EDITORIAL – II FOR ‘REBELLARE’ : 19th JANUARY 2010 ISSUE

            Tempus fugit. A fortiori. Time flies. With stronger reasons. On 19^th December 1910, a supercilious penman named Jean Genet was born in Paris, and with his heretical pen, stultified all the vulpine and lupine hegemony of the jackanapes of his contemporary literary world. A thousand thousand gun salutes to this plenary Quixotic for the veracious proclivity of his adroit pen, on behalf of us, on his birth centenary.

            An illegitimate child abandoned by his mother, Genet began to write while imprisoned for burglary. Apart from his first novel ‘Our Lady of the Flowers’ (1944) portraying an underworld of thugs, pimps and hustlers; and the ‘Miracle of the Rose’ (1945-46) telling of his adolescence at a notorious reform school; perhaps his most demented polemic is ‘The Thief’s Journal’ (1949) recounting his life as a tramp, pickpocket and prostitute. Genet does not write about homosexuality. He writes as a homosexual --- sans defense, sans justification, sans repentance or a plea for social understanding. His taste and activity as a thief were related to his homosexuality that had set him apart in solitude in his society. To him the prison embodied freedom --- freedom from heterosexual taboos, freedom from bourgeois preoccupations of glory and wealth, and it united him in abjection with the humiliated and the deprived sections of humanity. He became a leading figure in avant-garde theatre with just five plays --- ‘Deathwatch’, ‘The Maids’, ‘The Balcony’, ‘The Blacks’, and ‘The Screens’ --- stylized Expressionist dramas designed to shock and implicate an audience by revealing its hypocrisy and complicity in an exploitative social order. Admired by the Existentialists, he was the subject of Jean-Paul Sartre’s historic and adulatory biography ‘Saint Genet’ (1952).

            Today, as we should doff our hats verily in honour to this genius; we also must vow to proscribe every single puerile and jejune pen-shit of each such asinine writer, who itself is an astringent bane, a stigma, an onus --- in the literary territory. Thereby, in culmination, heralding an adage for the non-cerebral mediocre readers before choosing books to buy : “Caveat emptor.” Let the buyer beware!

EDITORIAL – I FOR ‘REBELLARE’ : 19th NOVEMBER 2009 ISSUE

           “You are too old to be influenced by me.” --- Such was the audacious and candid opinion of a then-unknown James Joyce merely in his mid-twenties, to the already iconic mellow-aged contemporary literary titan W. B. Yeats. Such truths are eternal. And such truths do we too believe in. So we herald our readers as well as writers to --- Be Audacious ! Be Anomalous ! ! Be Reactionary ! ! ! When today’s reader-writer world has become entirely ‘of the mediocres, for the mediocres, by the mediocres’, where there are few ‘cerebral readers’, and even fewer ‘cerebral authors’; here, on our behalf, is the eponymous debut of this web-magazine, bruiting some authors and artists, who are tirelessly lyminalising the alternative paradigm shifts of counter-contemporaniety in their contrapuntal creations. This e-zine, with its neo-literature, fruitfully resonates better for those very few cerebral readers, as a balancedly blended synchronization of some peerless cerebra and their respective reflections --- an astounding compendium of the writers’ as well as of the readers’ minds, eventually culminating into such a cluster of polemics which exposes a race that is often guilty of being laden with the vain legacy of mythologizing mediocrity, and eulogizing them underrating the true literary prodigies. The gospel truth of history that we, the Bengalees, as a race, have failed to make our gamut of literary genii (namely --- Dhurjotiprasad Mukhopadhyay, Kamalkumar Majumder, Jagadish Gupta, Amiyabhushan Majumder, Manik Bandopadhyay, Satinath Bhaduri, Gopal Halder, Nareshchandra Sengupta, Ramesh Sen, Asim Ray, Sandipan Chattopadhyay, Subhash Ghosh, Subimal Misra et. al.) arrive at the home-shelves of the foreign readers, is a shame unpardonable. We, the Rebellare-Team, ourselves being Bengalees, have dared to betray the audacity here to raise erect an unforeseen era of creativity, invoking as well as defying simultaneously, the timeless aura of our unquestionably cerebral creative heritage of ‘alternative literature’, with our ‘wea-pen’, as a rebel army, in this regard, as if to atone for this sin of our clan. Hats off to us! All hats verily off to us!

SUBIMAL MISRA : THE WRITERS' WRITERS' WRITER

                        As James Joyce is ‘the writer’s writer’, Subimal Misra is ‘the writers’ writers’ writer’. Writing since late 1967, he has hitherto remained inevitably unknown, as an off-the-beaten-track author like him should mandatorily be, in his own native land India, as well as among Bengali-language readers in his mother-tongue speaking state West Bengal. In the hitherto 44 year span of his writing-life, he has never ever allowed himself to print (despite being invited several times) even a single letter in any commercial periodical or any daily or journal of any establishment, always kept himself away from all sorts of media propaganda (like TV shows, Radio broadcastings etc.), felicitation meetings and award ceremonies (whether invited or not); and they have also remained wholesomely allergic to him, never risked to review any of his books throughout his entire life so far, nor do even dare to mention his name anywhere in their papers. He, the outcast, publishes and sells his own books, and never gives advertisements. As the immense magnitude of his ganglionic pen ranges from ‘samizdat’ via ‘tamizdat’ to ‘magnitizdat’, since ‘blue blouse’ through ‘aleatoric’ unto ‘degree zero’; he offers with effortless ease, a sojourn to cerebral literature.

                        He says that he is afraid of success, because if it comes in contemporaniety, he feels that whatever he is writing is not that much novel or unforeseen. He claims that his books are in no way ‘commodities’, and never prints the word ‘price’ in his books. It is printed as ‘Binimoy’ (exchange) and after that the phrase ‘Or what you as a reader of Subimal Misra think it should be’. In his own wors : “I am entirely an author of and exclusively for the Bengali little magazines. In the most ordinary sense, the little magazine of the Bengali language (nearly 2200 in number) is, in parallel to the establishments, a literary flow that publishes the writings of the authors keeping in tact their liberty, honouring their individuality; all the off-the-beaten-track writings in Bengali language are published chiefly in little magazines. But the number of true little magazines (in the most imbued sense of the term) that have some distinguished characteristic values, has lately come to almost a cipher. Even here, my stand is a bit awkward; I am not a parallel writer of the establishments, not parallel, rather mine is a reactionarily counter one. I do want to write, have written, am writing such pieces, to publish which even the little magazines will shudder in awe, and the establishments will never ever dare to touch them.”

                        His works, written with rebellious narrative forms as well as an anachronistic jumble of labyrinthine style and anomie-imbued content --- all these being the substance of the writer’s vision, symbolize modern man’s anxiety-ridden and grotesque alienation in an indifferent and hostile world. In the history of 700 years of Bengali literature, he is the only author who has experimented the most with form and language. He, a self-proclaimed disciple of Jean-Luc Godard, has been the first to employ Eisenstein’s ‘montage-technique’, to implement the ‘film-language’ in the arena of the Bengali literature; as well as to use Burroughs’s ‘cut-method’ in the narrative mode. His effervescently inventive narrative forms and multitudinous diversity of scattergun techniques using collage, cut-out, fusion, montage etc. enmeshing the ‘avant-garde’ underpinnings of his texts exhibit the endless process of interchange between his ‘language of thinking’ and ‘language of writing’. The myth of narrative has been vehemently rejected by him as he hates the age-old tradition of story-telling. His works are never thematic and in several cases merely handy repositories where his self-criticism is overtly severe, as are his fecundity of language and almost superhuman erudition. Almost all of his texts are polyglot in nature as he frequently quotes Latin, German, French and English, and even Sanskrit, and never offers a translation. In fact, his every single text deals with heterogeneous themes, and is imbued with contemporary socio-political-economical messages, thus symbolically illuminating upon the bourgeois-proletariat class dialectics. His writings seem indecipherably chaotic to the unprepared readers, as the riddles of his language are prone to trap his readers in their respective subconscious matrices of thought. Here language becomes a tendency, a phenomenon to which his readers fall preys as he lures them to psycho-penetrate into his language’s indigenous absurdity.

                        As he neither possesses nor knows computer, his encyclopaedic knowledge reflected in his writings speaks only of his voracious reading habit. He literally ‘lives together’ with books residing at a small 3-room apartment, 2 of which are loaded with nearly 15000 books, the other being his centenarian mother’s bedroom. Apart from Brecht and Sartre, he considers Proust, Dostoevsky, Kafka, Joyce and Borges his ‘soul’s companion’ for their cerebral fecundity. In every sense, he is the one and only anti-establishment author alive in the Bengali literature. With venomous language he attacks middle-class sentiment and rotten heaps of values. His every book is a cluster of polemics that exposes a race which is often guilty of being laden with a vain legacy of mythologizing mediocrity, underrating the true literary prodigies. Let us bruit this iconoclastic thinker, emblematic of post-post-modern times, who is his own adjective!

AN OVERTURE TO THE SOURCE OF OUR CULTURAL HERITAGE : THE ‘PURANAS’

“Time present and time past

Are both perhaps present in time future,

And time future contained in time past.”

[ FOUR QUARTETS ( Burnt Norton ) : T. S. ELIOT ]                    

                        The ‘Puranas’ occupy a unique position in the sacred and secular literature of our race. Etymologically the term ‘Purana’ means “that which lives from ancient times”. Originally, therefore, the term signified “ancient tale” or “old narrative” containing the records of past events, as compared with ‘History’. Later it became associated with a class of literature. According to the classical definition of the term found in the ‘Amarakosha’ written by Amarsingha in the 5^th century AD, it should have five characteristics or ‘panchalakshana’, which are ‘Sarga’ (creation), ‘Pratisarga’ (dissolution and recreation), ‘Vangsha’ (divine genealogies), ‘Manwantara’ (ages of Manus), and ‘Vangshanucharita’ (genealogies of kings). But this ‘panchalakshana’ definition can be applied only to the ‘Upa-Puranas’ (minor Puranas), and the ‘Maha-Puranas’ (major Puranas) should have ten characteristics or ‘dashalakshana’ which includes the following additional features : ‘Vritti’ (means of livelihood), ‘Raksha’ (incarnation of gods), ‘Mukti’ (final emancipation), ‘Hetu’ (unmanifest), and ‘Apashraya’ (Brahman). Apart from all these, another very elementary feature of utmost significance of the ‘Puranas’ is the glorification of ‘Dharma’ (righteous conduct), ‘Artha’ (economics and politics), ‘Kama’ (erotics), and ‘Moksha’ (salvation), along with that of ‘Brahma’ (god of creation), ‘Vishnu’ (god of preservation), ‘Rudra’ (god of destruction), and ‘Surya’ (god of light).

                        There are said to be eighteen ‘Maha-Puranas’ and the same number of ‘Upa-Puranas’. With a very few exceptions, almost all the ‘Puranas’ give a uniform list of the ‘Maha-Puranas’ mostly in the following order : ‘Brahma’, ‘Padma’, ‘Vishnu’, ‘Bhagavata’, ‘Naradiya’, ‘Markandeya’, ‘Agni’, ‘Vayu’, ‘Bhavishya’, ‘Brahmavaivarta’, ‘Varaha’, ‘Linga’, ‘Skanda’, ‘Vamana’, ‘Kurma’, ‘Matsya’, ‘Garura’, and ‘Brahmanda’. In case of the ‘Upa-Puranas’, the list is more or less as follows : ‘Sanatkumara’, ‘Narasingha’, ‘Nanda’, ‘Shiva-Dharma’, ‘Durvasa’, ‘Devi-Bhagavata’, ‘Kapila’, ‘Harivangsha’, ‘Ushanas’, ‘Manava’, ‘Varuna’, ‘Kali’, ‘Maheshwara’, ‘Shamba’, ‘Saura’, ‘Parashara’, ‘Maricha’, and ‘Bhargava’.

                        The ‘Puranas’ begin their dynastic lists with Manu, the saviour of humanity from the ‘Great Flood’. Vaivaswata Manu, the first king, had ten sons, among whom was divided the entire country. Ninety-five generations ruled between the time of Manu and the great war of ‘Mahabharata’. After the war, the ‘Puranas’ use the future tense for the subsequent dynasties. They are called “the dynasties of the ‘Kali’ age”, mentioned only in seven ‘Puranas’, where their account is traced till about the period of the historical ‘Gupta’ empires who were broken up by the ‘Huns’ in the 6^th century AD. The mention of even ‘Yavanas’, ‘Shakas’ and ‘Pallavas’, who came to India in the 2^nd and 1^st centuries BC, indicates that the geographical lists were brought up-to-date from time to time. The division of time into four ‘Yugas’ (ages), namely the ‘Satya’, the ‘Treta’, the ‘Dwapara’ and the ‘Kali’ had a historical basis; but the chronological system of fitting in seventy-one four-age periods making a ‘Manwantara’[1] in the cosmological scheme, is purely hypothetical as well as a later elaboration, as this theory applies only to ‘Jambudwipa’,[2] and not to the whole world. Great wars, conquests or political changes may have marked the end of one age and the beginning of another. The ‘Satya Yug’ appears to have ended with the destruction of the ‘Haiheya’ dynasties and the ‘Treta’ began with the reign of ‘Sagara’. Rama, the son of Dasharatha, is said to have lived in the interval between the ‘Treta’ and the ‘Dwapara’ yug. The battle of ‘Mahabharata’ has been taken as having occurred at the close of the ‘Dwapara Yug’, and the ‘Kali Yug’ began after the war. These ages thus symbolize changes in the political conditions in India.

                        According to the ‘Puranas’, ‘Dharma’ (righteous conduct), ‘Artha’ (economics and politics), ‘Kama’ (erotics), and ‘Moksha’ (salvation) should be the four aims of human life. ‘Dharma’ includes religious teachings. ‘Sin’, ‘Punishment’, ‘Penance’ and ‘Hell’ are described in details. The popular teaching consists of descriptions of ‘tirthas’ (holy places) and of pilgrimages, as also of ‘vratas’ (ritualistic observances) and ‘danas’ (charities) etc. The chief feature of all these is that these were available to all, including women and ‘Shudras’, to whom the ‘Vedas’ were denied. ‘Artha’, acquisition of wealth or polity, is found in the ‘Rajadharma’ section of many ‘Puranas’, dealing with the duties of kings and methods of administration, conduct of war and peace etc. ‘Kama’ includes marriage-rules, and duties of wife and women, which are illustrated by stories such as those of Sita and Savitri, who are cited as examples of perfect womanhood. ‘Moksha’ or salvation is the final goal placed before every human being. Transmigration is an article of faith; one can attain deliverance from the chain of successive rebirths by following the paths of ‘Yoga’ and ‘Bhakti’.

                        The theology preached in the ‘Puranas’ is heterogenous. The three chief gods are ‘Brahma’ (god of creation), ‘Vishnu’ (god of preservation), and ‘Rudra’ or ‘Shiva’ (god of destruction). They form the all-powerful ‘Holy Trinity’ of the gods and goddesses. ‘Surya’ (god of light) or the ‘sun’ is also very highly extolled in the ‘Puranas’ as ‘the source of all life under the open sky’. Apart from other gods and goddesses, there are ‘Gandharvas’ and ‘Apsaras’ who are respectively the celestial musicians and nymphs. Under demons are classed the ‘Asuras’, ‘Daityas’, ‘Danavas’ and ‘Rakshasas’. Among the three gods of the ‘Holy Trinity’, only god Vishnu’s ‘dashavatara’ (ten incarnations) concept is found in the ‘Puranas’; of which five are mythological : ‘Matsya’ (fish), ‘Kurma’ (tortoise), ‘Varaha’ (boar), ‘Narasingha’ (man-lion), and ‘Vamana’ (dwarf); four are historical : ‘Parashurama’, ‘Rama’, ‘Krishna’, and ‘Buddha’; while the last incarnation, ‘Kalki’, is yet to manifest. This ‘dashavatara’ or ten incarnations theory suggests the idea of the evolutionary process of the advancement of human civilization. The ‘fish’ emerges out of the early-Palaeozoic stage, followed by the ‘tortoise’ in the late-Palaeozoic times, and the ‘boar’ in the Mesozoic period. Next comes the ‘man-lion’ and ‘dwarf’ in the period of cave-men and bush-men. ‘Parashurama’ represents the nomadic and hunter stage of uncivilized, barbaric human beings; and ‘Rama’, ‘Krishna’ and ‘Buddha’ stand for the human race of full-grown city civilization.

 

                        The ‘Puranas’ are closely akin to the ‘Epics’ both in form and substance. Taken collectively, they may be described as a popular encyclopedia of ancient and mediaeval Indian culture ― religious, philosophical, historical, personal, social, economical and political. The importance of the ‘Puranas’ for the comprehensive history of Indian culture and civilization is immense, as there are sections dealing with polity, sociology, administration, fine arts, architecture etc. The present view is to accept the ‘Puranas’ as one of the important sources of the traditional history of ancient India. Nowadays it is considered that the function of a modern historian should be to disentangle legendary, fictitious or mythological materials from the purely historical or cultural data.

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[1] The ‘Puranas’ states that a human year is the day and night of the gods; 12000 divine years or 4380000 human years constitute ‘Chaturyuga’ (four ages) or ‘Mahayuga’ (great age) which is divided into four ages of progressive deterioration in the ratio of 4:3:2:1, respectively for ‘Satya’, ‘Treta’, ‘Dwapara’ and ‘Kali’. Each of these ‘Yugas’ is preceded and followed by ‘Sandhyas’ containing a tenth of the period of a ‘Yuga’. 1000 ‘Chaturyugas’, that is 4380000000 human years are equivalent to a day or night of Brahma, which is called a ‘Kalpa’ (aeon). Each ‘Kalpa’ comprises the periods of 14 Manus, the fathers of humankind, each of whom presides over 71 ‘Chaturyugas’; and each span of such 71 four-age period ruled by one Manu, is called a ‘Manwantara’, the reign of a Manu.

[2] According to the ‘Puranas’, the world is said to consist of seven concentric continents separated by encircling seas of different substances such as butter, milk etc. The innermost of the seven continents separated from the next by salt-water is ‘Jambudwipa’, which alone was subject to the law of ‘Chaturyugas’. The most important region of ‘Jambudwipa’ is ‘Bharatavarsha’ or India, so called because the descendants of king ‘Bharata’ reside there. ‘Bharatavarsha’ lies to the north of the ocean and the south of the snowy mountains containing seven main chains of mountains named ‘Mahendra’, ‘Malaya’, ‘Sahya’, ‘Sukimat’, ‘Riksha’, ‘Vindhya’ and ‘Paripatra’. The ‘Kiratas’ live on the east, the ‘Yadavas’ on the west, and the ‘Brahmanas’, ‘Kshatriyas’, ‘Vaishyas’ and ‘Shudras’ in the centre of ‘Bharatavarsha’.