Wild Animals Prohibited

by Subimal Misra

  After reading Misra's book, it was as if I received a push, or a jolt, a kind of inspiration. Ordinary things, ordinary reality, ordinary conditions, like dirt, grime and squalor could be brought to light. And thus began my tempora series, in my third year. Later, this 'dirt' aspect also extended to mentaldirt, which could be brought out. I might paint this in glorious colours, but it is a squalid reality that was being projected. In my 2013 exhibition, Fuxnama, the very name (taken from 'Lux', the undergarments brand – Trs.) reveals that slant.

  VR: How do you see the question of relevance of Subimal Misra's writing?

  SB: It is not only Subimal Misra, but the whole movement and politics of such cultural artifacts which were born in the late '60s and early '70s, from an ideology – I was also quite critical of this stance, notwithstanding the inspiration. Why is their rage focused within specific limits? Which is why I later became interested in the writing of Nabarun Bhattacharya. Perhaps Subimal Misra provided a foundation for that. There is a non-boundedness in his writing, as well as a flight to myth-making. After having read Subimal Misra and Nabarun Bhattacharya, if I now read Misra, I discern the humour, the dark humour.

  Misra's writing is very visual, so as an artist I can relate very well to it. It is as if someone is unable to paint and instead paints with words. We see a huge picture, like something by Bruegel or Hieronymus Bosch. I sense a close similarity between Subimal Misra's writing and the work of these painters.

  Subimal Misra is not just Subimal Misra. He is a particular kind of person, and there is a tradition of a leftist movement and a leftist intelligentsia here, as in Kerala. Whereas in another place, like say, Bangalore, we do not have such a tradition. Hence what seems new to them can seem stale to us.

  But of course, there has been a decay of the culture, and the space of little magazines has become eroded.

  Consider M.F. Husain or Subodh Gupta, who were able to amass considerable wealth through their work. Compared to them, someone like Vivan Sundaram is an anti-establishment figure. Yet Vivan Sundaram is known, it is not as if he is completely unknown. Subimal Misra is like that. But I think while Vivan Sundaram kept himself open, Subimal Misra kept himself closed. The intellectuals of the late '60s and early '70s tried to keep the windows of capitalism shut – but I don't agree with that now. One should keep all the windows open, but not be overwhelmed by anything.

  VR: Please tell us about your 2013 exhibition, Fuxnama.

  SB: In Fuxnama, the final picture is about the vilest of vile abuse that I ever heard – this harks back to my beginnings, the series of pictures of a dirty toilet, and the link with Subimal Misra. Fuxnamais about the powerful, whose power is endorsed by some objects, consumable objects. It takes off from the Rizwanur incident, in which a common man was smashed by a powerful person, and in the series of paintings, the powerful person is endowed with various powerful products, such as a gun or an undergarment. That vile abuse, and representing that as the ultimate, final act of the powerless, a scream of abuse – I could not have done this without the link to Subimal Misra.

  VR: What do you think about translation of Subimal Misra's writing?

  SB: I was fortunate to find several of Subimal Misra's publications in the Little Magazine Library in Tamer Lane, Kolkata. Accessibility is vital. Hence translation of Subimal Misra's writing is important. Perhaps a wider awareness can be created through the medium of English. The time is ripe to disseminate Subimal Misra's writing and awareness about his work in India and globally. This must be a time of synthesis, synergy and syncretism, rather than one of singularity and being bound, and the perpetual perpetuation and regurgitation of that. Like with the world of South Point School, and the role of South Point School.

  _________________

  Sumitro Basak is an artist based in Kolkata. His series of narrative paintings, titled Fuxnama, was exhibited to considerable acclaim at the CIMA Gallery, Kolkata, in 2013. Here he is in conversation with the translator, V. Ramaswamy.

  AN INTERVIEW WITH SUBIMAL MISRA

  Caveat

  I give very few interviews, and when I do, it is only for literary magazines. Prior to this one, I never thought it necessary to give answers to any other periodical or newspaper. I never went to the media. Hence, owing to my unfamiliarity, I don't know how useful it is. But I can't make it any easier or simpler, even if I tried to.

  Translator adds:Subimal Misra does not like to converse in any language other than his mother tongue. This is extremely difficult to translate, especially in a manner that conveys its precise literary flavour. I have tried my best to render his answers into English.

  Gaurav Jain: What have been the major changes in your stories since these stories from the 1960s(referring to the book The Golden Gandhi Statue from America– Trs.)?

  Subimal Misra: There have been many phases in my writing over the past few decades. Getting out, and then getting away from montage, collage and cut-up, I tried to make my voice more pinpointed, so that even without seeing the writer's name people could know for certain that this was Subimal Misra's writing. (There are both positive and negative aspects to this.) In my writing, I have used the form of the story, my own secret diary, reportage, excerpts from advertisements, pornography, slang – even a series of interviews with dacoits from south Bengal. Everything was mixed up, to became a unified whole. I walk along my own path through all this, whether this has been a progress or not I don't know. I am unable to say how much of it is story, and how much simply text.

  In my writing, and especially in my current writing, there is a conscious tendency to abandon 'meta-narrative'. There need not be a definite, fixed meaning of all the words, all the time. One may discover that the same words may have been used in diametrically opposite ways in the same text. Or one may find that the text is broken up and thus deconstructed and made inter-penetrating and interdependent. In the sequential flow of the narrative, 'yes' and 'no' become mutually interdependent.

  What I sense now is that if a person continuously and consistently wants to rebel, at a certain juncture he also has to become a rebel against his own rebellion. Finally the business of deconstruction has itself to be deconstructed.

  GJ: After the initial experiments of these stories and all your subsequent work, what are your conclusions today about using montage in literature?

  SM: Where's the montage? There was just one montage-based title, Haran Majhir Bidhoba Bouer Mora Ba Shonar Gandhimurti(Haran Majhi's Widow's Corpse or the Golden Gandhi Statue). Two sentences of completely opposite forms were taken and imprinted on the consciousness of the reader (something thought of by Eisenstein, but here my own conception). As a short-cut, that was shortened, apparently because such a long and unconventional name could not be gulped by readers. This is the unfortunate plight of an independent writer who wants to reach the public. Abandoning montage, abandoning the phase of anti-stories and anti-novels, abandoning personal story-writing – involving story and text, a very personal kind of prose – I have been carrying on, with constant enlargement, from the late '60s.

  GJ: The characters in these stories often have no history, and minimum social context – they are very cinematic in that way. When you read them today do you find them too thin, or do you consider cinematic characters to be valid in literature?

  SM: Unless one reads the writing in the original Bengali, one cannot reach the various dimensions. To put it differently – a scholar and doctor like Isak Borg (portrayed by Victor Sjöström) was so selfish, and yet Bergman did not see any purpose in elaborating that social context in a so-called realistic manner. A desolate city road, mid-afternoon, a clock without hands, the sound of the hooves of a horse, one of whose eyes is blinkered, and from that ramshackle horse-carriage there falls a coffin – from within which a dead man's hand is outstretched, and held captive in its closed fist is Borg's pale, ancient hand. That extremely dramatic revelation is a terrifying scene. Was the dead man actually Borg himself? Was this his soul's corpse, which he was carrying on his
body? Shadow-free light over the entire surroundings. The use of sound and camera is astounding. And lying there, like something rejected, is the sleeping Borg, who is supposed to receive the most important honour of his life in the city the next day. Watching Wild Strawberriesis like encountering a fragment of a poem communicating an endless, powerful, impenetrable secret. No, Bergman did not see any point in elaborating Borg's real social context in one of the world's greatest, human documents.

  GJ: There seems very little happiness in these stories, little joy of being alive. One of the main charms of the young Godard was his enthusiasm for life's small joys. Did you disagree with him on that?

  SM: Godard taught a new form of the thought process of argument, which is seemingly not a process at all. But I do not imitate Godard's method. One can go very deep into that subject, but that would not be fitting here. And 'joy'? There are multiple levels and dimensions in my writing. People take something from my writing based on how capable they are. How many people get 'joy' from Faiyaz Khan-Baba Alauddin-Amir Khan, or from Beethoven-Mozart-Bach? How many people can claim to possess the musical awareness to listen patiently to Indian classical music's supreme form, Dhrupad? How many people are happy reading Dante-Proust-Joyce? These things, all of these, occupy a marginal space, and are for very few people. To put it differently, people derive great 'joy' watching Hindi films, yet they have not heard the name of Mani Kaul. I do not consider such people to be 'educated'. 'Joy' cannot be simply obtained, it has to be earned.

  GJ: How can an artist like you and Godard today be effective critics of mainstream culture if you remain so cut away from it?

  SM: My short reply is, definitely yes, I did do that, and I will be able to do it. By actually staying far away from the media-fed, glamour-debased world, Subimal Misra wants to reach his readers by writing in little magazines which print only two or three hundred copies in Bengali. He wants to be tested thus. He wants to be judged by his writing alone, and not by media publicity. Here, in such matters, two lines of Rabindrasangeet inspire his work:

  Na hoy tomar ja hoyeche taiyi holo

  aro kichu nayii holo – nayii holo

  What this means is:

  You may not have got what you sought,

  but what you did get is enough, So what if you did not get anything more?

  One more point I'd like to add here is that you can be sure that I cannot be made to accept any award or prize – small, big, middling, whatever be its stature – which has become cheaper than even a 'sack of potatoes' now, – awards which only serve to identify mediocrity, not genius. When the Nobel Prize was instituted, Tolstoy was alive, as was Joyce. Their genius was beyond the imagination of those who decided on the awards. And Sartre's refusal of the Nobel Prize is of course legend.

  GJ: What has been your main goal in your writing? Do you feel hope for it today, after all the years of rejection and marginalization?

  SM: I do not have any goal, in the commonly understood sense, in my writing. While watching Sholay, I only wanted to know the name of Gabbar Singh's horse.

  There is a notion of an average in the mainstream. Average knowledge, average taste, average entertainment, even though in reality things are not so easy or simple. What you consider rejection or marginalization actually challenges a linear and one-dimensional notion of progress. In my view, what Foucault calls 'disciplinary power' is only one part of the establishment, of the mainstream. The hidden, unseen threads of power are spread all over, and are constantly at play in different forms or garbs.

  Some people think that mainstream culture yields only hollow pleasure, but on the opposite side, we argue, we make people think, compel them to think about their situation, about their surroundings. From the time of Socrates, to Rousseau, to Nietzsche, all of them, at one time or the other, in one form or the other, saw this mainstream culture in a negative light. Some people realize greater joy not from the mainstream but from the opposite side, even though they are only a minuscule part of the whole population. It is because they are there on the opposite side that the mainstream is also in existence. But I also feel that there are gaps in such thinking on my part, things can't be drawn in such an easy, simple way.

  No conception is complete by itself, independent of others. But on the other hand, this may also not be so.

  GJ: What gives you hope today?

  SM: Everything, and also nothing whatsoever. Whatever exists in this world bears the shadow of everything else.

  GJ: What do you think of the major Bengali writers that remain popular today, from Tagore to Amitav Ghosh?

  SM: From whatever little I have read of Amitav Ghosh, I don't think he has been able to develop something distinctive. He hasn't even learnt how to render an ambiguous sentence! Rabindranath's pictures and his songs are more dear to me than his literature.

  Only one book written in recent times in English, just one, could agitate me somewhat, that's Satanic Verses. Yes, Rushdie is capable. And although out of context, I would like to say that my favourite film director in India is not Satyajit Ray, but Ritwik Kumar Ghatak.

  GJ: Which contemporary writers do you enjoy reading today? Why?

  SM: Even now, ultimately I turn only to Finnegan's Wake. I try to read it again in one form or another. Even in 2010, I consider this to be the most modern book. However many rimes I read this, somehow, new meanings and dimensions emerge, I discover new word-constructions.

  Postscript

  Subimal Misra has not taken any of your questions lightly, the way a journalist's questions are treated casually. Rather he has tried to answer the questions seriously, which is why the answers have become a bit lengthy. He has said that his response should not be edited under any circumstances, and should either be reproduced verbatim, or rejected.

  _________________

  Gaurav Jain, 4 August 2010, translated by V. Ramaswamy, Tehelka, online edition, 9 September 2010.

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  About the Author

  SUBIMAL MISRA (b. 1943) has been called the only anti-establishment writer in Bengali. Influenced by the cinema of Sergei Eisenstein and Jean-Luc Godard, Misra experimented with the use of film language in Bengali writing even as he made William Burroughs's cutmethod his own. With his very first collection of stories, Haran Majhi's Widow's Corpse or the Golden Gandhi Statue(1971), he signalled his departure from conventional narrative fiction. He has written exclusively for little magazines. Misra's stories, novelettes, novellas, novels, a play, essays and interviews comprise over thirty volumes. Cupid's Corpse Does Not Drown in Water, an experimental prose-work, was published in 2010.

  V. RAMASWAMY lives in Kolkata. He is engaged in a multi-volume project to translate the short fiction of Subimal Misra.The Golden Gandhi Statue from America: Early Stories, published in 2010, was shortlisted for the Vodafone Crossword Book Award. He was awarded the Sarai Fellowship for Non-fiction Writing in 2013.

  First published in India in 2015 by Harper Perennial

  An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers India

  Copyright © Subimal Misra 2015

  Translation © V. Ramaswamy 2015

  P-ISBN: 978-93-5136-474-0

  E pub Edition © August 2015 -ISBN: 978-93-5136-475-7

  2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1

  Subimal Misra asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

  This is a work of fiction and all characters and incidents described in this book are the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is
entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved under The Copyright Act, 1957. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this publication may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins Publishers India.

  Cover design: Sk Jan Mohammad

  Author sketch: Hiren Mitra (courtesy Jari Bobajudhyo)

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