Saurabh Chaliha’s literary radiance will last forever
by Ranjit Kumar Dev Goswami
Two Assamese writers in the forties and the fifties of the twentieth century
introduced their readership to a kind of sensibility rare in its
sophistication, subtlety, scope and comprehensiveness: Ajit Barua (b. 1926) in
poetry and Saurabh Kumar Chaliha (1933-2011) in fiction. Steering himself free
of the sing-song lyricism of his romantic predecessors (some of them later
associated with what literary historians called modernism in Assamese
literature), Ajit Barua effected a radical shift away from patterns of rhythm
derived, as it were, from the metronome; explored the possibilities of the
language of everyday speech and tried to load just about every rift of his
verse with what may be called an ore of silence.
Chaliha, in his turn, fashioned an idiom that was “impure” in its break from
the standard literary idiom of the day (current since the last quarter of the
nineteenth century, more specifically from the literary eras of Banhi and
Jonaki) and sensitized it to accommodate the anxiety, loneliness and
restlessness of a “modern”, post-independence generation confronting a world
devoid of traditional certitudes. Combination of several registers (Kamrupi,
Bengali, English and Standard Assamese), Chaliha’s prose with its ingenious use
of diegesis and mimesis captured a multiplicity of feelings adroitly organised
and thus made for fresh experiments and play. The break from classic realism
was clear and unmistakable.
Ajit Barua – clearly at pains to get over the vague generalities characteristic
of the poetry of the earlier decades – fell back upon GM Hopkins’ mode of
individuation and derived strength from TS Eliot’s advice to his contemporaries
“to force, to dislocate if necessary, language into the meaning”. Chaliha was
perhaps too shy to admit of any model that he found himself emulating, either
consciously or unwittingly. In any case, dislocation is perhaps the keyword in
terms of which one may now approach the works of these two archetypal
modernists of Assamese literature. It was, one recalls, Ajit Barua’s “Man
Kuwali Samay” (1948) and Saurabh Kumar Chaliha’s “Ashanta Electron” (1950) that
signalled the modern era in Assamese literature.
Small wonder, critics have since found themselves looking for correlates in
various arts to understand these two writers. Insofar as Chaliha's works are
concerned, one usually has recourse to several different frames of reference:
impressionism, cubism, surrealism and interior monologue among others. And
Saurabh Kumar Chaliha is one of the few Assamese writers whose texts invariably
call for a kind of networking with, or recourse to, other arts: music (western
classical music in particular), painting, sculpture, architecture and cinema.
Indeed, some of the stray references in his stories to either the “geometric
design” of a wall or Picasso's “Harlequin's Family” adorning some room,
description of a table gradually broadening itself “as in a close-up shot”, or
characters in his tales either alluding or listening to Mozart, Salieri,
Beethoven, Dvorak, Tagore songs, jazz and barcarole invite the reader to relate
these narratives to an exceptionally broad range of associations. The details
of his stories involve a subtle play of voices and styles that contribute to an
overall effect that is peculiar to poetry alone in its communion with other
arts, music notably. Chaliha, endowed with auditory imagination of an
exceptional type, delighted in the use of counterpoints as a strategy of
representation: an exciting game of chess (in Ehat Daba) gradually draws to a
close with the sound of naam chanted to the accompaniment of khol somewhere in
the distance. Paul Claudel in his commentary on Mallarme's prose drama Igitur
noted that the poet here confronted the world as a text, not as a series of
mere spectacles. It is precisely this treatment of reality as a text that
informs the works of Saurabh Kumar Chaliha all through. The world represented
in “Bina Kutir” is a curious mix of what is “given” and what is constructed, or
fantasised, by the narrator. What is given, or reported, comes into play with a
series of tacit interpretations (meditations perhaps) adroitly woven round
various components of the texture of his tale. Several stories including “Ratir
Rail” foreground the fictional, textual character of reality.
Chaliha’s resolute attempts at keeping “ the man who suffers” distinct from
“the mind that creates” link him up with the struggle of the modern for
privileging the medium over the message, language over life. For a little over
six decades he guarded the creator within from the man of flesh and bone and
never allowed the word to become flesh and make his dwelling amongst us. It is
this voice, this mystery of a disembodied spirit, that is the theme of one of
the most powerful Assamese stories written in our time, namely, Harekrishna
Deka’s “Gaurav Chalihar Sate Sakhyat” (Meeting Gaurav Chaliha). Tracing the
mystery of the spirit back to the cultural milieu of the early sixties, Deka’s
story plays not only with the early history of literary reception of Chaliha’s
works, but also the ideas of absence, voice, death of the author, text and
textuality. Saurabh Kumar Chaliha's works resist stereotyping of any kind:
there is an undertow of pain and suffering beneath laughter, irony and play –
and the comic in his stories is nearly always in tension with an overarching
tragic vision of life. A writer incessantly questioning his own feelings and
never at rest, Saurabh Kumar Chaliha was always careful not to repeat himself.
If some of his earlier stories represent an extreme continence of affirmation,
there are also writings both fictional and non-fictional (the dividing line
here being very thin) that suggest his vision of a new birth: “Kharang”
(Drought) and “Adagdha” (Unburnt) being two examples. Story of a poor,
struggling student in a remote village in Assam with his cherished dream of
learning, “Kharang” brings to the fore a grim battle with destiny that seems to
the author to lend meaning and purpose to life itself. “Adagdha” (the word
clearly derived from the Bhagavata Purana, 5.14.4 - “yath? hy anuvatsaram
krsyam? nam apy adagdha-b?jam...” ) is about an old institution throwing up
hopes of rising, phoenix-like, from its own ashes to a “new birth”. His last
collection of stories, published in 2008, was significantly titled Navajanma,
new birth. Indeed, Saurabh Kumar Chaliha's name is likely to remain associated
in days to come with the idea of a new birth, a renaissance to be sure, in
Assamese literature, or, as Premendra Mitra once pointed out, in the history of
Indian literature in general.
(The Assam Tribune, 05/07/11)
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