Freedom and Beef Steaks by Rosinka Chaudhuri

Author:Rosinka Chaudhuri [Rosinka Chaudhuri]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Orient BlackSwan Private Ltd.
Published: 2018-06-11T16:00:00+00:00

The Ruins of History

Two different notions of historicality coexist in the early part of the nineteenth century in Calcutta in literary texts that belong to two different practices of literature. One of these, in tune with the European understanding of poetry, lies in the Romantic understanding of time and history as these are played out in memory—specifically the memory of historical ruins—as I shall try to show through the examination of a single poem by Henry Louis Vivian Derozio (1809–31). The other, which comes from the indigenous inheritance of local traditions, exists as historicity embedded in a poetry of the everyday in the Bengali poetry of Iswar Gupta (1811–59), born within a couple of years of Derozio, but outliving him by almost three decades. In Iswar Gupta’s unique poetry, an understanding of history exists in the contemporary rather than in the past, leading to a reading of history in the materiality of things as they exist transiently in the corporeal world rather than in a narration of past events. In between these two poets lies another, a singular and strange figure who constitutes a sort of bridge between the two in his history and proclivity, a poet of Portuguese descent popularly called Anthony Firingi. This obscure character charts an anomalous correspondence between modernity and history in the diverse time of the coming into being of the Indian modern, complicating, with his life story, the linear development of historical time, serving as a salutary reminder of the multi-dimensional provenance of the modernity that was taking shape in Calcutta in this period.

In 1825, at about the age of sixteen, Derozio, whose mother was English and grandfather described as ‘Native Protestant’ and ‘Portuguese Merchant’, took up work at an English relative’s indigo plantation at Tarapur, near Bhagalpur in Bihar. 18 It was here that he composed most of the poems that were to be published from Calcutta in 1827. If modernity is simply the knowledge that the present is discontinuous with the past, that it is now possible to look back on the past from one’s selfconscious habitation in the unique present, then one of the most interesting manifestations of this may be found in a poem called ‘The Ruins of Rajmahal’, where memory and history come together in a confluence construed by a self-conscious contemporary. The poem describes a dilapidated mosque in the gathering dusk, where

No serf has lighted yon kiosk,

There’s no Muezzin in the Mosque,

No vesper hymn, no morning prayer

Shall be put up, or answered there;

The sacred hall, the holy sod

By unbelievers’ feet are trod,

And ruthless hands have reft away

The marble that might mock decay! 19

Here we have a site of memory, what Pierre Nora calls les lieux de mémoire, where memory crystallises and secretes itself; this turning point, where consciousness of a break with the past is bound up with the sense that memory has been torn, can occur only at a particular historical moment of selfconsciousness, where history is perceived to be accelerating into the future, indicating a rupture of equilibrium.

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