Monday, December 29, 2008

ON A MOON-LIT NIGHT



KAVITA ASIA ASIAN POETRY FESTIVAL
19TH OF MARCH 1988


ON A MOON-LIT NIGHT


On a sky-lit night, long before,
The Goddess among goddess, my mother,
Under the honeying full-moon rays,
evened out the softy sands
paving our cottage frontal square,
called me tenderly to her side,
hugging held my light fore-finger,
taught me right, to write the ‘A’-
over and over erasing it,
the mother letter of the alphabet!

And here I am……
destined by providence to hold the pen,
by profession to scribe poems and prose!
But yet I dare, oh Mother Tamil,
You are now in my hands a sword
to fight the battle of the daily trampled
hungry, clotheless souls in pain -
Unto that commitment I surrender
at your feet, beloved Tamil, my mother !

- Sillaiyoor Selvarajan





NEW YEAR DAY!


NEW YEAR DAY!

Today is New Year day, they say,
But nay, for us, no, it's not today!
If today was New Year,
At our home,There would have been merriment
In what and what form!
Eating and drinking in festival norm!
Chinese crackers and fireworks galore!
We would have made pancakes and sweets,
Carried them in covered trays in ancestral kins!
Clad in new and silky garments
We would roam the streets
Wishing each other!
Wife, child and all
As dusk tends to fall
Gone to the village hall
For the fain damsels' ball,
On enjoyed a show and shared with comrades
The local sweet brew!A total full date
Of joyous night lateToday would have been!
Today is New Year Day, they say,
But nay, for us, no, it's not today!
Bread there's none,
No milk for the little one,
No timely meal, no rice, no porridge,
Even pure water is scarce!
For the shell-cup of black coffee
No sugar to palm-lick!
No clothing to change, so we take no bath;
No shelter under which
Our heads could we lay!
Today is New Year Day, they say,
But nay, for us, no, it's not today!
This Earth-cart to pull,The worker is bull;
The tiller who tillsThe granary till,
By no choice of his will,
To eat he has nil!
So, New Year Day,
For us, not today!
Then, when will that day,
Dawn for us pray?Nay, for us, no, it's not today!
The day man does plunder
Another's bread and butter,
The day humanity seizes
To be divided by races,Caste, creed or colour,
No by national valour;
The day world enacts
A universal lawOf live and let live…
Until that dayThere's no New Year's Dawn!

Sillaiyoor Selvarajan

AJ: THE ROOTED COSMOPOLITAN


AJ: THE ROOTED COSMOPOLITAN


Sunday, December 28, 2008

Aasai Rasiah's Portrait Painting of Prof. K. Kailasapathy.



Prof. K. Kailasapathy was a renouned scholar of the Thamils of Sri Lanka.
A specialist on comparative Literature.

Wednesday, December 17, 2008

Versatile Thamil Poet Sillaiyoor Selvarajan



NEW YEAR DAY!

Today is New Year day, they say,
But nay, for us, no, it’s not today!

If today was New Year,
At our home,
There would have been merriment
In what and what form!
Eating and drinking in festival norm!
Chinese crackers and fireworks galore!
We would have made pancakes and sweets,
Carried them in covered trays in ancestral kins!
Clad in new and silky garments
We would roam the streets
Wishing each other!
Wife, child and all
As dusk tends to fall
Gone to the village hall
For the fain damsels’ ball,
On enjoyed a show and shared with comrades
The local sweet brew!
A total full date
Of joyous night late
Today would have been!

Today is New Year Day, they say,
But nay, for us, no, it’s not today!

Bread there’s none,
No milk for the little one,
No timely meal, no rice, no porridge,
Even pure water is scarce!
For the shell-cup of black coffee
No sugar to palm-lick!
No clothing to change, so we take no bath;
No shelter under which
Our heads could we lay!

Today is New Year Day, they say,
But nay, for us, no, it’s not today!

This Earth-cart to pull,
The worker is bull;
The tiller who tills
The granary till,
By no choice of his will,
To eat he has nil!

So, New Year Day,
For us, not today!

Then, when will that day,
Dawn for us pray?
Nay, for us, no, it’s not today!

The day man does plunder
Another’s bread and butter,
The day humanity seizes
To be divided by races,
Caste, creed or colour,
No by national valour;
The day world enacts
A universal law
Of live and let live…

Until that day
There’s no New Year’s Dawn!

Sillaiyoor Selvarajan

Sunday, December 7, 2008

Reading Against the Orientalist Grain:


Syed Jamil Ahmed

Reading Against the Orientalist Grain:

Performance and Politics Entwined with a Buddhist Strain

Kolkata: Anderson, 2008

357 + xv pp, 173 colour images

ISBN: 978-81-906719-0-3

Available at: Anderson House, EN 11, Sector V, Salt Lake City, Kolkata 700091, India.

Reading Against the Orientalist Grain: Performance and Politics Entwined with a Buddhist Strain is exploratory and self-questioning, crystallized around the post-colonial location of the author. From this location, the phrase ‘against the grain’ connotes a bit of wry humour. The grain in wood, if planed in the wrong direction, will tear rather than lie smoothly. And that precisely is the intention of this volume. Recognizing 'politics' as a pervasive struggle for power and the ‘political’ as that which seeks to expose, subvert or enhance transactions of power, this volume is unashamedly political on two fronts: Orientalism’s ‘natural’ tendency for dealing with the ‘Orient’ and the hegemony of culture mobilized in ‘benign’ and ‘exotic’ ‘Oriental’ performances.

Reading Against the Orientalist Grain, as a study of performances, intends to read, i.e., to make sense of, to construct meaning out of eight performances. These are Caryā Nṛtya and Indra Jātrā from Nepal, Pangtoed Cham from Sikkim, Lhamo from Tibet, Paro Tsechu from Bhutan, Devol Maduva from Sri Lanka, Yoke Thay from Burma and Bauddha Kīrtan from Bangladesh. These performances are entwined with one common thread — Buddhism — more specifically, Theravāda and Vajrayāna Buddhism. The volume is the product of and an attempt to communicate the author’s experience of Buddhism as transience — ironically, in the past tense of these pages — against the Orientalist grain. It seeks to examine how various representations of ‘Buddhist’ performances, as networks of signs where the signified is infinitely delayed, are constructed and to what effects and consequences these representations are mobilized.


Syed Jamil Ahmed (b. 1955) is a director in theatre based in Bangladesh and Professor of Theatre at the Department of Theatre and Music in the University of Dhaka. He graduated from the National School of Drama (New Delhi, India) in 1978, obtained his MA in Theatre from the University of Warwick (Coventry, England) in 1989, and his PhD from the University of Dhaka (Bangladesh) in 1997. His reputation as a director is well established with credits such as Biñād Sindhu (based on the Karbala legend) and Behulār Bhāsān (an adaptation of the Manasā-maìgal) in Bangladesh, The Wheel in the USA, Ek Hazar Aur Ek Theen Ratein (an adaptation of One Thousand and One Nights) in Pakistan, and Pāhiye in India. His design credits include Acalāyatan, Kittankholā, Kerāmat Maìgal, TheTempest, The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, The Measures Taken, Oedipus Rex and Urubhaìgam in Bangladesh, Iphigenia in Tauris and Good Woman of Setzuan in India. His works stand out distinctly because he succeeds in impinging ‘traditional’ materials with a sharp contemporary relevance, and because he seeks passionate flights of imagination by blending Euro-American theatre practice with elements drawn from the indigenous/folk theatre of Bangladesh. He has published in the New Theatre Quarterly, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, Asian Theatre Journal, TDR: The Drama Review, and Research in Drama Education. His full-length publications include Acinpākhi Infinity: Indigenous Theatre in Bangladesh (Dhaka: University Press Ltd, 2000) and In Praise of Niraan: Islam, Theatre, and Bangladesh (Dhaka: Pathak Samabesh, 2001). He has traveled extensively in Asia, Africa, Europe and North America, and has taught as a scholar-in-residence under Fulbright Fellowship at the Antioch College, Yellow Springs, Ohio, USA (1990), a visiting faculty at the King Alfred's College, Winchester, UK (2002) and a visiting scholar at the San Francisco City College under Fulbright Visiting Specialist Programme (2005).

Friday, July 4, 2008

TWO Poems of Manu Dash


GENERATIONS

The day I was busy
settling the bills
of the oncologist, who
treated my ailing father,
my son celebrated silently
his seventeenth birthday
with his friends.

I watched morosely
the old plant in my garden.
It needed pruning
for leaf and bud.



MASK

I get upand put on the mask
till I retire to bed.
Over the years it has been
dearer and dearer to me.

Donning it, I play different roles,
deliver different dialogues,
and throw different expressions
at different people.

I try my best to keep
every body happy and agile.
All have forgotten
that I too have a face
of my own, and,
when I exhibit it,
they fail to recognise.
POET WITH DR.INDIRA GOSWAMI


Manu Dash is a bilingual poet, fiction writer, playwright, translator and columnist. He has six books to his credit and recently edited an anthology of poems in English written by Indians entitled ‘ninety-nine words’.

PROFILE
Born on 4th July 1956 in a village by the coastal belt of Bay of Bengal in Orissa, South-East of India.Had Post graduation on literature (1981),Bachelor Degree on Law(1986) and Post-Graduate Diploma in Personnel Management (1991).Joined a literary movement called ‘Anam’(1974).
Worked in various reputed industrial houses in India as a Personnel and Administrative executive.


LITERARY CREDITS:
Written poems in various Oriya as well as in English journals with equal felicity .Two collection of poems published in Oriya: Anjuley Samundrara Dheu (Waves of a Ocean in cup of the Palm) (2002) and Kala Harina(Black Buck)(2008).
A popular literary Columnist for Oriya dailies having1.5 million readerships.Four non-fiction books have already been published so far which include: Gudulira Jeje Bapa (Grandfather of Guduli),Priya Ganaka(Dear Astrologer),and Bhiru Bharat(Timid India) and Banchibara Bata (The way to live ). (2007)
A short story collection: Kandhei Nacha (The Puppet Dance) (2000).
Edited an anthology of poems in English by Indian authors entitled: ninety-nine words (2006).
An accredited lyricist of All India Radio.


Wednesday, July 2, 2008

Southasian Cartoon Congress

Himal Southasian announces region-wide cartoon competition Theme: “Dramatic Divide: The distance between the powerful and the weak.”

Competition eligibility: Open to all, as long as the topic is relevant to Southasia.

Format: Single or strip; colour or black & white accepted

Closing Date for submissions: 1 September 2008

Shortlist announced: 22 September 2008

Award ceremony: Shortlisted candidates will be flown to Kathmandu during November for a Southasian Cartoon Congress, where the winning entry will be announced.
Number of entries: Maximum of three cartoon entries. While the cartoons can be original or already published, this must be clearly indicated with each entry.
Language: If there is text, any Southasian language acceptable with English translation.

Send via: e-mail to editorial@himalmag.com or

by post to:
Himal Southasian c/o Surabhi PudasainiGPO BOX 24393
Kathmandu, Nepal
Technical details: For entries submitted by e-mail
1. Size: 800 (pixels) X 1100 (Pixels) with 100 dpi resolution
2. Image format: JPEG or Bitmap
3. Colour System: RGB

For entries submitted by post:
1.
Each entry must be no larger than an A4 size sheet.

Other required information: All entrants must include a covering letter with their full name, as well as e-mail and postal addresses.
Award: USD 1000 for winner, USD 500 for first runner-up, as well as publication of winning cartoons in Himal. All short-listed candidates will receive citations.

Copyright: Himal Southasian retains exclusive right to reprint and disseminate all cartoons submitted to the competition. Copyright issues surrounding already published cartoons must be cleared by the entrant.

Nominations: Third-party submissions of entries are accepted if they are accompanied by the written consent of the cartoonist.
Jury: Eminent persons representing journalism, academia and politics from around Southasia.

Contact: please direct all queries to surabhip@himalmag.com

Please note that none of the submitted cartoons will be returned to the entrant.

www.himalmag.com

Tuesday, July 1, 2008

Language Monument of Bangladesh


Friends of Earth Nedunchezhiyan

Environmental Activist
from Tamilnadu, India
and
Editor Thulir(BUD)
Children's Magazine on Environmentalism.

PEOPLES SAARC 2008

What is Peoples SAARC 2008?

Peoples SAARC is an annual regional convergence of peoples organisations and movements in parallel to the annual South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) summit. Sri Lanka is hosting the 2008 SAARC summit in Colombo between 27 July and 03 August. For security and logistical reasons Peoples SAARC 2008 will take place on 18, 19 and 20 July in Colombo. We look forward to hosting at least 500 delegates from the region and 500 from Sri Lanka as well as mobilising over 5000 on 20 July for a mass demonstration of South Asian peoples unity and for a peoples agenda in South Asia.

Background paper of Peoples SAARC 2008

Background Paper

Who participates in Peoples SAARC?

Women, labour, peasants, urban and rural poor, cultural activists and organic intellectuals, students, youth and marginalised and excluded social groups and communities. All activists groups, social movements, progressive intelligentsia, cultural activists, writers, journalists and all those who subscribe to the ideas of the People’s SAARC must be galvanized in the name of the People’s SAARC and helped to converge in Colombo during the third week of July 2008. We pledge to abide by three principles of the platform process namely: (i) by being inclusive; (ii) by subscribing to the common minimum agenda; and (iii) by non-domination by individuals or organizations.

How can one participate?

Those interested in participating need to submit the duly filled Registration Form via fax or email to the contact details given below.

Fax - +94 11 2768860
Email - peoplesaarcsl@gmail.com

Wednesday, June 25, 2008

JANA KARALIYA

Forefront theatre voyage for a new trend of drama art
Jana Karaliya
Mobile theatre & its duties
Expectations
Mission of the mobile theatre

Accomplishing a cultural mission by the use of ‘drama & theatre’ in an unprecedented way, through the first ever ‘Mobile Theater’ in our country, that will enlighten and build more human intimate relationships amongst the Sri Lankan people from the top stratum to the bottom and from north to south that will enable them to understand themselves and then the others better and to have peace inside themselves and then with the others.

Jana Karaliyathat goes from village to village taking a theatre with them

The accepted procedure in the drama field in our country is the drama troupes to travel to the fixed theater halls in the cities of distant areas. But, have you ever heard of a troupe of actors that goes beyond these cities to further remote villages carrying the theater hall with them and perform in that mobile theatre hall giving opportunities for these rural mass to enjoy a drama. The idea consumed in the mind of the veteran dramatist Parakrama Niriella, that this could be achieved if we can have a theatre inside a tent that can be dissembled, transported and assembled in another place. He further developed this idea as a project and discussed this with another dramatist/actor H.A.Perera.

There so many ways of using drama & theater. But there is only one of those practices established in our country at present. That is the writing of a play, producing it and performing in front of an audience which we call the 'Performance Theatre'. But, since a long time H.A. had the idea of establishing the other usages, such as using drama & theatre in education & personal development etc., which is commonly, called 'Applied Theatre'. The foundation to the mobile theater was laid by the combination of their two concepts. As a result of the long, hard, tiresome effort of both, the concepts has become a reality, and now there is a mobile theater and a mobile theater troupe to perform using this new methodology, and also to use drama & theater for education & personal development. It will travel all over the country with this modern theater not only performing in it, but also doing island wide provincial and district level 'theatre education' & 'theatre in education' programs.
Jana Kraliya 'Mobile Theater'
Since a long time dramatists in our country are accustomed to the picture frame (proscenium) theater that performs from one side of the theater to the spectators in the other side. But the janakaraliya mobile theater is constructed as a 'new arena theater' that performs to an audience in all four sides. But on the request of a director this theater can be converted to a 'thrust' theater that the audience will see the play from three sides. We still don’t have even a fixed theater with this flexibility. So this theater in this mobile tent certainly will be a new experience for the spectators as well as the dramatists in our country. This modern theater has an audience capacity of 500 adults or 800 children. It can be dismantled and loaded in a single truck and transported to part of the country.
Duties of Jana Karaliya
On the pathway of it the mobile theater troupe will assemble the theater in a particular place, stay there for a maximum period of one month, and accomplish the following activities.
Drama performances
Performing qualitatively high 7 creative dramas for the people who are deprived of enjoying any drama performance.
School children
Conducting drama & theater workshops, appreciation workshops and performing for school children covering the school system in the area
Conducting applied theater workshops for primary section teachers to develop their knowledge, skills and attitudes to use drama & theater in education.
Developing self esteem, personality and collective feeling in children by the applied theater programs done in collaboration with schools.
Youth
Conducting workshops to develop the skills & creativity of youth in those areas, who have any inclination towards drama & theater.
Dramatists
Providing performing opportunities for their already produced plays and/or encouraging them to write or produce plays for mobile theater.
get the participation of traditional folk drama artists in those areas and encouraging them to continue and develop their work.
Ethnic harmony
Janakaraliya is accomplishing a special cultural mission to develop relations between various ethnic groups (communities) estranged by the long standing war.
Make equal opportunities and treat all the Tamil, Muslim & Sinhala communities with equal respect when conducting the drama & theater workshops and all the other activities of janakaraliya.
Producing & performing all of the janakaraliya plays both in sinhala & tamil that enables every community to enjoy them.
forum theater
Apart from the performance and other applied theater programs mentioned earlier, the janakaraliya will hold 'Forum Theater' workshops, which is also a part of applied theater, to build self esteem & self confidence in various marginalized social sectors and to give them democratic space to express themselves through art, which will be useful to understand the hidden issues inside them that cause conflict with others. These issues certainly will be very useful in the process of conflict transformation.
Other activities
Screening quality films in the mobile theater that uplift the aesthetic appreciation.
Giving space in mobile theater for photographic & painting exhibitions.
Organizing or giving space for musical appreciation programs in the mobile theater.
Activities in Tsunami Affected Areas
In between the programs in the above mentioned areas our troupe will travel without the tent, to the tsunami effected areas and do drama therapy programs for the children.

Renowned Scholars of Tamilnadu, India




















Prof. I Muthiah(left) and Prof. S. Ramasundaram(right)
are two renowned scholars in Folklore and in Tamil Studies
of Tamilnadu, India respectively.

Tuesday, June 24, 2008

Piralayan of Chennai Arts Group

Piralayan and Chennai Kalai Kuli (Arts Group) committed and consistant in their theatre activities in Tamilnadu.
Street Theatre is their major forte of theatre activism and connected to procenium stage too.
His committment to Theatre in Education also a note worthy venture.

Prof. S. Ramanujam of Tamilnadu, India.



Senior and influential theatre person of Tamilnadu. He had contributed to Tamil and Malayalam Theatre of India and a specialist in Children's Theatre.

Monday, June 23, 2008

TRIBUTE TO Salim al-Deen: A Great Contemporary Theatre Personality of Bangladesh


Good-bye my friend, it’s hard to die – Syed Jamil Ahmed Once again I am reminded of the Mahabharata. Dharma quizzed a thirsty Yudhisthira on the bank of a lake, at the price of his life: “What is the greatest marvel?” All four of his brothers already lay dead, having failed to answer Dharma’s riddled questions. Yudhisthira, an exile in the forest, replied unhesitatingly: “Each day, death strikes and we live as though we were immortal. This is what is the greatest marvel” (Carriere 1987: 105). As I write this, Salim al-Deen lies buried in Jahangir Nagar University campus. I did not pay my last respect as he lay at Shaheed Minar nor visit his grave.

There is something uncanny about a dead person. It is not the pallor but the unnerving stillness. Now Freud (1998: 156) admonishes me with a smile: “everything is unheimlich [uncanny] that ought to have remained secret but has come to light.” It is then that Salim al-Deen’s face melts into the lake from where issues once again Dharma’s question. I can see my face reflected in the dead. Suddenly, the eyes open. They stare back unblinkingly. I forget my thirst for life. I run away – exiled in the forest – for life – I have not known Salim al-Deen for a lifetime. It has only been thirty-four years. This‘knowing’ is spread over designing two of his most renowned plays that are now considered landmark productions in Bangladesh theatre – Kittan-khola and Keramat-mangal; directing one of his play named Chaka thrice – in the USA, India and Bangladesh; and arguing with him on innumerable occasions with all my passion – because of – what appeared to me to be – his follies, slips and flawed lines of reason.

Now, I can only look back in anger for having missed my chances of unsaying the said and saying the unsaid. Yet, if I did have a second chance, what would I say? A few months back, he rang me up suddenly one night. It was a telephone call out of the blue. Salim al-Deen was depressed. His work had not reached the world, hardly anyone read himbeyond Bangladesh and West Bengal.

Life, he repeatedly said, remained unfulfilled. He seemed sure that he would die soon. I laughed – scoffed him for his infantile death instinct. “You are the greatest playwright in Bangladesh,” I said. “I value your work more than Tagore’s. Don’t hanker after publicity and acclaim of the press, Salim Bhai. Keep writing. I translated Chaka and will translate other plays, soon. I will publish them with a critical introduction on post-colonial theatre Bangladesh.” He spoke for sometime and before hanging up, said, “Maybe I needed to hear what you have said –.” This was the last time I encountered him. Uncharacteristically, we did not argue or fight. It is as though all our accounts were already settled.

I did not realize that it was the time to say adieu. But was it adieu – “I commend you to God” – and not au revoir – good-bye till we meet again?The signifieds endlessly slide under the signifiers, the presence of the word implies the absence of the Real, and we all are obliged to live in language – to endure the impossibility of presence of any object or person of desire. We are always-already living with/in absence – even with those who are ‘present’ – those not yet ‘dead’. Perhaps it is in this impossible dream that theatre exists: of conjuring the ‘present’ – the ‘here and now’ – as a lived moment, ‘making believe’ that presence sips not from cupped palms as we witness the weaving of a phantasmal rhythm of life from here to eternity.

It is here, in this evanescence of theatre that I can hope to weave my performance of Salim al-Deen – or perhaps perform my Salim al-Deen – yet again – and again – for ever – till death do us apart – I perform Salim al-Deen in the kaleidoscope of a rural fair of Kittan-khola enveloped in winter mist and fog. Tread softly. There, not far from you is Shonai – a marginal farmer in his 30s who will soon be landless because the rising bourgeoisie of Bangladesh can make better use of his fragmented plots. He will kill the man who is out to grab his land, leave behind the haunting memory of his dead wife and seek a new life with a woman of an itinerant snake-charming community. A key event that sets the transformation in motion is a performance of Shamsal Bayati (scene 4), where he describes the mythical phoenix burning itself on a pyre and the rising of another phoenix from the ashes. As Shonai watches the performance, it connects a high-voltage chord in his unconscious and he swoons. When he recovers, he asks Shamsal Bayati : “Then which is the truth – life or death?” Shamsal Bayati replies, “It is an ongoing struggle of metamorphosis, my child. No form is ever-lasting.” : If life is the truth, why have I never attained happiness in living?” : Why do you seek happiness?: Because there is. : My child, life is a great joy – sparkling with unbound vivacity. This you will realize at the hour of your death (Kittan-khola, scene 7, al-Deen 1994: 863-864). What was your realization – Salim al-Deen – at the hour of your death?

As you lay unconscious, propped up with life support system at the ICU of a hospital, as a few hundred theatre practitioners gathered outside waiting and hoping against hope for you to revive, even as I told Nasiruddin Yousuff, your most-loving friend, that you cannot die – that it is impossible that you will die now – that your life instinct is far stronger that all the wishes of Azrael – did you not remember the great joy – sparkling with unbound vivacity? But perhaps you had other plans. Perhaps, you had met Peer Gynt’s Button Moulder, and so had already decided to engage the grave-diggers?See there, death-defying Sindabad rises again in Hat Hadai set against the waters ofcoastal Bangladesh. Having sailed across the Seven Seas in sixty-four years of his life, the ancient mariner Anar Bhandari now lives like an aged whale marooned on an island near the coast of the Bay of Bengal. Death instinct overtakes him and he decides to engage a gravedigger to scrape up his last resting place. In the distant horizon, the glowing sunset sizzles softly in steamy vapors of mist. A group of people of the island has gathered around the spot where the grave is being dug. They are struck silent with fear, apprehension and grief. They realize that the use of spades and spuds in digging graves are similar everywhere. The spuds are necessary for the steep walls of the grave and the spades for lifting the earth.

In the vast landscape of the alluvial soil and sand of the island, the earth will yield the volume equivalent to a human body. In its place will descend the dead. All the memories of passion and amorous delight traced on the body for a lifetime will be clasped frozen within the binds of a white shroud. As they reflect, the eyes of the spectators are trapped in the sparkling mica of the thick-grained sand. They shiver as each of those sparkling particles dance in fading sunlight and transform with the rising mist into tears of the earth. Thus you wrote in Hat-hadai (episode 14, al-Deen 1997: 140). And yet, I have no tears for you. I refuse to yield you as a corpse and let you descend into your newly dug grave and rot. I refuse because I remember how Anar Bhandari renounced death and sought life in the pleasures of amorous delight with Angkuri and voyaged yet again across the Seven Seas. I could scream – "Arise, Salim al-Deen, if only as Anar Bhandari. I will marry you to Angkuri and watch you sail across the sky of this chilly winter night. I will erase Orion and in his place trace your body with stars as Adam Surat –“ At this point, the telephone rings. I pick up the receiver. It is the voice a reporter, asking me to comment on the death of Salim al-Deen. “I cannot comment,” I say. “No comments –“ Aren’t comments invariably trapped in unashamed crudity as they attempt to sum up all that is to be said in one puny little sentence, failing even to notice the sliding of the signifieds?One such crude comment was made by a theatre pundit at a conference in Islamabad, after I had related for his benefit a synopsis of Chaka. “Oh yes, I understand – it’s the wheel and life and the wheel of life.
Bit it is so clichéd an image!” But, when I tried to explain that Chaka is a valuable example to prove the point that a play can be written without dramatic conflict – in contradistinction to the much-esteemed theory of Hegel, Brunetière, Archer and company – the pundit, along with the circle of luminaries surrounding him, stared back with a blank gaze, utterly flabbergasted. No comments this time! For such skeptics as these, the only answer can be a performance of Chaka – such as the one we had created in Delhi – which again is not to claim that it too would silence them. Nevertheless, most of them gasped when they saw the ‘stage.’

It was our macabre joke to sit the spectators on stage and perform the play in the auditorium. And where the spectators would sit, rather where their heads would rest, we put up white masks – all uniformly staring back at the spectators in uncanny silence. In the midst of these death-masks, in a vast space a hundred feet deep and sixty feet wide that was doubled many times over by skillful lighting, the cart-driver of Chaka, along with an old man and a youth, embarked on a journey to deliver a corpse of an anonymous man. They are all poor migrant workers who had set out to seek work at a marshland where summer crops are being harvested.

One never learns who the dead man was or how he died, although the corpse is the central character of the play around which the action is woven. As the living trio travel with the dead through rural landscape, each small detail emerges with compelling clarity, melting in phantasmal memories and fantasies of the three, engulfing themwith a touch of the uncanny. Even though the presence of the word implies the absence of the Real, and even though we all endure the impossibility of presence of any person of desire, the trio begins to ‘touch’ the ‘dead’ in a manner that defies the absence of the Real. The body decomposes, rots, stinks – eyes bulge out – ants attack the flesh – yet the three cannot find its ‘home.’ The villagers of the address given to them refuse to acknowledge it and redirect him to another village. There, the corpse-bearing cart arrives late at night at a homestead which is more like a blazing vision of a frozen moment of life: the loud-speaker screams a marriage song, the celebrants have dozed off to sleep after a day of hectic labour, and only the bride with her friends – not a Sleeping Beauty – greet them with fearful eyes. Thus driven away from all human destinations, the driver and his two companions bury their dead on a dry riverbed. By that time, the dead has already arisen in of each of them. Thus burying and yet refusing to bury the dead, the three continue for their destination. Thus as I perform Salim al-Deen, as I try to piece together a meaning of this man who was called Salim al-Deen, I ask myself, do I really value his work more than Tagore? Would not Buddhadeva Bose (cited in Chakrabarti 2001) glare back at me and scoff that “modern Bengali culture -- if such a thing exists, and I believe it does -- is based on Tagore"? Salim al-Deen would not argue against Bose’s opinion.

But consider Raktakarabi, which is about a king who has trapped himself behind the iron curtains of a kleptocratic system that extends its vast network of tentacles even within the private life of the workers and seeks single-mindedly to extract the last iota of wealth with ruthless precision and mechanical efficiency. Tagore sets up a Nandini to rally the king and the common people to destroy the system of subjugation. My post-colonial location – a discursive product woven by discontinuous fragments of colonial history, now integrated into a totalizing globalizing society through commodity exchange – generates intense skepticism in the comprehension of the world produced in plays such as this.

The symbols are so obvious and characters such as Nandini and the King are so blatantly reductive that at no point one reads the world anew with Tagore’s lenses. In contradistinction with him, I would insist with Foucault (1977: 138) that “the subject (and its substitutes) must be stripped of its creative role and analyzed as a complex and variable function of discourse.” A subject (including this ‘author’) is “not the speaking consciousness, not the author of the formulation, but a position that may be filled in certain condition by various individuals” (Foucault 2002: 129). Subjectivity is formed by discursive practices; it is historically constituted within relations of power. Intrinsic to social life, ubiquitous and multiple, power is that which constitutes and differentiates competing interests and “manifests itself in forms of struggle at the political level.

These struggles make subjects what they are” (Edgar and Sedgwick 2002: 74). This is not to argue that Salim al-Deen takes a Foucauldian position in his plays. Indeed he does not and that was one of my points of contention with him. Nevertheless, Salim al-Deen also does not project a monolithic Tagorian Truth of Nature, Beauty and Humanist human subjects. His characters are fissured, contradictory and fragmented, and are literally woven with gossamer, in a manner that captures the most remarkable trait with briefest strokes. It is thus that he threatens the superficialities of ‘life’ and unmasks the fathomless depths of a magical reality. Despite his neo-romanticist and symbolist streaks, the characters – most evidently in Nimajjan – succeed in disintegrating perception, subverting deep-seated assumptions of life and projecting humans as discursive subjects. As the characters of his plays transform endlessly, they depart radically from the conventional categories of realism or romance, and hover over expressionist and surrealist landscape but, at the same time, refuse to abandon “a sharply etched realism in representing ordinary events and descriptive details” (Abrams, 1993:135). The refusal results in, as Abrams (1993: 135) would say, a tendency of interweaving in an ever-shifting pattern the realism in details “with fantastic and dreamlike elements, as well as with materials derived frommyth and fairy tales.” In performing Salim al-Deen, we have in theatre what Scholes (1979) recognizes ‘as ‘fabulation’ characterized by allegory, romance, a self-reflexive tendency encouraged by the writer’s critical skepticism, and “a sense of pleasure in form” (1979: 2) for its own sake.

FromKittan-khola to Hat Hadai, one witnesses al-Deen breaking away from norms, abandoning dramatic conflict, dialogue and even a linear cause-to-effect relationship in the development of the action in the plot; instead, he embraces the narrative whole-heartedly as in the indigenous theatre of Bangladesh and infuses his prose with an inbuilt poetic inflexion that situates itself in the interstices of the two categories. He succeeds in what Tagore sought but never could accomplish: breaking completely away from Euro-centric models that had largely taken hold of urban theatre of Bangladesh and West Bengal. It is here that Salim al-Deen, in spite of his admiration for Tagore, transcends him many times over. It is here that Salim al-Deen is unquestionably post-colonial – borrowing a convenient sign-post from Gilbert (2001: 1) that nevertheless recognizes a contentious terrain – in that his work exhibits “a strong urge to recuperate local histories and local performance traditions, not only as a means of cultural decolonisation but also as a challenge to the implicit representational biases of Western theatre.” And to this Salim al-Deen, I bid good-bye – adieu – till we meet again – not in life after death but in the sounds of silence when the spectators have all departed, when I sit alone in the empty auditorium enveloped in its cozy and uncanny stillness, when I am confronted once again with the question from the lake, when I realize that the lake melts into your face – I know you will swagger across the stillness with your characteristic gait, smile and ask, “Where has Peer Gynt been since the last time we met?” (Ibsen 1966:222) At that instant, I should ask you in return, “Where was I? Myself – complete and whole?” (Ibsen 1966:222) But, in the presence of the word that implies the absence of the Real, with the ‘self’ discursively woven by discontinuous fragments, ‘I’ will surely miss my cue. Precisely then, I know you will quote Tagore (1971: 108), as though to tease me, and say, “There is sorrow, there is death, and the pain of separation sears Still bliss, happiness, and the eternity emerge endlessly within us.” This is the greatest marvel – References7Al-Deen, Salim (1994) Kittan-khola in Shatabarsher Natak (Bengali Plays of 1400 B.S.) Vol. 2, Dhaka: BanglaAcademy.



References
Al-Deen, Salim (1994) Kittan-khola in Shatabarsher Natak (Bengali Plays of 1400 B.S.) Vol. 2, Dhaka: BanglaAcademy. Al-Deen, Salim (1997) Hat Hadai, Dhaka: Bangla Academy.Al-Deen, Salim (2004) Nimajjan, Dhaka: Krantik. Abrams, M. H. (1993) A Glossary of Literary Terms, Fort Worth, TX: Harcourt Brace College. Carriere, Jean-Claude (1987) The Mahabharata: A Play, London: Methuen. Chakrabarti, Indrani (2001) A People’s Poet or a Literary Deity accessed on 18 January 2008. Edgar, Andrew and Peter Sedgwick 2002 Cultural Theory: The Key Thinkers. London: Routledge. Foucault, Michel (1977) “What is an Author?” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, edited with an introduction by Donald F. Bouchard, translated from the French by Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Foucault, Michel (2002) The Archaeology of Knowledge, translated by A. M. Sheridan Smith. London: Routledge. Freud, S. (1998) ‘The Uncanny,’ in Literary Theory: An Anthology (Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan ed), pp. 154-167. Malden, Mass: Blackwell. Gilbert, Helen (2001) General Introduction, Postcolonial Pays: An anthology, Helen Gilbert (ed.), London:Routledge. Ibsen, H. (1966) Peer Gynt: A dramatic poem, Peter Watts (tr. And intro), Harmondsworth: Penguin.Scholes, Robert (1979) Fabulation and Metafiction, Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Tagore, Rabindranath (1971) Geetabitan, Ajit Kumar Guha (Ed.), Dhaka: Kathakali.

Good-bye my friend, it’s hard to die – Syed Jamil Ahmed


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Once again I am reminded of the Mahabharata. Dharma quizzed a thirsty Yudhisthira on the bank of a lake, at the price of his life: “What is the greatest marvel?” All four of his brothers already lay dead, having failed to answer Dharma’s riddled questions. Yudhisthira, an exile in the forest, replied unhesitatingly: “Each day, death strikes and we live as though we were immortal. This is what is the greatest marvel” (Carriere 1987: 105). As I write this, Salim al-Deen lies buried in Jahangir Nagar University campus. I did not pay my last respect as he lay at Shaheed Minar nor visit his grave. There is something uncanny about a dead person. It is not the pallor but the unnerving stillness. Now Freud (1998: 156) admonishes me with a smile: “everything is unheimlich [uncanny] that ought to have remained secret but has come to light.” It is then that Salim al-Deen’s face melts into the lake from where issues once again Dharma’s question. I can see my face reflected in the dead. Suddenly, the eyes open. They stare back unblinkingly. I forget my thirst for life. I run away – exiled in the forest – for life – I have not known Salim al-Deen for a lifetime. It has only been thirty-four years. This‘knowing’ is spread over designing two of his most renowned plays that are now considered landmark productions in Bangladesh theatre – Kittan-khola and Keramat-mangal; directing one 1
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2of his play named Chaka thrice – in the USA, India and Bangladesh; and arguing with him on innumerable occasions with all my passion – because of – what appeared to me to be – his follies, slips and flawed lines of reason. Now, I can only look back in anger for having missed my chances of unsaying the said and saying the unsaid. Yet, if I did have a second chance, what would I say? A few months back, he rang me up suddenly one night. It was a telephone call out of the blue. Salim al-Deen was depressed. His work had not reached the world, hardly anyone read himbeyond Bangladesh and West Bengal. Life, he repeatedly said, remained unfulfilled. He seemed sure that he would die soon. I laughed – scoffed him for his infantile death instinct. “You are the greatest playwright in Bangladesh,” I said. “I value your work more than Tagore’s. Don’t hanker after publicity and acclaim of the press, Salim Bhai. Keep writing. I translated Chaka and will translate other plays, soon. I will publish them with a critical introduction on post-colonial theatre Bangladesh.” He spoke for sometime and before hanging up, said, “Maybe I needed to hear what you have said –.” This was the last time I encountered him. Uncharacteristically, we did not argue or fight. It is as though all our accounts were already settled. I did not realize that it was the time to say adieu. But was it adieu – “I commend you to God” – and not au revoir – good-bye till we meet again?The signifieds endlessly slide under the signifiers, the presence of the word implies the absence of the Real, and we all are obliged to live in language – to endure the impossibility of presence of any object or person of desire. We are always-already living with/in absence – even with those who are ‘present’ – those not yet ‘dead’. Perhaps it is in this impossible dream that theatre exists: of conjuring the ‘present’ – the ‘here and now’ – as a lived moment, ‘making believe’ that presence sips not from cupped palms as we witness the weaving of a phantasmal rhythm of life from here to eternity. It is here, in this evanescence of theatre that I can hope to weave my performance of Salim al-Deen – or perhaps perform my Salim al-Deen – yet again – and again – for ever – till death do us apart – I perform Salim al-Deen in the kaleidoscope of a rural fair of Kittan-khola enveloped in winter mist and fog. Tread softly. There, not far from you is Shonai – a marginal farmer in his 30s who will soon be landless because the rising bourgeoisie of Bangladesh can make better use of his fragmented plots. He will kill the man who is out to grab his land, leave behind the haunting memory of his dead wife and seek a new life with a woman of an itinerant snake-charming community. A key event that sets the transformation in motion is a performance of Shamsal Bayati (scene 4), where he describes the mythical phoenix burning itself on a pyre and the rising of another phoenix from the ashes. As Shonai watches the performance, it connects a high-voltage chord in his unconscious and he swoons. When he recovers, he asks Shamsal
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3Bayati: “Then which is the truth – life or death?” Shamsal Bayati replies, “It is an ongoing struggle of metamorphosis, my child. No form is ever-lasting.” : If life is the truth, why have I never attained happiness in living?” : Why do you seek happiness?: Because there is. : My child, life is a great joy – sparkling with unbound vivacity. This you will realize at the hour of your death (Kittan-khola, scene 7, al-Deen 1994: 863-864). What was your realization – Salim al-Deen – at the hour of your death? As you lay unconscious, propped up with life support system at the ICU of a hospital, as a few hundred theatre practitioners gathered outside waiting and hoping against hope for you to revive, even as I told Nasiruddin Yousuff, your most-loving friend, that you cannot die – that it is impossible that you will die now – that your life instinct is far stronger that all the wishes of Azrael – did you not remember the great joy – sparkling with unbound vivacity? But perhaps you had other plans. Perhaps, you had met Peer Gynt’s Button Moulder, and so had already decided to engage the grave-diggers?See there, death-defying Sindabad rises again in Hat Hadai set against the waters ofcoastal Bangladesh. Having sailed across the Seven Seas in sixty-four years of his life, the ancient mariner Anar Bhandari now lives like an aged whale marooned on an island near the coast of the Bay of Bengal. Death instinct overtakes him and he decides to engage a gravedigger to scrape up his last resting place. In the distant horizon, the glowing sunset sizzles softly in steamy vapors of mist. A group of people of the island has gathered around the spot where the grave is being dug. They are struck silent with fear, apprehension and grief. They realize that the use of spades and spuds in digging graves are similar everywhere. The spuds are necessary for the steep walls of the grave and the spades for lifting the earth. In the vast landscape of the alluvial soil and sand of the island, the earth will yield the volume equivalent to a human body. In its place will descend the dead. All the memories of passion and amorous delight traced on the body for a lifetime will be clasped frozen within the binds of a white shroud. As they reflect, the eyes of the spectators are trapped in the sparkling mica of the thick-grained sand. They shiver as each of those sparkling particles dance in fading sunlight and transform with the rising mist into tears of the earth. Thus you wrote in Hat-hadai (episode 14, al-Deen 1997: 140). And yet, I have no tears for you. I refuse to yield you as a corpse and let you descend into your newly dug grave and rot. I refuse because I remember how Anar Bhandari renounced death and sought life in the pleasures of amorous delight with Angkuri and voyaged yet again across the Seven Seas. I could scream – "Arise, Salim al-Deen, if only as Anar Bhandari. I will marry you to Angkuri and watch you sail
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across the sky of this chilly winter night. I will erase Orion and in his place trace your body with stars as Adam Surat –“ At this point, the telephone rings. I pick up the receiver. It is the voice a reporter, asking me to comment on the death of Salim al-Deen. “I cannot comment,” I say. “No comments –“ Aren’t comments invariably trapped in unashamed crudity as they attempt to sum up all that is to be said in one puny little sentence, failing even to notice the sliding of the signifieds?One such crude comment was made by a theatre pundit at a conference in Islamabad, after I had related for his benefit a synopsis of Chaka. “Oh yes, I understand – it’s the wheel and life and the wheel of life. But it is so clichéd an image!” But, when I tried to explain that Chaka is a valuable example to prove the point that a play can be written without dramatic conflict – in contradistinction to the much-esteemed theory of Hegel, Brunetière, Archer and company – the pundit, along with the circle of luminaries surrounding him, stared back with a blank gaze, utterly flabbergasted. No comments this time! For such skeptics as these, the only answer can be a performance of Chaka – such as the one we had created in Delhi – which again is not to claim that it too would silence them. Nevertheless, most of them gasped when they saw the ‘stage.’ It was our macabre joke to sit the 4
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5spectators on stage and perform the play in the auditorium. And where the spectators would sit, rather where their heads would rest, we put up white masks – all uniformly staring back at the spectators in uncanny silence. In the midst of these death-masks, in a vast space a hundred feet deep and sixty feet wide that was doubled many times over by skillful lighting, the cart-driver of Chaka, along with an old man and a youth, embarked on a journey to deliver a corpse of an anonymous man. They are all poor migrant workers who had set out to seek work at a marshland where summer crops are being harvested. One never learns who the dead man was or how he died, although the corpse is the central character of the play around which the action is woven. As the living trio travel with the dead through rural landscape, each small detail emerges with compelling clarity, melting in phantasmal memories and fantasies of the three, engulfing themwith a touch of the uncanny. Even though the presence of the word implies the absence of the Real, and even though we all endure the impossibility of presence of any person of desire, the trio begins to ‘touch’ the ‘dead’ in a manner that defies the absence of the Real. The body decomposes, rots, stinks – eyes bulge out – ants attack the flesh – yet the three cannot find its ‘home.’ The villagers of the address given to them refuse to acknowledge it and redirect him to another village. There, the corpse-bearing cart arrives late at night at a homestead which is more like a blazing vision of a frozen moment of life: the loud-speaker screams a marriage song, the celebrants have dozed off to sleep after a day of hectic labour, and only the bride with her friends – not a Sleeping Beauty – greet them with fearful eyes. Thus driven away from all human destinations, the driver and his two companions bury their dead on a dry riverbed. By that time, the dead has already arisen in of each of them. Thus burying and yet refusing to bury the dead, the three continue for their destination. Thus as I perform Salim al-Deen, as I try to piece together a meaning of this man who was called Salim al-Deen, I ask myself, do I really value his work more than Tagore? Would not Buddhadeva Bose (cited in Chakrabarti 2001) glare back at me and scoff that “modern Bengali culture -- if such a thing exists, and I believe it does -- is based on Tagore"? Salim al-Deen would not argue against Bose’s opinion. But consider Raktakarabi, which is about a king who has trapped himself behind the iron curtains of a kleptocratic system that extends its vast network of tentacles even within the private life of the workers and seeks single-mindedly to extract the last iota of wealth with ruthless precision and mechanical efficiency. Tagore sets up a Nandini to rally the king and the common people to destroy the system of subjugation. My post-colonial location – a discursive product woven by discontinuous fragments of colonial history, now integrated into a totalizing globalizing society through commodity exchange – generates intense skepticism in the comprehension of the world produced in plays such as this. The symbols are so obvious and characters such as Nandini and the King are so
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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6blatantly reductive that at no point one reads the world anew with Tagore’s lenses. In contradistinction with him, I would insist with Foucault (1977: 138) that “the subject (and its substitutes) must be stripped of its creative role and analyzed as a complex and variable function of discourse.” A subject (including this ‘author’) is “not the speaking consciousness, not the author of the formulation, but a position that may be filled in certain condition by various individuals” (Foucault 2002: 129). Subjectivity is formed by discursive practices; it is historically constituted within relations of power. Intrinsic to social life, ubiquitous and multiple, power is that which constitutes and differentiates competing interests and “manifests itself in forms of struggle at the political level. These struggles make subjects what they are” (Edgar and Sedgwick 2002: 74). This is not to argue that Salim al-Deen takes a Foucauldian position in his plays. Indeed he does not and that was one of my points of contention with him. Nevertheless, Salim al-Deen also does not project a monolithic Tagorian Truth of Nature, Beauty and Humanist human subjects. His characters are fissured, contradictory and fragmented, and are literally woven with gossamer, in a manner that captures the most remarkable trait with briefest strokes. It is thus that he threatens the superficialities of ‘life’ and unmasks the fathomless depths of a magical reality. Despite his neo-romanticist and symbolist streaks, the characters – most evidently in Nimajjan – succeed in disintegrating perception, subverting deep-seated assumptions of life and projecting humans as discursive subjects. As the characters of his plays transform endlessly, they depart radically from the conventional categories of realism or romance, and hover over expressionist and surrealist landscape but, at the same time, refuse to abandon “a sharply etched realism in representing ordinary events and descriptive details” (Abrams, 1993:135). The refusal results in, as Abrams (1993: 135) would say, a tendency of interweaving in an ever-shifting pattern the realism in details “with fantastic and dreamlike elements, as well as with materials derived frommyth and fairy tales.” In performing Salim al-Deen, we have in theatre what Scholes (1979) recognizes ‘as ‘fabulation’ characterized by allegory, romance, a self-reflexive tendency encouraged by the writer’s critical skepticism, and “a sense of pleasure in form” (1979: 2) for its own sake. FromKittan-khola to Hat Hadai, one witnesses al-Deen breaking away from norms, abandoning dramatic conflict, dialogue and even a linear cause-to-effect relationship in the development of the action in the plot; instead, he embraces the narrative whole-heartedly as in the indigenous theatre of Bangladesh and infuses his prose with an inbuilt poetic inflexion that situates itself in the interstices of the two categories. He succeeds in what Tagore sought but never could accomplish: breaking completely away from Euro-centric models that had largely taken hold of urban theatre of Bangladesh and West Bengal. It is here that Salim al-Deen, in spite of his
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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admiration for Tagore, transcends him many times over. It is here that Salim al-Deen is unquestionably post-colonial – borrowing a convenient sign-post from Gilbert (2001: 1) that nevertheless recognizes a contentious terrain – in that his work exhibits “a strong urge to recuperate local histories and local performance traditions, not only as a means of cultural decolonisation but also as a challenge to the implicit representational biases of Western theatre.” And to this Salim al-Deen, I bid good-bye – adieu – till we meet again – not in life after death but in the sounds of silence when the spectators have all departed, when I sit alone in the empty auditorium enveloped in its cozy and uncanny stillness, when I am confronted once again with the question from the lake, when I realize that the lake melts into your face – I know you will swagger across the stillness with your characteristic gait, smile and ask, “Where has Peer Gynt been since the last time we met?” (Ibsen 1966:222) At that instant, I should ask you in return, “Where was I? Myself – complete and whole?” (Ibsen 1966:222) But, in the presence of the word that implies the absence of the Real, with the ‘self’ discursively woven by discontinuous fragments, ‘I’ will surely miss my cue. Precisely then, I know you will quote Tagore (1971: 108), as though to tease me, and say, “There is sorrow, there is death, and the pain of separation sears Still bliss, happiness, and the eternity emerge endlessly within us.” This is the greatest marvel – References7Al-Deen, Salim (1994) Kittan-khola in Shatabarsher Natak (Bengali Plays of 1400 B.S.) Vol. 2, Dhaka: BanglaAcademy.
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8ReferencesAl-Deen, Salim (1994) Kittan-khola in Shatabarsher Natak (Bengali Plays of 1400 B.S.) Vol. 2, Dhaka: BanglaAcademy. Al-Deen, Salim (1997) Hat Hadai, Dhaka: Bangla Academy.Al-Deen, Salim (2004) Nimajjan, Dhaka: Krantik. Abrams, M. H. (1993) A Glossary of Literary Terms, Fort Worth, TX: Harcourt Brace College. Carriere, Jean-Claude (1987) The Mahabharata: A Play, London: Methuen. Chakrabarti, Indrani (2001) A People’s Poet or a Literary Deity accessed on 18 January 2008. Edgar, Andrew and Peter Sedgwick 2002 Cultural Theory: The Key Thinkers. London: Routledge. Foucault, Michel (1977) “What is an Author?” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, edited with an introduction by Donald F. Bouchard, translated from the French by Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Foucault, Michel (2002) The Archaeology of Knowledge, translated by A. M. Sheridan Smith. London: Routledge. Freud, S. (1998) ‘The Uncanny,’ in Literary Theory: An Anthology (Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan ed), pp. 154-167. Malden, Mass: Blackwell. Gilbert, Helen (2001) General Introduction, Postcolonial Pays: An anthology, Helen Gilbert (ed.), London:Routledge. Ibsen, H. (1966) Peer Gynt: A dramatic poem, Peter Watts (tr. And intro), Harmondsworth: Penguin.Scholes, Robert (1979) Fabulation and Metafiction, Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Tagore, Rabindranath (1971) Geetabitan, Ajit Kumar Guha (Ed.), Dhaka: Kathakali.

Friday, June 20, 2008

Reflections on absent poet


NEW AGEMarch 7-13, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
Reflections on the absent poet
by Sivagnanm Jeyasankar


My reflections start with a part of Rabindranath Tagore’s poem which is used by the author Anisur Rahman as the concluding piece in the essay titled ‘The Shelidah Years of Tagore’. ‘Who ever wishes to May sit in meditation With eyes closed To know if the world be true or false. I, meanwhile, Shall sit with hungry eyes, To see the world While the light lasts.’ This book titled The Absent Poet & Other Essays quite simply reveals glimpses of socio-cultural life in Bangladesh. Though the author mentions the absent poet in the title of the book, the collection of essays in the book contains the temperament of a people’s poet. It is very difficult for a people’s poet to liberate her/himself from the inborn temperament of poetic protest or resistance. Anisur Rahman, the poet journalist can’t also escape from this reality. Anisur Rahman is simply bringing the socio-cultural reality of the contemporary life of the people of Bangladesh into the palms of the readers. The forty capsules of writings make up a 112-page book with an ‘Excuse’ from the author instead of a preface, marking the visible evidence of blindness of independent and modern society. It is not only a story of a particular country. It is the story of all the postcolonial countries. Independence changes only the colour of the rulers but not the conditions of the social situation of the particular countries, which annually celebrate Independence Day as the visible exit of the colonial rulers. The selection of issues and themes clearly exposes the intention of the author’s aspirations and expectations for a genuine democratic world for all the people in the country. Rahman sums up in the essay titled ‘Humayun Azad’s Renewal of Life’ and clearly establishes this. Rahman writes, ‘We would like to be ambitious, by following in the footsteps of Humayun Azad, and to take oath at his life’s renewal. We expect life’s renewal in Bangladesh through the freedom from corruption, razakars and religious fundamentalism. We hope for life’s renewal in Bangladesh, for a rebirth of our nation. New dreams, new times, new hopes wait for Bangladesh. That is how we patterned our thoughts. We will follow the beliefs Humayun Azad held dear. He renewed himself and the time he lived in.’ The failure of understanding this simple truth is the cause behind all the issues challenging the lives of human beings on mother Earth. The thought-provoking piece ‘Know Thyself — But How?’ reveals how we are parading towards a doomsday against the aspiration, ‘We dream of a state where our children will grow up and know themselves at home, in school and out in the wider world.’ The role of education and media in shaping up the minds of people, particularly children and youth are vibrant but effectively utilized by the rulers (it may be colonial or postcolonial) to control the people as subjects or the law and order obeying citizens. The rulers, if they white or black or brown needs crowed only for the celebration of monumental independence but not a society with creative power and critical thinking. But the cultural personalities included in the book think differently and waged a life for the creation of a positive world for all. Anisur Rahman, bringing in issues of the voiceless and marginalized to mainstream media which is the real evidence of presence of a poet in the minds of a staff reporter and journalist. This book indirectly arouses fundamental questions: to what extent are the art and literary scenes of South Asian countries are familiar to each other? How do the international pages in the print media or news segments in the electronic media portrays South Asians? Who are the sources or providers of the news to the main stream media of South Asian countries? Why the South Asians fails to connect to each other even in the electronic age? What are the elements blocking in the minds of South Asians? How are we going to link ourselves? What are the roles of mother languages and the electronic media in the interaction process? How to build the consciousness of solidarity and equality? These are few fundamental questions we have to think of in the initial stages. The essay titled ‘Language, Politics and Culture’ raises important issues for deeper and detailed studies. The author also mentions that ‘In 1998 marking the glorious tragedy of 1952 for our mother language Bengali, UNESCO has shown its empathy for the survival of every language and ‘the languages of ethnic minority groups are also vulnerable today. Here literature does not mean only literary text like poetry, fiction and non-fiction but also all works on and about science, technology, philosophy, arts, geography, and history. Here the question of translation is so vital.’ Rahman worried about the lack of initiative for exchanges only between Bangladesh and Sweden. In the essay titled ‘Swedish Writers’ Journey to Tagore’s Land’ he claims that ‘there was no initiative during the last century after 1913 for literary exchange between these two countries with rich literary heritage. The readers in Sweden are barely familiar with Tagore and his Gitanjali. They are uninitiated into the rich and very developed literature in South Asia.’ The author’s consciousness of South Asian context is a positive aspect in this regard. But the important question is why we are missing the consciousness of communicating among ourselves, the South Asians? The Absent Poet & Other Essays of Anisur Rahman is a key to open up ourselves on our own to reach our realities in order to enrich and enhance ourselves as people of South Asia and beyond.
Sivagnanm Jeyasankar is a Sri Lankan poet, teaches at the Department of Fine Arts, Faculty of Arts and Culture, Eastern University Sri Lanka. He is currently on a three-week visit to Bangladesh.
The Absent Poet & Other Essays by Anisur Rahman Publisher: Biddya Prokash

Syed Jamil Ahmed: A Brief Profile




Syed Jamil Ahmed (b. 1955) is a director based in Bangladesh and Professor at the Department of Theatre and Music, University of Dhaka. He graduated from the National School of Drama (New Delhi, India) in 1978, obtained his MA in Theatre Studies from the University of Warwick (UK) in 1989 and his PhD (on “Indigenous Theatrical Performances in Bangladesh: Its History and Practices”) from the University of Dhaka in 1997. He founded the Department of Theatre and Music at the University of Dhaka in 1994 and served as its Chair till 1997. He has taught at the Antioch College, USA (1990), King Alfred’s University, UK (2002) and San Francisco City College, USA (2005). He has also given numerous workshops on theatre in Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, Nepal, and Germany. He has over 50 research articles to his credit, some of which have been published in TDR: The Drama Review, New Theatre Quarterly, Asian Theatre Journal, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, and Research in Drama Education. His full-length publications in English are Acinpākhi Infinity: Indigenous Theatre in Bangladesh and In Praise of Niranjan: Islam, Theatre, and Bangladesh. His next full-length publication, Against Orientalist Grain: Performance and Politics Entwined with a Buddhist Strain, is expected to be published from Kolkata, India, in June 2008.

Syed Jamil Ahmed’s performance credits include direction of over 20 plays including The Wheel by Selim al-Deen (English translation of Chaka, jointly directed with Denny Partridge) at the Antioch College, Yellow Springs, Ohio, USA in 1990; an adaptation of Bisad Sindhu (a 19th century prose narrative on the Karbala tragedy by Meer Musharraf Hussein) in Dhaka in 1992; Kamala Ranir Sagar Dighi (devised from the indigenous theatre form of Pala Gan performed by Islamuddin Palakar) at the Department of Theatre and Music, University of Dhaka in 1997; Ek Hazar and Ek Thi Rate (an adaptation of A Thousand and One Nights) with Tehrik-i-Niswan, in Karachi in 1998; Behular Bhasan (an adaptation of the Manasa-mangal) with the Department of Theatre and Music, University of Dhaka in 2004 and 2005; and Pahiye (Hindi translation of Chaka) at the National School of Drama, New Delhi, India in 2006. Many of these plays have travelled to theatre festivals held in Kolkata, Agartala, New Delhi, and Islamabad. He has also designed the set for over 70 performances and lighting for over 80 performances in Bangladesh, India and Pakistan. He received two Fulbright fellowships (in 1990 and 2005) and his major areas of interest are Indigenous Theatre of South Asia and Theatre for Development.