Village

Evening’s a cow with a rope
round its neck. It can only
look ahead. Something changes
forever, without its consent.
Dust is a gunshot fired
from a silencer. It settles
like the spray from a sneeze.

Evening’s a shawl wrapped
around an old woman’s head.
It slips from her hair. She pulls
it up again. A village’s ears
need cover. Her hair’s a broom
which sweeps the wind
into the tunnel of her ears.

Evening’s a count of cowdung
cakes baked by the day. Its fuel.
All sound is an echo of something
heard by chance. Evening noise is
serendipity. Prayer is a puppet
show that plays in the evening:
Allah listens to ulu ulu ulu.

Evening’s a corridor of talk
against which the village leans
for a group photograph. Smoke
its frame, gossip its drainage. Moon
is the village idiot who closes
his eyes to hide from the world.
Illness a summer sound – foo foo.

Evening’s a fly scratching its back.
Red chillies curse hot oil. The air
fills with discontent. Well water
shrivels. Leaves brush with
small talk. Leftovers on plates
harden like gooseflesh. Oil lamp
wicks blacken to numbness.

And night drops like
a coin in a water well.

The poem came to me this winter. I wrote it sitting in a car by a tiny nameless stream in Salugara, an enthusiastic growing settlement on the suburbs of the small town I live in. It is, by no means, a village. An army cantonment and a Buddhist temple – War and Peace in a smart niece’s coinage – face each other on NH 31A and, together, have given rise to an ecosystem of itinerant markets, local trading communities , rest houses and hotels, one of which is called “Hotel Golden Gate”. So the presence of English, which would have earlier helped me to distinguish the rural from the urban, has already arrived here. The language and the economy of hope that it carries with it arrived decades ago.

It would be easier to say that it came with the Tibetans but that wouldn’t be completely true. It actually came with “Save Tibet” and in spite of the presence of monasteries and hospitals which carry the foreign alphabet of the faraway land in their signboards, a language that is painted in gaudy yellows and reds so that it might seem to a traveler that these could be flower nurseries, it is the language of the third generation Tibetan that one catches in the wind. Punjabi, Telegu, Malayalam, Tibetan, and of course there’s the Bengali, Nepali and Hindi, the so-to-say local languages. It’s the sound of these languages, too many for a village to hold, that takes away, if anything was left at all, from my calling Salugara a village.

The prelude to what I’m coming to is necessary before you ask: Who cares whether Salugara is a village or not? Or, if you are particularly in a bad mood, you’d shout – who cares whether you call Salugara a village or not?

I gave my poem the name “Village”. It wasn’t premeditated at all. How much of poetry ever is? The poem wrote itself or it might have been the evening. Only days later, when I’d overcome my usual shyness to send the poem to its first reader, did I ask myself the question that I ought to have asked much earlier. Why “Village”? Why had I, for instance, not called it “Evening” when the mood and the time in the poem is a time of the day that Bengalis call “godhuli byala”, a time when the feet of cows raise mild dust storms to end the day, a time of homecoming? I found no persuasive explanation. By no means do I take myself seriously as a poet, but it wasn’t the poem but the psychological process through which the name had come into being that interested me. Why had I called it a village? Trying to think of a possible answer led me to the far more difficult question – What is a village?

§

Looking for an answer to the question, I arrived at two poems – one in English, the other in my mother tongue Bangla. “The Village” by Amit Chaudhuri and Sunil Gangopadhyay’s “Ekti Gramyo Drishyo”: the English poem is about an English village and the Bangla about a village in Bengal. I will quote the poems in full.

The Village by Amit Chaudhuri

And my father was a student back in the Fifties,
in London (picture in overcoat and tie
and casual umbrella), migrating (like a bird
without the essential discipline of a bird)
from digs to digs, bedsitter to bedsitter,
yet unmarried to Mother, absent and lonely
as Adam in a foggy paradise when Eve
was uncreated, until mother arrived
and something grew complete. Both went for clear
monastic walks down grey, washed London lanes.
And once they took a friend’s mother – a Swiss
lady – wizened, but not, I imagine, in her dotage –
who, while they walked in the distance, attently painted
Hampstead Heath. The world was all before them.
Finished on an eventless day in the Fifties, she
gifted it to them. They brought it back to India.
It hangs upon a wall inside my room …
It’s painted on an ochre background. Two white, two grey
afterthoughts are clouds or a mass of clouds.
Below this, there’s the Heath, but to those people
who haven’t seen the Heath (as once I hadn’t),
it looks like a village, the kind of village Rip
Van Winkle must have returned to when he woke.
A village, then. A house and a lost church
defined by a tapering spire, are visible. Trees
are smudges – like green, dark green thumbprints on paper.
In fact, the village is a smudge held in the stillness
and clarity of her thought. This could be a day
near autumn, when the leaves haven’t fallen, but are about to,
or a day in summer, spent thinking of rain, and rain
about to fall. Or a brightish day in winter.
It’s not spring; spring’s about to come, or gone.
I can picture that world and the warm freckled hands
that gave it colour, or restraint from colour, which is the deepest
colour of all. As a boy, that scene, enframed,
was, for me, England. In a way, it still is.
Growing up and taking the trouble to see the real thing
hasn’t diminished the village, its heart as full
of sleeping resonance as the unstruck church bell.

Sunil Gangopadhyay’s “Ekti Gramyo Drishyo” is in my unhappy translation:

A Village Scene

On the clay courtyard sits the little teacher, the Class Six boy Gootli –
No cane in his hand, his finger lifted, a pair of specs on the edge of his nose,
Toy specs; can you play a teacher without specs?
The moon breaks through the clouds, the pet cat watches the scene.

Just one student, a girl; studies are not on her mind,
She’s restless, making plans to run away, an impatient gaze,
Untied hair, the anchal of her sari soiled from wiping sweat,
She pleads in a feeble voice, “Gootli, let me go now?”

Gootli rolls his eyes and says, “Show me your handwriting,
You aren’t going anywhere until you finish your lessons,
Such a shirker, still don’t know how to spell your name,
In writing the ‘ee’, you’ve broken the piece of chalk twice already!”

“I can hear the thunder, it’ll all get wet, the windows must be open!”
“The rains aren’t here yet, and you’re so restive to leave?”
“I haven’t finished cooking yet, what’ll you all eat at night?”
“That I don’t know, I won’t listen to these excuses during study hour.”

Strict teacher Gootli will just not give his student a break –
The class six boy won’t give up until he’s taught his mother her mother tongue!

Reading two poems about a similar theme makes one aware of convergences. To begin with, both the poems talk of the village as it were a picture. In Chaudhuri, the village hangs on a wall – “It hangs upon the wall inside my room …” In Ganguly’s poem, the village is, as the title makes clear, a “drishyo”, a “scene”. That triggered the reason for my aesthetic and moral worriment: why is the village a picture? Just a picture? Both the poems are structured to reveal themselves to the reader-as-spectator – in Chaudhuri, “The Village” could well have been the title of the painting and not just this poem; in Ganguly, the only way we can participate is to see, and even when we hear the exchange between the mother and son, we hear the words describing the “scene” for us, the possibilities of the rain coming through the windows and drenching everything or Gootli asking his mother to “show” him her handwriting. In fact, so important is looking in the Bengali poem that the only toy (and also prop) that Gangopadhyay will allow his child protagonist is a pair of spectacles, one that is – what else? – an aid to looking. The village, therefore, is for all purposes, only a picture.

It was of the village-as-picture that I thought when I returned to Mrinal Sen’s Hindi film Khandhar (Ruins). Sen bases his script on a Bengali short story by Premendra Mitra – Telenapota Avishkar or “The Discovery of Telenapota”. In Sen’s version, Subhash, a middle-class urbane photographer, goes to the village of Telenapota with his friends Dipu and Anil. The friends plan this as a weekend excursion. When they reach the village, which is now dominated by the ruins of an once palatial ancestral house, Subhash discovers a wing of the house where two of Dipu’s distant relatives – a blind aunt and her young daughter Jamini (whose name means “night”) – live. Subhash discovers that the old woman is waiting for the return of Niranjan, a man who had promised to marry Jamini. Jamini knows that Niranjan, now married, will never return but she colludes in the myth of his return to keep the old woman alive. The blind aunt mistakes Subhash for Niranjan and Subhash plays on too; in this drama of taking on false identities, Subhash and Jamini discover the hint of an emotion close to love. The entire journey from the city to the village and back is eventually recorded by Subhash in a portrait of Jamini that hangs on the wall of his studio in the last scene of the film.

As in the poems, in Sen’s film too I encountered the same tendency to privilege the optic in giving a narrative to the village. Subhash is a photographer, the aunt is blind, Jamini means the night, the darkness – these and the constant invocation of the metaphors of seeing (and light) that the director makes a part of his storytelling, so completely different from Satyajit Ray’s use of light in the Apu Trilogy (also about journeys from the village to the city and back), made me wonder what it was about the urban sensibility that had reduced the village to just a “picture”. So in the final scene of Khandhar when Sen’s camera focuses on a creation of another camera – Jamini’s photograph by Subhash – I wasn’t particularly surprised. The village had become an artifact, a record of an encounter that could only be memorialized in a piece of art – the village woman’s photograph in Sen or the Swiss woman’s painting of the Heath-village in Chaudhuri. And so the village hangs, almost always, from everywhere in the city, in disappearing accents, in backward gazes, in kites stuck to old electric wires, and on betel leaf spit patterns on walls of government offices; these days, its name (Nandigram, Singur) becomes graffiti, a new calligraphic font as precocious and painful as Naxalbari village once was forty years ago. (In Apoorva Lakhia’s Hindi film, Mumbai Se Aaya Mera Dost (2003), however, the trope of the picture is used from an opposite perspective. Television brings the world as a picture into the village, and the village, statuesque for so long, gets moving, like the stream of motion pictures that emanates from the picture box.)

It was not just the village being embalmed as a picture that troubled me in the poems and the Sen film, all three by Bengalis. It was something else, and it had much to do with the recent uprising of the village in the sensibility of urban Bengal. Cities give their names to films and so do rivers. But villages? Nameless and hence homogenized in our minds, they move like flags in the wind, take the direction of the wind. A Village by the Sea it was for Anita Desai, the village’s name seemingly unnecessary in the title. Chaudhuri’s poem is also only “the village”, this in a collection that’s charged with the specificity of the name of a road in a megapolis in its title – “St. Cyril Road”. Ganguly’s poem too – “A Village Scene”, in which the word village isn’t mentioned even once – is from a selection where a section is titled “Smritir Shawhor” (“City of Remembrances”) where the names of the city’s limbs and localities turn into metaphors.

It seems, at least to me, a telling irony that the recent fight for Bengal began over – I could certainly put it this way – a village. Nandigram: “gram”, the village, turned out to be a telling and pivotal suffix, not any less important than Galileo’s soto voce footnote “it moves”. Nandi is the god Shiva’s bull: it is unlikely that the village took its name after the animal. Is it possible that it was, at the time of its birth, a village of the Nandys, a surname used by a Kayastha caste in Bengal? It wouldn’t matter for neither the beast nor the community of Nandys could have predicted that out of the millions of villages whose destinies are to remain nameless in the national consciousness, it would be that rare thing – a famous, or infamous, village.

So whether it is the whispers of communist red flags that stir the still breeze in Nandigram or the marks of bullets on doors and legs of villagers who had wanted to flee, the village just lets out a warning to those who watch it breaking and joining and then crumbling into brittle news bytes on “Breaking News” on their television sets. It wants to remain a village, a gram, only and perhaps always. That is the village’s ambition in contemporary India – to remain a village, but one with a name. Perhaps that is why Shyam Benegal needs to put that proper noun in the title of his recent film about a village – “Welcome to Sajjanpur”! It is also as part of the continuing metaphor of the name – or namelessness – that the boy in the English poem does not have a name. He is the first person pronoun, the “I”; in the Bangla, the little boy has only a nickname – Gootli, an onomatopoeic expression of the little in Bangla; as little as “gram”, a sigh of a syllable.

This also is a cue to ask ourselves the question we should have asked at the very beginning – why do both the poems have little boys in them? The child in both the poems – the passive boy in the English poem who sees the painting and imagines a village; the active boy in the Bangla poem who wants his mother to be literate like him – seem so integral to the poems that not for a moment do we seem to feel the need to ask ourselves what difference it would have made had they been replaced by young girls. It might be worthwhile to ask, for a moment, the relation between the child and the village – why do both the poets feel the need to use a boy in the poems? What difference would a girl child have made to the poems? Are Chaudhuri and Gangopadhyay trying to use the child as a metaphor for the proto or yet to be fully formed social unit, the village as always in process? That sense of becoming that seems to mark the character of the village manifests itself in the act of doing something with the hand – painting in Chaudhuri, writing in Gangopadhyay. It is significant that when the painting arrives in the city, it has already become, it can hang upon a wall.

It is in this sense that we read the line “Mother arrived and something grew complete”. Like the mother’s arrival, the knowledge of the mother tongue will make something complete. Both the poems therefore end with something yet to be done, a piece of task not yet carried out, driven as they are by the aesthetics of incompleteness – “the unstruck church bell”. That is also the ethics of the village – for a village is where things are made, where things will always begin but never end …

And it is from where, in our sense of romantic time travel, the mother tongue emerged. So it is doubly ironic and a commentary on the many complex journeys taking place between the village and the city that the child has to teach his mother her mother tongue. In Chaudhuri, there has been a journey from the village to the city, from the heath to the wall. In that journey, and also because of it, the village has lost something to the city, its representation, one possible representation, as in the woman’s painting. In Gangopadhyay, there has been an opposite journey, the sensibility and anxiety that learning, literacy and education could bring a new life, the propagandist knowledge that has moved in the breeze from the city to the village. Why is the child trying to teach the mother to write in her mother tongue? Why is that knowledge important to the child? It is perhaps because the child is intuitively aware of what makes him different from his mother is those few letters, the alphabet. If he could give them to her, he would have succeeded in regaining a lost maternal utopia. Ah, the mother tongue!

“Ma, Mati, Manush” goes the slogan of the Trinamul Congress Party; my brother, who will not resist a cheap alliteration, says it’s been coined by “Mother Mamata”. Though it comes to my ears as a phrase that Jatayu, the fumbling writer with an obsession for alliteration in Satyajit Ray’s Feluda series of stories, might have coined, I have begun to see it as a cunning metaphor of the idea of the village. Not a village, mind you, but its idea – the tired tropes of the mother and motherland (“Ma, Mati”) and then the emergence of a new humanism (“Manush”). In that slogan perhaps is the answer to Gootli’s desire for his mother’s mother tongue!

Does that slogan – and the myth that it thrives on – base itself on any possible real village? And is there a real village at all? How real are Chaudhuri’s and Gangopadhyay’s villages? Chaudhuri is utterly self-conscious here – he calls the village in England the “real thing”. But where is the village in the Bengali poem? The poem, apart from perhaps the courtyard, could be set in any small town or even a city like Calcutta. Here one might be reminded, if only ironically, of Satyajit Ray and his first film Pather Panchali. Ray had, by his own admission, never been to a village. It was his journey to becoming a director of a “picture” (as many Indians still refer to a film) that led him to make the journey to Nischindipur, the village. So the village in Ray’s classic is a real village and a “set” at the same time, as it is in Gangopadhyay’s poem.

Chaudhuri’s poem reminded me of my journeys by train through the north of England. But I hadn’t, in any sense, been to an English village. Thomas Hardy and D. H. Lawrence had taken me there like they had countless others, those like me in a distant nameless province in a post-colony, who could tell the names of the English flowers without being able to identify them, and also the English, the city bred Londoner for example, who hadn’t felt the need to go into the “country”. “The Village”, the common noun in its title, is both an optical hoax and a nomenclature trick – a heath, Hampstead Heath, “looks like a village”. And so “a village, then”.

Gangopadhyay’s poem is also, if one notices carefully, a “village” only by virtue of a linguistic trick. It is a poem about a village because the writer tells us so in its title; or we wouldn’t even have known, or noticed. A Village Scene – only that one word, like a surname that indicates a caste, is what gives the poem a rural personality. Almost everything else is extremely suburban. (This is a bit like almost every small town in Bengal having a locality called “Dabgram”, a CPM invention!) This makes one suspect that Gangopadhyay’s village is only an imagined village, a suburb of a city or town that feeds the poet’s nostalgia for East Bengal or an imagined and productive nostalgia for a place where such socio-political pamphleteering of adult education has taken place. Making a ten year old boy a mouthpiece for that kind of propaganda is a bit of a joke – how many ten year old boys we know like to do their own lessons, forget teaching someone else?! This “comic tinsel Leninism” (Ashis Nandy’s words for Mrinal Sen’s leftist concerns in some of his films) would perhaps have worked had there been some trace of a little boy in Gootli. In Chhelebela, his childhood memoir, Rabindranath Tagore recounts playing teacher to the trees in his garden and hitting them with a cane when they, understandably, could not answer his teacher questions. That humour and essential boyness is missing in Gangopadhyay’s poem. Gootli’s political alertness, praiseworthy as it might be, is scary after a point. If this is a village now – and the poet’s political leanings emphasise his concerns in the poem – what will it be in the future when both Gootli and his mother have learnt the alphabet and become a part of the commerce that such knowledge is likely to bring? If this is a village – and one expects to see a Gootli in every house in the village – where are the absent fathers here? Are they in the fields, working, or have they moved to the city, pulling rickshaws and selling brinjals, all the while thinking of Gootli and his mother? Is the absent father in the poem only a trope for the village’s association with the uterine self in the history of civilization?

The two poems came to speak to me in two different co-ordinates of the village – Amit Chaudhuri’s “village”, hanging on a wall, viewed by the child, is what Ashis Nandy has called the “infantilized village”, “the permissible way of looking at the world”. Sunil Gangopadhyay’s village, where the young boy Gootli is teaching his mother the Bengali alphabet, is for all purposes, Nandy’s “geriatric village”, “the permissible way of dissenting”. To read the two poems together, however aleatory that reading habit might be, is also to become aware of how cityness and villageness are also, so much, only linguistic registers. To imagine a situation where the poem about the English village is written in Bangla is to be aware of the constricted relation between locale and language – something would just not quite ring true. It would perhaps even read like a translation of an English poem. But by virtue of the unequal directions of the accidents of history, the case for the imagined poem about the village in Bengal in English would seem to us – both those who wish “Good night” to their love in English and those who think of “India” as a foreign name for their country – as eminently possible. For a moment, and perhaps a little longer, I wondered how my poem would have read in Tibetan, inspired as it had been by a Tibetan refugee settlement. And yet not the sound of the Buddhist prayer wheels had entered my poem but the azaan and the ulu, not the colourful triangular flags but a cow and an oil lamp. Was my remembered village more subliminally Hindu than I was willing to concede to myself? I have not stopped wondering why.

§

It was perhaps only the Communist Party of India (Marxist) which took Gandhi’s adage, “India lives in its villages” seriously. It is where its voters live. If I were to ask my brother to coin an alliteration for this phenomenon, he would probably come up with this: Village, Vote, Victory. And in this they would reject the idea of Chaudhuri’s village being a village at all. Of course, there is a class difference in both the poems, one that is mediated and aggravated by the difference and gravity that attaches the pecking order of the two languages.

Chaudhuri’s poem is marked by wealth and an associated leisure. It is not just the journeys to England that signify class in the poem. It is “The Village”, the painting on the wall, that becomes a marker of class. A painting of a village can only become an artistic object in the houses of the rich. Every city home must have a touch of the pastoral – hence that painting on the wall. Every village must be rural – hence Gootli’s mother’s soiled sari, that one significant tell-tale sign of the economic class of Gootli’s family. In the film Dalaal, the character played by Mithun Chakraborty famously says, “Aami duto jinish shojjo kortey parina. Aek, amar gramer awpomaan. Aar amar gamchhar awpomaan.” (“I can’t stand two things of mine being defiled: My village; and my towel.”). It was that and the relation between a piece of cloth and the village that I was reminded of when I thought of Gootli’s mother’s sari. Gootli’s mother does not have something that the rich women in Chaudhuri’s poem do – that is leisure. The Swiss woman paints, the young boy’s mother travels, but Gootli’s mother, troubled by household chores, does not even have the time to learn the alphabet. The difference in class also comes through in the aesthetic of the poems. The Bengali village hangs like the alphabet on the blackboard, as thin as the letters. In contrast the English village is rounder and in spite of the absence of strong colours, it has, so to say, more body. And yet, in both, there is so little light – Chaudhuri’s village is a “smudge”, a picture where there’s “restraint from colour”; in Ganguly, there’s the darkness of thunder and lightning and the night about to invade the poem. So things that we traditionally associate with a village are missing: a sense of community, pleasure, joy, and what has been called “rustic humour”. Instead there is the eerie silence of individualism and an ethical gesture of an alternative cosmopolitanism.

§

After I had written my poem sitting in a car in a suburb of a small town in Bengal, I went back to the same place a few weeks later. Nothing had changed except the weather. It was now no longer winter; the stream, still nameless, held less of the sky in it, the water having gone to feed the dryness of the season. I heard the distant chatter of children on the playfield, the near-silent tired calling of birds at dusk, the final dying of dead leaves under busy feet. A song played on the radio, its tune one of those one knows without actually remembering; someone, presumably a woman, blew hard into a conch shell, the wind grew into an accusation, a young boy laughed out loudly. It was amidst a concert of these sounds, all of which I was incapable of bringing into one artistic space ever, that I decided to read my poem aloud. It was, of course, a self-conscious act, a bit like a gardener feeding the dead leaves of a tree to its root for manure. But I was alone and it was for this purpose that I had come back to this unremarkable place – to make a double journey, a pilgrimage for sounds. I said it aloud sitting by the stream and waited. I was waiting for something to happen, something that would attest the process through which the poem had come into being. I was like a surrogate mother who had come to hand over her child to its biological mother. I said it a little louder again; perhaps the trees and the field and the sky and the stream were a little hard of hearing? Was I waiting for some miracle to happen? I do not know. I don’t even know whether I’d gone back to the place to collect a birth certificate for the poem. It was here, in this place that was not quite a village, that my “village” had come into being. Why was I so suspicious of its parentage? Was it not possible for villages to be immaculately conceived?

As the evening fell into a drone of dailiness around me, I sat there and changed the last line of my poem. “And night drops like a coin in a pond” was what I’d written on my last visit. I changed the last word into a “water well”. “And night drops like a coin into a water well,” I wrote and folded the page. Something in my imagination about the village had changed forever. In the shrinking of space from pond to well, the postman’s journey between my remembered village and imagined village had got longer. Even the driver honked the horn more often than he usually does on our journey back home.