NEW Quest

The poets of West Bengal are divided in their interpretation of Postmodernism. One group led by Moloy Roychoudhury (b.1939) (of “Hungry Generation” fame) and his brother Samir Roychoudhury think that western Postmodernism should be adopted in its entirety and translated into Bangla poetry as it is, because, as a result of globalization, the people of West Bengal share the same experience of the people of the West. They have been propagating the postmodernist ideas through the little magazines, Hawa 49 and Kabita Pakshik. They have coined the term ‘adhunantika’ to denote Postmodernism. The other group is led by Anjan Sen (b.1951) and Amitabha Gupta (b.1947), and the little magazines Lal Nakshatra and Gangeo Patra carry their view. Anjan Sen and Amitabha Gupta have coined the word “UttarAdhunikata” to denote their conception of Postmodernism; but they refuse to equate it with the western concept of Postmodernism. They think that UttarAdhunikata is a product of the specific postcolonial realities of Bengal and its roots are in the folk life and folk-literature of Bengal through the ages. The “postmoderns” of the Moloy/Samir group call their poetry “Adhunantika”. The two camps are at war, and it seems at the moment that their conflicting claims are irreconcilable within any theoretical framework.

Adhunantika

According to the “Adhunantika” postmodernists of West Bengal, science and technology have dealt a crushing blow at all meanings and meaningfulness – the phenomenon of the postmodern age can be recorded only through a poetic language that bases itself on disjunction, illogicality and indeterminacy. Evidently, the Postmodernists of this particular brand posit great belief in Derridean Deconstruction: they have adopted the tenets of “textual post-structuralism” as dogma. Moloy Roychoudhury, of course, likes to connect Postmodernism not with its conventional seats in the European and American academia but would rather trace its origin in the third world countries like Nicaragua and Brazil. He writes (in English):

Before the rubric postmodern got decomposed in the western developed morgues of such caretakers as Jean-Francois Lyotard, Jurgen Habermas, Michel Foucault, Michel Pecheux, Frederic Jameson, David Harvey and other eggheads of the erstwhile occidental empires which had transformed the beautiful lands of the southern hemispheres into nightmare spaces, the postmodern rubric had emerged as a culturo-spatial explanatory in Nicaragua and Brazil. The idea emerged in the mind of Federico de Onis, a Latin American poet of postcolonial hybridized society in 1934, and not in the laboratory of a university professor of a colonizing power. The capture and the conversion of the lexicon postmodern itself reveal the volatility, spatiality, power-play, word-game, culture-politics, ideological manipulations, non-foundationality, glocalizability, continuous contemporaneity, indeterminacy, etc. inherent in the word postmodern.
(Roychoudhury 2003:39)

According to Moloy Roychoudhury and his colleagues, the modern age in Bangla poetry has come to an end, and therefore the word “Adhunantika” should be used to denote this postmodernist phase. They are in favour of waging an all-out war against those who are still propagating Modernist ideas in their poetry. In this, of course, they are at one with the “UttarAdhunik” group, because for the “UttarAdhuniks also the main adversaries are the proponents of mainstream Bangla poetry like Sunil Gangopaddhay (b.1934), Joy Goswami (b.1954), and others. Moloy Roychoudhury’s enmity with Sunil Gangopaddhay has, of course, a history: during his “Hungry Generation” days of the sixties, his main adversary was Sunil Gangopaddhay. That project having failed tragically, Roychoudhury’s newer project of postmodern poetry faces a great challenge from the establishment represented by the media giant Anandabazar. On the other hand, Anjan Sen’s theorizations of “UttarAdhunik” poetry have been scoffed at by such mainstream luminaries as Alokeranjan Dasgupta (b.1933).1 Samir Roychoudhury and Rudra Kingshuk in their book, Postmodern Biraler Sandhaney (in Quest of the Postmodern Cat) mentioned 20 features of postmodern (Adhunantika) poetry. Prabhat Choudhury has summarized them in the following way:

The absence of subject-centricity. In the Adhunantika poetry there is no fixed subject-centre, thought-centre or central theme.
In Postmodern poetry the framework of logic is absent. A poem is open-ended rather than close-ended.
Adhunantika poetry is multilinear, multicornered, pluralistic and indeterminate (“bidishamoy”).
Modern poetry inheriting from imperialist ideas was individualistic. The ‘I’ is absent in Adhunantika poetry.
The poet can gather his ideas from any areas of life. The poet or the reader no longer accepts do’s and don’ts.
The Postmodern poet knows that it is impossible to imitate reality. That is why Postmodern is creating hyper-reality.
Many poets end their poems in such a way that they seem unfinished.
Any speech-product of life is a discourse. In Adhunantika poetry, this discourse is deconstructed.
In Adhunantika poetry, there is a tendency to circumnavigate or break up symbols.
Adhunantika poetry does not erect any ideals. It only denotes a journey.
Adhunantika keeps possibilities open. It talks of heterotopia.
Adhunantikata is no predetermined theory. It observes life and considers its symptoms before starting its journey.
In Postmodern poetry the native importance of language is valued.
One important symptom of a Postmodern poem is the presence of logical crack or logical cleft.
If modernity is like a decorated garden, Postmodern poetry is rhyzomatic, i.e. like the grass.
It is not possible to erect an image of the poet from a Postmodern poem.
Postmodern poetry wants to cross all boundaries. Consequently, it is not possible to restrict it within any fixed definition.
It is no longer possible to link a poem to the poet’s political ideology.
Postmodern poetry is superimposed by undivided totality and great equipoise. It is no longer possible to locate it within binary opposites.
Modernist poetry reflected the spirit of humanism. Man has been praised there. Today, insects, animals and birds, plants, cups-dishes-spoons, dinner table, ashtrays, nose-rings, website, potato-growing, punctuation – everything is a subject for poetry. Only one side is not its target: the poet is “bidisha moshgul” (engrossed in waylessness?)2 (Choudhury 2002: 15-16).

Postmodern Bangla Kabita edited by Prabhat Choudhury is a kind of definitive anthology of Adhunantika poetry of West Bengal. Later on we shall see the similarity of a strand of Bangladeshi poetry of the nineties with this special brand of postmodernist Bangla poetry. The anthology showcases 96 poets of various age groups – from Utpal Kumar Basu (b.1936) of the sixties to the youngest Sheikh Azahar. In the Introduction, Prabhat Choudhury has hinted at the variety of subjects and styles of these poets. What strikes the reader is the fanciful experimentation with theme and language. For example, one poem by Rajatendra Mukhopaddhay is titled “Anarosh and Hemingway”; in Koushik Chattopaddhay’s poem 3 objects are juxtaposed in the style of the British poet Ian Hamilton Finlay’s “Found Poetry”3- a house nameplate, a shop ad and a doctor’s namecard:

Rajatshubhra Mazumdar (b.1980) wrote poems with titles taken from Tagore songs. One of them is “Tomar premey aghat achey neiko abahela”; but the body of the poem has no connection with the title whatsoever- it rather reads like a lesson in high school geometry:

A certain straightline of life-length YM is drawn. From Y point YZ a section equal to the hopelessness of 397 days is cut. Now on the Y point we draw <XYZ equal to the sadness of 25 November. And on the Z point we draw in the same way, XYZ
equal to the shock of 25 November. Now the YX and ZX straightlines will cut each other at this point. This point has been given the name X. In this way the triangular pain XYZ is drawn.

(Rajatashubhra Majumdar, “Tomar premey aghat achey naiko abahela”, Postmodern Bangla Kabita)

A number of poets have written with a mock-scientific veneer: they use scientific terminologies and catchphrases jocularly, the ostensible purpose being to give either amusement or shock to the reader. Here is an excerpt from Samir Roychoudhury:

It is probably Pranab Pal who shows the greatest gimmick in what he calls “Bhashabadaler Kabita” (Poems of Language-change). One poem runs thus:

To Dashbati/ The museum in the head is waking up. From the mummification in Egypt a blue nostalgia around the behag-note. Sadness has gulped down a cup of the great space. Stars and galaxies at the fingertips. One breastful writing I do on a ream of air. The liquor of the tea is flying away, the sea-coloured girl is flying away, sea morning. The swollen veins on the card-players hands, etc.)
(Pranab Pal, “Dashbatikey”, Postmodern Bangla Kabita)

Debashis Bhattacharya writes about the various articles of furniture:

What’s the harm if another name of furniture is woman? Look, the table of the other day is two-legged today: on it the sunmica is spotted with the marks of hot rice-plates… a chair, - a woman, with a sari of the ad, at eleven in the night the woman turns into a chair
(Debashis Bhattacharya, “Ashbabpatra o nari” [Furniture
and women], Postmodern Bangla Kabita)

Most of the poems in Postmodern Bangla Kabita are exercises in oddity: in the name of mathematical propositions, queer theorems have been concocted; in the garb of scientific jargon, meaningless words have been heaped up in poem after poem. On thing is clear from these “postmodernist” experiments is that a section of the young poets of West Bengal is bent upon subverting the structures of meaning and thus defamiliarize the socio-cultural contexts that occasion them. These experimenters in West Bengal have taken the western concept of Postmodernism as an article of faith. The following observation of D.W. Fokkema in his Harvard lecture fits these poets quite squarely: “…the postmodernist has completely given up the attempt at explaining… In the universe of postmodernism words invent our world, words shape our world, words are becoming the sole justification of our world… the narrator has neither a past, nor a future attachments nor worries… does not distinguish between relevant or irrelevant.”5 It seems, anything now goes in the name of novelty – any quaint gesticulation passes as Postmodernist.

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