग विशेषज्ञ डॉक्टर के

A Hand Stitched Piece of Tapestry

  _________________________________ [HUG speaks to Sumanta Mukhopadhyay on his recent compilation of Pranabendu Dasgupta’s major poetry in two volumes (Saptarshi Publications, Kolkata, January 2016)] ***   Prasanta: This is a signal work Sumanta. This a great reason to celebrate poetry—that you, with able help from others, have been able to now bring out a large part of Pranabendu Dasgupta’s poetical works, including quite a few unpublished poems, in such a systematic manner. A true labour of love. As you have said in your editor’s note that there seems to be conscious design in removing this poet of poets from our consciousness. He is no more in circulation for a whole new generation of readers in Bangla. Why has that happened and how can new readers have a gainful engagement with him with these two volumes? Sumanta:Thank you Prasanta. Thank you all who are attached to HUG. Keeping Indian poetry and world poetry in perspective one should read Pranabendu Dasgupta and HUG is providing that space for us. Do you think I have done this in a systematic manner? Not at all. In our language if you want to edit a collected book of poems you have almost nothing in your hand unless you are working with a poet like Bhaskar Chakraborty who kept every single detail of his own poetic journey in his personal archive or a poet like Joy Goswami, who can recall from memory almost the entire story of his time, in its diverse trajectories, or a rare Sankha Ghosh who whispers the journey of Gandhyarbo or Panjore Danrer Sabdo on some clouded evening. For Pranabendu I had nothing! No diaries, No personal account, not even his writings after 2003(His last collection Roudrer Nakhore was published in 2003). I have no idea how many unpublished and uncollected poems are still left behind. I feel sad when I think about him suffering for his sanity, concentrating deeply on a single poem, and a lonely man with no one by his side. I can still remember one of our renowned professors, one of his colleagues at Jadavpur University, shouting at him: “You get out from here.” Some of his fellow poets mocking at him: “All his disease would be over; give him an award.” Or: “When he comes visiting me, I pretend to be asleep”. It was and is a cruel world. Yes, it is depressing. But still he tried. I had to go through all available little magazines for every single line. I tried to do it systematically but I could not. Let us come to the next part of your question, Prasanta. I have written that the silent process of an annihilation could easily be understood but I did not mention the reason. It is quite difficult to figure it out. Like mist you can feel its presence but won’t be able to hold it by the scruff of the neck! Evidences are everywhere but the reason invisible. New readership hopefully shall feel the touch of an unfelt breeze and a completely new perception of the troubled time by reading his long untouched poems. Nobody has expressed it quite like him. Prasanta: Let me start with one of Pranabendu’s observations in his short prose piece titled Poetry and I.  “If I do not hear and absorb the inner turns and rhythms of Bangla language for some time, I am unable to compose poetry.” How does this inner voice and rhythm reflect in Pranabendu’s poetry? Does that evolve? Sumanta: Of course that does! Look, he has written that small prose work in 1980 and he talked about the inner pulse of Bengali language rather the inner turn as you have interpreted. I would like to emphasise on the time: because the entire turbulence of 70s has created many inner turns in Bengali language which you never overtly find in his poems. But he was talking about the language as a living body. How it vibrates inside your existence and how you react physically to the rhythm. I must declare one thing here. Pranabendu did mention his inability in the context of his second book— that he could not write Bengali poems in America, but the fact was something else. He tried to write in English! I have seen one such poem in a university journal, autographed by Robert Frost too. That volume must have been taken to Frost for his signature. (during those days he used to come to the university students for some fresh air; 1962 it was!) Frost signed under the poem with these words: ‘miles to go before I sleep’. So it must have been quite a complex history…this issue of language. We ought to track it later. Prasanta:Let us talk about his first collection “A Season”—18 poems in total. More than symbols, this collection is about a large ambit of philosophic breadth. There is also a musical consciousness in this collection, a sense of the classical world? Can you please tell us more? Sumanta: I have tried to mention all this in my notes. But, yes of course there is more to it. I personally think that Pranabendu started his career with a complex understanding of what constitutes song (music, if you like) and as his career grew he shifted towards visual images. The history of Bengali poetry I personally think is a history of negotiations with music in particular. I am talking about its form. Pranabendu, like his all fellow poets, started with a new sense of music in his mind. Remember Alokranjan Dasgupta’s remarkable research “Lyric in Indian Poetry”? If you delve deeper into the history of those days you would be surprised to find a musical consciousness was in the air, deeply entrenched. Everyone of them tried their own tune, so to say. It has nothing to do with the classical world. For Alokeranjan, it was “Jouban Baul”; for Sakti Chattopadhyay something else in “O Love, O Silence”. Actually,it was Buddhadeb Bosu who created a new meaning of ‘Song’ in his translation