kriticulture

The Middle Finger By Saikat Majumdar Simon & Schuster, 2022 Rs. 599 Saikat Majumdar writes charming ascetic prose. It has the power and lightness of a dancer's musculature and flows limpid and deep like a poem. And it delivers shocks of recognition in shafts of soft, evocative light.  I have read the novel three times and felt refreshed with each reading. In fact the opening chapter, which initiates the reader into a world of slaughter, death, survival and loneliness, possesses the wholeness of a standalone story. But then it is strategically positioned in the complex structure of a larger narrative that traces a sphere around a layered labyrinth. The fragile, fearful world of the opening chapter will upend another world, a world of privilege and self-assurance (howsoever tentative). With a mere middle finger, a whole world will be overturned. Subversion is the beating heart of the novel. But it is no easy thing, much less an easy obvious theme. It is complicated work, defia...

  Translated from Punjabi by Rajesh Sharma you don ’ t know how I ’ m counted in poetry: like some carcass-eating dog that has strayed into a full-blown mujra   perhaps you wonder what I write late into the nights in the light of a lamp for some party engaged in dangerous things   you don ’ t know how I go to poetry: like a rustic woman in new clothes of outworn fashion who steps, bewildered, into city shops   I ask of poetry nail polish for you coloured embroidery thread for my younger sister bitter medicine to treat father ’ s cataract   poetry sees mischief in such demands   every month night after night it sends for me its sentinels carrying batons of cane and guns with polished butts they take away my beloved books my childhood picture from the shelf and my first love ’ s cry that slipped on the stairs and, hurt, was broken into a disconsolate rainbow   you don ’ t know...

Photo by Amarjit Chandan (This essay was written in 2008. A short version appeared in The Tribune in 2007 here https://m.tribuneindia.com/2007/20070909/spectrum/book5.htm) Pash would have been 58 now if, twenty years ago, his life had not been violently cut short by those who found his pen far deadlier than their automatic guns. The warrior-poet that he was, he would not have allowed his pen to rust either. Over the short period that he lived to write (1970-1988), he had matured so quickly that one can only speculate what all he would have accomplished had he survived those mean bullets. One thing is certain: the last two decades would have deeply troubled him and aroused in him even more of that lucid fury which so distinctively marks his poetry and thought. The world has greatly changed over the last two decades. What has been called a new world order has, beginning immediately after his death in 1988, overtaken the old. The complexity of this order is matched only by its sh...

    Seven Poems of Pash   Translated from Punjabi by Rajesh Sharma       Of all things the most terrible to be robbed of one ’ s labour               is not the most terrible of things to suffer torture by the police               is not being sold off for a fistful of greed –               no, no, it ’ s not   bad it is to be taken unprepared and bad to freeze in silence from fear               yet it is not of all things               the most terrible   to see your truth go down to deceit               is bad  ...