My wife, who works as a scholar on the nineteenth century, has pointed out a poem to me called “Ingraji Naba Barsha”—“The English New Year”—by the (she thinks underrated) poet Iswar Gupta. It first appeared in 1852, a time just preceding the tumultuous change of 1857 (when the Sepoy Mutiny led to colonial power passing from the East India Company to the Crown, and formalised the Raj), and is canny and mildly satirical; R reminds me it’s also deeply attentive to the real, in the way it captures that occasion with the urgency of a bulletin. Iswar Gupta was a tremendously popular poet in his time — perhaps the Bengali poet — but, after the preponderance of the new bhadralok humanism from the 1860s onward, after the ascendancy of the “new” Calcutta (which, one hundred and fifty years later, is old, ruined, maybe even dead), he was no longer deemed a serious poet, and then ignored and forgotten. Iswar Gupta is not a poet of “emotion recollected in tranquillity,” as Tagore, at certain moments, might seem to be.
Bankimchandra Chatterjee, the first Bengali novelist, called him “jaha achhe tahar kobi,” or the “poet of what’s at hand” (for his subjects included pineapples and goats); my wife, echoing D. H. Lawrence, says he’s a “poet of the present.” Iswar Gupta is not a poet of memory, or the personal or historical perspective; but that doesn’t mean he’s ahistorical. History is not the annals; it’s what happens around us when we’re unaware it’s history. It’s Gupta’s unawareness of himself, his subjects, or of Calcutta as something separate called “history,” in a static, retrospective sense, that makes them all bustle with it. As a poet, he has recourse to devices common to traditional Bengali poetry — such as onomatopoeia — that later poets would use temperately, if at all, in a more Sanskrit-derived, literary manner, but which he employs shamelessly and with a radical outrageousness, as a response to the odd transitory society he inhabits. R writes that, in “Ingraji Naba Barsha,” the poet “initially describes a white man … joyous and indulgent, well-dressed in his well-decorated home. At his side, his wife looks ‘fresh’ in a ‘polka-dotted dress’ (‘maanmode bibi shab hoilen fresh/Feather-er folorish phutikata dress’).” The English words dropped liberally in the two lines—“fresh,” “feather,” “dress”—aren’t really comparable to the comfortable melange-like contemporary chatter of the globalised Indian middle class; they’re used in the way the lower classes traditionally use English — to pepper a sentence; to mutter a jocular barb; to pass a sexual insult about an upper-class woman. Midway into the poem, “the poet imagines himself to be a fly accompanying these two”—the Englishman and his polka-dotted wife—“on their carriage to church” (all these churches still exist mysteriously in different parts of the city), “sometimes sipping from their glass of sherry, sometimes sitting on her gown or her face and happily rubbing its wings.” In what incarnation but that of a pest would the man on the street partake of the slopes of a memsahib’s breasts? For Iswar Gupta, at this point, “poet” and “pest” seem interchangeable. The next scene describes the astonishing dinner back at the Englishman’s house, “evoked almost entirely and only through sound”:
Very best sherry taste merry rest jaté
Aage bhage den giya srimatir haaté
Kot kot kotakot tok tok tok
Thhun thhun thhun thhun dhok dhok dhok
Chupu chupu chup chup chop chop chop
Shupu shupu shup shup shop shop shop
Thhokash thhokash thhok phosh phosh phosh
Kosh kosh tosh tosh ghosh ghosh ghosh
Hip hip hurré daké whole class
Dear madam you take this glass.
As R points out, this doesn’t, largely, need translating, “except the framing couplets, of which the first one says that the very best sherry that makes the rest merry is to be given to the missus before anybody else, while the one at the end is almost entirely in English except for the word daké, which means calls.” A great deal of movement and physical activity is captured from that New Year’s Day—“Kot kot kotakot tok tok tok” probably the sound of heels ascending the steps and then authoritatively hitting the floor of the drawing room; “thhun thhun thhun” the pitch of the cutlery; “dhok dhok dhok” the sound ascribed usually to the rapid drinking of water, but here, almost certainly, of alcohol. The particular shape and form of these sounds were still unexpected to the Bengali ear. The terse, consonantal sound of English is also probably being alluded to, and mocked. Indians who didn’t and don’t know English, and want to mimic the way it’s spoken, make brief plosive noises: “phat,” “phoot,” “phut.” So there’s a belligerence to Iswar Gupta’s poem, the petulance of the poet/pest; it bubbles with resentment and energy.
Some of these sounds are audible in the Bengal Club as 2010 arrives, as they are in other clubs and residences — the “thhun thhun thhun” of forks, spoons, and knives, the “dhok dhok dhok.” Then, on Russell Street, there’s a great deal of what was absent from Iswar Gupta’s time: the honking of horns. These are the cars that have queued up, in futility, for Park Street. In the Bengal Club New Year’s Eve garden party, meanwhile, they’re playing “Scarborough Fair” and “Blowin’ in the Wind.” R writes, of the onomatopoeia in Iswar Gupta’s poem, that its “sheer presence of being” turns the poem into a “live playback recording of the changing shape of the everyday on New Year’s Day, 1852 …” Tonight, too, is noise.
We’re foolhardy to be in Park Street. We’ve eaten at a Chinese restaurant, and my parents and daughter have gone back home — the press is daunting as my wife and I make our way towards the traffic lights. We shouldn’t be here (because, really, we have nothing to do) and never are at this time of the year (except in a car, in crippled transit), but I’m drawn to it for many reasons: for the narrative I myself have woven around it in the course of writing this book, and am now entangled in; for the people themselves — those who’ve gathered here and of whom Utpal Basu said to me gravely in a different context: “Erai amader nagarik”—“These are our citizens.” This wasn’t an admission of defeat; it was an assertion that you can’t deny change or say it has nothing to do with you. Young men in mock-leather jackets swarm the pavements; the street pulsates with excitement as the year dies. Park Street isn’t their natural terrain; out of a suppressed sense of exclusion, maybe, and from genuine excitement, they walk about in proprietary groups in front of the famous restaurants of the middle class — Bar-b-que; Moulin Rouge; Peter Cat. A resentment simmers, which somehow gets channelled into the celebrations.