The Nineteenth of May and I
Shaktipada Brahmachari (Translated by Arjun Chaudhuri, from উনিশে মে ও আমি, Dainik Jugosankha, 20th May, 2001) ————————————— 19th May, 1961. My employed life had started by then. But my college life wasn’t over yet. When I passed my ISC examinations in 1958, immediately after that I acquired a job as a teacher in a high school at Silchar. And I was getting ready to appear for my B.A. examinations as a teacher-private candidate. Then came the Nineteenth of May. My finals were to begin only a few days after that. I was never involved in active politics. But there once had been in me a youthful curiosity for politics. And it was this curiosity that ultimately led me to become a believer in Marxism. I also discovered a connection between my literary thinking and Marxist thought. Thusly, I am a communist at heart. At that time, there was only one party that could be called Marxist-Communist. The CPI or the Communist Party of India. There used to be an office for the Communist Party in Silchar at around that time. It was a small two storeyed wooden building in Nazirpatty. The highly respected Comrade Gopen Ray used to live in that office itself. That place was almost a one-man commune by itself. The other leaders used to come there in the day or in the night, for work or even when there was no work to be done. Achintya Bhattacharjya, Digen Dasgupta, Dwijen Sengupta, Mani Ray and many others used to gather there. The party office had a Bengali newspaper subscription. The publication was called “Swadhinota” (Freedom). It was, of course, the mouthpiece of the Communist Party. I wasn’t a regular at this office. But I used to go there in the company of student-friends of my age, people who had been initiated in the ideology of Communism. I remember two of them especially. Chintaharan Das and Asit Aditya. Asit was a college mate of mine at G. C. College. We lived together for some time in the same house. It was through him that I came in touch with my other friend Chintaharan. Both of them were far ahead of me in their socialist ideas. They were both informed readers of literature, as well as voracious critics. Chintaharan went a step ahead. I have seen few such good orators as he was. This brings to mind that incident in 1959 when the Left led state government of Kerala was dismantled. The central government was a Nehru led Congress one. Indira Gandhi was the president of the AICC. The ‘red’ government was dismantled quite unethically. The communists were naturally very strident with their protest against this. A protest meeting was organised in Silchar as well in the form of a public convention right next to the round pond at Nazirpatty. The fiery address Chintaharan delivered in that meeting remains, in my opinion, almost unparalleled. Anyway, living amidst some close friends, with the reading of relevant literature, the adda at the tea shop, and other things, I continued to mature in my practices of writing poetry, and in the principles of socialism. And at around this time the year 1961 arrived. In the Assam State Legislative Assembly (then located at Shillong), they passed the State Language Bill. The language of this state would be only Assamese. The non-Assamese, especially the Bengalis, could not accept this easily. But the Assamese speaking crowd was numerically dominant in the Assam State Legislative Assembly. Purely on the basis of this numerical strength did Assamese become the official language of the state. The Bengalis were naturally quite displeased. Bengali must be given equal status as the official language alongside Assamese – this demand gradually gathered pace. The Bengalis in the Brahmaputra valley could not come clean with their objections to this bill, of course. But the Bengalis of Cachar (now Barak Valley) began to prepare for a protest movement. There was no support extended to this movement initially by any political party. Like it was in the rest of the country, the ruling party in Assam at that time was the Congress. It was this Congress government that had passed the Language Bill. Even though some of the Bengali Congress leaders of Barak Valley might have been secretly annoyed at this act of the government’s, they did not say or do anything by way of protest out in the public. As a result, there was an attempt to shape up an organisation to further the cause of the Bengali language movement by positing some nonconformist political figures at the helm of affairs. Even though there were quite a few senior leaders in the organisation, the primary driving force was a slew of young leaders from a middle income or a lower income background. It was then that the name of an entirely unknown young man began to emerge from among the ranks of the organisation. Paritosh Pal Choudhury. A child of an emigrant family. After leaving East Bengal, he had been busy in the Brahmaputra valley trying his luck. After that, he came to Silchar and soon achieved some renown as one of the leading organisers of the Bengali language movement. We began to hear of names like those of Rathindranath Sen of Karimganj, Harish Chakravarty of Hailakandi and others. They were engaged in consolidating the preparations for the Bengali language movement. But it seemed that the movement was not becoming forceful, or effective enough anywhere at all. That something so momentous would happen on the Nineteenth of May was not something anyone could have even thought of at that time. But there was a special reason behind that. The Congress was all in all in the political arena of the state of Assam at that moment. In the national context, the PSP (Praja Socialist Party) had acquired only some significance. The Communists were well known, but the party
Salaam Boi-mela!
Utpalkumar Basu The 11:40 local. I was returning on it. Possibly this is the last train for returning to Kolkata from the suburbs. Wintry night. Biting chill. Only a few passengers in the dimly-lit compartment. The stations are even more deserted. The train could have just skipped these stations since there is hardly any boarding or alighting. I don’t think anyone will de-board our compartment ere the train reaches Kolkata. But, ah, presently from a tiny little unknown station, on hops a hawker. Brown trousers, blue pullover, monkey-cap—rolled-up as headgear.And a bundle of books with him. “Have you read these, anyone here?”—he begins to holler, and the compartment wakes up with a start. “Have you read Phoolbala Devi’s latest, yes, have you?”—as the train jumps over and clears a viaduct, the young man’s voice is deluged by tremendous noise. Yet a middle-aged man, lying onthe middle bunk, sits up—“Let me see. Here, come over.” We all know this game, don’t we? He is a player from the same team, masquerading as a passenger. This joker will take the first stab at the incense-stick bundle, locks and keys, combs and wallets.So that the interest of the others in these items is aroused. But today the wind is blowing in a contrary direction. I end up buying the first book from the young man’s collection. Title: The Badass Ghost (ভুতের মস্তানী). Price: Rs. 2.50. Colourful cover. Hazy picture. Scores of printing errors inside. But what incredible stories! So, I buy a few more books without batting an eyelid. In the Clutches of the Ghost (ভুতের পাল্লায়ে), The Ghost’s Music-Room (ভুতের জলসাঘর), Mysterious Murder on the Ship (জাহাজে আজব খুন)Daughter-in-law does the Mother-in Law in (বউ এর হাতে শাশুড়ি খুন)—the last one in poetry form. So, let me come to the main point. These are my best reads of 1988. I consider all these books collectively as one book. There are lots of thematic crossings and currents within the books. Just like one encounters in bot-tola books, there is a running familiar pulse—whether it is to do with some cooking manual or with as esoteric a subject as learning Santhali in 30 quick steps. These are, of course, superficial similarities. Within the literary entrails of Phoolbala Devi’s 2.50 rupee book, appear stories of class exploitation,of hunger and death, stories of spectres and apparitions—their foul smelling subtle bodies are enough to create havoc at the annaprashan (rice-eating ceremony) of the roy-bahadur’s grandson: “And in a sudden flash, the beggar’s hands turned longer and longer. And they became skeletal. Holding up and shaking Roy Sahab’s and Dutta Sahab’s necks, those hands were striking one head against the other and with a strange nasal twang, he said “Nasty, yeah! Nasty? First clear the nastiness within your souls. You fellows find it below par to hand over a morsel of food to the poor beggar, eh! You could not stop, could you? So much food has now vanished into thin air! Where are the missuses? Not in sight! No one came with an iota of help, eh?” [স্যাঁত করে ভিখারির হাত দুটো প্রকান্ড লম্বা ও হাড়ের কংকালে পরিনত হয়ে, দুহাতে রায়-সাহেব ও দত্ত-সাহেবের ঘাড় ধরে প্রবল ঝাঁকুনি দিচ্ছে; দুজনের কপালে- কপালে সজোরে ঠোকাঠুকি করছে, আর অদ্ভূত নাকি সুরে বলছে “ন্যাস্টি!না?ন্যাস্টি!আগে মনের ন্যাস্টি দূর কর|গরিব ভিখারীকে এক টুকরো খাদ্য দিতে আঁতে ঘা লাগে|রুখতে পারলিনে?অত গুলো খাবার উড়ে গেল উধাও হয়ে? মিসসেসরা সব কোথায়ে গেল?সাহায্য করলোনা একটুও!”(ভুতের পাল্লায়ে)] This is literature’s undergrowth. The life blood of the jungle—weeds. Ghentu flower and Babla thorns. These books you would find on trains, footpaths, at fairs unknown. But not at book fairs or festivals. Those who buy and patronize such books with the money that they save from their meagre salaries or bonuses—many of them cannot even read yuktakshars (dipthongs) properly. Still they buy these books because in these they find stories of human love and emotion, tales of doting parents, the heroism of the local ruffian, the undoing of scheming political netas. There is love—but very little. More of sordidness and suffering. But within the cloud, the sun does shine. And all these are the ghost’s accomplishment. This is the purana of the spectral world of infinitesimally mysterious humans who hover around us—but are not noticed so easily. A bit like the beggars. From where they arrive, where they disappear to—who knows. [Translation by HUG. Title Photograph: Aritra Chakraborti] adminhumanitiesunderground.org
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
Affect and Absence: Irony in Siegfried Sassoon’s War Poetry
Avinash Antony & Somak Mukherjee On 13th July 1918 Siegfried Sassoon, now a decorated war-hero, was shot in the head near Arras, France. Ironically, it was not the enemy but a British soldier who shot him, thinking him to be a German soldier. This is one of the very many instances of irony that The First World War is replete with. In fact, in his seminal work Great War In Modern Memory, Paul Fussell points out “… every war is ironic because every war is worse than expected. Every war constitutes an irony of situation because its means are so melodramatically disproportionate to its presumed ends. In the great war, eight million people were destroyed because two persons, the archduke Francis Ferdinand and his consort, had been shot.”[i] This piece, however, is not an essay on irony; neither is it an essay on the Great War and Modern Memory, the poetry of Siegfried Sassoon, or war poetry in general. To be frank, this essay deals only fleetingly with some of the poems that Sassoon wrote in the years between 1914-1918.What this paper attempts to indicate is how affect is conveyed through absence: how the use of the ironic mode allows the reader to understand precisely because the poet does not speak. In the poem “The Dugout”[ii] written in July 1918, Sassoon has the speaker tell a fellow soldier not to sleep because “you are too young to fall asleep forever/and when you sleep you remind me of the dead.” One notes that almost everything remains unsaid in this poem. Except for the title, there is nothing in the poem to indicate where the speaker is, whom he is addressing, and in what conditions they are. Apart from an underground shelter, ‘dugout’ could also mean ‘a canoe’ as well as ‘a marijuana container.’ Divorced from context, it is perfectly legitimate to think that the speaker is either on a boat or in a den of vice. The poem could well be one that indicates the horrors of narcotic consumption. However, when it is put in context, one remembers the conditions the soldiers faced in the trenches. Sassoon describes these conditions in “Dreamers”[iii] I see them in foul dugouts gnawed by rats and in the ruined trenches lashed with rain. In the latter poem, Sassoon evokes the soldier’s traumatic experience in a far more straightforward manner. The poem is visceral precisely because it reveals; “The Dugout”, on the other hand, is affective precisely because it refuses to reveal. One is aware of the intensity of the trauma the speaker has suffered only when one questions why a sleeping youth reminds him of the dead. Is the speaker so affected because he has seen so many young men lying in the same manner on the battlefield? Or does the youth’s gesture while he sleeps remind the speaker of a state of innocence that, he recognizes, is long dead? The violence with which the speaker shakes the youth by the shoulder then, indicates how horrified the speaker is by the memory of death. And again, all this is indicated without once telling us whether the speaker is a soldier. Sassoon’s “Everyone Sang”[iv] also forces us to confront a strange ambiguity. It speaks about the first Armistice at Compiegne, 11th November 1918. Here he says Everyone suddenly burst out singing: And I was filled with such delight As prison birds must find in freedom Winging wildly across the white In the second stanza, the poem changes tone remarkably. Although he does say that everyone’s voice was suddenly lifted (which corresponds to the joyful tone of the first stanza), he now compares the beauty of the moment to a setting sun. He then reveals My heart was shaken with tears and horror Drifted away …O but everyone Was a bird; and the song was wordless; the singing Will never be done. One isn’t sure why exactly why the singing will never be done. Is it because the joy that was felt at the end of the war will last forever? Or is it that the dead soldiers now sing as angels in heaven; their songs both wordless and inaccessible to us humans? Is the phrase “wordless songs” a contradiction? Taken by itself, the phrase “the singing will never be done” could also be a more tempered version of Adorno’s claim that “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.”[v] Barbaric, as we know, was used to refer to those considered devoid of language. Are the songs wordless, then, because no words can bear the weight of testimony? And can we ever be sure? Irony, as a rhetorical device as well as a philosophical trope, has been discussed to death. In fact, one can recall at least one death that was caused by an excess of irony: the death of Socrates. Over the years, scholars have identified many different kinds of irony, each defined in different ways. In an attempt to avoid all of these, let us propose a simple working definition of the term. If an utterance, when taken out of context, means something completely different from (and usually the opposite of) what it means when the context is considered, that utterance is ironic. Of course, situations can be ironic too, but even in such cases, there is a duality of meaning and a context that effects the difference. The etymology of the word seems to support this: ‘irony’ comes from the Greek eironeia which meant ‘deceit’ but then came to mean ‘pretended ignorance’ usually used to prove a point. One recalls Swift’s “A Modest Proposal”[vi] where it is the knowledge that cannibalism is considered an insurmountable social taboo that allows us to understand that the text is a satire. An interesting view of irony, and one that seems most apt, is presented in Kierkegaard’s The Concept of Irony.[vii] In positing that irony is absolute negation, Kierkegaard alerts us to the fact that the ironic statement refuses to take a stance. Logically speaking,