Why Bear It Like A Crucifix ?
Shiv Prasad Joshi [Translation: HUG] ________________________ That there is a well-planned pattern of attacks is quite evident. One does not need to be thrilled with any prophetic prediction in this regard. People shall continue to be killed. Our surroundings are suffused with a kind of painful despondency. Various regions and sects are despairing. Canker and curses arise from odd corners. It is not that every cry for the redressal of injustice reverberates only from the places from where they can be heard loudly. All peril won’t come at one go. Attacks against the freedoms of unity, religion and expression are not new. Such things have been in practice, as per expected convention, since the time of Manto. The lines penned by such poets are so dear to us and to many fresh young minds and souls. We live and quote such words and phrases and we move ahead. When hawks and falcons dare us, like penetrating light from a torch we focus such phrases on those predators. Some respected writers in Hindi have shown indifference and have been generally inactive. Such reactions surprise the younger generation and make them mute and taciturn. Perhaps the same patterns are being enacted in other languages too. But gentlemen, those who are returning awards are not ‘a tired lot.’ These are courageous people,fired with the energy of resistance. This is not an immediate and easy route to heroism.Nor is this any Bollywood masala film—now showing. No, this does not seem to be an emotional outburst or useless sentimentality under whose aegis tales of martyrdom are to be written. This is no slapdash superficiality. Do you consider this whole thing in such a light? History turns back and demands something today. Some people wrap themselves in blankets and, turning the other way, doze off. Forget Sahitya Akademi. Look at the writerly angst which, arising out of their artistic creations, has turned out determined resolutions. This is spreading. Is this a disease or an infection? Till what time shall you wait? What will happen when you shall say—yes, now we have reached the limit? Do you need the sound or the effects of a loud explosion so that all limits can be shattered? Why shall you bear this like a crucifix? It is not that Christ wanted to bear the crucifix willfully. It was brought upon him. Are you trying to say that this predicament has been thrust upon you? This crucifix does bear its full weight upon you every single day and it crushes you. But what about those who are being bludgeoned to death? Do these folks harbour any torturous nail of affliction that pierces your soul straight to make you shriek in pain? Instead of carrying this cross of remorse and fanning this restiveness of not being able to make a difference, why not take on this responsibility of the collective? How can you make this the solitude of all your agony and criticality? In such times. How can you remain isolated? Why are you getting yourself mired in the metaphor of bearing the crucifix? You are doing that anyway—in your everyday suffering and torment, in violence and in struggles. How and when did this idea of awards get entangled and started being counted within the axis of your writerly existence? You were not born to bear the cross. Your aim was to compose poetry. You did care about this troubled and exploited society. Hence you began writing in the first place. So, where did this crucifix come from? And what is this thing about exposing and unmasking? Why are our dear poets getting entangled in idioms? Why are they speaking through the nodes of a certain righteousness, as if whatever they say must be the correct and proven truth? Why is resistance being so downgraded—wherefore this skepticism? So, when we see this collective spirit in Kannada, Punjabi, Konkani and Marathi, why is there this proliferation of camps and coteries in Hindi? Why do many different-hued flags flutter over its shamiana? As if it is still the British Raj or some pre-Raj scenario. What about a common tent, a single camp? Who may be infiltrating these camps? It is not surprising that what the wealthy and the powerful of the nation believe is more or less what you have come to believe. Most smart-aleck media pundits also arrive at similar conclusions. And the writers are being said to be of two kinds. Look, Chetan Bhagat has also become a speaker with an opinion. Elements like Bhagat are giving us nuggets of wisdom. And people like Anupam Kher too, always acting the sentinel toany criticism ofthe PM. They have the gumption to seek accounts from the writers. Even someone like Shashi Tharoor, the controversial and controversialist, feels the need to offer his opinion. Stay a writer if you are one; do not trespass into politics. And the sound of this terrible laughter–that reverberates from Delhi to the farthest qasbah-mohalla of India—Bow before me! Bow down or else—should no one speak anything about that? Should all turn supplicants? Is that even possible? I don’t know why all these learned, respected souls seem to be floundering. This time we are correct. This is not vanity, just self-worth. Not cleverness, it is courage. Not selfishness, it is conscience. Our conscience is in perfect sync with our soul. This is permanent uprightness. Please do return to this uprightness. This return shall mean an admission into the future. The future has always been created by uprightness. Not through this flailing and flittering. From what custody shall you frame your next creation? What heartstrings shall trill and tremble before your shut eyes? Surely Muktibodh, had he been around, would have said on our behalf—what is your politics, partner? It is not a cliché to have converted such a great piece of writing as Andhere Mein into a cliché so that every ‘sated’ soul might no more speak on and about it. Stop drinking Andhere Mein like a cold drink
Fafamau
Prasanta Chakravarty ওর আর কোনো গতি নেই জানো, কবিতা লেখা ছাড়া—she does not have any recourse, you know, other than writing poetry. This is what rings in my ears. This is how Anindita Mukhopadhyaya, whom I keep meeting as she swings on her Aeolian School Balcony ( বাতাসিয়া স্কুল বারান্দায়ে ), was introduced to me by a friend who himself only knows to swim and perish with poetry. There is a ticket that you have to earn. If you are ‘an explorer of the bliss of writing’, in Roland Barthes’ words. And this ticket can only be earned if you have routinely skipped classes and tutorials in college, dumped all projects and deadlines for good: কলেজ পালিয়ে যারা চুপিচুপি /ঘাসে নেমে এলো,/চলে গেল দূর দূর গঞ্জের হাটে,/তারা পেল /ঝাউফুল আর –/নেপচুনের সমুদ্র মুকুতা “Those who bunked college classes, and noiseless /Came down to the grass /Disappeared at the gunj-haat /They would accrue jhau-flowers/Neptune’s sea-pearls” On this balcony, living is tentative. Buffeted, but not indifferent: living, dying and living again on the swinging school balcony is a shared belief system that one partakes of. No one looks for any clarification here. Because no pointers are given. Living is staying in constant amazement of our existence and being aware of our finitude, even as we are deeply aware of and puzzled by the angelic and diabolic presences all around us: আসলে একটা পোকা সেই কোনকালে/মাথায়ে সেঁধিয়ে গেল–/ গন্ধতেলে ভেসে থাকত দুপুরের সর,/অসুধ খেয়ে সে কী ঘুম/আলোকলতা পিসির,–ইজিচেযারটা হাঁফাত,/বিচ্ছিরি টিকটিকি দুটো কী যে করত/খাটের তলায়!/ সমীরণ ধীরে না বইলে ভীষণ ভয় করত/সবেদন পরশন সইতে না পেরে/ছবিটা ঝনঝন করে পড়ে ভাঙলে/লতুপাগলি আবার সমস্ত পাড়াঘর মাথায় করবে | “Actually an insect, long ago/Embedded itself in the head /Afternoon’s rind stayed afloat in fragrant oil / Popping pills, those everlasting siestas used to begin /Aloklata Pishi’s easy-chair would pant /Those ugly lizards! Devil alone knows what they were up to /Underneath the bed/The buffeting breeze, not gentle, would terrify /Unable to withstand the aching touch /The painting came crashing down, in splinters/Lotu pagli, her wails and shrieks, shall once again wake the whole colony up.” Living is slow. And living is a misunderstanding that is unmistakably erotic. So the poetic recollection of that eroticism is eternity’s flowing back into the present. For the poetic tick that infiltrates our head is a delicious pall of an unrushed creamy rind, maddening in its extended fragrance. Everything around us takes time, wondrous and wondering , every bit rocks sluggishly, the insect’s magical potion taking charge, gestates inside our head—the leaden siesta, aunt’s chair that is easy, the resident lizards, all owe their existence in the nowness of their presence to that bug that had entered our cranial woodwork at the beginning of time. The bug of existing is now in poesy, undulating in living matter, throbbing. Such is the tremulousness of our living, such is its pitch-perfect diurnal cycle, that any minor change in this seasonal flavor— effected by the busy wind in this case, will inevitably lead to shrillness and imbalance. This strident intrusiveness of the wind starts off the dawdling madwoman. Who, with some oracular premonition, alerts us with her clamour of some impending doom. As a contrary force to time’s wind, there is a waft of a breeze, not mellow but full, and it always arrives in the dawn—যোগাযোগহীন এক হাওয়া —an unconnected puff of air. This is how visitations of memory, and connections, rustle us. This rustle will take more concrete shape anon. There is a side to the gunj/shahartoli existence that fills us up with rubies and pearls, this lost existence in utter oblivion–কী গান যেন, কাদের ঘরে?–অনুচ্চ, অনুক্ত…/ সেও বোঝেনা আমরাও চাই ওসব মণিমুক্ত. The basis of an existence, of all poetry, is the unsaid, the tonality of the low-lying, sunken, the nether. This is where the Aeolian balcony appears —within the cocoon of a concerned oblivion. It is a school of learning, a magical parallel cosmos that runs athwart us—বাঁ পাশে বিস্কুট-কলোনী ভরে যাচ্ছে নতুন আলোয়—this is the milky way of the light-awash refuge of a biscuit colony. It is this incandescent biscuit colony on the left side of our existence that leads to that dawn’s railway station where one encounters fafamau: হঠাত জীবনে এলো ফাফামাউ/ ভোররাতে রংচটা কোটে/…স্টেশনমাস্টার বলেন ” এই তো সিগন্যাল/ এ লেড়কি, ট্রেনে উঠে পড়”/তিনি তো জানেন না কিছু –/জীবনে এসেছে ফাফামাউ !/…এইবার ভোর হবে, পাহাড়িয়া ভোর/জোনাকিরা ফিরে গেছে, বাবুনাই ডাকে…/তুমি যদি নাও আসো/জীবনে তো ফাফামাউ এলো/ তাকে ছেড়ে তাকে ছেড়ে/যাবনা কথাও আমি আর | “And lo! fafamau has come into my life/ In his discoloured coat, at dawn/ The station-master says “There goes the signal/Hey girl, get into the train”/ But hardly would he know/ that fafamau has come into my life! /…Soon there will be morn, a hilly morn/ The fireflies have departed, the babunai sings…/Even if you do not arrive/Still fafamau has come into my life/Leaving him, quitting him/ I shall not, shall not go anywhere.” There is a undistinguished railway station where fafamau lives. The station is laden with matt-blue wooden benches, and a bluer waiting room. Here’s where fafamau shall welcome you. And black deodar trees and deodar fruits are afar, that surrounds you as night falls over you like a shroud. The tall darkening blacks, the azure waiting rooms are where our business of love and wonderment never comes to a stop. You will ignore the signal and disregard the station-master. But there is a price to pay for embracing such a life of a private, unhurried non-journey. The deodar darkness of the station turns into a macabre tribunal that exhibits us in our full, creaturely vulnerability. First to ourselves. And then to the world. A forlorn abjectness is our only fate. We genuflect. And an unconditional declaration is the only possible means to square with such stringent, unforgiving judgmental ways: না, না দয়া করে আমার দিকে আলো ফেলবেন না–/চোখে ব্যথা করে খুব–এমনিতেই আমি এরকমই ঘামি–/না, কোনও অসুবিধে হচ্ছে না আমার–লাই দিলে আমি মাথায়/উঠে যাই–আরও ধমকধামকের দরকার আছে আমার–/ বেত্শিক্ষকের
Bhaskar Chakrabarty’s Diary—1982: A Selection
1/1 Gist. A political journalist is more than a prostitute. 1/1 a poem is a deer with a dream in it. 1/1 Defeat becomes us. 14/1 Piku-Sadgati— incomparable, incomparable 29/1 If you want to catch a thief, kick the police. 30/1 Kamalda’s painting exhibition—academy of fine arts. 3/2 Orphee. This Cocteau film I had probably seen ten years ago. Watched it again today. Timeless classic. Kamalda’s painting exhibition. 5/2 Jule et Jim. Incomparable. Kamalda’s exhibition over. 10/2 Have to bring such a kind of laughter into grasp that nothing will ever make it fade. 10/2 A man’s body lying in this room, burnt to death. 19/2 Akaler Shondhane. How a good film can be ruined, Mrinalbabu shows at the end. Weight – 70 kg 5/3 Is it because I have been able to love that I am suffering so every day? 17/3 They read quickly, badly, and pass judgement before they have understood.—J.P.S. If the poet relates, explains , or teaches, the poetry becomes prosaic; he has lost the game.—J.P.S. 19/3 I must admit that I have never written any political poetry. But still, if someone calls any poem political, I will not be surprised. 22/3 Lochandas Karigaar is a memorable experience. 7/4 Bought a book for Rs. 50. Sinned. 8/4 You can’t be misguided. 12/4 Sinned again. Book. Rs. 21.40. Adalat o Ekti Meye. 22/5 A procession of abortive poems. 1/6 Life is good. Very good. Death, not so much. 6/6 When everyone is running after money, I am writing poetry. No money if I fall ill again. How long shall Sejdi manage. 9/6 I will awake from within one day. Illumined, incandescent. Feels as if I am walking around in unknown, uncharted country. Relationships are getting denser—hesitantly. By no means am I lonely. 14/6 Huge trouble. Too many letters to write. Must list name and date from now on. We don’t have any secretary. 21/6 Learning to use words slowly, with time. Terrible poverty. 26/6 Truly, my deepest secret poems are like the light of imagination, running in a moment from hither to thither. As if I have really been blessed with a gift of two wings. How grateful am I to life. 30/6 After every single poem, one has to stir in suspicion and examine it closely—whether it is a poem indeed. 2/7 55 poems in 6 months! Never in my life. 4/7 Perhaps my shorter poems are buried under my prose-poems. Wrong thinking. Disrespectful. 6/7 Modern Times. Classical touch of a genius. 24/7 No letter even today! Everyone’s busy? 27/7 Reality, simplicity and humanity with superb imagination. B. C. 28/7 Have coughed the whole night. Who can survive so many cigarettes? 29/7 We never came to thoughts. They came to us. H. Not liking coffee house. We are too late for the God and too early for the Being. H. 2/8 One has to love even being swindled in life. 3/8 Alone at coffee house. Extra tension. I should live with children. Have not graded any examination script the whole day. Don’t know why, but I have never worked towards a lucrative job, marriage. Today, perhaps, I have inched pretty close to marriage. Discomfitting. 4/8 Hotel. Afternoon, 3.05. Daal-rice. Fried fish. 9/8 After a trillion years, this birth. She was my mother. He, my father. My young brother, sister, didi. A few friends. And then, just vanishing into the wide yonder. Again will not see them for many trillion years. This mystery beckons me today. 9/8 Exhausted. Need a break for a couple of days. Somewhere deserted—rest. Trysting with song—Santosh Sengupta, Dhiren Mitra and Ramkumar. 10/8 Common people’s words needs to be conveyed simply to the common people— Did the political parties ever realize this? Ever? 11/8 Let there be no vacuous optimism in my writing. 15/8 One more insignificant day. 18/ 8 If the front door is bolted, smash it to smithereens. Munna has fever. I feel it coming too. 24/8 Ceaselessly, to stand upon a rickety, tremulous life and write poetry. What excrutiating poverty. 25/8 So weak I have become. Continuously thinking of ma. 26/8 Be calm be calm just be calm. 27/8 This life I have wasted by writing. Had I not written, this life I would have wasted more. Terrible poverty. Losing joy in life again. Any which way, must rummage among the daily nuts and bolts of life for happiness. Must. 29/8 Spending since morning. 30/8 Weight—68 kg 2/9 Idiot! Learn how to lie. You will be happy. Have I to lie in order to be happy? 4/9 Why don’t those who want new kinds of writing from me go to the stationary shop? Coffee House. 7/9. Theory of rebirth. A consolation to earth-loving humans. These days the young ones engage in opinion-mongering. For me Bibhutibhushan’s Ichhamati is no less than And Quiet Flows the Don. 9/9 I painfully realize today that there is nothing I can do other than writing poetry. 15/9 Can we not ever get the vast star studded night into language, into poetry? Being my own friend and my own enemy I have done, continually, so many plain chores, wishing to die silently. 16/9 In every moment of life, rejection entangles us. One has to accept it. One has to love more. Anger, excitement– I must eliminate from life. I have forgotten the habit of walking on roads. Have to start afresh in a quiet way. 17/9 I have always played with danger since childhood. Paying the penalty for that today. When Sejdi, too, tells me to write prose, I feel really anguished. 20/9 Greed, I must win over. Restraint, a valuable gift. Impassivity, stay with me. Beware. Disquiet ahead. 22/9 Someone who slipslides away from another
The Final Womb: A Script
Falguni Roy [Falguni Roy, poet and visionary— one of the rarest of rare voices from the subcontinent, died at the unripe age of 33 in May, 1981. HUG thanks Abhisek Chakraborty for collecting his work along with allied and contemporary writings in the same tradition—in the February 2014 volume of the magazine Eksho Ashi Degree. Here is a sample. Translation: HUG. A short film about Roy, Ebang Falguni (The Lost Lines Of A Beauty Monster), was made in 2004. It was produced by Subhankar Das and directed by Sharmi Pandey.] ——————————————- [I am having an urge to say a few things about the womb actually the way words tend not to distinguish the scents of foreign or home-grown words within a living language like we do not remember while replacing frames for our glasses that frame is an English word so also in real writing as it gets peopled by and through living creatures the idea of writing itself becomes irrelevant at that point and when non-imagistic art poetry literature come closer to god and spirit they get closer to non-imagistic film as if life is a running film one forgets that the creator is unmoved indifferent the medium itself gets a life of its own and things get vitalized vivified.] Shot One: A raging pyre—around which a bevy of beautiful and ugly looking naked young women—their eyes brimming with tears. Shot Two: A Neem tree—full-moon beams dripping though its leaves. Shot Three: The blazing flames look upward to the sky and the naked young women with brimming eyes look downward to the ground—freeze. Shot Four: In several of the branches of the Neem tree hang a few men by the rope with no hands or legs but in each of their phallic regions there is a television set—beneath their hanging bodies that raging pyre and those naked women with their eyes welling and above those dead bodies through the Neem leaves drip full-moon beams. Shot Five: The naked women together start ululating and at that point from each of their vaginal regions appears an unfertilized foetus—like balls they plop to the ground—the women’s faces contort with pain—they keen. Shot Six: The television sets on the hanging male bodies begin to roll. On one of the sets one sees a man copulating with another and those naked women cackling at each other at the sight. On another set a naked woman pleasures herself, moaning, and a man pierces her bosom with a sharp knife and the woman shrieks. On another TV an elderly woman is copulating with a dog and her old husband with his face hidden on the knees of a little girl is crying inconsolably. Shot Seven: The naked women are picking up the fallen unfertilized foetuses from the ground and their eyes are now drying up and the retinal dots within their eyes begin to burst and as their eyes and face are awash with blood the difference between beauty and ugliness vanish. Shot Eight: A raging pyre—a branch of the Neem tree over the pyre—men hanging by the rope on the branch—television sets on their phallic region and the following words appear on each television set— We want food clothes a place to stay We want women poetry We want alcohol pure and pungent Art our happiness Literature our alcohol Our alcohol the feeling of hunger Shot Nine: The naked women face the pyre and in unison say this—We do not want theory we want bodies we just want bodies and theories about bodies. Their faces awash in blood from their gouged eyes and in their hands the dropped unfertilized foetuses—in their vaginal region bloom abundant flowers—a profusion of flowers their colourful vaginas. Shot Ten: A road—a gate at the end of the road—carved on the gate—Maternity Home – and on the far side, another gate which says—Burning Ghat— A twosome—manush and manushi, on the road Manush revolves around his manushi Manush interrogates his manushi Manushi interrogates her manush Manush replies But no one speaks only makes gestures No one speaks save the eyes Shot Eleven: This picture is getting projected on the television sets in the phallic regions of the hanging dead-bodies with no hand or legs. On one of the TV sets a huge family planning poster beneath which sit those manush-manushi and in their laps 3 babies—they cry. On another TV set excited manush—his greying hair, advancing age, manushi’s greying hair and advancing age too but a quiet, naked kid in front of them and manushi with her hands on the penis of the kid petting him and the excited manush trying to smash and smash a pair of spectacles with a fat looking fountain pen. On another TV manushi’s body is turned into a skeleton—only the eyes are animated burning and tears flowing freely and manush is blind now and his body leprosy stricken—their child, a full grown man with breasts like women long hair like women, and manush walk gingerly and manushi pets his phallus—and both say this— Give love back to us Give love back to us And their womanly-man child stare at the sky, nervous agitated—not one beard on his cheek—like women his eyes nose lips are shaped Shot Twelve: A sole full-moon in the sky— Shot Thirteen: All around the pyre the naked women and in every lap unfertilized foetuses plopped out from the wombs and in every vaginal region multicoloured flowers and every eye tear-filled and everyone chants again— Give love back to us Give love back to us adminhumanitiesunderground.org