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Foreword

In the summer of 2011, I had just re-encountered a well-known short story in


Bengali, “Jibito o Mrito” (The Living and the Dead) by litterateur Rabindranath
Tagore, an acknowledged pioneer of the genre in Bengali. Although I could read the
story in the Bengali original, it was the lively and sensitive translation of the story by
Arunava Sinha that really brought home the story to me. One could not but help mull
over the many enigmatic strands of Tagore’s superlatively poignant narrative about a
young Hindu widow, Kadambini, given up for dead by her family when she
accidentally falls into a coma.1

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

Something of this churn of various ideas, I think, operates in our graphic


creative sequel to Tagore’s short story in The Lady Left Alive, where Bharath and I
probe into Tagore's sympathetic portrait of Kadambini's paradoxical status as familial
and social victim, as well as mover and shaker of the neat orders of the opulent
zamindari household. In her latter incarnation as a metaphorical “sudden gust of wind,”
Kadambini appears to perform a role that echoes that of the “West Wind” in English
Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley’s well-known Ode written in Italy, which images
the “trumpet of a prophecy” to a new and emancipated world-order.

Kadambini’s resemblance to Shelley’s ideal is probably not accidental, for


literary scholars have long recognised Tagore’s works in terms of their cultural
inheritance of European Romanticism, as spawned within the ferment of the nineteenth-
century Bengal Renaissance. In fact, Tagore’s oxymoronic portrait of Kadambini
confirms an astute observation by William Radice, British scholar of Bengali language
and literature. Radice notes “a list of opposites which seem to lie at the back of much of
Tagore’s thinking” at the “time” that he wrote his short stories, pitting “Night” against
“Day,” “Silence” against “Noise,” and “Eternity” against “Time” (23-24).4

Indeed, Tagore’s investment in opposites, as identified by Radice, relates


productively to an aesthetic tenet articulated by another major Romantic poet, Samuel
Taylor Coleridge. In his (admittedly rather disjointed) set of notes on aesthetic theory
entitled the Biographia Literaria, Coleridge famously distinguished between the
“imagination” and the “fancy,” privileging the former term. Additionally, he
differentiated between “imagination” in its “primary” and “secondary” aspects.
Relevant to our discussion here is the fact that Coleridge characterises the “secondary
imagination” as the “agency” which “dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to
recreate” the artistic or literary artefact.5

Kadambini may be said to be a fecund product of the conflict and resolution of


opposites that “re-create” her rather undefinable identity. On one hand she is
agonisingly human. Her profound social and emotional isolation at her friend
Jogomaya’s house ensues in physiological manifestations that we would now recognise
as psychotic episodes and panic attacks. Tagore mentions that “she would scream
sometimes alone in her room in the middle of the afternoon,” and “in the evening, she
would tremble on spotting her own shadow in the lamplight”. On the other hand,
Tagore also ascribes a metaphysical and sublimating aspect to Kadambini’s self-hatred:
“I am dangerous, harbinger of ill fortune, I am my spirit”.

Furthermore, if Kadambini is considered as representative of women in


general, she also appears to bear within herself Tagore’s ambivalent sentiments towards
the Other, as voiced from his normative perspective of male privilege. As a text of its
time, this short story appears to voice astonishingly patronising sentiments towards

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.
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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.

Reinventing Tagore's tale of Kadambini as a living phantom, friendless and


free of human companionship, Bharath and I reframe Tagore’s short story for a modern
readership as a tantalising murder mystery that traces the odd circumstances of
Kadambini's disappearance from her society. In order to achieve this aim, we shift
Tagore's original timeline for the story through the late 19th century forward to the
tumultous decade preceding Indian Independence in 1947. Our alternative plot teases
out the subtle hints of domestic violence and sexual tension in Tagore's story into full-
blown psychological drama, punctuating the narrative with uncanny manifestations of
fantastic and supernatural elements such as the mohini, the demonic female figure of
myth and village lore. Our plot utilises a cast of characters that lends voice to figures
left on social margins in the original story, particularly children and domestic servants.
These characters' recollections and repressed memories are pieced together through the
uneasy and coincidental cooperation of an aged civil servant and a young historian in
post-millennial globalised India.

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.
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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.

Correspondingly, there is another feature of Bharath’s artwork that the


reader—particularly the practised reader of Japanese manga--may pleasurably
anticipate. This relates to yet another aesthetic technique that Bharath identifies in “A
Form of Writing.” The panels on the page are divided in a “non-linear” manner, which
means that the “narrative is grasped not by linear progression of action but by the
cumulative effect of the entire page. The eyes need to take in the entire page at once.”
Bharath’s artwork thus invites the reader to continually sense and relish events and
details spread over the “entire page,” even those seemingly tangential to the main
narrative.10 In this aspect Bharath’s artwork can be said to approximate also some of the
7
Bharath Murthy, A Form of Writing: An Essay on the Comic (2011)
<https://bcomix.wordpress.com/2010/06/17/a-form-of-writing-an-essay-on-the-comic/>(accessed 17 June 2018)
8
Murthy, Bharath. 2009. An Art Without a Tradition: A Survey of Indian Comics. Marg: A Magazine of the
Arts 61 (2): 38–53.
9
William Wordsworth, ed. James Butler, The Ruined Cottage and The Pedlar (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 1979) 71.
10
This is a subject I have discussed at greater length in a journal article. Please see: Malini Roy, “The Vanished
Path of Buddhism: Religious Non-Conformism in Political Dissent in Contemporary India,” Libri & Liberi
(2017), Vol. 6, No. 2 <http://www.librietliberi.org/> (accessed 17 June 2018)
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characteristics of Nouvelle Manga, which, as exemplified in the work of comics artist


Frédéric Boilet and other artists, brings in the reader into active conversation with the
visual text. The artwork disallows a passive reception of events as they pass by, in a
method analogous to the cinematic Nouvelle Vague famously pioneered by French
filmmakers Jean-Luc Godard and Alain Resnais in the tumultuous and experimental
decades of the 1950s and 60s.11

Through our interpretation of Tagore's story in a highly contemporary and


increasingly popular genre, The Lady Left Alive seeks to revitalise the poet-saint's
deeply humanitarian messages of empathy and understanding towards the dispossessed.
Today, we live in a world fractured by conflict in every respect—be it the exodus of
Rohingya Muslims from Myanmar, or the States of the European Union which are
sending back hapless asylum seekers to war-torn homelands. Against this background,
Tagore’s messages remain as relevant to the whole world today as in his own time.
Perhaps more so, in fact.
Svanhild Wall (with the
approving eye of Bharath Murthy)

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.

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