Humanities Underground

Marginal Habitation, Spectacular Presences: Ramkinkar and the Elasticity of Margins

Pradip Kumar Datta In common usage the idea of the margins indicates a position that is outside the mainstream yet related to it. This provides a rich vantage point to critique the structures of the mainstream.  Very often the epistemic position is elided with the social constituency/position with which this is associated. Often neglected in the advantages of this critical positioning is that it is a mobile one. What is marginal may move sometimes to the mainstream and even if it does not, may then migrate somewhere to a position that is an ambivalent one. This is often true of movements of art or of individual artists with their works – and even of intellectual and ideological movements. Ramkinkar’s life and work appears to me paradigmatic of the mobility of the margins. This is not simply in terms of the fabled recognition (and market price) of the signature of a once neglected artist achieving success and fame. Elements of Ramkinkar’s career – specifically his life and environmental sculpture – suggest a trajectory that is more subtle. Very little is known of Ramkinkar’s early years, but even the little information yields a life that was not tied to a fixed social position. Born in the little known Jugipara in Bankura district (now an urban area), he was from the barber caste. However, from his youth, he was attracted by the clay modelling of the kumars or potter caste and attached himself to one of its leading practitioners, learning by seeing them at work. It was here that his talent was first recognised by Anil Baran Ray, a touring Congressman who set him to work on nationalist banners and posters. The nationalist connection exposed him to Ramananda Chatterjee, editor of the Modern Review – an early nationalist journal that publicised a great deal of contemporary Indian art – and whose roots also lay in Bankura. A close friend of Rabindranath with institutional connections to Visva-Bharati, Ramananda arranged for Ramkinkar to formally study art in Santiniketan. The turn to nationalist mobilisation which enabled new linkages between the elite and their social others, provided the conditions for leaping across social milieu. Ramkinkars’ social mobility ensured for him a position of autonomy – but it also marginalised him in relationship to the collectives around him.  Equally significant and far more decisive was the nature of the new milieu that he entered. While drawing primarily on the middle class, Visva-Bharati was founded on a dissenting vision of the world. It produced a new mode of marginality. While Visva-Bharati has become a venerable – indeed a defining – institution of modern Bengal if not of independent India, it did not occupy the same position when Ramkinkar entered it as a resident student in 1925. It can be argued that Visva-Bharati emerged from Rabindranath’s dissenting position on the imaginary of the Nation-State which he called Nationalism, a critique that was crystallised by the Great War of European nations. Visva-Bharati’s location indexed its commitment. Situated about a hundred miles from Calcutta, then the second city of the Empire, it was connected to it – but from a distance. On the other hand, it also sought to service its surrounding villages for self-empowerment through collective functioning and technological infusions.  What we have here is an attempt to produce new kind of habitation drawing on an inter-embedding of the rural and the urban while creating networks – through Calcutta, with global connections. In other words, it sought to produce a marginal world with its own ecology that would provide an exemplary model for both the developmental needs of the colonised country as well as an outpost of peace and inter-connectedness for a post war world. To put it differently, its marginal position aspired to re-produce the mainstream. Within Visva-Bharati, Kala Bhavana, the arts school of Santiniketan where Ramkinkar studied and then stayed on as a teacher of sculpture, occupied a significant position. Its art practices moved away from the preoccupation with mythology, history and portraiture that had characterised modern Indian art till then. Instead of working within studios, Kala Bhavana pioneered a move to outdoor painting, representing rural workers and landscapes. In doing this, Kala Bhavana consolidated and enriched the linkage between the middle class world of Santiniketan and the rural world that surrounded it. Ramkinkar occupied an interesting position within this practice. If he had lead a “normal” career his low caste status may well have qualified him to have been an object of this art practice; instead he became the artist who had the privilege to represent what could have been his people. The in-between position of Ramkinkar needs a little more elaboration. I should mention here that Ramkinkar occupied an anomalous position in the actual middle class life of Santiniketan. It is true that he recalled the early days of Santiniketan with great affection, bemoaning its family-like intimacy. It is also true that he was given a great deal of support by Nandalal Bose who headed Kala Bhavana and recognised his talent; and it was Rabindranath who it is reported, upon seeing Ramkinkar working, promised to support him in sculpting massive figures and compositions despite the continuously cash-strapped condition of the university. At the same time, Ramkinkar left behind traces that indicated he was not quite comfortable in his environment. The social boundaries of Santinketan were never quite overtly asserted, but what Ramkinkar’s presence did was to crystallise these. In his memoirs he recollects having been asked about his name; his initial, awkward appearance clad in khadi also roused humour in his classmates. These were powerful intimations of the caste marginalisation that lay in store for him – and which is reflected in the fact that he changed his surname and once even hid his name. More consequential is the fact that he consolidated his marginal position himself. He quite openly drank liquor and had a live-in relationship with Radharani, a low caste widow who was initially his domestic worker and then became his model and muse

The Haunting of the Uprooting: On the Functionality of Revisiting Chinnamul

Aparajita De “Zaam na, zaam na; kisu teyi zaam naa” (“I won’t leave, I won’t; not for anything else, I won’t leave), forty-three minutes into the first film made on the Partition, Chinnamul (The Uprooted, 1950) rings out close to our collective histories of the anguish that many share from Bengal during the Partition of India (1947). Director Nemai Ghosh (not to be mistaken with his namesake, the legendary Ray photographer) uses the nuance of the expert and the poignance of the storyteller of an epoch, much before Garm Hawa (Hot Winds, M S Sathyu, 1974) or much later, in Supriyo Sen’s documentary Way Back Home (2002). The details that Chinnamul captures are hard to ignore in the context of the then and the now. Pivoted on the travails of Srikanta and Laxmi from Naldanga, Dhaka, as the country is overnight divided and entire communities, lands, and identities vanish as if they never were, the film ultimately becomes metonymic of a country in transition, divided against itself. The local greed of Madhu Ganguly and Muzaffar Khan, one signifying an upper-caste Bengali brahmin and the latter a Bengali Muslim, become symbols of a predatory gentry that cashed on people’s helplessness; and acquired homes at throwaway prices to consolidate their hold over agricultural land and ancestral property. Such a motif of greed and dispossession was beyond caste or religion in the homelessness of a Prasanna, Srikanta, or a nameless sharecropper and Muslim neighbor. There is only one intersecting truth here: a community’s displacement is synonymous with others’ prosperity. There is no greater or lesser violence there except for those affected, their irreconcilable loss, and their inability to believe that known worlds were changing overnight into perilously new ones. But the film does not go into the violence and gore of 1947 and its aftermath, the eventful consequences of which we continue to pay over with more blood, tears, dispossession, and division. It pivots instead on the anguish of people unable to fathom homelessness. It is as if the community literally sleepwalks into an inexplicable apocalypse that makes them refugees within a matter of days, making them occupants of shoddy, makeshift colonies hastily formed of once-landed peasants with homes and addresses. In the faded reels of the unpreserved version on YouTube, the Naldanga refugees in Calcutta (now Kolkata) represent a minor group, amongst many during the time, formed consequent to a complacently drawn line symbolic of the Empire’s regular nonchalance in the fate of the millions it displaced and annihilated. Nevertheless, the film’s closing frame alludes to the hopes and aspirations of ‘going back’ of a return to the homeland that is, at once real and existing, and at the same time, vanished and becoming the stuff of myths. In the tenuous grey of that promise of ‘return,’ India too, began–its “tryst with destiny.” While daunting, the aspirations of a people stepping out of the Empire and its shadows were not flawless, and neither charted along a predetermined path. In experimenting and liberally flirting with a different kind of crisis after Partition, there was a special hostage: memory and its recalibration in Partition conversations. In the film, the country is at once a lived reality and an imaginative remnant which beckons the displaced to a ‘return.’ While the trauma of the Partition is not the focal point in Ghosh, in a broader context, an erasure of collective trauma around the Partition became dominant. What became increasingly amplified was the displacement and oppression of a particular group by another group. In narratives of trauma and loss, shared and transmitted, generational stories of displacement and anger, binarization and a competitive calibration of anguish and loss were normalized. In the afterlife of the seven decades following the largest displacement of humankind in modern history, the depiction, narration, and the retelling of the Partition have also become synonymous with a narrative sustaining hate, Islamophobia, and the demonizing of an antagonist, for the glory of a grand motherland, for the idea of Desh (country) cannot exist without an amorphous other. If not for reimagining, the horror of the terrifying other is commingled with a dangerous pandering to the illusion of the single grand enemy. This results in an idea that metaphorically connects us to the title of the film I began with—it uproots us from who we are, the uprooting of our memories we never reconciled with, the local histories of loss and solidarity we never quite highlighted in the bigger, single grand narrative that eclipsed our shared losses, shared traumas, and shared displacements along with the anguish of a generation that faithfully believed we would be the guardians of the dream they delivered us, their idea of India. Unfortunately, the lack of retrospective understanding that there is no comparative paradigm to reflect on who suffered more or less is colossal in its myopia in sustaining erasure and grand delusion. In revisiting the trauma associated with the Partition, one may start to construct aporetic events between what happened and how/who is affected and to what extent we choose to remember and transmit, and what we choose to forget or erase from collective discursive spaces, that stem from collective, and independent private ruminations. In revisiting the single most eventful historical event, spartan language may not be reserved for even the faint-hearted; for, the density of trauma and displacement needs emotive articulation as much as documentary evidence to record it factually. Significantly, a sense of critical reflection and an eternal vigil should be most dear to our essence of belonging. A continual, critical, reflective, comprehensive, and honest conversation around 1947 and its private memory needs to be revived from the elite corridors of history and brought into public discursive spaces. Stories of resilience, rebuilding, support, and solidarity need to be retold with renewed enthusiasm. Our private traumas are rooted in hatred and misunderstandings for so long that it has dangerously simplified our stories into a single one, with a single enemy and a single moral compass. Consequently, the overwhelming burden of totalitarian realities and selective erasure collapses any possibilities of reconciliation and closure. The

‘Footfalls echo in the memory’: Displaced Durgas and Migrant Forms

Subha Mukherji in Kolkata, October 2021 [The author is Professor of Early Modern Literature and Culture, University of Cambridge] Durga Puja is one of the biggest Hindu festivals of India, an annual event most widely and exuberantly celebrated in and around Kolkata. On display at the popular Barisha Club ‘pandal’ (pavilion for the installation of idols for religious festivals) in Kolkata through the second week of October was a Durga and her entourage: named ‘Bhaager Ma’, ‘the mother of divisions’ – or perhaps ‘the mother, parcelled out’. Durga the Mother Goddess is depicted as a disoriented, terrified refugee, sitting with her four children, clutching on to her last belongings, in the limbo of a detention centre marked by a cage located in a no-man’s land between the borders of India and Bangladesh. Behind her, a grey screen plays a video showing a muddy patch quivering with footprints hastily left by stealthy feet, big and small, as they fall at night. The footage is uncannily similar to the footfalls visible on YouTube since the BBC published its report of 12 October on Afghan refugees frantically fleeing the Taliban across the Iran-Turkey border, leaving marks on the rough ground as they ‘[sneaked] across’ in desperate hurry (Orla Guerin), while Turkey tightened controls. The similarity is an artistic accident but an existential continuum, signalling an emergent phenomenon of what I will call ‘migrant forms’: forms that respond to the imaginative and ethical demands of the unknowable reality of mass displacement, in a way that governments, institutions and public discourse have calamitously failed to do. Rintu Das, the artist who conceived the refugee Durga, has been playing with the idea for a long time, and has had a team of three clay artists working on it since long before the BBC footage was aired. But the co-appearance of the idol and the news clip in the same week signals a terrible convergence: the barbed wires and walls rising around the world, the governments which are excluding people, whether citizens or aliens, Fascist demagogues who are whipping up majoritarian hatred, are distinct in particulars but identical in essence. Artistic representations of a whole new kind are registering this, speaking across borders in an expressive medium that sometimes goes beyond their makers’ intentional agency, inducing a dialogue that only ‘tribes’ of artworks can do. And as the anthropologist Alfred Gell intuited, artworks do have a way of forming tribes. Just such an ecology is surfacing spontaneously across Kolkata. Bhabatosh Sutar and Dinesh Poddar, makers of this year’s Puja at Naktala Udayan Sangha, frame the pandal with an ominously empty train stuck on a border with bags and baggages spilling out, and signposts marking the distance to various cities-turned-checkpoints in Bangladesh. The Dum Dum Park Puja is themed around the country-wide, ongoing peasants’ protest against the Farm Bills of August 2020, but weaves in a symbol from the women’s protest at Shaheen Bagh in March 2020 against the Government’s CAA and NRC bills: the placing of shoes on the protest site to stand in for them as Covid surged. The heap of sandals strewn across the pandal was predictably denounced by the Hindutva brigade as blasphemous. This year’s refugee Durga counterpoints the muddy feet in the background – played to a soundtrack of guard dogs howling and panicked human cacophony – with exquisite prints of the Goddess’s feet in the long foreground, dyed crimson in the traditionally auspicious red foot-paint called ‘aalta’, leading up to what might have been the altar. This is how we tend to envision Gods visiting mortals, as Durga visits the earth – her parental home – every October, when Kolkata turns into a giant festival site. Except that the raised platform, here, is the barbed cage, and the Goddess has a disarmingly human face. It is a face caught in the headlights sinisterly focused on a border marked with ‘Crossing Prohibited’, but is also in the shadow – the near shadow of the CAA and NRC, and the longer shadow of the Bengal partition. ‘Footfalls echo in the memory’. Artworks like these take their place at once in the global, accretive, conversation, and, more consciously, in dialogue with a more local past: traditions of representation, events of history, and their own formal legacies. The CAA is the Citizenship Amendment Act enacted by the Indian Government in December 2019; its twin proposal, the NRC, is the National Register of Citizens. Packaged as positive legislation, the CAA amends the citizenship act to accept ‘illegal’ migrants who came to India after India’s independence, up until 2014, fleeing from religious persecution in their home states in neighbouring Bangladesh, Pakistan and Afghanistan, but conspicuously excludes Muslims – the largest majority in those countries – alongside other Indic-origin religious minorities like the Rohingyas. The NRC originally applied only in Assam (as of 1951), a state largely shaped by migration, but was suddenly reactivated and updated in 2019. These coupled measures were designed to identify ‘citizens’ and exclude ‘illegal’ immigrants on the basis of documents going back to 1971. In Assam, out of 32.9 million applicants for inclusion in the Registry, 1.9 millions reportedly got left out. While primarily targeted at Muslims who have lived in India for years, including those born here, this count included many Hindus too, whose ancestry went back to Pakistan or Afghanistan or Bangladesh. Fear is in the air. Das tells me that his neighbours, a Hindu couple originally from Bangladesh, are haunted by a generalised sense of terror and a radical insecurity. The wife keeps asking the husband, ‘Bhola, when they take me to the camp, what will you do? And the kids?’ Amidst the proliferation of obscurantist Acts and Bills, the precise targets of these new rules are not distinguishable to all. Anyone who has had to leave one of these neighbouring countries for India, and anyone who has been in India as a member of a long-settled religious minority, is susceptible to this miasma of despair. There are many families

The Aesthetics of the Festival

  We celebrate festivals. Actually we celebrate the experience and mood of a festival. Celebrating itself is an art, a primitive and joyous form. Besides, festivals are where we gather as a community—real or virtual. In short, festivals unite us through nurturing of certain rituals and art forms. I have just now used two phrases: ritual and art-form—but can these two words be brought together so easily? Ritual surely has a strong plinth over which our living as and within communities thrive; but it also has a strong ‘real’ and ‘diurnal’ dimension of religiosity, which resists abstraction. Rituals bind communities by means of highlighting collective participation in and through certain rites, initiations, addresses and customary practices.  Rituals help us immerse vertically in living.  On the other hand art-form is a secular expression, which is beholden to the idea of aesthetics.  Art forms could be autonomous or creations of individual artists which connoisseurs of art are then able to appreciate and judge. The questions of form takes us to a certain mode of abstraction, although created art is very much concrete and in front of us. When we ‘participate’ in festivals, do we work at the secular or the religious domain, especially if the festival concerned has a strong religious connotation? If the marker of a festival is strongly aesthetic and experiential, can such creations and receptions be called ‘cultural’ and be made part of our modern existence or is all experiential immersion necessarily is a matter of faith and submission that brings it within the purview of the religious? The Bengali film Mahalaya, directed by Soumik Sen, recently running in the theatres, provides us an occasion to think about such questions afresh. Here is a day that inaugurates the festival of Durga Puja by marking the initiation and commencement of devipaksha. But that day gathers special significance in the collective Bengali psyche since 1931 owing to a special program of chandipath (a form of chanting recited from the scriptural verses of Sri Sri Chandi or Durga Saptashati ) laced with a string of songs aired by All India Radio. The sequence narrates and dramatizes the story of Durga’s annihilating the mahishasura and thereby allegorizing the victory of the benevolent forces over the evil. To the secular listener the whole thing is an act of superb experience of narrative art, with a hint of melodrama, worked out through certain musical and narrativizing techniques. For instance, I have just used the notion of allegorical enactment in order to describe what happens each year in every Bengali household as the voice of Birendra Krishna Bhadra wafts across our habitus,inaugurating the grand festival. Bhadra’s tone, enunciation and consistency then assumes a bardic status which is still secular and cultural. Our inner experience is ignited and collectivized through art every year, it can be argued. The film dramatizes this event by reminding us of an interruption in this ‘tradition’ in 1976, when the ‘address proper’ and fulcrum of the ritual, the stotraptath/chandipath, was ‘performed’ for once by the favourite matinee idol of  Bengal, Uttam Kumar. The ‘experiment’ by AIR pushed during the time of Emergency was a total washout, an abortive venture. By means of highlighting this break and its catastrophic failure, the film wishes to highlight a particular mode of tradition. This form of recreating tradition stands firmly against the politicization of religion that the far-right peddles. In fact, such a modality of highlighting a consensual Bengali collectivity tries to create a ‘timeless’ middle path. I will argue that this mode is being systematically resuscitated in the Bengali mainstream cultural artifacts, art and literature, films and theatre in the post-liberalization decades. This mode wishes to keep away from both politics (left and right) and also from the ‘play’ in aesthetics by means of consecrating art and turning it ritualistic, auretic and communitarian. The question of a seemingly cultural experience turns complicated when we also notice certain other makers simultaneously playing, which have arguably converted this modern and technologically mediated experience of the AIR event into a diurnal ritual of timelessness. The film firmly affirms this second view—that tradition (in this case the immersion in bhava and bhakti) may have been a constructed category but sometimes it does turn timeless, universal and gets entrenched within the collective psyche of a people. The film highlights, by means of affirming Bhadra’s voice and Pankaj Kumar’s Mullick’s authoritative presence, a certain investment in collective practice even prior to the creation of the cultural artifact/ritual text. Mullick’s deep engagement with ritualistic exercises, enacted through rigorous collective rehearsals and AIR itself being invested in ritual practice prior to the airing of the programme are key elements in stressing the need to value and nurture this mode of diurnal-cooperative living. To arrive at the correct tempo or techniques of orchestration are not going to even produce such ethereal melody, let alone reach the ‘inner ear’ of the believer. That aspect of musicality shall remain unexamined and mysterious. This is what the film highlights–the excess that flows underneath. The film also marks the recurrence and repeatability of time. The ecclesiastical year is always marked by recurrence. It does so by suggesting to the viewers that such festivals do not operate independently of a certain consecration of time. Such events occur and perpetuate in its own time and in proper time. Time is not autonomous anymore. It is fulfilled. This is how finite beings connect to eternity, the film tries to tell us. Eventually, the errant ‘artists’, who relied on their individual talents and organizational capacity fail and are brought back into the fold of a mitigating tradition. No one is belittled (RSS is roundly critiqued but not Vivekananda). Everybody realizes with due humility the value and gravitas of that mysterious topos of the inexplicable that joins past with the present, the traditional with the contemporaneous, the aesthetic with the religious. A consensus is reached. The innovators like the singer Hemanta Mukherjee (Hemant Kumar) are taken to task initially–as brash, selfish and