Vote Puja
Sumana Roy ‘Since 1979, we have been celebrating Kali Puja in our house. But there is a history behind this tradition. … One of my brothers was born on a new moon night on Kali Puja so he was named Kali. … We always use a small idol that Kali makes himself or at least puts some finishing touches on.’ ‘I started getting this recurrent dream where I saw myself offering puja at Tarapith. … now people know and expect me to go to Kalighat every Poila Boishak’. Mamata Banerjee, My Unforgettable Memories * Where had the ram-dao1 disappeared? The general consensus that emerged from the tin-roofed houses was that it was all because of Shokti Haldar. He had switched to the Trinamool Congress Party. That had been a mistake. While no one asked ‘How could he …?’, since they had all voted for Didi, they were angry that he had ‘changed’ parties. It was one thing to be a voter and another to become a ‘party-man’. Where was Shokti Haldar? Had he really gone to Kolkata to seek Didi’s blessings before his first Charak puja as a TMC councillor? They laughed at the possibility – their religion had taught them that virgin women in widow’s white saris were powerless. Didi could be a Brahmin and powerful, but ‘Ma Mati Manush’ was one thing and Ma Kali quite another. So they preferred to believe Shokti Haldar’s nephew: ‘Shokti-kaka is taking swimming lessons …’. Shibu, now an immigrant, working as a driver in Siliguri, had come with his wife and eleven month old daughter to Trimohini two days ago. Like everyone else, he too was beginning to worry: what if the ram-dao really did not emerge from the pond? The ten thousand rupees saved over the last ten months, ever since the birth of his daughter, the difficulty in getting leave from his employer, and the overnight bus journey with a bawling infant – all this would come to naught if the ram–dao was not found. Today he had planned to get his dala ready: he had already brought four kinds of fruits from Siliguri, where they were far cheaper, and a dozen lyangra mangoes from Malda, the bus having made a thirty minute halt in that town. His offerings of fruits to Ma Kali would be better than everyone else’s, even Shokti Haldar’s: that thought made him happy and proud and even nervous. The sweetest mangoes from Malda, oranges from Mirik (so what if their skins were a little shrivelled in the heat), apples from Kashmir (the Bihari fruit-seller must have cheated him, but so what?), Singapori bananas, and grapes from a place he had never heard of – who in Trimohini could offer such a basket to the goddess? Now only the earthen lamps and joysticks needed to be purchased. He didn’t worry about the flowers: there were enough in Chhoto-mama’s backyard. (Only city people bought flowers. The gods and goddesses preferred fresh flowers that came free, not those bought from the marketplace. Two things could not be bought, he was certain: flowers and ululation.) With these thoughts, Shibu went to look for his daughter. He hadn’t heard her cry for some time now. ‘Mamata,’ he called out her name, walking out of the room that Chhoto-mami had arranged for them to stay in. There was no response. ‘Lokkhi.’ There she was, his wife, talking to a group of people near the bamboo gate. ‘Where’s Mamata?’ he asked her, pulling her by the anchal of her sari. ‘Mamata? In Kolkata, where else?’ replied an elderly woman, laughing and revealing her betel leaf stained teeth. For Shibu this had become the difference between the villager and the city-bred: he hadn’t noticed how white teeth could be – or perhaps should be – until he went to live in the city. Paan, biri, nosshi, khoini – they marked one as a villager. He ignored the woman’s words. ‘She wasn’t with me,’ he said, looking at Lokkhi. ‘Mamata tor sotin?’ the woman asked Lokkhi now. Most of the people in the gathering laughed at her words. It embarrassed Lokkhi and made her worry about her husband. What if Shibu flew into a rage? She had suffered enough to learn how to measure her words with the man. It made her angry too. Shibu, in spite of the occasional violence, had been a good husband to her. He had been loyal, where was the question of sotin, the other woman? Also, it embarrassed her to think of Didi, a woman she liked and admired, as the other woman in her marriage. ‘Mamata aamar meye,’ she replied, walking towards the house. Though Lokkhi had initially argued with Shibu against naming their firstborn after the Chief Minister of the state, she had gradually come to like the name. Her first choice of name had been Satabdi. She had seen the actress in many Bangla films and later in the travelling jatras, and had heard that she was now a politician in Didi’s party. ‘Why not Satabdi?’ she had demanded of Shibu. ‘It’s the name of the fastest train in India,’ had been her husband’s answer. It was Shibu’s secret ambition to be a train-driver, and so he had created an inventory of second hand knowledge about trains and the railway ministry. ‘Have the Japanese built a railway line to the moon?’ he had asked his employer, Dr. Sen, when the latter had told him about Sputnik and Apollo. Lokkhi did not want her daughter to be named after a train. She was superstitious about this: her parents had named her youngest brother ‘Saheb’, after a popular Tapas Pal film, and now her brother was in Dilli, working as a man-servant to a Punjabi family. When Fokla-da had gone to meet him in his paara, a village probably famous for gur, jaggery, because it was called Gur-gaon, he had found Saheb saying ‘Ji Saheb’ to everything that the turbaned Punjabi man told him. Lokkhi
Between Translation & Composition
Geeta Patel Miraji was a consummate poet of the streets, someone whose life was made replete through the journeys he took. Mehr Farooqi’s many eloquent portrait in the newspaper Dawn brings him to life as a sadhu, mala in hand, long hair untamed, earrings dangling. One can almost imagine him, his thaila or shoulder bag laden with books and loose pages scribbled full of poems, a small bottle of alcohol tucked between them, wending his way on a yatra. He could have been a typical aashiq, a lover, hollow-eyed, locks askew, bechain, swinging between hope and despair, haunting the street, awaiting a glimpse of the woman he said he loved, Mira Sen, outside her firmly closed door, loitering outside Kinnaird College in Lahore. As he describes in his nazm, “Aankh Micholii”: “I walk past my house a little, wish she were here. How quickly she eludes my glance. What must I believe? Does she abhor me? But this: she looked down so soon, in such silence. What can I believe, does she know my longing? And this? When our eyes meet, she shuts her door, and I, destitute, wander again.” But Miraji was a poet of the streets in many less conventional ways. If one can imagine galiyan as poetic paths, he also haunted the byways of libraries. He had forsaken a conventional education and was entirely self-taught. The librarian at the Punjab Public library remembered him as the first one in and the last one out. Libraries became his avenues to other worlds, avenues he travelled inexorably, returning to Urdu from sojourns into translations from French, Russian, Chinese, Japanese, Korean and, closer to home, from Bengali, Sanskrit, and Braj. In absolutely essential ways these journeys transformed his being, became the lodestone for his poetry. Miraji was very young when he wrote many of his essays on poetry that he could have encountered only through such “travels”; some of them, collected in Mashriq-o-Maghrib ke Naghmain, were composed when he was 18 years old. So from the inception of his first forays into writing the lovely nazms, geets and ghazals for which he became famous, he translated. And these translations were seminal for him as a poet. A few poets have acknowledged how important translation is for their own composition. Perhaps Rilke in his ninth elegy alluded to the centrality of translation. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, moved by the Sanskrit play Shakuntala and the profound lines of Hafez, sought out translation as inspiration for cycles of lyric. Kenneth Rexroth, in his essay “The Poet as Translator,” characterised translation as a kind of going beyond oneself in the act of voicing someone else’s lyric: “The translation of poetry into poetry is an act of sympathy — the identification of another person with oneself, the transference of his utterance to one’s own utterance … to transmit it back into one’s own idiom with maximum viability.” But Rexroth ventures further than this when, in discussing the British poet HD’s translations from ancient Greek, he calls her process and her verse “the story of her own possession by the ghost of Meleager”. For Rexroth the skimpiest understanding of translation is the common one: translation as a process of turning a text from one language into a text in another. Here the translator is almost absent, treated as a transparent funnel or conduit who enables what is most important — the new text. And usually what people look for when they think of translation in this way is fidelity, how close the translation is to the original. Rexroth brings the translator back into view, not just as someone who has to feel their way into the original by overcoming a self, but as someone who, in the process of translation, is taken over by the words that they are translating. They become something or someone else, and the two languages in their hands absorb these transformations. To explain the place of translation in Miraji’s life and work I would go even further. Adrienne Rich, in the United States, comes the closest to exemplifying what I want to say. Her poetic voice changed after she worked on Ghalib and she found in ghazal a form of lyric that made it more possible for her to enunciate love as loss. Miraji sought after different kinds of speaking when he translated; these then became his voice. But he also became another person through translation. And I am not sure how many poets have, like Miraji, held onto the spaces between translation and composition, composition and reading, reading and translation, as though they were as necessary as breath. Urdu has of course had its own a long history of translation. One familiar and perhaps apocryphal story of the origins of the language makes translation between the various communities of the camp or the market its birthing site. And among many of the notables in the history of Urdu literature whose names may be invoked in relation to translation was Altaf Husain Hali. Hali, who made some of his living from translating books from English, could be thought of as someone whose call for a new aesthetics — through islaah or the improvement or revision of Urdu poetry to produce Urdu’s “nayii shairii” as poetry based in natural (that is, realist) description — was founded in translation. Nineteenth-century British realism transmuted into Urdu poetry might also have had the project of translation as its host. “Nagarii nagarii phiraa musaafir ghar kaa raastaa bhuul gayaa, kyaa hai meraa kyaa hai teraa apnaa paraayaa bhuul gayaa.” This matlaa, the opening verse in a ghazal Miraji includes in Teen Rang (Three Colours), one of the poetry collections he compiled, scripted painstakingly in his own hand, fleshes out translation in myriad ways. It might be said to embody many of the features Miraji brings to translation. “From town to town the traveller journeyed, and forgot the road home, what was mine, what a stranger’s, both lost to memory,’’ he writes. “I don’t remember why
Glitch
Avishek Parui — When a 45-year old man with a beautiful wife and two teenaged kids still needs to watch gruesome violent videos all by himself every damn night to sleep well, you know there’s a glitch growing somewhere! Two cigarette smoke-curls were blending lazily over the bench where the men sat. The traffic across the street was getting busier with the falling hours. The car-horns were getting shriller, scooping spaces that were thinning fast. The December dusk of Kolkata waited for the streetlights to glow. The Friday evening was beginning to spread with the hopes of happier weekends. It was the time between two light-zones at Park Street Crossing where waves ran into what did not move. — Glitch! You sound as if I’m some camera shutter conked out. It’s not a snag you see, it’s a pattern, and one I stick to as it’s become a ritual over the months. Just like brushing your teeth after a meal. It’s not that I’m not embarrassed about it as I don’t really enjoy it. No more than you enjoy brushing your teeth every night! Both men were 45, both balding at the obvious places in their heads, both weary with the weight of the over-wrought; colleagues at the sales section of Panacea, a massive medicine company that manufactured painkillers that claimed to kill pain in less than 10 minutes. All kinds of pain. Panacea: the giant killer of pain. It sought to spread its branches across Kolkata, a city where the high-rises had to be rudely removed from the sounds that sank. — Pattern or ritual, the fact stands that you cannot sleep till you watch people torturing each other every night. You lock yourself in the bedroom on Sunday afternoons watching throats being slit when the rest of your family watches sitcom in TV. You’re 45. It’s sick and almost funny! — It certainly is! And that’s the real part you know. I mean we’ll both be really sick going by the way we’re headed now. Ten hours’ work a day, golden fried prawns at dinner parties where our wives wear dresses we can’t afford. Logically we ought to get our first stroke in three years and be dead in a decade. When I watch gory violence it’s not because I want to get a horny high or because I’m depressed . . . you know . . . It’s about something else. It’s about the ritual of seeing rituals break. It’s about seeing strangers scream in meaningless violence. It’s my own private hell. It’s someway real . . . you see . . . A real hell. And I need it to manage meanings in all the fake heavens around me. The voice paused after having hurled the words out in one breath. Too many cigarettes had lessened him already. All things around were lessening together in different degrees of decadence. The brief silence between the two men was slapped by the swishes and shouts as the evening began to eat the big buildings. The Friday dusk at Park Street carried a colour thickened by the smell of fries from various fast food joints that sell fast. The big restaurants with dark windows began to get dolled up for the Friday footfalls. At the appointed hour the billboards glowed up, as did the street lamps and neon signs. A small man with big balloons walked before the big music store that played John Lennon’s Imagine inside the cold glasses. One of the two men in the bench stared at the balloons. Different colors tied together in strings that looked the same: blue, yellow, red, green. The balloons floated gently, with the waves of air and sound around. Everything was mixing painlessly. Along the slanting lights. Through the camera lens. — That’s phony and lame . . . I mean it’s normal for a man of your condition to be bored, to go for drinks and see several women, we know many who bang around other people’s wives and still more who weekend with whores. That’s normal enough you see. But being compulsively dependent on violence for sleep is downright pathetic! You may as well watch porn! Get yourself a woman if you’re bored with your family. I can help you with that! The small balloon man still stood before the music store. He looked smaller with the growing crowd of people who crossed him like waves of car horns. He wasn’t selling anything. The blue, red and yellow balloons kept floating gently, swirling to the sound waves around. Not very far away a group of teenaged kids was heading for a pub, pushing against the crowd of people headed the other way, towards the Park Street metro station. Their words flicked the sweaty shirts of the tired workers hurrying for home. — When my dad tried to act tough on me last night, I smiled at him knowingly. I mean it’s so damn obvious he’s sleeping out with someone, that filthy bastard. Guess mom knows it too but she doesn’t care. And why should she? She’s got her own life to live and enjoy. This morning as I was leaving dad called me and handed me a couple of grand in a tender voice. No lecturing, no big speeches. Nothing. A neat two grand. Guess he’s paying me to shut up. Not to make an emotional fuss about it. As if I cared! — It’s good to have guilty parents. We all know that! My mom’s a whore. She’s been cheating on dad for over three years now. She starts seeing her friends whenever dad’s away on office tours. Where’s the goddam lighter gone? — What do you care? All you need is their signs across your application to a US university after the bloody GRE scores appear! And don’t worry they’ll be guilty enough to keep sending you money while you’re boozing away in the States! The evening lights were spreading out fast, with the breaths
Marx & the Non-West (including Ireland)
Spencer A. Leonard with Kevin Anderson Last summer, Spencer A. Leonard interviewed Kevin Anderson, author of Lenin, Hegel, and Western Marxism(1995) and Marx at the Margins (2010). The interview was broadcast on August 2, 2011 on the radio show Radical Minds on WHPK–FM Chicago. What follows is an edited transcript of their conversation. Spencer Leonard: Broadly describe your aims and ambitions in writing Marx at the Margins. Kevin Anderson: One aim was that, in the past couple of decades – really the past three decades since the publication of Edward Said’s Orientalism, there have been a number of critiques of Marx that centered on charges of Eurocentrism, ethnocentricsm, and so forth. I wanted to respond to those, but also to look at Marx anew in light of them. Moreover, while there are various works on Marx and European nationalisms, on India and China, and the late writings on Russia, no one had covered the whole of these, including Marx’s writing on the Civil War in the United States, which deal directly with ethnicity. So my second aim as to address them together in a single study with the other, more well-known writings. This also required taking account of newly surfaced writings of Marx slated to appear in the Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe. SL: Regarding the Eurocentrism charge, it is raised not only to criticize Marx, but also to reject the Enlightenment tradition in which all critical theory finds its roots. Yet, rather than dismissing the charge as an expression of third world nationalism, your book takes it seriously—arguing that indeed Marx and Engels are not wholly immune from criticism on these grounds. You point to the “unilinearity” of their early writings, above all the Communist Manifesto and the New York Tribune writings of the early 1850s. But is the category of “the West” really relevant for Marx or for the radical Enlightenment out of which he emerges? KA: Certainly there are places where that is the case. In some of the 1853 writings on India, for instance, Marx speaks of England as a superior civilization, which by virtue of its higher economic form is going to revolutionize India. Also, as late as the preface to Capital, Marx says that more developed countries show the less developed the image of their own future. These examples suggest almost, if one wanted to think of it in terms of a railroad train, that the Western European countries and North America are kind of in the front couple cars of the train and that Asia and the so-called “third world” are in the rear being pulled forward into modernity. SL: So that all countries would in a sense recapitulate the historical trajectory of those at the head of the train. KA: Right! Of course, stated so simplisticly, no one supports such a view. No one would say that India is going to become an exact copy of England. But of the extent that one would say that a country like Britain represents the future of humanity, one is adopting a Eurocentric model. Of course, there are also problems with the critique of Eurocentrism, which is often very critical of the social structures and social institutions of modern Western societies and far less so of the social structures and institutions of the non-West. Marx in examining “non-Western” societies is always critical. And as his thought matures, these criticisms cease to rely upon a Eurocentric unilinearity and move toward a more multilinear perspective. However, Marx is no primitivist anarchist interested in returning to a clan-based, low-tech society. Nor does he idealize the social formations in places like India, with their caste and other hierarchies, their subordination of women, etc. He does not sugar-coat any of that. Nonetheless, towards the end of his life, there is evidence that he entertains more of a possibility of societies evolving and revolutionizing themselves more on the basis of indigenous institutions. This is never entirely so, but he gives more consideration to the internally generated institutions of these societies. SL: It seems to me that when Marx says England represents a higher civilization, he is not really talking about the “Englishness” of England, much less anything “authentically Western.” Capitalism for Marx is not a superiorcivilization. Rather, capitalist society is “civilization,” per se, in a way that the past can only be said to be by analogy with it. Thus, in the Communist Manifesto, he uses the language of “civilization,” and terms everything else barbaric, as for instance in the passage where he talks about the beating down of Chinese walls by British imports. The issue is the universality of the form realizing itself at the level of world history. So, it seems that when he is using that language, he is talking about a social form, one that just happens to have emerged in Europe. KA: Well of course there is some truth in that, but as I also say in the book, the language sometimes verges on what today we would consider ethnocentric—the descriptions of India as an unchanging, unresisting society that has no history except that which is imposed on it by its foreign conquerors, and so on. There are some problems there. Another example would be an early text in which Engels applauds the U.S. war with Mexico, the conquest of California, and the incorporation into the United States of the Southwest, referring to “the lazy Mexicans” who were unable to develop the region in the way the North Americans are going to do. That kind of language reverses by the 1860s and 1870s. You can see a real turn there. Also in writings by Engels, but also on occasion by Marx, there is the claim that the Czech and the Serb peoples (to name only a few) are barbaric, so it is good that in some areas they are dominated by the Germans, who represent a higher civilization. These nations are destined to disappear, and this is a good thing. Again, there are exceptions to this even in the early writings. And whenever they are actually in contact with real historical movements of resistance that