Joy Goswami: The Cosmopolitan From the Mofussil

 Sampurna Chattarji’s translation of Joy Goswami’s poetry is essential reading for anyone with even a casual interest in Indian poetry.

  

'Joy Goswami's poetry is like a broad, brown, silt-laden river, with its source in suburban or mofussil spaces such Ranaghat and its distributaries spreading into a global consciousness.' Photo: Samuli Kangaslampi/Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

 

Uttaran Das Gupta 

Bengali poet Joy Goswami has often recollected in interviews and his writing the moment he decided to pursue poetry. The scene unfolds at a railway station in a mofussil town in West Bengal. (Born in Kolkata in 1954, Goswami grew up and has lived at Ranaghat, a town about 80 km north of the state capital.) While waiting for his friend Subodh Sarkar, Goswami was flipping through the pages of a volume of Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke’s poetry in translation when he decided to become a poet. Several retellings have rendered a mythical quality to this anecdote, somewhat like other myths of Bengali literature.

  

 

Joy Goswami. Photo: Wikimedia Commons

But unlike the other myths, there is an essential cosmopolitan flavour to this story — Goswami does not recall reading Tagore or Jibananda Das, but Rilke. In the Foreword to Death Comes After Water, a new volume of Goswami’s poetry translated into English by Sampurna Chattarji (Harper Perennial, Noida, 2021), poet and art theorist Ranjit Hoskote identifies this:

This anecdote reminds us that the metropolis has no monopoly on cosmopolitanism, and that we too easily confine the genealogy of modernity in our big cities.

Hoskote refuses to place Goswami’s individual talent in the tradition — to borrow from T. S. Eliot’s theory — of Bengali poetry, from Rabindranath Tagore to Jibananda Das, and then Sunil Gangopadhyay and Shakti Chattopadhyay. Instead, he identifies in Goswami a “post-gharana” writer.

Literary theory in India has more often than not focussed on the metropolitan centres such as Kolkata or Mumbai or Delhi as the epicentre of literature. These cities have provided traditionally provided employment and intellectual communities to writers, as centre of publishing and trade. In Bombay Modern (2016), Anjali Nerlekar identifies the city of Bombay (now Mumbai) of the 1970s as the perfect location for the kind of poetry that emerged from it: “Bombay… marks a nebulous configuration… It is the urban location that beckons thousands from across the nation every single day, but it also connotes the access for writers to the process of production and dissemination of books and magazines.” Like Bombay, Calcutta (Kolkata), too, has been the centre of production and dissemination of Bengali literature — spending time at Coffee House near the university or getting drunk at country liquor pubs such as Khalasitola or Chhota Bristol are almost the rites of passage for Bengali poets.

 

College Street Coffee House. Credit: Soumyadeep Paul, CC BY 2.0

Goswami’s poetry is a rupture of this urban tradition as well as an extension. It is like a broad, brown, silt-laden river, with its source in suburban or mofussil spaces such Ranaghat and its distributaries spreading into a global consciousness. Translator Chattarji identifies a certain quality in them, which she calls “let the world in” — “an invitation to seek out many worlds that inform them — Hindi films, political events, sports, theatre, history, science, mythology, folklore, legend, and of course classical music”. Chattarji, who has published several books of original poetry as well as fiction and non-fiction, puts together not one but three books of Goswami in the volume under review. These are Horiner Jyono Ekok (2002) as “Solo for the Deer”, Ma’er shamne snan korte lojja nei (2012) as “No Shame in Bathing before Your Mother”, and Shopang Shopang (2017) as “Whiplash. This is Chattaji’s second book of translations of Goswami’s poetry — she has earlier published a selection of his poems in 2018.

After Death Comes Water provides a reader with a vast section of a major poet’s career, and should be essential reading for anyone interested in Indian literature. A close observer will decipher the intricate folds of Goswami’s vast erudition and varied influences, as well as his deep political commitment. In a 2005 interview with Chattarji, which she quotes in her Translator’s Note at the end of the book, Goswami says:

“I wrote Horiner Jonyo Ekok in a state of openness. The noise of the city, the slogans of a procession passing outside my house, the ‘jatrapala’ [folk theatre] of my childhood days, tele-ad dialogues, a voice over a microphone, the abuses being hurled at each other by two competitive bus-drivers trying to out-race each other on Kolkata’s chaotic roads, I was allowing all that noise, all that voices in.”

The “noise”, once it enters Goswami’s inner poetic contraption, is transformed through his art into something more.

Take, for instance, the opening lines of “Solo for the Deer”:

It takes one year eleven months to get one line of poetry
A baby entered the womb, was born, waved its arms and legs about, learnt to walk,
Babble baby talk—and I?
Couldn’t pick up courage, even today, to call a dictionary a dictionary
                          To call Sachin Deb Sachin Deb

A little later in the same poem, the chaos of the city transforms the performative hesitation of the beginning into a full-blown jazz:

Imagine I have distanced myself and am sitting apart
People will come running, aghast
Will ask: Shall we give you a separate room?

 Will want to know, deferentially: Should we shave off your moustache right away?
The barber is on standby—just like Bakhtiyar, forever ready to die
With a little laugh I deepen my voice and say: Diffi—cult I’m reading Harry Potter right now

The voice is polyphonic, belying expectations from a gharana Bengali poem, with something of the folk theatre and humorous stand-up comedy in it. We see the esteemed poet of Bengali literature, a little aloof from the rest, immersed – not in metaphysical meditations as one might expect – but in reading Harry Potter. Words from other languages – as both Hoskote and Chattarji point out – slip in freely. As a translator, Chattarji italicises the non-Bengali words in her versions. The frequency of such words eschew any attempt at purity of language, instead indulging in the hotch-potch beauty that the spoken word in any language often is.

But, not everything is fun and games in this volume. As we progress through, the mood gradually becomes sombre, reflecting the changing political climate in Goswami’s native West Bengal as well as in the world around him. In “Whiplash”, prose poems are arranged thematically arranged in cycles of 11; the first cycle is called “Killing Fields” and begins:

Who said crops grow here? This land is for slaughter. Hands pinioned at the back, eyes blindfolded. Now kneel down. Who stands behind? We won’t get to know in this life. The one who will cut off his head. Or slit his throat like a chicken and throw him there. Feet will stomp the earth down. Just like my heels are doing right now…

The translator’s note informs us that this is a reference to the Bangladesh War and the genocide committed by the Pakistani army in 1971. Yet, to anyone who has followed Goswami’s career will be aware that there is more to it.

The title itself refers to Nabarun Bhattacharya’s Ei Mrityu Upotyoka Aamaar Desh Na (2004) [This Bloody Land Is Not My Country]. After violence over land acquisition for industries in the villages of Nandigram and Singur in 2007, Goswami had spoken out publicly against the policies of the then Left Front-led government of West Bengal and his political stance informs his poetry. As political violence yet again engulfs Bengal’s countryside, this time with a distinct communal tinge, returning to Goswami’s poetry might provide us with some succour.

Uttaran Das Gupta’s novel Ritual was published last year; he teaches at O.P. Jindal Global University, Sonipat. Das Gupta writes a fortnightly column on poetry, ‘Verse Affairs’, for The Wire.

 SOURCE ; THE WIRE

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