Ma's complex nature:
Complexity and paradox are the law of life. We all crave simplicty. I do. I like things black and white. I like things to be open and shut. Complexity stresses me out. But if there is something I've learnt from my study of Tragedy, from my study of literature, it is this. That complexity is beautiful, enthralling and also integrally related to the spinning of the plot. What do you write about a character who has no conflict, no duality, is not pulled this way and that? Now Buddha and Christ, how complex are their lives? Circumstantially may be but not spiritually or psychologically. They have no conflict.
The value of complexity and conflict was taught to me by my great guru Shakespeare. The first and the last. My anglophile nature. Very bad. In The God of Small Things, Mary Roy (Ammu) tells Chacko (her brother) that Anglophiles were all Chich Chich Ponch which literally translates into 'shit wiper', I mean, 'shit wipers' of the British (white race).
Can't say that this is entirely untrue. Aren't we Anglophiles somehow a little subservient and derivative? V.S. Naipaul calls us the breed of 'mimic men'. So what exactly is he? I hope he included himself too in the category of the mimics?
Anyway as Gauri Vishwanathan correctly points out in Masks of Conquest, the beauty of Englishliterature made the students of Hindu College fall in love with the English and become their willing servants through bureaucratic and other jobs and also by producing imitative literature. Even Derozio'sHarp of India, is derivative.
Anyway, long story short, I just loved Macbeth. His grand/excruciating conflict and redemption through knowledge. Only knowledge is the redemption, the goal, the telos. As in the case of Bimala; Rabindranath creates a very modern ending, where the goal of experience is knowledge, not the affirmation of a Karmic world. No simple piety. But the novel gives us an understanding of what it is to be human, to fall in love where we should not, suffer pain and gain knowledge about ourselves and about the world.
I just love that. It gives the writer something to write about and the teacher something to teach about. I taught Ghare Baire at Basanti Devi College, when it came in as a new text. Somehow my department always assumed that I would teach all the new texts. So, I taught 3 of the new texts in the syllabus that year: A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Secret Sharer and Ghare Baire.
I love the intensity of Macbeth's conflict. I love the fact that he is human and not divine. Yet, he does have the 'quintessence' of the divine in him, through the way he speaks and in the superb images and metaphors that his mind/language creates.
Language is eros, culture is eros, and people like me are in love with the English language. I talk more spontaneously in English than Bangla. If i had to deliver a speech suddenly, I would prefer to do it in English which I feel is more within my access than my own mother tongue. It is simply because I learnt the Bangla alpabhet when I was almost 8. No one in my family had insisted upon learning it earlier. In St Teresa's in those days, Bangla started from class III. Shame, I think today, and still aspire to be competent in Bangla. :)
Complexity and paradox are the law of life. We all crave simplicty. I do. I like things black and white. I like things to be open and shut. Complexity stresses me out. But if there is something I've learnt from my study of Tragedy, from my study of literature, it is this. That complexity is beautiful, enthralling and also integrally related to the spinning of the plot. What do you write about a character who has no conflict, no duality, is not pulled this way and that? Now Buddha and Christ, how complex are their lives? Circumstantially may be but not spiritually or psychologically. They have no conflict.
The value of complexity and conflict was taught to me by my great guru Shakespeare. The first and the last. My anglophile nature. Very bad. In The God of Small Things, Mary Roy (Ammu) tells Chacko (her brother) that Anglophiles were all Chich Chich Ponch which literally translates into 'shit wiper', I mean, 'shit wipers' of the British (white race).
Can't say that this is entirely untrue. Aren't we Anglophiles somehow a little subservient and derivative? V.S. Naipaul calls us the breed of 'mimic men'. So what exactly is he? I hope he included himself too in the category of the mimics?
Anyway as Gauri Vishwanathan correctly points out in Masks of Conquest, the beauty of Englishliterature made the students of Hindu College fall in love with the English and become their willing servants through bureaucratic and other jobs and also by producing imitative literature. Even Derozio'sHarp of India, is derivative.
Anyway, long story short, I just loved Macbeth. His grand/excruciating conflict and redemption through knowledge. Only knowledge is the redemption, the goal, the telos. As in the case of Bimala; Rabindranath creates a very modern ending, where the goal of experience is knowledge, not the affirmation of a Karmic world. No simple piety. But the novel gives us an understanding of what it is to be human, to fall in love where we should not, suffer pain and gain knowledge about ourselves and about the world.
I just love that. It gives the writer something to write about and the teacher something to teach about. I taught Ghare Baire at Basanti Devi College, when it came in as a new text. Somehow my department always assumed that I would teach all the new texts. So, I taught 3 of the new texts in the syllabus that year: A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Secret Sharer and Ghare Baire.
I love the intensity of Macbeth's conflict. I love the fact that he is human and not divine. Yet, he does have the 'quintessence' of the divine in him, through the way he speaks and in the superb images and metaphors that his mind/language creates.
Language is eros, culture is eros, and people like me are in love with the English language. I talk more spontaneously in English than Bangla. If i had to deliver a speech suddenly, I would prefer to do it in English which I feel is more within my access than my own mother tongue. It is simply because I learnt the Bangla alpabhet when I was almost 8. No one in my family had insisted upon learning it earlier. In St Teresa's in those days, Bangla started from class III. Shame, I think today, and still aspire to be competent in Bangla. :)
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