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Foreword
Being fortunate enough to know Arunava, his generosity and his creative spirit
in person, I had the fortune, over many email discussions, of being able to ruminate
over the various possible ways to retell Kadamini’s experience for a modern audience.
As it happened, I—the scriptwriter—was then “with child,” to quote the rather quaint
phrasing of earlier English usage, and was in the habit of staring out every afternoon
into the lush green tropical lawns in front of Jurong West Public Library in Singapore,
where I then used to live. Every day, precisely at 4 pm, the baby would make a long,
slow, turn in Circadian rhythm within me.
At the time, I also had the tremendous luck to be in touch with comics artist
and film-maker Bharath Murthy, who would later go on to publish the graphic
travelogue The Vanished Path (2015). I was acquainted with his extensive experience
and knowledge of the styles and techniques of Manga, as developed and practised
currently in Japan as well as many other parts of the world. Sitting in Singapore, at a
point not far from the meeting of the Indian Ocean and the Pacific, the position seemed
peculiarly apposite as a site for Manga’s Cultural Crossroads, to quote the felicitous
title of a scholarly essay collection jointly edited by German comics scholars Bettina
Kümmerling-Meibauer and Jacqueline Berndt.2
The churn of thoughts in my brain at the cusp of two oceans, however, in wild
consonance with the motion of the baby within me, seemed to echo even more the
“cosmopolitan thought zones” of a pioneering “Asian universalism” that historian
Sugata Bose has posited as a characteristic of Tagore’s thought. In Bose’s wonderful
essay on the subject, he talks about Tagore being bewitched with the practices of the
visual arts he viewed in Japan, as a result of his voyage on the Tosamaru in 1916,
taking in the Bay of Bengal, Penang, Singapore, and Hong Kong on the way. 3
1
Arunava Sinha’s translation can be located in the Appendix.
2
“Introduction,” Manga’s Cultural Crossroads, eds. Jaqueline Berndt and Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer (New
York & London: Routledge, 2013) 1-15.
3
Sugata Bose, “Rabindranath Tagore and Asian Universalism,” Tagore’s Asian Voyages: Selected Speeches and
Writings on Rabindranath Tagore (2010)
<https://www.iseas.edu.sg/images/centres/nalanda_sriwijaya_centre/nsc_tagore_booklet_small.pdf > (accessed
July 20, 2016).
2
4
“Introduction,” Rabindranath Tagore: Selected Short Stories, trans. and introd. William Radice (London:
Penguin, 1991)1-28.
5
Samuel T. Coleridge, The Major Works (ed. H. Jackson, Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 2000) 313.
3
women: “Womenkind cannot tolerate mystery,” the narrator states, apparently without
the distance of irony: “women either eliminate the very existence of what they cannot
understand, maintaining no relationship with it, or else they convert it with their own
hands into a new form where they can put it to some use—if they can do neither, they
become exceedingly angry with it”. Women, according to the narrator, seem incapable
of that state of “Negative Capability” mentioned by yet another English Romantic poet,
John Keats, in a letter to his brothers George and Tom. Keats characterises this state as
one “when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any
irritable reaching after fact & reason”.6 Tellingly, Keats’ practitioner of “Negative
Capability” happens to be a “man”--the seemingly generic human.
Reading Tagore’s short story from the subject position of a woman, however, I
could not help but burst into wild giggles, when I first read the seeming aperçu,
“Womenkind cannot tolerate mystery,” by one often revered in his own times as a wise
man of the East. And yet, can we, as readers, truly collapse the narrator of this short
story with the author? Is there perhaps a small but genuine gap between the two? For
Tagore, being the consummate artist that he undoubtedly was, also, significantly,
chooses to invest Kadambini—the woman, the widow—with the fearsome unsettling
force of the Outsider. He states that as “soon as” Kadambini recognised herself in the
metaphysical aspect of a “spirit,” “the rules that bound” her “to the world” exploded,
and “extraordinary power, infinite freedom” penetrated her very being, “without a trace
of diffidence, fear or concern in her heart”. In this respect, Kadambini becomes a
figurehead of the Romantic Wanderer, like Coleridge’s protagonist in probably his
best-known poem, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” condemned to wander the earth
with a dead albatross hung around his neck, in unremitted and infinitely repeatable
performance of Life-in-Death.
In thinking of our fictitious figure of the historian Nandita and her research
interests, however, I cannot help but regret the passing away of a friend, Riddhi Sankar
6
John Keats, The Major Works, ed. Elizabeth Cook (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 2001) 370.
4
Ray, at the untimely age of 38. His work on the zamindari system in Bengal provided,
in part, the inspiration for Nandita’s dogged burrowing into the past.
Our treatment of Tagore’s material builds upon hints embedded within what
Radice has rightly called Tagore’s “startlingly direct, simple, sometimes almost bald
manner of narration” (20). Bharath’s artwork has been integral to this process. Like that
of his travelogue The Vanished Path, the artwork here is mostly in black-and-white,
offering images that bloom in the haunting power of suggestion—showing rather than
telling the reader what to glean from the text. In a graphic essay written by Bharath
himself, entitled A Form of Writing (2011), he has pointed percipiently to the tendency
towards “abstraction” in the aesthetic techniques commonly employed in Japanese
manga, as expressed in “black and white images” as well as a “2-dimensional”
arrangement of “space,” comprising “simplified cartoon drawing” and “flat shapes.”7
This feature of Japanese manga stands in stark contrast to what Bharath earmarks as the
“realistic” bent of mainstream American comics, such as those brought out by the
giants in the field, DC and Marvel. The mainstream American tradition, as Bharath has
noted elsewhere in another essay entitled “An Art Without a Tradition” (2009), has
tended to dominate creative as well as receptive practices in the Indian comics/graphic
novels scene for a long time.8 Bharath’s artwork here, therefore, can be said to buck the
dominant cultural trend in this reinvention of Tagore for a contemporary audience.
Another key aspect to The Lady Left Alive is that Bharath and I have been keen
to show that the joint solution of the central murder mystery by the young historian and
the former civil servant does not quite leave behind a sense of cathartic peace. In other
words, the reader is not encouraged to move on “from ruin and from change” to “so still
an image of tranquillity,” to quote yet another Romantic poet, William Wordsworth.9
Instead, the sentiment we aim to convey is that of a disturbed apprehension of the
ultimate unknowability of the past, and an abiding sense of remorse at the fact that past
crimes will never be undone.
11
Tiago Canário, “On Everyday Life: Frédéric Boilet and the Nouvelle Manga Movement” 115-32.
Introduction. In Global Manga: Japanese Comics Without Japan?, ed. Casey Brienza, 1–15. New York &
London: Routledge, 2015.