D Kendall

India, day 19, 10 January 2023

The last few days I’ve mostly spent reading apart from a very pleasant picnic, my first Bengali picnic, where we ate hot food (temperature wise). I read recently that the Portuguese introduced chili to India, its origins being given as Mexico (among other places in the Americas). I wonder what Bengali food was like before the introduction of chili, an important ingredient now, which I’ve become rather used to.

I decided to concentrate for a week or so on reading more about St Jerome and try to move that project forward. I’ve re-read most of Kelly’s biography and found what looks like a very interesting book on Jerome and the Renaissance, which I hope will shed light on the many paintings of the saint in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

It’s also provided me a small haul of new and half familiar words (also from some other sources).

I’ve come across “parturition” (childbirth) and “encomiastic” (an adjective formally expressing pride) but they weren’t part of my active vocabulary but “paratactic” (describing a style of writing in which sentences or elements of sentences are set out successively with no indication of relationship), “tropology” (figurative language) and “passerine” (related to birds that perch) were all new. “Paratactic” cropped up when reading about translating from Hebrew as (according to Kelly), it is a paratactic language which can make for awkward reading in a literal translation. There are also “syntaxis” and “hypotaxis” (when some elements of the sentence are more important than others.

From a recent Times Literary Supplement, I’ve also learned “gustatory” (concerned with taste).

And some words that excited my interest in etymology; “ramshackle” meaning disorderly which is an altered form of the obsolete “ransackled”, ransacked, which apparently originates from the Old Norse “rann” meaning house + search. And “fornication” which has its origins in the Latin “fornix” for arch, the explanation being that prostitutes sometimes stood in arches while soliciting customers. It’s apparently from Late Latin, i.e. mediaeval Latin and I’m not therefore sure whether the prostitutes in question were Roman or mediaeval.

I’ve struggled to get a grip on Jerome’s various translations to avoid confusing the Greek Septuagint, the translation of the Old Testament by 70 or 72 translators (if you prefer having six translators each from the 12 tribes of Israel) who miraculously produced identical translations, with the Vulgate or other translations.

Unfortunately, the various copies of the translation from Hebrew to Greek (and later to Latin) were far from identical in Jerome’s time and he eventually took on the enormous task of producing a new translation of much of the Old Testament directly from Hebrew into Latin, which eventually became the standard translation for the Catholic church. But much of the initial reaction to his labours, first to revise the existing Latin translation and then to begin afresh, was negative as it was regarded as tinkering with the word of God. Jerome wasn’t always diplomatic with his critics, referring to them as two-legged asses on one occasion.

I shall continue on this track for a couple of days as well as reading about Puri in the neighbouring state of Odisha where I’ll stay for four days next week. So far I know that 93 per cent of the population are Hindus, that there are many interesting temples there, especially in the state capital Bhubaneswar, that the language spoken there is called Odia and that in colonial times, the state was called Orissa. The colonial name stirs vague memories of my stamp collection from long ago; presumably the patchwork of arrangements of rule, direct and indirect, during the colonial period was reflected in stamp issues. Not so long ago I got hold of a copy of a Stanley Gibbons catalogue and was fascinated by recognising stamps that I hadn’t seen for over 60 years but where the visual memory was tucked away in some nook or cranny of my brain.

In my moments of rest from reading about translation in the days of yore, I’ve indulged in idle surfing, checking Baltimore, place of publication of one of my Jerome sources. Apparently named after an English aristocrat named Baltimore, it became a place of refuge for Catholics. I can’t remember the track I took but it led to me to St Giles Palladian church in Holborn, which I realise I’ve never looked at despite nearby Charing Cross Road being very much part of my London and working for over a year in Carlisle St off Soho Square. I read about St Giles the Hermit and Chalfont St Giles in Buckinghamshire, a place I want to go to as the poet Milton’s house is there. And later reading about Cornish, which led me to the Scilly Islands, where I’ve never been but would also like to go. The January temperature seems very mild there so perhaps that’s a possible venue for escaping the Swedish winter and satisfying my need to tend to my Englishness, although it’s off every conceivable beaten track and I suspect the winter ferry ride from Penzance might have to be endured rather than enjoyed.

I’ve meant to keep a record of where such relaxed surfing leads me. But like a record of dreams, this remains at the vision stage. Perhaps I could interest my AI friend Alexa in this project – she would probably find it a stimulating change from my repeated requests to know which day it is (she does a great job of rescuing me from extremes of chronological anarchy).

Day 15 in India, Friday, 6 January

On the GT road, the great trunk road which once ran from Kabul to Dacca.  We first visit the Portuguese Catholic church at Bandel, one of the oldest Christian churches in India, wondering how they managed when taken over by the British, where Catholic churches were only exceptionally tolerated in mainland Britain until the nineteenth century. Perhaps there was a special dispensation – they could hardly have closed down all the Catholic churches in their empire.

We are heading for the village of Debandapur, birthplace of the Bengali novelist Saratchandra Chattopadhyay, through which the drying-up Saraswati river hardly flows. Chattopadhyay doesn’t have the same status as Tagore but he is none the less an important figure in Bengali literary history. The memorial building in the village has perhaps 30-40 cabinets with models showing scenes from the author’s life, his youth and adolescence in the village, publishing successes, a fire where one of his manuscripts was destroyed, his first wife and child, whom I believe died of plague, his second wife and contacts with other literary figures and honours bestowed. I like the ingenious and pedagogic approach, my appreciation greatly assisted by having the captions translated for me.

After Debandapur, we head back in the direction of Kolkata to Serampore, a Danish colony until 1845 when it was sold to the British, the Danes finding it hard to compete with the East India Company. Other than a fine church, St Olav’s with a Danish King’s initials on the wall, restored in collaboration by Denmark and India, there is not a lot to recall the Danish period. We sample the fare on offer at the Danish Tavern but stick to Bengali dishes as the Danish specialities, listing boiled vegetables, sound less than enticing. There is also a cemetery elsewhere in the town but the names on the graves have long since worn away so perhaps not so much to see there; dilapidated cemeteries are an environment that could favour mammalian-reptilian misunderstandings about natural location so I’m not sorry to give it a miss.

On the way back we pass from one end of Kolkata to the other, appreciating the vastness of this massive dense city. London is large from the Staines by-pass to Brentwood in the Far East but not this large and London also has substantial patches of greenery at Richmond and elsewhere to break up the urban.

Kolkata has seemingly endless rows of sometimes ramshackle shops and fine but neglected buildings. But the city is changing even in the few years I have known it. There are more and more gated upmarket blocks of flats ribbon developed along the access highways with their supermarkets, cake shops and other retail flotsam and jetsam of the rising middle classes, often only metres away from far more modest traditional lock-up shops. Central Kolkata’s attractions are perhaps too chaotic, the air too polluted for the upwardly mobile. But there are so many blocks being built, I ask myself whether it’s a bubble, whether there will be enough people earning enough money to buy all these flats. And I wonder what these people who live there do and who builds the flats – are the investors from Bengal or elsewhere and, if they are from Bengal, is this a sign of the growing robustness of Kolkata’s economy or of a lack of other profitable investment opportunities?

Day 13 India Wednesday, 4 January

A day in central Kolkata. It’s not more than 20 miles away but it takes the best part of an hour to get there with slow moving heavy traffic, first on the local road then on the by-pass. Even with slow moving traffic, the newspaper has daily reports of people getting killed or injured; poorly protected pedestrians sidestepping incautiously into the traffic flow, two-wheelers with precariously balanced sometimes side-sitting unhelmeted passengers falling off into the carriageway, unlit invisible night-time cyclists and bigger vehicles dodging and weaving, some bearing the motto “Safe traffic, save lives (or occasionally “Save traffic, safe lives”). A difficult environment for a dreamer who comes to a halt when thinking; my companion has to sharply refocus me several times; I explain about the phalanx of guardian angels with flaming swords surrounding me, which only I can see but I sense scepticism about their ability to deal with Kolkata’s dodgem race.

The city is covered by low yellow-grey cloud and I’m glad for my state-of-the-art mask, which keeps the particle-laden air at bay and enables me to avoid exhaustion. We are making for the university quarter and College St, still popularly known by its Anglo name. I’ve been there a couple of times before but by myself and didn’t then explore the alleys and find the publishers’ bookshops up anonymous flights of stairs. It’s wonderful to see compared with Sweden where a modest-sized town may lack a bookshop and where even Stockholm is now a thin city for bookshops, with Hedengrens hanging on and Akademiska Bokhandeln, which feels like a shadow of its formal self after the great purge of the shelf warmers a few years back. I find a couple of classics that have passed me by to read on the flight home – Galsworthy’s “The Forsyte Saga” and Wilkie Collins “The Moonstone”. I almost buy them but am put off by their poor quality with brown spots and generally scruffy appearance. Back home I remember the technical word for brown spots on old books, foxing. These books were badly foxed. I’m overambitious when I travel and the plane has often hardly left the home runway before I’ve concluded that my chosen reading demands more concentration than I can muster. Unfoxed Kindle it will have to be.

It’s intensive but very pleasurable to explore this area – despite being libro-chaste. There are a few cycle rickshaws here and a wonderful old tram, which I’d like to ride on.

We fail, however, to get into the Ashutosh art gallery with its fine collection of Indian art and objects, closed for Covid and not reopened. Hopefully, it just means it’s being refurbished. It’s a wonderful old place with few concessions to the uninitiated, no other visitors while I was there and convoluted requirements for information as I passed from gallery to gallery but I liked it, a museum’s museum.

We retreat to Peter Cat restaurant on Park Street and this time come in swiftly, forgetting about the pot-bellied man who slithers past the queue to gain a paltry few minutes (ideal Kendall wounds him to the quick with a cutting remark, real-existing Kendall hunches his shoulders to deal with life’s vale of tears).

 To enjoy Kolkata, you need oases where you can sit and rest from the exotic (and at times wretched). Staying in the centre on a previous trip in a small fifth-floor guest house with a swastika-decorated door, I could look down on the polluted cloud and a temple garden, fending off the kindly hotel staff  concerned about my sparrow appetite.  I honed my skills at getting through the city – investigating uncrowded parallel streets, finding places where I could safely cross roads, where I could eat and drink, I didn’t get as far as waymarking my trails with small cairns of rocks but I was tempted to do so.

You never quite get as much done in day trips to Kolkata as you plan. Everything takes time in the mega city whether it’s crossing the road or finding a cash machine. But despite the physical and mental strain, the wretched and the ramshackle alongside the super modern, I find the city fascinating with its wealth of associations and want to know more. I enjoyed my day but was glad to be able to remove my mask when I reached the purer air of rural Bengal and think that maybe tonight or tomorrow, the sky will be clear and I can look at the stars.

Day 12 India, Tuesday, 3 January 2023

Quiet reading days; I have been studying Bengali every day, reading Pagnol, thinking about my aims for 2023 (whether or not to make a plan for the year), reading an introduction to Hinduism (with a view to better understanding Indian art), planning my reading on imperialism and re-reading  J.N.D. Kelly’s biography of Jerome, the patron saint of translators with a view to writing some short pieces for a website. In Kelly’s notes, there is a reference to a letter from Jerome with his views on translation, which is also available on the net. I find it fascinating, a colleague wrestling with familiar problems more than 1,600 years ago.

 I am reproducing an extract here faute de mieux.

Jerome defends his method of translation

Jerome defends his method of translation with appeal to classical, ecclesiastical and New Testament writers. Letter 52 to Pemmachius, AD 395-396, p 112-119:

“5. In the above remarks I have assumed that I have made alterations in the letter and that a simple translation may contain errors though not wilful ones. As, however the letter itself shows that no changes have been made in the sense, that nothing has been added, and that no doctrine has been foisted into it, obviously their object is understanding to understand nothing; and while they desire to arraign another’s want of skill, they betray their own. For I myself not only admit but freely proclaim that in translating from the Greek (except in the case of the holy scriptures where even the order of the words is a mystery) I render sense for sense and not word for word. For this course I have the authority of Tully who has so translated the Protagoras of Plato, the Œconomicus of Xenophon, and the two beautiful orations which Æschines and Demosthenes delivered one against the other. What omissions, additions, and alterations he has made substituting the idioms of his own for those of another tongue, this is not the time to say. I am satisfied to quote the authority of the translator who has spoken as follows in a prologue prefixed to the orations. I have thought it right to embrace a labour which though not necessary for myself will prove useful to those who study. I have translated the noblest speeches of the two most eloquent of the Attic orators, the speeches which Æschines and Demosthenes delivered one against the other; but I have rendered them not as a translator but as an orator, keeping the sense but altering the form by adapting both the metaphors and the words to suit our own idiom. I have not deemed it necessary to render word for word but I have reproduced the general style and emphasis. I have not supposed myself bound to pay the words out one by one to the reader but only to give him an equivalent in value. Again at the close of his task he says, I shall be well satisfied if my rendering is found, as I trust it will be, true to this standard. In making it I have utilized all the excellences of the originals, I mean the sentiments, the forms of expression and the arrangement of the topics, while I have followed the actual wording only so far as I could do so without offending our notions of taste. If all that I have written is not to be found in the Greek, I have at any rate striven to make it correspond with it. Horace too, an acute and learned writer, in his Art of Poetry gives the same advice to the skilled translator:—

And care not with over anxious thought
To render word for word.

Terence has translated Menander; Plautus and Cæcilius the old comic poets. Do they ever stick at words? Do they not rather in their versions think first of preserving the beauty and charm of their originals? What men like you call fidelity in transcription, the learned term pestilent minuteness. Such were my teachers about twenty years ago; and even then I was the victim of a similar error to that which is now imputed to me, though indeed I never imagined that you would charge me with it. In translating the Chronicle of Eusebius of Cæsarea into Latin, I made among others the following prefatory observations: It is difficult in following lines laid down by others not sometimes to diverge from them, and it is hard to preserve in a translation the charm of expressions which in another language are most felicitous. Each particular word conveys a meaning of its own, and possibly I have no equivalent by which to render it, and if I make a circuit to reach my goal, I have to go many miles to cover a short distance. To these difficulties must be added the windings of hyperbata, differences in the use of cases, divergencies of metaphor; and last of all the peculiar and if I may so call it, inbred character of the language. If I render word for word, the result will sound uncouth, and if compelled by necessity I alter anything in the order or wording, I shall seem to have departed from the function of a translator. And after a long discussion which it would be tedious to follow out here, I added what follows:— If any one imagines that translation does not impair the charm of style, let him render Homer word for word into Latin, nay I will go farther still and say, let him render it into Latin prose, and the result will be that the order of the words will seem ridiculous and the most eloquent of poets scarcely articulate.”

W.H. Fremantle, G. Lewis and W.G. Martley. From Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series, Vol. 6. Edited by Philip Schaff and Henry Wace. (Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1893.)

Friday, 30 December 2022

Friday, 30 December 2022

I should pace myself, define my work sessions better and give the 77-year old a chance. Instead, I charge on and end up like today, feeling listless and uncreative. Or it might, more banally, just be the onset of a simple cold. But my mood also has to do with my starting to read one of the more serious books on my list, Shashi Tharoor’s “Inglorious Empire. What the British did to India”. 2016 (17). It’s part revulsion at what cupidity led the sometimes gormless younger sons of the aristocracy and unattractive others to do. But also an awareness of the extent of the task to try to understand how British colonialism and imperialism worked, the need to look at not just textiles, but the Indian steel industry, shipbuilding etc. and understand the effects of the clashes of social forces and that we are not dealing with the workings of a machine but a process where various outcomes were possible.

I have quoted five short extracts from Tharoor’s work below to give a feel of his book.

“In power, the British were, in a word, ruthless. They squeezed out other foreign buyers and instituted a [an East India] Company monopoly. They cut off export markets for Indian textiles interrupting longstanding independent trading links, As British manufacturing grew, they went further, Indian textiles were remarkably cheap. so much so that Britain’s cloth manufacturers, unable to compete, wanted them eliminated. The soldiers of the East India Company obliged, systematically smashing the looms of some Bengali weavers and according to at least one contemporary account (as well as a widespread if unverifiable, belief), breaking their thumbs so they could not ply their craft”. (p,6)

“India had enjoyed a 25 per cent share of the global trade in textiles in the early eighteenth century. But this was destroyed, the Company’s own stalwart administrator Lord William Bentinck wrote that ´the bones of the cotton weavers were bleaching the plains of India´. (p.7)

“The destruction of artisanal industries by colonial trade policies did not just impact the artisans themselves. The British monopoly of industrial production drove Indians to agriculture beyond levels the land could sustain. This in turn had a knock-on effect on the peasants, who worked the land, by causing an influx of newly disenfranchised people, formerly artisans, who drove down rural wages”. (p,7)

“Under the British, the share of industry in India’s GDP was only 1.8 per cent in 1913, and at its peak reached 7.5 per cent when the British left in 1947. Similarly, the share of manufactured goods in India’s exports climbed only slowly to a high of 30 per cent in 1947”. (p.9)

“As late as 1896, Indian mills produced only eight per cent of the total cloth consumed in India. By 1913, this had grown to 20 per cent, and the setbacks faced by Britain with the disruption of the World War 1 allowed Indian textile manufacturers to slowly recapture the domestic market. In 1936, 62 per cent of the cloth sold in India was made by Indians, and by the time the British left the country, 76 per cent (in 1946). (p.8)

I haven’t studied Tharoor’s sources. His extensive bibliography indicates that he is a serious and painstaking author. He is an academic but also a Congress politician. His book interests me a lot and I think will be of great value to me, not least the bibliography. My negative reactions so far are that I sometimes find it hard to pin down his sources (although that might only reflect the fact that I have only nibbled at the introductory pages, the balanced and weighty coming perhaps later. His description of India and its economy as it was before the British took charge makes it sound as if India was more advanced than I believed it to have been (although undoubtedly British actions led to rolling back development) and that the depiction of social forces, the possibility of Indian capital developing in the interstices of an increasingly bureaucratised empire, is not (so far) sharply drawn.

Revisionists would undoubtedly quibble with his statistics (and he would defend them). But I am broadly convinced of much what he says. I do not believe that the British were at any point in India to help what they regarded as a benighted and backward country, that was very largely an ideological smokescreen. They were there, both during the colonial and the imperial periods, to make money, and they did; the white man was not shouldering a burden, he (she) was a burden.

And if a thief, who has smashed up your house while removing your valuables, happens to leave a fine ladder and torch behind, this is not a mitigating circumstance (doffing my cap to the Indian railway system).

Thursday, 29 December

Masked and with my inhalator at the ready, I make my first trip into central Kolkata to Metcalfe Hall, once a public library and now an exhibition venue after refurbishment. The exhibition “Ami Kolkata” (I am Kolkata) is excellent with fine historical photographs, posters and other cultural items (see my Facebook page for photos).

I learn from Intach’s “Calcutta Built Heritage Today” that the design of Metcalfe Hall was based on the Temple of Winds in Athens, which I assume is the same as the Tower of the Winds; the similarity between this building and Metcalfe Hall is not immediately obvious to me but I’ll struggle for a while and see I can’t get my porticos, colonnades and verandas in order. According to Wiki, the Tower of the Winds was the first meteorological station in the world and there are eight sundials below the frieze depicting the eight wind deities Boreas (N), Kaikias (NE), Apeliotes (E), Eurus (SE), Notus (S), Livas (SW) Zephyrus (W) and Skiron (NW). I already knew Boreas and Zephyr but am pleased to make the acquaintance of the others. It feels good to see a well refurbished building as there are many fine, even exquisite, buildings in poor condition.

The Tower of the Winds inspired other buildings among them – St Pancras Church in London and the mausoleum of the founder of the Greek National Library, Panayis Vagliano at West Norwood cemetery, long on my list as one of the magnificent seven, the Victorian cemeteries of London.

St Pancras church has been in my thoughts but not “new” St Pancras church referred to here but Old St Pancras Church towards Camden. A sliver of the church graveyard had to be sacrificed to allow the Midland Railway access St Pancras station. The cavalier treatment of the unearthed bones caused a scandal and none other than Thomas Hardy, an architect in training at that time, was instructed to deal with the matter. His ingenious solution was to re-inter the skeletal remnants and stack the gravestones in a striking circle around a tree. Sadly, the tree was attacked by a fungus a couple of years ago and its saga is now all. I’m glad I managed to get there and photograph it.

This followed by coffee at the Old Post Office building, another restored architectural icon, and the Oxford Bookshop in Park St before being deterred by the 40-minute queue from a visit to Peter Cat, a favourite restaurant.  We make instead for the Metropolitan Library with its large collection of old and new books about Calcutta, among other topics, on dusty shelves with books replaced by readers in gay abandon so that the Bhagavad Gita is nestling alongside a handbook on environmental science.  But there is treasure to be found in the biblio wildlands and there is nothing wrong with the workspaces, it’s not at all crowded and will undoubtedly become one of my “oases” in the struggle to learn more about the megacity.

Finally, to a mall where I look for shortbread to replace my hosts’ massacred packet, victim of a nocturnal feeding frenzy. I find only digestive, which doesn’t quite obliterate the memory of my gluttony.

Back to base and now to continue reading Shashi Tharoor “Inglorious Empire. What the British did to India”, my daily Bengali and some Pagnol for a varied diet.

Wednesday, 28 December

I start the day by coming to terms with the cold-water washing machine. Before coming to India, I would have doubted its existence as this is not a machine dedicated to familiar 30 and 40 but actually cold water with special washing powder. My laundry session passes without incident apart from my emptying the machine when it had only paused to think about its next step. Any person with a normal relationship to the physical world would have stayed their hand on seeing that the machine was still half filled with water. Yours truly empties the machine and spends a soggy half hour rinsing and squeezing. But the crisis passes and my sticker certifying that this house has been trashed by David Kendall remains in my pocket for another day.

After my regular hour of Bengali, I make a start on Piers Breedon’s “The Decline and Fall of the British Empire 1781-1997”. One of my aims this trip is to learn more about how the British controlled the Indian economy in their interests and how that control weakened. Breedon is not so useful as India is only part of his study and much of it focuses on political rather than economic developments (and there is rather too much chit chat about the vagaries of the leading figures for my taste). However, there are a couple of points that interested me. He tells us (writing about the 1930s on p. 385) that “the economic ties between the two countries were unravelling. Indian business was developing independently of Britain…Between the wars, it became clear to the British that, despite fluctuations in benefits conferred and costs incurred, India was a declining asset. In particular, the subcontinent was manufacturing its own cotton goods as well as importing cheap fabrics from Japan and it no longer provided a large captive market for the products of Lancashire. Moreover, threatened with resignations from the Viceroy’s Executive Council, Britain could not even prevent India from imposing a protective tariff on English textiles”. I’d assumed before that independence was key for the loosening of British control but here it seems that it was a longer process. There was also a reference to B.R. Tomlinson’s “The Political Economy of the Raj 1914-1947” which looks as if it could be seriously useful. Not much time will pass before Amazon India’s motorcycle makes its hopefully careful way up our country path…

The other point, not directly related to my focus but still of general interest consisted of comments about the Labour Party’s take on independence in the years before 1947. According to Brendon (p. 401), “Paradoxically [hmm], Nehru had more respect for Churchill, whom he considered an honourable foe, than for the ‘humbugs of the British Labour Party’. Many of them were humbugs. They were staunch enemies of imperialism yet (in Herbert Morrison’s classic phrase) ‘great friends with the jolly old Empire’. They were committed to Indian self-government but vague about how and when it would be achieved. Yet if Labour politicians were more apt to prate about principles than the Tories, they scarcely differed from them in practice. Socialists were unwilling to sacrifice Britain’s global position to anti-colonial dogma. In the words of Ernest Bevin, the hard-boiled Foreign Secretary, ‘if the British Empire fell, the greatest collection of free nations would go into the limbo of the past’. Bevin actually wanted to stand firm and draft in younger men to hold India¨. And elsewhere on p,400, Attlee’s comment in response to an initiative by Viceroy Wavell that he was ‘frankly horrified by the prospect of ceding power to a ‘brown oligarchy’. Not exactly staunch anti-imperialists.

Otherwise, I made some progress on my interpretation of my photo of a shrine (see Facebook). Google’s attribution to Lord Shiva was, as I suspected, inaccurate. It was in fact the divine carpenter, god of construction and engineering Vishvakarman, whom I’d never heard of, revered by craftspeople and appropriate for these parts where there are many small enterprises producing, for example, surgical instruments. Perhaps a god for my family where there are carpenters and wheelwrights on my father’s side, who himself engaged in small-scale woodwork. But not for me as, while the carpentry gene is present among some of my children, my memories of carpentry lessons at school are not happy ones and my current relationship to woodwork is extremely chaste. CORRECTION I was wrong about the identification of the shrine with Vishvarkarman. It is in fact Kartikeya, the Hindu God of War. Vishvarkarman is popular around these parts but this is not He.

Tuesday, 27 December

Up relatively early to travel 20 km by auto (three-wheeled motorised rickshaw) to see some land owned by my hosts. These green and yellow rickshaws are everywhere in Bengal, except perhaps in central Kolkata. Sometimes they have fixed routes and you can travel quite long distances by transferring from route to route at certain locations. Weaving along Indian roads in heavy traffic, like a dodgem ride without a seat belt, is unnerving to start with but I’m used to it by now and the pace of traffic is slow. We are only close to one incident when a rider on a passing motorbike swerves and loses control (he falls off shortly after but is able to get up unaided).

I’ve been looking forward to seeing this patch of land, the expanse making the word “patch” inappropriate. At the same time, apprehensive as I feared that snakes might dispute that this is human domain. I’ve not access to the statistics but farmers are vulnerable to snakebites. They are underreported, many people not going to the hospital, some relying on folk medicine “remedies” (one research report I read mentions the practice of tying a stone (snake stone) to the bite wound and then getting the patient to walk on it to draw out the venom). In these parts, it’s most often the highly venomous krait that bites. The most dangerous period of the year is the monsoon when snakes like people are disturbed by water masses and have to leave their accustomed locations.

I need not have worried about this smallholding, however. The land is open without long grass and you can see where you are putting your feet. About as likely as being bitten by a weasel in West Sussex, unless you root around in the vegetation at the foot of the banana trees.

It felt very fine to sit calmly close to the pond after being much indoors during the days of yule. It’s important here to have a pond to store monsoon water as it doesn’t rain much at other times.

Back at the house, I sleep most of the afternoon, dreaming unpleasantly that I am climbing down the outside of a very tall building. It got better toward the end though when I realised that trying to scale down the exterior could only lead to disaster and I slid through some convenient aperture to land on a rather domestic carpet, whence I could make my way down the stairs.

I finished Chattopadhyay’s novels in the wee hours, still anarchic when it comes to the Circadian with periods of alertness not related to Bengali or European time. I have much more respect for the novel after a careful reading, although I felt he pulled his punches at the end when the emancipated lady finds her ally in life, resolves her financial problems and gains the respect of the most bitterly traditional of her opponents. But it was after all written as long ago as 1931; Chattopadhyay is skilful at making didactic dialogue readable.

I’ll do some Bengali today – I have practised saying “cold water” when our driver threw himself into the pond. I wouldn’t have done that for fear of terrors in the deep but he emerged refreshed and unscathed.

Monday, 26 December 2022

I take the quieter path past smallholdings with their ponds, the occasional shrine, young men idling on their motorbikes and load-burdened women accompanied by children.

This time I try an experiment, receiving to my pleasure a shy smile from some of the likelier folk in response to mine. In the West Country, you greet a meeting stranger, perhaps making some cheery comment and waving a badly folded Ordinance Survey map. But not here (especially not the B.F.O.S) where eyes are averted and the European stranger glides awkwardly past; probably shyness rather than hostility but it makes me feel uncomfortable, taking my distance in a tense badly fitting way alien to me. Until now I have conformed, but this time I decided not to, feeling that Bengal and I had to come to an understanding about this. It’s not an aggressive change of policy on my part but instead of averting my gaze, I attempt to look friendly and allow eyes to meet (I would prefer not to see a film of myself doing this but it does seem to work as intended).

Apart from shy smiles, I photograph flowers and, with more caution, shrines. I acquaint myself with the pretty Red Arrowroot of the Canna family, according to my plant recognition program, the first species to be described by Linnaeus in his Species planetarium (I must check this). It has medicinal uses and a clutch of alternative names and is also used in palaeolithic cooking, which I had never heard of but which seems to consist of aiming at a diet before humans ceased to be nomadic and start farming. Low on dairy products and high on what is available for gathering and killing although the subsequent transformation of the palaeolithic environment and its fauna and flora must be a problem.

There is also a shrine which Google Images assures me is Lord Shiva but I’m doubtful as it is in this case a shiva with eccentric attributes. To be investigated with someone more Hinduwise than I.

Since moving to Sweden with its convenient “mellandagar” (“between days”) to describe the passage from Santa to the following year, I’ve been irritated by the absence of a convenient expression in English for this period, “the days between Christmas and the New Year” being language as a stumbling block rather than an aid to communication. My casual import from the French of “bridge days” attracted comment and a Facebook and otherwise friend, told me that the Scots use the expression “daft days”. This apparently comes from a poem but has roots in the French fetes des Foux going back to the twelfth century. Once Google had grasped that I was not looking for cut-price pizza, I found some helpfully obscure sites in French, telling me about how the clergy organised events on the streets with schoolchildren (in the 12^th century?) and some splendidly called Basochiens, apparently associations of the legally trained and clerks. It’s not clear whether the clerics participated in these street frolics but there was a pape des fous (a bonkers pope) as well as a bonkers bishop and abbot (presumably not the genuine article). Supposed to honour the donkey on which Jesus entered Jerusalem, the festival is intertwined with saint days celebrating the festival of the innocents and later French religious festivals, presumably a result of repeated efforts by church and state authorities to bring some order into these shenanigans and associate them with something more easily controlled.

Links back to the Roman Saturnalia were also mentioned but suffering from thread fatigue, I went no further.

For the time being I will stick with bridge days, which seems to better correspond to our contemporary struggle to overcome the bloated and ease our way back to a muted form of everyday life after the red and white frenzy.

Sunday, 25 December

We do Christmas Swedish style on the 24^th, the 25^th a day of slow-paced leftovers. Then by two-stroke green and yellow “auto” to find footwear to replace out-of-control thong sandals. I found the shops in the local town paralysing when I first walked the three or four kilometres from the house, the winding road reminding me of teenage wanderings on Somerset Sundays. But now my eye has grown accustomed to India aided by light gentrification as Kolkata cautiously approaches, and Bengali retail holds few terrors.

Having sorted my feet out satisfactorily, I turn to the other end but here progress is sluggish.

I start for the nth time on the first lesson of my Bengali book, remembering the words for tiger, garden and mango, to enrich whatever surrealistic comments I feel I need to puzzle the locals with.

And then there is Chattopadhyay’s “The Final Question”, checking every cultural reference. The first essential lesson is not to hunt for the holy grail of neat explanation. The past has thrown down to us a complicated and contradictory tangle of myths and stories. The road to peaceful cohabitation of this area of knowledge with the other contents of one’s brain lies in accepting it as it is, in much the same spirit as approaching the world of the Nordic Gods, except that the pantheon here is even more complex. I am a little soft on the Goddess of knowledge, Saraswati, or Sarasvati as she prefers to be known in Sanskrit.

I dabble with applied Hinduism and add “hypergamy” and “hypogamy” to my stock, meaning marrying upward and downward in the caste hierarchy respectively. And learn that the word “caste” has been foisted on the Indians, probably initially by the Portuguese. And wrestle with the sub-divisions “jati” (clan) and “varna”, occasionally pinning them down for an ecstatic moment before they again slip through my hands wriggling away into the mist of unknowing.

St Jerome is with me and I want to write about his life as a translator, obtaining clarity about his bible translations and his theological positions and disputes with people such as Origen. Not too much of the latter as I suspect it is an invitation to dance in a marsh never to be seen again….

And when I tire of quirky obscurity, I have my collection of books about the British and India, wanting to know more about their means of controlling the Indian economy and the extent to and how the Indians freed themselves from the malevolent imperial embrace. I will have to think about how I combine these projects but it will have to wait until the bridge days are upon us, pointing forward to the coming glories of 2023.