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Beyond the Boundaries of Kochi: a Study of Raja Veera Keralavarma’s Travel Narrative to Kashi

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Niveditha Kalarikkal

Centre for Comparative Literature and Translation Studies, Central University of Gujarat, Gandhinagar. kunjikavu@gmail.com

Volume 12, Number 3, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n3.05

Abstract

Pilgrim narratives constitute a significant number of travel narratives which appeared in Sanskrit, English and various Indian bhashas in the 18th and 19th centuries. Raja Veera Kerala Varma IV, who ruled the erstwhile princely state of Kochi (Cochin) in South Western India, wrote an account of his pilgrimage to Kashi (Benares) during the years 1852-53. This travelogue in English was later translated into Malayalam by M. Raman Namboothiri and was published as Kochirajavinte Kashiyatra (The Cochin Raja’s travel to Kashi) in 2013. The ‘travel notes of the Raja of Kochi’ which was available in the form of his personal journal describes his meetings with many British officials and common people on the way, in addition to sketching the varied geographies and religious places that he visited during the 220 days long pilgrimage. The Raja who started his pilgrimage from Trippunithura was accompanied by a royal retinue which included his tour manager, a white medical doctor named Bingle and a few other servants. Veera Kerala Varma, later referred to as the ‘Maharaja who passed away in Kashi’ had an untimely death due to smallpox and his travel narrative reached Kochi along with his physical remains. This paper attempts to do a close reading of the travelogue to reveal the inquisitiveness of a Raja who had close associations with the British administrators, as one who attempted to step out of the boundaries of his kingdom with an ethnographic intent. The description of people and their cultural practices that were different from his own ‘country’ can also throw light on how a member of the 19th C English educated Indian elites looked upon newly evolving territorial identities, scientific advancements and public institutions that were being established through colonization.

Keywords: pilgrim narrative, cultural boundaries, writing home, territorial identities, colonialism and technology, modern self

First Travel Narrative in Telugu: A Study of Yenugula Veeraswamaiyya’s Kasi Yatra Charitra

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M. G. Prasuna

Associate Professor, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, BITS Pilani, Hyderabad Campus, ORCID: 0000-0001-5034-0992. Email: prasuna@hyderabad.bits-pilani.ac.in

Volume 12, Number 3, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n3.04

Abstract

Yenugula Veeraswamaiyya’s Kasi Yatra Charitra(1838) is considered the first book written in the genre of travel writing in Telugu. A seminal work, it faithfully reflects and records the social, religious, political and economic life of people in those times, along with aspects of tradition and culture. A well-recognised scholar of his times, Veeraswamaiyya embarked on his journey to Kasi (Varanasi) in May 1830 from Chennapatnam (Chennai). He travelled for 15 months and 15 days and returned to Chennapatnam on September 3rd, 1831. He wrote about his experiences of travelling through Tirupati, Kadapa, Kurnool, Hyderabad, Nagpur, Jabalpur and Allahabad to reach Kasi. On his return journey, he travelled across Patna, Gaya, Calcutta, Puri, Ganjam, Simhachalam, Machilipatnam and Nellore, and finally reached Chennapatnam. His journey was unique because he took along with him, nearly 100 people consisting of his family, friends and servants. A travel of this scale needed meticulous planning. It could have been extremely challenging and adventurous to travel through unknown territories. These journeys had to be made by walking on foot and sometimes in a palanquin, carried by servants.  According to Hindu belief, Kasi is the place where one attains moksha or liberation, and freedom from the cycle of death and rebirth. Hence, it is considered an important spiritual destination. This work is a storehouse of information and reflects the author’s keen observation. This paper will explore the historical, cultural, social, economic and religious significance of Veeraswamaiyya’s Kasi Yatra Charitra.

Keywords: Travel writing, Kasi yatra, pilgrimage, Telugu

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Travelling another Country: An Exploration into Travel Writings by Bhojpuri Speakers of India

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Jullie Rani

Centre for Political Studies, School of Social Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, 110067. Email: jullie.jnu@gmail.com

Volume 12, Number 3, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n3.03

Abstract

Travel writings by Bhojpuri speakers of India define stories of pain and separation, survival of lives in difficult situations and the aspect of being together as a group.  In the nineteenth century, Bhojpuri speakers from India were sent to countries such as Mauritius, Fiji, Trinidad, Surinam, and Guyana to work at sugar plantations under a five year agreement during the British rule. These Bhojpuri plantation workers were called girmitiya. In this context, this paper seeks to address issues of Bhojpuri diaspora, defining newer discussions towards political, social and economic and cultural spheres of their lives in another country, through an analysis of travel literature written by them.  Ample travel literature has been written by Bhojpuri speakers who went and settled in the respective countries to which they were sent, also called Bhojpuri diaspora. The aspect which makes this work different is that this paper specifically analyzes works of travel to another country written by Indian Bhojpuri speakers and not literature written by Bhojpuri diaspora.  The literary works analyzed here are written originally in Hindi and Bhojpuri namely– Fiji mein Kabir Panth ka Udbhav aur Vikas (Development of Kabir’s stories in Fiji) by Dr Kamta Kamlesh, Pravasi Bhojpuri ka Antardwand (Dilemma of the Bhojpuri diaspora) by Rasik Bihari Ojha, Pravasi Bhartiya kaha aur kitne (Number and location of the Indian diaspora) by Dr Prakash Chandra Jain and Bhojpuri kshetra ki jatiya pehchaan (Caste identity of Bhojpuri region) by Dr Shri Vilas Tiwary.

Keywords: Travel Literature, Pre-Independent Period, Indian Diaspora, Bhojpuri Speakers.

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Generic Shifts in Women’s Travel Writing between Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century Bengal

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Shrutakirti Dutta

PhD Scholar, Department of English, Jadavpur University, West Bengal, India. Orcid: 0000-0002-6781-9307. Email: shrutakirtidutta.93@gmail.com

Volume 12, Number 3, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n3.02

Abstract

Women’s travel writing in Bengal proliferated in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century through the popular form of serialized publications in journals such as Bharati (1877), Dasi (1892), Prabasi (1901), among others. However, to perceive this rich output of travel literature as a single, homogenous genre would be fallacious. Travel writing in this time undergoes several generic modifications as it journeys through the turn of the century. Through my paper I would like to trace these shifts within Bengali women’s travel narrative using the stretch of aryavarta as the anchoring landscape. From Prasannamae Debi in 1888 to Nanibala Ghosh in 1933, these travellers from Bengal travel to the north and north-west regions of India, mapping the same landscape but within diverse narrative frameworks, and in so doing, dramatically (and one could argue deliberately) alter the land they wish to represent. Their subjective position as women writers further inform and complicate their work, as do the contemporary political framework of the time they respectively inhabit. What the reader is left with can conservatively be termed travel writing, but can equally and with ease inhabit the roles of memoir, political writing, ethnographical study, among others.

Keywords: Travel Writing, Colonial Bengal, Women’s History, Hindu Revivalism, Aryavarta

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Emergence of Secular Travel in Bengali Cultural Universe: Some Passing Thoughts

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Simonti Sen

Professor of History & Director in the Directorate of State Archives, West Bengal. Email: sensimonti@gmail.com

Volume 12, Number 3, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n3.01

Abstract

This paper by no means presumes to provide a comprehensive analysis of the genesis and ramifications of Bengali travel consciousness either in thematic or chronological terms. It only seeks to highlight certain key aspects of Bengali ‘secular travel’ culture as it germinated in the colonial period. The term Bengali specifically implies the world of Hindu bhadralok and bhadramahila from where emerged the earliest writers of ‘secular’ travel accounts. This is of particular interest because travel, apart from pilgrimage, had no sanction within the traditional Brahamanical orthodoxy. The same cannot be said of the Islamic paedia, which was favourably inclined towards travel. Yet in the colonial period Bengali Muslims did not, in general, produce travel narratives of the ‘secular modern’ variety. One outstanding exception will be considered in this article. Travel among Bengalis took different forms. While there grew a tradition of travel within the country and producing books on them from the early eighteenth century, books on journeys to Europe and different eastern countries received the attention of publishers towards the end of nineteenth and early twentieth century. All these narratives are replete with binaries, such as we/they, home/ world and similar other usual tropes of articulation of ‘Self’ and the ‘Other’. The essay will end with a brief discussion of Deshe Bideshe (account of Kabul from 1927 to early 1929) by Syed Mujtaba Ali, which was quite exceptional in terms of both content and mode of ‘telling’.

Keywords: secular travel, Bengali society, colonial period, binaries of vision, Hindu bhadralok

Editorial Introduction: India and Travel Narratives

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Somdatta Mandal

Former Professor of English, Visva-Bharati, Santiniketan. Email: somdattam@gmail.com

Volume 12, Number 3, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n3.00

Travelogues belong to an interdisciplinary realm where discourses like literature, history, politics, anthropology, geography, economics, ethnography and even linguistics cross one another thus turning it into a proper subject of cultural/intercultural studies. It can be used as a site for raising questions, not only of ideology but of subjectivity as well, as the travelling subject is as important in a travelogue as the country travelled to. Traditionally an identity-building enterprise, travel writing is particularly interesting, since the persona of the traveller tends to rest on a cluster of oppositional concepts such as home-away, centre-periphery, near-distant, etc. Travel writing is also the art of discovering the magic of ordinary persons, places and things. You can discover magic only if you can look beyond reality to the reality behind everything. The famous travel writers Hugh and Colleen Gantzer believe that seldom travel builds bridges between people and times and civilizations. But that they believe, is what travel is really all about. The urge to travel was built in our genes, driven by the magic of curiosity.

Though earlier not recognized as a canonical subject for writing research papers, in the last three decades, the protean and hybrid genre of travel writing have been accepted as one of the most interesting areas in transnational and cross-cultural research. The deluge of new publications related to this genre proves the enormous possibilities through which travel writing can be studied.  The nature of the writing includes several forms, namely letters, diaries, autobiographies or oral records but it is too complex and too varied to be subjected to any neat classification.

Indian travel writing is considered to be the product of the colonial encounter. It proliferated in the nineteenth century and borrowed the genre from English travel writing but with time a great deal else is yet to be discovered. One can trace the elements of travel writing to pre-colonial times as well. Elements of the travelogue exist in the fictional accounts of the digvijayas in the epics, the safarnamas, tirthya-mahatyas or devotional accounts of the pilgrimages undertaken by saints, religious heads and poets, and in the lyrical reminiscences of a homesick lover like the Yaksha in Kalidasa’s Meghdoot. Questions are often raised about the specific nature of Indian travel narratives. So when the call for papers for the special issue of this journal was announced, we made it clear that we would like to focus on the travel writings by Indians and thus hide the problems of definition. The travel writing could be within India or the journey undertaken maybe to anywhere in the world and can be written in either English or any regional language. The study can be on individual texts, overviews, and any other aspect of Indian travel narratives that can yield rare theoretical insights into the construction of culture, language, ideology and subjectivity. Also the time frame of the study was not defined and the sole criterion was that the writer must be Indian. When we received an unprecedented number of abstracts we were overwhelmed with the choice and range of topics proposed and it was quite difficult to make the final selection. So one criterion for selection was to choose lesser known and regional texts, many of them written in the bhasha languages. The other was to focus on texts and issues that were more contemporary, ranging from train travels, texts written for children, travel blogs, and even cinematic narrations.

As the final contents list will show, the diversity of subjects is really mind-boggling. Divided into seven sections, the papers prove once again the protean nature of Indian travel narratives. The ‘General Overviews’ section contains three articles, two of which focus on Bengali secular travel culture and texts penned by women. The third article talks about the Bjojpuri speakers who went as girmitiyas to work in various British plantations in different colonies around the world. Six articles comprise the second section entitled ‘Pilgrimages.’ These include nineteenth century travels of Hindus to the holy city of Benaras as well as to various places in the Himalayas, including Kedarnath, Badrinath, Kailash and Mansarovar. The hajj pilgrimage to Mecca and the tourist potentials of the recently inaugurated corridor for Sikh pilgrims to visit Kartarpur Sahib in Pakistan have also been addressed in two different articles. Tibet and mountaineering issues have been discussed in three articles of the third section through various perspectives. One paper focuses on the transformative agency of the Nanda Devi on Bill Aitken, another analyses two literary texts by Vikram Seth and Nabaneeta Dev Sen that narrate their sojourns in Tibet. The continuous exchange of scholars and scholarly texts between India and Tibet over the centuries is the subject of another essay. Apart from documenting their journeys, we are told how the scholars initiated huge influx of literary texts between these two ancient countries, including the birth of Buddhist literature in Tibet.

The North East has always been a neglected domain geographically, politically and literarily for the average pan-Indian public residing in the plains. Five very interesting articles on the Northeast give us an overview of travel narratives in Assamese literature from the 18th century onwards to the recently written Nandita Haksar’s Across the Chicken Neck: Travels in Northeast India (2013) which shows how Haksar seeks to ‘unmap’ the Northeast by writing her experiences with the people and places of Northeast India. The fifth section is titled ‘Travelling West.’ Six articles discuss travels to Victorian England, Afghanistan, Russia and several places in Africa from different perspectives.  While two of them discuss individual texts in details, others focus on different reasons for each person travelling to the west, be it for religion, education, business, politics, wanderlust, or otherwise. The sixth section is the longest and comprises of eleven articles that analyze individual travel texts in details and from different points of view. Some of the texts are old and quite canonical whereas others are very recent, written in this twenty-first century. The last two articles of this section offer interesting study of one author, Shivya Nath and complement each other in a particular way. While one article discusses her 2018 text The Shooting Star: A Girl, Her Backpack and the World as a journey of exploration and reconstruction of the feminine self,  the other analyses the blogspots the author maintains under the same title. It shows how travel narratives are also changing their nature in this age of technological advancement and instant communication.

In a sense of yoking heterogeneous elements together, the last miscellaneous section comprising six articles is in a way the most interesting. Very few people were aware of Solon Karthak’s Nepali travelogues till he was recently awarded the Sahitya Akademi prize for 2019 (in February this year) for an anthology of travel narratives he published way back in 2013.  Also many readers don’t know much about Bhakti Mathur’s illustrated Amma, Take Me To… series for children or considered narrations of journeying through Indian trains to be part of travel texts worthy of study. Studying film texts by theorizing the experience of travel in a Malayalam film, North 24 Kaatham by Anil Radhakrishnan or studying the Goopy Bagha trilogy of children’s films made by Satyajit Ray and his son Sandip Ray, from the postcolonial queer dimension just proves once again how studying Indian travel narratives know no bounds.

A final note is necessary before concluding this introduction. The contributors for this collection comprise of senior academicians as well as young research scholars in the field. So, one should not expect the standard of all the articles to be the same. But I earnestly hope that everyone will enjoy reading them as much as I have enjoyed editing them and ruminate on how ‘India and Travel Narratives’ can be read and analyzed from multifarious and endless perspectives.

3 June, 2020

Haikus from Online Workshops of the Alexandria University

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By Sally Abed et al

An unusual context

“With classes moving online back in March, I started teaching the Travel Literature course and the Eighteenth-Century Literature course on Zoom. In all the classes I teach at Alexandria University in Egypt, I usually take the students on exhibition and museum tours in Alexandria to help them connect their studies to the surrounding culture. In addition, we used to have in-class workshops on different themes. The absence of such options due to the pandemic pushed me to think differently, and so inspired by Professor Albrecht Classen’s daily haikus, I decided to conduct haiku writing workshops with the students in both classes via Zoom. The activity was an extracurricular one whose aim was to break the monotony of the self-quarantine and the stressful situation of moving classes online. The students were understandably anxious about their classes, the pandemic and the exams. The workshop was a break away from all that and provided the students with a creative space of their own. During the workshops, I explained what haikus are, provided them with the necessary background, and showed them examples of haikus written by Ezra Pound, as well as other poets. Then I asked them to write their haikus accompanied with an image or a photo and I also participated in the activity. At the end of the Zoom workshops in both classes, the students read out their haikus to each other and commented on them. These are their own words, spontaneously written and unedited. Overall, it was an exiting and rewarding experience for everyone in class that they enjoyed thoroughly.” –Sally Abed

Sally Abed teaches at the English department in Alexandria University, Egypt. She holds a PhD in Comparative Literature with focus on medieval travel literature from the University of Utah. She publishes and writes on travel literature and women’s studies, among other topics. 

Special Collection: Creativity in the Time of the Pandemic 2020>>

Haikus by Sally Abed

Scheherazade,
pray tell us a bedtime tale
of new life and hope.

Midas touch again
All worthless empty riches
Stillness everywhere

Perfect spider web
Ensnares the soul in silence
A flutter of wings

I spread my wings wide
And dived into a rainbow
Of thousand colors

I miss the sea much
It visits me in my dreams
Fresh spray on my face

Smiles hide behind masks
Eyes peep suspiciously now
I can’t sneeze in peace!

Haiku by Rana Tarek

A gilded snuff box
In a gentleman’s soft hands
Bourgeois decadence

Rana Tarek (Teaching Assistant for the 18th Century Literature class at Alexandria University and an MA candidate at the English department)

Haikus by students

By Rodaina Ahmed

The Nightingale dies
Leaving a red rose behind
I’m alone again

By Marawan Mohamed

A crow circles high
A soulless vessel moving
The sound of black cries

By Ziad Othman

Life is light and dark
Conflicted, Man, Eternally
At which side he lies.

By Yara Saad

The glow is so bright
From her soul even at night
Yet, life made her blind

By Mohamed Hatem

A thought so Obscene
It suffocates my gasping brain
Like college work in Quarantine

By Bassant Ahmed

A bright beam of hope
is what we pray for non-stop,
After grief broke our all

By Habeba Ibrahim

And in the kind light,
See Her wrinkled veiny hands,
A landscape of time.

A silvery lake,
The jungle’s heart beats with each
Breeze, and a lone howl.

By Mohamed Sayed

Literature connects
Art is not separated,
Museums welcome me.

By Mariem Mohamed

Talking with my dad
Always makes me feel okay
Despite a bad day

By Mohamed Ibrahim

Everyone got home-stuck
As a tiny virus spreads
Showing man’s weakness

By Mona Allam

A narrow street.
Bumps and holes filled the ground,
Yet she finds home.

By Hana Ihab & Jailan Helmy

My cat is staring
His eyes sparkle at the food
He, a cute demon

By Maryam Mostafa

Deep and mysterious
A walk in a dead forest
yet not all alone

By Heba Mohamed

Walking in the rain,
A tall man drowned in sadness
Only him feels it.

By Salma Hadhood

The dear self of mine
A trip; she deserves it
Overwhelming life.

Published on June 2, 2020. © Authors

Book Review: The Silent Witness (2019) by Anuradha

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Publisher: Jaico Publishing House (January 1, 2019)

Language: English

ISBN-10: 9387944611

ISBN-13: 978-9387944619

Reviewed by

Maya Vinai

Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, BITS-Pilani (Hyderabad Campus). Email: mayavinai@hyderabad.bits-pilani.ac.in

 Volume 12, Number 2, April-June, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n2.21

Narratives on territorial conquest, occupation and settlement have dominated postcolonial studies for decades. There has been a considerable dearth of fictional accounts surrounding the European invasion of port cities via the sea routes and subsequent trade monopoly over the spices. The Indian Ocean has been the vortex of political activities and cross-cultural links. The ports along the Malabar coastline was of great interest to not just for one; but three competing super-powers namely the Portuguese, the Dutch and British. The trade links commenced with the onslaught of Greek traders who came to ports like Muzhiri or Mucheripatanam (Malabar) and Pum Puhar (Madurai) during 2nd century AD. Experts on Mediterranean maritime history like Vincent A. Smith points out as to how ports like Pum Puhar had the good fortune to attract traders across the globe as they were rich in three precious commodities “Pepper, pearls and beryl” (Smith 400) In fact, historical accounts of Warmington point out as to how there was a drain of Roman wealth as “Romans showed a taste for excessive decoration of fingers and by the use of gems to cover conches, garlands, armour etc. The practice of collecting gems became common during the 1st century AD and Saurus, Julius Caesar, and Marcellus were all collectors of precious stones. (131) However, the last of the European traders who came since 1498, the Portuguese, Dutch and British had imperialistic designs apart from sheer mercenary motives.

The Silent Witness (2019) by Anuradha, (translated from Malayalam by Nirmala Aravind) is a historic novel which explores the descent of Portuguese and Dutch suzerainty in the princely states of Kochi (central part of Kerala). She traverses backwards in time; to explain how these princely states became a pawn to the imperial project, due to their internal dissensions thereby paving way to an easy colonization by Portuguese and Dutch from the 15th to 18th C. In addition, the novel also highlights the ‘cosmopolitanism’ and ‘shared culture’ which emerged as a result of these trade and colonial interventions. All the historic events of the novel are juxtaposed around the plot to; both ‘hold and foil’ the forthcoming coronation of Kerala Varma as the ruler of Kochi. Running parallel to the plot is; the love interest of Veera Kerala Varma (Kerala Varma’s younger brother) and the niece of rival kingdom’s (Chempakassery) chieftain, Unnimaya.

The novel subtly hints to its audience as to how the Dutch were much better and more popular than the Portuguese. Novelist Anuradha charts out reasons for the latter’s unpopularity; like introduction of opium to masses whose “inordinate consumption” (13) destroyed public health and drained resources. She also directs the reader’s attention to the terror Portuguese ships triggered in the Indian Ocean by their canon-loaded caramel ships, and the restrictions imposed on ships which did not have a Portuguese trade permit or cartazas to ply the Indian Ocean. The novel is equally blatant about the Portuguese forcible conversions and exclusion of the Syrian Christians and their entry to places like Fort Emanuel or Fort Kochi. Nevertheless, many of the historic incidents especially that which deals with the Portuguese has been ardently dealt in Malayalam films like Urumi, Pazhazhi Raja and in briefer versions in few novels like N.S Madhavan’s book Litanies of Dutch Battery and Johny Miranda’s Requiem for the Living.

However, the most refreshing aspect of Anuradha’s novel remains her representation of Dutch in Kerala. Very few novelists have covered the socio-political implications of the Dutch regime and the coalition of three rulers of Kerala namely the Zamorins (Samoothiris) of Calicut, the Cochin kings and the Queen of Kollam to oust the Portuguese from power. Towards the concluding part, the novel also highlights the peaceful reign of Veera Kerala Varma under the Dutch over lordship. The novel insinuates the readers to analyse the reason why Kerala became a hotspot for violence and terror and susceptible to the hegemony of foreign invaders.

The novelist has engaged in a meticulous research of the 15 to 17th century and notably included most of the major events that occurred during the period. Anuradha  has recreated or fictionalized real historic characters like Itty Achutan Vaidyan of the Kollad family who influenced the Dutch Governor, Van Rheede, with his knowledge of medicinal plants. As the plot progresses the audience is introduced to Itty Achutan’s treatment of Van Rheede’s painful boil on his foot with courtyard herbs like neem leaves, raw turmeric horanthus (186). The successful treatment led to the compilation of Horticus Malabaricus or “The Garden of Malabar” which was considered one of the most important treatise on the medicinal plants of Malabar. In addition, the religious tolerance of the Dutch is highlighted repeatedly in the book by contrasting it with the ‘forcible conversion of natives’ policy adopted by the Portuguese making most of the indigenous natives turn indignantly against the Portuguese rule. Although the book casts the Dutch regime as more benevolent as compared to the Portuguese, a closer look of the sub-text reveal at times; the tyranny and bloodshed  Dutch inflicted on the Portuguese women and children while conquering Fort Emanuel popularly known as the jewel of Dutch throne.

Temples and temple festivals are sites of faith and power dynamics and cultural transactions in Kerala society. The novelist has truthfully invoked famous and leading temples of Kerala like the Guruvayoor temple, Vaddakanathan temple, the Poornathrayesha temple, Ambalapuzha temple, adding to the authencity of the cultural setting of the novel and drawing attention to pivotal role temples played in the lives of royal families. However, the novelist has left out inclusion of a few important temple events like the attack on the famous Guruvayoor temple by the Dutch and razing of the flagstaff which could have further enhanced the authenticity of the novel. In addition, the novel also has a few historic flaws like attributing Zamorin Manavedan’s uncle as the composer of Krishnagiti (the text of dance form Krishnattam). Krishnagiti was actually composed by Prince Manaveda who became the Zamorin in 1665. ( Bush 21). Another flaw that can be discerned is the representation of the Vadekkara Palace, the palace of Cochin kings for ages; as the palace of Zamorin Manavedan where he has a clandestine meeting with Kerala Varma.

Running parallel to the political anxieties of the protagonist Kerala Varma and his brother Veera Kerala Varma is the story concerning the closest ally of the Kochi princes, known as the Ali Marrakar. Ali Marrakar and his pirate troops on sea called Marrakar pada supported and defended Kochi at the time of crisis. The other close allies of Samoothiri and Cochin kings like Mangath Achan, Paliyath Achan find a place in the narrative. The book also draws the attention of the readers to the fact that in many princely states it was the Queen who took care of the administrative affairs of the kingdom. For example, the Queen of Kollam not only entertained her guests at the Puthukulangara Palace but also initiated political discussions. This delineates the power and agency woman had to take decisions and also efficiently execute the same.

The overall novelty of theme in English fiction makes it an excellent read for both book lovers and students of literature and history. In fact, the dual focus on colonial interventions in port cities and the resistance put up by the local rulers against the Portuguese makes it a an important text for postcolonial analysis as well.

Works Cited

Bush, Martha et al. 2015. The Royal Temple Theatre of Krishnattam. DK Printworld, New Delhi

Madhavan N. S. 2010. Litanies of Dutch Battery. (Trans. Rajesh Rajamohan). Penguin, New Delhi

Warmington, E.H. 1928. The Commerce between the Roman Empire and India (2nd edition) CUP, Cambridge

Smith, V. A. 1924. Early History of India. (4th edition),  OUP, London

 

Dr. Maya Vinai has been working as Assistant Professor at BITS-Pilani (Hyderabad Campus) since 2012. Her research interests include Temple Art Forms in South India, Representation of Matrilineal Communities in Literature, Food and Culture in South Asian Literature, and the impact of Dutch and Portuguese Colonialism in South India.  Her critical works have been featured in several national and international journals like South Asian Review, Asiatic- IIUM, Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies on Humanities and IUP Journal of English Studies. She has also authored a book titled Interrogating Caste and Gender in Anita Nair’s Fiction.

Book Review: Jallianwala Bagh Literary Responses in Prose and Poetry (2019) by Rakshanda Jalil

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Publisher: Niyogi Books Private Limited (Under the Imprint: Thornbird); First edition (1 April 2019)

Language: English

ISBN-10: 9386906929

ISBN-13: 978-9386906922

Reviewed by

Revathy Hemachandran

Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, BITS Pilani, Hyderabad Campus. Email:   p20170018@hyderabad.bits-pilani.ac.in 

 Volume 12, Number 2, April-June, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n2.20

The Jallianwala Bagh incident has remained a spectral and contrite event in the collective memory of Indian sub-continent over decades. It echoes unhealed ruptures and gets rekindled as a result of public and political expectations in the form of official apology from the erstwhile colonisers. On the eve of the centennial anniversary of Jallianwala Bagh incident, literary historian, translator and critic Rakshanda Jalil, has published her book, Jallianwala Bagh Literary Responses in Prose and Poetry. The book occupies a crucial position as there is discernible dearth of literature and historic fiction surrounding the massacre of Jallianwala Bagh in April, 1919. Literary contributions on the subservient life under the East India Company allow for a study on not just the experiences of the colonial subjects but also the imagined realities they had of their colonisers. The narratives of this traumatic experience cannot be solely attributed to the events of the Jallianwala Massacre but also to the events which preceded the hot summer afternoon of Baisakhi in April 1919.

Punjab has always been one of the main platforms of turbulence even before the colonisation of India by British East India Company. The people from Punjab were preferred over other provinces, for military recruitment during the World War I because of the British theory of ‘martial races’ (Jalil, 10) where they ranked people from various provinces on their superiority in war front. Writings from Punjab is quite rich in authentic regional flavours and that is reflected in their cultural production.  One can always see the presence of ‘Punjab’ or what it means to be ‘Punjabi’ in their writings. Punjab has not only contributed to the nation, great revolutionaries like Bhagat Singh, Lala Lajpat Rai, Udham Singh, Harnam Singh Saini for the Independence movement, also writers of great calibre like Manto, Bhisham Sahni, Josh Malihabadi, Ghulam Abbas and such who have encapsulated the residual scars of the traumatic events of the past in literary fiction and poetry.

In the introduction to her book, Jalil talks about her interest in literature arising from the interstices between collective conscience and history. Being a seminal moment in the history of Independence of India and the subsequent partition of the Indian sub-continent; the Jallianwala Bagh Massacre has led to a wide emotional unrest amongst the population which effervesced into a nationwide political unrest. Critical analysis of the incident has been taken up for scholarly pursuits in varying contexts across time and space, while responses to it in Indian Literature across regional literature and in English have been overlooked. In the book, Jalil also points to the nature of censorship imposed by the British on literature. Even letters from Indian soldiers who served in the World War was subjected to scrutiny; which portrays the extent of the British regimentation and surveillance on narratives which documented the colonial regime and the discontent it generated.

This collection which includes eleven prose writings, eleven poems and an excerpt from a play is intended to represent the popular imagination. It portrays how the masses responded to the event, the reasons led to the event and the consequences of the event. The prose writings featured here are windows into the imaginations of survivors, victims and the perpetrators. Jalil has managed to explore various avenues in which the psyche of grief-stricken Punjab could traverse into, at the wake of this particularly ghastly chapter of Indian Independence movement. The writers are able to bring in the experience of the victims and survivors and how the physical nature of this trauma has transcended to become an emotional scar in the history of East India Company’s rule in India. A few of the poems included in this collection of literary responses to the event are Jallianwala Bagh by Muhammad Iqbal, A Complaint to The Hunter (Shikwa-e Saiyyad) by Tirlok Chand Mahroom, The Tyrannies in the Punjab (Mazalim-e Punjab) by Zafar Ali Khan, An address to the Sons of the East India Company (East India Company ke Farzanaon Se) by Josh Malihabadi. When read side by side, these poems evoke a sense of an experience left behind in the memory of the horrendous event. These reflect and ruminate on the reasons, conscience and consequences of being occupied by the East India company. The modernity that percolated into the social lives of the population had started getting scrutinisations under the shadow left behind this massacre. The poets through heart rendering words have been able to separate the civilising mission’s visage off of the coloniser for the readers to witness. The literature of this period thus critically expressed their dissatisfaction against the dictatorial measures of General Dyer and the British Government. The repressive attitude of General Dyer and his fellow soldiers was denounced unequivocally in these literary works published between 1919 and 1923 in Hindi, Urdu, Tamil, Telugu and English languages and these writings were highly ‘seditious’ in character. Many of these literatures were proscribed by the Government of Punjab and later on these received similar fate in all provincial governments.

The fiction has been an outlet to channelize the emotions that Jallianwala Bagh let loose in the hearts of the colonised subjects and also has in retrospect left the readers with an opening to look back into the psyche of the survivors of this gruesome event. The eleven poems featured in this collection are odes to the lives that were laid down in Jallianwala Bagh. It raises questions pertinent to the nature of humanity. An elaborate introduction in the beginning of the book illuminates the history building to the incident and how it was represented in several languages across numerous genres and the social context of each. The nature and location the gazes from which these responses are also mentioned in this introduction.

The incident of Jallianwala Bagh predicated the final days of British rule in India. Furthermore, the literary responses post-Jallianwala Bagh which originated nationwide unveiled the imperialistic intent of the British beneath the mask of the civilizing mission for the Indian population to witness.

When considered as a whole, the prose and poems in this book meticulously explores the following themes. Firstly, the role nationalist policies and colonial regime played in the (Jalil, 2019) activities of the Indian public and the confusion it unfurled into their domestic lives, when politics intermingled with the socio-cultural practices; secondly, the thought process of the natives who were confronted with conflict of power structures, for instance a social obligation v/s adherence to the colonial dictum, and thirdly, the native’s inability to discern the extent of the catastrophic measures taken by the British to keep up their colonial superiority (crawling order and shooting on Baisakhi) and the experience of being subjected to this unearned violence. Finally, the Jallianwala Bagh incident has played an important role in understanding the nature of humanity in power transactions that existed between colonised and colonisers.

Many contemporary debates discuss the ramifications this event has elicited and the nature of accountability it deserves. Moreover, these discussions are yet to result in an agreeable acknowledgement of the nature of events that transpired between the coloniser and colonised. An inclusion of the evolution of multiple reflective voices from both Indian and British contexts, rather than a collection of the immediate response would offer much to the scholarship on the literature of Jallianwala Bagh. It would result in more engaging academic debates in trauma literature, protest literature and studies on imperialism and colonialism. Besides the introduction that elaborated on the history and context of every literary response in this compilation will help the readers further to ruminate on the representations of this event and its relevance for the present times.

References

Jalil, R. (2019). Jallianwala Bagh, Literary responses in Prose and Poetry. Niyogi Books.

Kolsky, E. (2010). Colonial Justice in British India : White Violence and the Rule of Law. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Sarkar, S. (1983). Modern India, 1885-1947. London.

Tharoor, S. (2016). An Era of Darkness : The British Empire in India. New Delhi: Aleph.

Revathy Hemachandran is currently pursuing her Ph.D in the department of Humanities and Social Sciences, BITS-Pilani (Hyderabad Campus). Her research interests include examining the representation of Agrarian unrests in literature, Contemporary Indian English fiction and South Asian Fiction.

 

Editorial: Reflections on Literature and Art at a Time of Pandemic

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Tirtha Prasad Mukhopadhyay

Profesor Titular, Miembro de Sistema Nacional de Investigadores (Nivel I), CONACyT, Mexico, Departamento de Arte y Empresa, Universidad de Guanajuato, Mexico. Chief Editor, Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities. Email: chiefeditor@rupkatha.com

 Volume 12, Number 2, April-June, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n2.00

Imagine the dystopia created by this viral holocaust. Incendiary piers start, burning bodies in wastelands. At night wastelands reportedly turn into a mass crematorium. At a University hospital in New Jersey, the bell rings every half an hour, announcing the passing away of a Covid victim. Ideas of nation states, frontiers, countries have only enclosed people in prisons of illusion.  Such unreal lineations become fault lines for nationalism, migrations, war and hierarchical exclusion. The Corona virus however is not impeded by such boundaries. It transmits from human to human; it affects people without distinction of nationality, economics, franchise, and turns humans into targets with a kind of Dawkinsian indifference.

On the other hand, though, the virus innervates solidarity in humans, which is manifest as the indivisibility of the herd. Yet, we are only capable of ignorant and conflicted response towards the possible evolution of, what Petrashov called, ‘noocenosic’ ecosystems. For Petrashov, biological agents like humans would have to compromise to co-exist or live with other powerful collectives like the virus and similar nanometrical entities that percolate through this wide world. On several occasions we may not have adequate knowledge about coping with threats that are so microscopic and intangible. Various respond activities have been proposed. Contrasted to proposals of precautionary survival aided by statistical indicators, we hear of views like that of some Swedish administrators who say that forced quarantine strategies are already conditioned by biopolitical responses to acts of war and terrorism. Epidemiological caution is supposedly built on a politics of panoptical surveillance. Hence it is not an indispensable tool in the management of the pandemic. Social evolutionary thinkers like Stephen Goundry speaks of the physically interactive gestures tht are necessary for social life and survival, and say that quarantining goes against natural human evolution.

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But the virus has forced us to reconsider what it means to live under the fear of death or even speciate extinction. This is where the artist’s personality comes at stake – since the artist, like all other human beings, is just another human being who has to respond to signals in its immediate environment, sometimes erroneously drifting, and sometimes doing the right thing. The virus has also generally coerced us to recognize true human worth out of the consciousness of our fragile life in the biological world. This global pandemic gives us a moment to reflect on the nervous and weedy layers of artifice that we have used to cover life’s raw and beautiful texture. The virus has instigated a psychosis in terms of not just statistical effects of disease and precipitant mental depression but from its threats to creative life. Biological virulence, is linked to media virulence, it turns human creativity into a whimpering shot in the dark. On a daily basis, we seem to be trapped in a world constantly manipulated by media pseudologies. There is little scope of independent thinking. Good examples of independent thinking are not hard to find though. Pepe Mujica, the former president of Uruguay, who was called “the poorest President” by the BBC, has a wonderful precept from Montevideo, where he tried to experiment with a lifestyle statement that was aimed at a distant and long-term amelioration of narcotic traffic in Central America. Mujica’s lessons were easy and difficult to achieve at the same time – he demonstrated that narcotic economy results from human greed of material things, not for substance abusers, which is another problem elsewhere, but for poor people in Uruguay, El Salvador, Colombia and other countries, who participated in the trade. Mujica’s own life, like Gandhi’s, was a demonstrable proof of this grand simplicity that touches the core of our humanity.

In a world where ‘art’ has become a product of investment economy, it is now time to acknowledge that anonymous art is better than art of the genius. Folk art is superior to masterpieces. Ritual is superior to art in a show-case. True novels are lived rather than parcelled out by the giant media. Neatness is more beautiful than décor and an unassuming home is more divinely aesthetic than a furnished salon with books printed by the media houses.

The project hence is to liberate humane expression from cinders of decadent royalty and big business, and from the fantasies spotlighted by newspapers and TV news. The virus forces us to confide in the warmth and love of home. It is the same love that preserves us at any time of want or hardship. Anthropophilia causes us to care for each other. It makes us committed and risk our life for others.  It is this capacity to empathise that saves us. Empathy, care, regard for others and for kin, are more important than any art that the media celebrates. The human being sacrifices love in order to become a monster of one’s passion – but no good comes out of it. The friendship of working class people is more precious than the social prestige commanded by the elite. The painted face of the news presenter secretly mocks at the ineptitude of the common man.

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The virus cannot be taken as an incentive to create “viral poetry”, as a testament of human art, like an Instagram post without any meaning beyond the instant. Browsing through the poetry section of last week’s Vanity Fair, we see on its page, the same incongruous union of contemporary “vanity” and “art”. The very title is pompous and instantaneous: “Why Poetry Is Having a Moment Amid the Global Quarantine”. As we read further we are introduced to the post-marketing world: “The poem is enjoying a bump in cultural relevance as the world sits at home and considers its surroundings. Why your timeline is possibly suddenly sprinkled with verse”. The Vanity Fair article is a precise reminder of how the same interweaving wealth of media magnate, collector, consumer and wealthy business personnel, fashion industry, ‘art’ is also actively spreading an idea of its own self-organizing poetry or art. The obnoxious twitter, the rigmarole of all things flashy and apple, blend wirh the empty tragedy of people locked at home.

The University in America, and many countries of Europe, has become a votary of the same class culture that prepares you for this world of quick sensations. In such times as now, we are compelled to ask “How does a novel apprised in New York impact the life of a villager in East Africa, or a lemon picker in Michoacan, or the trash collector in Kolkata’s marshlands. The media novelist, so gorgeously fetishized in the academy, is no more than a colonial and pseudo-progessive metrosexual. Museums worldwide have become abominable machines of the destruction of human spirit. The Metropoitan Museum of Modern Art once exhibited works of an indigenous artist. After the exhibition, the artist asked for a little compensation for transport and installation of the exhibits. The museum said, that they displayed his work was a lot of investmet in itself – and that he should be grateful for that. The MOMA arrogance exposes the real values of the art world. Consider the invisible way in which a critic in The New Yorker creates these neocolonial evaluations for a piece of painting. She says on the home page, “Museums know the desires of our hands. The special presence of paintings comes from their being at once untouchable and viscerally evocative of touch. (April 21, 2020)”. A piece of painting is never so important, that it will continue to invoke our presence for its self-fetishization.  Painting does not transcend life and humanity – it does not need to sit in a museum and make its own publicity look so arrogant and inhumane, waiting for its bidder, and its entry into the house of a collector.

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True human values lie in the honesty of the heart, even of it is not ‘artistic’ by the world’s standards. There may be true worth in the greatest of writings, but its appropriation by the industrial elite, has overshadowed its preciousness in a world of self-mesmerizing profanities. Creative writing should be undertaken in one’s own language, criticism should enrich one’s own culture and values. The unthinking study and glorification of Anglophone discourse, out of which we can scarcely escape, automatically aligns us to the media elite that tries to control the world’s markets. As long as we don’t shift our attention from the sufferings of our fellow humans we shall not render a disservice to people who speak the same language as ours, who reap the fruits, flowers and grain that sustain us. True beauty is tied to this simple life of communications.  The viral moment has now created a space of introspection. It lets us focus on the essential spark of life. Academic discussions have been alienating us for long time.  The best definition of creative process is to be creative, explore – each one, one’s true hope and dream. and to hope for expiation through a humble word. It would be time, in a world freed from the virus, to identify and negate the presence of all brands of elitism.

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