[Reader-list] Arka Mukhopadhyay's article on Lalon fakir

[anupam chakravartty]

thanks for sharing this

On Thu, May 26, 2011 at 5:00 PM, Chintan Girish Modi <
chintan.backups at gmail.com> wrote:

> From http://www.openspaceindia.org/articles/item/685.html
>
> City of Mirrors
>
> By Arka Mukhopadhyay
>
> Bengali fakir Lalon's life was an attempt to discover the man inside,
> the one that defies categorisation.
>
> If you go on Wikipedia and look through all the important events in
> world history on May 5, you won’t find this anecdote – that on that
> date in 1889, a strange meeting may or may not have taken place
> between two men in a houseboat on the River Padma, off the shores of
> Shilaidah in presentday Bangladesh. But in many ways that meeting, if
> it happened, was a meeting of worlds. One of the men was
> Jyotirindranath, owner of the houseboat, scion of the illustrious
> Tagores of Calcutta (who were also the local landlords), artist,
> playwright, polymath, philosopher, nationalist-entrepreneur, musician,
> and mentor to his younger brother Rabindranath, whose transcending
> genius would later obscure his own star. On that day, Jyotirindranath
> was exactly a day over 40. Although he is now rarely known outside the
> pale of Bengali nostalgia, at that time he was one of the men who were
> shaping an emerging national conscience. He was a moulder and a
> product of history.
>
> The other man in that meeting which may or may not have taken place
> may or may not have been a staggering 115 years old at the time. He
> may or may not have been Hindu, or Muslim. He may or may not have been
> illiterate. His only brush with history would come when he would exit
> it about a year later, for his death in 1890 is just about the only
> part of his life to which the archive can lay any claim with
> certainty. But Phokir Lalon Snaai, which may or may not have been his
> (un)real name, lived outside of time and history, in a spaceless land
> of myths and shadow-truths, where stories made with breath and dreams
> endure, but mere facts are dust and ashes (to paraphrase Neil Gaiman).
> From that meeting which may or may not have happened, Jyotirindranath
> would draw a pencil sketch of Lalon, said to be the only true likeness
> in his entire lifetime. Lalon, for his part, may or may not have sung
> the following song, one of the 10,000-odd that he allegedly composed:
>
> Baarir pashe arshinagar
>
> Ekghor porshi boshot kore
>
> Aami ekdinona dekhilam tare
>
> (Near my home lies the city of mirrors, where a neighbour dwells. But
> oh, I have not seen my neighbour even for a day.)
>
> --Arshinagar, the City of Mirrors
>
> Elsewhere, Lalon also speaks of “aayna mohal” – the hall of mirrors. A
> place where the One Truth is diffracted into a million manifestations,
> each as real as the ones around it, but ultimately all only
> reflections. Did Lalon, the man made of many stories, know Attar’s
> ‘Conference of the Birds’? But ‘arshinagar’ could also mean the city
> that lies in the seventh heaven. Perhaps it is the country that Kabir
> invites us to, when he sings ‘Chalo hamaara des’.
>
> In 2010, filmmaker Gautam Ghosh released Moner Manush (Man of the
> Heart – a phrase we shall return to later), a biographical film on
> Lalon, which opens with the same trope as this essay – the meeting
> between Lalon and Jyotirindranath. In fact, let me admit that I have
> unabashedly ‘lifted’ the image from the film, because it’s an image I
> like to dwell on. The boat is almost like a stage, an empty space as
> Peter Brook would call it, set upon the meta-space of the almost
> limitless Padma, a river known as ‘the destroyer of human achievement’
> – Kirtinasha. Here’s more from the same Lalon song:
>
> Geram bere ogadh paani
>
> O tar nai kinara nai toroni pare
>
> Amar mone boro banchha jaage,
>
> Kamne se gaay jaai re?
>
> (Endless waters surround the village. They have neither shore nor any
> boats to cross. Oh I wish so much to see his face, but how shall I get
> across?).
>
> In Ghosh’s film, Lalon’s life story unfolds through what he calls a
> ‘ballad-structure’ – essentially a series of flashbacks as the two men
> converse. The Lalon that emerges is one whom many urban intellectuals
> like to see – a vicious critic of religious strife, one who ridicules
> division on the basis of jaat, a not-easily-translatable word roughly
> corresponding to race, religious affiliation, or in the Indian
> context, perhaps even caste. Ghosh’s Lalon is an almost messianic
> figure who presides over his ashram, hippie-guru-like in his
> long-haired, bearded avatar. And indeed, this is one of the many
> mirror-images of Lalon, the one who sang:
>
> Shob loke koy lalon ki jaat shongshaare
>
> Aar lalon bole jaater ki roop,
>
> Dekhlaam-na ei nojore.
>
> (Everyone asks, ‘What jaat is Lalon in this world?’ And Lalon says,
> what the shape of jaat is, I have not seen with my eyes).
>
> The jaat he speaks of encompasses and surpasses not only religious
> identity, but also notions of gender:
>
> Sunnath dile
>
> hoy mussalmaan
>
> Naari jaatir ki hoy bidhaan?
>
> Aami bamun chini poita proman
>
> Bamni chini kishe re?
>
> (If circumcision makes you a mussalmaan, what then is the dictum for
> women? If Brahmin-ness is proved by the sacred thread, how shall I
> know a Brahmin woman?)
>
> This is a ‘secular’ and ‘progressive’ Lalon that may be useful to many
> of us, but to posit him only as such would be limiting, just as it is
> limiting to look at Kabir only as an icon of Hindu-Muslim unity. For
> their space-less place is also identity-less, and ultimately, even
> ‘secular’ and ‘progressive’ are only markers of identity:
>
> Ki bolbo porshiro kotha?
>
> O taar hosto podo skondho matha naire
>
> Khonek bhashe shunyer upor
>
> Khonek bhashe neel-e
>
> Porshi Jodi amaay chhnuto
>
> Amaar jom-jatona shokol jeto dure,
>
> Se aar lalon ek khaane roy
>
> Lokkho jojon phnaak re.
>
> (What shall I say of my neighbour? Oh he does not have hands, feet,
> shoulders or head. Now he stays in the empty space above, and now he
> floats in the blue waters. If he but touched me, I’d lose my fear of
> death. He and Lalon stay in the same place, yet a million miles away).
>
> In a private conversation, a noted Bengali musician and musicologist
> asked me, “Who is Lalon? Or was there a Lalon? Why is this man
> completely undocumented even though he lived in a time of
> documentation?” Indeed, the ‘facts’ of Lalon’s life, such as they are,
> are well-known. People say he was born a Hindu, around 1774, went on a
> pilgrimage in his early-20s where he contracted smallpox and was left
> for dead, was rescued by a Muslim couple who nursed him back to
> health, and thence became a disciple of a wandering Fakir, Shiraaj
> Snaai, in time becoming a master himself and setting up his ashram in
> Cheuria near Shilaidah, where he lived, and died in 1890 at a
> staggering 116 years. All of which is fine, except there isn’t a shred
> of documentary evidence to corroborate any of this. In his lifetime,
> if he existed at all, Lalon scoffed at any attempt to construct his
> life story or confine him to the politics of identity. He was a man,
> that was all. His whole lifetime was an attempt to discover the man
> inside, the one that defies all categorisation. Allegedly illiterate,
> he displays in his rustic songs an astonishing familiarity with the
> subtlest discourses of Hinduism, Sufi Islam and Tantric Buddhism, all
> of which he amalgamates in the way of the Bauls – dehatatwa – another
> untranslatable word roughly corresponding to ‘wisdom of the body’. It
> is a complex creed involving breathing, meditation, discourse, and
> yes, even sexual practices. But the body for him was a way – shaadhan,
> to use his term -- towards emptiness. It wouldn’t be surprising if he
> was conversant with Adi Shankara’s words – “I am not earth, not water,
> not energy not the wind, not the sky, not the five senses nor their
> sum total. I am not one nor many, but that which remains when all
> these are taken away – I am only the inviolate Self.” Was there a
> Lalon? Or was he just an articulation of our universal yearning , the
> man who resides inside, the moner manush?
>
> “One access to the creative way consists of discovering in yourself an
> ancient corporality to which you are bound by a strong ancestral
> relation. So you are neither in the character nor in the
> non-character. Starting from details, you can discover in you somebody
> other -- your grandfather, your mother. A photo, a memory of wrinkles,
> the distant echo of a colour of the voice enables you to reconstruct a
> corporality. First, the corporality of somebody known, and then more
> and more distant, the corporality of the unknown one, the ancestor. Is
> this corporality literally as it was? Maybe not literally - but yet as
> it might have been. You can arrive very far back, as if your memory
> awakens. This is a phenomenon of reminiscence, as if you recall the
> Performer of primal ritual. Each time I discover something, I have the
> feeling that it is what I recall. Discoveries are behind us and we
> must journey back to reach them. With the breakthrough -- as in the
> return of an exile -- can one touch something which is no longer
> linked to origins but -- if I dare say -- to the origin?”
>
> These words belong not to Lalon, but to Polish theatre maestro,
> traveller, seeker and questioner Jerzy Grotowski. Yet here he too
> becomes Lalon, for what he is speaking of is transmission, of the body
> as memory, and art as wisdom. These are things Lalon would have known.
> He bloomed out of an enormously rich counter-culture of Bauls,
> Phokirs, Dorbeshes and other ‘sacred lunatics’ (to use a Grotowskian
> term), whose path was the confluence of Chishtiya Sufism, Tantric
> Buddhism and Vaishnavism. In this immense merging of human spiritual
> streams, the figure of the Guru was central. If the body is that which
> we perform, then what you performed was merely what your guru had
> poured into you, and his Guru before him, reaching back in a
> continuous line of transmission to what Grotowski calls the Performer
> of primal ritual, and what the Bauls and Phokirs of Bengal call Moner
> Manush (the man of the heart), Alekh Snaai (the unseen master),
> Manuraay (king of the heart) and so on. Grotowski visited India
> several times, and interacted extensively with Bauls. He spoke of
> re-evoking “... an ancient form of art where ritual and artistic
> creation were seamless. Where poetry was song, song was incantation,
> movement was dance”, perhaps thinking of the path of the Bauls –
> Shahaj Path (The Simple Path).
>
> Interestingly, the Alekh Snaai that the Phokirs speak of could have a
> curious etymology, for Alekh may well be derived from the Arabic Alaq
> – meaning clot but referring to sperm, after a Quranic verse. So the
> invisible, formless origin merges with the very palpable seed of life.
> Indeed, sexual practices, perhaps inherited from Tantra, played a
> central role in the creed that Lalon belonged to. For only in the
> union of the man and the woman can the formless manifest itself, and
> thus the quest for emptiness was rooted very much in the corporeal. In
> a very different vein, Rabindranath Tagore would talk about the union
> of the body with the formless:
>
> Sheemar majhe ashim tumi
>
> Bajaao apon sur
>
> Amaar majhe tomar prokaash
>
> Taai eto modhur.
>
> (Amidst the finite, you are infinite. You play your own music. That is
> why your efflorescence in me is so sweet, so beautiful).
>
> Tagore may never have met Lalon, but he definitely heard many of his
> songs breathed out by the Bauls, and their words were inscribed in his
> mind, as he says. He speaks of one of Lalon’s most famous songs:
>
> Khnaachar bhetor ochin pakhi
>
> komne ashe jay
>
> Taare dhorte parle mono beri
>
> Ditam pakhir paay.
>
> Which Tagore translates as:
>
> Nobody can tell whence the bird unknown
>
> Comes into my cage and goes out.
>
> I could feign put round its feet the fetter of my mind.
>
> Could I but capture him.
>
> In his presidential address to the Indian Philosophical Congress of
> 1925, quoting these lines he says: “This village poet evidently agrees
> with our sage of the Upanishad who says that our mind comes back
> baffled in its attempt to reach the unknown Being; and yet this poet
> like the ancient sage does not give up the adventure of the infinite,
> thus implying that there is a way to its realisation.” In his famous
> Hibbert lecture of 1931, ‘The Religion of Man’, he would further say:
> “I felt I had found my religion at last, the religion of man, in which
> the infinite became defined in humanity and came close to me so as to
> need my love and co-operation. This idea of mine found at a later date
> its expression in some of my poems addressed to what I called
> Jivandevata, the lord of my life.”
>
> Tagore, who himself walked the pathless path, knew his fellow
> traveller well. Perhaps Grotowski knew of him too, from all his
> travels within and without with the Bauls. They and Lalon are images
> of each other in the City of Mirrors.
>
> And which image of Lalon shall I finish this little essay with?
> Perhaps the Lalon that is rooted in the ever-present moment of the
> body, a Lalon caught in the throes of the ecstatic dance of the Bauls.
> For what this Lalon has to tell us is that the body is what matters –
> it is the body that is oppressed, it is the body that is forcibly
> displaced, the body that is consumed, the body that is genetically
> modified, subjected to the AFSPA, the body which is commoditised. It
> is only by emphatically asserting the body’s autonomy, by celebrating
> it, that we can live in the ever-present moment – the few moments that
> we live here on this earth.
>
> --Arka Mukhopadhay is a writer, theatre person and Sufi-practitioner,
> currently based in New Delhi.
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