Anandamath, or The Sacred Brotherhood: A Book Review
Ketaki Kushari Dyson
Bankimcandra
Chatterji, Anandamath, or The Sacred Brotherhood,
Translated with an Introduction and Critical Apparatus by Julius
J. Lipner, Oxford University Press, New York, 2005, ISBN
0-19-517858-0
Julius J. Lipner is
Professor of Hinduism and the Comparative Study of Religion, and
Chairman of the Faculty Board of Divinity at the University of
Cambridge in England. Half-Czech and half-Indian by birth, he grew up
in West Bengal and received his initial education in Calcutta, at St
Xavier’s School and Jadavpur University. When he e-mailed me
out of the blue, asking me to be on a panel of speakers at the launch
of his latest book at the Nehru Centre in London, I felt honoured,
but at the same time somewhat diffident, for I was in no sense a
Bankimchandra expert: I had neither done any scholarly research on
him, nor written on him, as had Sudipta Kaviraj, another scholar
invited to speak.
I began my talk in a light vein, pointing out that
I did have something in common with Bankimchandra Chatterjee, which
the audience would never guess. The fact is that Bankim and I share
the same date of birth! He was born exactly 102 years before me.
Perhaps this knowledge did influence me and my life’s path in
some subtle way. I was secretly very proud of the fact. My father was
a great admirer of Bankim and bought me a complete set of his novels
when I was just ten. By the time I was eleven, I had given a
preliminary reading to all the novels. Later on, my father encouraged
me to read Krishnacharitra and Kamalakanter Daptar. If
I had been born in 1838 like Bankim, he would not have played the
role in my life that he has done. Because I was born a century after
him, he could become a kind of role model. He was always there, a
venerable classic figure from whose books one could draw strength and
guidance, and learn how to write good Bengali.
As
if to fulfil some kind of internalized discipleship, I managed to get
my second connection with the great man. When I first graduated in
Calcutta, it was with English Literature as my Honours subject, but I
also obtained the highest marks in the compulsory Bengali paper, thus
getting the coveted Bankimchandra Chatterjee Medal. That too acted as
a signpost in my life. At the time I got the medal after his name, I
was just eighteen years old, and a budding poet. When, twenty years
later, I made the decision to become a full-time writer and began
writing my first novel, in Bengali, it was as if Bankim was quietly
smiling at me. Some of my friends and family members did comment that
it was an entirely appropriate decision for someone who had got the
Bankim Medal.
So it is not as a Bankim scholar, but as a Bengali
who grew up with the Bankim heritage and eventually became a Bengali
writer, and thus an uttarasuri of Bankim, acknowledging him as
a purvasuri, that I approach this new translation of
Anandamath. The first thing I wish to say is that Julius
Lipner has to be congratulated for putting this edition together. A
translation of a classic into a contemporary idiom is always welcome.
An old book is given a rebirth and a new lease of life among a
different set of readers. And the critical apparatus Lipner has
provided is erudite and impressive. I haven’t sat and compared
his version with the original novel line by line. I have just dipped
into his translation here and there, and my overall impression is
positive. Lipner’s language is crisp and racy. No doubt there
are spots where I might say to him: ‘This phrase might have
been translated better this way,’ but in the case of literary
translation no two persons ever agree about every issue. Lipner has
produced a fluent and eminently readable translation, which is a
laudable achievement. I must add that I really like his translation
of the Vande Mataram hymn; it is poetic and rhythmic; the translation
of the line ‘tomari protima gori mandire mandire’ as
‘Yours the form we shape in every shrine’ is particularly
felicitous and appropriate.
His editorial decision to transliterate the
Bengali letter cha sometimes with a ch (as in
‘Chatterji’) as is common in English and sometimes with a
c in the fashion of Sanskritists (as in ‘Bankimcandra’)
has left me somewhat bemused. Though this is a minor point, it has
the potential to confuse some readers.
The long Introduction merits close study.
Interestingly, Lipner has felt the need to justify ‘the
viability of literary translation’ (p. 109) – I suppose
because he was initially trained not in literature, but in another
discipline. But translation matters even in religious studies, and
Lipner cannot be unaware of that. Referring to our globalized world,
he speaks of ‘the inevitability of translation in modern
times’, but of course linguistic translation has played a
seminal role in human intellectual endeavour throughout history.
Indian stories were retold and emerged in Aesop’s fables; the
Arabs translated Greek texts and brought new knowledge to Europe; the
translation of the Bible played an important role in the history of
Christianity; in India, where would we be without our vernacular
versions of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata? And in so
far as Lipner is an Oriental scholar, he is himself an uttarasuri
of men like Charles Wilkins and Sir William Jones, who translated
Sanskrit texts and changed European perspectives.
So my message is: ‘Never fear, literary
translation is a valid and extremely valuable intercultural
act!’ Lipner asks: ‘Is Bengali a “subaltern”
language? And does translation from Bengali into a world language
like English, which dominates the global landscape today, serve only
to endorse Bengali’s subject status, indeed to undermine its
linguistic identity?’ (p. 119)
In my personal opinion, Bengali is certainly not a
‘subaltern’ language; I do not think that the adjective
can be applied like that. I find this ‘subaltern’ a very
problematic and insidious term: I don’t really trust it as a
concept, and I agree with Lipner that it ‘calls for
considerable contextual analysis’ (p. 119). If one accepts this
kind of classification, one can easily become a subaltern. One
of the reasons why I devote a good part of my time in diaspora to
writing in Bengali is to remain my own captain and avoid being a
subaltern of the London literary establishment. As for the second
question in Lipner’s set of two questions, I wonder how the
translation of a Bengali literary text into English can endorse the
language’s subject status, or undermine its linguistic
identity. If anything, the act of translation surely enhances the
status of our language, puts it on the map! It would be a strange
predicament indeed for us Bengali writers if others will not learn
Bengali to read us, and nor can we be translated without our language
losing its status and even its identity! It is as if we could never
win, and must live in perpetual purdah. Others must not be allowed to
read us! This particular question of Lipner’s puzzled me very
much until he revealed, at the book launch, that this strange opinion
was actually held by certain academics in Delhi who specialize in
translation theory. It reminds me of those tribal people who do not
like being photographed because they believe that the act of being
photographed means that your soul or spirit is somehow being stolen.
Lipner has been shy about putting in more analyses
of an overtly literary nature in his Introduction. In his Procedural
Note he says that his Introduction ‘is not intended to be
primarily a literary analysis of the novel, though it contains many
literary observations.’ Later on he says that its aim is ‘more
modest: to put the novel in context, and to suggest trains of thought
that might open up the text to a deeper understanding’ (p. 48).
I can see where he is coming from, from his own discipline of
religious studies, and I have great faith in interdisciplinary
research, and believe that there are many angles from which one can,
and should, look at a literary text and thereby receive illumination,
yet I would argue that when discussing a novel, the literary context
ought to be the crucial context, the context that in an otherwise
interdisciplinary investigation coordinates, binds together, and
unifies the research work; otherwise one can get trapped in endless
controversies from which there is no exit. To treat a foreign
literary text solely as an example of religious belief, or a
political project, or a heady mixture of both religion and politics,
downplaying the literary aspect, is perhaps to make it an alien
Other, and if a joke is permitted, even to subalternize it! It
is similar to treating Tagore only as a religious teacher, a hallowed
Gurudev, and not seeing him as an artist first.
Lipner’s discussion of the religion and
politics in Anandamath is indeed very informed and nuanced;
and I agree with most things in it; I am suggesting that putting it
within an overall literary framework would have only saved him a lot
of unnecessary hassle. Yes, Anandamath may have been used in
politics, whether by nationalists in the past, or by the Hindu right
of modern times, but that is certainly not the primary way I read it
when growing up in Bengal. First and foremost, I read it as a novel,
not as a historical novel in the precise sense, but certainly as a
novel which made statements about certain historical events. Locating
his narrative in the time of ‘chhiyattorer manvantar’ or
the famine of the Bengali year 1176, Bankim clarifies how in the
1770s the era of Muslim rule in Bengal was over and why British rule
was to be welcomed. The nawabs of Bengal had become degenerate
rulers, not looking after their subjects. In that way they had
betrayed the people and forfeited support. Bengali Hindus needed to
cooperate with their new masters because they could learn new things
from them. But they are not being asked to become slaves; surely the
era of foreign rule must also come to an end one day, because isn’t
love of the motherland a central theme of the novel?
I must honestly admit that when I was growing up
in Bengal in the fifties I did not come across people who thought of
Anandamath as an anti-Muslim book or as having an anti-Muslim
agenda. Nor did I think in that way myself. I couldn’t, because
I saw this book as part of a literary corpus, one novel amongst other
novels written by Bankim. How could the creator of a character like Ayesha in Durgeshnandini and the
many Muslim characters portrayed with sympathy in Rajsinha be anti-Muslim? In my opinion, the
contextualized criticism of 18th-century Muslim rule in
Bengal contained in Anandamath does not automatically make it
an ‘anti-Muslim’ book. It is only in my British life that
I have become aware that some people view the book as anti-Muslim. I
must say that I do not agree with the opinions Lipner quotes from
Tanika Sarkar or Akbar Ahmed, and I agree with the way he deals with
their opinions.
On pp. 67-68 of Lipner’s book Tanika Sarkar
is quoted as saying: ‘Since the British have something to
impart to the Hindu, Hindu empowerment, it seems, must unfold within
an overarching colonial framework. It is the Muslim, the vanquisher
of generations of past Hindus, who will be the great adversary of the
new Hindu. This is the concluding note and message of Anandamath.’
I sense a hiatus between the first sentence and the second sentence.
There seems to be a non sequitur there. That Hindu empowerment
would happen within a colonial framework is obvious, and this is part
of the novel’s concluding message, but why the Muslim would in
future be ‘the great adversary of the Hindu’ is not
explained, and I certainly do not see this as part of the novel’s
concluding message.
On p. 70 of Lipner’s book Akbar Ahmed is
quoted as saying: ‘There is a direct causal relationship
between Anandamath, written in 1882, and the destruction of
the mosque at Ayodhya in 1992.’ Faced with this kind of
reasoning, one could well ask whether in that case there was ‘a
direct causal relationship’ between the Koran and the
destruction, by Muslims, of numerous Hindu temples in India in the
past.
As for the Hindu right using the text of
Anandamath for their own purposes, we all know that the devil
can quote from the scriptures for his own purposes. Now that Lipner
has made a new translation available, with an excellent critical
apparatus, people can think through these issues again, and more
carefully.
The use of religious imagery to enliven patriotism
in the Vande Mataram hymn is certainly not jingoistic or bigoted. It
is a beautiful, stirring poem in praise of the motherland. My mother
taught me the words and the tune in which it is usually sung before
I read the book. It is a patriotic song which begins in the shape of
a hymn, but it is not partisan or exclusive or anti-anything. It is
asking people to think of the land as a mother, which is a perfectly
legitimate exercise of the human imagination. The earth as a mother
is an important image in the poetry of Tagore. Does that make Tagore
suspect? The identification of the Motherland and the Mother Goddess
in Bankim is, as Lipner rightly points out, through the fusion of the
clay of the image and the clay of the motherland (p. 88). I myself
used the clay image in one of my English poems; writing about severe
floods just before the Durga Puja in 1978, I wrote:
Not
She who laughs above Her soggy icons,
but
our land, huts, bodies
are
the infinite shapes of clay.
Does that make me a
partisan poet? Poetry may have philosophical elements, but is not
identical with philosophy. Poetry proceeds through concrete images,
by making elusive ideas incarnate, giving them bodies and names, and
is always embedded in cultural contexts. European poetry is often
steeped in Christian imagery, but we do not object to that, do we?
Traditional images are simply part of a poet’s toolbox. A poet
has the right to use the tools at his or her disposal. There is no
sinister agenda behind that.
I do think that acknowledging Anandamath as
a literary text gets us out of unnecessary controversies. There may
be a nationalist project in it, but first and foremost it is a
literary text. I do not agree with the Bengali critic from whom
Lipner quotes on p. 107, who says that Anandamath is not a
novel, but a nineteenth-century parable of indigenousness, that there
are many actors in this novel, but not a single character-portrayal.
It may not be one of Bankim’s top novels, but it is a work of
fiction all right. Bhavananda and Jibananda are certainly not mere
types. Kalyani, Shanti, and Jibananda’s spirited sister
Nimaimoni are not types, but credible women. If we neglect the female
characters in the novel, we miss much of the humour. Gauri Devi
cooking is drawn in brief brush-strokes, but is unforgettable.
Shanti’s cross-dressing might have been derived by Bankim from
Shakespeare’s plays. I think the female is important in this
novel not only through the mother-image and the image of the faithful
wife and loyal companion, but also through the daughter-image. After
all, it is a little girl, the daughter of Kalyani and Mahendra, who
is miraculously saved. The child that escapes murder is not a boy,
but a girl. She is cherished. The novelist is determined to save her.
Straightforward literary-biographical analysis tells us that Bankim,
as an enlightened father of three daughters and with no sons, and as
someone who enjoyed companionship with his wife, writes about the
girl-child with deep sympathy.
Looking at the book as a novel also shows us the
Muslim question in perspective. The agon or ‘contest’
in Bankim’s soul that Lipner hints at is also part of the
‘sthaan-kaal’ of the novel: the 1770s, the collapse of
Muslim rule in Bengal, and the great famine of the Bengali year 1176.
The novelist is not making a final statement about any community for
all time, but showing characters speaking and interacting in an
imagined juncture of time. As someone who has written both novels and
plays, I feel bound to point out that dialogues put in the mouths of
fictional or dramatic characters do not define the novelist or
dramatist. Characters are speaking, not the author in his own person.
Macbeth, not Shakespeare, is the murderer. It is a fact that when
people are angry, they swear and use bad language. A writer portrays
such scenes, but that does not mean that such language necessarily
mirrors the author’s personal thoughts or attitudes. Similarly,
as Lipner rightly points out, the location of the Sannyasi rebellion
and of the temple complex and similar details are worked out by the
author using both his observed realities and his imagination. A novel
or a drama is always a composite material.
I end with a couple of comments. Personally, I
find bhadralok, like subaltern, an overworked category,
but I am not sure why Lipner identifies the bhadralok with men
only (p. 4). I would say that women also belong to it, are included
in it, and that is how some other historians see it. Secondly, when
he says, on the same page, that ‘women’s emancipation as
we understand it today was hardly a gleam in anyone’s eye’,
the exact period being referred to is not altogether clear from the
context. It gets blurred. Is he talking about the end of the 18th
century, or the middle of the 19th? If the reference is to
the middle of the 19th century, then one must point out
that by then the question of women’s emancipation, especially
their education, had certainly become a gleam in the eyes of some
people. This was an important issue in the Bengal Renaissance. Suttee
was made illegal in 1829, the Victoria School, later the celebrated
Bethune School for Girls, was founded in 1849, and the act permitting
Hindu widows to remarry was passed in 1856. According to the scholar
Ghulam Murshid, women’s writings in Bengali began to appear in
print from the 1850s onwards. And in the oral tradition there were
nursery rhymes, songs, and fairy tales composed by women long before
that.
But
these are minor questions. This book is undoubtedly a fine addition
to the treasury of Bengali literature available in English
translation, and I recommend it to both scholars and lay readers.
(This review is based
on a talk given at The Nehru Centre, London, on 18 November 2005, on
the occasion of the launch of the book.)
Published December 12, 2005
Ketaki Kushari Dyson [ketakI
kushaarI Daaisan*] was born in Calcutta in 1940 and educated at Calcutta and Oxford. She has been based in England since ... (more)
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