The truth unites : essays in tribute to Samar Sen

332 Pages·1985·35.952 MB·English

by  Ashok Mitra, Samar Sen

THE TRUTH UNITES
Essays in Tribute to Samar Sen
EDITED BY
ASHOK MITRA
Su barnarekha
Provided by
The Library of Conqren
Special Foreign Cur1ency Prc-O"ra111
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···.---·-------
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85-904853
The Truth unites : essays in tribute to Samar
Sen / edited by Ashok Mitra. -- Calcutta :
Subarnarekha, c198S·.
xiv, 316 p., clJ leaf of plates : port. ;
23 cm. . •
· · Festschrif t honoring Samar RaAjan Sen, b.
1916, Bengalee journalist; comprises articles
chiefly on contemporary sociopolitical issues
and intellectual life in India.
Includes bibliographies and index. /
2 $
Rs180.00
11/25/85 skm I E 51649
..................._ ____________ __
·-----~~___:,_;· ~~-~-1!1!1
· -..~
85-904853
The Truth unites : essays in tribute to Samar
Sen I edited by Ashok Mitra. -- Calcutta :
Subarnarekha, cl985·.
xiv, 316 p., clJ leaf of plates : port. ;
23 cm. .
. · Festschrif t honoring Samar Ranjan Sen, b.
1916, Bengalee journalist; articles
comp~ises
chiefly on contemporary sociopolitical issues
and intellectual life in India.
Includes bibliographies and index.
2 $ /
Rs180.00
11/25/85 skm I E 51649

~ Subarnarekha 1985
Printed by P. K. Ghosh at Eastend Printers, 3 Dr Suresh Sarkar
Road, Calcutta 700 014 and published by lndranath Majumdar,.
Subarnarekha, 73 Mahatma Gandhi Road, Calcutta 700 009, India~
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Trapped by Integrity: f\lf\IN
An Introductory Note
Samar Sen, I dare say, would hate this volume. He would detest the
thought that has gone into the planning of the volume, as much as
the pretentiousness he would claim to discern in some of the essays
presented here. He fixes a jaundiced eye on all scholastic fare. Most
of all, he abhors any ceremony, if that is not a mild way of
putting it. He would like to despatch himself to an unobtrusive
comer, and watch the raucous crowd make fools of themselves.
Not that he would temporiz.e, ever, his hatred for those who pollute
the human condition. But he would choose, on each occasion, his
own mode of expression, which, more often than not, would lean
rather on a brief, biting sarcasm than on boisterousness of any type.
He would therefore consider this collection of essays an affront.
This sense of affront, I feel tempted to add, would be aggravated by
his dislike of all that the editor of this volume stands for, parti
cularly the editor's political views. The volume thus involves a major
risk: those who have contributed to it are placing at hazard their
goodwill with the person whom they intend to honour. They have
none the less considered this risk worth taking. They wanted to
inscribe, at least for the sake of history, their tribute to a quiet little
man who, in his own manner, encompasses a kind of greatness.
An outsider who stumbles on this volume will be immediately
struck by the heteroget;tous nature of its contents. There is nothing
astonishing about this disparateness: it is a reminder of the course
Samar Sen has meandered along during the past five decades or
thereabouts; it also illustrates the circumference of his admirers.
His slender physical frame is in a sense a deception. His apparent
love of indolence too is a bit of fiction. This man has lived, felt and
fought intensely. The convulsions he caused to Bengali poetry-to
its form, its syntax, and its diction-make it impossible to write him
out of its annals. Some may nurture a violent aversion to his poetry.
Yet, they will not dare to ignore him. Succeeding generations of poets
will take umbrage at the suggestion that, up to a point, their efforts
are feeble echoes of the all-shattering quake Samar Sen caused to
vi An Introductory Note
Bengali poetry fifty years ago. But ·that would be the conventional
homage that conceit pays to fact. That much of Bengali poetry is
today direct, matter-of-fact, easy-flowing, is owing to Samar Sen.
He made dry prose enter the corpus of poetry. Lyricism of a sort was
there, but it was lyricism of a non-evocative category. The sheer force
of what was being stated infused it with a liquid fire. The poet
himself, however, remained detached, never mind whether it was a
serenade to a listless maiden, or a take-off on the state of the nation's
politics. The strength of the poetry emerged from this magic of
detachment. Never before had commonplace Bengali words, set
down in seemingly absent-minded disarray, carried so much con
viction.
Samar Sen, still in his early twenties, was threatened by success.
It could have gone to his head and induced him to rush towards the
direction of the establishment. It did precisely the reverse; he drifted
towards Marxism, and launched into a discovery of the roots of cre
ative endeavour in the travails of the toiling people. The interregnum
of the Second World War was in fact the only period when his poetry
had an overt, assertive theistic content. His poems turned into
rolling paeans of Marxist belief and the spirit of anti-fascism. He
also began experimenting with old Bengali poetical structures, per
haps because of a felt urge to transmit his sense of political com
mitment to a wider clientele.
Abruptly or otherwise, that phase by and large ended with the
mid-1940s. For the next one and half decades, the records are nearly
a blank. Did the man get lost? He pottered around, perhaps trying
to make up his mind between adulation for Marx and passion for
Bacchus. In settling on a profession, Samar Sen, almost in the manner
of someone who is yet to emerge fully from out of an alcoholic
stupor, opted for daily journalism. Next followed a sojourn to the
Soviet Union, the only visible outcome being a few tame translations,
from Russian into Bengali, of stodgy classics and jejune folklore for
children. When he returned home, and to Calcutta, he once more
sought refuge within the portals of capitalist journalism.
A sullen anger must have persisted within. In the early 1960s, he
suddenly broke away. The story of his life between then and now is
a succession of such breaking aways. A group of establishment :
people had set up a trust and picked him as a safe choice to
edit a weekly journal which they thought could be used for their
intra-establishment political gang-wars. Samar Sen agreed to be the
An Introductory Note vii
editor, but refused to play the game. It is now pointless to quibble
over whether he first decided, then chose, or first chose, then decided.
In the grey corridors of our daily existence, decisions and choices
cannot always be neatly disentangled. In any event, it is only the
denouement that matters, which was the emergence of Samar Sen
as the combative, iconoclast editor of Now. Some of the most
ferocious editorial writings in India in the post-independence period
must have appeared in Now during the four years he was its editor.
The small talk in coffee house circles, when the journal made its first
appearance, was that mourning had become Now. That talk soon
petered out. It was scarcely mourning; it was hibernation suddenly
turning into a magnificent assertion of social commitment which
began to pulsate Now.
Did he arrive at this point on his own, or was he cajoled into taking
the direction he took? That kind of tittle-tattle one can put aside.
What is historically important is that he arrived where he did. To
describe Samar Sen's arrival as serendipity of a sort is again to miss
the point. He had not, at the end of his voyage, set anchors at any
island of gold. He reached a rough, hard terrain where there was
only rock, and no water. This man could have led a comfortable
existence as a hack writer of editorial comments for any capitalist
newspaper; he could have bartered his poetical talents for an
assured position in the ranks of the literary establishment. He did
neither. Instead, he chose trouble; he has lived with it ever since.
Thus started the radicalization of Samar Sen. Perhaps others
'Yould put it somewhat differently: his entrapment into an integrity
which was always there. The arbiters of Now soon got rid of him.
Encouraged by friends, he ventured on Frontier, the weekly journal
which has now gone on for seventeen years. It is, some would say,
a mad journal, excruciatingly uneven in quality, and commits
howlers with unseasonal regularity. It is often radical, but-again,
some would say-without much of a cause. It has often a cause, but,
the complaint would be lodged, messes up its presentation by
displaying all the wrong reasons. The defenders of Frontier-and
of Samar Sen-would dismiss such whimpers with righteous scorn.
To them the journal is the embodiment of true faith; amid the
morass of sinking values, Frontier is terra firma; it has stayed stuck
to the policy of the principle notwithstanding the diverse tribulations
it has gone through. Scoffers there were right at its inception.
Despite them, Frontier has survived. It does not have the same reach
viii An Introductory Note
as it had when it started. It did not get many advertisements then, it
does not now. As a new issue arrives, one wonders if there will be
another. Frontier sells a few thousand copies inside the country,
mostly in Calcutta; it also sells a few hundred copies outside the
country, mostly amongst the radical fringe in Western Europe and
the United States. -It is precarious existence without question. None
the less, like its distinguished contemporary from Bombay, the
Economic and Political Weekly, Frontier too keeps the· ftag of
contrariness flying.
It is this contrariness which defines Samar Sen, and it took him
until the fading years of his journalistic career to come face to face
with his identity. In the Indian milieu, it is not easy to be against it
all. Samar Sen is against not just the ruling establishment; he is also
against those whom he chooses to condemn as the establishment of
the left. Which is to say, he goes out of his way to be quarrelsome.
He has exhibited that tenacity of disdain which allows him to be
constantly on 1;he other side of the river, never mind whether it is the
·Mississippi or the Volga or the Yangtze. Social oppression is a
ubiquitous phenomenon, he would argue; honesty demands that
you rise in revolt, with whatever weaponry you command, against
the oppressors. His integrity is the magnet which has drawn admirers
from all shores; some of the admirers beleaguer him with moun
tainous tracts on revolutionary praxis, others send in gift cheques.
Both physically and materially, it is still marginal living for him
and his journal. The journal does not make any money for him, it
drains away money. Several of his earlier well-wishers have walked
away, perhaps repelled by what they consider the obtuseness of the
journal's editorial policies and mores. In more recent years, a new
crop of journalism has reared its head in the country-sleek, smart,
flashy, superficial, illustrating the dazzle of emerging capitalism
which is taking control of the country. Samar Sen has often felt
discouraged, but he has not given in. Is it pride that keeps him
going? Or is it hope that transcends the grimmest circumstance?
Perhaps it is a bit of both. As one scans the Indian landscape, one is
hard put to it to find many other examples of such dogged persistence
in the cause of integrity, an integrity which, to quite a few, passes
understanding.
It is this rich flavour of obstinacy which has gathered for him
loyalists, flocks of them. Defiance has become Frontier. It is possible
to draw an analogy between Samar Sen and Calcutta, which is the
An Introductory Note ix
city of his endurance. Calcutta, they say, is dying, if not already
dead. In a hundred senses, the statement can be proved right; in a
hundred other senses, it is demonstrably false. An ambivalence in
objective reality keeps Calcutta going. There is an allure in its
squalor, a hope in its despair, a flourish of life in the debris of its
dead, which render Calcutta into what it is. Poets abound in.it, as
do politicians, as do parasites, otherwise known as political com
mentators. Fakes and revoliitionaries, both lay claim to Calcutta,
and in about equal measure: what will they do if Calcutta were not
around?
Calcutta frustrates you, yet it fascinates you. You want to escape;
you cannot, at the same time, do without Calcutta. Those who find
in Calcutta the claustrophobia of a family wake will come across a
similar feeling of desolation in Samar Scn's outward appearance
and attitude. Whether you visit him in his office or in his ground
floor apartment-dark and bleak even in the blazing summer after
noon-a sadness will threaten to overwhelm you, a sadness which
is a by-product of the f oreknowlcdge that the day's perambulations
are mere make-believe: about everything will shrink, shrivel, die,
including Calcutta, including its political idealism, including its
literary bravado. Thcrefo re, since you are altogether so certain that
nothing means anything any more, be brittle in your talk, be as
empty as you can in your witticism, you annihilate, annihilate,
annihilate; as if it is annihilation alone which matters.
· This is scratching at one facet of reality though. Were euthanasia
the whole truth and the only truth, why bother· at all to offer the
hospitality of your journal to the radical elements who keep building
castles of revolution in the air, why allow them the indulgence of
bashing one another's ideas on the head, why bother to ruin yourself
financially by persisting with the journal, despite your failing health,
despite the many personal tragedies that have recently visited you?
No, Calcutta is, and will remain, an adhesive ball of contrariness.
Nihilism is passable, but nihilism in Calcutta's climate is reconcilable
with any number of positive formulations. Pessimism is here sculp
tured into a snobbery. But the snobbery is not the final aspect
either. To be an anti-snob is a parallel snobbery, of almost equally
respectable genre. Along· the crumbling columns and passages of
cynicism which is Calcutta, you thus continue to confront assorted
economists, scientists, poets, film-makers, playwrights, and, inevit
ably, crooks and opportunists, apart from those itinerant combatants
x An Introductory Note
and instant revolutionaries, each one weaving a specific, silly,
beautiful dream of social engineering for the morning to follow, ·
as if the battle of the barricades had already been won. It is these
contradictions that make Calcutta. They also make Samar Sen and
his circle.
What would Samar Sen do if there were no Calcutta? But one
could easily reverse the proposition: what would Calcutta do if
Samar Sen and his impossible journal eease to be? In a manner of
speaking, they delimit each other, they also complement each other.
Rain or shine, the iconoclasts and the revolutionaries will always be
here; they will plan for the fire next time, and, in the same breath,
they will dream of yet bluer skies. They will need gallons and gallons
of convincing that arson and construction may not always go
together. They will laugh at your face, and keep dropping in on
Samar Sen in the dark, dingy cubbyhole of his office.
And Samar Sen, with resigned solemnity, will offer them hospital
ity, even if, in the process, he succeeds in further ·emaciating his
already nearly non-existent physical frame. He will do so perhaps
because he still wants to clinch the point: mind triumphs over matter;
· it did in the past, it does so now, it will continue to do so for ever.
It is this faith he keeps aftame within himself, even as he ap
proaches his seventieth year, which has inspired an odd group
of historians, sociologists, economists, political scientists, literary
critics, journalists and others to put together this collection of essays
as their tribute and homage to one who, to them, personifies the
integrity of human existence.
AsHOK MITRA
1May1985