Between Subimal Misra's 'anti-stories' and my own historical work on Bengal in the 1940s, I see a strange affinity. A central aim in my empirical account of famine in Bengal was to expose the intimate (and obscene) relationship between power and hunger, and to narrate the extent to which the fulfilment of the craven desires of some is dependenton the abject immiseration of others. Moreover, I wanted to capture the way that clamorous greed silences human sorrow. During famine it was the din of power – in its depraved pursuit for money, resources, recognition, 'security', and even sex – that provided cover for the annihilation of the poor masses, while in the 'middle' – between 'power' and destitution – morals failed, fear prevailed, and a grotesque callousness deepened to the point of inhumanity. Hunger, in this sense, provides a singular hermeneutic to examine a very sick society. It was not, however, the plight of the destitute and dying that I aimed to capture in my work, but rather the broader effects on 'civilization' at large, of brutal inequality. I also wanted to detail the multiplying moral hazards of passively upholding structures that guarantee human extermination, and the particular kind of heartlessness this entails. Famine is just as much a story about human cruelty, self-interest, vanity, insatiability and vindictiveness as it is about starvation. Subimal Misra's work confronts similar themes and supports my contention that famine in Bengal has never ended. Throughout his work, hunger continues to haunt the landscape – hunger as the foil against which all plots unfold, and hunger as the hermeneutic that belies the vain gesticulations of disappointed lives. He himself draws the historical link to the Bengal famine in 'Calcutta Dateline': 'A dog stands over a dead body, tears out and eats the flesh. It wouldn't have been proper to show this scene too clearly. Why does the moon cast so much light on the dry riverbed on the night after the new moon? Bit by bit, the past arrives and becomes meshed with the present.'
The famine, again, and again – forever reappearing in violence done to the bodies of the poor and the willed ignorance of the self-contented. Though 'it would not be proper', Misra always shows the scene, all too clearly – without apology or pause. 'A dog stands over a dead body, tears out and eats the flesh.' This same unflinching frankness is perhaps why I began this note by mentioning my own Irish grandfather. Subimal Misra's writing, like his life, always reminds me that if there is redemption to be found at all, it can only be found in a street-fighting sense of honesty. In the fight against brutal inequality, it is not a question of change, but a question of justice – the most universal question of all – and justice demands breaking through the deathly silence of 'proper' lives. Wild animals not prohibited.
Toronto
July 2014
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Janam Mukherjee is the author of Hungry Bengal: War, Famine, Riots and the End of Empire
SOUNDING IN THE DARKNESS
Nilanjan Bhattacharya
A bare-bodied man, with a mop of curly hair and a somewhat wild look, uses a pick on a grey-coloured stone. The stone is immense, one cannot discern where it begins and where it ends. For that matter, it could also be part of a mountain. One can make out that the stone is extremely hard, even with the force of the assault not even a tiny bit breaks off. But there is no let-up in the man's effort, he keeps hitting the stone. There is the sound of the pick hitting the stone. That sound spreads over a vast area. From afar, one sees the man going on hitting the stone, tirelessly. Not even a tiny bit breaks off from the stone, yet the man's pick keeps falling and rising…
To arrive at the second scene from the first one there is no need to dissolve the scene, even if there is a cut the audience can clearly understand that the man sitting hunched over the rickety, four-legged, wooden table, writing by the light of a table-lamp is the same man who used the pick in the earlier scene. The sound of the pick assaulting the stone envelops the entire room. Coming closer we can see word after word being written, as if in cadence with the sound of the pick hitting the stone. Coming even closer, the words of the letters become larger until they become blurred – and other letters emerge over the blurred ones –
Subimal Misra, 45 years of scuffle
Or, perhaps even more, but not any less.
After this, the letters gradually fade away. There is darkness, the way it is before the beginning.
Subimal sits hunched and writes away, and then the protagonist of his text, 'Only God Is Alive Now', or he himself, plucks out three great words emerging from the French Revolution – equality, fraternity, liberty. Popping the three words into his shirt pocket, his journey commences. He had amazing strength of mind, waves of zeal surged forth from the trough of his body. He issued a call on behalf of the unfed and the destitute of this age. They come running, carrying ploughs, sickles, pens, riding on scooters, their wives riding pillion, tummy, midriff and armpits exposed. But there's not a grain of food in any of their bellies. They come and eat, keep eating, they have no enthusiasm for the three powerful words. On the way, the protagonist meets a cock-a-doodling frog, and a savage with a feather stuck in his hair. They too could not understand the significance of the three words. The protagonist suddenly encounters Hitler. The moustache-shorn Hitler, with dhuti-khaddar worn over military garb, was now busy organizing an anti-fascist movement. Hearing about the three words, Hitler was extremely pleased and takes them from the protagonist. He then sticks them to the red longcloth festoon of the anti-fascist movement. It looks terribly coy. The red longcloth flutters. The words almost quack aloud!
In this fashion, with letters beside letters, words confronting words, erecting image and counter-image, and mixing reality, unreality and hyper-reality, Subimal's prose declares war on the various pretences of contemporary society. The way of writing, its pace, changes in the course of the same story. Subimal assaults words with words. The first line of his writing attacks the next line. He is unbelieving, he does not believe even himself so easily. He advances in his writing by continuously examining what he writes. Perhaps he has just written about an image of magic realism, the very next moment he demolishes that with the lash of the whip of harsh reality. He does not believe in literary beauty. He intends to expose society's syphilitic sores and thus stab 'contented people' with torment, cause pain and cause their dissolution. This is his scuffle of so many years, his responsibility in writing. That's why he can live out his whole life turning his back on the established publishing stream.
The man writes, he keeps writing – letter after letter, stuffing words beneath words. Sometimes disjointed image commentary. In his texts, Subimal deconstructs film language in his own way. Then, instead of that becoming beautiful and refined, it becomes a narrative style that is rude, which shakes and pushes. In his own words, 'All this disjointedness one after another produces a reaction in the reader's mind. The objective is to influence the feelings, and go beyond – to poison. This is 'shock treatment' ('Babbi'). Subimal is always attacking. Sometimes it is straight and direct, like a charging bison. In the one-page prose piece, 'Health for All by 2000', a young wife who has just come from the village to the city to beg, stands with her two small children beneath the neon lights of Jawaharlal Nehru Road, gazes with astonishment at the wondrous and captivating things in the stores, and wonders: 'All these things, so many things, what do people need them for, what for?' Just after this, Subimal drags us, nay, even himself, and brings us right next to the imagery – 'Every morning, as I sip my tea I run my eyes over the newspaper, “45,000 die of hunger every day”, How expensive tea has become nowadays … would it be cheaper to have coffee instead?'
Subimal uses reports published in newspapers in his texts, as well as political writing on the wall. The unerring, strategic insertion of all these does not permit the text to become smooth. Nor does he permit the reader to float along on the stream of soothing prose. The form of the information-text, 'In Sum, News is Poetry', is akin to montage. Which begins with the commentary on the everyday life of Nanigopal, one of the starving millions of India. Nanigopal's story becomes covered over
in the information montage of bits and pieces of truths and falsehoods. By using such information, Subimal reveals the actual truth: this man-made famine. As if the disjointed bits of information are freshly shot bullets from the barrel of a gun, which strike the reader. He makes the mind feel the pain of hot lead.
The man is still hunched up and writing. The light of the table-lamp becomes pale, patches of salty mildew marks on the wall in front. Twilight descends outside the window. The room gets hot in the stuffy heat. Beads of sweat fill the man's forehead. Yet the man keeps writing.
Some people walking along the road peep inside, they call out to the man – 'Hey, come along, come out for a while. Come for a walk with us. You've never seen anything in this life.' Lowering the foggy window of the air-conditioned car, a couple of people call out to him – 'Hey, just come along, let me take you for a ride in the air-conditioned car.' But the hunched-up man does not for once turn to look. He keeps writing. The sound of words battling with words fills the room and wafts into the street, the sound of a pick assaulting stone.
In Subimal Misra's writing, there are levels after levels within the same text, like a stream of bunched-up, frenzied language floating along. It may suddenly take a curve, it can come racing towards the reader at great speed. With his own hands, Misra creates, with great care, this terrifying uncertainty, not just with prose, but with the layout of text and font arrangement, repetitive use of a single word, with unnatural font size and density. There are quiz-like series of questions, arrangement of narrative through geometric diagrams. For that matter, the inseparable parts of his prose become mathematical equations. He disturbs the readers, chases them and again, at the same time, demands their active participation. Suddenly, in the middle of a page a data-collection table appears. The reader is requested to make tick marks in accordance with their thinking, or to put percentages. Addressing the reader, Misra writes, 'The numbers put down by you will complete the story.' Every one of Subimal's prose works is created from this kind of apparently disjointed, mutually conflicting text montage, and thus over a whole book. As if each of his books is an entire art exhibition – various artists' artworks spread on pages, on walls, on top and at the bottom. Standing in the midst of this, you will feel you are being attacked. Even if you can withstand it, it demands a lot of time to see and read all the artworks. A lot of it may appear abstruse, meaningless. If you have tenacity, you will return, you will try to see and read. And if you do not return, it does not really matter to Misra. All of his work is unpaid, not even a single word of his is for sale. Misra does not sell, he bears no accountability to the market. Hence, he is unruffled by the poor commercial prospects of his books.
The light grows faint all around. The man with the wild look is still working his pick. In the semi-darkness, he looks like his own shadow. The pick rises and descends. The sound of the pick assaulting the stone can be heard. The entire screen is now pitch-black, the way it is in the end. But the sound of the pick assaulting the stone can be heard. Since even darkness cannot hold back the sound.
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Nilanjan Bhattacharya is a documentary film-maker based in Kolkata. Translated by V. Ramaswamy.
THE RELEVANCE OF SUBIMAL MISRA
Procheta Ghosh and Tapas Ghosh
Even without having read Freud, we know that the foundation of the Freudian worldview is human sexuality. Just as even without knowing about Marx one understands that the foundation of Marx's worldview is the division of people into economic classes. Similarly with Nietzsche and other thinkers. However, today, the exploited folk no longer heed duffers like us, or such thinkers; they think for themselves. Today, with the mushrooming of glittering shopping malls, Nadu's petty shop and Das-babu's stationery shop have been pushed aside; everywhere, we are surrounded by flat-owning affluent friends, and in family functions, poor relatives are no longer welcome. Whatever we have convinced ourselves is the truth, at the end of the day, we are left holding nothing but ashes in our fists. No philosophy, no intellectuality – we do not want to forget about ourselves any more. Subimal Misra is relevant to us for this reason. He is a literary figure who no longer believes in producing literature. In his writing, questions without answers keep emerging. He keeps demolishing, with the ruthless madness of Kalapahad (the iconoclast sixteenth-century Mughal general in Orissa, who supposedly destroyed Hindu temples – Trs.), the cosmological temples that civilization has built over so long.
Anarchy? Perhaps. When the tree's shade moves away from the heads of homeless folk who have lost the roof over their heads, when the support of belief is no longer there, what else remains, other than query and confusion? Whatever has been held to be correct is what is suspected the most. It is not the heart, but the mind that is considered to be superior. Here, the duffer's sense and the ignoramus' knowledge tell us not to dwell in jealousy but feel empathy, compassion for the men who have not learnt to be defeated. What kind of civilization have we constructed where not just others but we too measure ourselves by our achieved success – Subimal Misra informs us that it is not success that's the worthy thing to achieve in life, but failure. Through his writings, he advances towards his aim of achieving failure. His aim is not to educate readers, his aim is to engage and galvanize the reader to act.
In Subimal Misra's prose, characters do not show any loyalty to established social mores and customs. They simply don't care about these. As if these just don't exist. Subimal Misra probably thinks, there's no value system that is generally accepted or recognized. Whatever is apparent as a generally accepted value system is actually merely something constructed and imposed by the society. As much as his characters are subaltern or marginal in the economic aspect, they are even more so in terms of value system. It is this which makes Subimal Misra both purely local, Bengali, and yet completely universal.
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Procheta Ghosh and Tapas Ghosh are the editors of Jaari Bobajudhyo.
A CONVERSATION WITH SUMITRO BASAK
V. Ramaswamy: When did you first hear of Subimal Misra?
Sumitro Basak: I was a student at Kala Bhavan, Santiniketan. There were some senior students, wise characters, in my circle of friends, who were serious about their radical left beliefs. They formed a kind of cultural group, and I had some friends of that ilk. Thus a book landed up in my hand, although it was not as if I had made any conscious effort at reading anything. It was the book Haran Majhi… And as I read the book – something happened.
I am a central Kolkata boy, and the life that I knew involved extended family and friends, my Santiniketan circuit, the Bolpur station, Bhubondanga, Kolkata and Sealdah station, where I went to sketch. It was in my third year of college that I got the book. This was the time when one started assimilating things and discovering oneself. A self-development takes place in one's late teens and early twenties. I liked what I was reading. It was as if my own likes and dislikes were reflected in the writing, there was a similarity with how I knew and saw things. I was a random reader, not schooled in any particular mould. And the Vishwa Bharati library was a magnificent treasure house. I read Subimal Misra's book and the play by Picasso, Desire Caught by the Tail, at around the same time. My mental make-up during my student days was greatly influenced by these two. And in particular the story 'Sealdah Station and Kapalkundala'. I had the habit of sketching in Sealdah station. As a child, I had read Amar Chitra Katha's children's version of Kapalkundala, by Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, and so I knew the storyline. This was in 1994. The story seemed very real to me. It was about how Sealdah station becomes an unknown entity. I had seen the bastis nearby. So it wasn't at all a story to me.
I was born in 1975, in Nilratan Sarkar Hospital, and we lived in a house opposite Prachi cinema, in Sealdah. So there was a kind of organic connection with and an implicit awareness about the scenarios Misra writes about. My own experience had been like the story. I also liked the story, 'Archimedes's Discovery and Thereafter', in the sense that I could relate to it from my ow
n ground-level experience of Kolkata.
I left Kolkata at the age of sixteen to study in Santiniketan. I had a greater affinity with Bolpur station, where I went late at night to sketch. Similarly with Bhubondanga. So I felt a close link with Misra's writing. I felt this is reality. I also read other famous Bengali writers, but somehow their writing seemed contrived, or seemed to be written in a way for which I had not been initiated. But for Subimal Misra's writing, I didn't need any initiation.
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