#2: Heart Was Where Home Was in Luminous Kolkata

Luminous Kolkata

Heart Was Where Home Was: Inside and Outside

          A couple of rejoinders to the previous post on Kolkata , August 1946.         
      I welcome comments, and will accept them based on relevance and responsibility.  I’ll return to some of the issues raised before at a later time—as the spirit moves me. I am also trying to keep these posts somewhat self-contained and therefore now and again there may be repetition of some elements.    

It is important to add that mine is not a researcher’s discourse—not here in any event. My recollections are first those of a child, then of a young boy—supported by stories I used to hear, and indeed conversations I have had with others since then. The gatherings in our Sadananda Road house had nothing in common with bands of learned gentry in Kolkata The people I am commemorating here were more like “fervent lovers” and not “austere scholars”—to borrow, irreverently, words from the French poet Charles Baudelaire. So here I am again with bits and pieces of remembrances. People and events scattered like cities and villages, roadways and rivers, connected by a map, not by any clock compelling a single direction of time. I know that my map remained equally steady under moonlight and under storm clouds. That map also bound together immense vistas where thorn bushes and craters appeared suddenly, without warning.

 There is a short poem by the great theatre man and poet Bertolt Brecht that continues to haunt me whenever I am jolted by unspeakable violence and feel helpless trying to oppose it even in a small way. The poem is an incentive to resist, a reminder to gain and regain our humanity—and it goes something like this:

Within me there is a struggle

Between the delight in a blossoming apple tree

And the horror of a Hitler speech,

But only the latter drives me to my desk.

The gatherings at our house always seemed to be of people who—in their own way—followed a similar path, whether or not they knew anything about Brecht or his theatre. I mean, some did others didn't. This kind of thinking, this sense of creativity needs some exploration.

      Back in 2012, when that genius of Bengali theatre Khaled Chowdhury was still with us, we were reminiscing one day about people we had known and we had been close to. At one point our chat turned to the brand of music/songs in Bengal called (for some time now) “jibanmukhi”—literal translation, “life-oriented”. We were amused by such name-calling and agreed that the term was quite redundant and neither of us could find any example in music that was “jibanbimukhi”—oriented against life, or worse, “maronmukhi”—oriented toward death. It is true of course, and I have brought Hitler into the picture, that the Nazi Party in particular and fascists generally, appropriated different brands of music and art as their own, but did they create anything? As a matter of fact, many Nazi flunkies who gassed prisoners in concentration camps, went home after a hard day’s work and found comfort in the likes of Mozart. There has never been any music of genocide, only the wailing and then—silence.

     When I was a graduate student—quite a few years ago now—one of my teachers, the philosopher Herbert Marcuse, asserted in a similar discussion that “a fascist aesthetic is a contradiction in terms.” I am certain that Hitler’s speeches and other horrors of the time drove many of my parents’ contemporaries to their writing table. That’s how I witnessed them then and that's how I see the creative energy of today’s writers, artists, musicians, scientists and mathematicians whom I know and respect. I intend to share the content of my conversation with Khaled Chowdhury at some auspicious moment in the future, and in all fairness to the enthusiastic life-oriented artistes of our time!

So anyhow, I imagine I am sitting in our living room listening to the grown-ups talk about stories and storytellers, about famines and rebellions, about the Burmese front and captured Indian soldiers. And then at some point my uncle leaves the conversation, pulls out our harmonium and begins singing new songs—composing them at will. My parents used to say that apart from his own compositions he sang whatever grabbed him at the moment: bits and pieces of classical melodies, Rabindranath, Sachin Deb Burman, folk tunes—and when he was not singing, he was telling stories. I suppose these were prologues to all the courageous plays he wrote. 

Sometimes he would come and sit with us kids and start singing, clowning, entertaining us with sketches. He was my wizard man who made magic in our house where he spent most of his free time. I found out too that he’s the one who started calling me Gogol soon after I was born because, he said, everyone in this family was destined to be a writer and he liked what he was reading by Nikolai the Russian author. Well, the name stuck, and Gogol was my only name until I was enrolled in Class One at the Mitra Institution in Bhabanipur. That’s when my grandfather wrote down “Ranadhir” as my “good name” on the application form because I was a child of World War II. I think that is something he wanted me to remember. But I must confess that even today most people in India, and many here in the US, know me as Gogol, or with our usual suffixes—Gogol-da or Gogol-mama, or Gogol-jethu. This system of attributes, the meaning of all suffixes, is something for the reader to have known or to discover. I won’t explore that here.

To get back to the matter of writing as the “family trait”. This wizard uncle—my mother’s cousin and my father’s “rebel brother” was none other than Bijan Bhattacharya, my “GoshTHo-mama”, whom young Bengalis may know, or may not, as the writer-director and main character “Pradhan Samaddar” of Nabanna—the seminal play of that era about the Bengal famine and peasant uprisings of 1942. A play that remains quite relevant I believe to our time of unchecked greed and exploitation—and consequently a world full of immense suffering. A play written at GoshTHo-mama’s desk as he was coming to terms with Hitlerian horrors of his world, I’m sure. And I am also sure that in the near future I’ll have more to say about the life and times of Bijan and of his son Nabarun (Bappa to me) whose life was cut short by unrelenting cancer earlier this year. Bappa was about ten years younger than me—what a singular loss, I think, and for many generations! Much like the loss of his father was I have come to realize. Here too I’ll have to bring forth some of the conversation I had with Bappa not too long ago.

To recapitulate a bit then, the living room where I watched all the spirited people—young and old—come and go was downstairs in our house on Sadananda Road in Kalighat, Kolkata where I was born. We lived there with my grandfather Satyendranath Majumdar whom many have called the father of Bengali journalism and who at that time was the editor of Ananda Bazar Patrika which continues to be the most prominent Bengali newspaper today, but as a beast of a completely different color and kind. 

My father the poet Arun Mitra, Uncle Bijan of course, writers Subodh Ghosh, Benoy Ghosh, Swarnakamal Bhattacharya, actor Gangapada Bose, and others were all journalists in that newspaper at one time or another. They congregated often enough in our house. Add to that poet and composer Jyotirindra Moitra, poets Bishnu Dey and Subhash Mukherjee, writers Manik Banerjee, Prabhat Deb Sarkar and artist Gopal Ghose—“Shilpi Gopal” to me—and Subhash’s classmate the singer Hemanta Mukherjee (later morphing into Bollywood’s Hemant Kumar). And sometime after they were regulars, came the versatile vocalists Tarapada Chakraborty and Debabrata (George) Biswas. There were also Jyotirmoy Roy and Ritwik Ghatak, writers who also worked in movies (Ritwik became an astounding director and utilized again and again the acting talent of uncle Bijan). Once in a while the actor Pahari Sanyal would show up. He was learning French under my father’s tutelage. I would find some combination of these people and also others in our living room on any given day.

II

Many of the “also others” were personal friends of my parents or my grandfather from different walks of life. They were not poets or musicians, journalists or writers, but for me they were sources of unconditional affection and other connections to the world. One friend of my dad, Khirode Bhattacharya whom I called “BaRo-mama”—was sports editor of The Hindustan Standard—the English language daily newspaper published by the Ananda Bazar group. BaRo-mama inspired me to discover and to enter the world of sports. I remember him taking me to a shop on Dharmatala Street to get my first football (soccer) boots made to order by Hakka-Chinese shoemakers of Central Kolkata. The top of the boots was made of brown leather and the cleats were in fact compacted leather studs tacked into the soles—a far cry from today’s slick varieties made by Adidas or Nike or Puma that seduce my grandchildren and their friends.

Of course my leather boots were reserved for some school and club matches, and then too I was embarrassed to wear them if most of the other players were playing without boots. Indeed, for our daily neighborhood football in Hazra Park, a stone’s throw away, we always played in bare feet. This was a time when some club footballers in India, rather some Indian club footballers, were still playing the game barefoot. There are many stories about the disdain the Brits—the Sahebs—had for these barefoot footballers, and also about barefoot Indian teams defeating the booted Englishmen. 

Because of BaRO-mama’s job and his affection for me, I got to watch many of the best football matches of the time. Football was the sport within which I was nurtured. It was also the most popular sport in India at that time. Locally, nothing was more grand and more tempestuous than the rivalry between East Bengal and Mohun Bagan, with one of India’s great “Muslim” clubs—Mohammaden Sporting—not far behind. (The Bangalore Muslims was another club of note in the South.) I was fortunate to have seen the greatest and most unflappable defender of the era—Sailen Manna playing at his peak. I used to wonder how a full-back could stay so poised in face of onrushing attackers and then clear the ball almost all the way to the opposite goal. We tend to forget that there wasn’t much of “building from the back” in football those days and the standard formation (we used that in high school and college) was the “pyramid” (2-3-5): two roaming backs in front of the goalkeeper, three midfielders—left, center and right, five attackers—inside and outside left, a center forward, and inside and outside right. (I believe Stanley Matthews of Blackpool and others of his generation played that way too.) Kind of the opposite of the defensive football pioneered by the Italians later and of course, nothing like Holland’s introduction of total football. A team trying to regenerate the pyramid today will get crushed by the opposition, if the players are on equal footing.

Other Mohun Bagan stars I remember were T Aao, Mewalal, Sattar, Bharadwaj, Anil Dey, Mahabir, and I believe, one Ahmed Khan. As for East Bengal, I was very intrigued by the shooting skill of Pagsley. I remember his specialty shot that didn’t rise—a “grass-cutter” that whizzed along the surface and didn’t give the goalkeeper a chance to react quickly. East Bengal also had Appa Rao, Venkatesh, Dhanraj, Byomkesh Bose and Saleh. I don’t remember who played exactly in which years, or rather, whom I saw playing together in any given season, but no one had the longevity of Sailen Manna. There were no big football stadium then in Kolkata, and spectator galleries—I remember our green wooden seats—were quite close to the action. So for a young boy there were only magicians on the pitch within smiling distance. There was magic too in the running commentaries on radio of big matches to which I wasn't able to go. Then I had to imagine the moves—dribbling, passing, tackling, shooting—going on out there in the field of wizards. Sharing the passion of radio commentators was the next best thing to being in those green bleachers.

As sports arenas go, Eden Gardens was the pride of Kolkata in my boyhood too, and again, thanks to BaRO-mama I found my way to most of the cricket matches—test matches in those days, played at the Eden Gardens. It worked out very well for me because Kolkata tests were usually played during winter holidays, between December 30/31 to January 4/5 with one rest day in the middle! Clearly, my cricket experience was completely different from football. Five days of entertainment without any school, perhaps unimaginable to today’s youth, was unique in its own way, along with encountering some of the greatest in that sport. A few days ago, I saw in the news that the Indian cricketer Rohit Sharma had created a world record by scoring 264 runs in a one-day match against Sri Lanka—at the Eden Gardens. This made me think back to another double-centurion in that stadium. This was a bit later in my life, when I was almost out of my teens and watched the great West Indian batsman Rohan Kanhai demolish Indian bowling with his 256 runs, supported with centuries by Basil Butcher and to me the greatest of them all—Gary Sobers. Suddenly I remember that the Windies were 333 for 3 and again 444 for 4 in the course of that innings.  That’s how memory, as repository of so much stuff, brings up all kinds of trivia to the surface, some more questionable than others, don't you think? 

This business of football versus cricket in my growing up time in Kolkata and for subsequent generations as well, deserves more attention. And I’ll definitely add my take in a future post. The one thing I felt deeply as a young spectator, and a little bit of player of both sports, was that football was Bengal’s game—in the blood of all who lived in our luminous city and beyond—Bengalis and non-Bengalis, Christians and Muslims and Hindus all together. On the other hand, notwithstanding some successful Kolkata players, in my boyhood cricket belonged principally to Bombay and Baroda, and throughout the country to the privileged classes. It is worth checking out player and team histories from those days and also which states (provinces) in the nation won the most national championships—Santosh Trophy in football and Ranji Trophy in cricket. 

III

The head of our Sadananda Road house was my grandfather Satyendranath Majumdar as I have said before, and in truth he was the only grandfather I ever knew and loved and admired. To me, his connection to the rest of the household was the first and decisive example of what a family could be if it was real. That is to say, not constrained by blood ties or marriage. Let me elaborate.

My Dadu (as I called him) was in fact a bachelor, and my mother was his niece—his sister’s kid. Uncle Bijan (GoshTHo-mama) was the son of another of Dadu’s sisters. These “blood ties” were somewhat incidental in our family. Dadu was my father’s mentor and their relationship was as good and strong as any father-son connection I have witnessed. Theirs was the primary bond around which the other relations settled in our house. GoshTHo-mama could have been a brother to both my parents, and BaRo-mama Khirode could have easily been my dad’s twin brother. The dynamics inside and outside our “family tree” even back then taught me something profound about ancestors and descendants.

I just discovered a poem on the subject I wrote some time ago. To me this poem captures my thoughts and feelings a lot better than any discursive prose could do in this piece, so why not add part of it here now? 

Genealogy: Why Blood Is Thinner Than Water, Mostly

My father’s mother Jaminibala

daughter of the night

had already returned home

when I stumbled onto this earth

About her my father Arun

source of sunlight and poetry

once wrote

“on my mother’s sari

so many stars

so many stars!”

Jaminibala’s mother Soudamini

flash of lightning

was a matriarch whose sister

Kadambini the cloud

made house calls while my father

tagged along clasping her hand

of the first woman doctor

in the country

where they was born

and me too

My mother’s father Ashutosh

one of Shiv’s many selves

was raised by an iron-willed mother

whom my mother and aunts feared

Ashu was a country lawyer

with nine girls and finally a boy

a man who charged his clients little

and worried about his kids

until he died suddenly

I think I was three then

but I remember his head

full of salt and pepper hair

So Shiv’s children grew up

all over the place, a couple of them

the fifth and the eight with us

Tripti and Smriti—contentment

and memory became my best friends

Tripti a glorious actress

who lit up the Kolkata stage

and Smriti who joined the phone

company and married Ashok

my father’s youngest brother

My mother Shanti

a woman of peace wrote about

the silent suffering of women

and took me to meetings and marches

along with her sisters while they looked

for jobs in the big city

or else they would perish

and with them the world

I was barely getting to know

Meanwhile, my father’s father

Hiralal the diamond-child

a rather unfeeling man

was kept as a charity case by some 

Bengali prince to keep books

and manage taxes

Hiralal never seemed to need us

except that one time

when he fled from

days and nights of terror

when across the city old neighbors

were cutting throats and breasts

and burning children alive

My mother’s mother Shailobala

like Shiv’s wife Durga

daughter of the mountain

taught her daughters

to sing act laugh rebel

in the end though

she moved from place to place

just like her girls

a year here, two years there

until the day she broke

her earthly chains, quite old

it was the same month

uncle Ashok died

well before his time

I remember thinking she suffered

too long and he not long enough

The widows and orphans

hanging from this family tree

I knew them well—all of them

When I talk about my grandfather

the one with whom we lived

and who loved us beyond love

I mean Satyendranath

keeper of the truth

and bravest journalist of his time

he was in fact Shailabala’s brother

and a real father to my dad and

mom and the two aunts

who joined our household

my grandfather never married

When I think of the word cousins

I poke my memory

with this old picture I have

where many of them are bundled like

a giant centerpiece

at someone’s wedding

I notice there are some missing pieces

like me in exile fumbling with crayons

as I try to color

over the winter grey of my town

some of us were close friends

when we were kids

some I hardly know anymore

I try to guess which aunt

was their mother

we the cousins are all over the place

from Queens to Queensland

and me in landlocked PA

Of course, many characters

from this family drama

like spirited Tripti Shanti Arun

have left the stage for good

and without fanfare….

[Intermission]

I’ll add the last portion of this poem when the time comes. My final thought today is a that the value of blood ties is over-exaggerated and most of us are reluctant to talk about the misery the ties bring. My experience constantly reminds me that we are keepers of everyone we care for, beyond our parents and our children, beyond our parents’ parents and children’s children.

I began by saying I intend to hop around on my cherished map. And so I did. Next time, I’ll rest on memories of the fantastic women whom I came to know at 3 B Sadananda Road. They must have a separate space alongside my mother Shanti Mitra who shaped my world in that early universe. And perhaps I’ll add a couple of stories about my grandfather. 

© Ranadhir (Gogol) Mitra, November, 2014