Bhalobashar Kobita O Kobitar Bhalobasha

মিষ্ট মধুরিমা,

নলবন্দী ঐ, অঙ্গুরিয়

ঝমঝমা বাজে। কথানল। দুষ্ট চড়ুইভাতি,

সুধানুই তিন আঙুল

উঠানে তুষ্ট,  টানটান চৌচুপী

কারণ, এমনই বাঘ,

রসিক কাঠামোতে

মন বলে।

 

গোধূলির আলো মেখে আকাবাঁকা চলে মধুরিমা

গোলাপ ধন্য হয়।

...

সে মানুষ মুছে নিবারণ

সাবধানী শান সহ কোলাহল

টর্চ সহ পাঁচ সেল, আরো পাঁচ কায়া তরুবর

ধুর্জটি, সভা হও

সবাকার পাখ মেলে নিরাময়

ঘনোদুদ অনুকুল ক্ষীর।

সে মানুষ অজান্তে গ্যাছে দোলমঞ্চে

যেখানে কুড়োতে নিবারণ, আঁখি ম্যালো, সুন্দর সু-প্রভাত।

...

হত্তুকী বনে

গোপন কোনে

বিষাদপুচ্ছ তিমিরবরণ

হাত রেখেছি

নাম রেখেছি

সব করেছি

শঙ্খ বাজাও

পিছে ধাই

কাহারবা কাহারবা বাদ্যে ঝিলমিল

বালুচর বেশে জটা দরবেশ হাওয়া।

...

 

 

ভালোবাসার মহান গন্ধে ধুপ জ্বলে, মাছি বসে

কানাচে ঐ সানসেট

শিখরে সমুদ্র নিয়ে যায়,

শিখরে নীলচাঁদ-লালচাঁদ নিয়ে যায়

গদের আঠায় বসেছি

নির্গ্রন্থ বসেছি, সাইকেল ধেবে চলে চলাচল

পৃথিবীর ঘন জ্যোৎস্নায়

বনে বসে পরী

নাবিকের মিতালোক আবডালে,

পাবে,

হেমকান্তি পাবে, হারানিধি

কাঁদে ভেঁপু দুখময় মিহিলিপি চুষে

মধুরিমা হেঁটে গ্যাছে কৌম কাগজ পুড়িয়ে

ভালোবাসার মহান গন্ধে ফিরে আসে বীতশোক, ফেরে মাছি।

 

...

 

এসো আমরা সরল হচ্ছি ভালোবাসার মতো

বিমল বনে গুচ্ছগাছা ফুল ফুটেছে কত

চাঁদের বুকে চরকাবুড়ি অ্যাক্লা থাকে ঐ

বনের টিয়ে মনের ভিতর মনের টিয়ে কৈ

এসো আমরা ফ্যান গেলেছি দুইমুখে নি ঠোঁটে

ভালোবাসার বোতামজামা পদ্মপুকুর ফোটে।

...

বুলবুলি এলো ঐ বিনুনী উঠানে

কলের কাঁঠালভাল নাগর বিধানে

কিশোরীর কাকলিতে ইস্কুলভার

প্রশ্ন তো অ্যাক্টাই, পিস্তল কার?

 

...

কান্তমনি খান্ত হলে বন্যাজলে দীঘল দিদি দাঁড়িয়ে আছে দাঁড়িয়ে আছে রৌশনারা

শহরে নতুন পুলিসম্যান, উনিশ ডাকের কাছে, জমাই খরচ

নুইয়ে দিলো নদীসার দিনরাত

নুইয়ে দিলো সাইক্লিক কেল্লাফতে

লুৎপুৎ কলিজার স্বস্বর বাগে

মৃগনাভি, তিরামিসু, সুঠাম গালিচা

তাহাদের করে রাখে নিস্প্রভ

হরিণী যেতে বিবর্ণ

বাজে কুসুম

যেতে সর্ষেক্ষেত

কোজাগরী জরিবুটি মাধ্যমে মসৃণ মাংসভাত

প্রফেসি-সায়রে পৃথিবীর অন্তিম ভালোবাসা

ঙ-নৌকার ফুরফুরা মাঝি ঐ রক্তরক্ত ডালিম ভালোবাসা

 

 

তথাপথে থতমত শেষ সপ্তাহ ছুটোছুটি আংরাখা

অতএব আধারের আয়তনে

সরলমায়া দ্বিবিন্দুপথ ও হলুদ স্কুটার

...

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

On the Curse of Public Taste

 

One century ago Vladimir Mayakovsky had written ‘A Slap in the Face of Public Taste’ when he was fourteen, and like all fourteen year olds, he was spot on. For me, the biggest menace haunting the world since civilization began is public taste which is often called hegemony by intellectuals and pseudollectuals alike.

Things worsened since the French Revolution. First came democracy which was all about people and then came the mass-market which was all about consumers and their choices. “Individualism”, a catchy term, was coined. Catchy terms get coined when there is a need to put something in a box. So they put the individual in a box and fastened the lids so tight that the individual was doomed forever, or  at least till sometime in the future so distant and hazy that no great prophesy has yet reached there. Prophesies which aimed at looking so far in the future,  their own fallacies, such as the one Mayakovsky had chosen to adhere to, got trapped in their own fallacies – arising out of the frailties of human logic and rationale,  determined by the needs of civilization.

The scheme did not just stop there. They built other boxes, such as ‘lunacy’ and ‘spectacle’ and placed them in such a way that if an individual gets out of the former box, s/he will inevitably end up in one or many of the other ones.

A lot of things were done to appease the gods who drag the cart of public taste. It was even acknowledged that public tastes change with time. Thus came the idea of fashion and the need to adhere to the ongoing tastes of fashion, backed by the threat of being shunned or ignored or derided if someone chooses not to.

Again, there was a rule that one must not hurt another one. Public taste chiseled this rule into its latest avatar – one must not hurt another even if the other is, metaphorically, like that princess from a Bengali fairy tale whose skin got burned in moonlight. This new rule was first named ‘politeness’ and then, ‘political correctness’. Thus, everyone lost the right to offend anyone irrespective of how overtly sensitive or delicate the other one is. This rule made expressions delicate because anyone expressing would be weary of the other.

Now, if everyone is scared of the other, there would be no unity and without unity there would be no public taste. Public taste is needed because consensus is needed to rule the society. To ensure unity, they targeted learning. We had to learn that united, we stand. We also had to learn that being happy is essential to live and hence we should make ourselves and others happy. Then we were taught of the things we need to do to ensure this happiness. All these teaching and learning were governed by public taste which runs our schools and fuels our cars.

Again, stuffs that determine public taste were determined. Definitions were put forth, mostly by the rule of majority.  A system of reward and punishment was developed – one was to be rewarded by certain signifiers of power if one worships public taste and adheres to the norms for long enough, and there were prisons, madhouses, flophouses and other asylums for those who went against public taste. But the worst treatment, in the form of absolute silence and non-acknowledgement of existence, was reserved for those who did not care either about conforming or about not-confirming.

People who unconsciously use their superconscious – poets and artists, philosophers, prophets and fools – are the worst affected. There are lots of norms to adhere to, the worst one being that they have to please everyone, or at least almost everyone, and cannot offend anyone. (Of course, there are some boxes which have been labeled as ‘bad’ by the majority and the ones which have been labeled thus can be kicked and punched, but that is another story of power and history).

Certain strong watchdogs have been put in place to make the scheme foolproof. Two such watchdogs, which are very prominent and verily there today are state and the media. Their blessing has become essential and they bestow their blessings to those who adhere to public taste. Their curse is reserved for those who don’t, be it because of not wanting or because of not caring.    

The third watchdog has two faces – one face is called money and the other on is called utility. It’s pretty cool to Karl Marx for being too impractical and everyone does it because it’s pretty cool, but the fact remains that he was spot on when he said that money is the root of everything. Well, he didn’t exactly say that but whatever he said was somewhat similar. Without money, we can’t do many things we need to do to live. And money is directly linked to utility – a tangible quality. If you can’t produce anything having tangible impact, you don’t get money. Marxists refer to this thing as the production process.

Introduce public taste in this scheme and the diabolicity becomes daylight. Those yielders of the superconscious, the poets and the philosophers, hardly produce anything of tangible impact. Ergo, unless they sign a deal with other watchdogs such as the state and the media, they won’t get blessings from this third one. Ergo, without signing such self-depreciating deals, they don’t get to live (leaving aside those who get lucky in other ways, such as winning a lottery or inheriting a fortune). Of course, in certain political situations they can escape these watchdogs, only to be hounded by the others. For example, in countries struggling for self-determination, they have to bow either to the forces of nationalism or to those of imperialism and produce materials which would beat least of some use to either of the two or more sides in the stake.

Public taste does not acknowledge the existence of things which are of no or very little use to a large section of the public. And everyone, countries and big corporations included, have no option but to bow to the public – the voters and the consumers. Type the word “superconscious” in a MS Word Document and the red line that appears below it will make Microsoft Corporation’s submission to it pretty much clear.

If we get to know that an individual who is deaf and dumb and blind and has no hands and feet is ordered to climb Mount Everest and is denied the choice of refusal to abide by the order, we will surely get shocked. However, when we find poets and prophets and artists either starving to death or being compelled to be bound to eternal servitude to the watchdogs of public taste, we don’t get that shocked. This is because we have been taught to be selective in our shock-reception, and this teaching has also been a part of the whole big scheme that is determined by public taste.   

 

Now this can go on and on but it’s cloudy outside. Public taste taught me to draw conclusions so I will now draw conclusion. Here we go:

Public Taste demands more than a damn. It demands everything.  It is merciless towards those who ignore or insult it. It has been the biggest tyrant ever. And any way of getting rid of it has not yet been envisaged.            

       

vitamin and silver for our fetishists

Then, moving up the last flight of stairs, the way prophets and fools want to reach the stars, X, a blot, mostly durable, faces the idol, stares, one foot raised, face lugging, heaving towards monstrosity. X holds history of space and history of form. The idol, beyond every bridges and islands. Cold breeze from fogfucked shores.  

Crack.

5 hoots

Cactus-leaved

 

 House by the River.

everyone sat, down, to eat.

…

 

Xylem -phloem through tree of head

Cosmic tree outside

Also,

Cat inside stares at cat outside

Cat outside stares at cat inside

 

The numbered other

O my stamped friends

Killer Monday comes

Me tied to tracks

Beaten, beating

Beautiful world, kill-hoop of dreams

The last sound of time and destiny and creation

Runs towards

New month

New light of mind is green, attributed

Break more, hold branches,

Smooth, flowerlove

There, another tree

Cold ancient friends from first forest of world

Gathers around spine of fires

Of Universal stay

To eat fingers and bones.

of rust.

…

 

O God. Dimmed,

Eggs. Remember, nostalgia

Human X, sweaty, wants to catch

 cold swan

from river.

The river is old.

Break actual nature of swan

Feast in duck-meat. Fires lit by fingerslit canopy.

In love with soft sounds of cooking,

Meat

We return to our old kitchens

Loving you, I did. Dot of light approaches

Keep count of sunsets.

Do you remember me, nostalgia?

 

…

 

No one in birthshadowed solitude

Other shadows are outside

Tigerlit dawn through fires, tiger-shadows on walls of world.

I lay down my sword

I kneel

I weep.

Run to the pieces

This me. How to return without you? Flames, leap,

from fields.

Sounds in the wind.

…

 

Beautiful, once, this life, you know I run. kill it. gouge eyes. slit wrists.

I move up

I move down

your solitude, love, loving,

we awake darkness, sounds through silence,

our sounds of love move world of cars and doors, cupboards fill

slaughterhouses fill.  

O my mauve soldiers of sunlight

bright kids,

bend to hooks of sunlight.

beautiful rice and love.

there’s no light here. we become reptiles, we crawl towards us

whatever was inside.

cat being,

night. and again and again

we wake up to sounds of rice and love. they punch all tickets. they move along endless rhymes of the city. whoever comes, beautiful, and looks at your eyes, never leaves.

 

…

 

dense light. life-faced smell comes back, to grasses and heaving flesh, return

to Rubicon,

look, fireball, wooden singers are free,

Minerva motorcycles stunned behind minarets, some say, blood goes

armies swarm to beaches of life

marks that become words, signs and vendetta

kick the molasses away. kick them strong and sharp

keep your glasses on, keep reaping and sowing, copper-dreamed boiling

of blood and muck,

kerosene and political.

Tathagata, our children

seeds asleep

Marquis Retina,

you’re nothing other than this. New youth ahoy, seeds of light on wick. Seeds of life on love, death and immortality.

And then, failing to awake dreams and imagination,

whole dives deep. arrange the moments of death and dying. make the corpses strike. art was born.

rabbit runs along strip between here, now and there, then.

 …

 

these won’t shout

first, I’ll speak of a situation

huge moon rises  

name of house – mother-capitulation.

…

 

in the land of futility

protein hormone and oxygen

milked cows and free-fall. in the land of faded glimpses, sailorman eat gaps between lacksymbol lactomama. Horny beasts in moonlit shores,

shooting past chromosome of heads

then, blast and overture

of flags in the in-between land

where few dared to venture

moving through dulcet proofs, notmoving through riversleep,

goldface February footprint.

   

…

 

glassmooth hats in mirror – clearly, another forest, charmed here, I knew

knowing. sheep and shepherds glide down this road. touchbodied mayhem in portico,

that valley. springday stuck to window like head. distance between two moving points.

distance between teeth and nipple.

Silkworm of warm, soft music – fond folds of senses; velvet shoulders;

Thus, become mind.

 

…  

 

long sun comes out

between finger

bumper to bumper one turnip, two. these leaves,

forgetting and bereavement.

tantalize wrists, doors won’t open

flotilla departed harbor full scrape patterns: a fading of hiptage

ages. urge. this pull, these roots. point them out. thrash them to mound of flesh and love:

pure and absolute,

kung-fu cup! earthen plates fight for god. your dome is full. your eyes shine.  

 

…

 blue fly of comely red lodge.

here we go. hemorrhaged, hedgefunded,

mutually exclusive,

until one day, every day was Tuesday.

mango-cart rolled downcliff

between eyes and fingers – sleek, slutty slopes – evolution of neuron and history.

…

 

reptiles fly

the sky is high

first caveman’s mother-complex tattooed on  prickly walls. in this garden of colours,

in case I lose my compass

give me winter of salt

o blood. o periscope.

 

…  

 

vomit violent love

throb before doors get shut

- our castle of meatsome fear

                versus,

- our gloomworn seeds, aglow

I invented boredom

I discovered masturbation

I discovered suicide

I won’t act unless I am the hero.

I am the lovemachine of zero.

sparrows on the green boat

dead boatman bled blood

and I thought the river and the river was.

sparrows flew away, sunbound,

searching for the source of this that makes these stick on.

 

…

 

manuscript of silver, with trident,

harmony

much spoken, adroit in limbo, find, leaving nebula, strictures of starlight, neobulb,

bitsy birds on cozy nest. maroon geometry sings all along nightroad erosion,

enter the wheels, patterned to crafts of fruit.

nocturn apple – in three syllables of fingertip, softer than the reeds and chords of what lies hidden

behind cracks and trumpets – dead cigarettes on the floor, edges of sonorous relief, many wisdom of wordwombed stretch. Gnash, hungry, bees of fire and cessation. music in the streets: magician left lay: new radiant alloy: enchantment.

 

…   

 

Supernova in lieu of murder

count cherry blossom

cosmetic plankton in big market

wipe pathos off forehead

sweet awaking blue notes tones cut to calculation

counterfoil, production of telephones

boiled difference, tolling,

gates close before singsong moonlove starlove

saffron talkies, comes, cosmetic

between legs,

sunlight and shame, pubic balderdash

emperor breaks

beatboxed rain on gramophone

diorama on steeplechase landfill

lorries loiter secret cumulonimbus,

downhill, chimneys from rainwind door

jammed woodbine for flutter and floss,

roasted

a pinch.

look across calm light. new life of dead and hidden in water and soil.  

…

 

drenched, copper-nailed,

inside larynx that aim at galaxies inside waterfalls father and son swiped Jupiter,

seven-choired coil, city of trees and gun, one or two dots of glowing dark, specs in subliminal recoil, decoy and subterfuge, lightning-pained scape; chromestage annihilation, mascara and desires. may my shadow stick to your asscheek forever. one lunge - storyteller needed for downtown cascade. blue wine in eyes, roofshaked three bronze-brazen hours, head breaks through head of sky, daylight and hunger of splendid-pain lightning, wolfteeth, creamtittied daughters, of decay, unleash static death of moments. take me to mahogany chorus, blurred captions and borders - seminal, fluid –

first conception of crime,

new compilation

bandits of lotus I hear your eggs screaming from frying pan, my belly on your locomotive, birds progress with trolleys of cold fire, one unit, lilac – that door, darkness, go! next, frenzy

waves tic caterpillar,

nostril-column calamity, tell, waterbreath deathbreath –

sulfur-sheriff!  

again, flip through seesaw mammoth pages  

sloth gulping of bulb-ballerina.  

 

a book of dew.   

  

…

dementia, I want to sleep once again. this sunshine.

round fleshy fruits, seedless, like little balls of poetry

stare, get ready for the next round of blunt thrashing,

morning groans at kneebone, formation of antennae and antecedence

from river of women and other lies, you know,

annexure, running through mangomania turbine hinterlands, she plucked cherries for sepia frames of gumboots and overcoat, paracetamol and stoic ammonia, wearing alkali tunic with brave spots, paraffin jostling with mirages, regular like tyrants clerks and grandfather clocks. little magic-rats scamper out of her moon and nibble at the frame, leaving teethmarks on certain hidden flags and sails that move boatworld to cascade canvas, join killer-dots that scream so sharp that roof of world shatters within her phantom-eyes of dusk and penumbra.   

thus, her nursery of dreams.

today will be a lucky day.

 

…

 

saw you, pendulum-rolled, hey.

pegged with concrete and reflection,

you fell

- ad nauseum –

 a bit,

and froze.

 

…  

On the Necessity to Subvert

This came out in the blog On the Plum Tree run by Dr. Niamh Clune. The chief inspiration behind this comes from an anti-intellectual school of post-colonial literary thought that emerged in Calcutta in the late 90s. The school, propounded by a group of scholars referred to as the Margin Theorists, were harshly repressed by the mainstream intelligentsia because it went against their establishment and was detrimental to the "Culture Industry" (a coinage of Adorno & Horkheimer of the famed Frankfurt School) of Bengal. An article in which the Margin Theorists, prominent among them being Ajit Choudhury, Dipankar Das and Tridib Sengupta, expound their thoughts, can be found here


The original piece which I had written was a tad bigger in length than the version that came out in the blog. It is as follows:

 

 

On the Necessity to Subvert

 

A Tale of Two Knights

Let’s start from a single point and its apparent positive and apparent negative.

The Point – A vast majority of people who write want their writings to be read by many people and Internet, especially Facebook, satisfies this urge to reach out.

The Apparent Positive – The easy flow and ready availability of poetry and poetic expressions: there’s no monstrous publishing house with its clouts, touts, pimps, agents and other sharks standing in the way, minimal censorship hassles, no need to put any extra effort or spend any extra money for publicity, marketing and pitch.

The Apparent Negative – There’s nothing stopping poetry we find lousy from hitting us. Bad poetry, as the consensus goes, is worse than bad whiskey.

 

 The above is an instance of underdetermination – the banner which social networking, as the new white-knight of globalization, upholds. Have we not united under that very banner? The purpose, as skeptics of the world would agree, is to dissipate and dilute the clamour for more – because ‘more’ is still the exclusive jurisdiction of the dark knight – power, with its several tentacles such as money, connections and other blahs. 

Simply speaking, you don’t have enough money or power to approach a literary agent of a big publishing house, to spend for publishing and publicity, you don’t have enough money or power to lobby at the corridors of the award-givers, so you are pissed, and there are many like you who are similarly pissed. And then the Gods said, “Let there be Social Networks!” Now, you are happy because you can make your work read by a lot of people, and the big brothers of publishing are happy because you are not mad at them anymore.

What? Are you asking for more? Good, there is self-publishing! Spend a lump and here we go. Now, now, are you asking for even more?  Hmm, now you are entering a rarified zone. You need to spend a bigger lump this time, but it’s not just about money. You have dared to enter the territory of the dark knight. Absolute obedience is necessary. What happens to our hero after this will be determined by so many factors that if I dare to spell them out, I will be accused of giving flowers to the corpse of the demon essentialism, whom, as I have been told, our great hero and saviour whom we lovingly call postmodernism, had slain.

These two knights serve their master who currently goes by the name ‘globalization’ and who rules over the castles our socially conditioned existence. One such castle was christened as the ‘culture industry’ by a couple of scholars in 1944[1].      

   

Language of the Globalizer, Language of the Globalized

The language of the globalizer is one which would not lead to a red underline when you type it over on any virtual counterpart of pen and paper without installing/activating any language-pack. The script of the globalizer is one which can be typed on any of these virtual counterparts without installing or activating any script pack. Whatever you express through waves and particles needs to be comprehended by the globalizer – who has fed and clothed our cognition, enabled us to open our windows (not sure whether pun unintended or not), given us our bridges and platforms. Making “at least some sense” has been the first criteria of reaching out, ever since cavepeople learned to convert their grunts to speeches. Given that we have learned to give the devil his due, and we have learned about justice equity and good conscwhatever, we don’t have any “reason” at our disposal to rebel against the need for passwords to cross the bridges. (Of course, unreason lurks, repressed as symptom[2], in the deep folds of our carefully cultivated reason; however, unlike our reason, it (unreason) sees no daylight of our conscious mind, which, thus, sees no reason to rebel against the taught need for passwords and other rules of the game.) If you need to play the game, you have to play by the rules as shaped by history. The picture is clear up to this point. After that, the waters start getting murky.

 

Of Masterpiece and Masterpisses

We turn to the twentieth century Greats, especially to Saussure and Barthes, to learn that one need not learn great things and get great literary aspirations only from the greats. Here we are stuck in a loop with another late twentieth century Great. Lyotard has given us the ‘differend’ which implies confrontations pertaining to language in which the ends are left open.

He uses the example of a masterpiece in explaining the concept of ‘differend’:

A writer has written a masterpiece. No editor agrees to publish it. Now, how can she prove that it is a masterpiece? We want to extend the question into the zone of the future that is coming but is still unknown. How the writer can sustain as a writer — who knows that she is writing masterpieces and it is the very knowledge that confines her to a solitary cell — no one else is there who knows it too, because the works just do not get published? Her masterpieces do not get known as masterpieces due to the very quality of being masterpieces[3][4]. Let’s keep post-structuralism and Saussure out of the discourse and just stretch this illustration. The writer uploads it on her Facebook profile as a note and on her blog, tags a hundred people on each, copy-pastes the link on all the free platforms available on Internet, including on the Facebook profiles of ten thousand people. It’s not “published” in the traditional sense, but it’s on the public pool, as a free resource. It goes ‘viral’. Thus, it becomes a masterpiece. In this way the Internet, apparently, resolves this particular conflict and it does not remain a differend. Of course, it’s not a free lunch. She has to be in a social-economic-cultural-educational position to have access to the internet, have enough means to pay her internet bills, throw open her Facebook profile for advertisers to infiltrate (how often have you been pissed/ not-pissed at the thumbsized picture of Oscar Wilde with the caption: “Learn to write like the greats. Click to learn more” at the right-hand column of your Facebook profile”?)and make a lot of virtual friends,  socialize with a lot of people on the virtual sphere so that they don’t get pissed or remain indifferent to  her masterpiece. Thus, any scope of her choice of reclusion and/or poverty gets nullified because she wants to make her masterpiece a masterpiece but she hasn’t got enough money or power or contacts to do so. It is this very want that both the white and the dark knight of globalization seek to safeguard and strengthen and this very choice that they seek to deny. It’s a win-win situation for globalization. It’s not a contract between her and globalization but a submission – to the lord and master of the castle named Culture Industry – on her part, one which she has no choice but to make, because she wants to. Her masterpiece won’t be a masterpiece otherwise. Thus, what we see here is not a negation of a differend. Lyotard still gets his last laugh[5] and we are still at square one. We are not back to it because we were always there.     

 

Civilizing Me: Hegemony[6] and the Melodrama Behind Writing[7] (in case you care)

 

Calcutta got the enlightenment-pump in the 19th century when it became the capital city of what was then the biggest British colony in terms of population, geographical expanse and the wealth it generated for the British Empire. There’s no documented ethnocultural history from the pre-colonial era of the geographical locus of this place. Calcutta, just like Bombay, was established and developed as a city by the colonizers keeping their colonial needs in mind.  The “Western” perspective, i.e., the perspective of the dominator tells us that Mapping, Documentation and Profiling of culturally identifiable units is necessary. Moreover, the perceived dominant position which those culturally identifiable units that had subjected themselves to such Mapping, Documentation and Profiling for a long span of time hold in the power-play of history has led to a definite inferiority-complex in those ethno-cultural units which have not subjected themselves to similar Mapping, Documentation and Profiling for such a long span of time and are hence are being dominated by those units which had undergone such  Mapping, Documentation and Profiling. This complex is reflected in the way such groups trace and approach their own cultural indentifier-roots. But this inferiority complex causes discomfort to and leads to discomfiture of the ego of the dominated and hence it is only natural that the dominated will try to appease its ego by embracing the perspective and perception of the dominated.  Thus, it is not surprising that the intelligentsia of Bengal has learned to approach its Bengali identity as a group in a “Western” way, i.e., by mimicking the dominators – be it the colonizers or the globalizers. The essay I had referred to in footnotes 3 & 4 terms it as ‘mimicry of overdetermination’. This mimicry can be seen in every discourse the intelligentsia partakes, self-styled avant-garde art and literary being no exception. For example, because of the fact that this city has been a major platform for several artistic and intellectual ventures on the 20^th century, a significant chunk of the cultural-elites over here had started terming Calcutta as the Paris of the East. Another example would be the fact that those prominent personalities like Tagore & Ray who had received acclaim from the West got easier access to the culture capital of the ‘Culture Industry’. Thus, when Satyajit Ray went to Cannes in the 1950s, it became a milestone in the cultural scenario of Calcutta, but it certainly did not become so in the cultural scenario of France or Italy when the Renoir, Malle, Antonioni or many other Western cinema-personalities who dealt with the New Wave or Neo-Realism genres of Cinema made multiple visits to the city to meet him and get a hang of the Parallel-Cinema cult of India.    

 

Allow me to state where and how I stand. Bengali is my ‘native’ language. I read and write both in Bengali and Engli$h. I think and speak using Bengali. My grandpa and six generations before him were colonized, my father was nationalized, I have been globalized. Because the West properly entered East through the exact geographical locus I am sitting at right now, these parts have a tragicomic cultural history. For all practical purposes, the city I hail from was established by the colonizing forces. The mission of ‘Civilizing the brutes’ began from this city and its surroundings. The Engli$h language, along with ideas of Enlightenment, was the basic signifier of the dominant discourse, and those who practiced, assimilated and perfected the lessons learned from the West. Then our country got politically independent, a lot of shit happened and a lot of shit has kept on happening, but the dominant discourses have remained the same and the power-structure has remained largely similar. This applies for the cultural front as much as it does for the political and economic front. My grandfather needed to know the Engli$h language to be ‘up there’ and so do I. As for writing, I write using both the languages though I am more comfortable with Bengali because I think in that language and hence I don’t have to translate my thoughts. It’s not that I have to go through/perform a conscious process/activity of mental translation of my thoughts and ideas to write in Engli$h, but it’s still a second language and it will forever be so. Human existence is social and it’s largely owing to conditions of existence that I will be forced to be a relentless player in the dominant discourses and their interplay, whether I continue my literary pursuit or not.

 

 

As for globalization, it has strengthened the fortifications of the roughly three hundred years old world order. There’s this saying that the local is the new global and there’s also a term ‘glocalization’ floating around these days, but these are the things we are given to bullshit ourselves with. Of course, it terms of hegemony, cultural[8] or otherwise, it’s still binary, it may not be 0 and 1, but it’s around ¼ and ¾, but the 1 had to concede the ¼ to the 0 for self-preservation but that doesn’t really make it non-binary. Does it? It might or might not become ½ and ½ in future and then the power-structure may or may not start shifting, but that’s none of my business.

 

 

            

Macaulay’s Bastard

 

Though I write using the colonizer’s language at times, I would like to assert that I am not Aerial and that language is not Prospero. At the same time, because I have not acquired the Western ‘cultural’ heritage by easy birthright, I have not inherited it. When my voice, as a writer, is to be heard (read) on a global/Western stage and context, I can ill afford to be the bastard child of Macaulay. But, am I not exactly that? Therein lies the dichotomy, a mad pull of opposites, and a source of perplexing insecurity and conflict. Have I inherited the cross/crosses I bear? What cross/crosses do I bear? What have I inherited? These questions can never have clear-cut answers and if I attempt at finding same, I would once again be deemed guilty of worshipping the demon of essentialism.

 

I do not want my writing to fall into the void which I have explained while dealing with the writer who had written her unpublished masterpiece. At times I feel like I have been pushed to the edge of the cliff beyond which lies that scary realm of silence. The fightback begins from this very point. I represent myself and my own voice. The enemies are represented by the dark and the white knights, their great master who currently goes by the name ‘globalization’. (the master had a different name and a different face in the past and so had the knights, the master will have a different name and a different face in future and so will the knights). I have no desire to fan up or the flames of the sort of want which the author of the unpublished manuscript has, and I don’t want the great master whom the dark and the white knights serve to determine my wants and deny my choices. That master is big and strong and so are the two knights. The sole weapon in my arsenal is to subvert. Given that my want is to not let my voice fall into the void of being unheard, I have to fight them back and move away from the cliff-edges. That’s my first lack of choice. Again, given that the opposition is the dominator and I am the dominated in this text, my choicelessness also lies in the very fact that I have no option but to subvert. Being Macaulay’s bastard child and being a dominated globalization has indeed killed my choices. Just that my wants are not the sort that can be fulfilled by either my bastardom or my oppressedness.      

In short, I want to be a dominant part of the discourse through my written text. For that I need access to platforms wherefrom I can reach out to the originators and recipients of the existing dominant voices. The current spread and outlay of force and domination stands against such access. I can’t indulge in full frontal fight against the current voices of dominance, including that of the Culture Industry. Hence, there is this need to subvert.

 

Despite the predominance of those who indulge in collaboration and complicity with the agents of force and domination (such as the two knights I have mentioned previously) in the realm of texted voices(/voiced texts?) there are many out here whose aspirations are akin to mine. Let the oppressed writers of the world unite (and subvert). They have nothing to lose but their projected sanity. They have the world to win seats of power to decentralize.    

 

 

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[1]  Adorno & Horkheimer, The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass-Deception, 1944

[2] Per the understanding of Freud-Lacan-Zizek

[3] I have quoted this from here: http://ddts.randomink.org/Engli$h/mom-book/ch_1.html. It’s a part of an insightful treatise on post-colonialism by three Calcutta-based academics. It’s not been widely published or circulated. To me, it is a masterpiece.  

[4] Chaudhury et al, Margin of Margin: Profile of an Unrepentant Post-colonial Collaborator, Anushtup, Calcutta, 2000

[5] My understanding of Lyotard is woefully limited. I have used his concept of the differend simply because the illustration featuring the unpublished masterpiece relates directly to the point/s I seek to make.

[6] I refer to hegemony here as that of the ‘Culture Industry’, following the understanding of Adorno and Horkheimer.

[7] This term and the title of the next chapter are drawn out from the same essay as mentioned in Footnotes 3 & 4 .

[8] Supra 5