Saliencies of Emerging Sounds: Rajbanshi Poetry and the
Idioms of Identity
The Rajbanshis as a nation have been long engaged in a search for a workable historical address informed by their shared emotional legacies. They betray a deep urge to emerge, imagined or otherwise, as a nation across the geo political boundaries that had divided their cultural territory. This seems, to put in a term used by Benedict Anderson, a ‘historically ordained’ enterprise of a nation. Anderson locates three temporal junctures of nation’s ‘historically ordained’ rise. One such juncture is when a particular language gains privileged access to ontological truth and attains an inseparable linkage to this. There is a second juncture: when society evolves into a naturally organised body around or under a hierarchically superior power centre (like that of a monarch who is supposed to have obtained the authority to rule from a shared cosmological disposition reflecting the essential human loyalties for the hierarchical and the centripetal). There is a third occasion, mentions Anderson, when nations rise- that is at the time when conception of temporality is achieved and cosmology and history become indistinguishable (italics mine) from each other, the juncture when the origin of man and the world become essentially identical (Anderson, 1991, 36).
The Rajbanshi consciousness arrogates itself through an experiential geo political contingency that elicit meaning to their everyday ‘fatalities of existence’. The Rajbanshi consciousness is embedded with a strong awareness of a disembodied cosmology and history that used to govern their communal universe of meaning and sense of space. The distillation of this uneasy awareness keeps haunting the body of the texts that form the tangible contours of the sounds in the emerging narrative of Rajbanshi poetry:
King’s canopy crumbled
Washing away river’s rules
……………………………..
Yet it hardly pleases your heart:
Old folks, ancient lores
The heart had its own say:
“The days of the king had a glorious sway”
We only had the wild roots for food
Yet we had Bhawaiya to sing
(‘Phoolti Abo’s Tales’, Tr. Jyotirmoy Prodhani))
The Rajbanshis , living intimately with their folkways, found adequate expressions in the rich spool of the Rajbanshi folk narrative. But their contingent encounter with the reality beyond their bucolic familiarity and the settled landscape of the memories of their history impel them to invent alternative sites and tools of expressions compatible to organise the anarchic hinterland of their present mind in formal linguistic articulations. Poetry is born out of an imperative to relocate their social self for they are alert to the processes of a political and a cultural displacement or, critic and translator Pradip Acharya puts it, poetry is born out of a ‘plurality of pain’:
I beat the drum and it
Blows like glass
In search of diverse claims
The inkpot is veiled
I feel I know it
But I don’t
I would rather ask
Who are you
The whole realm is the clamour crows
(‘It Shocks’, Hiralal Das, Tr. Pradip Acharya)
Chronologically the beginning of modern Rajbanshi Poetry has an old history. It dates back to the early twentieth century with the pioneers like Rai Saheb Panchanan Burma whose collection of poems, Dangdhari Mao (Menacing Mother), considered one of the first published anthologies of, what we can call, ‘Modern Rajbanshi Poetry’. This birth of modern Rajbanshi poetry seemed to have been a palpable linguistic manifestation of a deep sense of agony in sharp contrast to the dominant mood of romantic ease and mystic melancholy of their folk songs. Rajbanshi poems betray a perpetual sense of anger and a helpless nostalgia for a seemingly lost horizon that used to nestle their myths and lore. They relocate themselves as helpless onlookers of the processes that have mutilated the very references of understanding their own self, which they so confidently used to refer to as the repository of their community identity and consciousness. The resigning of a clueless nation to this fate makes the alert members of the community livid. Rai Saheb Panchanan Burma’’s Dangdhari Mao is an enraged mother, restless at the apparent inertia of the able bodied male folk when their soul is symbolically molested:
The scream startled my menacing mother
………………………….
Her scream clamour from earth to sky
………………….
The men folk just gaze and are shocked
And menacing my mother shouts her anger
And rages beyond brandishing the pestle
(Menacing Mother, Rai Saheb Panchanan Burma, Tr. Pradip Acharya)
Application of a community language in formal forms like poetry is a remarkably formidable project, for the Rajbanshi language had remained a living linguistic heritage outside the ambit of any official patronage in the post independent Indian context. This language seemed to have been without any official warrant for its manifestation in solemn formal discourses. Despite the current linguistic protocol, most scholastic investigators had ticked it off as a dialect. Some called it a sub-dialect of Assamese and Bengali by the scholars of the respective language groups. Prof. Suniti Kr. Chatterjee, Dr. Sukumar Sen, Dr. Upen Goswami in Bengal and the scholastic icons like Dr. Banikanta Kakati in Assam were the major champions to have identified Rajbanshi language as a dialect/ sub dialect of Bengali and Assamese respectively. There is a parallel school belonging to the scholars of relatively less scholarly eminence who claimed Rajbanshi as a sovereign language. This school of thought includes scholars like Khan Choudhury Amanatullah (author of Coochbeharer Itihas), Rai Saheb Panchanan Burma, Gauri Nath Shastri, Upendranath Burman, and more recently this school has found critical support in Dr. Girija Shankar Ray, Dr. Dwijendra Nath Bhakat, Dr Ramendranath Adhikary, Dr. Girindranath Roy et al. Despite being a language yet to obtain constitutional recognition or become a part of curriculum, the speakers of the language opted for urgent articulations in their own idioms rather than train their voice to express in acquired languages.
There was an early instance of this endeavour of locating the self beyond folk narratives in the works of Ratikanta Das of Itakumari village in Rongpur district of present Bangladesh. He had published a collection of Rajbanshi poems during the reign of Warren Hastings. Nevertheless, there has been a steady growth of Rajbanshi publications from the late fifties onwards. In the sixties, Pathik had published a collection of Rajbanshi Bhawaiya songs; in the sixties Saat Bhaiya (Seven Brothers) had brought out an anthology of poems by seven poets. In the seventies Tushar Bandopadhyay had published an anthology of Rajbanshi poems – Aloloi Jhololoi Moderer Phool. Meanwhile several collections of poems were being published by individual poets. Perhaps the first most significant anthology of Rajbanshi poems was the Rajbanshi Kavita Sankalan (1996), co-edited by Jatin Burma and Vinod Bihari Burma of Toofanganj in Coochbehar District of North Bengal, which included fifty poets writing in Rajbanshi language in Assam and Bengal.
The growing emergence of printed literature in Rajbanshi provides a steady foundation to the emerging awareness of the Rajbanshi community as a nation with the idioms its own, peaking of its own reality. This also has become an exercise of rediscovering the settled landscape of their native histories which was erased by the ruling forces that control the apparatuses of culture and education. Without a space in history they are a veritable homeless nation. The poems betray a sympathetic camaraderie between a defeated generation and their progenies, where the former makes poignant efforts to retrieve the lost country by exhorting their successors to claim the sites of their belongingness:
Hey son, come kido
Come and hear this, won’t you?
The gazing land gone forlorn
The garden and the fields
The home fronting east
Tied to, attached
The bonny lass with glowing skin
They are all yours, son.
(‘River of Wishes’, Ramakanta Ray. Tr. Pradip Acharya)
Their endeavours to address their realities in the form of poetic narrative enables them to expand the ‘horizontal proliferation’ of their experiential realities. The ritual of reinventing their language in formal poetry in prints assures the speakers of the language, who share as much historicity and common cultural conjectures, begin a process of regaining a sense of self dignity which was obstreperously mutilated by the strategic disruptions of the political paradigms in force. The Rajbanshi poem is not a militant overture despite being abidingly aware of being subjected to a process of forced displacement. This is rather a lonely lyric seeking the warmth of the lost terrains and its intimate shibboleths:
Someone get my bosom a patch of green
My importunate mother cries.
She wails and asks:
“Where is my youth vanished?
Where is my village gone?
Where is the rivers
The boats bobbed so in the winds?”
(‘A Patch of Green’. Salil Panchanan. Tr. Pradip Acharya)
The historical misfortune of the Rajbanshis to have been fragmented into multiple national identities particularly because of forceful annexation of Coochbehar with Bengal through the shrewd political moves by the erstwhile Bengal Chief Minister, Dr. Bidhan Ch. Ray, and the subsequent demolition of the Princely State of Coochbehar, which used to be the centre of the Rajbanshi history and culture, made this, in retrospect, an imperative for the Rajbanshis to get engaged in the enterprise of social and cultural re-signification. Political commentators like Naren Das, Lalit ch. Barman and others have pointed out how the acceptance of about 16 lakh Bangladeshi refugees in 1949 by the Bengal government and their accommodation in Bengal was one of the vital factors behind the jealous campaign of both the Bengal Congress party and the opposition (Dr. Bidhan ch. Ray of Congress and Sarat ch. Bose of the opposition party et al) to annexe Coochbehar with Bengal thwarting attempts of both keeping Cochbehar a separate state or its merger with Assam with which Coochbehar had historical and cultural proximity. The annexation of Coochbehar by 1950 was followed by the imposition of the state language of Bengal upon the people and the quick removal of all historical references of the Rajbanshis from the official history texts of the state coupled with the disfiguration of historical and cultural sites of the place and people that were the living testimonies of a past of the community beyond the claims of newly adopted official textbooks. With the advent of the current political regime the state went for forced confiscation of land right of the Rajbanshis through the large scale conversion of their land into ceiling land as part of the dubious land reform drive in Bengal. The Rajbanshis, who sustained primarily on agriculture on the land they had inherited from their forefathers, found themselves as virtually landless and became either labourers in the same plot of land which they owned just the other day or had to migrate as urban unskilled labourers.
After a phase of economic and cultural devastation the Rajbanshi consciousness is trying to rebuild its identity picking on the severed ends of their history and memory. This process, however, creates a mode of identity category. Paula Moya points out the exposition of the Ethnic organizing principles which claims that formulations of identity categories do not necessarily devolve into essentialist programme. It rather “provides modes of articulating and examining significant correlations between lived experience and social location” (2001, 4). In the process, they underline the need to prioritize the emotional and psychological features, which might seem to be irrational at times, in relation to their social identity reformulation. Ethnic studies scholar Lola Romanucci, nevertheless, justifies this response (Ethnic Identity 1996).
This journey work from the oral to the written; from the folk songs to poems; the Rajbanshi consciousness encounters and accommodates alien urban realities and the entire contour of these verses transforms and bears testimony to these changing exigencies. This becomes an imperative for them to redeem their collective memory of a lost landscape which was their collective belonging. The poems, therefore, manifest the subdued pain and agonies they are smarting from the turmoil of their inner desperations:
Let the sky crush on the earth
And the earth crush over the sky
I want just this much
……………………….
Let the adamantine Himalaya
Stand up proud
And laugh and clear
….
I want just this much.
(‘I Want’. Dharma Narayan Burma. Tr. Pradip Acharya)
These poems are a body of lyric that inadvertently aim at heralding a change. Change, in fact, as an idea, has a threat perception to those who are ensconced in the comfort of certainties. Historically the attempts of dissolving self within the territory of the governing class resulted in further disfiguration and fragmentation of their native identity. The young disjunctives, therefore, to redeem their wounded souls, take up this project of change in earnest. This is the juncture when they embark on the search for their receding address making a way for the Rajbanshi poetry to arrive:
No, I don’t want anything else
The fecund field of my adolescence
The green expanse of emptiness
………………………………………..
Give that back to me
I don’t want anything else, not me.
(This Land, This People’, Ramakanta Ray. Tr. Pradip Acharya)
Works Cited
Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Community. London: Verso, 1993.
Barth, Frederick. Ethnic Groups and Boundaries. Boston: Little Brown, 1969.
Adhikary, Dr. Ramendranath. Introduction. Rajabanshi Kavita Sankalan. Eds. Jatin Burma and Binod Bihari Barman. Calcutta: Anima Prakashani, 1996.
Barman, Binod Bihari. Ed. Apon Sur Rachanay Pathik. Jalpaiguri : 1957
Burma, Jatin and Binod Bihari Barman. Eds. Rajabanshi Kavita Sankalan. Calcutta: Anima Prakashani, 1996.
Barman, Lalit Chandra. “Couchbeharkè Pachchimbanger Antarbhukta Kora Hoyechila Keno?”. Bartaman, Siliguri edition, 31 March/ 2006.
Bhakat, Dr. D.N. Rajbanshi Bhasa Prashanga. Golakganj: Centre for Ethnic Studies and Research, 2004
Chatterjee, Suniti Kumar, in Dr. Girija Shankar, ibid.
Das, Naren. “Couchbeharer Bhabishyat Bheb è Dekhar Agè Atiter Kothgulo Bhebè Dekha Bhalo”. Bataman. Siliguri edition, 9 Sept/ 2005
Dutta Ray , Dr. Suranajan and Dr. Girija Shankar Ray. Eds. Upabhasha Prashange Loka Shilpa. Vol I No. II, 1974.
Grierson, George. Linguistic Survey of India. 1897.
Khan Choudhury, Amanatulla, “Rajbanshi Bhasha Tattva”. Souvenir of Uttar Banga Sahitya Sanmelan, Coochbehar : 1911.
Khan Choudhury, Amanatulla. “Coochbeharer Prachin Bhasha”. Paricharika. Behar: 1914.
Moya, Paula, M.L. & Michael R. Hames- Garcia. Reclaiming Identity : Realist theory and the Predicament of Postmodernism. Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 2001.
Ray, Dr. Girija Shanka. “Foreword”. Rajabanshi Kavita Sankalan. Ibid.
Romanucci-Ross, Lola and George A. DeVos. Eds. Ethnic Identity: Creation, Conflict and Accmodation. London: Almitra Press, 1996.
*( Translations cited in the paper are from This Land, This People: Rajbanshi Poems in Translation. Translated from Rajbanshi to English by Pradip Acharya and Jyotirmoy Prodhani. The book is under publication)
The paper was presented in the national seminar on Society and Change in the North East, in Dibrugarh University, Dibrugarh, 2006.
Friday, March 7, 2008
SHEELABHADRA
Revati Mohan Dutta Choudhury, one of the most prolific literateur of Assam died recently. He had created some of the finest short stories in Assamese highlighting the culture and mores of west Assam. Populalry known as Sheelabhadra (his pseudonym) created a new mythology in literature. The papers makes an attempt to critically locate Sheelabhadra.
An Imaginary Haven- Madhupur or Macondo:
Reaching out to Sheelabhadra’s World
_______________________________________________
Among the contemporary Assamese story writers, Sheelabhadra belongs to a different geo-cultural locale. He draws on the landscape of the pastoral disquiet, and keeps going back deep into the recesses of his memories of a home long distanced from the proximity of his physical reality, yet he remains a spirited troubadour traversing the bucolic terrains within, along the rhythms of Madupur musings – his reinvented home- fashioned with his imaginations.
The locale that Sheelabhadra keeps coming back to is his native village mythically renamed Madhupur. He achieves an easy formation of a narrative, deceptively unpretentious, creating a universe where history and memory happily dissolve into each other ; stories and characters of the past become part of a mythology and the landscape, which forms the backdrop of his tales, reaches out onto the archaeology of his nostalgia. His creative position is, unlike the romantic claims, is not informed by any chance encounter with epiphanic surge; rather he is a conscious artist, aware of and alert to what he is to write about, at the same time he can speak of a lost landscape without degenerating into sentimentality, for his strength lies in his ability to speak in dispassionate cerebral grit.
Revati Mohan Dutta Choudhury, born in an elite family of Gauripur in West Assam, which has its geo-cultural proximity to Bengal and the present Bangladesh, has been through unique historical experiences. He has been an intimate witness to the rise and fall of his own small town as well as to its glories and the disquieting peeling off of the shades off its walls. He had his higher education in Calcutta, a gold medallist in
Mathematics, began his career as a civil contractor and retired as a teacher of Mathematics of Assam Engineering College of Guwahati. When it came to writing, for him, it was more an attempt to reconnect himself with the most intimate and poignantly personal pasts of his own than to commit himself to any declared intervention as a writer in the domain of the public. He, in fact, had adopted the pseudonym Sheelabhadra to emerge in public as a writer. “Why Sheelbhadra?” He was asked once in one of his interviews published in Chilarian (1995). He replied simply that he had taken the name because that was the name of a mathematician of ancient India and to choose a name of a mathematician was prompted by the fact that he himself was a teacher of mathematics. What he did not say was that by taking the name of a mathematician he had the latent desire to be a writer of bare precisions, the art he had mastered as a student of mathematics. Madhupur, the place of his nostalgia, is the protagonist of his stories. His stories record, in fragments, the biography of his memories of the place that was once his home.
His stories have been translated into English, Oriya, Bengali and Hindi. It is significant that his works have received different kind of responses from the readers of different language groups and that is one of the reasons translators were tempted to translocate his stories in the domain of their respective languages. This paper would make an attempt to make a brief analysis of his select works and their significance in our understanding of a history, which is more than a mere impersonal recording of information, it is rather a chronicling of the annals of a past with the warmth of intimacy.
Sheelabhara is a prolific writer. His major collections of short stories are Madhupur Bahudur (Madhupur’s is Far Away); Akou Madhupur (Madhupur Haunts); Apon Manuh (My Own People) among other. One of his major novels is Godhuli (The Twilight). This novel has been translated into English, Hindi and Oriya, while his short stories have been translated into Bengali, Oriya, Hindi and English.
Sheelabhadra through his stories makes a critical journey into the recesses of the past and tries to reach out to the moments that so formidably shaped his self as an individual and a part of a historical community. In his ability to invent a locale where myths and
memories arrogate as integral components of his narrative texture, Sheelbhadra is in league with the other significant writers of our century- Gabriel Garcia Marquez, R.K. Narayan, O.B. Vijayan in whom the place itself graduates into protagonist. In Marquez it is Macondo; in R.K. Narayan we have the ubiquitous Malgudi; in O.B. Vijayan we have the tales of Khasak and in Sheelbhadra we have Madhupur. These writers, in telling the stories, have a comfortable place to go back to. They let the events and individuals expatriate from the villages of their own memories to the narrative of the stories and with ease they soon become immortal characters in their respective fictional universe.
Sheelabhadra’s Madhupur is the Gauripur of the mid twentieth century. He nostalgically recalls the days when the place imbibed with the easy joys of comfortable lives where time had its own laid back pace to move on. The west Assam, the erstwhile Goalpara district in Assam, had its unique historical past and cultural legacies quite different from the rest of the state. The old Goalpara district had a feudal past unlike the rest of Assam, hence the lores and the folk ways, the stories and legends, the myths and music bore different hues and dimension quite uncommon from the cultural expressions in the mainstream Assam. Goalpara was one of the central parts of the medieval Kamrup-Kamata kingdom, which was the seat of tantric religious practices where mother goddess was worshipped as the ultimate source of shakti and power. This Kamrup-Kamata was also the original abode of non-Aryan goddesses like Kamakhya, Kali and Durga. This was also the place where the Vaishnavite movement of Srimanta Shankardeva flourished. If we look at Bengal’s cultural history, it was mainly in the sixteenth century when Durga and Kali made entry in a major way in the Hindu households in Bengal firstly, as a religious assertion against the powerful rules of the Nawabs in Bengal (the way Oriya Vaishnavite saint Sri Chaitannaya carried out nagar kirtana on the streets of Nabadwip as an act of asserting religious freedom against the oppressive impositions of the Nawabs in Murshidabad), and later Durga became a symbol of aristocratic assertions of the nouveau riche emerged during the late eighteen century colonial Bengal. Durga was primarily worshipped by the feudal households of Bengal in a fashion the Kings used to worship the Goddesses of Shakti for victories in war, but in case of Bengal the worship of Durga was largely associated with the self interest of the feudal families. From the mystic abode of the Tantric seats of Kamrupa, the deities attain a status of a domestic goddess with their power being restricted within the confines of the so called bonedi households, though the rituals of worshipping the goddesses, tenaciously associated with the geo-cultural history of Kamrup – Kamata, has been retained to achieve pseudo-authentic claims of cultural ownership over the religious symbols by the new practitioners of faith. Goalpara, on the other hand, retained religious and cultural legacies as elements of inheritance without having to reformulate them as tools of political assertions or means of assigning prestige to their social status. These cultural and historical heritages became so intrinsic to the consciousness of the people and place of Goalpara that they became too obvious for the populace to be aware of them.
Sheelabhadra’s achievement lies in being able to construct a perspective to make an inward enquiry from a vantage of distance. He is both physically and temperamentally removed from the locale he was so abidingly associated with. In his this endeavour to narrate the social history of his distant home, the writer recreates a narrative from the privacy of intimate experiences. His stories, like Marquez, are essentially informed by his memories and a deep sense of nostalgia. To write about one’s own home from a distance demands unusual commitments, for, it forecloses free flight of artistic imaginations. He candidly admits this paradox in the beginning of one of his most famous short stories- ‘Madhupur Bahudur’:
It is difficult to write a seemingly objective account of one’s own home without being nostalgic. And if the writer is away from home, the very distance alerts him of a pain. Home, an image prerserved so jealously, how all on a sudden, recedes onto the distant horizon. How so sadly it becomes alien.
Madhupur Bahudur
The renaming of his native place from Gauripur to Madhupur is not out of a mere imperative to expand his artistic freedom, but Madhupur in Sheelabhadra is descriptive of the former self of the place that was his home, for he finds himself as an ‘alien’ in the present environment of his native place now. He writes:
The Madhupur that keeps haunting me is older by decades. Madhupur was never stagnant just the way any other things are. Both the place and its people have changed so remarkably.
Rationality impels me to accept this, but then, my emotions have its own say. This is where we are destined to come to terms with pains by default, though the changes are inevitable, with or without me.
Madhupur Bahudur
He then embarks on a journey-work deep within to trace the territories long lost into the labyrinth of time. Gabriel Garcia Marquez creates a magic world by freely interconnecting the myths, memories and histories within the textures of his narratives without privileging one over the other. The process of writing or recreating the distant universe of experience becomes a journey into the realms where the consciousness of the creator forms its own logic and narrative protocols. In One Hundred Years of Solitude we encounter Ursula’s world deeply akin to our dreams and imaginations where, to our great relieve, rationality and other normative codes, subside into the backyard. In Marquez reality merges with magic creating a universe of its own significations. Memory gains legitimacy as a metaphor of meaning and historicity. But questions persist: “Is memory a valid enough tool of reference?” or “Is experience, which begets memories, a stable interpretive apparatus of semantics?” The poststructuralist thesis begs to differ. The postmodernists make a critique of what they call ‘experiential foundationalism’. But these theorists provide us perspectives in relation to identity questions. But the writers in question are engaged in a search of a landscape distantly poised along the universe where feelings dislocate into meanings. In R.K. Narayan, Malgudi is the place where his characters lived, so in O.B. Vijayan’s Khasak. And in Sheelbhadra it is a veritable slide show that projects umpteen characters and incidents with whom he grew up.
In Sheelbhadra we come across all the people who can possibly live in any given town. There is Rajabahadur, the zamindar (Raja Prabhat Chandra Barua. His two princes, one of them was a renowned film maker Pramathesh Chandra Barua and the other one was famous Elephant catcher Prakritish Chandra Barua(Lalji)); village priest Gagan Thakur; nonchalant tabla ustad Paresh Ghosh alias Felubabu, temperamental homeopath practitioner Dinesh Doctor, the ubiquitous astrologer Satya Ganak; Chandra Seal, the biri company dancer; thatched and bamboo house making expert Parashu Dafadar, ill tempered Keval mama; ever happy tea stall owner Ramprasad; freaky Atapjan Pagli; singing mendicant Sadhubaba, the simple minded prostitutes as well as the old and decaying aristocrats of Madhupur like Naba uncle and others who would go out of their ways to express their love with genuine sincerity. Sheelabhadra brings back all of them
along with the ambience and the simple events that once formed the world of his tiny town, which he now calls Madhupur.
Sheelbhadra’s Madhupur stories make a creative documentation of the values, ethos, temperaments and wisdoms; desires and passions; sagacity and generous indifference as well as the ignorance and innocence of a time he once used to know as his own. He had captured the very essence of human relationship that helped the life get going. Through the warm and emotional attachment of the common people with the zamindars; the ever accessible down to earth Rajabahadur who would closely monitor his people’s wellbeing (unlike the text book and fictional image of feudal figures); and the simple events, which once formed the entirety of their universe, his stories take us back to a world, not only of his own experiences but the experience of a generation. He takes us to a place so different in terms of its pure warmth of human relationships as well as its naivety that touches our heart. Through his memories he creates a world of a different dimension, at the same time his stories evoke poignant responses for they are the elegiac lores of a pastoral horizon we so avidly wish, if it were ours.
***
* Translations cited in the text are by the author.
The paper was presented in the National Seminar on Profiling Social Change through Translations organised by the Dept. of English, NEHU, Tura Campus, on 1 & 2 November/ 2006.
An Imaginary Haven- Madhupur or Macondo:
Reaching out to Sheelabhadra’s World
_______________________________________________
Among the contemporary Assamese story writers, Sheelabhadra belongs to a different geo-cultural locale. He draws on the landscape of the pastoral disquiet, and keeps going back deep into the recesses of his memories of a home long distanced from the proximity of his physical reality, yet he remains a spirited troubadour traversing the bucolic terrains within, along the rhythms of Madupur musings – his reinvented home- fashioned with his imaginations.
The locale that Sheelabhadra keeps coming back to is his native village mythically renamed Madhupur. He achieves an easy formation of a narrative, deceptively unpretentious, creating a universe where history and memory happily dissolve into each other ; stories and characters of the past become part of a mythology and the landscape, which forms the backdrop of his tales, reaches out onto the archaeology of his nostalgia. His creative position is, unlike the romantic claims, is not informed by any chance encounter with epiphanic surge; rather he is a conscious artist, aware of and alert to what he is to write about, at the same time he can speak of a lost landscape without degenerating into sentimentality, for his strength lies in his ability to speak in dispassionate cerebral grit.
Revati Mohan Dutta Choudhury, born in an elite family of Gauripur in West Assam, which has its geo-cultural proximity to Bengal and the present Bangladesh, has been through unique historical experiences. He has been an intimate witness to the rise and fall of his own small town as well as to its glories and the disquieting peeling off of the shades off its walls. He had his higher education in Calcutta, a gold medallist in
Mathematics, began his career as a civil contractor and retired as a teacher of Mathematics of Assam Engineering College of Guwahati. When it came to writing, for him, it was more an attempt to reconnect himself with the most intimate and poignantly personal pasts of his own than to commit himself to any declared intervention as a writer in the domain of the public. He, in fact, had adopted the pseudonym Sheelabhadra to emerge in public as a writer. “Why Sheelbhadra?” He was asked once in one of his interviews published in Chilarian (1995). He replied simply that he had taken the name because that was the name of a mathematician of ancient India and to choose a name of a mathematician was prompted by the fact that he himself was a teacher of mathematics. What he did not say was that by taking the name of a mathematician he had the latent desire to be a writer of bare precisions, the art he had mastered as a student of mathematics. Madhupur, the place of his nostalgia, is the protagonist of his stories. His stories record, in fragments, the biography of his memories of the place that was once his home.
His stories have been translated into English, Oriya, Bengali and Hindi. It is significant that his works have received different kind of responses from the readers of different language groups and that is one of the reasons translators were tempted to translocate his stories in the domain of their respective languages. This paper would make an attempt to make a brief analysis of his select works and their significance in our understanding of a history, which is more than a mere impersonal recording of information, it is rather a chronicling of the annals of a past with the warmth of intimacy.
Sheelabhara is a prolific writer. His major collections of short stories are Madhupur Bahudur (Madhupur’s is Far Away); Akou Madhupur (Madhupur Haunts); Apon Manuh (My Own People) among other. One of his major novels is Godhuli (The Twilight). This novel has been translated into English, Hindi and Oriya, while his short stories have been translated into Bengali, Oriya, Hindi and English.
Sheelabhadra through his stories makes a critical journey into the recesses of the past and tries to reach out to the moments that so formidably shaped his self as an individual and a part of a historical community. In his ability to invent a locale where myths and
memories arrogate as integral components of his narrative texture, Sheelbhadra is in league with the other significant writers of our century- Gabriel Garcia Marquez, R.K. Narayan, O.B. Vijayan in whom the place itself graduates into protagonist. In Marquez it is Macondo; in R.K. Narayan we have the ubiquitous Malgudi; in O.B. Vijayan we have the tales of Khasak and in Sheelbhadra we have Madhupur. These writers, in telling the stories, have a comfortable place to go back to. They let the events and individuals expatriate from the villages of their own memories to the narrative of the stories and with ease they soon become immortal characters in their respective fictional universe.
Sheelabhadra’s Madhupur is the Gauripur of the mid twentieth century. He nostalgically recalls the days when the place imbibed with the easy joys of comfortable lives where time had its own laid back pace to move on. The west Assam, the erstwhile Goalpara district in Assam, had its unique historical past and cultural legacies quite different from the rest of the state. The old Goalpara district had a feudal past unlike the rest of Assam, hence the lores and the folk ways, the stories and legends, the myths and music bore different hues and dimension quite uncommon from the cultural expressions in the mainstream Assam. Goalpara was one of the central parts of the medieval Kamrup-Kamata kingdom, which was the seat of tantric religious practices where mother goddess was worshipped as the ultimate source of shakti and power. This Kamrup-Kamata was also the original abode of non-Aryan goddesses like Kamakhya, Kali and Durga. This was also the place where the Vaishnavite movement of Srimanta Shankardeva flourished. If we look at Bengal’s cultural history, it was mainly in the sixteenth century when Durga and Kali made entry in a major way in the Hindu households in Bengal firstly, as a religious assertion against the powerful rules of the Nawabs in Bengal (the way Oriya Vaishnavite saint Sri Chaitannaya carried out nagar kirtana on the streets of Nabadwip as an act of asserting religious freedom against the oppressive impositions of the Nawabs in Murshidabad), and later Durga became a symbol of aristocratic assertions of the nouveau riche emerged during the late eighteen century colonial Bengal. Durga was primarily worshipped by the feudal households of Bengal in a fashion the Kings used to worship the Goddesses of Shakti for victories in war, but in case of Bengal the worship of Durga was largely associated with the self interest of the feudal families. From the mystic abode of the Tantric seats of Kamrupa, the deities attain a status of a domestic goddess with their power being restricted within the confines of the so called bonedi households, though the rituals of worshipping the goddesses, tenaciously associated with the geo-cultural history of Kamrup – Kamata, has been retained to achieve pseudo-authentic claims of cultural ownership over the religious symbols by the new practitioners of faith. Goalpara, on the other hand, retained religious and cultural legacies as elements of inheritance without having to reformulate them as tools of political assertions or means of assigning prestige to their social status. These cultural and historical heritages became so intrinsic to the consciousness of the people and place of Goalpara that they became too obvious for the populace to be aware of them.
Sheelabhadra’s achievement lies in being able to construct a perspective to make an inward enquiry from a vantage of distance. He is both physically and temperamentally removed from the locale he was so abidingly associated with. In his this endeavour to narrate the social history of his distant home, the writer recreates a narrative from the privacy of intimate experiences. His stories, like Marquez, are essentially informed by his memories and a deep sense of nostalgia. To write about one’s own home from a distance demands unusual commitments, for, it forecloses free flight of artistic imaginations. He candidly admits this paradox in the beginning of one of his most famous short stories- ‘Madhupur Bahudur’:
It is difficult to write a seemingly objective account of one’s own home without being nostalgic. And if the writer is away from home, the very distance alerts him of a pain. Home, an image prerserved so jealously, how all on a sudden, recedes onto the distant horizon. How so sadly it becomes alien.
Madhupur Bahudur
The renaming of his native place from Gauripur to Madhupur is not out of a mere imperative to expand his artistic freedom, but Madhupur in Sheelabhadra is descriptive of the former self of the place that was his home, for he finds himself as an ‘alien’ in the present environment of his native place now. He writes:
The Madhupur that keeps haunting me is older by decades. Madhupur was never stagnant just the way any other things are. Both the place and its people have changed so remarkably.
Rationality impels me to accept this, but then, my emotions have its own say. This is where we are destined to come to terms with pains by default, though the changes are inevitable, with or without me.
Madhupur Bahudur
He then embarks on a journey-work deep within to trace the territories long lost into the labyrinth of time. Gabriel Garcia Marquez creates a magic world by freely interconnecting the myths, memories and histories within the textures of his narratives without privileging one over the other. The process of writing or recreating the distant universe of experience becomes a journey into the realms where the consciousness of the creator forms its own logic and narrative protocols. In One Hundred Years of Solitude we encounter Ursula’s world deeply akin to our dreams and imaginations where, to our great relieve, rationality and other normative codes, subside into the backyard. In Marquez reality merges with magic creating a universe of its own significations. Memory gains legitimacy as a metaphor of meaning and historicity. But questions persist: “Is memory a valid enough tool of reference?” or “Is experience, which begets memories, a stable interpretive apparatus of semantics?” The poststructuralist thesis begs to differ. The postmodernists make a critique of what they call ‘experiential foundationalism’. But these theorists provide us perspectives in relation to identity questions. But the writers in question are engaged in a search of a landscape distantly poised along the universe where feelings dislocate into meanings. In R.K. Narayan, Malgudi is the place where his characters lived, so in O.B. Vijayan’s Khasak. And in Sheelbhadra it is a veritable slide show that projects umpteen characters and incidents with whom he grew up.
In Sheelbhadra we come across all the people who can possibly live in any given town. There is Rajabahadur, the zamindar (Raja Prabhat Chandra Barua. His two princes, one of them was a renowned film maker Pramathesh Chandra Barua and the other one was famous Elephant catcher Prakritish Chandra Barua(Lalji)); village priest Gagan Thakur; nonchalant tabla ustad Paresh Ghosh alias Felubabu, temperamental homeopath practitioner Dinesh Doctor, the ubiquitous astrologer Satya Ganak; Chandra Seal, the biri company dancer; thatched and bamboo house making expert Parashu Dafadar, ill tempered Keval mama; ever happy tea stall owner Ramprasad; freaky Atapjan Pagli; singing mendicant Sadhubaba, the simple minded prostitutes as well as the old and decaying aristocrats of Madhupur like Naba uncle and others who would go out of their ways to express their love with genuine sincerity. Sheelabhadra brings back all of them
along with the ambience and the simple events that once formed the world of his tiny town, which he now calls Madhupur.
Sheelbhadra’s Madhupur stories make a creative documentation of the values, ethos, temperaments and wisdoms; desires and passions; sagacity and generous indifference as well as the ignorance and innocence of a time he once used to know as his own. He had captured the very essence of human relationship that helped the life get going. Through the warm and emotional attachment of the common people with the zamindars; the ever accessible down to earth Rajabahadur who would closely monitor his people’s wellbeing (unlike the text book and fictional image of feudal figures); and the simple events, which once formed the entirety of their universe, his stories take us back to a world, not only of his own experiences but the experience of a generation. He takes us to a place so different in terms of its pure warmth of human relationships as well as its naivety that touches our heart. Through his memories he creates a world of a different dimension, at the same time his stories evoke poignant responses for they are the elegiac lores of a pastoral horizon we so avidly wish, if it were ours.
***
* Translations cited in the text are by the author.
The paper was presented in the National Seminar on Profiling Social Change through Translations organised by the Dept. of English, NEHU, Tura Campus, on 1 & 2 November/ 2006.
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