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As Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926), the Prague-born Austrian poet, said:
"We are born, so to speak, provisionally, it doesn’t matter where; it is only gradually that we compose, within ourselves, our true place of origin, so that we may be born there retrospectively"
On this website, I will explore some of my mental coordinates which you, the reader, may or may not share, though I would like to believe that there are certain universalities in mental processes, influenced as they are by where we come from, where we are going, the journey itself and its evolving nature as it comes to be. Our minds may be sharing, perhaps unknown to ourselves, some of the coordinates of our otherwise various journeys. Journeys that are neither preordained, nor prefigured, only partiallly imagined and improvised within the bounds of individual capacity and means, within the constraints of one's options and imagination. Our paths may be interrelated through what happen to click into some inner receptors as we look about ourselves day by day throughout life. Out of the multitude of inputs, sensory and perceptual, which ones work their ways into consciousness and stay there, not as fixed entity but growing and changing, are for the most part a serendipitous process, though hardly a random one. They result and evolve from the interplay of what goes on within and what goes on without.
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| Employment/Experience Summary |
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life as ceaseless exploration of interfaces between the mental landscapes carried within and the concrete ones outside as perceived in time, this time and other times:
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I was born and raised in Calcutta, and schooled there upto my early-twenties, when I found myself moving, rather abruptly and uncertainly, to England, about to put my body and soul to the largely assigned task of becoming the first female with a Ph.D in my natal and marital families.
Was it an explorer's ambitious move, or was it mostly my being carried along by pressures and forces as yet beyond my full comprehension, let alone control? At that time, I thought my propulsion was self-motivated, then gradually I started seeing how much of a flotsam I was, as always, right from the dawn of my consciousness of my self relative to my surroundings. And yet, even the often overwhelming situations and circumstances never managed to block the seeping in of what nourished and resonated with the hardly-grasped elusive inner core. Looking back, it seems that I've been more like a plant that grew both in spite of and because of its surroundings, adapting to the tangible and the intangible environment. The journey life turned out to be was produced not only by the imperatives of situation and experience but also by the fugitive spirit's ability to pluck out of the very air around its own food, songs, and company for nourishment.
After getting a Ph.D in economics (Cambridge, 1968; thesis on the market behavior of Indian farmers), I went back to India, and thought I was settled down (in Delhi) with my own family and job as a senior fellow of Agro-economic Research Centre and subsequently as a project coordinator of Indian Council of Social Science Reasearch. So it went until 1976, the year after Indira Gandhi's imposition of an 'emergency-ruled' autocracy, when I found myself moving with my husband and son to Berkeley, California. Earlier, I had lived in the east coast briefly, but Berkeley is where I came to have my permanent address, my final home.
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Collecting and mulling over images & ideas along the way, while moving back and forth in time, space, and life surroundings
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In the twenty-five years since then, commuting every year between Berkeley, my adopted home, and Calcutta, my native home, between the two languages, between the two cultures, between self-contained solitariness and immersion in endlessly intrusive teeming life, I have grown habituated to, even fascinated with, the rhythm of this regular oscillation, of crossing back and forth. Like a bird on seasonal migration, often solitary, maybe more like a ferryman with home on both shores, always crossing over from one shore to the other carrying thoughtful bundles of physical and mental elements in varying configurations.
In the course of these years, I have also engaged in other crossings-over. Back and forth between social science and literature. After eleven years of teaching development economics to undergraduates at UC Berkeley, I left teaching, (faced as I was with few academic job options locally and my own need to live with my family), and got into looking at (for) literature as social commentary.
Engaging in a rather intensive 'labor of love', I have translated from Bengali literature, selecting with an eye on Bengal's history and the role of literature as social commentary. Bengali literature is rich, complex, one of the major world literatures, though mostly un-translated, and its readership today runs to at least 25 million, out of the nearly 200 million native speakers living in India, Bangladesh, and the rest of the world.
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On these pages I attempt to share some of my reveries, reminiscences, reviews, realizations, reappraisals of events of artistic, sociological and literary interest, and insights I have gained from my own work as well as from studying others' work. Alongside, I will also present as-yet unpublished pieces -- (a lecture or two, and excerpts from translation manuscripts).
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My work in the area of economics and social studies have been published as articles in periodicals and as institutional research papers. My five books published so far are of translation from Bengali literature:
Of Women, Outcastes, Peasants, and Rebels: a selection of Bengali short stories, edited and with translator's introduction. Berkeley: University of California Press; 1990.
A River Called Titash (Adwaita Mallabarman's 1956 Bengali novel, in my translation with an introduction, afterword and notes). Berkeley:University of California Press; 1993.
Wives & Others, a collection of short stories and a novella by Manik Bandyopadhyay, edited and with translator's introduction. Penguin (India); 1995. The collection on the theme of sexual politics, written in Bengali in the thirties and forties, this book, now out of print, had won the 1998 Sahitya Akademi award for English translation. I expect to have a new, revised edition of this book published sometime.
Rajnagar, my translation of Amiya Bhushan Majumdar's novel. New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi; 1997.
Forest Interludes , a collection of Anita Agnihotri's journals and fiction, edited, translated, and with an introduction. New Delhi: Kali For Women (now branched out as Zubaan); 2001.
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| Education |
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I have a B.A. and an M.A in Economics from Calcutta University, a Ph.D. in Economics from Cambridge University.
Not to be underestimated, though, is the informal process, (mine as everyone else's) of self-education, self-assigned research, and self-examination. Thus becoming more of an auto-didact with the passage of time, the altering nature of the times I have lived through, and with the imperatives of life's constraints as well as of felt needs and desires.
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| Skills |
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Nearly four decades of major exposure to, and active professing in, some aspects of the social sciences. Those aspects, speaking broadly, are the economic/political/cultural sociology of development at macro and micro levels, and specifically, gender in the labor markets and the societies of South & Southeast Asia.
Since 1990, I became a published translator of Bangla literature.
For some years I was also an avid photographer, especially in black-and-white. Some of my photographic work were exhibited at UC Santa Cruz in May 1999 and at Calcutta Information Centre in 1995. At this time, some of them can be viewed at picture.com by searching under my name
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Visit the two other pages on this website -- beloved images; essays & song lyrics -- which offer, along with quoted lyrics and reproduced images, some of my own unpublished pieces, including my translation of the lyrics of a dozen or so 'love' songs of Rabindranath Tagore (songs known in Bengal as 'rabindrasangeet'), composed at different stages of his long music-making life.
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| Personal Interest |
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The power of the written word to bring to life images, emotions and conflicts that the reader perhaps has not known before.
In making selections from Bengali literature for my translation, what I look for, aside from their value as social commentary, is powerful description of images of physical and emotional worlds, of different cultures and moral worlds. Literature, I believe, is the most valuable cross-cultural bridge as well as illuminator of human psyches and human societies. Let me illustrate with some excerpts from the five books of my translation of literary works in Bengali/Bangla.
(i)-(iii) from OF WOMEN, OUTCASTES, PEASANTS, and REBELS:
(i) from Rabindranath Tagore's 1893 story "The Punishment" (shasti):
. . . As the village uncle entered the yard of the Rui home, he felt strange about. No lamp was lit there yet. He could barely make out some silent figures on the dark porch. From a corner of it, a woman’s whimpering was turning into sobbing. The child was frantically crying for his "ma," and Chhidam equally frantically was trying to stop the child from crying out.
The uncle, a little frightened, addressed the dark porch from where he stood in the yard: "Dukhi? Are you there?"
Dukhiram, who was sitting absolutely still like a stone figure, burst into crying like a disconsolate child the moment he heard his name called.
Chhidam quickly stepped down from the porch and came to face the unexpected visitor, who remarked, "your women have been at it again, right? We heard them shouting through the whole day."
Up to that point, Chhidam had been trying desperately to think up some way to take care of the terrible event. . . . Now he went totally blank and could think of nothing to hide the situation from the visitor’s curiosity. All he could do was to vaguely mumble, "Yes. They had a bad fight today."
The growing curiosity of the gentleman distracted him from the original purpose of his visit. He now approached the porch, asking, "But why does that make Dukhi weep like that?"
Chhidam saw no way out, and, in his terrible panic, he blurted out, "In the fight, my wife struck her older sister-in-law with the cleaver."
. . . All Chhidam could think of at that moment was how to hide the terrible truth; it did not occur to him that his lie might produce an even more terrible reality. Faced with the suspicious visitor’s question, his bewildered head simply made up a story likely to sound somewhat plausible.
The startled gentleman asked if she was dead. Chhidam said yes, and fell at his feet, begging for his help. . . . The gentleman happened to the undisputed village expert on the intricacies of court cases. . . . He thought a little and said, "Well, here is a way out. Run to the police station, and report that when your brother came home hungry and found that his wife had not cooked, he struck her with his sicle. I can guarantee that it will save your wife’s neck."
Chhidam now felt his throat drying. He got up from the gentleman’s feet and said in a feeble voice, "But it is possible to replace a wife, not a brother." He had not reasoned this way at all when he blurted out the first lie, which he did in a frantic rush of panic and confusion. But once he had done that, he unconsciously started rationalizing it, even trying to use it as a kind of consolation for the loss he was implicitly risking.
The village uncle and legal expert agreed that it was a valid point and said: "All right. Then tell them the way it actually happened; you can’t save them both." With that, he quickly exited.
Soon, the news spread throughout the village . . . The next day, the police came to the village: something that was as uncommon and overwhelming an external intrusion as a flashflood. . . .
(ii) From Mahasweta Devi’s 1979 story "Paddy Seeds" (bichhan):
To the north of Kuruda and Hesadi, the twin villages of outcastes and tribals, the bare soil, sunbaked and bone-dry, becomes wavy. No grass grows there even after the rains. A few solitary cactuses stand like cobras with raised hoods. In the middle of this vast, undulating, burned-out stretch is a little green patch, hull-shaped, hardly an acre in size. It leaps into the range of vision only when one stands atop one of the high crests of the wavy brown landscape. There is something almost spectral about that flourish of lush green.
Even more unexpected, apparition-like, is the little straw-roofed platform perched on four posts in the middle of that green patch surrounded by arid stretches of brown earth. This kind of shed is set up for watching over crops at night, but the green plants standing there are only thorny sisal and wild weeds with fibrous leaves like pineapple tops, unlikely to attract even the hungriest herbivore.
Soon after darkness starts to fall, the most unreal, almost ghostly appearance is that of a man approaching in long brisk strides from the direction of Kuruda. As the figure comes closer, one can make out that he is a wizened old man, covered with wrinkled leathery skin, clad only in a loincloth, from one side of which hangs a pouch made of patched old quilt. He climbs up the wobbly crude ladder made from branches. He strikes flintstones to light a bidi and sits in the shed smoking for a while. Some time after it gets quite dark, he unrolls his mat and lies down, seemingly to sleep. From a high crest of the wavy brown land, he can be seen every evening going through the same routine.
And every evening, back in Kuruda village, Dulan Ganju’s old wife can be heard grumbling and complaining, loudly and at length, about the man. Nobody can say she has no right to, for the man out there is Dulan Ganju. Their two sons, the daughters-in-law, and the grandchildren do not like this nightly repetition of futile shouting, but there is nothing they can do to make her stop. They know that if they were to say anything, she would turn her steam to blast them. . . .
The sons do think that staying out night after night guarding a patch of weeds is strange behavior. But then, they never count their father among ordinary people. He has always been complex, dark-natured, inscrutable. . . . Mother does not measure any less than him. Her spare old body of sturdy bones holds such capacity for hard labor, courage and stubbornness – and anger – that she too is regarded by them as beyond the common measuring rod for humans.
They rarely see their parents talking close together. But whenever Father is about to undertake something big, he asks Mother to sit by him on the porch. He lights the hookah for her and says, "Come, Dhatua’s mother, let’s have one of your brainwaves. Everybody in the village takes your advice; even the police are scared of you." She answers this invitation in her usual loud voice but without the sharp angry edge . . . .
[When despite his crafty battle of wits with the powerful landlord Lachman Singh, Dulan finds himself trapped in the latter’s villainy, he deploys his cunning in a solitary guerrilla war on his personal and class enemy. To his folks he seems to have gone out of his mind. But he is not mad. Without revealing the plot twist, here is a bit from the end part of the story after Lachman Singh is mysteriously killed and Dulan transforms the weedy plot into a nursery for paddy seeds.]
While on one side the search for Lachman Singh proceeds, on the other side a new Dulan comes back from the watchpost of his plot. A serene Dulan, at peace with himself. He talks [to the headman] about something, as a result of which the villagers of Kuruda collect in the [headman’s] yard. Dulan starts by telling them that he knows he has never shared anything with them. Everybody is surprised by his tone and his words. He continues: "You all praised my paddy. When I did not harvest it, you all said that I was mad. You said I was mad earlier too when I toiled over that land. . . . Will you now grant this madman one request? . . . Use my paddy as seeds on your fields. . . . I want you to come to harvest and distribute my paddy seeds. Let me have some too. I’ll plant them again, and again, for all of us to use." . . .
(iii) From Hasan Azizul Huq’s 1981 story "Through Death and Life" (amrityu ajiban):
. . . Karam Ali studied the fallow plot of land he was going to prepare for plowing this time. . . . The sky was ready again. As it waited in grave silence, one could hear even the skitting of water insects on the [marsh's] black crystal surface. He was so enchanted with the calm that he was seeing his fallow plot as if it was already cleared, its uprooted damp weeds gone into the marsh, its uncluttered soil already spaded into chunks turned over, as if those chunks had soaked in rain for days and become sweetly soft. In a succession of effortless images, he could see his little fallow plot in the vast flatland float in the air above ground as a lush green field of growing seedlings, transformed like a beautiful daughter once born out of one’s own blood.
Karam Ali stirred out of his dream with a sigh and . . . proceeded with the hoe to tackle the thicket of weeds and vines in the middle at the base of the single coconut tree. . . .
A sharp loud hiss went up the moment the hoe came down . . . and at once he saw a smooth coil of yellow vine swiftly uncoil. The very next moment the dazzling form of the snake was swaying against the panorama of the darkly clouded sky, the softly overflowing green of baby paddy and the glistening expanse of water.
Suddenly his entire life up to that point seemed engulfed in the blank darkness that precedes one’s birth. The reel of memory unraveled and his past tumbled away like a kite caught in rough wind. The future also disappeared from his mind, the future of constant labor and deprivation. Even the immediate present embodied in the surrounding landscape became dim and unfocused, as he watched, with the acute concentration of his peasant life,the cobra steadily swaying two and a half yards from him. . . . Karam Ali tried to look into its eyes but soon gave way to the steady stare, cold and sad, . . . .He felt no anxiety, no fear, no hatred, no nausea, no love, no affection. He only saw his destiny, his whole life, and the constancy of relentless struggle, without respite, without excitement, the struggle in which defeat was everpresent yet hesitant in the face of his tenacity. The dazzling white mark on the outspread hood seemed pulsating with complex motion, and he observed in it the intricate tangle of threads that seemed to be weaving his past and his future, his life and his death. . . .
The swaying hood seemed to be slowly receding. Then before his startled eyes, it rose to an enormous height, towering above the trees in his line of vision. . . . Then the powerful jaws opened under the hood, the dark cavity seemed to be holding for a moment all the worn-out lives of the villagers and their constant, ageless struggles, . . . before they were going to be crushed with a merciless crunch.
The hood suddenly came lower and toward him. Karam Ali was calm, ready, his hands resting on the handle of the hoe. It slowly lowered its head and, ignoring him completely, left with the utmost grace and dignity along the edge of the field and the shallow edge of water, . . . Karam Ali now wanted to go home. . . . he suddenly felt himself choking with the pressure of an enormous fear.
From A RIVER CALLED TITASH, Mallabarman's 1956 novel, ch. 1:
Titash is the name of a river. Its banks brim with water, its surface is alive with ripples, its heart exuberant.
It flows in the rhythm of a dream. . . . The river Titash does not hold the awesome terror of the Padma and the Meghna. Nor the furtive beggarliness of the thin village strem that sneaks by the paddy storebin of Ramu Modal and the primary school of Jadu Pandit. It is a medium-size ricer. A daredevil village boycannot swim across it, and a lone boatman never fears to cross it in a little boat with a young wife seated inside.
Titash flows in a regal mood. It is never crooked like a snake, never devious like a miser. Ebb tide with the waning moon draws away some of its water but does not reduce it to poverty. High tide with the waxing moon swells its waters with high energy but does not flood it.
On the banks of so many rivers once rose the ramparts of the indigo merchants’ estates; their ruins still meet the searching eye. So many rivers saw armies of the Pathan and the Mughals pitch tents on their banks; the thin swift cutters of the Arakanese Mahg pirates engaged in the fury of blood-spilling fights – battles raged along their banks. How the waters of those rivers ran red with the blood of people and of horses and elephants. Some of those rivers are dry today, but they have left their marks in the pages of scholarly books, Titash holds no such grand history in its bosom. It is simply a river. . . .
Never has it known the joy of descending the mountains, picking up water along the way, touching the sprigs of hillside wild flowers, flowing over and around the rocks. Nor will it ever know the ecstasy of of losing itself in the gigantic kiss of the ocean. Once upon a time the restless Meghna . dancing her way, slipped in a careless moment – her left bank strained and broke. Her currents and waves flowed into that breach. The inflow there created its own course, finding and molding soft alluvium, cutting and twisting through hard ground. After making a broad sweep that held hundreds of villages along the two sides touched the edges of many forests and flatlands, this pride of the Meghna returned to the lap of the Meghna. This is its history. But is it something that happened in recent times! Nobody even thinks of its origin. All they know is that it is a river that flows over a great distance between its two mouths joining with the Meghna. Like the little gap between the two ends of a metal bangle such as village women wear, a small gap separates the two ends of Titash. . . .
Women go back and forth on the river between husband’s home and parents’ carrying within her breast so many different smiles and tears. The young wife going with her husband has the tears of parting in one eye and the dance of a butterfly in the other. The ones who travel sitting well inside the boat’s shed belong to . . . all those upper castes. . . . Fishermen’s wives come and go in their fishing boats. They are not as delicately pretty; and they are not obliged to stay strictly under cover. The Malo youths blame the fate written on their foreheads – they will never get one of those fair beauties as wife. They do a lot of watching, though. If they look long and hard, they will from time to time catch a glimpse of a fair face and a pair of pretty eyes through a windblown fold of the sari draped over the open end of the shed. It prevents those outside from seeing her, but she can see them. With plenty of fish in the water, the Malo youths’ spirits soar. Lowering their eyes to their nets, they send the passing beauty a song she will not fail to hear:
A daughter I was of a Brahman,
Worshipped Shiva for a husband.
Then I fell in love with a fisherman,
And now I spin flax for his net.
Who thought this was in my fate!
The boat moves down and slips into a channel beyond the village on the river. Like the sideways flick of a snake’s tongue, the channel suddenly turns away around the village, far inland. Perhaps the boat will follow the channel past several more villages to take the young wife to the one where a home waits for her. Perhaps that home is beside the channel and small children are ready with a prank to startle her. Perhaps someone else also waits for her, with other plans. Perhaps the channel has grown too beyond a point, and she has to get off the boat and walk some distance to reach the home. There, amid the design the [river] artist has laid out in the loveliest quiet shades of green in a mosaic of planted fields, she walks slowly along the narrow ridges between the patchwork of green
. . . . For a young wife coming to a village right beside Titash, the boat pulls us by the ghat, busy with various activities, and she climbs out bathing in the empathic warmth of some ten pairs of female eyes. If it is her parental home, she runs up the slope and goes in to hug her little brothers and sisters. And if it is her marital home, she pulls down over her face the part of her sari covering her head and slowly walks the path up, taking restrained steps and staying between two to four women who lead and follow her.
In this manner, Jamila walks the path that leads from the ghat to the maqtab adjoining the mosque of their neighborhood, and with one foot at the corner of the maqtab, she glances back at the riverside. Her husband is still haggling over the fare. Just a couple more annas and the boatman would go away happy. . . . The evening is setting in, and the path is lined with overgrown glass. Doesn’t the man understand that she’s afraid, when after asking them to go on ahead, he himself is taking so long to come! What if a snake is out here and about to strike her big toe, taking it for a little frog!
Khamir Mian is the accounting type; never cheats anyone of a paisa and never gives anyone an extra paisa, carefully weighs everything he does. When the boatman gives up and turns glumly back to his boat, an unexpected daub of happiness disoves its color through Khamir Mian’s mind. The coming night is his night for what! On the eve of such a night, how can anyone make a boatman feel deprived!
From a moment’s silent defeat, the boatman gets four times what he could not get from ten minutes of arguing. He smiles at the four-anna bit on his palm shining in the fading light and heads midstream. When Khamir Mian comes near Jamila, she feels as if the snakes that have been wriggling around the big toe of her bare foot are suddenly all gone. . . .
From WIVES & OTHERS, the story "Poisonous Love" (bishakta prem; 1940s):
Talk of attachment between two hearts? It can very easily spring up regardless of time, place, and character. For Satya and Sarala, too, it took no longer than a month to sense the mutual attraction, to get mentally attached. In a case like theirs where other people don’t stand in the way, don’t consider it important even to bother their heads, affinity of minds usually is sufficient for the kind of union that is its natural culmination. Love is but an affinity of minds. But it seems that because of the very affinity of their minds, Satya and Sarala on his and her own set aside as unnecessary the kind of union which is a necessary outcome of mental affinity. They felt unhappy when not with each other, but neither realized that they had no choice but start living as soulmates.
Satya is the one who seems more impervious to the fact that by some trick of fate their minds have become attached. The man is by nature a bit secretive, circumspect, and moreover, his occupation is stealing -- in fact, he has been seeing her with a plan to get away with her jewelry and money the moment he got an opportunity. With Satya, the thing most desirable is that nothing about his life gets expressed. Whatever goes on stays hidden, everything from how he makes a living to how he lives his life. He’s not one to consider himself lucky to find his own heart stolen.
It’s of course true that on the night he first stepped inside Sarala’s room he was dressed as the typical stealer of hearts. He had gotten hold of the heart-stealer’s attire a short time ago from the house of a businessman. Why businessmen must live in their own homes so cautious of thieves is something only they know! Satya couldn’t do very well in the businessman’s own room, and from the room of his profligate son, all he got was the outfit of a night-roaming babu -- muslin dhoti and kaftan, gold watch, gold link-buttons, et cetera. But he had to buy the pair of new shoes. The money for that came, of course, from the wallet of the businessman’s same gone-bad son. Even so, as taking money off others’ wallets is Satya’s form of making a living, he felt a little bad about buying expensive shoes with money he held as his earning. All in all, one could say that it was out of his compulsion to make use of his need for a proper pair of shoes to go with the babu attire that he hit on the idea of fleecing Sarala. How long can a man go on doing nothing to remedy a nuisance of the otherwise pleasant squishing of new shoes on his feet entering his ears to produce only the unease of a mild regret?
Sarala doesn’t have much of what can exactly be called beauty. This for her is an asset -- a considerable source of attraction. A woman who does not have the looks to make everyone say she’s pretty, not even to prompt some to say she’s pretty and some to say she’s ugly, a woman upon seeing whom men don’t feel any inescapable obligation to form an opinion one way or the other about her beauty -- for such a woman timid men are absolutely crazy. And men who like to buy their women are by nature timid. Sarala’s having jewelry on her body and furniture in her room is quite enough as bonus.
The jewelry on her body is mostly gilt, though, and the furniture in her room mostly second-hand, bought at auctions. Sarala keeps her all-gold jewelry hidden, and knowing hidden jewelry to be safer than displayed jewelry, she has no regret about always having to wear only the imitation. The furniture are also gifts she exacted -- and knowing that exacted gifts are usually second-hand, she has no regret about the furniture in her room. Besides, compared to the husband’s room she came from, furnished with a decrepit bedstead used by three generations and a termite-eaten almirah, having her room decked in second-hand furniture from Anglo homes bought at auctions is no small pleasure! Sarala’s bedstead is not second-hand – it’s a gift of love from the man who seven years ago died of heart failure drinking alcohol in this room. It was her first piece of furniture. That’s all right. In seven years, lot of memories evaporate, but an expensive bedstead doesn’t become old.
This being what Satya is like and what Sarala is like, they go on for some time solicitously trying to convince each other that neither carries any suspicion whatsoever toward the other, that they are simply such fun-loving people, so good as companions in having just a jolly good time, that they must share an uncommon affinity of temperament.
And then the two of them do develop an affinity of hearts. But as long as the declaration was false, it was easy to convince each other. Who can believe it now? There’s no point in trying to convince, there’s no way to be convinced. No matter whether they say it directly, convey it indirectly in gestures and hints, or swear on it in the names of their special gods and goddesses, the result would still remain the same. Satya’s schemes and ploys to find out the hidden jewelry’s location would like a trap keep Sarala in as tight a spot as she’s in now. And Sarala’s unrelenting focus on extracting money and gifts would keep making Satya feel as harassed as he does now. No matter whether their hearts do or do not share an affinity, Satya doesn’t have the ability to give up for anyone his love of stealing gold, and Sarala doesn’t have the ability to give up for anyone her love of getting expensive gifts.
Sarala keeps thinking: if only the fellow were not a thief! I’ve no doubt that I’d ease up on the demands, and increase the amount of love and care I give him, I’d certainly try harder to keep him with me for much longer. But the scoundrel is a thief, a rogue.
Satya keeps thinking: if only the broad were not so hardboiled! I’d no doubt drop all plans to rip her off and hand her whatever I make, I’d certainly try to have an understanding with her and settle down here. But the wicked creature is a loanshark, a veritable Kabuliwallah.
Thus they think, and both keep getting irritated. Irritated, both grow resentful inside: Quite a character I’m in the clutches of, it’s making me sick with anxiety.’
Regretfully Satya decides that he’ll finish the job as soon as possible and make his exit. Regretfully Sarala decides that she’ll throw him out as soon as her collection starts to drop.
One day, showing up well before the afternoon is over, Satya says, "Just landed in some money, Sarli, let’s have a bit of fun today, okay?"
Feeling genuinely happy, Sarala asks, "How much? Where did you get it?"
The face Satya makes, winking one eye at her, beats comparison. "Just so!" he says. . . .
From RAJNAGAR, a historical novel by Amiya Bhushan Majumdar placed in the 1860s in a rural area away from Calcutta’s colonial hub.
[The excerpt here describes an exchange in the teachers’ room between a pseudo-modernist follower of the Brahmo religious reformist movement, then fashionable among Calcutta elite families, and a sharp-tongued elderly Brahmin pundit who is the school's Sanskrit teacher.]
"You know, there’s a son of the Mitter family in Khidirpur who has newly embraced satyadharma [the true religion]. But before that , he deposited the family’s house deities with a temple. . . . But I’m not like that, no sir. To me what’s false is absolutely false. We too had in our family a house deity in the form of Narayan-shila –"
"Did you immerse that in the Ganga?" Charan asked.
"Wait, wait, Charan Das," said Shiromoni the pundit, "Immersing in Ganga is but a Hindu practice."
Neogi said, "If you’d kindly pay a visit to my home here you’d see the geode sitting on my desk serving as a paperweight. I want my sons to know it as just a pebble. . . . To this day, I have not heard a sound of either anklet bells or fluteplaying come out of it." . . .
Shiromoni gave a loud hah-hah laughter and said, "Here exactly is the fallacy in the thinking. How can there be sound of anklet or flute in what you consider a pebble?. . ."
Charan Das said, "Are you saying that it becomes pebble when thought of as pebble?"
"That’s just how it always is," said Shiromoni. "What to you and me is a cross-beam smeared with blood and adipose tissue is to some people the symbol of a holy avatar. Perhaps even Neogi-mashai, when he sees such a cross-beam, raises joined palms at least to his chest."
Neogi’s jaws stiffened. . . . He said, "It’s not in my habit to hide the truth. I admit, when I see the cross, what you’re calling a cross-beam, I find nothing to be embarrassed about in conveying my respects . . . . [I]n this country of ours even such symbols are worshipped as, it must be admitted, should be embarrassing for any gentleman, any civilized person. Talk of the cross, compared to those?"
Charan asked if he was referring to folk deities like Ola-bibi, Shitala-thakrun.
Neogi replied, "I’m referring to your god of gods, Mahadev."
Some words bring a loose conversation to life with a lightning strike, as it were. The last gong would be going off after this class period on a Saturday. The only thought on Shiromoni’s mind was of going home. . . .
Charan said, "That’s only a handful of clay or a piece of stone. What’s embarrassing?"
"But the shape? . . ." Neogi stopped, full of scorn, "I call that the worship of beastliness." . . .
A good many veins were visible on Shiromoni’s wizened body. Suddenly, a vein right in the middle of his forehead started throbbing hard from the pressure of blood. Suddenly he laughed with a loud, harsh tha-tha sound. "Well said! I’ve heard that among the white folks newborn babies are brought folded in handkerchief by a stork. You’re a Bengalee, I don’t know if that’s how it happens also in your case. But think of your own birth, your children’s birth, think of whether or not they resulted from animal behavior in the muck of sin. Yet we’re born to the ground from the gate of heaven. . . , tell me, mashai, what can be as holy as mother’s vagina . . .?
"Chhee-chhee-chhee, what’s all this stuff you’re saying," Neogi inserted his index fingers quite some way into his ears.
Shiromoni said, "Consider the matter with the help of your brain. It’ll change your concept of holiness. A blood-smeared post, which brings to mind death, pain, vengeance; if you can keep that before you, then is it wrong if we keep before us the symbol of joy and birth?"
Dong-dong: the last bell rang. . . . Shiromoni got up. He said, Namaskar, mashai. Don’t take offense at an old man’s words. Today I’m here, tomorrow I may not be." . . .
From FOREST INTERLUDES, from "The Mahuldiha Days," a novella (1996) about an administrative officer’s campaign in a remote tribal area to promote literacy:
Surrounded by impassable hills lies this densely forested valley, through which cricket calls ring even during daytime. Hidden somewhere amidst that is the source of an underground river, which can be seen flowing in a rill out of a pond, then getting lost, and reappearing a mile and a half west amidst deep forest. The legend is, a long time ago a Juang brought this river in here, that’s why the Juangs call themselves children of the sage. Numbering close to forty-five thousand, they live scattered over this valley. . . .
‘How do you feel today, Dhwantari?’
Dhwantari, sitting in his porch, only smiles his toothless smile in response, continuing to gaze at the ground. A major wave of malaria has swept over this area. Though it took many lives – of children, adolescents, newly married youths, Dhwantari is still alive. Even sitting in the autumn sun, he gets the fever’s shaking. A load of crinkly white hair on his head, his age beyond count, he’s like trees and rocks. Some time ago, in explaining to me the complex social rules of their community and the dynamics of clan structure, Dhwantari pointed his finger to the forest and said simply this. It’s over there, he said, eleven brothers went there to farm; before clearing the forest to prepare the land, they each marked a tree with his axe; that’s how Dharamdeo came; the forest around a tree became a seat, a throne; from each seat later emerged a clan. Dhwantari said, for them the village was one family; that’s why there could be no marriage between men and women of the same village, wives must come from other villages. Dharamdeo is believed to have created this earth, these hills, the river underground, these trees. Yet there’s no image anywhere of Dharamdeo, no temple. In a stone the village goddess is worshipped with oil and vermilion. Dharamdeo is never revealed to human eyes. Perhaps very late at night, when the hilltop moonlight mixes with the saal flowers’ smell, when light and shadow play on the dew-damp ground like the original man and woman in coitus, then this non-manifest deity silently walks the valley, from village to village. At the musky scent from the deity’s body, the ruthless leopard wakes up and licks its paws, and the baby elephants on the Narayan hill are startled by the deity visiting their dreams.
Everyone still believes in what Dhwantari says. Although he doesn’t talk much these days. . . . Opening his swollen, heavy eyelids with difficulty, he tries to look at me, smiles again. Pairs of feet walk the ground in front of his downcast eyes – he knows them through inference, child’s muddy pipit feet, young woman’s silver-ankleted feet, young man’s dry cracked feet in tire sandals. My handloom sari’s border design at my feet he seems eager to study closely. But the sun’s heat and glare start waving the yellow of mustard flowers to his eyes. And exhausted by the effort, he falls asleep again, squatting there, his head tucked into his knees.
Dhwantari has, however, accomplished a major task for us. He was given a book to look at -- ‘Know about Life,’ in green cover, freshly printed. Feeling the book, turning it and smelling it, Dhwantari said smiling: let the young men and women read it; he’d watch from sitting here right on this porch. In other words, he had no objection to his people reading the book. . . .
About a month ago, while I was walking the stony arid paths of Kusumpota, something suddenly grabbed my attention near a fenced yard. It was a summer twilight. The sky held some faint light, not going dark all at once as on winter evenings. There was a lot of noise of many reciting a lesson together. It was the same line they were reading aloud, but their pronunciations and manners of reading were so varied that the result was like a haphazard assortment of shouts. I simply had to go in and look. Sitting before two sooty lanterns and bending over torn copies of a primer, some twenty or twenty-two young to middle-aged men and women were literally doing battle with the printed letters. The old copies of the primer, the broken slates obtained from the school for their use. The teacher, the widowed mother of a worker of the Kusumpota anganwadi; ran to hide but was stopped. The students came at duskfall, I was told. They’d keep nodding from sleepiness, yet they won’t leave. . .
I said, ‘Read me a little, let's see how well you've learned.’
They looked at each other’s face, bare-chest men in short dhotis, dry-hair women in cheap mill saris; some picked at their nails from embarrassment, some rubbed one foot against the other; the chests of some heaved like bellows from feeling afraid. Clearly, they were all goddess Saraswatis in their learning capacity. They read out together because the pages were more or less memorized from repeated hearing, but reading out one at a time felt too scary, because the letters started dancing before the eyes like so many big black ants. From this bunch quickly stepped out that wonder boy – Bhajaman Juang.
'Arre! This small boy, what is he doing here? Ei, don’t you go to the regular school?’
'How can I go to the school, it’s during the day. I herd the goats then.’ Picking up the primer, Bhajaman read out fluently. . . .
Copyright: Kalpana Bardhan. Quoting from or otherwise using any part of this page must acknowledge by providing a link to this website.
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