Tuesday, December 30, 2014

Photography Divine

From time to time one comes across a text that seems so overwhelming in its implications that it's hard to talk about it. The questions of whether or not the divine, the truly sacred is mechanically, or digitally, reproducible have been long asked and answered. I'll quote a passage from Debganer Marte Agaman (The Gods Come to Earth) by Durgacharan Roy published in the 1880s that I found absolutely fascinating. The gods are visiting the Earth and after a tour of several places in India they have arrived in Calcutta. Having seeing the most obvious tourist sights...
They proceeded to another spot, where Narayan enquired, “Varun, what house is this?”
Varun: This is called a photographical establishment. For two rupees they will shoot your photograph.
Indra: Varun! Don’t you think it’s a good idea to take a photograph or two of the way in which we are touring Earth to show back in Heaven? What do you say, Grandpa?
Brahma: What’s the harm? Will they take a photograph of the group?
Varun: Why not?
“So be it”, Brahma laughed. “Narayan! Images of your tribhanga, flute in hand, are flooding the markets. Should we take one of you too?
Narayan: The all-seeing upon his swan is not far behind. If he’s getting one, why shouldn’t I?
They entered the house and decided upon the price. A sahib came and accompanied the gods to a dark room and made them sit. Upon entering the room Grandfather said, “Varun! This darkness is scaring me. Let’s get out of here. I don’t need a photograph.” Upa said, “Sir! Let’s see what the sahib is up to.” He stood up to look, then sat down and craned his neck. The sahib came running and said, “You are much too restless! Sit still. Otherwise the image will not come out right.” The sahib went out and before long the gods were looking at their own images and laughing. Upa kept looking from the image to Narayan, and back.
Narayan: What are you looking at?
Upa: They have drawn quite accurately. Why do the bazaar artists draw Grand Uncle in that monkeylike manner?
Brahma: How did you manage to draw so beautifully in such short time?
Varun: Sir—using a machine!
(Translation mine.)
 A few points about the translation (rather about the original): any single word or phrase denoting 'photograph' is used. The Bengali has "কয়েকখানি চেহারা তুলে নিলে হয় না?" A literal translation makes no sense at all, but the general idea is "capturing a likeness of the physical form". So as to not make it clumsy, I have used 'photograph' against better judgement. When Brahma asks if they take a group-photo, I decided to leave out the hyphen because the 'group-photo' as a discrete concept has probably not emerged.  Would have sounded anachronistic? But it's reassuring to see that the divinities also yield to the seduction of the 'having-been-thereness', so to speak.

Best not to add much to this.

Monday, December 29, 2014

Pay and Use

He got on the empty elevator, sweating profusely. ‘3’. It was a weekday, but there was still a considerable crowd inside the shopping mall. Barring a few unaccustomed ladies in sarees who would visibly express their nervousness, most of Kolkata had got quite used to the escalators over the last few years. They weren’t a source of added excitement for kids any longer. Prasun remembered when he was growing up, he’d look forward to journeys by the Metro precisely because of the rare escalator rides that came with the journey. Just as soon as the elevator had started, a voice rang out of the announcement unit.
—Please pay attention. You are requested to report at the Office immediately.
This took him completely by surprise. Was he the one being addressed?
—Yes, Sir, you. We have observed your movement inside the shopping complex since morning. Please report. Immediately.

He always knew that there were eyes all over the shopping mall but he had no idea that there were people tracking his every move. He got off the lift at the third floor and rushed to the gents’ toilet located in the left wing of the complex.
...

Prasun Bhattacharjee, originally from Uluberia, has been staying for the last four and half years at a paying guest accommodation near Jadavpur. It is a neat, two-room apartment: a bedroom-cum-living room, and a kitchen. There’s a common bathroom for two or three adjacent quarters, but since one of these is perpetually empty, he had to share the toilet with a single neighbour. A wrought-iron camping bed, a few stable pieces of furniture, a gas-oven run on pirated cylinders, and a few books strewn tastefully around, form the sum total of his earthly possessions, as he sees it. There’s no point journeying back to Uluberia. Over the last few years he has visited his parents about eight times. He doesn’t feel particularly attached to the place since he settled into his part-time job. What job? He didn’t care much, so why should we?

He has a few friends with whom he’d hang around at the university close by, mostly after working hours. Behind his back they have many questions about him, but politeness kept them from asking him directly. They assemble for a few rounds of tea. The tea itself is uninspiring. To be honest, so is the conversation on most days. Over the recent past, however, things have been different and this has not escaped Prasun. On one occasion he was even been asked by one of the guards to produce an identity card. He had walked past, as if in a hurry, but felt distinctively uncomfortable. He had used a different entrance over the next few days, which meant that he had to take a bit of a detour, but it saved him the trouble of more confrontations.

Within the group, he hardly ever speaks. He doesn’t think that he has much to contribute anyway. He listens eagerly. The students and researchers he is friends with talk a great deal. He values their opinion although in most cases he doesn’t feel too affected by them. One or two of them have visited his apartment in the past. Prasun had first met a couple of the members of the group shortly after arriving in Kolkata and getting his job. He had gone to buy roti and egg-tarka from one of the three contiguous shops inside the Jadavpur CIT market. He liked the fact that these shops saved themselves trouble by not chopping the onions into salad strips and just handed one big quarter slice of an onion with each purchase. What had sparked off the initial conversation is forgotten, but it can’t be too difficult to guess at. His friends had stopped buying from those shops after a dead mouse was discovered in the tarka about a year ago. Justifiably so, Prasun thinks, but because the discovery of the mouse or anything before or since hasn’t made him seriously ill, he has persisted.

There is one peculiarity about Prasun, which his friends, even the closest ones—those who have visited him—have been unable to solve. From time to time he disappears for about an hour without warning. This caused a fair amount of confusion within the group at first. Then someone, unable to handle the suspense any longer, ended up asking him. He gestured vaguely in a westward direction. Gradually, his friends observed, a pattern emerged: more often than not he disappears almost immediately after a cup of tea. Now they barely notice, given that his presence seems to make very little difference anyway.

Prasun walks down towards the remains of the Bengal Lamp factory, turns left, then right, into Katju Nagar. Through Katju Nagar he goes till he reaches a small bazar that sits on a triangular plot of land at the intersection of three roads, maybe lanes: two of which, eventually lead to the shopping mall. When it’s not that urgent he pauses a brief while at the pukur ghat, where many, aged and young, assemble to exchange niceties and news. If he’s in a hurry, he ignores all that and goes straight on ahead.

It’s a relief, he sometimes thinks, that most places these days employ security guards through private agencies. The faces at the entrance to the shopping mall change from time to time, not offering much scope for familiarity. He is sure that they do see him with a degree of suspicion anyway, but he doesn’t let that bother him too much. If it’s morning, he knows he must visit the toilets in the left wing of the enormous shopping complex. Prasun knows that the ones that are located in the right wing are cleaned in the first hour, about the time he usually reaches. He enters the mall, walks straight down, turns left and enters the cubicle without making eye-contact with too many people. Normally, it isn’t very crowded in the first hour. Most people, he optimistically thinks, have jobs to which they must attend. His only rivals to the toilet seat are some of the employees who don’t have places to live close by.

There was a time when Prasun would feel obliged to pause awkwardly before a few of the shops pretending to eye something or the other, sometimes not clearly noticing what shop he was standing in front of. When he felt one too many suspicious eye glancing in his direction, he had on occasion gone so far as to enter some random shop, left his bag at the counter and walked around inside for a bit. People who visit these malls, he has seen, don’t strictly go about their business. They watch one another, or check to see if they are sufficiently seen. Over the last year, consciously or unconsciously, he has started moving around less apologetically. He feels that he doesn’t offer much by way of spectacularity. He has learnt to ignore glances. He observes the people instead—couples, young and old, families, kids laughing and quarrelling, groups of teenagers furiously snapping selfies in front of the Christmas tree or the plastic gods during the Pujas. But he doesn’t think much about all this.

The toilets too have changed over time. One day when he was already late for work, he realized upon reaching Jadavpur Thana that he had a toilet emergency. He had two options: to return to Jadavpur, to his own place, or to hold it in long enough to reach his office, still another forty-five minutes away. Seeing that he was anxious and sweating, a friendly student in the auto-rickshaw had suggested cheekily that he go relieve himself inside the toilets of the shopping mall. They have automatic flushes, he had advertised. Whether they had automatic flushes or not, Prasun didn’t care. He thought it was a life-saving idea. Nor did he have time to measure the accuracy of this statement as he rushed in to the toilet cubicle. Both cubicles in the toilet were unoccupied. He had never felt so inexplicably grateful in his life. The seats were dry, the floor was dry, it even smelt nice. It was not before a few minutes had passed that he looked around. He heard a strange tinkling music that was being played, he noticed that they had toilet paper, something he had never used before. He wasn’t even sure how it worked. This was the first time. On the way out, he had remembered to verify that student’s claim. Yes, they were automatic flushes. An eye-like opening a few feet above the urinal—probably some kind of an LED or infrared sensor at work. A couple of weeks later he had ventured again, on another similar emergency.

The visits started getting more frequent. Till the time came when Prasun had to confess to himself that he was visiting not simply in cases of emergency. He was beginning to enjoy it. He was starting to observe things and creating patterns out of the chaotic comings and goings of human beings within the shopping mall. Although he restricted his field of study almost entirely to the toilet cubicle, he was venturing this way and that. Once he had even managed to eat a surreptitious brunch that he had got packed elsewhere inside—because it really wasn’t the open space that it claimed to be—the food court upstairs. He had to make do without the napkin because that would have made it too obvious, and ate out of the tin box, without even taking it out of the plastic bag. On the way down he had rinsed luxuriously.

From inside the toilet cubicle, which he formed the base of his observations, he could see nothing. As a result he did not study people. He didn’t study anyway—let’s say he ‘noticed’. He noticed anonymous habits instead: habits that were not only anonymous but also lacked faces. He would have judged people based on their habits had he known who they were. One day, about a couple of years back, he noticed that the toilet-paper rolls had disappeared. They had been replaced by some kind of mini telephone shower he had never seen before. This was probably on popular demand, Prasun concluded. He didn’t care much for toilet-paper, but he did miss the many games he had devised. There was relatively little that one could do with this new shower. For one, he used to fashion little origami boats out of the toilet-paper. They would be very feeble and far from satisfactory, but he enjoyed letting them down on the water bowl after he was done. He had also started scribbling on the paper with a gel-pen he had bought. They’d all get flushed down by the next user.

What he hates most about the newly installed showers was that people tend to leave the seats extremely wet. Especially in winter months, this does not amuse him. If he were to write them all down, he could easily compile a large compendium of toilet habits. Apart from the obvious distinctions based on the amount of noise made and suchlike, he notices various other nuances: that some people are economical with unfamiliar waters. They use very little of it and are in a hurry to get out once done. There are others who believe that it is safer to wash everything that a stranger had touched before. They create a mess. Prasun hates it especially when water from the next cubicle trickles into his own. He hates it when people spray the shower backwards, that is, in the direction of the cistern. This dirties a part of the pot that is not accessible to the flush nozzles, and then, of course they don’t bother cleaning it. There is a right way and a wrong way, he has decided. Seated on the pot, some people hum English songs, while others hum Bengali or Hindi songs. There are a few who know the words to the tunes that are played on the shopping mall’s music system. One day he had heard someone in the next cubicle hum all through one of the songs and join in only at the chorus—“Nothing’s going to stop us now”. Prasun can identify this song now and hums the tune to himself, often unconsciously.

He loves the apologetic smile that a person waiting for him to get out greets him with. Usually he can tell when there’s someone waiting. People try pushing the door even if they see that the knob is indicated ‘occupied’ (red), when it’s really urgent. Even when they don’t touch the door knob, he has learnt to make sense of the shifting of feet that takes place outside. When he gets out they exchange awkward glances—there is a mixture of frustration and gratitude. When he doesn’t hear the knock, Prasun tends to spend a fair amount of time. After the disappearance of the toilet-paper he has resorted to playing games on his mobile phone. He has an old Nokia 3315. He never liked it as much as the 3310, and he hates the jelly-like keys, but it’s faithful. He plays Space Impact on ‘Silent’. The longest he has spent inside a cubicle is twenty-five minutes: a record he doesn’t intend to break. In summer, he rounds off his visit to the shopping mall with a few glasses of chilled water from filters that are installed on the right wing of the mall. Two quick glasses, a bit of loitering, and he is off.
         
On this particular day, Prasun had an actual emergency. For one reason or another all the toilets on the ground, first and second floors were occupied. He wasn’t sure how this was happening. He had rushed in, as usual. Seeing that the doors were shut, he had gone to the ones on the right wing as well. They were being cleaned, as he had guessed. He had waited awkwardly pretending to adjust his hair with his fingers at the first floor basins, all the while keeping an eye on the doors that he could see in the reflection. No luck. Second floor. The same. He had never used the ones on the third floor and so he had climbed down hoping that the ground floor toilets would  have emptied by now. Again, no luck. He finally decided that he must try the top floor. He got on the elevator, and that’s when the message came. He realized as he walked to the toilet that his movements had been far too obvious today. Once he was done, he walked out, avoiding the lifts. He would have to stay away for a while or try some other place that was on his route.

Saturday, December 20, 2014

"Love is only chatter"

I saw this the other day while waiting for Neelakantan and Riddhi in front of the Roland store at the Anwar Shah road intersection. Why this framed image offering life-lessons was sharing space with the tree inside the tree-corset I'll never know.


Wednesday, December 17, 2014

Duel-narrative

Calcutta, Thursday
My Dearest Marian,
I have desired Sir John  Day to inform you that I have had a Meeting this Morning with Mr Francis, who has received a Wound in his Side, but I hope not dangerous. I shall  know the State of it presently, and will write to you again. He is at Belvidere [sic], and Drs Campbell and Francis are both gone to attend him there.
(...)
W.H.

Warren Hastings writes to his wife, then in Chinsurah. A famous story. One of those bifurcated points in history, when one single, famous incident tempts you to think of the possibilities of the dis-narrative.

Monday, December 1, 2014

Edward Lear in Calcutta

Many of us, who were brought up on a staple diet of absurd poetry in the Native Tongue, were introduced to Edward Lear through Satyajit Ray's translations that appear in Torae Badha Ghorar Dim. (Are there many languages that display a similar inexorable affinity for nonsense verse, in the original and in translation, especially for children?) I knew Edward Lear as a master of the nonsense verse and I'm sure we each know people who can still recite large chunks of 'The Owl and the Pussycat' from memory. My first exposure to his painting was when I was visiting the British Museum a couple of years back. I had vaguely heard about his landscape painting but I hadn't seen too much of it online and people didn't really talk about it all that much.

Recently, while researching English/European painters in Calcutta around the 18th and 19th centuries, I came across his memoirs. During the October Reading Group Seminar for the ETIC project, Abhijit Gupta referred me to Joe Robert's Bengal, the Cold Weather 1873: A Dream of Edward Lear in India. I didn't find the novel particularly stimulating. The author confesses his love for Edward Lear in the introduction and I think I would have liked to see a work driven by more imagination and less obedience to the journal. A meeting between Lear and a young Toru Dutt is an exciting thought, but apart from a few witty exchanges it didn't do much for the narrative, I felt. It is, in the author's defence, presented as a dream. I wish it were livelier and more confident of itself. Be that as it may.

Edward Lear came in 1873, Chandernagore being his last stop before Calcutta. He had with him a young Italian boy, Giorgio. He seems to be quite fond of him. Lear stayed at the Governor's House. The Viceroy at the time was Lord Northbrook. Lear was reading G.O. Trevelyan's Cawnpore, a narrative of the revolt of 1857.

As expected, Lear had funny names for the places he visited, and from what I read, I could detect a bit of good-humoured contempt for the officious lifestyle of his fellow countrymen in India. The Chowringhee, for instance, did not suit him. He describes it as "a road of palaces and a fearful humbug. The Promenades des Anglais at Nice beats it hollow." His name for Calcutta was "Husslefussabad" and a stretch leading up to Tollygunge (I can't pinpoint where exactly) is named "Moscopolis".

During his stay Lear went on drawing a steady pace. The city, however, seems not to have appealed to his artistic sensibilities. "Immense commerce and population of Calcutta ghats—for which I was not prepared", he writes on December 27.  (That same night he was to enter some lady's room by mistake, thinking it his. "Great fuss thereanent.") He far preferred the 'suburbs'—Tollygunge for instance, with which he seems quite happy. "Drove to Tollygunge. Beautiful bits of villages and verdure; I do not think I ever before saw so much novel, interesting, and drawable stuff in so small a space and so short a time." December 23.

Lear, as many are aware, was also a bird-watcher. He makes some notes of a few of the birds that he saw around the city: "Several small green bee-eaters, and at Tollygunje, a largish, green bird with red and blue about head, on top of a tree; seemed a big woodpecker, only sate still on the very top of a tree, a habit non-woodpeckerish, and making an odd noise." December 31. He searched high and low for a bridge he intended to paint and found it after much effort that same day.

On December 26 he ordered a sketching-stool. It arrived on New Year's Day, 1874 and broke on January 5. He notes, "I very ill, along of the new sketching stool having broken down under me, and hurt my behind very badly." Poor fellow. He was about 62 then. He also bought several photographs while he was here—two dozen at Thacker & Spinks alone.

What I also didn't know about him: I came to learn from the introduction by Ray Murphy, is that Lear was fairly close to the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood. One William Holman Hunt visited his studio and "ended by agreeing to be his adviser". Hunt was junior to Lear. Lear, nevertheless, called him "Daddy". Murphy argues that this influence did more harm than good, because, according to him, "much of the poetry implicit in this early work evaporated and was replaced by a sickly blight of strained effects, search for novelty, interest in what was merely picturesque, and false sentimentality..." (ELIJ, 23) He notes that Lear would have liked to be remembered more for his painting than for his verse. Murphy refers to this one occasion when Lear had written to an aged Ruskin in 1883 thanking him "for having, by your books, caused me to use my own eyes in looking at landscape from a period dating many years back." The ageing man apparently scribbled at the top of the letter, "Is this the Nonsense man?"

There are only two paintings by Lear from his Calcutta trip that I could find. Both set in Tollygunge. The second one, which went under the hammer at Christie's in 2011, seems the better (more skilled) of the two, yes? His diary is worth a read. For those interested, Marco's Edward Lear's Diaries blog is an interesting re-presentation of the same.

Edward Lear, Tollygunje. Wikimedia Commons.
Edward Lear, Figures on the Banks of the Hoogly, Tollygunge, Calcutta.