OTHER WORDS - Ordinary lives, extraordinary stories - Ashapurna Debi : Aruni Kashyap

Aruni Kashyap revisits the complex worlds and emotions that came to life in the works of the renowned Bengali writer. 

Bengali author Ashapurna Debi is a household name in Assam mainly due to her trilogy, translated by Manu Sen. With more than 150 novels and 1500 stories, she has created such a large fictional universe that it is difficult to keep track of her work. In a career spanning 70 years, she mostly told stories about middle-class Bengali life.

When I read her stories like ‘Chinnamasta’ I wondered what a merciless pen hers was. She wrote about people who were so complex that we find it difficult to accept them sometimes, but never question their plausibility. In fact, I remember, my mother didn’t read Ashapurna Debi for many years after she had read ‘Chinnamasta”’ because she was disappointed that a woman author she admired so much could create such a problematic mother-figure like Joyaboteee. Widowed at an early age, Jayabotee’s world revolves around her son. But conflicts soon begin with her new daughter-in-law over petty things. On one occasion, deeply hurt, Jayabotee prays that her daughter-in-law would be taught a lesson for the cruel, impolite, mocking reference she made to her widowhood. Soon after, her son dies in a tram accident. But the story doesn’t end here: it ends in a scene, when Jayabotee, now recuperating from the tragedy, invites her daughter-in-law with a sweet voice to come and have her meal. Noticing a defeated, docile daughter-in-law having her meal, Joyabotee lets out a faint, triumphant smile. This is what Debi excelled at: with a mild stroke of her pen, she showed the immense complexity of the human mind.

I have been a great admirer of Ashapurna’s prose and her magnetic storytelling ability which is absent in many great authors who can write good prose but can’t tell a story well or who are great storytellers but write mediocre prose. Debi was skilled at both: you would read her story first following the gripping plot, but come back later for her technique, her voice. With each reading, a different aspect of the story is uncovered. Her style is conversational. Her sentences are tinged with sarcasm, irony and mild humour. But at the same time, she wrote in a lyrical, epic style when required. Her character-driven trilogy on the lives of three generations of Bengali women is her most famous and ambitious project. Pratham Pratisruti follows the life of a headstrong Satyabati in 19th century Bengal. Subarnalata is on Satyabati’s daughter, the child bride, set against the partition of Bengal and Swadeshi movement. Bakul-Katha is about Satyabati’s granddaughter who is an unmarried author.

Of the three novels, The First Promise  is the most powerful, capturing the age with a huge cast of nearly sixty characters. What’s astonishing is that we remember all these characters vividly long after we have read the novel. We know how they think; how petty or generous or selfish or insecure they are; what they are jealous of and what they care about. In Ashapurna’s own words, the three novels are set against ‘tuchcho doinondin ghotonaprobah’ (petty day-to-day events). But what evokes awe in these novels is the way they capture history in daily conversations, events. Not for a single moment, we feel that The First Promise was written by a Bengali author during the late 1960s: we are instantly drawn into the world of 19th century rural Bengal, to the family of much revered, rich kobiraj Ramkali Chatterji who leaves his house after being beaten by his father with his footwear and comes back learning the art of kobiraji, and gains respect in the village because of his economic status. 

Sometimes I wonder if the next two novels were written in haste. The attention to detail that Ashapurna paid to the first novel in the trilogy and many of her other famous novels such as Sochibabur Sonsar and the doomed love story Nodi Deek Hara gradually diminished in her short stories like ‘Sworgor Ticket’, ‘Barir Naam Shubhadirsti’ and ‘Jogonnanther Mati’. Subarnalata becomes a tedious read towards the end. So many characters emerge and vanish that it becomes difficult to follow the story. The First Promise has innumerable characters too, but they are treated in rich detail; we even hear their thoughts. Subarnalata, towards the end, almost gets filtered through the perspective of the ailing and dying protagonist. Bakul Kotha doesn’t have the dramatic events that hold the attention of readers like the previous two novels. The atmosphere in this book is mostly calm, with occasional disturbance. Anamika Devi (Bakul), a successful author, recalls the trials and tribulations of the women from previous generations. 

In fact, by the end of this novel, the trilogy comes back to where it began. The opening lines of The First Promise says, “Satyabatir golpo amar lekha noi. E golpo Bakuler khata theke neoa.” (Satyabati’s story isn’t mine. I have borrowed it from Bakul’s notebooks). The prelude to Promise is a conversation between Bakul and the first person narrative voice of the author who wants to write a novel on Bakul’s life. She is amused by it, for she doesn’t believe that her life is worthy enough to be written about. Her laughter is that of mistrust and mockery because Bakul thinks she is totally ordinary (sadharon) and says, “Amar golpo jodi likhtei hoy, shey to aaj noi. Pore”. (If you really have to write my story, write it later, not now) because Bakul thinks before writing her story one should write about her grandmother (pitamohee) and great-grandmother (protipitamohee). Debi writes that behind the thousands of free Bakuls and Paruls of today’s ‘Bongodesh’ there is an extended history of struggle -- the struggle of their mothers, grandmothers and great grandmothers, who were just one among hundreds, and who dared to do things that inspired other women to break the bonds of tradition and patriarchy. It is the extraordinary struggle of these ordinary women who lived in the ‘onteshpoors’ of Bengal that Debi celebrated in the next thousand-odd pages.

Ashapurna Debi was one of the greatest storytellers of India. Winner of the Jnanpith Award, India’s highest literary award, she never received national fame like some of her peers, though she was a better author than many of them. For a long time, readers thought it was a man’s pen-name, for males dominated the Bengali writing scene when she started off. They couldn’t believe that a woman could write so powerfully. Her critics may dismiss her for not dealing with big themes, major political upheavals and for writing only about the domestic, but when did she step out? She used to say, “Ami ji dekhechi, tai likhchi”. Her fiction, mostly set inside the house, is an incisive look at Bengali life over seven decades seen through the window and whatever else comes through the door. But even with her limitations, in a droplet of water, she could show us the sea which few writers in the world could.

FIFTH WALL - Some nostalgia and a little fun : Uddipana Goswami

Uddipana Goswami, Literary Editor

There are many who are saying enough of violence, insurgency, blood and gore already. I agree. There should be an end to conflicts, we should find peace. But in a land where the ethnic cauldron boileth over, where vendors of peace shake hands with mercenaries of war, where every aspect of our life is somehow touched by the spectres of bloodshed and brutality, we are often forced to dwell on the issue. But as we start a new year, we can perhaps laugh off some of these concerns. For a while at least, maybe we can concentrate on the pure delight literature sometimes gives us. This issue therefore is dedicated to exploring the humour literature of Assam.

Assam’s tradition of humour in writing is as old as written literature. Occasional hilarity and a few witticisms were to be found even in the 14th and 15th century Vaishanvite literature. Oral tradition and folk literature however, has always abounded with humour. We have grown up listening to many ribald tales (upakatha) from the Ramayan and Mahabharat which are perhaps not found anywhere in a written form till today. While my father was researching on the Ojapali art form of Assam, he also recounted many instances of comic interludes in the performances and witty repartees between the performers. At a time when there seems to be very little to delight in, I think we need to sometimes go back to these oral traditions that have survived since yore and forget the turmoil of contemporary times.

This issue brings you an overview of humorous literature in Assam and traces its development in the modern period. One of the foremost humorists of Assam, Bhadra Bora, takes you on this journey. And in an effort to rediscover some unadulterated humour in our day-to-day lives, Gitanjali Das revisits Bhabendra Nath Saikia’s classic, Mohadustor Dustobuddhi.

From this issue we are starting a new section, ‘Other Words’, which will place fresh perspectives before the readers of NELit review through essays, reviews, thought pieces and what have you. Not necessarily connected with the dominant theme of the particular issue, ‘Other Words’ will also occasionally take our readers beyond Northeast literature. This week, on the 103rd birth anniversary of Bengali author, Ashapurna Debi, Aruni Kashyap revisits her oeuvre and speaks of the extraordinary power of her pen.

DUST OFF - No separatist treatise - Revisiting Parag Das’s Sanglot Fenla : Aruni Kashyap

 The novel is not an apologia for violence. It attempts to show how the Assamese had to take the course of armed resistance after all democratic means had been exhausted. 

Sanglot Fenla

Parag Kumar Das

Udangshri Prakashan,1993

`50, 212 pages

Paperback/Novel

I have heard many people in Delhi and Guwahati, in Golaghat, Mayong and Nagaon, tell me that they had struggled with a strong desire to go to the forests of Burma after reading Parag Das’s Sanglot Fenla. While I was growing up, I was never denied a book but in 1993 or ‘94, when I had asked for a copy of the novel after seeing a poster hung in the Guwahati Book Fair, my father had instead bought me a young-adult novel. Forbidden stuff has a strange allure and many years later, I spent an entire day scanning the length and breadth of Guwahati looking for it.

Sanglot Fenla, which roughly translates as Revolution’s Army, captured the minds of an entire generation. During my undergrad years, reading Manoram Gogoi’s memoirs Paragdar Xannidhyat (In Paragda’s Company), I was amazed reading about its popularity. When was the last time the publication of a book became an event in itself, a cultural moment? In the world, I could only think of the release of the Harry Potter novels and recently, Haruki Murakami’s 108Q. Sanglot Fenla was serially published from July 1992 in the pages of Budhbar, the newspaper Das edited. Its first edition was over at the Guwahati Book Fair that had started on January 20 and the next edition was printed for the Asom Sahitya Sabha’s 59th session at Sibasagar. Due to some tiff between the organisers and the publishers, the book shops were shut in protest during the Sabha. Gogoi narrates that even during this phase, hundreds of people thronged Budhbar’s stall only to buy Sanglot Fenla and Rastrodrohir Dinalipi (A Seditioner’s Diary, 1992). One old woman demanded a copy immediately despite being told that they were not selling as a mark of protest. “I came all the way from Lakhimpur only to buy these two books, you better give them to me,” she said. Has anyone heard of an old lady travelling 415 kilometers only to buy two books?

Sanglot Fenla is no more in print, but has left an enduring legacy. In the early ‘90s, after the counter insurgency operations, many ULFA cadres had surrendered. The ones still underground nurtured a romantic idea of the separatist insurgency. Away from the hunger, diseases and death in the valleys of Burma, they were leading a life of luxury in Guwahati and Dibrugarh, earning a bad name for the organisation. But there were many more cadres who were still committed and took their goal seriously. Parag Das wanted to celebrate the struggle of these committed cadres, who according to him had not yet been co-opted into the system.

Parag Kumar Das

Actually, there is no single narrative thread in the novel. It is about Digonto, his training in Burma, where he had seen the hard work of many of his comrades. It is about how various sections of the society such as the Assamese tribals and migrant Muslims were excluded from the movement and the immense potential these groups had to contribute to it was left untapped by the mainly upper-caste ULFA leadership. In many ways, Sanglot Fenla reworks the picaresque novel. It rests in the tradition of The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling or Kim by Rudyard Kipling by following the escapades of a hero over a range of experiences. But Sanglot Fenla is not comic from any angle. It is the search for an alternative: what happens when all attempts of democratic means to achieve justice get exhausted? What happens when you are betrayed by your own comrade-in-arms? What happens when decadence and luxury and arrogance traps the rebel? How does one deal with the irony of running a rebellion under the indulgence of the same government you want to overthrow – everyone in Assam has speculated about the nexus between the AGP government led by Prafulla 

Mahanta and ULFA – something which Parag Das was very critical of and rightly so.

However, the novel is not an apologia for violence. Rather, it attempts to show how the Assamese had to take the course of armed resistance after all democratic means had been exhausted. It is also not a separatist treatise for youths who read the book unguided. In fact, to understand the novel properly, one must read Parag Das’s non-fiction and Manorom Gogoi’s memoirs. What Das narrates in the novel is merely an extension of his narrative non-fiction retold with characters and situations.

Throughout his career, Parag Das dreamt of a multi-hued Assam, bound by unity because he knew that breaking down into small groups would not help and would only appease the central government’s imperial design that has always feared the common cultural thread binding different communities in Assam. He also tried to raise awareness on human rights abuses by the Indian Army in Assam. Sanglot Fenla fits into this larger project: but what redeems the novel from the clutches of narrow, jingoistic nationalism is his depiction of the inhuman brutality of the ULFA cadres on their “traitors”, their decadence. Chillingly, the torture scenes at the Indian Army camp and the ULFA camps are very similar and successfully (sadly) compete with torture scenes of Chilean testimonios under Augusto Pinochet’s regime.

FRONTISPIECE - Writing the Northeast : Preeti Gill

"Writers across Assam, Manipur, Nagaland and Tripura are deeply concerned about the brutalisation of their societies and have been confronting these issues upfront. "

Literature, like other art forms, shares a dialectical relationship with society and with history and geography. This is particularly true in the case of the Northeast where recent histories have had such a major impact on the writing that has emerged from the different states. ‘Terror lore’, a term coined by poet Desmond Kharmawphlang to describe the stories that emerge from societies besieged by collective fear and insecurity, works very well to describe the dominant thread that colours much of the literature from the Northeast. The first time I travelled to the region was in search of creative writers for an issue of The Book Review, a New Delhi-based journal. As I read and researched, and interviewed writers in Guwahati, Shillong and Kohima, I heard stories that astounded me, for the Northeast does not get much attention in the English-language ‘national’ press or in the national consciousness. 

As I learned the little-known histories of peoples here, it became important to me to engage with these histories, with these ‘voices’ from the margins, to look at the writing pouring out from these ‘troubled frontiers’ and to question how writers represent the violence that surrounds them without falling into the trap of creating merely a pornography of violence.  

Writers across Assam, Manipur,
Nagaland and Tripura are deeply
concerned about the brutalisation
of their societies and
have been confronting
these issues upfront

Through much of its post-colonial history, insurgencies and counter-insurgency operations have been part of the fabric of everyday life in the Northeast. Militarisation has become a way of life in the region with “the deficits of democracy, development and peace best explained by Northeast India’s history as a frontier,” says The Oxford Anthology of Writings from North East India. To the people of the Northeast, their world is central to themselves, to ‘mainland India’ it is a borderland, but the pattern of political violence in the region cannot be seen as temporary or aberrant.

Most communities here can pride themselves on possessing a vibrant storytelling tradition, says Tilottoma Misra who has edited The Oxford Anthology. People whose history and civilisation had been pushed into the margins took up the task of recreating their past and reinventing tradition as part of the nationalist agenda of identity assertion. Writers across Assam, Manipur, Nagaland and Tripura are deeply concerned about the brutalisation of their societies and have been confronting these issues upfront. Among the most significant novels in recent times to do this are Rita Chaudhury’s Abirata Jatraand Arupa Patangia Kalita’s Felanee. While the first is based on the author’s experience as a student activist during the Assam Movement, Felanee is a subtle analysis of the impact of organised violence against a group of dispossessed and marginalised women.

This thread runs through the novels, short stories and poetry of some of the best-known writers from the region like Indira Goswami’s Jatra, Arupa Patangia Kalita’s many powerful, true-to-life short stories and novels, Uddipana Goswami’s poetry, Bijoya Sawian’s Shadow Men, to name only a handful. Temsula Ao’s realistic depiction of what happened in Nagaland in the 1960s and 1970s in These Hills Called Home: Stories From a War Zone is one of the strongest collections in recent times to document the violent history of the state.

A number of younger writers have continued in this tradition. A case in point is young author Aruni Kashyap, who says that in the decade after the Assam Agitation of the 1980s, as a generation of young intellectuals took up arms alongside the ULFA, school students like Uddipana Goswami (now a published poet and short story writer) wrote fiery poems supporting the organisation. For them it became important to decipher why so many educated young men took up guns against the Indian state. Many of the insurgents are now themselves writing novels and memoirs. A former ULFA cadre’s collection of poems, Melodies and Guns, generated immense interest and controversy in 2006.

In Manipur, modern fiction emerged in the first half of the twentieth century. The events of the World War II changed the psyche of Manipuri writers, who started to concentrate on their changing realities and social milieu. Post the 1970s, Manipuri writing started to reflect the spiral of political violence that engulfed their state. An example is the recent publication of a collection of poems by Irom Sharmila Chanu titled Fragrance of Peace.

The Mizo insurgency spearheaded by the MNF took up arms against the Indian state and the security forces sent in by the Indian government worked methodically: they burned large tracts of land and regrouped villages into new administrative units. Local people lived in this kind of limbo for twenty years. The terror they underwent gave voice to a whole new body of writing. Cherrie L Chhangre, poet and writer, explains: “When the movement was at its peak in the ’60s and ’70s, the act of writing itself posed innumerable risks”. There was a sudden deafening silence when many diaries, journals and creative writings were burnt by the security forces or by the writers themselves for fear of reprisals.

Where earlier writers were engaged with stories of trauma and conflict, today they write of the overwhelming influence of the Church. In ‘What poetry means to Earnestina in peril’, Mona Zote writes about the excessive influence and ‘interference’ of the Church and the desire among the younger group of writers and poets to go back to the pre-insurgency and pre-Christian days to explore their roots. “I like a land where babies/are ripped out of their graves, where the church/leads to practical results like illegitimate children and bad marriages/quite out of proportion to the current population, and your neighbour/is kidnapped by demons and the young wither without complaint...”

The new literature of the region, mostly in English, has “sprung from the staccato cry of machine guns” and reflects the changes sweeping across the landscape. As Easterine Iralu writes in biographical pieces, curfews and gunfire were part of her growing up years in Nagaland. Temsula Ao too, sees conflict as a major trend in the writing from the Northeast, the others being identity and the idea of the nation. Younger voices from Meghalaya, Nagaland and Arunachal Pradesh are much more Westernised compared to an earlier generation, and they have lost touch with their roots, says Ao. The older writers are moored in their tradition and culture, and she talks about Esther Syiem’s Oral Scriptings where Syiem uses a lot of characters from mythology and folk stories. Mamang Dai does the same thing in her Legends of Pensam.  Ao also writes about her own people and uses their myths for her arresting collection Songs of the Other Life.

An interesting insight into diaspora writing by young writers living in Bangalore and Delhi is provided by Mitra Phukan, a well-known Assamese writer, columnist and classical vocalist. She says they write of a ‘remembered Assam’, about their memories of home, of life in joint families, of their reactions to what is happening in their beloved homeland.

Despite the literature reviewed above, life in the Northeast (as elsewhere) is not all bleak, tragic or violent. There is love and hope in the indomitable human spirit. In much of the writing there is the serenity and mysticism that is so much a part of the landscape of the region. Each writer from the region is closely rooted within his/her own culture, tradition and history and this is something that provides depth and substance to their writing.