The city of angst through Gunter's pen

By Ashok Chopra

IN 1987 Gunter Grass's book The Rat was released to rave reviews. It was a searing indictment of man's abuse of his environment and provided a chilling insight into what the future holds. It taught us how, by wasteful consumerism and an urge to self-destruction, the human race stands condemned. The race would be supplanted, as inevitably as were the dinosaurs, by its logical successor in the evolutionary chain: The rat. It was described as "a brilliant and powerful" novel. Soon Grass left for India, to spend a year in Calcutta. The result was Show Your Tongue that was released internationally in August 1989. Some of you who may have had a chance to read the book may well ask as to why am I writing about it in a column which, as the title suggests, should be devoted only to modern classics. You do have a point. Grass's Show Your Tongue is no modern classic. For us Indians it is an important work which gives us an idea of the writer's mind, extraordinary imagination, combined with a master craftsman's eye for language. Above all it depicts a great deal of truth — the truth that can be, and is, not only bitter, but rather hurtful.

For almost all outsiders, Calcutta in its first impression, has always appeared as a black hole, a cesspool of humanity where the future has been seen and it doesn't work. Thus Gunter Grass's book Show Your Tongue is no different. To use Franz Kafka's expression comes "as an ice axe to break the sea frozen inside us." And despite the fact that one had expected so much from fleeting western reports, Grass's venom showed no sign of softness and understanding like Geoffrey Moorhouse's Calcutta or Dominique Lipierre's City of Joy and so many others who managed to see a lotus in the midst of a stagnant pond. For Grass all is turgidity and morbidity — religion, political and the power elite — that has been conspiring to take the city to ruin and damnation:

Yet, in excavations a thousand years from now
In alluvial flats from the last flood
the site of legendary Calcutta, nothing
will be found, no bottle cap, no nail, no vail,
no fixture or tube, not even
the refuse of the refuse, only silent garbage.
In the present garbage already
turning to humus, promising vegetables, we found
A school hidden in a shed, children
crouched over slates, practicing Bengali letters.
The exercise, written over and over in translation: Life is Beautiful.
The vultures here know too much, know
what will be in the paper tomorrow.
Soon that computer, the one
the son of a sweeper
say the vultures,
developed in his free time,
says the paper,
will regulate garbage collection. But the stink won't be so easy to
..........

And if this is not enough to indicate what the book is all about, Grass quotes an aphorism of the 18th century German scientist, Lictenberg:

House-sized ads. World Bank plans
to save the city lie in a pile like
the garbage beside the road to Dum Dum,
another kind of daily inflation,
in notebook, Lictenberg says,
that in revolutionary times, "The sweepings
outside the city, in them you can read
what a city lacks, as a physician
read stool and urine."
What is lacking? For dying,
nothing, but for life, naked
as the proverb has it, everything
except pure will.

On its release when the book was reviewed in the Indian press a critic of a Calcutta paper panned the book as a "Drain Inspector's Report". Well, to a certain extent it may look so at first reading. But it is certainly an unusual book comprising three parts: a set of black and white drawings on the seamier side of Calcutta city, a prose section consisting of mainly stacatto impressions of life and society, which is rounded of with a long poem that puts all that the author has depicted in the drawings and said in his poems into a nutshell. The main point, however, is that all three parts have to be read together and not in pieces to get a complete picture of what Grass is trying to say.

Once you have finished reading the three, the question that comes to mind is: Is there just bitterness and anger or is there an angst too, to use a German expression to describe Grass's feelings towards the great city?

All three pieces are superficially one long litany against contemporary life and society in Calcutta but it is a litany directed against the power elite and the traditionalists who have learnt and forgotten nothing from history and left the teeming masses literally in the gutters. So the ire is directed against the politicians and number one on the firing line is Subhas Bose because of his association with Adolf Hitler. (As mentioned in the previous two parts, Grass has written consistently both in the novels and prose against Nazism) and later with the Japanese premier Hideki Tajo, represented the ultramilitarist army position during World War II.

The prose section opens On the North Side of Calcutta with a blistering attack on the incongruity of the Bose statue as if to say that he was a little man strutting around in high shoes full of noise and fury signifying nothing. If Bose is made the butt-end of jokes and diatribes constantly it is the Bengali intelligentsia that has fostered and encouraged the invincible myth that comes in for much greater attack. Quoting the title of Hugh Toye's work The Springing Tiger Grass pokes fun on the incredulity of the intellectual:

And what, we ask ourselves over tea,
would have happened had Bose,
photographed in civvies besides Hitler,
and in uniform on a reviewing stand in Singapore,
freed the subcontinent for Japan and turned
history east of Suez upside down?
From Bose to Basu and others in one short step taking along all the politicians of post-Independence India.
But When the son of heaven landed,
stern old Basu, in white cotton
that purges (since Stalin) have washed
.......

Who outlived all Indira's head-cracking goondas,
did not smile, demanded kerosene,
Basu, literate like all Bramins,
finds his Marx unhelpful, because
no passage in Das Kapital refers
to Flooding shortly before religious festivals.

From politics to religion — Durga puja, Kali puja, Saraswati puja, in fact the whole pantheon of gods and goddesses that Bengal holds sacred:

Kali puja announced, I saw Calcutta
descend on us. Three thousand slums,
usually wrapped in themselves, crouched
low by walls or sewer water, now
all ran out, rampant, beneath the new moon,
the night and the goddess on their side.

In fact, the cover of the book shows kali stretching out her tongue, which is a symbolism for "shame". It's a sense of shame at what the power elite of Calcutta have done to the city and its environment which has made it a putrefying metropolis with no hope for the future that the main thrust of this three-tired book is all about.

Saw, in the holes of uncountable mouths,
the lacquered tongue of black Kali
flutter red. Heard her smack her lips:
I, numberless, from all the gutters,
and drowned cellars, I'm
set free, sickle sharp I.
I show my tongue, I cross banks,
I, abolish borders,
I make an end.

Grass's biting prose, the morbidity of his drawings — all painted in black with an impending sense of gloom — and tied up with the poem at the end conveys the sense of total helplessness that a visitor experiences in the day to day life — life that can be quite repelling and nauseating but still carries on seemingly making no work on everybody and anybody. In fact, after a while they seem not to even notice the filth surrounding them.

Says Grass: "Next to the meat-hall (New Market) an open passage way: for shitting, pissing. That drift squat. I hold (to no avail) my breath, until I am through and out. In the meat-hall, next to the butcher stalls for Moslems, a dog trying to wolf down and unborn lamb or kid. The fetus is shiny, smooth, and the way it glistens makes it look fresh and appetizing. But to slippery — the dog has trouble biting into it. Boned beef at the Moslem butcher stall costs eleven to thirteen rupees a kilo; lamb at the Hindu stall costs thirty-six to forty rupees. Not the market, but religion determines the price."

While reading Grass's book the famous remark of Einstein comes to my mind: "What you see or don't see depends on the theory that you use. It's the theory that decides what you see." Grass's theory of perception was obviously jaundiced and he saw only what he wanted to see which may be true but it isn't the whole picture. Calcutta's real wealth is in its culture which has been born and created by the richness of language and literature. Of all the states of India it is here that an authentic culture survives because it has had a rich legacy of Tagore and so many others which were handed down to Satyajit Ray and other contemporaries in literature, art, cinema, theatre, music. Grass has chosen to ignore all this and much more. Perhaps, had he written this book on Delhi — a babu city of petty existences — it would have been more pertinent, for as far as filth, dirt, garbage, stench etc goes, Delhi is perhaps far ahead of Calcutta.

But much of the gloom that Grass projects is born out of a sense of anger and compassion: "On the way to the Hong Kong Bank, we see a naked woman of indeterminable age propped against a wall. She is covered — as if accidentally — by rags. No one except us seems to notice, and even we slow our pace for one long terrible second. Beyond begging now, Pariah of pariahs. Pure negligence, that she's still alive. And on the walls everywhere — including just to one side of the dying (for how long now!) woman — the hammer and sickle, strangely precise brushwork. After all, West Bengal is governed by communists and other leftist parties, who have forbidden dying in public."

The people of Calcutta have always been ferocious in the defence of their beloved city. In fact, no other city seems to evoke such strong and passionate emotions. Calcuttans may seem to be as dead to the warts as Gunter Grass is alive to them. But this book, from the very first line is one long diatribe of anger which not only angered but also hurt many an Indian, particularly in Calcutta, despite the fact that there is quite a lot of truth in it. But then truth is always bitter. And going through this book is like going through O! Calcutta all over again.

That is typical Gunter Grass who from experience discovered that one's picture of the world is false, and not only false, but based on montrosity. It is important to understand him. And only then can one understand his works. Read his essay "The Destruction of Mankind has Begun" wherein Grass makes the telling point that, for the first time in the history of species, writers can no longer assume the existence of posterity. He says that, as a result, "the book I am planning to write... will have to include a farewell to the damaged world, to wounded creatures, to us and our minds, which have thought of everything and the end as well."

But as Rushdie points out, "outside his fiction, in his political activities and writings, Grass is also making a second, and equally proper response: we aren't dead yet. We may be in deep trouble but we aren't done for. And while there is life, there must be analysis, struggle, persuasion, argument, polemic, rethinking and all other longish words that add up to one very short word: "Hope".