Antaranga New York

So here is my article from Jara Parijayee's August-September 2011 issue, reproduced by permission.

Text © DURBA BASU

New York, up close

Like all of my musings on New York, this too must be tagged with the names of both the cities I divide my existence in. This is the first page of my article in Jara Parijayee's  current issue (August-September 2011), now on the stands. A scanned PDF looks infinitely better this JPEG reincarnation I made out of it, but this is all that the blog's interface would allow!

Text © DURBA BASU

Things that Happen When Falling in Love

This is an event I will not be able to attend, but it has left me longing for a magic carpet. So here I post it for anyone who can make it to Gateshead, UK, betwen 2 April and 20 June. SIGH! [I literally sighed as I wrote that.]

Things that Happen When Falling in Love
Installation with Video, Photographs, Sculpture & Text by Raqs Media Collective

Venue: The BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art,
Town/City: Gateshead-on-Tyne, United Kingdom
Time: Exhibition runs from 2 April – 20 June 2010

In early April 2009 the last of the distinctive Titan cranes from the Tyneside Swan Hunter shipyard in Newcastle (UK) were loaded up onto a heavy load vessel and sailed out of the River Tyne. These vast iconic forms were dismantled and shipped to a new life at the Bharati shipyard on the west coast of India. This narrative forms one of the starting points of a new installation - Things that Happen When Falling in Love by Raqs Media Collective.

The installation brings together words, ships and people on the move to create an image of a world where the fortunes of both love and labour are framed and dismantled by global forces. It is an attempt to come to terms with the fact that we finally learn to value a history only when [we] consider its departure, its passage away from our lives.

Things that Happen When Falling in Love reveals the emotional undertow of Capitalism’s wake as it traverses continents and histories. The North East of England and the West Coast of India are drawn together experientially through industrial and geographical change. The passage of a ship bridges this transformation.

In their notes towards the making of this work, Raqs write, “Like on-shore sweethearts bidding farewell to men in sailing ships, the world watches its own histories float away. Sometimes, when finally falling in love, only the words for knowing loss and longing remain.”

Sthaniya Sambaad

The makers of Sthaniya Sambaad wanted, the blurb said, to make a film on Calcutta, for they felt that somehow contemporary cinema from the region has forgotten the city, and at a time when the cityscape is changing rapidly. I realized it has been a long time since I watched a film on Calcutta, that is, one that is explicitly concerned with the city. That, and the fact that I would be getting to watch a newly made Bengali film, and Moinakda’s film, sitting in New York. I have not been his student, but Jadavpur ties beckon. Growing up as a ghoti in North Calcutta though, I have experienced only second-hand the displacement across the Bengal border that ensued with Partition—through novels, autobiographies, memoirs, history, film, and narratives of family-friends, and later, my in-laws.

As I watched the film, and tried to understand the colony’s fascination with Park Street, I realized once again how much my North Calcutta middle-class ghoti femaleness marks my sense of the city. Park Street with its bars and restaurants was for the likes of me a forbidden adult world until I earned a little money, and the placeholder of the colony’s fascination with Park Street was instead New Market and Chowringhee, where one could make periodic, chaperoned forays. Prithviraj glossed Park Street for me anew—how his friends from the colony, where the film is mainly set, had this thing about visiting Park Street. Park Street, New Market, Chowringhee…the white town, sahebpara as we would often hear it referred to, the colonizer’s part of Frantz Fanon’s Manichean colonial city. Over the years other indices of Manichean division are becoming increasingly visible in the cityscape. My teenage having passed in the pre-mobile, pre-Barista, pre-shopping mall era, I too feel out of place nowadays in pockets of my own city. Planned housing in Calcutta in the years of my growing up meant Salt Lake; it has since come to mean these townships like New Town mushrooming around the peripheries of the city occasioning new narratives of displacement. The fact that this glitzy new Calcutta is part of our everyday lives through page three—even for readers like me at a distance—only serves to intensify the sense of disjuncture. Go towards City Centre entering Salt Lake by the inlet leading from EM Bypass into DA block: the stark contrast between the shanties and wayside shops and the Calcutta of the shopping malls strikes you immediately. I have sometimes wondered in recent years how much these changes register in cultural production from the city. In scripting the latest bit in the narrative of a particular local iteration of modernity, Sthaniya Sambaad takes up these questions head on.

Literally meaning 'local news,' the title of the film accrues a poignancy as the perspective of the displaced like Atin remains marginal to the city's narrative of development. The scene at Olypub is telling in this respect. As Atin's half-aware affection for Ananya makes him impatient to resume their search for her, city academics and intellectuals sit chatting over drinks at the table behind theirs, and who knows, probably over the very issues that are causing the likes of Atin to be displaced yet again. The film sensitively leaves a subtle gap between the subaltern and the intellectual. While Atin makes his first foray into that bit of the white town that has become a haunt for those who think alternatively, if his sensitivity resonates with the concerns of the intellectuals, his repressive Bengali middle-class sense of propriety marks his distance from them—the fact that Dipankarda is able to appreciate Atin's appraisal of Ananya's swanlike neck, and his preference for alcohol, outrage him. In nursing his secret attraction for Ananya amid the noisy inanities of urban development, Atin would remind Eng Lit types of the questing boy-hero in James Joyce's 'Araby'.

It was a wee bit strange to see in a film faces I know—Saswatada as music teacher, Subham Ray Chowdhury on the perch, the actor cast as Ananya’s sister, Bodhisattva Kar, Manas Ray, Shibajida at Olypub, and Bratya Basu. I am not acquainted with all of them, but know some of them from my years at Jadavpur, or have heard about from friends, or have seen them on television, or on Orkut and Facebook, and know one of them as a celebrity neighbour. These familiar faces also lend some more reality to the film for me while the two absurd characters, and denizens of the colony make their journeys into Park Street. Having married into a bangal family that located on Jheel Road, I have some sense of the peripherality of the colony in the film. The lanes look familiar though I don’t know Deshbandhu colony that well. And the CPM folk—as Moinak Biswas put it, during the post-screening discussion—you can’t live with them or without them, because they have become so much a part of the props.

This post has been churning in my head for a while, and now as I am writing, spring is literally erupting all over India… days after a goon associated with the Vedic Village episode has been killed. My mother-in-law is preparing for her special puja for Dol in the Jheel Road house. At Shantiniketan, Dol has begun much earlier in the morning with the prabhatpheri… khol dwar khol, laglo je dol…

28 February 2010

© Text: DURBA BASU 2010

Remembering Meenakshi Mukherjee

How do you mourn a person you have wanted to meet, because you have known her through her work, but never quite got the chance? I muse as I take a flying carpet ride uptown, expedited by the magical arrival of every train I want so that I reach the Columbia campus just in time. Somewhere near Schermerhorn, I take the wrong turn, get misguided twice, then get into the right building but onto an elevator that refuses to go up, and by the time I finally arrive, Gauri Viswanathan and Meena Alexander have already spoken. As I step into the room, Gayatri Spivak is saying a few words about Meenakshi Mukherjee. It takes me a while to realize that she means to speak later actually, and this is a little pause in between speakers, as memories seem to spill over from whatever she has planned to say when it is her turn. Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, Robert Young and Gayatri Spivak share their reminiscences. Spivak reads out messages from Probal Dasgupta and Supriya Chaudhuri. Mukherjee’s literary sensibility and the acuteness with which she engaged with a later generation of literary scholars who were more oriented towards theory and social science comes through in what all of them say. Taking issue with the labelling of Meenakshi Mukherjee as ‘pre-theoretical’, Rajeswari Sunder Rajan points out how Mukherjee’s reading of Jane Austen anticipates the argument about Antigua in Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism.

Then everybody in the room is invited to speak in remembrance if they wish. As Rochelle Almeida and others reminisce, among them Mayurika, a former student of Meenakshi Mukherjee, now a researcher at SOAS, one gets a sense of the warmth she exuded all around her. Almeida recalls a chance meeting with Mukherjee at a conference where a long gap in the schedule threw them together, and how Mukherjee was very enthusiastic about discussing her work, while she wanted to talk about Mukherjee’s. Mukherjee had said that she thought from reading Almeida’s Originality and Imitation that it would be by a white Portuguese woman. Mukherjee, then limping badly because of an injury, required assistance in draping her heavy silk sari for the evening, and Almeida goes on to say how she came to the rescue, and how Mukherjee told everyone that she had never ever worn her sari as immaculately and that she looked like an Air India air-hostess because of Rochelle!

Mayurika is the only direct student of Meenakshi Mukherjee among those gathered, and gives us an impression of the scholar as pedagogue—hitching up her sari to sit on the teacher’s desk throughout an engaging lecture… followed by her students to her office where they were welcome at any time… caring to teach them citation styles…. Mayurika’s admiration and reverence for her professor remind me of my professor, Alo Ray’s memories of Meenakshi Mukherjee and Sujit Mukherjee as her mentors. When Mayurika talks about her teacher, it seems as though the same warmth overflows, that I could sense in Alodi towards her teachers as she spoke of them over the phone, long ago in Calcutta.

Fittingly, Spivak commences by recounting how they met for the first time in a Texas locker-room after swimming. Mukherjee recognized her as an Indian woman by the mark of the drawstring of the underskirt on her waist, and they hit it off from there. Spivak doesn't forget to add that this was after she had given Mukherjee’s first book a bad review.

I try to match the overall impression I get of a vibrant intellectual who was also very warm, gave generously of her time, and was ever appreciative of the achievements of younger scholars and her students, with my first encounter with her through her OUP edition of Pride and Prejudice that opened up questions of feminist theory for me, and later on, for my students, when I began teaching in Calcutta. I am carried back to the time when I was thrilled to watch a bunch of impressionable undergraduates getting sensitized into an understanding of the novel where the woman’s perspective was central. It was as though I had handed them a magic wand. As I get up to leave the small gathering, it seems I have come for more than myself.

Hyderabad diaries

15 August
Facebook on your mobile. At Shamsabad airport I suddenly realize the length of my absence from home. Dhoni seems ubiquitous in the ad spaces in a spick and span airport. Of course, it is Mahi’s Team India now. And of course, I have been away. Anything I write here can be so aptly tagged with "displacement"! Strange how arriving at a place for the first time in my life I should get a sense of having been away. Well. Imagined communities...

Surreal drive from Shamsabad airport to Miyapur. I am beginning to get the feel of Cyberabad. As we wind down the highway, the headlights flash upon rocky remnants of the Deccan and evidence of intense ongoing construction work. What must this place look like by day?

I discover later that my belongings are soaked through courtesy IndiGo’s strange luggage handling. Among them is my copy of Midnight’s Children. Ominous?

16 August
Clad in a Fab India 4-kali skirt and top, sling bag on shoulder, my hair up in a makeshift knot that frequently metamorphoses into a ponytail, the question I elicit among the women acquaintances my mother has made in the last 7 days, is whether I am married. But they are nice on the whole, and even though I look very different from locals, I feel comfortable out on the streets. The men seem courteous.
I can’t get rid of my America-acquired habit of smiling at people (all women in this case), especially if I have spoken with once. Fortunately there are no mishaps. I wonder and wonder—I never smile enough in greeting while in the US.

17 August
Getting out of the elevator, I learn the Telugu for “open” (or so I think), when a visitor/neighbour says, “tivande”.

18 August
The dosas have a different feel—soft like tissue paper. I am getting by with my Hindi thankfully. I am amazed at how much I can explain when I don’t have the word they might understand. Though I know that a horizontal shake of the head in these parts stands for the affirmative, I am flummoxed while shopping.
My little niece seems to like payesh. I will make it again another day.

19 August
Another new Telugu word: “eynkda”. It may mean “where” or “which shop”. I learn it as the woman from whom I buy onions enquires as to where I have bought tomatoes that look fresh.

20 August
My little niece, all of 8 months, is yelling “aa…aa…aa”. I try to teach her to sing. Nice sawaal-jawaab session ensues. Once I sing a note, she mimes “aa”!

Ripeness is all

So the fairy tale has ended with the Prince getting out for a golden duck. When once upon a time he got his century-on-debut at Lord’s, TV screens in Calcutta went blank for an hour … some caprice of the cable networks… and we heard next day in the papers how a star was born. I was reading at the dining table that moment, and impatiently channel-surfing for news, and as I learn news of the duck from Cricinfo, I am at the dining table again, reading, but miles and seas away. Drama has forever followed the star, to the moment of retirement. In the land of the Ramayana and Mahabharata, cricketers—batsmen among them, to be precise—are no less than epic heroes. Much will be made of the first-ball duck tomorrow and forever. I would agree, canonically Eng Lit style, ripeness is all.

One Book, Two Places

One sultry September afternoon in 2001 I stopped at College Street like many other afternoons, on my way back from Jadavpur, to pick up copies of Milton criticism that I had ordered at Saha Book Company. Oldtimers know no one is Saha there. When Sahada’s concern had split into three, the man himself having to move to another corner of College Street—a sleepy lane devoid of the feel of the place—by an irony of the logic of commercial metamorphosis, no one in the other two segments any longer bore the name Saha, though all the three concerns carried it. They had split sometime in late July, and I had kept my visits restricted since then to Sahada’s new shop out of a sense of loyalty. For some secondary material I was looking for, it was Sahada who said that those books had gone to one of the other shops when they divided up the property, the one called Saha Book Company, on the other side of Presidency College, and I could ask there. So I had no choice but to order my stuff from them, but thankfully, something of Sahada still survived in that newly independent segment of the old concern, for as I was to discover that day, some characters still had it in them like him to be occasionally generous to cash-strapped college students. With Sahada, it would show as something more than just business sense, for he belongs to a generation of College Street booksellers, now passé perhaps, who would always be remembered by students and academics alike for their ability to provide books at good price. It's a pity he will never have the capital to set up a bigger bookshop and be more mainstream, and would always be frowned upon by more established booksellers for his alternative bookselling practices. When I stepped into that more-than-normally crowded bookshop that afternoon it did not seem that the experience had any chance of being memorable, for then that College Street day seemed extraordinary only in terms of the extraordinarily warm weather. I was almost praying for rain even though I knew a drop of rain from the retreating monsoons would spell trouble with so much printed matter to carry.

I still remember the crowd of new college students in the shop—regulation mob at College Street at that time of the year—shouting out titles from Calcutta University’s undergraduate syllabus, keeping the few staff on their toes, which meant they had little time for other customers. As soon as my pile on Areopagitica descended on the front desk from the mysterious mezzanine regions above, I counted out the money and prepared to leave. Turning away, I spotted on one of the shelves an Oxford volume titled Colonial and Postcolonial Literature by an unfamiliar author: Boehmer. Knowing I could not afford the expensive-looking book with what remained in my wallet after my purchases, I hesitated to ask if I could see the book, and even as I hesitated I remember marvelling at what seemed to me unusual typography on the spine—the font with which ‘Oxford’ was printed, not the usual kerned font. Following my gaze, the man at the desk—Sahada's erstwhile assistant—asked if I would like to have a look at the book. When I said I would rather come back another day for I would not be able to buy it even if I liked, he still insisted and had the book brought out by an assistant. So I watched the book emerge from their newly-made sparkling glass bookcases, drifting over a sea of unknown heads, changing hands twice before I finally held it.

In a few seconds of flipping through, I knew that this was one book to begin with for someone just making first forays into postcolonial studies. The accessibility of Boehmer’s presentation appealed instantly, and the range that that slim volume covered seemed impressive. What was even more interesting for me was that Boehmer seemed to dwell at length on the British modernists. I had just had my first sustained academic exposure to high modernist literature, and was completely swept off my feet by TS Eliot and Virginia Woolf, and even as I quickly read a few of Boehmer’s paragraphs on them, felt terribly shaken. Something had vastly changed in those few minutes for me—I did not know how to articulate. In all the confusion of the shop and the heat rising from the ground, as it were, all I could decide was that I needed to read that book whether or not I finally agreed with Boehmer’s assessments, and I had a gut sensation that given the assymetries of book distribution, I would have to buy it to read it in Calcutta, for even if it had been published in 1995, that book wouldn’t be available right then in the libraries even in the city that calls itself the city of booklovers.

I must have flipped through the book for about fifteen minutes if not more, and to my request for reserving the book for the by-then ridiculous amount of 30 rupees (that would have left me with 8 rupees, just enough for some jhaalmuri and the bus-ride home), Sahada’s former assistant responded very generously offerring that I take the book home and pay anytime later. The price came to 620 rupees, after discount, and it was highly unusual for a small business as theirs to allow such latitude even to a regular customer. Having thanked him, I made my way through the lane towards the bus stop happy as a child. True to my fears, a torrential downpour ensued as the bus neared my stop, but I was able to shield my new acquisitions well as I hurried home.

Boehmer opened up several windows, needless to say. It hurt for a long time that modernists were such masked imperialists, and I did not know how to deal with this painful disenchantment—if I loved poco, all that was left me was to love them as one continues to love an affectionate even if ill-tempered grandparent. Boehmer’s book completely defined my experience of Conrad and Achebe, and so much else, and I still find myself going back to that little book with which it all began. I haven’t let go, nor has the book let go of me, for like a faithful, almost talismanic old map, it puts things in place when I am a little mystified, or since I have grown up a little, lets me ask questions that I can then go pursue elsewhere.

5 December 2007. The street outside is called University Place. The unwalled campus and small to medium businesses—eateries and coffee shops and photocopy joints—that have grown up around the university have a strangely Calcutta University-para feel about them, despite all differences. Following Theo d’Haen’s talk on Conrad, I know that Elleke Boehmer and Alison Donnell would speak as respondents. The talk has begun though the respondents have still not arrived. I wonder if they have cancelled, but somewhat morose, I don’t ask anyone. Two white women enter, and I know it’s them, but keep guessing who’s who till someone addresses Elleke Boehmer by name when it’s time for questions. They speak briefly after it is all over, and people get chatty over wine. I lurk around, waiting for my chance to talk. For the seemingly endless minutes I stand near her waiting, College Street floods my memory. She turns to me finally, and I ask a small question on Conrad, and after she answers, I thank her for her book, and briefly recount my first encounter with it. All I can manage to say is that I had no money to pay (nor even that I did eventually pay the bookseller—does she think he just gave it away to me?!), and that it was a very formative experience to read her, but nothing at all about how hot it was. She’s delighted to know the effect the book has had on me and wants to know where I am from, and where this encounter took place, and tells me how someone first read her book as a photocopy in Bangladesh. As we finish talking, I glance over her shoulder at the window. It's snowing. The season’s first snow in New York.

© Text: DURBA BASU 2008

Evicted

What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make an end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from...
...We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time...

From "Little Gidding", Four Quartets by T.S. Eliot.

I begin again. The decontextualised epigraph from Eliot is as much an epitaph for my earlier blog as a prologue for this one. Logging in to blog after aeons, I find so much has changed on Blogger. For a brief moment, I faintly revolt against having to gulp down all the changes Blogger wants me to accept if I want to use their space. But what would it matter? I briefly muse on possible wider consequences of Blogger urging all users to update their blogs. I just want to write, and there wouldn't be much at stake anyway. So I accede as countless others have done. And then, I am dismayed to find the template I loved so much is no longer available. I re-posted my earlier postings, simply because I was loath to lose them--they are like pieces of myself. There must be some way to retain the earlier comments too. I would love to save the comments my friends made. The only consolation is that Blogger let me keep the same title. So here am I, typing away again.

Postscript: I have added the link to my earlier blog on this page so that I don't lose my friends' comments, and the older blog itself.

Another World, Another Time
“Biyer shanai jachchhe bole, chhotobelake jachchho fele,” stares at me from an 8'x10' billboard as I pass Golpark. A pensive Deepika Padukone, resplendent in bridal jewellery, a distant gaze on her kohl-rimmed wide eyes, her forehead gently resting on her bejewelled left fist… Saturday afternoons idled away looking at black and white photographs… my brother in a pram, jolly, chubby baby that he was… me and my brother on the day of my annaprasan… me crying disconsolately, sure that the lion over my head at the gate of Sakshigopal Mandir would devour me… my mother cuddling me in the lobby of a Benares hotel, my freshly lost incisor on the table in front... me in school uniform posing on the Victoria Memorial grounds, one sock drooping… … summer afternoons spent in coaxing the local sweetshop man for clay cups to pour milk for our kittens… poking fingers in the bellow of the harmonium while my uncle played and sang... reflecting sunlight on his face with book transperencies as he checked on the mirror if a shave was due... my brother and I busily assisting our father in repairing leaks on the roof before the monsoon set in… poking the colourful caterpillars that infested our ghaashphool in the monsoon so that they would curl up … Honking horns remind me I must pick up altered trousers on my way to my parents’ place from my in-laws’. At home, my mother has kept an album ready for me to take along to another land… my brother in a pram, jolly, chubby baby that he was… me and my brother on the day of my annaprasan… me crying disconsolately, sure that the lion…At night, when I hear familiar snores around me— I miss these sounds at my in-laws’— I login hoping to find my husband online. He isn’t there. I wait. I type something in a new Word document. He’s still not online. I type a few more lines, and more, and more. My blog is born.

© Text: DURBA BASU 2007

Blogger's Block?

This is the first time I am blogging in New York. I have been itching to write for a long long time and don’t know quite what has held me back. I had much more time before the semester started, and much more new in life each day than I do now. All the newness that my mind registered went into the long emails I wrote, and yet I never once tried to blog. Perhaps one needs to get used to even a new corner in a new home to think of it as suitable for personal, reflective activity, even through its fruits will be shared with others.