রবিবার, ১০ নভেম্বর, ২০১৯

Evolution of Bengali Short Stories : Malay Roychoudhury



Evolution of Bengali Short Stories by Malay Roychoudhury
Chhotogolpo, synonym for short story, is a hybridized word. Chhoto 
having been derived from prakrita or plebianized Sanskrit chhudda or chutta, 
which meant short, small, tiny, dwarfish, low-pitched, little, reduced, puny, 
delicate, minor, etc. Golpo is a hybrid of gappo and jalpo. Gappo is 
plebianized Bangla version of Persian gupp that entered indigenous 
lexical domain consequent upon establishment of Islamic rule. It meant 
oral narrative, conversation, argument, gossip, prattle, etc. It had also 
entered English lexicon as gup, in the guise of an Anglo-Saxon slang 
during the gin-and-tonic days of the Empire. Almost all indigenous words 
which entered the imperial semiotics received a degenerated reception. 
Hindu gods became lords, and god Jaggannatha became juggernaut, a 
strange expression which meant a relentless destroying force; an example 
of colonial semiotic violence transforming the native's protector into a 
destroyer. Jalpo evolved out of Sanskrit jalpan, and meant utterance, 
discussion, speculation, proposal, and establishment of one's own opinion 
by refuting someone else's.
Narratives at folk level as well as at the level of the court of kings, 
in brief or elaborate form, existed prior to the arrival of British Empire,
 written in poetic meters to enable people to memorize them, in the
 absence of literacy and nonavailability of nonmanual process of
 reproduction, as the texts were calligraphed on palm-leaves. In 
essence, therefore, indigenous story-texts existed since antiquity, 
outside the perimeters of the constructedness of fables, but within 
the confines of nature, i.e. tale. However, the indigenous culture did not 
have exact equivalents of fables and tales, since the genres were based 
on the Greco-Roman dialects of good and evil, and papal dialectics of
 God and Devil, which assumed human individual as a cultural product 
and subject to construction. Premodern Bangla had katha or narrative, 
and kathakata or narration of scriptural and mythological oral chronicles. 
The narrator was kathak-thakur or Brahmin priest, and may be found even 
today in a metamorphosed gaiety during any puja trying to re-root himself 
in antiquity in front of a loudspeaker mike; he would be worshipping goddess 
Durga, demon Mahishasura, and a veiled banana plant simultaneously, 
in a postmodern anomie, of course.
    Fiction is indigenous, though in metrical form. However, the genres 
short story and novel came with colonial rule. Novel was a product of
 European Renaissance, and the original genre novella was Italian, 
which emerged during that great epistemic upheaval, though the rudiments
 thereof existed since second-century Greece. Novel was coterminous as an 
established genre with the appearance of Rene Descartes' theory of knowledge.
 Descartes' theory starts with the quest for certainty, for an indubitable 
starting-point or foundation on the basis alone of which progress is possible;
 the point of certainty had to be located in one's own awareness of one's own self. 
Renaissance and Descartes would not have been possible without such royal
 plunderers as Christopher Columbus, an Italian. Novel was generic outcome of 
the concepts of individuals' self-location, progress and seizure of nature. 
None of these philosophical ideas existed in premodern life/world of
 Bangla people, for whom nothing existed outside nature.
In fact the synonym for culture, i.e. samskruti, had to be coined by 
Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941). The appellative upanyas, synonym for novel, 
was coined by Bankimchandra Chattopadhya (1838-1894) who had first written 
Rajmohan's Wife (1864), a novel in English, before writing the first ever novel
 in Bangla literature, Durgeshnandini (1865), a fiction in prose. Economic 
and political powers in Europe, when novel emerged, were agriculture-centric 
and rested with landowners who had time for leisure.
    Short story emerged in Europe with the Industrial Revolution, 
and the epistemic paradigm shift caused by European Enlightenment. 
Industrial Revolution replaced traditional agrarian economy by one dominated 
by machinery and manufacturing. This transferred the balance of political power 
from the landowner to the industrial capitalist, and created a huge urban 
working class. The slow agrarian idyllic life was replaced by a fast 
industrially-compartmented life without much leisure for a large population. 
The subject-position of the individual changed beyond retreat.
 While the history of rise and fall of the novel in Europe is associated 
with the rise and fall of imperialism, the rise and change of short story is
 associated with the centrality and fragmentation of the modern human individual.
 Novel emerged in European antiquity. Short story emerged in European modernity.
 Both of them arrived on the shores of Bangla literature at the same time, 
when the representatives of European Enlightenment, the Christian missionaries, 
settled at Srirampur in 1800, simultaneously introduced Bangla printing press, 
translated prose of gospels and the Bible, Bangla grammar books and Bangla
 dictionaries. The first gospel of the first century Christian apostle and
 evangelist St. Matthew was the mother of printed Bangla prose, which 
appeared on 18 March 1880. This was also the year of establishment of 
Fort William College. And this was the juncture when a Bangla speaker of 
letters left the world of nature to join the world of culture, in order to get 
constructed as an individual in the mirror image of Enlightenment episteme.
    Groomed in the above episteme, a sizeable Bangla middle class originated,
 and spread with the British as their reliable appendages, throughout India. 
Bangla periodicals with news and fiction had to appear for, by and of the 
newly constructed individuals of this class. Though newsmagazines such 
Digdarshan (April 1818), Samachar Darpan (May 1818) and 
Sambad Prabhakar appeared first to cater to the cultural needs of
 this class, they contained the seeds of the subsequent literary periodicals
 like Bangadarshan (1872), Bharati, Sadhana, Hitavadi, Navajivan and Sahitya,
 published in the 19th century. For publishing Bangadarshan, Bankimchandra
 Chattapadhya had installed printing press at his own residence. 
The contentious issue relating to strict definability of novel and short story 
might not have been imported till then, and all fictions were golpo. 
The eighteen-page fiction Indira (1872) and fifteen-page fiction 
Yugalanguria (1873) written by Bankimchandra and fourteen-page
 fiction Madhumati (1873) written by his brother Purnachandra were
 all published under the rubric of upanyas or novel. It was more than 
eighty years later, when the power of definition, distinction and evaluation
 of literary discourse rested with academicians that the former two 
were declared to be neither novel nor short story whereas the latter 
was branded as a short story, since by then definitions imported from
 the West had piled up in the volumes stacked in college libraries. 
But the first canonisable perfect short story did not appear till Rabindranath 
Tagore wrote Postmaster (1891) in the weekly Hitavadi.
    However, the works of Mir Mosharraf Hossain (1847-1912), poet, 
novelist and playwright, failed to get canonised, primarily because 
formation of Muslim middle class individual in the new episteme of
 Enlightenment was delayed as the rulers whom the Empire decimated 
were mostly Muslim. The community initially refused to be subsumed in
 the language of emerging Bangla literature because of what was 
considered Hinduani semiotic and semantic features. For the Hindu 
individual, this also was one of the reasons to move closer to the new
 episteme. In third volume of Bengal in 1756-1757, historian Hill had 
written 'Genuine (i.e. Hindoo) rajahs and inhabitants were much disaffected
 to the Moor (i.e. Mohammedan) government and secretly wished for a 
change and opportunity of throwing off their tyrannical yoke.' The 
first fiction of a Muslim author to be canonised came quite late in
 Byathar Daan (1922) by Kazi Nazrul Islam (1899-1977). In fact, 
this is the only Muslim name I find in Budhed Choudhury's voluminous 
dissertation on short story Bangla Sahityer Chhotogolpo O Golpokar (1962), 
spanning a period from 1800 to 1940, and no such reference in 
Sahitye Chhotogolpo (1956) by Narayan Gangapadhya, though
 the books are studded with names from classical and modern 
European literatures.
    Thenceforth canonisation could be possible only within European
 maxims. But the strictest maxim was that no printed matter should be 
against the interest of the Empire. Short story therefore had to be confined
 to a defined freedom of the author, sort of a four-walled discourse. 
Indigenous diverse oral forms were never drawn upon and ultimately
 withered away in neglect. Since the first grammar books and dictionaries
 were written and printed by European missionaries, Bangla signifiers 
started developing catalepsy. Most the Bangla words had several meanings, 
depending upon context, and even contradictory meanings, as is now evident
 from the Bangiya Sabdakosh (1933), dictionary compiled by 
Haricharan Bandhyapadhya. Consequent upon alien intervention, 
the meanings of Bangla words were narrowed down to a few or 
even only one, and in several cases even change by colonial educators. 
Today a large number of Bangla words are explained with the help of English
 words. A huge lexical world at the social periphery simply vanished as the 
expressions were dubbed anchalik or non-metropolitan. Metropolitan Bangla 
flourished as language or literature articulated by upper caste Hindus, 
especially by the super-Brahmins of the 19th century, the gentry of 
Brahmosamaj. Our modernity emanated from colonisers' values, and 
metropolitan Bangla evolved within those confines. Anchalik was tribal 
and lower-caste semiotic sphere. Similarly, words and expressions used
 in Muslim community were exuviated off metropolitan Bangla. The fund
 of words, diction, expressions were basically metropolitan till the emergence
 of the postmodern Bangla short story. That the language of the entire two 
hundred million people is the language of Bangla literature dawned quite late,
 when the Western rhetoric, poetics and canons became redundant and irrelevant.
    From Bangadarshan onwards till the publication of the periodical 
Sabujpatra (1914) edited by Pramatha Choudhuri (1868-1946), son-in-law of
 Rabindranath's elder brother Satyendranath Tagore (1842-1923),
 fictions were written in former old Bangla of letters, documents, verse, 
horoscopes etc., which was being articulated in flowery, Sanskritised, 
compounded, consonantal or vowel-blended words and long-winding 
sentences, beyond the reach of the uninitiated, so that the Brahminism 
of vocabulary could represent the fixity of power of the newly constructed 
individual. Pramatha Choudhuri was well versed in English and French 
languages and literatures, and had introduced triolet, terza rima, sonnet etc., 
colonial verse forms after he came back from England as a barrister. 
Sabujpatra gave prestige to spoken Bangla, i.e. the dialect spoken in and
 around the metropolis, which was the imperial capital till 1911. What had 
happened by the time Sabujpatra appeared was establishment of hundreds
 of jute mills in the same area, and convergence of a huge labour force from
 far-flung places who required a common medium of communication. 
A common medium of communication was also required by students 
from other provinces who came to the metropolis for studies at Hindu 
College (1817) and Calcutta University (1857). Sabujpatra changed the
 language of literature forever, and strengthened the grip of Western canons,
 but within elitist semantics.
Modernist discourse and discursive practices, irrespective of whether they 
arrived with the British rulers or through glossy Soviet despatches, legitimised
 Occidental canons and hegemony. Canons, aesthetic or military, imply
 legitimization. Destruction of the Bamian Buddhas is legitimization of 
homocentric canon. It is against nature. It thinks that the rainbow does 
not have so many colours. Rabindra Guha, who does not have any roots
 permanently like an arborescent, has articulated the dangerous consequences 
of a peculiar cow-belt hegemony in his micro-narrative Contactile. 
The little magazine explosion I have been talking of was postmodernist
 rupture from modernist discourse and encirclement of the centre by
 periphery. Two thousand fiction writers are sustained by six hundred 
periodicals within and outside West Bengal. This excludes magazines
 published in Bangladesh as well as Web little magazines. In an epoch
 having two thousand living fiction writers---several of them write
 postmodern poems--proliferation of new forms, diction, semiotic 
and syntactic practices, wordplay, spaces and experiences, is bound to
 push the Bangla short story beyond any conceivable frame. Canonical 
disarray was inevitable. It is not possible to bind some texts within
 academically-defined genres.
It would be interesting to note that when the Indian nationalist leaders
 in their anti-imperialist discourse gave a call for Civil Disobedience (1932)
 and Quit India (1942) movements, they did not advise writers to disobey 
and quit colonial canons. It took three earth-moving literary movements, 
lives of thousands of Naxal intellectual youth, jails of Indira Gandhi's Emergency
 and putrescence of Establishment Marxists to get rid of them. 
Thereafter it was plenitude of the multivocal, unprecedented freedom 
for the author, subversion of academic dictats. And propensities of 
parataxis, nonlinearity, hybridity, rhizomatic, syncreticity, heterogeneity, 
openness, playfulness, irony, aptativeness, disjunction, displacement,
 immanence, fragmentation, disorientation, disruption, hagiographical, 
indigenous, talkative folk forms, subaltern, eco-feminism etc. became
 widespread in the fictions published in little magazines. This phenomena
 has drawn the wrath of modernist critics who have been selectively 
castigating authors. However, they are aware that postmodernism is 
the only umbrella beneath which such a diverse discourse may be brought 
together for a unifying congregation.
Despite such subversive and multivocal texts of the literary movements being
 eventually subsumed into the mainstream, even if selectively, based on
 political, media-centric, upper caste or post-Partition diasporic inclinations
, the challenge has permanently affected the way the postgeneric has 
impacted the present, and will impact the future, discourse, as has already
 been experienced in the case of certain Hungryalist and Shastravirodhi
 fiction writers like Basudeb Dasgupta and Ramanath Ray. Any literary 
defiance embodies the provocation of a literary code into socio-cultural,
 or tangentially, political code. Understanding of a postmodern text's 
interpellated and interpetalled designs definitely entails active collaboration
 on readers' part. The reader, the reader-as-critic, cannot afford to take 
his own position as granted, since certain problems will always remain 
unresolved at his own level. Any interpretation of a text will depend on
 the reader's understanding of the macro and micro cultural constructions
 and the socio-political givenness it was written from.
The postmodern Bangla short story generally aspires to resist memory's 
appropriation technique of vernacular newspaper literature or of textbook 
history, as the narrative proceeds mapping out counter-hegemonic 
strategies and obeys a memory-triggered structure in which textual 
swings develop ethnic elasticity. Postmodern short stories are worlds
 away from the metafictive self-consciousness of Parichoi-Kallol-Pragati
 and Notun Reeti authors, who gave primacy to the one single voice.
 Certain postmodern stories are a polyphonic mélange which need
 not be seen as productive of meaning but necessarily reflective or
 expressive. There are still some academicians who humiliate their
 graduate and postgraduate students if they are unable to locate the
 produced meaning of a text. Evidently, the discourses are basically 
plural, and there can never be a monocentric correctness as demanded
 by modernist critics.
It is pertinent to note that during the Emergency when Indira Gandhi
 suspended fundamental rights of the individual, and texts were subjected 
to censorship, several authors adopted a secret slyness in their fictions to
 enable the narrative to speak in different voices from behind textual masks
 in order to de-structure and deconstruct the centre of power. During the last
 decade of the 20 th century, in certain semi-urban and rural areas of
 West Bengal, ravaged by political violence, authors are forced to employ
 this technique to rescue language and literature from the terrorizing 
stasis around them.
As a result of the culture of political violence, villagers affiliated to one 
political party are hounded out of their ancestral hearth and farmland 
forever, or till the balance tilts, by villagers affiliated to the locally powerful
 or ruling political party, something unimaginable during premodern/precolonia
l and modern/colonial days. Such values are completely alien to West Bengal
 where Muslim farmers never fought with each other. However, the 
postmodern feature is that such violence and terror have got nothing 
to do with Marxist and Gandhian ideologies that the parties brag about. 
All ideologies, commitment and virtue have withered away. Loyalties can
 be switched at will, one's own or someone else's. Though in their youth in
 1950s they had shouted Yeh azadi jhutha hai (Frantz Fanon in 1961 called it
 'the farce of national independence') on the streets, the now-bloated top 
bosses of political outfits do not appear to be seriously bothered about
 present smithereening of West Bengal's ethnic life/world, of people who 
have lived together since thousands of years. As a result of political violence,
 the subject (just a digit to the State) is territorially deappropriated; his 
forefather's land has become a recognizable locus for incessantly 
unresolved problems. And this is one of the subject-positions where
 postmodern Bangla textual reality develops as a complexity. In Tripura 
the division is between tribals and non-tribals where the violence is defined 
by ruthless firepower.
Certain dominating media networks have their maximum security prisons 
of authorial world of customer-friendly consumerist language, which have 
been subverted by the micro-narratives of such authors as Udayan Ghosh,
 Atindriya Pathak, Barin Ghoshal, Subimal Basak, Ajit Ray, Kamal Chakraborty,
 Mrinal Banik, Samir Basu, Tarak Rej, Nabarun Bhattacharya,
 Manab Chakraborty, Bhagirath Mishra, Abhijit Sen, Subimal Mishra, 
Prasun Bandhopadhya. Arupratan Basu, Subhas Ghosh and Abani Dhar. 
Fluidity of their micro-narratives undermine the logic of power; the reader 
is forced to unravel the intertextuality and the power-structure that weave 
subject-positions within societal complexities. The subject refuses to be a digit. 
Their texts undermine the readers' search for a fixed subject-identity through
 semantic, semiotic and syntactical flux. The texts function as filter as well 
as amplifier of suppressed voices and fragmented undefinable subjectivities.
 The narrative involves the reader in the textual problems of the story which
 resist creating modernist stereotypes. As a result the identities, instead of
 getting lost in the quagmire of fixity, engage themselves in perpetual remaking.
Titles of postmodern Bangla short story go beyond logocentric modernist 
norms to metonyms of plurality. It may be intentional or unconscious. 
Instead of calling them 'titles', it would be ontologically and historically
 proper to call them 'rubric'. Prior to the invasion of colonialism, nature 
could never be owned by a native of West Bengal, be it land, water surface 
or forests. There were no concepts of title, title holder, deed, registration, 
rights, will, probate, affidavit, advocate, dalil, sastavej, wakil, wakalatnama,
 tauji, mauja, jameendari, shariq, munim, mukhtar, peshkar, etc. pertaining 
to ownership of nature or dispute relating thereto. All these words were alien
 to Bangla ethos and ethnos; they did not and do not have Bangla synonyms.
 These concepts were aimed at containing land, flora and fauna, subordinating 
them to human will, and rendering nature's infinititude into computable minims.
 It was settlement and seizure of Bangla territory through language.
Bangla nature represented, in innumerable forms, gods and goddesses. 
Even Buddhism was forced to have gods and goddesses. Today, most of 
the political violence in villages erupt out of disputes relating to ownership 
of farmland, orchards or water surfaces. Land reforms have reached a dead
 end as fragmentation of land has crossed limits. There is now no scope to 
absorb the surplus farmers in cultivation. No industries have come up to
 absorb them either. Rather, the majority of those that already existed, 
especially those owned by indigenous people of West Bengal, have either 
been struck off through alien ontology or locked off by disgusted entrepreneurs.
 Rural areas swarm with illiterate, unemployed farmhands while urban 
and semi-urban areas swarm with educated unemployeds, fifty years after
 Independence and twenty-five years of quasi-Marxist rule. Several of the 
authors have been groomed in this postmodern condition. A strange 
post-Industrial scenario indeed! Time packaged in a coffin!
In premodern Bangla, oral or written narrative was nature's gift to mankind
 of this specific geography. The text was not the private property of the writer. 
In fact, the concept of author itself arrived with Occidental poetics. 
The premodern writer did not have authority over the text prepared by him. 
In case of some Mangalkavyas, the writer claimed that a particular god directed
 him in his dreams. Even as late as 1970, Komol Kumar Majumdar has written
 almost all his stories after obeisance to his personal deities in the first sentence
 of his texts, which he ethnicised in an incomparable discourse based on 
premodern semantic, semiotic and syntactic nuances.
In case of premodern writers, any subsequent writer was free to add
 his own contribution to anybody else's texts, or change the entire structure
 of the earlier narrative. Valmiki's epic Ramayana has hundreds of versions
 in various Indian languages. All of them are accepted at all levels of the
 particular language-society. Nabaneeta Dev Sen in her essay 
The Hero's Feet of Clay (2000) has cited women's re-tellings of the epic, 
dating from 16 th century to the present day.
Prior to invasion of modernity, there was personal possession in 
Bangla life/world, and no idea of private property existed. The concept
 of ownership of text created violence in native philosophy, society and culture. 
No text had a title in premodern Bangla literature, and the writer was not at all 
a title-holder author. Title meant seizure and fixity. Title identified the center
 of power. Titles of narratives arrived with Occidental poetics, and became 
inseparable from the center of power of the content during
 Porichoi-Kollol-Notun Reeti span. The title identified the core of the 
subject matter. Since the title-holder or the author owned the text, the 
entry and the exit of the text had to be securely closed. Hence the twist
 of the key in the last para or thereabouts of a story became essential to 
keep the exit-door of the story carefully clicked shut. The close-endedness
 of a text was perfected with imperialism's foray into indigenous unowned cultures.
Political internecine violence may also be interpreted as emergence of a 
tool to reopen indigenous cultures, be it in West Bengal, Tripura or
 African countries. Naxal violence in West Bengal, and fragmentation
 of this school of thought into thirty-six warring camps, had gone beyond 
political domain. In fact, the efforts of Hungryalist, Shastravirodhi and 
Neem Sahitya fiction writers to dismantle the single core of the subject matter, 
were carried further by writers who emerged after the above fragmentation. 
The gol gappo sndrome became limited to newspaper literature. 
The postmodern fiction writer employs rubric instead of title, as an external 
unifier of his narrative thoughts, as a measure of decentering, and for 
the purpose of highlighting the periphery. With emphasis on the periphery,
 the focus of the text shifts to micro-territory of characters. However, the
 micro-territory remains increasingly plagued by neo-colonial ills; economic 
disorder, social malaise, political scams, criminal as politician, government
 corruption, influx of famished Bangladeshi Muslim families, repression by 
state and political party apparatuses, digitalisation of individuals as voters,
 indifference and apathy of public sector institutions. The progressive time 
of modernity has evaporated in thick polluted air. Amid this hypochondria, 
the postmodern texts are forced to probe their own narrative ways out of 
the disillusion. There are authors who have declared in print that they do 
not own copyright of their books.
Not having a title and title-holder, the postmodern text has evolved ability 
to be both of specific micro-territory and yet also peregrinated. In its tension
 between the micro and the macro, local and non-local, particular and general, 
between domestic and public environs of characters, there is constant 
rubrification of identity. The alterity of the text is constructed on the principle
 of self-difference rather than as a self-identical whole. A postmodern mixture
 has taken place after the indigenous communes of West Bengal were overrun
 by influx of displaced persons from East Pakistan, leading to titlelessness
 of micro-cultures, micro-rituals, micro-customs, etc., and interweaving 
thereof in pluralistic discourses. A rubric emancipates postmodern Bangla
 short story from the major colonial anchorage of history. Titlelessness
 attacks ossification of text as art, and avoids commodification. Since 
postmodernism is mobile and on the random nomadic move, title of the 
text is an impossiblity, superimposed and artificial.
From premodern to postmodern Bangla literature has moved quite fast,
 much faster than Europeans. Language developmen, however, has not 
been able to keep same pace. The geographical space called Kalikshetra,
 spanning from Behala in the north to Dakshineshwar in the south, was
 handed over to Rai Majumdar Lakshmikanta Choudhury for raising revenue
 from the produce of the area vide a 1608 order of Emperor 
Nooruddin Muhammed Jehangir. Only people of subaltern castes viz.
 heley kaivarta, jeley kaivarta, namashudra, mahishya, sadgop, rajvangshi,
 poundra-kshatriya, etc., lived and toiled in the villages of the area.
 Not a single upper-caste family lived in Kalikshetra. Lakshmikanta,
 a Brahmin, built his residence on the outskirts of Behala. Kalikshetra 
became Calcutta when the descendents of Lakshmikanta, better known as 
Sabono Choudhury, were forced by the then Nawab of Bengal to transfer 
intermediacy and revenue rights to the East India Company in 1698. 
Premodern Kalikshetra became modern Calcutta. The original subaltern
 inhabitants were driven out, and in came hordes of middle-caste business 
families to seize upon new business opportunites. And with the transfer 
of Diwani Rights in Bengal to the Englishmen in 1765 and establishment 
of Fort Wiliam College in 1800, the entry of upper-caste families to the
 area became unstoppable. Modern Calcuta became postmodern Kolkata
 in 2001, as all original inhabitants, both premodern and modern, 
have been hounded out of the hub of the metropolis.
  
       
                                   

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