A Workshop and Bahirbanga Bangla

This month, on March 9, the newly spruced up J P Naik Bhavan saw another unique gathering. The occasion was an international workshop on 'Migration -- Marginalisation, Ghettoisation and Identity Crisis: Theoretical Perspectives and Practical Insights". The workshop was conducted by the Departments of Sociology, Marathi and Kannada, and one of its highlights was a Writers' Meet "to celebrate the multilingual identities of the megacity Mumbai".

Gujarati poet Dr Dileep Jhaveri, who moderated the programme, put it differently. "There are several nuances to minorities, and to existence at the margins and the existence within. The poet speaks a language that is a minority language. Day-to-day languages do not have pretensions of surviving; these are the languages of power that politicians and journalists speak -- the majority languages. It is the poet who 'changes blood and darkness into soul'.

The evening saw a congregation of writers from a variety of languages - Shimunje Parari from Kannada, Sudha Arora and Harsh Sharma from Hindi, Hemant Divate, the Marathi poet, Dr Suniti Udayavar from Konkani, Dr Hrishikeshan from Malayalam, Marilyn Noronha, who writes in English, to name just a few.

Among the speakers was Mandira Pal, Bengali short story writer and editor of the Bangla 'little magazine' Prabase Nijabhashe, which she started in 1990 to "come into contact with congenial Bengali diaspora who settled outside West Bengal". It was her way of coping with the 'struggle' of adapting to the cosmopolitan lifestyle of Mumbai, "where there are many cultures, many languages and there still exists solitariness" -- a solitude that she discovered when she moved to Mumbai after marriage from a small town in West Bengal.

Over the years, the literary magazine has grown far beyond its immediate personal objectives, becoming a vital space for writers from several cultures and languages. The short stories, poems, novels and essays that she has published in translation come from various parts of India and from the world, including Bangladesh, the Czech Republic and Sweden: they include Md Basir and T Padmanavan (Malayalam), Vijaya Wad and Asha Bage (Marathi) and Suresh Dalal, and Pannalal Patel (Gujarati).

"The Bengali non-commercial diaspora authors are benefited from this magazine," she said, "in the sense that this magazine is not bound by any market or face pressure such as public demand. A new word 'Bahirbanga,' outside West Bengal, Tripura and Barak Valley, has emerged to identify a volatile space. Bahirbanga authors do not have any definable domicile at all, as they are neither migrants like the refugees from the former East Pakistan, nor are they permanently rooted in states where they are always under threat of being culturally weeded out or linguistically vandalised. They do not have a geographical or architectural space to return to or get rooted in…

The most important feature of Bahirbanga writers is that they write about the place they live in and the people they live with. They have been able to evolve their own distinctive Bangla, laden with the inflections of local discourse, or a mixture of subaltern Bangla-Bhojpuri spaces, or Marathi or Gujarati discourse." Yet, she said, their achievements are rarely recognized: "you have to mimic the voices of Kolkata-centric literature if you want to get an award or prize".

Still, the Bangla 'little magazine' culture seems to be alive and well; in fact, one of Mandira's short stories, Kindred in Pervasive Sadness, translated into English by Rajlukshmee Debee, appears in a collection that has sprung up from 600 Bangla little magazines and their 2,000 fiction writers. The collection, titled Postmodern Bangla Short Stories 2002, features contemporary post-colonial Bangla fiction from India and Bangladesh and is brought out by Haowa 49 Publishers, Kolkata.

Another interesting presentation was Sunita Shetty's introduction to Tulu. "Earlier, Tulu was considered a dialect of Kannada," she said, "but in the 19 th century, research by German missionaries proved that Tulu is an independent Dravidian language." One of the five Dravidian languages of South India -- the others being Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam -- it is spoken mainly in coastal Karnataka and the Kasaragod district. "It retains the sound of older languages but maintains its own identity," Dr Shetty said.

Mumbai has touched these writers in various ways -- Marathi poet Hemant Divate's middle-class romantic "fragrance of Pond's Dreamflower at Marine Drive" metamorphoses into the "smell of tired sweat"; his is earthy poetry that confronts the smells and sounds of the daily routine of this city. Marilyn Noronha's poetry in English underlines the dehumanization of the Mumbai experience, as reflected in that great leveler, violence to women. Speaking of her domestic help, she says: "She sits on the floor, I sit on a chair/ last night we were both yanked by the hair"… As Marilyn said, "Mumbai is home, I will not be happy elsewhere -- though there are some concerns and some disillusionment about the city I love, and writing is part of the endeavour to make sense of this."

Through the crowds and the chaos, Mumbai has space for everyone; the Malayalam writer Hrishikeshan who arrived in the city in search of a job; Konkani writer Suniti Udayavar, who came to Mumbai 45 years ago, and continued her education after a 22-year-gap, doing her Masters and winning the first gold medal in her department at Mumbai University; the Sindhis who came as refugees post-Partition and carved a niche for themselves -- people like Arjan 'Shad' and Popati Hiranandani, who are recognized as eminent writers in their own community but find few readers elsewhere. If there is one thing that a multi-lingual reading like this one underlines, it is the universality of the human experience, whatever the language -- the shock of familiar situations in different cultures.

As Prof Dr Annakutty V K Findeis, who organised the event with Madhuri Bajpai, head of the German department, put it: "Mumbai has an identity which is not segregated but a whole. When ghettos or segregation take place, it is the poets who are the bridge-builders. When poets sing from the heart, they forget all distinctions, they have the power to make us laugh, love, and cry with them." In this, language can -- and should-only be a transient barrier.

Menka Shivdasani is an English-Indian poet based in Mumbai. She is a co-translator of Freedom and Fissures, an anthology of Sindhi Partition Poetry.