Calcutta, Crow
Brinda Bose I what conversations do you hold with the room you grew up in? are they the colour texture stink of seaweed, soaked in the spirit of briny seas olive black with the dark weariness of faraway lands alive with the hope of survival in return exquisitely hardy in refuge,remnants most intimate, most distant more difficult than fleeting friends and lovers lost and found that old room swam you through every fall nick ephemeral passing elation swept out blood crusted bandages when wounds healed and smirked at your flickering jubilations having no memory and all memory, no eyes and ears and nose and mouth and fingers but all eyes ears mouth nose fingers your room baillemaps you each time you return tracking bruises that broke and made you fingering, lightly, all the laughter that birthed the crows feet at the corners of your eyes II finally, only one street defines this city the coffin of skeletal tramlines where collegiac ghosts rest on violent flashbacks on laughter coiled in cobwebs on raging literature crouched in crumbled pages: precarious, predatory on shelves holding crusted pavements and gross management tomes to ransom there was a time when all of poetry was an epiphany, wild and endless before recollections rolled anger roiled and ardour spent retreading bookstreet now where time is liquid, burning drowning infusions sugarblack melting argument smoking affection, o what affection was that… whoever knew that such an ageless street as this the ageing might reclaim hunting still for themselves, for others, for manuscripts torn, caffeine, grass, frenzy, ennui, rapture restless verses that spiral up and down those grimy stairs vomiting fear and tenderness insomniac III crawling this city’s face, grey termite tearing through a dusty shelf two millimeters in a year, or less.remembrances of what we said and did not say, what we did, slept, loved, lied, cried.but so much that we said we would do but have not, burning and yearning through alleys of conversations real and imagined. calcutta, crow. about all you know and think you know, about us together and apart walking along unbidden local traintracks and riverine, those glances which have met and held. of a time before we came to be, that a city existed in which we were born and played and hungered and wept, and knew, and did not know calcutta’s crow resolute resilient fretfully watching that odd tender touch that drops from your careless hand on my shoulder it has been so long and not so long at all that the city has held us, screaming and silent. all our lives when our lives have just begun. is it the old man bergson who meanders along with us unbearably light, henri henri hold on tight we said. oh is he the third who walks always beside us shadowdances through our piledhighyesterdays and wipes the snot of obnoxious recollection on our sleeves as they brush against each other and smirk. calcutta, crow agnosco veteris vestigial flammae, i feel once more the scars of the old flame but what is that flame how high does it sear to leer up the skirt of ageing thighs where did it come from when did the match strike and blaze and touch a fingertip of jasmine attar to the languorous dip behind my ear which your hand reached out and licked calcutta’s crow somnolent satyr-ical hanging from the edge of the parapet looking into our eyes as we wander together and apart there and here, rapt lost hidden in the stench of stories we have shared in separate lives just like those old framed black and white replicas of our future selves having neither history nor logic that hang askew in that studio on the second floor where clocks stand frozen that no one visits except us. calcutta, crow ____________________ adminhumanitiesunderground.org
Women in Unemployment & Revolutions at the Workplace
Avinash Mishra [Avinash Mishra is one of the most expressive, dangerous and suicidal voices in the world of literature today. The following reflection arises out of Agyeya’s Shekhar: Ek Jeevani, a novel published in two volumes. The writer, in a personal preamble, reminds us of Agyeya’s own words: “Shekhar was not any notable man. He was not even a good man. But he is trying to find himself with honesty within the palimpsest of human experience. May be he will not turn out to be a good companion, but if you care to travel with him till the end, your feelings about him shall not harden—that much I can assure. And who can tell, in this age, you and I may all be kindred characters. Perhaps you may discover a Shekhar within yourself, who is not great, or good, but he is forever agile, independent and honest, terribly honest.”] A Biography of a New Shekhar From the ashes of a few poems a life took birth. In order to live one must burn poems. Life seems to be at the centre of all projects and poetry lies beyond all such projects. Life is made. Poetry becomes—on its own. To become, on your own, is a test of dignity. But in order to become oneself, one has to keep away from all projects. For ages, no one takes any interest in Shekhar’s past. Everyone wants to know about prospects for his future.And his present—somewhat like our eyes, which, after being accustomed to darkness, cannot easily square with a sudden gleam of light. In the words of Nazim Hikmet: *** And he has no idea what all will happen to him Only I know what will happen Because I believed everything he believes I loved all the women he’ll love I wrote all the poems he’ll write I stayed in all the prisons he’ll stay in I passed through all the cities he will visit I suffered all his illnesses I slept all his nights dreamed all his dreams I lost all that he will lose *** ‘A long lost future shall turn golden with the advent of feelings’—this belief had become the past within Shekhar’s nowness. The future tramples all feelings. The moments of deep introspection too disappear. Irregularity becomes the only regularity. The nights do arrive as your own, but their very being there makes them untimely. *** Shekhar had learnt that love’s strains and traction are ultimately liberating. There is no more scrupulous a word than ‘No’ in love. When someone enquires: “Are you in love?”, there is no more precise and faithful a reply than ‘No.’ *** O God, Give the cats a life of vagabondage And to Shekhar, those roads that the cats cut across *** Water never returns and that is the opulence of its existence *** The river’s happiness is not the water, but the journey. *** Shekhar never went anywhere. Not to go anywhere is to truly travel. Sometimes not to go itself is sufficient. In order to express an untrammelled hatred for the dunces and the dolts of this world. *** Shekhar made an excuse of love so that he could pause. And he stopped in places where he sought a pause. He has never abandoned his steadily walking friends to hop into a car.Trains would try to lure him to those unknown, unheard of lands, but he did not choose the paths of animosity. An excuse of love is what he made, and stopped in the places where he wanted to pause. A little crazy Shekhar is not; meaning, he is – quite a lot. *** 18 days and Shekhar is still in the same pair of denims, and in those familiar pair of chappalsfor the past 3 years. Wife is happy with him at home and the mochi—the cobbler, outside. The landlord, like the universe, is unhappy. *** When Shekhar was in class 12, he eloped with a girl, who is now his wife. His wife was looking for a tall sweep. She said “In the neighbourhood and in society there is a lot of dirt. I need a tall enough sweep.” In those days he used to look like Ajay Devgan and Ajay Devgan like him–Premi Aashik Awara Pagal Majnu Diwana. ‘Phool aur Kaante’ he had seen 11 times. The kind of swains you encounter in the Phool aur Kaante predicament are gross and uncivil louts. They taunt girls in public. But the girls finally married these louts because these uncouth, ill-bred ones were not scared of the villains—the khalnayaks. These lovers used to be the examples of the victory of loutishness over villainy and such girls stood as symbols for the victory of tall sweeps over dirt. *** Shekhar likes labour. Not recognition. Salary, yes. Not awards. More than his rights Shekhar worries about his responsibilities. More than the Sundays he looks forward to Mondays. He knows that changing jobs does not mean transforming the world. When Shekhar used to be unemployed a friend used to pronounce—“When you will start at the workplace, all revolution will vanish in thin air.” The world of friends did not have revolutions. Revolutions were only in the world of women. Women were not friends. Friends were unrevolutionary, job seeking. Once in a while they tried revolution in private but for that they needed women. The point of it all is that without unemployment and women, one cannot have revolution. But women in unemployment and revolutions at the workplace were impossibilities. Shekhar likes jobs. Not bureaucrats. A little crazy Shekhar is not; meaning, he is. Quite a lot. *** Ambition is a good thing. But Shekhar does not have that in him. Like all those other things which are thought to be good. But Shekhar does not have them. He was weak in calculation right from his birth. Now the whole world seems to tie him up in knots. At every step he encounters crossroads… *** These days Shekhar can’t
Textile Strikes and the Dialectical Montage: Looking at Albert Pinto ko Gussa Kyun Aata Hai?
Mantra Mukim In one of the early scenes in the film, Albert Pinto ko Gussa Kyun Aata hain?, we see Albert Pinto entering his house, and demanding a cup of tea. A harmless demand otherwise, becomes the first moment in the film where Albert voices his distrust of union politics, a distrust that sets his tea above and against his father’s association with the mill workers’ strike. Also present in the same scene, his father tries to justify the strike to his wife by pointing at inflation and low-wages. However ‘Strike-vrike’, as Albert brands it, makes it an event of complete banality which should not be seen as either radical or favorable. A garage-mechanic by profession, he cites his own non-participation in the strike at the workplace as a source of his upward mobility, which for him stands for knowing his upper-class clients by their first-names. As illusory as it sounds, the naivety with which Albert embraces it, is what drives his anger for the better half of the film. This obstinate anger is aimed at severing his class-affinities, his slice of reality. But before one tries to house Saeed Akhtar Mirza’s 1980 film, in the political context of Mill strikes, one needs to grapple with the complex history of the protest itself. H van Wersch’s work on the Bombay Textile Strike of 1982, is possibly one of the most comprehensive book on the subject. The lack of scholarly or artistic interest in the area contrasts sharply with other strikes like the miner’s strike in England (1984-5) which has already produced a vast body of literature. Thus, Mirza’s film, exploring what Marx would have called the ‘historical present’, adds to an otherwise unattended historiography of worker’s movement in India. And it is in order to contain this history that the film employs radically new techniques, like the montage and the vaudeville, something that I will discuss eventually. Anand Patwardhan’s twenty-two minute documentary Occupation and a recent feature film, City of Gold, are the other two representative ventures towards the Textile strikes. Textile Industry and its problems are almost as old as Bombay, or rather the city’s industrialized form. Under the aegis of the British East India Company, attempts were made to set up textile industry in Bombay but the initiative failed as it was impossible to induce a sufficient number of weavers to settle in Bombay which had not much to offer beyond swamps and stretches of marshy land. It was only after Surat lost the war to the Marathas in 1759, that Bombay became economically important. When the industries finally started to appear, in early nineteenth-century, Parsee Nanabhoy Davar set up the city’s first textile mill calling it Bombay Spinning and Weaving Company (1856).1 A far cry from this is the early Nineteen-eighties, where around two-fifty thousand workers went on strike demanding bonuses and better working conditions. Regarded as one of the largest industrial strikes in world history, this effort obviously had behind itself years of planned unionization and politics. ‘Meeting zyada, Kaam kam’, is the taunt used by an anxious manager in the film. The textile strike that rocked the trade union world in the eighties was for the workers an outcome of their pent up frustrations. Mirza too has to briefly work with the interview mode, in order to lay out the conditions that occasion the strike, and thus the film. These inter-generic moments are not rare in his cinema, Saleem Langde Par Mat Ro, a 1989 film, is a case in point. Nevertheless the film remains incomplete in its understanding of union politics. It shies away from the fissures that grip the union system itself. The performance of RMMS (Rashtriya Mill Mazdoor Sangh) has been mentioned time and again as one of the root causes of the strike. The RMMS became the sole representative of the textile workers under the Bombay Industrial Relations Act (BIR) dating back to 1946, a position it enjoyed due to the weakening of the communist union during the war. Congress’ role in the national independence struggle helped it to gain a certain monopoly as far as worker’s support was concerned. However, RMMS’s excessively formal structure gave way to a more aggressive, and unfortunately more individualist, unions like MGKU (Maharashtra General Kamgar Union), headed by Datta Samant. When textile workers struck work for a day in September 1981 there was no indication that this event, bearing the characteristic of a ritual, would in due time turn into the biggest strike the Indian subcontinent has ever witnessed. It is officially acknowledged that the textile strike lasted 18.5 months, or involved more than the 2.5 lakh textile workers. Albert Pinto came almost a year before the big strike, and thus it is just the ritualistic element of the strike that Albert is aware of, and that is what supposedly makes it unworthy of his attention. While workers around him, like his father, are registering their dissent, both by using RMMS and against it, Albert is content with the imported cars that he can borrow from the garage. Borrowed cars in his case also imply a borrowed voice. So not unlike the cars, Pinto uncritically borrows the vocabulary and cadence of the actual owners who, not surprisingly, belong to the class his father’s fighting against. The reason why the owners strike an easy relationship with Albert is that in him they find a suitable surrogate for their economic and moral ideals. The conversation that Mr. Briganza and Pinto share (at 58:00 to 60:00), tells us how Pinto is caught in an imitative act, where anger is the only a suitable medium for him, to float his anti-political stand and at the same time dominate Stella. As Wersch highlights in his book, the agitation was for proper bonus settlement and as before the prevailing expectation was that the unrest would subside after some positive result was achieved. But what changed in 1982 was Datta Samant, who declared that the fight would not just be for
Kafka’s Parable, or, Literature Between Past and Future
Supriya Chaudhuri Suhita Sinha Roy Memorial Lecture, Paschimbanga Bangla Akademi, 9 January 2015. This lecture was delivered in the evening of 9 January, Professor Jasodhara Bagchi having passed away in hospital that morning. It was a long day of great grief and bitterness, ending with this formal, pre-arranged public occasion. For me it was an occasion of profound sadness and double remembrance, a ‘speaking to spirits’, as perhaps all memorial lectures should be. ————————————————————– I was recently asked to lecture on Hannah Arendt, and I found myself re-reading her 1961 book of essays, Between Past and Future, where she quotes this parable from Kafka: He has two antagonists: the first presses him from behind, from the origin. The second blocks the road ahead. He gives battle to both. To be sure, the first supports him in his fight with the second, for he wants to push him forward, and in the same way the second supports him in his fight with the first, since he drives him back. But it is only theoretically so. For it is not only the two antagonists who are there, but he himself as well, and who really knows his intentions? His dream, though, is that some time in an unguarded moment – and this would require a night darker than any night has ever been yet – he will jump out of the fighting line and be promoted, on account of his experience in fighting, to the position of umpire over his antagonists in their fight with each other. Kafka’s parables, says Arendt, ‘unique perhaps in this respect in literature, are real παραβολαί, thrown alongside and around the incident like rays of light which, however, do not illuminate its outward appearance but possess the power of X-rays to lay bare its inner structure that, in our case, consists of the hidden processes of the mind.’ I am not quite sure what Arendt meant by ‘incident’ here, since no actual event is specified: rather, the story itself gives us the structure of an incident which remains partly hypothetical, projected in the parable’s dream-like conclusion. In the tale, an unnamed ‘he’ is pressed forward by an antagonist from behind, and pushed back by an antagonist from the front. He fights both, not unaided, for ‘the first supports him in his fight with the second … and in the same way the second supports him in his fight with the first.’ Yet, as Kafka says, it is not just a fight between the two antagonists, since ‘he’ too is present, and who really knows what his intentions are? But he has a dream, or a hope – that in a dark night, he would be able to jump out of the line of combat and watch, like an umpire, while the two antagonists fight each other. I will return to this parable and what it appears to illuminate. But let us begin with an obscurity, for the dream presents us with a textual difficulty I have not yet been able to resolve. The story Arendt cites is taken from a set of untitled aphorisms entered in Kafka’s diary between the 6th of January and the 29th of February, 1920. All the sheets on which they were written, except the first, were then torn out of the diary, possibly when he sent his diaries to Milena Jesenská (with whom, as is well known, he formed an intense attachment, and who translated his work into Czech). The ‘Notes from the year 1920’ were included in volume 5 of Kafka’s Gesammelte Schriften, edited by Max Brod and published in New York in 1946 by Schocken Verlag, which is the edition Arendt used. It is a revised and expanded version of the first 5 volumes of the Prague edition of Kafka’s Gesammelte Schriften, published in 1935-37 by Heinrich Mercy Sohn. Arendt quotes the German passage in its entirety, and notes that she has slightly modified Willa and Edwin Muir’s English translation, which also appeared in New York in 1946 in a collection named The Great Wall of China (Arendt 227-28): Er hat zwei Gegner: Der erste bedrängt ihn von hinten, vom Ursprung her. Der zweite verwehrt ihm den Weg nach vorn. Er kämpft mit beiden. Eigentlich unterstützt ihn der erste im Kampf mit dem Zweiten, denn er will ihn nach vorn drängen und ebenso unterstützt ihn der zweite im Kampf mit dem Ersten; denn er treibt ihn dock zurück. So ist es aber nur theoretisch. Denn es sind ja nicht nur die zwei Gegner da, sondern auch noch er selbst, und wer kennt eigentlich seine Absichten? Immerhin ist es sein Traum, dass er einmal in einem unbewachten Augenblick – dazu gehört allerdings eine Nacht, so finster wi noch keine war – aus der Kampflinie ausspringt und wegen seiner Kampfeserfahrung zum Richter über seine miteinander kämpfenden Gegner erhoben wird. Max Brod’s edition of his friend’s writings was of course notoriously subjective, even idiosyncratic: moreover, Kafka is every editor and textual critic’s dream – or nightmare. So perhaps appropriately, in the new critical edition of Kafka’s works published by S. Fischer Verlag between 1982 and 1999, based on the all the extant manuscripts and early editions, the dream itself – that is, the conclusion to the parable – is missing. I have checked authoritative transcripts of the 1920 Diary, as well as the new translation of the Shorter Works, Volume I, also published under the title of The Great Wall of China by Malcolm Pasley – whose collection of Kafka manuscripts forms the nucleus of the Kafka archive at the Bodleian Library in Oxford – and not only are there slight variations in language, but the episode itself ends at ‘und wer kennt eigentlich seine Absichten?’ (‘and who really knows his intentions?’) Er hat zwei Gegner, der Erste bedrängt ihn von rückwärts vom Ursprung her, der Zweite verwehrt ihm den Weg nach vorne. Er kämpft mit beiden. Eigentlich unterstützt ihn der Erste im Kampf mit dem Zweiten, denn er will ihn