RE-MARKINGS September 2021 Highlights - Conversations with Jonah Raskin & Anita Money; Remembering Satyajit Ray, E-Launch of 20th Anniversary Special (March 2021) Number

EDITORIAL

Some died in neglect, others in the midst of every attention. No remedy was found that could be used as a specific; for what did good in one case, did harm in another. Strong and weak constitutions proved equally incapable of resistance, all alike being swept away, although dieted with the utmost precaution. By far the most terrible feature in the malady was the dejection which ensued when any one felt himself sickening, for the despair into which they instantly fell took away their power of resistance, and left them a much easier prey to the disorder; besides which, there was the awful spectacle of men dying like sheep, through having caught the infection in nursing each other. This caused the greatest mortality… On the one hand, if they were afraid to visit each other, they perished from neglect; indeed many houses were emptied of their inmates for want of a nurse: on the other, if they ventured to do so, death was the consequence. This was especially the case with such as made any pretensions to goodness: honour made them unsparing of themselves in their attendance in their friends' houses, where even the members of the family were at last worn out by the moans of the dying, and succumbed to the force of the disaster … Men now coolly ventured on what they had formerly done in a corner, and not just as they pleased, seeing the rapid transitions produced by persons in prosperity suddenly dying and those who before had nothing succeeding to their property. So they resolved to spend quickly and enjoy themselves, regarding their lives and riches as alike things of a day. Perseverance in what men called honour was popular with none, it was so uncertain whether they would be spared to attain the object; but it was settled that present enjoyment, and all that contributed to it, was both honourable and useful. Fear of gods or law of man there was none to restrain them. As for the first, they judged it to be just the same whether they worshipped them or not, as they saw all alike perishing; and for the last, no one expected to live to be brought to trial for his offences, but each felt that a far severer sentence had been already passed upon them all and hung ever over their heads, and before this fell it was only reasonable to enjoy life a little. Such was the nature of the calamity…

The impact of this passage cannot be lost on anyone who saw and experienced the devastating effect that the merciless COVID-19 unleashed upon mankind. The lines cited above provide a graphic account and appear to have been extracted from a recent reportage. Yet, readers will be startled to know that they come not from any contemporary news desk but from The History of the Peloponnesian War penned by Thucydides some 2500 years ago. The amazing parallel that we observe in the two situations, despite a span of 25 centuries separating them, compel us to understand that epidemic, pestilence, natural calamity, pandemic and the like are an integral part of the human experience and that they are always universal as well as contemporary.

It is true that survivors refuse to draw any lesson from the past or present and love to continue to cherish the illusion of immunity from disaster. They tend to forget that if life is all about hedonistic pleasures, it is also about restraint about how we conduct ourselves as a member of the social community. To make a mockery of protocols like ‘social dis-tancing’ and wearing a ‘mask’ only shows how insensitive we can be to feelings of compassion for others.

The near and dear ones who have been snatched away from our midst will never return. The doctors and health workers who have lost their lives so that others could live deserve all our gratitude. Our obligation to them all cannot end with merely our prayers for the peace and rest of the departed souls. We need to take it as a collective responsibility to contribute our very best to ensure that no one feels alienated and segregated again on account of our lack of empathy and concern for our fellow men, women and children no matter from what class, caste or region they come from. To all those who used the pandemic as an opportunity to grow rich and affluent overnight by hoarding medicines, Oxygen gas cylinders and the like, I wish to remind them of a statement made by Alexander Solzhenitsyn in The Gulag Archipelago: “Do not pursue what is illusory – property and position: all that is gained at the expense of your nerves decade after decade and can be confiscated in one fell night. Live with a steady superiority over life – don't be afraid of misfortune, and do not yearn after happiness; it is after all, all the same: the bitter doesn't last forever, and the sweet never fills the cup to overflowing.

Before closing this editorial note, I deem it an honour to thank all the contributors who have enriched this volume with their presence. I also deem it a privilege to dedicate this edition of Re-Markings as our salutation to all the medical scientists in the world who have done their very best to make the planet pandemic-safe by giving us the vaccines at a pace that is simply incredible. 

Nibir K. Ghosh

Chief Editor

CONTENTS

 The Mythology of Imperialism at 50: A Conversation with Jonah Raskin – Nibir K. Ghosh / 7

An Evening to Remember: E-launch of 20th Anniversary Special Number, 18th March 2021 – Sugata Bose / 16

 If You don’t Know Me by Now…Black Lives Matter – E. Ethelbert Miller / 20

 

A Conversation with Anita Auden Money – Nibir K. Ghosh / 23

Michelangelo goes to Istanbul: Enard’s Tell Them of Battles, Kings and Elephants – Rajesh Sharma / 36 

The Bliss of the ‘Inward Eye’: A Birth-Centenary Tribute to Satyajit Ray – Nibir K. Ghosh & Sunita Rani Ghosh / 41

Ye Mera India: Conceptualizing the West, Home, and Belonging in Popular Hindi Cinema – Urvashi Sabu / 48

Native/Non-native Dialectics: Myths and Folklore in Thomas King’s The Back of the Turtle –  Charu Mathur / 54

Tradition and Deviation: The Wounded Self in Bhabani Bhattacharya’s Novels – S. P. Swain & Ramani Ranjan Panigrahi / 61

Divakaruni’s The Forest of Enchantments: A Feminist Version of the Ramayana – Gunjan Chaturvedi / 69

Redefining Progress: Perpetual Dilemma Between Self and Soul in the Modern Age – Abha Sharma / 78

Rediscovering the Indigenous Identity: A Study of  Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony and Easterine Kire’s Son of the Thundercloud – Riya Dutta & Seema Singh / 86

Ecological Undercurrents in Barbara Gowdy’s The White Bone – Ashoo Toor / 96

 

 Exploration of Dalit Sociological Life and Feminism: Bama’s Karukku and Sangati – Pramod Kumari / 103

 The ‘Form’ of Mourning: Reading Julian Barnes’s Levels of Life – Sahajmeet / 111

 Fantasy Literature: A Child-Centric Approach – Insha Iftikhar / 118

 The Institution of Marriage in Shobhaa De’s Spouse – Santosh Kumar Singh / 125

 Reading Amit Chaudhuri’s Novels in the Light of Rājaśekhara’s Kāvyamīmāsā – Shivali Garg / 132

 Psychological Displacement in Monica Ali’s Brick Lane – Asma Rafiq & Alisha Chaudhary / 140

 Women as Victims of Inhuman Social Realities in Pre-independence Bengal – Emily Pandey / 148

Poetry

Tuncay Gary – The Theatre is being Demolished / 152,

Fauré, Satie, Debussy and Ravel / 152, Reached the Middle / 153, To be Exposed on an Island / 154

Cyril Wong –  Diary Entry / 155

Deena Padayachee – Gauntlet / 156

Pratiti Kaushal – A Battle you couldn’t Survive / 157

Book Review

The Secret Diary of Hendrik Groen – Sushil Gupta / 158

Unwinding Self  by Susheel Kumar Sharma –

H. C. Gupta / 159

The Village Poet & Other Stories by Manoranjan Behura – Debashreemayee Das / 160

An Evening to Remember: E-launch of 20th Anniversary Special Number, 18th March 2021

Sugata Bose

First of all, may I congratulate Professor Ghosh and everyone associated with Re-Markings on the publication of this wonderful 20th anniversary celebratory number. It was very good to hear Jonah Raskin and Anita Auden Money. It is so wonderful that Re-Markings has had special issues on Doris Lessing and W. H. Auden. No historian of the 20th century can afford to not cite W. H. Auden. He has a brilliant poem on every major historical event to have occurred in the last century including, of course, on partition which Ayesha Jalal and I quote in full in our book Modern South Asia: History, Culture, Political Economy.

The 18^th of March is of course a red-letter day in South Asian history. On March 18^th 1944, the Indian National Army moved into North-eastern India towards Imphal and Kohima. With "Chalo Delhi" on their lips, the Azad Hind Fauj crossed the Indo-Burma frontier and carried the armed struggle for liberation onto the Indian soil. They marched singing their battle song kadam kadam badhaye ja. Step by step they would advance until the Indian flag fluttered over the red fort of Delhi. On that historic occasion, Netaji issued a lyrical order of the day in which he dwelt on the theme of sacrificial patriotism:

There, there in the distance – beyond that river, beyond those jungles, beyond those hills lies the promised land—the soil from which we sprang—the land to which we shall now return. Hark! India is calling! India’s metropolis Delhi is calling! three hundred and eighty-eight million of our countrymen are calling. Blood is calling to blood. Get up, we have no time to lose. Take up your arms. There, in front of you, is the road that our pio-neers have built. We shall march along that road. We shall carve our way through the enemy's ranks or if God wills, we shall die a martyr's death. And in our last sleep we shall kiss the road that will bring our Army to Delhi. The road to Delhi is the road to Freedom. Chalo Delhi!

The INA soldiers were ecstatic to be on Indian soil, and journalists reported scenes of jubilation and camaraderie as they closed in on Imphal and Kohima.

My father Dr. Sisir Kumar Bose invited Abid Hassan, a very close aide of Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose, to deliver the Netaji oration in Calcutta 51 years ago, on January 23^rd 1970. That morning Abid Hassan deli-vered his beautifully crafted and deeply moving Netaji oration titled “The Men from Imphal.” He had chosen to foreground in his oration the harrowing retreat of the brave soldiers of freedom after their march to Delhi had been halted at Imphal. In one brilliant paragraph, he portrayed the character of the army of liberation to which he belonged:

What a group we were and ours was but a unit among many of its kind in our army. I felt proud and I feel more proud today that I belong to it. Baluchis were there among us and Assa-mese, Kashmiris and Malyalis, Pathans and Sikhs and Guja-ratis. Proud members of classes called the Martials and those still then denied reputation for martial valour but who proved in battle that they could, by their deeds, claim equal honour. Every region in India was represented. Every religion and every caste mixed inseparably together, not only in bigger formations but even in small platoons and sections. Each unit being a living tribute to the unity of India. We had our different private faiths and we had our different languages but, in our purpose, and in our political belief, we were a well-knit, determined and indivisible whole.

Once they reached Mandalay, Netaji came to meet them. The Sikhs oiled their beards; the Punjabi Muslims, the Dogras and Rajputs twirled their moustaches. We the indiscriminate, Abid Hassan said, “put on as good a face as we could manage." As Netaji spoke to them, their weariness seemed to depart and they felt refreshing new blood circulating in their veins. Abid Hassan understood the essence of his leadership: "He was all we had as our leader to whom each one of us however humble meant something and who to us all meant everything. He belonged to us, to us all of the Azad Hind movement and entirely without any compromise." Abid Hassan then flashed back to October 1943 to illustrate the meaning of “without any compromise” by telling the story of Netaji's visit to the Chettiar temple in Singapore. He had turned away the Head Priest saying, "What, come to your temple where even Hindus of other castes are not permitted entry, not to speak of members of other communities who are equally near and dear to me?" He agreed to go when the High Priest returned with an invitation to an Indian national demonstration. When we came to the temple, Abid Hassan remembered, "I found it filled to capacity with the uniforms of the INA officers and men and the black caps of South Indian Muslims glaringly evident. The memory I retain is one of an invigorating music as that of a symphony dedicated to the unity of the motherland. That music sustained him during his travails on the battlefield."

Abid Hassan returned to us and stayed at our home in 1976 and we interviewed him over three days. On the basis of that interview, my mother wrote a long-form article “The Memory of a Soldier.” Krishna Bose's diary which I was reading the other day, contains an important entry on March 14 1976, regarding the tape-recording session that day. Abid Hassan says, she notes on 17^th August 1945 in Saigon, he would have accompanied Netaji and Netaji himself wished so but because of military protocol, Colonel Habibur Rahman was asked to go. He was senior anyway, all of them were to follow him shortly so they did not realize that it would become a matter of such importance at the moment.

Jonah Raskin mentioned Ravi Shankar so I should tell you that during this period of the interview on March 15 1976, Pandit Ravi Shankar came to see the Netaji Museum, Netaji Research Bureau, from where I am speaking today and we showed him around. On January 23^rd of that year, he had presented a wonderful birthday concert for Netaji performing the ragas Shayamkalyan, Charukeshi and Manj Khamaj on the occasion of the second International Netaji Seminar that year. The first one had been organized by my father in 1973. Since this is the 20^th anniversary of a journal, I thought I’d read to you a letter that Abid Hassan wrote to my father about the Netaji Research Bureau's new journal The Oracle in 1979: "My dear Sisir, thanks ever so much for sending me a copy of The Oracle. You have brought it out very well indeed, much better than I expected. But then you are always so thorough and painstaking attending to all my minute details, just like your uncle and it is the drudgery of attending to details that pays dividends in the end. I know so many people envy you when success is achieved but, of course, they are not there to help you with a hand at the wheel pulling the cart out when it is stuck in the mire. How many years day in and day out have you been attending to the Netaji Seminar! It is, thanks mainly to your efforts, that it has now turned out to be a veritable scholarly research institute." I know that not only Nibir Ghosh but also the team around him, attend to the details and that is what makes Re-Markings such a wonderful journal.

51 years ago, Abid Hassan had, in his Netaji oration, referred to these frustrating times "when India again seems to be a house divided against itself." The times have turned even more ominous now and in human acts that Abid Hassan deplored, are becoming an everyday reality in today's India. His oration was, in Sisir Kumar Bose's words, a moving affirmation of the revolutionary faith given to us by our leader. Abid Hassan had closed his oration with a message of hope "the people of India will accept any leadership provided the call remains the same and the call cannot be but forget not that the grossest crime is to compromise with injustice and wrong."

I know Nibir had made a special request to me to end with a little bit of music. Now as he was about to proclaim the formation of the Azad Hind government, Netaji asked Abid Hassan to get the national anthem Jan Gan Man rendered in Hindustani, so that soldiers of the Azad Hind Fauj could appreciate the meaning of Rabindranath Tagore's song. In Singapore Abid Hassan got the lyricist Mumtaz Hussein compose the Hindustani song in three verses, rather than five of the original. Ram Singh Thakur wrote down a band score based on the original tune. Mumtaz Hussein did not attempt a translation but sought to capture the spirit of Tagore's song: "joyo hey" naturally became "jaya ho" long before A. R. Rahman made "Jai Ho" famous, the world over. The first verse that mentioned several place names bore a strong resemblance to the Ben-gali lyric. A comparison of the second verse evoking unity, which is not part of today's national anthem, gives a clear sense of the connection between the Bengali original and the Hindustani version. The Azad Hind version went thus: “Sabke dil mein preet basaye/ Teri meethi vani/ Har sube rehne waale/ Har majhab ke praani/ Sab bhed aur fark mitake/ Sab god teri aake/ Gunthe prem ki maala.” [Your sweet voice/ Fills all hearts with affection/ Those in each province/ And those of each religion/ In your bosom, they shelter seek/ And garlands of love do they weave.]

So, I really do hope that Re-Markings will play a role in binding, not just all of the communities of India but all of the communities and peoples of the world with a garland of love, through their literary pursuits which has always been both politically engaged and ethically informed.

·        Professor Sugata Bose, Gardiner Professor of Oceanic History at Harvard University, USA, is Chairperson, Netaji Research Bureau, Kolkata and former Member of Parliament (Lok Sabha). He is the author of Internationally acclaimed books that include His Majesty's Opponent: Subhas Chandra Bose and India's Struggle Against Empire, The Nation as Mother and Other Visions of Nationhood, The Essential Writings of Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose, Modern South Asia: History, Culture, Political Economy among others. Professor Bose delivered the above address as Chief Guest at the event.

 v

The Mythology of Imperialism at 50: 

A Conversation with Jonah Raskin

Nibir K. Ghosh

Jonah Raskin, former chair of the Communication Studies Department at Sonoma State University, U.S.A., is the author of fourteen major books that include: The Mythology of Imperialism: Joyce Cary, E.M. Forster, Joseph Conrad, Rudyard Kipling, D.H. Lawrence (1971); Out of the Whale: Growing Up in the American Left (1973); Underground (1978); My Search for B. Traven (1980); For the Hell of It: The Life and Times of Abbie Hoffman (1996) and American Scream: Allen Ginsberg's ‘Howl’ and The Making of the Beat Generation (2004). In the late 1960s, he taught English and American literature at the State University of New York at Stony Brook and for most of the 1970s he worked as a reporter, a journalist and an editor at University Review, a monthly magazine of politics and the arts. As a Fulbright Professor in Belgium, he taught American literature at the University of Antwerp and the University of Ghent. e serves on the advisory board of Re-Markings and is a regular contributor to the journal. He visited India in March-April 2017 to deliver the Keynote address at the international con-ference on “Peaceful & Prosperous South Asia: Opportunities & Challenges” organized by JIIT, Noida from 27-29 March 2017. He also delivered a talk on “American Literature” organized by ELSA in collaboration with Re-Markings at Agra on March 31, 2017. This conversation focuses on Jonah Raskin’s epoch-making book The Mythology of Imperialism that has reached the 50-year milestone of its enduring popularity in 2021. In his unique style, the author shares his views on various issues and concerns related to Imperialism that went into the making of the book and their continuous relevance in con-temporary times.

Ghosh: Heartiest felicitations Jonah on your magnum opus, The Mythology of Imperialism, reaching the half-century milestone of its first publication by Random House in 1971. How does it feel being the author of a book that has seen fifty years of existence in a rapidly changing world?

Jonah Raskin: First of all thank you for your questions and for your congratulations. I could write a whole book in response to your questions. I’ll try to be brief and to the point. The world is changing rapidly as you say, but in my view we still have imperialisms and we still have colonialisms. We still have centers of empire and distant peripheries, though with the latest technologies the peripheries aren’t as distant as they once were. I wrote The Mythology of Imperialism when I was 28-years-old. It was published when I was 29, so when I think of the book I also think of my own young manhood during a turbulent time, when the U.S. was at war with Vietnam, and much of the world was in upheaval. The book is a reflection of who I was at a particular time and place. I mostly think of Mythology today as an artifact, though I’m told it’s more than that and that it has contemporary relevance. I am not sure about that.

Ghosh: What led you to contemplate writing on the theme of Imperialism especially at a time when equally major issues were confronting the world?

Jonah Raskin: I didn’t see other equally major issues. I thought that all the issues of the time were subsumed under “imperialism,” though I didn’t give enough attention to what I might now call “anti-imperialist” literature, literature from what was called the “Third World” and what some today might call “post-colonial lit.” The old colonialism is mostly gone, but I think it has been replaced by new colonialism.

Ghosh: Could you shed some light on both the title and the subtitle of your book?

Jonah Raskin: Doing research for the book in Manchester and London I discovered that when the Brits had an empire, they came in contact with societies that had myths and rituals. They had a kind of anthropological approach to countries they invaded and occupied and tried to control. I thought that the Brits also had their own con-temporary myths and rituals and that in that regard they were similar to the cultures they aimed to tame. Originally, the book didn’t have a subtitle. The subtitle for the second edition was the idea of the publisher, Monthly Review, and in my view it was mostly intended to publicize the book and sell copies. The word “revolutionary,” which is in the subtitle, has less meaning today than it once had. In the 1960s it was taken over by advertising and public relations. In the 1980s we had what was called “The Reagan Revolution.” Imperialism was a word that pushed buttons in the early 1970s. It still does. I wanted to be provocative.

Ghosh: “The Mythology of Imperialism is as solid as granite; it should be around for a long, long time. It is great reading.” What reasons would you cite to substantiate this remark of Maxwell Geismar in terms of the enduring popularity of The Mythology?  

Jonah Raskin: I don’t put much stock in what Geismar said. He was a generation older than I and looking for young scholars and literary critics to praise. He was kind enough to say lovely things about my book, in part because he wanted to colonize me and make me one of his disciples. I wanted to be my own master and nobody else’s disciple.

Ghosh: What went into your decision to include the authors that you discuss: Joseph Conrad, Rudyard Kipling, D. H. Lawrence, E. M. Forster, and Joyce Cary?

Jonah Raskin: Conrad and Kipling were obvious contenders. The germ of the idea for the book was a comment by T. S. Eliot who saw Conrad and Kipling as opposites. They were to a certain extent, and, while Conrad loved the British Empire, he was also a fierce critic of Belgian colonialism in the Congo. My Ph.D. thesis was only about Conrad and Kipling. When I decided to expand the thesis into a book I knew I wanted to include Forster especially because of his novel A Passage to India. I threw in Cary because I liked many of his novels, including The Horse’s Mouth. I included a chapter on Cary’s Mister Johnson be-cause it has an African protagonist. If I were to rewrite the book now I would definitely include Virginia Woolf. She had a lot to say about empire. I would also probably include V. S. Naipaul. He would make for a useful foil to Kipling and also to E. M. Forster. I love contrasting and comparing, though I try to be subtle about it.

Ghosh: How come the name of George Orwell, who made political writing an art and changed the contours of the English novel, does not come for elaborate discussion in the book?

Jonah Raskin: I could write volumes about Eric Blair, aka George Orwell, whom I first read when I was 18 and at college when all first year students were required to read Orwell's essay "Shooting an Elephant" and write an essay about it, which I found incredibly difficult because I had conflicting feelings. Like almost every author I have ever written about I could have written more about Orwell than I did write about him. I usually want to write less than write more. Sometimes, as the notable Latin American author Eduardo Galeano said, "Less is more." I am not trying to be cute. Most writers don't know when to stop. Orwell did. He said a lot in a small space and he said it clearly. My aims as a writer have been more or less the same as Orwell's: "sheer egotism," "aesthetic enthusiasm," "historical impulse" and "political purpose."  At college, we were supposed to understand Orwell's story without knowing anything about his biography or the historical conditions that gave rise to his work. I think that's a wrong-headed approach. You can't understand Orwell unless you know something about his life and the times in which he lived. "Shooting an Elephant" is probably beyond the imagination and critical faculties of an 18-year-old American student. The only elephants in New York were in the zoo and it was illegal to shoot and kill them. Orwell was writing about how the human beings who operated the British Empire were trapped by their roles and had to behave in a certain way. He wrote, "I was stuck between my hatred of the empire I served and my rage against the evil-spirited little beasts who tried to make my job impossible." At 18 I didn't realize that when Orwell wrote about "the evil-spirited little beasts" he was writing about the people of Burma, who weren't "evil" or "beasts" or "little."  I can see now that while Orwell had certain ideas about empire and why he should abandon it, he also had imbibed many of the attitudes of the empire. He was a part of the thing he hated, and as he put it he wanted to "drive a bayonet into a Buddhist priest’s guts." That's intense. It's also a vivid image. He doesn't say "kill," or "exterminate the brutes," as Mr. Kurtz says in Heart of Darkness.  "Drive a bayonet" into a priest's guts couldn't be more vivid or visceral. Imperialism and colonialism are evil because they warp the humanity of everyone involved, colonizers as well as colonized.

I'm reminded of a conversation I had with a professor of English when I was in New Delhi. I was complaining about the British who tried to control India. The professor said, "At least the English were here in India, unlike the Americans who try to control us at a distance and by email and Facebook." Orwell was in Burma not in London. He saw and felt the empire first hand. From him and his writings I learned the importance of experience. If you want to write about the Spanish Civil War, you go to Spain during the Civil War. If you want to write about people who are down and out in London and Paris you live and work among the people who are down and out. I have embedded myself in many of the communities I have written about. Orwell has been my role model.

Ghosh: You begin the book with the statement, “We, the readers and students of literature, have been hijacked. The literary critics, our teachers, those assassins of culture, have put us up against the wall and held us captive.” What made you see the “literary critics” as “assassins of culture”? 

Jonah Raskin: Once again I was being provocative. But I would also say that I recognized at the time that literary critics had power. They influenced readers, students, teachers. For a long time, they told people what books to read and what books not to read. They limited the whole idea of culture. I think my language also reflects the influence of Sartre on my writing. I knew some of the major American literary critics, including Lionel Trilling, and thought that much of what they wrote was pernicious. When I wrote that passage there was a lot of hijacking of airplanes. I borrowed the concept and the image and applied it to literary criticism. I thought that our teachers, my teachers, tried to take us and me, specifically, to places where we and I didn’t want to go, intellectually and culturally speaking. I didn’t want to go to Oxford and Cambridge which many of my professor regarded as the pinnacle of something they called “civilization.” What about Cairo, Beijing, Mumbai and Hyderabad and their notable contributions to the arts, architecture, philosophy and music? Zero information from my professors. They didn't know and didn’t care to know.

Ghosh: In the words of Sinéad Kennedy, “The Mythology of Imperialism calls upon its readers to view it as ‘a weapon for revolution’ and suggests that the role of the writer is not just to explore the world but to be ‘a political and cultural revolutionary.’” What is your take on Kennedy’s observation?

Jonah Raskin: Sinéad was using my book for her own purposes. There are many roles for writers. One of them is to be cultural revolutionaries. If they write books that are original and provocative they will prompt readers to rethink the world and perhaps to change their modes of behavior, but I don’t think that novels or poems really do change the world. Think of all the anti-war novels and poems we have had since The Iliad, Homer’s great anti-war epic. And still we have had wars for thousands of years. But if someone wants to write an anti-war epic, I say go ahead.

Ghosh: In terms of career options, what consequences were you subjected to on account of your ability to demolish myths created by those who wielded power in the groves of American academe?

Jonah Raskin: I did not receive tenure at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. That was in part because of my writings, but it was also because I was in fact a cultural revolutionary and was arrested and jailed three times in 1968 and 1969.

Ghosh: Could you please share the narrative of your role as a cultural revolutionary and the story of your arrest and jail?

Jonah Raskin: As I have mentioned above, I did not receive tenure at the State University of New York at Stony Brook because my writings were provocative and inflammatory to say the least and often written in language that was not academic but meant to appeal to the long-haired, marijuana-smoking hippies who were leaving colleges, tra-veling widely and settling down in communes all over the country. Also, I was denied tenure because I was arrested and jailed three times in 1968 and 1969. The first time I was arrested was with about 700 others who were protesting at Columbia where I had been a student from 1959 to 1964.

Ghosh: What were the protests about?

Jonah Raskin: What were we protesting? The university was con-ducting research for the U.S. government that was used to wage war. It was making inroads in Harlem, the adjacent Black community, without consulting the inhabitants. It was also woefully backward in terms of the curriculum and needed a radical overhaul. Sadly, in the English Department not a single writer of color was taught. No Richard Wright, no James Baldwin, no Zora Neale Hurston. No women writers were taught. No Emily Dickinson and no Virginia Woolf. I took a class called “Comparative Literature.” What did we compare? English, Irish and French writers. No Asian or African writers.  The professors thought they were genuine intellectuals. If they were intellectuals, they were intellectuals with blinders. I’ll skip the second time I was arrested, though I’ll say this: Columbia wanted me to apologize to the university authorities for my political actions on campus. I was told “You were taught to be a scholar and a gentleman and you didn’t behave in a gentlemanly way.” When I chose not to apologize, the university had me arrested – not very gentlemanly. The third time I was arrested I was protesting the War in Vietnam and the murder of two members of the Black Panther Party who were shot and killed while they were asleep. Law enforcement agents killed them. That third time I was also beaten and tortured. I do not exaggerate. I needed about 50 stitches in my head. My whole body was black and blue from the sticks and clubs that battered my body. Nowadays, many people know that there is police violence and brutality, especially against Blacks. In 1969, it was unusual for a white professor to be beaten and tortured.   

Ghosh: Bridget Fowler, in a review of your book, points out that your revolutionary views of the time did not quite fit in with the “usual conventions of the professional academic.” Any comments?

Jonah Raskin: I meant to go against the conventions. That’s obvious. Fowler made some astute criticism of Mythology and she also recognized some of its strengths. I would say that I wanted to write a book that would be as creative as a work of literature, to break away from the language of literary critics and forge my own vocabulary to use to talk about Kipling, Conrad and the “gang.”

Ghosh: Has your view about Imperialism that you so passionately advocated in 1971 undergone any change in 2021?   

Jonah Raskin: I recently wrote and published a book about American literature titled, A Terrible Beauty: The Wilderness of American Literature. It’s a survey. In some ways it is in my view a “better” book than Mythology, but it has not yet had the appeal of Mythology. If you want to be noticed and read it pays to be provocative. I am not the same person today at 79 that I was at 29 and 30, or the same person I was at 22 when I left New York and went to Manchester, England to write about the British Empire and British literature. In New York in 1964 when I left the USA no English department would have given me the green light to write a book that showed the relationships of Kipling and Conrad to imperialism. Perhaps we have come a long way since then. Maybe not. I don't want to place too much emphasis on the accolades of former students, but I would point out that former stu-dents send me accolades all the time. I would also point out what Doris Lessing said, “I wish someone like Jonah Raskin had been around to teach me when I was young.” I was always on the side of the students, the learners. Well, not always. But I tried to put myself in their shoes and to be helpful.

Ghosh: How do you view the subtler contemporary variants of the Imperialism virus?  

Jonah Raskin: Good point. Imperialism is a virus. During my last time teaching I asked students to read Tayeb Salih’s Migration to the North, a short brilliant work of fiction from the Sudan that explores what we mean when we talk about a “virus.” Racism is a virus. There are others, including sexism and patriarchy.

Ghosh: Kindly share your views about the notion of the “White Man’s Burden” forwarded by the likes of Rudyard Kipling.

Jonah Raskin: Kipling was a literary genius, multi-talented with paternalistic ideas and attitudes toward India and Indians. He reinforced ideas of empire. The Brits said they wanted to bring “civilization” to their colonies. Well they brought the English language and Shakespeare and they also did their best to dismantle the civilizations they found in India. Supposedly someone asked Nehru what he thought of “western civilization.” He apparently said, “It’s a good idea,” meaning that it wasn’t much more than just an idea and that westerners might try to civilize themselves. The U.S. still needs to civilize itself.

I recently read and wrote a review of Amit Chaudhuri’s Finding the Raga: An Improvisation on Indian Music. I said, “Rudyard Kipling—the Anglo-Indian novelist, short story writer and bard of the British Empire—must have known that it wasn't true when he wrote, ‘East is East, and West is West, and Never the twain Shall Meet.’ After all, Kipling merged East and West in his own head and fused them in books like Plain Tales from the Hills, a collection of short stories, and in his novel, Kim, which is a retelling of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.” I have not forgotten Kipling, The Mythology of Imperialism or my own youthful self who still lives inside me, I am happy to say. In a way, the book brought me to you, Nibir and to Re-Markings and gave me a second life as a critic of art, literature and music.

Also, when I was in India a few years ago I met and got to know a bit from a student who had read Mythology which had been published in India by Aakar Books which is located near the Girdhari Lal Cricket Academy in New Delhi. The student noticed the tone of my book and recognized that it was written in part from a sense of anger. That is true. The student learned, he said, that one could write from a sense of anger. I believe that Conrad wrote Heart of Darkness with a pen dipped in the ink of moral outrage. Remember please that he noted that “The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much.”

Ghosh:  Please elaborate on your statement in the opening chapter of your book, “Culture and literature are political weapons, both in the hands of the colonialists and their revolutionary adversaries.”

Jonah Raskin: When I was a student in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the prevailing notion in academia in the U.S. was that literature was apolitical. Over the years I have recognized that most everything is political, in the sense that it involves power. Who tells the story is significant. The point of view of the narrator matters. When the narrator is an Indian, rather than a Brit, it changes nearly everything. We can read and appreciate novels, poems and plays from cultures not our own, but it’s also helpful to be aware of the underlying points of view. When I was a student, I learned a lot about India when I turned away from Kipling and began to read the novels of Mulk Raj Anand. His perspective opened my mind.

Ghosh: From the standpoint of 1971, you say: “the great modern writer is a rebel and a craftsman, that he is both a nihilist and a utopian. He destroys old worlds and builds new ones from the rubble about him.” What, according to you, should be the role of the modern writer in coming to terms with the contradictions visible in society and polity?

Jonah Raskin: It helps if and when the writer is aware of the contra-dictions in the society which inevitably shape the lives of individuals. A novelist can explore how social conditions influence human psy-chology and how human thinking can change the workings of society. It’s dialectical. In my view, a writer has to be a craftsman. He or she has to master the art form in which he or she works. Now I’m sounding preachy, which I don’t like. Politics is no substitute for tech-nique and skill. I remember that Conrad once said that when revising a work it was essential not simply to change a word here or there, but to take a second or a third look at the society and deepen one’s perspective.

Ghosh: Edward Said considered The Mythology of Imperialism among the few important books of the time. In your Afterword to the book you have focused on Edward Said. What is your view of Edward Said’s work on Colonialism, Orientalism etc. in terms of your stand on Imperialism?

Jonah Raskin: I think that Said made important contributions to the study of literature and to that part of the world once known as “The Orient.” But Said doesn’t have the last word. There is no such thing as the last word. I was honored that Said invited his students at Columbia to read The Mythology of Imperialism, because the book began when I was an undergraduate at Columbia. That felt like coming full circle. Some of the early orientalists made important contributions to the understanding of the East. They weren’t all narrow minded. The problem with book like Said’s Orientalism is that readers, scholars and teachers assumed that it was “a sacred text.” The “proper” response to the book, if I can call it that, is to think critically about it and to interrogate it. I hope readers will think critically about my own ideas and the way I have expressed them.

Ghosh: Thank you Jonah for your precious time and insightful words.

v

A Conversation with Anita Auden Money

Nibir K. Ghosh

Anita Auden Money was born in Calcutta during the last days of the British Raj to John Bicknell Auden – an eminent British geologist who worked for the Geological Survey of India until just after Independence – and Shiela Bonnerjee – a Bengali painter and the granddaughter of W. C. Bonnerjee, first President of the Indian National Congress. After reading English at Oxford and with Art as an interest, she has been preoccupied with various academic and literary engagements. She has worked for the poetry magazine Agenda founded by William Cookson. She is interested in poetry, literature and critical debate and writes occasional memoirs and reviews. Till February 2020, she worked as an administrator in an inner city London comprehensive and is cur-rently doing some voluntary tutoring with Action Tutoring.  Being half English and half Indian, she is a perfect instance of the East-meets-West paradigm. She is interested in social issues and education in its broadest sense to include cultural life and heritage and to encourage students to appreciate their own diverse cultures as well as the Wes-tern culture where they are being educated. She considers it a privilege to be the niece of W. H. Auden, one of 20^th century’s greatest poets. In this conversation, she talks at length about her varied experiences and about the life and poetry of her uncle.

NKG: It must be a privilege to be connected to W. C. Bonnerjee, the first president of the Indian National Congress through family lineage. Please share some of your impressions pertaining to this historical connect?

AAM: My mother Sheila and her sisters Minnie, Anila and Indira, often called the Bonnerjee sisters, spoke of their grandfather as Grey Beard. They did not really know him but were well aware of him. My mother’s aunt (on her father’s side), Agnes Majumdar, has written a memoir which describes both her father W. C. and mother Hemangini and the time spent in England in a house in Croydon. There is also another slim memoir jointly written by Agnes and Sadhona Bonnerjee with a foreword by N. B. Bonarjee (another branch of the family) and preface by Protap Bonnerjee, my mother’s brother. It is interesting to read about his early life and his decision to go to England, forfeiting his father’s approval and breaking with tradition by crossing the black water. W. C. died in England and is buried in the old Croydon Cemetery. He shares a tombstone with his son Saral Krishna who died young. I visited with Rosina Visram who has written about Asians in Britain. 

NKG: What are the impressions of Agnes Majumdar about W. C. Bonnerjee?

AAM: Agnes comments on W.C.’s great admiration for Western culture and education. All his children (boys and girls) were sent to school and then university in England. His daughter Nelly became a doctor and married an English barrister, while his son Shelley married an English woman but returned to India. Susie, also a doctor, went to work in India and Agnes, Pramila and Ratna (my grandfather) married Indians.  W. C. belongs to the school of reform initiated by Ram Mohan Roy and Vivian Derozio and recognized the causes of India’s weakness. He has been criticized for his English leanings but he knew moderation was needed and that it was essential to gain the sympathy and goodwill at least of some of the ruling classes in England as well as of their re-presentatives in India for the growth of the Indian National Congress. Alan Octavius Hume was a friend and ally in the establishment of the Congress. W. C. did not hesitate to raise his voice at the time of the Ilbert Bill and the India Councils Act and it is he who established and paid for the Indian Committee so that Indian grievances could be aired in the House of Commons. It is a source of pride to know what an ex-cellent barrister he was and that his intelligence and culture was noted by contemporaries. I am also glad to hear that he spoke English beau-tifully! 

NKG: In what way did your parents influence you? What would you consider as their legacy to you? Did your mother Sheila Auden share her Bengali heritage with you at any point of time in your formative years?

AAM: Calcutta in the 1940s was a cosmopolitan city; my parents and Minnie (my mother’s sister and Principal of Bethune College) and her husband Lindsay Emerson (a journalist on The Statesman) with whom they shared the apartment in Lansdowne Road had a wide, inter-national circle of friends and acquaintances that included both Euro-peans and Indians. Sudhin Datta, the poet, writer and critic was a great friend. My mother would often break into Bengali when speaking with Minnie or other relations and friends. She also spoke about aunts in purdah and about her mother Kitty (nee Ray) who was one of the first girls to go to Presidency College and her father, Ratna, a witty racon-teur and accomplished Barrister who after Rugby, read Greats at Balliol and then studied Law at the Middle Temple. 

She encouraged, without in any way dictating, an interest in poetry, literature and the arts and in particular mythology and fairy tales while my father, also encouraging these interests, introduced us to a sense of place, maps and evolution. Between them they instilled in us a curiosity about people, things and ideas which linked the world. 

There was often music playing on the large gramophone – Beethoven in particular – and Minnie would sit in an armchair correcting the work of students. In our bedroom a bookcase constructed of wooden packing cases housed numerous children’s books and we were often read to, not just by John and Sheila but also Minnie and Lindsay. I recall a number of cocktail parties and the sound of voices from the drawing room when Rita and I were in bed. Sometimes guests would come in and even read to us.  

NKG: Tell about your mother’s love of painting and other interests.

AAM: My mother, a painter, who, on her return from European worked briefly with Jamini Roy, also illustrated books and wrote articles on fashion and stories for children (usually with a moral or making a particular point as in Beavers Dam) which were published in Shankars Weekly, The Illustrated Weekly of India, The Courtier and The Statesman. Though she was largely trained in the West (at The Central in London and also in Germany) her paintings and illustrations have a quality that is both idiosyncratic and Indian. She signed her name at the bottom of the pictures in Bengali. I have a copy of The Caramel Doll which she illustrated; a story about two Queens, Suo Rani the favourite and Duo Rani the forlorn, written by Abanindranath Tagore and translated by the poet Bishnu and his wife Pranati Dey, friends of my parents.

She later painted a Hindu Pantheon which Wystan bought and hung in Kirchstetten. It is now back with me and hangs in my son Otto’s bed-room. She also painted a number of Christian themes but unlike her aunt Agnes never became a Christian but took infinite care to see that Rita, my sister, and I, attended Mass on Sundays. I remember her dressed elegantly in a sari wearing high heels, taking Rita and me by bus to Burton on Trent for Mass as there was no Catholic Church in Repton where we were staying with my Grandfather, only St Wystan’s. 

NKG: What memories of your father do you recall vividly?

AAM: My father John told us about Jimsi, the wolf he had rescued as a cub when climbing in the Himalayas but finally had to give to Calcutta Zoo and there were stories about Mimi the monkey who was jealous when my father married my mother and during a cocktail party turned on the taps in the bathroom but was unable to turn them off and was found shivering on a window sill. We loved rides in his jeep and visits to the Geological Survey where there seemed to be lots of monkeys in the trees. During holidays in Darjeeling where we stayed in the Majumdar’s house ‘Point Clear’ in Jalapahar we could see the peaks of Kanchenjunga and Everest. Our father had mapped some of the Himalayas and had taken part in the K2 Expedition. 

Later we enjoyed holidays in Europe as well as a Christmas in Khartoum and one in Kabul when my father’s work took him to Sudan and Afghanistan. My parents were based in Rome in the 60s (my father was working for the FAO) and we visited and had a great affection for Italy, already having stayed in Ischia with Wystan on our way to England from India in 1951. At his request we took my father’s ashes to India, scattering half in the Ganges followed by a ceremony at The Geological Survey where they planted a tree in his memory, and the other half at Rishikesh. My mother’s ashes were scattered at the confluence of the Ranjeet and Teesta rivers.

NKG: Did your uncle Wystan encourage your reading interests in any way?

AAM: We had  a fine copy of Grimms sent by Wystan from New York which added to our library: we had all the Andrew Lang books – pink, red, blue, green and yellow – Hans Anderson, George MacDonald, Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear, the Myths of Greece and Rome by Guerber, and the Norse Myths, both well illustrated and with many pre-Raphaelite pictures, Indian Myths, The Arthurian Legends, Rudyard Kipling’s Just So stories, The Cautionary Tales,  Strewelpeter, the Baba books, Winnie the Pooh,  Heidi, Orlando the Marmalade Cat, and many others – one I especially liked called The Cold-bloodied Penguin which had Disney like illustrations and contrasts the cold north with the sunny south and a sense of nostalgia which you find in Colonial lives. 

NKG: During your study of literature at Oxford University, who were the writers you were specially drawn to?

AAM: When I was at Oxford (1959 to 1962) the syllabus did not really encompass the 20^th century although I think there was an optional paper.  Like many other students I had read a good deal of the classics and quite a bit of 20^th century writing before going up to Oxford. At Oxford we covered Old English, Middle English, through the Eliza-bethans to the 17^th, 18^th and 19^th century. 

I enjoyed the emphasis on language and how it developed and was enriched by foreign borrowings and early debates on the issue. I remember poems from Old and Middle English like The Wanderer, The Seafarer, The Ruin, The Dream of the Rood, Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, Sir Orfeo, Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde. I read through Shakespeare’s plays and was particularly interested in Measure for Measure and the sense of rebirth in later plays.

I liked Donne and the ‘metaphysicals’ and appreciated the scope of Milton’s Paradise Lost, the cinematic effects he achieved, his use of Latinate constructions but also his musicality. I also discovered the 18^th century: Johnson’s Rasselas, Swift’s Gullivers Travels, Pope’s Rape of the Lock,  Sterne’s Tristram Shandy.  I was interested in some of the debates about scientific experiments and early attempts to fly.

I would have liked to do a B.Litt. on Coleridge as I had been reading through his Biographia but was persuaded to do it on Shelley’s prose. This was never completed but I read through all Shelley’s letters, The Defence of Poetry and other writings including his own two Gothic Novels and Mary Shelley’s comments on his metaphysical views.  In the process I became interested in Gothic Novels and read Franken-stein, Vathek, The Castle of Otranto, Ann Radcliffe’s novels, Charlotte Dacre’s  Zofloya or The Moor, Melmoth the Wanderer, Dracula, The Monk  and others, including a  parody written in the early 19^th century  called The Heroine by Eaton Stannard Barrett. In fact, I compiled a lengthy bibliography of Gothic Literature. I also read Godwin’s Caleb Williams which I found very interesting and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. Like Helen Gardner, my tutor Rachel Trickett who later became Principal of St Hugh’s was critical of the New Criticism and over-interpreting texts and using technical jargon. 

NKG: Did you ever contemplate being a writer yourself?

AAM: I have always written a little, mainly poems, though now do not find myself trying to write a poem but more interested in short pieces with thoughts on different things or responses to situations and like the idea of short stories, a medium I particularly enjoy in preference to novels.

NKG: Have you ever experienced the dilemma of double conscious-ness in terms of your family connections with those engaged in the struggle for freedom against British rule and your being the daughter of a British citizen employed in the services of the Empire as a geologist?

AAM: I am critical of many aspects of British rule in India, but particularly because of the attitude and prejudices of some of the people who went out to work there. However Shashi Tharoor‘s  Inglorious Empire, while  pointing out how the East India Company exploited India and created a situation of economic reliance that continued, does not pay enough attention to individual Englishmen like my father who worked for the Geological Survey of India and far from exploiting India, worked for the country, got on very well with individual Indians and was highly critical about the prejudices of some of the English in India. My father had early on appreciated the intelligence of many of the Indians he met, though irritated by the affectations and snobberies about public schools displayed by anglicized Indians including members of my mother’s family. It is in this context interesting to note Kipling’s reaction to The Indian National Congress. The Bengali ‘Balliol-educated’ lawyers who featured prominently in the Congress were mocked as having acquired a superficial induction in Western culture. Contrary to the thinking of earlier administrators, Kipling felt that Western culture could not be successfully grafted on to what he saw as the obscurantism of the sub-continent. This opens a huge area of debate about culture, hybridity and the bonds created by Empire and is something that preoccupies me.

NKG: It must be a mark of distinction to be the niece of Wystan Hugh Auden, one of twentieth century’s greatest poets. What features of W. H. Auden’s life would you like to highlight?

AAM: Both my father and Wystan broke away from prejudiced racial attitudes then current in society: my father married a Bengali and Wystan left England for America, became an American citizen and lived with Chester Kallman who was Jewish. Constance Rosalie showed an interest in my mother’s background and was glad that my father, after an unhappy first marriage, was now happy. However, she and George Augustus hoped that the children of the marriage would be christened. This finally happened with my mother’s approval after my father became a Roman Catholic; he felt it was more universal and Anglicanism was too closely associated with the Raj. If Constance Rosalie found it hard to accept Wystan’s homosexuality and George Augustus had ambivalent views about Chester’s Jewishness, they were not narrow-minded and John and Wystan were able to communicate with them. In 1941 Wystan who had met Chester wrote a letter to my father who had married my mother and I had just been born, saying, “Every ohm of private happiness and decency is, I am convinced, a political asset to the world.” 

NKG: How often did you get to meet your uncle Wystan?

AAM: In 1951 Wystan visited India and stayed with us in Calcutta. It was our first meeting with him though he was already a presence in our lives. My mother remembers how impressed the servants had been when he shook each one by the hand. Less diplomatic than Louis MacNeice (who also visited India) in his responses to culture-vulturism, he complained among other things about watching Indian dancing, not his cup of tea, though in an early letter to my father had recommended yoga as a technique, at the same time firmly dismissing what he thought to be any accompanying mumbo-jumbo. E. F. Benson, a writer Wystan, my parents and many of us have enjoyed, captures the burlesque of some of the turn of the century fascination with the occult, unconscious workings of the mind and frequent absurdities of East West relations – what you could describe as Western gullibility versus Eastern enterprise.  Yeats had his dictated writing and Indian interests, Gerald Heard, Aldous Huxley and Christopher Isherwood explored Vedanta, but Wystan turned to psychology. My mother also distrusted facile attempts at under-standing Eastern philosophy, but she minded what she felt was Wystan’s antipathy to the East. There is a letter Wystan wrote to her years later in response to an apology of hers after an evening when having drunk too much, she had aired some grievances.

NKG: What did Wystan write in the letter you mention?

AAM: Here are some excerpts from the letter:

My ‘antipathy’ to things Eastern is very largely the defence mechanism of a writer.  The East is a whole world, or several whole worlds, of religion, art, thought which must be taken seriously, not dabbled in. I have no patience with Westerners who take little nibbles at Yoga or Zen or Eastern art and think themselves citizens of the world in consequence.  Since I am not prepared to devote my whole life to the East, I think the wisest and most respectful course is not to consider it at all

… I understand well how mad you must get with the English Family – it is not just the Audens, but English society as a whole is an in-bred snooty family. Why do you think that I went to America? (Incidentally, if you had trouble with Papa, how do you think I felt when he went into a diatribe against the Jews in Chester’s presence?). Try to be patient with us, though, my dear.  Love, Wystan

NKG: What other memories would you like to talk about?

AAM: Our stay in Ischia on our way from India to England remains in my memory as it did with my sister Rita as a special time full of new experiences. We met Chester whom we liked and saw as another uncle. He had, rather to my mother’s surprise, bought her a purple dress which she never wore though amused by the gift. The household included Giocondo who helped generally, Mose the dog and Lucina the cat.  We used to frequent two cafes in Forio, one run by a man called Peter and the other by Maria and Gisella. I remember sitting in a café and being put to a test to draw a house, road and I think a river or stream, drawings which were then interpreted. Chester had us match-ing people to animals, birds, reptiles, not easy but revealing. During some siestas Wystan read us Seaton’s Aunt (Walter de la Mare) and The Hobbit (Tolkien).

On one occasion in Ischia Wystan asked if we did not find the thought of our parents marrying puzzling. At the time I recall finding the question intrusive though realized later that this was prompted by a genuine interest in both what we thought and curiosity in how chance brings people together and the oddity of marriages. He was fascinated by the mystery of two humans with their variant genes uniting in marri-age and creating new entities. He had always been puzzled by his own parents whom he felt were in some ways ill matched. The Epithala-mium he wrote for my sister’s marriage to Peter Mudford is interesting in a number of ways. He had earlier sent me a letter marked TOP SECRET asking for the maternal surnames for his surprise poem: “Wherefore, as Mudfords, Audens/ Seth-Smiths, Bonnerjees,/ With civic spear and distaff/ We hail a gangrol/ Paleocene pseudo – rat/ the Ur-Papa of princes/ and crossing sweepers.”

Bonnerjee was misspelt with a g making one think of Miss Gee!  The poem makes clear how our genetic origins defy snobbery. My sister did not like the poem (one of her favourites was Musee des Beaux Arts) but she got on very well with Wystan who admired her intelligence and was impressed that she was a surgeon. For her wedding he had taken the trouble to buy a new silk suit. On being offered a gardenia to wear in his lapel he discovered that there was no button hole and promptly cut a hole (having somehow borrowed a small pair of scissors from my mother) so that he could wear the gardenia for this special occasion. For my wedding in Florence, he made a huge effort to come though he was in extreme discomfort after an accident. 

He opened accounts for my sister, myself and his godson Philip Spender at Blackwells in Oxford so that we could buy books. His tenure of the Chair of Poetry coincided with my time at Oxford. Not everyone had voted for him but he had a strong supporter in Enid Starkie who had said that the Chair should go to someone outside Oxford and a practising poet. His talks drew crowds and I felt a proud niece to have such a famous, though controversial, uncle whose ideas always challenged thought. The disapproval of his move to America continues to remain a shadow in England.  

Both my father and Wystan in spite of their scientific interests believed in hidden powers and were superstitious. As the third and youngest son Wystan told my mother he identified with the Fairy tale hero who is lucky but the shadow of this luck was a sense that poetry was un-Christian, as in fact magic. Curdie in The Princess and the Goblin, one of the books Wystan liked and read as a child, recites poems to ward off the goblins. Addressing Chester and Christopher Isherwood he says: “Although you be, as I am, one of those/ Who feels a Christian ought to write in prose/ For poetry is magic: born in sin, you/ May read it to exorcise the gentile in you.”

NKG: Auden has stated in Shorts (Thankyou, Fog): “Whatever their personal faith/ all poets, as such,/ are polytheists.” What is your take on this?

AAM: These ideas, expressed aphoristically, should also be understood aphoristically as a truth which can be interpreted in various ways. Professor John Bayley has pointed out in The Romantic Survival that part of the energy of Wystan's work lies in the tension between two voices – a can and an ought. Wystan had discussed doubleness with Charles Williams whom he liked and admired quoting Montaigne, “We are, I know not how, double in ourselves, so that we believe what we disbelieve, and cannot rid ourselves of what we condemn.” He had suggested The Double Man as the American title for his collection known in England as New Year Letter. As John Fuller has pointed out there is something here also of Jung’s lame shadow. 

NKG: What similarities did you find in your father and uncle?

AAM: Both Wystan and my father were good people. They had many minor faults and small prejudices but believed in the dignity of people and treating them as equals, helping where they could. Each had something of the healer as did my sister Rita.

NKG: What aspects of Auden’s poetry do you consider to be most significant? Do you agree that Auden was a great experimenter with artistic forms?

AAM: He experimented with different forms and his technical profi-ciency has been acknowledged by many people. I find his comment under ‘Choirboys’ in A Certain World interesting: “As a choir boy, I had to learn, not only to sight-read music, but also to enunciate words clearly – there is a famous tongue twister in the Jubilate – ‘For why, it is He that hath made us and not we ourselves’ – and to notice the difference  between their metrical values when spoken and when sung, so that, long before I took a conscious interest in poetry I had acquired a certain sensitivity to language which I could not have acquired in any other way.” 

NKG: Many celebrity writers have praised Auden’s poetry. Do you have any such opinion in mind?

AAM: Yes. Derek Walcott who discovered his poetry as a young boy in St Lucia has said: “I think Auden actually dared a lot more than either Pound or Eliot. I think his intellect was far more adventurous, far braver, far stronger, and far more reckless than either of them.” Alexander McCall Smith in his book What W.H Auden Can Do For You says that Auden changed his life and that when he died he felt a great humane voice had been silenced, a view shared by a number of people. He speaks of the intellectual density of his work, the lines ‘packed with ideas.’ This might sometimes be a fault but it is also a strength and the ideas become part of a landscape characteristic of Auden throughout his poetry. 

NKG: What about the views of his critics?

AAM: Wystan’s critics point to the lack of memorability in much of the later work and of a decline in technique and tone. When a poet has set himself the novel and very difficult task of giving the ‘drab truthfulness of prose’ poetic form, there will be a different rhythm and less obvious memorability but I feel that there are many memorable lines. I like many of the poems in Thankyou, Fog particularly ‘Nocturne’ and ‘Lullaby’ published after his death.   

NKG: Do you agree that Auden’s early poems were more popular in comparison to his later creations?

AAM: Wystan’s earlier poems may remain for many people those they remember and love but it would be a pity if poems written after the late 50s are ignored. They need a different attention to find the music and have important things to say. In his last works you hear a quieter single voice and growing sense of gratitude and acceptance. The English language is praised for its peculiar qualities. Edward Mendelson has noted the frequency of the word ‘odd’ in various combinations in his last poems and it brings to mind the world of strange compatibles in Edward Lear like The Owl and The Pussycat.

NKG: Could you throw some light on Auden’s poem on the Partition of India?

AAM: Wystan’s poem “Partition” written in 1966 describes the arbitrary dividing by a lawyer who had no knowledge of India into India and Pakistan. My father had written to him in 1948 shortly after Independence about the Calcutta riots and how he and other Europeans had helped collect bodies lying in the streets as they were less at risk than Hindu and Muslim friends. Awareness of the problems in India were primarily due to my father for he and Wystan corresponded throughout their lives but I am sure Wystan also found information from other sources as well. 

NKG: In his celebrated elegy on the death of W. B. Yeats, Auden makes a characteristic pronouncement: “Poetry makes nothing happen.” Yet, at the end of the poem he says: “With the farming of a verse/ Make a vineyard of the curse,/ Sing of human unsuccess/ In a rapture of distress;/ In the deserts of the heart/ Let the healing fountain start…” Do you see any dichotomy in the two assertions?

AAM: The line, “For poetry makes nothing happen” challenges interpretation and has been lifted out of context to be queried in isolation. The negative assertion appears to be contradicted by the high note of affirmation of the poet’s voice at the end of the poem. Wystan grew increasingly concerned about his own rhetorical ability and the danger of misuse and inflation into propaganda, disapproving of Shelley’s assertion that poets are the legislators of the world. It is this concern or double take on the role of poetry that creates a sense of dichotomy but if you read the beautiful lines that follow, a subtle context is provided: “it survives /In the valley of its making where executives/ Would never want to tamper, flows on south/ from ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,/ Raw towns that we believe and die in: it survives,/ A way of happening, a mouth.”

Poetry may not directly make things happen in the Primary World but as a construct of the Secondary World of the Imagination, shares the poet’s vision of truth with the reader. This truth is common to all and each person is uniquely responsible to society.

NKG: Auden’s birth centenary went unnoticed in 2007 in England. The Bible says that “a prophet has no honour in his own country.” Do you think it holds true for Auden?

AAM: The Centenary, while in some ways low key, gathered momen-tum and took place through the  year with  many celebratory events, the first at Westminster Abbey. But some of the English still hold it against Wystan that he went to America and there is the criticism of his later work. He does not appear to be formally honoured in his own country, though with many individual admirers. I was hoping they would issue a stamp particularly as he wrote Night Mail but when I approached the relevant people, the idea was not taken up.  

NKG: Re-Markings brought out a special section on Auden in its March 2007 issue with an endorsement by none else than Edward Mendel-son? How would you respond to such a gesture by Mendelson?

AAM: Having an endorsement by Edward Mendelson is ideal as he is the person who knows the most about Wystan’s work and has devoted his life to understanding Wystan.

NKG: You have had an interesting career marked by diverse engage-ments. Kindly shed some light on the work you have enjoyed most.

AAM: I have enjoyed aspects of everything I have done and feel that there is a linking pattern. Giving exercise classes for women taught me how to encourage people to look after their figures and improve morale as well as providing me with a discipline that I keep up in a small way aware how important this is as one grows older. Working in antiques taught me about the development of different styles through different periods and the hybrid influences that make colonial furniture so interesting. It also acted as a complement to my knowledge of different periods of literature.

Working at Agenda introduced me to new disciplines: learning to use a computer and control a mouse in my fifties, managing accounts, fund-raising and organising events. As to editing, it made me realise how easy it is to miss mistakes when checking copy and that it takes se-veral eyes to spot all errors. I later helped organise an ambitious 3-day conference at Senate House with John Armstrong on Modern Poetry and Prejudice. What I came to understand was how varied and sometimes divisive views on writers and poets can be and how the question of taste and judgement turn into tyrannies. My own tastes were more eclectic than that of William Cookson, the Founder and Editor of Agenda. Judging poetry can be a very subjective thing though you find groups of people might share similar tastes. I think many people writing were more concerned with what they were saying than how they were saying it. I used to respond to the tone of a poem as well as its rhythm. 

Working in an Inner City State Secondary was an eye-opener. I had a wide-ranging role starting as a PA to the Head, then working in the library, later supporting the Sixth Form, organising work experience for students, some enrichment activities and finally running a careers programme. But I also had to cover in Reception, help with general office activities and lettings. I found it beneficial to be in an environ-ment that reflected the inner city multi-ethnic reality instead of the more middleclass and, by and large, more prosperous world I had been familiar with. I liked engaging with students and staff who came from a wide range of backgrounds. Though I felt critical about aspects of the curriculum I admired how teachers managed the challenges they faced in controlling and interesting large classes. 

NKG: How would you respond to Auden’s remark that poetry can be good without being great?

AAM: A very sensible and wise comment that embraces the whole range of poetry and includes light verse, nursery rhymes and song lyrics, appreciating what is well constructed and entertaining. To ignore these smaller achievements in the search for the great is to create a completely false understanding of poetry. In fact, one can only appre-ciate what is great if one is capable of appreciating what is good and when looking for models to learn from it is more productive to follow what is good rather than what is great. Wystan had spoken highly of De La Mare’s anthology Come Hither for including nursery rhymes as well as poems by Keats.

NKG: In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, what lines from Auden do you have in mind for the younger generation?

AAM: “Human Time is a City/ Where each inhabitant has/ A political duty/ Nobody else can perform,/ Made cogent by Her Motto:/ Listen, Mortals, Lest Ye Die.” However, I prefer the idea of people discovering their own lines.

NKG: Thanks, Anita, for this engaging conversation.

AAM: Thank you Nibir for this opportunity.

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The Bliss of the ‘Inward Eye’: A Birth-Centenary Tribute to

Satyajit Ray

Nibir K. Ghosh & Sunita Rani Ghosh

Not to have seen the cinema of Ray means existing in the world without seeing the sun or the moon. – Akira Kurosawa

‘Truth is beauty, beauty truth,’ wrote John Keats at the end of his “Ode On a Grecian Urn” after advocating ‘Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter’ in his immortal poem. In the context of Keats’s poem, it is right to presume that truth, no matter how bitter, when mani-fested in any artistic garb becomes an artefact of beauty. Even in these dreadful times when the entire globe is engaged in coming to terms with death, decay and destruction, wrought by the ravages of the COVID-19 reality, a film like Pather Panchali (Song of the Little Road) or Apur Sansar (The World of Apu) can make us understand that the human struggle for existence and survival against overwhelming odds and calamities is not a rarely occurring phenomenon but is part and parcel of the ever-ongoing narrative of human existence. These films do not offer an easy escape from reality like mainstream Bollywood stuff where drama, dance and song transport us to a world filled with euphoria where everything ends in imagined happiness. 

As art-film addicts, we have always been a great admirer of Satyajit Ray movies. We have watched with relish most of his films that brought him national acclaim as well as international renown. We have enjoyed with immense aesthetic delight most of his creative renderings on celluloid including Pather Panchali (1955), Aparajito (The Unvanquished, 1956), Apur Sansar, 1959), Charulata  (The Lonely Wife, 1964), Aryaner Din Ratri (Days and Nights in the Forest, 1969), Pratidwandi (the Adversary, 1970), Seemabaddha (Company Limited, 1971), Asani Sanket (Distant Thunder, 1973), Sonar Kella (the Golden Fortress, 1974), Shatranj Ke Khilari (The Chess Players, 1977: his first Hindi film), Sadgati (Deliverance, 1981), Ghare Baire (The Home and the World, 1984), Ganashatru (An Enemy of the People, 1989), Agantuk (The Stranger, 1991). Each of his cinematic creation keeps us glued to the screen as we witness with wonder the unfolding of life in its various manifestations through the play of light and shade, silence and speech, action and stillness.

In a career spanning over four decades, Ray’s enviable list of national and international awards and accolades – Magasaysay Award, Bharat Ratna, Dadasaheb Phalke Award, Soviet Land Nehru Award, Vidyasagar Award, French Légion d’Honneur, Oscar Award for Lifetime Achieve-ment, to name just a few – bear ample testimony to the range and variety of his contribution in enriching the cinematic world with his innovative thoughts and ideas in multi-dimensional roles, not only as a director par excellence but in diverse arenas like screenplay, music, photography, dialogue, editing, costume design, cast alignment, settings etc.

Born on 2 May 1921 in Calcutta (now Kolkata), Satyajit Ray lost his father Sukumar Ray at the age of 2 year 4 months. His mother Suprabha Ray brought him up singlehandedly and encouraged him to be interested in art and aesthetics. The colonial backdrop of Calcutta naturally attracted Ray to everything essentially Western: Art, Literature, Music, Cinema. After graduating in Economics (honours) from Presidency College, Calcutta, his mother urged him to go to Santiniketan for getting an insight into Indian art and tradition that would help him in his proposed career as a commercial artist.

Apart from his mother’s desire, the lure of Tagore himself (who had been a friend of his father and grandfather) made him overcome his initial reluctance. The imprint that Santiniketan made on his impressionable mind is lucidly recorded in his own words: “In the two and a half years, I had time to think, and time to realise that, almost without being aware of it, the place had opened windows for me. More than anything else, it had brought me an awareness of our tradition, which I knew would serve as a foundation for any branch of art that I wished to pursue.”

Ray’s love and esteem for Rabindranath Tagore grew manifold with the passage of time. Five of Ray’s films are based on the works of Tagore. It seems what attracted him most to Tagore was the latter’s inherent humanism and Indianness. Ray’s reverence and gratitude to Tagore can also be ascertained from the 54-minute documentary film, Rabindranath Tagore (1961), he made to mark the first centenary of Tagore’s birth in 1961. With a heart full of emotion, Ray narrates at the beginning of the documentary: “On August 7, 1941, in Calcutta, a man died. His mortal remains perished, but he left behind him a heritage which no fire could consume. It was a heritage of words and music and poetry, of ideas and ideals and it has the power to move us today and in the days to come. We, owe him so much, salute his memory…”

It may be mentioned that even at the tender age of 6 Ray had accom-panied his mother on her visit to Santiniketan and met Rabindranath Tagore. When he gave the Nobel Laureate a notebook for his autograph, Tagore wrote a short poem for Ray in Bengali. The lines translated into English read thus: “Many a time/ Have I travelled many a mile/ to nations far away/ I've gone to see the mountains,/ the oceans I've been to view./ But I failed to notice with my two eyes wide open/ What lay not two steps from my home:/ On a sheaf of paddy grain/  A shining drop of dew.”

It is significant that, in resonating Tagore’s idea so implicit in the short poem, Ray never tried to dazzle his audience with glittering and eye-catching locations, so imminent in the then contemporary Indian cinema, but confined himself to what lay close at hand to discover “a shining drop of dew on a sheaf of paddy grain.” Rather than undertake frequent travels in search of alluring locations, he preferred to opt for spots and places that matched the mood and the ambience of the story he was adapting for a particular film.

Though Ray never had any formal training in the art of Cinema, he acquired most of the skills of the trade intuitively. He loved watching American films right from his early childhood, a fact that he mentions in his Oscar Award acceptance speech that he gave from his hospital bed in 1992:

It's an extraordinary experience for me to receive this magni-ficent award; certainly the best achievement of my movie-making career. When I was a small, small school boy, I was terribly interested in the cinema. Became a film fan … I have learned everything I've learned about the craft of cinema from the making of American films. I've been watching American films very carefully over the years and I loved them for what they entertain, and then later loved them for what they taught. So, I express my gratitude to the American cinema, to the motion picture association who have given me this award and who have made me feel so proud.

Ray may have been an avid watcher of American films but the advice he received from Jean Renoir in 1949 must have impacted him quite a bit. Renoir had told him: “If you could only shake Hollywood out of your system and evolve your own style, you would be making great films here.” Ray actually did that as can be evinced from his own statement: “I make films for the love of it…I enjoy every moment of the film ma-king process.” He adds further: “I write my own scenario and my own dialogue…I find it fascinating to do so. I select my own actors, some-times from among the professionals, sometimes right from the street, and when I do that, it seems to me that casting is great fun, because you're actually looking for flesh and blood incarnations of the characters you've dreamt up in the process of writing.”

It is noteworthy that the stories and plots of his films came from established writers: Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay, Rabindranath Tagore, Sunil Gangopadhyay, Shankar, Munshi Premchand, Henrik Ibsen, Ray himself among others. His film adaptations do reveal that he allowed his creative freedom to determine what was necessary to retain from the originals to portray what he thought to be quintessentially human. Andrew Robinson rightly avers that Ray, in course of his adaptations, may have had in mind what Renoir had once told Ray: “We don’t admire a painting for its fidelity to the model, all we want is for the model to stimulate the painter’s imagination.”

Ray’s turning point in life came in the year 1950 when he made a trip to London with his wife Bijoya. He was then seriously reflecting on his idea of making Pather Panchali. In his six-months long stay there he saw a large number of films including Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves which made a profound impression on Ray. He writes: “All through my stay in London, the lessons of Bicycle Thieves and neo-realist cinema stayed with me.” Bicycle Thieves had strengthened his belief that a realistic cinema could be created with an almost entirely amateur cast and shooting at actual locations. Urged by his zeal and passion, Ray had completed his treatment of Pather Panchali on the return journey by ship to India.

Pather Panchali was screened in 1955. The film brought him instant global renown with eleven international prizes, including Best Human Documentary at the Cannes Film Festival. It was a kind of fulfilment of Ray’s dream of making a film steeped in humanism and shot on actual location in the midst of nature with relatively unknown cast and characters without any make-up. His passionate desire to make Pather Panchali, the way he always wanted to, also proved a great learning lesson to the city-bred Ray, a fact that he humbly acknowledges: “Before I made my first film, Pather Panchali, I had only a superficial knowledge of what life in a Bengali village was like. Now I know a good deal about it. I know its soil, its seasons, its trees and forests and flowers, I know how the man in field works and how the women at the well gossip, and I know the children out in the sun and the rain, behaving as all children in all parts of the world do.”

Though there were quite a few detractors, the lavish praise of filmmakers like Kashiko Kawakita and many others compensated for them all. Kawakita wrote in lyrical style: “When I first saw Pather Panchali in 1956 at Cannes, it struck me like thunder. When I first met Satyajit Ray in 1958 at Brussels, he looked like Krishna the mighty god. Since then, he has been my great master; through him and through his works I learnt how to live and how to love.”

In his most anthologised poem “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” William Wordsworth has written: “For oft, when on my couch I lie/ In vacant or in pensive mood,/ They flash upon that inward eye/ Which is the bliss of solitude;/ And then my heart with pleasure fills,/ And dances with the daffodils.” The bliss of the “inward eye,” that Wordsworth alluded to, was what Ray was intrinsically gifted with. Rather than take recourse to complex techniques and theories of Film-making, Ray relied on what was truly captured by his “inward eye” which went deeper and beyond what the naked eye observed. Ray had remarked, “a shot is beautiful only if it is right in its content, and this rightness has little to do with what appears beautiful to the eye.”

It is often given to understand by some of Ray’s critics (Nargis Dutt of Mother India fame included), many of whom may not have seen even a single film of the maestro, that Ray presented in his films a seamy side of India steeped in poverty, deprivation, misery, superstition and the like to impress the Western audience. Nothing can be far from the truth as is evident from the powerful statement that Ray made in a letter to his biographer Marie Seton in 1970 to show his displeasure against the acclaimed French filmmaker Louis Malle’s mammoth 378-minute documentary Phantom India (1969). Phantom India had evoked strong criticisms, especially of widespread poverty and bureaucratic corrup-tion, the problematic status of women and the caste system, which although officially abolished with India’s independence from Great Britain in 1947, Malle found to be worse than ever 20 years later. Satyajit Ray condemned Louis Malle’s films for their obsession with poverty and for his ignorance of India. He stated candidly: “personally, I don’t think any film director has any right to go to a foreign country and make a documentary film about it unless a) he is absolutely thorough in his groundwork on all aspects of the country – historical, social, religious and b) he does it with genuine love. Working in a dazed state – whether in admiration or disgust – can produce nothing of value.”

Ray reiterated that what was deficient in the Louis Malle’s version of India was the ‘integrity of design’ which, according to him, was a requisite that validated creativity in filmmaking and in writing. The integrity of design with which Ray approached his subject matter and all other attendant responsibilities are evident from the ‘groundwork’ he applied himself to with ‘genuine love’ to create with perfection each one of his films. In fact, it is Ray’s ability to recreate with love and passion the simple nuances of day-to-day experiences, captured with his ‘inward eye’, that he passed on to Indian Cinema as his legacy. In the words of Adoor Gopalkrishnan, the celebrity director of offbeat Malyalam films: “I am proud that we, the Indian filmmakers of the present generation, are greatly indebted to Satyajit Ray for having taught us to look at the Indian reality in ways different and deeper than was ever attempted before.”

The hallmark of Ray’s essential attributes is beautifully stated in the Citation accompanying the 64^th Honorary Oscar Award (1991) conferred upon him in 1992: “To Satyajit Ray, in recognition of his rare mastery of the art of motion pictures, and of his profound humanitarian outlook, which has had an indelible influence on filmmakers and audiences throughout the world.” After receiving the Oscar Award, Ray told the Time magazine, “The most distinctive feature of my films is that they are deeply rooted in Bengali culture, mannerisms and mores. What makes them universal in appeal is that they are about human beings.” What Ray’s films highlight about human beings is the manner in which they face ‘the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune’ (to borrow Hamlet’s words) with resilience, grace and equanimity, dreaming their little dreams and moving on without giving up in despair. Life, according to Ray, was complex and there seemed to be no easy solutions. “The only solutions,” he said, that are ever worth anything are the solutions that people find themselves."

It may also be pertinent to contend that, despite the international acclaim that Ray’s films have won among the audience overseas, his work is little known. Way back in 1978 when Professor John G. Cawelti of Chicago University and author of celebrated The Six Gun Mystique, visited Agra, he specifically alluded to his admiration for Rays films Apur Sansar and Asani Sanket.

Likewise, recently, when we asked Professor Jonah Raskin from California if he would be interested in a conversation with Re-Markings on Satyajit Ray, he instantly responded by stating: “I am familiar with some of Satyajit Ray's work – the Apu Trilogy most of all. I like his visual pacing very much. I have felt like I inhabited the world of Apu and Ray… It is very important I would say for Re-Markings to honor Ray's  work in a special number.”

In an interview Satyajit Ray remarked in 1982 how he viewed the success of his films with perfect poise: "I never imagined that any of my films, especially Pather Panchali, would be seen throughout this country or in other countries. The fact that they have is an indication that, if you're able to portray universal feelings, universal relations, emotions, and characters, you can cross certain barriers and reach out to others, even non-Bengalis."

Ray’s astute observation about the need for universality in films appear to be in sync with what Samuel Johnson said about the plays of Shakespeare: “Nothing can please many, and please long, but just representations of general nature.” It is providential, perhaps, that William Shakespeare and Satyajit Ray, though separated by centuries, died on the same date i.e. April 23 (Shakespeare 1616, Satyajit Ray 1992) after contributing their very best to the enrichment of humanity beyond boundaries and barriers of language, nation and culture.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Gupta, Udayan. “The Politics of Humanism: An Interview with Satyajit Ray.” Cineaste, Vol. 12, No. 1 (1982), pp. 24-29.

Johnson, Samuel. Preface to Shakespeare. Ed. D. J. Enright and Ernst De Chikera. Oxford University Press, 1962. pp.131-161.

Keats, John. “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” Keats: Poetical Works. Ed. H. W. Garrod. Oxford University Press, 1976. pp. 209-210.

Oscar Academy Award ‘Citation’ and ‘Acceptance Speech.’ http://aaspeechesdb. oscars.org/ link/064-24/. Accessed 15 May 2021.

Ray, Satyajit. Louis Malle’s Phantom India. Letter to Marie Seton dated September 6, 1970. Marie Seton Collection, Section 2, Item 10. British Film Institute Library, London.

Ray, Satyajit. Official Website. https://satyajitrayworld. org/rays_ view.html.

Robinson, Andrew. Satyajit Ray: The Inner Eye: The Biography of a Master Film-Maker. Oxford University Press, 2004.

Wordsworth, William. “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud.” Selections from Wordsworth. Ed. D. C. Somervell. J. M. Dent and Sons Ltd., 1969. p. 60.

·        Dr. Nibir K. Ghosh is UGC Emeritus Professor, Agra College, Agra. A Senior Fulbright Fellow at the University of Washington, Seattle, USA during 2003-04), he has authored/edited 15 widely acclaimed books.

·        Dr. Sunita Rani Ghosh is Head, Department of Hindi, Agra College, Agra. She has been a Visiting Scholar at the University of Washington, Seattle, USA during 2003-04.

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