Essay Issue 2 — November 2023
Shonar Tori: On Questions—the Agrarian, the Literal, and the Literary
By Aninda Rahman
We poets here are not Russians, still the category of our poetry is judged with Soviet ideals; Whether a composition is good or bad in terms of its affect (bhab) is not of any concern, rather its class—whether bourgeois or proletariat is judged. After all, if in some future Bolshevist principles and systems prevail in the country, then what? … Today under the reign of the lords (kortader amole) my writings are punctured here and there with Musalmani knives, and fingers raised to our noses. Which graveyard of Marxism is ahead of us?
—Rabindranath Tagore, Letter to Amiya Chakravarty, 1939
(8 years after Tagore’s visit to the USSR)
A specter is haunting Europe—the specter of communism. All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcize this specter: Pope and Tsar, Metternich and Guizot, French Radicals and German police-spies.
—Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (1848)
If one examines history in the context of people’s resistance against the plundering oligarchic establishment that were the zamindars and their accessories, for a significant period—from the beginning of the Permanent Settlement in 1793 to the so-called first war of independence in 1857—a form of colonialist realism evolved (akin to capitalist realism hypothesized by Mark Fisher, whom I am happy to recall). This situation persisted for the next 100 years. The East Bengal State Acquisition and Tenancy Act of 1950 put a final end to the unhealthy privileges of these titleholders.
While there were certainly good zamindars, there is no perspective where the existence of the zamindari system can be viewed favorably. There was no option other than self-abolition for the landed class to cease the exploitation they were bred for. The conservation of their class was not merely a choice but a survival imperative. Other alternatives would inevitably lead to their demise.
There existed a cognitive enclosure—a restricted way of thinking within the boundaries of colonialism—suffered by most zamindars, regardless of their proficiency in cultural areas. Rabindranath Tagore (RnT) emerged in this milieu.
The new establishment of private property introduced a novel mode of interaction with the world, encouraging individuals and communities to view natural resources and communal spaces as commodities subject to individual appropriation and control. The root of Tagore’s celebration of natural unity, omni-observant subjecthood, insistence on experience, and epiphany of the individual lies in this capacity to occupy the vantage. The poem “Shonar Tori” was composed in 1893, one sluggish century adjacent to the Permanent Settlement.
01. On Reading Shonar Tori
[01.01] “Shonar Tori” (I’m mostly keying in Roman letters that I feel equivalent, and avoiding transliteration standards here or anywhere), a collection of romantic poems including the famous eponymous piece of great literary craft was published in 1894. Rabindranath Tagore translated it into English that would be compiled into the book “The Fugitive” (1921).
The poem tells about the dejected self of someone who has been abandoned by a boat that had no room for him/her and was filled with paddy s/he grew to the brim. It is widely and nearly exclusively read and prescribed as a problem of Man’s futile attempt to hold onto life’s achievements and the eternal loneliness of self. The sadness of the modern mind is a result of the transitoriness of the presence of being and having someone simply ceased to exist in the mind of others, even the beloved. While I can relate to the despair outside the controlled interpretations, the metaphor seems distant and coerced. From Rabindranath Tagore’s corpus it can be deduced with ease that the longing for permanence and the lament relies on the idea that social contribution should be rewarded with remembrance and other rituals of high regard.
The Kolkata-centric cultural elites have for too long kept hegemonic control over the artistic and literary sensibility of educated Banglaphones. The pervasive cultural capital that dictated the pedagogic and academic manifestation of literature molding future functionaries that would rule the masses, also shaped the reading of Tagore among the reading classes in general. Tagore’s iconography is often a pictorial of a conflicted oldman. Proliferated visual presence of such grand figures of nationalist history (or any other field) can be viewed as a form of passive surveillance conducted by associated value establishments. Their placement at a communal space are but signals of allegiance or alignment. All these make critical engagement with Tagore’s texts evading all the hagiographic clamor about a glory man difficult. One can understand the rise of New Criticism in America, of the necessity of close reading of the text, as a reaction to such widespread numbness to the content of literature foregrounding details of wishful biography and autobiographical hence subjective recollections.
[01.02] Shonar Tori begins with the alarming imagery of rain falling fast and the river rushing and hissing, the island licked up and swallowed. It is not stated who, the zamindar or the undertenant is the narrator. The farmer however, is ready with sheaves of corn in a heap, a gift the boat will be laden with and at the end the lady with the helm refuses to take the owner (we cannot say cultivator with any certainty) of the produce which curiously translated by the poet as corn instead of paddy (bold and slanted letters are from Tagore’s English). Bengal’s collective idiom of gold connotes accumulated wealth; Golden is the color of ripe paddy, the central archetype of the poem. The trading of rice for corn informs the conversation among the global colonial elites in their parlance. Corn: as in the infamous Corn Laws between 1815 and 1846, the crux of class protectionism, the word corn encompassed all cereal crops.
02. The Agrarian Questions
[02.01] The play of the curved waters is all around (Charidike Baka Jol Koriche Khela). Apart from the rural panorama, Shonar Tori details a topography of cultivable terrain. This is a small piece of charland (river island) surrounded with streams as sharp as a razor. Then there is an extra modifier, a monoword— khoroporosha. Some say this word has an element of obscurity; school study guides say it refers to some sharp edged weapon. Or was it just for a nonce? Khor means drought in Bangla. Porosh means touch. Khona, the agricultural oracle of medieval delta of Bengal, says, about the cultivation of Aush paddy—Joishther Khora Dhaner Bara, roughly translates as, In summer it dries, giving extra rice. The variety Aush grows quickly—ashu, the word it is believed to be derived from means immediate. Seemingly dead plants become green with a touch of rain. Aush rice can be harvested in different months of the year, but notably around the rainy season.
The poem says, as soon as reaping is done, rain comes. In Tagore’s translation, rain fell fast. The text doesn’t mention Aush, but no other type ripes right on the cusp of monsoon. Remember the poet’s famous poem Ashar, referring to the first month of Monsoon, mentions the cultivation of Aush. Though in today’s Bangladesh Aush is not as widely cultivated as before, and before the spread of Boro across the country, the government has given some hesitant effort to reintroduce subspecies of Aush. The challenge is cultivating Boro as opposed to Aush, and the low lying lands near the water bodies where Boro can be and Aush cannot typically be grown, make more sense in the economy of land grab (even three-crop lands are not safe from state-sponsored nonagricultural expropriation). If the land is not elevated enough and the water level rises fast, all the produce is at stake. All the geographic uncertainties, of weather, water, and of land (climate change as a common concern will be belated to the 20th century) are felt throughout the poem. The banks are eroding fast.
At this point, the undertenant, and the landholder face different threats. For the small farmer—the solitary reaper—this is not the time for strategic stockpiling, and there is no time for negotiation. S/he is resting at the bottom of the supply chain. Both stakeholders may be in a hurry to make some quick money but the loss of land will hit them differently.
Let’s not ignore the realpolitik of landholding in the zamindari estates around Shilaidaha under RnT, his nephew and successor Surendranath Tagore, and one Gopi Sundari Dasya (GsD) who owned the Jalkar of Padma where RnT maneuvered his famous Budgerow. Jalkar may mean a grant of a right of fishery or it may mean the grant of a sheet of water together with the subsoil. RnT and GsD famously and fiercely, legally and extralegally, fought, for years, at their respective thresholds of feudal authority. The anecdotes and legal reports favor RnT by attributing moral superiority to him over his counterpart. GsD with her boat full of gunmen were reported to engage in looting, targeting vulnerable fishers by forcibly taking Hilsa from their boats. She and her employees showed hesitation to carry out similar actions on land, particularly within the terrain of the Tagores. The core of such conflicts usually lay on the claim on new charlands.
The issue of rights to charland property was a complex issue in the 19th century, as it is now. The Bengal Alluvion And Diluvion Regulation, 1825 dictates, in cases of char formation, rights depend on the type of water body. If a char forms in a large navigable river with a non-fordable channel, it’s under Government control. If the channel is fordable—like Tagore’s poem Amader Choto Nodi (lit. Our Small River), it’s added to the land of the nearest estate owner. In small rivers with recognised property rights, a formed sandbank belongs to the riverbed owner with fishing rights, who in this case was GsD. The erosion of the mainland however was a separate source of anxiety. The Bengal Tenancy Act of 1885 stipulates that if a tenant has secured a reduction of rent, their right to the diluviated land would be considered surrendered or extinguished.
The Company and the Parliamentary Lords struggled to stabilize issues surrounding the unique problem of alluviation (Poyosti) and diluvion (Shikosti) land in Bengal. The grand rivers Brahmaputra and Ganges, along with millions of acres of lands and their complex ownership claims, legal intricacies, and policing expenses, hindered the formulation of a unitary and profitable solution to Shikosti-Poyosti and charland questions.
The early 19th century saw the dominance of predatory capitalism, marked by the exploitative maneuvers of the ruling class. Destruction of local industries, the commodification of labor leading to extreme extraction of surplus value, define this period. As the century unfolded, the landscape shifted towards the embracing of industrial capitalism. Yet, the sanctity of land endured, remaining as the cornerstone of real estate. Landlords employed an array of tactics to secure and maintain their holdings. In RnT’s estates, he created settlements for the Nama Shudras, bringing them in as cultivators of charlands. Through allotments, he bestowed the right to plots of arable lands to a part of his bureaucracy. In one instance, he discovered that subordinates in the estate office were whispering about how he allotted useless lands full of sands to employees. Shocked, he investigated the area himself, wading into the muddy sediments only to confirm the claims.
In another anecdote, RnT’s Budgerow got stuck in a char, and as the water level dropped rapidly, his companions hesitated to disturb a poet. He was ready to leave the place with a dingi, a small fishing craft. However, the tenants of the charmahal (islanders) and the jalmahal (fishers) took this personally. To prevent the disrespect of their Raja, the King—as the uneducated villagers would call him—they rallied together, tugged the riverboat with ropes, and relocated him to the deeper water.
Shilaidaha experienced a peasant revolt in 1931, led by Ismail Molla Malitha. Tagore, who had handed over the zamindari to Surendranath 20 years prior, was urged to visit Shilaidaha to foster a reconciliation between the peasants and the bureaucrats. For six hours he listened to opposing parties, and convinced both to agree on a revised methodology for determining the land-owner. The rebellion was neutralized, and Tagore’s technical solutions became part of later legislation. However, this dispute continued into the Pakistan period. An ever shifting demography continued to pay the price of wealth reconfiguration in the colonial era, by famines, genocide(s), and exodus.
Ater the zamindars left, big landlords and successful money magnets assumed the role of the former zamindars and continued to consume the pasture land as before. Vast stretches of land were lost and thousands of farming families became homeless every year. People affected by land encroachment lose their housing, land and source of income. We see them forced to take shelter on roadsides, embankments, and empty spaces in cities. They are the victims of accumulation by dispossession (read David Harvey, the Tutor of our time).
02. On the Literary
[02.01] We need to (re)locate Rabindranath Tagore to the time slab between The Bengal Tenancy Act of 1884 that paved the way to the rise of landed intermediary class, and The Bengal Tenancy Act of 1938 that finally, even though minimally, created for the small farmers, access to land ownership. The zamindar-subject relationship saw a steady deterioration in this period (which would never improve), and until the 1950 Tenancy Act, the monopoly of the zamindars and their beneficiaries on lands could not be broken. It’s crucial to recognize the debt owed to A K Fazlul Huque for his relentless efforts in securing landowning rights for farmers.
In 1890, Rabindranath Tagore inherited not just the estates, but the weighty legacy of orchestrating the subjugation of the native underclass, predominantly peasants, fishers, and artisans of East Bengal. According to his own writings, Tagore had been a reluctant facilitator of serfdom. However, he consistently defended the Permanent Settlement, asserting that allowing the murha, the uneducated, rayots (cultivators) to buy and sell lands would be “tantamount to suicide.” Tagore’s educational philosophy rested on the fundamental assumption that education could serve as a transformative force, sidestepping the question of structural inequality.
Rabindranath Tagore was chosen as the prime custodian of the fading dynasty of grandfather Prince Dwarakanath Tagore, a financial oligarch of colonial Bengal and a pivotal figure in the hierarchy of transnational colonial elites. PDnT’s businesses faced steady depletion through the era of Rabindranath’s father Maharshee Debendranath Tagore who religiously prolonged PDnT’s dying businesses and maintained the family status in the imperial-capital nexus. MDnT put Robi’s childhood into some extent of austerity and regimentation that would eventually shape Robi as a worthy defender of the interposed oligarchy—the in-betweeners of the colonizers and the oppressed—RnT.
If one tries to learn about the Tycoon-turned-Saint MDnT, they will find almost nothing about his zamindari. Even official chroniclers of the mini-empire, like Sachindranath Adhikary, a long-termer in Tagore estates, expressed his despair upon not finding even a trace of PDnT and MDnT’s zamindari records. Therefore, most knowledge is constructed around his overlordship, his strategic maneuvers within circles of the revenue elites, and the private practices of frugality through which he nurtured his prodigy, Rabindranath Tagore. Along with the cognitive dissonance underlined by a fancy yet saint-like lifestyle, RnT inherited the specific methodology of suppressing records and archives critical of his family. Let’s recall journalist Kangal Harinath Majumder and his lifelong and posthumous on-going struggle against Maharshi Debendranath Tagore that has been actively erased from history—the delusional habitat of the educated mind.
In the unregulated pre-industrial era, Dwarakanath Tagore enjoyed unfettered autonomy of a Prince. The Tagore family flourished during the colonial era as the security of a holding company—the first European-Indian partnership Car, Tagore & Co. est. 1839. The company was the market leader in the grand historical injustice of indigo trading. This laissez-faireing Tagore & Co. succeeded to the Bengal Coal Company, a monopoly, becoming the reason for regulations being imposed on the market to protect the interest of other European entities.
With the rise of colonial bureaucracy, the intermediary classes, and the moneylenders seizing the opportunity to intensify the exploitation of the agrarian masses, extracting until the last drop, by the time of MDnT, an upgrade to the zamindari system was overdue. A large group of stewards and clerks thrived by leeching off already parasitic structures and needless to say, they were resistant to any upgrade. On the urban frontier a new moneyed class was emerging. The colonization of South Asian lands entered the era of constitutional oppression. In this new constitutionalism, factions of the native elites engaged themselves in ideological (proxy)battles. The Prince is now the Maha-Rishi lit. the Great Saint but the prefix that makes Maha-Raja is not detached. As history progressed, Rabindranath Tagore would become the Poet-Saint, the Kobi-Guru. This transformation in the sobriquets of the tycoons are not isolated from the changes in the mechanism of capital accumulation and social reproduction.
It would be a mistake to assume that Rabindranath Tagore, often characterized as an unsuccessful agricultural reformer and financial entrepreneur, did not foresee the path he chose to ensure the fate of his family’s wealth. The rise of the so-called informal sector based on landless agricultural laborers and various approaches to social business to capitalize the (land)free labor stock would emerge as the prevailing method of accumulation from the bottom in the next century.
The primitive ways of wealth accumulation ceased to be as viable and as dependable as before for the transitioning native elites of the colony. Compounded by the impact of World Wars, wars of independence, and peasant movements, the new normal compelled RnT and his contemporaries to turn to science and technology. He had beside him, Leonard Knight Elmhirst, also a landed gentry, campaigning across the globe promoting the utopia of rural reconstruction. They aimed to optimize natural resources to bring up the margin of profit to match the systematic erosion.
But change was inevitable, and anxiety found a deep seat in the psyche of Rabindranath Tagore. A significant shift took place amidst Kolkata’s mercantile class. As the noble house of the Tagores transitioned from immobile wealth to cultural capital, culture and education became the new frontier and a repository of influence. Later, we will see how these cultural repositories were safeguarded through innovative methods of cultural appropriation, exclusionary practices, and notably, copyright laws. However, Tagore’s true innovation lay in fortifying cultural capital and expanding his influence through the deployment of an army of idea vassals.
[02.02] To understand the workings of a literary text permanently made into textbooks—there is no outside-the-text—but in the immediate outside, there are some fatigued footnotes and exercises, just enough to filter and funnel the text to the desired discourse.
Most of these supplements are largely irrelevant to the text’s meaning, particularly when considering the negative capability of a poet (theorized by Keats as the detachment from material reality to tolerate ambiguity and multiple interpretations). Letters written by euro-mesmerized writers like Rabindranath Tagore were diverse, contradictory, and personal yet aware of the Empire. Autobiographical writings are only valuable to the extent that they shed light on the personal use of words and experiences across the corpus.
We are here to examine and respond to the phenomenon, not the manifestation medium. We are not cutting short the author’s agency but taking a closer look at all the relevant agencies and counter-agencies in their dialectical history active in the text.
But what is really important is to see the colonized literature of the aristocracy-bourgeoisie spectrum as encoders of educationised minds. This mind, despite the variety of literary input they internalized, follows the projectile of the canon-balls. The complex history of cultivation of rice, and century old ever shifting division of labor, land disputes and the politics of irrigation, water and transportation, insurgencies none of these could ever become usual points of discussion regarding the Shonar Tori pedagogy.
03. On the Literal (and the vital)
[03.01] There are microplastics/micropolitics in each grain of rice. The paddy, until they lie horizontally, dead,—they were loaded with certain ideological and legal weight. The alienation, from the biomechanical body of the farmer and other noneconomic living organisms, and the land where it has been most vibrantly attached, the paddy shifts to a new legal status. Hence, now its ontology needs new definitions (and relations, excuse the Marx-dropping) of biomechanical bodies, the atmosphere, how it is relative to the parameters of blood, water, and soil. Every physical change brought to the paddy, by threshing, husking, boiling, drying, milling, polishing, packaging to the next point of capital exchange that requires another set of correlatives to the body, the land and the waters. The other alienated (why not? instead of separated, refined or extracted from etc.?) parts are feeds for the animal and the humans—straw, husk, bran, leaves, stem, straw silage, rice polishings, rice offal, and bran oil as part of their diet. Each of these enjoy an individual economic life. Upon consumption, a commodity is transferred to the economic hereafter. But again, it demands yet another set of coordinates of nutritional values, pharmacology, sleep cycle, sleep episodes and so on.
In Bangla Bhatghum, lit. a rice-slumber, refers to midday sleep, first was a feature of cattle grazers, then of the farmers, and then of the bureaucrats, each contributing to the loss of midday sleep of the previous, sometimes by adopting technologies (Marx again, augmenting the matter to reflect some universal formula, greatly scalable) i.e. agricultural machineries like powertillers, tractors and so on, and other means of accumulation. There were riots in the UK in 1830 because horse-powered (literally driven by horses) threshers replaced farm workers. The new employment in the factory does not allow midday sleep for the formerly shepherd; the farmer, now displaced from the land, joins the millions of wage laborers; they are collected for extraction in shifts, and other means of accumulation; the shaheb and the bibi, members of the lethargic bourgeoisie, are now pushed towards higher efficiency, even when s/he is ‘unproductive’ with mobile scrolling and doing other midday affairs, generating wealth for the attention capitalist. The growth of the economy means loss of sleep. But this is purely an orthodox materialist line of thought.
The New materialist today would ask for atomic details, sometimes receding too far from the mode of production, of materials, the thing. The Object-oriented Ontologists or the Ecocritics would show a similar interest in the materiality of the object. What I have been struggling to say so far is that the wish to involve the literal object in the equation is, in the language of theorist Jane Bennett, an exercise of ‘the political ecology of things’. Most Marxist analysis dwells on the positive emergence of the commodity. Prior to the finished product, it’s just raw material, one mere means of production. The previous life of the commodity is broken down to numerical forces like means of production, labor power, labor process etc. The quest for looking beyond commodity fetishism ceases with the discovery of these forces. Then if one wishes to restart the analytical activity, one simply has to reset the clock to the point where the raw material had been a commodity, the labor was a commodity, the machines were similar instances of commodity;—the land, like any goods exchanged in the market, was a commodity. Again, a new cycle of breaking down the production forces to the level of commodities begins.
This falling apart to the same kind of fractions is not inevitable. Akshay Kumar Dutta, the 19th century rationalist, born in the same year as Engels, taught students of the Hindu Hostel his famous Formula of Prayer. As, Effort = Crops, and also Effort + Prayer = Crops, therefore, Prayer = Zero, meaning, nothing comes out of prayer. Let’s take the liberty to more accurately represent this relation as: Crops= (Effort→Crops)+Prayer. The use of = symbol in the equation is problematic because once the Crop gains the status of a commodity, it will not require further effort from the farmer. In many scenarios, the relationship between Effort and Crops is unidirectional or asymmetric. Effort, often measured in terms of agricultural inputs like labor, resources, and technology, contributes to the growth and yield of crops. However, the reverse, where crops directly convert to effort, is not a typical or meaningful scenario in the context of agriculture.
The formula is limited because it does not break down the Crop or Effort or even Prayer into constituents of physical elements and bodily experiences. I must use this as an opportunity to advertise Dutta’s book on the “The Worshiping Communities in the Bharotborsho”, a significant work in the scientific inquiry to various religious groups from ancient times. Incidentally, he, even though a Brahmo, because of his stands against the Shastras, was driven out of Debendranath Tagore’s theosophical enterprise where his career began.
Let’s continue from the previous discussion on the loss of midday sleep with regards to rice—it’s one way to recognize the vitality in the matter. To examine, in Bennet’s words, ‘the guiding question’ on the changes in ‘political responses to public problems’ if ‘the vitality of (nonhuman) bodies’ are seriously considered’, the theories of Values need to be complemented with all other kinds of values, measurements, proportions, binaries of presence, degrees of absence etc. relative to those bodies (or simply, substances), rice in the current case. The vitality of rice in this context can be formulated as: Rice Induced Nap Benefit=k×Leisure Time Loss. Needless to say, this formula looks vulnerable.
Overthinking so far wasn’t the best idea. What I want to say in short: commodities are always pre-haunted. Along with the commodity status of a literary image-object, the vitality in those referent-objects must not be ignored in favor of metaphor-works of literature.
[03.02] The question of the literal takes a slightly different meaning in this section. The literal is subjective. As it is subjective, it is capable to testify lived experiences.
Where I cannot relate to Rabindranath Tagore because, apart from distances—temporal, spatial and political, is that my world doesn’t center my subject: myself or the other. The world overruns the limits of my sensors. Without cracking the metaphysical rhetoric, one may have to physically trespass to see the affairs within the walls of the wealth where these literature are born. As a touring species I have had some opportunity to visually experience the interior of the powerful, sometimes by purchasing an entrance to the museum in their temple-like aura, nearly feeling the presence of great movers of history with the aid of haunted artifacts. In 2004 a total of 37 items were stolen from Visva Bharati University’s showcases including: Mrinalini Devi’s baluchari saree, Debendranath Tagore’s gold ring, some gold and silver items, Rabindranath’s favorite gold pocket watch and other items. And with these Rabindranath Tagore’s Nobel Prize certificate and the golden Nobel medal itself, “which is one of the best achievements of Bengalis so far!”, according to one newspaper.
The case against the Romantics (sans-Blake and his likes) and many other consequent bourgeois modernist still clutching on symbolism as a token for (their) unitary understanding of the(ir) world and history of men, is formed not on aesthetic and stylistic objections, but from the materialist question of the extraction of everyday functions of sub-literary communities, the agrarian, the working class, and on the process of making the lived experience of the underclass into vehicles of metaphysical conceits.
Very often sharp questions about literary text, Shonar Tori (lit. and alternatively the golden boat or the boat of gold or the boat for gold) for example, whether this text testifies the privilege of the wealthy to metaphorise lived experience of the poor, or whether any text stands on some ignorance, negligence, erasure or misappropriation of existential aspects of the ordinary people to make some existentialist claim about the extraordinary—this semiotic transposition (by the powerful who has literal control over literal transportation of goods) of existential concerns—are wrongly supplemented with hazy hagiographic details, whereas the text itself stands on its own as an instance of cooptation of underclass imagery and defamiliarisation of hard economic reality.
[03.03.The worms of the mind. The dogs of the sand]
—Kaun hain ye log? Kaha se aate hai?—Who are these people? Where have they come from? Asks Jolly from Jolly LLB (2013). The film was inspired by the 1999 Delhi hit-and-run case where a BMW-E38 driven by the sons respectively of a high rank defense officer and a weapons dealer killed six people, including police constables and urban vagrants in their sleep.
—People are literally shitting on footpaths. Dislocated band of paupers sleep under the fresco of Louvre Museum painted on the walls of Alliance Française of Dhaka. Why have they come to the Leviathan-city? Homeless people? No. These people who die, rat and rot, inside and outside—they are the landless.
—From today’s newspaper: In the morning Oltu Mia went to the farmland. He was hired to unearth the fertile land. Later, the soil-laden Latahamba lost control while climbing the road and started rolling backwards, ultimately taking Oltu Mia’s life. Latahamba is a locally made truck with shallow engines once meant for the rivers that are dead now.
—A news from the Upstream, Shilaidaha: Under the moonlight, a hundred hungry excavators graze and feast upon the vast charlands that emerged from the waters of the mighty Padma. Any crop is now cheaper than sand. People are cheaper than sand.
—At one point, scooping out of the soil and sand from agricultural land would change the land class, an act strictly prohibited, says the government. They are the overseer of all charlands too. But these lands, like the phases of the moon, take their time to emerge within the cycle of growth and recession. When ready, the moon would always be dispatched to industrialists.
—A schoolboy from Rajbari, downstream Shilaidaha, said to the TV reporter: “The deafening noise from Bhekus leaves our heads spinning.” Bheku is the local standard to pronounce backhoe. Bheku, Tolis (another word for locally engineered unregistered vehicles) and Mahendra trucks transport the sand to the brick kilns, leaving a trail of tire marks while leaking dirty oil.
—In the last phase of hydrologic exhaustion, in the anthropocene, these Kutta Gari lit. Dog Cars can go everywhere. It can climb vertically from the soil-mined craters. It can run when half submerged. It is capable of carrying 300 sacks of paddy or similar loads of soil. Peasants own metaphors too—a metaphor is not essentially privileged.
—Are you listening to the Rhizosphere?
—Rabindranath Tagore dedicated a verse drama “Bishorjon” (1890) to Surendranath Tagore, his nephew and successor of Shilaidaha pargana:
“Shriman Surendranath Tagore Pranadhikeshu (Master Surendranath Tagore treasured more than my heart), A notebook bound in your hand, I have covered hundreds of pages/ covered with letters,/ The worms of the mind are swarming and leaving a lot of footprints…”
[03.04]
I personally think the poem raising all these questions is full of images. We may recall Rabindranath Tagore once made this remark about Jibananda Das’s poems. An image is a hard object after all.
