Dastabez, Unfinished


Our tribute to Mamoni Raisom Goswami


http://laffaireliterary.blogspot.com/p/dastabez-unfinished.html


http://www.sevensisterspost.com/epaper/melanee/

Seven Sisters Post Online


The Seven Sisters Post is now available as an e-paper online (www.sevensisterspost.com).


Do check out the literary section (pp2-3 of the Sunday Supplement) and give me your comments and feedback.


http://sevensisterspost.com/epaper/sunday_20.11.11.pdf
http://sevensisterspost.com/epaper/sundayps13.11.11.pdf

Call for Submissions

The Nor’eastern Post has been renamed the Seven Sisters Post. The daily will be launched from Guwahati and Dibrugarh in the first week of November, 2011. It will be a publication of the Saradha Group.

It will be a hyper-regional paper, giving extensive coverage to the entire Northeastern region. At the same time, our World Page will then focus on global developments but primarily look at the Afro-Asian scenario, drawing on non-western sources to give an alternate view of the world. We will have a features page and an op-ed page that will be rich in contributions from the locality, region, nation and often from our neighbourhood.  We intend to do two pages of business in keeping with the emerging opportunities.

Our Sunday supplement will seek to showcase original creative writing from the region and neighbourhood, besides focusing on its varied traditional and contemporary life. We intend to print from other Northeastern states soon. Our team comprises media professionals from the region who have worked in top national dailies such as The Times of India, The Hindustan Times and Mail Today. Our chief editor is Subir Bhaumik, the BBC’s former East India bureau chief. Naba Sarma, ex-bureau chief of The Economic Times, our business editor, will be backed by Abhijit Deb, formerly with the Reuters. 

In short, it will be a paper with a difference that the region has long waited for.

As the Literary Editor of the Seven Sisters Post, my aim will be to showcase the literatures produced in the Northeastern region to a wider audience as well as to make readers in the region aware of the richness of their own literatures. Literature from the Northeast is usually treated as a homogenous entity, but my effort will be to bring out the diversity within it. It is hoped that this will establish a dialogue of equality and harmony among the many constituents producing the various ‘literatures’ of the Northeast.

This is a call for contributors to share their creative and critical writings as well as translations with the newspaper.

-          The critical writings/features could relate to any aspect of the literature of any of the regions within the Northeast. They may also deal with particular writers or texts or genres.

-          In creative writing, poetry submission is particularly welcome, although space permitting, we might also occasionally carry pieces of fiction/memoir/literary non-fiction.

-          We will also devote considerable attention to translations of classic and contemporary literary pieces. The translators must however, have acquired the necessary permissions from the original copyright holder. A short translator’s note and adequate information about the original author are also required.

Contributions from writers living in/hailing from outside the Northeast are especially welcome. I am also looking at ‘mainlanders’’ views of Northeast literature.

Please send in your entries to northeastliterature@gmail.com. To avoid having your email sent to the spam folder, please use the following in the subject line: “Submission: SSP”. Emails without this subject line may get deleted.

Uddipana Goswami

Literary Editor

Seven Sisters Post

Call for Submissions

I am joining as the Literary Editor of the Nor’eastern Post – a daily soon to be launched from Guwahati, Assam. It promises to be a regional publication with a national and international reach. My aim as literary editor will be to showcase the literatures produced in the Northeastern region to a wider audience as well as to make readers in the region aware of the richness of their own literatures. Literature from the Northeast is usually treated as a homogenous entity, but my effort will be to bring out the diversity within it. It is hoped that this will establish a dialogue of equality and harmony among the many constituents producing the various ‘literatures’ of the Northeast.

This is a call to readers to share their creative and critical writings as well as translations with the newspaper.

-          The critical writings/features could relate to any aspect of the literature of any of the regions within the Northeast. They may also deal with particular writers or texts or genres.

-          In creative writing, poetry submission is particularly welcome, although space permitting, we might also occasionally carry pieces of fiction/memoir/literary non-fiction.

-          We will also devote considerable attention to translations of classic and contemporary literary pieces. The translators must however, have acquired the necessary permissions from the original copyright holder. A short translator’s note and adequate information about the original author are also required.

Contributions from writers living in/hailing from outside the Northeast are especially welcome. I am also looking at ‘mainlanders’’ views of Northeast literature.

Please send in your entries to northeastliterature@gmail.com. To avoid having your email sent to the spam folder, please use the following in the subject line: “Submission: Nor’eastern Post”. Emails without this subject line may get deleted.

Uddipana Goswami

Literary Editor

The Nor’eastern Post

Occupying Imagination, Affiliating to the Nation

[My translation of an excerpt from Benudhar Sharma's Kangrecar Kanciali Rodat (1971), published in Asymptote Journal, January 2011.]

Translator's Note:

The northeast of India has, since the inception of the Indian State, been constructed as the nation’s periphery. Much has been written on how it became one of the most conflict-ridden zones of the country as well as on the political engineering involved in incorporating this periphery into the larger Indian nation. Little scholarship, however, has gone into exploring how the periphery began to imagine itself as a part of the nation. The manipulation of popular imagination that went into creating a subnational consciousness where there was none needs to be studied in the context of current insurgent movements in the northeast, many of which claim to be ‘anti-colonial’ and not ‘secessionist’ vis-à-vis the Indian state. Some of the best sources for such study are the memoirs of early members of the Indian National Congress (INC) active in interior regions of the northeast. On the Indian mainland, the INC was constructing the notion of an Indian nation while also fighting the British colonisers. Meanwhile, the elite of the northeast came into contact with the INC’s ideology during its pursuit of higher education and other activities in neighbouring Bengal. I have had access to a few accounts written by Axamiyā writers who represented the INC in Assam, which at the time comprised most of the rest of the northeast. Attracted by the ideals of the Indian nation and its fight against colonialism, these writers were instrumental in spreading these ideas in their native lands.

But just as the British occupied Assam and other parts of the northeast nearly a century after annexing the Indian mainland, Indian nationalism also took a long time making inroads into the psyches of the Axamiyā and the northeast. The extract I have translated (Sharma 1971: 50-53) is an account from the early days of proselytising by INC workers in Axamiyā villages. The author, Benudhar Sharma, recalls that even in the 1920s, when Gandhi and his non-cooperation movement were whipping the Indian nation into an anti-colonial frenzy, Axamiyā villagers nursed antagonistic sentiments towards INC volunteers. For them, Gandhi was ‘like the paddy-devouring gandhi insect . . . out to devour the nation.’ By the 1940s, however, folk songs began to laud Congress workers; Gandhi became an avatar of god; anti-British sentiments were visible. Indian was now hailed as the motherland and ‘Bande Mataram,’ the clarion call of the Indian nationalist movement, was heard in folk performances.

Love has a way of happening

(My poem published in Focus on Indian Writing in English in Muse India 35. Jan-Feb 2011.)


[Read some other poems:Tejimolā Forever; Mother Goddess Kamakhya; Manufacturing Memories; For Nilikesh da, Shot Dead; End of Ennui; From Exile (1); After This Sky; Tryst; Would I Be A Poet Still; elegaic; A History of Violence, Fearless, The Rains Come from Behind the Curtains, Love has a way of happening]


Love has a way of happening at the most unlikely places.
For Rajen ata and Banalata it happened on a wooden bridge 
Across the crazed Pagladia during turbulent times 
Over handfuls of sanasur sold outside school
Shared in silence from a soggy piece of newspaper
That perhaps brought news of anti-immigrant riots.
From where they sat, they could not hear
Annunciations made in new centres of power
The din of displaced memories across far away borders
Birth pangs of twin states, breaking of a sub-continent.
Bonds of race, language, native land were nothing
Before the brush of shy fingers against soft hands.

Love has a way of ending in the most likely ways.
For Rajen ata and Banalata it ended 
When indigenous livelihoods and cultural superiority clashed
Refugees are not to be trusted, his father said
Recounting how they had lost their all
To wily immigrants who exchanged a bag of salt for 10 acres
‘We will not concede another inch of our land’.
Her migrant father said these natives live
On culture borrowed from us 
We have lost our homeland, our dignity remains.
An individual is slave to history
So they left their love at that.


***
Love has a way of happening in the most unlikely times.
For Dulu mama and Shipra it happened amidst
The most troubled circumstances, during volatile days
When the uneasy camaraderie of prolonged coexistence
Between communities was broken by a confused logic 
Of entitlements, a climate of coercion.
He could not tear himself away from 
Either the romance of jingoism or the love 
That lingered from a childhood spent 
Swimming together, cycling to school, climbing trees, 
Stealing robab tenga from his father’s backyard
Peeling the fruit, popping into her mother’s kitchen for mustard oil
And green chillies, mixing it all and feeding each other 
In the shade of the bakul tree.

Love has a way of enduring despite political turmoil.
For Dulu mama and Shipra it endured despite his leanings
Towards an ideology of hate, clothed in a glamorous pat xaj 
Of nationalistic fervour, a greater love. It takes a while
To remove the veil from the face of evil
But love finds its way back home. They pulled him back,
The years of togetherness, even though the glamour wore off
From ultra-nationalism and youthful love.
His mother would not take her in – it was the climate –
They eloped, had children and reunited with the family.
A new politics was born.

***


Love has a way of happening quite naturally.
For Sumon and me it happened on the telephone
Over conversations that veered dangerously close 
To intellectual discourse about intertwining histories, 
Divisive politics and reshaped identities.
History no longer had a hold on us, we need not forfeit
Like Rajen ata and Banalata. Our politics wasn’t muddled, 
We did not vacillate like Dulu mama and Shipra. 
Lost love, redefined politics came to fruition 
In a confident generation, globalised as far as suited us
Localised as much as was enough
To hold on to our ethnic identities over smoking cups
Of cappuccino and latte, feeding on pizzas
While in the background played
Rabindra Sangeet and Bihu songs.

***

[Notes: ata: grandfather; sanasur: mixed savouries; mama: maternal uncle; pat xaj: silk dress of Assamese women; Rabindra Sangeet: songs of Rabindranath Tagore, a Bengali treasure; Bihu: the cultural marker of Assamese identity.]

I Thought I Knew My Ma


(My short story published in Focus on Indian Writing in English in Muse India 35. Jan-Feb 2011.)


Read my other short stories: Virginia Mahi, Colors


I thought I could see my ma in a green and white polka dotted frock sitting on her bed beside the window, looking out at the night sky, trying to capture the full moon between two pink wild roses blooming on the old creeper that curled itself around the bars of the window. I thought I could almost hear her sigh as she smiled to herself dreaming of a tall dark-haired man, clutching a microphone and singing in a gravelly voice on the Bihu stage, under another full moon. She was thinking that she will marry him when she grows up, and koka should have no opposition to that because although he was a Muslim, he was an artiste, and koka was an artiste, and he always said that literature and art should be the only religions people were ever allowed to practice. They were her religions too, although she also toldkoka that loving flowers should be another religion. She was practicing her religion now, loving the flowers, letting them hold the moon in their bosom. The flowers shifted slightly in the breeze, and the moon was hidden for a moment. At that same moment, a shadow passed over her face. She was wishing he had not been a Muslim, because although art, literature and loving flowers should be the only religions, in Barbari where they lived, Hindu and Muslim were the only religions. The Muslims there were mostly immigrants, and Aita said they fought over land and cut each other up at the slightest provocation and gave birth to lots and lots of children “so that they can grab some more of our land.” Of course, aita had eleven children, of whom my Ma was the youngest. But she reasoned koka was very rich, and they could afford to have as many children as aita could bear. Aita was proud she could bear her husband so many children.Koka of course never knew how they were raised because aita kept them under her control and also, he was hardly ever home. If he was not supervising his vast land holding, he was settling some dispute in the village of which he was the undisputed patriarch because he had set it up by clearing the forests and settling people from his old village, and bringing Muslim agriculturists to work on their fields. In the evenings, koka would be rehearsing for the next play the Rangmahal club would stage – he was their chief patron and often, the lead actor. When there was no play, Choudhury koka, Sirajuddin koka, Dambaru mama and everybody else would get together and discuss poetry or music. Sometimes, if the artiste was not travelling with his troupe, he would come and sing in their batghar which koka had transformed into a natghar, aita often complained. When the sounds of the rehearsals started reaching the main house, and aita retreated into the kitchen, my Ma would sneak away from her study table and run to the batghar. It was through these rehearsals that Ma had become close to koka, who liked that one of his children was interested in the arts. And koka forever for her remained the artiste, the lover of literature, and the man who always quoted Chandraprasad: Xundarar Aradhanai Jibanar Khel: the sport of life is in the worship of the Beautiful. Sometimes, the image of the Beautiful conjured up in her mind would be that of her father, sometimes of the artiste. She only ever wanted to be the silent worshipper.

I thought I could sense my Ma’s bewilderment when she was forced to come and live in Guwahati. I thought I could measure her reluctance. She had not wanted to come, but koka had insisted she get a better education than he ever did: “Study English literature, because it will teach you to appreciate how beautiful life is.” She had heard from him that pain could be beautiful, and after the death of the artiste – some said from drinking too much, but she never believed them – she had often felt loss could be as precious as love. Without anybody knowing it, she had stolen the teacup kept aside for him – aita insisted that no Muslim could drink from the same cup as they did – and hidden it in her trunk under her bed. Although she hardly ever took it out of there, she liked to think: “this is the cup that ‘runneth over’ with my grief”. She left behind the cup when she went to Guwahati and once when she came home for the holidays, she didn’t notice that it was gone from her trunk. Just like the artiste’s cup, many things had slowly slipped away from her unnoticed, but not her shyness, her solitude, and her love of Beauty, reinforced now by the English Romantic poets.

***

The silken slender threads of a mournful flute found her one day at her hostel window when she was once again toying with the moon. They were floating in from the direction of the boys’ hostel, and she was immediately in love once again. Her artiste was back to life and she had found something to hold dear in this city where everything seemed daunting, everybody intimidating. Majnixa xar pai xunisane ketiyaba ketekir hiya bhaga mat? She felt the bird’s wailing that the poet heard in the middle of the night must have aroused the same pain, the same desire as the music of the flute now did in her. Sometimes she wondered who it was that could weave such sorrowful magic; often she told herself the magic was enough, the magician incidental. And she would not have known if he had not played the same melancholy notes on College Day, and as she sat there in the auditorium with her friends, she suddenly, for a moment, went back to her old bed at home and could smell the wild roses at her window. But she was grown up now, and knew she could not dream of getting married to somebody just because they pierced your heart with so much pain. Because she knew now what marriage entailed and she could foretell how aita and koka would both react if they only knew she was in love with a tribal boy. Koka would perhaps understand the love and devotion, but she knew well enough now that abstract religions of the heart had nothing to do with institutional religions people practised in everyday life, and even koka would not accept such a social ignominy as his daughter marrying a tribal boy. Oh, the tribals are Hindu alright, but they do still eat pork and drink alcohol. And although her elder brothers often went hunting in the reserved forest nearby and brought home deer meat almost every time, and maybe even ate wild pigs and buffaloes on the sly, pork – and of course beef – were taboo at home. And all the men of the house, including koka, only drank alcohol in secret, never socially like the tribals did. She had been shocked the day she found a bottle of rum in her father’s safe which he had accidentally left open. She had never told anybody about it, and had later accepted that although drinking alcohol was bad, it is a weakness even the strongest of men must sometimes give in to. And then, they say artistes need alcohol. Was he drunk now? Suddenly she came back to herself and found herself sitting in the auditorium surrounded by an applauding audience and blushed. The performance had ended, and she wished she could look at him sometime longer. Since she couldn’t do that now, she started sitting towards the end of the classroom and watching shyly, guiltily, his profile on the boys’ side of the room. And waiting for the evenings when she could listen to him playing the flute. She made believe that he played only for her, because she listened. One day instead of the music, she heard a huge commotion from the direction of the boys’ hostel. Some of the more adventurous girls in the hostel went over to the warden’s and brought back the news that the tribal boys had started a rebellion of sorts. They would no longer eat in the Second Dining Hall, they wanted to eat with the upper caste Hindu boys in the First Dining Hall. There was a little violence, and some of the boys on both sides had been injured. From the next day, she did not hear him playing the flute anymore. News was some of the boys in the hostel had been rusticated for indiscipline, he was one of them. Some of the other girls who had taken to openly declaring their adoration of him ever since the College Day, proudly proclaimed that at least his sacrifice had set in motion a change that would be good for the society. She wanted to cry because she hated it when they spoke about him as though he could ever belong to anybody but her.

***

I thought I felt my Ma’s trepidation the day she got married. I thought I knew how her tears were both of sorrow at leaving her parents’ home and of fear of the unknown life she was about to start by marrying deuta. Her only consolation was that koka had himself chosen deuta to be her husband, and she knew he would never make a wrong choice for her. She had barely met him a few times before the wedding but she had read his novel and imagined he would be like Pramathes, the protagonist, who was a social activist and stood for all that was true, right and good. She was also a bit worried that if he was as good as Pramathes, she might not live up to his expectations. But her sense of inadequacy began to disappear as she started learning a few lessons about life in the daily grind of married life. The first of these lessons was that a man who was too good to be true should not get married. Unaware of his duties to his family, deuta indeed turned out to be like Pramathes, consumed with a desire for cleansing the society of its evils and injustices. Perhaps it was something in the air in those days, but many other people like deuta also thought they could do this, and very naively they all joined the Asom Andolan – that massive civil unrest that turned our society upside down for nearly six decades – a well-intentioned movement which a few self serving people hijacked and turned into one that polarized our society, alienating all Muslims and as well as tribals. People like my deuta who had joined the movement because they wanted to fight for the rights of the “sons of the soil” did not realise this until it was too late. And then when they did, they ended up as bitter defeated crusaders who remained forever afterwards cynical about any change in society. Deuta could never get over it, and he changed, kept strictly to his textbooks and teachings and pretty much banished whatever was left of Pramathes from his person. Meanwhile, my Ma had already given up two of her favourite preoccupations, because early in the marriage, she had realized that it would not do for both partners to immerse themselves in art and literature, or there would be nobody to run the house, what withdeuta also possessing at the same time an unbending social conscience. Since the same realization had not come todeuta, it was my Ma who had to relinquish.

She did however keep her third religion alive, that of loving flowers. She had a huge garden with many different kinds of flowers to which she was more attached than to deuta. When I was born, she named me Pahi – flower petal – although she must have been disappointed that I did not turn out to be as delicate, as pliant, or as attached to her as her flowers. I was more attached to deuta who would sometimes, only for me, come out of his cynical shell and recount the fervour with which his generation had wanted to “save our nation and identity”. Another generation was at that moment in history trying to do the same with guns and explosives and failing miserably, defeated by ideological poverty. Growing up amidst all this and knowing what had gone before, I started believing that mass movements and armed insurgencies led nowhere. Revolution had to begin at the individual level, and I started my little rebellions. I began by renouncing the Brahminism I was born into. I took to eating beef and pork with friends, and later, travelling to places my mother would only have heard of, or my one-time social activist father would never have been acquainted with, where the people who he had once thought he was fighting for really lived. There, getting drunk on rice beer, we discussed ethnic reconciliation and religious tolerance, deliberated on blueprints of a future society without conflicts. And I thought I was in love, with an indigenous Muslim boy who spoke with the same passion about the same things I believed in.

I thought my Ma would be my worst enemy at this juncture. I thought deuta was the one who would understand. But it was deuta who very subtly blackmailed me into agreeing to marry Bordoloi khura’s son who lives in Bangalore. He stopped eating, and sat on his easy chair in the veranda for hours with a wounded look, the book on his lap open at the same page for a week. I gave in, but not before I realized my mother was on my side. She said nothing the day I broke the news, and I would have thought she was silent only because deuta had said what she would have wanted to say, had she not come and sat beside me on my bed and run her fingers through my hair the day the love of my life heaped accusations of hypocrisy and elitism on me and Bandini seeing that I was well rid of him, came up to me and told me how he had been sleeping with another woman all along. My world and my rebellion and my beliefs had all come crushing down, but in the midst of it all, I suddenly saw my Ma, I saw that my Ma felt my pain, that she was indeed made of pain. And it was then, for the first time in my life, that I thought I should get to know her the way she must have been.


***