Stunned Animals, Misunderstood Animals, Beatific Animals: Stray Reflections on ‘Allah Miyan Ka Karkhana’
[HUG reads Allah Miyan Ka Karkhana by Mohsin Khan. Trans. Saeed Ahmad. Noida: Rekhta Publications, 2023] A great humanist work is unpitying and naïve at once. Such writing brings us very close to our unuttered & unutterable tendencies and contingent calculations, and lines those up with the alignment of stars, in order to create a bewildering but eminently possible tapestry of events. History moves through the foibles and grandeur of human beings here, but invariably the central point is to deeply question assumptions about our superiority as all-knowing beings in the world; and to follow how we act and react when confronted with absolute contingency,whenever the ground shifts with no prior notice. Being there turns more significant than being something in such searching texts. One way to address such a predicament is to frame ourselves in close proximity to our neighbours: insects, moles and reptiles, crows and pigeons, domestic animals like dogs and cats, goats and monkeys, donkeys and chicken. We share our habitat with them. But we share more: our craftiness, our vast generosity and love, the sudden mustering and eruption of courage, the apprehending of unrealized terror and our common and monumental stupidity. Each species has its own world, and there are interspecies behavioural ways and tactics, and then the bipeds who call themselves humans interact with those in the ‘other’ world. Those creatures reciprocate or attack, flee or surrender to the bipeds. And of course, bipeds interact with other bipeds. How does relationality work in these overlapping spheres? Great modern writers like Melville and Cormac McCarthy, Hofmannsthal and Kafka, Conrad and Coetzee, Basheer and Bibhutibhushan have encountered their own skin and bones by squarely confronting the creaturely terrain. Francis Bacon and Werner Herzog have done the same in kindred arts. A remarkable detour in Mohsin Khan’s novel Allah Miyan Ka Karkhana (translated into Hindi by Saeed Ahmad) comes right in the middle of it. The episode proves prescient as the narration progresses. The brother sister duo of Gibran and Nusrat are left to play with their hen and chicks, as they try to protect them (vainly) from the predatory eyes of the cats and the crows since their kite has been torn and the kite-flying string burnt to ashes by their mother. At such a moment they spy a blue-white butterfly, flitting about in joyous airiness. The hen and the chicken take turns to jump at the prancing insect, but it eludes them with ease. After flitting about for a while, the butterfly perches itself on a wall. Gibran and Nusrat inch closer to the butterfly and watch it periodically open and shut its magnificent blue-white pair of wings. At an opportune moment, Gibran lurches forth and catches hold of its wings. The butterfly tries to free itself from his clutches, but in vain. Nusrat implores her brother to let go off it but Gibran says that he has now found a new pet for himself. Upon Nusrat’s advice that it isn’t easy to nurture a butterfly, Gibran finally frees it and lets it go. But with a severely impaired pair of wings now, the butterfly can hardly fly. Exhausted and writhing in pain, it decides to again sit—but this time, quite low on the wall. The hen was waiting for exactly such a moment. At one swoop it picks up the butterfly on its beaks and crushes it to death little by little. The chicks too join the unexpected feast with glee. While one of them crushes the head of the butterfly, others enjoy savouring the wings and the antennae. “Am not I A fly like thee?Or art not thou A man like me? For I dance, And drink, and sing,Till some blind hand Shall brush my wing.” The short exchange that follows between the two siblings re-translates somewhat like this: Nusrat: Bhaiya, the butterfly must have condemned you with lots of malediction. Now you will see that the Almighty shall have your body plucked in the same manner by hens and chickens when you reach the abode of Allah Miyan. Gibran: Why would I be plucked and maimed? I’d let it go. The butterfly was savoured by the hen and the chickens. It’s they who would suffer. Nusrat: If you had not gotten hold of her legs with so much violence, she would have easily flown higher up. Nusrat was telling the truth, and so, Gibran turns silent. Later he notices that the blueish tinge of the butterfly’s wings is still throbbing warm over his fingertips. The novel is about various kinds of predation and its consequences. The roots of such predation cannot be removed by cosmetic morality or by cruel rationalism. The work is rather an exploration in psychological and relational phenomenology, which eventually brings about the tragic realization that the innocence of certain creatures—be it human children, dogs or butterflies, must pass through the hellfire and the miracles of Allah Miyan’s factory—which is what creaturely existence is all about. The miracles of creation are at once bewildering—for the food cycle ensures that one animal preys on another. The novel begins with a crucial question relating food cycles to creation itself. A motif begins to emerge. When a pet chick (Kallo) is taken away by the predatory local cat, the adolescent protagonist Gibran asks his sister: “What was the need to make cats at all if Allah Miyan had already made chicken?” Nusrat, in equal innocence, replies that she does not know the answer but Allah Miyan must have thought about such things before he created his myriad creatures. All through the novel, this simple and piercing question shall return in many guises. The responses of the adults range from admonishment (Don’t ask such blasphemous questions) to metaphysical unknowability (The Almighty has his own designs and reasons, which are beyond human comprehension). There is a third answer: to read books and dive into jahandari (practical and material knowledge) and not mere deendari (spiritual and religious knowledge) and to understand the nature of things as well as hone imagination.
What Next ?
Brinda Bose Kochi was the flashpoint, charged with rebellion after a violent police crackdown. Since then, Kiss of Love has danced, hugged, walked, sung, shouted, held hands, cheek-pecked, kissed and french-kissed in solidarity protests that have reverberated through many Indian cities in diverse locations, from around or on university campuses to streets outside RSS headquarters and places between. What Next? is the question already fermenting in protestors’ minds, perspicaciously enough. It’s a vital question for us to stop and think about, especially because the protesting must not, cannot stop – even while the fear of a wider movement congealing and de-fusing, through repetitive motions of protest, looms greyly on the horizon. However, such timely and pertinent self-questioning may be poised to be tripped up by what in football parlance is known, I believe, as ‘own goals’, losses conceded by one’s own team members that threaten to woefully undermine, if not willfully derail, the larger – and yes, dare I say it, political – impetus of the current chain of protest ‘events’. Hurdles are being placed along these already-always-treacherous paths of nascent youthful insurgencies not just by rabid ‘rightists’ (which we all expect, and know by now to field) but by the wise and the cautious and the skeptical in the very broad spectrum of ‘the Left’, all of whom one would have hoped were allies. This is the place, of course, where the Left has repeatedly begun to fail itself – and the reason why right-wingers will sit back and rub their hands in glee and wait for the opposition to self-destruct while they consolidate and close ranks in a frightening, calm repressiveness. And the broad Left has been consistently displaying a remarkable ability to self-destruct, splitting political and philosophical hairs ad nauseam and seemingly unperturbed about throwing out baby, bathwater as well as bathtub all in a single swing of the arm, perhaps content for having nuanced the argument sufficiently in the process. How does one alert one’s fellow-team-travellers to the urgent need of the hour: a huge, diverse, potent, sustained and ‘terrible’ coalition against the Right – one that will strike terror, not amusement, within their closed ranks –and lure one’s friends away from the dubious pleasure of being endlessly-argumentative Indians, chasing their own tails while the enemy watches, waiting to pounce? We have recently witnessed a round of this with Ranabir Samaddar’s critiques of the Hokkolorob protests at Jadavpur University, in which he dismisses the student protestors as the “articulate [read elite] class” who will remain irrelevant to the masses in West Bengal, comparing the present unrest unfavourably with student participation in the Naxal movement of the 1960s and 70s. Even as many (articulate) challenges to Samaddar’s left-conservative formulations have just been successful in decimating much of his contentions, a wave of strident evaluations of the Kiss of Love protests is clearly beginning to rumble and heave around our shores – in which the parameters of analysis are perhaps different but the upshot remains the same: this is not revolution, for revolution is something else, revolution is elsewhere – and of course, revolution is forever ‘to come’ even while revolution is desired now, today, this minute. In fact it is intriguing to seethe last kind, those invested in hastening a chiliastic, apocalyptic moment, worry about the spontaneous and morphing nature of movements and contribute toward a certain deferral on the grounds of preserving the purity of a movement.Of course we may well take constructive heed of some of the criticisms leveled against the Kiss of Love events. Leaders and participants of the protests are themselves reflecting and questioning and revising and planning; they are not unthinking players in a series of dumb rituals. But what we must consider now is the moot debate, which is double-pronged.First, that it is not about a divergence between the seriousness of issues of labour/class and the frivolity of the sexual transgression of public kissing, it is about how one may deploy a diverse range of political, social, cultural and aesthetic strategies in the long, arduous battle we have to wage now in the current censorious regime and climate. And second, since a pattern of protesting has begun to be adopted by a growing range of actors and the frequency of protests has increased, we must take into cognizance the scholarly evaluation that such protests are under threat of moving out of the sole purview of social movements and becoming ‘mainstream’, a part of everyday politics – because none of us would want the edge of rebellion to be blunted. We know that protest politics must not become the politics of ritual. But the point remains this: that while we should all put our heads together to devise new and fresh strategies of resisting the onslaught of the moral police, we must not self-flagellate or accuse each other of failing the ‘true’ test of revolutionary politics – because politics and its measures may be as diverse as its triggers, and responses must be variously sharp and immediate, contingent and rapid, passionate and sustained; they can, and perhaps should, twist and turn and morph daily but they must not fade or fall or fail until the task is done. The goalposts must not be allowed to be shifted. Yes, it is time now to ask some tough questions of ourselves. The Facebook page for the Delhi Kiss of Love protest outside RSS headquarters near the Jhandewalan metro station is instructive, both about the aggressive antagonism and condemnation from ‘the Sanghis’ and the continual strategizing, visualizing and implementation of plans by the protest’s organizers and supporters. The page is suffused as much by a sense of embattlement as by uncertainty, excitement, conviction, doubt – which is how it should be. A post-protest update by one of its organisers congratulates those who came to protest and reaffirms solidarity but cautions that the fight has merely begun as the oppressions start closing in. There is there, if I am not reading it incorrectly, a
Creating Beauty Is A Noiseless Battle
Joy Goswami It has been the polestar of Bangla poetry: Phire Esho Chaka (Come Back, O Wheel)/ To Gayatri. And the original manuscript lies right in front me at this moment. Like Kafka’s diary, there are descriptions of a few dream sequences in the manuscript. The collection has elicited all kinds of praise and reverence in the last 40 odd years. What can I say that is new? But as I see the jottings and scribbles in the marginalia, I feel that I am right there with the poet as he gives shape to those lines. Goosebumps. Binoy Majumdar, the poet, seems to be a riddle, an enigma in the firmament of Bangla poetry. How do we see a poet today? We see him as a social explicator, as a critic, even as a reformer. The poet is routinely offered sundry platforms, chairs and silken shawls. Though troubled by some initial hesitation, the poet gets used to such a role as days go by. When the society is mired in violence, corruption and skulduggery and cannot see any light, sensitive, art loving people cannot rely on politicians and standard do-gooders any more. The kind of doubts they are assailed by, the kind of interrogations that arise in their minds, who else but a poet can satisfactorily answer them! Why? Since the poet is pained by the sorrows of others. Come, let’s all pay a visit to the poet. And then a collective voice cries out: Please say something. Please. And in this manner a group of uncertain, wandering people reach the poet and gradually push him towards the wall. As he is shoved right to the wall, a stool is advanced to him. And then the collective voice again: Get up on that stool, please stand up. We cannot see you, cannot hear you clearly. Here, a hand-mike, please use this. The poet—since everyone is so eager and expecting, relinquishes his vacillation, and starts speaking. And as he speaks, all his indecisions and waverings tend to recede by and by, till they vanish altogether. Television screens, literary festivals, protest meetings—all become regular events in his life, part of his existence. In such a life one speaks more than one writes. And when one speaks, one gets to believe that he is speaking to the whole of his community—for the Jati. The sensitive, common people are allayed of their apprehension of darkness engulfing them. Finally, there is someone who can speak on their behalf. A few can, at least. Every single time society witnesses a fresh accident, an incendiary poem would appear. Poem? Or opinion. Do we have time to ponder on that distinction? Here is our true poet. This is what art is supposed to perform. Be a conduit in protests, a vehicle in rallies. Its sole function. Sole function, and in such a manner? And what about that poet who is himself lost, seeking direction in every turn? The one who discovers the world anew every single day and feels that he did get to learn something novel. There is a possibility that yesterday’s mistake could be corrected today. And therefore, jots down one’s everyday experience and encounters in a meticulously drawn diary. Yes, as poetry. Unadulterated poetry. Do they have no right to create art, those who are unable to directly recommend that society must take such and such bearing or make this or that pitch? What role is left for such poets? If Binoy is placed aloft that stool, one is certain that he will hardly stay there for too long. He will fidget, feeling lost and suffocated. And then he will simply walk away. If we see that Binoy has been pressed on to that wall by an expectant mob, he will be too absorbed with his surroundings to pass any judgement. Perhaps he will turn around and face the wall instead. And then? —-See this wall, do you? There is something going on within it. —-Something? What do you mean? —-May be a rivulet is meandering across and some scenes are unfolding. Disturbing scenes. All lie there within this wall. Latent. You just need the eye to behold. This is exactly the exchange that Binoy is having with Balika Kankaboti even as he composes this timeless collection of poems. One recalls Bergman’s almost contemporary creation: Through a Glass Darkly, where a young woman’s intense gaze through an orifice in the wall will lead her into a magical realm where everyone is agog and waiting, everyone radiant in their expectation—for God might appear there at any moment. If someone sets his eyes on things differently and catches a glimpse of more than what we would usually notice (perspectives that we feel others should appreciate), we brand him as mentally unbalanced. Just like that woman in Through a Glass Darkly. What is Binoy able to see? He can see an ordinary, local grocery store. And walks past that store casually, freely. And then he relates that object and his relationship with that object to the whole of creation at a cosmic level. This local, ordinary grocery store is attached to the tiller in his field to the forces of gravity to the tireless sun to goddess Venus or Saraswati. In this magnificent, staggering cosmos, what more can a poet give, other than a series of flabbergasted moments of revelation, marvelling anew at every fresh object and seeking to forge relationships with those? But marvelling and revelation—are those sufficient? Can one write poetry with such a meagre capital in the world today? In a world where airplanes ram themselves into trade-centres, where tanks strut in Christ’s own town, where Gujarat happens in the next room—can one continue to write poetry latching on to wonder and surprise? Binoy Majumdar had to say this by way of prefacing this book: these adorations in love (through these poems) are an accurate journal and chronicle. But what shall we do with such loverly devotion? What can society gain by these ruminations?
Tagore: Looking Beyond the Mirage of Appearances
Rajdeep Konar [Rajdeep Konar is pursuing his doctoral studies in Center for Theatre and Performance Studies at the School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, where he is investigating Rabindranath Tagore’s ideas on aesthetics, especially in the domain of performance.] “No man loves life like him that’s growing old.” -Sophocles, Acrisius [fragment] It is a fact that in the life of Rabindranath Tagore there has indeed been numerous instances of de-constructing and creating anew. But equating all that with his act of beginning painting at the age of sixty with the others, I think, would not be justified. It is one thing to re-write a play nine times, to change one’s views on matters of political or social concern even if one has believed in it for the greater part of his life and it’s yet another for a sexagenarian poet in Rabindranath Tagore’s position, to say that words no longer fascinate him and it is in a completely different artistic language: painting that he finds his calling. It definitely indicates towards an intense commotion underneath- a storm, which shakes the world of the poet, shakes his faith in the words which once in Budhadeb Bosu’s terms seemed his owned loyal subjects. I would like to direct my investigation, in this essay, towards this sudden loss of interest in words. Therefore, I would be trying to find out exactly what sort of circumstances would oblige Tagore, a compulsive writer by the sheer volume of his works, form an utter revulsion towards the vocation of writing, in the final phase of his life. This as we shall see, will lay bare an interesting negotiation that the old poet was going through with himself, at the time and also enlighten us regarding how he was reacting to the arrival of modernity in Bengali literature. “People grow older with every passing year; but the first half is what can be named growing while the second is withering away.”[i]These are the exact words with which writer and critic and Tagore enthusiast Budhadeb Bosu (1908-1974) begins his book “Shongo: Nishongota / Rabindranath” (1963). Budhadeb, when he was writing these words was already in his fifties and thus we can rest assured that he was speaking from more than intuition. He goes on to speak in the rather longish paragraph that follows about the perils old age has brought to his life: the fast diminishing physical and mental strength, blurring eyesight, deteriorating memory, the doubts and anxieties plaguing the mind faced with the smallest of decisions. All of this, as Budhadeb writes, affects him as a writer and makes writing, what was earlier pleasurable for him, an irksome and tiring process. We have also heard writers express similar sentiments under such circumstances. “An aged man is but a paltry thing, A tattered coat upon a stick”[ii] is what Yeats felt. American journalist and literary figure H. L. Mencken says “The older I grow, the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom.”[iii] Thus, age we find weakens the physical constitution and makes oneself vulnerable, especially artists. So does Tagore too was similarly distraught by his diminishing physical and mental abilities? It does not seem likely at the time he begins painting in the early 1920’s. While there indeed were occasional illnesses, recurring problems like the pain he had in his knee, it was not until his mid or late 70’s that we get to hear from Tagore expressions like- “I no longer want to carry on the garland of pains that I am having to carry in this life”. For confirmation we can go to another Tagore enthusiast and philosopher Abu Syed Ayub who identifies Tagore as the possessor of a “poetic health”, stressing that even in his periods of grave illness Tagore’s poetic abilities remained unaffected[iv]. An allegation which Budhadeb Bosu makes in his work Kobi Rabindranath against Tagore and which might come to our aid here is that: the drama which is found developing through Tagore’s poetry beginning from Manasi ends in Gitanjali and after that Tagore only repeats himself and has not been able to write anything worthy of its creation. According to Budhadeb, specimens of whatever Tagore would write in his later poetry, was already available in Gitanjali. Even though Abu Sayeed Ayub in his work Adhunikota O Rabindranath dedicated to Budhadeb presents a surgical analysis of Tagore’s later poetry to dismiss any such notion; Sankha Ghosh shows in his essay Budhadeber Rabindranath how Budhadeb himself has contradicted his own view on a number of occasions. For instance the collection of poems titled Adhunik Bangla Kobita edited by him begins with Tagore’s post Gitanjali poems. There are definitely instances of poets or writers reaching a certain age and feeling that they have nothing new to say: Sudhnidranath Datta, a poet from the Kollol Jug in Bengali literature, who was also close to Tagore; for one lamented in his poems much before he was old “whatever was there to say, has been said long ago” while Bishnu Dey among the modern Bengali poets became tragically repetitive in his later years. However, whatever he may be called, the Tagore who writes Sesher Kobita, Shyamali or Sisutirtha, can never be called repetitive. So we are yet to find the true nature of the problem. We might go back from Tagore’s own words on the matter for some light. To Rani Chanda, who by her own admission was the most rigorous witness to Tagore painting, he says- “The bearer of beauty (rasa) is language. That is why the danger, thus everything changes with the change of language…so it often seems to me that my paintings would never be rejected because even if the specialty of lines and forms change, there would never be any dearth in their beauty.”[v] So was Tagore anxious that unlike his writings which may lose their popularity and acceptance with the change in linguistic trends his paintings would be acceptable beyond contexts of time and