Now, when I return to the song I was thinking of, introduced to me by my uncle in London when I was studying there, I see it’s about the end of a thundershower in the month of bhaadra, which just precedes the onset of sharath: “The rain-shower ends, I hear a tune of valediction/bring your songs to a close/you’re going far away.” In the beginning of September, as I think of Norwich, the lines sound as if they’re directly addressed to me. “Chharbe kheya opar hotey/bhaadra diner bhora srotey re,” it continues—“The canoe starts out for the other bank/In the powerful current of a bhaadra day”; then “It rocks midway in the swirling water.” There are inner rhymes (hotey, srotey) in the Bangla lines I’ve transcribed. I can’t translate the finely judged words or the lines’ perfect symmetry, but they mainly achieve their beauty because Tagore adds nothing: he’s making a statement of fact, just as the remembered lines from a child’s primer (jal pare/pata nare; “rain falls/the leaf trembles”) that first drew Tagore to poetry state a fact. Here, Tagore seems to be telling us that no afflatus or elaboration is necessary, because the world is at its most compelling as it is.
When I think of that song, I hear my uncle singing in his low, unsteady, pleasant voice. It’s a voice that sounded as if it needed warming up before it got going, or wanted kick-starting—but it never did get going. “The pollen from the kadamba has covered the forest floor,/The bees have forgotten their way among the keya flowers,” he sang softly, with a mad intensity. He told me that there was nothing poetic about these lines—all was fact, evidently; the bees did get confused after rainfall; they lost their sense of scent and their way to the flowers. For a quarter of a century, he’d lived uninterrupted in north-west London; these songs approximated photos or home movies of where he’d come from. What made these photo-substitutes talismanic is that no one else nearby could understand them or knew very much of the place they’d recorded. In Belsize Park, in a bedsit that overflowed with carrier bags, Bengal didn’t exist except in those songs—and Tagore songs were both cheap and many, a dime a dozen. “The wind’s stopped in the forest today,/Dew pervades the air,/Memory’s aftermath in this light becomes shining drops of rain.” The last untranslatable image—“alo tey aaj smritir abhash brishtir bin-dur”—would bring him close to tears; for the Indian is genetically programmed to feel an acute intimation of parting on any mention of the rain.
* * *
Sharath, I realised for the first time during this “study leave,” was spring’s mirror image. It had that gentleness and equanimity of light; June and July’s mulching, rotting humidity had almost vanished. There was a hint of a second flowering; illusory, but convincing. Whoever devised the six Indian seasons took into account this nuance and play; they knew the year, like a day, is not only a progression, a movement from one phase to another, but a passage through echoes, reminiscences, and expectation, through intermediary periods that recall one another, as dusk and twilight do in the day’s twelve hours. To these reminiscent moments—as when, after the monsoons, you were suddenly in the midst of spring—these devisers had given names, making them seasons, rather than tactfully ignoring them. In fact, part of the great unacknowledged joy of sharath was to know that it wasn’t, actually, spring. Spring, or basanta, is arguably the more famous season, given its bright flowers and sexual birdcall; but you’re always aware of—and are trying to ignore—the prospect of another withering summer. With sharath, there’s an intake and release of breath as you stand in the stillness; there is no summer to come; the temperature will rise for two weeks in October, then fall again; and the inevitable temperate calm of hemanta will continue into winter. All this I began to learn in the first few weeks into “study leave.”
Though one wouldn’t suspect it, there are concordances between Norwich and Calcutta. Both are geographically to the east of the nation. The east—except perhaps at the beginning of the day, or in the golden age—historically constitutes the margins. People still “go West,” not eastward. Norwich confirms this by its isolation, especially from London—London might be an international financial hub, but Norwich has limited access to it. There’s no dual-carriage motorway connecting it to the capital; you enter Norwich by a road that’s slightly wider than a country lane. The railway track is ancient, and it makes some of the other obsolete railway lines around England look efficient and smart. Also, the towns just south of Norwich—from Diss and Manningtree to Ipswich—are where the most suicidal and unhopeful people in England live, and there are repeated “fatalities” on the tracks, whereby some poor, terminally life-hating soul becomes a reason for an abortive or delayed journey. These conditions make many self-proclaimedly normal people suicidal, meaning that the prospects of increasing fatalities in the environs of Norwich will continue to be high. Every weekend, “engineering works” have been taking place on the Norwich railway lines (to either modernise or salvage them) with an infinitely patient, scholarly regularity, so that commuters returning from a Saturday in London must be offloaded at Diss and transferred to a bus, arriving after four hours instead of the usual two into the familiar cathedral town.
Calcutta, until exactly one hundred years ago from when I write this the Empire’s “second city,” is today comparably cut off from London—from the rest of the world, even. (It was in 1911 that, alarmed by the swelling Swadeshi movement in the state, and forced to reunite the Bengal they’d partitioned in 1905, the British transferred the capital to Delhi; and it strikes me as odd that there were no centenary events in Calcutta to mark the advantages and disadvantages of not being a capital city.) Today, you may fly uninterrupted from Calcutta to Dhaka or Bangkok or Singapore; anywhere else, and you must be offloaded at Dubai, or Delhi, or Frankfurt, like the returning commuters to Norwich, and put on another flight—and not just on Sundays. Still, Norwich’s isolation feels more ancient. Partly it’s because it’s so much older than Calcutta. In fact, in the eleventh century, Norwich was apparently a city of immense importance, second only to London; this, you’ll agree, has a disturbingly familiar ring. Perhaps to speculate upon what Calcutta will be centuries hence, one must study the Norwich of the twenty-first century: a place that has as good as forgotten its past. To me, travelling to it in the autumn is a bit like going to Africa in the colonial era, or at least what it was like for Marlow, in Heart of Darkness, to sit in England, back from the Congo, and feel the one inexorably flow into the other. So it is that I’ve stared out from the heavy glass-paned windows of my sixties-designed visitor’s flat into the broads, from which gulls rise periodically, and sensed the presence of the primordial; Marlow’s famous words come back—“I was thinking of very old times, when the Romans first came here, nineteen hundred years ago—the other day … Light came out of this river since … We live in the flicker—may it last as long as the old earth keeps rolling! … Sandbanks, marshes, forests, savages—precious little to eat fit for civilised men, nothing but Thames water to drink. No Falernian wine here, no going ashore.” Easy to feel, at certain moments, like that Roman when I’m in Norwich, especially as I stare out of the window from Suffolk Walk; and forget Calcutta, a much younger, more recent, city.
* * *
Hardly into my “study leave,” I notice the frail bamboo outlines for the Puja pandals begin to appear in street corners. Their context, in the intersection, is so urban; regulations permit these apparitions to hold up or divert traffic during the Pujas. But, in this phase of their construction, when they’re intricate husks, their fragility visible to the public eye, they’re reminders of an ancient Bengal—which may not exist anywhere at all today except in these fleeting cameos.
There’s little doubt Durga Puja began as a harvest festival. One story has it that the first time it became an urban event was when Raja Nabakrishna Deb of the Shobhabazar Rajbari (or the princely family of Shobhabazar) in North Calcutta organised a Puja for Lord Clive in 1757, to celebrate the British victory at Plassey—to mark, as it were, the passage of power from Siraj-ud-daula to the East India Company. The Rajbari has rec
ently issued an official rebuttal of this account. Anyway, as Kaliprasanna Sinha’s anarchic verbal record from 1860, Hutom Pyanchaar Naksha (The Night-Owl’s Sketches), shows, most of the powerful Calcutta families had appropriated the Pujas by the middle of the nineteenth century, making them an occasion for boisterous, often competitive, celebration. At some point, the Pujas passed from the domain of the families to the paras, or neighbourhoods—often, stifling, cloistered, ten-foot-wide lanes lasting no more than a quarter of a mile. It was at this time that the Pujas—despite their name, which means “worship”—must have become secular, roughly four or five days of pretending to pay obeisance to the goddess, of wearing one’s most uncomfortably new clothes, of commingling, communal eating, flirting with cousins, followed by more communal eating. For the middle class, there’s no withdrawal from the Pujas—it permeates the interior and the exterior, the apartment and the street, equally. It must have been in the late seventies and early eighties, after the Left Front had come to power to begin what surely no one thought would be a near-interminable tenure, and Bengal began to grow increasingly isolated, culturally and economically, that the Pujas started truly to prosper. By the early eighties, without anyone quite noticing or certain of what had happened, they’d become the world’s most extraordinary festival, holding absolute, even tyrannical, sway over the city for as long as they lasted. By the early nineties, the noise and crowds were forcing what remained of the middle class in Calcutta to leave their homes, and check into a guest house or hotel in Ooty or Puri—in other words, to spend the Pujas elsewhere. Some of the elements of today’s Pujas must be immemorial—the sound of the dhak or drums in the morning approaching the apartment block; the actual worship performed (I use that word literally) by the priest, and his exhilarated dhunuchi dance later. Others may have emerged in the fifties or the sixties—the spectacular pandals in different parts of the city; the excursions undertaken to admire the goddess, whose likeness may be made on traditional lines, or to resemble a contemporary movie actress. (This year, I believe I spotted a Durga modelled on one of the blue people of Avatar.) But it’s in the early eighties, probably, that the attention shifted from the mother goddess and her family in the pandal—which is a marquee of variable size made of bamboo, papier mâché, cloth, and other material—to the pandal itself. The pandals have, in the last twenty-five years, been made to look like the Titanic; the General Post Office; the Fountain of Trevi at Rome; the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg; the Tagore house in Jorasanko; the Egyptian pyramids; old, disused theatres, houses, or temples—in fact, anything that catches the pandal-maker’s fancy that year. The intention is not so much to entertain as to disorient and astonish; to tap into the Bengali’s appetite for the bizarre, the uncanny.
The lighting, done by “the men from Chandannagar,” a town about thirty miles away from Calcutta, also contributes to this realm of astonishment. They follow no convention of “beautiful lighting”; the counterpart of the Puja lights are not the Christmas lights hung on Regent Street, but the patterns created by the plastic spiral stencils sold on streets, going round and round with your pen in different ellipses; the shards of colour that rearrange themselves within a kaleidoscope; covers of exercise books; pictures blazoned in the local tabloid; “breaking news” messages and TV bulletins. Sometimes they swirl and form patterns; sometimes they depict the treasures contained in a child’s textbook, even something like the secrets of the inner ear, with the eardrum, the anvil, and the cochlea; often, they will represent—in repeated, moving sequences—an event that’s recently captured the imagination: rumours, in 1990, of a plague in Calcutta; Satyajit Ray receiving an Oscar for lifetime achievement; Princess Diana’s sudden death in a car crash; Amitabh Bachchan hosting the Indian version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?; the two aircraft flying straight into the doomed Twin Towers. They flash; they swiftly enact an episode; they begin again immediately. They’re meant to tell those stories until dawn, even when there’s no one in their proximity; just as, in some secret reflex, you’ll think of them after that year is over.
The myth of the Pujas is a simple one—full of rural sweetness. Durga, the mother, comes to our world from her world in the Himalayas, usually in early October, to slay the moustached asura who’s sprung out of the body of a buffalo and is now oppressing us all. Some such episode involving a bully must have occurred in our childhood, and we’d called upon our mother then to set it right. The Pujas are, in part, an ever-returning homage to that magical sense of being rescued, so indispensable to children. But we’re mostly grown up now, as we mill around the pandals, and we know that asuras aren’t easily disposed of, that mothers aren’t all-powerful; and it has to be admitted that it’s this sense of irony about the mother, and our stubborn denial of reality, that gives the Pujas their tenderness, and makes Durga, paradoxically, so strong. For she’s infinitely empowered by our need.
She arrives on a lion. Her ten arms are as familiar as some other physical deformity might be in someone you’ve long known. She’s also called mahishasuramardini, “she-slayer of the buffalo-asura.” Arrayed on both sides are her children, Saraswati, Lakshmi, Kartik, Ganesh. According to the ordaining of the almanac, Durga may use a canoe or an elephant for transport. But she’s always depicted upon a lion. By the end of the Pujas, the myth moves into its second phase—of valediction, reminiscent, once more, of the sweet, powerful yearnings of rural life. By now, Durga has become our daughter; it’s time for her to go back to her husband, Shiva, in the Himalayas; her holidays—not just ours—are done. We’ve become her father; and, like every father, we know it’s futile to want to keep back a married daughter—she’s not ours to keep. In the Pujas’ ten days, we’ve somehow aged and spanned a lifetime, from being child to parent, as characters often do in the course of a novel.
Usually, I’m in Norwich before the goddess arrives, let alone before she’s departed for the Himalayas. At least, that’s been the case since 2006. But, in 2010, I asked for “study leave.” And though I stayed in Calcutta in 2011, the Pujas, before I knew it, were gone, with that faint, bittersweet surprise that overtakes you when things long anticipated are suddenly over. A day later, the pandals looked prematurely empty, the idols had been transferred to trucks and taken to the Hooghly River to be immersed; and, in two days, those pandals were being shorn patiently of their phantasmagoric and duplicitous outer covering, whatever it was that made them look, in the past week, like mock-landmarks or mock-monuments. I went past them in a car that week, as they became naked, overarching outlines of bamboo, tied together by rope—an extraordinary experience of illusory joy, to see them thus, almost exactly as they’d begun to appear three weeks ago. It’s as if some lost part of your life had returned to you, in a second lease of life, in a way it can’t from a photograph or recording—it’s that moment when the Pujas will soon begin, it’s late September and the pandals are being hurriedly completed, and you haven’t gone to Norwich. It’s a twin season, just as sharath is to spring, dusk to twilight. This interval hasn’t been named yet, but it does come up before the week reaches proper closure.
Those frail bamboo husks are, for the time being, the last evidence in the year of the great craftsmanship of rural Bengal—the old ingenuity that’s channelled, yet again, into an event such as the Pujas. Something like the shapeliness of those husks, so finely put together despite their angularities, with none of the ricketiness that bamboo scaffolding has when buildings are being painted, is what the traveller Al-Biruni must have run into when he was here, in Bengal, in the tenth century, and found, he claims, not an agricultural but an artisanal society—people everywhere, not growing things, but making things with their hands and implements. I too feel as if I’m witnessing the products of some gift, or talent, special to these parts for centuries as I watch the bamboo structures being dismantled.
By craftsmanship I mean a quality of tactility, of “madeness.” It comes from the instinct to shape and touch things, to impart an intimacy to materials. By the
1860s, that urge seemed, superficially, to have been superseded; Bengalis had ceased becoming artisans and had begun to become artists—poets, sculptors, composers, and, later, filmmakers. As if keeping pace with this change, certain words developed new and startling meanings. For instance, sahitya, which had meant “text” or “textual content” or even “literary content,” came, by the end of the nineteenth century, to mean, specifically, “literature,” or the literary canon. Similarly, kabi, which was the word for an author of a scholarly or orthodox kind, now referred to a “poet,” in the modern sense of the word. The Bengalis had become moderns; no, they were moderns. Speaking of Ishwarchandra Gupta, the great idiosyncratic poet of the nineteenth century, and the major poet of Bengali literature before it became a proper literature, Bankimchandra Chatterjee pointed out in 1885: “Ishwar Gupta is a kabi. But what kind of kabi?” He proceeded to clarify that Gupta might be a kabi, but that he was not a “poet”—deliberately using the English word. But the desire to be an artisan—such as, in a sense, Gupta was—would never quite die in the modern Bengali. The major Bengali painter of the twentieth century, Jamini Roy, a well-to-do bourgeois who studied the conventions of European painting at Calcutta’s Government College of Art, achieved his stylistic breakthrough by turning to the pats, or paintings, by the anonymous patuas of the nineteenth century who plied their works on a variety of sacred and profane subjects in the vicinity of the Kalighat temple. “I am a patua,” said Roy, firmly distancing himself from the term “painter,” in an unwitting but obverse mirror image of Bankimchandra’s remark about Ishwar Gupta.
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