Returning To Earth

Das found himself invited to the ‘festival of joy’ in 1899; from theevidence of his poems and fiction, it doesn’t appear that he thought life -- ‘jiban’-- an unqualifiedbenediction. There is, not infrequently, a note of bewilderment in the wayDas’s poems speak of earthly existence, the bewilderment of a person who wakesto find himself in a place of transit from which he must soon move on. Thenameless speaker in the poem ‘Banalata Sen’ begins wearily:

For thousandsof years I roamed the paths of this earth,
From watersround Ceylon in dead of night to Malayan seas.
Much have Iwandered. I was there in the gray world of Asoka
And Bimbisara,pressed on through darkness to the city of Vidharbha.
I am a wearyheart surrounded by life’s frothy ocean.
To me she gaveme a moment’s peace -- Banalata Sen from Natore.

The translationis Clinton B Seely’s, of the Department of South Asian Languages at Chicago,from his superb literary biography of Das, APoet Apart. From the beginning, Das, an elusive, deeply private writer,reluctant to make himself better known, reluctant, in some crucial instances, topublish his own work, has had his champions, who attempted to bring his work tothe attention of the Bengali, and now the Anglophone, reader. The most importantof these was the poet and critic, Buddhadeva Bose, Das’s contemporary,probably the most influential Bengali writer of that bristly, fascinating post-Tagoreangeneration, whose generosity in supporting a fellow poet was, and still is, asunusual in the republic of Indian letters as was his critical shrewdness andacumen. The poems are now part of the Bengali consciousness, on both sides ofthe border dividing India from what was Pakistan and is now Bangladesh; it’ssafe to claim that Das is the pre-eminent and best loved Bengali poet afterTagore. Those who know his work first-hand are convinced that he is among thetwentieth century’s great writers, and so the process of recuperationcontinues, now in English. Like some of those writers -- one thinks of Pessoaand Kafka -- Das felt, for some reason, compelled either to suppress some ofhis most important writings, or to locate them in a secret life. Seely’sexcellent work, as translator and biographer, represents a sustained effortthat’s been ongoing for a few decades now, a project, however, dogged by thesort of inexplicable delays and impediments (his translations have still to finda publisher), the sort of nebulous cloud, that occasionally seemed to keepDas’s contemporaries (despite the enthusiasm of Bose and some younger writers,and Tagore’s qualified but genuine admiration) from seeing the true value ofhis work.

Now the English poet Joe Winter’s translations, collected in twoslim but not insubstantial volumes, NakedLonely Hand, a selection of some of the most well-known poems, and Bengalthe Beautiful, which contains the sonnets that were published posthumouslyand made him a household name in Bengal, give the process of dissemination, andthe cause of Das, a fresh impetus -- a small but significant contribution whichwill not be, hopefully, scuppered by Saturn.

Bothtranslators,

Seely and Winter, have either taken the trouble to master Bengali (Seely’sdoctoral thesis was on Bengali literature) or to make themselves intimate withit -- Winter, until recently, lived in Calcutta, and returned to England afterseveral years; it was in Calcutta, I believe, that he discovered Das’s poetry.Seely has been revising and revising the translations, including the one ofDas’s single most famous poem, from which I’ve quoted, above, the openingstanza. Winter’s version announces a translator who’s happier with looserforms, whose diction has a not-unattractive roughness and simplicity that isprobably more characteristic of Winter’s own writing as well as of somepost-War British poetry than it is of Das. Unlike Seely, Winter is also intenton preserving Das’s glancing, sometimes unnoticeable, rhymes -- a constraintwhich, paradoxically, produces some of that looseness of structure, as well asoccasional awkwardnesses of phrasing. Here is the same opening stanza inWinter’s version:

For thousandsof years Earth’s path has been my path. I have passed
at dark ofnight the sea of Ceylon and the ocean of Malay;
the ashenworlds of Bimbisara and Asoka I’ve encompassed,
and Vidarbhatown’s dark distance, in life’s far ocean-foam-play…
and a touch ofpeace came to me once, the tiredest of men --
there andgone, the gift to me of Natore’s Banalata Sen.

One of thereasons that Winter is trying to preserve the original structure of thethree-stanza poem and its rhymes is, surely, to adhere to the summation, in theoriginal, of the last line of each verse with ‘NatorerBanalata Sen’; or ‘Natore’s Banalata Sen’. This is a rounding-off, acoda, at once mysteriously resonant and mock-resounding; it enacts acharacteristic and essential modernist comedy, although comedy is not what oneusually associates with this poem or its author, ‘the most solitary,’according to Bose, ‘of our poets’. Yet comic is what, in the first instance,Natore’s Banalata Sen is, as is the idea of her simultaneously physically andtranscendent redemptive quality; for Natore is what in India is called a ‘mofussil’,a prototype of the sort of small town that came into being (in this case, inEast Bengal) in the time of colonialism, usually with an administrative centre,a post office, a school, a hospital, a railway station. Banalata is the kind ofname a young middle-class woman of Das’s generation might have had; ‘Sen’a surname that ordinarily denotes the vaidya caste, the caste Das’s ownfamily belonged to before it became Brahmo (the protestant reform sect amongBengali Hindus founded by Rammohun Roy). The fact that she’s called‘Banalata Sen’ rather ‘Banalata Devi’, ‘devi’ a respectful honorificonce used to address women in lieu of the surname or maiden name, tells us thatshe belongs to the new educated bourgeoisie, and probably appears to ourexhausted traveller, after his sojourn through mythic and historical time, in adrawing room. In other words, Natore and Banalata Sen are at once glamorous andbanal, these two unrelated qualities converging in them as they did in severalaspects of not just modernity, but what the Indian social scientist ParthaChatterjee calls ‘colonial modernity’ (it’s natural, in this context, tothink of Joyce). That the ordinariness, the replicatedness, of the colonialmodern should somehow be both embedded in the monuments of the past and of theworld (the Odyssey, the kingdoms ofAsoke and Bimbisara), and yet be involved in a huge inversion of value, where it(here Banalata Sen) possesses, in its banality, a magic greater than that ofmyth, is a crucial part of the comedy, and its revelatory intent. As criticshave shown earlier, the poem is not only haunted by the passing of civilisations,but freighted with allusion. There are references to Poe’s ‘To Helen’;and, as an excellent essay by the Bangladeshi poet and critic Kaiser Haqdemonstrates, to Pater’s euphony to the Mona Lisa. But it’s the ordinarinessand the singularity of the colonial modern, of Banalata Sen, that gives it itsspecial shape, and sets it apart from the piece by Pater and the poem by Poe.

Das himself was born to educated, even accomplished, Brahmo parents (hismother a poet, his father a schoolteacher) in an important mofussil, Barisal, inwhat was then East Bengal. The mofussil had some of the characteristics weordinarily associate with small towns -- of being a backwater, of being a placeto escape and get out of. But it does seem to me, from the evidence and thequality of my parents’ memories, both of whom also grew up in a mofussil inEast Bengal, that it was, to a significant extent, a place of discovery,subversion, possibility (these are registers I find in the phrase ‘NatorerBanalata Sen’), and, noticeably, ambition. At least until independence, itrepresents a crucial stage of self-fashioning, between the pathshala (the traditional school, such as my father went to when hewas very small) in the village and the university (such as also my father wentto) in Calcutta. That is, the mofussil was not all provincialism and dullness,as is, so often, the case with the American small town, at least in its literaryincarnation; nor was it a Naipaulean ‘half-made’ entity. It was a place ofboth constrictedness and hope, and, keeping figures like Das, Nirad C Chaudhuri,and even my parents (my mother a singer of some repute, my father a successfulcorporate man) in mind, one of professional and artistic experimentation, and areal seedbed for cosmopolitanism. I have mentioned ambition as a quality of themofussil (sometimes formerly landowning) bourgeoisie; it’s something that Dasappeared to lack, or to interrogate terribly and turn inside out. Das went toCalcutta first as a student of English literature at Presidency College, gaininga second class both in his undergraduate and his MA degrees, and then took upvarious forms of employment, including that of part-time lecturer (the secondclass degree foreclosing academic advancement). Whether it was ambition thattook him there or whether it was something else isn’t clear. Whether it wasambition that made him publish some of his poems, and never publish many ofthem, and kept him from publishing his short stories or the novel Malyaban,or whether it was something else is also open to question. Whether it wasintention or unmindfulness that made him step in front of a tram in Calcutta (apretty difficult thing to do accidentally) in 1954, leading, of course, to hisdeath, has never been fully explained. Indeed, intentionality, and its robustmofussil cousin, ambition, are never transparent or clearly stated in Das’slife, or in the lives of the drifting protagonists in the poems (‘Forthousands of years Earth’s path has been my path. I have passed/ at dark ofnight the sea of Ceylon and the ocean of Malay;/ the ashen worlds of Bimbisaraand Asoka I’ve encompassed’) and the fictions.

What Das did take from the mofussil is what one might, for want of abetter descriptive term, call its palpable dream-life, a mixture of daytimefantasy and the images that populate our sleep, and inform, at any given pointin history, the very decisions we make. It’s this dream-life that gives to myparents’ memories their still-contemporary mixture of colour andcosmopolitanism -- a peculiar mixture of emotion, desire, and the secular wordthat seems to have occurred at that time -- for which words like‘cosmopolitan’ actually sound tentative and inadequate, and ‘dream’, inthe end, seems almost more apposite. Das’s poems make this dream-life explicitin their susceptibility to astonishment, and in their particularly eccentrictake on historical time. Here are the opening stanzas of ‘Windy Night’, inWinter’s translation:

The wind wasfierce last night -- a night of innumerable stars.
Nightlong animmense wind toyed with my mosquito-net;
at times thenet billowed out like the monsoon ocean’s maw,
at times ittore free of the bed
on a whim tofly to the stars,
there weretimes I felt -- half-asleep maybe -- there’s no net over my head,
it’s flyinglike a white heron in a blue ocean of air to graze the side of Swati’s star!
Last night wassuch a splendid night.
Then all thedead stars were awake -- not the hint of a gap in the sky --
there too inthe stars I saw the faces of the ashen, all the dear dead of the world;
all the starsshone in the dark like the dew-glistening eye of a courting
male kite at the top of an aswattha-tree;
the vast skyglittered like a shawl of shining cheetah’s-skin over the
shoulders of the Queen of Babylon on a night of moonlight!
Last night wassuch an amazing night.

This is anaccount of an inner tumult, as well as of the positioning of one’srelationship to one’s art and to certain transformative moments; the processthat produced it is part of the same one, you suspect, that produced RaymondRoussel’s and Henri Rousseau’s visions, as well as their ambivalent,double-faced relationship to the public persona of the artist. Theseimaginations -- Das’s, Roussel’s, Rousseau’s -- are often cartographicaland historical; they don’t balk at making impossible, even ludicrous, journeysthrough time, spaces, horizons; and yet often their mode, in the lives of theirauthors, is secrecy, a jealously-guarded privacy, that undermines the two poles --the exoticist and the cosmopolitan -- in which the eclectic,internationalist sensibility most often falls in the twentieth century. Theyemanate from a nameless dream-life that constituted the submerged universe ofthe more visible and recognisable forms of cosmopolitanism, a universe that wasto be found in the mofussil, in the suburbs of Calcutta, as well as in the Jardindes Plantes which Rousseau visited frequently, and the affluent Parisianstreet on which Roussel lived. It’s this submerged universe, linking Bengalimofussil to Paris, that I became aware of, in a circuitous way in my ownconsciousness, when I first heard of Roussel’s Impressions of Africa, a title that came to me with the curious bitof information that Roussel had never actually journeyed to equatorial Africa.This, then, immediately reminded me of Bibhuti Bhushan Banerjee’s ChaanderPahaad or The Moon-Mountain. Banerjee is the author of the classic novel, PatherPanchali, and his The Moon-Mountainis set in Africa, to which Banerjee had never been. I also recalled, at once,that this last fact had been conveyed to me, when I was a boy, by my uncle,who’d grown up in one mofussil, Sylhet, then moved to another, Shillong, justbefore Partition, where he’d read ChaanderPahaad. ‘One day,’ he said to me, ‘I received a letter from my olderbrother, who was then a colonel with the King’s Engineers (it was the time ofthe War), and I immediately knew from the postage stamp that it had come fromAfrica. Do you know why? Because I had read ChaaderPahaad. But it was not an Africa of elephants and lions. The picture on thestamp was of a railway platform and railway tracks. Thatwas the Africa Bibhuti Bhushan had written about.’ In other words, the Africamy uncle recognised was at once mofussil, enmeshed in Partha Chatterjee’ssemi-comical and specificity-cherishing ‘colonial modernity’, as well asimaginary continent; a place simultaneously alive and immediate as well as beingone that was experienced absolutely second or third-hand. This is the submerged,rather than the visible, world of cosmopolitanism from which many of Das’strances and visions seem to emerge, with rents in the mosquito net andcheetah-skin all intact.

Here is the unnamed protagonist again, in the poem ‘Naked LonelyHand’ (from which the collection takes its title), reminiscing, bringing backto the present a more composed but nevertheless slightly unfathomable setting:

Again in the Phalgunsky the darkness lowers:
as if amysterious sister of light, this darkness.

Like that ladywho has always loved me
and yet whoseface I have never looked upon,
that verylady,
the darknessdeepens in the Phalgun sky.
I seem to heara tale of a lost city,
the beauty ofan ash-gray palace wakes in my heart.

On the IndianOcean shore
or else beyondthe Mediterranean coast

or out beyondthe Sea of Tyre
not now, butonce, a certain city stood,
a certainpalace,
a palace ofthe richest furnishings:
Persiancarpets, cashmere shawls, round-sheer pearls and coral of theBering wave,
my lost heart,my dead eyes, my extinct dreams and desires,
and you lady --
all was oncein that world.

The ‘lady’is one of Das’s many compulsive variations on the Banalata figure, here liftedout of the colonial modern and made metonymic, presented in the world of thepoem only as a ‘naked lonely hand’. The only suggestion, here, of the modern-- not the colonial modern, but the post-1860s Bengali refashioning of the‘modern’ -- is, curiously, in the recurring reference to the Bengali monthwhich coincides with spring, Phalgun.Both the Indian seasons and the Bengali calendar are pointedly observed and runas a counterpoint and as a parallel time-cycle to the Gregorian calendar inBengal’s nineteenth and twentieth centuries; and this counterpoint in time isan essential characteristic of Bengali modernity. In the poem, Phalgunis the present moment, the settled, familiar, homely moment of Bengali bourgeoismodernity, from which the other time-frame, the Gregorian calendar of history,is seen in a perspective that narrows and converges till it becomes invisible,or visible in another way:

Phalgun’s darkness ishere with a story from over the sea,
a pain-filledoutline of exquisite domes and arches,
the smell ofpears, now gone,
ash-paleparchments in profusion of lion-hide and deer-skin,
glass panes rainbow-coloured,
and atcurtains coloured like peacocks’ fanned-out tails
a momentaryglimpse
of rooms,inner rooms, more rooms, further rooms --
a timelessstillness and wonder.

Curtains,carpets spread with the blood-red sweat of the sun!
Blood-crimsonglasses of watermelon wine!
Your nakedlonely hand…