Barnita Bagchi (Utrecht University) Ār Konakhāne/'Somewhere Else

Cracow Indological Studies Vol. XX, No. 2 (2018), pp. 163–178 https://doi.org/10.12797/CIS.20.2018.02.08 Barnita Bagchi (Utrecht University) b.bagchi@uu.nl Ār konakhāne/‘Somewhere Else’: Utopian Resonances in Lila Majumdar’s Autobiographical Writing* SUMMARY: This article examines the autobiographical writings of Lila Majumdar, 1908–2007, a writer most famous for zany, fantastical, defamiliarizing, speculative fiction for children and young adults. Majumdar was an influential maker of cultural history. While her natal Ray/Raychaudhuri family comprised master entertain- ers who simultaneously brought reformist, innovative values into the public sphere of the arts, the leading woman writer from this milieu, in her autobiographical and memoir-based volumes Ār konakhāne (‘Somewhere Else’, [1967] 1989), Pākdaṇḍī (‘Winding, Hilly Road’, [1986] 2001), and Kheror khātā (‘Miscellany’ or ‘Scrapbook’, [1982] 2009), imaginatively created utopias. These ‘otherwheres’, to use a word that captures utopian connotations that she creates in her writing, give voice to the marginal and the liminal. We find in her autobiographical writing the dual urge of longing for a utopian elsewhere, and a dissatisfaction with all the places one finds temporary mooring in. KEYWORDS: Lila Majumdar, modernity, utopia, gender, reformist, autobiography In memory of Professor Jasodhara Bagchi, 1937–2015, pathbreaking scholar of Bengali women’s writing and culture Remembering and haunted by lost and elusive spaces, connecting homes and worlds, building fragile everyday utopias, representing * An earlier version of this article was presented at an international work- shop on ‘Opening up Intimate Spaces: Women’s Writing and Auto biography in India’, at the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland. The author thanks Dr. Monika Browarczyk, Dr. Nora Melnikova, and Dr. Tara Puri, work- shop organizers, for their invitation and their comments on the presentation. She also thanks the two anonymous peer reviewers for their helpful feedback. 164 Barnita Bagchi dystopian personal worlds, women’s autobiographical writing often modulates itself in a defamiliarizing key (Smith and Watson 2010). In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a period of modernity, many south Asian female (auto)biographical “I”s, notably also Lila Majumdar’s,1 whose work is analysed in this article, stake out textual spaces for radically other selves, creating idioms of memory and desire which simultaneously articulate loss and agency: Tanika Sarkar’s work on Rāsasundarī Devī’s Āmār Jīban (Sarkar 1999) articulated this simultaneity memorably. That women’s autobiographical writing at its most striking unsettles assumptions of even feminist scholars is borne out by Sarkar’s now classic 1999 book. Rāsasundarī‘s autobiography is analysed by Sarkar as a text full of abstraction and a crafted devotion- ality. Āmār Jīban is a text that is neither cosy nor domestic or obvious- ly ‘feminine’, and it constantly creates distances between the narrated and the written self, while also being a text in which theatrical meta- phors for the world drawing partly from Vaiṣṇava Hinduism are strong. Sarkar’s study of Rāsasundarī’s Āmār Jīban, an auto biographical text of the late nineteenth century written by an old woman, became and remains a landmark in studies of south Asian women’s auto biographical writing. In my article, I examine utopian resonances in the autobiographical and memoir-based writings of Lila Majumdar, 1908–2007, children’s writer, autobiographer, and humourist. After introduc- ing the thematic triangle of women’s autobiography in Bengali, utopias as the longing for elsewhere (literal translation of ār konakhāne of the title), and Lila Majumdar’s life and work, the article investigates utopian resonances in three interrelated autobiographical works by Majumdar. Majumdar, who represents herself throughout her autobiographical writing as a hot-tempered, stubborn tomboy in her growing years, writes memorably feisty, humorous autobiographical pieces. She is a writer who also unsettles stereotypical assumptions about women’s 1 I have spelt this writer’s name as Lila Majumdar, since she is well known to readers in this Roman spelling. I have chosen not to use the trans- literated spelling Līlā Majumadāra, though I adduce it here for the record. Ār konakhāne/‘Somewhere Else’… 165 writing, since she is most famous for zany, fantastical, defamiliarizing, often mischievous, sometimes speculative fiction for children and young adults. The title of one of her autobiographies, Ār konakhāne, translates literally as ‘somewhere else’, and has utopian resonances. The phrase itself brings to mind Balākā, ‘Flight of Swans’, a haunt- ing poem by Rabindranath Tagore, about the perennial desire found in nature and man to be somewhere else, in perpetual restlessness; the poem images, for example, a mountain which wishes to become the scudding, disappearing clouds of summer. The wings of the empty universe resound with this song – ‘Not here, but somewhere, somewhere, somewhere beyond!’ (George 1992: 487) That desire to be somewhere else/somewhere beyond has connotations of utopia, a mode and a resonance in human thought and imagination (Bagchi 2012: 2, 7). Utopia is a polysemic word, which is why the term resonance, with its connotation of multiple senses and echoes, is apt to designate utopian imagination. We outline below in what senses we use utopia in this article. Utopia connotes a place (topos), actual or imagined, enshrining social dreaming. Utopia is a place of the good, and a place which is nowhere to be found: paradox, ambiguity, and janus-facedness are embedded in a very modern punning coupling of the good, ‘eu’, and the nonexistent, ‘ou’, made by Thomas More in his Greek neologism ‘utopia’, the title of his eponymous book, which was written in Latin (1516). Utopias are often poised between hope and fear, reality and imagination, aspiration and irony. It is widely accepted in the scholarly community today that utopia and dystopia are universal, or that they can be translated across cultures and periods (Bagchi 2012; Sargent 2010). Modern South Asian literature and culture are also full of utopian practices and resonances. Lila Majumdar was a writer who straddled the full length of the twentieth century, and who excelled in writings for children, particularly nonsensical, fantastic, and ghostly writing. She also penned three acclaimed volumes of autobiographical writing: apart from Ār konakhāne (mentioned earlier, [1967] 1989), they are Pākdanḍī (‘Winding, Hilly Road’, [1986] 2001), and 166 Barnita Bagchi Kheror khātā (‘Miscellany’, [1982] 2009). She creates utopias throughout her oeuvre, including in her autobiographical writing. These otherwheres that she creates in her writing give voice to the marginal and the liminal, with her writing being published as colonial India trans- formed into post-Independence India. Jacqueline Dutton has recently argued that “based on the evidence available to us regarding the diverse belief systems and worldviews, cultural manifestations and socio-political movements that dem- onstrate fundamentally utopian visions, it seems that the desire for a better way of being in the world is indeed a universal concept” (Dutton 2010: 250). As far as children’s literature and fantasy are con- cerned, it is now well-known that utopian possible worlds, often better worlds, are powerful grounding elements in such writing: the hundred- acre woods in the Pooh stories, Hogwarts school in the Harry Potter books—examples can be multiplied. Lila Majumdar’s children’s writing also constructs a variety of possible worlds, characteristically set in the everyday, which quickly, defamiliarizingly turn into the absurd, the zany, and the darkly comic. But I argue that to see her only as children’s writer is to do injustice to the richly complex and multidimen- sional ways in which she functioned as writer, as well as to the ways in which utopia as a mode and resonance can be traced in her oeuvre and life, including in her memoirs and autobiographical writing. Her autobiographical writings need also to be seen as key resources for understanding the cultural history of modernity in twentieth-century South Asia. Majumdar described herself also as a writer of ‘ājgubi’ literature, which she herself translated as ‘fantasy’ (Majumdar 2001: 423); she did not see herself as writing science fiction (ibid.). As writer of fantasy, I would argue, she understood the resonances of utopia, which, like fantasy-writing, is a kind of speculative fiction, taking risks in imagining reality at a slant; this trait also shows up in her autobiographical writing. Majumdar also has a playful, wide- ranging, spatial imagination, which is important in understanding the ‘topos’ at the heart of utopia. The mountains of northeast India, Ār konakhāne/‘Somewhere Else’… 167 the houses of colonial Calcutta, the worlds of indigenous peoples in Shillong or in Dumka: these become Majumdar’s possible worlds in her autobiographical writing too. This combines most interest- ingly with Majumdar’s hailing from a line of Brahmo reformist men and women, in the spheres of gender, social work, and social ethics, and with herself being strongly reformist in spirit. Perhaps most fundamental to understanding utopian resonances in Majumdar’s work is the dual urge of longing for a utopian elsewhere, and a dissatisfaction with all the places one finds temporary mooring in as the title of the book Ār konakhāne suggests.

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