The title of Bibhutibhushan’s novel Aranyak comes from the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, the book of the forests in the Vedas, its “story” from the writer’s long stay in the forests of Bhagalpur. That this young writer – was turning to the Upanishads to make sense of his experience is a significant move, particularly when one reads his work as modernist. Just as the British modernists found themselves looking to ancestral literary traditions – as James Joyce did in Ulysses, TS Eliot in The Waste Land and “Tradition and the Individual Talent” or to premodern spaces, – DH Lawrence in Mornings in Mexico, WB Yeats in “Sailing to Byzantium”, Matisse to Turkey, or Picasso to Africa – Bibhutibhushan turns to the space of the forest, just as it is on the verge of being colonised, and the Upanishadic imagination to write what is now called “autofiction”, perhaps even – for there never is a dearth of such categories today – “environmental autofiction”.
A college graduate, without a job or parental and financial support, Bibhutibhushan had to leave Calcutta for Bihar to become an assistant manager in an agricultural estate. The protagonist – who’s also the narrator – of his novel does the same. The diary records of the former transform to become the voice of the latter. We know from Smriti-r Rekha that Bibhutibhushan was reading Conrad’s novels in Bhagalpur, and one can only speculate how that narrative of colonialism would have affected his understanding of his own role as a coloniser, turning the forests into profit-making agricultural land.
As Rimli Bhattacharya, the translator of Aranyak, notes, “The destruction of the forest is a necessary prelude in the Adiparva of the Mahabharata: Khandava vana is consumed by fire to provide a clearing for Indraprastha whose urbane magnificence is only the site of further dissension.” She also notices that “the two most frequent adjectives used in Aranyak are ‘janamanabheen’ (bereft of human beings) and ‘bonyo’ (from Sanskrit Vanya) which has been variously rendered in English as rude, rustic, wild, savage and uncivilised. An ‘unpeopled’ forest is conceived as a lack, the very definition of ‘people’ excluding tribals, beasts and birds, spirits and all other creatures of the imagination who inhabit it.” The idea of “bonnyo” occurs both in Aranyak and Ichhamati.
Bibhutibhushan’s use of the word is readymade, used to name more than to characterise pejoratively. Bibhutibhushan’s understanding of the forest is cosmopolitan, not exclusionary – humans have as much a right to it as other living beings. The transition from jungle to forest is obvious – what we have today is a “Forest Department” and a “Forest Development Officer”, not a “Jungle Department” or a “Jungle Development Officer”. For Bibhutibhushan, the human’s residency in the forest would seem natural, coming, as it would have, from being conditioned to the reasoning of our epics – both the idea of vanwas, exile, and vanaprastha, retirement. This intuitive understanding would have led him towards the opposite – that living spaces, whether village or city, belonged to plants and animals as much as humans. Equity was not in equal distribution of living spaces for humans but in equal access for every species.
Satyacharan, a Calcuttan, is able to see the limits of his textbook education when he is lost in the forest or when he meets the forest residents, who have the benefit of their inherited political and medicinal systems. In the Prologue, which turns the rest of the novel into a reminiscence, we see the difference: Satyacharan, “sitting on the Maidan” in Calcutta, notices that “near me was an almond tree,” he thinks “of the forestlands of Lobtulia-baihar or Ajmabad” – the solitary tree versus the “dense forest, blood-red with flowering palash.” The first is the present, his location in history; the second has the calm and beauty of a dream, “dreamt in the half-awake slumber of a holiday evening.” Evening, with its gentle light, daydreaming – all these are the gifts of a forest. Nearly a hundred years after the experiences which led to this book, one feels like Satyacharan in the city – the forested lands, once accessible to most, will soon exist only in a dream, only in memory. That is the prescience of the form of the Prologue.
Satya recounts the horror and his own complicity in its destruction – these are the moments when he becomes Everyman, all of us: “the sal forests have been set on fire to clear the land… By my hand was destroyed an unfettered playground of nature. I know too, that for this act the forest gods will never forgive me.” And then, in Ancient Mariner-manner, he begins telling his story: “I have heard that to confess a crime in one’s own words lightens somewhat the burden of the crime. Therefore, this story.” As I write this, I wonder what good my writing about these plant thinkers would do to plants – what good has Bibhutibhushan’s writing done for the forests the protagonist of his novel destroyed?
It is interesting to note Satya’s first impression of the landscape, and how he notices the absence of the human. Every time I have read these paragraphs, I have wondered about the opposite – whether humans notice the absence of plant and animal life in cities. Sarbojoya, in Pather Panchali, does, but do we? After a night on the train from the city, Satya writes: “I noticed that the terrain had changed in the meantime, and nature too, had taken on a different guise: no fields or cultivated land to be seen and very little evidence of human habitation – only forests, big and small, dense in some places and sparse in others. Occasionally, there were stretches of open land, but it was all virgin land.”
“Virgin land” – a city-dweller’s phrase, as if land was ever virgin, and its virginity marked only by man’s absence on it, like a woman’s body is. Aldous Huxley would, at around the same time that Bibhutibhushan was writing his novels, write about how nature, particularly plant life in the tropics, was being romanticised for our consumption. The Bengali writer, though, was doing quite the opposite. Satya misses city life and its pleasures; he does not really care for this life in the forest. He complains about being “lonely”, that he “could not understand well the speech of the local people, could not figure out a method of work… The people… were as good as barbarians… Those first ten days were excruciating. Ever so often, I felt that having a job was of no use; it was far better to stay on half-starving in Calcutta than stifle to death here… This was not the life for me.” That is why he’s not convinced when Goshto-babu, who was from Bengal’s Bardhaman district, tells him, “The jungle will get inside of you. By and by, you won’t be able to bear any kind of disturbance or put up with crowds. That’s what has happened to me. Just this last month I had to go to Mugher for a court case, and all I could worry about was when I’d be able to get away.”
It is a feeling that is familiar to many of us – a feeling of viraha when away, the urge to get back, perhaps like what a parent feels for a child left alone at home, an inexplicable and unquantifiable attraction, like our bodies experience when up in the air, the urge to return to earth. It is this urge that manifests itself in the Prologue to the book, when Satya, sitting in Calcutta’s Maidan, thinks of his time in the forest. Bibhutibhushan returns to this repeatedly in his writing – the indescribability and unquantifiability of the effect of the elements and of plant life, of the untamed and even the wild, on the human. He is repeatedly invoking an informal and continuous pedagogy, one outside the linguistic – for the language of words is exclusionary, and does not allow us to be educated by the so-called non-human. He is pressing for an education by the elements and plant life, and stressing on self-discovery as being as important as the discovery of others and by others.
Gradually the forest compels Satya to question the idea of who or what constitutes the category of the civilised: “It seemed to me that people in Bengal had become much too civilised in comparison.” As the novel progresses, and we encounter a knowledge system produced by experience, the fingerprints of trial and error still visible in its history of experimentation, we begin to see the emptiness of a bookish and lifeless pedagogy that teaches us very little, almost nothing about our lives and where we live. Bibhutibhushan gives us a spiritual ecology, an understanding of life in its various roop, forms. It takes Satya time to get to this experience:
I would not be able to return to the hurly-burly of Calcutta forsaking the vast tracts of forestland, the fresh fragrance of the sun-scorched earth and the freedom and the liberation they represent. This was not a sentiment that came upon me all of a sudden. Nature in the wild appeared before my enraptured and inexperienced eyes in myriad forms, her beauty unveiled… the searing afternoon in the guise of a mad Bhairavi… and, on moonless nights appeared the immense form of Kali, wielding the flaming blade that was Orion, the radiance extending into space.
Realisations such as these, that connect our thoughts to those of our ancestors, who, under the spell of fear and darkness, and perhaps other things, imagined a woman with four or ten arms, or have called the sound of wind through bamboo groves music, make us question both the idea of civilization and development. “It was only here, in these lonely forests, that one had the opportunity to meditate on and be amazed by every little thing: it was the ambience which drew out such fine sensations. If I were to speak the truth, I would say that it is only since I have come here that I have learnt how to meditate on things… I had never before enjoyed my own mind in this manner.” We think of critical thinking as only an engagement with the thoughts and ideas of others, not as self-argumentation or meditation on one’s mind, on one’s self: “The vision I had never known existed inside me was opening up now like a flower, and thoughts I had never imagined now inhabited my world.”
Excerpted with permission from Plant Thinkers of Twentieth-Century Bengal, Sumana Roy, Oxford University Press.
