<i>Kali O Kolom Jaishtha</i> 1416 -- May 2009
Football fans will know what I'm talking about when I say that sometimes even a much anticipated Chelsea versus Manchester United match in the English Premier League can turn out to be a rather unexciting encounter, with ordinary dribbling and passing that is only enlivened momentarily with flashes of genuine footwork. So too with this issue of Kali O Kolom, where genuine inspiration lurks amid the mass of plodding literary essays. It is not the themes that are at fault here since they range from Rabindranath to eminent historian/archeologist Hassan Dani and poetry written during the 1960s to communal disharmony. Rather, it's the style of writing, which leads one to suspect that perhaps the magazine should be aware that 'literary' writing, like all other types of activities, too can fall into a rut. It is also a truism that serious essays for publication in literary journals that also aspire to popular readership can be difficult to produce on a consistent basis and that standard publications being brought out over the long term with deadlines to meet can mean that at times the match-up does not live up to its expectations - a sentiment that I'm fairly sure the editor of this particular page will also agree with! It is a fate that only the irregularly published little magazines can avoid, who can afford to wait until they have enough material they deem worthy of publication. And even then… To give an example of the above, the essays on Rabindranath in this issue of Kali O Kolom are rather run-of-the mill academic work. In fact, one of them-- Gadyakabita, Punoshcho O Rabindranath by Amor Roy -- actually contains the following sentence in its very fourth paragraph: "Rabindranath er ontordrishti (introspection) boro beshi" - which is somewhat akin to stating solemnly that the Indian Ocean has a lot of water in it. It raises the level of hack work on Rabindranath to new heights. Or lowers it, depending on one's viewpoint, to new depths. The article on the poetry of the 1960s is another example - not that it is not competently written, but it is a topic that has been written about to death, with nothing genuinely original being played out of it anymore. Like works on Nazrul, on whom I at least have yet to read any genuinely original writing over the last five years. Among the flashes of inspired dribbling are a short story, 'Piri' by Pranto Polash, which rudely jerks, as art sometimes ought to, the comfortably placed middle-class reader of Kali O Kolom into the gritty reality of life in the other lower social stratas. A piece on Hassan Dani (the celebrated Kashmir-born archeologist who put into operation the refurbishing of the Varandra Museum in Rajshahi and taught at Dhaka University through the 1950s before emigrating and settling in the then West Pakistan) by Rokaiya Khatun Rekha 'Uncle Dani, Aami Jemon Dekhechi' is delightful. The in-memoriam on Naresh Guha is informative, but by concentrating solely on his poetry, fails to take into account, in my opinion, the utterly fresh mode of writing he brought to Bengali critical appreciations. One example is the article he wrote on Jibanananda Das and reprinted in Abdul Mannan Syed's masterfully edited Kobita Shomogro: Jibanananda Das. In it can be found Naresh Guha's sharp eye for detail, where he typically was the first to note while cataloguing Das's deep immersion in Bengal's natural world that there was something missing. While Das, Guha wrote, did not tire of writing on fields and grain, on fields of grain ("dhaan er golpo boltay taar klanti nai…") strangely enough in his poems one could hardly find any flowers or fruits ("phul nai…phol achay, tao shamanno…"). There are two articles, one on the African writer Achebe, and the other a valiant revisionist attempt to set straight the Orientalist bias of British historians of Oudh's Nawab Wajed Ali Shah, but both pieces are too heavily dependent on books published in English to be of any real surprise to those readers who can access them in the original. Of note are the poems 'Holud Pata'r Krondone' by Suhita Sultana and 'Jarul Street' by Mustofa Tariqul Islam. There are the usual collections of art reviews, among which is one on Rokeya Sultana's solo show in Kolkata by Debabrata Chakravarty, illuminating the gratifying, welcome and warm turn in cultural relations between the two Bengals ever since the BNP-Jamaat coalition was decisively rejected at the polls. One hopes that in the next five years the relations will be cemented to a point where no regressive cultural attitudes will ever be allowed to be affected by state or party policies and attitudes. That newer forms of the old Mohunbagan-East Bengal matches can take place within an overall frame of courtesy, amity and mutual respect. It is to Bengal Foundation's credit that they are playing such a positive role in the renewal of ancient ties. The cover painting 'Untitled' is an oil by celebrated Bangladeshi artist Mohammed Kibria, who can be said to have given birth to modernism in this country's art. Born on January 1, 1929, in Birbhum in West Bengal, Kibria graduated from Calcutta Art College in 1950, with his meditative brooding on colour as form in its own right being a lifelong one.
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