I have lived all my life in Kolkata, but I had not read any literature in Bengali. Subimal Misra was the first writer in Bengali whose work I actually read. While I knew about the Bengali little magazines, I was not a little-magazine reader. My relation to Bengali is as someone proficient in the language, a proficiency attained simply by living, working and socializing among Bengali speakers. I learnt the language by ear, as someone with an urge for comprehension and sound communication. I mingle among diverse sections. As a lover of literature, I have, of course, read a fair amount, from all over the world, albeit in English, or English translation. I had done a little bit of translation into and from Bengali earlier. I liked translating; it gave me a lot of satisfaction. But I had never undertaken literary translation from Bengali to English earlier. So this was not a translator’s project so much as a project’s translator. In this Misra project, I saw my role as simply ferrying the stories to others through the English language.
This was not a translator’s project so much as a project’s translator.
For several years now, I have been studying religious texts. In this, my attitude was to implicitly accept what I was reading, without question or critique, and thus to try to understand what was written. In translating Subimal Misra, my attitude was similar: to silence any personal reactions to the writing and simply to faithfully translate the original, from my reading of what is written. Implicit in this is my insider position in this society, but I am also an outsider – a Tamilian, and ignorant about Bengali literature. That gives me an outsider’s gaze, but it also limits my understanding as well as quality of translation.
I [see] my role as simply ferrying [Misra’s] stories to others through the English language.
In translating, my natural disposition is to be true to the original, taking no licence whatsoever. As if there is only one correct and exact translation possible! But over the years, I have learnt that there can be different ways of translating. Sometimes, the translation in English may lack the literary quality of the original; in which case, perhaps that should remain untranslated. So the main task in my translation is to get out a near-exact English version. Thereafter, I keep working on it, changing something here, cutting something there, and so on. I have also come around to the idea of taking a little licence and departing from mechanical exactitude in favour of literary quality.
Strictly speaking, a glossary or notes should accompany the stories, to provide a cultural-linguistic contextualization to the translation for the benefit of non-Bengali and non-Indian readers. A simple translation would not convey so much that each story implicitly conveys in the original – there is so much that Misra has told me: his comments on the stories, about allusions, style, and so on. But I thought that such a glossary would also make the volume rather stodgy and overbearing and, hence, that was left out.
I needed the comments of others, such as readers of Misra who also read in English. I shared my translations with them as well as friends and family members in Kolkata and elsewhere. I tried to follow their suggestions. Dr Mrinal Bose had not only introduced me to Subimal Misra, he had also kept after me, prodding me to begin. He enthusiastically received my translations, gave me his honest comments, critique and suggestions immediately and eagerly awaited the next story. Ankur Saha, a US-based writer and critic, and Souva Chattopadhyay, a Misra reader who wrote the Wikipedia entry on Subimal Misra and maintains a blog on Bengali parallel literature called Boipara, also provided much encouragement. Nilotpal Roy, a literature scholar and Misra reader, whom Misra considers to be the foremost scholar of his writing, read through the translations and made a critical evaluation. This answered some of my own doubts regarding the quality of my translation in the light of the original writing. But I remain aware of my failings. For instance, Souva asked me to write ‘Brothers Whitty and Shitty’ in the style of The Canterbury Tales. That remains to be done.
But most of all, I had the opportunity of continuing dialogue with Misra, almost entirely over the phone, which served as an education on diverse matters, as well as commentary and annotation on the stories and on his writing and thinking. I tried to internalize all this and bring to bear in my translation.
These translations are therefore, in all fairness, something like a collective project, although I take full responsibility for the final output. This is also a matter of personal satisfaction, since my own inclinations have been in the direction of the welding of individual sensibilities and energies for collective endeavours and outcomes.
Dr Bose also introduced me to the name of Elfriede Jelinek, the Austrian writer who writes in German, and pointed out some similarities between Misra and Jelinek. Despite the immense difference in their backgrounds and local environments, Misra bears some resemblance to Elfriede Jelinek in making certain basic and unconventional life choices and in unflinchingly and relentlessly laying bare the rot he perceives in society. Both of them prompt these questions: What is writing? Who writes? What is written? What do we know? What do we read? Why do we read? To a reader with pretensions to writing, they prompt the question: Why do I write? Translating Misra has been a process of personal growth for me.
In real life, Subimal Misra is a simple, warm, kind-hearted, down-to-earth, gentle human being. He has no airs, no pretences, no glory, no grandeur, no renown. After over forty years of writing in anonymity, he now wears his very anonymity as a badge of honour. He is modest, but not without self-respect and respect for human dignity and independence, which he asserts with a fierce, ferocious, unstoppable vigour, notwithstanding age, dire straits, severe ill health and failing eyesight. There is an innocence, a purity and an uncorrupted quality in him. He remains an indefatigable idealist and man of principle despite the degeneration, bleakness and blight of his surroundings.
As an activist-writer, Misra is demanding. He does not give a chance to the reader to curl up comfortably with a story.
As an activist-writer, Misra is demanding. He does not give a chance to the reader to curl up comfortably with a story. That is well nigh impossible. Even understanding what exactly the author is trying to convey or achieve has to be worked at and worked out by the reader. His writing is an exercise for the reader to engage in. The comfort-seeking reader – he should pass Misra by. It would simply be a waste of time, a grievous mismatch. Misra casts his net for the appropriate reader, for the activist-reader.
Misra’s anonymity and non-translation into English or any other language have meant a great loss to the Indian and world literary scene. Translating Misra is challenging, requiring time and others’ critical inputs to skilfully re-render the qualities and effects of the original writing. But the translation is vital, to bring international attention to the distinctive voice and oeuvre of a gifted writer, a valiant figure in the world of literature and a ferocious thinker of the world and times we live in.
[Misra’s stories] could more appropriately be called prose-art or text-works.
Short stories form an important part of Misra’s work and are also perhaps the most accessible to non-Bengali readers. Misra has written well over a hundred stories. They could more appropriately be called prose-art or text-works.
The story ‘Haran Majhi’s Widow’s Corpse or the Golden Gandhi Statue’ (1969) took the world of Bengali literature by storm. Portraying in a few short, staccato sentences the life of a destitute peasant family, this then became a full-blown, mythic construction, with historical, national and global connotations. The story ends, but again, not really, for the prevailing order continues to wipe out thousands of peasant families.
There is a wide variety in the subject, style and form of Misra’s anti-stories. Among characteristic Misra-esque features are striking and long titles; hyper-realism; objective yet empathic depiction of the lives of marginalized people; fable-like narrative; use of folk idiom, verse and metre; reportage; cinematic techniques like montage, collage, juxtaposition and motif; excoriating and visceral critique; and a graphic, visual and kinetic effect, akin to a m
ovie playing inside the embedded, code-decoding consciousness of the reader to whom the work is addressed.
Misra has written about assaulting the middle-class consciousness. Hence, some people might consider Misra’s stories to be gruesome or revolting.
Misra forsakes all the rules of grammar and composition. His stories are often long, barely punctuated narratives – continuous, unrelenting, unsparing – written in that form simply to assail the reader, to bring him to the point of suffocating distress.
Misra has written about assaulting the middle-class consciousness. Hence, some people might consider Misra’s stories to be gruesome or revolting.
In Misra’s prose compilation Son and Murderer (1996), the acclaimed Bengali writer Debesh Ray acknowledges that Misra has given a special form to postmodern discourse in Bengali literature. He says, ‘Subimal Misra could easily have written good stories in the conventional sense. Instead, he chose to make the story-writing itself the subject of the story. He hasn’t confined himself to the limits of form. As a result of his personal choices, his stories, rather than being called stories, could also be called prose.’
A microscopic observer of people and society (like the Urdu writer Manto), he is a sociologist of spoken Bengali, with a keen ear for the language, accents and intonations of common folk, street argot full of slang and vulgarity, as well as the vainglorious puerilities of the middle class. He often cocks a snook at and makes mischief with the niceties of spelling, syntax, punctuation and composition.
[Misra] often cocks a snook at and makes mischief with the niceties of spelling, syntax, punctuation and composition.
Gandhi, the father of the Indian nation, appears in some of Misra’s stories. In this collection, ‘The Golden Gandhi Statue from America’, ‘Brothers Whitty and Shitty’ and ‘Money Tree’ refer to Gandhi. Gandhi’s statue is a central element in the first story. It falls and breaks during a bout of political agitation and America promises to replace it with a golden one. The Gandhi-cap-clad criminal-politician in ‘Brothers…’ counsels the failed rail wagon thieves to be Gandhi-like in their profession, mirroring the state of what the very name of the father of the nation has come to signify. Very close to the site of the toppled Gandhi statue lies the dead white donkey in ‘Money Tree’. Misra had told me that the white donkey symbolized Gandhi. Another of Misra’s Gandhi stories is ‘Mohandas o Aenr Kata’ (‘Mohandas and the One-balled Man’, 1986). In this, a man who loses one of his testicles in a bizarre accident ekes out a living by impersonating Gandhi and standing statue-like in public places. He finds it increasingly difficult to survive and contemplates going to Bengal, where he thinks the new Leftist government might give him a job.
Books by Subimal Misra
Stories
Haran Majhir Bidhoba Bouer Mora ba Shonar Gandhimurti
(Haran Majhi’s Widow’s Corpse or the Golden Gandhi Statue)
Nanga Haar Jegey Uthchhey
(Bare Bones Awakened)
Dui Tin-te Udom Bachcha Chhutochhuti Korchey Level Crossing-e Borabor
(Two or Three Naked Children Run Around Beside the Level Crossing)
Bobby
Aar Pipegun Eto Gorom Hoye Jaay Je Er Byabohar Krumosho Komey Ashchhey
(And the Pipegun Gets So Hot That Its Use Is Steadily Reduced)
Shreshto Golpo
(Selected Stories)
Ei Amader Shiki Lebu Ningrani
Subimal Misra’s stories must be read over and over again, and one should think about them whenever possible. By and by, they grow on you, or in you. You find things around you echoing characters, images and words from his stories. After the devastating fire in March 2010 at Stephen Court in Kolkata’s Park Street, reports and images in city newspapers seemed to come out of Misra’s stories of nearly four decades ago: the pervasive stench of death, vultures sitting on rooftops in the heart of the city, an old man muttering that he is searching for his dead son’s bones... The dire warning in ‘The Golden Gandhi Statue from America’ – The one who will vanquish you is thriving in Gokul – in the light of the Maoist insurgency in West Bengal in 2010, Jangalmahal becomes the mythic Gokul. And the psychographies of extremist youth in Misra’s stories from the 1960s Naxalite era, such as ‘Blood’, ‘The Dagger’ and ‘Feeling Distant’, can also be re-read in the context of the current Maoist upsurge in various parts of India.
In an interview, Misra said of his writing: ‘I don’t want to write anything which makes people pat me on my back and say, “Well done, this is great literature boy!” I want people to read my writing and spit on my face, to point at me and say, “Here’s the one who pokes and pricks the wounds of this syphilitic civilization and reveals them like the clear light of day.”’ In Bobby (1985), he wrote, ‘I believe in carrying out a kind of “planned violence” through my writing.’ Misra’s stories document in depth the land of Bengal in the last three decades of the twentieth century. He writes of its marginalized people, its degeneration, hungers, lusts and hyper-violent reality. As critic Ankur Saha writes in an article on Misra in the Bengali literary e-zine Parabaas, ‘In contemporary Bengali literature, no one calls a spade a spade as boldly as Subimal Misra does.’
Since Misra’s linguistic-sensory-cognitive-cerebral universe is immediately and primarily Bengali and Kolkata-based, in a very specific way, his writing is therefore fundamentally untranslatable – in the sense that the lived experience within a specific historical-cultural-social-intellectual-institutional-canonical system shall necessarily remain unknown to a reader in a manner that the best of glossaries and annotations cannot aid.
Misra’s writing is deeply Bengali. But he is simultaneously locally rooted and universal. Though deeply embedded in the vernacular Bengali world, his writing is informed about current affairs and inspired by world literature. His humane vision emanates from a corporeal engagement with the world around us – as a human being, identical in so many ways to any human being anywhere, but depicted in shades, tones, accents, strokes and sounds that are purely and incommunicably local and Bengali.
Notwithstanding this specificity, the wider relevance of Misra’s writing lies in its engagement with what are also, ultimately, fundamental questions confronting all of humanity – all societies, nations, governments and every human being. These are seen in the raw as it were – exposed, uncovered, naked – in Kolkata. Hence, the local specificity is also a means whereby the globally relevant art and text product is imbued with a powerful, well-rounded, integral, throbbing, buzzing rawness and immediacy. As if the heart of feeble humanity is itself pulsating in the reader’s palm.
That local and corporeal specificity is thus testimony to the minute observer of human life that Misra is; to the activist that he is, a toiler for a future that is of better taste, where the real life of literature can begin, in a hitherto predominantly unlettered society.
But illiteracy is also a metaphor for the comatose, zombie-like, media-fed and consumption-fed existence that postmodern, global, capitalist economy-society-culture has produced. An order which denies the possibility of the human being exercising himself or herself as a complete, free, aware, tasteful, ethical entity rather than a mindless, manipulated, herd-driven, lust-fulfilling animal.
There may never be dignity and justice for all in this planet. The poor are perhaps too powerless and the powerful who matter and who can effect change are too caught up in their own vain pursuits to look beyond themselves… So Misra does not give in to despair or frustration. He lauds the acts of subversion and rebellion by the oppressed as the only moments of celebration in this bleak, hopeless life.
Misra believes that the world would be far more beautiful when many more voices are unleashed. In that yet-to-come world, dalit writers will write about the dalit reality of dalits and find international renown, the landless peasant Haran Majhi will read and write. But until then, the best response to the current world order may be something like the image Misra concludes his story ‘Dui Tin-te Udom Bachcha…’ (‘Two or Thre
e Naked Children…’) with, an image that one can easily find in Kolkata: a naked, prancing urchin, gleefully mocking the world passing him by, clutching his genitals and parodying the Hindi film song: ‘Bol, Radha, bol, sangam hoga ki nahin...’
Subimal Misra’s relevance in the world of literature is that he has shown how to assail and demolish the prevailing order as a writer, in his time and place, doing all he possibly can. And he has done this on and on, ever more penetratingly, even as he himself became ever more marginalized. But he thus managed to keep the candle of hope of an alternative flickering in the face of the all-enveloping darkness of an arrogant, commercial singularity.
Books
(This Is How We Squeeze a Quarter of Lemon)
Anti-Golpo Sangroho
(Anti-Stories Collection)
Satyo Utpadityo Hoy
(Truth Is Manufactured)
Kaath Khay Aangra Haagey
(Wood Eats, Charcoal Shits)
Chhottrish Bochorer Rograrogri
(Thirty-six Years’ Scuffles)
Kika Cut-out
Premer Mora Joley Dobey Na
(Cupid’s Corpse Does Not Drown in Water)
Haatey Dhoriye Deowa Hoyeche Shesh-Hobishyir Maalshabhog – Aar, Ebong, Haashtey Haashtey, Khorkutor Moto Bheshey Jaowar Anando-Gourob
(The Pot of Sacred Rice – Funerary Rites Completed, Blissful Pride)
Novels
Tejoskriyo Aborjona
(Radioactive Waste)
Asholey Eti Ramayan Chamarer Golpo Hoye Uthtey Parto
(Actually This Could Have Become Ramayan Chamar’s Story)
Rong Jokhon Sotorkikoroner Chinnhho
(When Colour is the Symbol of Danger)
Kontho Palok Ora – Shobkichui Ba Bajaar Cholito Bastobotagulike Obishyashjogyo Korey Tolar Koushal
(The Feathered Neck – Everything, or the Knack of Rendering the Marketable Realities Unbelievable)
The Golden Gandhi Statue From America Page 14
