Subodh Sarkar (Bengali Poet/Writer)

Subodh Sarkar, born in 1958 in Krishnanagar — a District town, known for its cultural heritage — in Nadia District of West Bengal, is a noted Indian Bengali poet, editor, translator and Associate Professor in English at City College, Calcutta University. His PhD is on the hyphenated identities of Indian American women writers writing in English. His family was a refuge from East Bengal (now Bangladesh) to West Bengal. His father died young and they were a big family of seven members including a young widow mother, who always wore white cloths on as a Hindu ritual — as a mark of bereavement. He spent his childhood in severe abjection, and they were even uncertain of second time and there had always been a fear of hunger, since there was no one to support them after his father demise. There was no literature at home, no sign of poetry-inclination in Sarkar.  But the torn and yellow book of songs “Gitabitan” by Tagore  — brought by his elder sister one day with a harmonium, who used to sing the songs from the book with the accompaniment of the musical box — changed the course of his life, transformed him into a poet. He married to Mallika Sengupta.

His first book of poems was published in the late 70s, and now he has 32 books to his credit — 27 of poems, four of translations and one travelogue on America. His important books include “Kabita 78–80” (Krishnanagar, 1980), “Ami Karo Andhakar No” (Kolkata, Prativas, 2004), “Manipurer Ma” (Kolkata, Ananda Publishers, 2005), “Subodh Mallika Square” (Kolkata, Vikash Grantha Bhavan, 2006), “Prem O Pipegun” (AajkaalPrakashani, 2008), “Blasphemy–Poetry” by Subodh Sarkar and “Visualsby Manas Roy” (Roymans, 2014). His poems have been translated into English, French and several Indian languages and published in several journals and anthologies. Sarkar is the editor of Bhashanagar, a Bangla culture magazine with occasional English issues. In 2010, he was appointed as the guest Editor of Indian Literature, the flagship journal of Sahitya Akademi, New Delhi. He has been the chairman of the Kobita Academy (Poetry Academy), Government of West Bengal in 2016. He visited Russia and Turkey as a member of the Indian Writers’ delegation organized by Sahitya Academy in 2010.

Sarkar has won many awards and titles. He received the Shakti Chattopadhyay Binodan Vichitra Puroskar (1997), D.Lit. from G.B.University, West Bengal Gangadhar Meher National Award from Sambalpur University 2016, the Bangla Academy/Bangla Akademi Anita-Sunil Basu Puroskar from Pashchimbanga Bangla Akademy /the West Bengal Bangla Academy Award for poetry in 2000, recipient of National Sahitya Academy Award-2013 for his book “Dwaipayan Hrader Dhare” and Nazrul Award-2014  from Kabi Sangshad Bangladesh. He is also recipient of Bangabhushan from the Govt. of West Bengal.

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In an interview, when Subodh Sarkar was asked by the interviewer: Do you remember your first recognition as a poet?

He replied, “I was at Krishnanagar Railway station with some of my schoolmates, not to board any train, but to while away time by watching busy passengers rushing in and out. A vagabond was loitering on the platform behind us, possibly looking for some food. A train was approaching the station. We took safe position, not to be jostled by passengers. All of a sudden, in a flash of a moment, the vagabond jumped before the approaching train. There was a roar followed by a silent count down. We thought he was finished, but to our utter surprise we came to find him on the second platform, eating bread from a small packet he picked up from rail lines. I looked at him through the empty space between two compartments; he looked back at me with a queer deathly smile on the corner of his lips.

“I wrote my first poem that night about the smile. I lost my first poem, which was highly appreciated by my friends, after reading it to them the next day. That was my first recognition, which died with the disappearance of the poem. But that smile continued to smile for last 35 years of my career as a writer. This is the smile that made me what I am today. I cannot write a single poem without remembering the smile. That smile is hunger, that smile is Asia. That smile is Africa, Latin America.

To the question “Would you tell us something about the forces, conflicts and events that led you to poetry and shaped your sensibilities?” He replied, “I was born in Krishnanagar, a District town, known for its cultural heritage. In the mid 70s, when I was still at school, the Naxalite movement broke out which popularized a slogan, `China`s chairman is our chairman`. The Naxalites dreamt of a revolution which drew not only peasants but also the cream of the students from elite campuses. It believed in annihilation of landed gentry and land owners. Every day, on my way to school, I used to find abandoned dead body in the wood which I had to cross every morning. This is how I had to negotiate between bloodshed and books on my back. After that, I grew up and came to the city of Kolkata with a job of a lecturer in a city college. My days in the city constantly clashed with my days in the small town. I was perennially going through the turmoil of a metamorphosis. I was walking out of my old self. This old self and the new self were thrown into a war zone which shaped out my sensibilities. And this war was a base camp for my poetry. If there is no conflict, my sensibilities get benumbed and cannot wake up for poetry. I must say, I was a supporter of the Left, but I withdrew my support and I supported Ms. Mamata Bando padhayay whom I have described as rescuer of the poor. I respected her mandate which came to her from the grassroots and I championed her as real Neo-Communist. Mamata defeated the 34-year regime of the communists who in the name of poor people established a reign of terror. I said I committed a sin by supporting the fakes. When I realized, I run away and I freed myself of the dead albatross hanging from my neck. My poetry did not fall from the sky. I write only when I am dictated from within.”

“I believe if you revise a poem, then you again revise the same poem, and it goes on, and finally the poem becomes a good essay in the process.”

“I have a variety of audience in my mind. I have been writing not for all. My poetry is read mostly by college university students. Scholars and Professors hardly enjoy poetry. I have always been scared to read out before my colleagues. But I was red with shame one evening when a renowned scholar recited one of my poems all by his heart in front of my friends, their wives and children. I rectified myself but I still believe poetry is enjoyed and loved by the youngsters and then recognized by the oldies.”

When he was asked, “You have expressed concern for the survival of Bangla as a language. Somewhere in Bhashanagar you said, the status of Bangla had been on the edges. Why do you have this anxiety?”

Sobodh Sarkar was of clear in his opinion, “Bengali is spoken not only in India`s Bengal, Tripura, Assam but also in Bangladesh. Bengali speakers are estimated as 250 million people spread all over the world. It has been accorded the fifth rank in the list of the ten top languages in the world. I am proud of my language not because of its rank but for its immense possibilities as a creative language. My concern for Bengali is born out of an anxiety that the young city people are not interested in Bengali, they don’t read Bengali, they don’t want to speak Bengali, and they don’t want to hear, either. They read English, sing in Hindi. A language is carried forward from generation to generation through young speakers. I have a deep concern if the young elite continue to speak English, then we have another colonialism, and this time not from outside but from inside. I have a war with these neo-colonialists. Bengali intelligentsia have had a great tradition of Bi-culture which allowed Bengali elite to be the masters of two languages — Bengali and English. But now it seems to have been the extreme cultural hegemony of one language. Young people from school level and college level have to be conscious of the legacy of the language.”

“MESSAGE in a poem may be a pain in the arse. Putting message in the cup you are drinking from has not been a good practice. You are not a saint, you are a poet, you may cry, but you have no tears. If you philosophize your poetry, then philosophy will reign, and poetry will go. When I write a poem, I have no agenda except my sensibilities. I obey my heart, I listen to my skin, I support my ears, I hear what I cannot say.”

Three important things have happened in Indian Literature in the last 30 years. Dalit is number one, English number two, and thirdly women. Dalit literature is now hot cake in India and abroad. Dalit writers engage us with a fascinating discourse. I read these writings with keen interest. There has been a red carpet welcome to the writers writing in English from India. Feminist literature in India still occupies a large territory of Indian literature. Dalit poets and fiction writers have great potential like the Black American writers in America, Aboriginal writers in Australia and elsewhere.

Face book poems are the worst poems I have ever come across. Online (web) magazines are the future magazines for our posterity. But for us, it is too early to accept. Mania is a sickness, it will go. Those who are celebrated in print, they will never turn around for web journals. Young generation is taking up poetry seriously. It’s a good sign.

To the question, “What can be the role of translation in the present context? Do you think that translation is transfer of power, from one language to another?

Subodh Sarkar replied, “Translation is the visa to a language in which you do not exist. Whenever I find my poems translated in a foreign language I feel I have a reason to be elated, I realise that my poem gets another life in another language. It’s a big thing. Translation, in its own manner of being inexistence, is a power. Gitanjali, the book which earned us the first Nobel[1] Prize in Asia, was a bare minimum of translation but it enlightened Europe about the poetry and philosophy of the Indian subcontinent. The role of the translator is as significant as that of an ambassador. Europe cannot be Europe without the translation of Homer and Sophocles. India, till date, remains unknown in India without translation.

(Courtesy: https://journals.flinders.edu.au/index.php/wic/article/view/24/25)

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“At the end of each moment of grief, each hour of suffering, each kind of failure, I can see a small container and restrained laughter is lying hidden in it. Grief is the mother of all poems- there can be no two opinions about that. I search for that container at the end of every poem. I can’t bear with the tears from the eyes. I don’t like a person sitting being overwhelmed with grief. Once I said to a beggar near the Taj Bengal hotel “Can’t you go inside and snatch your food? What’s the use of sitting in front like this?” I wrote about this in my poem “Tears from Eyes”. When dangers appear on its feet at my home then I speak out to the danger “Just sit on my chair. Have tea. I shall talk to you when you cool down.” The most dangerous moment for a man is his hunger or his inability to eat. Throwing away that danger under a banyan tree in my childhood, I crept in Kolkata. Reaching Kolkata, I felt that I was in a greater danger than before. Visiting Delhi, I realized the intensity of the danger was greater still. A person moves from one kind of danger to another, from one kind of wonder to another, from one type of love to another in his or her own life. Should we not laugh then? Should we leave our acts of cutting jokes? I have the habit of taking up of any serious subject in a lighter vein. I have shaken the chins of personalities from Gautam Buddha to Fidel Castro in my poems. Actually, the presence of blasphemy is more prominent in my psyche than that of a true worshipper. Perhaps for that reasons my poems are twisted, rough and chaotic.”

“I like to hide my grief with a cap of happiness. But sometimes I feel that I should manage a revolver and shoot on my head.”

To the question, “As there is coexistence of black and white, light and darkness in life, so there are mixtures of polished and unpolished words in your poems. One can find an effortless yet sensible use of English and Hindi words in your poems. Your dexterity in this field comes to surface through your choice of subject matters and the use of language. Again this can be said that you have freed the language geography of the Bengali poems from artificiality and widened its scope. What is your opinion about this?  Reply of Suodh Sarkar was, “I have no words of my own- I am a slave to the sound wave that flows and extends from a fish market to a university classroom. I have never felt ashamed of using any word till today. No word is either polished or unpolished for me. Both the words like ‘Om’ and ‘Son of a pig’ are holy words for me. A word is created from the depth of life. The words are the symbols of our feelings even though there may be good or evil things in their depths. The English and Hindi words used by me, they are found to be used randomly in the Bengali poems of today. Why should they be not used after all? Can you tell me how many Hindi words are used by an auto-wallah? There is a mosaic of Hindi, English and Bengali words in his language. How can I escape from that? Why should I escape at all?”

“The persons who write love poems all his or her life also have a responsibility. The question is who is responsible and to whom. I don’t believe in the fact that a poet becomes a great poet once he has a sense of responsibility. There is no relationship of responsibility with writing. This question has often been raised in West Bengal and it comes even now. As a priest has a responsibility, a Communist has a responsibility, a Gandhian has a responsibility, a poet, too, has a responsibility. Why should it be considered a precondition for writing poems? When I go through a nice poem, I like to bow down my head near the feet of it. I don’t question about the responsibility of the poet. The question of my consciousness that has arisen, I have a clear view that an unconscious person also can write good poems. One can write good poems without having proper knowledge of monetary policies, socialism or market policies. On the other, it is often dangerous to understand these concepts. Then the essence of a good poem evaporates. According to me, a piece of poem is as holy as a piece of white paper. There is no need to stigmatize that by showing much consciousness. We should not think that the poets are only conscious creatures in this world while others are not. A beggar is also a conscious person. Even he knows who will offer him alms and who will not. A kind of great madness is required for writing poems. One should write poems in an open mind keeping the principles of economic, social and market policies in their pockets. The more I grow up, the more I understand that composing poems is a very difficult task. The kind of craziness I had in my younger days has been replaced by philosophical undertones.

“It is good to have an ideology. Everything feels empty without this. It makes us feel that there is no support, it also makes us feel that our feet are not on the ground. But it should not be considered as be all and end all. My ideology is my own. There is no use to blow the trumpet on this. It is better to leave an ideology if it destroys the essence of poetry. Why can’t a person leave his ideology if someone else can hoodwink immortality for the sake of poems. I shall give more marks to those poets who had thought of not to attempt to write some poems due to the presence of an ideology, can write poems having kept that ideology aside. I shall not award marks to the ‘fundamentalists’. The problem with an ideology is that it does not know how to honour another ideology. Why shall I not be able to call them good poems if those are written by others beyond my notions of an ideology?”

“I live myself within an entire human life. Many people do like me. My entire world is spread out from my toothpaste to my laptop—and I am an ordinary citizen of that world….. A human life is no longer attached to a country only. Therefore, to say it in a very simple and natural way, despite the fact that my poems are written in Bengali, but they have the audacity to cross the threshold or barriers of a language.

“This is one of the dreams I have. Translation is a big dream. Poems cannot be translated by anyone without a dream….. But there is a dearth of good translators and the good translators of poems are very rarely found…..”

“Books written in English are the tools to dominate the dynamics of power, it has become easier to catch the market if the books are written in English…. Will it be such that people will start writing in English only leaving aside the languages like Bengali, Assamese and Marathi etc. Are those days coming near? I am afraid. The Indian languages are so rich that the writers in English will not be able to imagine…. If Indian literatures are properly translated, India will win. But I don’t think my dream is coming true. The post-colonial writings we championed as ‘empire writes back` in India are now hungrily eating up the vitals of Indian literatures in languages. We are in the war with English. After 30 years India will be Ireland. Do we know any Irish writer writing in Irish Gaelic? None of our children will read Bengali.”

(Courtesy: http://puneresearch.com/media/data/issues/56cefaf448217.pdf)

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