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Literary Review
Tale, teller, translator
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Two memoirs from two very different periods. Yet, issues — feminism, revolutions, revolutionaries and translation — strangely overlap in these texts, says BRINDA BOSE.
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WE are all, as Rushdie famously declared, translated beings: and today, as we all know, translation is one of the most loaded terms in our (multi)cultural lexicon: located simultaneously at various sites, working through innumerable ambiguities, continuously transforming itself into new avatars. For the two titles under review here, questions relating to translation are paramount: how does the Bengali translate into English? How does politics translate into revolution, and feminism into politics? Memory into memoir, reality into text? Fact into both fiction and faction?
Sulekha Sanyal's The Seedling's Tale was published in its original Bengali as Nabankur in 1956, a year in which its author also survived a painful divorce. Manikuntala Sen's autobiographical memoirs in Bangla, Shediner Katha, was published in 1982; it is an interesting — perhaps significant — coincidence that they are both made available in English now at the turn of the century by a small feminist publishing house from Kolkata. Issues — feminism, communism, revolutions and revolutionaries — overlap strangely in these two texts even while the contexts that engendered them diverge: at some basic level, it may be said that Sanyal dreamt them while Sen lived them, but that will be doing a disservice to the spirit of translation, which recognises the act of translating (whether dream into fiction, or experience into "an account of those days") as revolutionary in and of itself.
Cast in the mould of a feminist bildungsroman, Sanyal traces the tale of Chhobi (literally, "picture"), a gutsy and hardy little girl who grows up to defy the conventions of a patriarchal family order in Bengal during the last, frantic decades of India's anti-colonial struggle. Born and educated in Bangladesh in her early life, Sanyal herself received her political education from her brother and his friends who were involved in revolutionary terrorist activities against the British, and her sympathies are clearly identified in Chhobi's tomboyish enthusiasm for the undercover work the young men around her risk their lives for in their patriotic fervour. Sanyal had been a member of the Communist party in her college days in Calcutta (where she came after partition), and this, her first novel, is imbued with her fledgling political views about freedom, space and choice. Somewhere along the way — perhaps almost unconsciously for the author, and certainly not consciously for her protagonist, these ideas that hung like dewdrops in the nationalist air outside entered Chhobi's very being, condensed into dreams of personal freedom, and crystallised into rebellion, of the sort that we would label today as feminist. As with all causes, Chhobi in the single-minded pursuit of her's, struggles and bleeds, of course, but emerges hopeful. She is a significant signifier in an arid landscape of female oppression as she finally boards the train that will take her from her village to Calcutta, a sequence in which one may identify all the landmark tropes for modernity, advancement, and the quest for personal freedom denied to young rural women of her time. This "picture" — the final freeze, as it were — blushes with hope and promise, both romantic and political, aspiring toward emancipation at multiple levels of living and being, espying fulfilment.
Manikuntala Sen's memoir, in contrast, is starker, sharper, heavier with the weight of lived experience. It is, after all, a historical document, for Sen takes her accounting of the political climate of her times very seriously, and almost eliminates her own personality from her memoirs except in the most functional terms. How deliberately shorn it is of personal colour may be recognised from just one example that Tapan Raychaudhuri offers in his foreword: she talks of sharing accommodation with Jolly Kaul and moving to Delhi to be with him after resigning from the Party, but there is no indication anywhere in the book that Jolly Kaul is her husband. In Search of Freedom is clearly Sen's political manifesto, a riveting document that chronicles not merely the activities of the Communist Party of Bengal in the tumultuous decades leading to and beyond Indian independence, but also the growth of the women's movement from its grassroots — both within and outside of the Party — that Sen herself shaped to such a great extent during those momentous years. Sen's incredible life story — as much as we can reconstruct of it from her rather impersonal account — is that of a feminist in search of the freedom of politics as much as political freedom. "The dream of socialism was in the air and the young shared it" she says — but the "I" that narrates the tale appears to be uncomfortable with the notion of being anything more than an eye sharply trained on the socialist upheavals she causes, enters, or leads.
If any reader is left dissatisfied with such an act of (c)omission in Sen's narrative, it is always possible to (imaginatively) graft a tale such as Chhobi's upon it, transposing fact into faction as well as translating fiction into life; but that would clearly be a politically incorrect endeavour, for feminism, for the socialist cause each text espouses, and for the complicated ethics of translation. To each her own, then: teller, tale — and politics, of course.
Nabankur (The Seedling's Tale), Sulekha Sanyal, Calcutta: Stree, 2001.
In Search of Freedom: An Unfinished Journey, Manikuntala Sen, Calcutta: Stree, 2001.
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