‘The Earth Quakes: Late Anti-Stories’ by Subimal Misra: Experiments both sublime and banal

Aunindyo Chakravarty

Subimal Misra is difficult to read. But he can be addictive. Like the first time you smoke to be cool, and then cough, and feel sick. It has been a year since Misra died. This collection of ‘anti-stories’ is not the first of his writings to be translated by V Ramaswamy, a Tamilian more Bengali than me. But I hadn’t heard of him till now. Ramaswamy, in lieu of an epilogue, tells us how hard it was to translate Misra’s prose, because he slid between sadhu and cholti Bengali, the languages of the text and the street. Ramaswamy says he couldn’t solve this problem, for he hadn’t found a parallel in English. Yet, the reader will find traces of the shifting sands of language in the way Ramaswamy constructs the translator’s syntax. Would Misra be more effective in the original Bengali? Perhaps. I don’t know.

Misra abjured the mainstream. He refused to publish his stories in any large publication, only giving them to lesser-known Bengali ‘little’ magazines. He reportedly published his novels on his own and sold them from a self-run stall at book fairs. Misra claimed no copyright over what he wrote; anyone was free to use it in any way they liked. One can see the same rejection of the mainstream in the explicit and implicit politics of his prose of insurgency. It is an interrogation, and a critique of power in itself. A large part of that critique is aimed at the organised left, especially the erstwhile Left Front government of West Bengal. Ill-health forced Misra to stop writing in 2012, right after the Left Front government fell. The target might have been some other political entity had these stories been written at some other historical conjuncture.

As I began, I repeat, Misra is difficult to read. The first story in this collection, ‘The Great Renunciant’, is misleadingly straightforward in its structure, even when it is startlingly different in its approach. It is a tale of a wandering minstrel Jharuprasad, told like an unstructured biography, such that one is unsure whether it is about Jharuprasad or his sometime paramour-cum-muse Niyatirani. Ramaswamy writes that this story is a rare piece with a “simple, straightforward and conventional narrative”. Just when the reader might feel comfortable about having grasped the style, and smirk at the pomposity of calling these ‘anti’ stories, they will be hit by the next few pieces, each more bewildering than the next. One will be left wondering what Misra is trying to say, but most readers will drag on, in the hope that they have the skill to navigate the textual maze and conquer it with their intellect.

Indeed, in one of the last pieces in the book — I hesitate to even call it an anti-story — Misra says, “My writing is not suitable for whiling away time or to read in bed before falling asleep. Rather, my writing may seem a bit clearer if, in the course of reading while sitting upright, the reader gets up and walks a bit from time to time in order to think.” I must admit that I skipped some of the pages, till I reached Misra’s admonition almost at the close of the book. He wrote about critics who go through “the cover, preface and contents page, riffle through the remaining pages, and then write fervently”. Chastised, I went back to re-read those stories that I had skimmed past. It required great effort, and I couldn’t get a sense of them. Yet, the majority of the stories can be bitten into, chewed, and tasted, even if one cannot swallow or digest them.

Misra is at his best when he constructs montages of working people, even those who do not have work. They are living, breathing people, with ruthless warts and disconcerting morality. They have voracious appetites for the coarse materiality of living. Misra writes of power in its capillary existence within the frayed social fabric. He writes of violence, submission, protests, negotiations, and tactics, not in organised politics, but in human relationships, between father and daughter, husband and wife, suitor and lover. The writing is cinematic, like the French new-wave — Misra was indebted to Godard’s cinema — and is structured with jump cuts and deliberate discontinuity. He moves seamlessly from the third person to the first, without any explanation. We often don’t know which character is speaking. It is almost as if we are living in a synchronic space, which has been stretched across the page.

And this is where Misra’s experiments can be both sublime and banal. From the gut-wrenching description of the rape of the real-life Tapasi Mallick in Singur, to the almost collegiate political commentary, that exist side by side, in ‘Nappy Change’. This reader faced similar contrasts of exhilaration and disappointment in ‘Memory Game’ and ‘Lenin’s Lenin, Notwithstanding Syphilis’. If Misra succeeds in dazzling us with his ability to hold disparate, jostling fragments together, his self-conscious political posturing is gratingly predictable, and clichéd. Or perhaps, it is the cynicism of this jaded reader which makes Misra’s message seem hackneyed. At some other time, it might have been inspiring. And perhaps, there will again be another time for such a word.