A Passion for Diphthongs

Author(s): Chandak Sengoopta

Source: History Workshop Journal, No. 57 (Spring, 2004), pp. 263-270
Published by: Oxford University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25472739 .
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 HISTORIC PASSIONS

^ ^
Satyajit Ray (in striped shirt) shooting his searing portrait of Calcutta, The Adversary9
(1971). Siddhartha, the introspective hero, looks down from the parapet on a city in turmoil -
it refuses him employment, confounds him at every point and eventually forces him out.
Photo: Nemai Ghosh.

A Passion forDiphthongs
by Chandak Sengoopta

I wish this piece could begin like Orhan Pamuk's novel The New Life: T
read a book one day and my whole lifewas changed. This was the kind of
lightwithin which I could recast myself; I could lose my way in this light; I
already sensed in the light the shadows of an existence I had yet to know
and embrace'. My historic passion (such as it is) did not, alas, announce
itselfwith any grandeur. I was pushed, to be sure, into 'an existence I had
yet to know and embrace' but by numerous unpredictable encounters with
books and bookmen, rather than by one magnificent epiphany.

History Workshop Journal Issue 57 ? History Workshop Journal 2004

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 264 History Workshop Journal

I grew up inCalcutta in the 1970s. Calcutta - now called Kolkata - had,

of course, been the capital of British India until the early twentieth century
and considered itself to be the second city of the Empire. (Nobody in the
city knew of Glasgow's claim to that title and would have treated itwith
disdain if they did.) By my time, those colonial glories had long vanished,
except for a few buildings and an occasional street name that the munici
pal nationalists had forgotten to rename. In the seventies, the economy of
India as a whole was closed to foreign investment and Bengal (the province
of which Calcutta was the capital) was particularly moribund in economic
terms. The economic malaise was accompanied by an absurd level of
political turbulence. Plagued by strikes, lockouts and an incredible shortage
of electricity, the local factories did not seem to produce anything. Public
transport was dismal, the hospitals were overcrowded hell-holes, there was
no television except for two hours in the evening (with which the daily
power cuts would often coincide), food was usually adulterated and the
general air of prosperous bustle that one now notices in any Indian citywas
completely absent from the Calcutta of my youth. Lenin, one was often
reminded in those days, had predicted that communism would go to
London fromMoscow via Calcutta. Whether or not Lenin had actually said
such a thing, the city certainly pullulated with Marxist sects of every variety
- each
hating the others with a venom that itwouldn't dream of wasting on
themere bourgeoisie - and the state government was run by a strange entity
that believed in democratic elections but was the last openly-Stalinist party
in the world.
-
And was a vibrant in cultural terms we
yet, Calcutta place couldn't get
a decent biro but produced more worthwhile literature than today's pros
perous Calcuttans can manage. We couldn't generate enough electricity to
watch television for a few hours every evening but some of us made films
that have yet to be surpassed, artistically as well as technically. Tf one has a
camera that takes film and the film registers images, then all one needs to
make a masterpiece is imagination', our greatest film-maker used to say.He
was being glib, of course, but he was also revealing an important secret of
his own (and the city's) spirit. For despite all its poverty and lack of infra
structure and resources, Calcutta always had a thriving bourgeois culture.
Of course, themiddle-classes were tiny in comparison to the teeming masses
-
of the poor - which Third World city is any different? and they had minus
cule resources but they achieved feats thatwere little short of amazing. The
Calcutta of Mother Teresa has eclipsed that other city from theWestern
-
consciousness. When - if average Americans or Germans or Britons think
of Calcutta, they think only of poverty, and poverty of the most grinding,
humiliating sort.When I think of Calcutta, I, too, think of poverty and hope
lessness - because there really was and is so much of it.But unlike typical
Westerners, I also know that for those lucky enough to be born above the
- a
poverty line note that I am not talking of a few rich people here but of
much larger group - the could offer wonderful
city phenomenal food,

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 Historic Passions 265

poetry, great novels, superb films and, above all, an eclectic, cosmopolitan
culture inwhich East andWest intermingled to a degree that remains match
less inmy own experience.
But exciting as life could be in that old Calcutta, itwas no fairy tale. I
was luckier than many, since my father had a decent job as an executive at
the Indian incarnation of ICI and although by no means wealthy, we were
always comfortably off. Life at home was deliciously bookish, although not
academic in any way. I grew up reading voraciously in the local language
(Bengali) as well as inEnglish, although Imust confess that I had themost
awful literary taste, preferring Agatha Christie toDickens and P. G. Wode
house to Emerson. Although my father had done well in life, he had not
risen high enough in the corporate world to feel very secure; in any case,
he had never wanted to do that kind of work. He had always yearned to be
a doctor but his parents had been too poor to send him tomedical school.
Itwas his fervent wish, therefore, tomake a doctor out of his son. This was
not just a personal issue. Jobs were hard to find in the city and only big busi
nessmen and independent professionals could hope for total financial
security. Business, in the eyes of my parents, was dirty and the law was a
profession for crooks; an engineer's career would be acceptable but itwas
medicine and medicine alone that could ensure a high-status life for the son
and fulfil the father's own frustrated ambition.
- some well-known
My bookishness was not a problem consultants of
the city were successful writers and it was perfectly acceptable for a
Calcutta doctor to be a man of letters in his spare time.What had to be
avoided at all cost was the life of a college lecturer in the humanities. In
economic terms, this was wise - a lecturer at a British university may be
underpaid but a lecturer at a Calcutta college in those days lived barely
above starvation level. But itwas not entirely an economic question. The
colleges and universities were crippled by the political chaos of Calcutta.
Lectures would be disrupted by gangs of 'revolutionaries' (or 'nationalists');
college administrators and the vast army of clerks would strike whenever
dissatisfied with their salaries or working conditions - which, understand
ably, was often; and the life of an academic was certainly nasty and brutish,
ifnot solitary or short. No, no, no - thatwouldn't do at all. It was going to
be medical school, thenmore medical training and then (my father's dreams
got very unclear at this point) some kind of cushy research post, or a
thriving practice in some posh part of the city. Tragically, some of this
actually happened, although not the thriving practice.
Long before qualifying as a doctor, however, I came to realize that
medicine was not forme. I quite enjoyed the bonhomie of medical-student
life but much preferred books to people and fictional murders to real death
defying operations. The passion for detective stories grew ever more
intense but I also began to develop some rudimentary feeling for the arts,
especially for the cinema. My great hero was Calcutta's biggest celebrity
Satyajit Ray. Those who know his name in theWest think of him only as a

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 266 History Workshop Journal

film-maker but for us locals, he was the ultimate polymath. His films, of
course, were captivating: we waited eagerly for a new Ray film every
autumn and spent months discussing it, stopping only when he started
shooting another film and we could speculate about that one. But he was
also the most consistently interesting writer in Bengali, the most original
graphic designer we had ever known, a superb lyricist and a brilliant
composer. I can now see thatwhat I especially liked about Ray was how he
brought history to life in his work; itwas Ray who first showed me that
history was not a tedious series of dates and events to be memorized but an
exhilarating voyage of discovery.
Ray made some forty films over forty-odd years and wrote countless
stories; that huge corpus offersmore examples of Ray's historical sensibility
than I could even hope to list here. Let me, therefore, talk only of his 1978
film, The Chess Players, which was set in the city of Lucknow, the capital of
the autonomous Northern Indian province of Awadh (Oude), in 1856, just
before the great Mutiny which would tear the old world apart. The
backdrop was Lord Dalhousie's machinations to annex Awadh, but in the
foreground were two politically uninvolved noblemen, who spent their days
and nights playing chess. Ray never brought the two strands of his plot
together, placing them instead in counterpoint; the literal game of chess was
reflected and finally, dwarfed by the larger contest between Wajid Ali Shah,
theNawab [King] of Awadh and Lord Dalhousie's representative, General
James Outram. (The role of Outram, incidentally, was played superbly by
Richard Attenborough, who suffered badly in the stiflingCalcutta studios
and never understood how a film-maker of Ray's stature could work in such
primitive conditions.)
Ray and his genius of an art director recreated the period faithfully and
comprehensively: every piece of furniture, every sword, every chessman
and every piece of costume was either a genuine antique from the period
or a carefully-designed replica. The film also used bits of documentary-style
commentary to establish the broader historical setting. All of this was
beautifully accomplished but for Ray, documentary realism provided no
more than the skeleton of his project. The historical flesh was added in
numerous subtle ways. Mid nineteenth-century Lucknow was renowned,
for example, for its somewhat decadent musical culture, epitomized by
thumris, a distinctive genre of semi-classical vocal songs. In a Bollywood
film, the characters might be shown bursting into perfectly-orchestrated
song at every opportunity but Ray proceeded otherwise. He commissioned
two long and authentic thumris and put them on the soundtrack during a
on the screen
virtually-silent nocturnal scene where nothing much happens
except the movement of chess pieces. The thumris play softly, almost
subliminally, in the background and no source is identified. The effect is
magical: it's as if the very air of Lucknow vibrates with music, whilst the
two obsessional noblemen, impervious to such levities, carry on with their
interminable game of chess. The songs not only recreate themusical history

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 Historic Passions 267

of Lucknow; they also underscore the singlemindedness of the chess players

and infuse aural pleasure into a slow and potentially yawn-inducing
sequence of a chess game.
Ray's ability to pack multiple shades of meaning into a minute's worth
of film was especially evident at the end of The Chess Players, which
intercut scenes of the British Army marching into Lucknow, with the chess
players making theirmoves in the waning light of a winter afternoon. The
air resounds with the evening call to prayer from a nearby mosque. (Awadh
was aMuslim province.) Realizing that the light is going and eager to speed
up their game, the two noblemen decide to switch to the faster, 'English'
way of playing chess, which was uncommon in the leisurely world of nine
teenth-century India. This was much more than another nugget of historical
information: as they start playing in the 'English' way, the soundtrack
combines the prayer-call with the slightly louder sound of the bugle playing
the retreat; the camera pulls back slowly as the credits come up. The two
Indians recede gradually from view, carrying on as they always have but at
a different, self-consciously 'English' pace, whilst the quintessentially
Oriental prayer call merges with but is not wholly swamped by the call of
the bugle. If the cultural impact of Britain on India - or rather, the deeper
-
significance of that impact has ever been summed up more economically,
more accurately or more beautifully, then I am not aware of it.
Although Ray showed me what history could be and even though I got
the idea formy recent book on the history of fingerprinting from an inci
dental remark in his marvellously entertaining but entirely unhistorical film
The Golden Fortress, I can't say that itwas he who first triggered my desire
to be a professional historian. That happened farmore slowly. I didn't really
know what I wanted to do with my life even after I had graduated from
medical school. I enrolled on a postgraduate course in psychiatry in the
vague hope that psychiatry was nicer than real medicine. Itwasn't. By then,
however, I had managed to find a tiny little retreat formyself. I had begun
to send in unsolicited articles or book reviews to the literary pages of a local
English-language newspaper called The Statesman. (I do not know why but
I have always found English to be the easiest language to write in and
Bengali the best language for speaking, thinking and daydreaming.) After
a couple of such pieces were published, the editor Jug
Suraiya began to
commission me to do book reviews. He had an extraordinarily eclectic
approach and never relied solely on review copies; Iwas always encouraged
to find books on my own and Jug agreed to run reviews of
virtually every
one that I suggested. Thanks to him, I read farmore than I
normally would
- and
made some money with which I could buy even more books. Itmay
sound like hack work, but it saved my life and sanity and today, I realize
that virtually everything I value inmy lifewas formed during those years
when I reviewed books for The Statesman.
It was journalism that eventually stimulated my professional interest in
history. Not initially, of course. But even in the early days, I was drawn

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 268 History Workshop Journal

almost instinctively to historical works. One was Stephen Jay Gould's

magnificent study, The Mismeasure of Man. Brought up as I had been to
believe in science as the rational, value-neutral pursuit of truth,Gould's
exploration of the social, racial and cultural dimensions of intelligence
measurement was a revelation. 'Facts', declared Gould, 'are not pure and
unsullied bits of information; culture also influences what we see and how
we see it. Theories, moreover, are not inexorable deductions from facts.
The most creative theories are often imaginative visions imposed upon
facts.' No historian of science needs to be told all this today; back then,
however, and for an ignorant trainee psychiatrist, Gould's words were of
incalculable import. Around that time, I also chanced upon Frank
Sulloway's Freud, Biologist of theMind. Today, I am not overly impressed
by Sulloway's rather schematic iconoclasm or his patent allegiance to socio
biology, but I shall always admire the ways in which his book traced the
roots of psychoanalysis in the biological and clinical theories of the time. I
learnt more about such figures as Krafft-Ebing, Meynert and Fliess from
Sulloway than about Freud himself - and wouldn't have dreamt of
complaining about that. Sulloway, I felt, reconstructed the discursive
universe that Freud had inhabited, drawn upon and reacted against but
which was now virtually unknown and, for those Freudians who did
remember some of it, somewhat repugnant. Here, I thought, was a superb
illustration of the historian's task: to reveal how theories evolve within a
matrix thatmight have little in common with the contexts in which those
theories are eventually applied and debated. (It was wonderfully appropri
ate that some years later, I was to find the topic formy PhD in one of
- the roots of Otto bizarre misogyny in
Sulloway's footnotes Weininger's
the biological theories of the time.)
Although by now, I was no longer thinking entirely like a doctor, Iwasn't,
of course, thinking like a real historian either. Nevertheless, my journalistic
pieces became almost completely past-oriented and given the areas of my
or scientific history.
expertise, theywere frequently concerned with medical
Itching formore space than Jug Suraiya and The Statesman could provide
me with, I was fortunate infinding Nirmalya Acharya, another editor of very
catholic tastes. He encouraged me to write an enormous article in Bengali
ever inflicted on that language)
(the only substantial piece of writing I have
on the lunatic asylums of old Calcutta for his magazine Ekshan; thewhiggish
tone of the article and its numerous errors now embarrass me profoundly
but itwas my firstpiece of real historical research and prepared me well for
a lifetime in libraries and dusty archives. That was also when my new friend
- a
Punam Zutshi sociologist who was very familiar with the academic world
- asked me whether I had ever
of India as well as the United States
considered becoming a professional historian of medicine. Of course I
- I didn't even know there was such a
hadn't thought of any such thing
since I
profession. But Punam's casual question resonated inmy mind and
was nearing the end of psychiatric training and getting no younger, itwas, I

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 Historic Passions 269

felt, now or never. If itwas possible to switch to history full-time and for
ever, then well and good. Otherwise, I would have to come to terms with
medicine and psychiatry, also for ever.
After only a little bit of research, however, itwas clear that no institution
in Calcutta was interested in history of medicine or, indeed, in giving a
home to a discontented doctor dreaming of being a historian. Why not go
abroad, then? I had always had a strongWestern streak inmy soul (all that
Conan Doyle was bound to take its toll), I was deeply interested in the
history ofWestern medicine, the elite doctors of Calcutta had long had a
tradition of training abroad and, perhaps most crucially, I was convinced
that I could never escape entirely from medicine if I didn't escape from
Calcutta. But go where? Since many of my non-medical contemporaries
went to America for higher study, I had come to think of American
universities as the best (and best-funded) places to tryone's luck. (So much
forConan Doyle's fog-shrouded London!) I really didn't expect my appli
cations to succeed, however, and when the admission letters arrived, first
from Cornell and then from Johns Hopkins, I almost fainted in excitement.
- he
Reassuring my father of the medical nature of the course really did
seem to believe it at that point -1 ran, almost literally, to the plane, a week
after completing my psychiatry training.
The new intellectual and cultural stimuli that awaited me in the New
World could fill volumes, but Imust mention one particular book that I had
to read inmy very first semester at Cornell: Herbert Butterfield's scintil
lating essay, The Whig Interpretation ofHistory. I had no idea what Butter
field was writing against but felt instinctively that he was right in his
insistence that we should refrain from shoe-horning past people and
theories into narratives culminating in our glorious selves. True history, I
happily agreed, delved into the depths of the past not to seek continuities
with the present, but only for the sake of understanding the past in its own
terms. 'The twentieth century which has itsown hairs to splitmay have little
patience with Arius and Athanasius who burdened theworld with a quarrel
about a diphthong', remarked Butterfield, 'but the historian has not
achieved historical understanding, has not reached that kind of under
standing inwhich themind can find rest, until he has seen that that diph
thong was bound to be the most urgent matter in the universe to those
people.' Touche! If an agnostic who was born a Hindu could have a tomb
stone, then those are the words I would have on it.
This is a tale of historic passions but passions, as Freud taught, need to
be restrained by the voice of reason - weak and ineffective as that restraint
might be. For me, reason has always spoken with the voice of the great
Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges. I have often thought that some of
- his austere
Borges's tales 'games with time and infinity' - should be
required reading for historians and, indeed, for scholars in general. His
short essay 'Kafka and His Precursors' celebrates the art (and artifice) of
intellectual history better than any historiography disquisition that our

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 270 History Workshop Journal

colleagues have ever penned and who could symbolize our profession more
eloquently than the faceless, nameless drudges searching with unquestion
ing faith for the secret of the universe in row after infinite row of unintelli
gible books in 'The Library of Babel'?
For me, however, it is the less well-known story Averroes's Search',
which really sums up the joys and frustrations of a historian's life. This
short, dense tale concerns one episode in the life of the twelfth-century
Islamic scholar, physician and philosopher Averroes. Borges, it seems in the
beginning, is trying to give us a rounded, detailed recreation of life in the
kind of exalted Moorish circle that Averroes moved in. As the story
progresses, we realize, however, that it is really concerned with a conun
drum of intellectual history: Averroes is writing a commentary on
Aristotle's Poetics but cannot make sense of the terms 'tragedy' and
'comedy'. On the final page, Averroes looks into a mirror and suddenly
disappears 'as if fulminated by an invisible fire'. An extraordinary para
graph follows in the author's own voice, explaining that just as theMuslim
Averroes, whose culture had no concept of drama, had failed to compre
hend what Aristotle had meant by 'tragedy' and 'comedy', so had Borges,
immured within the twentieth century, failed to imagine Averroes himself.
T felt that Averroes, wanting to imagine what a drama is without ever
having suspected what a theatre is,was no more absurd than I, wanting to
imagine Averroes with no other sources than a few fragments from Renan,
Lane and Asin Palacios ...'

When I read it first, I thought Borges was showing us the underside of

Butterfield's diphthong. We might find such diphthongs through patient
research but, as we are our none-too-commodious para
imprisoned by

digms (Borges's catalogue of authorities, of course, consists entirely of

figures condemned as Orientalist by Edward Said), we might still fail to
understand what they signified in their own time. I still think that is the
primary message of the story but perhaps there is a more optimistic under
current. Averroes fails, of course, to understand Aristotle and Borges
-
claims to have failed in imagining Averroes but the story shimmering with
lively, meticulous depictions of long Spanish afternoons, of Averroes's
passionate absorption inAristotle, of the witty conversations and debates
of Averroes and his friends - is a virtual love-letter to the historian's art.
Whilst all our efforts to reconstruct and explain the past may be doomed,
the sheer delight of trying to do so, of attempting to interpret what we do
not have the resources to understand, makes up, Borges seems to be

hinting, for the failure that may attend our efforts. Or so, at any rate, I
would like to imagine.

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