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Literary Review
Receive me, then, Calcutta
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For NABANEETA DEV SEN, it was hard to keep away from poetry, her parents being poets. Yet, keep away she did, when the vicissitudes of life took her elsewhere. And through many crossings she kept coming back to it. A personal narrative of a poet's relationship with her craft.
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CONCEIVED in the womb of one poet, and sired by another, it was hard for me to get away from poetry, and poets. All my life I was in the vicinity of poetry until I sailed out into another world for higher studies, far away from Calcutta. Then I married a non-poet and put poetry on hold. It was a new world, a new life, a new me. I was getting used to the new cultural milieu on both shores of the Atlantic — the challenge of the academia, learning languages, learning to drive, learning to cook, making a home with the man I loved. All these wonderful, simple, worldly things were happening in my life all together, far away from Calcutta. Far away from poetry.
And then the most exciting thing in my life happened. I was about to become a mother.
As the foetus grew within my womb, swimming in the amniotic fluid, it suddenly struck me that it was passing through all the stages of evolution from the fish to the mammal. The idea filled me with pride. And guess what? Poetry returned to me. I felt one-up on Mother Earth, she took millions of years to get here. I took only nine months! A poem poured out. Then one more. And one more. A whole series of poems were born along with my first child. Here is a translation of the first poem of the Antara Series.
Antara
Antara rising from primordial waters
Like the first sun, forever new, forever old
You made me a universe
History and pre-history filed through me hand in hand
In gradual evolution.
Antara, because of you
I've earned the right To enter the tenfold halls of my foremothers
Clutching your baby hands in my fist
I hold the future in my debt forever
Antara, in an instant you have filled all time
By your grace I am coeval with the earth today.
* * *
Calcutta is a jealous city. Very possessive. It does not like its own people to stay away from it. Every time we came home for a visit, our friends and relatives complained heavily. "What keeps you there? What do you have abroad that Calcutta does not have? Why waste your education and energy on foreigners? Why are you in self-exile? Don't you miss home? Come back, come back home, we need you, you need us too, this is your own place, this is where you belong." Calcutta made me feel guilty every time I left it to return to my home across the oceans. It pouted and sulked.
Life takes unexpected turns. A moment came when I had to return to Calcutta with my two daughters and three suitcases. Calcutta was not ready for me. In those days a broken marriage was rare, it left the woman without a place in the social structure. The friends and relatives who had been pressing me so hard to return to Calcutta were too embarrassed to accept me as I was. A poem was written.
Return of the Dead
Receive me then, Calcutta,
I am your first love
Your childhood sweetheart
Here I am, an aborted mother
I have brought the ocean with me instead
My arms are heavy, yes, but my breasts
Are heavy, overflowing with wasted milk
Look at the fathomless salt water
Come, look at me, then,
Naked as the setting sun
Touch me, Calcutta, my newborn flesh
Belongs to you now
Receive me in your waiting arms
Your loneliness is over
Your prayers were heard
I have returned, just as you
Would have liked me to
Why this stunned silence, then?
Lift your chin,
Don't shift your eyes,
Speak to me — Here she is, returned from the dead
As you had wished
Look at me, yes, I am she, Your old flame, your world of passion
Your very own
Nabaneeta
Well, in this poem, I was openly speaking to my readers. But it was just this one single poem where I did this. Something else was happening in the meantime. Whatever I wrote was read as a response to my broken marriage and interpreted as such. Compassion flowed from every direction. This was beginning to get on my nerves. There was too much interference, too little privacy. I had to find a way out.
* * *
In India a woman's writing is often interpreted in the light of her personal life. The author becomes a part of the text she produces. This is a nuisance men do not have to suffer. This happens because for us, women, writing as an exercise is really an act of trespassing. Writing is a cerebral act, it is done with the mind, and its appeal is primarily to the mind, rather than to the senses, unlike other arts like dancing, singing or cooking. And right there the woman who writes has transgressed. Once she is recognised as a transgressor, she is under the strict surveillance of society. This was what had happened in my case. But I found a solution to my problem.
I stopped writing poems. They were becoming too grim. I began to write funny stories about my own family, absurd situations created by me, my bedridden mother, my two little girls, their pet animals. I wrote happy fairy tales about intelligent, efficient princesses who had the power to win over any tricky situation, and wild, wild travelogues which were true stories of my life. In one sweep it stopped the flow of pity, and had the readers laughing with me and sharing the absurdities of middle-class life. I had somehow managed to step out of the regular middle-class milieu, and the stereotypical expectations had stopped. A woman hitch-hiking alone on a ration truck to the MacMahon Line to see the India-Tibet border, forcing herself into the homes of unknown men (including a Tibetan Lama) to get a night's rest, is not the middle-class woman we know. She goes to a seminar in Hyderabad; then, on a whim, dashes off to the Kumbh Mela all by herself, sleeps on the bare ground by the roadside, and finally falls into the sacred river swept by a stampede, wearing an expensive Kanchibharam sari, three sets of sweaters, two pairs of socks and high heels at 2.00 am. It's the story of a "crazy" woman, and crazy women are sexless, they do not fit into the category of Women as such. In my humour stories I appeared as the Mother — of two school going daughters — and the Daughter — of a domineering but bedridden mother. These again are sexless gender roles. At the same time I was writing political novels (no eroticism, thank you) and literary criticism. To make up for the fun and frolic. (As a University Professor I also needed a "dignified" persona. Must be careful about the things you write!) The hungry curiosity for my personal life story subsided. Poetry subsided as well. I became a prose writer.
But although I abandoned poetry, thank god poetry did not abandon me. Whenever life betrays me, poetry comes to my rescue.
Renowned Bengali writer Nabaneeta Dev Sen's work ranges from poetry, fiction, and literary criticism to humour, children's literature and autobiography. She is the daughter of two well-known poets.
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