Coldnoon summer 2013 (1) by kenneth Trimble

SUMMER 2013 VOL I ISSUE II

EDITOR ARUP K CHATTERJEE

Coldnoon envisions travel not as flux but instead as gaps in travelling itself. Coldnoon means a shadowed instant in time when the inertia of motion of images, thoughts and spectacles, comes to rest upon a still and cold moment. Our travels are not of trade and imagining communities; they are towards the reporting of purposeless and unselfconscious narratives the human mind experiences when left in a vacuum between terminals of travel.

First published in New Delhi India in 2013 ISSN 2278-9642 Cover Photograph, Marcelo Rodini Cover Design, Arup K Chatterjee Typeset in Bergamo Std. Editor, Arup K Chatterjee Assistant Editor, Amrita Ajay Intern Assistant Editor, Huzaifa Omair Siddiqui Contributing Editors: Sebastien Doubinsky, Lisa Thatcher, G.J.V. Prasad, Sudeep Sen, K. Satchidanandan Copyright ÂŠ Coldnoon 2013. Individual Works ÂŠ Authors 2013.

No part of the publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or copied in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the author and the editor, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent acquirer. All rights belong to the individual authors, translators and photographers.

Jawaharlal Nehru University New Delhi 110067 India www.coldnoon.com

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

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Editorial | I and Barbed Wire: Meditations on Travelogy

Poetry

Three Poems | Salma Ruth Bratt

Five Poems | Kenneth Trimble

Three Poems | Sébastien Doubinsky

Four Poems | Snehal Vadher

Three Poems | Jessica Tyner

Three Poems | Eric L. Cummings

Poems | Arup K Chatterjee

Three Poems | Sudeep Sen

December 2012 | Shoshannah Ganz

Four Poems | Kelly Ann Jacobson

Four Poems | Jean L. Kreiling

Three Poems | Fahredin Shehu

Five Poems | Mohan Rana

Three Poems | Ronojoy Sircar

Three Poems | Manash Bhattacharjee

Four Poems | Jenny Morse

Nonfiction

Acts of Flanerie and Homecoming: Urban Spaces in the Poetry of Arun Kolatkar | C.S. Bhagya

Dacha | Robert Fox

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“ A Search in Secret India”, From Acts of Faith: Journeys into Sacred India | Makarand R. Paranjape

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Chilmark and Cheltenham: A Travel Diary contd. | Ananya Dutta Gupta

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“This is my home”: Reading Migration in Anjan Dutt’s Bow Barracks Forever | Mitali Gangopadhyay

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A Twice-Born Canon and its Reifiction: The Indian Hill Writings of Emily Eden, Fanny Parkes, Frank Smythe and Eric Shipton | Arup K Chatterjee Travel Without Moving: Ireland as An-Other England in G.B Shaw’s John Bull’s Other Island | Osmond Chien-ming Chang

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Studying Alternative Protest in Cyber Space: Through the Prism of the Pink Chaddi Campaign | Sapna Dudeja

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Contributors

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Editorial Board

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am thankful to my teachers and professors, Saugata Bhaduri, Makarand Paranjape, G.J.V. Prasad, and Dhananjay Singh for their support and theoretical guidance; to Marcelo Rodini for his photograph that became the cover of this volume; to the board of Contributing Editors – Sudeep Sen, Koyamparambath Satchidanandan, Sébastien Doubinsky, Lisa Thatcher and G.J.V. Prasad; to all the contributors in this volume for their prompt responses to my calls for submissions; to Shubhankar Dey of Induswebi Website Designing Company for overseeing the renewal and maintenance of www.coldnoon.com in its present form; to Huzaifa Omair Siddiqui who has served Coldnoon as Intern Assistant Editor Finally I wish to thank my Assistant Editor Amrita Ajay, and last and foremost of all, my parents to whom I dedicate this. Arup K Chatterjee

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To Ma, Baba, & those who could not Travel

With a mask of blood I cross your thoughts blankly: amnesia guides me to the other side of life

“Across”, Octavio Paz

COLDNOON: TRAVEL POETICS

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EDITORIAL | I and Barbed Wire1: Meditations on Travelogy2

Define, on the two-dimensional surface of the earth, lines across which motion is to be prevented, and you have one of the key themes of history. With a closed line…and the prevention of motion from outside the line to its inside, you derive the idea of property. With the same line, and the prevention of motion from inside to outside, you derive the idea of prison. With an open line…and the prevention of motion in either direction, you derive the idea of border. Properties, prisons, borders: it is through the prevention of motion that space enters history. (Netz, vi)

In the above sketch of barbed wire, with the recurring “you”, Reviel Netz has kept the reader on the other side. He evokes curiosity, just as barbed wire does. The barbed wire does not block sight. It perforates sight, dividing the space on the other side into prickly grids. “[S]pace enters history” as it is circumscribed. The fallout of the entry of space into human consciousness is the prohibition of a material entry or exit into, or out of, this space. Historically, across cultures of migration and in those with memories of concentration camps, the barbed wire has been understood as a symbol of Fascist ideology. However, its role in travelogy is entirely the reverse. Travelogically the barbed wire liberates the traveller from the same totalizing force that it is otherwise seen as upholding. The questions of who enters and who guards the exit are politically sensitive. They cannot be answered without ethical 1

The title of this essay is borrowed from Nathan Lerner’s photograph Eye and Barbed Wire, made in 1939. The photograph is also a text in analysis, as part of this essay. 2

“The travelogy of a travel act, or literature depicting a travel act, is thus its social and political difference, or inertia, against a graph [trend or tradition] of travel that temporally precedes or follows it.” See, “Editorial: Economy of the Travelled” in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics, Winter 2012-13.

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disturbances caused on either side of the barbed wire. The questions should be addressed to and by the subject of prohibition, the eye and the I; for it is eye that is the first warden of space, and the I, the first integer of its density. With the coming of the Bessemer process in 1855, manufacturing steel, on industrial scales, became cheaper. It is not surprising that the first patent for the barbed wire was issued only in 1867, despite its brazen “calligraphic” design belonging with the earliest artistic vindictiveness of the human civilization3. The strength of the barbed wire is in its unbreakability, in its tensile strength. It is perpetually tense, with the promise of withstanding greater tension; in its tension alone lies its fierceness to act upon human or animal flesh. In this regard, the eye of the subject plays a crucial role in the advancement of the state of incarceration that barb wire presents. With the eye comes the I. When I travel, I do so in frames. More specifically, I travel from frame to frame, from one frame of looking to another. In other words, I travel poetically. The truth is I can only try to do so. The problem in travelling poetically is the problem of causality. When I talk of the frame of travel, I am referring to the image of travel, or the poetic image. I am even referring to the image as the phenomenon – the one, singular phenomenon. In The Poetics of Space Gaston Bachelard argues the past of this image has no role to play in its communion with traveller’s spirit, that there is no causality in the poetics of appreciation of an image. He reasons that when a poet draws an image he does not supply us with its history. The poetic image is an inaugural form. And, yet the image has a transsubjective communicability to us. 4 3

Referring to George Basalla’s The Evolution of Technology (Cambridge, 1988) Alan Krell writes in The Devil’s Rope: A Cultural History of the Barbed Wire: “the device could have been invented hundreds of years before the third quarter of the nineteenth century” (7) 4

See p. xv-xix. Bachelard further writes: “this transsubjectivity of the image could not be understood, in its essence, through the habits of subjective reference alone. Only phenomenology – that is to say, consideration of the onset of the image in an individual consciousness – can help us to restore the subjectivity of images and to measure their fullness, their strength and their transsubjectivity. These subjectivities and transsubjectivities cannot be determined once and for

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When I say that I travel from image to image I would betray to you a presumption that these images are somehow coherent in their interpretability; there must inevitably be some historical conditioning I have been subject to, that makes my choices in sight cohere. This rejection of the subjectivity of (my) image, this prohibition of a subjective entry into (my) image resembles Netz’s thesis of the barbed wire, that is, space enters history when framed. Consequently, I cannot enter an image without entering history, and I cannot begin to treat it as the undissimulated image without being criticized for turning my back to history. And, more importantly, I would also betray the presumption that I can see, and that my travel poetics becomes as mute as visually challenged one becomes. I do not intend to trivialize this dialectic between the solipsist and the historicist, the phenomenologist and the ontologist. My idea is not of reconciling them but adding tension to their oppositions. In order to interpret my image-to-image transition in poetic order there must be a thread, an intermolecular pattern. I will not call it history or space or phenomena or individualism. I will call it tensity5. Tensity is not tension; it is a property of matter with regard to its withstandability of tension. There is tensity in my images. I can experience the tautness with which they pierce me; if they happen to pierce you I tend to equate my mind with yours, mine and your flesh. It is a matter of our respective tensities. When I try to snap the barbed wire, or to bend over it I find it giving way, yielding to my flesh. I also find bruises on me. For, that is how the tensity of my flesh behaves. But, the opposition of the barbed is not primarily towards my flesh. It is neither to my sight. Instead, the wire facilitates my sight. It incites me to look beyond its grid while in its absence there would not have been a beyond. The frame that I have to create otherwise, or the frame that creates itself, is brutally in provision in every grid of the barbed wire. There is a tension in my frames without

all, for the poetic image is essentially variational, and not, as in the case of the concept, constitutive.”(xix) 5

Tensity is the “state of being tense”; it is as such the becoming and being of tension in matter. In this essay it the word will frequently approximate the meaning of “tensile strength”

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the barbed wire. It is this tension that holds my poetic images from scattering. The barbed wire has incorporated this tension. It does not let me or my frame choose one another. It inflicts its tension on my flesh when I try to bend it. It stifles me because I can now see space with the promise of those countless frames, each with countless images. It directs me to one frame but prohibits my reaching another. The barbed wire is a complex of spectacles. It is not unaided. It is guarded by the inner that we should not trespass. Whether with the German at the Auschwitz or the domestic patriarch, the barbed wire is a spectacular pretense without either, or some other castigatory figure. It is a pretense because its tension precedes the tensity of the condition of being under gunpoint, or, at least, figuratively so. What is the barbed wire if not a referent to something ghastlier than itself? What is its efficiency, after all, if not guarded by a rifleman or a foul-mouthed gardener? The wire is not a wall whose rupture is a challenge in an order of degrees. The wall is a straightforward force of obstruction. The barb wire is a cul-de-sac. It does not snap. It gives in marginally. I am a traveller, not a prisoner, or a refugee. As a traveller, I need not snap it. But it invites me to. And, in the process it traps me. I do not know what it is to breach the barbed wire. I cannot, therefore, talk of it. But as I stand behind it I have numerous frames to look into. It is only now that the two categories that I had earlier rejected come into play â&#x20AC;&#x201C; history and solipsism. I see barren land. There is some vegetation at a distance. Materially, I can only deduce that there is less or more vegetation beyond the point of my vision. I can deduce the colour of the vegetation. My deductions will at best be empirical. Or, I could instead declare there was a monster, there where I was not able to look. That it was bathing in the fountain, expiating its sins. Let the rational mind find ample justification for such foresight, empirical, or solipsistic, for now, behind the barbed wire I am truly in pursuit of coherence. I lack tension; my tension has been usurped by the architect of the barb wire. The tensity that weaves my poetic images is transferred into that of the barbed wire. It pre-empts the suspension of my images. When in knowledge of the tensity of my images I am content not having to provide arguments or explanations about their coherence. I know they have chemistry like the organic bonds of carbon; that, their vast reaches

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overwhelm the necessity to provide a scientific discourse, anew. In his poem, “Barbed Wire” W.H. Auden construes it in the very same terms. Across the plains, Between two hills, two villages, two trees, two friends, The barbed wire runs which neither argues nor explains But where it likes a place, a path, a railroad ends…(450)

While I, behind the barb wire, try to deduce, imagine, or detect the cast away images, for Auden the wire itself becomes the image. Along the suspension of the wire there is an end to everything that moves. It is not substantively treacherous. It simply imbibes tension, indiscriminately, almost blotting it from its surroundings. It is only in crossing the barbs that the tension renews itself in space, and in the body inhabiting space. The poetic image is left to the traveller’s detection. But as long as I am behind, the leitmotif of the barb is tantamount to the poetic image. Higher the tensity of the wires connecting the barb, greater is its iridescence, and greater its potential for the revelation of new image. What is it when the barbed wire itself becomes the poetic image? I am tempted to lose, briefly, in the homonyms of “steel” of “steal”. The barb wire steels my image. In doing so, it adds great tensity to my image – the image of the I behind the barbed wire. However, by first becoming the image itself, it has transferred the imagery upon me. As in militarism, so in travel, the barbed wire has only a relative, spectacular, function. It is nothing without the eye or the I. It finally makes a spectacle of myself. I hang frozen behind it. I am suspended without being able to reach for the images I had imagined. Now, I am within the frame. When I sketch or photograph an image the I behind it diminishes in authorship. The image is transported from one realm to another, from one to another history. My position within that artistic framework is invariably superimposed with the viewers’ concurrent positions. Henceforth, my frameworks begin to matter less. Subsequently, the position of the image metamorphoses. When the barbed wire has framed me, the image and the I are steeled. The position is all that matters now. It is stretchable because of the steeliness, of the tensity of the image. But, it is not transferable across histories or subjectivities. The tensity itself is historical, and subjective; it is the most specific element that connects

every image of the barbed wire or the I behind it. It is the Grand pretense whereat all pretense is stolen. But, before I explain this further, I will study an image.

Nathan Lerner’s Eye and Barbed Wire

In the above image, there is no certainty of how close the eye is to the barbed wire.6 The play of light and shadow heightens this uncertainty. There is also a deliberate obfuscation of the scale. Especially because it is an almost cross sectional image, the eye appears to be moving in several directions.7 The eye, in this case in not just behind the barb wire but 6

see Krell’s The Devil’s Rope, p. 8

“The eye appears variously to be floating, lying flat on the ground and attached to the wire.” (ibid.)

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simultaneously beneath it – an overpowered eye – yet, constantly seeking an outlet, while outlets only abound between the barbs. The eye is caught embedded in the stones, nay it lies stoned, beneath the steely patriarch. Lerner has removed all signs of flesh from the photograph.8 There is no possibility of physical torture in the absence of life. As a result, we do not bother about who guards the barb wire to kill and who gets killed. The embedded eye is tantamount to the traveller’s eye, or the I that is the constant traveller – a nomad without a territory. The nomad, in this case, has been territorialized. Nomadism can be defined by a progressive change in densities of spaces.9 The nomad, who, as an inhabitant of space is its densifier, vetoes the population density of space. The eye can be hyper-nomadic. It can be in many places at one time. And, because it plays the role of a nomad, it chooses its place only as a consequence of its previous locale of inhabitation. the nomad goes from point to point only as a consequence and as a factual necessity; in principle, points for him are relays along a trajectory. (Deleueze and Guattari, 44)

While the barb wire is the striation in space causing a condition of polis, the eye represents the nomas; it “stands in opposition to the law”. Deleuze and Guattari reject the notion of the nomad being without a space or a territory; instead he is one who has chosen to belong everywhere, in a smooth space, free of territorial striations and borders.

“Lerner’s photograph is stripped of people (but stamped strikingly with a human presence)”. (ibid.)

In Nomadology: The War Machine Deleuze and Guattari describe nomadism as “divagation of local climates”. They further cite Hubac: “The nomads are there, on the land, wherever there forms a smooth space that gnaws, and tends to grow, in all directions…it has been established that the nomads make the desert no less than they are made by it…They add desert to desert, steppe to steppe, by a series of local operations whose orientation and direction endlessly vary”.(46) Thus nomadism not only controls population density but also material density of the earth.

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As such, he must be defined not by movement but the spaces he occupies or appears to derive10 from. With the nomad, on the contrary, it is deterritorialization that constitutes the relation to the earth, to such a degree that the nomad reterritorializes on deterritorialization itself. It is the earth that deterritorializes itself, in a way that provides the nomad with a territory. The land ceases to be land, tending to become simply ground (sol) or support. (45)

Because the nomad belongs in a deterritorialized everywhere, he does not move. He is “sedentary” and his space is “localized”. However, in the case of the eye, in the above photograph, firstly, its nomadism is territorialized. Instead of belonging to a local space, the space that it is embedded in, by very virtue of its specificity of the neighbouring striations, is a foreign space. The nomad (the eye) is alienated from its smooth space. It has been made to travel. Made to travel? Indeed, yes. Thus far, whatever it chose to occupy, and wherever to shift, it did so as a consequence of its derived territory. If this is true, Deleuze and Guattari, have rekindled the debate of causality versus phenomenology in my travel discourse. Accordingly, there is a historical cause for the nomad’s derivation from space to space, or within space itself. As such, the word “derivation” itself would suggest there is an efficient causality between the deriver and the derivate. So far, causality of travel poetics appears “hence proved”. However, saying that the earth becomes merely the sol11 (or soil) for the suspension of the solid body of the nomad does not entirely qualify the position of the eye in the photograph. The eye does not stay suspended anymore; it is mapped onto the soil. It cannot vetoe 10 “The word used in Latin to describe leave-taking of the shore is “deriver”, that which is a root of the modern word “deriving”. See “Editorial: Economy of the Travelled” in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics, Winter 2012-13.Also see, Counterpath: Travelling with Derrida p. 1-5. 11

“a fluid colloidal system; especially : one in which the medium is a liquid”, from Merriam-Webster Online: Dictionary and Thesaurus. See <http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/sol>

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the density of the space any longer. The sol itself has become the space, the territory to which it belongs. Sol acquires spatiality; the earth is reterritorialized and the nomad takes its first leap towards travelling again, after aeons of sedentariness. The nomadic eye, then, cannot forego adding to the density of the earth. Since it is no longer, merely, suspended in its (sol) territory, it has lost all its tensity. The tensity of this nomad is in an inversely proportional relation with its influence on density. When its territory is everywhere, therefore incalculable, it has only an infinitesimal bearing on the population density of space. When embedded to the earth, in fact, stoned on the surface of the earth, it not only becomes part of the populated density, but also the material density of its space. Shorn of all its tensity, that has now given way to that of the barbed wire, the eye resumes its travel. Contrary to the original presumption, that my – the travelling poet – eye travelled from frame to frame, it was never movement that defined my poetic images, but sedentariness. I have travelled from image to image only in a smooth space. It was the smoothness of their locales that linked them in a poetic communicability. No matter how singularly revelatory I thought each of them to be, my images were ever so homogenous. While the movement (or sedentariness) of the nomad is rhizomatic that of the nomadic eye is fulcrumatic. The movement of the eye circles the retina, which in turn is held by a fulcrum. The eye returns to its position time and again, each time by a different reaction. Arguably, in every position, the eye is following a nomadic trajectory, but it is also bound by its amplitude. Like a nomad, the eye accepts the relay of the image of one territory to another. There is purpose involved in the movement between images: the purpose of aiming at a site within the scope of its amplitude. Left to a smooth space the eye seeks image upon image, tensing itself to resonate between images. There is no resonance without tension, while higher the density of a substance, and lower the tensity, lower is its resonating capacity. When there is maximum tensity resonance is at its peak. In this relation between tensity and resonance the eye is caught in a paradox.12 To produce resonating images the eye tenses 12

The paradox of the eye is whether to itself resonate or to be a resonating effect between the images it encounters. Higher the tension in the images, visible to the eye, greater is the tensity required by the eye to weave them in a resonating

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itself more and more. When the tension of the eye exceeds its tensity, vision gives in, and breaks. The eye goes into a state of glaucoma.13 The travelling eye that is constantly in pursuit of a new image, that must necessarily be causally resonant with another, from a former territory, is therefore on the road to blindness. In other words, the travelling eye is definitely not a traveller, and further, it is not an eye – not an eye without the risk of eyelessness. Against the background of the earth – grounded to this wall – the I does not move anymore. In the erstwhile motion of the I, the eye was caught in a glaucomic travel. It is only now that its freedom sets in. It does not just travel, but everywhere it travels to, it also discovers a new territory. It behaves like the refugee at the Aushwitz who is described by Jean Paul Sartre in “Republic of Silence” as: We were never more free than during the German occupation. We had lost all our rights, beginning with the right to talk… Everywhere…we encountered the revolting and insipid picture of ourselves that our oppressors wanted us to accept. And, because of all this, we were free. Because the Nazi venom seeped even into our thoughts, every accurate thought was a conquest. Because an all-powerful police tried to force us to hold our tongues, every word took on the value of a declaration of principles. Because we were hunted down, every one of our gestures had the weight of a solemn commitment.

Sartre conflates auditory silence with visual silence. The emerging commitment of the voice and the eye underscores the emergence of the I. The I disrobes its nomadism; it gives in to the State apparatus (or is

chamber. And, with this added requirement of tension, the eye is more vulnerable to reach its breaking point, or the point of zero tensity, zero resonance and zero vision. 13 Glaucoma is a condition of complete or partial loss of vision due to excess intraocular pressure (tension) in the optic nerves of the eye. This pressure is caused due to excessive renewal of eye fluids; the eye renews fluids every time it blinks.

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made to give in). But, there is no substitute to the accuracy and boldness of the image that it now begins to chart. The eye has been mapped. And, even from behind the barbed wire it truly forays. The nomad’s trajectory is a relay of conditionality between his points of settlement. On the other hand, the eye has lost all receptivity for the relay. The listless gaze upon whatever lies beyond the barbs is a passage towards an imaginary migration, following a new land discovery. Not only the I occupies space, but space itself occupies the I, by means of the eye, as the I wanders exhaustively on the space inner space of the barbed wire, which is the space on the other side. Closer the eye is to the barbs, more efficiently they occupy its blind spot – its amplitude of accommodation. The eye no longer sees the barbs. There are no close-angle reflexes to the barbed wire. The travel of cause and effect ceases here; there is no flesh in the photograph that the barbs can scrape. The travelling I is liberated, and sublimed, with the incarceration of its eye. The new migratory space is not a series of historical points or poetic resonances. It is the exact whole and the final sublimation of the barbs – the uppermost poetic ideal. It is also the death of living for a purpose, and the beginning of a purposeless zeal for life; living of I as The Imag…no! I shall not prescribe that corrupt ethical stance of capitalising the traveller’s ipseity. The I must only be An “image”, the one image, and yet just another among many other travellers. I do not intend to teach humility to the travel poet, but a travel of poetic profits. To travel in the selfsame image spelt with a capital I is to return to a nomadic deterritorilized existence in a seemingly heterogenous, but practically homogenously arid desert space. The traveller should be the sedentary road not the nomadic distribution upon it.14 The I, therefore, is in need of the barbed wire. Now, coming back to the point where I had left (for the image), the pursuit of the poetic image is always part of the traveller’s pretense. By virtue of his nomadic eye, every image is also the point where a relay 14 According to Deleuze and Guattari the “nomadic trajectory… does not fulfil the function of the sedentary road, which is to parcel out a closed space to people, assigning each person a share and regulating the communication between shares. The nomadic trajectory does the opposite: it distributes people (or animals) in an open space, one that is indefinite and noncommunicating.” See Nomadology, p.44

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towards the next image occurs. An image stretches to relay its poetics to another; this tendency of the image becomes the pre-tendency of the eye. It is this pretense that blinds the travelling eye. The eye steals the pretense of the image; it is forever in a tendency to find images that can resonate with others, in a Grand Tour15 to find the one sublime and phenomenal image. It is owing to the sentry of the barbed wire that this pretense is usurped in its entirety. Given their tensity, the steel wires act as a classic repository of tension. At the same time the pretense of the eye is laid bare. In Auden’s poem the barbed wire becomes the ideal image which does not succumb to the necessities of explanation or dialogue. It is situated in a Republic of Silence. And yet, it is a Grand pretense because it cannot exist but relatively, its grandness subject to the vulnerability of the “I”. The word “pretend” has its roots in the Latin “tendere” meaning “to stretch”. Pretense is generally considered a sign of dishonesty. The word is translated variously as “falsehood” or “affectation”. I read it, instead, as a sign of the movement of the self that is beyond the power of its I. I am never there, where I am, but always ahead of there. This uncertain position is a function of the nomadism of the I that heavies it with pretense. That which is pretentious is also rhizomatic. It does not have a formulaic pattern of travel. The rhizome cannot be historically or politically defined. It is, in fact, in opposition of its polis. In this dialectical relationship, it is also inseparable from the historicity of its polis, which it dialectically sustains. The barbed wire itself is a rhizome. Its rhizomatism thrives on a nomadic architectural imagination. This makes it as primitive as the nomas, and as powerful as the State itself whose symbol it stands as, even while it is formal contradiction to it. A sublimation of the dialectic between the rhizomatism of the eye (later of the barb wire) and the State guardian of the barb wire paves way for the supreme poetic image. The image of the barbed wire is the most self-sustaining image of travel poetics. In fact, it even supersedes travel and poetry. To conquer the strength of this image

Grand Tour was a ritual tradition of travel around the continent, and later the Orient, that began in 17th century Europe, typically affordable for the aristocracy and other high echelons, and frequently associated with landscapes that were considered “picturesque” or “sublime”.

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the traveller has to go beyond it. I dare not say what image, or historical experience, this sublimation can produce. Even in 1905 G.K. Chesterton had pronounced the world a smaller place due to the orientalist literary exploits of Rudyard Kipling16, and his tribe of burdened Whites. I have just to reiterate a cliché. Only, the barbed wire has forced itself as an unprecedented way out of this tightening of scopes of travel. Both the travelling eye and the I need to be wired in. The barbed wire presents itself as the arms of Virgin Mary, the way she is witnessed in the pre-Reformation portraits of Baby Jesus with his mother. After Reformation, when the portraits started to feature Jesus relatively farther from the breasts of Mary, history coincided with the increase in optic prostheses in Puritanical Europe.17 There is a high chance that is recommendation will be read as barbaric. But it is the only way to curb barbarism in travel writing, and to protect the heterogeneity of the poetic image in face of the totalitarian and purposeful travel narrative. The ideal poetics of travel is possible only in an act of selfstoning, an ongoing penance, in ridding the eye of its tension. The ideology of the barbed wire is reversed in its travelogy. The barren land I see on the other side of the barbs is the bone of my conquest. I can be its sovereign poet only by being on this side; in crossing the barbed wire I will become a functionary of the state to guard the eyes of the rest to come. The tensity of that image will dissipate as though it were a mirage. As long as I do not cross the border, tread upon that inner space, my image will pretend its offerings to me.

See “On Mr. Rudyard Kipling and Making the World Small”, in Heretics.

Paul Virilio writes in The Vision Machine: There is a vast iconography evoking this prime communicational image…the Reformation's rejection of consubstantiality and of such close physical proximity intervenes during the Renaissance, with the proliferation of optical devices.” See p. 7.

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References Auden, W. H. Selected Poems, Ed. W. H. Auden. New York, 1958. Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. Trans. Maria Jolas. Beacon Press, Boston, 1994. Chatterjee, Arup K. “Economy of the Travelled”, in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics, Winter 2012-13, Ed.Arup K Chatterjee. Yodapress, New Delhi, 2013. Chesterton G.K. Heretics. Ferenity Publishers, LLC, Rockville, Maryland, 2009. Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Félix. Nomadology: The War Machine. Trans. Brian Massumi. Wormwood Distribution, Seattle, 2010. Derrida, Jacques and Malabou, Catherine. Counterpath: Traveling with Jacques Derrida. Trans. David Wills. Stanford University Press, California, 2004. Krell, Alan. The Devil’s Rope: A Cultural History of the Barbed Wire. Reaktion Books, London, 2002. Netz, Reviel. Barbed Wire: An Ecology of Modernity. Wesleyan University Press, Middletown, 2004. Sartre, Jean Paul. “Republic of Silence”, in Republic of Silence, Ed. A.J. Liebling Harcourt, Brace & Co., New York, 1947, pp. 498-500. Virilio, Paul. The Vision Machine. Tr. Julie Rose. Indian University Press, Bloomington, 1994. Merriam-Webster Online: Dictionary and Thesaurus. http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary

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POETRY

COLDNOON: TRAVEL POETICS

THREE POEMS | SALMA RUTH BRATT

Salma Ruth Bratt lives in Saint Cloud, Minnesota, USA. She is a professor of English and English pedagogy. Her writing is often in collaboration with Moulay Youness Elbousty. __ Bratt’s Hanuman is a novelty among the colonial and the navigator forefathers of this generation; there are grandfathers who have discovered sea routes or new lands and have become the subject of legendary celebrity or subaltern criticism. However, Hanuman does not fit in either sphere. His travels across the Indian Ocean are far deadlier compared to the voyages over the Atlantic. As the snake-guardian and sea-monster, Surasa expands before the doubly expanding Hanuman, the latter finally shrinks, enters her orifice and sails out of her ear. The scene inverts the Greek myth Cyclops that ends with the monster being killed by Odysseus. Hanuman defeats Surasa by doing just the opposite – paying her his respects. He begs leave from her. In spite of this inversion Hanuman inspires awe in his present day grandchildren. Unlike the primitive nomad or the modern colonizer Hanuman’s travels are neither of desertification, nor colonization. Surasa is the other of Sita who Hanuman is going to rescue. Hanuman does not conquer either, but Bratt interprets the seeds of a romantic quest, perhaps, in both. In this interpretation Hanuman’s travels are more singular in comparison with the myths and history of Western travel.

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Three Poems

Hbibi What I love most Is every movement toward you Opening my heart Hbibi When I dream I don’t wake to find you And I see Only by closed eyes If I feel you Reach my hand Your firm grasp Holds me But I call your name Without answer A simple movement Still far From home

COLDNOON: TRAVEL POETICS

Old Testament Watch there On that flat plain of volcanic black rock Serpent head rising above Dismembered body flayed across Be fooled By the pointed beard Then look at those breasts Fertile round belly Prominent navel Open arms An invitation Sit here On this bench of red and yellow A crowd of serpents will hold you Listen to the voices of ancient gossips and judges Pay for the sins of your past See them The tools of sacrifice Hooked-shaped obsidian for pulling out hearts Bloody still Smell this Masked bundles over pitted fires Smoke-conjured essence of a dead warrior Throw yourself on the fire for the public good Hold this Feel it round in your hands A Tecomate bowl Gourd shaped Take a drink Get dressed A spiral War serpent headdress Blade and torch Back mirror and coyote tails 4

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Â Strap on your spears and your serpents Adorn your sex organs with flowers Wear a necklace of teeth String jaws around your neck Feel your arms tied back Get down on your knees Water rushes toward you See the conch shells and the serpent Climb up Look around Feel the stretch of your legs You could fall here You could die Burn it A crystal Watch it form See Micah glitter on a wall Play here Breath and wind A centipede dance A kick-a-bone game Flapping arms Trees of butterflied spiders Birded serpents Water streaming from a tree Swooping words Follow this Reaching upward to the sky

COLDNOON: TRAVEL POETICS

Grandfather Hanuman

Surasa spread her jaws a full league wide, so Hanuman swelled to twice that size. The monster's maw became sixteen leagues; presto! The windchild grew to thirty-two. However much Surasa blew up her face that monkey managed to double the stakes. But when she loomed a hundred leagues he suddenly shrank to tiny form, shot into her maw and out again and politely asked leave to depart. Ramcaritmanas, Tulsidas

Golden house Mahogany brown door closed against us Strange smells and sounds Float by our curious noses and ears Grandfather had flown here We thought Not like the others In sickening voyages across the Atlantic Not in boats smelling of decay, urine, salty sweat Not rocking in queasy motion Grandfather opened his arms and flew Expanding to cover the ocean Constricting to land on the far away shore Like the sun when it sets across the water Gold like the sun Was our Grandfather And when we passed his closed door We dared one another to enter "You first!" "No you!" "You scared?" "You are!" And so we never did We never burst through to declare ourselves "Grandfather!" We would have shouted

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Â "We are yours!" "You are ours!" Not one of us ever dared We were different We knew that But still, we hoped... Couldn't he see us? The children outside Didn't he know we were his? Couldn't he throw wide the door? Welcome us home? Feed us sweets Tell us stories Of his far-away place Of his fanciful ocean journey Couldn't he throw wide his arms? Couldn't he touch us? Couldn't he see himself in our faces? Brown as we were Still we were his Hadn't we crossed the ocean too? He had shrunk To the size of a split yellow pea And forgotten that a woman Dark like the soft brown mahogany door Now shut so tightly against us Had once opened her arms to him And hadn't he once In his life At least once Held her in his arms? Hadn't he loved her then? Golden skin

COLDNOON: TRAVEL POETICS

Golden jewels Golden sun setting here Setting here on a golden home With a door shut tightly against us

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FIVE POEMS | KENNETH TRIMBLE

Kenneth Trimble has published three books – Clouds on Hanover Street, Shores of American Memory and The Barking Mad Poems. His work can be seen in the Guerrilla Graffiti Magazine, www.horrorsleazetrash.com, www.collectedworks.com, and www.tenpagespress.com. He lives in Warburton, Australia. __ The poet can never travel; he is always caught between the travel of cultures, in a hypnotic labyrinth as a buffer between their travelogies. While in the Isle of Skye in Scotland, Trimble upholds a maxim of William Blake, holding “infinity in the palm”, seducing the reader, as well as himself into a cultural myth. And soon, the superego intervenes in this infinity to deflect the ego on a road to becoming anonymous. However, for Arunachala, who he seeks this anonymity from, he is a constant other, a hallowed “thou”. The poet walking through Arbat Street, in Moscow, at the brink of Soviet Russia’s collapse and the end of its War in Afghanistan is at best a hybrid Dostoevsky who cannot partake of the euphoria of communism, even while crossing the material remains of the origins of the Bolshevik Party. He is left alone, and afloat “on the river of no returns”.

COLDNOON: TRAVEL POETICS

Five Poems

William Blake and I I sat on the beach at Skye with two friends; thirty years ago; a lot younger then. A bottle of red wine; a loaf of bread, and some cheese. We sat in silence, and drank, with that youthful easy ease. We tore our bread, and ate our cheese, chased by Merlin’s breeze. I do not say this lightly, but that day on the beach, we took communion, the beach our altar, the mountains, our priests. William Blake was right, when he said, ‘to see a world in a grain of sand’ for on that day in Skye, I held infinity in the palm of my hand.

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Arunachala I seek anonymity in you, a faceless face, a jewel in the thousand pillared lotus. Shining red mountain lit bright in ruby red, a thousand brown bodies, prostrate to Thee. What is your secret hidden in your rocks? Why do you call me Thou?

COLDNOON: TRAVEL POETICS

White Birch A forest of white birch greeted me in the spring of 1988. Land of poets. Land of blood. I a young communist filled with hope; emptied by despair. I held Jack Reeds, ‘ten days that shook the world’, with fragile hands. I wandered down Arabat Street sensing history; feeling betrayal. Locked in the past I became a pilgrim in an old army coat. A dishevelled Dostoevsky with an Australian accent. Midnight; red square, a cold night flowers into bloom. Soldiers goose stepping under a red star. Onion domed Saint Basil, Rasputin lurks in his cloistered shell. I watch in the shadows of false dreams. I am alone. Here.

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By the River Kites fly high in the luminous light. Sadhus sit entangled in hair, smoking transcendent weed. Boats glide on the river, jasmine wafts in the morning breeze. The Ghats are burning. Thunder rolls on; as cows and people stand around on mass. A traveller in India watches. He watches. I am playing with my camera on the river of dreams; a shutter clicks; two boats drift on the wind. Images; mystical moments, captured on the river of no returns.

COLDNOON: TRAVEL POETICS

Inland Lake Eyre was full with water. Fish clambered onto the sand. Salt water fish, swept into fresh waters, dying. We camped not far from the lakes edge, and at night you could hear the dingoes, howl. The stars a living thing; holding the ancient dreaming. Morning came-animal tracks circled our tents. My eyes scanned the lake. Out there pelicans hang above water; perhaps they got lost.

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THREE POEMS | SÉBASTIEN DOUBINSKY

Sébastien Doubinsky is a visiting lecturer at Aarhus University, Denmark, and the Editor/Publisher of Le Zaporogue. He is the author of numerous books of poetry, and non-fiction. Apart from English he has also published in French. __ For Doubinsky the past is the region which always beckons the traveller yet is inaccessible except in memory or in myth. So, his travels are spatial yet also temporal; his poems are spaces where time does not stand still, yet it does not slip through one’s hands either: “travelling is but a figure of the mind”. Like the sailors in Seamen’s Semen, there is no destination but a continuous journeying which does away with all idea of arrival, but also with the idea of leaving for one can never really slip out of the circles of the world. The Seamen are the typical nomads who can never really find his way back home for all that remains is memory, history and myth, all of which are illusory and unsatisfying. Yet the call of the road is one that must forever be hearkened to and history, even if one does not believe in it, must coalesce into meaning the amorphousness of the journeys of, and into, the past.

COLDNOON: TRAVEL POETICS

Three Poems

In Greece with Christophe (1983) I remember thirteen years ago the green sea and the invisible wind carried smells of mystery and decay through the blue streets of Athens the ruins of the days shone brightly against our sweaty backs and a woman brought us water when one afternoon we were lost and burning in the middle of hills fertile with cicadas and treacherous stones we were so young then under the trees Apollo spoke to us and in the hills the muses had bodies of white marble we could admire but not touch red evil Aphrodite moon shone harsh magnificent over the balcony of our hotel room in Argos cursed city

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taste of olives and feta cheese and the laments of rebetiko crackling from old radios I can still remember the metallic taste of the retsina wine poured into dirty glasses in the end of the afternoon and I can still hear the voice of Dionysos calling us from the darkening hills and I can still touch the cheap souvenirs we bought in a hurry at Omonia we believed in History then pale yellow innocence unknowingly lost forever between the mountains and the Ægean sea in Kalavrita there is a source of pure water —for the first time I was in love

COLDNOON: TRAVEL POETICS

Seamen’s Semen the gurgling sea shines flatly like a mirror full of promises and the stars are piercing the blue carpet like very long nails and the sailors sing a lonesome blues watching the harbour close by earth fertile city glowing neons the call of the flesh and all things the sailors cannot wait to set foot on the all-too-familiar forgotten land and spray their foamy salted semen within wombs for rent like cheap bug-infested rooms —but they don't care sailors are not the romantic type with a whore looking like the back of a cargo-ship who would be, they say and the sailors dream resting confused within their arms for hire content with images of firm earth red meat and cheap alcohol sometimes one begins to laugh at his own memories while the ships await in the silent night like minotaurs in the labyrinth calling the men with the saddest songs luring them back with promises of postcards and centrefolds

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they say they never want to go back but they always do they say they know every harbor in the world but they still want to see more and they stand at the doors of miserable taverns displaying their tattoos large hands tough backs and sometimes very pale eyes that steal away the soul of sad-looking married women who want to believe in cheap words such as adventure and tour du monde because they need to believe in something more than the stale exotism of their husband's after-shave silhouettes of strength and sadness square ghosts sitting at the bar drinking and drinking and fighting sometimes in an attempt to be merry —trying to chase away the sirens and harpies continuously gnarling at their souls— and then drinking some more for no particular reason at all silhouettes of sadness and spume we pretend to avoid and secretly envy forgetting that the horizon is everywhere the same imaginary line Odysseus Black Beard Blaise Cendrars seamen images of poets mouths of the obscure

COLDNOON: TRAVEL POETICS

telling stories to their children and their children's children arriving is just another illusion as you cannot build roads on the sea and leaving is just another hope as you already know all the faces so, poets, pick up your suitcase full of books and step into the salty wind of this summer morning but remember: travelling is but a figure of the mind here â&#x20AC;&#x201D; smell the sea hesitation is a moment

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Fragment between kingdom and catastrophe – all of our humanity concentrated in a stutter of the mind

COLDNOON: TRAVEL POETICS

FOUR POEMS | SNEHAL VADHER

Snehal Vadher has studied at universities in the UK and currently lives in Bombay, where he teaches English and conducts creative writing workshops. His short fiction and poetry has appeared in nthposition, Nether and Almost Island. He maintains a blog on poetry at http://chantsdemaldoror.wordpress.com/. __ Vadher begins by redirecting the common activity of walking; his walk has no relief, no end, and no punctuation. He walks from nowhere to nowhere, the road of his walk being a single spool spiralling inward or outward around home. Travel is presented as a transcendence to foreign pastures and of common homegrown pecuniary concerns such as the rarity of choice between “latte or a cappuccino”. But even in transcendence there is a search for the community, where the travel experience can become “the subject of conversation”. The nomadology of the traveller gives into the nomadology of the road that “Keeps vanishing at the end of each climb”. The road does not merely distribute the nomad over space but is itself distributed in the process: “The road only reaches the town with us.” The road becomes, in the unbecoming of the traveller. In the end what survives is the tensity of the highly unbreakable “electric spines” that contain the most ordinary yet surreal, the sternest poetic image.

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Four Poems

Walking walking i measure distance unspooling time on the road rocking in trochaic under my feet becoming a measure of distances between me that was is yet to be how many paces how many ages in the ageless light of noon till my breath dissipates it's darkness till arriving overshoots beginning reversing what i had set out for to the cause of returning home

COLDNOON: TRAVEL POETICS

Travellers

I The scenes that flash past make the travellers look thoughtful and put them to sleep. When they open their eyes, they are greeted by a new landscape, sheep grazing on a hill, a weather that becomes the subject of a conversation, like that one about the coming of the man with a trolley of drinks and snacks or the tiny flower-shaped hole made by the ticket checker as reason to keep the tickets as memorabilia.

II They had arrived a quarter of an hour earlier, and standing at the platform had seen and wondered at the machinery, their reflections in the passing trains faces turned the other way, eyes squinted, hair blown by its wake. All this was made in moments of calm and with the abstract goodwill of the manufacturer, so that their journey be comfortable, but which in trying to reach each one of them can no longer be felt in the segregation of the coaches, in the redundancy in the announcements,

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Â in having to consider the repercussions of small choices (will it be a latte or a cappuccino?) with the background knowledge that few can afford this luxury and with the irksome possibility of such moralising as unseasonable.

III These were the thoughts of him who dreamt the soldier of Dagestanâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s dream reversed, living in it, imagining that the train had come to a standstill, someone explained what the name of the station meant, then he had got off and entered the little magazine stand on the platform, where in a self-help book he had read something to the effect that even the simplest of the rules were not established, which made him get back on the train more at peace with himself and the others, whom he believed to have had these thoughts, too.

COLDNOON: TRAVEL POETICS

The Road to Harihareshwar The road to Harihareshwar Keeps vanishing at the end of each climb, And when it finds itself in the descent, Changes its mind in a hairpin bend. Swerving abruptly at cliff edges, Snaking through the shadowless afternoon With a river’s turbulent grace, The road only reaches the town with us. The view outside is something we’ve thrown Out of our conversation; the sun Illuminates the greys between the brown, Dry country and uninhabitable white sky. Through the antennae of leafless trees Our silence seeps into the distant mirroring lakes, And when we reach the sea, we’ll make The offering of disbelief to any god that’ll have it.

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Evening October days passed by in a flurry, like sunlight through a train's window. The landscape outside swerved more than the moving forward justified, and echoed off the furniture left behind. Evenings made clear that this light can be taken away. If the crescent moon did not hold the gaze with its cold sheen, the outlines of the fading bodies would have smudged in the smoky haze: then, only giants would keep standing by the fact of their having electric spines.

COLDNOON: TRAVEL POETICS

THREE POEMS | JESSICA TYNER

Jessica Tyner is a Pushcart Prize-nominated writer from the USA, and a member of the Cherokee Nation. Her publishing history includes over 30 pieces in 2012 alone. Recent projects include travel writing with Mucha Costa Rica, copy editing for the London-based Flaneur Arts Journal, and contributing to New York’s Thalo Magazine. She has recently published poetry in Slow Trains Literary Journal, Straylight Magazine, and Glint Literary Journal. __ The architecture of an active volcano, assumes anthropomorphic dimensions when Tyner approaches its ash covered crater. The womb of the Irazu reminds the poet of her own womb wounded from a recent surgery. Both the poet and the image mourn a common eruption (of an abortion?) The memory of the womb rekindles the memory of the child; the poet becomes a child of the volcano, in the absence of her own, and her lover. When, later, with her lover aboard “The Catamaran” she experiences the fragmenting of love between them, it is the sickness at sea, and the foreign “Jamaican tongues” that, ironically, and therapeutically heal their relation momentarily. The “blossoming explosion” finally occurs again when eventually, Tyner gives yields as a wilful imitation the travel-artefact – clamped by her lover’s lips like a souvenir – and becomes Penelope-and-Odysseus-in-one.

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Three Poems

The Road Past Cartago I drove to Irazu Volcano two weeks after being split open and threaded back together. The lurching station wagon barely made it up the curling road. Villagers hung their fresh laundry in the fields, stained underwear and baby bibs slapping in the breeze among the smell of morning gallo pinto and cow manure. At the highest point, I parked the choking car and walked towards the crater, ash and sand crawling between my toes, stitches pulling tight in my stomach. There are no guards en paraiso, no insurmountable fences, no signs telling you no. Ducking under the broken wooden gate, I witnessed the abyss below. Sulfur makes Diego de la Haya turquoise as a cartoon and I crouched down like a child, pressed my palm hard into the heat of a wound that blossomed as effortlessly as a Guaria Morada, as beautifully as the last eruption, and wished you were there.

COLDNOON: TRAVEL POETICS

The Catamaran May’s long weekend was spent on a catamaran in Manuel Antonio, the crew’s thick Jamaican tongues twisting around Tico Spanish. On the upper deck I said I was leaving you and couldn’t look you in the face. A dolphin laughed and an Indian couple on their honeymoon asked you to take their picture. For three hours you tried to untangle my reasons until we both got sea sick and spent the sunset hanging our heads over the rails.

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Love You More I sent you a keychain stamped love you more from my crumbling Costa Rican hacienda. You were turning thirty and we had years of regrets stitched and scarred up and down our arms like teenagers in the grip of delusion, tired dogs after the fights. I waited until you caught up with me to say I was coming back, my muscles tensed, fat scars ropy thick, ready for a blossoming explosion black as your eyes swimming beneath heavy brow and deafening as your lips wrapped like a vise around my name.

COLDNOON: TRAVEL POETICS

THREE POEMS | ERIC L. CUMMINGS

Eric L Cummings shuffles between Prague (Czechoslovakia), and Morgantown, (West Virginia, USA). His poems have appeared in Watchword, New Calligraphy, nether, GRASP, and/or, VLAT and elsewhere. He teaches ESL in Central and Western Europe. __ Cummings complicates Stockholm Syndrome with his experiences in Stockholm that both holds him as a hostage and refuses its ethnic identity to the poet. He is left as a perpetual nomad, in spite of smelling “like paint dripping in the Moderna Museet”, the state museum of modern art at Stockholm. We cannot determine what precisely makes him guilty of having to leave: the expiration of his period of captivation or the loss of memory of home, where he must now necessarily be bound. As a nomad he now hates all fauna and forestry; he prefers the industrial desert that his city is, the smooth unmarked space despite its token striations of the trains and the plumbings. The city can provide him heterogeneity and the promise of a rhizomatic existence, while “The Appalachian Trail” is a morass of vegetation that curbs his nomadology. The road to home is “unmarked”; it is smooth. And yet, home is a non-existent location for the nomad. Poetically he begins to de-vegetate the road with the coming of the ice rain. The travel poet must now deflect himself away from home, en route to another desert.

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Three Poems

Stockholm (syndrome) My first day here I was the neighbour no one knew, a stranger and no one noticed. This country is rich in salutations, its core; untapped sincerity, an ore in its purest form. Life here is a race to see who can keep their candy on the tip of their tongue the longest, a contest to see who enjoys swimming the most. These are a people running the run without running, whose dreams dream them. I feel alien and ugly. Only their language knows me truly, denies my greedy lips its secrets. I respect that, I'm an intruder in this long soft morning shadow. Here, is a place I shouldn't exist and don't. A Templar tomtar, loitering astray all night in the Kungsträdgården, I smell like paint dripping in the Moderna Museet. My face has grown the customary smile and I sport a long and long scarf on cobbled streets tween candied houses as even I've always floated on toes.

COLDNOON: TRAVEL POETICS

Held captive for brief but intense periods of breathlessness, I'm easily confused. It's time for me to go back to the home I barely remember. This feeling of stay is stolen but no one in their heart of hearts has the heart to tell me this. Bit by bit I'm swept up by a spring breeze, I feel more and more guilty I have to leave.

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A Hike (The Appalachian Trail) There is something funny about Washing our clothes in the stream. The nature of this laughter is desperation. In today's day and age to get wet, To do something by hand, seems Extra and ancient. I wish my grandfather Could see me, my meager attempts, Tell me the difference, either buttressed or betrayed. Distraught. The sigh of the wind Sighing behind our backs . The choke of the soapy River bubbles unto my elbows. The embarrassed garments, The overall disappointment of this day, glower. The track back is long, broken and invincible. Is that a bear there? Run or climb? Die, die, die, die. I Don' care, our blisters will kill us if virgin hemlocks Don't swallow us first. It feels like God forgot this forest While falling down this hill. Maps were made to lament. No one we know expects us to survive. Even if we do they will still be right. I hate all bird, fauna, Bug, and flower now. I miss the city, its plumbings, peoples, Trains and real things; the nascent nights that wont kill us. I want to go home: Where there is no way to let down the memory Of the living. Home: Where it doesn't matter how hard we try or don't.

COLDNOON: TRAVEL POETICS

Late Accumulations (Pan-American Highway) I don't want to say raining. But it's raining ice. Not hailing, these are not little thuds hitting but intermittent crackles blanketing. A cold static has come. The old kingdom is over. It's too dark to be out on this road driving. The rhythm on the roof tells me this, A whisper from my own lips, or the secret of winter unsatisfied with passing, broadcasting, answers? This is surely the emptiest state. A satellite country with comet weather. Making a come back, creeping in from a wrong exit, sliding up next to the peripheral, stealth, this chill. It's shiny knives against springs windshield. No, spears. Needles, not spears. Me outside where I'm heading, not home. Lonely smoking, not alone. The boycott against my ways is somewhere warm indoors watching TV and eating something nice. Even you have felt the cold. You, even there, have overheard the ambitions of self echo. You too have given up, undaunted, writing illegibly in the dark. Me, like any season, a visitor trying to be. I admit I'm tired and I resent sleep. This is not my bed yet. Away, the road is frozen and dignified- more so than the promise of me. This road unmarked, follows its way home, chases its tails. The two ways always arguing. I can hear them howling in the wind. Miserable because it's ice falling, not rain. It's not raining yet it is raining, the road is wet.

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POEMS | ARUP K CHATTERJEE

Arup K Chatterjee is writing a dissertation for Ph.D at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. __ Often, travellers bear the mark of their journeys on their own bodies; often it is borne by others on their behalf. Chatterjee casts away these marks on his reflection, the other. It is this other identity that he belittles even while displaying as a conquest of a city. He makes the other a subject of his conversations, his poetry and sees in it a blueprint of an architecture to come. He seduces the other by pretending to make “false starts”. He believes the other lives a trivial existence that begs no journaling or sensitive recollections, that the details come to the poet effortlessly. In the promise of making “false starts”, the otherwise sedentary poet, constantly trods on the body of the other, who he considers of a prudish civilization. There is a sustained dialectic between the city that keeps “conscience in sunshine” and the slumber of the “native hills”. While the other is drawn as maps and contours of flyovers the poet’s promissory note is a reinstatement of the “cloud and storm” imagery, with whose ranks he associates his own “crumpled sheets”.

COLDNOON: TRAVEL POETICS

Poems

Haikus native hill slumbers until wanderers rewrite a new foreign text

the gardener could tell so long after footprints fresh the ash of bonfired letters

family bits leave â&#x20AC;&#x201C; a room occupied some less with some more of earth

motion was the cause hurled into my becoming; lost in translation

fathered by a dream highway songs, engines rustled past father's seasons

postman knocks on door nameplate becomes signature name walks back inside

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Â parched letter arrives back at the sender's address garden grave shudders

coffee shops retire temple going youth perform chaste festivities

entry at some gate times of arrival and exit toss year after year

aircrafts drone upon flyovers, as we rehearse how to part, beneath

Lines on a graph sheet Co-ordinates travel away From identity

bodies sip on tea or walk up and down, keeping conscience in sunshine

COLDNOON: TRAVEL POETICS

Mapping You writing about you leaves no crumpled sheets, no false starts i pretend it was not easy that i had to keep so many journals remembering an evening we spent that you could not remember being there because you spoke so little you did not want the driver overhearing look the sky is full again with false starts, crumpled sheets last month i was telling a friend When i come to you my hands are rainy maybe coming near your bosom is like coming from the rain yet you stay dry in my words without thunder or wind or turmoil you are my city, the many places, i live in my memory you come out of shower

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Â loving you is feeding the voyeurs who nowadays you purposely do not recognize your contours in my stack of lines which men may buy as maps to build flyovers you tell me let us go into fog instead of holding hands in open i will not name you, owing to the envy you feel as if you were another but give me an hour, another chance i am just about to learn the higher art of clouding my mind with cloudy senses trying to crumple and heavy one last sentence this is the last drop of ink that is left before it can turn dark too dark and cloudy, and a brief storm leaving just you and me in a fog enshrouding continents if you came now i will pretend once more that it was so hard to write of you, and overbrim the dustbin with false starts

COLDNOON: TRAVEL POETICS

THREE POEMS | SUDEEP SEN

Sudeep Sen’s books include: Postmarked India: New & Selected Poems (HarperCollins), Distracted Geographies, Rain, Aria (A K Ramanujan Translation Award), and Blue Nude: Poems & Translations 1977-2012 (Jorge Zalamea International Poetry Award) is forthcoming. He has also edited several important anthologies, including: The HarperCollins Book of New English Poetry by Indians, The Literary Review Indian Poetry, Midnight’s Grandchildren: Post-Independence English Poetry from India, and others. His poems, translated into over twenty-five languages, have featured in international anthologies by Penguin, HarperCollins, Bloomsbury, Routledge, Norton, Knopf, Everyman, Random House, Macmillan, and Granta. His poetry and literary prose have appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, Guardian, Observer, Independent, Financial Times, London Magazine, Literary Review, Harvard Review, Telegraph, Hindu, Outlook, India Today, and broadcast on bbc, cnn-ibn, ndtv & air. Sen’s recent work appears in New Writing 15 (Granta) and Language for a New Century (Norton). He is the editorial director of Aark Arts and editor of Atlas <www.atlasaarkarts.net>. __ All poems of Sudeep Sen are taken from The HarperCollins Book of English Poetry (2012) by Indians. ‘Mediterranean’ first appeared in New Writing 15 (Granta). ‘A Blank Letter’ first appeared in Language for a New Century (Norton) and Postmarked India: New & Selected Poems (HarperCollins). ‘Kargil’ first appeared in Platform, Yellow Nib, Caravan, Australian Poetry Journal and Ladakh (Tyrone Guthrie Centre / Gallerie). The poems are republished here with email-written permission of the author. __

SUMMER 2013

The freezing of the traveller’s “memory” undergoes whitening – a calcification. The nomad settles down in his own architecture. The colours from the previous travel coagulate and are “ready to refract”. Sen, as the nomad, must now cocoon himself in his refracting architecture, wherein he hides his nomadology. He intends to return to civilization but without civility being able to mark his precise location. The nomad can only settle down by constantly refracting the gaze of the polis. Sen steels up his spirit at Kargil to confront the ghosts of battle but what he finds is their absence, which is even more horrifying. The warzone does not pay loyalty to “flawed theorem[s]” of civil society. The space that remains is a desert without a travelogy, and the residual monsters, such as the birds, are the leftovers of the nomadic who have either died or have deserted.

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Three Poems

Mediterranean 1 A bright red boat Yellow capsicums Blue fishing nets Ochre fort walls 2 Sahar’s silk blouse gold and sheer Her dark black kohl-lined lashes 3 A street child’s brown fists holding the rainbow in his small grasp 4 My lost memory white and frozen now melts colour ready to refract

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Kargil Our street of smoke and fences, gutters gorged with weed and reeking, scorching iron grooves / of rusted galvanise, a dialect forged from burning asphalt, and a sky that moves / with thunderhead cumuli grumbling with rain,… Tiepolo’s Hound, Derek Walcott, Book One (II).1 Ten years on, I came searching for war signs of the past expecting remnants — magazine debris, unexploded shells, shrapnels that mark bomb wounds. I came looking for ghosts — people past, skeletons charred, abandoned brick-wood-cement that once housed them. I could only find whispers — whispers among the clamour of a small town outpost in full throttle — everyday chores sketching outward signs of normalcy and life. In that bustle I spot war-lines of a decade ago — though the storylines are kept buried, wrapped

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in old newsprint. There is order amid uneasiness — the muezzin’s cry, the monk’s chant — baritones merging in their separateness. At the bus station black coughs of exhaust smoke-screens everything. The roads meet and after the crossroad ritual diverge, skating along the undotted lines of control. A porous garland with cracked beads adorns Tiger Hill. Beyond the mountains are dark memories, and beyond them no one knows, and beyond them no one wants to know. Even the flight of birds that wing over their crests don’t know which feathers to down. Chameleon-like they fly, tracing perfect parabolas. I look up and calculate their exact arc and find instead, a flawed theorem.

SUMMER 2013

A Blank Letter An envelope arrives unannounced from overseas containing stark white sheets, perfect in their presentation of absence. Only a bold logo on top revealed its origin, but absolutely nothing else. I examined the sheets, peered through their grains — heavy cotton-laid striations — concealing text, in white ink, postmarked India. Even the watermark’s translucence made the script’s invisibility transparent. Buried among the involute contours, lay sheets of sophisticated pulp, paper containing scattered metaphors — uncoded, unadorned, untouched — virgin lines that spill, populate and circulate to keep alive its breathings. Corpuscles of a very different kind — hieroglyphics, unsolved, but crystal-clear.

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DECEMBER 2012 | SHOSHANNAH GANZ

Shoshannah Ganz is Assistant Professor of English at Grenfell Campus, Memorial University, Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada. Her interests are Canadian literature, religious influence on Canadian writing, travel writing, and women’s writing. Ganz has published on a number of Canadian authors and co-edited The Ivory Thought: Essays on Al Purdy, pub. by University of Ottawa Press. Her monograph on Canadian Literary Pilgrimage is under peer review with Wilfrid Laurier University Press. Ganz’s current book project examines the influence of Eastern thought on Canadian women travellers writing about South East Asia from 1850-1940. __ Ganz, the “eternal student of dirty streets”, traverses India locating cultural invariables; invariables that do not belong to her anymore, for no sooner she stops to analyse a page, than the “Mumbai minute/passes by”. The nomadology of the nomad is a series of lamentations over the desertification of earth; a nomad thrives on the desert and every successive desert he constructs mourns of the loss of a forest. For Ganz, the nomadic student, a pilgrimage appears a funeral; the eros of the masses is ridden with the travel poet’s thanatos. This sequence is reversed near the wretched slums of Mumbai that inspire in her a romance “by the railroad/tracks”. Even the men hanging from the train doors, and curry evokes a familiar nostalgia. In these sites the poet travels in a smooth space without the divide of the inner and outer, where the heterogeneity of cultural signs owns her into them. However, this familiarity is not enough to shake away the memory of the inflexible plastic imagery of the packaged bottle of “Clean Water” which does not pose cultural variability. The image of the highly tense plasticity homogenously spread over her travel sites threatens poetic imagery, which cannot travel as safely, uniformly and unchanged as the plastic bottles of water.

SUMMER 2013

December 2012 (In India on a Train from Mumbai to Pune)

I. Eternal student shoe shine boy Guatemala gasoline eyes unfocussed on the future stumbling steps shoe shine man Mumbai eyes moving gracefully across ancient Hindi text Yogic wisdom posture legs crossed I gaze back Guatemala I angry eyes down teva brand sandals stumbling I smile now eternal student of dirty streets the page turns Mumbai minute passes by

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II. Pilgrims Funeral? Pilgrimage? All in white. A shrine? A body? Was the man face down on the platform by the train dead? Birds migrating? Pilgrims flocking? Women hover bend over prostrate body.

SUMMER 2013

III. Clean Water The sky begins to blue again out of Mumbai smog brown tilled earth beside railroad ties green gardens cows flowering bushes garbage so much plastic now. eternal. in nature poems. memorial to progress. Mel, the Canadian private pilot tells us the biggest change in 20 years is bottled water.

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IV. By the Railroad Tin roofs held down with big rocks and tents made of plastic bags. It reminds me of camping and I wonder about falling in love by the railroad tracks.

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V. Iconic India They seem to be hanging out the train doors in iconic India pose not because of crowding but just because that is what men in India have always done. I want a picture because it seems as familiar to me as McDonalds and Starbucks. Here where curry is comfort food.

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FOUR POEMS | KELLY ANN JACOBSON

Kelly Ann Jacobson is student of M.A. in Fiction at the Johns Hopkins University. She is the Poetry Editor for Outside In Literary & Travel Magazine. Jacobson’s poetry has been published in Wooden Teeth magazine and Outside In Literary & Travel Magazine. Her work can be found at www.kellyannjacobson.com. __ Jacobson begins in a panorama of London. Her eye becomes the London Eye, overlooking the Thames and the landscape becomes an ephemeral “bubble”. In her identification with an architectural representative of London the city turns fragile. It soon, even, forgotten when in the fate of Rome the traveller’s fate overlaps: “Rome burns, and I am aflame.” Or perhaps, Rome burns like a shifting cultivation. The verdict on her London exploits comes in a foreign land; from the expanse of the defendant’s panorama, we are brought to the “tinted gaze” of the prosecutor, her own sister. Jacobson, herself, becomes the gazed. However, having come full circle, the traveller begins again, this time at Florence at the “Piazzale Michelangelo”. She is celebrated in a rainbow of Irises, by her father, the cultural patron. The nomad moves from panorama to panorama. There is the impending sensitivity (or guilt) towards the specific, and the minute. But, whatever lies in the zone of vision, within this panorama, needs must be desertified and subsequently, deserted.

SUMMER 2013

Four Poems

London I want to preserve the city in amber, though the streets are tangled webs. There is a suited man in the park, two lost travellers, and we walk the claustrophobic aisles to the Eye. He wants to pay, but I’m learning. The pod rises like a blown bubble, and the whole world is before me.

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Trastevere I arrive first: student on leave, suitcase full of ripped-cover classics. My sister, a worldly stranger, kisses my cheek and says Ciao! Within a day: my first disco, a dark room near Santa Maria where bodies melt like silver. Rome burns, and I am aflame.

SUMMER 2013

On the Arno My father leaves us by the river to hunt for images. My sister, almost naked, lounges in the sun. We drink boxed wine with straws and confess sins; at the verdict she wears movie star glasses, and I cannot recognize her eyes behind the tinted gaze.

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Piazzale Michelangelo We look down on our shared city like farmers, tree green and towers too tall for travelled legs to climb. Fatherâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s finger clicks, and I stare at the part of town where last night our waiter, singing English in my ear, led me outside and kissed me. I told no one, not even myself. We buy salted peanuts and sip mango nectar, and my father preserves me in a bed of Irises.

SUMMER 2013

FOUR POEMS | JEAN L. KREILING

Jean L. Kreiling’s poetry appears frequently in print and online journals and in anthologies. She is a winner of the Able Muse Write Prize, and has been a finalist for the Frost Farm Prize, the Howard Nemerov Sonnet Award, and the Richard Wilbur Poetry Award. She lives in Massachusetts, USA. __ Just as the “rainless devotion” of the English for their Queen is “visceral” and “reasonless”, so is the ideology of tourism. Kreiling “inadvertently” bares this similarity between ideology and travelogy. The Queen and her Crown have become monuments in her country, and civility its tourists. Monuments and memorials may coincide with one another while belonging to entirely separate ideologies. Kreiling exposes the overlapping ideologies, and subsequently travelogies in the Monument of the Confederate Defenders – the pro-slavery secessionists – that leads to the Rainbow Row that began as a series of pink houses coloured in the manner of colonial Carribean, thus Afro-American, houses. Further, the spaces of the symbols of secession and unity coincide in the marker of the Ordinance of Secession and the Circular Church. Not only the grand but also the trivial details of the railings and pavements insinuate a complex morass of conflicting ideologies. These when becoming tourist sites are sanitized of their historical differences in the travelogy of the tourist and the state. This travelogy functions by insisting upon the “dignity” of (loss of) memory.

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Four Poems

Southern Comfort (Charleston, South Carolina) Not far from the Monument to the Confederate Defenders,  the pastel façades of Rainbow Row defend elegance. Less than a block from the marker commemorating the Ordinance of Secession, the Circular Church commemorates unity.

 Monument memorializing the Confederate States of America (of the southern States of USA), that seceded from USA is 1861 owing to their advocacy for slavery, against the US policy of Reconstruction.  A row of houses is Charleston, revived from slum dwellings in early 1900s, beginning with Dorothy Porcher Legge’s buying of three houses and painting them pink – the colour of colonial Caribbean houses. The Rainbow Row now houses buildings coloured in diverse pastel shades.  The official document drafted in 1860, by the Confederate States of America.  Circular Congregational Church, founded in 1681, that believes in a radical Christianity, upholding the truth, but not the literality of the Bible.

SUMMER 2013

At the City Market, lowcountry craftsmen weave and sell sweetgrass baskets, while other vendors sell knickknacks made in China. Each wrought-iron railing and horse-drawn carriage invokes a complex history and insists on the dignity of those who remember.

 A market complex built in 1790s. It became the site of the Confederate Museum in 1899, built by the United Daughters of the Confederacy, for display of artefacts from the period of Confederacy.

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The English and Their Queen (State Opening of Parliament, London, November 2009) The Coldstream Guards play Elgar; golden braids adorn the coats of horsemen on a route that once bore kings whose rule was absolute, and now this Queen for more than five decades. Though powerless, the jewelled crown never fades: its legend lives, sufficient to recruit these regiments of riders, every boot and buckle shining in precise parades. The tourists gather, though a gray sky spits, and locals, too, seem wide-eyed, just as ready to see, through veils of rain, a regal glow. Do they remember courage in the blitz? Do they admire her posture, straight and steady despite her age? Why do they love her so? It hardly matters why they love her so. One Englishman explains that they respect her diligence, her promise to protect their heritage. As P.M.’s come and go, she stays, her subjects proud to rank below her gray-haired eminence, so often decked in someone else’s jewels. You can’t elect

 The oldest regiment in the British Regular Army; begun in 1650, in Coldstream, Scotland.  English music composer, Sir Edward William Elgar (1857-1934).  QueenElizabeth II (Elizabeth Alexandra Mary), present queen of England and the Head of the Commonwealth of Nations.

SUMMER 2013

your living history, star of this show. Well, yes, but this is more than civic pride or national nostalgia. Pageantry makes public a more visceral emotion: pale faces light up, and it seems I’ve spied on private depths, bared inadvertently: a rainless realm of reasonless devotion.

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The Sand at Horseshoe Bay (Bermuda) Pink as babies’ ears, paler than the first moment of a virgin’s blush, the sand cushions our flesh in tiny coral skeletons.

SUMMER 2013

Gaudy (Route 301, Central Florida) Like gawkers at a train wreck, mesmerized and yet appalled, we read the exclamations on gaudy billboards: fireworks advertised each mile or so, followed by exhortations against abortion (bible-bolstered pleas) and offers of free o.j. (where they think we’ll overspend on fruit or tasteless tees) – we really ought to buy, or pray, or drink. For fearlessly bizarre variety it would be hard to beat this tacky trail: one hand-made sign hawks “GUNS & JEWELRY,” another hollers “MOUNTED BIRDS FOR SALE.” Not far from Starke, a few miles south of Lawtey, around the fourteenth or fifteenth red light, two signs tout fudge; another warns the naughty of speed traps – oddly, laudably forthright. We cringe as roadside clutter blares and glares, but candor probably beats coy restraint in highway marketing: selling your wares to drivers may require this Day-Glo paint. And as the local color, unrefined but functional, implores us to consume, a kindred icon, expertly designed, appears ahead: the golden arches loom.

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THREE POEMS | FAHREDIN SHEHU

Fahredin Shehu graduated from Prishtina University, in Oriental Studies. His published volumes include Nun, Invisible Plurality, Nektarina, Elemental 99, Dismantle of Hate, Plemroma’s Dew, and Mulberries. His work has been translated into French, Italian, Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian, Macedonian, Roma, Swedish, Turkish, Arabic, Romanian, Persian, An ambassador of Poets to Albania by Poetas del Mundo, Santiago de Chile, Shehu is a member of World Poets Association, Greece and the Kosovo Pen Center. __ The self is “muttered” as the other when Shehu, the modern traveller, takes a journey backward. Self is in the utterance; when this utterance thickens the other precipitates as in the verse of the Farsi poets, and the amalgamation of the “mundane and divine” in the Isfahan carpets. Crossing and re-crossing the mythical Kinvad, “Crossing the border again and again”, Shehu gives up his human attributes for that of a Jinn, whose food is light and whose road is one of “fragrance”. The nomadism of this Jinn – half human, half celestial – is hyper-nomadic. He does not have human voice or soul; the legendary musicians and poets of Beirut were all humans. He cannot become them. He can merely witness the “The Miracle of the Orient” without being territorialized even so little as to be able to describe it. While the nomad is at home everywhere, home for the Jinn is only in light, inside its lamp. He is a constant watcher of the land ahead, like a lonely “Lighthouse”, without the human will to intervene, but with the human condition of enduring.

SUMMER 2013

Three Poems

Under the Shade of Huge Oleander (Isfahan, Iran) Crossing the border again and again Going beyond the heavy clouds Even there the silence is zooming Somebody awaits; a polite host A noble who knows The life’s tunnels where I see light Are long and curved; the path I lead Shall give model for the seeker Being a plant sometimes; is a feeling that Is only understood by a Nightingale As the story unfurls, as a rainbow carpet, It seeks the ear so it may nestle in the heart While I seek a morsel of light And a leaving of traces of fragrance So the rest may follow and perhaps Conjoin…

 A historical city in Iran, and one of the largest and most prosperous cities in the world, also, the capital of Persia, during the reign of the Safavid Dynasty (15011722).

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The Womb of Art It appears that I’m back, several centuries; to realize why Farsi poets had such a passion. It seems I’m here to once again taste that flavour; where mundane and divine are delicately spreading; the nuances as in Isfahan carpets. It looks like the tune is sending me as time machine back to the birth of secret of nightingale to a rose; manifests at the blast of the moment It tells that I must come again, to pass the bridge 33; the resemblance of Kinvad.  It seems I have word no more, to compare “Here” and “There”, and finally got muttered.

 A bridge built by Ahura-Mazda (the highest deity in Zoroastrianism) leading up to Paradise.

SUMMER 2013

The Rain in Beirut Last night and today Blessings of the Lord Bless-Rain To wash off the sin of the sinner; I Walking on the shore; listen to the palm leaves And the waves that brings the chopped Wings of the Algae If I would have the silken voice of Fairuz I would sing Beirut, Beirut too And if I would have the Soul of Gibran I would write “your Lebanon and my Lebanon” While I reckon the loneliness of the Lighthouse Well; I’m just a mere traveller; descrying The Miracle of the Orient For so many times I observe The demanding eyes of the Host; as he wants To realize how Beirut looks From the eyes of the Guest He is unable to do this; just as I’m able Even to describe it

 Widely celebrated, contemporary Lebanese singer.  Renowned English, and Arabic writer from Lebabnon who migrated to USA in 1895.

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FIVE POEMS | MOHAN RANA

Originally from New Delhi, he finished his undergraduate studies from the University of Delhi. He is a very prolific Hindi poet and has so far published seven volumes of poetry – Jagah (Dwelling ), Jaise Janam Koi Darwaza (As If Life Were a Door), Subah ki Dak (Morning's Post), Is Chhor Par (On This Shore), Pathar Ho Jayegi Nadi (Stone-River), Dhoop Ke Andhere (In the Darkness of the Sun), and Ret ka Pul (Sand-Bridge). His bilingual collection Kavitain (Poems) translated by Bernard O'Donoghue and Lucy Rosenstein was recently published in London. He lives in Bath, Somerset, UK. __ Rana begins as a nomad trying to defect to civilization. The space is absent from the maps he seeks it in. He tries the manners of the civilized even within a nomadic existence, changing colours “per terrain”, names and appearances and even the hairstyles of his proverbs. His efforts of redressing his nomadic past seem to be living on “borrowed time”; it is not he that lives but his attempts at becoming another. There is not door on his way, no inner or outer. His identity is neither the lock nor the key to his past or his future. His space is the omnipresent desert. Rana has become a Snowman, now suddenly marked and remarkable in his distinctness due to his nomadic past. He is feared in civil stations – in the park. He is a potential threat to the homogeneity of the striated and vegetated spaces of the city. It is the nomad, the gypsy, whose presence engenders the threat in the dwellers of this already striated space (constantly under the watch of the state’s police) of marking “their move”. The nomadic poet, magnified under a camera lens, is denied any possibility of reterritorialization.

SUMMER 2013

Five Poems

A Country of My Own There they had memorized forgetting alone There was no country of my own; I was uncalled for, Neither some promise to wait upon, The wind rambles daily by the hours Banging its head against doors and windows, I rinse the drawers, all its contents; as if nothing was there Objects in this room; as if I also were an object Not finding my own wishes, save an endless quest Holding my pulse, I search my country on the maps Gathering directions from the shadows of sun And all I got was a fistful of doubts

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Chameleon Changed so many names, colours per terrain Changed appearances per dialect per mannerisms And often took my proverbs to the barber Learned some curses, yet while tossing on bed those words of misery abound Toss the coin, this trick never fails Bell the cat with a paper chime; I advise myself in dreams Hailing revolution, misleading the wind wheel Toppling over the slopes of spring, I am the autumnal descent Will I remember in the changing colours and tribes This borrowed time that lives my life in my sighs Even while reciting I often forget how to speak the truth

SUMMER 2013

The Incoming Past Future, whose deferral, Is in the knowledge of being Life bursts forth across the door As the mind flounders in speculation Without or within This way or the other Bolted or ajar! Who has been waiting for me there Who have I been waiting for I am yet to reach the answer station A step towards the door Is the loss of a step behind Frankly, my truth is not the key Frankly, it is neither a lock

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Delhi Reconnaissance I have been running; the distances grow I just fell short by a distance of 6900 kilometres I keep running to find someplace near The window seems too far for my Delhi Reconnaissance And my destination is ever lagging behind Visions of yesterday have blurred by now As I truss myself in a new bedrock Untying my laces, for naked feet to run

SUMMER 2013

Snowman Their curious wandering eyes staring at the white skies Suddenly startled as they fell on the park slopes On a suspicious figure Between the trees I recoiled Seeing them As though They Were reborn as aquatic beings Was it my fear turning them into icy sentinels? They must wonder That behind the lens Of this camera, a Snowman marks their move! Fear is ignorance Truth is fear And ignorance, truth

All poems of Mohan Rana have been translated by Arup K Chatterjee

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THREE POEMS | RONOJOY SIRCAR

Ronojoy Sircar is writing a dissertation for M.Phil in English Literature at Jamia Millia Islamia University, New Delhi. His poetry has been published in Nether and Full of Crow. __ The farewell to a journey is always a deferred event. It is an event separate from the journey, or the journey is superseded by the event of the farewell; it is defined by the farewell, which is forever belated. Sircar’s “Goodbye” brings the eyes of his companions to face his, and vice versa – eyes that had previously looked in the same direction. Not only the farewell confront the minor event of travel, but the travellers are themselves made to confront each other. This confrontation is not absolute, neither is the “Impatience”. It is not a condition but an impasse during the changing of the self into its other. The self and the other are connected by a membrane, of high tensity. It is this membrane that constitutes the real event. While going away from this membrane, the self sees ripples of the other in it. The membrane loses tension with the loss of this contact. Sircar’s travel is also a period of growth, during which the eye of the traveller repeatedly blinks to relax the tension acquired in it with every successive image. The image has to keep on parting from the eye, reflection must remain sceptical of the self for the membrane to have an existence of its own, which otherwise is a blank and unmoving slate of water. In the parting of the other or the reflection from the self, the membrane comes to life in its ripples and the eye’s amplitude of accommodation is relaxed, preventing blindness in the traveller.

SUMMER 2013

Three Poems

All I Can See are Your Eyes in Rear-View Mirrors In between a space of hundred(s) lies(,) a page of absent regret(s) (as I rummage through your trash broken reels, cigarette smoke, bottle caps and ash) And the I, right here, waits for your eyes, (turning towards your past) to look through the rear-view mirror towards the me in the backseat, half asleep in someone else’s car speeding past yours as you turn left on route 7 missing me

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speeding past you in the time it takes to say goodbye Goodbye (For Prabuddha & Shahid)

SUMMER 2013

Impatience Sometimes, it's just trying to avoid walking into yourself changing, into someone else.

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Parentheses “Because we separate It ripples our reflections Because we separate It ripples our reflections” (The thumb was lost forever As he clasped his fist A r o (it) u n d Closing the half-open door to his dreams While she gave him Her Hand To hold And a leather belt, she found on the ground To chew on As she flipped the switch And the television came on With laughter dispersed with white noise) Blinking helped (I think) (It helped clear and fog the vision at once demystifying the mystery that was his own reflection on the television screen) Mirrors speak the truth when no one is looking (for truth) Blinking helped (I think) The door, coming loose of its hinges, Swung out wildly, dropping the weight of their memories [ON TOP OF THEM] She was singing a song

SUMMER 2013

He couldn’t possibly understand Although he tried to picture that inky blue night she sang the same song once before and the tears stopped forever, Lost, perhaps, Somewhere between the crystal sharp memory of stars dying all around them as the cigarettes burnt themselves out into the ground, Trailing smoke Near her lips gently parted Breathing out syllables of lost houses and silent winking windows, Images catching their own form(lessness) in smoke reflected in her eyes, Caught in their own perversions, Their own subversions, The politics of their looks Silently sinking into the night sky, as his third eyelash Cutting across her images got caught Between his left eye and the bridge of his breath Out in the open For everyone to look at and wonder what her eyes, looking up at him and the stars at that moment (memories, both, fading) were saying? Focused on that one damned lash Which she would be forced to remember by the sheer power of the depth of its invisibility To him Her fingers Crept closer

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To the point where his vision would begin to blur The very fabric of intimacy, and flicked Darkness away, and all that was left was Smoke and incomplete images left to fill the blank noise with inky blue skies of dying stars and parted lips Within him. Blinking helped (I think) As he came around To a room with a glass sheet stretched across a steel frame Half frosted From the outside With people walking past it Stepping in and out of outlines They thought they had left at home Walking around like murder scenes; Lines being drawn out, and worn out each time by the visibility of recognition In eyes, equally worn out by Windows Half open Letting in the cold hard wind of December evenings. Blinking helped (I think) For the very next moment she walked back in Emerging from within cigarette smoke and ineffable melodies of blurred fingers, dying stars, parted lips and an inky blue night you wouldnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t have believed

SUMMER 2013

and never left again.

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THREE POEMS | MANASH BHATTACHARJEE

Manash Bhattacharjee received his doctoral degree in political science from Jawaharlal Nehru University. His poems have been published in The London Magazine, First Proof Volume 5: The Penguin Book of New Writings from India, The Little Magazine, and The Palestine Chronicle. He has contributed articles, essays and reviews to The Hindu, The Times of India, The Hindustan Times, Outlook, Biblio and Economic and Political Weekly. He lives in New Delhi. __ Bhattacharjee ushers in a host of imagery that chisels out a smooth space: “blade’s edge”, the sun that turns into a snowball and deserts the earth, “steel against steel” and the “wheels of memory” that run over the body. He is a caterpillar that thrives in the wilderness but in opposition to it – a nomadic persona. It is not the road that distributes this nomad across Muvattupuzha, it is the temptation to de-vegetate the “avalanche of trees”. The house he reaches is deterritorialized from its earth: “It was…more wings/Than pillars.” The poet is antagonistic to the “ancestral tree” and finally the latter sheds its leaves, in a poetic victory of the nomad. In the course of this nomadology, Bhattacharjee seeks repose in the memory of Ghalib, and the streets that he dwelled by. The labyrinth of Ballimaran does not house Ghalib, or his streets anymore. It only houses their ghosts. Even the ghost has lost its address. What remains after we take away “what is left of Ghalib in/ Qasim Jaan” and “what is left of Qasim Jaan in Ballimaran” are entities that have been made nomads in the poet’s nomadology. They are no more in these spaces or times that the poet travels within. They have shifted without notice.

SUMMER 2013

Three Poems

Reading Sebald World, take a backseat. Do not disturb. I am reading Sebald. Hush. Trees with eyes flit by My blind face. I hurriedly drink Evanescence. Sebald slows me down. I am a caterpillar Of existence. I crawl in Green fear Towards the blade’s edge. I think of the dead. Some graze my mind. Others run amuck. The dead haven’t died. Yet. I read Sebald. The sun turns Into a snowball. Time holds up a crystal Of half-lies.

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I keep turning the pages. Night, the ghost, descends On horseback. I follow echoes of hooves Drowning in the sea. Writing is not the speaking But the hearing Through steel against steel. And life is an inverse Journey by train Where the wheels of memory Run over you.

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Wedding in Muvattupuzha It wasn’t the road which took us To Muvattupuzha. It was the avalanche of trees Improbably lined. You wondered if a god did it Secretly overnight or a band of Mad gardeners toiling Against sloth and poverty. The trees did not point towards Any address. They Gestured towards an unknown Fairy tale. Our ride ended At the foot of a house. It was More dream than body, more wings Than pillars. The gate’s reckless heart was open Wide as we walked in Rousing cobblestones from sleep. Menfolk like cheerful coconuts welcomed Everyone at the door. We exchanged names In hurried gestures of forgetting.

 A picturesque town in Kerala.

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Till we met the father who hid Grapes in his mouth and wore a face Older than his tongue. He was a fable who could charm A tavern full of strangers. A beehive of womenfolk were Making haste to ensure the food pacified The appetite of gods. Aroma from the kitchen seized Our attention as the mother of fish and Spices gently greeted us. The artist who sketched the house Peered from a photograph like An oak tree. Invisible drawings flowed In his beard. An avalanche of relics caused a Giddiness impossible to hold without A glass of spirits. We climbed the stairs with liquid Expectations and discovered the smallest Bedroom in the world. The bar on the terrace overlooked An ancestral tree. Its trunk was more Drunk than I could be that Wet afternoon. I was young Basho on the bar stool Watching the rain pour over a monotonously Beautiful landscape. The sun beat the clouds just

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Before oblivion. We climbed the church Stairs and witnessed a wedding Under the rainbow. Old hymns of youth rang Solemnly in the man’s memory As oaths encircled him. The town arrived half wet For the grand feast. They drowned In the toast of blessings. The men drank endlessly As the rain. The Ancestral tree shed its leaves.

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A Visit to Ballimaran No longer that alleyway of unending pastimes, no longer that couplet stalling a game of dice, no longer that foot’s pause driving a thought home, no longer that inspiration turning words into kites. Ballimaran is a busy stream of shoes hung for sale. No sound of hooves or sight of palanquins reigns over subjects. The colour of footwear automobile horns mark the citizen’s health. I ask a man, “Which way to Ghalib’s home?” His eyebrows arch, “Why didn’t you ask him the address? A name is not enough.” I go my way, telling Ghalib’s ghost, “Your name has lost its address, your address its neighbourhood. Is that how one gains the world?” 

A historical area in the walled city of Old Delhi, mostly remembered for the 1857 Revolution, and for housing Mirza Ghalib’s Haveli.

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The guard in blue uniform is wearier than stone. He ushers me inside the ancient courtyard made up to date. I stare at forgeries on stage set to befool children. It isn’t easy to veil someone’s neglected absence. The telephone booth is an offstage parody of callers in prosaic hurry. No one carves like old times a turn of phrase to perfection. I ponder. No one anymore counts blessings with wine. No one disobeys god with irony. No one braids the night with couplets. As light sinks a girl drifts in to read the dilemmas of Ghalib’s heart. The azan distracts her glued eyes. She leaves folding a secret in her dupatta. It is time to go home. Time to leave what is left of Ghalib in Qasim Jaan. To leave what is left of Qasim Jaan in Ballimaran. Names that belong to a different time when the air breathed verses. And a couplet weighed heavier than a pair of shoes.

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FOUR POEMS | JENNY MORSE

Jenny Morse has submitted her dissertation for Ph.D at the University of Illinois, Chicago, USA. She is an instructor at Colorado State University. Her poetry has been published or is forthcoming in Notre Dame Review, Wilderness House, Quiddity, and Terrain. Her critical work has appeared in or is forthcoming in Seismopolite, The Montreal Review, The Ofi Press, and the Journal of Contemporary Thought. __ The bare minimum products of the world, “a boat and a bus and a bridge and a cord”, can be enough to take one away from the world. It belongs as the war machinery of the nomad; it does not belong to the world. The dwellers of the alien land that Morse traverses, both human and animal, offer fealty to her party. It is their nomadology that threatens the indigenes. After returning from this striated space the nomads themselves have to part with small artefacts from their war machinery, like the shoes of her lover that Morse has hidden. Their nomadology is suspended for a while as the train takes over this nomadic force. Morse no longer moves away from the door, but into it. She has lost her nomadology; the Wednesday of doom is deferred for the world to be specified upon herself, alone. It is the doom of being unable to communicate with her fellow-nomad, of the inability to dry the ocean with her extinct nomadology. She wants to go deeper inside the door, now, to be hidden by her lover. The nomad, herself, has been deserted.

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Four Poems

Six Miles of Chiloe I remember leeches sucking on toes like they hadn’t just fed on fat cows in this paradise; how you called us cowpie-walking champions. I remember wind or water, the boat trip, the abandonment, the barbed wire that threw us off course. The one-armed boatman who returned us to civilization, maneuvered us along the river, climbing back into its mouth like he’d stolen us from the Pacific and knew that government might hold us in custody a few more sunsets. A white whale waved as we sat on the beach, enjoying the spray, wondering how long we could live on bread and cheese. I remember the cows visited our dry sand the third day, careful not to moo us out of our tent as if they knew how much sleep meant; the salt air and the sun. We might have been the only people left in the world while we waited to see someone who might tell us how to get out of here and watched the baby crabs playing hopscotch in our footsteps. I remember the fishermen who ransacked our sunken ship like they knew where we’d hidden the treasure, how I spied on them as they bathed and pulled a rope out of the red hull like the ship was just docking and once the passengers boarded, it would unbeach itself and set out like an ordinary freighter. We looked for a place to pitch camp and found the dunes. We wondered where to get fresh water, then found the stream. I remember hiking down the beach and discovering a dismantled shelter complete with broken air-conditioning unit, wondering how whoever had lived there had gotten electricity. Some boys hiked on ahead of us, right into the cliff’s edge, but we found their home on the ridge through binoculars. We stared into the sun for long minutes knowing that no one had ever seen the beach in quite this light; no one would again. The broken u-shape in the cliff was a carved imperfection.

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The waves threw themselves against the rocks, hoping the fragments would find new life in the orange sun. I remember the dead seal that both fascinated and disgusted us, and the kelp that covered the shame of its purple decomposition. Sleep had never been so easy and Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d never understood the world until that moment, a boat and a bus and a bridge and a cord of wood away.

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Departure A train approached in the distance with its horn and its wheels and the cushions of glass in the windows. I felt it first in the vibration like bass drums on my shinbones, like little earthquakes in my knees. I wrote this poem with you in mind and your feet approaching the train. I wrote this poem here in the waiting room corridor where the floor shakes when the load boards and the train rolls downhill and away. Now, I’m putting on your favorite shoes, measuring my toes against the instep, but you’ll be near sea level when you discover your shoes are no longer on board.

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All I Know of Cusco I dream of a blue door or of a blue doorâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s dream of me, and from the steep rise of Cuesta San Blas we can see La Catedral. La Virgen passes on raised planks above the chants of gloria, gracias a dios, gracias a la madre de nosotros. I am lost and distant from the blue door or the blue door is lost and distant from me. A man arrives to walk me home. We never speak, but when we shake hands, I pass him a coin and a key.

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Terminal It was a Wednesday at the end of the world, though the world didn’t end there then. It ends now as I reflect in blue water, numbered distance, a chronology located in essentialism and debt. If I asked you how long I stared at the ocean, would you have a reckoning, would the question linger like your scent after a shower, would you suspend me in your mind like a hung photograph and then open a door to hide me.

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NONFICTION

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ACTS OF FLANERIE AND HOMECOMING | C.S. BHAGYA

C.S. Bhagya is student of M.A. in English at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Her poetry has appeared in several online literary journals. She has also written for The Times of India, DNA and Tehelka. __ Bhagya’s reading of Kolatkar territorializes the nomad; conversely it imbues the flaneur with a nomadology. From the dark heart of religion to the seaside banter of Bombay, Arun Kolatkar's poetic oeuvre spans diverse thematic strains and geographies. The paper situates Kolatkar as one of the first flaneurs. Significantly, Kolatkar invests the Bombay with his own nomadism; in Bhagya’s reading Bombay is a chimera of streets,grimy lanes and bylanes, which the poet traverses, popping in and out of a restaurant or two. She follows Kolatkar's small and large epiphanic journeys down these streets and attempts to provide, a more tangible shape to Kolatkar's particular aesthetic of – and the peculiar melancholy associated with – urban spaces and the act of homecoming.

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Acts of Flanerie and Homecoming: Urban Spaces in the Poetry of Arun Kolatkar

To cast even a fleeting glance across Arun Kolatkar’s oeuvre is analogous to losing yourself in a city – the reader as a flaneur – in sprawling labyrinthine pathways trafficking in art and filth, in the seaside banter of Bombay, and in pilgrimages out, to the dark heart of religion. While Kolatkar’s first collection of published poems, Jejuri, evokes the eponymous small Maharashtrian pilgrim town and contemplates questions of faith, rituals of worship and the perpetually fluctuating nature of faith, his later collections, Kala Ghoda Poems and Sarpa Satra alternatively meditate upon the ethos of life and living in an Indian metropolis – its various palatable and unpalatable significations – and the relevance of myth in contemporary history. The posthumously published collection The Boatride and Other Poems recapitulates a poetic consciousness deeply intrigued by the polemic of a changing cultural milieu – modern-day-India’s perceptibly precarious character, where all identities are unfixed and protean. The question of language and plural linguistic identities, too, is a concern embedded in his poems, emphatically foregrounded by the fact that he was a bilingual poet, writing with equal verve and conviction in both Marathi and English. In the Introduction to The Boatride and Other Poems, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra recollects Kolatkar’s response to Eunice D’Souza on one particular occasion when she remarked on the books on Bosnia on his shelves. Mehrotra comments that Kolatkar dwelt at length on his reading habits. “I want to reclaim everything I consider my tradition,” was Kolatkar’s reply. “I am particularly interested in history of all kinds, the beginning of man, archaeology, histories of everything from religion to objects, bread-making, paper, clothes, people, the evolution of man’s knowledge of things, ideas about the world or his own body. The history of man’s trying to make sense of his place in the universe and his place in

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it may take me to Sumerian writing. It’s a browser’s approach, not a scholarly one; it’s one big supermarket situation.” (Kolatkar, 2009, 29) In his poetry, especially poetry which attempts to circumscribe the experience of urban spaces, Kolatkar’s method of observation is precisely that of a browser – somebody whose gaze moves effortlessly along the aisles of a supermarket or a library, and alights on things which trigger his curiosity. Although the objects that his languid gaze throws up are largely ephemeral in nature, for the span of those few seconds, the object of interest is potently summed up and examined closely to divine truths of the ordinary. In Kala Ghoda Poems, the streets of Bombay, under Kolatkar’s scrutiny, metamorphose into historical archives which trace the city’s burgeoning urban landscape to its roots, its sights turning into the paraphernalia a flaneur slowly gathers as he walks by. Thus, for Kolatkar, the city is cumulative, always moving from one stark yet mellow epiphany to another, and it always exceeds singular, monolithic conceptions and definitions. It is against this inconstant city, as Kolatkar writes in his long poem, ‘The Boatride’, that “the sea jostles/ against the wall/ vacuous sailboats snuggle/ tall and gawky/ their masts at variance/ islam/ mary/ dolphin/ their names appearing/ music.”(ibid 206) Thus, Kolatkar’s cityscape epitomises variations and his poetry, the quality of their confluence. In “Irani Restaurant Bombay”, for instance, Kolatkar depicts a space which is volatile with details, yet enigmatic. Its dark interior holds landscapes where “dogmatically green and elaborate trees defeat/ breeze; [a] crooked swan begs pardon/ if it disturb the pond” (ibid 53), while the same landscape is inverted in “a thirsty loafer’s” glass of water. Everyday routines – almost banal in retrospect – of visiting a café on a hot, dusty afternoon acquire a larger-than-life density and are transfigured into elaborate rituals, where even the loafer affects “the exactitude of a pedagogue”. Inside the restaurant, a battle between portions of light and darkness ensues and unbalances the passer-by. Not only does the landscape wobble in a glass of water, but “instant of mirrors turn tables on space/ while promoting darkness below the chair, the cat/ in its two timing sleep dreams evenly and knows/ dreaming to be an administrative problem.” (ibid) When Kolatkar’s cityscape issues into smaller domestic and public terrains it only exemplifies features of the larger narrative, in that, the city

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and all its multitudinous facets and possibilities is one where the dreary and the beautiful, the dark and the irradiated are in constant negotiation, on occasions overlapping and replacing the other, so that the dreary and the dark are frequently rendered opulent. But while such spaces are ardent in the mere fact of their existence, they always hold the latent possibility of disintegration. In the restaurant, “the cockeyed shah of iran watched the cake/ decompose carefully in a cracked showcase”, the swan is “crooked”, the landscape “wobbles” and “the heretic needle jabs a black star”. Urban spaces in Kolatkar’s poetry are geometrically warped spaces. They are built along dissimilar trajectories and are constituted by oblique lines and shapes rather than straight, easily comprehensible designations. Furthermore, the composition of the restaurant in the poem is intensely aware of and metonymically refers to greater economic modes of formulation – it is along these lines that a capitalist-consumerist urban space is structured. The restaurant and the city are dark counterparts to each other, and in the former, “tables chairs mirrors are night that needs to be sewed/ and cashier is where at seams it comes apart” (ibid). A deep consciousness of the economic undercurrents of urban life characterises the greater part of Kolatkar’s oeuvre. Places which were previously emblematic of religious effervescence and sanctity are undercut by incursions which are distinctly commercial and consumerist in nature. Even Jejuri, a pilgrim town, is more a tourist trap than a spiritual destination. When the narrator arrives at Jejuri in a bus, the priest, the pilgrim town, in fact, the bus, too, is complicit in the deception, and all three are equally menacing and fraudulent. “The bus goes round in a circle,” writes Kolatkar describing the manner in which it enters Jejuri. “Stops inside the bus station and stands/ purring softly in front of the priest./ A catgrin on its face/ and a live, ready to eat pilgrim/ held between its teeth.” (Kolatkar, 2006, 15) Kolatkar’s long poem “The Boatride” is an ode to the city again, but here the city materializes as an extension of the sea. An explicitly Bombay poem, Kolatkar meditates on experiences of the city which inevitably pursue and mine the water body surrounding it to yield submarine reflections. Bombay is a space reclaimed from the sea, and Kolatkar never forgets it. The sea in the poem is an entity assembled in opposition to the city, one which the multiple subjects in the poem resort to as an escape from “flaws in stonework”, after “grappling with

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granite” of the city’s immutable borders. (Kolkatkar, 2006, 197) In fact, the sea’s mutability is sought as a foil for the city’s rigid contours. On the sea abounds “the confusion of hands about/ the rigging/ an off white miracle”. (ibid 197) The sea offers “a clarity of air” difficult to discover within the city’s grimy interior. Furthermore, a newly-married man finds that his desire for his new bride is transposed to the elements, and “gold/ and sunlight/ fight for the possession of her throat/ when she shifts/ in the wooden seat” (ibid 199). At sea all details of memory pleasantly blur, and reappear only when the boatride draws closer to its end signifying an elegiac return to land and to the concrete values of the city: “Familiar perspectives/ reoccupy/ a cleanlier eye/ sad as a century/ the gateway of India/ struggles back to its feet/ wobbly but sober enough/ to account for itself/ details approach our memory/ ingratiatingly” (ibid 206). Bruce King, in his essay “Two Bilingual Experimentalist: Kolatkar and Chitre”, comments that, “In ‘The Boatride’ an ordinary trip around Bombay harbour is treated by Kolatkar as both incredibly boring and as a source of wonder while the poet observes and sometimes fantasises upon the trivial and stereotypical. The trivial is viewed with a coolness which curiously creates a complexity of tone, while the poet as observer will suddenly imagine other possibilities for the scene, especially of a surreal or incongruous manner. Kolatkar is aware as a visual artist that a slight manipulation of sight lines, of angle vision, can defamiliarise and turn into art what is normally regarded as dull, commonplace reality. By taking an odd, non-committal tone and by bringing in unusual perspectives Kolatkar turns the commonplace into an aesthetic experience, using the ordinary as the basis of art”(King, 2004, 165). Kolatkar is interested in precisely this aesthetic of the ordinary where details of the everyday are reinvigorated continually by the poet’s eye instead of being investigated by a gaze which has already turned apathetic. Consequently, his poetry conjures up a plethora of images which reinvents the city and attempts to decipher it for what it is even amid its tremendous clutter of buildings, people, roads and filth the same way the seagull in ‘the boatride’ “invents/ on the spur of the air/ what is clearly the whitest inflection/ known”(Kolatkar,2006, 200). Although the exploration of urban spaces through the cityscape and divergences of language, culture, religion and geographies is an allpervasive motif in Kolatkar’s writing, his collection of poems on

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Bombay’s art district Kala Ghoda, titled Kala Ghoda Poems best embodies this motif; the collection consists of several sequences of poems (“Breakfast Time at Kala Ghoda”, “The Shit Sermon”, “The Rat Poison Man’s Lunch Hour”, “Man of the Year”, to name a few) which constitute an exposition on Kala Ghoda: the intricacies and textures of the lives and modes of living of those who populate the district. The opening sequence Pi-dog thwarts the reader’s expectations by positing that – as opposed to what the convention would have us believe – geographies need not be owned or given expression only through the media of specific human subjects, or necessarily take shape within a human consciousness, but can be and continually are appropriated by the proliferating excess of non-human components which occupy them: not just inanimate objects but animals – wild, domesticated, stray, and those that have taken to the city adapting to its various whims with as much ease as a human city-dweller. “This is the time of the day I like best/ and this the hour/ when I can call this city my own; […] when it’s deserted early in the morning,/ and I’m the only sign/ of intelligent life on the planet” (Kolatkar, 2006, 15) says the pi-dog at a time when the inrush of people and their automobiles, bilious clouds of smoke and crowds surging past purposefully on their daily engagements haven’t yet overpowered the streets; in a sense the non-human sections of the city can reclaim it only during the wee hours of the day or very late into the night when the city resumes, at least partially, a pristine stature. This poem, like several in the collection, devotes its attentions to excavating origins across temporal and spatial disjuncts, and like many others, is about reclamations – of lost lands, lost mythologies, lost accounts of history. It is as much about recovering lost pasts as about reconstructing them from fragments of memory and fact, both of which are equally unreliable but seductive in their promise of a coherent selfnarrative. “I like to trace my descent/ – no proof of course, just a strong family tradition – / matrilineally, to the only bitch that proved/ tough enough to have survived,”, says the pi-dog somewhat smugly in the third part of the sequence, “first, the long voyage, and then the wretched weather here/ – a combination/ that killed the rest of the pack/ of thirty foxhounds,/ imported all the way from England” (ibid 17). On the other hand, the pi-dog claims, “On my father’s side/ the line goes back to the dog that followed/ Yudhishthira” (ibid 18), as if to say that it is a perfect

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amalgamation of both chronicles of mythology and religion yet simultaneously embodying modern narratives of globalisation – an identity that most city-dwellers in India hanker after – hence revealing a possibility that the larger aspirations of the city have explicitly leaked into the fabric of the lives of all it contains. Kala Ghoda Poems is also a demonstration of the act of flanerie – here, a specifically Bombay flanerie. Arvind Krishna Mehrotra acknowledges as much in his “Introduction to The Boatride and Other Poems” commenting that, “In 1962, when he wrote ‘Irani Restaurant Bombay’, Kolatkar wouldn’t have read Walter Benjamin’s essays, which were not then available to the Anglophone world, nor would he have heard of the arcade-haunting Parisian flaneur. But as Bombay loafer himself, someone who daily trudged the city’s footpaths, particularly the area of Kala Ghoda, he would have recognised the figure” (ibid 22). Kala Ghoda Poems consists of the poetry of the ordinary as much as the poetry of the peripheries – from crows, old bicycle tyres, watermelons, to darker subjects like prostitution, poverty, death and hauntings, the collection spans the marginalia of the city. Often scatological and overtly sexual, the poems, in their language and imagery expressly evoke the murkier side of human nature, and the city too is annexed into its dismal syntax; but the poems constantly defy expectations and disallow the subject to obscure poetic possibilities. In fact, for Kolatkar, the city comes alive and is most exuberant in its murk and filth. In the poem A Note on the Reproductive Cycle of Rubbish, Kolatkar remarks that rubbish may initially look beguiling, but one has to look beyond first impressions to gauge its true nature. “It may not look like much./ But watch out/ when rubbish meets rubbish/” because it is at that point of contact that rubbish turns fertile, waits “Patiently./ Copulates with the winner.” (ibid 35) In another poem sequence titled “Meera” Kolatkar writes of a “fresh new series of installations” which go on display “in the form of modest piles of rubbish/ all along the kerb”: thus, for Kolatkar, garbage is replete with artistic value, and in fact, for a city which is expanding unapologetically leaving the debris of its former self and its appendages to form a residue at its peripheries – all the while fluctuating persistently between innumerable veneers – garbage is plausibly the perfect art installation to appropriately express its shifting states of being.

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In another instance, the third section of the poem Knucklebones is addressed to a woman, where the poet begins, “You get up with a big smile on your bum./ Your sari wears a grin/ where your buttocks have sucked it in” indicating that the overtly sexual character of many of Kala Ghoda’s inhabitants does not detract but rather irrevocably forms a part of it: one’s sexuality is not something one needs to apologise for, but instead acknowledge, even celebrate. When the woman stands, it isn’t just her sari, “it’s time itself that feels the pinch,” but she shows great presence of mind and straightens her sari out, and the poet concludes, “time unpuckers when you smooth your behind.” (ibid 69) But ultimately, the poet persona's tone is elegiac, for having lost a beloved city to the throes of an expanding population and urbanisation which has left the city crippled, now possessing a mere shadow of its former glories. In the seventh section of the poem-sequence titled David Sassoon, the poetic persona angrily berates the city “that gets/ more and more unrecognisable/ with every passing year”, “a cement-eating bloodguzzling city/ pissing silver, shitting gold,/ and choking on its vomit.” He mourns its loss – a loss which he is compelled to witness as it occurs. “I find myself prisoner once again,/ […] and forced to watch/ the slow disintegration of a city/ I cared about more than any other.” (ibid 148) Thus Kolatkar’s poetry is a tribute to a city which changes mercilessly under his gaze, a city which does not relieve its inhabitants of the sorrow of returning to an unrecognisable past. In Kolatkar’s Bombay homecoming is impossible, at least not in the true sense of the word, because his city has already been corroded and is beyond repair. If he returns it will only be to a wrong home, a misplaced nostalgia, a place disfigured by an unforgivingly cruel, misshapen memory.

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References Kolatkar, Arun. Kala Ghoda Poems. Pras: Pune, 2006. _______Jejuri. Pras: Pune, 2006. _______The Boatride and Other Poems. Ed. Arvind Krishna Mehrotra. Pras: Mumbai, 2009. King, Bruce. “Two Bilingual Experimentalists: Kolatkar and Chitre” in Modern Indian Poetry in English. Oxford University Press: New Delhi, 2004.

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DACHA | ROBERT FOX

Robert Fox is an award-winning writer and/or director of several short stories, plays, poems, a novel and short and feature length screenplays. Two of his screenplays have been optioned to Hollywood. His recent stage directing debut led to an Audience Choice Award at the Canton One-Acts Festival. Fox teaches English and video production in the Ann Arbor Public Schools. Fox lives in Ypsilanti, Michigan, USA. His website is www.foxplots.com. __ The romantic image of a journey into exotic foreign lands is shattered by Fox’s account of his travels in the Ukraine. The traveller is always the outsider, and being the outsider means being helpless and nearly childlike, as the narrator feels himself to be. The act of journeying into foreign lands always brings with it the fear of exclusion from social setups which are alien to the sojourner. Yet, the traveller is always confronted with the origin of that which he had hitherto only experienced in imitation, like the narrator’s mistaking of the voice of the real cuckoo bird for that of a cuckoo clock. This becomes an index for the inherent incompatibility of the two worlds which the traveller through his journeying tries to unite – like the fresh milk which he finds not so tasteful. The pristine is always too pristine and indigestible for the traveller unaccustomed to it. Travelling thus becomes a series of obstacles and what remains for the weary tourist after his journey is the memory of his travails, not travels.

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Dacha

Leaving a Soviet-era apartment for a weekend trip to a countryside dacha (summer home) was not as simple as walking out the door, hopping into the car and getting on our merry way. Leaving meant unplugging every appliance, shutting off the water, double and triple checking every window, calling the security company and then locking and double locking every door, which in itself wouldn’t be so bad. But realizing you left something after going through the whole process meant unlocking each and every door and then calling the security company again to cancel the alarm, before going through it all over again. It is exhausting. By the time you were done, you were ready not to go anywhere. And then here’s the kicker: once the alarm company is notified, you only have a minute to clear out before the alarm would sound, notifying the police. And this includes the locking of all those doors. And the penalty shall you not make it out on time? The cops show up at your door, guns pointing. It made going out almost seem futile. But like everything else in Ukrainian life, you grin and bear it, then move on to the next obstacle that surely awaited you. With the fortress doors now securely bolted behind us, we piled into the car and were on our way, crammed into the backseat with Babushka. It was hot and stuffy and unfortunately, the air conditioner was broken. Our lives almost all came to a crashing halt as Sergei pulled into the middle of busy intersections without first looking to see if traffic was clear. As we headed out of town, I was taken aback by how suddenly and without warning, the city comes to an end. Unlike American cities, there is no gradual fade into suburban sprawl. The city abruptly ends and its place: villages, farmland and endless fields of sunflowers. No billboards littered the roadside. Instead, babushka vendors sold sunflower seeds and burly men sold watermelon from wooden carts and stands, along with the occasional route van stops sprinkled along the road. For the first time, Ukraine actually looked beautiful. Even the dilapidated village shacks and shanties held a magical beauty like something out of a rural painting.

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But just like anything else in Ukraine, it was only a matter of time before any semblance of peace and tranquillity is interrupted by Ukrainian bullshit. This time, the bullshit arrived in the form of Ukrainian authorities. Two policeman standing on the side of the road waved us over with black and white striped batons. This was the Ukrainian equivalent of being pulled over. “What’s happening?” I asked, as Sergei pulled over. The policeman slowly approached on opposite sides of the car. “Shhh,” Katya demanded. “Whatever you do, don’t speak.” Sergei handed over his I.D. as well as several other documents, which included who knows what. The other officer stuck his head through the passenger side, sneering at all of us, but mostly at the foreign darkie in the backseat. Sergei was asked several questions, which he answered confidently and seemingly without fear. At one point, both looked at me with even deeper disdain. After a lengthy discussion, Sergei handed the cop some cash and the cop handed Sergei back his documents, shook his hand and returned to his post. And then we were on our way. “What just happened?” “Nothing. Everything’s fine.” “Was he speeding?” “No. Police just like to pull people over from time to time.” “For no reason?” “For money.” “Are you serious?” “Of course I’m serious.” I was amazed yet again by how accepting Ukrainians were to this sort of thing. Nobody fought back. They just bent over and took it. Then again, they were smart enough to realize that not abiding would just mean just getting fucked longer, harder and deeper. “And you won’t believe what my dad told the cop.” “What?” “He said you were his son-in-law.” “Really? Why?” “To keep you out of prison.” Sergei turned around: “Bobby, cows,” he said in Russian as we passed by a field of cows.

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“Da. Cows,” I said. We turned off the main road, onto a very narrow, pot-hole laden dirt road that could barely fit even this smallest of cars. If a car came from the other direction, somebody would have to find a way to squeeze inbetween trees on the side of the road. Ten minutes later, we finally arrived at the dacha – a small, plain cottage made of white brick, topped off with a tin roof. Entering the dacha involved walking up a very steep stairwell consisting of ten or so steps. Inside, a spiral, corrugated-steel staircase led upstairs to the master bathroom and a spare room snugly co-existing with flying buttresses. “My father built this himself,” Katya proudly boasted. This came as no surprise. The main floor consisted of a living room, consisting of a fold-out bed, and a small, black and white television. A small dining room led to a smaller kitchen, which then led to a closet of a bathroom, making the one at their apartment look like a bathroom fit for a mansion. Since the dacha had no running water, the first order of business was to load a large, plastic barrel into an old, wooden wagon and headed to the village pump. Katya placed the barrel under the old, rusty pump and began filling it up, instructing me to hold the barrel steady. When the barrel was full, I attempted to load it back into the wagon, but the weight of the barrel almost caused me to fall over backwards. When I finally regained my balance, Katya held the wagon steady so I could place the barrel into it. Walking back to the dacha, I had to navigate through a wide array of bumps and ruts along the way. At one point, I hit a bump, causing the wagon to topple over, forcing me to chase the barrel until it landed in another bump down the road, much to the merriment of villagers tending to their gardens and vodka. When we returned to the dacha, we headed into town with Elena, who was carrying two old-fashioned milk jugs. “Are we going to milk a cow?” I asked, looking at her mother’s jugs. “Close. We’re going into the village for milk.” And with that, we set off. There are just some things in life you just don’t picture yourself ever doing. And this was one of them.

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We walked down the long village road against the backdrop of a beautiful sunset over a landscape of sunflowers, passing occasional farms and cows grazing on the side of the road, under an orange-pink swirl of a sky. At the end of the road was the village of Volosskoye, whose “downtown” was the equivalent of one block consisting of a small market and a dark, decrepit apartment building. An old man sat on a rotted, wooden bench, drinking vodka and watching children playing in the street, where many a vehicle not pulled by horses traversed. Before we got milk, Katya and Elena entered the small shop for some meat and cheese (and based on the smell wafting out of the store, some clearly rotting meat or cheese), wrongly assuming that it was for the best that I waited outside. Shortly after they went in, I approached a goat chained to a fence and snapped a picture. An old man with a long, white beard approached, violently waving his finger at me as though it were a puppet on strings. He shouted something at me in Russian. “Nyet, Russkiy,” I said, desperately pleading my case. But the man continued shouting at me. Moments later, Katya ran out of the store, coming to my defence. “Is this your foreigner?,” the man asked Katya, in Russian. “Da.” “Get him the hell out of my village. The cheap son of a bitch owes me!” “What did you do?” Katya asked me. “I really don’t know,” I said, as the man continued to yell. “I took a picture of his goat.” “What is he saying?” I asked. “He said if you want to photograph my goat, then pay a price.” “As in literally pay a price, or is he threatening me?” “He wants you pay him.” “I’ll butcher you like a cow if you take another picture of my goat, you hear me?” the man said. Katya apologized, then took me by the hand. “Never do that again.” “Do what again?” You can’t just take pictures of another man’s goat.” “Why? What’s the big deal?”

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“Stop asking why. It’s just the way it is.” “That doesn’t really answer my question.” “You’ll scare people, that’s why.” “I’ll scare people?! This country scares me! Nothing works right. Nothing’s logical. Nothing’s rational.” “If you’re looking for rational, you’re in the wrong country. It’s not perfect, but it’s my country. This is how it is. If you can’t handle it, no one’s forcing you to stay.” This helped settle me down and I realized we just survived our first squabble, just in time for Elena to come out of the shop. We approached a middle-aged woman – her face worn and haggard from village life – selling milk on the side of the road. “Evening milk?” asked Elena. “Morning”, the vendor sullenly replied. Elena walked away. Katya and I followed. “What’s wrong?” I asked. “They don’t have evening milk.” “What the hell’s evening milk?” “Milk that’s milked in the evening.” We headed towards the dark and dingy apartment building. From the outside, one could only assume that it was not only abandoned, but inhabitable. And we were about to go inside. “So where are we going now, the black market?” I asked as we crept around to the back of the building. “Shhh. Don’t ask questions.” Of course not. Why would I question entering into what I was pretty sure was Ukraine’s own Amityville? As we entered, the stairwell was completely black, even when compared to Katya’s dimly lit stairwell. We made our way up several flights, trusting that each step was evenly spaced since they were impossible to see in the darkness. When we finally reached our destination – a destination whose purpose was still unknown – Katya reminded me yet again: “No English.” Elena knocked at the door. Moments later, another haggard, middleaged woman appeared through a bead curtain hanging from the doorframe.

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“Evening milk?” Elena asked her. The woman nodded as Elena handed her the jugs. She then disappeared and we stood in the hallway, waiting in the darkness. Moments later, the woman reappeared with two jugs filled with warm, fresh milk. Elena paid and we began our descent into darkness – a feat far more frightening than the way up. Each step felt as though we were about to stumble off a cliff. “Did she just milk a cow in there?” I asked. Katya said no, but I wasn’t convinced. When we returned to the dacha, Elena took out some glasses and began pouring milk, as everyone eagerly waited for the straight-from-the-teat treat. Elena handed me a glass. “Nyet, spasibo,” I said. “Why not? It’s fresh,” Katya said. “It’s a little bit too fresh for my taste. I don’t trust it. I like my milk with chemicals in it,” making myself look like an ungrateful misfit once again. Following an unpleasant night of trying to sleep on what amounted to a prison cot, a new day awaited. Sergei boastfully announced that he would be making his specialty – the one and only meal he cooks – shish kabob, or shashlik. Little did I know what a prolonged, precise science making this meal would turn out to be. After spending a half hour or so preparing what was essentially a pyre on top of his handmade grill, he handed me a box of long matches, giving me the honour of lighting his grill as though it were the Olympic torch. The only problem was, I have a rather unusual phobia of matches. It took me several attempts to both get over my fear and actually light the damn thing, due to my limited experience. Sensing that Sergei was growing impatient and that I was looking more and more like a wuss, I finally stepped up to the plate and lit the match. I quickly turned toward the grill to light it, resulting in a flame bursting three feet into the air, singing my arm-hair and just missing having my face torched off. Katya then led me down the road – Sergei’s flame still in view behind us. A horse-drawn buggy passed us by. “This reminds me of the Amish.” “What is Amish?” Katya asked. I explained to her who the Amish were. “Why would they choose to live that way?”

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“It’s their religion.” “Here, people don’t choose to live this way. It’s the only option they have.” She had a point. At the end of road, we approached a wooded area. As we headed into the woods, I heard what I assumed was somebody’s cuckoo clock. “Do you hear that?” “What?” “A cuckoo clock.” “I don’t hear a cuckoo clock, but I do hear a cuckoo bird.” “A real cuckoo bird?” “Of course.” “I never heard a real one,” I said with astonishment. “I didn’t realize just how much they sounded like a clock!” We climbed to the top of a small cliff, overlooking the Sura River – a tributary of the Dneper. Clearly, Katya had much more experience at climbing rocks and foliage than me, as I fell quickly behind. When we finally made it to the top, we sat on the edge of the cliff to admire the view and to catch our breath – or at least my breath. We then headed down to the river for a swim – Chernobyl-bedamned. The river was completely coated in a green, moss-like substance that I was certain would glow in the dark and give me a third testicle. Or melt my existing ones. And suddenly, without warning, a water snake popped his head above the surface, turned right toward us, slithering its tongue. I’m pretty sure I screamed like a schoolgirl and booked full steam ahead to the shore, slipping and sliding on the slimy, moss-covered rocks. Katya was right behind me, but not nearly as panicky. And that’s when I noticed the snake was swimming right toward us! Fortunately, we got out just in time. Disappointed, the snake disappeared beneath the surface, where it would presumably wait for its next victim. We headed back to the dacha, where Sergei eagerly greeted us. He took me by the arm, and led me to his homemade grill. He gently lifted up the grape leaves, then proudly showed off his meat skewers, carefully placed on the grill, placed equally apart on the grill. One would assume that once meat is placed on the grill, it is only a matter of minutes before it could be consumed. However, this would not be the case, as it would be another two hours before it was done. Sensing that I was expected to

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be impressed by Sergei’s meat, I did my best to act in the manner of one who’s impressed. “Bobby, shashlik.” “Shish kabob,” I said in response, as he gently rotated the meat just so, before covering them back up with the grape leaves. I felt as though I was just given a glimpse of the Holy Grail. “What are the grape leaves for?” Katya translated. “For flavour. And to keep the meat moist.” Finally, the time had come to eat. And eat we did, as we gathered on the patio. Ukrainian folk music played into the perfect late-summer night. We sat outside in the garden patio. Every square inch of the table was covered in food, as well as every square inch of seating capacity. Sergei and I washed our food down with a couple of shots of vodka, which did just enough to make me feel all funny inside. Following dinner, we ate watermelon (arbus). Never had I eaten so much watermelon as I did that night. Or shall I say, never had I been forced to eat as much watermelon as I was that night. As Elena offered met yet another slice, I held onto my gut to indicate that I was full. But this didn’t seem to matter. “I’m going to burst,” I pleaded. But Elena insisted. I gave in once again, forcing myself to eat it. When it was all gone, Sergei put the music on louder, then began clapping along to the music. Despite feeling like I had a bowling ball sitting in my stomach, I joined Sergei. After Katya joined in, Sergei coaxed a reluctant Elena to join in, as well. I did a surprisingly solid imitation of a traditional Russian dance, drawing laughs from everyone – except for Babushka, of course, who sat and watched. Silently judging, but speaking volumes. When we finished dancing, Sergei poured me another shot, which I reluctantly drank, despite Katya’s flash of disapproval. She quickly poured me a cup of water in hopes of diluting the vodka already inside me. Suddenly, I was overcome with the desire to take a little midnight stroll. I headed through the gate and down the dirt road, carrying my cup of water with me, ignoring Katya asking where I was going as the music filled the night air.

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Katya watched from the gate as I staggered around the corner at the end of the road. She continued calling out my name, but I didn’t respond. I was in my own little world, oblivious to my surroundings. Katya quickly caught up with me, taking me by the arm and turning me around in the manner one would do to an Alzheimer’s patient who escaped from a nursing home. “Where were you going?” she asked. “That way”, I pointed. “Let’s go back. No more drinking”, Katya said, as she led me back to the patio, helping me into my seat, where tea awaited.

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From Acts of Faith: Journeys into Sacred India | MAKARAND R. PARANJAPE

Makarand R. Paranjape is Professor of English, at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. He has published five volumes of poetry – The Serene Flame, Playing the Dark God, Used Book, Partial Disclosure, and Confluence. He is the author of the novel, The Narrator. His edited volumes include Indian Poetry in English, The Penguin Sri Aurobindo Reader, and The Penguin Swami Vivekananda Reader. His mongraphs include Another Canon: Indian Texts and Traditions in English, and Altered Destinations: Self Society and Nation in India __ This work of non-fiction is an edited excerpt from the writer’s book Acts of Faith: Journeys into Sacred India, published by Hay House. Many passages from within the excerpted sections have been omitted here for the sake of subject-adherence and brevity. They have been republished here with email-written permission of the author. __ Travel leads to identity of difference, and moral and spiritual arousal. It leads to awakening, at least it presumes awakening. Finally travel arouses tolerance. It shapes identity by shaping discriminations within consciousness. We are always conscious, of something. This principle works at the root of phenomenology. Travel, thus, gives rise to the self and the other. Sometimes the other is seen as the anti-thesis of the self. In the economy of self-constructon, that other has come before, for the self begins its fashioning in relation to this other. So, paradoxically, it is not the other that is antagonistic or antithetical to the self, but the self to the former. This process is detrimental to spiritual growth. Paranjape rescues the traveller from this impasse by constructing the other as the infinite of which the self is purely a dynamic part. It invites the traveller to partake

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Â of the creation of this infinite other that resides in the very spirit it invokes. The idea of the difference of the self can therefore only consolidate the other, as the acknowledgement of the profane enlightens the sacred itself.

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“A Search in Secret India”. From, Acts of Faith: Journeys into Sacred India

Paul Brunton’s book, A Search in Secret India, first published in 1934, has come to acquire the status of a classic. It is famous, not so much as a travel book, but as a guide to Indian spirituality. Born in 1898 in England…[Brunton] started, as many Westerners then did, as a theosophist. The whole premise of his journeys to India and the Orient was to find spiritually enlightened beings or mahatmas, a belief that was most probably derived from theosophy. As a journalist and writer, he is credited with bringing the profound truths of the East to the West in simple and lucid prose. As a guru, however, Brunton took himself too seriously. By the time he died in 1981, he had more than 20,000 pages of philosophical and spiritual writings. Of all he wrote, his first book, A Search in Secret India, remains his most readable and important book. It is reputed to have brought many readers to the spiritual path, awakening their latent urge for the divine. It is after reading Brunton that countless pilgrims from the West mustered courage to make that arduous trip to India. The book, moreover, has considerable documentary value because it contains accounts of some well-known yogis, sadhus and holy men of India. Besides the detailed narrative on Ramana Maharshi, the other notable figures in the text include Mehr Baba, Hazarat Babajan, Mahendranath Gupta (Master Mahashaya), the Shankaracharya of Kumbakonam [sic], Swami Vishudhananda of Banaras, Shahabji Maharaj of Dayal Bagh, and Yogi Ramiah of Tiruvannamalai. There are also encounters with several other faquirs, yogis, magicians, astrologers and miracle-mongers in the book. The book is replete with prophecies and predictions, ends with a reversal and a denouement; it thus has an effective plot and affords the satisfaction of a story well crafted, controlled and concluded. In fact, it would not be inappropriate to mention that Brunton’s book helped me in my own journey to sacred India. Its year of publication, its authenticity, its

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documentary power and its appeal as a story, thus, make A Search in Secret India unique in the genre.

A Search in Secret India as Travel Literature A convenient point of entry into Brunton’s book occurs a little after the first half. Brunton has had one meeting with Ramana Maharshi, but then wanders on, not knowing exactly what he is looking for. His grand spiritual tour of India, so to speak, is still incomplete. Also, he has not yet had a proper opportunity to assimilate what he has seen and experienced. It is at this juncture that he encounters, in the dusty streets of Puri, a ‘Literary Sadhu’. That, of course, is not his name, but is all that Brunton condescends to tell us about his interlocutor. Lounging on the beach, Brunton is amusing himself with ‘rosescented pages’ of Omar Khayyam, when a holy man squats by his side and introduces himself in excellent English, ‘Pardon me, sir…but I, too, am a student of your literature.’ To prove his point, the sadhu unties the knot of his linen bundle to reveal, quite appropriately, if not the Minute, at least the Essays of Lord Macaulay! About the father of English education in India, the sadhu observes, ‘A wonderful literary style, sir, a great intellect – but what a materialist!’ The other book that the sadhu carries is A Tale of Two Cities, of which he says, ‘What a sentiment, what tear-bringing pathos, sir!’ But it is his third book which is most interesting – Mammonism and Materialism: ‘A Study of the West’ by a ‘Hindu Critic’. Brunton says, ‘It is written in a declamatory style by some Bengali babu and published in Calcutta – probably at the author’s expense’. Brunton does not think too highly of it, ‘On the strength of the two degrees tackled on to the end of his name, but without any first-hand acquaintance with his subject, the writer luridly pictures Europe and America as a kind of new inferno, full of suffering and gloom, and peopled by tortured working-classes and sybaritic plutocrats engaged in debased pleasures’. Brunton turns to the Literary sadhu and demands, ‘Now tell me – do you agree with the writer of Mammonism?’ The sadhu is not to be outdone so easily. He replies, ‘Just a little, sir; just a little!’ So far, the dialogue has proceeded along predictable, if entertaining lines. It is now

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that it takes an unexpected turn. The Literary sadhu adds, ‘It is my ambition to travel to the West one day; then I shall see for myself’. Brunton asks, ‘And what will you do there?’ The sadhu replies, ‘I shall deliver lectures to transform the darkness of the people’s minds into light. I would like to follow in the footsteps of our great Swami Vivekananda, who gave such captivating orations in the great cities of your lands. Alas, that he died so young! What a golden tongue died with him!’ Brunton responds, ‘Well you are a strange kind of holy man’. The sadhu brings the encounter to a close by citing Shakespeare, ‘The Supreme Playwright has set the stage. What are we but actors who make our entrances and exits, as your world-renowned Shakespeare says!’ (Brunton, pp. 175-77) This intriguing passage can be read at several levels. It is as if in the deep of his Indian travels, Brunton has suddenly encountered his opposite number, someone who might have been Brunton himself and whom Brunton himself might have been, had circumstances been reversed. In his encounter we also see two different kinds of stereotypes and models of travel in evidence. Moreover, there is the inequality between the two which overrides all other impressions. The Literary sadhu is very much a product of the colonial education system and yet, the dominant self is not a colonized, but a recovered self. Its model is, of course, Vivekananda, himself an English-educated positivist, transformed by Sri Ramakrishna. Vivekananda’s triumphant travels in the West, which on closer examination are revealed to be not so triumphant after all, then, become the model for the east-to-west spiritual traveller. The reason why I foreground this relatively minor incident in the book is because it reveals the complex and paradoxical relationship of Brunton to India. As the representative of the ruling race, he is at once superior to the land and its people. His privileges as a Western traveller are visible throughout – in the hotels in which he stays, in his mode of travel, in the bakhsheesh that he gives to faquirs who perform for him, in his access to the rich and powerful of the land, even to the extent of his receiving special treatment wherever he goes. For instance, he travels in a reserved compartment with Sahabji Maharaj, the head of the RadhaSaomis of Dayalbagh, part of the way, a privilege nobody else enjoys. At Banaras, when he visits Swami Vishudhananda, he persuades Pandit Kaviraj, the principal of the Government Sanskrit College, to act as his

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interpreter. For all practical purposes, then, Brunton is the Sahib travelling amongst natives. Nowhere is his sense of superiority to the natives more evident than at the beginning of his book, where he credits himself as a Westerner with higher powers of observation and logic. ‘It is an unfortunate fact’, he observes, ‘that Hindus lack any critical approach to these matters and will mix hearsay with fact quite indiscriminately. Therefore such reports diminish greatly in truth as documentary records. When I saw the cataract of credulity which covers so many Eastern eyes, I thanked Heaven for such scientific training as the West has given me and for the common sense attitude which journalistic experience has instilled in me.’ (ibid., p. 14) It is obvious that though Brunton’s book is filled with the most incredible and ‘unscientific’ happenings – including telepathy, stopping one’s breath, raising the dead (in this case, only a bird), tearing out an eyeball and restoring it, and so on – Brunton, because he is an Englishman, is, by his own assumption, above suspicion; his credibility is never called into question. Critical thinking, scientific training and common sense are all conferred a priori upon himself (and the West) and denied to Indians. This makes Brunton’s collusions with imperial cultural paradigms obvious. He calls his book A Search in Secret India because he claims that the India he writes about is largely unknown to his compatriots who rule the country. He attributes this ignorance to ‘the inevitable barrier imposed by this form of caste’, – that is, the caste divide between the rulers and the ruled, the whites and the browns, the colonizers and the colonized. ‘Fewer still have taken the trouble to go out of their way to find the adepts in Yoga, while not one Englishman in a thousand is prepared to prostrate himself before a brown, half-naked figure in some lonely cave or in a disciple-filled room’. Evidently, Brunton is one such Englishman. In his figurative and literal prostrations before India’s holy men, he is also prostrating before India and what it represents at its best. Brunton’s project, then, is mired in a complex politics of collusion and resistance. He respects India too much to trample on it; yet, by virtue of his racial, political, cultural and ideological affiliations, he cannot altogether escape from the colonizer’s mentality and attitude to things Indian.

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A Search in Secret India as a Spiritual Text The source of this book’s effectiveness as a spiritual text is the presence of several spiritual gurus in it, but especially of Ramana Maharshi. There are two places in the text devoted to Brunton’s encounters with the Maharshi, Chapter IX: ‘The Hill of the Holy Beacon’, and Chapter XVI and XVII, ‘In a Jungle Hermitage’ and ‘Tablets of Forgotten Truth’. Respectively, which are the last two chapters of the book. During the very first darshan, Brunton has an important spiritual experience. The Maharshi says nothing, but his gaze is riveting, ‘There is something in this man which holds my attention as steel fillings hold magnet’ (ibid., p. 141). What is happening is typical of the silent, but potent action of the greatest ‘mind-slayer’ of recent times. Of all miracles, the miracle of inner peace and equanimity is the hardest to attain; only a perfectly self-realized sage emanates it as his natural state. The silent intercourse so overwhelms Brunton that he postpones his pressing queries for meetings that follow. When he does get an opportunity, Brunton plies the Maharshi with questions, only to receive what appear to be a series of rebuffs, ‘Why should you trouble yourself about the future?...Take care of the present; the future will then take care of itself.’ Or, ‘As you are, so is the world. Without understanding yourself, what is the use of trying to understand the world?’ (ibid. p. 146) The Maharshi seems to suggest that what Brunton has received is much greater and deeper than any question that he (Brunton) might raise. Before he departs Brunton has a major paranormal vision in the Maharshi’s presence, which he calls a ‘vivid dream’. He imagines that he is a boy of five, standing at the mountain path to Arunachala, holding the Maharshi’s hand, who seems to be a towering figure, having grown to a giant’s size. They ascend to the top of the hill, encountering several yogis and siddhas in subtle bodies on the way. On the top of the hill, once again the Maharshi looks into Brunton’s eyes: I become aware of a mysterious change taking place with great rapidity in my heart and mind. The old motives which have lured me on begin to desert me…An untellable peace falls upon me and I know now that there is nothing further that I shall ask from life. (152)

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Brunton’s doubts do not fade but he is aware of being in the presence of a very great truth. Before Brunton departs, he is vouchsafed one more paranormal experience, once again coming to him via the Maharshi’s gaze: ‘His eyes shine with astonishing brilliance. Strage sensations begin to arise in me…His mysterious glance penetrates my thoughts, my emotions and my desires…’ Brunton is uneasy thus to lose control, but once again begins to feels an ‘extraordinary peace…a sense of exaltation and lightness. Time seems to stand still. My heart is released from its burden of care. Never again, I feel, shall bitterness of anger and melancholy of unsatisfied desire afflict me…What is this man’s gaze but a thaumaturgic wand…’ (ibid., p. 162) It is now that Brunton experiences nothing less than what the Buddhists call bhanganyaya, the deconstruction of the body itself: ‘Suddenly my body seems to disappear, and we are both out in space!’ (ibid., p. 163) After this memorable encounter, Brunton goes on in his wanderings all over India, still ostensibly searching for yogis, faquirs and miracleworkers. But there is a noticeable change in his attitude. Ironically, the very sense of wonder, innocence and novelty which has enabled him, without being judgemental, to encounter so many of these holy men of India, is now missing. Instead, a strange ennui gradually takes possession of him, until he finds himself tired and utterly exhausted, back in Bombay (now Mumbai). He has taken ill and is on the verge of a nervous breakdown. What Brunton is going through, is, in the parlance of the mystics, the dark night of the soul, that vale of doubt and tribulation through which every earnest seeker must pass before arriving at the shoreless expanse of the final beatitude. A cry of anguish issues forth from Brunton’s tortured mind: ‘I realize unexpectedly that I have become a pilgrim without a God, a wanderer from city to city and from village to village seeking a place where the mind may find rest, but finding none.’ (ibid. 271) It is as if neither the secular nor the sacred can satisfy him. As the defeated traveller, his purpose dissipated, prepares to turn his face towards home, he realizes how futile and limited his quest has been. Travel, at this point, takes on a totally different dimension, resembling the age-old metaphor of the round of lives that we go through, travelling from birth to death. This is no longer the travel of a European adventurer visiting distant shores in search of conquest or wonder, but the travel of a

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soul from life to life, in search of everlasting peace or freedom from process. The Maharshi to him is a ‘child of a remote Past, when the discovery of spiritual truth was reckoned of no less value than is the discovery of a gold-mine today’ and ‘one of the last of India’s spiritual supermen.’ (ibid., 301) Brunton’s notion of spirituality then is backward looking. For him, it is a question of conservation and retrieval. That, indeed, has been the real thrust behind his travels – that there is something secret, hidden, inaccessible, which needs to be recovered, brought into the open, and made available to all. It is only in his later books he does talk about the future of humanity, of which is needed to save the race from selfdestruction. This process of going inwards reaches a quiet climax in the last pages of the novel. Here, Brunton tries to follow the Maharshi’s advice to its logical conclusion, working upon himself in solitude, rather than looking for external props. He tries to trace thought to its source, to stand outside himself as it were. Given the way the book is constructed, this culmination of Brunton’s search must happen; otherwise, the reader would feel cheated: ‘Finally, it happens. Thought is extinguished like a snuffed candle. The intellect withdraws into its real ground, that is, consciousness working unhindered by thoughts. I perceive, what I have suspected for some time and what the Maharishee [sic] has confidently affirmed, that the mind takes its rise in a transcendental source.’ (ibid., 304) Brunton is no longer a traveller; paradoxically, he is no longer even a pilgrim. From his heightened state of consciousness, Brunton seeks to bring back some ‘memorials’ of the ‘starry truths’ that he has gleaned, even though they must be ‘translated into the language of the earth’. These prophetic utterances are offered in italics, and are most certainly the ‘Tablets of Forgotten Truth’, which the chapter heading promises to reveal. After these profound interjections, Brunton describes one last meeting with the Maharshi in which they communicate perfectly in silence, ‘In this profound silence our minds approach a beautiful harmony…my own inner life has begun to mingle with his’. (ibid., 311) Looking at Brunton’s ‘Tablets of Forgotten Truth’, I cannot help but being struck by a curious paradox. At the very point that Brunton finishes his process, he ceases to be interesting. The ‘Tablets’ themselves,

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Â written in archaic language, appear to be so many ineffectual clichĂŠs and truisms without the power to illuminate or uplift. Brunton the traveller, even Brunton the pilgrim, has been a very interesting raconteur, a conscientious and engaging narrator. The moment he lays claim, however indirectly, to sagehood, he becomes not just flat and boring, but somewhat incoherent and incomprehensible. His wisdom seems to express himself in vague assertions and generalizations. This difficulty persists in his later books as well. In this sense, the journey is far more interesting than the arrival.

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References Brunton, Paul, A Search in Secret India, [1934]; reprint B.L. Publications, New Delhi, 1982

Excerpt From Paranjape, Makarand, R., Acts of Faith: Journeys to Sacred India, Hay House India, New Delhi, 2012

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CHILMARK AND CHELTENHAM ANANYA | DUTTA GUPTA

Ananya Dutta Gupta lives in Santiniketan, West Bengal, India. She teaches at the Department of English & Other Modern European Languages, Viswa Bharati University. This travel diary was written over summer in the year 2000 between short trips to different parts of England at the invitation of alumni of University College, Oxford __ The present work of non-fiction is the second part of the essay titled “Chilmark and Cheltenham: A Travel Diary”, the first part of which appeared as the author’s journal entries of her time spent in England, for the days of 11th and 12th July, 2000, in the online issue of Coldnoon: Travel Poetics, July, 2012, and is shortly to be published the print volume of Coldnoon: Travel Poetics, Winter, 2012. It is suggested to readers of this essay to revert to the previous July issue, featuring the first half of this work. __ Travel is not in flux. It resides, sometimes retires. It does so in the gaps of language; the travelling act is void of the actor’s language. It is ever directed. Dutta Gupta’s language is incomplete. It comprises bullet markers to her several destinations during her visit to England. At every ungrammatical fullstop, at the break of syntaxes we gasp a little. It is our cogitations that complete this language. Dutta Gupta handles the exhaustive narrative with a negligible use of her cogito or the “I”, relying entirely on the I of the reader.

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Chilmark and Cheltenham: A Travel Diary contd.

13th July: Spend some time in the garden; tempted yet again to sit on the swing, a favourite occupation since childhood, desist; browse through the holiday-books in the dining-room. The phone rings. A representative of some charitable institution called, I am told afterwards. Charity seems to be an integral part of the English life, I remark. Mr. Woodhouse compares English institutionalized charity with Indian alms-giving. He expresses outrage at the shrill protests against allegedly aggressive foreigners seeking alms on public transport. At breakfast, eat the melon more confidently; not liking the taste of ginger habitually, I am relieved to find that it blends in so smoothly with the melon. Feel very smug when Mrs. Woodhouse looks up the entry on Sinbad the Sailor in the Oxford Companion to English Literature; try not show how much it pleases me to be right; Mr. Woodhouse expresses his disappointment with a very mild utterance, ‘blast!’ ; I deduce that he doesn’t like being wrong. Choose to visit Wilton House for the sensible reason that I can always visit Bath on my own; dying to tell my kind hostess all the time that the real reason is that I want to spare her yet another long drive. Given a naval joke to read; I approach it deferentially, not the ideal mood to appreciate a joke in. And then, what I have been fearing all along happens: my host finds out how stupid I really am; I didn’t note the shift from the apocalyptic to the bathetic. Given a book of poems to read; can’t help marvelling at the commitment of the judge by profession and poet at leisure; have to read over the same poem repeatedly before the printed word begins to register; read the rest of the poems in that slim volume with pleasure. Start for Wilton House. In the car, my hostess asks me if the first English family I have ever stayed with has surprised me. ‘Pleasantly’, I tell her, ‘because of its joviality’. I tell her about my constant dread of

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embarrassing myself. ‘Have you?’ she asks. ‘Not yet, I hope,’ I reply. ‘Well, there is still time’, she assures me, and we burst into a laugh. As we drive into the car-park, my hostess asks me if I know the word ‘pothole’. There are too many of them in Calcutta, I remind her, for me not to know what they are called. Beautiful grounds; the garden has a pond with little red foot-bridges across it. Sit by the river and watch the playful ducks; note for the first time how the webbed feet actually move in water; ducks’ eyes seem less harsh than those of some terrestrial birds; they seem to glide over the water, leaving silent tracks behind them; of course, they can be very noisy when they want to, I am going to discover that while sitting by the lake within the Pittville Pump Room Grounds in Cheltenham a few days later. Learn about the ‘daisy chain’. In fact, find out that the daisies read about in Alice in the Wonderland are those dainty grass-flowers blooming everywhere since spring. Admire the stately Lebanese cedar trees; converse, among other things, about war, women and domestic violence, over delicious chicken-sandwiches. Learn both the literal and metaphorical meaning of ‘preening’. Talk about Doctor Zhivago. As usual, unable to explain why I like it so much. The funny-looking nun in the film on the Earls of Pembroke reminds me of The Sound of Music. Walk through the Tudor kitchen; as two gentlemen walk through the scary creaking door to have a look, I realize how unadventurous I am; I would never have tried to find out what was behind that creaking door. Find the meticulously created dolls’ houses most absorbing. Excited by the illustrations of Sidney’s Arcadia in the dining-hall; find the splendour of the rooms rather monotonous. Admire the elegant chairs placed along the corridors. Look expectantly at the closed doors, expecting, that is, a member of the family to come out any moment. Too many photographs of the present Earl and his family; fail to appreciate his daughters’ hairdo. The portrait of Charles the First shows a rather sensitive face with feeling eyes. Quickly buy a souvenir, a miniature painting of Wilton House. Almost walk into the coach-drivers’ restroom on the way out. Look up at the sky and find it looking as clear and calm and cheerful as I am feeling; can’t miss the chance to thank Mrs. Woodhouse for yet another marvellous day out. Tell her exactly what it has been like: idyllic. She is gracious, as usual. Back again at the Cottage, find myself in a reading mood: manage to complete the first chapter of Jonathan Bate’s ecological appreciation of English Literature, The Song of

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the Earth; fascinated by his observations on the original associations of the word ‘culture’; but having studied Hardy at one stage, find his observations on the latter well-worn. Then comes the suggestion from Mr. Woodhouse that we go and see The Gladiator. Well and good. The cinema is a charming old building; quite unlike the ABC Cinema at Oxford. Enjoy the blockbuster, gore and all, more thoroughly than I expected. Towards the end, hear sniffles from the lady on my left. I find the opening scene and the hero’s reminiscences about the home left behind rather evocative. Russell Crowe doesn’t have the Roman nose; I like him all the same. Find the opening battle between the Romans and the Germans quite gripping. It all seems so efficient- the fighting, I mean. The actor who plays Commodus looks uncannily like Timir Baran, a Bengali actor of yesteryear. A scene or two makes me jump out of my skin; but I rather like looking at Lucilla’s ‘Oriental’ costumes. As we walk out, Mr. Woodhouse suggests that the film must have offered a catharsis of any latent violent impulse in me. I assure him I wasn’t feeling violent in the first place. Talk to William about films on the way back again; ask him to see the films of Satyajit Ray if he can. Another enjoyable chat before retiring.

14th July: Try not to look at Westie; have the ‘usual’ breakfast; find out that the name ‘India’ for girls has been fashionable; learn the second English exclamation after ‘blast’- ‘gosh’, which is complimentary; say goodbye to my kind hostess. Meet Rose, who seems not to know what to make of me. Admire Mr. Woodhouse’s watercolours and learn a great deal about the differences between game- and coarse-fishing. Reminded of Three Men in a Boat. Ask about hue and cry over fox-hunting. Take pictures of the house where I have spent three of the most enjoyable days of my life. Don’t say good-bye to Westie. Learn a great deal more on the way: about post-offices in rural England, self-service petrol-pump stations, franchise and dealership, the Swedish pre-eminence in the European technological scenario. Aryans and their horses; meet what has by this time become a familiar site on otherwise deserted roads: beautiful, staid horses carrying confident riders of all ages, rein in hand; ‘Aryans’ Mr. Woodhouse

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observes. Also discuss the main roads criss-crossing the country, Treasure Island (Mr. Woodhouse has actually been on the island called Dead Man’s Chest), and the naval advances of Renaissance Europe, and Mr. Woodhouse’s past tutors at Oxford: Peter Brown and David Cox. The latter was a virtuoso mountaineer who successfully climbed up the Radcliffe Camera and the University Church of St. Mary’s here in Oxford, unaided by ropes or any other equipment. My host draws my attention to a certain inscription on a dusty window-screen of a dusty vehicle: ‘www.dirtyvan.co.uk’. See some typical old caravans. Accident near Oxford; asked to look away, but don’t need to. The Gladiator has hardened me.

15th July: Buy the ticket to Cheltenham on the bus; Laila still standing outside, waiting for me to turn; I do, and she says ‘bye’. See a bit of the Cotswold countryside on the way. Northleach is a beautiful village. Picturesque cottages on both sides of the road. The Rough Guide to Britain has already prepared me for Cheltenham; a very prosperous town where every house looks freshly painted. Alight from the bus to a friendly handshake with an exceptionally tall man in bermudas- Mr. Johnson. I feel quite tempted afterwards to ask him his exact height, but refrain. Meet the spaniel, Brock. Stop at Mrs. Johnson’s art gallery. Mr. Johnson asks if he can walk his dog before taking me to the house. I agree readily. He parks the car in a quarry and we climb up to one of the hills. It is a beautiful sight; sit on one of the benches thoughtfully set at particular spots in remembrance of deceased friends who loved those spots; Mr. Johnson says one can see the Welsh border in the distance on clearer days. Talk about brown lands and the pressure of housing. Take photos of the hills and valley below. Mr. Johnson asks, ‘You know public schools in this country are actually private, don’t you?’ I do, but don’t miss the opportunity of laughing heartily at the vagaries of English nomenclature. It’s a big imposing house- a hundred and thirty years old. Mr. Johnson says, ‘Welcome to our house.’ I am shown to one of the sprawling bedrooms upstairs with its equally sprawling bed, towering window and tall, heavy curtains. I note that the room has four mirrors in

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all, unusual for a boy’s room, for it is probably the room of Edmund, the eldest of the four Johnson children. No photographs. Meet Thomas. I have already been told that the kitchen is two floors below. Can’t find the kitchen on first attempt, because the staircase leading into the basement lies beyond a door. Sip tea and talk about my thesis. Mrs. Johnson arrives home from work. She thanks me for the chocolates. Mr. Johnson approves my choice with a considered ‘hmmm.’ Talk about Oxford in summer, how I don’t notice the undergraduates when they are there, but miss them when they aren’t. Recognize the large wooden kitchen cabinet as similar to those seen in Western magazines on old-style interior decoration, where the cups are hung on hooks and saucers rested side by side against the wall. Pick raspberries with Mr. Johnson in the garden. Dress for the evening concert, come down for a very quick supper. Meet Agnes and Leo. The chicken and onion in yoghourt reminds me of my mother’s special, ‘Chicken Ressalla’. For Mrs. Johnson it is a nameless culinary improvisation. We laugh. Mr. Johnson and I leave for the chamber-music concert at the Pitville Pump Room. Spot a rather run-down pub on the way; it’s appropriately called ‘The Calcutta Inn’. Learn that it used to be the haunt of a sizeable community of army-officers who settled in Cheltenham on returning from India. Judging by the looks I get from the respectable audience inside the Pump Room, a salwar-kameez-clad Indian is a novelty; make quite a few elderly heads turn. Enjoy the Takacs Quartet playing the string-quartets of Beethoven, Janacek and Dvorak. Try my best to follow at least the mood; look up at the cast-iron railings, elegant Ionic pillars and the beautiful carvings on the ceiling. During the interval, Mr. Johnson introduces me to his friends; one, a doctor and keen gardener with green eyes and clad in a green suit. They talk about Vikram Seth. Another gentleman, carrying a cane, comes closest to the image in my mind of an imperious Englishman. Also meet a kindly Quaker. Thank goodness I remember that Quakers are pacifists! Mr. Johnson speaks of visiting ‘beautiful’ Calcutta. I disabuse him. Use the corrective epithet-‘interesting’. The applause at the end of the recital is thunderous, accompanied by vigorous stamping of feet; the latter is a novelty to me. Learn more about Classical Music on the way back, notably, the criteria used to assess the merits of, say, a quartet. Back in the house, talk about the problems of India’s teaching community and the brain drain over tea. Retire for the night.

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16th July: Rise at seven; the warm smell of coffee and toast meets me as I approach the kitchen. Mrs. Johnson likes saying, ‘well done’. This time, it’s my turn to have ‘done well’. Told that Mr. Johnson, a Catholic, is just back from the Sunday service. Mrs. Johnson, a Protestant, goes to church less regularly. Agnes, their daughter is a Protestant, while her three brothers are Catholic. Find this most interesting. Learn that Mr. Johnson’s mother was furious when Agnes was confirmed a Protestant. Talk about my mother’s piety and my father’s sometime atheism and how Hinduism can accommodate both. Mr. Johnson provides me with a town-map for my morning perambulations, a book about Gloucestershire and the Forest of Dean, and a copy of the genealogical tree of Mrs. Johnson’s family. I am dropped at the Montpellier Square. Armed with the town-guide and my camera, I begin my northward wanderings. Soon find myself on the fringe of the Imperial Garden in full summer bloom; the brilliant colours make up for the artificiality. As everywhere else, struck by the predominance of elderly visitors. Walk around to the open-air art exhibition on the other side; extraordinary paintings of Indian flora and fauna, including a tiger, an elephant and a peacock. Walk on, turn right at the next crossing to take a look at the Town Hall. Note the cast-iron balcony-railings on the other side of the road. Walk up the Promenade, stop in front of the war-memorials, saunter through the Town Centre and soon find myself in a particularly green residential quarter; photograph the impeccably maintained houses furtively. The town proves to be smaller than I expected, for I am already outside the Pittville Pump Room Grounds; there are the small aqueducts over the lake Agnes told me about. Seagulls and ducks flock to the water. A white woman and a black man walk by, holding hands; I sit on a bench in a cool shade and begin studying the genealogical chart which traces Mrs. Johnson’s family back to Richard de Clare, Earl of Hertford who married Amicia, the Countess of Gloucester in the 12th century. Find the frequency of unnatural deaths (three executions including one decapitation, another case of mob-lynching and yet another, of drowning) the only interesting aspect. Read through the section on Cheltenham in the book Mr. Johnson has lent me. At a quarter to one, start walking towards the Pump Room to meet Mr. and Mrs. Johnson as they come out after the morning

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session of chamber music. Another ‘well done’ from Mrs. Johnson, this time with more justice. Walk to the car for the onward journey to ‘Paradise’. Answer questions on Indian travelling habits on the way. Reach ‘Paradise’, which turns out to be a farmhouse on the borders of the Cotswolds, complete with sheep. Ask the supremely stupid question if they are sheep or goats, just as I mistook the call of the sheep for that of goats at the Salisbury Cathedral. Feel a wave of the old shyness engulfing me, as I walk in holding a pot with a young oak-sapling. The Wadfield, as the house is called, has just turned three-hundred. The host is a very genial-looking film-scriptwriter. His sons couldn’t look more alike, while his wife, Laila, looks more like a Russian village-woman as seen in the pages of Russian Folktales, without the scarf, of course. Try desperately hard to ask the resident guest, a photographer, clever questions on photography. Munch sesame nuts and catch the talk around me about Chilean wine. Go out into the lawn with the fount in the middle, a real arch on the right and a fake arch on the left. Catch sight of the large table with chairs around it just outside the house, where we are to have lunch. Help hold the sparkling-white tablecloth under threat from a sudden strong breeze. Enjoy talking to the younger son, Paddy, about the source of the Ganges, Kumbhmela, his interest in anthropology and travels in America. Have spoken earlier to his elder brother, Dom, who suggests I should visit Newcastle-upon-Tyne; not sure if he is pulling my leg; try to keep a straight face. Dom thinks India is England’s only history. Can’t agree with that. Later, at lunch, joined by the host, who asks me about Bollywood. He also tells me that the Romany word for water is ‘pani’, as in Hindi. Tell him my father loves the gypsies. Talk about Java and the Dutch in Indonesia. The menfolk ask me why I don’t drink; tell them my mother doesn’t like the idea; besides, I don’t believe in tempting myself. Later think of what would have been a much better answer: not trying things out can also be a form of experiment. Tell them about my father’s theory that ancient Hindu sages ate beef. My host notes that the direction of the wind has changed; people do think about the direction of winds still, I wonder. Sit and watch a game of croquet; mildly amused by the leisurely game. The host proposes a jeep-ride; is pleased when I agree promptly. So, Agnes, Katie and I hop into the ramshackle jeep. I love every moment of it, not feeling

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scared in the least. The sheep have been shorn, Agnes observes. The petdog runs ahead of the jeep and leaps over a fence like a dancer. The host draws my attention to a buzzard and Sudeley Castle in the distance. He keeps apologizing for the absence of tigers and elephants. Thank him for the ride. Leave soon afterwards for Tewksbury Abbey for the evening concert of Bach’s choral music. Drive through the pretty village of Winchcombe on the way. As we walk through the church-compound, Mr. Johnson shows me a ‘flying buttress’. Inside the Abbey, the atmosphere is magnificent. Seated in the front row. The female soloist is wearing diamonds. Can sense the power of the conductor, in this case, a very handsome and self-conscious Sir John Eliot Gardiner in a long black coat. Realize that the ceremony is part of the experience. Enjoy the music in parts and gaze up at the embossed ceiling. Mr. Johnson identifies a double bass, a bassoon and an oboe for me, and also a version of pathetic fallacy in church-furniture: the misericord. Taken on a conducted tour of the Abbey, look into the private chantries of the Duke of Clarence, Hugh le Despenser and Edward le Despenser, Mrs. Johnson’s ancestors. See the copy of Van Eyck’s triptych, The Adoration of the Lamb. Learn that churches are always built in an east-westerly direction. Meet the Vicar, see the Vicar’s residence: Abbey House. Walk through the typical alleys of the village with tiny low doors into houses along them; reminded of the narrow lanes of Varanasi; take a quick look into a Nonconformist Chapel, also take a look at the River Avon from the old graveyard behind. Walk past the hotel which finds mention in Dickens’s Pickwick Papers. Drive to Odda’s Chapel, the ruins of a Saxon church; the river Severn flows close-by. Learn that its waters come up in February. Visit another old priory church; see the angel carved on its apse-wall; learn that empty cans are hung to scare off birds and that yewtrees were originally planted in graveyards because its poisonous fruit kept off animals from nearby farms. Ask what a certain beautiful tall tree is called: poplar, I am told. It is not the ideal tree to have near one’s house, because of its far-flung roots. Remember Raymond Jack’s poem, The Proud Poplars. Drive past what are typical sights in the English country-side: a Sunday-afternoon game of cricket and village warmemorials; as we approach the town, my host points out to me the country’s largest spy-centre and the famous Cheltenham race-course. Mr. Johnson attended a school in York run by Benedictine monks. Find

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out about the Order’s beliefs and practices. Quite gratified when Mr. Johnson tells me I am a very good student of architecture. Talk about mobile phones with Leo at dinner. Mr. Johnson gives me a photograph of the University College insignia as souvenir.

17th July: The next morning, I say goodbye to the family, sign in the twenty-fiveyear-old visitors’ book, thank Mr. Johnson, and am dropped at the Cheltenham Bus Station by Mrs. Johnson. Do look Brock in the eye and wave at him as the car drives away. I greet the nine-twenty Swanbrooks Bus to Oxford with a smile. The bus stops at Northleach on the way back. Notice that one road-side pub offers ‘acomodation’. I thought spelling-mistakes only occurred on Indian sign-boards! Oxford, 17th- 26th, July, 2000.

Note: The author has changed the family names out of respect for the privacy of the families concerned.

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READING MIGRATION | MITALI GANGOPADHYAY

Mitali Gangopadhyay is Assistant Professor of English at M.D.M. College, West Bengal State University, Kolkata. She has published in India, and outside, on a wide range of topics, from Shakespeare to contemporary Indian English literature. Gangopadhyay has written a monograph on Ruskin Bond and worked on a research project on the Anglo-Indians in Kolkata. Her areas of interest are Cinema and Literature, Postcolonial writings and 1857 Mutiny. __ Home, for an Anglo-Indian, remains a confused bifurcated space, torn between his “original” home, which is the land inherited from his ancestors and “adopted” home, the land acquired by the historical event of the European colonization of India. The fissure between the “original” home and the “adopted” home creates a loss of identity and further complicates his sense of belonging in the postcolonial environment. Interspersed with this sense of belonging is the issue of “exile”. While the “original” home dominates over the psyche of an Anglo-Indian in the form of an imaginative space, the cartographic reality of his “adopted” home assumes the proportion of an exile. This home/exile, belonging/non-belonging dichotomy breeds complex feelings of rootlessness, insecurity, unhappiness, nostalgia, and often instigates an Anglo-Indian to cross the boundaries of his “adopted” home, in search of a new home. Migration, in this context, is not just a physical movement from one place to another; it is also a journey of the mind, a voyage undertaken through conflict and resistance to reach a point of reconciliation with the “adopted” home. Gangopadhyay critically illustrates this thesis in her study of Anjan Dutt’s film, Bow Barracks Forever.

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“This is my home”: Reading Migration in Anjan Dutt’s Bow Barracks Forever

Theories on migration have been largely debated over the years from social, political and economic perspectives. From the developmentalist optimism of migration theories in the 1950s and 60s, to the structuralist and neo-Marxist pessimism and scepticism over the 1970s and 80s, from the new economics of labour migration approaches of the 1990s, to the transnational immigration policies involving the diaspora in the twentyfirst century, migration studies have undergone paradigmatic shifts in dealing with the heterogeneous nature of global migration (Haas, 2007, 8). Against this extensive panorama of migration theory, the growing trend of the Anglo-Indian emigration from post-independence India offers an interesting case study of what Caplan (2007) describes as “culture of emigration”. On studying the nature of migration in the Anglo-Indian community, Caplan identifies the role of “culture factors”, like beliefs, understandings and practices which help the Anglo-Indians to evolve a “local lifestyle and an outlook which is out-focused and which insists, as one Anglo-Indian woman put it, that ‘life is only abroad, not here’” (43). Inseparably connected with the culture of migration is the issue of self-definition, or identity, which revolves around the ambivalence concerning home and nation. Home, for the Anglo-Indian, remains a confused, bifurcated space, torn between his “original” home, which is the land inherited from his ancestors, and his “adopted” home, the land acquired by the historical event of the European colonization of India. The fissure between the “original” and the “adopted” homes creates a loss of identity, and further complicates his sense of belonging in the postcolonial environment. While the “original” home dominates over the psyche of an Anglo-Indian in the form of an imaginative space, the cartographic reality of his “adopted” home often assumes the proportion of an exile. These dichotomies of home/exile and belonging/non-

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belonging breed complex feelings of rootlessness, insecurity, nostalgia, and often instigate the Anglo-Indian to cross the boundaries of his “adopted” home, in search of a new home. However, this search may not always culminate in a successful migration to an alternative place of choice. Migration might just dominate over the psyche as a forceful desire or desperation to cross geographical borders, while failing ultimately to translate that desire into a physical transfer of lands. In this context, the desire to migrate or imaginative migration overpowers the actual, physical act of migration. While migration theories may be useful to explain migratory causes and patterns in the Anglo-Indian community, imaginative migration has scarcely been critically studied. As the title suggests, this essay will examine the issue of migration from different perspectives and its impact on the identity of the AngloIndian community in Anjan Dutt’s, Bow Barracks Forever (2004). The film critically explores the emerging trend of migration that leads to the rapid decline of the Anglo-Indian population in India. Dutt’s approach to the Anglo-Indian act of migration, I argue, has two distinct angles – first, migration as a physical journey conditioned by a lucrative socioeconomic choice and, second, migration as a metaphorical or an imaginative journey, a journey that is navigated in the mind. In Dutt, physical migration is either transnational or internal, and involves crossing of geographical boundaries. On the contrary, imaginative migration involves a craving for the “original” or an alternative home, which is made possible through psychological displacement. My study intends to show how Dutt focuses more on the desire for migration than on the physical act of migration itself. The actual geographical displacement, which constitutes the very basis of migration, is challenged in Bow Barracks Forever as Dutt discovers an alternative mode of migration, that is, imaginative migration. Dutt explores the terrain of the mind and shows how imagination can become a powerful medium through which the act of migration is carried out. However, imaginative migration is virtual, and hence, transient. Dutt’s intention, as my essay unfolds, is to show how the desire for migration in an Anglo-Indian is replaced by an overpowering acceptance of India, as the “only” home. The film traces the internal journey of an Anglo-Indian female, a voyage that she undertakes, through personal conflicts and social obstacles, to reach a point of reconciliation with her “adopted” home.

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Constructed in British India to house American troops, Bow Barracks, one of the oldest buildings in Central Kolkata, is occupied by a mixed population of Anglo-Indian, Chinese, Muslim and Hindu families. Though a considerable percentage of the Anglo-Indians have already migrated to other countries, they are still the dominant group occupying one of the oldest building blocks of the city as residents. Anjan Dutt gives reel life to the joys and pathos of these Anglo-Indian families leading a neglected and unnoticed existence in one of the centrally located areas of the city. A medley of Anglo-Indian characters appears against the silhouette of Bow Barracks. Anjan Dutt focuses on three families, that of Emily Lobo and her younger son Bradley, Tom and his wife, Anne, and Melville and his wife, Rosa. Peter, the cheater, is a drunkard, who shuttles between the families, trying to alleviate their worries, sometimes by offering liquor, at other times, by playing the trumpet. The plot is spun around the controversy regarding the dilapidated condition of the Barracks and the possible means available to restore it. There is constant mention of the Calcutta Improvement Trust (CIT), which has declared the Barracks unfit for residential purposes and therefore orders an evacuation of the place for governmental control. The building is also a lucrative property for the promoter, Mr. Mukherjee, who instils a culture of threat and fear through a set of hooligans, under the leadership of Kesto. A third option comes in the figure of Manish, a young architect, who stresses on the heritage of the Barracks and wants to renovate it. Manish’s inspiring words to the Barrack residents, “As a citizen of the city, don’t you have some responsibility?” seem to have a philanthropic mission, but unfortunately lead to his murder. It is against this social and political insecurity of the Barracks that Anjan Dutt shows a few representative Anglo-Indian families caught between the possibility of migration and the unfulfilled desire for it. Bow Barracks Forever begins with the motif of physical migration. The Dawson family is moving off to Bombay, and from there to Sidney, Australia. Their furniture is being shifted, down the stairs of Bow Barracks, and piled up on a tempo. Mr. and Mrs. Dawson’s little son, Philip, hides under the bed of Emily Lobo, another resident of the Barracks, reluctant to leave the city, his home, and above all, his friend, Anwar. Mr. Dawson, however, has made up his mind to migrate because

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the “city is going from bad to worse. Everywhere you go you have got to give ghoosh (bribe)”. The Dawsons migrating to Australia may be explained in terms of the Neoclassical economics theory, which determines a migrant’s choice of home on a cost-benefit calculation. In this case, the migrants are viewed as rational actors whose primary considerations are economic, although other factors, like health and reunification with family also prevail. However, the apprehensions of stepping into an unknown country, a new home underlie the Dawsons’ apparent expression of relief in their rejection of India, or more specifically, Calcutta. Two other physical migrations which Dutt dramatizes in the film are that of Sally’s and Abdul Chacha’s family, both of which are instances of internal migrations, or migrations within the nation. Sally, a teenage Anglo-Indian girl, realizes that her desire to marry Bradley and migrate to England will remain a dream, since Bradley is not interested in her, but in Anne. She, therefore, grabs the next possible opportunity and runs off with one of the “para chokras” (local boys) to settle in Bombay to begin her new career as a singer. Abdul Chacha is also forced to leave the Barracks because he is an illegal tenant and the target of Kesto, the promoter’s hired goon. Unlike Sally, Abdul and his wife put up a strong resistance against migration, yet circumstances compel them to move out of the Barracks. Dutt, however, only dramatizes their departure from the Barracks, their home, but there is no mention of their destination. While the act of physical migration is restrictively featured in two or three shots, the film-text devotes itself largely to the exploration of the imaginative migration through the principal female character, Mrs. Emily Lobo. Emily is an Anglo-Indian woman, caught between the two worlds of London and Calcutta, between her British past and Indian present. Her elder son, Kenny, is characterized throughout the film by his absence. It is through a series of phone-call sequences to Kenny in London, where only Emily’s voice is audible, that Kenny comes alive. From the little boy, Philip, to the old, drunkard, Peter, Emily’s desire for migration to London is known to all. There is an outward confidence in her gesture each time she mentions that she would push off to London with her younger son, Bradley, as soon as Kenny shifts to a bigger house. Whether she is in the middle of a meeting regarding the uncertain future of the Barracks, or talking to a guest, Emily breaks off suddenly and

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rushes to a local, roadside P.C.O. to call up Kenny. These international calls are strategically placed in the plot at regular intervals to externalize Emily’s intense desire for migration. Though the cacophony of the surrounding streets threatens to shatter her dream, Emily intimately engages herself in an imaginative journey of the mind. None of her calls are received by Kenny; it is after the mechanical “record your message” beep that Emily immediately embarks on a lone, private journey towards London. She has a folded sheet of paper in her hand, with her lines to Kenny jotted down, so as not to waste any precious second of the longdistance I.S.D. calls. The city recedes to a shadowy background as Emily cocoons herself in a private space, expressing to Kenny her desperation to reach London: I have been trying to talk to you for the past months, son. I left so many messages also…I just want to know whether you got your confirmation and when you will shift to a bigger house…So just tell Mummy when you are ready, darling. Will it be Christmas time?

It is this imaginative migration that keeps Emily occupied throughout the film. To the little Philip, migrating to Sidney, she says: “You are going to be a pukka (complete) gentleman. I am going to London to live with Kenny dada. I am going to see the Big Ben, River Thames and all.” With Sally, she shares her plans of migration, how she would sell off the expensive gold necklace, inherited from her husband’s family, to buy air tickets, once Kenny changes his apartment. In fact, she assures Sally that she would take her to London once they move out. To the other tenants of the Barracks who have gathered on the terrace to meet the architect, Manish, she boldly declares, “I don’t want to stay here for the rest of my life. I am not staying here for long”. This imaginative migration works like an obsession in Emily and is a pointer to her psychological displacement, a journey from India, her “adopted” home, to England, her “original” home. Kandel and Massey in “The Culture of Mexican Migration: A Theoretical and Empirical Analysis” (2002) show how the aspiration to migrate is transmitted across generations through social networks. Anjan Dutt shows how this aspiration works in Emily as well. She wants her

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son, Bradley, to believe in her dream, to participate in it, and finally, fulfil it. She rebukes Bradley, “You should be calling your brother, not me”. However, Bradley is firmly rooted in reality and instead of indulging in his mother’s imagination, he turns the mirror to his mother: And take this one thing clear in your thick head once and for all. Ken has not called and he will never ever call. He has not been calling you for the last four years. He is not calling you back because he is not bothered. So you are stuck here with me in this stinking city forever. I am nothing. I am a failure like Daddy because that’s the best I can do. I can’t do anything better than that. I will end up as a waiter in Park Street because that is the best I can do, because I am too God damn silly, stupid, weak.

Emily is thunderstruck. The harsh reality which she has carefully evaded so long stares into her face. As tears roll down her cheeks, Emily sits on the bed, immobile and lifeless. The flow of her imagination is at once arrested and she is left in a vacuum. The final blow comes to Emily in the next scene. When Tom hits his wife, Anne, in a fit of rage, Bradley makes a valiant protest and is shot by Tom on the leg. While Tom is arrested, Bradley struggles in the hospital. The protective mother, who had always tried to keep away her son from the corrupting influences of Calcutta and had planned a career for him in London, now sits emotionally wrecked, on a bench outside the hospital, accompanied by Anne. She looks at Anne, tortured and physically bruised, yet brave enough to love her son and accept the ruthless challenges as part of life. It is at this crucial point that Emily has an epiphany and she confesses: “And what a strong woman she (Ann) is, Peter. After all that beating-sheating (the Anglo-Indian coinage) she did not leave because of my little boy, because of my little boy”. Dutt’s use of the epiphany transforms Emily’s perception of home and identity. The imaginative migration to England had so long dissociated her from India, her “adopted” home. But once her fantasies of migrating to her elder son in London are broken, Emily perceives herself and her younger son, Bradley, in a new light. She feels integrated with the life at Barracks and reconciles to her Indian identity. Life in the Barracks may be difficult, but like Anne, she will learn to face it. She now passes on her treasured necklace, the symbol of her liberty and freedom from Bow 145

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Barracks, to Anne, her prospective daughter-in-law. Finally, she writes to Kenny: Do you remember the necklace that your grandmother gave me? I have been saving it to buy our passage off to London. But I don’t care about all that now, son. Because I have to give the best thing to the bravest woman I know. If she can take so much shit and stick on, so can I.

Anne has not escaped, nor will Emily. In Anne’s possession, the necklace takes on a different symbol. Anne decides to sell it and use the money for repairing the Barracks. From Emily’s personal dreams of migration, the necklace now transcends the microcosmic Lobo family to embrace the future of the entire Anglo-Indian community and their life in Bow Barracks. To Kenny, therefore, Emily can now write with a new faith: Kenny dear, I never felt this way before, but I suddenly feel that I don’t want to leave this house…This is my house. We have decided to stay here. Calcutta is getting lousy, no doubt, but this is my home…So if you ever feel lost and lonely and need to come back home, just remember, we are always there for you.

The dream of migration, which Emily not only cherished so long, but also enacted imaginatively in her mind, is replaced by a stronger faith in her Indianness, and thus she effortlessly surrenders herself to Bow Barracks. India, or in this context, Calcutta, with all its limitations, emerges as the “only” home for the Anglo-Indians. The film-maker’s message is explicit. It is this very awareness that India is their home that can prevent the Anglo-Indians from migrating abroad. In her own way, Rosa, too, expresses her desperation to migrate from India. However, she does not have any preferred destination country. She indulges in a sexual affair with the Bengali insurance agent, Bipin, and pleads him to release her from the Barracks: “Why don’t you take me away from here, Bipin? I can’t, I can’t take it anymore. Even the Dawsons have left from here. Nothing. There’s nothing here”. Rosa does escape, but returns after some time to her husband, Melville. With

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repentant tears and a sincere plea to Melville, “I don’t know where to go. Please let me stay here”, Rosa reconciles to her home at Bow Barracks. Anjan Dutt’s much controversial cinematic representation of the Anglo-Indians in Bow Barracks stands out not only in its exploration of the motif of migration, but also in suggesting how the Anglo-Indian community might be integrated to their “adopted” home, India. In his discussion on the reasons behind the mass exodus of the Anglo-Indians from India, Robyn Andrews (2007) states that it is a “combined effect of a well-established culture of migration…sense of alienation from India and the reassurance and encouragement from their contemporaries and kin who reside abroad” that motivate the Anglo-Indians “to quit India, than to stay” (49). This rising impetus of the culture of migration is countered by Dutt in celluloid, which projects how the Anglo-Indians living in the Barracks rise above the push and pull factors of migration to integrate themselves with India, their “only” home. Identification with India, Dutt seems to suggest, is not possible by any imposition of law; it is a condition of the mind which is achieved by conquering over the desires for migration to attain an overwhelming faith in one’s Indian identity. Bow Barracks Forever, therefore, remains Anjan Dutt’s emphatic statement on the need for integrating the fast declining Anglo-Indian community with India.

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References Haas de, Hein. Migration and Development: A Theoretical Perspective. COMCAD, Bielefeld, 2007. Caplan, L. “‘Life is Only Abroad, Not Here’: The Culture of Emigration among Anglo-Indians in Madras”, Immigrants and Minorities, 14 (1): 26-46, 1995. Kandel, W. and D. S. Massey. “The Culture of Mexican Migration: A Theoretical and Empirical Analysis”, Social Forces, 80 (3): 981-1004, 2002. Andrews, Robyn. “Quitting India: The Anglo-Indian Culture of Migration”, A Journal of Sociological Anthropology and Culture Studies, 4 (3): 32-56, 2007. Gaikwad, V. R. The Anglo-Indians: A Study in the Problems and Processes Involved in Emotional and Cultural Integration. Asia Publishing House, New Delhi, 1967. .

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A TWICE-BORN CANON | ARUP K CHATTERJEE

There is a constant ideological tussle between the Indian and English intellectuals to rediscover and rehabilitate Victorian-Indian travel literature, to besiege discursive autonomy around the times and regions that the writers belonged to. Scholars in this discipline are fashioning these texts in a hermeneutics of their own, which is fictional. This reification, or reifiction, as Chatterjee calls it, is also a fictionalization of historical consciousness of a neutrality of colonization, and simultaneously usurping authority over the knowledge of the same, as a means of justification of intellectual supremacy in postcolonial canonization. In this, he concentrates on a specific zone of Indian Travel Literature, which he calls Hill Literature. The irony of this intellectual tussle lies in the non-partisan, attitudes of early Hill Writers towards the Raj – both the rulers and the ruled – and especially in their resistance to being colonials, and their inert resolutions of exile in the Indian hills, away from mainstream England and mutinous Indian plains. Absent from Victorian English, and now Indian English, this twice rejected literature is suddenly faced with the possibility of becoming a twice born canon at the hands of ‘whoever reaches it first’ – the Indian or the Western academia.

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A Twice-Born Canon and its Reifiction: The Indian Hill Writings of Emily Eden, Fanny Parkes, Frank Smythe and Eric Shipton

The concept of the archive shelters in itself, of course, this memory of the name arkhe. But it also shelters itself from this memory which it shelters: which comes down to saying also that it forgets it. (Derrida, 1995, 9)

The design, and the order of texts, in a literary canon, is its architecture. To prevent abusing the specificity of the discipline I will call it architexture. It is the selection and systemization of texts into a canonical hermeneutics. What precedes this architexture is an archiving of texts, by the architects, or what Derrida calls, the “archons”, who are “first of all the documents’ guardians… (and) accorded the hermeneutic right and competence…they recall the law and call on or impose the law.” (10)

I If Indian English, in pedagogy and curricula, has generally begun after the Indian nation state, it does not mean that it has glossed over the English that came before the moment of independence. On the contrary, the canon of Indian English has begun with the works of Raja Rao, Mulk Raj Anand, R.K, Narayan, Rabindranath Tagore, H.L.V Derozio, Sarojini Naidu, among many others who wrote before India, insofar as, even Rudyard Kipling and E.M. Forster are, or must be, now considered Indian English writers. A recent addition to the Delhi University English syllabus is “Anglo-American writing from 1930” featuring work by Salman Rushdie, who for most part has been the toast of Indian English. We are, therefore, prepared enough to naturalize authors into hybrid nationalities, while teaching their works. Despite such flexibility, there

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has been continual academic blindness towards Indian English travel literature written before independence. Of this literature, not much can be theorized in terms of present nation building or anti-nation criticism, purely owing to the stamps of leisure and commission with which travel literature is couriered to its readers. We have better to teach about hybrid nationalities and many Indias, in literature of the past and recent greats. Meanwhile, a colonization of literary ideas has begun through the gateway of a marginal canon, which I will call “Hill Literature”. Indian Travel English is so vast that even mining its minor facets is certainly welcomed with popularity. A part of it is Hill Literature made of early authors such as Emily Eden, Fanny Parkes, John Lang, and numerous others, including present ones like Ruskin Bond, Stephen Alter, Bill Aitken. Many of the older authors have come to public notice only in the last fifteen years or so. However, the agency of the architexture has been undergoing a regular domiciliation, on one hand, and colonization on the other. There has been no embargo on research related to Hill Literature by any patriarch, whatever. Consequently, when William Dalrymple re-published Fanny Parkes’s Wanderings of a Pilgrim (1850) as Begums, Thugs & Englishmen, The Journals of Fanny Parkes (2003), he was free to quote entirely out of context, the subject-author of his finds, in order to justify the non-colonial attitude of his “patriarchic function” (see Derrida, 10). The urgency behind this, as Dalrymple makes obvious, was the “orthodoxy” of Edward Said’s Orientalism – phenomena. So, in order to use Parkes as his tool of defiance he unreasonably schedules her into the binary of the colonial and the noncolonial. An excerpt from his Introduction to the book, which also informs an article in the Guardian, reads: Parkes is an important writer because she acts as a witness to a forgotten moment of British-Indian hybridity, and shows that colonial travel writing need not be an aggressive act of orientalist appropriation - not "gathering colonial knowledge", as Edward Said and his followers would have us believe, but instead an act of understanding… it is ridiculously simplistic to see all attempts at studying, observing and empathising with another culture necessarily "as an act of domination - rather than of respect or even catharsis. (2007)

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In the chapter “Ascent to Landowr” Parkes finds the Paharis “most exceedingly dirty” (Vol. II, 227) after having just finished calling them “animals to stare at” (ibid) resembling Tartars. Dalrymple points out that she found “Indian men ‘remarkably handsome’” (2003, x). It is not “men” that Parkes talks about but native servants. The exact passage that Dalrymple paraphrases from is: Some of the natives are remarkably handsome, but appear far from being strong men. It is impossible to do with a few servants, you must have many; their customs and prejudices are inviolable…They are great plagues; much more troublesome than English servants. (Vol. I, 26)

“Remarkably handsome” is as uninsightful and average in Victorian English expressions as Dalrymple tries to celebrate it. The only other human subjects Parkes finds “remarkably handsome” in her entire narrative are the interracial children of Mr Gardner and Mulka, and a certain bridegroom called Unjun Sheko. Apart from this the phrase is used for cows, bulls, an Arab pony, camel’s clothing, and so on. Dalrymple, also adds that for Parkes “The evenings are cool and refreshing ... The foliage of the trees, so luxuriously beautiful and so novel…” (2003, x). Those are Parkes’s words immediately after she has pronounced the climate “oppressive” with “hot winds”. “I can”, she writes, “compare it to nothing but the hot blast you would receive in your face were you suddenly to open the door of an oven.” (Vol. I, 25). Within two paragraphs of the above climatic appreciation, she will call the weather “very uncertain”. Finally, in a glaring counterfeiture, Dalrymple quotes Parkes, with a clear intention of sanitizing her persona. This is what Parkes wrote according to him: “Oh the pleasure…of vagabondising (sic) in India” (2007)

What Parkes wrote instead was “Oh! the pleasure of vagabondizing over India (Vol. II, 192, italics mine). The shift from “over” to “in” is strategic for Dalrymple who intends to project Parkes as a “patriarchic function” of the class that is not “over” but within the object of rule. In

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the section of this vagabondizing Parkes can be seen “cantering away” on her Arab pony, a sight which speaks more of her individual and sexual prowess than her undoubted general love for India and its peoples. The very passages that Dalrymple quotes from contradict his representation of Parkes. Given this state of his revisionist and non-contextual references from Parkes, it is clear how little his work has been scrutinized by the editorial commissioners of both Guardian and Penguin. Jacques Derrida analyses in Archive Fever the economy of Sigmund’s Freud’s rhetoric of self-archiving under the guise of self-criticism, wherein the psychoanalyst is struggling to find a “mutation” or a cleavage within his own institution. Freud, is here, matched by Dalrymple in his re-texturing of the existing architexture. This architexture has come under severe attack from the Saidian school wherefore it is incumbent upon the archon, now, to highlight the cleavages, which come in the forms of the Eden sisters, sisters of India Governor-General, Lord Auckland. He calls Emily Eden “waspish and conceited” which is entirely justified, and equally dangerous when done so in comparison with Parkes who as even Dalrymple acknowledges was “eccentric”. In fact, she was as eccentric as inconsistent, as free as fearless to express her mercurial responses. There is no vindication of Eden’s high-handedness as there is none of Parkes’s capriciousness. This is to say, casting Parkes as the symbol of Indian English hybridity is theoretically flawed due to Parkes individual hybrid constitution. Dalrymple categorically informs of Eden’s literary popularity, as opposed to Parkes’s whose Wanderings “never had another edition.” Eden’s Up the Country is, hence, analogous with coloniality, which must be disavowed, and simultaneously re-avowed in terms of claiming guardianship over that which is the secret. In Derridean terms, in the process of clearing the memory of the arkhe or the arch texturer, he has used itself as his ploy, and shelter. As Derrida explains, the transformation of Freud’s house into a museum, although marks a passage from the private to the public, but does not do so from “the secret to the non-secret” (10). The hermeneutics of the architexture is left to the “archontic” signatory of a treaty of settlement, or domiciliation – practically a “house arrest”, as Derrida calls it – and in this atmosphere the archon archives. He uninterruptedly assumes patriarchy over the “secret”, marks his exergue before the hermeneutics of the architexture. In other words, he cites

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before the beginning and lawfully orders the beginning and its course. Dalrymple, in this respect, resembles Lang, the 1850s’ Australian Indian English writer, well known for his contempt of British officialdom. In his “Himalaya Club” serialized in Charles Dickens’s Household Words, Lang writes effervescently of English snobbery, from his solipsistic refuge is Mussoorie. From here, he leaves us an inventory of English manners, stingy pensioners, and trivial scandals which have become a source of nostalgic imitation in most of present day Hill Literature. Incidentally, both have written most of their works based on or around Delhi, both went to Trinity College in Cambridge, and both are of Scottish descent. Needless to say, both have been signatories to an archontic domiciliation.

II Bill Aitken, a Hill Writer from Scotland (now Indian), archives a new canon of architexts in “An Introduction to the Literature on Nanda Devi”. Unlike Dalrymple, he does not try to posit the canon – or pose canonical differences – within colonial and non-colonial binaries. He seeks religio-spiritual, instead of ideological, grounds of difference, between his predecessors. Of the long list of authors on the patronGoddess – as he treats the Nanda Devi – three stand out, persistently. They are judged on their degrees of reverence for the heathen deity. Both historically, and in Aitken’s study, Frank Smythe comes between Eric Shipton and H.W. Tilman. Aitken chooses, however, elaborate first on Smythe, and leaves “for the last, the best and most literary offerings to the goddess”, which is Shipton’s Nanda Devi (1936). Aitken’s archival essay succeeds in polarising Smythe and Tilman as spiritual antagonists, with Smythe as the believer and Tilman as the “workmanlike nonbeliever, and both being finally surpassed by Shipton’s offerings. (Aitken, 2006) The book by Smythe that Aitken refers to is Valley of Flowers, a choice that is as beautiful as strategic. Aiken does not choose, for instance, Smythe’s Kamet Conquered or The Spirit of the Hills, in either of which Smythe is the mountaineer struggling against the invincibility of the hills, the rugged weather that scares away Darjeeling sherpas, of the very indomitable spirit that is the object of ascent. Nowhere is Smythe even

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partially irreverent of the Himalayas, or acts “frustrated” as more recent day mountaineers like John Roskelley. Instead, in Kamet Conquered he warns: The Himalaya must be approached humbly…Other mountains forgive mistakes, but not the Himalaya. (8)

Yet, the atmosphere of unrivalled peace and cosmological sovereignty that Smythe witnesses in his sojourn in The Valley of Flowers could not be paralleled during a treacherous climb: There is a power of which we know little in the west but which is a basic of abstract thought in the east. It is allowing the mind to receive rather than to seek impressions, and it is gained by expurgating extraneous thought. It is then that the Eternal speaks; that the mutations of the universe are apparent: the very atmosphere is filled with life and song; the hills are resolved from mere masses of snow, ice and rock into something living. When this happens the human mind escapes from the bondage of its own feeble imaginings and becomes as one with its Creator. (64)

Smythe is spiritually drawn to the pristine hills that had seen neither Europeans nor the commercialism that besotted the Swiss Hills, neither railroads nor vistas, but remained content in “the kindly peasant folk (that) graze their flocks in the summer months” (1936, 17). The Valley of Flowers is located at about 12500 feet, which is at just half the height of Nanda Devi (over 25000 ft.) The latter is where Aitken places Shipton, while Tilman is left as “almost a caricature of the emotionally repressed Englishman” whose “appearance on top of Nanda Devi has a Chaplinesque dimension”: (He) crave(s) her indulgence in breaching protocol by not removing (his) boots on her sacred summit. (Aitken, 2006)

The peak, however, remains for Shipton, for whom it is the “Inviolate Sanctuary of the “Blessed Goddess”” (also the name of Shipton’s book). The mountain peak and the mountaineer “seem made for each other” (ibid), each sharing the other’s philosophical prowess. While Tilman’s

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Ascent to Nanda Devi is fraught with rashness and Judaic mindset (he “leapt at the opportunity” (ibid), when Shipton refused), Shipton’s reward lies in his “Sanctuary” at the base of the Nanda Devi. What separates Smythe and Shipton is that the former is shown singing the praise of the goddess’s feet like a “gardener”, while the latter consorts with her respectfully near her bosom. Smythe can be seen in The Valley of Flowers as a self-taught gardener “above jealousy and suspicion”, without the ambition to exceed his arboreal garden. Shipton, on the other hand, is brought to the brink of extreme height and fame, whereat he refuses to cross the sanctuary of Nanda Devi, and de-sanctify it. All three mountaineers are domiliciliated by Aitken to respective positions, in which Tilman’s domicile is delegitimized, Smythe’s legitimated, and Shipton’s sanctified. In archiving this hierarchy of archons, Aitken himself assumes the patriarchic function.

Thesis: The word “fiction” has its roots in the Latin fictio which means “to feign” or “to fashion”. Dalrymple and Aitken, both perform the archontic role of naturalizing a canonical hermeneutics; both do so by the reification of their corresponding patriarchic functions, through a defense of deferential responses to the Indian hills, ideologically or spiritually. Dalrymple’s reification is based on a feigned revisionism of ideology in Parkes’s representation of India where probably none existed, or an ideology that was overpowered by her unbounded spirit. It is part of his own quest for domiciliation. Aitken’s reification tries to fashion away from the current trend of the technological ascent and altitudinal devaluation of the Himalayas, thereby re-inscribing his own domicile. While Dalrymple looks back in anger and gropes for the spoils of war, Aitken lives in historical and spiritual continuity with the holy ghosts of Uttarakhand. To call one as more or less archivally upright is not the requisite gesture. In either case, it is an act of reifiction, which is far from being critically questioned. It is a fiction that designs and defines a new architexture, that of Hill Literature. Indian Hill Literature is a marginal canon, yet to be canonized by our academic institutions. Its study is crucial to our English, and it therefore

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Â requires a systematic, rather than a reifictional hermeneutics. What I have here called Hill Literature has been a twice-rejected literature, both at the hands of the English, and the Indian English. In the last decade there has been increasing complexity of academic interest in Hill Literature, although not from Indian universities. In the shelter of a criticism of colonization, or in a criticism of the same critique, the memory of the present literary colonization of Hills Literature is waning unnoticeably. Quite readily the hoax and sombreness of Hill reifictions is turning into a twice born canon, unnoticed at birth, and re-engendered at the turn of the Third World academization. If the architexture of Indian hills is at the freedom of the archon it is imperative to determine the authority that has commissioned this archiving process. What gets archived within is always for benefit of the without. The domicialiation of the archivist is not self-determined, and neither is the house arrest a self-incarceration. The nation and the consignation are not in the same domicile. Our task is then to re-order the exterior source where the consignation belongs, and re-define the architexture of the hills. There is no archive without a place of consignation, without a technique of repetition, and without a certain exteriority. No archive without outside. (Derrida, 14)

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References Aitken, Bill. “An Introduction to the Literature on Nanda Devi”. <http://www.himalayanclub.org/journal/an-introduction-to-theliterature-on-nanda-devi/>, 2006. Dalrymple, William. Begums, Thugs and Englishmen: The Journals of Fanny Parkes. Penguin, New Delhi, 2003 _____ “Lady of the Raj”. <http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2007/jun/09/featuresreviews.guardi anreview35>, 2007 Derrida, Jacques. “Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression” Diacritics, 25 (2): 9-63, John Hopkins University, 1995. <http://www.jstor.org/stable/465144> Lang, John. “Himalaya Club”, in Household Words, Vol. XV, ed. Charles Dickens. Ward, Lock, and Tyler, London, 1857. Smythe, Frank. Kamet Conquered. Victor Gollancz Ltd., London, 1932. _____ The Valley of Flowers. Hodder, London, 1936. Parkes, Fanny. Wanderings of a Pilgrim, in Search of the Picturesque, During Four-and-Twenty Years in the East; With Revelations of Life in the Zenana, Vol.s I & II. Pelham Richardson, London, 1850.

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TRAVEL WITHOUT MOVING | OSMOND CHIENMING CHANG

Osmond Chien-ming Chang is writing a dissertation for Ph.D in English Literature at National Chengchi University, Taiwan, Republic of China. His research interests are travelogues, English Romanticism, diaspora, fantastic literature, and trauma studies. __ While the nomad makes deserts out of civilizations, Shaw’s characters in John Bull want to make a home out of every place. There is a nominal “utopian” movement towards the other in the cases of Broadbent and Doyle, but the self never territorializes in this other. Even when the foreigner wants to relocate into the native culture (of Ireland), or the native into the foreign culture (of England, they both conceive elements of their own homelands in the prospective settlement. One is a colonizer, and the other at best, a comprador bourgeoisie. Chang exposes how even in the desire to travel inward or outward there is no travel; in other words there is no deterritorialization. There is a movement in either case but there is no travel; it is only a series of sedentary travel narratives that constitutes John Bull. Chang’s essay is a demonstration of how the political in a narrative can be read in the travel machinery (or war machinery) of its characters.

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Travel Without Moving: Ireland as An-Other England in G.B Shaw’s John Bull’s Other Island

Ever since its publication in 1904, G. B. Shaw’s John Bull’s Other Island, though written for the Dublin Abbey Theatre on W. B. Yeats’s invitation, has fuelled a lot of controversy over its nationalist ideology. Unlike previous topoi in Irish literature, John Bull not merely expresses Shaw’s firm belief in the experiment of the iconoclastic, but also leads readers to examine Ireland both as an Edenic paradise and a country of dirt and poverty through two travellers, the Anglicized Irishman, Larry Doyle, and the Glastonized Englishman, Thomas Broadbent. While the controversial attention is often accorded to political and religious oppression, national identity, and the Gaelic Revival movement (Irish Literary Renaissance), this satirical comedy is seldom considered and read as a travelogue. In his introduction “Bernard Shaw and the Irish literary tradition” Peter Gahan observes that Shaw’s plays, John Bull in particular, are “pertinent to the social, political, and economic context of Ireland” (22). In the same vein, Heniz Kosok notes that the play “mirrors in various ways the specific social and cultural situation of Ireland at the time when it was written and performed” (175). Like most of the contemporary Irish playwrights, Shaw continues with the fundamental ideas of nationalism in John Bull in which the story background is intricately set between the downfall of Parnell (1890) and the third Home Rule Bill (1912). While John Bull reflects, in a general way, the situation of Ireland at a particular moment in history, it can be also said that the play expresses Shaw’s thoughts about his homeland revealing his concerns about the possibility of Irish self-government and separation from Britain’s influence. Shaw puts the idea in his “Preface for Politicians” that Ireland in his views “is the only spot on earth which still produces the ideal Englishman of history” (qtd. in Kosok, 178). It is not hard to realize that critics draw much attention to political and social issues

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embodied in this play. Especially, in tracking the development of cultural nationalism in the Irish Literary Revival, David Pierce has already commented that “[i]n point of fact, as John Bull’s Other Island (1904) repeatedly demonstrates, Shaw himself was better than Yeats at distinguishing English from Irish, not least in showing how the terms were subject to comic reversal” (4). The play is introduced to us as a satire on the ridiculous Irishman stock in the figure of Tim Haffigan and his two friends, or business partners, Tom Broadbent and Larry Doyle, who travel to a small town Ross Cullen in Ireland. Perhaps, owing to his white man’s burden, Broadbent not only travels to Ireland for business, but develops passionate love for everything there, including Nora Reilly, Doyle’s old lover. Unlike Broadbent, however, Doyle has no interest in returning to Ireland even after eighteen years; rather, he would like to stay in London and become an Englishman instead of remaining Irish. Because of his double-identity struggling between two nations, Doyle is the one often viewed through the lenses of diasporic and postcolonial theories. The present paper proposes to investigate sedentary travel (or rigid travel) in a cross-cultural movement of John Bull which is very little examined in the field of Shavian studies since 1995. This paper attempts to establish two things via the Guattari-Deleuzian doctrine of travel. Firstly, it focuses on the stock of the Anglicanizing Irish gentry as a symbolic reterritorialization within a superior order of imperialism to highlight a representation of difference between the self and the other. Secondly, it explores a utopian movement towards the other, with the application of a Shavian romantic and realistic imagination. The above discussion seeks to present an overview of the travel narrative in Shaw’s John Bull. In order to situate John Bull within the context of the travel narrative, a division of nomadic and sedentary travel is imperative. In bringing to light the illusory presence of travel, Deleuze and Guattari, in A Thousand Plateaus, argue that “even though the nomadic trajectory may follow trails or customary routes, it does not fulfil the function of the sedentary road, which is to parcel out a closed space to people” (380). In one way or the other, the nomad, like the migrant, has a certain territory and customary paths from one point to another, but the nomad in Guattari and Deleuze’s view is the one whose travel can be said to cling to the smooth space.

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Unlike sedentary space, the smooth space is not limited “by walls, enclosures, and roads between enclosures,” so that it has no points and paths within a certain territory or the center. In the light of this argument, the movement of the nomad, as well as the smooth space, is deterritorialized without being reterritorialized. Guattari and Deleuze write: If the nomad can be called the Deterritorialized par excellence, it is precisely because there is no reterritorialization afterward as with the migrant, or upon something else as with sedentary (the sedentary’s relation with the earth is mediatized by something else, a property regime, a State apparatus). With the nomad, on the contrary, it is deterritorialization that constitutes the relation to the earth…(381)

Syed Manzurul Islam, along with Guattari and Deleuze’s, not just simply argues that the nomad is the one “who moves without moving,” but also links this movement with the ethic of travel (10). Here Islam’s concept of travel without moving does not mean that nomadic travel is the one without motion or toward the centre (inside) but, it denotes a decentred and deterritorialized scheme of travel. Because of deterritorialization, the nomad does not locate itself in a striated regime, but, in contrast, lives in a smooth space not enclosed by any rigid line. In other words, nomadic travel is, in fact, not around a fixed location but in a boundless space, because it performs without reterritorialization. As such, it can be said that, home for a nomadic traveller is anywhere and at the same time everywhere. Examining the case of John Bull it is not hard to find that Broadbent is the one who never leaves England like Adela Quested in E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India, even though both of them set off from London and arrive in another country. With a set of sensational ideas or prejudices about Ireland drawn from the Music Hall, Broadbent goes there driven by the white man’s burden, with the desire to see nations outside the center (Britain). As to the Stage Irish, it is not limited to a misrepresentation of Tim Haffigan, a man born in Glasgow, Scotland, as authentic, but this ridiculous arch-image of Irishman, as pointed out by Doyle, has already been built in the theatre for a long time:

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[Broadbent] But he spoke – he behaved just like an Irishman. [Doyle] Like an Irishman!! Is it possible that you don’t know that all this top-o-the-morning and broth-o-a-boy and more-powerto-your-elbow business is as peculiar to England as the Albert Hall concerts of Irish music are? No Irishman ever talks like that in Ireland, or ever did, or ever will…He [Haffigan] picks them at the theatre or the music hall. Haffigan learnt the rudiments from his father, who came from my part of Ireland…(13, italics mine)

As a result, Broadbent’s ignorance and misunderstanding about the Irish is predictable, especially for his misrecognition of Haffigan as the real Irishman. Being a non-native, Broadbent, cannot, or even has no ability to, tell a Scot imitation of the Irish accent and behaviour. Just as Islam writes, “the truth of binary difference…cannot subsist without an epistemological plane and a representational frame” (52), what Tom Broadbent knows about an Irishman is in fact based upon what he thinks a real Irishman should be. Partly because of this misunderstanding and partly due to fantasizing the other island outside of England, Ireland, to an extent, becomes a country or a place for Broadbent’s business to develop. Like Mrs Moore in Forster’s A Passage, Broadbent is the one with a hungry heart to touch and sense the atmosphere of a foreign country but, definitely unlike her, he is not a visitor to Ireland for his sincere desire to learn about a new culture, but in the capacity of a businessman looking for development, and providing his English guidance to the Irish. In the following passage, Broadbent behaves no different from a colonizer: Broadbent (quite reassured). Of course I am. Our guidance is the important thing. We English must place our capacity for government without stint at the service of nations who are less fortunately endowed in that respect; so as to allow them to develop in perfect freedom to the English level of selfgovernment, you [Doyle] know. You understand me? (16-17)

Broadbent attempts to distinguish and make a division between England and Ireland, or even, between England and other countries. In this sense, even after crossing the threshold of the sea between Ireland and England,

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Broadbent never at all passages himself to a foreign nation. Even in Ireland he still adheres to Britain; he never deterritorializes. Despite the fact that Broadbent shows his mobility along the smooth surface to Ireland, he does not erase the boundary between the inside and the outside. On the contrary, with the white man’s burden to Ireland, he is not merely rigid to think of the position of the Irish, but also to forget “the memories of the inside” that has him “re-claimed by the rigid boundary and folded back into the inside” (Islam 53). By this fact, he is, as this study suggests, the one who travels to Ireland without moving, in the context of reterritorialization, and fits in Islam’s concept of the sedentary travel or the Hegelian – “the same re-turns to the same” (53). Further, turning to the case of Ireland and trying to answer Broadbent’s question for Doyle, the words above, in Broadbent’s mind, reveal an attitude of colonialism. To the Irish, England, according to Stanley Weintraub, “meant colonial rule from Dublin Castle” (434), and, among other characters in John Bull, Broadbent is the one who “wants to turn the region – exploit it might be another view – into a tourist hotel with golf course and villagers of commercial quaintness” (433). In addition to this, Broadbent, as Keegan observes, “spends his life inefficiently admiring the thoughts of great men, and efficiently serving the cupidity of base money hunters” (95). Certainly, Broadbent’s optimistic and sentimental approach towards Ireland as the other island of England and his pragmatic-materialist attitude makes Ireland an Edenic paradise. Ireland being on the fringes of the empire, and yet within the premises of capitalism, a nomadic movement is somehow hard to be achieved. Thus, Broadbent’s travel to Ireland can be said to be a sedentary travel within the dominant modes of polis-ing. However, Ireland in Doyle’s view is a country full of dirt and poverty that makes him reluctant to return to Ross Cullen. Especially at the moment when Broadbent asks him to go with him, Doyle replies that he has “an instinct against going back to Ireland: an instinct so strong that I’d rather go with you to the South Pole than to Ross Cullen.” Here, he explains the main reason for not going back: Doyle. Never mind my heart…How many of all those millions that have left Ireland have ever come back or wanted to come back? But what’s the use of talking to you? Three verse of twaddle about the Irish

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emigrant “sitting on the stile, Mary,” or three hours of Irish patriotism in Bermondsey or the Scotland Division of Liverpool, go further with you than all the facts that stare you in the face. (14, italics mine)

Recapitulating Guattari and Deleuze’s division between the nomad and the migrant, Doyle satisfies the fundamental requirements of travel, above all, traveling from one point to another and then returning back to the original place; he cannot be a nomadic traveller in this sense. Instead, he is a sedentary traveller like Broadbent. When Doyle refuses to go home, it at least contains two meanings here: one is his reluctance of returning back, and another is his intention to locate himself in the dominant modes of the polis, referring to England. And it is this very fact of Doyle clinging to the negativity of nomadology that features the foundation of his sedentary culture. Despite that Doyle’s travel fits the ethic of travel, that is, a movement of departure and arrival, he is the one “along with the route of power,” that never leaves or escapes from the centre (Islam 43). With regard to Doyle’s travel, it cannot be called travel because “it can only either be a ‘travelling incarnation’ or the sedentary movement of power on the adventure of conquest, knowledge and commerce”, viewed in the light of Islam. As such, both Broadbent and Doyle’s travel, as we’ve already seen, for its remarking walls, or reterritorializing territory as a barrier between the inside and the outside, or a refusal of encountering the other, reveals symptoms of sedentary travel culture in John Bull. Even though they cross the threshold of the sea between two countries, they never reach the smooth space because their travel not only moves without moving but in the end returns to the rigid boundary acknowledged and allowed by the law/force of the inside. Although Shaw, as Shavian critics have pointed out, attempts to write John Bull for specific political purposes, I have sought to explicate not so much the relationship between two countries (England and Ireland) in the present study, but rather placed it under the lens of the travel narrative and explored sedentary movement in the play. Whether or not Shaw had ever thought to create his characters to represent nationalism or a diasporic nostalgia, or otherwise, what I have tried to show in this study is that John Bull is not limited to just a political reading but opens itself to our investigation of possible issues and trends of travel in it.

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References Deleuze, Gilles and Félix. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1987. Islam, Syed Manzurul. The Ethics of Travel: From Marco Polo to Kafka. Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1996. Kosok, Heinz. “John Bull’s Other Eden.” Shaw: The Annual of Bernard Shaw Studies, 30: 175-90, 2010. Pierce, David. “Culture Nationalism and the Irish Literary Revival.” International Journal of English Studies, 2(2): 1-22, 2012. Shaw, George Bernard. John Bull’s Other Island. The Pennsylvania State University, 2003. <http://www2.hn.psu.edu/faculty/jmanis/gbshaw/ JBsOtherIsland.pdf>. Weintraub, Stanley. “Bernard Shaw’s Other Irelands: 1915-1919.” English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920, 42(4): 433-42, 1999.

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STUDYING ALTERNATIVE PROTEST IN CYBER SPACE | SAPNA DUDEJA

Sapna Dudeja is writing a dissertation for Ph.D in English Literature at Jamia Millia Islamia University, New Delhi. She teaches English at the University of Delhi. __ Dudeja charts out the trajectory of a potentially successful revolution in contemporary times: The Pink Chaddi Campaign (PCC). While touristic travel involves the coming of the outsider among the natives, a movement like the PCC is its reversal, inasmuch it extracts the digital native, that is the generation born in the digital era with regular access to the internet, from its native land and brings it into the real public sphere. Although, the internet is often mistakenly celebrated as the new public sphere, it thrives on anonymity and dissensus, while the public sphere is located within bourgeois consensus. In the case of the PCC the movement by the native is also suggestive of its travel. A cyborgian revolution, that is essentially heterogeneous, and occurs in a smooth space, is re-territorialized into real-time public sphere. Although, the nomadology of the cyborg diminishes, its revolutionary potential increases. Not its virtual nomadology but a real time commitment constitutes its war machinery against the State, henceforth.

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Studying Alternative Protest in Cyber Space: Through the Prism of the Pink Chaddi Campaign

Though social networking sites and the internet have often been used to garner support within the socio-politico-cultural domain, something unprecedented happened in India recently that gave a new dimension to such sites within the Indian context. On January 24, 2009, and later, members belonging to the right wing extremist organization Sri Ram Sena attacked women in Mangalore pubs. Incidents of violence supported by similar right wing units were reported from across the nation in subsequent days. To protest against such organized violence perpetrated against women, ‘A Consortium of Pub-Going, Loose and Forward Women’, a group on Facebook1, organized a campaign which they called ‘the pink chaddi campaign’ (henceforth referred to as the PCC). The group was formed on February 5, 2009, with a modest membership. It grew exponentially, touching a remarkable 58,703 mark as on March 30, 2009. Later, a similar group by the name of the 1

Facebook is a social networking website owned by Facebook Inc. The founder of Facebook is Mark Zuckerberg, a student at Harvard. Facebook came up from Harvard University’s version of Hot or Not Facemash. Facemash juxtaposed photos drawn from the online facebooks of nine houses and asked users to choose the “hotter” person. Facebook began by offering membership only to Harvard students. Later, Zuckerberg included Eduardo Saverin (business aspects), Dustin Moskovitz (programmer), Andrew McCollum (graphic artist), and Chris Hughes in his team and it spread to other Universities like Yale and Stanford. Starting with an investment of 500,000 US$ from PayPal and 12.7 million US$ from Accel Partners, Facebook saw a huge loss of around 3 million US$ in the beginning. Companies like Yahoo, Microsoft and Google tried to buy some stakes in Facebook but only Microsoft was successful in buying 1.6% shares of Facebook for 240 million US$ and the value of Facebook rose to 15 Billion US$.

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campaign itself was formed on Orkut2 as well. Nisha Susan, the founding member, urged people to send ‘pink chaddis’ to Pramod Muthalik, the chief of Sri Ram Sena. Hundreds and thousands of ‘chaddis’ were sent to the chief’s office and the campaign was hailed as extremely successful when the chief called off the plan to disrupt Valentine’s Day celebrations across the nation and was willing to talk across the table. The campaign also triggered off similar campaigns like ‘the pub bharo andolan’, initiated by Renuka Choudhary, Minister of State for Women and Child Development; ‘the free hug campaign’; ‘take the night’, organized by a group called Fearless Karnataka or Nirbhaya Karnataka; ‘blank noise picnic’, organized by a group of the same name on Facebook; ‘the pink condom campaign’, organized by a group on Facebook called ‘The Self-respecting Hindus’ Initiative for Equality and Liberty with Dignity or The SHIELD3, to protest against the “sickular (sic) Pink Chaddi walas”. The first four were supportively aligned with the PCC and aimed at challenging Muthalik and Sri Ram Sena by having 2

Orkut, as most people would know, is a website for social networking named after the creator Orkut Büyükkökten, a Turkish software engineer. The website was launched on 22nd January 2003 and is managed and operated by Google. By the end of 2006, Orkut became the most visited website in Brazil and was therefore fully managed and operated by Google, Brazil. In the beginning, membership was through invitation only but as the number of users kept increasing, the website became open to all. The features of the website were basically blogging, messaging, scrapping (leaving friends a message), adding and viewing pictures, videos, blogs and comments. Earlier, everyone could view images, information and personal data of other members but now users can set their own levels of privacy. 3

This group, on Facebook, states that it has three main missions: first, “to speak up against malicious vilification of Hinduism and Hindu culture, and to expose the coordinated attempts by sickulars (trinity of Evangelists, Jihadis and Communists) to project Hinduism as the root cause of all evils in the Indian society.” Second, “to act as a pressure group on saffron organizations (mostly referred as Sangh Parivar by the mainstream Indian media) who sometimes unfortunately indulge in disagreeable deeds and acts in the name of Hindu religion and culture.” Third, “to actively work towards betterment of the Hindu society in particular and Indian society in general, by fighting vices like casteism, crime and corruption and lending a helping hand in humanitarian operations.”

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a mass Valentine’s Day celebration. ‘The pink condom campaign’, on the other hand was launched as a counter campaign. The group behind the campaign describes itself as The SHIELD or alternatively as ‘Consortium of Assertive and Proud Hindus who are Sick of Indian Sickulars Conspiring to Attribute Every Vice in the Society to Hinduism’. This group is critical of both Sri Ram Sena’s indulgence in disagreeable acts in the name of Hinduism and the PCC as a “sickular” (sick + secular) response to the same. Though the ramifications of these campaigns have been numerous, one path-breaking accomplishment of these campaigns is that they foreground the idea of cyber space as the new public sphere. Jurgen Habermas is one of the key theoreticians to have talked about the public sphere. According to him, modernity was ushered in when the bourgeois came to power through the public sphere: In its clash with the arcane and bureaucratic practices of the absolutist state, the emergent bourgeoisie gradually replaced a public sphere in which the ruler’s power was merely represented before the people with a sphere in which state authority was publicly monitored through informed and critical discourse by the people.4

But once they came to power, they began to regulate and thereby close forums of public interaction so that they could remain in power. And that is why the dream of emancipation of modernity failed. Rationality got splintered as there was no communication between the different spheres through which emancipatory politics could be worked out. So according to him, the task of post modernity is to achieve “communicative rationality” and consensus through the public sphere. While Habermas primarily talks about the public sphere as a space where consent or “public opinion” can be generated, I have used it to imply a space where protest can be launched. Through these campaigns, the

Jürgen Habermas. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. (German, 1962, English Translation, 1989); The MIT Press, Cambridge Massachusetts, pp. 305.

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cyber space emerged as an alternative space where protest could be launched and online social networking could be used to mobilize people and resources towards a cause. These campaigns initiated an online forum where people from different walks of life could articulate and discuss the burning questions of the day and more importantly, could bring about a change. Especially the PCC was successful in making a ‘real’ difference and showing the potential of the cyber world as a domain where real problems can not only be articulated but also solved (the extent to which they get solved is of course debatable and could form the focus of another paper). Since it is a new domain (especially in India, it is a recent phenomenon), one needs to analyze it further to explore its potential as a tool of resistance. When one talks of cyber space and feminism, the category one is looking at is called cyber feminism – when new scientific developments and technology are used towards liberating women.5 Cyber feminism, says Sadie Plant, director of the Centre for Research into Cybernetic Culture at Warwick University in England, is “an alliance between women, machinery, and new technology. There is a long-standing relationship between information technology and women’s liberation.”6 Donna Haraway’s essay “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s” is generally accepted as marking the beginning of cyber feminism. According to Haraway, “A cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction.”(83) In the essay, she presents an argument for “pleasure in the confusion of boundaries” (83) and the utopian ideal of “imagining a world without gender” (84). A majority of western cyber feminists have been preoccupied with the analysis of

While Sadie Plant defines cyber feminism in terms of women’s empowerment and technology (in general), there are others who define it specifically in relation to cyber space. However, the concept remains fluid and a strict definition cannot be provided. 6

As quoted in Hari Kunzru’s “You Are Cyborg”. Issue 5.02 (Feb 1997), Wired News. <http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/5.02/ffharaway.html> Date of access: 29 March 2009.

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Haraway’s concept of the cyborg – either advocating it as enabling or condemning it as disabling in terms of the feminist project. In India, the fusion of feminist concerns and the cyber space gave birth to the PCC. The PCC can be seen as inaugurating a new kind of cyber feminism, opening a new avenue that cyber feminists around the world can explore further. It is a new kind of protest, unthought-of till now, having far reaching effect on the real world. The Indian variety of cyber feminism, it seems, has something significant to contribute to the debates within the domain of cyber feminism in general. While one can be hopeful of its potential, the success of just one campaign does not give us enough reasons not to be cautious against the same. Thanks to the success of the PCC, technophorics would be one up over technophobics, especially theoreticians like Howard Rheingold who, in his book The Virtual Community: Finding Connection in a Computerized World (1994)7, states that through the cyber space we have “access to a tool that could bring conviviality and understanding into our lives and might help revitalize the public sphere.” (14) Further, he opines: Virtual communities are social aggregations that emerge from the Net when enough people carry on [electronically mediated] public discussions long enough, with sufficient human feeling, to form webs of personal relationships in cyber space…When the automobile centric, suburban, fast food, shopping mall way of life eliminated many of these ‘third places’ from traditional towns and cities around the world, the social fabric of existing communities started shredding… [computer mediated communication is driven by] the hunger for community that grows in the breasts of people around the world as more and more informal public spaces disappear from our real lives. (5-6)

Clearly, according to Rheingold, cyber space is that utopian space where we shall be able to recover the meaning and the experience of 7

Since this book is not easily available, all the references are as quoted in Kevin Robin’s essay “Cyberspace and the World We Live In” in The Cybercultures Reader, edited by David Bell and Barbara M.Kennedy.

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community, recapture the sense of a “shared consciousness” (245), make up for the loss of a sense of social belonging, rebuild a sort of small-town public sphere – a world where every citizen is networked to every other citizen and every member (who wishes to participate in the discussion) has a voice. It can become “one of the informal public places where people rebuild the aspects of community that were lost when the malt shop became the mall.” (25-26) Through this medium, it is claimed, we shall be able to construct new sorts of community, linked by commonality of interest and affinity rather than by accidents of location, carry on the project of social revitalization and renewal, “revitalize citizen-based democracy” (14), transcend national frontiers and build a “global civil society” (56), form “not only community but true spiritual communion” (115) in “communitarian places on-line” (56). The successful PCC seems like the real manifestation of Rheingold’s vision. But what is problematic is that he seems to suggest that formation of a community and hence a public space will alone ensure deliverance. He does not really stress on how this will or should lead to action. For instance - what kind of community is formed, who are the people who form it, who can access and afford to be a part of such a community (the question of class is extremely pertinent here, especially in the Indian context, where not many people have access to the internet)8, what is their agenda and plan of action, what kind of an intervention do they seek in the real world (if they seek any), how effective are their strategies, what is the extent of the gap between their conception and execution are some of the questions that one needs to engage with in order to explore the connection between community formation, public sphere, consent generation or subversion.

In his essay, “ALT.CIVILIZATIONS.FAQ: Cyberspace as the darker side of the west”, Ziauddin Sardar points out; “Internet access is an expensive luxury… One can feed a family of four in Bangladesh for a whole year for that sort of money…In the Third World…only the reasonably well-off can afford access to the Internet. That leaves most of humanity at the mercy of real reality…So most of the people on the Internet are white, upper-and middle-class Americans and Europeans; and most of them, are men…less than one per cent of the people online are women.” (739-40)

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The cyber world has definitely emerged as the new public space but the formation of a new public sphere and the launching of debates in the same do not necessarily ensure its use for a political purpose. So many online communities do not have a political agenda at all. Even when they do have an agenda and launch a movement, they cannot ensure its success. Since the cyber community is an open community, once launched, protests gain a life of their own. A close study of the language used by bloggers/ members of the PCC is extremely revealing. Besides exposing their subject positions and ideologies, it shows how, in the public sphere, through and with the use of language, an issue that started off more as a cultural debate concerning pub culture, Indian culture and the relationship between the two and as a gender issue attains different dimensions. It became a religious (Christian/West versus Hindu/nonWest) issue with religious fanatics linking ‘chaddi’ as a cheap form of protest with pub culture, western influence, Christianity and loose behavior. For instance, let us consider three different entries: User 1: If you don’t like to send them chaddis, send them idol of Lord Rama and ask them to follow Him rather than beating up women for whatever reasons. User 2: Now chaddis has (sic) to be divided into hindu christian and muslims!!! we have to think on seperating (sic) based on relegion (sic)!! User 3: Initiated by Nisha Susan, a Christian, this is a Christian conspiracy to lower moral standards of Indian women. Obviously, the Pink Chaddi Campaign is financed by some Baptist group. The Campaign is vulgar since gifting the panties is an after-act token of appreciation of good performance, in the West. That the Christian initiative dares not send Chaddies to Moslem clerics shows their true agenda.9

From the official website of Mutiny Media Private Limited, 2007. Entries can be found in the discussion forum of the pink chaddi campaign. User 1 and 2 – Februray 14, 2009. User 3- February 20, 2009.

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Clearly, the verbal attacks, climate of abuse, linguistic warfare triggered of by members as well as non-members in the online forums generate dialogue and add new angles to the issue at hand. According to Habermas, the cyber domain is already controlled by capital, and therefore cannot be used for subversive ends. Use of the Internet has both broadened and fragmented the contexts of communication…But at the same time, the less formal, horizontal cross-linking of communication channels weakens the achievements of traditional media. This focuses the attention of an anonymous and dispersed public on select topics and information, allowing citizens to concentrate on the same critically filtered issues and journalistic pieces at any given time. The price we pay for the growth in egalitarianism offered by the Internet is the decentralised access to unedited stories. In this medium, contributions by intellectuals lose their power to create a focus.10

However, through the example of the PCC, in this paper, I have argued that the potential of using cyber space for subversive ends cannot be denied. But again, by stating that cyber space has the potential to be appropriated for formulating a politics of enablement, I do not mean that it is a benign or utopian space which can solve all real problems. In fact, no technology is totally benign or totally evil. It is a double-edged sword. It is open to both use and abuse. As a matter of fact, cybernetics is more often abused than used. To realize that, one only needs to study the increase in the rate of cyber-crime in today’s world and the havoc caused by hackers. In his essay, “ALT.CIVILIZATIONS.FAQ: Cyberspace as the darker side of the west”, Ziauddin Sardar states that, Cybercrime is going to be the crime of the future. Organized crime is a $ 750 – billion – a – year enterprise, the drug trafficking generates revenues of $ 400 billion to $ 500 billion; much of this money finds its way into cyber space, where it is totally out of

As quoted in <http://maximiliansenges.blogspot.com/2008/04/social-media-incyberspace-public.html> Date of access: 29 March 2009.

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governments’ control, where it can lose itself in split-second deals, and where it is legitimized by the international movement of more than $ 1 trillion a day. (738)

Further, he adds, “On-line terrorism is not too far away and most of the early proponents of this sick art are hackers.” (739) Also, “half of cyberspace which is not commercial is largely ‘toilet wall’.” (741) In the context of virtual communities, Sardar states that, A cyberspace community is self-selecting, exactly what a real community is not; it is contingent and transient, depending on a shared interest of those with the attention span of a thirty second soundbite…In a cyberspace community you can shut people off at the click of a mouse and go elsewhere. One has therefore no responsibility of any kind…Thus the totalizing on-line character of cyberspace ensures that the marginalized stay marginalized…[C]yberspace is to community as Rubber Rita is to woman. (744)

In my opinion, virtual space has meaning only in relation to real space. When virtual space/ identity/ protest/ culture/ life aims to replace or substitute real space/ identity/ protest/ culture/ life, it can become dangerous. For instance, if desire for a virtual protest/ community has the impact of weakening the desire for a real one, then it can no longer be considered efficacious; if one’s virtual identity is the only proof of one’s real existence, one is in danger of extinction at the click of a button. One should be able to locate the virtual within the real. When new technologies are used to respond to regressive and solipsistic desires only, it is time to check them and make them morally and politically responsible. I would conclude by stating that in this paper I have highlighted an incident of the formulation of an enabling politics within cyberspace – not to say that it is homogenously good but to show that although it is abused, it can be appropriated for a good cause, to make a difference in the real world - and that is the way forward. One has to think of new, creative ways of resistance. Since in the cyber age one cannot ignore the interface between the cyber space and real world, one should try to make use of this new domain to empower oneself for a socially beneficial cause.

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Sending a pink ‘chaddi’ to Muthalik, to my mind, was a very creative, novel, Gandhian and effective way of protesting, making a real point through the use of virtual means. The pink ‘chaddis’ that became a tool of non-violent resistance against moral policing succeeded in achieving the desired effects. The Sri Ram Sena was so unsettled with receiving so many ‘chaddis’ that its members could not even decide what to do with them. First, the party decided to send them to an orphanage, then to publically auction them, then to send saris as return ‘gifts’, then to return them to the parents of girls who had sent them and finally to publically burn them. The underwear, I suppose, has never before played such a significant role in the history of protest movements in India.

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References Castells, Manuel. The Rise of the Network Society. Blackwell, Oxford, 2000. Habermas, Jurgen. “Modernity versus Postmodernity”. A Postmodern Reader. Ed.s. Joseph Natoli and Linda Hutcheon: 91-104, State University of New York Press, Albany, 1993. Haraway, Donna. “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s”. Socialist Review, No. 80. 1985. Also pub. in The Postmodern Turn: New Perspectives on Social Theory. Ed. Steven Seidman: 82-115, Cambridge University Press, New York, 1994. Kunzru, Hari. “You Are Cyborg”. Wired News. 5(02): 1997. <http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/5.02/ffharaway.html> Robins, Kevin. “Cyberspace and the World We Live In”. The Cybercultures Reader. Eds. David Bell and Barbara M.Kennedy: 77-95, Routledge, London, 2000. Sardar, Ziauddin. “ALT.CIVILIZATIONS.FAQ: Cyberspace as the darker side of the west”. The Cybercultures Reader. Eds. David Bell and Barbara M.Kennedy: 732-52, Routledge, London, 2000.

Internet sources: Orkut.com. http://www.orkut.com/ 7 March 2009 Facebook.com. <http://www.facebook.com/> 30 March 2009 Mutiny Media Private Limited. <http://mutiny.in/2009/02/09/pinkchaddi-campaign/> 7 March 2009 Blog-a-loreans: Brand of Bangalore Bloggers. <http://blogaloreans.in/2009/02/hug-karo-and-pub-bharo-andolan-inbangalore-to-dare-the-ram-sene/> 8 March 2009. <http://thepinkchaddicampaign.blogspot.com/> 8 March 2009. <http://blog.blanknoise.org/> 8 March 2009. <http://thepinkcondomcampaign.blogspot.com/> 9 March 2009. <http://hindushield.blogspot.com/> 9 March 2009. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberfeminism> 29 March 2009. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_sphere> 29 March 2009. <http://maximiliansenges.blogspot.com/2008/04/social-media-in-cyberspacepublic.html> 29 March 2009.

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CONTRIBUTORS

Bhagya, C. S. New Delhi, India bhagyacsomashekar@gmail.com Bhattacharjee, Manash New Delhi, India manasharya@gmail.com Bratt, Salma, Ruth Saint Cloud, Minnesota, USA krbratt@gmail.com Chatterjee, Arup K New Delhi, India chatterjeearup.k@gmail.com Cummings, Eric L. Prague, Czech Republic / Morgantown, West Virginia, United States of America willworkforwords@gmail.com Doubinsky, Sébastien Aarhus, Denmark sebastiendoubinsky@yahoo.fr Dudeja, Sapna New Delhi, India sapna.dudeja@gmail.com

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Dutta Gupta, Ananya Santiniketan, West Bengal, India ananya_duttagupta@yahoo.co.uk Fox, Robert Ypsilanti, Michigan, United States of America foxwriter7@hotmail.com Gangopadhyay, Mitali Kolkata, West Bengal, India ganguly.mitali@gmail.com Ganz, Shoshannah Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada shganz@swgc.mun.ca Jacobson, Kelly Ann Washington DC, USA kellyannjacobson@gmail.com Kreiling, Jean L. Massachusetts, USA jlkreiling@hotmail.com Morse, Jenny Illinois, Chicago, USA jhmorse15@gmail.com Osmond Chein-ming Chang Taiwan, Republic of China ozzie1228@gmail.com Paranjape, Makarand, R. New Delhi, India makarand@mail.jnu.ac.in

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Â Rana, Mohan Bath, Somerset, UK letters2mohan@gmail.com Sen, Sudeep New Delhi, India sudeepsen.net@gmail.com Shehu, Fahredin Rahovec, Kosovo fahredin.shehu@gmail.com Sircar, Ronojoy New Delhi, India ronojoy.sircar@gmail.com Trimble, Kenneth Warburton, Australia trimblekenneth@bigpond.com Tyner, Jessica Puerto Viejo, Costa Rica jessicatyner@gmail.com Vadher, Snehal Mumbai, Maharashtra, India snehal238@gmail.com

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EDITORIAL BOARD

EDITOR Arup K Chatterjee

ASSISTANT EDITOR Amrita Ajay

INTERN ASSISTANT EDITOR Huzaifa Omair Siddiqui

CONTRIBUTING EDITORS Sebastien Doubinsky Sudeep Sen G.J.V. Prasad Lisa Thatcher K. Satchidanandan

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