Eye on Calcutta
The Calcutta chromosomes
Eye on Calcutta
Renu Roy
A creative artist concerned about roots and identity cannot escape the frame of reference that the city continues to be
It cannot be entirely an accident that two of our greatest living writers of the English language were born in this city. Amitav Ghosh in 1956, and Amit Chaudhuri in 1962. The dates are important because they clearly indicate that the cultural context I am referring to is firmly post-colonial, yet probably it does refer to the Raj, in a deeper and more significant way.
Calcutta was, after all, the first city to be built from scratch by the British outside Britain. It also hosted their first university overseas, their first medical college, and even their first civilian engineering college, that is outside the army. That the English language, and its literature, has a history of connections with our city is only natural, and historically inevitable.
How else do you encounter the plaque on Free School Street that tells you that William Makepeace Thackeray lived here once? How else do you account for the fact that our Park Street cemetery bears an epitaph written by the English poet Walter Savage Landor, in memory of the woman he loved? Rose Aylmer belongs as much to Calcutta as to English poetry. However much you may wish to shake them off, the ghosts of the Raj continue to haunt us to degree that we have almost got used to it. some of us, I know, would feel downright neglected and lonely without those colonial visitations.
Our city has certainly shared more than its fair share of glory and greatness through its literary citizens, so much so that the history of Bengali literature cannot be written without Calcutta in view. But the English language too has a rightful claim to its own piece of turf on the east bank of the Hooghly. This becomes all the more apparent when we remember that the first great Bangla poet to emerge in our city wrote first in English. If any one had changed the course of the history of Bengali literature it was Michael Madhusudhan Dutt, especially in his monumental and modern rewriting of the Ramayana narrative from the point of view of Ravana.
It is interesting to remember that Michael’s first published poetical work was in English. Entitled The Captive Lady it told the romantic Rajput tale of the love and valour of Pritviraj Chauhan. Michael’s departure from the English language and his return to his mother tongue has of course, achieved the status of one of the great legends of cultural nationalism, but the poet’s original choice cannot be forgotten. It certainly indicates how deeply English had been part of our city and its culture.
Michael was not an exception. The other Dattas must also be remembered. The Datta sisters — Aru and Toru — also wrote verse in English and won accolades from discerning readers even in the England of their days. In their painfully short lives, truncated cruelly by death, they left behind an immense possibility for Indian writers of English verse. And all this was at a time when the literati refused to accept English as an Indian language. Its acceptance, in fact, has come much after Independence, when colonialism has long ceased to cast its shadow on our cultural context.
Unfortunately, verse in English never won kudos for Calcutta after the 19th century. Despite the countless volumes published by the Writer’s Workshop, and the painstaking efforts of P Lal, Calcutta has not been able to produce a poet of the stature of a Nissim Ezekiel or even a Dom Moraes.
But prose it has continued to produce in plenty. One may challenge the Calcuttan-ness of an Amitav Ghosh or Amit Chaudhuri, who were born here, or Jhumpa Lahiri, who returned to her parental roots to be married here, or even an Upamanyu Chatterjee, but the fact is that if you are a Bengali, either first generation or second, culturally you will always have an umbilical connection to Calcutta. It is not for nothing that Amit Chaudhuri returned to come and live here. There is something about roots. And sometimes it is so deep, and so complex that it is difficult to explain rationally. The Calcutta chromosomes survive in devious ways. A very patriotic Bengali friend of mine put it rather ironically, when he said that the best Bangla novel this year has been written in English. He was referring to Amitav Ghosh’s latest book – The Hungry Tide.
The English language chromosomes seem to have survived through a significantly long period of time, from their first appearance in the 19th century right into the 21st. It might seem a little dated now, but the novels of Bhabani Bhattacharya in mid-20th century had their own quaintness and subtle impact that may have lost its edge today, but certainly not their validity, as a statement of the times in which they came to be written. I am sure that I am leaving out many names, perhaps too many, of writers in the English language who have been linked to our city and have made their contribution. But I am neither a historian, nor a critic, but a lover of both literature and our city.
Again and again, the spirit of our city surfaces in the most unexpected and startling ways, especially in literature. How else do you explain the emergence in Calcutta of the semi-successful writer Jayojit, the protagonist of Amit Chaudhuri’s A New World, who returns from the American Mid-West with a broken marriage and a young son in tow, to revel in the “tranquility of watery lentil daal in a chinaware bowl and paabda fish in mustard”. How else do you account for the beginning of Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake, where a pregnant and perpetually hungry, Bengali woman desperately tries to rustle up some jhaal muri in her New York apartment? And if jhaal muri isn’t all about Calcutta, what else is?
Whether you are a second generation Non-Resident Bengali like Jhumpa Lahiri, or brought up in Mumbai like Amit Chaudhuri, if you are a creative artist who is concerned about roots and identity, it is impossible that you will be able to escape the frame of reference that Calcutta continues to provide to all those who are historically linked to it. This certainly is not only about being a Bengali, because the same predilections seem to haunt the visual imagery of a Wasim Kapur, or the Hindi writing of a Mannu Bhandari or Alka Saraogi.
The acceptance of English as an Indian language; the recognition of its Indian practitioners throughout the English-speaking world; and the resonances of this body of writing with what I choose to call The Calcutta Experience; all are post-colonial and post-Partition.
We are therefore confronted here not with a nostalgic connection between the city and the English language spawned by the Raj, but with a comparatively new experience translating itself through new artistic expression. We are being presented here with a wider, larger vista than contemporary Bangla literature, which is still caught up in its own middle-class vortex, but which is inextricably entangled with our city. The Calcutta Chromosomes seem to be growing everyday, in unpredictable directions, and one feels confident that evolution will see its emergence into a considerable cultural context, to which we will all be proud to belong.
http://www.telegraphindia.com/1050604/asp/calcutta/story_4824660.asp
Eye on Calcutta
Renu Roy
A creative artist concerned about roots and identity cannot escape the frame of reference that the city continues to be
It cannot be entirely an accident that two of our greatest living writers of the English language were born in this city. Amitav Ghosh in 1956, and Amit Chaudhuri in 1962. The dates are important because they clearly indicate that the cultural context I am referring to is firmly post-colonial, yet probably it does refer to the Raj, in a deeper and more significant way.
Calcutta was, after all, the first city to be built from scratch by the British outside Britain. It also hosted their first university overseas, their first medical college, and even their first civilian engineering college, that is outside the army. That the English language, and its literature, has a history of connections with our city is only natural, and historically inevitable.
How else do you encounter the plaque on Free School Street that tells you that William Makepeace Thackeray lived here once? How else do you account for the fact that our Park Street cemetery bears an epitaph written by the English poet Walter Savage Landor, in memory of the woman he loved? Rose Aylmer belongs as much to Calcutta as to English poetry. However much you may wish to shake them off, the ghosts of the Raj continue to haunt us to degree that we have almost got used to it. some of us, I know, would feel downright neglected and lonely without those colonial visitations.
Our city has certainly shared more than its fair share of glory and greatness through its literary citizens, so much so that the history of Bengali literature cannot be written without Calcutta in view. But the English language too has a rightful claim to its own piece of turf on the east bank of the Hooghly. This becomes all the more apparent when we remember that the first great Bangla poet to emerge in our city wrote first in English. If any one had changed the course of the history of Bengali literature it was Michael Madhusudhan Dutt, especially in his monumental and modern rewriting of the Ramayana narrative from the point of view of Ravana.
It is interesting to remember that Michael’s first published poetical work was in English. Entitled The Captive Lady it told the romantic Rajput tale of the love and valour of Pritviraj Chauhan. Michael’s departure from the English language and his return to his mother tongue has of course, achieved the status of one of the great legends of cultural nationalism, but the poet’s original choice cannot be forgotten. It certainly indicates how deeply English had been part of our city and its culture.
Michael was not an exception. The other Dattas must also be remembered. The Datta sisters — Aru and Toru — also wrote verse in English and won accolades from discerning readers even in the England of their days. In their painfully short lives, truncated cruelly by death, they left behind an immense possibility for Indian writers of English verse. And all this was at a time when the literati refused to accept English as an Indian language. Its acceptance, in fact, has come much after Independence, when colonialism has long ceased to cast its shadow on our cultural context.
Unfortunately, verse in English never won kudos for Calcutta after the 19th century. Despite the countless volumes published by the Writer’s Workshop, and the painstaking efforts of P Lal, Calcutta has not been able to produce a poet of the stature of a Nissim Ezekiel or even a Dom Moraes.
But prose it has continued to produce in plenty. One may challenge the Calcuttan-ness of an Amitav Ghosh or Amit Chaudhuri, who were born here, or Jhumpa Lahiri, who returned to her parental roots to be married here, or even an Upamanyu Chatterjee, but the fact is that if you are a Bengali, either first generation or second, culturally you will always have an umbilical connection to Calcutta. It is not for nothing that Amit Chaudhuri returned to come and live here. There is something about roots. And sometimes it is so deep, and so complex that it is difficult to explain rationally. The Calcutta chromosomes survive in devious ways. A very patriotic Bengali friend of mine put it rather ironically, when he said that the best Bangla novel this year has been written in English. He was referring to Amitav Ghosh’s latest book – The Hungry Tide.
The English language chromosomes seem to have survived through a significantly long period of time, from their first appearance in the 19th century right into the 21st. It might seem a little dated now, but the novels of Bhabani Bhattacharya in mid-20th century had their own quaintness and subtle impact that may have lost its edge today, but certainly not their validity, as a statement of the times in which they came to be written. I am sure that I am leaving out many names, perhaps too many, of writers in the English language who have been linked to our city and have made their contribution. But I am neither a historian, nor a critic, but a lover of both literature and our city.
Again and again, the spirit of our city surfaces in the most unexpected and startling ways, especially in literature. How else do you explain the emergence in Calcutta of the semi-successful writer Jayojit, the protagonist of Amit Chaudhuri’s A New World, who returns from the American Mid-West with a broken marriage and a young son in tow, to revel in the “tranquility of watery lentil daal in a chinaware bowl and paabda fish in mustard”. How else do you account for the beginning of Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake, where a pregnant and perpetually hungry, Bengali woman desperately tries to rustle up some jhaal muri in her New York apartment? And if jhaal muri isn’t all about Calcutta, what else is?
Whether you are a second generation Non-Resident Bengali like Jhumpa Lahiri, or brought up in Mumbai like Amit Chaudhuri, if you are a creative artist who is concerned about roots and identity, it is impossible that you will be able to escape the frame of reference that Calcutta continues to provide to all those who are historically linked to it. This certainly is not only about being a Bengali, because the same predilections seem to haunt the visual imagery of a Wasim Kapur, or the Hindi writing of a Mannu Bhandari or Alka Saraogi.
The acceptance of English as an Indian language; the recognition of its Indian practitioners throughout the English-speaking world; and the resonances of this body of writing with what I choose to call The Calcutta Experience; all are post-colonial and post-Partition.
We are therefore confronted here not with a nostalgic connection between the city and the English language spawned by the Raj, but with a comparatively new experience translating itself through new artistic expression. We are being presented here with a wider, larger vista than contemporary Bangla literature, which is still caught up in its own middle-class vortex, but which is inextricably entangled with our city. The Calcutta Chromosomes seem to be growing everyday, in unpredictable directions, and one feels confident that evolution will see its emergence into a considerable cultural context, to which we will all be proud to belong.
http://www.telegraphindia.com/1050604/asp/calcutta/story_4824660.asp
posted by bitandpieces at 11:28 AM
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