THE CALCUTTA CONNECTION

-

Calcutta. Kolkata, the new name given to it makes it quite alien to us as we got used to the old name ever since the childhood. The first acquaintance with it was through a children’s book on Rabindranath Tagore entitled “Pillala Tagore” which was published by National Book Trust and translated into Telugu by my father. The imaginary adventures of the boy Tagore, in the old palanquin in their palatial house, Jorasanko Thakur Bari and his grappling with the Bengali prosody quite naturally haunted the budding creative writer for a long time.

My acquaintance with Calcutta for the second time was through the works of Sarath. The illustrious Sarath Chandra Chattopadhyay had become the popular household writer Sarath babu to the Telugu people due to the great translator, Bondalapati Sivaramakrishna of the renowned Desi Publications. The indebtedness of the Telugu reading public in general and that of me in particular to that translator par excellence is something beyond the words. When I went to my aunt’s house during the summer vacations after writing my S. S .C examination in 1972, by a curious stroke of luck, I found the complete works of Sarath in Telugu translation in my uncle’s library. Calcutta is to Sarath what St. Petersburg to Dostoyevsky, London to Charles Dickens, and Paris to Victor Hugo and River Mississippi to Mark Twain. The seamy side of it presented in Charithraheen and the spiritual dimensions of it portrayed in Vipradas complimented with each other perfectly. Devadas studied there, Srikanth stayed there for considerable time and it had been the nerve centre of entire fictitious world of Sarath.

Calcutta became dearer to me due to the stories of Ichchapurapu Jagannadharao, a renowned Telugu short story writer. Some of the stories of I J Rao dealing with Sujatha and Jagan, a married couple, have Calcutta as the setting though some of them are set in Agra also. I read those stories scores of times when I was a bachelor as they were  created as an ideal modern couple and Sujatha  was conceived as the ideal wife whom I young man dream to  have.  Sujatha was very much fond of  Rasagullas and Jagan found it difficult to get them for her as they were sold out quickly every day. One of the stories of I J Rao thus starts: “It is very much difficult for the people to meet even the acquainted persons in a city like Calcutta. People would be deeply immersed in their duties. Wherever they work they would reach their homes very late in the evening. The employees of the lower cadres should have guts enough to step into overcrowded trams or buses. It is always a herculean task to reach the house travelling long ways on the roads struck up by the traffic jams, engine failures and processions. And the higher officials couldn’t leave their seats till their daily work got completed in the late evenings or nights.”  I learnt that I. J. Rao worked as a Customs officer and posted in Calcutta where he stayed for a few decades. It took some years to me to realize that Calcutta was closer to the north- east districts of Andhra Pradesh like Srikakulam and Vizianagaram and the people of those regions went to Calcutta for education and employment especially during the pre- independent days as we, the people of the south-east districts like Chittor and Nellore went to Chennai.

To visit Calcutta had  been one of my ambitions and I could fulfill that when I took a day’s break there to my journey to Gauhati where I attended a seminar three years back. A friend helped me to book accommodation to me in Sri Ramakrishna Mission institute of Culture. It was a huge quadrangular building   and I reached there in the evening. The room was spacious and simple very much like that of an ashram. I saw many foreigners in the dining room and they were all serious and well mannered and cultured. I was surprised to find fish being served there and all of them ate it. Then I remembered that fish was a staple diet to all the Bengalis and even Brahmins there eat it. Some of the people in our region call them Jalapushpalu which means flowers of the water. I had a sound sleep after a day’s travel and I was woken up by a call in the next early morning. When I opened my door, I saw an institute staff with a big trolley in front of him. He poured hot water into a big mug containing tea leaves and placed it on a tray and handed over it to me.  There was a big bowl of milk on the tray and the tea I prepared myself was fresh and tasty. But I was amazed to find people drinking so much of tea every time.

Then I telephoned to a friend who once promised me to be my guide in Calcutta. He informed me that we weren’t allowed to travel through the city till 3 O’ clock in the afternoon as a municipal election was held on that day. So I had to sit behind a window, watch a small stretch of road and recollect many incidents took place on similar places in many novels like Gora. My friend came to me only at 4 P M and he took me to the Howrah Bridge.  As the 3rd-longest cantilever bridge in the world, it serves as the gateway to Kolkata, connecting it to the Howrah Station carrying the near entirety of the traffic to and from the station, taking its average daily traffic close to nearly 150,000 pedestrians and 100,000 vehicles. Then he took me to the head quarters of Sri Ramakrishna Math at Belur.  I was thrilled to walk on the land on which two great modern Indian saints walked a few decades back. The majestic prayer halls and the temples dedicated to Sri Ramakrishna, Sri Sarada Devi and Swami Vivekananda, in which their relics are enshrined, and the main monastery of the Ramakrishna Order on banks of the river Hugli (Ganges) reflected the ancestry of the Indian spirituality where as the throngs of people sat there singing and chanting reminded me of the unbroken extension of it.

Then we went to Dakshineswar Kali temple situated on the eastern bank of the Hooghly River. The presiding deity of the temple is Bhavatarini, an aspect of Kali, meaning, 'She who liberates Her devotees from the ocean of existence i.e. Saṃsāra'. It is always fascinating to observe the strength people derive by their faith in a god and it was wonderful to find out the same spirit in all those devotees congregated there.

By the time we reached Jorosanko, it was closed and I could only get a peep at it from a long distance. When were  returning to Institute of culture I heard people singing and chanting Bhajans in many places though I couldn’t locate the places where they assembled. I requested my friend to take me to a sweet shop called Madhuri from which Jagan the protagonist in the stories of I J Rao used to buy rasagullas for his wife Sujatha. He looked perplexedly for some time and then took me to a street side sweet shop. Besides the rasagullas I also tasted Sandesh . When I was heading towards my inn I began to search for the padadhuli (Specter of dust of the feet) of Sarath and the nest which Rabindranath Tagore conceived as the home for the entire world.

                                                     ---                MADHURANTHAKAM NARENDRA

            (The writer is a bilingual short story writer, novelist and poet, who writes in Telugu and English)

                                               


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A POND IN THE SAND

-
Dr. Boya Subramanyam Reddy, a physician who hails from Thondavada, a small village near Tirupati and who had settled down in Mineral wells, a village of around 80 miles from Dallas, USA requested me to translate a book entitled   Meditation   written by Eknath Eswaran an Indian born spiritual teacher who established the Blue Mountain     Centre of Meditation in California, USA. Then he published it ( Dhyanam) under the banner of Subhashini Prachranalu in 1998. I had the acquaintance with Dr. Subramanyam Reddy through my father. When my father visited USA on the invitation of TANA conference    held at Chicago in 1995 Dr. Subramanyam Reddy contacted him and invited him to Mineral Wells. He introduced himself as an ardent fan of my father’s stories and my father, in one of the introductions he    wrote to a short story collection, related the interesting way he travelled to Mineral Wells from Chicago by a domestic flight and how Ms. Subhashini, the ...
Read more

THE SILENT AESTHETIC SAINT

-
When I tried to   read his novel in its serialized version in Andhra Jyothi weekly around 1970 and left it unread within   three or four weeks as I couldn’t understand and follow it   I didn’t   foresee that I would have the rare opportunity of getting befriended to him after   two decades. It didn’t happen suddenly or accidentally as it took more than a decade for bringing us together. He is Vaddera Chandidas, a Telugu novelist par excellence. After the publication of Himajwala , his very first novel he became a celebrity instantaneously. Then I was studying in the high school. After one of his trips to Tirupati, my father told me that he met Vaddera Chandidas there in the University quarter which was almost at the feet of the huge Sheshadri hills. In a secluded house like that he, with his odd simplicity, uncanny truthfulness and unassuming frankness, appeared as a person lost in a forest, according to my father.   When I joined the Degree College in...
Read more

WELCOME TO BHARATHAM MITTA

-
To call The Mahabharatha a literary text is a heresy and to say that it is a scripture amounts to sectarianism. Then what it is? It is a part of life to us, the people of erstwhile North Arcot district of British India and to the southern parts of Chittoor district and the northern parts of Vellore district of the present times. Every village of this area contains a place called Bharatham Mitta and many of these places have a small temple of Dharmaraja which becomes the hub of the respective village in the months of May and June every year as it would be the setting for the Mahabharatha yagna. It is hot summer when the mercury climbs over 40 degrees, the water level in the wells would get shrunk and the peasants would be waiting for rains. People of this area conduct the Harikathas   of Virataparva whenever there is draught and Nalacharithra when they fall on evil days as they believe that that   would bring    them good luck and happiness . Organizing Mahabhara...
Read more