<i>Kali O Kolom Boishakh 1416</i> -- April 2009
Opening this issue of Kali O Kolom I was immediately attracted to the article on Humayun Kabir, the distinguished poet, novelist and outstanding essayist who was a member of India's Rajya Shabha, and twice its education minister - once when Jawaharlal Nehru himself called upon him to fill the considerable shoes of Maulana Abul Kalam Azad. Nearly all educated Bengalis of a certain generation are aware of the general outlines of Humayun Kabir's life and career: his distinguished family lineage (a family name and tradition that lies in tatters and ruins now), his brilliance as a student, and of his later illustrious political and literary career. He was also the editor of journals at Presidency College, Calcutta, and later at Oxford. He retained a lifelong interest in philosophy, writing on Kant, and was later instrumental in forming the United Front in West Bengal. I personally remember reading a long time back one (alas, only one!) of his many books titled The Revolt and the New Leaf in Bengali Poetry: 1930-1950, which later was incorporated I believe into his Studies in Bengali Poetry. To me it is still a classic in its acknowledgement of Rabindranath as the pivot around which Bengali poetry whirls, even as it balanced that appreciation with fine critical judgements of the later poets, from Buddhadev Bose and Sudhindranath Dutta down to Bijoylal Chattapadhyay and even Shamsur Rahman. This above lengthy introduction by me is merely to demonstrate the eagerness with which I went straight to Abul Ahsan Chowdhury's piece on him, but perhaps because I already knew quite a bit about Humayun Kabir, the article, except for its competent overview of the latter's political activities and writings on Indian and Bengali Muslims, was disappointingly descriptive. It is more suitable as an introduction for readers who know next to nothing about this extraordinary son of Bengal. It perhaps would have been far more interesting, and proper with a high-toned literary journal's standards, if the writer had analysed Humayun Kabir's argument that Bengal's later poets revolted not so much against Tagore (in fact they revered him) but against his brand of Romanticism, a romanticism that some of the younger, later poets charged slid dangerously close to what Goethe meant when he said that romanticism is sickness, classicism is health. The article could have explored to the extent that this charge was correct and if the poets right in saying so. I personally think that Rabindranath's romanticism sprang from such classic Indian sources that the argument is a futile one, that his poetry and songs will remain a source of eternal health for Bengalis, but it has to be acknowledged also that this criticism gave space and energy for later poets to fashion their own speech and diction (it was Rabindranath's diction that exercised quite a few of them). It is an argument and contention that could have been fruitfully and interestingly illuminated in the pages of Kali O Kolom in the context of the article on Humayun Kabir. But I have learnt, with advancing age, that a lot of times things are not how you want them to be, and one must be grateful for small mercies, though Dylan Thomas advised us to the contrary. Here I feel I must apologize to readers and to the editor of Kali O Kolom if this particular review has been imbalanced by so much commentary on one topic/article/personality, but the editor of this literature page assured me of complete freedom in my reviews and I'm afraid that once in a while one must test such promises. Freedom is meaningless without the occasional excess - as critics of Taslima Nasreen should acknowledge. The article on Akhtaruzzaman Ilyas, in contrast, by Shohana Mahbub is absorbing for its focus on the language of his short stories. Here it has to be pointed out that this is so despite Ms Mahbub's own language at times drifting into being flowery and ornate - critical analysis ought to avoid such obvious pitfalls. There is a readable essay by Chanchal Kumar Bose on the 'brittya bhanga naris' in Manik Bandhapadhyay's famous novels but the style may be difficult to follow for the more general readers of Kali O Kolom. Which brings me to the subject of a disputatious letter about a previous article in the Chaitra 1415 issue on Rabindra Dasgupta from Shafi U Ahmed of London. Mr Ahmed (if I understood his letter correctly) disputes the notion, advanced by the writer of the piece Gulam Murshid, that Rabindra Dasgupta was a pundit in a most unusual way, opining that punditry must be measured by the average number of books published in the pundit's lifetime, and that by this measure Rabindra Dasgupta's status as a pundit is disputable since currently a book is published every thirty seconds. The Age of The Specialist, Mr Ahmed says, has superseded The Age of The Pundit. It is an interesting formulation of the pundit and punditry, who I guess is supposed to read every book and know everything about everything. There is a lovely in memoriam on Ramkumar Chattapadhyay by Professor Karunamoy Goswami, and I for one, a fan of both men - one the outstanding tappa specialist and the other an academic whose writings on Indian music is proof that real scholars are able to carry their learning lightly - wished that he had written a more extensive piece. Among the other items on the magazine menu, Mihir Sengupta's Gha (Sore) is a work that is notable for its narrative voice, while Characharer Katha of Satyaki Haldar, a story of a ghat and boats, is mesmerizing for the way it flows - it is increasingly rare for writers to use such rural themes in an existentialist manner. In some of Kali O Kolom's short fiction over the years, one can discern writers who are absorbing specific types of Western influences and adapting them creatively. Kanon Purokayastha's travel piece is on Charles Darwin's house, while the art reviews in this issue match their usual standard. Zahid Mustafa, himself an artist whose own show has also been reviewed in this issue, has contributed a piece on the performance art show of Wakilur Rahman and Dhali Al Mamun held recently at the Jatiyo Jadughar. The book reviews are of Hasan Azizul Haq's Firay Ashi Firay Jai, Agunmukhar Meye by Nurjahan Bose (the autobiography of a most extraordinarily fiery woman), Hamid Kaiser's Mon Bari Nai,, poet Altaf Hossain's Ki Phul Jhorilo Bipul Ondhokaray: Nirbachito Kobita, Shahid Iqbal's Bangladesher Kobita'r Shonket O Dhara, and Piyash Majid's Naach Protima'r Laash. The bright and attractive cover art, an oil painting, Surja O Chandra is by Syed Jahangir, who is a 1955 graduate from Dhaka's Charukala Institute, which back in the old days was of course simply the Art College - nothing is simple anymore, everything must glitter! Who is to tell who plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose…Syed Jahangir was an artist who was influenced in a major way by American art trends after he graduated, and perhaps traces of it still can be found in a certain fondness for American-styled Expressionism in his oils, as opposed to his highly evolved pen-and-ink sketches of rural Bengal and its rivers and boats. He was born in 1935 in Khulna, has held solo exhibitions in many countries, and in his retirement devotes himself solely to his art.
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