Confessional Diary
Subrota Dasgupta [ This short story first appeared in the blog Aainanagar (aainanagar.com) in November 2013. Translation by HUG.] ——————————————– Indulging Bhanu was the sole impetus behind my story telling spree. But every story cannot be told to a six year old. So here it is. –Subrota Dasgupta Morning. Diya was using bits of newspaper to scour her ear. It’s Diya’s habit of cleaning and scrubbing her face and teeth, at times poking her ear with such stuff. Especially when she is thinking. Today, she is thinking about Baba. About Baba means about Baba’s twenty-third girlfriend. Shefali-di. Shefali-di is one of the earliest of Baba’s students. Used to be a regular at their place. After her college days, she worked as a proof-reader in a local press. Baba was instrumental in getting her this job. She stays at a rented place near Barasat with her mother. Shefali-di’s father is no more. This, baba’s prem-rog, his obsession with falling in love, is an old condition. He has fallen in love with a lot of women at various points in his life. Sometimes when people felt that he was in love, actually he was not. There used to be a lot of unrest at home, Diya recalls. But Diya was more or less at peace with herself. The reason: Baba’s confessional diary, where every detail of Baba’s love life got jotted down. For instance, during the time when Ma was raising hell about Moushumi-di’s falling for Baba, Diya came to know from the diary that Baba was not at all interested in Moushumi-di. He had merely offered a ride to her one day—that was all. Shushovan-kaku had spied that one odd incident and had promptly sneaked in a word to Ma and to Santosh-kaku. Now Santosh-kaku is the younger sibling of Akashvani Radio and then, naturally, the gossip mills worked overtime. But then again when Baba was head over heels with Trina Bose, things were quite sedate at home since only Diya knew about it. It is a mystery how this fateful diary would unfailingly reach Diya during such times. But in this manner, Diya could solve twenty-two love-stories. The places Baba would go with his dates, the kinds of gifts he bought, the reasons for his falling in love and also how and why each affair would come to an end—Diya knew all. But this time, the mystery about Shefali-di is getting curiouser and curiouser. The pages of the diary are clean! The very idea that such a love affair can bloom between the two is such a fabulous notion; leads to a greater mystery actually. At this point let the many attributes of Shafali-di be quickly described. Shefali Ghosh is in her early thirties. Height: 4 feet 2 inches. Weight 80 kgs. Pale dark in complexion. A bizarre, uneven set of teeth. A fast receding hairline leading to a short-cropped style. One may easily be confused about her gender because of her ambiguous, uneven voice. Middling in studies, she was. It was thanks to Baba’s notes that she had passed with honours in her BA exam. There is no doubt that she is extremely hardworking. Can carry books in gunny bags from Barasat to Behala to Sodepur to Baruipur with complete nonchalance. Suppose the household maid makes herself scarce for a month without any prior notice, no issues: Shefali-di to the rescue. About five thousand books in fifteen huge almirahs can be dusted in two hours flat. And most importantly: Shefali-di is a terrific cook. She is especially good with patients, those who might need some special attention. When Baba was bedridden with jaundice, Shefali-di would make sure to send all kinds of yummy food almost every other day. Certainly Baba can fall in love with someone with such stellar qualities. No harm there—it is his prerogative after all! But why the heck is the diary staring blankly at Diya this time? Diya is restless. She just got to hear that Baba has actually booked an apartment for Shefali-di near Barasat. Strange tidings. Until now, Baba would buy books, pens, key rings, photo frames, cheap perfumes, soft toys and suchlike for his girls. But a whole new apartment! Every morning with Minoti-di, Ma is going hysterical about Baba. And Minoti-di, as she kneads maida, moulding the dough into those perfectly round luchis, consoles Ma, “What can one do Boudi. Steel yourself; things will get better.” And as Baba sits at the table, Ma, in her divine snivelling avatar, would pack his tiffin with fruits and sweets and luchi-tarkari. Just can’t take this any-more—inane and pathetic! Such a scene used to be pretty common earlier too but Diya took no heed of these things then. She would know exactly what the situation was. This time it is different. And to top it all, Jayanta-kaku, who is an accountant himself, casually informs them that Baba had transferred half the money that he had recently acquired by selling off Dadu’s property to Shefali Ghosh’s account. Jayanta-kaku is a man of integrity—so there is no question of distrusting him. Something must be done. Shall Diya make an effort to confront Shefali-di herself? Shefali-di works in the College Street area, she knows. Every day at 2 o’clock Shefali-di comes out of her press to have toast and ghugni. Diya sure can accost her at that time. But the funny thing is that when Diya did actually encounter her, Shefali-di herself made some queries, like: How is Baba doing? How is Ma’s health these days? Are Diya’s classes going on well? Said that there was a lot of pressure in her work-place as the book-fair was round the corner, and regretted that she had not come to their place of late. All this means that she had not met Baba recently. What kind of love-story is this? Thanks to the dairy, Diya never ever had any urge to get one on one with Baba about their personal lives. With Baba it is
Paul Celan And The Future of the Poem
Manash Bhattacharjee The name “Paul Celan” in the title refers to not only Paul Celan the poet but also Paul Celan who talks about poetry. Celan is in dialogue with his craft; with others in his craft, as well as in dialogue with those he feels illuminate the possibilities and problems of his craft, that is, poetry. So, Paul Celan in the title is a poet who asks questions about poetry, including the fundamental question: What is poetry? The word “future” does not mean an unspecified, free idea of a future out there, future as such, but a specific moment or moments in future time that have a correspondence with the past, the future of a past, a past’s future, that creates a new reference point across time. But because this future is the future of the “poem”, a solitary product of time, the idea of the future here is not to be imagined in collective terms. Nor is this future a private one, because a poem is always intended for a reader. A poem, strictly belonging to neither the individual nor the collective, is always in relation with the world. That relation is of course political and tends towards the ethical. The conjunction “and” in the title means the future of the poem is not reducible to the name Paul Celan but is seen in conjunction with the poet’s idea of the poem’s future. I will probe into Celan’s reflections on poetry by looking at his famous speech on 22 October, 1960, The Meridian, which he delivered on the occasion of receiving the Georg Büchner Prize. His Rumanian birth – marking him a foreigner – his narrowly escaping a Nazi labour camp sixteen years before the announcement of this prize, and his imbuing his German mother tongue with Hebrew and Yiddish influences that didn’t endear him to the German literary establishment, created, according to Ger Killeen, “an air of improbability” around Celan being awarded the prize. Despite being aware of these incongruities, Celan decided to brave what he revealed to a friend as “a dark summer.” In his acceptance speech, Celan delved into German dramatist Büchner’s works to chart out his views on art and poetry. He picked up certain key moments from the plays Danton’s Death (1835), Leonce and Lena (1836) and the incomplete Woyzeck (1837) as well as Büchner’s only short story, Lenz (1835). Büchner is the only name explicitly present in Celan’s speech. Büchner plays the role of an equator, the central figure, as Celan’s charts out the imaginary meridian of poetry. But there are others, more implicitly present, in the speech, including Martin Heidegger, Martin Buber and Osip Mandelstam. Amongst them, Celan’s engagement with Heidegger is the oldest, dating back to 1952, when he started reading Being and Time. I shall first trace Celan’s reading of Heidegger in relation to what matters in The Meridian speech. Towards and Not Towards Heidegger James K. Lyon, who has written in detail about the Heidegger–Celan affair (and whose research I will exclusively read from in this section), tells us Celan was an unspecialized novice in philosophy when he started reading Being and Time. Ignoring the question of Being in the text, Celan focused instead on the concepts, the vocabulary and what he marked as Heidegger’s “phenomenological investigation.” In terms of vocabulary, Celan picked up Heidegger’s style of using compound words like “being-no-longer-in-the-world” and “this-not-yet” as poetic moves which turned literal language figurative. This exercise also helped Celan gain command over the German language. In terms of concepts, Celan picked up quite a few of them. From Being and Time, the idea of truth as “unconcealedness” appealed to Celan, and he took note of the corresponding idea of “Being-in-untruth” as an essential characteristic of “Being-in-the-world.” The idea of truth was serious for Celan, but, unlike for Heidegger, it did not mean any abstract principle for him but a real characteristic showing itself through openness, candour, sincerity and, in negative terms, the opposite of deceitfulness, falsehood, shallowness. Celan found post-war Germany mired in untruth. As Lyon clarifies, the truth Celan passionately sought in his poems was not metaphysical but something specific, to be established temporally through time, event and person. While reading Being and Time, Celan also made two notations: one, the question of how poetry’s permanence is related to time, and, two, that poetry stands more in relation to world-time than time. Taking the notion of truth and time together, Celan made a twist of something he read in The Question of Being, where the philosopher had written how through forgetfulness a “past entity” concealed or lost from memory could be brought into unconcealedness or unconcealment by “thoughtful remembrance.” Celan translated “past entity” into “what was in the past” or “that which happened”, thus fixing the concept to a specific historical event of post–World War II Germany where there was rampant forgetfulness around him working overtime to obliterate the memories of the Holocaust. For Celan, truth as well as time were tied to the notion of memory and forgetting, centered on specific events in historical time, and he read Heidegger’s concepts through that lens of understanding. It marked a decisive shift in The Meridian speech. The other crucial aspect regarding Celan’s reading of Heidegger are the concepts surrounding language. Celan noted in his intense reading in 1953 of Heidegger’s Wrong Path, of the essay ‘What are poets for?’, where Heidegger calls language the house of Being. In the fall of the same year, Celan writes a poem, ‘With a Changing Key’, using the same metaphor: With a changing key You unlock the house where The snow of what’s silenced is driven. Once again we find, Celan taking up a Heideggerian concept to make a crucial alteration: If language is the house of Being, that house no longer offers an image of calm and security because inside it lies a frozen silence that is bound to confront the poet even when he tries to
The Idea of an Institution
HUG If media reports are to be believed, then Presidency University in Kolkata is on the verge of formalizing a set of mandatory guidelines for its campus (and off-campus) inhabitants—about maintaining ‘university’ hours, holding protests and dharnas, using campus walls and substances, and finally about making negative or critical comments on the institution on social media sites. No institution can run without some form of rules and institutional mechanisms, of course. But what is important is to note the drift of those rules in this case. In other words, what do we gain by giving shape to this university in a certain manner—in order to inculcate a set of brilliant students and make the institution a site for a particular kind of excellence? We shall come back to these two words—brilliance and excellence – in a bit. There has been an interesting legend about this institution in question, a significant myth that is circulated periodically in the media and in the Bengali imagination generally—that as a harbinger of a certain argumentative tradition in the Bengali psyche and by way of ushering in a relentless and rigorous form of scholarship to go with it, this institution has produced prodigal individuals and a climate where a no-nonsense exchange of ideas can take place—ideas that then might transform disciplines and laboratories, boardrooms and political platforms. From this idea of an argumentative institute, then Presidency College, again sometimes in a mythical fashion, got another quite different tag after the seventies—that here was an institution which was not coldly or instrumentally reformist and merely argumentative, that it could also infuse powerful forms of personal and political romanticism within its ambit of ideas, that ideas needed to be tested on historical and material ground realities; that it was important and possible to be contrarians in a climate of conformity and ruthless oppression. On these twin towers of thinking—rigorously rational and considered romantic (which occasionally did clash with each other) – debates and ideas were bookended, even after it became clear that the institution was not marked by any particularly identifiable set of ferment or drive. This began to change by the eighties with the mushrooming of the very idea of management and management institutes—just like it happened in another institute in another part of the country—St Stephens, though the character of the two institutes are in many ways quite different too. (About this shift in ethos in St Stephens, where the idea of babudom got layered with the incursion of management studies, Sanjay Subrahmanyam has eloquently written). Singular events in the nineties showed this shift. In Presidency, many were surprised to see some student volunteers in formal jackets and all ‘tied up’, in their otherwise traditionally cerebral college festival Milieu. It seemed that in a place of robustness and laidback nonchalance, a set of people with a jarring set of principles had suddenly arrived or were trying to advance a different set of ethos which was neither classically argumentative nor like the ones undertaken by the risk-taking romantics. Some of the new lot was very articulate, with good social skills (often powerful quizzers and debaters, so that it seemed like they were thinking minds with a sense of argument). But if looked at carefully, one would see that a champion debater can argue from many sides, dazzlingly, polemically sometimes. The culture of debate paradoxically resists analysis. It also makes you conversant with multiple viewpoints and might help blunt your principled and ideological moorings. This new group of people consisted of doers, focussed, utterly practical in mindset, with an antipathy for what they actually considered was a needless wallowing in the realm of ideas—be it rational or suicidally romantic. The demise of USSR and its aftermath greatly helped this group of doers to sharpen their pragmatic position in the one direction possible: the market. They wanted to have a say in the development of their own situation and usher in a new ethos in Kolkata that needed a facelift, they argued. Finding it impossible to sustain their kind of dream in a powerfully laidback culture, they would flee the city and be highly successful in their chosen terrains. Not all were management people, mind you, but even if they were in more fundamental fields, the ethos was managerial and practical. It did not matter whether you debated for socialism in college. Success in the real world meant using social skills for creating and securing jobs, trying to relate theory through the lab to the market, helping create assets for the individual and the nation, fashioning happiness and happy events around our lives. And steadfastly keeping away from the robust and the transformative, the spontaneous and the morbid, even from the watery philanthropic and the civilized. This new ethos, born in the late eighties, has now taken a much more virulent and powerful form. And it is not just the administration and the faculty who think differently now. But primarily it is the students who have bought into this ethos—a zeitgeist of sorts that goes well with Thought and Literary festivals, with banning cycles and substances alike. Naturally, the idea of discipline has become a major rallying point now, even for otherwise progressive souls (or is it because they are progressives?). Lumpens are everywhere—this fear has infected the middle class Bengali living room. And these lumpens have short-sighted, populist and young mavericks to egg them on too from within the university! They distract the meritorious and the brilliant—the future nation builders in whose safe hands must we bequeath our labs and conference halls, our library carrels and our quadrangles, our starched sarees and our closed circuit networks. What’s more—there will be a blanket ban on ideas being exchanged about the soundness of the policies that the university will undertake. So, no badmouthing your institution in the public sphere and social media sites. This gag order not just subverts all forms of ‘harebrained thinking’ but even the very dictum of the old world liberals is gone now:
Why Classics?
Utpal Dutt Snobs have always been contemptuous (over their morning cups of coffee, if you please) of the non-professional theatre groups in the city who are modestly building up a movement. Slogan-mongering, puerile, Communist, un-Indian—they have used many such odd epithets. So far, perhaps, they have had a ground—we have been busy too long making theatre a living newspaper and we had reasons for it. But we have also been guilty of neglecting the past, of scoffing at it with silly phrases borrowed from our smattering of Left literature. But now we can throw down the gauntlet. One group is rescuing Tagore from the emasculating chauvism of Santiniketan; another is rediscovering forgotten classics of the nineteenth century; a third bringing you Shudraka’s masterpiece. The classics belong to us and we alone can interpret them for the modern audience. Shorn of the classics, a modern repertoire becomes shorn of tradition, rootless and empty. For, the greatest experiment consists in carrying tradition forward, not in denying it; in interpreting and moulding it for our epoch, not in rejecting it as old. Moreover, the classics give us elemental noble passions that are wanting in contemporary drama. As Robert Jones once said in disgust, “Modern drama has been reduced to conversation about whether egg is hard-boiled or not.” There is a tendency in the name of revivalism to compress the emotions of men and women into the trivialities of breakfast and dinner. The dramatists are busy imitating probable conversation: what would such a character caught in such a situation say if he were real? The result—not even a fraction of complex modern life finds expression in theatre. Life is not just conversation and behaviour, but thought, emotion, passion. Desperate attempts have been made all over the world to capture on stage these other great aspects of life. Tagore heightened his drama from the real to the allegorical. Toller poetized the struggle of the working class. O’Neill’s Strange Interlude (1928) introduces inner voices of the characters. Brecht tried the epic style with modern themes. Eliot wrote Shakespearean verse about cocktail parties. But most of this expressionist and poetic drama has failed; it has become mere jugglery with forms. It has not the simplicity of the classics. Why is this so? Because theatre has abandoned its conventions. There was a time when the theatre was all convention. The Chorus introduced the play; the king’s chariot was imaginary; Vasantasena’s lavish villa was described purely through the spoken word; so was Cleopatra’s voyage down the Nile, and the death of Ophelia. There was a time when the actor soliloquized and gave us a glimpse into his soul and not only into his behaviour. What after all is the value of the opera-bouffeish murder of Duncan without the beautiful revelation of a man’s soul in ‘Is this a dagger?’ speech? Hamlet would be a typical Renaissance melodrama of intrigue, murder, ghost, duel, suicide and four corpses to bring the curtain down, except for the soliloquies, the conflicts within a thinker, his struggles with himself, which tone down the horror and give the frantic incidents a new meaning. The Chinese tragedian entered the stage and immediately introduced himself and his problems to the audiences. The Japanese stage manager in black freely walked around on the stage, prompting and helping the actors. But in 1840 a man called David Hill invented the photograph, and soon after, the disease of realism gripped the theatre in Europe. And now the Bengali theatre has caught it too. In this country of picturesque gesture and musical language, the dramatists are busy limiting the actor to the appearances of life, immobility and prosaic how-do-do’s. Would you believe this is the country where the Jatra developed—Jatra, which relies entirely on blank verse and sweeping gesture? Would you believe that Girish Ghosh wrote his Pandab Gaurab (The Glory of the Pandavas, 1900) and Kshirodeprasad his Bhishma (1913)? The playwright today is afraid to philosophize, whereas his predecessor could dare to write in dramatic form a full-fledged treatise on the essential loneliness of man, to express through Bhishma the philosophy of individualism. Thus, the classics teach us to heighten events from merely a photograph to a full painted canvas. They recapture for us the language of theatre. They show us the methods whereby we may so handle a modern theme that will surprise with a fine excess; it will awe, astound, ennoble. Behind the humdrum incidents of daily life, it will capture the soul of man. —————————————————— adminhumanitiesunderground.org