The Mirage in the Pupil
Born Lucy Renee Mathilde Schwob, Claude Cahun (1894-1964) tried on several pseudonyms including Claude Courlis, referencing the Curlew bird, and Daniel Douglas, after the British literary Lord Alfred Douglas. Cahun purposefully chose sexually ambiguous names for herself which further complicated the projection of her image to not only the public as they viewed her art but to her peers and colleagues as well. *** *** In 1909, Cahun met an illustrator, Suzanne Malherbe who would become her life-partner. Malherbe worked under the name Marcel Moore, and she and Cahun shared an intimate collaboration throughout the rest of their careers. *** In 1940, the island where the two lived became invaded by Nazi troops and as if Cahun’s Jewish roots didn’t put her in danger as it were, both she and Moore became intensely politically active in a self instigated anti-German movement (The Guerilla Girls 63). Cahun created surrealist flyers, often interpreted as works of art themselves, which she then distributed in mass amounts into bystanders’ coat pockets, open car windows, discreetly left on tabletops and crumpled and thrown into buildings. Her actions were not only political but artistic as well. Cahun and Moore’s operation was so successful and on such a large scale that troops were actually convinced of a secret resistance group operating on the island. When the two were eventually found out, they were imprisoned and though it was never actually carried out, sentenced to death. *** *** She published her writing widely while the photographs remained private. Cahun met Philippe Soupault at Monnier’s bookstore, Les Amis du Livre, in 1919, and he proposed that she collaborate on the revue Littérature that he was launching with André Breton—the journal that would lead to the founding of the Surrealist movement. Cahun, intimidated, declined. It would take another ten years, and the interceding of her friends Henri Michaux, Robert Desnos, and Jacques Viot, before Cahun would meet Breton and become officially affiliated with the group. Affiliated—but never an official member. *** *** “I will follow the wake in the air, the tracks on the water, the mirage in the pupil.” *** *** “I want to stitch, sting, kill, with only the most pointed extremity. The rest of the body, whatever comes after, what a waste of time! To travel only at the prow of myself.” *** *** One of Cahun’s most cutting literary works is Heriones, originally published in Le Mercure de France in 1925, it consists of 14 monologues told from the point of view of famous women of history: Eve, Delilah, Judith, Penelope, Helen of Troy, Sappho, Cinderella, the Virgin Mary—they’re all here and speaking like no storyteller allowed them to before Cahun. Each chapter overturns the traditional narrative associated with these women—Cahun reads women’s history against the grain. *** *** In many of her essays and letters one can see how Cahun undertook her passionate, sophisticated analysis of the relation between politics and poetry. Place Your Bets, published in 1934, brilliantly critiques the assumptions of a crudely propagandistic art, as advocated by Aragon, and defends the practice of the avant-garde. In particular, it anticipates many subsequent Marxist debates on the nature of artistic production and reception in its complex understanding of the ways in which the meaning of a text is beyond the conscious awareness of either the author or the reader. *** *** “Instead of removing the wings from a dragonfly to call it a red pepper, in a subtractive or reductive move, we should affix wings to the red pepper, in an additive or augmentative mood, to have it become that dragonfly.” *** *** “Poets act in their own way on men’s sensibilities. Their attacks are more cunning, but their most indirect blows are sometimes mortal.” *** *** In her memoir, Confidences au miroir (Confiding in the Mirror), written after her imprisonment during the Second World War, Cahun writes of her longing for affiliation and her simultaneous inability to ally herself with any one group. It seems clear she is speaking of her disillusionment with the Surrealists, their constant exclusions, and the deaths of René Crevel and Robert Desnos when she writes of her indignant feelings at the fact that “the most sensitive and sincere lose their spirit or their lives. . . . [I have always] reacted by abstaining, opposing, resigning, by maintaining friendships with the solitaries or the ones who have been excluded—this attitude is obviously harmful to the participation which I desired above all else.” We can detect here a certain wistfulness, inspired not only by the past, but by the inevitability of the past: it could not have been any other way. Cahun being Cahun, she could only ever operate on the margins, and embrace those she found there beside her. *** *** Cahun employs a very dark satire in a post-war document beginning: ‘Have you had any dealings with the Nazis? Did you notice that they have a certain sense of humour? Is it different from yours?’ François Leperlier notes how in this piece Cahun contrasts ‘l’humour non objectif nazi (l’humour nihiliste)’ with ‘l’humour noir.’49 Lacking a sense of contradiction, desublimated nihilist ‘humour’ manifests itself in the brutal reality Cahun evokes at the Matthausen concentration camp. Here, among other grimly farcical events, a gypsy orchestra is obliged to play the popular French song ‘I will wait’ (‘J’attendrai’) whilst the inmates watch three of their comrades being hanged for trying to escape. *** *** “Under this mask, another mask. I will never be finished removing all these faces.” *** *** “A man thought he had photographed the hair of the woman he loved, strewn with bits of straw as she was sleeping in a field. When the photograph was developed a thousand arms, shining fists and weapons appeared, and he saw that it was a riot.” *** *** In a 1936 document addressed to a meeting of Contre-Attaque, Cahun condemns patriotism, because, according to her, even where it is supposedly proletarian, it leads only to its adherents becoming ‘marionettes des impérialistes’ (‘puppets of imperialism’).This was what she and the others
“Aao Radio Sunein”: Manto’s Radio Plays
Aakriti Mandhwani _______________________________ [i] Saadat Hasan Manto is arguably best known for his oft-acerbic, yet true-to-life depiction of the tragedies that befell India during the partition. “Khol Do” is one such popular narrative; Manto pens the short story of a young girl who is separated from her father during the Partition and, upon her rescue raped so persistently by her “rescuers” that she, even after having been returned to her father, mechanically opens her shalwar when the hospital doctor has merely asked someone to open the windows in the room. Manto’s skilful climax brings to the fore the painful understanding of how, following the carnage of the Partition, language itself loses its complexity and results in the fixing of one particular meaning; indeed, “Khol Do”, for the girl, has come to mean only one thing. Of “Toba Tek Singh”, another of his pungent stories on the Partition, prescribed in numerous university syllabi, which, in many senses, can be deemed partly responsible for Manto’s name in contemporary popular circulation, M. Asaduddin paradoxically says, “The name ‘Toba Tek Singh’ creates all this resonance… It is only some moments later that one thinks of Manto, the writer who created the character. It is the classic case of a fictional character overshadowing its creator”. However, even as the power of Manto as short story writer is noted and feted, he did not only pen short stories. He is equally well-known for his biting account of the film industry of pre-Partition Bombay and its stars, in a post-Partition series of essays titled “Ganjey Farishtey”. Before the Partition, along with his other illustrious contemporaries like Krishen Chander and Rajinder Singh Bedi, Manto was also a writer of film stories. His other professions included being a translator, critic and editor. However, another fact—noted by every biographer, yet always in passing and, therefore, not chronicled well enough—is that Manto worked at All India Radio (AIR) in Delhi for 18 months from the beginning of 1940 to August 1942, writing more than 110 radio plays during his time there. I would like to uncover Manto’s relationship with this forgotten archive, that is, the radio plays he wrote for AIR. Manto self-confessedly turned to radio as a means of sustenance, at a time when he could not get any other work that paid him nearly as much[ii]. Through a close examination of some of the plays written by Manto for AIR, the essay shall seek to understand how Manto, as an artist, dealt with the material that was meant to be broadcast over radio, to examine the contradictions between writing for what seems to be commercial gain. Manto’s treatment of this difference between writing for AIR as against writing short stories for publication shall be uncovered through his own views on it, and the contradictions that lie within the artist that provide the logic for such demarcations shall be probed. Even as the Manto oeuvre ranges well over 110 radio-plays, because of language limitations and difficulty in accessing the archives at AIR[iii], I shall only examine the plays included in Dastaawez Part 3[iv] . Manto the “Artist” vs. Manto the “Commercial” Writer An artist, writing and making a living in the modern marketplace, is understood to make a distinction between the art he makes for personal satisfaction and the art he seeks to sell. More often than not, both these kinds of writings are simultaneously available in the public domain, since the writer seeks appreciation for the art that gives him personal satisfaction. Pierre Bourdieu, in The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field says of writing: “It is instituted through two principal mediations: on the one hand, the market, whose sanctions and constraints are exercised on literary enterprises either directly, by means of sales figures, numbers of tickets sold and so forth, or indirectly, through new positions offered in journalism, publishing, illustration and all forms of industrialized literature; and on the other hand, durable links, based on affinities of lifestyle and value systems, and operating especially through the intermediary of the salons, which unite at least a portion of the writers to certain sections of high society, and help to determine the direction of the generosities of state patronage.” It can, therefore, be understood that a writer, at any time, has to deal with both these questions simultaneously. In Manto’s context, the second option—that which seeks to “unite at least a portion of the writers to certain sections of high society”—was not feasible in the sense that Bourdieu thinks of it, namely, that of “state patronage”. However, for Manto, it indeed was “based on affinities of lifestyle and value systems, and operating especially through the intermediary of the salons, which unite at least a portion of the writers”, and that was a movement called the Progressive Writer’s Association (PWA). Instituted in 1936, the PWA united and perhaps even encouraged the form of the Urdu short story, a fairly recent phenomenon in the history of Urdu literature, to grow. The similarities between the intent and value judgements of Manto’s short stories—even as he, throughout his life, completely sought to disengage from movements of any kind—and the work of other pioneers of the progressive Urdu short story form, do stand in agreement with the general collective judgments that are so essentially a part of the PWA. Asaduddin mentions that, at the time of Manto’s joining, other personalities like Ahmad Shah Bukhari, N.M. Rashid, Chiragh Hasan Hasrat, Miraji and Upendranath Ashk were also associated with AIR. Though a perfect delineation is difficult to make—especially in the case of an artist such as Manto who actively avoided being grouped in any institutional way—at this point, the essay tentatively proposes to set up a dichotomy between Manto’s art and Manto’s commercial work, with Manto’s art leaning towards the expectations that the PWA, during its formative years, had from its literature. This dichotomy is proposed not only because of Manto’s personal interactions and timorous debates with other members of the PWA,
A Poet’s Passage
Arindam Chakrabarti ————————————- Time does not pass; we pass. So writes Bhartrahari. “kaalonayaatah, vayamevayaataah”. Utpal Kumar Basu, having lived for the last decade or so in an entirely undeserved public oblivion (though his last book of poems “Piya Man Bhabe” got the Sahitya Akademi award last year), passed away a few weeks back. I came to know him quite accidentally when I found an elderly gentleman, studiedly unkempt in attire, but with a pair of sleepy but large and scintillating eyes, attending my lectures on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, week after week—as if he needed to take a test on that text—at the Kolkata (Patuli) Center for Study of the Social Sciences. That was about eight years ago. He never introduced himself to me, but I came to know that he was Utpal Kumar Basu, a poet’s poet who was awarded the Ananda Puraskar. When I started reading his work systematically, I marveled at how incomparable his depth, subtlety and precision were in relation to all the celebrated poets in Bangla of our times. And yet, this extra-ordinary mind moved about and sat in obscure corners of literary, philosophical or social science seminars, in ill-washed kurta-pajama and a pair of boots, as if he was a retired banker’s clerk getting interested in literature, philosophy and anthropology late in his life. A well-traveled geologist who read amazingly widely, Utpal Kumar had an insatiable appetite for knowledge which was never satisfied by information. Sitting in his own flat one evening in 2009, I had debated the complex relationship between scientific and historical knowledge and poetry. I tried to provoke him by idolizing Binoy Mazumdar and making the kind of divine insanity that Socrates traces poetry to (for example in the Platonic dialogue called “Ion”) a necessary condition for good poetry. He laughed in disagreement and claimed modestly that he had never been insane, though he had often been angry and lustful. His progressive politics was never on display. Even in bitter disagreement, he maintained a good-humoured smile and a warm friendliness which have become vanishingly rare among intellectuals and prize-winning poets in India. For all his amicability, Utpal Kumar’s political irony never missed its target: “There is very little time, now let us mingle in the crowd of all those knowers of politics/ who get their food from shooting their guns on the shoulders of starving peasants. (The untranslatable original here goes “chaashider maathaay kanthaal bhenge”)”. Autobiography and cosmopolitanism, relentless protest against economic inequality and a lyrical aloneness, uncanny Jibanananda-like sensitivity to touch and smell of every body-hair, every “smell of sunlight on the kite’s wing”, every drop of sweat of corporeal animal existence combined to stamp each of Basu’s poem’s with an unrepeatable perfection. Chaitrye Rochito Kobita, Lochondas Karigar, Khando baichitryer Din,Dhusar Atagach, Salma Jorir Kaaj, Night School, Tusu Amar Chintamoni: just some of the titles of his books make a unique catalogue of phrases that remake the Bengali language, quietly but radically by the sheer juxtaposition of the classical and the contemporary, the rural and the urban, the plain and the ornate, the exotic and the quotidian. Some of his imagery defies all literary critical taxonomy: “ And then, in the grass-forest are left behind your personal sandals of Spring time/ The sky today is as real as the blue shirt and shorts of the children of gods/ A lonesome peacock is roaming in that first floor room/ Sajal used to stay in that room/Sajal’s wife and daughter used to stay…. Getting down to the furrow of the promiseless river two men are looking for copper and mica// You lost your private sandals of Spring time in Badampahar/ I lost my personal writing style in Badampahar//” He kept losing his personal style, just so that he can adopt a different style every now and then. Such quiet but strong refusal to imitate was Utpal-dA’s hallmark, that he would cautiously avoid imitating himself, let alone imitate Rabindranath, or Jibanananda or Shakti Chattopadhyay. His gaze was fixed on some god of small truths. If dead, as he is now, he would love to come back but imaginatively he was always interested in retrieving his own embryonic innocence, in imagining what it is like never to have been born, but just conceived: “When I was in the womb, as a fetus, about to be born, there was no untruth. Stray pieces of belief were there, some muck, and there was a walking trail in the forest. After the cremation fire goes out, I keep flying back into the scorched out pond, Into the ashen wood, and back in the the cracks on the path” A couple of years back he published a short poem in the magazine Anushtup. Eshechhe Bedonaa. Those days I happened to be struggling with some physical pain and also was lecturing in my classes on Buddhist and Wittgensteinian philosophies of pain. The poem was so personal and so universal in its unsharable acuteness of suffering of an aching ageing body that I wondered how it could even be written in Bengali or any language at all. It is clearly about chronic pain which no words can ever express. Yet the personification of recurrent pain and the tragic humour about such unbearable pain made it a delight to read. The more it hurt the more it charmed. I tried to translate it and failed. Well, now that the eternally inquisitive Utpal-daa is personally busy interviewing death, Nachiketa –style, I offer my failure as his translator as a tribute to his memory. Agony Arrived Pain has come. As if on a well-planned pilgrimage at his own expense. He will go to Varanasi, go to Mecca, and in between, Now and then, Will also visit me. How much has your right hand healed? Hope you have not missed Taking proper diet regularly, though it will be fine If some such trifling memories lapse, In the midst of all those goings away and comings back Of Agony. For, his
Singing The Boatman: Hemango Biswas and the ‘Bahirana’ in Folk Music
Rongili Biswas As part of the legendary folk singer Hemango Biswas’ birth centenary celebration,the first volume of his collected works came out which contained among others, his writings on folk music. As one of the editors of that volume (Hemango Biswas Rachanasangraha, vol 1, Pranab Biswas and Rongili Biswas ed., Deys Publishing, Kolkata, 2012), I had to read his theories and critique on folk music closely. His theorization is complex, multi-layered and geared towards achieving a purity in folk singing. He firmly believed that folk singing is non-codified. Its sensibility is defined by the specificities of physical ambience, language, tune, rhythm of labour, styles of articulation as well as geographical, historical and cultural contexts of a particular region. In that sense, it cannot have a school or gharana as found in the classical musical tradition. If it has something that is construed and shaped by the parameters I just mentioned that would better be termed as bahirana, a mode of learning that draws upon the traditions of a particular region, and is firmly entrenched in the cultural specificities of the same. The compulsions of market economy constitute too strong a force working against the traditional modes of such pure performances. Artistes often present corrupt versions of traditional songs with accompaniments that are far removed from the purpose of preserving them. Urban and sometimes even rural audiences, whose perception has been moulded by the corrupt versions, do not desire anything better than those versions. Even serious artists often succumb to such demands. Hemango Biswas was a strong and often a lonely critic of such distortions in folk singing. As a student of his classes on folk singing and as his daughter and close associate, editing the volume made me share his anxieties, anxieties that get deepened in today’s context. One way of responding to that, I thought, would be to build up a musical archive where his own recordings, those of the artistes he thought as genuine representatives of the original styles and the songs collected by him sung in his preferred styles could be preserved. This is urgently required to minimize the loss that his own collection in the house has already undergone. The archive contains several notebooks containing the lyrics of songs collected by Biswas from various Indian provinces. These range over bhatiali, bhaoaia, kamrupi, bongeet, sari, jari, jhaore, ghumor, murshidi, jhumur, gambhira, bhadu, tusu, kajri, choiti, dhamail, lullaby, hori, bihu, etc. Within this repertoire, only a chosen few have been recorded in Biswas’ own voice (in the album Surma nadir gangchil), which gives a fundamental idea about the extremely nuanced and ornate style of bhatiali and dehatatwa he represented. Bhatiali is essentially the song of the boatman on the river. Bhatiali relates to the slow downstream movement of the boat while sari relates to the vigorous upstream journey. Since rivers constitute an integral part of the terrain of the two Bengals (West Bengal and Bangladesh) these songs are often considered to be one of the principal representative forms of folk songs from Bengal. Solitude in a way constitutes the core of bhatiali. On the one hand, the sound of the water brings in a lilting unevenness in the notational structure that calls for a specific vocal timbre for rendering it properly. On the other, bare nature and the very expanse of the river facing the boatman brings out an existential anguish. And bhatiali often tends to merge with dehatattwa– a genre of music that dwells on the philosophy of the body. In these, the river is typically used as a metaphor for life. Where to get anchored and how to attain transcendence (siddhi) avoiding the enticements of life (presented through the motifs of lights, markets, colours) are questions asked perennially. ‘Dehotori dilam chhario’ is a famous song of this genre. Here is a typical Hemango Biswas style. “ I unfasten the boat of my body in your name, o guru. If I drown, your name will be tarnished. Traders trade goods in the market Colourful lights dazzle the shop windows. They rob people in full glare On the principal street, Taking your name. I unfasten the boat of my body in your name, o guru. I am puzzled to see the market. Perhaps I am luckless, Fallen into trouble. I left Narayanganj to walk The path of Madanganj. Taking your name. I unfasten the boat of my body in your name, o guru. If you go to Madanganj The alligator of desire will catch you. Pass through the town of Siddhi first In order to reach the perennial abode. Taking your name. I unfasten the boat of my body in your name, o guru. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AmULE_uK1qY This is a form of bhatiali that is extremely ornate in nature. Its classical, rambling, nuanced style of rendition is rare, nearly extinct nowadays. The names of the places act as metaphors, as is the norm for this mystical mode of communication. Madanganj, Narayanganj, Siddhirganj exist as place names and they also stand for symbols of desire, abstinence and transcendence. I am tempted to quote an artiste who hails from the same region as Hemango Biswas – Sylhet in Bangladesh – and is considered to be the master of a certain style. His rendition follows a mild beat and a different scansion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ivCgAyTW73k I cry my heart out By this worldly river. O my mind, who will help you cross over. I wasted my time when times were good, I have come to the river at the bad hour Boatman, I do not know your name Who would I call? The boat is there, but not the boatman There is not a soul on the banks Boatman, I do not know your name Who would I call? Idam the lesser mortal says ‘ Who knows what awaits me’ Sitting at the dargah of Hazrat Shah Jalal Idam Shah cries. O my mind, who will help you cross over. This song was used in Rittwik Ghatak’s film ‘Meghe Dhaka Tara’ at