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

Local News

I'm very happy that Sthaniya Sambaad has won the award for best feature film in the New York Indian Film Festival! So happy that I decided that that must register on the blog somehow, even if only with a two-line post! Strange coincidence that the award came on the Tagore sesquicentennial which I had been looking forward to, and that Ore grihobaasi, which is something like a refrain in the film was the song with which my training in Rabindrasangeet commenced. 

Sthaniya Sambaad at the New York Indian Film Festival, May 4-8, 2011

Sthaniya Sambaad (dir. Arjun Gourisaria and Moinak Biswas, 2009), which I have blogged about here, makes a comeback to New York in 35mm film format at the New York Indian Film Festival, May 4-8, 2011. Click here to go to Sthaniya Sambaad's page on the festival's website. I will probably not make it to the festival, and have to be content with rereading my blogpost here, written after I first watched the film last year at Tisch :)

Phantom of the Opera

After several attempts to get tickets to what has become Broadway's longest running show, we finally got there on a very snowy evening in New York. Around 1991 or so --because I think this was just before the Gulf War--when I was searching for recordings of Pepe Jaramillo, in my enthusiasm for the piano, a shopowner in Shyambazar where I grew up, recommended Richard Clayderman. I listened to the tracks from Phantom of the Opera not knowing any more than that it was a musical. I liked the music, liked Clayderman, but still pined for Jaramillo. I haven't found more of Jaramillo than what I grew up listening to. The yearning for more of Pepe on the piano remains for I have always thought he must have been very interesting not only to listen to live, but watch. So on a day when my Facebook status update says that I am in a 'Phantom of the Opera state of mind', I must tag this post with Calcutta... like so many other posts.

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

Baby Soda

After making a trip to Manhattan only to be baulked out of watching John Cassavetes' Love Streams (1984) when a screening was cancelled at the last minute, I decided to take the train back from Union Square, in the hope that the general liveliness of the milieu might enliven me. I was all the more disappointed because I had braved a big snowstorm that was forecast for later in the evening. And Union Square did live up to expectation, for there was the Baby Soda band playing lively jazz. So I stopped to take pictures on my mobile, and gave to myself one of their CDs up for sale. In the picture above, they are playing a soulful number.

Book Launch: An Ethics of Betrayal, by Crystal Parikh, December 1 at 6 p.m.

The Humanities Initiative
New York University
presents

An Ethics of Betrayal: The Politics of Otherness in Emergent U.S. Literatures and Culture

by Crystal Parikh
Assistant Professor
Departments of English and Social and Cultural Analysis
New York University

Discussant:
Phillip Brian Harper
Erich Maria Remarque Professor of Literature,
Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis,
and Chair, Department of English

Venue: 20 Cooper Square, 5th Floor
Date: December 1, 2009
Time: 6 p.m.

Reception to follow

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.

Memorial Meeting for Meenakshi Mukherjee, September 25, 2009

Memorial meeting for the internationally renowned feminist scholar Meenakshi Mukherjee
Date and time: September 25 at 4 p.m.
Venue: 754 Schermerhorn Extension (Institute for Research on Women and Gender seminar room), Columbia University.

Directions: The link for the campus map is http://www.columbia.edu/about_columbia/map/

Text sent by Professor Harish Trivedi of Delhi University to the Hindustan Times:

Meenakshi Mukherjee: A Rare Human Being and an Effortless Intellect

Professor Meenakshi Mukherjee, who passed away in Hyderabad on 16 September, was one of the most innovative, inspiring and widely honoured professors of English of her generation in the country. Each one of her major books charted out a fresh field and flung open new doors of academic enquiry: The Twice-Born Fiction: Themes and Techniques of the Indian Novel in English (1971), Realism and Reality: the Novel and Society in India (1985), and The Perishable Empire (2000). For the last-named book, she was awarded the Sahitya Akademi Prize for the best book of the year in English, thus becoming one of the four or five literary critics to have won it in the last fifty years. Her latest book, an intellectual biography of Romesh Chunder Dutt (1848-1909), was launched in Delhi yesterday, the day after she died as fate would have it. Professor Mukherjee began her teaching career in Patna where she had been a student and where she met and married Sujit Mukherjee, one of her professors who distinguished himself no less as a scholar, translator and later academic publisher. The two were perfectly matched in temperament as well as academic inclinations and wherever they lived, their home became a warm and welcoming social and intellectual adda. Meenakshi Mukherjee taught successively at the University of Poona, Lady Shriram College, New Delhi, the newly founded University of Hyderabad, and then back in Delhi as a professor at the Jawaharlal Nehru University. In between she was also a visiting professor at Chicago, California and Texas. A whole legion of her devoted former students and colleagues are to be found all over the country as well as abroad.

Not only did her own work contribute to giving a new orientation to the discipline but she also helped build up institutions which would bring together senior and younger scholars and enable them to present their work and share ideas. For twelve years (1993-2005), she was the Chairperson of the Indian Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies (IACLALS) which under her leadership went from strength to strength, increasing its membership from under 50 to over 400. Of the major international conferences she was instrumental in organizing during this period, one was held in Shimla in 1994 and resulted in a book which she and I co-edited, Interrogating Postcolonialism (1996). The other was a grander conference in Hyderabad in 2004, in which some of the most distinguished literary scholars and theorists in the world participated, including Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Homi Bhabha, and which led to the publication of as many as three books.

A defining characteristic of Meenakshi Mukherjee both as a person and as a scholar was her simplicity. In an age of increasing scholarly jargonization and even obfuscation, no one ever had any difficulty in following whatever she spoke or wrote. But such simplicity always went hand in hand with solid and substantial scholarship and a degree of persuasiveness that more complex ways of formulation would often have failed to achieve. She said the kind of simple things that clever people do not say.

As in her work so in her life, she was the most genial and forthcoming of human beings. Her modesty, affability and quiet charm were most in evidence when she was with young researchers and teachers who had most reason to be in awe of her. She could instantly establish a rapport with them which often turned into life-long friendships. She was a rare scholar and a rarer human being.
Harish Trivedi

Clytemnestra... Clytemnestra... Clytemnestra...

A year since we watched the Martha Graham Company's Clytemnestra at the NYU Skirball Center for the Performing Arts. Here's a picture I found on the net.

Posing Beauty

Photography exhibition
Thursday September 10, 2009, 10 am - 7 pm
Gulf + Western Gallery 721 Broadway at Waverly Pl, NY 10003
Admission free

Posing Beauty explores the contested ways in which African and African American beauty has been represented in historical and contemporary contexts through a diverse range of media including photography, film, video, fashion, advertising, and other forms of popular culture such as music and the internet. Throughout the Western history of art and image-making, beauty as an aesthetic impulse has been simultaneously idealized and challenged, and the relationship between beauty and art by examining the representation of beauty as a racialized act fraught with meanings and attitudes about class, gender, and aesthetics. In the first of four thematic sections, Constructing a Pose, considers the interplay between the historical and the contemporary, between self-representation and imposed representation, and the relationship between subject and photographer. The second theme, Body and Image, questions the way in which our contemporary understanding of beauty has been constructed and framed through the body. The last two thematic sections Objectivity vs. Subjectivity, and Codes of Beauty, invite a deeper reading of beauty, its impact on mass culture and individuals and how the display of beauty affects the ways in which we see and interpret the world and ourselves. Posing Beauty problematizes our contemporary understanding of beauty by framing the notion of aesthetics, race, class, and gender within art, popular culture, and political contexts. This exhibition features approximately 90 works drawn from public and private collections and will be accompanied by a book published by WW Norton.

Chandrika Kanade

When she jerked her grey locks yelling “Begin!” to forty of us in her deep though wavering voice, and we commenced on singing “We three kings…” she seemed a formidable high-priestess of good taste. I can spell it out only now, from the vantage point of adult recollection, for what she inspired was a jumble of reactions ranging from admiration to fear during that weekly ritual called “Singing” class. When she played “Whisper a prayer in the morning…” on the upright piano, she seemed elegance personified, and the elegance and yelling seemed irreconcilable traits even to a four-year-old. And as she hurried through the corridors with her bunch of notations—some new, some tattered—I wondered if the beautiful signs on them would ever mean anything to me. They seemed attractive for they seemed to conceal all the pleasures that the sound of a piano could give. Her huge emerald ring...and then how one fine day all her hair turned jet black... those are my earliest memories of Miss Kanade, as we used to call her.

Those of us who had sisters or cousins for predecessors in school quickly learnt and told everyone else that she had been given the sobriquet “Princess Margaret” once upon a time. She had the same hairstyle as the princess in her youth, and had once performed before her. And then there was the other story of how being told “Miss, you are looking good today,” would invariably flatter her. M— told me the story, and once even greeted Miss Kanade like that as I stood by, to elicit a wave of the hand accompanied by, “ O, that’s an old compliment!” before she vanished into her room in the school building, outside which was a little board with “The Den” inscribed on it… so they say… for when I finally had the chance to check for the inscription, it was no longer there. Then there was the Sound of Music legend. Her stage-production of The Sound of Music was part of CGHS* lore, and as she taught us the songs from the film, one could tell they had a special place in her heart. As I watched her play with her heart and soul, the loose flesh of her arms jiggling at every movement, I could almost imagine her doing the same with the gracefulness of youth.

Other ‘public’ memories of Miss Kanade abound—memories of Investiture services and Founders’ Day services in the Thoburn Methodist Church on hot summer days. Who knew how one might miss the spirited intricacies of Miss Kanade’s rendition of the School Song, or the rousing notes of “Now thank we all our God” years afterwards?... And in other climes... Or even in the later years of school, when she had left. In her farewell speech she had said that people must retire and make way for others just the way furniture must be replaced from time to time. And so she went, and the pianos never sounded the same again.

Who knows with what courage, but I went to her to ask if she would teach me to play the piano. I was six years old then, and hadn’t even asked my parents. She said she would, if we bought a piano. I knew that that wasn’t possible. So I contented myself with watching Miss Kanade closely as she played while we sang, for she was grace itself on the piano. She taught me without my knowing then that piano-playing was truly as much to be watched as to be listened to.

As we kept taking singing lessons from her over the years, I sometimes wondered if she remembered the little girl, one of many little girls perhaps, who had asked her for piano lessons. It was her last year in school. We were lining up near the piano as usual in groups of four for the test in singing. The other three in my group had louder voices, and I was just recovering from a bout of pharyngitis and feared being drowned out. And I was. We had to sing her favourite from The Sound of Music, “The hills are alive…” When we finished, she said, without turning, “Sing again, Durba, you weren't yourself... maybe drink a little water first?” So she associated my name with a voice!

I had fallen in love with the piano when I was about two-and-a-half-years old, when I began attending the kindergarten school everyone in our extended family went to. At both schools I attended, I would tinkle at the pianos whenever I got half the chance. And then, literally dreamt of pianos for years. I dreamt the same dream till I was about 24, till I found a way to take piano lessons without buying a piano right away. Above all, it was bliss to be able to finally play La Paloma, that my fingers had itched to learn for years.

It was about the same time that I decided to go on a trekking trip to Darjeeling, and having heard that Miss Kanade was then teaching at Mount Hermon School, Darjeeling, made up my mind to meet her, and perhaps tell her I was finally learning, even if twenty years late. MHS was founded by Emma Knowles, after whom my ‘house’ in school was also named, so all the more reason for a pilgrimage. All I ended up seeing were the impressive school precincts, for with the school closed for some reason, there was no one at the gate whom I could ask about Miss Kanade’s whereabouts. The Queen of the Hills was still pretty, and it seemed as though postcards that survived in memory from my first visit when I was four (two years before I asked Miss Kanade for piano lessons:) were leaping into life all about me, and the trek in Rimbik, and the trip as a whole, were very enjoyable. Returning to the din of Calcutta, I inquired among old friends for news of Miss Kanade for naught, and after about a year, just after coming to New York, learnt that she had passed away. So the little girl shall never tell her that she is finally playing. Or that whatever vignettes of her survive in her memory are so vividly compelling that even if Miss Kanade never knew about it, she did teach her to play.


Gloss:
* CGHS: Calcutta Girls' High School

© Text: DURBA BASU 2009

Bail-out teach-in: Critical Perspectives on the Global Financial Crisis

The New York University Postcolonial Colloquium presents
Bailout Teach-in: Critical Perspectives on the Global Financial Crisis
Wednesday, October 22nd
6:30pm
13-19 University Place, Room 222
Panelists:
Andrew Caplin (Economics, NYU)
Patrick Deer (English, NYU)
Ana Dopico (Comp Lit/Spanish & Portuguese, NYU)
Jean Franco (English/Comp Lit, Columbia)
Randy Martin (Art and Public Policy, NYU)
Mary Poovey (English/IHPK, NYU)
Sanjay Reddy (Economics, Barnard)
Robert Young (English/Comp Lit, NYU)
All welcome
www.nyupoco.com

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

Postcolonialism and the Hit of the Real at NYU, 6-8 March, 2008

Food for thought for postcolonialists/poco-sympathetics. Apathetics welcome too! Look at the amazing line-up at www.nyupoco.com. If you plan to attend, be sure to register by email (see below), and if you do not have an NYU ID, please carry a photo ID with you.

Phul phutuk na phutuk...

Below I reproduce one of my perennially favourite Bangla poems. The opening lines literally translated would read "Whether flowers bloom or not / it's spring today." That gives no indication, however, how powerfully the poem is written. 'Powerfully' is the word. I've woken up thinking of the poem--quite possessed by it in fact--only to find that it has snowed heavily, and that I have actually not brought over the anthology from Calcutta, and that I don't have the poem written anywhere. So I called up a friend, all snowed up in Rochester, who first recited from memory, then called up his poetry-loving father in Calcutta to cross-check, and then sent me the poem electronically.
If the font does not display properly but you're dying to read, then you would have to download Avro Keyboard here, which actually downloads pretty fast, and is easy to use.


ফুল ফুটুক না ফুটুক…

সুভাষ মুখোপাধ্যায়


ফুল ফুটুক না ফুটুক
আজ বসন্ত

শান বাধানো ফুটপাথে
পাথরে পা ডুবিয়ে এক কাঠ-খোট্টা গাছ
কচি কচি পাতায় পাঁজর ফাটিয়ে হাসছে

ফুল ফুটুক না ফুটুক
আজ বসন্ত

আলোর চোখে কালো ঠুলি পরিয়ে
তারপর খুলে-
মৃত্যুর কোলে মানুষকে শুইয়ে দিয়ে
তারপর তুলে-
যে দিনগুলো রাস্তা দিয়ে চলে গেছে
যেন না ফেরে

গায়ে হলুদ দেওয়া বিকেলে
একটা দুটো পয়সা পেলে
যে হরবোলা ছেলেটা
কোকিল ডাকতে ডাকতে যেত
-তাকে ডেকে নিয়ে গেছে দিনগুলো

লাল কালিতে ছাপা হলদে চিঠির মত
আকাশটাকে মাথায় নিয়ে
এ গলির এক কালো কুচ্‌ছিত আইবুড়ো মেয়ে
রেলিং-এ বুক চেপে ধরে
এইসব সাতপাঁচ ভাবছিল-

ঠিক সেই সময়ে
চোখের মাথা দিয়ে
গায়ে উড়ে এসে বসল
আ মরণ! পোড়ারমুখ লক্ষ্মীছাড়া প্রজাপতি!

তারপর দড়াম করে দরজা বন্ধ হওয়ার শব্দ
অন্ধকারে মুখ চাপা দিয়ে
দড়ি পাকান সেই গাছ
তখনও হাসছে