Desicritics Author: Amitabh Mitra

Do You Remember Those Caves? A Poetry Film on Gwalior

Amitabh Mitra — Sat, 7 Mar 2009 00:26:12 EST

do you remember those caves

at the foot of the fort

where we used to play

and the old cemetery

we once hid from the sun

and hordes of maratha warriors

cascading behind a broken window

hunting relentlessly

for stolen moments.

the heart was then a street

pursuing days and nights

and a subdued sky

hid a longforgotten secret.

imprisoned

we traveled the eyes

and hopes

of another day.

Poetry, Art and Film by Amitabh Mitra

Poetry: And I Knew Him

Amitabh Mitra — Mon, 2 Mar 2009 09:49:45 EST

I knew him
The black man playing a recorder
At a Boksburg street junction.
Every day
He played the tale of sun set blood
Of the fear of white rain gods
Of a hope of the train from Soweto
Might stop
Running over him ever since he was born
He never asked for money
Only the landscape that
Once belonged to him.
One day
He never came back.
His place trampled
By a new founded
Sky.

Photograph - Apartheid Museum, National Archives, Pretoria

Poem by Amitabh Mitra

Cecilia Makiwane Hospital, Symbol of Hope and Courage in South Africa

Amitabh Mitra — Sun, 1 Mar 2009 10:36:34 EST

I saw a documentary film recently on Al Jazeera about Chris Hani Baragwanath Hospital, affectionately called Bara in Soweto, South Africa. Soweto remains the biggest black township and is synonymous with the struggle against the apartheid. It made me write this photoessay on Cecilia Makiwane Hospital in Madantsane. Mdantsane remains the second biggest township in South Africa, situated in the province of Eastern Cape, it provides the leadership to the new South Africa.

Cecilia Makiwane was born in the Mac Farlane Mission in Victoria within the district of Alice in Eastern Cape in 1880. Her father was Elijah Makiwane and mother was Maggie Majiza. She studied in the Lovedale Girls School in Victoria, Alice. Cecilia Makiwane studied nursing and she holds the title of being the first black woman to be licensed as a professional nurse in 1908. Several honours have been bestowed upon Cecilia and show the regard with which the medical fraternity holds Cecelia. Amongst them are: a statue of Makiwane being erected in 1977, a hospital in Mdantsane near East London being named after her and the nursing tradition of observing a day of prayer on January 7 (the date Makiwane was admitted ). She passed away in 1919.

Having worked in a number of African countries, I came to Ciskei during the apartheid era. Ciskei was an independent homeland country and Mdantsane remained within its confines. The Ciskeian Government built the hospital and named it after her. It is a tertiary university affiliated referral hospital which once boasted of a thousand beds. A number of doctors from overseas sacrificed their lives while serving in this hospital during the apartheid era. Cecilia Makiwane Hospital remains a symbol of hope as it is the symbol of anti apartheid struggle, courage and catering to thousands of patients till this day

Sunrise at Mdantsane

The sculpture of Cecilia Makiwane

With nurses in traditional dress

Patients being air transported from remote areas

Flying Medics of Mdantsane

Indigenous plants and flowers within the hospital campus

An indigenous flowery plant

Susmit Bose, A Maestro of Indo-English Music

Amitabh Mitra — Sun, 22 Feb 2009 06:16:04 EST

I came across Susmit Bose one afternoon on a hot summer day at Delhi sometime in 1978. I am not sure of the year and it might be even before that. Delhi was my favourite hunting ground, hunting for poetry books, trying to sell my poetry book, hunting to fall in love again and again, it was all about love and poetry as it is still now. I have actually never met him till today.

We have a mutual friend who owns a busy café cum gift shop just below Indian Oil Bhavan on Janpath. It is there that I found Susmit Bose’s Long Playing Vinyl Record ‘Train to Calcutta’. Susmit Bose was going to be with me for the next thirty years. I have carried his LP wherever I went. This is one of my most treasured items.

Delhi of the seventies was different. Poetry and Music were emerging in an aroma of genuine Indianess. JS ‘The magazine that thinks young ‘ edited by the maverick Desmond Doig in the seventies was organising music concerts in Kolkata and bringing beat groups from Shillong, Kohima, Darjeeling, Bombay and New Dehi. Indo English Poetry had already taken roots in New Delhi. Reciting poetry near the tea shop next to Godavari at Jawaharlal Nehru University was a regular feature. Evenings and Poetry merged together in unforgettable nights. I feel proud to have been a part of that period.

Susmit Bose came as a sudden storm with simple lyrics that got embedded in permanency.He wrote on his album,

‘These songs convey my sentiments and interpretations of situations around me. I am not trying to preach in my songs but want to share my feelings with you. Having experimented in serious forms in folk music, there are two songs in this album which are the results of this experiment. They are both beautiful songs. The ‘Baul’ ( the folk song of Bengal) written by Kazi Nazrul Islam has had a great impact on me. Viva La Quinte Brigada is a song of the Spanish civil War and has been recorded before by someone whom I regard with great respect - Pete Seeger. I take this opportunity to thank all who helped me to make this dream of recording come true especially Bob Dylan who inspired me a great deal in my music.’

My favourite has always been his song whose lyrics go like this –

I wrote this song

On a Sunday morn

On a train to Calcutta bound

Of a boy who was travelling all alone

The sun went up and all was well

Till the man in the uniform

Was checking all the tickets

And was smiling

A sudden frown came on his face

As he saw the boy around…..

Susmit Bose is now known as an Urban Folk Balladeer. He sings about social issues in English to Indian audiences. His latest song on Binayak Sen, a doctor imprisoned in Chattisgarh created as much furore as my poem on him. A talented filmmaker, he’s produced several successful television shows for Doordarshan, Surabhi, a show on Indian culture being amongst the best-known. He has also released documentary films like Akha Teej on child marriage; A Revival on traditional medicine, For Who; Man Of Heart on the bauls, for IGNCA (Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts). He also arranged the song Hum Honge Kamyab with Anil Biswas and has led the All India Radio Choir. He’s performed in international folk music concerts from Cuba to Berlin, and has sung with folk music legends like Pete Seeger in the US and Canada. He has also performed with Paul Horn, an internationally acclaimed flautist, for a US/UK project on world music.

How do you speak of freedom?

When your thoughts are so in chains

How do you see the rainbow?

Without the rain(Certain Thoughts, Public Issue, 2005)

Whenever I travel to India, I make it a point to visit the café and ask my friend about Susmit. All of us have grown old and today on my birthday I put his vinyl disc on the player and listen to his immortal songs. What a better way to celebrate a birthday by listening to a giant of Indo-English Music. I remember I had penned a few lines in 1979 –

Connaught Place Blues

We had once walked around Connaught place for hours
Trying to solve a puzzle
Of a day in its stately columns
Holding aloft the far shores
Of an unfamiliar sky
Morning of jigsaw pieces in The Book Worm or
Keventers
Mind shopping at the pavement
For love poems
Rushing to embrace
Colors, lips
At a backthought corridor in
Dhoomimal Gallery
Our legs ached
Going round and round
Just trying to be somewhere
Until the one legged man in Dass Studios
Appeared from nowhere
As Sushmit Bose’s voice from the gramophone
Bent down to pick us
Loving was an afternoon
In a season that finally fell in its
Rightful place.

Shaleen Singh's unusual poetry, Proprietary Pains

Amitabh Mitra — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 05:33:18 EST

Shaleen Singh belongs to a small town of Budaun in the province of Uttar Pradesh in India. Post Colonial Poetry in India came in varied extent from the metropolis. Yes, there is definitely an invisible bond in ones creativity to the town or village of residence. The rustic surroundings of Budayun have influenced Shaleen’s poetry to a certain level.

The Indo-English Poetry Movement that dominated with a few names from the sixties to eighties has lost the anarchy that it professed. Instead poets like Shaleen Singh have brought their own vivid and iconoclastic imagery that defies any norm of poetry, grammar and even English. It is a poetry that is truly Indian. His poems are ultimate, radical and spoken in two or three words. They are like the hot wind that blows so often in summer at Budayun. Its searing effect is reflected on words that are immediate, poetry that seems to grow unhindered in unusual circumstances like the old Banyan tree in his house at Budayun.

Cover Watercolor by Amitabh Mitra, Poets Printery Publishing, South Africa

Zubeida

Amitabh Mitra — Sun, 8 Feb 2009 12:38:24 EST

Huzrat kothi, your home
another minor minaret
lost to history and Mughal nobility
to a stampede of life, moments and memories.

Days and nights in old Delhi
have always been streets that have weathered
misfortunes
and a torn sky that has overgrown to people
hangs on pegs of tombstone drying its tatters
the sun burns its way and a piercing June wind
chases
a seller's voice
mangoes and utensils
tamarinds and jaggery
clothes and clothes...

Oh! belief and rain
I spy a
white salwar and dupatta
sheltered by a pock marked door
ghungroos jingled a runaway tread
in a smile and an aroma of familiarity
Ammijaan's voice calling you back
a muezzin’s cry restraining from a nearby mosque...

I had once held to storms, seasons
and shadows in stained glass windows
as a hundred pigeons took off to nowhere from your loft
that day.

I sat on steps,
footprints tracing
a tremor
of your eyes
sifting edges in a
corridor,

I had found
you
that day.

Silkscreen Print and Poem by Amitabh Mitra

Book Review: Down Memory Lane by Ravi Govender

Amitabh Mitra — Sat, 7 Feb 2009 00:49:37 EST

My friend Ravi Naicker is a poet and a teacher in Umzinto, Kwa Zulu Natal. I told him about my desire to publish a book of South African poets that would focus on the politics of New South Africa.He immediately asked me to contact his friend Ravi Govender in Durban.

I called him up and requested him to introduce me to South African poets from Natal who were affected during the apartheid regime. He was enthusiastic and promised me to do the same. The same afternoon I chanced upon Ravi’s book, Down Memory Lane at a used book shop in East London. Definitely, this is the same Ravi Govender I had been talking that morning.

Quoting from Radio Lotus FM website –
Govender.....Ravi Govender was born in Victoria Street, Durban just two blocks from the Indian Market on October 17th not too long ago.

He writes two popular columns for POST newspaper - of which he is also on the editing team. He is a public speaker, entrepreneur, serves on the board of a Durban Hospital and also a successful author. His hobbies are rugby, reading and watching movies and he is a Hollywood film buff as well as a James Bond nut. Ravi’s favourite actors are Anthony Hopkins and Al Pacino and his favourite movies are The Wild Geese and any 007 movie. His take on Bollywood is that "Priyanka Chopra is the cutest thing on two legs" and he rates Veer Zara as his best Eastern movie.

Ravi has a regular programme ‘Off the Shelf’ on Lotus FM which has gained immense popularity over the years.

Down Memory Lane is a book of historic value as it documents events through the eyes of a small boy growing in an apartheid era. This book had me engrossed as pages unfolded the Indian culture that blossomed even in severely restricted conditions of that time.

Aziz Hassim, Award winning Author of the Lotus People writes in his Forward, ‘There is a saying that if you forget your past you will be condemned to repeat it. When I read Ravi Govender’s essays and his reminiscences about our somewhat chequered history, I marvel at his ability to recall Durban’s bitter sweet past with touching finesse and a depth of perception’

Regarding the ‘bhais’ (gangsters) that prowled the Durban streets during that time, Ravi has aptly named this chapter as ‘Bada Bing, Bada Boom’. He writes, ‘Some of the cadres that ruled the streets were as follows: Victoria Street where I was sired boasted The Victorians, The Queens Brigade reigned in Queen Street. The Salots which consisted primarily of brothers operated taxis near Kapitan’s Balcony Hotel in the Grey Street area. The Dutchins laagered in Old Dutch Road and The Young Americans were united in Bond Street.

They were mostly ‘toothless tigers’ trying to live off their former reputations. You know the type: one guy initiates an argument and then edges backward into his mate, declaring “hold me back, hold me back, before I kill him”

Ram Gopal Verma can actually make a film based on such a story in Durban involving such characters.

In his column ‘ Proudly Indian – Our contribution to a better world’ Ravi recounts, ‘November 16 1860,the first vessel, the SS Truro, left Madras, sailed to South Africa and was borne along more through sheer human spirit than spook and diesel.
Another factor attests to our success. Foremost in the life of our forebears was the need for a place of worship and a place for education. Parents still sacrifice their own comfort and luxuries to ensure they give their children a good education and go on to further studies, to enable them to have good careers and be productive citizens. It also serves to preserve the hard earned reputation that Indians have as valuable contributors to this country'.

Not bad for people who arrived here to be cane cutters and who have gone on to produce doctors, educators and captains of industry.

Cato Manor is synonymous with the apartheid in South Africa. During1949 and 1950 when the Group Areas Act was passed on by the government, people were forced to move from the place to townships like KwaMashu and the Indians moved to places like Chatsworth and Phoenix. Cato Manor became an international symbol of resistance to apartheid by Indians.

Ravi has written about forced removals of Indians from a place called Magazine Barracks. He writes ’the murder weapon was the diabolic Group Areas Act and the misery and turmoil caused by its death blow is unpardonable. The action of its perpetrator was unconscionable.’

Ravi Govender’s book, Down Memory Lane is an unforgettable narration of the Indian community’s resistance to alien laws, their sacrifices and finally their victory over all odds. The present generation of youth in India and overseas have a lot to learn from reading this book, his words continue to inspire us all.

Tapan Sinha Left Us Today

Amitabh Mitra — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 17:55:05 EST

The stones remained hungry

As palaces and kothis overturned

A night crossed over from guarding

An extinct royalty

To streets of Kolkata

Where the youth tore off

Its resplendence

Stabbed by a fury

Of political landscape

Yet the night survived

Its heart throbbed

Images grew from

White and black

Fact and fiction

Summer and winter

And crowded the birds

Once despondent of

Hope

Tapan Sinha merged

With this

Night today

Days of untoward resolute

In its finery

Crystal eyed

He continues to show

Us all.

FimmakerTapan Sinha born on 2 October 1924, left us today. He was arguably the most uncompromising filmmaker outside the orbit of parallel cinema. This poem is inspired by his two movies Khudito Pashan (Hungry Stones) based on a story by Rabindranath Tagore and Aapon Jon, a film about the Naxalite Movement in Kolkata.

South Africa, A New Destiny

Amitabh Mitra — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 00:33:31 EST

I have a problem. I can’t remove the smiling face of ANC President Jacob Zuma from my mind. Billions are being spent on a media exercise where everywhere you glance, there is Jacob Zuma. Every street corner, every rented car and every news paper have a life size portrait of the leader. He had descended in East London with thousands of followers in a show of strength and the launch of the election manifesto.

I have nothing against him, in fact I like him. But the media whose power can now be realized is that if I cannot remove his picture from my mind then how the millions of illiterate voters would do so even if they feel like voting for the breakaway faction of the Congress of People (COPE).

I have learned long back that politics here, like in India, is an expensive involvement. In fact former Member of Parliament MJ Akbar has given in his blog the actual figures that a Member of Parliament has to spend to retain a seat. It is no surprise that politics in South Africa follows the same way.

COPE has come up with a lot of hope and even lavish parties were thrown at Sandton Hotels but people whom I know in the townships have not yet reached a firm decision. It has so many leaders like Sam Shilowa and Mosiuoa ‘Terror’ Lekota that it would not be easy to push forward one person as its face.

Meanwhile I see that the former Gauteng Premier and a Presidential hopeful at one time and now a billionaire industrialist, Tokyo Sexwale has thrown his force behind Jacob Zuma. Jacob Zuma says that Those who have broken away from the ANC are like the donkey on which, according to the Bible, Jesus rode into Jerusalem. According to Zuma, the donkey later tried to return to Jerusalem on its own in order to once again experience that moment of glory, but the people chased it away. In the same way the Congress of the People (Cope) leaders will find they are nothing without the ANC, Zuma said.

While Lekota was addressing supporters in Durban's Umlazi area on Saturday. "All of us spent time in prison and this cannot be the badge to run the country. The time has come, the honeymoon is finished.“ he said.

General Bantu Holomisa who has always been my favourite from my Transkei days is bound to pick up a few more seats for his United Democratic Movement Party due to the split in ANC and the Pan African Congress.

I am thinking whether I should heed the call of Rahul Gandhi and go back or try to contact Amar Singhji and try my luck. If I have to vote here, I am still not sure like most of my patients.

Manjit Bawa Passes Away

Amitabh Mitra — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 00:28:27 EST

And colors fell silent today

A sun struck with

Anecdotes and animals

Screamed somewhere

Narrow yellows merged in

Thick orb of orange

Streets were blown

In a dupatta of white

A smile tinged in a ravishing

Blue suddenly looked back

I had seen them all at Garhi

In the seventies

The eye had then staged

Plays of a turntable

Time

Twice even thrice

In a single day

Violence was the afternoon

Manjit drew in rude

Delhi summers

Riding words of a chiasma

Violence is the afternoon

We saw him in flames

Of years and layers

Untold by a dark

Violence he left

Is you and me

And a coherence of

Irrefutable days

He chose to give

Away.

Manjit Bawa passed away today at his home in Delhi. He had been in a coma for three years. One of the first painters to break out of the dominant grays and browns of the western art and opt for more Indian colours like red and violet, the maestro was influenced by nature, Sufi mysticism and Indian mythology. Renowned Poet Pritish Nandy who had given shows of his poetry and art with him was one of his closest friends.