CRITICAL AND CREATIVE WINGS Volume 3, Issue 1, March 2016

Editor Tapati Talukdar

Associate Editor Shymasree Basu

Editorial Board Shri Partha Kumar Mukhopadhyay, Former Associate Professor of English, Kidderpore College, Kolkata and a Fellow (U.W.A.) Dr Kalyan Chatterjee, Professor of English (retired), University of Burdwan, West Bengal Dr. G. K. Das, Former Vice - Chancellor, Utkal University and Professor of English (retired), University of Delhi Dr. Bijay Kumar Das, Ph.D., D.Litt (Utkal University), Professor of English, University of Burdwan, West Bengal Professor C. R. Visweswara Rao, Former Vice-Chancellor, Vikram Simhapuri University, Nellore, Andhra Pradesh Shri Shankar Chatterjee, Former Reader in English, University of Kalyani, West Bengal

Publisher Tapati Talukdar, HB 7, Flat No.6, Salt Lake, Kolkata 700106 E-mail: [email protected], Tel: 033 2337 5310

Printer The Artisan 107A, Bepin Behari Ganguly Street Kolkata 700 012 Preface Published/owned by Dr. Tapati Talukdar, HB 7, Flat No.6, Salt Lake, Kolkata At last we are about to pass the manuscript of the fifth issue of our 700106. JournalCritical and Creative Wings for the press. It has taken much longer than we had anticipated as we have initiated peer-reviewing March 2016 from this issue. We have got quite a few new contributors among whom I must mention my teacher Shri Tirthankar Chatterjee, Dr. Dhrupadi Chattopadhyay, Dr. Monirul Islam, Shri Ranjit © Tapati Talukdar Chaudhuri and Ranadurjay Talukdar. Among our regular contributors I must say something about my teacher Professor Kalyan Chatterjee, and Dr. Rudrashis Datta who despite their illness kept their commitment to write for the journal. This issue, like the preceding ones, opens with the article of Professor Kalyan Chatterjee who makes an incisive comparative study of Tagore and Wordsworth, focusing mainly on their treatment of childhood and nature inShishu poems and the Ode on Intimations of Immortality, respectively. He has traced convincingly the powerful influence that Wordsworth appears to The editors are in no way responsible for the views expressed have exerted on Tagore’s poems. All his essays published so far by the authors in their articles included in this volume. have drawn wide applause from all readers. The next article by Dr. Dhrupadi Chattopadhyay is a comprehensive chronological study of the development of Indian writing in English in the nineteenth century. Her well-researched essay studded with multiple references that focuses on how the writers have transcreated spaces in the evolutionary chain is a valuable addition to this issue. The article written by Dr. Rudrashis Datta thoroughly explores Shri Aurobindo Ghose’s long narrative poems which few dare delve into to underscore the narrative art of the poet, particularly his use Volume 3 Issue 1 of startling images. He has also, appropriately, integrated Aurobindo’s philosophy enunciated in the motif of the immortality of the soul into his thought-provoking essay. Dr. Shymasree Basu has chosen to focus on the animal world along with nature in her eco-critical study of Alice Walker’sThe Chicken Chronicle. Her precise and thoughtful article on Walker’s intimate relationship with her chickens and the earth is likely to be appreciated by readers as her essay in the last issue drew applause from many. Dr. Monirul Islam’s comparative in-depth study of Robert Southey and Michael Printed by: Madhusudan Datta in their exploitation of the Ravana myth is also The Artisan a precious addition to this issue. He convincingly discusses the 107A, Bepin Behari Ganguly Street mythic transformations in the context of nineteenth century British Kolkata 700 012 email : [email protected] Price: Rs. 200/- Volume 3 Issue 1 March 2016 Critical and Creative Wings

Orientalism and Colonialism on the one hand, and the inchoate great enthusiasm. Among my teachers whose inspiration has been Nationalism on the other. Ms Sohini Sengupta has investigated the the driving force in this venture mention must be made of Prof. myths of the Stone Woman and Ahalya as revisited by A. S. Byatt Kalyan Chatterjee, Shri Shankar Chatterjee, and Prof. B. K.Das. I and K. B. Sreedevi in their respective short stories. Her feminist consider it a rare honour that Professor Brandon Kershner always reading enriched by multiple mythic references is also well- sends his insightful comments on the articles of our journal. I am researched. Ms Jyotsna Bidave has introduced us to a new area in immensely indebted to Prof. G. K. Das, Prof. C.R.V.Rao, Prof. R. her close reading of Dalit autobiographies of Maharashtra showing W. Desai, and Prof. Prabhat K. Singh for their advice and their gender diversities. She also focuses on features that separate encouragement. I am in regular touch with my teachers Professor women writers’ works from those of their male counterparts. My Kalyan Chatterjee and Shri Shankar Chatterjee who always help contribution aims at paying my humble tribute to Joyce on the me whenever I am in doubt about anything. They are also eager centenary year of his debut novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young readers of the journal and send me their comments on the articles. Man. There are countless studies on this work from myriad Other avid readers of our journal are Shri Tirthankar perspectives. The only area that appears to me to be less explored is Chattopadhyay, Shri Shymapada Pal, Shrimati Pronati Roy, my its interpretation from Bakhtinian perspectives. Whether I have friends Monika Mitter, DiptiAdhikari, andAmit Das, to name but a succeeded or failed in my daunting venture is for the erudite few. My family, my brothers and sisters, and my friends extend not readers of our journal to judge. Among the creative works, only moral support but financial support, too, to us in our venture. Professor Brandon Kershner’s poem deserves special mention as We need to develop a much wider network of readership to make his poem also, like his books on Joyce that explore varying facets of the journal sustainable. The number of readers we could access to is dialogism, bears the stamp of his greatness. I do not want to break too meager so far. Let us hope that the number of subscribers would the spell he or other poets weave by my trite comments. Shri Ranjit increase this time. It is hope that sustains us. Let this optimistic note Chaudhury has translated his own song in Bengali to add a new resonate through my preface to enthuse the contributors and note to the issue. AyanAdak’s poem, like his earlier ones, is likely subscribers who also deserve my heart-felt gratitude. Last but not to be lauded by the readers. Shri Tirthankar Chattopadhyay has least, I owe immensely to my friend Dipti Adhikari and her translated Manik Bandyopadhyay’s Bengali short story “Raghab husband SukamalAdhikari for printing every issue at an affordable Malakar”. He has pertinently pointed out the relevance of the story cost. I thank the staff of The Artisan for their sincere effort and to our present-day reality in his foreword and thus justified its wholehearted cooperation in printing the issue. enduring quality. My son Ranadurjay has woven the spell that Satyajit Ray cast on his mind, initially through his fiction and later We have tried our best to exorcise the articles of grammatical errors through his immortal cinematic renditions. The issue closes with but still if there are any, the sole responsibility lies with me. We the book-review by Dr. Shymasree Basu who has explored the web welcome feedback from our readers. Our e-mail ids are given Vikram Seth creates through his poems. These are only preliminary below: observations as the ultimate judge of any book is the reader. [email protected] [email protected] The issue as it reaches you is the result of concerted efforts of many Shymasree Basu among whom I must mention my friend Shymasree who is a great Tapati Talukdar support for the journal. My new friend Dhrupadi has helped me HB 7 Salt Lake considerably in completing the issue. She reads every issue with Kolkata 700106

Volume 3 Issue 1 March 2016 Volume 3 Issue 1 March 2016 Critical and Creative Wings CONTENTS

Children Playing On the Shore and Intimations of Immortality : Tagore and Wordsworth KALYAN CHATTERJEE 1

'Transcreating' spaces? Modernity and the Early Indian Writing in English DHRUPADI CHATTOPADHYAY 15

The Development of Sri Aurobindo's Narrative Art in Longer Narrative Poems RUDRASHIS DATTA 46

Alice Walker'sThe Chicken Chronicles : Womanism as Life Force SHYMASREE BASU 66

Remaking of the Myth of Ravana in Robert Southey's The Curse of Kehama and Michael Madhusudan Dutta's Magnadbad Kabya MONIRUL ISLAM 78

The Petrified Female Body: Reading Women’s Self- Transformations in A. S. Byatt’s “A Stone Woman” and K. B. Sreedevi’s “Ahalya Later: Woman of Stone” SOHINI SENGUPTA 98

Marathi Dalit Autobiographies: Gendered Diversities JYOTSNA BIDAVE 111

The Protagonist in Joyce'sPortrait : A Bakhtinian Reading TAPATI TALUKDAR 127 Critical and Creative Wings Children Playing On the Shore and Intimations of Immortality : Tagore and Wordsworth

LOCHLOOSA Children Playing On the Shore and Intimations of BRANDON KERSHNER 154 Immortality : Tagore and Wordsworth

PETRICHOR Kalyan Chatterjee AYAN ADAK 155 Literal parallels and imitations tell little about the JESUS RE-CRUCIFIED relationship between two great poets. For any study of deep Translated from Bengali affinities between them the place to look for is recurrent and RANJIT CHAUDHURI 156 underlying imageries, such asleit motifs , symbols, and some such things. As an illustration, I cite here a recurrent imagery "RAGHAB MALAKAR" in Tagore’s poetry and prose that can be his own version of the MANIK BANDYOPADHYAY 1 Translated from Bengali Upanishads and yet at the same time attests to the symbiosis TIRTHANKAR CHATTOPADHYAY 157 of his imagination with the poetry of English Romanticism. Simply stated, the imagery in its basic structure turns on the Growing up with Ray cosmic appeal of the eternal silence of the starry sky above RANADURJAY TALUKDAR 168 and the ceaseless questioning of the sea below. It is seen in Romantic poetry in a great variety of ways, but Tagore puts BOOK REVIEW his stamp on this imagery by giving it a still more particular SUMMER REQUIEM turn: the stars from high above are indeedgazing at the poet. VIKRAM SETH Shymasree Basu 173 A letter (#181) from his boat on the Padma river is an early example of Tagore’s use of this imagery in prose: “suddenly I saw that everlasting universe gazing at me from Contributors’ Profile 178 the evening sky.”2 Interestingly enough, it had appeared in one of Tagore’s early poetic ventures too,Kobi-Kahini (A Poet’s Story), 1878, which is in essence, the creation of a Shelley-like poetic persona. In this poem, thekobi, during his Alastor like wanderings in the world, sits by a river bank, watching the sky. And what a sky it is! it is bathed in the refulgent light of the full moon, and, what is more, gazing

Volume 3 Issue 1 March 2016 1 Critical and Creative Wings Children Playing On the Shore and Intimations of Immortality : Tagore and Wordsworth steadfastly at the poet (1: 11-12). As a poet, Tagore had all its pristine grandeur. After a long journey and then, immortal longings. He lived his poetry. The poetic persona he climbing up a hill a little ahead of his companions while it is projected in his songs and lyrics was his inner biography, his still night, he notices that the ground at his feet is lighting up. transcendental essence, the identity by which he wanted to be Suddenly, known to posterity. Alight upon the turf Scattered through his prose writings, there are, one Fell like a flash, and lo! I looked up. should note in this context, tributes paid to Wordsworth, The Moon hung naked in a firmament showing his increasing tendency to look upon Wordsworth as Of azure without cloud, and at my feet a poetic role model. Tagore putshib-ninda (mock-dispraise) Rested a silent sea. ( 740: 38-42) in the mouth of his paradoxical hero, Amit Ray in Shesher The moon, as the poet went on with his epiphany, “gazed” Kobita(translated title, Farewell, My Friend )), who criticizes at the mist on the sea, and through a rift in the mist, the sea Tagore for being oblivious, like the long-lived Wordsworth, waves could be seen, “innumerable, roaring with one voice.” that the times have changed (Farewell 13). It is, however, the The “three chance human wanderers” diminished quite in the same Amit Ray, who, later in the novel, reveals his true awesome presence of “a majestic intellect.” There the poet knowledge of the essential Wordsworth. To his snobbish “beheld,” as he says, “the emblem of a mind / That feeds upon sister Sissy, who has come to rescue him from living in a infinity” (53-71). cottage, saying that he has become green like a pine tree, It cannot be established if Tagore had actually read this Amit, now a serious lover, gives a gentle retort by referring 14th and final book ofThe Prelude. It was not necessary, for he her “to Wordsworth’s lines that the society of nature imparts subscribed to the same Romantic aesthetics, but if he had, he to one’s body, mind, and spirit the character of ‘mute would surely have been attracted to this sublime scene in insensate things’ ’’ (87-88). It was this transformation by nature. We are reminded of many a Tagore poem, but let me nature and its spiritual essence that Tagore carried from give here the example of a very different poem, namely, Dus- Wordsworth’s poetry into his own celebration of nature. Somoy (Evil Hour). The imagery of the sea below and the For a striking example of the aforesaid sea and sky stars above, gazing at the poet in eloquent silence, occurs imagery, I turn to the fourteenth and final book of even in this unlikely poem: Wordsworth’sThe Prelude (The 1850 edition Prelude in 14 In the sky above, the stars in ardent gaze books, published shortly after Wordsworth’s death). This is as And, pointing their fingers, are beckoning you follows. The poet and two companions, while it is still night, While on the ocean below death is foaming 3 have set out on a mountain trail in Wales to watch sunrise in In the waves rushing toward you (Rabindra 1: 695).

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The core of the imagery is observable here too. Another same—a transcendent presence out there in the universe example of this cosmology with a deepened religious note is making itself felt on earth and in the mind of man. Throughout song no. 97 of the EnglishGitanjali : “What is this sudden Tagore’s poetry and song, the cosmic theatre of the sky is sight that is come upon me?/ The world with eyes bent upon almost a constant presence—sunrise and sunset, and night thy feet stands in awe with all its silent stars” (45). There are, stars beckoning man, as if the universe is trying to speak, as hinted above, numerous other songs in which this imagery though it cannot.5 occurs. The following are only a few of them: II Tumi je cheye accho akash bhore / Nishidin animeshe Tagore wrote continuously; there never was an idle dekchho more (You, who are gazing at me from the entire sky, moment with him. He woke up at dawn, meditated, and by / Day and night, looking at me with unblinking eyes). ( Puja sunrise, was ready to start writing. As he wrote, turning out (Worship): 77) poem after poem, hundreds of them in his lifetime, his reading Akash Juriya chahibe kahar ankhi / Ghorer bahire nirobe of Romantic poetry, lodged deep in his mind, would percolate loibe daki (His eyes will gaze at me from the entire sky / into his words. This too may explain the identity of some of Silently calling me out of my house). (Puja 247) his characteristic imageries, but he found in Romantic poetry nothing less than a secular scripture and he gave it a new lease Animesh ankhi sei ke dekhechhe / Je ankhi jagatpane of life in his native Bengali, which like virgin soil bore a cheye royechhe (Who has not seen those unblinking eyes / hundredfold harvest. Tagore’s felicity as a lyricist and Those eyes that keep gazing at the earth?) (Puja 506) musical composer from a very early age had been put to good From the very beginning of his career, Tagore saw the use in the prayers of the Brahmo Society. In composing these imaginative possibility of adapting Romantic aesthetics to songs Tagore had gradually discovered the emotional charge Bengali poetry. (It is commonly known that the battle was not poetry can derive from its association with religion, witness won on a single day). What attracted him the most in the the intense theism that is so noticeable in the poems of the English Romantic poets? The answer can be found in Pujasection in Gitabitan . He had sung some of these to his Tagore’s late-career essay, that they “saw the world in union father, as he mentions in his biographical essay “Maharsi with their inner being. The world was to them the extension of Debendranath”, something he had been doing from an early their own personality.”4 He was but reading his Upanishad age. It is, however, difficult to say what attracted Tagore into this definition of Romanticism: the unity that the atman more, poetry or religion. In the booklet Religion of an Artist seeks with the universe. Wordsworth’s “universal power” with its appropriate title, he defined his religious faith in and “essences of thing” (The Prelude 2: 304-307) are forces humanistic terms (Singh 91-92), or that, as Ghose says, he outside him and not so theistic as in Tagore, but the idea is the may even have reconstituted a religious faith for his poetic

Volume 3 Issue 1 March 2016 Volume 3 Issue 1 March 2016 4 5 Critical and Creative Wings Children Playing On the Shore and Intimations of Immortality : Tagore and Wordsworth use.6 I have suggested that Romantic poetry, which he assayed precocious boy with a poetic sensibility, but there is one from his early teens, would have brought him to the outstanding poem by Wordsworth, besides the Prelude Upanishads, but which one is earlier is difficult to prove. passages alluded to above, which had a peculiar grip on Suffice to say that the Romantic deification of nature and the Tagore’s mind. He went to it again and again. There is no individual’s relation to it, would naturally appeal to Tagore other single poem, except probably Shelley’s “Hymn to given his background in the Upanishads. Intellectual Beauty,” which accounts for so much in Tagore. The semblances and parallels that we speak of here are It is Wordsworth’s great “Ode on Intimations of Immortality,” not by any means an exhaustive list; it is not our intention; the height of the Romantic apotheosis of childhood. It came to their purpose is to suggest how Wordsworth’s poetry had him at a tragic juncture of his life (see below). I will devote the planted some seeds deep in Tagore’s mind. He could have remaining space entirely to this great ode, for he returned to read in Wordsworth a kindred feeling that he who could read the poetic transcendentalism of the Ode again and again, but nature’s language gained a new perception bordering on a most notably in theShishu poems ( Rabindra. 2. 1-71), which mystical bliss. Nature to him became alive with a becameThe Crescent Moon in English translation. transcending presence, whose dwelling was the universe Significantly, only a few lines from the Ode by Wordsworth, itself, the infinite and everlasting. This faith he garnered even a word or two, went recurring through the poems of from Shelley as well. But Wordsworth speaks of it with a Shishu collection.Agood example is Wordsworth’s sonorous more intensely personal feeling, especially, while couplet : reminiscing about his childhood communions with nature in And see the children sport upon the shore Books 1 and 2 ofThe Prelude : And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore. (590: 170-71) These lines have been variously enunciated in world I, at this time, 7 Saw blessings spread around me like a sea. literature, but nowhere more echoingly than in Tagore's Thus while the days flew by and years passed on magnificent introductory lyric to hisShishu collection : From nature and her overflowing soul, On the shore of the world-ocean I had received so much. [. . .] (647-48: II, 394-398) Children meet in a fair Encompassing these blessed souls Writing about his childhood in his prose autobiography Rests the tranquil air. Jibonsmriti (1912), he wrote: “I still remember how at times, Waves wearing sea foam on top in the mornings specially, my mind would be filled with a Roll homeward evermore. strange joy. It looked to me as if the universe was wrapped in There comes from the ocean a great roar, 8 some deep mystery” (Ghose 12). This is nothing unusual in a While the children play on its shore.

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One can well imagine that Wordsworth’s great ode fancy with heart-warming child-talk. But Ariadne's thread is captured Tagore’s renewed attention at a critical time of his not lost; the children, who came trailing clouds of glory in the life, that is, when his wife died prematurely in 1902, leaving English nature-poet's fond reverie, return in the last Shishu him with the care of their children, some very young. The poem Ashirvad, which in Tagore's own translation becomes poems ofShishu were ostensibly composed to divert the the prose poem “Benediction” (Poems and Plays, 83-84). I children by the touching sentimentality of the parent-child attempt below a closer translation of its short opening stanza : relationship. A mother’s overflowing love for her child and On this earth have sprung forth these white souls, the latter’s endless questions is a commonplace of the child- They have brought news from Paradise. centric culture of India. But in the lovely-cuddly child talk of Bless them, O bless these pure hearts. the parent, there falls a shadow or a beam from the These little beaming faces, what do they know of sorrow? transcendent world, lighting it up on the edges. Here are They come smiling to your door. some lines from the poemKhoka (kid), which Tagore himself (Rabindra. 2:70) translated under a different title—”The Source” and in prose: This benediction-like closing poem revives speculation “The smile that flickers on baby’s lips when he sleeps—does about Wordsworth’s poetry in the tropics, where his anybody know where it was born?Yes,there is a rumour that a compatriots got as a spin off to their territorial conquest, the young pale beam of a crescent moon touched the edge of a stronger bond of cultural osmosis. Tagore’s philosophical vanishing autumn cloud, and there the smile was first born.”9 child in theShishu poems is anticipated in the Ode, as also the What Tagore tells us about the baby’s smile seems to be momentary glimpses of heavenly joy on the child’s face: poetizing what is often lovingly said by parents in Bengal, “That nature yet remembers / What was so fugitive” when their baby appears to be smiling in his sleep: “Look, he (Immortality Ode, lines 135-6). is talking with God!” However, “The Source” (the changed It is certainly a wonderful phenomenon in world poetry title is significant) could be an unconscious echo of that a single poem could stir another poet’s imagination so Wordsworth’s apotheosis of the child in his Ode : deeply, with the exception perhaps of some single poems by But trailing clouds of glory do we come Shelley, such as Intellectual Beauty. Wordsworth’s lines, too, From God, who is our home: such as “our Souls have sight of that immortal sea” (167), Heaven lies about us in our infancy. have innumerable echoes in Tagore’s sea poems. (588: 64-66) Wordsworth’s image of the Soul, which, though confined Reading through the magnificent poems of inland, envisions the “immortal sea” (Ode 166-67) is Shishu—there are fifty of them, one could very well say, undoubtedly characteristic of many Romantic requiem “Here's God's plenty.” The poet weaves together delicate

Volume 3 Issue 1 March 2016 Volume 3 Issue 1 March 2016 8 9 Critical and Creative Wings Children Playing On the Shore and Intimations of Immortality : Tagore and Wordsworth poems. It is an imagery seen notably in Tennyson’s than at the hands of Tagore in a wondrous multiplicity of “Crossing the Bar,” which in turn locates in this tradition one forms. of Tagore’s last songs, composed in his dying days— NB.An earlier and longer version of this article in the US Somukhe santi parabar—bhasao toroni he kornodhar journalPhilological Review Volume 1 ( Spring 2013) : 13-27. (Yonder is the sea of peace, launch your little boat on it, O helmsman) (Rabindra 3: 893).Why is the Tagorean sea, with Notes yet its ceaseless plaint on the shore, an emblem of ineffable peace? It is so because it came in the wake of the sea-loving 1. Tagore often referred, for example, to the opening Romantic imagination. Wordsworth too, saw the sea that verse ofIshoponishad : Isha vasyamidam sarbang way: an image of a mighty force, quiet and silent under a full yat kincha jagattang jagat (This universe and moon seen from a lone mountain. The sea is restless, whatever goes on in it are clad in the mystery of endlessly foaming at the mouth, and yet it is also at peace with God):Dharma in Rabindra Rachanabali, Vol 12, p. itself, its dualism, symbolizing the eternal cycle of life and 43 and many other places in this collection of death. Tagore too speaks of the sea in his much earlier poem religious essays, as also hisSantiniketan sermons in Somudrer Proti (Ode to the Sea,April 1893) in characteristic the same volume (pp.1-509). dualism: “Tell me who can understand her profound peace 2. Rabindra 11: 199. This and other references to and her endless plaint?” (1: 379, 3rd line from the top), but Tagore’s original Bengali follow the edition of his more pertinently, the image of the child on seashore and its memory of life before birth (cf. the opening lines of the Ode) works by the Government of West Bengal: Kolkata, found its first expression in this early poem by Tagore: “I am a 1961-67. These letters were originally written child of the earth, sitting on your shore, /And listening to your between September 1887 and December 1895. NB. voice [. . .], the memory of that life before [...]like a faint Translations throughout this essay, where not glimpse stir in my blood” ( lines 19-32). It is like the Ode, indicated, are mine. though in a different manner, both a rebirth poem and an 3. I have tried to translate the poem close to the elegy, the loss of one primal vision being compensated by a new meaning in nature. It occurs to one that through a great original, while in Tagore’s own translation, number of poems over a long period of supreme creativity, no. 67 inThe Gardener ( Poems and Plays , Tagore was writing his own ode on the intimations of 133-34), the poem is considerably changed. immortality. Wordsworth’s great ode got no better adoption

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4. ”Modern Poetry” (in Bengali) in Rabindra Works Cited (1961), 14: 342. There is an English Ghose, Sisirkumar.Rabindranath Tagore . New Delhi: translation of this essay inA Tagore Reader , SahityaAkademi, 1986. Print. ed.A.Chakravarty. Emphasis mine. Shelley, Percy Bysshe.Shelly: Poetical Works . Ed. nd 5. Cf. Lines 8-11 of ‘Balaka’ the eponymous Thomas Hutchinson. 1905; 2 edition in paperback, Oxford : Oxford University Press, 1970. Print. poem in this most famous of Tagore’s post- —. “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty.” Shelly: Poetical Gitanjaliworks. Rab . 2: 509-511. nd Works. Ed.Thomas Hutchinson. 1905. 2 ed. Oxford: Oxford 6. Sisirkumar Ghose quotes Tagore from University Press, 1970. 529-531. Print. Religion of Man (Tagore’s lectures delivered Singh, Baldev.Tagore and the Romantic Ideology . at Oxford): “My religious life has followed Bombay: Orient Longmans, 1963. Print. the same mysterious line of growth as has my Tagore, Rabindranath. Rabindra-Rachanabali poetical life” —Rabindranath Tagore. New (Collected Works of Tagore). 15 volumes. Kolkata : Delhi: SahityaAkademi, 1986, 84. Government of West Bengal , 1961. Print. ---.Chhinnapatra (Torn Letters) numbered from 1 to 7. Harold Bloom made much of these lines in 252. 11: 1-322. Print The Anxiety of Influence (Bloom 1975: 13.) ---.Dharma. 12: 1-96. Print 8. This poem was translated by the poet in ---. Gitabitan . 4: 1-736. Print prose: “On the Seashore,” The Crescent ---.Kobi-Kahini 5: 55-90. Print Moon, Collected Poems and Plays of Rabindranath Tagore, 51-52. My verse ---.Puja . 4: 3-188. Print translation is a crude attempt to catch the ---.“Sahityaroop” (Literary Beauty), 14: 395-403. Print sonorous sound of the Bengali original. ---.Santiniketan. 12: 98-509. Print 9. Collected Poems & Plays of Rabindranath ---.Shishu. 2: 71. Print Tagore, 53. Tagore’s own translation --- (English works) Collected Poems and Plays of Rabindranath Tagore. London: Macmillan, 1936. Print.

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---.Crescent Moon . Collected Poems and Plays. 52-86. 'Transcreating' spaces? Print. Modernity and the Early Indian Writing in English ---.Gitanjali. Collected Poems and Plays. 1-48. Print. Dhrupadi Chattopadhyay ---.Farewell, My Friend. English Trans of Tagore’s NovelShesher Kobita by K.R. Kripalani. 1946; Kolkata: It needs to be emphasized, perhaps, that the Visva Bharati Publishing Department, 1999. Print. Indian colonial intelligentsia of the nineteenth ---.A Tagore Reader. ed. A.Chakravarty (New York: The century chose Indian languages not English, as Macmillan Company, 1961), 241-253. Print. their primary, indeed overwhelmingly predominant, media for imaginative expression. Wordsworth, William. Works of William Wordsworth. ‘Indo-Anglican’ writing had to wait for post- Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions Ltd, 1994. 578-79. colonial times to become a significant literary Print. genre, under conditions of intensified ---. “Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Globalization. (Sarkar 174) Early Childhood.” 587-590. Print. The Indian Writing in English of the nineteenth century, ---. The Prelude , Works . 631-752. Print. as Sarkar notes, is marked by the sudden favour that it received with the post-colonial theorists. Hence, the ‘becoming’ of the Indian writing in English and its several aliases is related to the attention that the Indian critics enjoyed ‘under conditions of intensified globalization’. As Meenakshi Mukherjee piquantly points out, “after having been accustomed for a long time to being actors without speaking parts in the world arena of English Studies, it is both flattering and exhilarating for us to be allowed a voice, and to suddenly find that the present moment in our narrow local existence is actually part of a broader historical process of global magnitude worthy of being theorized” (96). Post- colonial scholarship amidst certain whimpering protests has since been given that extra gloss because it has apparently

Volume 3 Issue 1 March 2016 Volume 3 Issue 1 March 2016 14 15 Critical and Creative Wings 'Transcreating' spaces? Modernity and the Early Indian Writing in English catapulted the ‘non-speaking’ subjects into the ‘speaking’ the critical ‘amnesia’ to look for spaces ‘de-territorialized’ (albeit still in the margins) arena. that had emerged in the nineteenth century under the aegis of In this framework the nineteenth century literary ‘modernity’. In the first section I shall argue for a specific economy in English had to wait a century for post-colonial path that the history of Indian writing in English has taken scholarship to rescue it from the depths of time. While one which has bound this body work within temporal admits that this charge carries significant weight, one perhaps expectations with a premium on the locus of the ‘nation’. The needs to question the logicality of both the critical interest and following section seeks to establish the paucity in the the chronoscopic amnesia1 . The politics of this imaginary understanding of ‘spaces’in terms of literary initiatives in the moves from cultural specificities loaded with imperial gear to nineteenth century where it is often understood in terms of the metaphorical necessity of historicities (Spencer). But the binary ‘flows’. The last section will draw on the problematics literary history of Indian writing in English in the post- of spaces to contend that nineteenth century Indian writing in colonial times reeks of essentialization where the ‘third world English in its defiance of ‘spatialities’ had understood spaces has a fixed space of its own from which it can speak in a in terms of ‘transcreation’. sovereign voice” (Prakash 380). Therefore, as specimens of From Imitation toAuthenticity historical interest, the Indian literature in English of the The literary history of Indian writing in English has often nineteenth century remained bounded within the premised itself on the idea of a ‘prospective’ and expectations of Western historical co-ordinates of time and ‘progressive’history to the effect that the movement has been space, where history has not only dictated the temporal away from colonial history. This kind of historiography has parameters but in its articulation has fixed the locus of the ensured that time or temporal markers are the only movement telling2 . allowed and where location or space is a constant. Sumit Sarkar’s comment is emblematic of the perception ‘Authenticity’has emerged a key marker in such formulation of the trajectory of Indian writing in English. In this case, and which in turn derives its sap from the ‘locatedness’. theory has far outstripped reality as the question of the nation When writing in English the author had to constantly prove to (in its presence or absence) has somehow emerged as the be ‘authentic’ often relying on the trope of the ‘nation’ for its 3 primary agent of enquiry . The more one has insisted on the sustenance4 ‘Authenticity’, therefore, draws an immediate politics of the language itself, the more resilient the theories equivalence with being located in a space that speaks for the have become in strengthening the canon on the basis of nation. nationalist affiliations which in turn has imposed its own As Snehal Singhvi notes, by 1970s there was a consensus logic of framing ‘territories’. In this paper we shall focus on that the ‘Indian English novel ’ came into being in the 1930s,

Volume 3 Issue 1 March 2016 Volume 3 Issue 1 March 2016 16 17 Critical and Creative Wings 'Transcreating' spaces? Modernity and the Early Indian Writing in English as the novelists by then promoted a Gandhian view with the purely linguistic parameters have hijacked the debate about ‘representation of India in its entirety’(Anand , Rao, Narayan historiography.5 the three big names). The thrust was to ‘imagine’or construct The onus of the development of the language and its a literature that wrote for the entire nation, dissolving literature has been often the prerogative of the colonizer as we subnational/regional boundaries which would in turn provide find in this categorization. Often, the linguistic parameter the legitimacy to this body of literature (Singhvi). This with its colonial ‘complicity’ factor written large has argument can well be extended to include the entire body of interacted and exchanged notes with the temporal Indian Writing in English literature. It cannot be ignored that conceptualization of the history of Indian writing in English. literatures whether in their times or in retrospect are closely The temporal parameter of the history of the literature related to the language of production, and as Dhawarkar produced in India (in English) has been dictated by the notes, it “embeds the history of writing in the history of its personal historical engagement of the literary historian with medium of composition” (201). With Indian writing in the narrative of the literary history that he is in the process of English the history of the medium of composition has constructing. Consequently, the engagement with the somehow enjoyed paramount importance to the effect that a literature in English and its history has been one with silent ‘defensive nationalist narrative’ has emerged which is intrusions and compulsive interactions of both the colonial constantly trying to negotiate a truce with the literature’s presences and their significant absences. The first phases of exogenous linguistic heritage. So it hardly comes as a surprise early Indian writing were presumably dictated by the colonial that the nineteenth century has borne the brunt of theorists of construction and hence always remained suspect. The the early Indian Writing in English as it guarded the prospect language question has indisputably emerged as the ‘context’ of an uneasy relationship between colonial modernity and the of such literary negotiations. ‘complicit’coupling with the colonizer. Reading English as a Some of the earlier critics have identified the pathogen as natural corollary to the British rule often translated as being almost an illegitimate coupling between the British conflation of the categories of strictly linguistic and literary intelligentsia and the Indian. As M.K. Naik puts it, “Indian cultures. N Krishnaswamy and Archana S. Burde’s English literature began as an interestingby-product of an schematization of the history of the language and the eventful encounter in the late eighteenth century between a literature in India is an apt example. In their proposed scheme, vigorous and enterprising Britain and a stagnant India” the development of the language and literature are causally (emphasis added). The body of Indian English writing was linked to the several key government policies and spans a seen as a bastard child, whose parentage was constantly under couple of centuries (18). Formulations such as these based on scrutiny (Dwivedi). Hence, the early critics of Indian writing

Volume 3 Issue 1 March 2016 Volume 3 Issue 1 March 2016 18 19 Critical and Creative Wings 'Transcreating' spaces? Modernity and the Early Indian Writing in English in English like M.K. Naik, K.R.Srinivasa Iyengar, Paul C The colonial construction and later a kind of nationalist Vargese and David Mc Cutchion etc, took the onus on reaction to frame the nineteenth century literary history has themselves to dissociate Indian writing in English from the created an interesting trajectory of the Indian writing in body of English literature. Indian literature had remained a English. Apart from the obvious nomenclatural markers like cancerous bulbous tumor in the body of Anglo-Indian the Anglo-Indian or the Indo-Anglican to the Indian writing Literature and had to be claimed and invented as the country’s in English, this genre has traversed the contentious path from very own. To achieve this target, one had to first legitimize the ‘imitation’ to ‘authenticity’. The embryonic stage that Naik genesis of that literature.All the prominent early historians of Indian writing in English trace it back to the colonial and Iyengar would like to establish is that of the mimetic stage “fruitful” encounter. , where in the colonial period, the literature “ is greatly influenced by writing in England, and we have our own Iyengar starts off by claiming it as a part of ‘Common ‘Romantics’, ‘Victorians’, ‘Georgians’, and ‘modernists’”. Wealth Literature’ having “common goals” and “shared R. Parthasarathy maintains, writers “from Henry Derozio … interests” with the rest of the Common Wealth countries. He concludes that we should perhaps call it ‘Indo-Anglican to Aurobindo Ghose … are only of historical interest. They Literature’. He says that writers like R.K.Narayan responded wrote like English poets and, as a result, failed to establish an in the negative and ensured that Indian Writing in English was indigenous tradition of writing in English” (Iyengar 285). The far from being considered as an appendage to the “parent” intermediary stage is that of Narayan, Mulk Raj Anand, Raja body of English literature (Narayan qtd. in Naik (1979) 28) . Rao onwards that functions in a continuum via the historians Writers like Mulk Raj Anand continued to feel that English till Rushdie takes over the reins. With Rushdie and was an ‘alien tongue’ and, therefore, the speech that emerged ‘Rushditis’, where epigones of Rushdie abound, begins a new as ‘Indian English’ had to be synthetic (Anand qtd. in Naik era where Indian English has come of age and need not (1979) 37). This debate ensured that there is an independent engage in skirmishes against the so-called ‘parent’ English body of Indian Writing in English and, therefore, there was a Literature. It does not engage in a debate on the choice of the need to historicize to exorcise it of the looming presence of medium of language. One virtually travels from Derozio’s English Literature. The early historians of the literature still romantic lisp to Rushdie’s ‘broken mirror’. It is at Raja Rao held the view that “English is proving an indispensable tool, a that we pause and ponder a little : cementing force, a key, and a channel all at once” (Iyengar One has to convey in a language that is not one’s own the 26). In this sense, at the pure utilitarian level, one was arguing for the ‘naturalization’, to borrow Hans Harder’s spirit that is one’s own. […] It is the language of term, of a language. intellectual makeup—like Sanskrit or Persian was before—but not of our emotional makeup. We are all

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instinctively bilingual, many of us writing in our own is to transcend the boundaries of petty culturally bound language and in English. We cannot write like the regionalisms and form a ‘national language’of articulation, in English. We should not. We can write only as Indians. effect speak for the ‘nation’. ( Das 788). Our method of expression therefore has to be a dialect The onus of the English author to write for the nation has which will someday prove to be as distinctive and been a cultivated trope in the criticism concerning Indian colourful as the Irish or the American. Time alone will writing in English. The linguistic parameter has always justify it. (Rao1) overshadowed the reading methodologies of the literature of It is with Rao that we ‘apparently’ learn to confidently the nineteenth century. But the ‘excess’ inherent in the appropriate the language as our own, albeit with the sub-text language itself has also allowed the critics to place the of translation looming large. Most importantly, even the conscious literary subject at the very centre of the genre of genealogy of this translated presence has been often traced to Indian writing in English. The intellectual production has the nineteenth century. Moreover, the act of translation continuously sought to establish this genre as a stable somehow manages to legitimise the prospect of appropriating political discourse. 6 an alien tongue: English. The linguistic parameter, therefore, The logical parameters of this discipline of criticism has often takes the guise of a cultural interpreter rendering the placed the modern, English educated, Indian subject at the ‘complicit’ colonial linguistic transactions hospitable and, very centre of this discourse, almost using it as a pure sign more importantly, perhaps provides the opportunity of where colonial constructions and available nationalist domestication. GJV Prasad, taking cue from Rushdie’s reactions function as polar signifiers, continuously attesting comment about the writers of Indian English as ‘translated the authority of the subject. The scholarship concerning the men’ illustrates what one perhaps gains from this early nineteenth century Indian writing in English has, ‘translation’: therefore, predicated itself on the formation of a cultural This gain is mirrored in the pollinated and enriched matrix that relied on its ‘imitative’ potential. The intellectual language (and culture) that results from the act of broth of the Indian writing in English school of the nineteenth translation—this act not just of bearing across but of fertile century bridged the gnawing gap between the philosophy of coming together. Translation becomes a viable tool of coping the ‘national cultural rhetoric’ and its praxis as it played the with the paucity of linguistic articulations; therefore, the act role of formative connect between the ‘derivative colonial of translating culture exceeds the language itself. One is subject’and the ‘firebrand nationalist’. The textual culture of always already translating the origin in one’s original culture the nineteenth century Indian writing in English, therefore, to produce the desired Indian concoction. To write in English was easily subsumable in the larger historical trajectory

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This bound historiography of sorts has created biases that were penalized for not being ‘Indian’ enough, by the second have dominated literary criticism and one of them being the half of the twentieth century we are already heavily reliant on concept of territory. With Rushdie and a host of diasporic the diasporic writers like Salman Rushdie. In Imaginary writers one has perhaps come to terms with expatriate Indians Homelands he speaks about the possibility of dissolving the writing about trans-national identities. While the concept of locus of a homeland, where the location is always already in location has been significantly altered, the expectation from motion and a product of the imagination. Hence, the mirror an Indian Writer in English has continued to be similar. Post through which the author sees the reflection of his being to be the independence of India and the success of the diasporic able to reproduce it in the work of fiction is the ‘broken writers with Rushdie as the locus, the temporal parameters mirror’ and owing to the myriad reflections in the mirror is have been largely stabilized to allow for ‘space’ as the likely to be more potent than one which is ‘whole’. With this contentious trope. With the mass movement of people across understanding, the ‘locatedness’ so central to the the globe, the focus has shifted from bound territorialities to understanding of Indian writing in English, where it carries content and hence one finds Vikram Seth a very difficult the onus of representing India as a whole, enters the debate writer to be placed in literary historiographies. He writes with, so to say, an un-location. about characters and spaces that bear no relation to India or As Post-orientalist scholars have maintained, it is, the Indian subcontinent proper; his translation of three indeed, limitedness of colonial geographies that have been at Chinese poets may be a case in point. the centre of contentions. It goes very well with the Claiming history in post-colonial India where it is understanding of standardized geographies where a number important in a curious way to be still heard by the ‘West’ of scholars have maintained and explained how riotous conquering time becomes far more legitimate and important spaces that were the colonies were tamed and ordered than ‘space’.As we have seen in this section, movement away (Breckenbridge (1993)). This was a complex and layered from the colonial parasol has premised itself on locating the system of ordering spaces where both the known and the Indian writing in English within the parameters of terra unknown, to use Benedict Anderson’s term, are ‘imagined cognita. communities’7 . Often in the terms of ‘imagining colonial Marking and Un-marking Spatialiaties geographies’ there was an assumption of pitting the ‘ordered The historiography of Indian writing in English has western mind’ against the chaos of the non-European (cf. placed a premium on the temporal coordinates with the result Macaulay). This imagining was based on what Prem Kumar that it has created its own understanding of geographies. Rajaram calls the ‘affected dystopic imagination’. While the Indian writers in English of the nineteenth century If hegemonic discourses had created colonial spaces in

Volume 3 Issue 1 March 2016 Volume 3 Issue 1 March 2016 24 25 Critical and Creative Wings 'Transcreating' spaces? Modernity and the Early Indian Writing in English the nineteenth century which was born out of lack or of a Indians travelling to Britain were very conveniently dystopic imagination, then studies in the latter half of the interpreted as travelling to the ‘heart of the Empire’ and their twentieth century have tried to pose counter-categories. The travels assumed to be ‘counter-flows to colonialism’(Burton, prohibitive physical distance between the two continents in Fischer, Sen). A whole lot of scholarly work appeared that the nineteenth century is often taken as the starting point and took to examining the travels of the Indians to Britain.9 This the understanding of ‘imagined spaces’ has relied heavily on followed the classic example of looking for a counter- this lack therein. By the second half of the twentieth century, imagination. If the West had ‘imagined’ India, the Indians on in response to the understanding of the Western discourse as a the other hand had an Indo-centric filtered discourse of the unilateral one, there have been ‘counter-discourses’ which Vilayat as White/foreign ‘other’. This is exemplified in the have tried to look at the conceptualizations of spaces by the ways the Indians reacted when they finally came to the ‘natives’when they began travelling to the West.8 metropolis that they ‘imagined’through the textual culture. In Indians have been travelling to England as early as the their discoveries of western modernity primarily through a 1600s. Most people returned to India carrying stories about textual culture which heavily relied on the Scottish the lived foreign land with them (Ballhatchet158). They were Enlightenment for nourishment, these travelogues attempted a formidable presence even in the public spaces in Briton to un-mark territories. Travelling to the megapolis and then where they were often sources of amusement and curiosity being disappointed with the ‘realities’ of the imagined space (see Fischer and Panavi) . The first recorded conversion to resulted in the unmarking of territories which had been a Christianity of a native was as early as 1618 in one of the constant presence owing to the textual excess that colonial arterial blocks of London. By the nineteenth century, with the western education system had provided. Tagore’s travels to fairs and exhibitions, India was a clearly etched physical Europe had resulted in his writing a travelogue called Europe presence in Britain. There was a growing demand for Indian Prabasir Patra, where he expresses his utter disappointment goods and collectables for the people in Britain who had at not being able to relate to London that he ‘knew’: never traversed the seven seas to reach India (Breckenbridge Before coming to England I had expected that this small (1989)). India in the imagination and in the materiality was a island from one end to the other would reverberate with the veritable presence in Britain by the nineteenth century. By the ideas of Tennyson, I had thought that wherever I would stay in mid-eighteenth century Indians began to write about their this two hands expanse of soil I would be able to hear travels to Britain and by the nineteenth with the growing Gladstone’s eloquence, Max Mueller’s vendantic exposition, number of Indian students in England also began to write Tyndall’s cientific theories, Carlyle’s profound thoughts and travel advisories. These travelogues and experiences of Bain’s philosophy; I had imagined that people everywhere

Volume 3 Issue 1 March 2016 Volume 3 Issue 1 March 2016 26 27 Critical and Creative Wings 'Transcreating' spaces? Modernity and the Early Indian Writing in English would be engrossed in intellectual pursuits but I have been early Indian writers in English did not subscribe to either the disappointed. The women are engaged in discussing fashion, understanding of a retrospective ‘Indianess’ or the distinct men are engrossed in work, life is flowing as it does territorializations of the ‘mind’. We shall contend in this everywhere else- only politics inspire occasional storm and paper their understanding of spaces in their literary output furore. which they had transcreated, to borrow P.Lal’s term, where In the critical-scape of the post-Saidian critics, these translations also result in new creations (P.Lal). It is not to travelogues served as expository which has created its own suggest that the writers in the nineteenth century had little textual genealogy of ‘discovering the West. In the context of idea about what were the territorial limits of the country. On the travels of Dean Mahomet, Amrita Satpathy thus remarks, the contrary, Ram Mohan Roy’s essay in the beginning of the “He explored England like an open-minded tourist for whom nineteenth century had already outlined in great detail the the East was no longer “exotic” because to him Britain was limits of “Bharata Varasha” and that the barbarians or the the reverse of what Western travellers thought of the East, mlechhas lived beyond it. namelyVilayat , the metonymic and Indo-centric concept of The supposed ‘orientalist’ textual territorializations here the White/foreign ‘other’”. Travels shows how the East escape the binaries that have been staple in the critical-scape. fought passivity by appropriating the language and territory Most of them were the first travellers to Europe and their of the West, i.e. England, and brings to life his view of the writings did not necessarily feed into the retrospective West (i.e. England). These kinds of articulations of aspirations of the critics. The early writers of Indian English disappointment were easy in formulating a discourse where indeed were the first fruits of the newly introduced western the concepts of spaces were still easily discernible as the education system. Partaking of this new education was a sure spaces of the ‘other’ (as the case may be). These sign of the advent of western modernity. Being educated in conceptualizations relied on the same essentializing premises this western modern system meant blurring of intellectual that the British travelogues to India did, and enter the vicious spaces where the classical languages of Latin and Greek circle of marking and un-marking of territories. came to cohabit with Sanskrit. Intellectual borders are Understanding the early Indian writing in English in this challenged and the new ‘textual-scape’is transcreated where binary grid appears limiting.10 the new knowledge is not merely translated into their socio- Transcreating spaces political and economic landscape but enters a process of constant negotiation and creation. Owing to a largely western In the imaginations of the Europeans of India or the education they had already framed an idea of what Europe Indians of Europe there is a presumptive covalence of held in store for them through texts. The travel to England understanding them as challenging spaces of the mind. The

Volume 3 Issue 1 March 2016 Volume 3 Issue 1 March 2016 28 29 Critical and Creative Wings 'Transcreating' spaces? Modernity and the Early Indian Writing in English was not a travel to an unknown space but a very familiar one The worthiness of the love does not seem to emanate with a sense of déjà vu (Mukhopadhyay). The illustration of from a certain specified geographical vantage point but England as ‘hyperreal’was result of a translation albeit in the effortlessly moves between spaces; heightening the realm of imagination. This was in stark contrast to the complexity where borders are dissolved. The vantage point is realities of the colonial urban spaces that these youths often not a territorial one but is informed by the understanding inhabited. In the early nineteenth century, increasingly, of a literary collectively that emerges from having been spaces were demarcated as being European and non- tutored by a privileged western education. A few days before European and escaping these distinctions the authors began to his playSermista (written in Bengali and then translated into focus on the pure countryside outside the limits of the city. English) was to be staged, Madhusudan Dutt wrote to his This paradox ensured that modernity or western modernity friend : was tied inextricably to the notions of spaces.11 I am aware, my dear fellow, that there will be in all This might lead us to larger metaphorical question : Are likelihood, something of a foreign air about my drama; but if cultural specificities territory bound ? Here one needs to the language be not ungrammatical, the characters well perhaps move one step beyond the “the social production of maintained, what care you if there be a foreign air about the spaces” which, according to Lefevre, as a “concrete- thing?... I am writing for that portion of my countrymen who abstraction” instead, look for excess and spilling over of these think as I think, whose minds have been more or less imbued abstractions. In conditions of colonization, spaces were with Western ideas and modes of thinking; and it is my indeed socially and politically created ,often arbitrarily, but intention to throw off the fetters forged by us by a servile the response to such creations was not mere dissent by a admiration for everything Sanskrit. (Murshid 33) complex co-mingling and blurring of boundaries which, we The early Indian writers in English were writing for an shall see, is also ‘created’through cultural translations. audience both in India and in England who they thought Most of the writers in question silently challenge the shared a common textual realm. Dean Mahomet was the first parameters of locating their literary output in concepts Indian to have written his travelogue in English and was one pertaining to 'Indianess', territorial or otherwise. It reminds us of the earliest travellers to England to have gained of a few lines of Manmohan Ghose's poetry which reads : considerable repute. He had journeyed to England in the late He is retired as noonday dew eighteenth century and is credited with being the one who had Or fountain in a noonday grove; introduced shampooing in Britain and ran a successful And you must love him ere to you commercial establishment in the form of a coffeehouse. He He will seem worthy of your love. was directly part of the colonial administrative machinery as

Volume 3 Issue 1 March 2016 Volume 3 Issue 1 March 2016 30 31 Critical and Creative Wings 'Transcreating' spaces? Modernity and the Early Indian Writing in English a camp-follower, servant, and subaltern officer in the East Branching so broad and long, that in the ground India Company’s army (1769 to 1784). His conception of the The bending twigs take root; and daughters grow British landscape is through the lens of a tradesman. Dean About the mother-tree, a pillar’d shade! Mahomet in Britain had developed a critical distance both High over-arch’d, and echoing walks between. from the Indians and the Irish. His vantage point is an The desire is to associate with a collectivity of textual interesting deviation from the otherwise elitist literary spaces. A.N. Dwivedi quotes George Sampson’s laudatory produce that we find in the nineteenth century. He does not response to Manmohan Ghose’s poetry, “the most remarkable belong to the intelligentsia but rather to a commercial of Indian poets who wrote in English”… and the reader of establishment but he too seeks to enter this space via a Ghose’s poems “would readily take them as the work of an received textual culture and quotes Milton to place a very English poet trained in the classical tradition”. It is the familiar Banyan tree in context : presence of pristine beatific England that forms the axis of The banyan tree, which is a species of fig, grows here to his poetry. His poetry still claims its authenticity using images an enormous height. Some of its branches shoot forth from nature with generous doses of Hellenic references. In horizontally from the trunk; and from them proceed a number Primavera, Ghose’s poetry seems to be frozen in time: of less boughs, that fall in a perpendicular direction, “Strive how I may, I cannot slumber so:/ Still burns that downwards, taking root from other bodies, which, like pillars, sleepless beauty on the mind;/ Still insupportable those serve to support the arms they sprung from. Thus, one tree visions glow;/ and hark! My spirit’s aspirations find/ An multiplies into twenty or thirty bodies, and spreads over a answer in the leaves, a warning on the wind.// o crave not great space of ground, sufficient to shelter, at least, five silence thou! Too soon, too sure/ shall autumn come and hundred persons. Neither is this, nor any other of the Indian through the branches weep:/ Soon birds shall cease, and trees, without leaves all the year. Under the branches of the flowers no more endure;/ and thou beneath the mould banian, the Gentoos frequently place their images, and unwilling creep./ and silent soon shalt be in that eternal sleep” celebrate their festivals; and the Faquirs inflict on themselves, (7). His reading of the topography and the socio-cultural different kinds of punishment. landscape of the country is often not a picture of progress, but Milton, inParadise Lost , gives a very natural description a nation that can be appreciated for its natural rhythm and of it in the following terms : beauty. The most obvious connect is the poemLondon. The poem celebrates the human presence in the city, the sea of The fig-tree, not that kind for fruit renown’d; noises and pulsating life. The poem does not draw upon the But such as at this day to Indians known In Malabar, or Decan, spreads her arms, ills of the city nor does it celebrate its apparent cultural or architectural or socio-political grandeur. “Farewell, sweetest Volume 3 Issue 1 March 2016 Volume 3 Issue 1 March 2016 32 33 Critical and Creative Wings 'Transcreating' spaces? Modernity and the Early Indian Writing in English country; out of my heart, you roses,/ Wayside roses, nodding, strangely gifted, Hindu by race and tradition, an English the slow traveller to keep./ Too long have I drowsed alone in Woman by education, a French woman at heart, poet in the meadows deep/ too long alone endured the silence Nature English, prose-writer in French ; who at the age of 18 made espouses./ oh, the rush, the rapture of life! Throngs, lights, India acquainted with poets of France in the rhyme of houses,/ this is London. I wake a sentinel from sleep” (45). England, who blended herself in three- souls and three The presence of the poet, subject of the poem, is not just an traditions …”. At least three of her works have no spatial otiose presence; he is a subject who has been jolted out of his connect with India; namely, A Sheaf Gleaned in French slumber into the realization of this whole new country. In the Fields(1876) , Bianca , or The young Spanish Maiden (1878) letters to his mentor/ friend Binyon, he introduces the and Le Journal de Mademoiselle d’Arvers(1879) . Apart from countryside of England to his British friend. In a letter written her translations, none of her novels even remotely refer to an on 10th August 1886, Ghose writes, “And Derbyshire, I can Indian theme or location while her most celebrated work The tell you from my own experience, is one of the loveliest Ancient Legends and Ballads of Hindustan, published countries in England if you could go the right part. I stayed posthumously, deals with Indian mythology. Interestingly one whole summer at Mallock Bank and from there had a enough, this fluid movement of spaces and an eternal longing splendid walking tour…. You can do it very well in two days, for Europe does not call for an annihilation of one’s own sleeping at Castelton the first night and there is a splendid identity. In her letters to Miss Martin, Toru describes with mountain walk over the Kinder scout” (105) . He invades the fondness her love for the lush green Bengal landscape as landscape rendering it transparent to the British folk much as she writes about the beautiful European summer. For themselves. He absorbs the colonizer’s landscape and her Europe and India are both familiar spaces. introduces it to the colonial folk themselves. He takes charge Interestingly enough, this is not simply bound by of the landscape itself, interpreting and re-inventing it territorial demarcations of India and Britain but comes to continuously. occupy layered spatialities which were often filtered through In fact, in his poetry and of several others of his racial/religious memories. Peroze P. Meherjee in “Fair Iran” contemporaries like Kasiprasad Ghose, Derozio, Govind wrote : “ what Comes of the compelling loveliness of a Chunder Dutt, to name a few, territorial affiliations related to scholar’s life, or was it the working of ancient the nation seem an unnecessary association. In the case of memory?”(141). In the prose poem the author commences his Toru Dutt, inLife and letters of Toru Dutt, Harihar Das quotes journey from Iran where a maiden asks him, “ Fill thou me a the French critic James Darmester, who when talking about cup, thou Aryan son of an Aryan; and pledge they love with Toru says, “the daughter of Bengal, so admirably and so lips and eye. For this is the land of heart’s desire, the haven of fulfilment. Conn’st thou me? I am the maiden of thine ancient

Volume 3 Issue 1 March 2016 Volume 3 Issue 1 March 2016 34 35 Critical and Creative Wings 'Transcreating' spaces? Modernity and the Early Indian Writing in English love; the mother of the fairest type of men that were.” The The trend of conflating geographies is a common route that they take is intriguing: “It seemed as if we were no denominator for most of the literature in English of the longer treading earth; we were fast traversing air or rather nineteenth century which changes significantly with the birth etheric space. Over what regions we flew, I knew not; nor of the novel that writes the nation. Extending the boundaries knew I the circuits we made.” Within this circuitous travel he of the familiar poses an alternative to the idea of contending “heard the voice of Ancient India and its commemorative geographies related to territory- bound nationalism, which prayer in the spring-clad vales— ‘Tat Savitur warenyam was a burning point of enquiry in the nineteenth century. So bhargo devasya dhimahi, Dhiyo yo nah parchodayat.” As the the immediate familiar as the site of cultural location is travel comes to a close, he finds himself in the “airs of an silently challenged as the distant spaces lose their wondrous English spring morning! And it was English soil and English quotient. This space that is created, I argue, is a trans-created earth, and no nebulous floor of eyealluring cloud!” Meherjee space (a product of both translation and creation). It is, reminds us of the necessity of looking at layered spaces indeed, a translated space as we move across linguistic within the textual-scape. His uninhibited tour is aided by a barriers from a charged linguistic space where the mother maiden and is mediated by a bout of hallucination. Although tongue is prioritized over the others, and, on the other hand, the author takes a circuitous route through ancient Iran and there is a premium on the English language too as several ancient India it is not certain whether he lands in ancient critics note (Niranjana, Joshi). These movements between England. Most importantly, the poet himself is not the arbiter linguistic cultures provide for a basis for fluidity which then of the journey. This points to a paradoxical nature of the culminates in the expression in the English language. While transcreated spaces. At one level, it allows for the author to one is keenly aware of the politics and implications associated blur the thresholds of belonging to spaces and, on the other, it with the English tongue in nineteenth century India, one makes the political implications of the layered nature of these cannot ignore the leverage that the English literary sphere spaces pronounced. The author is often not in charge of the provides. It allows for a linguistically shared space not only movements associated with these spaces which indicate that among the colonizer and the colonized but between regional the flights of fantasy are grounded in a charged colonial vernacular linguistic identities. The Transcreated space is a reality. These spaces are not merely innocent travels of twin result of both physical travels and travels within texts. derivative design but an attempt to forge larger political alliances. English as the language of education and imagination offers that transcreated space where these Notes 1 alliances can be sought. Mikhail Bakhtin states inThe Dialogic Imagination : ‘We will give the namechronotope [“time space”] to the intrinsic

Volume 3 Issue 1 March 2016 Volume 3 Issue 1 March 2016 36 37 Critical and Creative Wings 'Transcreating' spaces? Modernity and the Early Indian Writing in English connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are India underwent simply parallel routes, we may still argue for artistically expressed in literature’p.84. the possibility, in the case of English writing in India, of a 2 Doreen Massey, for instance, examines how the politics of nascent space in which British and Indian social codes and time and space are intertwined and in the post-modernity era value systems began to intersect and mutually determine one when time seems to have been stabilized in the form of another”.(169) political codes, space comes to occupy the new contentious 6 It is interesting to note that Lal Behari Day in the zone. introduction to his novelGovinda Samanta had already 3 Most notable is the debate between Frederic Jameson and pointed to the confidence that should emerge from the use of Aijaz Ahmad. Jameson maintains that the thirdworld the language of the colonizers. literatures continue to be nothing but ‘national allegories’. 7 Exotic representations of India were quite delectable for the Ahmad had in turn criticised the ‘first world’ location of colonialists. Both Michael J. Franklin and P.J. Marshall in Jameson. Romantic Representations of British India, record several 4 Jacob Golomb relates the concept of authenticity with the such romantic manifestations in the visual and the print concept of the nation: “One is historically authentic when one media in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Using creates one’s own history by utilizing and recreating one’s Raymond Schwab’s terminology they elucidate the past and the past of one’s people, projecting them with phenomenon called ‘Oriental Renaissance’. The early Indian anticipatory resoluteness towards one’s future…. English poets were a part of that very cultural matrix which [Authenticity] is the loyalty of one’s own self to its own past, framed the ‘Oriental Renaissance’. Are we to observe the heritage and ethos” (117). movement in early Indian English poetry as merely a visible 5 Another case in point is the obvious relationship drawn product of this renaissance? between the western modern education and the development 8 These ‘counter-discourses ‘were written in response to the of genres and Indian English literature at large. Alpana discourses that claimed that the literary produce of the Sharma Knippling notes : “Its ‘origin’ owes as much to the nineteenth century was essentially derivative (to use Dipesh educational reforms called for by both the 1813 Charter Act Chakrabarty’s term). Henry Schwarz in ‘Aesthetic and the ensuing 1835 English Education Act of William Imperialism : Literature and Conquest in India’(2000), Bentinck as to the circulation, representation, and purchase of observes that in the late nineteenth century Bengal there was a English literature and culture among members of the Indian deluge of literary produce that with a jaundiced romantic eye, upper classes in nineteenth century India. While we are not at blatantly celebrated the British influence in India. The liberty to assume that novel production in Britain and colonial aesthetics as he suggests was closely linked with the idea of

Volume 3 Issue 1 March 2016 Volume 3 Issue 1 March 2016 38 39 Critical and Creative Wings 'Transcreating' spaces? Modernity and the Early Indian Writing in English governance. He says “aesthetic sensibility was cultivated in Ballhatchet, Kate. ‘Indian Perceptions of the West’. singular relationship with the colonial power”. Comparative Civilizations Review (1985). Berkley : 9 R. Visram,Asians in Britain: 400 Years of History (London, University of California Press, 1992. Print. Pluto, 2002) is a substantially revised version of her Breckenbridge, Carol. “ The Aesthetics and Politics of pioneering Ayahs, Lascars and Princes: Indians in Britain, Colonial Collecting: India at World Fairs”. Comparative 1700–1947 (London: Pluto, 1984); K. Teltscher, “The Studies in Society and History. 31. 2 (Apr 1989): 195-216. shampooing surgeon and the Persian prince: Two Indians in Breckenbridge, CarolA. and Peter Van der veer. Orientalism early nineteenth-century Britain,”Interventions , 2 (3), 2000, and the Postcolonial Predicament: Perspectives from South pp. 409–23. For later period, particularly notable works are: Asia. University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993. Print. S. Lahiri, Indians in Britain: Anglo-Indian Encounters, Race Burton, Antoniette. At The Heart of the Empire, Indians and and Identity, 1880–1930 (London, Frank Cass, 2000); A. the Colonial Encounter in Late-Victorian England. Burton, At the Heart of the Empire: Indians and the Colonial California : University of California Press, 1998. Print. Encounter in Late-Victorian Britain (Berkeley, University of Chattopadhyay, Swati. Representing Calcutta, Modernity, California Press, 1998); J. R. Hinnells, Zoroastrians in Nationalism, and the Colonial Uncanny. New York: Britain(Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1996). K. Vadgama, India Routledge, 2005. Print. in Britain: The Indian Contribution to the British Way of Life Das, Sisir Kumar. A History of Indian Literature: Western (London, Robert Royce, 1984) S. Sen, Migrant Races: Impact, Indian Response 1800-1910. New Delhi: Sahitya Empire, Identity and K. S. Ranjitsinhji (Manchester, Akademi, 1991. repts. 2000. 2005. Print Manchester University Press, 2004). Day, Lal Behari.Govinda Samanta. London : Kessinger 10 I use territory in the sense of material bound spaces as Publishing, 2010 (1874). Print. opposed to ‘space‘as a metaphorical concept. Dharwadkar, Vinay. “ The Historical formation of Indian 11 Swati Chattopadhyay discusses the problematic of the English Literature.” Ed. Sheldon Pollock. Literary Cultures construction of space in nineteenth century Calcutta and in History: Reconstructions from South Asia. London: points to the concept of “dwelling” in western modernity Univeristy of California Press, 2001. 199-270. Print. (182). Doreen Massey;New Left Review , vol. a. (1992). Print. Works Cited Dwivedi, A.N.Indo-Anglican Poetry. Allahabad: Kitab Ahmad, Aijaz. “ Jameson’s Rhetoric of ‘Otherness’ and the Mahal, 1979. Print. ‘National Allegory.’”Social Text . 17: (Autumn 1987) : 3-25. Fischer, Michael. “ Representations of India, the English East Print. India Company, and Self by an Eighteenth Century Indian

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Emigrant to Britain”Modern Asian Studies , vol. 32. 4 (Oct. Making of the English Novel in India’ Columbia University 1998):891-911. Print. Press, 2002. Print. Fischer, Michael. “Migration to Britain from South Asia Krishnaswami, N. and Archana S. Burde. The Politics of 1600s-1850s”,History Compass, vol 3. 1 (2005). Print. Indian’s English. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998. Fischer, Michael. Counterflows to colonialism: Indian Print. Travellers and Settlers in Britain (1600-1857). New Delhi: Lal, P.Transcreation: Two Essays . Calcutta : Progressive Permanent Black, 2004. Print. writers Workshop,1969. Print. Fisher, M. H., ed. Dean Mahomet: An Eighteenth Century ---.Languages. Delhi: Social Science Press 2010 . Print. Journey through India. Delhi : Sterling Publishers, 1987. Lefebvre, Henri.The Production of Space. London: Print. University of Delhi : SahityaAcademy, 1991. Print. Blackwell, 1991. Print. Franklin, Michael J and P.J.Marshall. Romantic Lootens, Tricia. “Bengal, Britain, France : The Locations and Representations of British India. Oxon:Routledge, 2006. Translations of Toru Dutt”. Victorian Literature and Culture Print. Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2006. 573-590. Ghose, Manmohan.Collected Poems Vol.I, Calcutta: Print. University of Calcutta, 1970. Print. Mahomet, S. D.Travels of Dean Mahomet. Cork: The Ghulam Murshid, ed. The heart of a Rebel Poet: The Letters Author, 1794. Print. of Madhusudan Dutt. New Delhi: Oxford Univ. Press, Mahomet.Travels of Dean Mahomet. New Delhi: Sahitya 2004.Print Academy, 1970. Print. Golomb, Jacob.In Search of Authenticity London: Massey, Doreen. “ Politics and Space / Time ” New Left Routledge, 1995. Print Review vol. I .196 (1992) . Print. Harder, Hans.ed. Literature and Nationalist Ideology. Mc Cutchion .Indian Writing In English, Calcutta : Writers Writing Histories of Modern India. New Delhi: Social Workshop Publication, 1969. Print. Science Press, 2010. Print. Meherjee, Preoze P. “In Fair Iran”. The Golden Treasury of Indian English Prose, A Selection. New Delhi: Sahitya Indo-Anglican Poetry. Ed. V.K.Gokak. New Delhi : Sahitya Academy, 2004.Print Akademi, 1970. Print. Indian Poetry in English, New Delhi: Heinemann, 1980. Print Mukhopadhyay, Bhaskar. “Writing Home, Writing Travel: Iyengar , K.S.Indian Writing in English, New Delhi : The Poetics and Politics of Dwelling in Bengal.” In MFS Sterling, 1994. Print Modern Fiction Studies volume 39.1(Spring 1993):169-186. Jameson, Federic. “Third-World Literature in the Era of Print. Multinational Capital”,Social Text. 15( Fall). Print Naik, M.K..A History of Indian English Literature. New Joshi, Priya. In another Country,Colonialism, Culture and the Delhi: SahityaAcademy, 1982. Print. Volume 3 Issue 1 March 2016 Volume 3 Issue 1 March 2016 42 43 Critical and Creative Wings 'Transcreating' spaces? Modernity and the Early Indian Writing in English

Nair, K.R.Ramachandran. Three Indo-Anglican Poets Sen, Simonti. Travels to Europe: Self and Other in Bengali (Henry Derozio, Toru Dutt and Sarojini Naidu). New Delhi: Narratives 1870-1910. New Delhi: Orient Longman, 2005. Orient Longman, 2005. Print. Print. Niranjana, Tejaswini. Siting Translation, History, Post- Shingavi, Snehal. “The Mahatma as Proof : The Nationalist Structuralism, and the Colonial Context. Los Angeles: Origins of the Historiography of Indian Writing” in English. University of California Press, 1992. Print. National Idiology and the Historiography of Literature in Panikos, Panayi. Immigration, Ethnicity and Racism in South Asia. Ed. Hans Harder, New Delhi : Social Science Britain, 1815-1945. Philadelphia: University of Press, 2010, 353-75. Print. Pennsylvania Press, 1993. 33-4. 44. Print. Tagore, Rabindranath.Europe Prabasir Patra. Calcutta: Prakash, Gyan. “Writing Post-Orientalist Histories of the Vishvabharati, 1961, 1994. Print. Third World: Perspectives from Indian Historiography”. Teltscher, Kate. “The Shampooing Surgeon and the Persian Comparative Study of Society and History. 1990. 380-408. Prince: Two Indians in Early Nineteenth-century.” Print. Interventions vol. II.3 (2000) : 409-423. Print. Prasad, GJV.Continuities in Indian English Poetry, Delhi: Trivedi, Harish and Meenakshi Mukherjee, ed. Pencraft International, 1999. Print. “Interrogating Post-colonialism.” Interrogating Post- Raja Rao.Kanthapura . New Delhi: Oxford University Press, Colonialism, Theory, Text and Context. Shimla: Indian 1963 (1938). Print. Institute ofAdvanced Studies, 1996. Print. Rajaram, Prem Kumar. “Dystopic Geographies of Empire”. Alternatives: Global, Local. Political. vol.31.4 (Oct-Dec 2006): 475-506. Print. Roy, Ram Mohan. “India Its Boundary and History.” The English Works of Raja Rammohan Roy. Ed. Jogendra Chunder Ghose. Calcutta : S. Roy, 1901. 1-7. Print. Rushdie, Salman. Imaginary Homelands. London : Granta Books in association with Penguin Books, 1991. Print. Sarkar, Sumit.Writing Social History. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999. Print. Schwarz, Henry. “Aesthetic Imperialism : Literature and Conquest in India”.Modern language Quarterly , 61.14 (December 2000). Print.

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The Development of Sri Aurobindo's Narrative Art in Sri Aurobindo’s interest in narrative poetry can be traced Longer Narrative Poems to his study of classical European literature during his years at 2 Rudrashis Datta Cambridge. Though the first collection of his poetry was published from Baroda, these poems were written in Apoem with an elaborate narrative structure differs from Cambridge. The influence of the classics on his poetry is a lyric primarily in the scope that it gives to a poet to meditate detected more in his narrative poems and his experiments on a theme at a greater length. For a poet like SriAurobindo, a with the quantitative hexameter inAhana and Ilion . narrative is an important means to develop an idea and The first attempt of Sri Aurobindo to write a narrative illustrate it through a narration of a historical incident, a poem was the incompleteThe Vigil of Thaliard , written in legend or a myth or even an imaginary construction of 1891-1892. In fact, this is the only long poem Sri Aurobindo 1 events. It is perhaps inevitable that a poet who wrote lyrics as wrote in England. Sri Aurobindo appears to have picked up brief and intense as “Who”, “Revelation”, “Parabrahman”, the Thaliard episode from Pericles in which Thaliard appears “Epiphany”, “Man the Enigma”, “Cosmic Consciousness”, as a lord of Antioch, employed by Antiochus to murder “The Self’s Infinity”, shall explore the narrative to support Pericles. The theme of the poem seems to be the protagonist’s and illustrate the dense layers of significance in the lyrics in search for his soul’s liberty. One can sense here Sri the specific contexts of transience of man’s life and the Aurobindo’s own yearning for liberty of the soul expressed so permanence of his spiritual possibilities in the evolutionary eloquently in the shorter lyrics of the time. Another theme of design of Nature. Sri Aurobindo’s important narrative poems the poem is the importance of time in the Universe, an aspect such asThe Vigil of Thaliard , Khaled of the Sea , Love and Sri Aurobindo seemed to have sensed at an early age. The Death, and Urvasie , can therefore be read as works which image of the dervish has been used to relate Thaliard’s complement his lyrics through an expansion and clarification spiritual endeavour in the backdrop of Time. When Sri of the ideas of his lyric poetry. It is significant that Sri Aurobindo says that ‘time is a sleeping dervish’, the participle Aurobindo began writing narrative poems after his approach ‘sleeping’hints at night. Thaliard sits for his yoga alone in the to the idea of death and the possibility of immortality in a forests of the night and the weird scene is conveyed through physical-philosophical sense crystallized into a coherent some exotic imagery : view of man’s evolutionary possibilities. Judged in this The roses shuddered in their sleep, context, his first narrative poem shows remarkable stability The lilies drooped their silver fires, and assurance in terms of the assessment of man’s role on The reeds upon the humming steep earth in the immediate physical and spiritual sense. Bowed low their tapering spires;

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For tho’no sob pulsed in the air, search for spiritual solace for his tortured soul, “Childe No agony of wind, Thaliard saw a glinting spear /Across the milky way”. 6 Down heaven’s moonlight-painted stair 3 These images and the ones that follow immediately are Trod angels who had sinned. symbolic representations of the turmoil in Thaliard’s soul. Sri The image of ‘warden’ explicitly illustrates the moon Aurobindo appears to be relating the turmoil in Thaliard to the passing across the heaven with stars around her: environment surrounding him, in much the same way many The warden of the starry waste of Shakespeare’s characters and incidents are related to the Who walks with orange-coloured lamp atmosphere in which they live and act. A subversion in the Answer’d eyes nursing fire, paced 4 natural order among the humans is generally reflected in a Night’s silver-tented camp. disturbance in the nature around man in many of These images set the atmosphere for Thaliard to sit Shakespeare’s plays. In the present narrative, the forgiving solitary, searching for the freedom of his soul within his own spirit of the murdered Pericles removes the darkness that self. The images of ‘fireflies’, ‘glow-worm’and ‘stars’add to characterizes the earlier part of the poem. The image of the the mysterious surroundings, which bear a striking ‘morn’ illustrates the happy forgiving in the wake of “a resemblance to the opening lines of Coleridge’sChristabel . wailing anguish,” and “the foaming gulfs of clamour The simile which compares the fireflies to drops of ‘burning broke/Around a fallen king.” The forgiving spirit speaks to rain’ gives us a sense of the difficulty of the atmosphere in Thaliard, “Thaliard awake; the smiling morn/ Forgets the which Thaliard sits, besides highlighting Sri Aurobindo’s cloud of yesterday.” 7 tendency to transfer adjectives from one context to another unlikely context – a tendency that reveals itself frequently in The change in the atmosphere is reflected in the cosmos Savitri. The transfer continues at some stretch in the poem: as well. The revolving constellation of Astrate in the Milky Way is described thus : Fireflies drizzled in the dark Like drops of burning rain, Astrate from her cloudy chair The glow worm was crawling spark, Paced with her troop of star-sweet girls; The pool a purple stain, Unfilleted her glorious hair The stars were grains of blazing sand.5 Hung loose in cowslip curls, The images of the ‘spear’, ‘blast’ and ‘tempest’ that …………………………….. follow most appropriately prepare the background for the Her body lapped in cloth of gold vision of the murdered king, Pericles. It is apparent that the Awave disguised in moonlight seemed, Whose every curve and curious fold act of violence haunts the child Thaliard, and hence is his With opal facets gleamed. 8

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Sri Aurobindo finely adorns the constellation Astrate fulfilment. The deification of the mortal by the divine sister with such illustrative images. Her seat is ‘cloudy’, her of the sea – the central vein of the fragment – is a veritable companions ‘star-sweet girls’ and her hair curly like mirror to the poet’s philosophy of the divine life – that cowslips. Her apron is made of gold. She appears to be a wave divinity shall descend and dwell in mankind and better its life ‘disguised in moonlight.’9 Finally, she presents herself as the on earth itself.10 The mortal’s raptures, therefore, should ‘wed alchemist, and here the depiction abruptly closes. Though it is with the child of the unbounded sea.’The visual and abstract left unfinished, the narrative clearly voices Thaliard’s image of the ‘sea nymph,’ unequivocally, projects the seeking his soul’s ‘sweet liberty’ in which he seems to have heroine’s supernatural origin : succeeded with the heavenly aid of the ‘alchemist’ – Astrate. So is the beautiful sea-stranger gone This incomplete poem suggests the possibility of a divine To her new home, who now no more must run intervention in the curing of earthly ills – a thesis that recurs Upon the bounding waves, not feel the sun, in many of the longer poems of SriAurobindo. On wind-blown limbs, destined a mortal’s bride. The theme of a divine intervention is extended with a So is the strongArabian deified greater subtlety in his next narrative,Khaled of the Sea , In bliss.11 which, unfortunately again remained incomplete. In fact, Khaled of the Sea is Sri Aurobindo’s first attempt at epic A little earlier the poet dwelt longer on the abode of the writing. His fascination with the deification of a mortal by the sea-nymphs of whom the heroine is the chief representative. sister of the sea finds expression here. As its sub-title The image of the ‘ocean caves’ finely illustrates the suggests, the poem is anArabic romance in blank verse. Only mysterious nature of her dwelling: And yet he knew that of the caves she spoke the Prologue and an unfinished Canto remain. The Prologue tells us how a daring Arab, fascinated by a beautiful damsel Where never earthly light of sunshine woke, whom he met in the desert, took her away after having And of unfathomed things beneath the floods overpowered the two terrible creatures with her – a tigress And peopled depths and Ocean solitudes and a snake. The incomplete Canto I, the only survival of the And mighty creatures of the main and light twelve Cantos of the scheme titled ‘The Story of Almaimun Of jewels making a subluminous night and the Emir’s Daughter’, gives an account of the fabulous Lower than even the deal may sink. 12 riches of the Emir and his dishonesty in accumulating them. Clearly reminiscent of Keats’s images in La Belle Dame The tale ends abruptly here. The fragmentary nature of the sans Merci, the images juxtapose two worlds, the human poem does not help us know whether the Arab’s love is also a world and the world of the nymphs, representing the ‘other-

Volume 3 Issue 1 March 2016 Volume 3 Issue 1 March 2016 50 51 Critical and Creative Wings The Development of Sri Aurobindo's Narrative Art in Longer Narrative Poems human’ world. Since the world is constructed out of concrete Sthulakesha, the rishi. SriAurobindo deviates here a little and images from the earth-nature, we may even interpret the he mentions Chitroruth, thegandharva king as the father of ‘other world’ as an extension of our own, a world that is Pramadvara, and substitutes Priyumvada for Pramadvara to accessible under special circumstances. Khaled breaches the suit the English tongue. As the myth goes, when Priyumvada barrier, crosses to the ‘other world’ and rescues the damsel was asleep a snake surprised her, but her husband Ruru from the tigress and the ‘coiling cobra’. It is interesting in this journeyed topatala , the underworld, in quest of his wife’s context to note Sri Aurobindo’s interpretation of the image of soul; and by sacrificing half of his life restored his wife back. a snake in poetry and philosophy: “The snake indicates some The parentage of Ruru and his being engrossed in his love for kind of energy always- often bad, it also can indicate some a beautiful girl whom he had made his wife, his passionate luminous or divine energy …. The cobra is a symbol of the affair with Priyumvada, his mournful wandering through the energy in Nature – the upraised hood and light indicates the forest after her sudden death, and his successful journey to illumination and victorious position of the emerged patala, almost Aeneas-like, clearly anticipate the grander energy.”13 The symbolic image of the snake, undoubtedly, is design ofSavitri . used here as a kind of energy in Nature guarding the ocean- Interestingly, Sri Aurobindo admitted later his failure to born nymph, and the ‘jewelled hood’ indicates ‘the ‘penetrate to the heart of the Indian idea’ in the Ruru myth, illumination and victorious position of the emerged Energy’. because of the influence of the western underworld myth on This narrative, incomplete as it is, can be read as an his understanding of the Indian context. He states that affirmation of the ability of human beings, equipped with a it should have had a more faithfully Hindu special set of abilities and aided by specific circumstances, to colouring, but it was written at a score of years age enter and operate in an ‘other worldly’environment. (1899) when I had not penetrated to the heart of the This ability is shown in an intenser light in the first Indian idea and its traditions and the shadow of the complete narrative poem of Sri Aurobindo,Love and Death . Greek underworld and Tartarus with the sentiment of Also, this is the first narrative poem where he deals with the life and love and death which hangs about them has got into the legendary framework of the Indian triumph of Love over Death. The narrative concerns the myth 14 of Ruru. In classical Indian mythology, Ruru was born to patala and hells. Rishi Pramiti and anapsara Gritachi. Ruru later went on to In a letter to his brother Monomohan he compares the become a rishi to whom Sthulakesha gave Pramadvara for his Ruru myth to the Orpheus myth of the Greeks thus, wife. Pramadvara was the daughter of Menaka, anapsara and If we compare it with the kindred tale of Eurydice, Vishwavasu, agandharva , and she was brought up by the distinction I have sought to draw between the Hindu and Greek mythopoetic faculty, justifies itself

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with great force and clearness. The incidents of playing with a flower’, in fact, generates multiple nuances. It Porpheus’descent into Hades, his conquering Death is the morning responsible for the blossoming of a bud into a and Hell by his music and harping his love back to flower, it decks the petals with dew, its cool breeze gently the sunlight, and the tragic loss of her at the moment stirs the flowers, and its bright yet pleasant shine envelops it of success through a too natural and beautiful human all over. Clearly, the morning here stands for Ruru and the weakness, has infinite fancy, pathos, trembling flower for Priyumvada. But, paradoxically, both morning human emotion. The Hindu tale, barren of this and flower are essentially short-lived excellences of Nature, subtlety and variety is bare of incident and wanting and this association suggests the respective fates of the in tragedy. It is merely a bare idea for a tale. Yet what lovers. an idea it supplies!15 This narrative, along withUrvasie and the epic Savitri , The barrenness and lack of subtlety in the Indian tale has can be read and interpreted as companion pieces both in the been used to his advantage by weaving into the tale’s texture context of his search for a solution to the universality of death his own understanding of the natural order of existence where as well as an attempt to re-read Nature in the context of humanity has access to the super-human order of existence. spiritual evolution. Unlike the classical European myths Though the narrative was written well before we get any dealing with the conquering of death by humans, Sri concrete hints of Sri Aurobindo’s philosophy of Nature, it is Aurobindo’s characters attempting to conquer death are apparent that he had been preoccupied with primary issues of made to go through a very special and unique process of existence such as those of life and death, long before he put spiritual upliftment, which can be slow and gradual, as in the them in his philosophical tracts. case of Ruru or Savitri or sudden, even miraculous, as in The Ruru-Priyumvada story is an ideal love story from Urvasie. theMahabharata which Sri Aurobindo clads with his own Love and Death can also be read as a work revealing Sri ideals of love, though his use of the legend goes much beyond Aurobindo’s tendency to juxtapose images from nature with mere depiction or celebration of love. Clearly, his idea does contradictory significance and create unique nuances. Some not entirely exclude love in its physical aspects. For example, of the images can be studied in isolation as illustrations. The when the poem begins, the opening image of ‘morning central image in the narrative, without doubt, is the visual- playing with a flower’, picturing Ruru’s love- affair with his cum-kinaesthetic image of Hell, described at the moment of bride Priyumvada, it is difficult to go beyond the Ruru’s entry : interpretation that the lines are merely creating a context of But suddenly a bloom, a fragrance. Hell the togetherness of Ruru and Priyumvada. The ‘morning Shuddered with bliss: resentful, overborne,

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The world-besetting Terror faded back element becomes subordinate to the philosophical content of Like one grown weak by desperate victory.16 the myth. TheSatapatha Brahmana first records the story of The ‘fragrant bloom’, another unlikely juxtaposition of the love between Urvasie and Pururavus, in which Heaven images, explains the result of Ruru’s hurling of half his soul’s and Earth, two contrasting worlds, unite in complete 19 life: metaphorical identification. Urvasie fails in her heavenly Then with a sudden fury gathering duty, and Pururavus in his earthly service. For Urvasie, His soul he hurled out of it half its life, Heaven is the desirable world, earth the undesirable. To Sri Aurobindo’s Pururavus, Urvasie symbolizes divinity which And fell, like lightening, prone. 17 he strives to attain discarding his royal duties. Sri Aurobindo K R Srinivasa Iyengar points out another critical image, was clearly experimenting with the myth to make it a put to use for the first time by Sri Aurobindo in his poetry, platform for his thesis of manhood evolving into divinity. In while he attempts to blend the earth and thepatala as Ruru is 18 fact it has been pointed out that the Urvasie myth is a classic about to enter the realms ofpatala. The image is that of the example of what Northrop Frye, in hisAnatomy of Criticism , aswattha tree, which is perceived as a cosmic tree whose roots calls, ‘the tendency of realism to emphasize the content and are in thepatala and its branches spread across the world. It is representation rather than the shape of the story.’20 The story likely that Sri Aurobindo was aware of the cosmic of the poem itself does not promise anything new. It deals manifestation of the image of theaswattha tree as enunciated with the passionately sensuous human relationship of the in theBhagavad Gita . He seems to have felt the symbolic half-divine hero with the celestial dancer. By her indulgence potentialities of the tree that is made to represent Ruru’s in love with Pururavus, she develops close association with aspiring soul. human experience. Sri Aurobindo takes up the framework of That Sri Aurobindo was desperately searching for the myth to emphasize the content and the representation. legends to highlight his own thesis of evolutionary Nature can Urvasie, representing divine love, with her charms triumphs be understood from the fact that all the narrative poems he over the earthly monarch who finally leaves the earth to live wrote during his early years at Pondicherry were taken from with her in Heaven abandoning the ‘green and strenuous Indian myths dealing with the issue of death and immortality. earth’below.And in this very attainment of the king there lies Urvasie is another case in point. Urvasie, unlike Ruru or a failure that Savitri would not repeat. By sacrificing a minor Priyumvada, was a celestial nymph, anapsara who danced at trait Urvasie achieves a brilliant goal; and in the attainment of Indra’s court. Even Pururavus is a semi-divine hero for he is Urvasie, Pururavus sacrifices something extremely vital. In a the son of Budha or Mercury by Ila, the daughter of Manu, and sense, Urvasie can be said to reflect a conflict Sri Aurobindo the grandson of the moon. In Sri Aurobindo’s hands, the story

Volume 3 Issue 1 March 2016 Volume 3 Issue 1 March 2016 56 57 Critical and Creative Wings The Development of Sri Aurobindo's Narrative Art in Longer Narrative Poems might have had at that point in time – whether to plunge into Urvasie myth has been explored at length by K D Sethna. He the struggle for freedom of his country or to devote himself to says : yoga to seek divine transformation for all mankind. InUrvasie as well as in Love and Death there is that Kalidasa’s treatment of the Urvasie legend, as Sri struggle against mortality and the fate which Aurobindo reads it, reveals his interest in only a particular circumscribes mundane life. Pururavus scales on facet of the tale. Sri Aurobindo says in The Harmony of Over world to clasp the vanished Urvasie; Ruru Virtue: descends into the Underworld to bring back In dramatic tone and build therefore this is an Priyumvada killed before she was ripe. Earth's heart admirable creation, but there is so far no hint of the storming beyond earth to gain fulfilment, either by world-wide divineness of Urvasie, of the goddess attaining the supra-terrestrial from its darkness what 22 within the woman. In direct allegory Kalidasa was it has snatched and submerged. too skilful an artist to deal, but we expect the larger Clearly, according to Sethna, Sri Aurobindo's Pururavus conception of this beautiful and significant figure to symbolizes the Earth, his falling in love with Urvasie is the enter into or at least colour the dramatic conception Earth's embracing divinity, while his pursuit of Urvasie of the woman; some pomp of worlds, some represents the Earth's seeking of divine immortality. greatness of gesture, some large divinity whether of However, his final abandoning of the 'green and strenuous speech or look to raise her above a mere nymph, earth' to live forever with Urvasie in Heaven somehow deters however charming, into the goddess we knew. Yet in one from claiming the cause of humanity in Pururavus. It sounds more an individual attainment. But the love incarnate rigidly excluding the grandiose or the coloured Urvasie he pursues is in fact Divine Love. So there is room to Kalidasa has shown, I think, his usual unerring believe in Pururavus's upholding the cause of divinity for the dramatic or psychological tact.’21 whole of mankind. While admiring Kalidasa’s dramatic skill in treating the The legend of Urvasie discharges a very important legend of Urvasie, Sri Aurobindo highlights his failure in instructive function.Apart from its imaginative and sensuous visualizing the goddess in the nymph; and therefore, possibly, depiction of the amorous affair, it is a clear warning to the Sri Aurobindo colours the divinity in Urvasie besides her kings, who, like Pururavus, overcome by love, forget their womanly charm. His emphasis on the divinity of the maiden earthly duty and pursue their personal goals. In Sri helps him in changing Kalidasa’s allegorical figure of Aurobindo's scheme of evolutionary Nature, they play no Urvasie into a divine symbol. role because the contexts of their aspirations are narrow. K R SriAurobindo’s disquiet with Kalidasa’s treatment of the Srinivasa Iyengar highlights this narrowness when he says :

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By rendering the Urvasie legend on an epic scale, Pururavus's successful manoeuvring to the seat of the mighty Sri Aurobindo has dyed it with shining indelible Mother seeking her blessing, the Mother's giving him holy purpose and crowned it with racial and water to drink and Urvasie's restoration to him and, finally, prophetic significance. Its wealth of sensuous his leaving the earth with Urvasie to live permanently in elaboration, its luxuriance in colour and sound, its Heaven. This narrative is presented with the central image of high arching epic similes, its r e s ounding the star, and images of radiance sourced from physical nature polysyllabic proper names, its subtle fashion of in a manner that makes the narrative brilliant poetry in its own personal and national perspectives, its forceful right even without its philosophical basis of evolutionary delineation of the drama of man's temptation and Nature. fall, its suggestion of the filiations between earth Seen from a stylistic viewpoint, Sri Aurobindo's early and heaven – these diverse 'marks' of Sri narrative poetry appears to be a preparation at a philosophical Aurobindo's poem make a grand total of creditable and narrative level for engagement with the greater achievement in the difficult epic genre.'23 complexities that the Savitri legend appears to carry. That an Sri Aurobindo seems to have been exploring the epic poem dealing with the issue of man's immortality in a symbolic potential in the legends he treats in his narrative philosophical-spiritual sense was already in his mind is poems. Though the poem is named after anapsara , evident from the fact that the first draft ofSavitri was written Narayana-born who lies on the thigh of the Supreme, the a year earlier thanUrvasie . Judged in this context, Urvasie thigh being the seat of sensuousness, basically it is and indeed all of his early narrative poetry are attempts to Pururavus, the 'poet and the lover' and not 'the king and the explore the dimensions of the immortality motif which is hero', grandson to the Sun and the Moon that dominates the dealt with significant poise and philosophical sophistication action of the poem.24 In four Cantos he treats Pururavus's in Savitri. triumphant return from the God's war, his meeting and falling Notes in love with Urvasie on his way back to the earth, his 1. A commentary on this aspect of the narrative occurs encounter with the giant Cashie to save his beloved, his in Jonathan Culler’s address entitled ‘Making yearning to meet Urvasie and its fulfilment, their wedding History: The Power of the Narrative’ at an and a year-long ecstatic stay in the Himalayas resulting in the International Seminar on Narrative held in New Delhi birth of a child, their return to Ila and the Gods' successful in 1990. The address was published in Narrative: A trickery to snatch Urvasie back. Like Ruru's sojourn to the Seminar, ed. Amiya Dev. New Delhi: Sahitya God of the Underworld, we have here a narration of Akademi, 2005.

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2. A B Purani dwells at length on Sri Aurobindo’s 15. Ibid.78. Cambridge years in his biography The Life of Sri 16. Sri Aurobindo.Collected Poems . Vol. 2 of The Aurobindo. 4th ed. Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Complete Works of Sri Aurobindo. Pondicherry: Sri Ashram, 1978. AurobindoAshram, 2009: 139. 3. Sri Aurobindo.Collected Poems . Vol. 2 of The 17. Ibid. 139. Complete Works of Sri Aurobindo. Pondicherry: Sri 18. Srinivasa Iyengar, K R. Sri Aurobindo : A Biography AurobindoAshram, 2009: 49. and a History. 5th ed. Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo 4. Ibid. 49. International Centre of Education, 2006: 67. 5. Ibid. 49. 19. Max Muller elaborates on the metaphor of the 6. Ibid. 49. ‘heaven’and the ‘earth’and its basis in the Satapatha 7. Ibid. 55. Brahmanain the ‘Introduction’to his translation The 8. Ibid. 57. Satapatha Brahmana, Madhyandina School. Vol.12. 9. Ibid. 58. Part 1. London: Clarendon Press, 1882, reprinted by 10. The theme ofKhaled of the Sea bears a striking Motilal Banarasidass in 1972. There is no evidence resemblance to the playPerseus the Deliverer . It is that Sri Aurobindo read the translation during or unclear whether they were written at the same time. before his treatment of the Urvasie legend. However, it is apparent that the image of a universal 20. Frye, Northrop.Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays . saviour was recurring in the works of Sri Aurobindo Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957: 67. during the period 1899-1902AD. 21. Sri Aurobindo. ‘The Harmony of Virtue’ in Early 11. Sri Aurobindo.Collected Poems . Vol. 2 of The Cultural Writings. Vol. 1 of The Complete Works of Complete Works of Sri Aurobindo. Pondicherry: Sri Sri Aurobindo. Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, AurobindoAshram, 2009: 156. 2003: 106. 12. Ibid. 155. 22. Sethna, K D.Sri Aurobindo – The Poet . Pondicherry: 13. Pandit, M P.A Dictionary of Sri Aurobindo’s Yoga . Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education, Twin Lakes, WI, USA: Lotus Light Publications, 1999: 156. 1992: 273. 23. Srinivasa Iyengar, K R. Sri Aurobindo : A Biography 14. SriAurobindo.Letters on Poetry, Literature and Art . and a History. 5th ed. Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Vol. 27 ofThe Complete Works of Sri Aurobindo . International Centre of Education, 2006:344. Pondicherry: SriAurobindoAshram, 2004: 56.

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24. The meaning of ‘apsara’ is sourced from Ralph T H Works of Sri Aurobindo. - Early Cultural Writings. vol. 1. Griffith’s translationThe Hymns of the Rig-Veda . Pondicherry: SriAurobindoAshram, 2003. Print. Rev. ed. New Delhi: Motilal Banarasidass, 1973. --- .Collected Poems . The Complete Works of SriAurobindo . Book X, Verse85:632. vol. 2. Pondicherry: SriAurobindoAshram, 2009. Print. Works Cited ---.-The Complete Works of Sri Aurobindo Letters on Poetry, Culler, Jonathan. ‘Making History: The Power of the Literature and Art. vol. 27. Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Narrative’.Narrative: A Seminar , ed. Amiya Dev. New Ashram, 2004. Print. Delhi: SahityaAkademi, 2005. Print. Frye, Northrop.Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays . Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957. Print. Griffith, Ralph T H., Trans.The Hymns of the Rig-Veda . Rev. ed. New Delhi: Motilal Banarasidass, 1973. Print. Iyengar, K. R. Srinivasa. Sri Aurobindo : A Biography and a History. 5th ed. Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education, 2006. Print. Max muller, Friedrich, Trans. The Satapatha Brahmana, Madhyandina School. vol. 12. Part 1. London: Clarendon Press, 1882, rept. Motilal Banarasidass, 1972. Print. Pandit, M .P.A Dictionary of Sri Aurobindo’s Yoga . Twin Lakes, WI, USA: Lotus Light Publications, 1992. Print. Purani, A. B.The Life of Sri Aurobindo . 4th ed. Pondicherry: SriAurobindoAshram, 1978. Print. Sethna, K D.Sri Aurobindo – The Poet . Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education, 1999. Print. Sri Aurobindo. ‘The Harmony of Virtue’. The Complete

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Alice Walker'sThe Chicken Chronicles : women’s strength. Committed to survival and Womanism as Life Force wholeness of entire people, male and female. (2) Although firmly rooted in the Afro-American feminist Shymasree Basu tradition, womanism tries to rectify the separatist agenda of White, mainstream feminism by projecting the health of the Alice Walker coined the term Womanism in her community as a goal. Womanism, as Walker states, is collection of Essays entitled In Search of Our Mothers’ committed to the survival of the entire race: both male and Gardens: Womanist Prose. Walker’s fictional oeuvre focuses female. InThe Chicken Chronicles she takes the survival of on narratives which touch upon the Womanist agenda of the entire race into consideration and the perspectives which healing and nurturing oneself as well as the community. In emerge from the text make it evident that Walker is The Chicken Chronicles Walker chooses to showcase her transcending or enlarging the boundaries of her ideology to belief in Womanism as a faith and a way of life. Her take the people and animals of the earth into consideration. commitment to social issues is also well-known and in this Also Alice Walker has been actively involved in various Human Rights movements and has written extensively about memoir Walker unites her Womanist concerns with her the need to unite and resist oppression being practiced by environmental activism to impart life lessons through her Capitalists and other powerful people of the world at every project of running an organic Chicken farm. Thus the eco- level of society. Thus the Acknowledgement page of the text critical and gender perspectives converge in a rare text which has this characteristicAlice Walker observation : has been lauded as eccentric but inspirational. May our call be from this day onward, to all the The womanist ideology, as Walker conceives it, is an all creatures and beings of the planet who have no inclusive philosophy. In her Collection of essays In Search of voice : I have come to you, for you, to be a witness to Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose she had set out the your life and to extend whatever understanding and origins of the word and its multiple connotations in the happiness I can. (xv) epigraph : TheAcknowledgement has a very strong resonance with Womanist 1. from womanish (opp. of “girlish” i.e., the ending of one of her essays 'What Can I Give My frivolous, irresponsible, not serious.) A Black Daughters Who are Brave?” (the Spelman College feminist or feminist of color… Commencement Address,1995) where she had observed, 2.Awoman who loves other women, sexually and/or “We are the daughters of Mother Earth: it is in our naturalness nonsexually. Appreciates and prefers women’s and joy in who and what we are that we offer our gratitude, culture, women’s emotional flexibility…, and our worship and our praise” (107).

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AfricanAmerican women writers have always spoken to discourage any thought of human arrogance. They seemed about their work as granting a legitimate agency to the voices pleased” (11). of the community. Black women writers have thus operated Thus raising the chickens connects Walker with the non- with a specific agenda of protest and Walker's fiction starting human world of chickens and what follows is an attempt by from her first novelMeridian tries to bear witness to the ills of her to establish connections between herself and the sexism and racism that afflicted Black women in their community of chickens. Curiously enough, these chickens communities and domestic spaces. But, more importantly, become her girls and she invests them with their own intrinsic Walker's fiction tries to offer life lessons, whereby one can personality. As her connection with the world of chickens is transcend the pain and heal in order for their struggles to be strengthened she explores a new dimension to her own redeemed.The Chicken Chronicles traverses the same maternal subjectivity. The tropes of sisterhoods and other territory and Walker bears witness to the life of these mothers are quite defining ones in Afro-American literature. chickens and their universe offers valuable lessons in InChicken Chronicles the eco-critical perspective makes survival for the humans. Walker connect with the non-human world of chickens as a Thus the memoir is more about spiritual growth that was human but more as a mother. Also, the rootedness of the initiated by her decision to run the chicken farm. Christopher chickens to the earth is observed and noted and might recall Cokinos in his paper “What is Ecocriticism?” points out that Walker's most popular novelThe Color Purple where Celie, Ecocriticism is a discipline which entails an ethical critical at the end of the novel, thanks all of Creation as she celebrates agenda and pedagogy and investigates and “makes possible her family. The stars, the moon, the hills everything becomes the connections between self, society, nature and text” (3). connected. Walker's novel affirmed those Black people, who Quite early in the memoir, Walker elucidates the concept of believed in the goodness and the sustaining power of the Space Nuts as propounded by her. Space Nuts is an Earth. For her, this vision was also the ideology of the peasant expression which has both pejorative and positive who spends his own life connected to the earth. Celie's connotations. People who harm the planet, according to empathy with nature leads her to trust God anew. In this Walker, are simply Space Nuts whereas those who try to heal memoir the same theme of spiritual rootedness with nature are referred to as “Yaay! Spacenuts.” When Walker first offering calm is revisited in the following manner : sights four perfectly formed chicken eggs while cleaning the The chickens, though, burrow into the earth as far as shed she cries out “Yaay!Spacenuts.” She observes, “This is they can, kicking aside their straw, and they will the best gift of all. You have given us these four beautiful eggs. make a circle of their special friends, and they will What wonderful people you are. Chicken people. I stressed, slowly nod off. It is enchanting to watch them do

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this. There will be the most sumptuous quiet, as if the Co., that elusive “eternity”-for someone as busy as whole world feels drowsy. It would be difficult to she-which meditation has always been. (23) imagine war and terror anywhere on Earth. (14) These lines perfectly coalesce Walker's concern with healing Later Walker also notes how sitting with the chickens (18) and peace to be found in nature as the field of color purples expanded her soul and she could meditate in their evokes a sense of wonder in Creation inThe Color Purple . companionship: something she had been unable to do earlier. More importantly, it touches upon the theme of Another aspect of this memoir is the seamless manner in connectedness of the human with the non-human worlds which Walker's interactions with her chickens (whom she which is an abiding concern of eco-criticism. As Thomas refers to as 'daughters') brings to mind the memories of her Dean has noted in his paper “What is Ecocriticism?”: mother and how the rearing of chickens also gave her the In order to understand the connectedness of all much needed calm. In In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens things—including the life of the mind and the life of Walker spoke about the manner in which her mother's the earth—one must reconnect the disciplines that gardening skill was a proof of her resilience and was a have become sundered through over-specialization. testament to her creative self which refused to bow down to Inherent in the idea of interdisciplinarity is the the oppression of living as poor, Black folks in Eatonton, wholistic ideal. Therefore ecocriticism must remain Georgia. She calls this creative spirit of her Black female “a big tent”—comprehensiveness of perspectives ancestors “the notion of a song” (237). Raising these chickens must be encouraged and honoured. All eco-critical brings Walker closer to her mother. She remembers how her efforts are pieces of a comprehensive continuum. mother had once ordered chickens through mail order and on Ecocritical approaches, thus, can be theoretical, the box being delivered, spoke to each of them kindly and historical, pedagogical, analytical, psychological, with rare empathy and concern. rhetorical and on and on, including combinations of Walker writes reimagining the moment: above. (5) The memoir thus blends womanism with Walker's eco- And something else will happen between my mother conscious activism and personal memories to create and her flock. I see this, now that I am old enough to something very new. In her earlier collection of essays Anything We Loved Can be Saved Walker had clarified her see her so much better: she will sit with them when stance on nature and environment by stating that it went we are at school or at church and endless work has against the Christian doctrine because valuing the Earth and prevented her from leaving home, and she will enter Nature and celebrating connectedness with it was something the peace that I have found with Babe, Gertrude,, & that Christian Church discouraged. She quotes an extract

Volume 3 Issue 1 March 2016 Volume 3 Issue 1 March 2016 70 71 Critical and Creative Wings Alice Walker'sThe Chicken Chronicles : Womanism as Life Force fromThe Color Purple where Shug is trying to rectify Celie's non-human complements Walker's ideology of White conception of God as an old man with blue eyes : celebrating a Pagan God. The moments of contemplation and the human empathy that Walker I believe God is everything, say Shug… attains while in the presence of her chickens is indeed a celebration of this Pagan god who, My first step away from the old white man was trees. Then air. according to her, is everywhere. The chickens Then birds. Then other people. But one day when I was sitting connect her to her spiritual self and more deeply to quiet and feeling like a motherless child, which I was, it come her mother. They make her evaluate her own to me: that feeling of being part of everything, not separate at maternal subjectivity. While recording her travels in all. I knew if I cut a tree my arm would bleed. And I laughed India as a part of the memoir, Walker adopts the and I cried and I run all round the house. I knew just what it style of a fond mother writing to her daughters was. (8) whom she left back home. She talks about the sightings of various animals in India and always The celebration of connectedness has a certain resonance with the wonder of an individual who believes in the with Wordsworthian Pantheism. However, Walker chooses to beauty of her Creation. call this a “Pagan” sensibility. She writes: In one of her letters to her chickens she forwards a plan 'Pagan' means 'of the land, country dweller, peasant,' for survival where she advises them to rely on the female all of which my family was. It also means a person strength of each other to survive when she could not be whose primary spiritual relationship is with Nature present physically to take care of them. The Afro American and Earth. And this, I could see, day to day, was true community has always been sustained by its strong female not only of me but of my parents; but there was no members. The sisterhoods within the community have way to ritually express the magical intimacy we felt always been its strongest bulwark and have consolidated the with Creation without being accused of, ridiculed for, indulging in 'heathenism,' that other word for community from within. Novels such as Walker's The Color paganism. And Christianity, we were informed, had Purple, Gloria Naylor's Women of Brewster Place and Mama fought long and hard to deliver us fromthat . In fact, Day have celebrated the strength of such women. Through millions of people were broken, physically and the following advice Walker wants her chickens to find their spiritually, literally destroyed for nearly two strength in their concerted sisterhood : millennia, as the orthodox Christian Church 'saved' When Mommy's away, and Mommy's away a lot them from their traditional worship of the Great because Mommy is a nomad, you yourselves, being Mystery they perceived in Nature. (17) twelve strong females, can create me in my absence. Thus celebration of the connectedness of the human and the You can create the Mother you need. It is only

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Mommy, out flying about the Earth, who cannot … no matter how much you depend on the mash and create you, except in her thoughts of your sweet, grain Mommy provides, no matter how much you most cuddle-and food-interested ways, and the enjoy sitting and napping with her, the real wonder of you which she carries nestled in her heart. excitement comes for you when she opens your gate (75) and you are free to rush into your real mother's Thus the non-humans are able to create an almost human bounty. The bugs, the grasses, the seeds, the worms, community on the lines of an empowered sisterhood to the fallen apples and the plums. It is She that you sustain themselves. Greg Garrard has maintained in his truly depend on. She whom you innately trust. Your monographEcocriticism that animals, like the concepts of love of Her is so hardwired in you, you probably dwelling, pastoral and wilderness are integral to evolving a don't even notice Her. wholistic approach to eco-criticism (136-159). Garrard has It is exactly the same with Mommy, who realizes that singled out Liberationists as a sub group within eco-critics she is, like you, only small. (185-86) who are more concerned with domestic animals than wild ones. He quotes Willis in this regard who develops this Thus Walker and her chickens form one perfect family wild/domestic binary alongside the pastoral/wilderness with Nature and Mother Earth. The human and the non- analogy. He observes, “The distinctive peculiarity of animals human become one and both are connected to Earth. is that, being at once close to man and strange to him, both InAnything We Love Can Be Saved Walker had spoken akin to him and unalterably not-man, they are able to about the need to re-imagine institutional religion as it would alternate, as objects of human thought, between the mean decolonizing the mind, which, according to her, was of contiguity of the metonymic mode and the distanced, utmost importance. She describes the effect of decolonizing analogical mode of the metaphor” (128). the mind in the following manner : Walker's domesticated chickens do much more than this. And what is the result of decolonizing the spirit? It is They define Walker's engagement with environmental and as if one truly does possess a third eye, and this eye ecological issues and represent her womanist ethos of opens. One begins to see the world from one's own healing.Also the chickens symbolize her goal of promoting a point of view; to interact with it out of one's own pagan concept of God which would celebrate the conscience and heart. One's own 'pagan' earth spirit. connectedness between human and non-human. We begin to flow, again, with and into the Universe. The conclusion of the memoir celebrates this thought in a And out of this flowing comes the natural activism of unique manner as Walker describes the chickens rushing out wanting to survive, to be happy, to enjoy one from their pen to look for food in the garden outside : another and Life, and to laugh …We begin to see

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that we must be loved very much by whatever Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose. 231- Creation is, to find ourselves on this wonderful 243.San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983. Print. Earth. We begin to recognize our sweet, generously appointed place in the makeup of the Cosmos. We ---.The Color Purple . New York: Simon &Schuster, 1982. begin to feel glad, and grateful to be here. (26) rpt.1985. Print. ---. “The Only Reason You Want to go to Heaven is that You ThusThe Chicken Chronicles is a definite culmination Have Been Driven OffYourMind.” Anything WeLove Can Be of Walker's womanist ethos and raising the chickens is an Saved: A Writer’s Activism. Ed. Alice Walker. 3-26. New attempt on her part to decolonize the mind and revise the York:Ballantine Books, 1997. Print. perception of nature through the interactions between the ---. “What Can I Give My Daughters Who are Brave.” human and the non-human, thereby charting new territory in Anything We Love Can Be Saved: A Writer’s Activism. Ed. the ecological terrain. Alice Walker. 89-107. New York: Ballantine Books, 1997. Print. Works Cited ---.The Chicken Chronicles : A Memoir . London: Hachette, Cokinos, Christopher. “What is Ecocritism?” Defining 2011. Print. Ecocritical Theory and Practice. Sixteen Position Papers.Salt Lake:Utah,1994.www.asle.org/wp- content/uploads/ASLE_Primer_Defining Ecocrit.pdf.Web.27April.2016. Dean, Thomas. K. “What is Ecocritism?” Defining Ecocritical Theory and Practice: Sixteen Position Papers.Salt Lake:Utah,1994.www.asle.org/wp- content/uploads/ASLE_Primer_Defining Ecocrit.pdf. Web.27April.2016. Garrard, Greg.Ecocriticism . New York: Routledge, 2007. Print. Walker, Alice. “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens”. In

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Remaking of the Myth of Ravana in Robert Southey's Indian rulers. Dutt, a poet of the colonial India reformulated The Curse of Kehama and the myth to create a reverse narrative, where the villainous Michael Madhusudan Dutta's Magnadbad Kabya king of theRamayana and of Southey’s The Curse of Kehama becomes a representative of the subjugated Indians under British rule. The adaptation of the myth proved problematic Monirul Islam for both the poets. Although they reworked the myth to represent their respective nationalist concerns, Southey was 1. Introduction accused of idolatry by contemporary British reviewers,1 and One of the most enduring Indian mythological characters Madhusudan, a Christian convert was accused of profanity is Ravana, the arch enemy of Ram in Valmiki’sRamayana . for reconstructing a myth sacred to the Hindus. Since ancient times, the story of avatar Ram’s conflict with 2. British Indianism,Anglicism and The Curse of Kehama the multi-headed Lankan King, Ravana exists in its multiple Raymond Schwab inThe Oriental Renaissance argues versions in the South-Asian countries (Ramanujan). The that the Roman and the Grecian wave ruled the European myth reached the western audience in the second half of the mind since the fifteenth century, but Europe’s entire eighteenth century, chiefly due to the efforts of English landscape changed as the Asian influence poured in during speaking orientalists in Calcutta, who translated and the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries. Schwab defines disseminated a number of ancient Indian texts. Parts of the phenomenon of Asian influence overpowering Europe as Valmiki’sRamayana itself were translated into English by the ‘Oriental Renaissance.’ Under the impact of the oriental missionaries William Carey and John Marshman between renaissance English literature in the late-eighteenth and the 1806 and 1810. Southey was inspired to conceive his “Indian early-nineteenth century harboured a passion for eastern epic”The Curse of Kehama under the impact of Jonesean themes. Between 1776 and1800, for example, twenty four syncretism of the 1790s and modelled the character of his plays or dramatic performances were staged in London based villain-hero on Ravana. Michael Madhusudan Dutt’s theatres on eastern themes (Barfoot 73). Calcutta played a Megnadhbadh Kabya( The Poem of Killing of Meghnad ) was crucial role in this Renaissance. It became a centre of oriental inspired by his knowledge of both eastern and western poetic learning under the leadership of Warren Hastings (1772- traditions. He reworked the story of theRamayana and 1785). TheAsiatic Society of Bengal was established in 1784 turned Ravana into a tragic figure. Southey found in Ravana headed by William Jones and a number of translations of the an apt figure for representing the religious degeneration of ancient Indian religious, philosophical and literary texts were priest-ridden Hinduism and the political despotism of the made by the Society members. Wilkins translated the

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Bhagwat- Gitain 1785; Jones translated Hitopodesa, I got at Picart when I was about fifteen, & soon Jayadeva’sGita G ovinda (1789) and Kalidasa’s Shakuntala became as well acquainted with the Gods of Asia & (1790).2 Confronted with the Indian antiquity, Europeans America as {with those} of Greece & Rome. This were overwhelmed and overawed at the ancientness of Indian led me to conceive a design of rendering every civilization and Hinduism. India’s past was glorified and mythology which had ever extended itself widely & Hinduism came to be valorised as the sunny religion of the powerfully influenced the human mind, the basis of east: a “myth of an innocent pre-lapsarian India” was created a narrative poem. (Collected Letters 1798-1803, No. (Franklin, 52). The Indianism of the orientalists encouraged 344) many British writers to make use of the new-found Southey embarked on the project with a poem on Islamic mythologies of India in their literary output. The phase of mythology,Thalaba, The Destroyer (1800) and as part of his Indianism, however, was very short lived and faded very 'design' he started thinking of writing a Hindu epic when he quickly in England with the rise of the Clapham sect and was on the verge of finishingThalaba . When the final copy of British Anglicism under the leadership of men like William Thalaba was undergoing corrections and rectifications, Wilberforce and Charles Grant. The orientalists valorised the Southey, in a letter to his friend Wynn (on 23 July 1800), ancient Indian philosophy and religion, but the Anglicists expressed his desire to compose a poem based on Hindu condemned Hinduism and Hindu society as decadent and mythology: “I have some distant view of manufacturing a degenerated. The Anglicans utilised the discourse of Hindoo romance, wild as Thalaba: & a nearer one of a Persian degenerated Hinduism to justify their demand for permitting story of which see the germ of vitality. I take the system of the missionary activities in India and proselytizing the Hindus. Zendavesta for my mythology, & introduce the powers of With the Hastings trial (1788-95) the Anglicist-Orientalist Darkness persecuting a Persian, one of the hundred & fifty debate reached its peak and led the ultimate victory of the sons of the Great King...”(Collected Letters 1798-1803, Anglicists and the ‘pious clause’ was included in the Charter No. 538). By the time Southey conceived of the design of Act of 1813. The whole spectrum, from the universalism and his 'Hindu epic' he had already read, partly or fully, Bhagwat syncretism of the 1790s to Anglicism and Anglicanism of -Geeta, Shakuntala,, Manava Shastra, Ain-i-Akbari Nala early nineteenth century, is relevant to any reading of Damyanti, passages from the Ramayana and the Southey’sThe Curse of Kehama . Mahabharata, and some of the Puranas (Drew 237). Though conceived in 1800, Southey completed the poem in1809, only Since his younger age Southey was attracted to different after meeting with W. S. Landor who assured him of printing the systems of faith. He wrote to John Martyn Longmire (on poem. Southey, therefore, conceived the poem when Jonesean November 4, 1812) about this :

Volume 3 Issue 1 March 2016 Volume 3 Issue 1 March 2016 80 81 Critical and Creative Wings Remaking of the Myth of Ravana inRobert Southey's The Curse of Kehamaand Michael Madhusudan Dutta's Magnadbad syncretism was in vogue and some elements of early radicalism Kehama's predecessors” (Complete Poetical Works 622).3 was still there in him, but when he completed the poem he Southey believed that all Indian villains are modelled on moved away from his early syncretism and was already Ravana. In a note to the poem, Southey remarks on the transformed into a nationalist of some sort; his perspectives on means a typical Indian villain thrives upon and notes the continental and colonial politics underwent major changes. “remarkable peculiarity” of Hindu gods who assist the Therefore, it was not unlikely for Southey to have introduced his power of evil : poem as a “monstrous fable” of a “false” religion (Complete Prayers, penances, and sacrifices, are supposed to Poetical Works 567). possess an inherent and actual value, in no degree The poem is at bottom a story of two lower caste natives depending upon the disposition or motive of the Ladurlad and Kailyal and their struggle for survival in the person who performs them. They are drafts upon oppressive regime of the Brahmnical king Kehama. Kailyal, Heaven, for which the Gods cannot refuse payment. a lower caste girl, becomes the object ofArvalan's (Kehama's The worst men, bent upon the worst designs, have in son) sexual desire. When Arvalan attempts to violate this manner obtained power which has made them Kailyal's chastity, her father Ladurlad strikes Arvalan to save formidable to the Supreme Deities themselves . . . his child from the oppressor andAravalan dies. Ladurlad was (Complete Poetical Works 567) driven by his instinct to save his child: "Only instinctively... Kehama wants to become “Man Almighty” (Complete /Only to save my child I smote the Prince" (Complete Poetical Works615 ) , by following the “remarkable Poetical Works 571). Once dead, Arvalan's spirit seeks peculiarity,” as Ravana tried to do by his prayers and revenge upon the father-daughter duo through his mighty penances. Kehama, however, is not simply Ravana. father Kehama. Kailyal escapes the wrath of the king and is Southey's Ravana originates from, and is a part of, a saved from being burned alive with Arvalan, when she falls particular historical moment in Indo-British encounter. into the river. Ladurlad is cursed with endless suffering by the Brahmin King. The rest of the poem is Kailyal and Ladurlad's By the end of the eighteenth century Southey started escape-adventure from the revenging spirit of Arvalan and supporting the growing demand of the missionaries to allow the 'man-Almighty' Kehama. The tale concludes with them to convert the natives of the colonized nations. He Kehama's failure to achieve supreme authority in the world wrote in 1802 inAnnual Review that “Christianity would and his imprisonment in hell. Ladurlad and Kailyal are produce the greatest possible good, individual and general; rewarded in heaven. because it would root out polygamy with its whole train of evils; because it would abolish human sacrifices, infanticide, In a note to the poem, Southey defines Ravana as “one of and practices of self-torture; because it is a system best

Volume 3 Issue 1 March 2016 Volume 3 Issue 1 March 2016 82 83 Critical and Creative Wings Remaking of the Myth of Ravana inRobert Southey's The Curse of Kehamaand Michael Madhusudan Dutta's Magnadbad adapted for our happiness here as well as hereafter” (Cuttings that the target of the missionaries in India should be from the Annual Review 207). This missionary zeal in converting the lower caste Hindus : Southey was ever growing. On July 14, 1813 Southey wrote it is the interest of all the oppressed castes to become in a letter to W. Wilberforce that the “Hindoos were easy Xtians, & the oppressors are everywhere the few. As proselytes to the Moors;” he wished “that Government for the Bramins let them alone – convert those who should promote such plans [for proselytizing], furnish the pay the Bramins & who support them – & the means, & leave the Missionary to Societies to find men, & business is done. Xtianity would increase the direct the execution” (Collected Letters 1791-1797, No. temporal comforts of all. prove this by detailing the 280). Southey's arguments in these reviews are similar to inconveniences of the Brahminical ritual. those of Charles Grant who in “Observations, On the State of (Collected Letters 1804-09, No. 995 ) Society Among the Asiatic Subjects of Great Britain wrote about the “general depravity of Hindus” and suggested: “The The narrative of the poem is precisely an example of how the true cure of darkness is the introduction of light disadvantages of Hinduism could be used to draw the lower [Christianity]” (148). caste natives into Christianity. Southey took up the political agenda of his friends Wilberforce and Grant in what Daniel Read in the context of England's (and Southey's) growing 4 White defines as his “conversion poem.”According to White, 'Indophobia' and dislike for Hinduism, Ravana can be the question of how “to Christianize the natives became the termed a religious despot, a symbol of oppression, cruelty question that motivated Southey first in his reviews and then and backwardness of Hinduism. Southey's poem does not inThe Curse of Kehama ” (5). have anavatar who could rescue Hindu society from Kehama, however, is more than a religious despot. If the degeneration and decay and, in Southey's scheme, the figure of Kehama is based on the mythical Ravana, he was a intended rescuer is Christianity. Therefore, though Kehama projection of British fear of, and hatred for, the Indian rulers is the hero, the central concern of the story is Kailyal and who rose in arms against them. The Mysore rulers, HaidarAli Ladurlad and their tale of oppression, persecution and and Tipu Sultan posed a major threat to the British dominance subsequent redemption. While he condemns despotic in India. The third and the fourth Anglo-Mysore wars were Kehama, he valorises the two lower caste natives. The given large coverage by the British media. Tipu's defeat was valorisation, however, is problematic because he was celebrated. In a number of letters, written after the third battle utilizing the caste division in Hindu society to the advantage of Mysore (1789–92), Southey refers to the publicity given to of the missionaries. In a letter to his brother Henry, written in Tipu and the Mysore wars. He wrote to his friend Grossvenor December 1804, Southey made the intriguing observation Bedford (c. July 9, 1792 ): “Let the newspapers now no more

Volume 3 Issue 1 March 2016 Volume 3 Issue 1 March 2016 84 85 Critical and Creative Wings Remaking of the Myth of Ravana inRobert Southey's The Curse of Kehamaand Michael Madhusudan Dutta's Magnadbad talk of Tippoo/ Of the fine fighting Christian or pugilist Jew” rhetoric in the poem foreshadows the utilitarian policies that (Collected Letters 1791-1797 , No.17). Again on October 23, were advocated by James Mill and Thomas Babington 1795 writing to Bedford he refers to 'Tipooing': “that man Macaulay a few years later. deserves ten years more Tippooing for not writing his life” 3. Bengal renaissance, Indian nationalism and (Collected Letters 1791-1797, No . 137). According to Rajani Meghnadbadh Kabya Sudan, after the third battle of Mysore and in thirty years after Anglicism in India can be said to have its formal his death in 1799, Tipu became a figure “the British loved to beginning during the governor general- ship of Lord William hate” (71-72). Southey's Kehama is, partly, an India ruler like Bentinck(1828- 1835) when some major decisions were taken Tipu. in matters of East India Company policy on education and In Southey's scheme of things, therefore, Valmiki's social reforms in India. However, demand for anglicising Ravana was transformed to serve evangelical and imperial Indians and proselytising them was there since the 1790s. concerns of England. Kehama, for Southey, is a despotic Westernization of education started with individuals and Indian king and priest of an inhuman religion, a savage who missionaries opening up schools in different parts of India. must be uprooted, for Southey believed: “The better and the Indians themselves took a leading role in the introduction of teachable natives would connect themselves with their 'modern' education: in 1817 Hindu College was established in civilized neighbours, and their children be exulted into the Calcutta by a group of affluent Bengalis so that their sons higher race; the more obstinate would cut off by spirituous might study those texts that the “gentlemen in Europe read” liquors, their own vices and their own ferocity. This is the (Chaudhuri 11). In fact, the Bengali intelligentsia in the order of nature: beasts give place to man; and savages to nineteenth century was largely westernised and civilized man” ( Cuttings from the Annual Review 603, Christianized. In the “intellectual crucible at Calcutta,” in the emphasis added). Southey draws the sympathy of the British nineteenth century, Christianity was not “just a religion but readers towards the lower caste sufferers. Kailyal and also an intellectual, even civilization tradition. Christianity Ladurlad are portrayed sympathetically in contrast to the king stood for the European Enlightenment. It stood for Western and the priest Kehama, because Southey's implicit design civilization” (Seely 9). Madhusudan's affiliation was to the was to build public opinion in favour of conversion and group of westernised and Christianised Bengalis in Calcutta. westernization of the natives. His method is to show the He was educated at Hindu College and later at Bishop inconvenience of the Brahminical religion and their College. Like many of his contemporaries, Madhusudan oppression on the one hand, and the docile and domesticable thought that Christianization and Anglicization would save image of the lower caste people on the other. Southey's the degenerated race of Hindus. In the year 1854 Madhusudan

Volume 3 Issue 1 March 2016 Volume 3 Issue 1 March 2016 86 87 Critical and Creative Wings Remaking of the Myth of Ravana inRobert Southey's The Curse of Kehamaand Michael Madhusudan Dutta's Magnadbad published a lecture onThe Anglo-Saxon and The Hindu and despiseRamandhisrabble:buttheideaofRavanaelevatesand argued that the Hindus are “now an aged, a decayed race” and kindlesmyimagination;hewasagrandfellow”(Murshid168- theAnglo-Saxons have come to 69). Undoubtedly it was the western influence that gave raise from his grave the Hindu to a brighter, a fairer Madhusudan courage to deconstruct the good (Ram)/evil existence' : the Anglo-Saxon is the soldier of the (Ravana) binary. His reading of the Grecian classics (e.g. the Cross—the Crusader . . . After quelling the obstinate Iliad) exercised considerable influence upon his antagonism, after crushing the stout resistance of characterizationofIndrajit(Meghnad),butitwasJohnMilton's European Paynimrie, this victorious gonfalon of the cross humanisationofSataninParadiseLost thatgreatlycontributed is now unfurled before the mighty and the vast citadel of Braminism and it is the hand of the Anglo-Saxon which toMadhusudan'srevisionoftheRavanamyth.Madhusudanwas must plant it on the embattled towers of the citadel. also an avid reader of the Romantic poets, many of whom (Madhusudan Rachanabali 624-629) celebratedMilton'sglamoriztionofthe“figureofSatanatGod's expense” (Read). William Radice in the introduction to his Anglicised Madhusudan dreamed of becoming an English poet and in 1862 he travelled to England to accomplish his translationofMeghadbadhKabya notesthatasastudentofthe goal.Meghnadbadh Kabya was published a year before this. Hindu college Madhusudan was “heavily and directly” In his remaking of the story of theRamayana, Ravana is influenced by the Romantic poets (xliii). Madhusudan's presented as the protector of his countrymen and as a loving connectionwiththeRomanticpoetsleadsustothequestionofhis father whose son Meghnad is stealthily murdered by the knowledge of Southey's epic,The Curse of Kehama . Though, invading enemy Ram's brother Lakshmana. Madhusudan's thereisnodefiniteproofthatMahdhsudanreadSouthey'speom, revision of the character of Ravana received strong itismostunlikelythathehadnoknowledgeofthepoem.Itseems condemnation from his contemporaries. Rabindranath more so when we consider the fact that Madhusudan's mentor, Tagore in his essay “Sahitya Sristi” (“Literary Creation”) D.L. Richardson published a massive anthology, Selections criticised Madhusudan for undermining the heroic status of from the British Poets, which contained a number of poems by Ram. The central conflict in Meghnadbadh Kabya, Southey. If Madhusudan had knowledge of Southey's according to Tagore, is between the fear of religion and the opposition to religion and Madhusudan preferred the appropriation of the Ravana myth, which in all probability he audacity of Ravana against the Gods.5 had,inwritingMeghnadbadhKabya notonlywasherewritingan Indian myth, but also was deconstructing Southey's western Madhususdan wrote to his friend Rajnarayan Basu that “I adaptationofit.

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When we take into consideration Madhusudan’s act of though heaspired to becomean English poet he had a deep doublemisreadinginMeghnadbadhKabya ,wehaveaglimpse lovefor hisnativetradition. oftheelementofnationalisminthepoem.Southeyadaptedthe The intellectual ambivalence of Madhusudan and his character of Ravana to suit the imperial design of his country; contemporaries was what Bhabha calls, “the effect of flawed MadhusudanrecastsRavanatorepresentthefateoftheIndians colonialmimesis.”Macaulayadvocatedintroducingasystemof under the British in the form of the suffering of Lankans in the educationthatwouldproduce“aclassofinterpreters”outofthe handsofRama.Theanti-imperial,anti-Britishturnofthepoem, Indiannativeswhowouldoccupythein-betweenspacebetween however, is apparently incompatible with Madhusudan’s the British and the millions they governed –“a class of persons westernization.TheproblematicnatureofMadhussudan’santi- Indianinbloodandcolour,butEnglishintastes,inopinions,in colonialdiscoursecanbeunderstoodoncewetakealookatthe morals and intellect”(“Minutes” ). Bhabha's critique of Bengalrenaissance. Oneoftheoff-shootsoflateeighteenthand Macaulay'sversionofthecolonialsubjectformationshowsthat early nineteenth century British orientalism and the the 'mimic man' harbours ambivalence and has the potential to introduction of western education in India was the Bengal disrupt the colonial authority (125-126). The 'mimic' men of renaissance and the birth of nationalist feelings among the nineteenthcenturyBengalsufferedfromacrisisofidentityandit 6 educated Bengalis. Criticism of the evils of contemporary often led them back to their Indian roots (Kopf 263). In Hindu society by the Anglicists, combined with the western Madhusuadan's later writings the crisis of identity becomes education of Bengalis, liberated a space from where the manifest, inMeghnadbadh Kabya we find it in a latent form. nineteenth century Bengali intelligentsia could think about Madhusudan's anti-imperial politics in the poem also had its reconstructingtheHindusociety. Theorientalistconstruction roots in the rising discontents against the British in the 1850s. ofa'goldenage'ofIndiancivilizationgaverisetoasenseofalost Defiant acts of rebellion against the British like Santhal gloryamongtheIndiansanditfuelledtheirdesiretorevivethe hool(rebellion) of1855-56 and 'Mahabidroha'(SepoyMutiny) 'glorious' past. The work of the orientalists, in other words, of1857providedMadhusudantheimmediateimpetusforgiving planted the seeds of Indian nationalist desires. Renaissance in a nationalist turn to his epic. Ravana's resistance against the Bengal started with a phase of imitation, asAurobindo Ghose colonising force and the failure of the resistance, therefore, would later remark (14-18). Madhusudan was a part of this cannotbereadinisolationfromthenationalistuprisingsof1855- imitative phase of Bengal Renaissance, but like Henry Vivian 57.Meghnadbad Kabya is“anactofdefiance...andbereadas DerozioandRajaRamMohanRoy,heembracedtheconceptof containing the seeds of post-1857 Indian nationalism and the nationalistic pride. He was well versed in the Indian classical eventualexpulsionoftheBritishfromSouthEastAsia”(Radice writingsanddrankdeepofit. Hisletterstohisfriendsrevealthat lxxxv).

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4. Conclusion ‘monstrous’display in the poem but he was chiefly critical of The adaptations of the Ravana myth by Southey and Southey’s valorisation of Hinduism, the “strenuous attempt to Madhusudan exemplify the complex nature of the conferEnglishpopularityontheHindooGods”(Madden144). the 2 relationship between metropole and imperial RaymondSchwabgivesachronologicallistofworkspublished periphery. The nineteenth century saw a great mobility: between 1784 and 1794 to show the eruption in oriental people, objects, information, genres, and feelings, myths, scholarship during the last years of the eighteenth century, discourses and ideas travelled vast distances. In the great especially after the Asiatic Society of Bengal was established circulation of global traffic, the myth of Ravana crossed (51-52). SeealsoO.P. Kejariwal’s(1988)TheAsiaticSocietyof continental borders. Robert Southey's negotiation of the Bengal and the Discovery of India’sPast 1784-1838. The first myth resulted in a poem that embodied the nationalist chapter of the book entitled, “The Background” analyses the ideology of early nineteenth century England. The same modernWesternefforttoknowanddiscoverIndia. global traffic allowed Madhusudan access to the likes of 3 Southey’s knowledge of the character of Ravana could have Homer,Virgil, Milton, Moore or Byron and his reading of othersources,e.g.Moore’sTheHinduPantheon . theminspiredhiminhisactofreconstructionoftheRavana 4 myth.Madhusudan'srestructuringofthemythofRavana, Thomas Trautman in Aryans and British India: New however, is more intriguing because his act of rewriting is PerspectivesonIndianPastsarguesthat“BritishIndomaniadid notsimplyadeconstructionofanIndianmythbutitisalsoan notdieofnaturalcauses;itwaskilledoff.The‘Indophobia’that actofempirewritingbacktothecentre. Postcolonialityof became the norm in early nineteenth-century Britain was the postcolonial literatures depends on the preceding constructedbyEvangelicalismandUtilitarianism,anditschief experience of colonization and their "foregrounding architectswereCharlesGrantandJamesMill”(99). tension with the imperial power...andtheir emphasizing 5 The essay has been translated into English by Swapan their difference from the assumptions of the imperial Chakraborty. See Rabindranath Tagore: Selected Writings on centre” (Ashcroft, Griffith, and Tiffin 2). Meghnadbadh LiteratureandLanguage,162-163. Kabyaisapostcolonialtextthatnegotiatestheexperienceof 6 See O.P Kejariwal’s The Asiatic Society of Bengal and the colonization and subverts the assumptions of the imperial DiscoveryofIndia’sPast1784-1838andDavidKopf’s British centre. Orientalism and the Bengal Renaissance: The Dynamics of Notes IndianModernization1773-1835. 1 Among the reviewers John Forster was most scathing on Southey. Forster condemned every aspect of Southey’s

Volume 3 Issue 1 March 2016 Volume 3 Issue 1 March 2016 92 93 Critical and Creative Wings Remaking of the Myth of Ravana inRobert Southey's The Curse of Kehamaand Michael Madhusudan Dutta's Magnadbad

WorksCited Madhusudanrachanabali.Ed.KshetraGupta.Calcutta:Sahitya Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin. The Empire Samsad,Rev.ed.1999.Print WritesBack:TheoryandPracticeinPost-ColonialLiteratures. Narayan,R.K.TheRamayana .NewYork:Penguin,2006.Print. London: Routledge,1989.Print. Ramanujan,A.K.“ThreeHundredRamayanas:FiveExamples Bhabha, Homi. “Of Mimicry and Man: The ambivalence of and Three Thoughts on Translations.” Many Ramayanas: The colonial discourse” inThe Location of Culture. New York: Diversity of a Narrative Tradition in South Asia. Ed. Paula Rautledge, 2004.122-31.Print Richman.Berkeley:CaliforniaUP,1991.22-49.Print. Barfoot, C.C. “English Romantic Poets and the 'Free Floating Schwab, Raymond. The Oriental Renaissance: Europe's Orient'.”OrientalProspects:WesternLiteratureandtheLureof Rediscovery of India and the East, 1680-1880. Trans. Gene the East. Ed. C. C. Barfoot, and Theo D'haen. Amsterdam: Patterson-BlackandVictorReinking.NewYork:ColumbiaUP, RodopiBvEditions,1998.65–96.Print. 1984.Print. CharlesGrant.ObservationsOntheStateofSocietyAmongthe Southey,Robert.TheCollectedLettersofRobertSoutheyPart Asiatic Subjects of Great Britain, Particularly with Respect to Four:1810-1815.Ed. Pratt,LyndaandIanPacker. Romantic Morals;andontheMeansofImprovingit.—WrittenChieflyin Circle: 2013.Web.RomanticCircleElectronicEdition theYear1792.London:N.p.,1813.Web.29June2012. --- . The Collected Letters of Robert Southey Part One:1791- Chaudhuri, Rosinka. Gentlemen Poets of Colonial Bengal: 1797.Ed. LyndaPratt. 2009.Web.RomanticCircleElectronic Emergent Nationalism and the Orientalist Project. Calcutta: Edition Seagull,2002.Print. --- . The Collected Letters of Robert Southey Part Three:1804- Dutt, Michael Madhusudan. The Poem of the Killing of 1809 . Ed. Carol Bolton, and Tim Fulford. Romantic Circle: Meghnad. Trans. William Radice. New Delhi: Penguin India, 2013.Web.RomanticCircleElectronicEdition 2010.Print. ---.CuttingsfromtheAnnualReview,Vol.I.-VI.,Containingthe Ghulam, Murshid. Lured by Hope: A Biography of Michael ContributionsofSouthey.N.p.,1803.Print. MadhusudanDutt.NewDelhi:Oxford UP,2003.Print. ---. The Collected Letters of Robert Southey Part Two:1798- Macaulay,ThomasBabington."MinutesonEducation.”Feb.2, 1803.Ed.IanPacker, andLyndaPratt.RomanticCircle: 2011. 1835.InternetArchive.Web.12Mar.2014. WebRomanticCircleElectronicEdition Madden, Lionel, ed.Robert Southey : The Critical Heritage . ---.TheCompletePoeticalWorksofRobertSouthey. NewYork: London:Taylor&Francis,2002.Print. Appleton&Company,1857. Print.

Volume 3 Issue 1 March 2016 Volume 3 Issue 1 March 2016 94 95 Critical and Creative Wings The Petrified Female Body: Reading Women’s Self-Transformations in A. S. Byatt’s “A Stone Woman” and K. B. Sreedevi’s “Ahalya Later : Woman of Stone” Tagore: Selected Writings on Literature and Language. Ed. The Petrified Female Body: Reading Women’s Self- SukantaChaudhury.NewDelhi:OxfordUP, 2001.Print. Transformations in A. S. Byatt’s “A Stone Woman” and Trautmann, Thomas R. Aryans and British India: New K. B. Sreedevi’s “Ahalya Later : Woman of Stone” perspectives on Indian Pasts. Berkeley,C.A.: California UP , Sohini Sengupta 1997. Seely, Clinton B. Introduction. The Slaying of Meghanada: A Introduction Ramayana from Colonial Bengal. By Michael Madhusudan There has been a close association between women and Datta. Trans. Clinton B. Seely. New York: OUP, 2004. 3-69. the process of petrifaction in multiple mythic sources, Print. legends and folklore. This paper seeks to examine the mythic Sophie Read. “Milton and the Critics: The Reception of revision of stone metamorphosis and women’s self Paradise Lost.”DarknessVisible .N.p.,n.d.Web.18Apr.2016. transformations within divergent traditions of Western and Indian contemporary literature. For the purposes of this White, Daniel E. "Idolatry, Evangelicalism, and the Intense paper, I would like to read A.S. Byatt’s short story “A Stone ObjectivismofRobertSouthey."Romanticism 17.1(2011):39- Woman” (2003) and K.B. Sreedevi’s “Ahalya Later: Woman 51.Print. of Stone” (1990), a Malayalam short story whose translated version by Gita Krishnankutty has been used here. Petrifaction stories which detail transformation of human beings into stone have been a recurrent feature in mythology: from the Greek myth of Niobe, sculptor Pygmalion and his female ivory creation Galatea, Nordic troll women, Native American creation stories of being descended from stones to Ahalya’s punitive transformation in Hindu mythology. There are also reverse Greek myths of the Gorgons (especially Medusa’s) turning their victims into stone, and Scylla and Charybdis’s metamorphosis as stone barriers for mariners. In most cases, strange topographical features and the larger than life context of myths fused the human and the natural, the animate and the inanimate world in the collective imagination. For example, we have the tragic Greek tale of the Theban queen Niobe, who incurs divine wrath by boasting of her fourteen sons and daughters to Leto, mother

Volume 3 Issue 1 March 2016 Volume 3 Issue 1 March 2016 96 97 Critical and Creative Wings The Petrified Female Body: Reading Women’s Self-Transformations in A. S. Byatt’s “A Stone Woman” and K. B. Sreedevi’s “Ahalya Later : Woman of Stone” of Apollo and Artemis. As a punitive measure for her hubris sociologist Nancy Chodorow highlights this primary (i.e. tragic pride), these twin Olympian deities killed all of connection which she feels is not adequately explained in Niobe’s children. She fled for Mt. Sipylus, transformed in Freud’s phallocentric (i.e. privileging of the masculine her eternal grief to a rock. The female face- shaped natural signifier “phallus” in language and social relations) analysis formation, commonly known as the ‘weeping rock’ on Mt. of female sexuality. According to her : Sipylus bears credit to such a rich story of female metamorphosis. Thus the metaphor of the stone is an As long as women mother, we can expect that a ambivalent one, simultaneously connecting human beings girl’s preoedipal period will be longer than that of a to fossilized passivity and the glory of eternity, much like the boy and that women, more than men, will be more frozen figures in Keat’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn”. In his Ode, open to and preoccupied with those very relational Keats has described the decorative pastoral images on a issues that go into mothering – feelings of primary marble urn as, paradoxically, lifeless as well as enjoying a identification, lack of separateness or state of permanent bliss, preserved from time immemorial. differentiation, ego and body-ego boundary issues and primary love not under the sway of the reality A.S. Byatt’s “A Stone Woman” principle. A girl does not simply identify with her The literary figure of the mourning woman mother or want to be like her mother. Rather, mother metamorphosed into stone finds contemporary expression and daughter maintain elements of their primary in A.S. Byatt’s text “A Stone Woman” (2003). The story re- relationship which means they will feel alike in explores the mythic narratives of female stone fundamental ways. (110) transformation, as here the woman’s change follows her own instinctual progress of dissociation from her material Byatt’s narrative explores the depth of Ines’s bond with world. Byatt’s account draws upon several classical and her mother sharing accommodation and emotions. There is a biblical sources: from Anaxarete in Ovid’s Metamorphoses sense of primary oneness of Ines and her mother in the who transforms literally due to her cold reaction following opening description, co-habiting in sheltered domesticity. Iphis’s death, or Lot’s wife who is transformed to a salt pillar This is severed through the latter’s death. As Ines is unable to when she looks back to an iniquitous city (Lara-Rallo 177). resolve her umbilical crisis of being severed from the warmth Published in theLittle Black Book of Stories, Byatt’s story of the maternal womb, she feels herself undergoing a records Ines, the female protagonist’s gradual and transformation. Predictably, her bereavement results in a irreversible stony transformation following the death of her searing pain in the abdomen which, the doctor reveals, has mother. Like Niobe’s maternal sorrows, Ines’s grief draws become gangrenous. The operated and dressed navel area is a attention to the strong pre-Oedipal mother-daughter bond constant reminder of her loss and thus becomes the first body which sustains through her mother’s death. The feminist part to solidify. One routine evening, she discovers her gut as

Volume 3 Issue 1 March 2016 Volume 3 Issue 1 March 2016 98 99 Critical and Creative Wings The Petrified Female Body: Reading Women’s Self-Transformations in A. S. Byatt’s “A Stone Woman” and K. B. Sreedevi’s “Ahalya Later : Woman of Stone” “a raised shape, like a starfish, like the whirling arms of a becomes sharper than ordinary human beings. It is not, nebula ... it was cold to the touch, as cold and hard as glass or however, a heightened sense of power achieved through her stone” (Byatt). Emotional void corresponds to specific alien anatomy (like superhero fantasies) which thrills her. Not physical change. Byatt not only revises the mythical narrative only are her mystic powers limited, she has no control over of female stone transformation by cataloguing with scientific her gradual incorporeal decline with the debilitating effects of minuteness the slight changes in Ines’s body, she also alters ageing on the human body. As an alternative discourse of perspectives by suggesting that metamorphoses may not traditional myths, “AStone Woman” is in fact a transgression always be a curse. When she becomes resigned, Ines makes a of established discourses of power and presence. Here the conscious choice towards transformation. She does make a narrative deconstructs the hierarchy of classic Western new beginning, but from a radically different plane by dualities where one binary oppositional term is privileged moving beyond the human, of finding intimate life in stones over another; such as logos over pathos, meaning over and finally exhilarating from the experience. meaninglessness, life over death. As Helene Cixous points Ines embraces her alternative destiny, the cursed one of out, the privileged binary term in this sequence ruled by a myths and fairytales, with lively relish. There is a self- phallocentric culture of difference is always masculine. She indulgent tone as she effusively describes the colourful elaborates on the subordinate position of the feminine term : changes in her body, which seems to flourish with hidden glow. Petrifaction which metaphorically corresponds to the Organization by hierarchy makes all conceptual physical process of decay and ageing is complicated by Ines’s organization subject to man. Male privilege [is] stance of accepting and even admiring the gradual crystal shown in the opposition between activity and clutter of her body. Rubies and pearls, fire opal, geyserites, passivity, which he uses to sustain himself. ... granites, black opal, labradorite, dolorites and barite; she Philosophy is constructed on the premise of develops a fetishist bond with her increasingly bejewelled woman’s abasement. ... Night to his day – that has body. Her isolation and suffering has initiated this process of forever been the fantasy. Black to his white. (64-67) metamorphosis, yet her mythic/fairy tale enchanted stature is not changed through human contact. Rather Ines affirms the Interestingly, Cixous subverts the monstrosity and negative necessities of dissociation from society, mulling over the implications of another mythic prototype, the Gorgon limitations of our ordered, human lives. Byatt continuously Medusa whose sight transforms men to stone. According to refigures mythic associations which reject stone her, the phallocentric hegemony which perpetuates the transformations as a negative experience. Despite her stony “active” male gaze is responsible for this male fear of exterior, Ines develops a more acute, raging consciousness countenancing the independent and uncontrolled (hence while her feelings course through her veins like “molten disordered) female vision. Thus male metamorphosis results lava” burning things it falls over. Her sense of smell too

Volume 3 Issue 1 March 2016 Volume 3 Issue 1 March 2016 100 101 Critical and Creative Wings The Petrified Female Body: Reading Women’s Self-Transformations in A. S. Byatt’s “A Stone Woman” and K. B. Sreedevi’s “Ahalya Later : Woman of Stone” from the fear of difference which destabilizes traditional rational discourse. As she looks forward to merging her gender hierarchies. Primarily based on the concept of mythic destiny with the mythic troll women of Iceland in stormy transformation, the figure of the Medusa posits the weather (another compelling motif of the revolutionary complementary nature of monstrosity and beauty. Byatt’s potential of her transformation), she begins to laugh, dance story, too, plays with this relational model of pairing and sing “Trunt, trunt, og tröllin i fjöllunum” (Byatt). This traditional opposites such as description of Ines’s appearance had been dismissed earlier by Thorsteinn as a nonsense as both grotesque and beautiful or the “striding stone women” phrase peculiar to troll women. However, like the laugh of the inhabiting a young Iceland found later in the narrative. Medusa, Ines’s incoherent gibberish threatens the clarity of In a story which lists few human beings, where Ines’s structured phallocentric language privileging a dominant, mother’s passing away forms the exposition of the plot, and fixed meaning; effectively built up on the ambiguity of a the anaesthetist is known for his aversion to any undue magic realist plot. emotional display, it is no wonder that Ines’s solitude is K.B. Sreedevi’s “Ahalya Later: Woman of Stone” affirmative and deliberate. Her sole companion in the story is also an exile in England. Thorsteinn Hallmundursson, the The paradoxical association of the stone between the Icelandic stonecutter, Ines meets in a graveyard provides living and the dead, power and powerlessness also features in another instance of mythic revision. Even though his claim to a range of myths within the Brahminic religious context. One bring life to stones makes Ines appraise him as another of the many forms of Shakti (female energy) is a crude, un- Pygmalion, Thorsteinn himself inverts that claim within the sculpted stone (Narayan 90). This context needs to be narrative context. Contrary to Ovid’s Pygmalion myth which considered in critically examining stone transformation details the sculptor’s desire for his female creation Galatea, curses in Hindu myths such asAhalya’s metamorphosis into a finally bringing her to life, Thorsteinn assists Ines’s stony stone by her ascetic husband Gautama for her sexual progress towards death. There is a fluid coming together of infidelity/violation. Like Pygmalion’s Galatea, Ahalya is the natural elements in the narrative culmination where “Snow embodiment of absolute feminine beauty and the sole and ice and hurtling cloud are in and on the wind, mixed with creation of the supreme male Creator, Brahma. After her moving earth and water and odd wreaths of steam gathered birth, he gives her for safe keeping torishi Gautama. When from geysers” (Byatt). It is perhaps suggestive of the chaos Ahalya reaches maturity, she is again handed back by the sage and diffusiveness of transgressive feminine language. Thus to her Creator. Pleased with his abstinence, Brahma gifts him Ines’s final and irretrievable metamorphosis is also her Ahalya in marriage. Thus Ahalya’s history, from her venturing towards the unknown, beyond the boundaries of conception to marriage crudely reflects the commodification

Volume 3 Issue 1 March 2016 Volume 3 Issue 1 March 2016 102 103 Critical and Creative Wings The Petrified Female Body: Reading Women’s Self-Transformations in A. S. Byatt’s “A Stone Woman” and K. B. Sreedevi’s “Ahalya Later : Woman of Stone” of female sexuality within patriarchy where she is solely used active intervention of other gods, however, Indra is pardoned as an object of male desire and reserved for her exchange and given the testicles of a ram. Ahalya, on the other hand, value. would only be released from her curse much later by the Pradip Bhattacharya notes, “The nameAhalya itself has a redeeming touch of Rama’s feet. double meaning: one who is flawless; also, one who has not Despite being a marginal narrative within theRamayana , been ploughed, i.e. a virgin” (14). As a commodified body Ahalya’s story has received enormous critical attention, with kept for her exchange value, Ahalya’s virginity (equated with many retold modern renditions of this tale of sexual infidelity purity) is thus a necessary accompaniment of her and subsequent metamorphosis. This even includes a short subordination perpetuated by patriarchal ideology.According epic thriller by the Bengali filmmaker Sujoy Ghosh recreating to the myth, Lord Indra – king of the gods – resents that a the myth on cyberspace. The tale of Ahalya has also been prized female beauty is not bestowed on him as his natural retold severally within modern South Indian (esp. Tamil, right. Therefore, he goes in Gautama’s disguise to his ashram Telugu and Malayalam re-readings) literature. This paper and establishes sexual relations with Ahalya in the sage’s considers the Malayalam writer K.B. Sreedevi’s feminist absence. While some versions of the myth uphold Ahalya’s adaptation of the myth in her short story, “Ahalya Later: innocence claiming she could not see through Indra’s Woman of Stone” (1990, trans. Gita Krishnankutty). Sreedevi masquerade, others view Ahalya as adulterous since she narrates Ahalya’s feelings and reminiscences after she is eventually realised his impersonation. For instance, the redeemed by Rama, only to be self-transformed into stone American Indologist Wendy Doniger notes that, the Valmiki once again by the shocking discovery of Sita’s banishment by Ramayana describes Indra’s rape of Ahalya (37) unlike later Rama. She is initially grateful for the compassion of Rama versions of the same story which construct details of Indra’s whom she considers in contrast to her stone-hearted ascetic sexual masquerade. This was probably made to implicate husband much more humane. While travelling to Valmiki’s Ahalya in her sexual violence and justify Gautama’s curse. ashram through the forest, she realizes the folly of her Indra is caught by the sudden arrival of Gautama and the assumption when she learns of Sita’s exile. Ahalya’s second enraged sage curses both of them. The stigmatized Ahalya is metamorphosis follows mythic precedents of grief stricken petrified for purification for sexual betrayal (the Valmiki women who transform themselves to stone. However, it is Ramayana also describes Gautama to have cursed Ahalya also a protest against the double standards of Rama’s male with invisibility for many years, living without food and dharma (i.e. religious duty) which liberates Ahalya while undergoing meditation to purify herself till she receives Rama stigmatizing Sita for perceived sexual impurity even after her as a guest) while Indra is cursed with castration. Through the agnipariksha (namely, trial by fire).

Volume 3 Issue 1 March 2016 Volume 3 Issue 1 March 2016 104 105 Critical and Creative Wings The Petrified Female Body: Reading Women’s Self-Transformations in A. S. Byatt’s “A Stone Woman” and K. B. Sreedevi’s “Ahalya Later : Woman of Stone” Born, raised and living solely among men, Ahalya suffers blossoms over the carpet of flowers. They made her happy” from the unique lack of any female companionship. Ahalya is (142). Emotional fulfilment comes also through her also connected to Ines in Byatt’s short story by their common companionship with Sita, who is literally Earth’s daughter maternal void. Her predicament is also paralleled to the birth with powers of healing and fertility. Found at the tip of a of the Greek goddessAthena from Zeus’head.After an oracle plough by King Janaka while engaged in cultivating a ritual professed that Zeus’s second child by Metis would overthrow field, Sita’s name means “furrow”, while Ahalya’s him just as he had usurped his father, Cronos, he swallows a nomenclature is associated with the virgin beauty of pregnant Metis, and consequently came to have a splitting unploughed land. In Sanksrit, “Sita” literally means furrow, headache. When his head was cleaved open for relief,Athena, the trench made by a plough and is thus held to be the the goddess of wisdom sprang forth. This fantasized myth is personification of fertile earth and the abundance of nature. replicated in the origin ofAhalya who is solely engendered by For the same reason, she is held as an incarnation of Goddess Brahma, symbolizing the male fantasy of self- generation Lakshmi. Complemented by their names, Sreedevi builds on which appropriates the creative powers of the female body their connected tragedies as both face unjust and rigorous (accordingly the Frankenstein myth serves as a dystopian punishment for male desire. alternative). Therefore, the Ahalya myth reinforces the Like Sita’s final rejection of Rama when she descends into privileging of culture/reason (masculine) against the Earth from where she was born, Ahalya in the revised nature/emotion (feminine), proclaiming both the superior narrative refuses to go back to living under the discriminatory context of Brahma’s art and Gautama’s spiritual control. Both moral standards of patriarchy. Her transformation into stone Ahalya’s un-natural conception and the transformation of her symbolizes her emotional void following Sita’s exile and her sexuality into stone are instances of sublimating the feminine anger at Rama’s failing his own standards of virtue and and establishing male domination over nature. This compassion. Throughout the story, we see Ahalya measuring hegemony is altered in contemporary mythic adaptations Rama’s ideal manhood which complements his wife’s virtue such as Tagore’s poemAhalya as well as K.B. Sreedevi’s short against her own domestic incompatibility with Gautama. story which focuses on Ahalya’s relationship with the However, Rama’s subsequent exile of his wife nullifies this changing natural world. The text lyrically describes Ahalya’s ideal as a fallacy. The narrator describes her poignant lament content in the surrounding environment of the hermitage near before her own petrifaction : a river, “... flowering forest. Under the huge trees with roots “The fire has abandoned its own flame? that snaked down, the ground was like a carpet of flowers. The Prakriti has been disowned by Purusha? sun’s rays, filtering through the branches, scattered more This terrible experience ... his insult ... his act of contempt ...” (Sreedevi 145).

Volume 3 Issue 1 March 2016 Volume 3 Issue 1 March 2016 106 107 Critical and Creative Wings The Petrified Female Body: Reading Women’s Self-Transformations in A. S. Byatt’s “A Stone Woman” and K. B. Sreedevi’s “Ahalya Later : Woman of Stone” Drawing on the Samkhya philosophy of Hinduism the awareness of the limitations of the known human world and a narrative focuses on the dualities of the universe, where rejection of (his)tories, myths and other systems of belief Purusha symbolizes consciousness and Prakriti stands for which perpetuate hierarchical binaries within society. The nature. Ahalya questions those religious interpretations petrifaction of the female body is not held as the death of which regard Rama and Sita's story as one of cosmic desire; it is the fantasized sublimation into a different state of harmony, since it emerges as a narrative privileging form being. For both, self-transformations into stone become an over matter, masculine over the feminine. Ahalya's self- awakening moment of liberation and illumination, even a transformation is also a reaction against the agony and positive culmination to eternity. The narratives explore the endurance of her entire life strung by male dictates. Her stone dualities of power and powerlessness inscribed in cultural figure not only expresses her solidarity with the disowned myths of stone transformation. At the same time, they also Sita, it rejects her own ideal womanhood carved for control. consider the relative deadness of organized societies which She had been previously cursed to become invisible and thus exclude or limit contradictions in discourse. Their thwart her threatening sexuality but she now willingly metamorphosis mirrors as well as questions the emotional embraces that destiny making herself inaccessible to repression/petrifaction of patriarchal and industrial- everything but the natural world. mechanized societies subordinating body and its spontaneous impulses. Conclusion Works Cited Stone transformations for women were traditionally intended to be disciplining devices for the female body in order to subject them to repression and eternal silence. Bhattacharya, Pradip. “Panchkanya: Women of Ironically, Ines and Ahalya reclaim control over their bodies Substance”.Journal of South Asian Literature . 35.1/2. by consciously choosing metamorphosis. While Ines finds (2000) : 13-56.Web. 29Apr. 2016. “molten lava” underneath her stony exterior, Ahalya Byatt, A. S. “A Stone Woman”.The New Yorker . 13 Oct. inscribes her own story of defiance against narrative 2003. Web. 29Apr. 2016. convention. Ines craves for the rich possibilities of an Chodorow, Nancy. J. “Pre-Oedipal Gender Differences”. alternative mineralized realm and the joys of non-conformity. The Reproduction of Mothering. Berkeley: Univ. of Ahalya shapes her body/world through the personal California Press, 1978. Print. experience of suffering. The self transformations of Ines in Cixous, Helene, & Catherine Clement. “Sorties”. The Byatt’s “A Stone Woman” and Ahalya’s in K.B. Sreedevi’s text “Ahalya Later: Woman of Stone” are based on the Volume 3 Issue 1 March 2016 Volume 3 Issue 1 March 2016 108 109 Critical and Creative Wings Marathi Dalit Autobiographies : Gendered Diversities

Newly Born Woman. Trans. Betsy Wing. London: I. B. Tauris Marathi Dalit Autobiographies: Gendered Diversities Publishers, 1996. Print. Jyotsna Bidave Doniger, Wendy. “Sita and Helen, Ahalya and Alcmena: AComparative Study”.History of Religions . 37.1 (1997): 21- Introduction 49. Web. 29April. 2016. Dalit movement in Maharashtra has been projected as an Lara-Rallo, C. “Deep Time and Human Time: The all India movement. After Ambedkar, movements and Geological Representation of Ageing in Contemporary orgnisations like ‘Dalit Panther’ and Buddhism as an Literature”. Acculturating Age: Approaches to Cultural alternative to Hinduism for the untouchables augmented Gerontology. B. J. Worsfold. 1st ed. Catalunya : Univ. of Lleida efforts to realize the rights of the dalits. Literature, in the form Press, 2011. Print. of poems, stories, articles and autobiographies, were Narayan, M. K. V. “Hindu Iconography”. Flipside of published to protest against the Hindu tradition, culture and Hindu Symbolism: Sociological and Scientific Linkages in ethics of the Varna system. Dalit women assert that the issues Hinduism. Fultus Corporation, 2007. Print. of caste, class, gender and the intersectionalities of these Sreedevi, K.B. “Ahalya Later: Woman of Stone”. Ramayana identities are not taken into consideration in both the dalit and Stories in Modern South India: An Anthology. Ed. Paula women’s movements, which lead them to voice their Richman. Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 2008. Print. problems differently. I attempt to explore whether this different voice is represented in the autobiographies. The present paper is an exploration of four dalit autobiographies as they narrate experiences of humiliation, domination and violence by theSawarna communities. More significantly, these narratives are also narratives of resistance. I choose to focus on the autobiographies of two men and two women to highlight the ongoing negotiations and dialogues of the dalit community, as well as the variances in structure, style, language, sense making, perspectives, and, generally, the ways of articulating meaning and resistance in these narratives. My paper attempts to explore whether the

Volume 3 Issue 1 March 2016 Volume 3 Issue 1 March 2016 110 111 Critical and Creative Wings Marathi Dalit Autobiographies: Gendered Diversities dalit women’s narratives, experiences, expressions and internal and external. The external factor is feminism where language vary from those of the dalit men. The four dalit the representation of dalit women by non-dalit women is narratives are as follows : “less valid and less authentic”, that is why they feel the need 1. Mazya Jalmachi Chittarkatha (The Sketch of my to talk differently. The internal factor is dalit patriarchy which Life) (1986) by Shantabai Kamble subordinates, and suppresses dalit women. Even in the field 2. Teen Dagadanchi Chul (The Hearth of Three of literature, dalit male writers tend to be dismissive of dalit Stones) (2000) by Vimal More women’s writing, not taking into consideration the literary 3.Akkarmashi (An Outcaste) (1984) by Sharankumar outputs of dalit women’s writings (456-58). Limbale Rege (1998), in her essay, discusses the significant shift in the 4. Upara (An Outsider) (1980) by Lakshman Mane feminist movement thought during 1980s and 1990s. She Mazya Jalmachi Chittarkatha by Shantabai Kamble and argues that the “masculisation of dalithood and savarnisation Akkarmashiby Sharankumar Limbale represent the Mahar of womanhood” could not raise dalit women’s issues. There community and their lives in Maharashtra. The other two is this need for the assertion of the discourse on caste and narratives,TeenDagadanchi Chul by Vimal More and Upara gender that leads them to have a standpoint (39-46). by Lakshman Mane represent theGondhali (Nomadic Tribes) andKaikadi community (Denotified Tribes), Autobiography- Form of Literature and Testimony of respectively, in Maharashtra. One way to reflect on these Life : narratives would involve a comparative juxtaposition of Autobiography is recent in India because, traditionally, a these narratives in terms of the gendered experiences of group or community was given more importance than an marginalisation and exclusion. The other way to analyse the individual (apart from the Bhakti Movement) and the form of narratives is to critique the variation in the expressions of autobiography focuses on the individual. Strictly speaking, in male and female autobiographies as dalit women claim to India western style autobiographies were written only in the have a different voice in the movement from dalit men nineteenth century. Some of the socially privileged Marathi because they feel that dalit movements do not represent dalit women like Lakshmibai Tilak (Smrutichitre , published in women’s issues. four parts, 1934-37) wrote self narratives. Dalit female Guru (1995) points out that there are two factors autobiographies were written late twentieth century. Baby responsible for dalit women to have a different voice: Kamble, a dalit activist, wrote her autobiography, Jina

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Amucha only in 1986. This is considered to be the first dalit Vimal More use colloquial language to narrate their female autobiography in Maharashtra. In the same year, childhood. The language of expression changes from Mazya Janmachi Chittarkatha, a self narrative by Shantabai colloquial to formal, significantly, while sharing the Kamble was published. These autobiographies are not just a experiences of higher education and work place. The word part of literature but also testimonials to the struggle these Master , for instance, is used to refer to a teacher in the women had. These writers, painfully, yet confidently, move beginning of the narratives which changes toShikshak in the beyond the domains of individual problems in order to later part of the autobiography.Another feature that marks the articulate the larger narratives of suffering and the larger works of the male writers who seem to be straightforward in structural and institutional frames as well as everyday and the narration is their use of abusive and violent language as collective practices of exclusion and marginalisation. So it the following experience narrated inAkkarmashi shows: becomes significant to investigate their experiences, Santamai and I went to a money lender. He was drunk. perspectives and impact of such exploitation on their lives. Santamai and I stood at some distance from him. Santamai’s blouse was torn exposing her breast. The money lender kept Language, Style and Sense Making: staring at the peeping breast, but he refused to lend us money. To begin the analysis of the language and style, one can His look spread like poison in my heart. I wished that the observe that the titles reflect the way these writers identify blouse of the moneylender’s mother or sister was torn and I themselves in the society.Mazya Jalmachi Chittarkatha (The could stare attheir breast. I burnt within. Our poverty was Sketch of my Life) by Shantabai Kamble and Teen detestable. I wanted to rebel against such humiliation. Dagadanchi Chul (The Hearth of Three Stones) by Vimal (Limbale 82) More represent how the writers look at their lives, the way In the cited sentences, the writer does not hesitate to share they relate themselves to their community and how they his grandmother’s insult as a Mahar woman. Rather he seems identify themselves in the society. The other two titles to express himself boldly and deliberately to make the reader Akkarmashi (An Outcaste) by Sharankumar Limbale and sensitive to and sympathetic towards him and his community. Upara (An Outsider) by Lakshman Mane reflect how the Mane, too, is outspoken in his expression. He narrates an writers feel they are identified by the society. They describe incident of a couple, Paru and her husband Maruti, at pala themselves negatively, purposely, to reinforce the pain and (small huts made together by the community people at the suffering of their heart. roadside, outside a village). Paru was fair and beautiful. She One important feature of these writers is that they except baths twice a day, combs her hair and stays neat. She is

Volume 3 Issue 1 March 2016 Volume 3 Issue 1 March 2016 114 115 Critical and Creative Wings Marathi Dalit Autobiographies: Gendered Diversities criticized for that by her husband and others atpala as they separate whirlwinds. When they start eating, all high caste are lower caste people and are supposed to live covered with boys and girls sit in a circle with the teachers, chatting with dirt. When she takes her bath by the road, some young men one another but the Mahar boys and girls are asked to sit linger around thepala . Maruti gets annoyed at the sight. One under another tree. All Mahar children watch them likeowls . night, she is kidnapped and raped by the men. She is not After the lunch, all the leftover food is collected and given to accepted by her husband and community after that. She the Mahar children and they are very happy to receive it. The becomes insane and commits suicide. The writer tries to food seems to them likeNectur . Parshya and Sharan carry it reflect the situation of the women of his community, their on the way back and the others follow them exactly like lives and their sense of insecurities through his hungry vultures. He says, “Our stomachs were as greedy as a autobiographyUpara ( An Outsider). He shares his own beggar’s sack”. Mane calls himself a dog in the junk pile painful experience so vividly that the reader is moved to when he is teased as an untouchable in the school. He says sympathy. The writer says that he was too young to that he deserves such humiliation because of his background understand what had happened then but could sense the and lifestyle. He is angry not only with the high caste society seriousness of it. for the discrimination but also with himself and his These instances show that both the male writers share community for living such a miserable life. their experiences explicitly. The female narrators seem to use Shantabai narrates an incident of the year 1967 when she sanitised language. The incidents they share appear to have was working as a principal of a school. Her 8-9 year old been changed from what actually happened to them. They daughter Mangal went to a friend’s house to drink water avoid using abusive or offensive language, trying to be during lunch break. Mangal took water for herself from a pot simplistic and neutral as they do not blame any individual or for which her friend Chhaya started crying. She said that her community for being harassed or dominated. The male mother would beat her if she came to know that Mangal (a writers show anger which is also reflected through the similes Mahar girl) had touched anything in the house. Mangal did they use in the narratives. not understand anything so she asked for explanation, on Limbale shares an incident of a school picnic. While which, Chhaya explained that she was told by her mother that narrating his experiences, he compares the Mahars with the they had gods in the house and if Mangal touched anything in others. He says that the Wani and Brahman boys play the house, everything would be polluted. Shantabai says that Kabbadi but the Mahar boys cannot join them so they have to though she was the principal of a school and had respect in the play a separate game and the games seem to him like two school and society, this incident took place only because they

Volume 3 Issue 1 March 2016 Volume 3 Issue 1 March 2016 116 117 Critical and Creative Wings Marathi Dalit Autobiographies: Gendered Diversities were still consideredAsprushya (untouchables). The writer, narratives which also record the facts of their community life. in her capacity as the principal, did not take any action against They do not impart a sense of anger or revenge when they it; she did not even react or ask the woman for the reasons for share their humiliation. The only understanding one receives this discrimination. Rather she instructed her daughter to go is the sense of discrimination. Both the male writers seem to to their own house to drink water and not to others’houses. be aggressive and burning with agony unlike the women Vimaltai narrates one incident that happened to Gopal writers who maintain composure. The above incidents, apart Shinde, one of the family members atpala . Once he brought from the writers’ own sense making towards the home a beautiful, blue and peacock colour sari, ashalu (a sari discrimination, reflect how theSavarna society was an with border made with silver metal that a bride wears on the institution which contributed to the writers’ realisation of wedding day). Everyone at thepala appreciated it and being dalits. suggested to him to hide it as he might be suspected of theft. Both the female autobiographies end with a positive and While they were talking of all this, two police men, a woman vigorous note which creates empathy for them in the reader’s and three or four men walked towards thepala . The lady mind. The male autobiographies reflect feelings of anger and pointed to Gopal and said he was the one who took away her revenge throughout and leave the readers in a pitiful, sad and shalu by diverting her attention to the vessels he had on restless state of mind. The ending paragraph ofAkkarmashi is display. The police started beating him without any enquiry. as follows : He tried to explain that he did not steal it; the lady gave it to Who will undertake Dada’s funeral after his death? him on buying the vessels but the police kept beating him, the Will Muslims attend his cremation? How can they one who went to rescue him was also beaten up. The police perform rituals after death? Where would they bury scared everyone by saying that he would be locked up. One of his body? What will happen to his corpse? What will the family members then collected money from everyone and its fate be? In which graveyard will they cremate gave it to the police requesting them to leave Gopal, thinking him? Would people come to the rituals after that if Gopal was locked up, they would need more money Shantamai’s and Masamai’s deaths? Why this and time to rescue him. At the end, theGondhalis were at a labyrinth of customs? Who has created such values loss as they had lost the vessels, money and were beaten up of right and wrong, and what for? If they consider too badly. Such incidents show harassment as routine and my death illegitimate what values am I to follow? unpredictable in their everyday lives. (Limbale 113) Vimaltai and Shantabai sound uncomplicated in their

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Limbale makes the reader think about all the questions he Can’t you see? Are you blind? Don’t touch me...” Naja was asks at the end of the narrative which are not the questions scared and moved aside. When the writer narrates these only to him and to the reader but also to his own community, incidents, she seems to be submissive. She does not comment caste system and to the social structure as a whole. on or react to the incidents, neither does she blame anyone. Teen Dagadanchi Chul()by The Hearth of Three Stones Resistance: Vimaltai is a comprehensive account incorporating her An important aspect that emerges while discussing the memories of family,Pala, problems of hunger, violence and social discrimination is the mode of resistance. It could be humiliation, school and childhood, cultural practices and interpreted in two ways, the way the writers try to resist the rituals, customs of theGondhali community, the change humiliation they suffer from the high caste society and the marriage brought in her life and her participation in activism. way they resist themselves from raising a voice against the Once, Vimaltai narrates, on a Thursday in Belgaon, a discrimination. market day, ten to twelve people came to theirPala and asked Mazya Jalmachi Chittarkatha begins with the day Naja, for help in hiding the liquor they had in their shops as they the writer, is admitted to school. There are many experiences apprehended a police raid. All ‘their’ (Gondhali) people shared which reflect the contemporary society and culture. refused to help because they were scared of police. They were The incidents shared in the autobiography are narrated just as too helpless to oppose when the bar owners decided to dig the they happened without the writer’s opinions or perspectives ground in front of the Pala and hide the liquor there. All could about them. She does not seem to react to the situations when hear the police van coming their way while they were she narrates them. She shares her experience when she was in finishing the task. The conspirers ran away and ‘their’ men class three. Her new teacher Patil Master asks her and other hid; only the women remained at the Pala. The police Mahar children to sit outside the classroom. He would not enquired, messed up everything in the huts and warned the touch them, nor would he allow other (socially privileged) women to leave the village by morning to which they agreed children to do it. Whenever he had to check their homework and left early morning, not knowing where to go. This or class work, he would ask them to keep their slates on the incident underlines the depth of the silent suffering of the floor; he would then pick it up and check it. There are many lower castes and their loss of agency against the domination experiences which represent the caste biased nature of the of the upper castes. society. One day, during school break, Naja was crossing road When the people atpala could not feed themselves by when Jija Sable was carrying water from well. The lady begging, they decided to sell steel pots, pans, tins and other abused Naja saying, “You, the daughter of mahar, go aside...

Volume 3 Issue 1 March 2016 Volume 3 Issue 1 March 2016 120 121 Critical and Creative Wings Marathi Dalit Autobiographies: Gendered Diversities stuff as a source of income. They had different terrible disturbed whenever he would think of this fact. When the experiences, some of those Vimaltai shares. Once she went writer narrates such experiences, the thoughts of being with her cousin Ambuakka to sell steel vessels in a village. humiliated, of inequality, of domination and, most She narrates that they had to walk in the sun for the entire day importantly, of revenge linger in his mind, which are reflected to sell the vessels yet could not make any profit as people in the autobiography. would just enquire and would not buy anything. Towards the Lakshman Mane belongs to theKaikadi community. His end of the day, some women call them and show interest in autobiography too has the school experiences at the buying. Vimal and Ambuakka were asked to sit at a distance beginning. When he goes to school, he is asked to sit at the from the house as their touch would pollute the house. They door but the children of high caste started teasing him and did were bargaining for every vessel at half of the price that not allow any touch. But the writer, as a child, is not surprised Ambuakka asked for. They did not show the least respect to at it as he felt he was dirty enough to receive such treatment. her while talking as she belonged to a lower caste. When she He narrates one more incident when his teacher took all the asked for water, a woman gave it from some distance so that students to a photographer to click a group photo after the she was not touched and polluted by her. Such a treatment was examinations were over. They were made to sit in a row. A given to them everywhere they went. When Vimaltai narrates beautiful Maratha girl was sitting next to Lakshman. She all these incidences, she does not try to resist the wanted to leave the place but the photographer did not allow. discrimination though she feels humiliated. Next day, there was a rumour that Lakshman tried to hold the Sharankumar Limbale shares his experiences with a girl’s hand and he, along with his family, was forced to leave rather divergent perspective.Akkarmashi also begins with his the village quietly without even enquiring whether whatever school experience but the way he narrates the incident is was said was true or not. completely different from the way Shantabai renders hers. He One day, his parents went to collect thefoka (wet sticks of does not only narrate what he experienced as an untouchable a particular tree which are used to make different types of but also what his granny, mother, sisters and other women pots). They did not return even in the afternoon so Lakshman were going through (as he feels they suffered more than what was worried. His youngest sibling was crying of hunger as he did). In one of the instances he says that Hanmnta Limbale there was nothing to eat in the house. He was angry with the was angry when his name was added to the writer’s name in parents. All of a sudden he could see his parents coming with the school because, though he was Sharan’s father, he was not some other people. His parents were beaten up badly. He married to Sharan’s mother. As a child, he was annoyed and describes that his mother’s sari was all torn and she did not

Volume 3 Issue 1 March 2016 Volume 3 Issue 1 March 2016 122 123 Critical and Creative Wings Marathi Dalit Autobiographies: Gendered Diversities even have blouse on her body. She was wearing his father’s dalit men and women talk about their lives but there are shirt. He was all the more disturbed by the sight, not knowing differences too. Looking at the similarities, all the narratives what had happened. They were caught while taking the sticks start with the school experiences, maybe because education from the side of someone’s farm. They were punished so was a factor which was always missing in these communities mercilessly for a trivial reason just because they belonged to a and the writers try to symbolise or represent the positive lower community. Lakshman was furious seeing his parents’ change in the community. Although the issue of condition, which raised many questions in his mind but he untouchability is common in all the narratives, yet it is resisted himself. observed that Vimal More does not have much of these All these narratives begin with the school experiences of experiences to share as she belongs to the later generation. the writers. Ironically, they describe school as one of the The tone and approach of the dalit female writers, as we have institutions which made them recognize themselves as noticed, is milder than those of the dalit male writers. They untouchables. They all share experiences of social represent their experiences as a part of the culture and society discrimination in more or less similar way as they all talk of that time. They definitely are not happy with the treatment about the incidences of being teased as an untouchable, being they receive but they do not have visibly rebellious thoughts made to sit away from the other children, not being allowed to as the male writers have. That ‘dalit women talk differently’ touch the slate in the teacher’s hand, not being permitted to has been amply revealed in the way they talk about their lives play or eat with the high caste society children and many and problems, completely different from the way the men do, other such incidents. Their own community also proved as through their simple and straight forward expression. an institution which made them identify themselves as lower Another important characteristic is that dalit women do not caste and class people, different from the Savarna society have any experience of sexual violence to share but the dalit when the writers, as children, started going to school. Their male writers narrate such incidents happening in the society. parents too were criticised for educating the children. There could be many reasons for it. One reason could be the Vimaltai’s father was worried that she would not get married culture. The culture and society these women are brought up if she were educated. The school emerges as both a liberating in do not allow them to talk about such issues and these force as well as a representative of society at large that trainings are imprinted so deeply on their minds that it reinforced identities of marginalization. becomes an unconscious part of them not to discuss these Taking the above discussion into consideration we may aspects openly.Another reason could be the psychology of the conclude that there are definitely some similarities in the way society in general and of these writers in particular which

Volume 3 Issue 1 March 2016 Volume 3 Issue 1 March 2016 124 125 Critical and Creative Wings The Protagonist in Joyce's Portrait: A Bakhtinian Reading links virginity or sex issues to reputation, pride and identity in The Protagonist in Joyce's Portrait: the society. This could lead one to think that the image or A Bakhtinian Reading reputation of dalit women might be ruined if they talk about Tapati Talukdar sexual violence so openly. The dalit women consciously write in such a way that they will be welcomed and accepted in the James Joyce started writing a novel in 1904 entitling it society. The paper has made an attempt to find the unique Stephen Herowhich was “in some sense autobiographical” ( L voice of female dalit resistance as distinct from that of their II 131-2). But he grew utterly dissatisfied with the style he male counterparts. had adopted to write it. His dissatisfaction appears to stem from his inability to mute the dominant authorial voice Works Cited tending to fix the image of the protagonist. It seems the proximity of the creator to the character has proved too Guru, Gopal. “Dalit Women Talk Differently”. Economics problematic to create the distance between them and invest and Political Weekly 12.1 (1995): 456-58. Print. the character with a voice of his own. However, he tried to Kamble, Shantabai.Mazya Jalmachi Chittarkatha. Zapurza distance himself from his protagonist, as the surviving pages Publication, Mumbai, 1986. Print. ofStephen Hero attest to, by instilling a generous dose of Limbale, Sharankumar.Akkarmashi(The Outcaste) . Delhi : irony. Still the discarded draft makes the novelist’s presence Oxford University Press, 2003. Print. felt on every page. This works as the main imperative to Mane, Lakshman.Upra .Pune : Granthali Publication, 1980. radically change the style in portraying his protagonist when Print. he rewrites it as A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, published in 1916. Joyce derives many features of his More, Vimal.Teen Dagadanchi Chul ,Pune : Meheta protagonist from the surviving fragment of Stephen Hero, Publication House, 2000. Print. posthumously published in 1944, and also from his essay “A Rege, Sharmila.“ Dalit Women Talk Differently: A Critique Portrait of the Artist” (1904) but he gets rid of the diffuseness of ‘Difference’ and towards a Dalit Feminist Standpoint of the former and the abstruseness of the latter. The recreated Position.”Economics and Political Weekly 33.44 (1998): version, as Joyce scholars have confirmed, is the result of his WS39-WS46. meticulous and repeated revisions. What draws our applause and wonder as well is the way he has changed the language of his depiction to match the age of his protagonist.

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The novelty ofPortrait (the shortened title would be used voices of the author and character/s, between and among for all textual references) lies in its processing the narrative characters, their arguments and agreements that constitute the through the consciousness of its protagonist Stephen. Other dialogic field in a fiction. This style of discourse, called Free characters inhabit the fictional world but none is dominant. It Indirect Discourse (FID) in Stylistics, enables the author to is from Stephen’s point of view that the world is represented. introduce “order and stylistic symmetry into the disorderly Joyce breaks with the realist tradition in his portrayal of flow of a character’s inner speech” retaining the emotional Stephen and shifts his focus, instead, to the use of varying contour of the character’s speech (BakhtinDI 319). Besides languages to unravel his consciousness. Each of the free indirect discourse, double-voiced discourse embodied successive stages of Stephen’s life strikes him and the reader through comic, ironic or parodic discourse that shows the “as a language” (R. B. Kershner 154). This explains why direct intention of the character and the refracted intention of physical details of Stephen are missing inPortrait but the author constitutes another site of internal dialogization of Stephen Hero devotes a few lines to rendering the earlier voices in the novel. It is through “Heteroglossia” (DI 324), a Stephen’s facial features at the beginning (Stephen Hero 29). term coined by him, that varied voices enter the novel. Joyce captures Stephen’s consciousness inPortrait by Polyphony is another key- term he borrows from music but exploiting discourse in a way that shows how the world “orchestration is, to cite Michael Holquist, “the means for appears to him and what his point of view on himself is. He achieving it. Music is the metaphor for moving from seeing does not reduce Stephen to a puppet and, instead, invests him … tohearing …” ( DI 430). This paper proposes to discuss with an independent voice. But he does not or cannot efface Joyce’s portrayal of his protagonist inPortrait in the light of the author from his work though his celebrated theory of Bakhtin’s ideas to show the hero’s ultimate sense of his “own impersonality leads us to believe so.Portrait incorporates inner unfinalizability” and his “capacity to outgrow, as it the voice of the author in such a way that the writer only were, from within” (Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics 59). It appears to disappear from the text. It is the discourse that is through the discourse attributed to the hero that the author betrays the presence of the author, particularly “the quasi- can represent the phases of his (the hero’s) development to direct discourse” (M. M. Bakhtin The Dialogic Imagination come to the realization of his unrealized potential. 319) used in abundance in the narrative. For Bakhtin, the speaking person and his discourse Bakhtin who is, probably, the first to discover dialogism constitute the core of the novel in which the speaking person’s in fiction considers quasi-direct discourse as one of the voice is “artistically represented … by means of (authorial) effective devices to incorporate dialogism. It is the play of discourse”. He (the person in a novel) does not merely speak,

Volume 3 Issue 1 March 2016 Volume 3 Issue 1 March 2016 128 129 Critical and Creative Wings The Protagonist in Joyce's Portrait: A Bakhtinian Reading he acts as well and his action is charged with his ideology. Poetics 48). All the characterological traits of the hero The important thing for the novel is not the image of the become, as Bakhtin goes on to say, the subject of his self- person in his own right but “precisely the image of a consciousness and object of his introspection. Joyce allows language. But in order that language become an artistic his protagonist Stephen freedom to articulate his thoughts image, it must become speech from speaking lips, conjoined through his FID, inner speech, his formal dialogues with his with the image of a speaking person” (DI 332, 336). ‘Image friends and, ultimately, through his free direct discourse in of a language’, as annotated by Holquist, implies the the diary-entries. In fact, Joyce’s portrayal of the formation of “ideological impulses behind an utterance” (DI 429). It is the Stephen’s self through language appears to realize what speech aspect of language, that is, utterance, that Bakhtin Bakhtin says in his book Marxism and the Philosophy of puts the optimal stress on. The mode of Joyce’s Language, ‘The logic of consciousness is the logic of representation of language or languages through the speaking ideological communication, of the semiotic interaction of a person/s ofPortrait appears to conform to Bakhtin’s social group’ (qtd. in Kershner 19-20). A discussion of the concepts. narrative proper that follows shows how Bakhtin’s ideas ThoughPortrait shows the predominance of the appear to inform the portrayal of Joyce’s protagonist. protagonist’s point of view, Joyce has made it multi-voiced Portrait opens with an Irish tale meant for children as its by positing Stephen in a polyphonic world in which his voice tenor makes it abundantly clear and also the biographic is dialogized with those of others besides himself and the reference provided by Joyce’s father in his letter to him (L III author. Free indirect discourse shows the dialogic interaction 212) lends support to it. The allusion to the tale betrays the of the character with himself, too, along with the author. The consciousness of language in the child who appears to alien (not one’s own) voices comprise those of his family recount the story, “Once upon a time and a very good time it members, school fellows and Jesuit Fathers of his college, was there was a moocow coming down along the road and and the social and political forces. Stephen’s encounter with this moocow that was coming down along the road met a varying styles of discourse is represented inPortrait and his nicens little boy named baby tuckoo … [ellipses inserted by agreements and arguments with them form the dialogizing Joyce]” (Joyce 7). The story shows the dialogue of voices background of the evolution of his consciousness. What between the novel and the alluded story, in addition to those Joyce seems to have underscored is not “the fixed image” of of the primary teller and the secondary teller, seemingly the his protagonist, but the sum total of his consciousness and child. “The novel as form is always citational, constantly and self-consciousness …”(Bakhtin Problems of Dostoevsky’s plurally in dialogue with other novels, other writings”

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(Andrew Gibson 152). The tale, quoted above, told in a unable to enter into dialogic relationship with that of the repetitive manner with the incorporation of the word ‘nicens’ addressee. Instead, it leads to the fragmented rhyme that the reveals the unsophisticated style of a child who appears to child appears to compose exploiting the rhythmic potential of recount it. The style of rendering underscores the linguistic the word ‘apologise’ and the verb phrase ‘pull out his eyes’. innocence that one enjoys in childhood- the lack of anxiety to Joyce closes the expository section leaving pregnant hints conform to the restrictive syntactic norms of constructing that the consciousness that is born would evolve into an sentence in English. The novel, as Kershner writes, “is independent self through language, particularly through his permeated with the nostalgic sense of a lost linguistic encounter with alien utterances. The words of the rhyme do innocence, a time when language was natural, without its not soothe us as music generally does, instead, they leave an burden of alterity” (155). The language of the story is able to ominous message of fear and foreboding in us. create the stance of reaching us unmediated. The ellipses put Stephen is posited in what Bakhtin calls a heteroglot in by Joyce break that illusion as we immediately learn that world in Clongowes Wood College where we meet him next. “His father told him that story …” (Joyce 7). From this point He is represented in the playgrounds among his school mates. onwards we are exposed to the child’s free indirect discourse It is not the author who tells us how he feels but it is through that blends the voices of the author and the character- the his inner speech and free indirect discourse that we learn, “He beginning of a mediated language. However, the oral lore felt his body small and weak amid the throng of players and assumes a present tense experience as the fabled moocow his eyes were weak and watery. Rody Kickham was not like gets connected to the fictional tuckoo who emerges as the that: he would be captain of the third line all the fellows said” child Stephen. (Joyce (Portrait ) 8). It is the character’s point of view on the The opening section highlights Stephen’s encounter with new world he now inhabits that Joyce highlights here. Of “alien utterances” (BakhtinDI 284)- that is, words not one’s course, the author’s voice remains veiled in all the modes of own- when he is exposed to his mother’s pleas and his discourse but he creates the stance of granting autonomy to governess Dante’s threat, “His mother said: - O, Stephen will his protagonist Stephen. We discover that the voices of the apologise. Dante said: - O, if not, the eagles will come and author and character dialogize on a note of agreement in the pull out his eyes” (Joyce 7). But these utterances fail to lead to second section of chapter 1 as irony or parody is hardly “active understanding” in and produce the expected resorted to. But Stephen’s interaction with his classmate “rejoinder” (BakhtinDI 282, 284) from Stephen who is too Nasty Roche displays some sort of clash in their point of view young to fathom their significance. Hence this discourse is that probably provokes him to call him “a stink”. It is the

Volume 3 Issue 1 March 2016 Volume 3 Issue 1 March 2016 132 133 Critical and Creative Wings The Protagonist in Joyce's Portrait: A Bakhtinian Reading consciousness of status that propels Roche to ask Stephen if gather from Stephen’s discursive flow of thoughts captured in his father is a magistrate when the latter answers he is “a the narrative : gentleman” (Joyce 9). Thus their discourses dialogize That was not a nice expression. His mother had told representing dissonance or some sort of clash arising out of him not to speak with the rough boys in the college. the former’s awareness of social superiority to the latter. Nice mother! The first day in the hall of the castle Stephen’s exposure to alien words betrays his struggle to when she had said good-bye she had put up her veil contextualize them but they resist assimilation. They do not double to her nose to kiss him: and her nose and eyes become his own and hence remain enclosed in what Bakhtin were red. But he had pretended not to see that she calls “quotation marks” (DI 294). These words mostly consist was going to cry. She was a nice mother but she was of school boy slangs he hears spoken in the heteroglot world not so nice when she cried. (9) of his college. This is how he tries to decode the word ‘suck’, As the use of the word ‘belt’ as a school boy slang is the “Suck was a queer word. The fellow called Simon Moonan immediate context of the first sentence it may mimic his that name because Simon Moonan used to tie the prefect’s mother’s voice. The second sentence reinforces this notion by false sleeves behind his back and the prefect used to let on to reproducing his mother’s words. We may call it double- be angry. But the sound was ugly”. He tries to discover some voiced discourse that is followed by his interior monologue sort of affinity between the sound of “dirty” water passing evoked by the word ‘nice’. His discretionary application of it through a basin and the sound the word makes (Joyce to his mother demonstrates how Joyce invests Stephen with (Portrait ) 11). His struggle to decode words persists what Bakhtin calls an “autonomous consciousness” throughout the opening chapter and his perennial fascination (Problems of Dostoevsky’sPoetics 285). with words paves the way for his choice of artistic vocation at For Bakhtin, language is an energy negotiating between a the end of the fourth chapter. person’s inner consciousness and the outer world (Caryl Joyce gives us a foretaste of the stream of consciousness EmersonProblems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics XXXIV). In technique inPortrait itself in an embryonic form in the Portrait Stephen is constantly preoccupied with making opening chapter and in a more mature form in the closing sense of the surroundings of his new world, “All the boys diary entries. The narrative is replete with Stephen’s inner seemed to him very strange. They had all fathers and mothers speech or monologues. But there can never be any actual and different clothes and voices” (Joyce 13). He evaluates his monologue in Bakhtin’s concept of speech as in a monologue classmates not only on the basis of what they say but also on the character speaks to himself/ herself. This is what we what they do to him, “He did not like Well’s face. It was Wells

Volume 3 Issue 1 March 2016 Volume 3 Issue 1 March 2016 134 135 Critical and Creative Wings The Protagonist in Joyce's Portrait: A Bakhtinian Reading who had shouldered him into the square ditch the day before discourses which dialogize two points of view on the same … It was a mean thing to do; all the fellows said it was. And person. However, Stephen learns about the complicity of the how cold and slimy the water had been!” (14) Here Stephen’s priests and the church in bringing about Parnell’s downfall free indirect discourse, particularly the last sentence, is and eventual death. This piece of information along with his charged with his emotion and the one that precedes it betrays own searing experience of being subjected to unjust his value judgment endorsed by others. Similarly, Stephen, treatment by a Jesuit Father sows the seed of hostility in him subjected to the inhuman flogging by the Dean of Studies, for against the church and the Fathers he eventually comes into not writing his lesson as his glasses were broken, smarts close contact with. under a strong sense of injustice. He judges the Father’s Portraitis categorized as a Bildungsroman that action as “wrong”, “unfair” and “cruel” (53). The flogging documents the protagonist’s ‘becoming’- the gradual rendered in detail concretizes the intensity of his pain and education of a self from childhood to maturity. Bakhtin’s suffering. But Joyce keeps the reaction confined to what definition of aBildungsroman appears to capture the Bakhtin calls “the field of vision” of his protagonist trajectory of Stephen’s development, “… life and its events, (Problems of Dostoevsky’sPoetics 49). bathed in the light of becoming, reveal themselves as the Stephen’s exposure to the heated language used by the hero’sexperience, as the school or environment that first pro-Parnell and anti-Parnell members of his family during the forms and formulates the hero’s character and world view. Christmas dinner, represented by his father, Mr. Casey and The idea of becoming andBildung makes it possible to Mrs. Dante Riordan, respectively, enables him to understand, organize material around the hero in a new way and to partially, the intricacies of politics. He is in a fix to decide uncover, in this material, completely new sides” (DI 393). whose point of view is right. This makes him remember his Joyce unfolds Stephen’s growth through his exposure to vision of Parnell when he was in the infirmary of the college, myriad experiences that lead to the formation of his artistic “Awail of sorrow went up from the people. –Parnell! Parnell! sensibility and formulation of aesthetic creeds. It is the He is dead!” (Joyce (Portrait ) 27). Stephen discovers a discourse attributed to him that maps his maturing world similar note in his father’s emotional defence of Parnell who view. But the path of his aesthetic journey is not a smooth one fought to free Ireland from the colonial rule and Casey’s as he undergoes a traumatic experience when exposed to the reverential reference to him as “My dead king!” But he is powerful discourse of Catholic religion during retreat and bewildered to hear Dante calling Parnell “a traitor”, a “devil faces dilemma when offered a priestly vocation. The element out of hell” (38, 39). This foregrounds the clash between two of what Bakhtin calls “testing” appears to be subsumed in his

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“becoming” (DI 393). centuries and countries, appears to implement what Bakhtin Joyce chronicles the growth of Stephen by showing his says about ‘contemporaneity’, “That contemporaneity from wide exposure to adult discussion of diverse topics to which which the author observes includes, first and foremost, the he “lent an avid ear” (Joyce (Portrait 62). Stephen’s realm of literature – and not only contemporary literature in encounter with literary works constitutes another strong the strict sense of the word, but also the literature of the past formative element in his growth as demonstrated in his that continues to live and renew itself in the present” (DI 255). fascination with Mercedes in Alexandre Dumas’s The Count We cannot but hear an Eliotian ring in the cited sentence of Monte Cristo(1844) . The discourse betrays an abrupt above. Though the author-creator of a work must not be change bearing the imprint of what Hugh Kenner calls identified with the author as a human being (DI 253) we ‘Edwardian novelse’ (qtd. in Kershner 161). As a cannot help noticing the temperamental and ideological consequence, his language is marked by abstractions and affinity between Joyce the man and Joyce the creator. vagueness that grow as the narrative progresses. The Moreover, he appears to have some personal investment in influence of Pater, Meredith and Swinburne can be discerned the portrayal of Stephen despite the distancing strategies he in the discourse attributed to him since his adolescent phase. deploys inPortrait. Bakhtin also assigns a “profoundly He does not, of course, mention them but he does express his active”role to the author “ in relation to someone else’sliving, great admiration for Newman and Byron to his class mates autonomous consciousness” to question, provoke, answer Heron and Boland (80-81). The narrative report renders in and object to his activity (Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics unambiguous terms that “All the leisure which his school life 285). This is how the author enters into dialogic relationship left him was passed in the company of subversive writers with his character/s. The allusive dialogism of Stephen whose gibes and violence of speech set up such a ferment in referred to above is more or less based on Joyce’s literary his brain before they passed out of it into his crude writings” exposure. (78). Stephen alludes to scores of philosophers and writers, Stephen’s proclivity to sin as demonstrated in his directly or indirectly in his discourse, like Aristotle, Aquinas, adolescent visit to a prostitute appears to reflect Joyce’s Dante, Guido Cavalcanti, Ben Jonson, Flaubert, Shelley, rebellion against the hypocrisy of the middle-class about Ibsen, Newman and many others. His wide exposure to world rigid sexual morality. But Joyce’s art helps him transmute his literature moulds his literary sensibility and leaves its mark experiences in such a way that they transcend their on his discourse that also mirrors his evolution. Joyce’s biographical boundary and become the stuff of represented comprehensive inclusion of literary models, spanning reality. He succeeds in casting it all “into the crucible of the

Volume 3 Issue 1 March 2016 Volume 3 Issue 1 March 2016 138 139 Critical and Creative Wings The Protagonist in Joyce's Portrait: A Bakhtinian Reading hero’s self-consciousness.” Thus Stephen, like Dostoevsky’s would wake. The past was past” (Joyce 146). But he is soon to hero, emerges not as an “objectified image”, but as “an be pricked by doubt if he has really amended his life. The autonomous discourse,pure voice; we do not see him, we offer of a priestly vocation constitutes a turning point in hear him; everything that we see and know apart from his Stephen’s consciousness which may be called “the discourse is nonessential and is swallowed up by discourse as chronotope ofthreshold” underlining the “ crisis” and its raw material, or else remains outside it as something that “break” ( DI 248) in his life. Stephen’s dilemma stems from stimulates and provokes” (Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics his simultaneous attraction of and repulsion for a priestly 48, 53). Joyce is able to orchestrate the theme of his novel position- the prospect of gaining secret knowledge and secret through discourse attributed to his protagonist. power allures him but the chill and order of the life repels him It is by attributing to Stephen free indirect discourse that (Joyce 159-61). He is able to decide to reject the offer and this Joyce is able to represent convincingly the estrangement he ushers in a significant change in the direction of his feels towards his parents and siblings that leads him to seek development. resort to sin, “He cared little that he was in mortal sin, that his Stephen is gradually drawn to his artistic vocation life had grown to be a tissue of subterfuge and falsehood” initially by hearing the banter the bathing boys make with his (Joyce 98). He is agonizingly aware of his sin and pride name which reminds him of his mythical namesake despite being elected prefect in the college of the Sodality of Daedalus, “Now, as never before, his strange name seemed to the Blessed Virgin Mary, “The imagery of the psalms of him a prophecy” (Joyce 168). He emerges as “an ideologue” prophecy soothed his barren pride. The glories of Mary held rendering his “ideologemes” ( DI 333) which, for Bakhtin, his soul captive. … His sin, which had covered him from the imply ideas. Stephen verbalizes his ambition that he would sight of God, had led him nearer to the refuge of sinners” create, like the great artificer, “… a living thing, new and (104-5). As mentioned above, confronted with “the soaring and beautiful, impalpable, imperishable” (Joyce authoritative discourse” of the retreat sermons, he is seized by 170). Immediately afterwards, the sight of a girl in midstream fear that elicits from him the urge to repent. This type of with an admixture of magical and mortal beauty that greets discourse resists dialogization as its semantic structure is his admiring eyes reconfirms to him his aesthetic mission. static and “admits no play with the structure framing it …” His ecstasy is rendered through his direct discourse, “- (DI 343). However, he tastes momentarily the bliss of a life of Heavenly God! cried Stephen’s soul, in an outburst of profane grace as captured in his free indirect discourse after he joy” (171). Joyce does not allow his protagonist to lose touch confesses to his sin, “Another life! A life of grace and virtue with reality even at this moment of epiphany as revealed in and happiness! It was true. It was not a dream from which he Volume 3 Issue 1 March 2016 Volume 3 Issue 1 March 2016 140 141 Critical and Creative Wings The Protagonist in Joyce's Portrait: A Bakhtinian Reading the discourse ascribed to him, “A wild angel had appeared to Anglo-Irish word. Later he discovers it to be “English and him, the angel of mortal youth and beauty, an envoy from the good old blunt English too” (251). This word makes Stephen fair courts of life, to throw open before him in an instant of aware that he is speaking the colonizers’ language, “-The ecstasy the gates of all the ways of error and glory” (Joyce language in which we are speaking is his before it is mine. 172). The vision of the girl shows a dialogic relationship with How different are the wordshome, Christ, ale, master on his Joyce’s essay “A Portrait of the Artist” in which Stephen’s lips and on mine!” (189) “Here it is the very familiarity of the restlessness gives way to a feeling of satisfaction when “… word which produces a feeling of estrangement when little by little he began to be conscious of the beauty of mortal Stephen is made to realize that this familiarity is not shared, conditions” (“A Portrait of the Artist” 262-3). In Portrait, and the significance of this moment of verbal foregrounding Joyce appears to represent his protagonist’s internal dialogue is political …” (DerekAttridge n75). with his earlier self that features in the essay.The Paterian The narrative makes use of double-voiced discourse to flourish reflected in the romantic excesses in Stephen’s portray its protagonist as Joyce’s ideologies appear to be discourse is balanced in each chapter of the novel by refracted through Stephen’s internal and external dialogues. alternating it with grim realistic details (John Paul Riquelme We seem to hear two voices- the voice of Stephen and that of 121). Thus the narrative itself appears to contest its styles. Joyce- in the discourse attributed to him. Stephen’s Dialogic relationships, as Bakhtin insists on, “exist among all discussion of aesthetics with Lynch embodies in a refracted elements of novelistic structure; that is, they are juxtaposed way what Joyce formulated as his aesthetic creed deriving contrapuntally” (Problems of Dostoevsky’sPoetics 40). tenets from Aristotle, Aquinas and Flaubert as confirmed by We can cite words from Stephen’s interaction with the Ellsworth Mason and Richard Ellmann (141-8). The direct dean of studies to illustrate what Paul de Man calls the voice of Stephen and the refracted voice of the novelist are ‘principle of radical otherness’ in dialogism that focuses on juxtaposed dialogically. In this context, he refers to Plato and the ‘heterogeneity of one voice with regard to any other’(qtd. refutes the latter’s view that “beauty is the splendour of truth” in Kershner 18). Stephen uses the word ‘light’ in his by putting forward his view that “the true and the beautiful are discourse, “For my purpose I can work on by the light of one akin” (Joyce 208). Stephen’s discourse displays his dialogic or two ideas of Aristotle and Aquinas”. The dean takes the disagreement with that of Plato. The Flaubertian theory of word literally and says, “Epictetus also had a lamp …” (Joyce impersonality that rings resoundingly in Stephen’s oft-quoted (Portrait ) 187). Similarly, the word “tundish” which the dean speech can be cited as a double-voiced discourse, “The artist, does not understand surprises Stephen who has to take it as an like the God of creation, remains within or behind or beyond

Volume 3 Issue 1 March 2016 Volume 3 Issue 1 March 2016 142 143 Critical and Creative Wings The Protagonist in Joyce's Portrait: A Bakhtinian Reading or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, may cite, “He [Stephen] drew forth from his treasure and indifferent, paring his fingernails” (Joyce (Portrait ) 215). spoke it softly to himself: -Aday of dappled seaborne clouds” This discourse marks a concordance not only between (Joyce 166). Don Gifford has pointed out that Stephen has Stephen and Joyce but also shows a dialogic relationship with misquoted from Hugh Miller’s The Testimony of the Rocks Flaubert by echoing one of the important tenets that ushers in (1857) as he replaces “breeze-borne” by ‘seaborne’ (219). a major change in novelistic writing in the twentieth century. This makes us read irony in what Stephen considers to be his Moreover, this discourse underscores how Joyce surpasses ‘treasure’. Similarly, when we learn that Stephen spends days Flaubert by supplementing the latter’s theory of “brooding upon … only a garner of slender sentences” from impersonality by equating the artist with God. This manifests Aristotle and Aquinas (Joyce 176-7), we have reasons to what Bakhtin calls “a genuine polyphony of fully valid doubt the depth of Stephen’s scholastic pursuits. Joyce voices” (Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics 6). It also appears to focus on Stephen’s affectation of in-depth represents how the novelist transmits his point of view knowledge of myriad authors as demonstrated in his frequent through the discourse attributed to Stephen as the narrative of allusions to them. Gifford lends support to Stephen’s Portrait,unlike Stephen Hero, does not give him scope to superficial and fragmented citations, divorced from contexts appear in his person to articulate his views. This is how Joyce (10-12). Stephen’s language, too, appears to be subjected to appears to translate his precept into practice in the novel Joyce’s irony. His moment of inspiration is signalled through itself. The author, of course, appears in a veiled form through his free indirect discourse, “O, what sweet music! His soul the discourse ascribed to Stephen, mainly, and he appears to was all dewy wet. … His mind was waking to a tremulous critique Stephen through the discourses attributed to his morning knowledge, a morning inspiration. A spirit filled friends. him, pure as the purest water, sweet as dew, moving as music” Joyce appears to make use of another kind of double- (217). The artificiality of Stephen’s expression and the purple voiced discourse, highlighted by Bakhtin, by subjecting language that he uses to embody the moment appear to show Stephen to irony. His ambivalent attitude to his protagonist Joyce’s ironic attitude to his protagonist. His subsequent self- continues to puzzle his critics. It is the attribution of free glorification as “a priest of eternal imagination, transmuting indirect discourse and absence of evaluative authorial words the daily bread of experience into the radiant body of that have shrouded Joyce’s attitude in mist. However, the everliving life” (221) reveals not only his inflated ego but also hidden irony in the discourse betrays, partially, his critical Joyce’s parody. In the parodied discourse, as Bakhtin argues, estimation of Stephen. As examples of such a discourse we an internal fusion of the point of view, intention and

Volume 3 Issue 1 March 2016 Volume 3 Issue 1 March 2016 144 145 Critical and Creative Wings The Protagonist in Joyce's Portrait: A Bakhtinian Reading expression of the character with those of the author takes Clery, “And if he had judged her harshly?” (Joyce 216) “He place making the parodied language offer a living dialogic began to feel that he had wronged her” (222). “Yes, it was her resistance to the parodying intentions of the latter (DI 409). body he smelt: a wild and languid smell …” (233). His love InUlysses, Stephen’s Paterian obsession is ridiculed in for her penetrates his consciousness and her image becomes Bloom’s thought that Simon Dedalus’s song appears to an element of the surrounding reality that Stephen is able to evoke, “Words? Music? No: it’s what’s behind” (Ulysses evaluate along with his own self. 354). Joyce’s intended irony will be more evident if we Stephen’s worldview is reflected in his dialogues with his compare Stephen’s verbose expression to it, “Words. Was it friends Davin and Cranly. It is his nonconformist attitude that their colours? He allowed them to glow and fade, hue after informs his talk to Davin, “When the soul of a man is born in hue: sunrise gold, the russet and green of apple orchards, this country there are nets flung at it to hold it back from azure of waves, the greyfringed fleece of clouds. No it was flight. You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall not their colours: it was the poise and balace of the period try to fly by those nets” (203). The narrative gradually builds itself” (Portrait 166). In contrast, the use of irony in Stephen up his distinctive difference from his classmates that earns Hero is quite apparent as Joyce seeks resort to it to distance him from Davin the comment, “Always alone” (201). Later himself from the ideologies of the younger Stephen whom he he confides to Cranly about his quarrel with his mother qualifies by the epithets, “the fiery-hearted revolutionary” emanating from his loss of faith. He tells him about his and “this heaven-ascending essayist” (84, 85) while decision to embrace exile as he will not serve that in which he discussing his essay. no longer believes-be it his home, his country or his church. Stephen writes the villanelle for his beloved who inhabits The voice of Gabriel of “The Dead”, the concluding story of more his mental space than the physical. It is through his Dubliners, resonates in his voice (189) showing the dialogic continual dialogic arguments with himself that he expresses agreement between the two and reflecting the ideology of the his irresistible attraction for the girl. The girl with throbbing author, too. Cranly’s retorts, however, strike us as more vitality and “a living personality” (Theodore Spencer 18) we rational and forceful when he insists on the genuineness of a meet inStephen Hero is reduced almost to an object in his mother’s love and points out that his mind is “supersaturated memory.Portrait has a close dialogic relationship with with the religion” in which he says he disbelieves (240). But Stephen Hero as it reproduces many incidents from it but he clings to his decision to leave his country so that he can try presents them differently. Stephen’s free indirect discourse to express himself in some mode of life or art as “freely” as he and inner speech capture his fluctuating feelings for Emma can and as “wholly” as he can (Joyce 247). Joyce’s

Volume 3 Issue 1 March 2016 Volume 3 Issue 1 March 2016 146 147 Critical and Creative Wings The Protagonist in Joyce's Portrait: A Bakhtinian Reading ambivalence comes to the fore in positing Cranly’s (251). Stephen betrays maturity in judging both his style and “acidulous observation” (Lee Spinks 180) here or Lynch’s his thought as ‘vague’. Though he makes this assessment in “coarse ejaculations and comments” (Spencer 20) earlier (in the context of the preceding entry couched in his exuberant response to his talk on aesthetics) seemingly as a style, this judgmental assertion may be applied to criticize the counterpoint to deflate Stephen’s ego. Thus Stephen’s purple prose that characterizes his style after chapter 1. This verbosity appears to be put under the scanner of not only the discourse may be described as what Bakhtin calls “the author but also his friends. critique and trial of literary discourse around the hero- a ThatPortrait closes with Stephen’s diary-entries appears ‘literary man’-who looks at life through the eyes of literature to be immensely significant. It is as if some sort of agency in and who tries to live ‘according to literature’” (DI 413). the narrative is bestowed on him to articulate his own words Stephen emerges in the process of ‘becoming’ which is without any constraints. He is now able to speak in his own explicitly voiced in his mother’s prayer, “… that I may learn person and own voice getting rid of the implicit control in my own life and away from home and friends what the exerted by the author/narrator in attributing the stifling third- heart is and what it feels.” His penultimate discourse shows person singular to him. Though still in Dublin, he him hailing his mother’s prayer “Amen. So be it” (Joyce 252). demonstrates through his discourse, akin to interior His interactions with his mother reveal he has established monologue, his freedom to express his thoughts that make us some sort of rapport with her. In fact, inUlysses, the graceless change our opinion about him. Rendered in Free direct figure of his student Sargent evokes in Stephen his stream of discourse, the diary entries create the stance of reaching us consciousness on mother’s love, “She had loved his weak unmediated. Stephen’s evolution from ‘He’ to ‘I’ invests his watery blood drained from her own. Was that then real? The discourse with an individuating rhythm. What appears to be only true thing in life?” He is then led to the thought of his significant is the note of humility informing his discourse mother, “She was no more … She had saved him from being with his mother that shows he is, partly, purged of his inflated trampled under foot and had gone, scarcely having been” notion about himself, “[Mother] Said I have a queer mind and (Joyce (Ulysses) 33). This train of thought, somewhat have read too much. Not true. Have read little and understood reminiscent of what Cranly tells him inPortrait, sets up a less” (Joyce 248). Similarly, another entry which strikes us dialogue between the two works. as more important is his critiquing of his own style, “Read The same entry incorporates his important what I wrote last night. Vague words for a vague emotion” announcement as to the methodology and mission of his artistic pursuit, “Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the

Volume 3 Issue 1 March 2016 Volume 3 Issue 1 March 2016 148 149 Critical and Creative Wings The Protagonist in Joyce's Portrait: A Bakhtinian Reading millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the father’s voice creating in him consciousness of language smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race” fittingly closes with Stephen’s invocation to the mythical (Joyce (Portrait ) 252-3). His discourse announces his father Daedalus to help him “recreate life out of life” (Joyce aesthetic mission to address the realistic concerns which (Portrait) 172). What stands out in Portrait including its appear to be genuine as they feature in his reflection earlier, journal is “… the dialogical vitality of his consciousness” as it too, for example, “How could he hit their [his countrymen’s] incorporates “competing voices” (Kershner 300-301). conscience or how cast his shadow over the imagination of In conclusion, Bakhtin’s term “re-accentuation” may be their daughters … that they might breed a race less ignoble applied to Joyce’s portrayal of his protagonist, “… great than their own?” (238) His emphatic declaration betrays his novelistic images continue to grow and develop even after the awareness of the imperative of gathering real experience to moment of their creation; they are capable of being creatively ‘forge’the conscience of his race. It is the dream of the future transformed in different eras, far distant from the day and that sustains him and urges him to vehemently reject Yeats’s hour of their original birth” (DI 422). We may, legitimately, nostalgic clinging to the loveliness, “I desire to press in my predict that the image of Stephen will continue to grow in arms the loveliness which has not yet come into the world” newer studies in the coming days as the last few decades have (251). He appears to have been liberated from the thrall of shown promise of such a healthy trend. Thus Bakhtin makes borrowed thoughts and styles and thus the signs of his literary texts ‘writerly’ and Joyce writes ‘writerly’ fiction as ‘regeneration’that Kenner rules out about him (416) are quite myriad secondary texts on him bear witness to. clear. Attridge’s tentative attribution of a second meaning- Works Cited “fake”-to ‘forge’ (66) also appears to be far-fetched. “Thus Attridge, Derek. Joyce Effects: On Language, Theory, and the loftiest principles of a world view,” as Bakhtin says about History. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2000. Print. the idea in Dostoevsky, “are the same principles that govern Bakhtin, M. M.The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Ed. the most concrete personal experiences. … The idea helps Michael Holquist. Trans. Caryl Emerson & Michael self-consciousness assert its sovereignty … and helps it Holquist.Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1981. Print. triumph over all fixed, stable, neutral images” (Problems of ---. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics: Theory and History of Dostoevsky’s Poetics 78-9). The fusion of the hero’s Literature.vol. 8. Ed. & Trans. Caryl Emerson. Minneapolis: discourse about himself with his ideological discourse about Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1984. Print. the world renders him unfinalizable. Coming back to the play Emerson, Caryl, ed. Preface. M. M. Bakhtin. Problems of of voices, the narrative which opens with the biological Dostoevsky’s Poetics: Theory and History of Literature. vol.

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8. Trans. Caryl Emerson. Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Bodley Head text offset and reissued with an introduction by Press, 1984. Print. Declan Kiberd in 1992.) Gibson, Andrew. Towards a Postmodern Theory of ---. Letteer Joyce, James. “ To Grant Richards.” 13 March Narrative. Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univ. Press, 1996, Print. 1906.Letters of James Joyce VolumesII and III. Ed. Richard Gifford, Don. Joyce Annotated: Notes for Dubliners and A Ellmann. vol. 2. New York: The Viking Press, 1966.131-2 . Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. 2nd ed. Berkeley: Print. Carolina Univ. Press, 1982. Print. ---. Letter Joyce, John Stanislaus. “To James Joyce.” 31 Holquist, Michael, Introduction. M.M. Bakhtin. The January 1931.Letters of James Joyce VolumesII and III. Ed. Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Ed. Michael Holquist. Richard Ellmann. vol.3. New York: The Viking Press, 1966. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Univ. of Texas 212. Print. Press, 1981. Print. Kenner, Hugh. “The PORTRAIT in Perspective”. A Portrait Joyce, James. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: Text, of the Artist as a Young Man: Text, Criticism, and Notes. Ed. Criticism, and Notes. Ed. Chester G. Anderson. U.S.A.: Chester G. Anderson. U.S.A.: Viking Penguin Inc., 1964. Viking Penguin Inc., 1964. Print. repts.: 1968 (twice). 1969 Print. repts. 1968 (twice). 1970. 1971. 1972. 1973. 1974 (twice). 1970. 1971. 1972. 1973. 1974 (twice). 1975. 1976. (twice). 1975. 1976. Print. U.S.A.: Penguin Books, 1977, U.S.A.: Penguin Books, 1977. Print. 416-39. Print. ---. “A Portrait of the Artist”. Ed. Chester G. Anderson. Kershner, R. B. Joyce, Bakhtin and Popular Literature: U.S.A.: Viking Penguin Inc., 1964. Print. repts.: 1968 Chronicles of Disorder. Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina (twice). 1969 (twice). 1970. 1971. 1972. 1973. 1974 (twice). Press, 1989. Print. 1975. 1976. U.S.A.: Penguin Books, 1977. 257-66. Print. Riquelme, John Paul.Stephen Hero, Dubliners, and A ---.Dubliners. Eds. Robert Scholes & A. Walton Litz. Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: Styles of Realism and U.S.A.: The Viking Press, 1968, Print. (The updated and Fantasy. Derek Attridge. Ed. The Cambridge Companion to revised Edition) NewYork:Penguin Books, 1996, Print. James Joyce. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1990. ---.Stephen Hero. Ed.Theodore Spencer. London: Paladin 103-30. Print. (an imprint of HarperCollins), 1991. Print. Spinks, Lee.James Joyce: A Critical Guide. Edinburgh: ---.Ulysses. Great Britain: The Bodley Head, 1960. Print. Edinburgh Univ. Press, 2009. Print. (Reset and published in Penguin Books, 1968.) (The 1960

Volume 3 Issue 1 March 2016 Volume 3 Issue 1 March 2016 152 153 Critical and Creative Wings Petrichor

LOCHLOOSA PETRICHOR

Brandon Kershner Ayan Adak CISSY The rustling leaves, the pensive sky, Splayed in the boat, we’re drifting alone on the weed- A familiar scene, a forgotten sigh choked lake. You dredge your childhood for stories Sudden clouds, and melting rains —the white clapboard house in Mississippi, Miss Pinky, And it’s yesterday, once more again the Aberdeen Flood when all the hidden creatures Another land, the showers same struggled up into sight, the water churning with snakes and N’orwester, earth and the pouring rain, rats— A smile thereon, with nothing to lose, stoned, you say you’re having trouble moving Nothing to gain, with nothing to choose forward in time. The boat weaves among the water hyacinths, and on shore, The smell of earth – now winners all, Joy unbound, nothing small a black anhinga holds stiff wings out to dry while the world turns flat as glass in this A lightning spark, the reverie broke, still center of Lochloosa. Fifteen years The future again, a little choke from now the lake will have drained Riches all, a saddened king The rains though cold, are comforting to shallow pools, barely enough to float the smallest stories, the thinnest memory. The shower brings forth a hidden peace A little smile, while the rains don’t cease And for a change, there’s no running away As the rains melt past, tomorrow, today

The smell of earth – forgives at last, A bit of today, perhaps the past…

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JESUS RE-CRUCIFIED "RAGHAB MALAKAR" Translated from Bengali Manik Bandyopadhyay Ranjit Chaudhuri Translated from Bengali Tirthankar Chattopadhyay Everything rhymed the same then as now – Glowworms glinted in prolific swarms [God in human form, as the myths have it, once took Just as the flowers wafted their wild ecstasy all around! away the clothes of the bathing milkmaids to test their Yes, the mind was also as much keen to grasp and feel, devotion : ages later, Himself invisible this time And to recreate sometimes, oh yes! around, He is, through His representatives, taking away Nature rhymes the same now, Right? the clothes of all men and women of Bengal, to test He The rain-drenched clouds come as much close, alone knows what … but remember that it was He who Only our eyes lack the real feel, Oh No! fooled Duhsasan to save Draupadi from the ultimate shame of total nakedness and let this at least, O Raghab The wild ducks still hover often, Malakar, be your consolation in prison when applying But they don’t look as much strange. ointments on your split forehead. I hope you, reader, Pity! We don’t seek to be the kin of theirs will also agree with me after reading this short tale …] Even in a fit of trance, I mean, Oh No!

It’s the same when we chance upon a child orphan It is uncertain whether Raghab will survive. His skull has Or a Jesus re-crucified on our way along, been cracked open by blows from sticks. Pity! We don’t have enough empathy to hug or weep, What is a road only in name leads from Fulbari Oh No! crossroads through fields, swamps, bushes and brackens to Maldia four miles away. Along these four miles, there is nothing which can be called a village, only a few clusters of hutments forming habitations here and there. On the market- day, a few people travel along this route which remains almost deserted on other evenings. Though deserted, the road is safe. No traveller has faced any danger on this road in the last few years. They say

Volume 3 Issue 1 March 2016 Volume 3 Issue 1 March 2016 156 157 Critical and Creative Wings Raghab Malakar someone was bitten by a jackal in daytime about three years heads walk towards Maldia along the road which is a road ago. Apparently even a treatment with Kestoram’s burnt only in name running from Fulbari to Maldia. Except the amulet and magnet could not save the patient. More recently dress, the size of their bundles, their age and complexion, there may have been one or two cases of snakebites, dogs there’s not much to tell the one from the other: that is to say, barking and charging, bulls with menacing horns. No harms both are almost alike in length and breadth. It is impossible to worth remembering, however.Afew thrilling tales of robbery say if they are equal in strength, the strength has never been are told, but no one knows when they occurred, nor is there tested. A metre-long loincloth covers Raghab Malakar under any proof if they took place at all. If the inhabitants of the his waist, an oldgamchha almost in tatters. Gautam shanties around this road commit felonies at all, they are not Mukhopadhyay wears a mill-madedhoti of normal length, committed nearby. They haven’t the courage to manhandle, not too old and washed at home, an old printed shirt frayed at or even threaten, the lonely wayfarer on this road. If anything the neck, and canvas shoes on his feet. Raghab’s bundle is like that happens, they will be held responsible. Neither the quite large, more than four times the one Gautam carries. police nor the landlord Kartik Chakroborti will look for Raghab’s unkempt hair is turning grey, so is Gautam’s kempt proofs; the villagers will be crushed by the pincers of the two hair but Raghab must be the older of the two by fifteen to disciplining forces, their huts burnt to ashes, the permission to twenty years. Raghab is pitchblack, Gautam is lighter. live in the area cancelled. Near a nameless settlement of about ten huts, Raghab Once, Radhacharan, the landlord’s cashier, was carrying feels a little out of breath. The package is heavier than the one cash to the headquarters, accompanied by two guards. About he carried last time. He puts it down for a few minutes. seven men beat them up and snatched the money. Later they Gautam says, Have you put it down again? What’s were caught and jailed, five of them from Fulbari and two happened to you today? Eh? from Maldia, — but later. By then, the people of Raghab’s Is that a question to ask after doubling the weight on my own shanty-village and those of the others surrounding it had back? Raghab sweeps away the sweat on his brow with his been trampled under the pressure of the two sides. fingers and adds, God! Never knew clothes could be so heavy, When someone shouts for help from the road, they mate! Never seen so many garments except at a clothier’s. respond. When a nervous person demands company, they go Gautam’s enlarged eyes bore into Raghab when he says, with him either to Fulbari on this side or to the turning on the Clothes? What do you mean, clothes? Didn’t I tell you I was highway on the other. They are responsible for the welfare of supplying sacks to Mathur Shah who needs them to send rice? the lonely and nervous wayfarer, aren’t they? Last time I felt it, sir, clothes it is. The day wanes as two men carrying bundles on their Clothes, come, come! Who ever told you? Even in the

Volume 3 Issue 1 March 2016 Volume 3 Issue 1 March 2016 158 159 Critical and Creative Wings Raghab Malakar district-town, people are begging for clothes, they can’t even The village of ten huts seems lifeless – not a dog barking. have one for as much as twenty rupees, and you think I’m Countlessshaluk flowers bloom in the swamp by the carrying loads of them to Maldia! Look at his intelligence, the roadside. Only two months ago the men and women of this rascal! settlement harvested theseshaluks to save their lives; not Raghab’s smile doesn’t make Gautam too happy. everyone could. Raghab’s effort to straighten his spine It is at the district-town that you are selling them, sir. You almost sends him reeling backward. Emotion overpowers his only store them at Maldia. You bring the bundles along this voice as he says, Traitor, thakur sir? Call me a traitor? The route two to four times a month, and you send them to places other day, the patriot gentlemen held a meeting at the again through the Panchgarh route everyday in small packets. marketplace and told everyone, Report whatever comes to We often wonder why thakur sir doesn’t take the bus along the your notice at the police station. Have we told the police? Panchgarh road to Maldia, and why instead does he get down Thakur sir, we don’t report either the good or the bad at the at Phulbari, pay us a wage to carry the luggage, himself station. No matter what we say, they prod us with their sticks. walking four miles. The young gentlemen watch the We have spoken among ourselves. How does that concern Panchgarh road, that’s your danger. you? Who has told you? Where have you heard all this? Well, well, take the parcel, Gautam sounds satisfied. Gautam’s menacing tone is muted by fear. Why this huff ? Aquarter more for you today, ok ? Who shall tell us, sir? Guessed it all. Unlettered, but are Raghab silently balances the bundle on his head, Gautam we all that foolish? helps. Raghab listens to Gautam’s ersatz metaphysics, the Gautam quickly lights up and thinks a little. What did sophistry which has been used again and again through the Raghab mean when he said they had guessed it all? Does that ages to lull millions of Gautams to sleep. How it is good to die mean everyone knows? And who’s we? Does that include honest and how it is a loss to live in dishonesty. Gautam’s only Raghab and a few of his friends and relatives, or does the oratory is strong. It makes Raghab choke in emotion. His line stretch to many others? conscience strikes its head on the ground in repentance, Raghu, I pay you four rupees as wage. saying, O what have I done! O what have I done! That’s right, sir.Youare kind. Raghab’s shanty is in the next settlement, almost equidistant from Phulbari and Maldia. This one can almost be And so you tell the whole world about my trade details? I called a village. About thirty huts, and a track as wide as the trusted you, Raghu, and have you, in return, played a traitor main road, running about three hundred yards to the village with me? which has even got a name: Pottu . After this short walk

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Raghab puts down the load. This time he doesn’t merely know. Come back home after the meal, or you may sleep there sweep away the sweat with his fingers but sits comfortably also. on the bundle and says with a happy cordiality, How about a Raghab remains on the bundle with bent head. Just a sad leaf cigarette, thakur sir? glance, and the eyes are lowered again. There’s a catch in his A thirty-hut shanty-village with a name, about three voice as he says, Thakur sir, we want these clothes for hundred yards away, and this too as silent, lifeless, dead as ourselves. the ten-hut one they passed a while ago. Not even naked You want clothes?All right, ok, I’ll give you one, Gautam children running forward to beg, as if no one cares if a gulps.Apair of clothes. Come now, that’s settled, let’s go. Get traveller is passing along the road or not. South of Pottu up. village lies a dense jungle, the water-fed undergrowth, Raghab gets up and prostrates himself at Gautam’s feet, charmless, colourless, ugly, begotten in lowlands by gripping his legs with both hands. No farther today, thakur sir. waterlogging through three months of rain. A dusklike Give us the clothes and then you leave. Thakur sir, give us silence in the cricket song, signalling the dark night, though it these clothes in charity. Please, the womenfolk in our huts are is not evening yet. Though it is not evening outdoors, Raghab all naked. knows that it is pitchblack inside the rooms. Gautam also Gautam is afraid. But his fear of these people is limited, knows that. Doesn’t he belong to this region? As he is about and so his mind exceeds the fear-limit. He takes Raghab by to shout at Raghab, a child’s cry startles Gautam to a pause. his long hairs, pulls him up and roars, Son of a bitch! Drug- Someone has put a hand on the child’s mouth. A shiver runs addict! Villain! Get up, I say. Pick up the load. I’ll get through Gautam. The swamps and the jungle, the huts, the Nandababu to put you in jail for six months. I’ll get track and the loincloth-clad man, all these old things seem Bhairabbabu to destroy your roof and banish you from the somehow rendered new by the tongueless silence of the land. Pick up the load and walk fast. village, the visibility of the man, the choking of the child’s Our daughters are going naked, thakur sir, mothers, cry, the posture of resting on the bundle. sisters, wives, all— He offers Raghab a leaf cigarette. Even before he lights If they’re naked, why don’t you catch them and … up his own, he offers one to Raghab. He says, Carry it along Gautam repents as soon as he says this. He shouldn’t have quickly, son, let us do the rest of the way apace. Hunger said such lewd things, called Raghab’s mother, sisters, wife makes my stomach squeal, honest truth, Raghu,Kali ’s my and daughters such obscene names. Gautam also tries to witness. Let’s be off quickly. Once the goods are delivered, decide on what words of flattery to select to wipe out those you’ll also be free. You’ll eat there tonight. With me, you terrible expletives. Too much of softness might give the

Volume 3 Issue 1 March 2016 Volume 3 Issue 1 March 2016 162 163 Critical and Creative Wings Raghab Malakar bastard an upper hand. The words must be appropriate, The bundles of clothes and Gautam are dragged inside the weighty and effective. village. The loads are dropped in the frontage of Raghab’s Then let the clothes lie here, thakur sir. room where the adults now sit in a huddle to discuss what’s to Raghab raises his voice to send out a shout, and at once be done now. The programme was settled several days earlier, the dead village of Pottu seems to spring to life; twittering, a deep hole has also been dug in the jungle to bury Gautam, squirming crowds of men and women wearing next to still they can’t do without a discussion. The clothes must be nothing come out. So many people do not live at Pottu; the distributed quickly, for outsiders have to return to their own population of the other settlements has also gathered here villages while people from this village must go back to their today. Gautam is dumbfounded at first, then he springs up and respective homes. A gathering of so many people must not tries to run away. Raghab leaps to catch him by the hand. continue for a long time; who knows if someone passing Not any more, thakur sir. I asked you to donate the along the road won’t notice something. Raghab roars clothes, and you didn’t listen. intermittently, raising his scythe and telling everybody to Why don’t you take them all, my son? Take all the keep mum, — what will happen if someone on the road hears clothes. Let me go. the noise and comes to inquire? The inquirer also will have to be buried along with thakur sir. It’s one thing for one man to Not any more, thakur sir. Had you made a gift of them, it go missing. Won’t several missing persons raise a storm? would be different. It’s robbery now, shall we let you go and be hanged? No clothes for anyone who talks. Raghab keeps the excited crowd in control. His raised This announcement from Balaram is more effective than voice stops the clamour of most, but the sharp and nervous Raghab’s roar. Everyone goes completely silent, even the protest of some who are terribly afraid cannot be stopped. Old protesters. Only Pacha’s aged mother goes on whimpering. Narahari strikes his own forehead and shouts, You’ll kill us, There had been no end of cries, laments and expressions will you kill all of us, Raghab? The police will come, tie up of earnest humility from Gautam, but even these quietened and beat us up, set our houses on fire. O my god, Raghab’s down when Raghab raised his scythe just once. Now Gautam destroyed everything. says in a muted prayer, Let me go, my sons, please. Killing me Two women break out in loud weeping. won’t fetch you anything. You already have the clothes, why Three middle-aged men look angrily at Raghab and say, commit the grave sin of killing a Brahmin’s son? Let me go. We are not in all this, Raghab. Balaram says, How can we release you? As soon as you Raghab says, If you aren’t, what makes you stand here? are set free, you will go and fetch the police force, thakur sir. Don’t claim a share of the clothes, and you are free to leave. Gautam touches his sacred thread as he pronounces a

Volume 3 Issue 1 March 2016 Volume 3 Issue 1 March 2016 164 165 Critical and Creative Wings Raghab Malakar solemn oath, citing his parents, gods and goddesses, swearing Gautam nods assent, Give. not to inform the police at all. He drinks the water and runs away at once. Will you remember this oath, thakur sir? The police arrives in force the next day, towards late In utter hopelessness, Gautam makes the final bid to save afternoon. They would have arrived in the morning, but it his own life, Listen, I can’t inform the police. I can’t tell them takes half a day to prepare the papers, sort out the documents even if I want to. and mount the stratagem. Gagan Shah of Nathganj has a You can’t? registered outlet for clothes as well. No. If I tell them, I’ll be in prison. These clothes are from After the issue of clothes for Maldia village by an order the black market. When the police ask me where I got them, predated by three days, appointing Gautam Mukhopadhyay what shall I tell them? If I tell the truth, they will arrest the as the carrying agent, and preparing appropriate receipts, man who supplied the clothes, arrest me, and we’ll be jailed, account books etc. as prescribed by statutes, the garments not to speak of the end of the trade. If it were not a black trade, looted at Pottu village are washed clean of the taint of being why should I choose this mode of delivery? Don’t you see? I stolen goods. can’t tell the police, nor anyone else, that you looted my On reaching Pottu village, the policemen find that a goods, no way. cause far more important and correct than the intended arrests Raghab says, That’s right, we didn’t think of this. At last, has now emerged. There was a serious riot last night over the everyone breathes a sigh of relief. To remove thakur sir division and distribution of the looted clothes. Two were forever was the only way for them, but can a human mind be killed, several injured. Raghab’s skull has multiple cracks. comfortable with the thought of killing a living human being It is uncertain whether Raghab will survive. in this manner? Since thakur sir himself is a thief, he can do nothing if the stolen goods are snatched away from him. They have nothing to fear if they release him. Raghab says, Then go away, thakur sir. No hard feelings. Gautam tries to stand up, but falls. He tries to speak but can’t utter a sound. With a throat parched into timber, he makes a few gulping efforts, and manages to say, Water, a little water. Thakur sir, will you drink the water touched by us lowcastes?

Volume 3 Issue 1 March 2016 Volume 3 Issue 1 March 2016 166 167 Critical and Creative Wings Growing up with Ray

Growing up with Ray “Reader’s Paradise”, with library cards and all, formed by gluing the used sides of my father’s visiting cards to one another. Ranadurjay Talukdar Sometime in 1990, I remember one Sunday morning when I was busy trying to figure out an article in the Many years ago (I think it was 1989) I was roaming Anandabazar Patrika. I remember very little about the article, around the house, lost in my daydreaming world. Back then, I except that it was trying to build a case for a Nobel Prize in used to do that a lot. I was nine years old. And occasionally I cinema. It also talked about this great film director called would pick up a book at random and start reading it, and often Satyajit Ray and my mother, who was sitting next to me, told get admonished by my parents for picking up “adult” books. me that Ray would surely get a Nobel Prize, had there been On that day, however, I picked upShera Sandesh , a delightful one for cinema. It was the first time I heard of Ray the compendium of the best writings from the magazine Sandesh, filmmaker. Apparently, his films were far more famous than started by the great Upendrakishore Ray and later edited by his books. I was somewhat disappointed, for, in my mind, Ray his son Sukumar Ray and his grandson, Satyajit Ray. was all about Feluda catching killers from Benaras to Of all the delightful stories I read in that book over the Kathmandu, or Professor Shonku searching for unicorns in course of the next few weeks, the one that stayed with me was Tibet. Pretty much every piece of trivia I knew back then a short story calledGolokdham Rahasya. It was the first time I could be traced back to a Ray novel or a story. Be it Daniken’s met Feluda, the 27 year old detective created by Satyajit Ray. bizarre extra-terrestrial theories, or what the serious sounding Sharp, erudite, fit and self-employed, Feluda was a unique word ‘kleptomaniac’meant. Each Feluda novel had been read concoction of qualities almost impossible to find in the and re-read so many times that I pretty much memorised the average 27 year old Bengali. The story kindled my interest, key portions of the books. I remember stupefying one of my and I pestered my father to buy me more Feluda books. The cousin sisters with a near flawless recitation from memory of first one he got for me wasKailash e kelenkari, and it cost 7.5 the first couple of pages of a certain Feluda mini-novel called rupees back then. I still have that book, and all the other books Napolean er chithi. of Ray (Feluda, Professor Shonku, short story collections and In 1991, I had a chance to meet Ray.Aclose friend’s uncle other books) my parents bought for me over the course of the stayed in the same building where Ray stayed in Bishop next ten odd years. They jostle next to each other in two Leffroy Road, Kolkata. The uncle offered to introduce us to shelves in the bedroom in my house in Kolkata. The two Ray. My friend and I practiced what we would say when we shelves later became my library, ambitiously named met Ray; I would invariably pretend to be Ray in those

Volume 3 Issue 1 March 2016 Volume 3 Issue 1 March 2016 168 169 Critical and Creative Wings Growing up with Ray practice sessions. Close to the date, however, I got cold feet. I One of the favourite pastimes my close friends and I used to stammer back then, and I was pretty confident that I indulged in (and still do) is remembering dialogues from Ray would be speechless, in more ways than one, when I’d meet movies and using them in everyday conversations. Nothing Ray. So the meeting never happened. It never would. gives us greater joy. A favourite one amongst friends is the Then, in 1992, Ray actually got the Nobel Prize in line from Nayak. We imitate Uttam Kumar and say, in that cinema- an Honorary Oscar for lifetime achievement. Shortly inimitable style, “how do we explain what it means to be afterwards, he passed away. After he died, Doordarshan drunk to someone who hasn’t got drunk?” when asked by showed seven of his films over a week’s time, calling it the unsuspecting friends whether we are nursing a hangover. Or, Satyajit Soptaho. It was the first time I saw his movies. I was after our exams, if someone would ask us, “first class or told not to watchJana Aranya , as it was an “adult” film. I second class?”, we’d reply, “Mohunbagan”, in remembrance think I watched all the others, including the Apu Trilogy. of Jana Aranya, where Sukumar says “Mohunbagan” in reply Later, in a doordarshan programme calledChuti Chuti , aired to a passer-by’s question, “Dada, pass na honours?”-Aperfect during the summer holidays, I saw the usual Ray fare verbal non- sequitur which deliberately confounds the idly earmarked for kids- Gupi Gyne Bagha Byne, Hirok Rajar curious soul. If we go on a trip somewhere and a friend, who Deshe, Sonar Kella and Joy Baba Felunath. was supposed to come along, ditches us at the last minute, we It wasn’t until my last two years in school and early days clamour to say at the check- in counter, “unka thrombosis ho in college that Ray films became an integral part of my life. I gaya, woh aa nehi saka”, a la Mandar Bose in Sonar Kella-a discovered Ray beyond the Apu trilogy, Feluda and gem of a hilarious excuse. Typing out these random GugaBaba. The mesmerizing Calcutta trilogy revealed itself, remembrances somehow makes them sound stupid; but, trust and I found myself identifying more with it than the Apu me, when you find the perfect moment to unleash a Ray trilogy. I watchedKanchenjungha again and again, just to see movie dialogue, it feels like striking gold. the scene where the mist and the minds clear at the same time. The Ray yardstick, as we call it, has made us reject most My college days also opened up a wide vista of global masters of the Bangla cinema that has been created since he passed like Goddard, Truffaut, Kieslowski, Kurosawa and others. away. The Ray aficionado in us has found it difficult to laud While the great masters delighted with their storytelling, the attempts of the maestro’s son Sandip Ray to recreate the unconventional approach to everything from the camera to Feluda magic on screen. Often, we calculate that the editing, nothing felt nearer and more accessible than Ray. His copyright on Ray’s works would expire in 2052, 60 years after films became that yardstick against which everything would his death, and we will all get together and direct the perfect be measured. Feluda film, even though we’d all be well over 70 by then.

Volume 3 Issue 1 March 2016 Volume 3 Issue 1 March 2016 170 171 Critical and Creative Wings BOOK REVIEW

When I was in school, I dreamed of being Feluda when I BOOK REVIEW grew up, and wanted to be 27 forever, like Feluda. When I was SUMMER REQUIEM finally 27, I realised that being 27 doesn’t come anywhere Vikram Seth close to what I imagined it would be. Ray’s books shaped my world as a kid; his films shaped mine as an adult. The best New Delhi: Aleph, 2015. thing about growing up with Ray is that there’s a bit of him INR 399, Pages: 66 that you always discover every time you experience anything he created, and the promise of that discovery is what keeps Vikram Seth’s latest anthology of poems focuses on the one going. themes of loneliness, loss of love and estrangement. The mood for the most part is melancholy and evocative of sadness. The bedroom, cafes, buses, parks -in fact, the twenty first century urban landscape serves as an objective correlative of the mind. However, Seth’s characteristic references to nature also punctuate the landscape. The green spaces offer a relief, a sanctuary from the emotional turmoil of human relationships on the verge of dissolution or estrangement. The title poem “Summer Requiem” sets the keynote for the anthology and sketches a landscape which iterates the poet’s loneliness; nature all the while keeps to her eternal rhythms. As memories of the past intrude on the present the exuberance of nature becomes a poignant reminder of the intimacy he has lost. A Requiem is a Mass held to pray for the repose of a departed soul. Alternatively, it also refers to the music composed on such an occasion. The poem harps on the demise of a relationship and its bitter aftermath. The opening lines of the poem are stark in its portrayal of the emotionally scarred poet-lover :

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Everyone I seek has a terror of intensity. acceptance of the fragility of love but the succeeding poems The liberated generation lives a restrained youth. iterate the theme of the persistence of memory and its Stone by stone has been built across the mountain, inability to forget the intimate chemistry with the beloved. “What’s in it?” dramatizes a mundane moment at a party Yet people have broken their backs quietly gardening. where the name of his friend was casually mentioned. While And whether the sheep escape or the radishes are blighted the conversation moves on, his mind simply does not get past Is all the same to me; I must forsake attachment. (1) the sound of a name. The heart ache is clear in the stark simplicity of such lines: “I love you more than I can say. /Try The cynical stance, however, barely masks his anguish as I do, it hasn’t gone away” (13).The easy rhyming verse and the poet delivers a host of images which portray his gives the melancholy mood a desirable lilt. alienation and his solitary state. The phrases “gather and In “Caged” the pair of lovers could be anybody in an scatter” used as a refrain refer not only to the fallen leaves but urban bedroom trying to live out a barren relationship where also to the vignettes of his memory. The town is “indifferent”, physical intimacy has almost vanished.As the poet lies awake the “cornflower and crocus have withered”, “the hour of rust beside his companion he observes the loss of love in their brings everything to a close.” Amongst these images of a relationship. “As if we were not friends but manacled foes, sterile and perhaps inimical environment the poet locates his /As if one sorrow were two private woes. /What grew with own fractured and vulnerable soul. Seth has elsewhere time took time to disappear, /But now we see that there is little mentioned that the “I” in his poems is almost always himself. here” (14-15). One finds an almost Prufrockian mood of One cannot help but wonder if the persona of this poem is lovelessness permeating the lines. The poem which best uttering Seth’s own heart break at the end of his long crystallizes this mood of profound despair is “Full Circle”. relationship with his partner Phillipe Honore. The poet’s The poem revisits the home that the poet shared with his cynicism is prominent in such lines: “I have so carefully partner. The poet begins by defining his own fragile mapped the corners of my mind/That I am forever waking in a emotional state- “The circle from indifference /To new lost country./ Everything learnt has been trivial” (2). The indifference /For you is perfect, but for me /The present still is bitterness of a lost love is evident when he writes, “What tense /With rigid reminiscences that come /Unwished-of you, further pain can the future promise /To a wandering exile your home” (57). The succeeding images of the poem are his from heart to heart? /Memory is a poison; it has sickened my “stock of memories” and portray the two lovers in their body. /The cleavage of attachment has frayed my mind(4).” quotidian existence in the past. The memory of his partner The silence at the end of the poem which envelops the mowing the lawn and perfectly creating a fire in the hearth landscape has an air of finality. seamlessly weaves with the moments of mutual One perhaps relates this silence, this peace to the

Volume 3 Issue 1 March 2016 Volume 3 Issue 1 March 2016 174 175 Critical and Creative Wings BOOK REVIEW companionship when they worked before their keyboards almost Wordsworthian quality about it and the poem closes with the soft strains of Bach for accompaniment. However, with the poet feeling rejuvenated on seeing a pair of swans in the idyllic existence is now over as the poem ends with the a lake swimming in peace at the hour of sunrise and poet recounting his dream of visiting the cottage and being effortlessly he loses his “drift of despair” (22). denied access as it was locked from inside. The metaphor of The anthology is praiseworthy for it showcases Seth at the locked house represents the poet’s inability to attain a his best, trying to evoke the diverse moods of despair, closure as far as his earlier memories are concerned. The cynicism, disillusionment and sometimes ennui. The lyrical poem in its lyrical beauty recalls Auden’s “Funeral Blues” grace of Seth’s words and the versification are unmistakable. which also focuses on the theme of loss of love, although it The poems do not jar the reader even when it is describing the stems from bereavement rather than estrangement: “He was disenchantment of love. The verse remains controlled and gentle: anchoring the poet’s troubled mind. The poems with my North, my South, my East, my West /My working week, their deep emotional core are confessional and personal, my Sunday rest /… I thought that love would last forever: I giving the reader the feeling that Seth is trying hard to was wrong.” exorcize the ghost of a broken relationship. Summer, long The anthology also focuses on the difficulty of the associated in literature with youthful passion, is no time for a creative mind to find impetus after the failure of a personal requiem. But human relationships hardly conform to the relationship. The poem “Can’t” attests to this feeling of ennui seasonal paradigms and the poet-lover remains this and uses the technological analogy of the reset button as a vulnerable creature trying to come to terms with the altered refrain (“I’ll press the reset button in my head.”) to describe reality. Seth’s poems tread the fine line between an excess of the poet’s determined effort to find some semblance of order sentimentalism and sincere emotions and succeed. We in his professional life. The poem with its tragic-comic tone is emerge from theSummer Requiem lauding the poet’s universal in its plea to acknowledge a broken heart as an vulnerability and dignity in equal measure. The poems, like excuse for professional ineptitude. The reader readily the best love poems, teach us about the transformative power identifies with the following lines: “The dreams I dreamt of love and also its unaccountable vicissitudes and vagaries. have filled my soul with dread. /The world is mad, there’s The penultimate poem “Spring Morning” seems to symbolize a turn of thought and the poet coming to terms with his darkness everywhere. /I’ll press the reset button in my head irrevocable solitude. There is an affirmation, if only /Who’ll kiss my tears away or earn my bread? Who’ll reach ephemeral, in the lines : the clothes hung on that distant chair? /I must, I simply must “…let his heart be free / Of grand ferment. If eternity / Is get out of bed /And press that reset button in my head.”(12) long, he can link days to days. /The sun is generous; there are But there are also lyrics where Seth revisits his favourite ways” (60). theme of finding solace in nature. “One Morning” has an

Volume 3 Issue 1 March 2016 Volume 3 Issue 1 March 2016 176 177 Critical and Creative Wings Contributors’ Profile

Contributors’Profile She is presently a Senior Fellow in the Department of Culture, Govt. of India. Dr. Kalyan Chatterjee retired from the University of Dr. R. B. Kershner isAlumni Professor of English Emeritus at Burdwan as a Professor in English. He is a renowned scholar the University of Florida. He is an authority on Bakhtin and having numerous publications in international and national Joyce. He has numerous publications to his credit. He is a journals. He is now an authority on Tagore. poet as well. Dr. Dhrupadi Chattopadhyay is an AssistantProfessor in Ayan Adak is a Consultant with E&Y, Australia. He is an S.N.D.T. University in Mumbai. She did her PhD from the engineer and an MBA. He has published an anthology of his University of Heidelberg, Germany. poems. Dr. Rudrashis Dutta is an Assistant Professor of English at Shri Ranjit Chaudhuri retired as Assistant Professor in Raigunj B.Ed. College. He is a Visiting Faculty in the post- English from Bidhan Nagar Government College, Salt Lake. graduate section of St. Paul’s College. Writing and singing are his pastime. Dr. Shymasree Basu is currently an Assistant Professor in Shri Tirthankar Chattopadhyay retired as Reader in English English at Vidyasagar Evening College, Kolkata. She from the University of Kalyani. Writing is both his passion completed her PhD from Jadavpur University. and pastime. Dr. Monirul Islam is an Assistant Professor in English at Ranadurjay Talukdar is an MBA. He is presently a Director Asannagar Madan Mohan Taralankar College, Nadia. He is in E&Y,India. Reading is his pastime. also a Visiting Faculty in the department of English, University of Kalyani. Ms Sohini Sengupta did M.Phil in Women’s Studies from Jadavpur University. She is now working as a Visiting Faculty at Jaipuria College, Kolkata. Ms Jyotsna Bidave is a PhD scholar in Tata institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai. She did her Master’s from the University of Pune. Dr. Tapati Talukdar is a retired teacher of Barasat College.

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