“You did not want an esoteric conversation, [you] wanted a simple exchange of thoughts. I hope we have kept it so…” This is how Chinmoy Guha reassures danseuse-actor, Mamata Shankar, and perhaps himself, interjecting in the middle of their exchange to point out that he keeps things simple. In fact, across all the interviews in Broken Mirror: Conversations with Artists and Thinkers, Guha sticks to this basic principle of keeping things simple and uncomplicated. Even when the conversations as he calls them move along profoundly philosophical lines, this feature makes every single colloquy in the book eminently readable and hugely entertaining, informative, open, and, in many places, deeply poignant.
The interviews were conducted between 2000 and 2023. But, despite the broad timespan and range of intellectual and artistic preoccupation of the dramatis personae, Guha’s unwavering integrity holds the book together with a firm grip.
I won’t agree
Interviewing intellectuals and artists can be daunting, especially if someone like Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is among them. If they happen to be celebrities in their respective fields, the interviewer cannot afford to let slip his guard, nor can he always anticipate their ironic or smug responses communicated verbally or through body language. Who knows if sometimes they are put off by what they think are clichéd questions. But they have to keep the readers’ curiosity in mind and not be too cagey. Treading the thin line between respect for the interviewees’ privacy and the need for thawing their natural reticence can be no less overawing. It is to the credit of Guha that he can hold his own in some tough situations during the tête-à-têtes.
One notices this in many instances of interlocution. But none more incandescent than the central piece: the conversation with Spivak. When Guha asks her about feminism, even going to the extent of suggesting to her that there is “something pointedly artificial about feminism”, the mercurial Spivak shoots back: “I won’t trash feminism.” Guha tries to qualify his question, but Spivak won’t stop: “No. I will not agree with you…”. She goes on to explain the positive aspects of feminist discourse, for more than a page before stopping. But she does not let the smouldering embers die so soon. She returns to the subject later, in some other context, and takes another full page and concludes decisively: “I will not be against feminism if you stand me up on the stage.” Sometimes the deconstructionist in her stands up: “How many people have abused me about this but no one has noticed that by using that sentence I am doing myself what I am criticising.” She can afford neither to affirm nor to deny certain statements she may have made earlier that Guha draws her attention to. It is to the credit of Guha that he can ask such questions as he does to a leading feminist. It shows how he is willing to act as agent provocateur, as it were, to keep the reader on his toes.
Provincialising Marx
Guha’s questions make many of the interviewees revisit the history of the Marxist movement through the lens of their childhood or early manhood in the 1940s and 1960s. This is only to be expected in the context of Bengal. Among those who do this are Mahasweta Devi, Tapan Raychaudhuri, Shankha Ghosh, and Dipesh Chakrabarty. The intertwining of national and personal histories is not something one comes across often in formal history writing. One such untold story is about Mahasweta Devi losing her job twice because the writings of Marx or Lenin were discovered in the drawers of her study. She narrates how she took the help of Bidhan Chandra Roy, then the chief minister of the state, and apprised him of her predicament. She told him the circumstances of her family, and that she was the one to fend for her family, and urgently needed the job back. She also told him that she had never read Marx or Lenin. “To be frank, I haven’t, to date. He advised me to meet Atul Gupta along with the letter he gave me. I did the needful. I was reinstituted [sic] and worked for some time. One fine morning, papers related to Marx and Lenin reappeared in my drawer in the place of the accounts I had kept there. I had been framed.” She lost her job again.
Yet Guha knows how important communist discourse must have proved to the intellectual growth of the personalities of that era. So he eggs them on. He tells the historian, Tapan Raychaudhuri, “Marxism too had its influence [on historical research]” To which Raychaudhuri replies, “Marxism was a strong influence on historical research in our time. …I used to believe and still do that class struggle and the production system are the bare necessities for social evolution. But I have never used these in research.” Such conversations make it possible for readers to clear their misconceptions and stereotyping of historians as leftists.
Similarly, when Guha asks Dipesh Chakrabarty: “You got embroiled in the Naxalite Movement,” the latter answers in the affirmative, and says the Naxalite Movement began when he was a student at Presidency College and he got deeply involved in it. He became a part of the squad under the leadership of Asim Chattopadhyay and others. Chakravarty actually became a student leader of sorts and witnessed how those who had abandoned their homes to join the movement had to starve and bear police atrocities. He belonged to a middle-class family and felt scared. So, one day he told them that this movement wasn’t his cup of tea and that he had panicked. He was labelled a betrayer, and a time came when his former comrades spat at the mention of his name.
Para-disciplinary ethical philosopher
Another important theme that emerges from such conversations is the one of how we ought to understand the much-abused term interdisciplinarity. Both Chakravarty and Spivak had one kind of disciplinary training and ended up doing a host of scholarly work in other disciplinary domains. But it was not easy. Spivak says, “It was somewhat audacious on my part to define myself as a ‘para-disciplinary ethical philosopher’… I have been saying this for quite some time because people tend to link me with interdisciplinarity … that it’s not as easy…. A particular discipline thoroughly conditions you as to how you will put yourself together. Then it's a most pleasant thing that we never escape from it perhaps at all. Those who are less fortunate, sit within a discipline and think other disciplines are weird.”
Dipesh Chakrabarty’s case was different, as he moved from physics to management and then to history as a student. Beginning with how he was never a student committed to the study of history, he insists that his exposure to history happened when he ventured to find answers to a number of questions. Then he narrates his academic journey from physics, especially to its philosophical aspects, to the Indian Institute of Management, where history was a compulsory subject.
The French and German connection
It is a coincidence that all the personalities interviewed are Bengali, or connected to them. But two of them were originally from France and Germany. As those who have translated Bankim and Tagore into French and German respectively, they are known in Bengal and their respective countries. But their cases are unique. France Bhattacharya was married to a Bengali, Lokenath Bhattacharya, and Martin Kämpchen, to Bengal.
At certain points, their stories can get overwhelmingly emotive. Like Kämpchen’s memory of the Gitanjali experience: It happened to be his last day of a three-year teaching stint and he had told his students that he would not teach them anymore. A little later, as he was about to leave the class, the students presented him with a Bengali edition of Gitanjali. “Strangely, I would be in tears most of the time I held that book in my hands”, he says. “I don’t know why! I did not even know Bengali then. To be honest, I had not even thought of learning Bengali before that day. Learning a completely unfamiliar language is not easy. But that day, with Gitanjali in my hand, I resolved that I would learn Bengali only to read this book someday.” There are more of such moments, as indeed moments of mirth and celebration, that take the reader by surprise. All, no doubt, owing to Guha’s gentle and empathetic goading.
The soft side
Though I enjoyed reading all the interviews, my favourite, apart from the intense discussion of poetry with Shankha Ghosh, the sweetness and light in Mamata Shankar’s anecdotes, the intellectually stimulating conversation with Spivak, is Guha’s long conversation with Dipesh Chakrabarty. The conversation is the longest of all, but there is not a moment’s boredom. It tells us a lot about history that may not be available in his huge body of writing. Chakrabarty can be chatty and profound at the same time. There is an element of intimacy and sincerity that Guha has been able to extract even out of the sternest of intellectuals. There are moments in Guha’s conversation with Spivak when she too reveals a softer facet of her character, especially when she reminisces about her parents.
Guha brings out the softer side of her inner self too. It is also touching when she reminds Guha that she had to face challenges in her youth because she was good-looking. It is not always hard academics or cerebral stuff that one gets. Her father told her that as his daughter she would always be given preference, but she must always stand at the end of the queue. “… I think of this [moment] every day. This is why I can’t always answer with conviction and pride. I think I’m standing at the end of the line after all. This is dad’s gift.” To Guha’s question, “So, contrary to what many of us think, you did not rise to eminence overnight?” her reply was, “Not at all. You can never imagine the care with which ma shielded us. Dad died when I was 13. She used to tell me, you have such a life outside that I cannot arrange your marriage. Imagine, the year [was] 1957. A Bengali widow, 43 years of age…” One realises how even Spivak is not always a fire-breathing theorist.
The royal hunt
At this point, I need to move from academics to film and acting. Two personalities in the book were involved in the production of the award-winning film, Mrigaya: Mrinal Sen, the producer, and director, and Mamata Shankar, the female lead. The film holds a special place in the Odia mind as the original story on which it was based was written by the leading Odia progressive writer Bhagabati Charan Panigrahi, and published in 1936. Around the time the film was made, the setting and plot held a special significance in the backdrop of the Naxalite movement. For some reason, Mrinal Sen never mentions the film in his conversation with Guha. But this was Mamata Shankar’s debut film, and her anecdotal recollections of her association with both Mrinal Sen and Satyajit Ray are gems from the history of Bangla film-making.
The missing line
There is much more in the book than I have been able to highlight in this brief review. However, I cannot help but mention Shankha Ghosh talking about endless revisions of poetry by Tagore. Ghosh also has a priceless anecdote concerning the poet Sudhindranath Dutta. It seems the latter had changed a line of one of his poems which was among Shankha Ghosh’s favourites. “How could he do this? We own this line now, what right does he have to alter it?” But he also says how he is himself guilty of having done something similar. But he regretted this and restored the original lines.
Having known a few of the interviewees personally, and met and heard, or seen the works of, the others, I am frequently surprised by how little I knew of their inner selves. The book has thrown refreshing light on the obscure corners of their minds and hearts. I now understand what Guha means when he says in his “Introduction” that he has “tried to recapture for the reading public the life experience, world-view, hopes, and frustrations of an array of leading personalities from the world of academics and culture, who have left a deep imprint on the shaping of Bengali, nay Indian ethos… I try to unfold the intellectual creativity and inner selves of these personalities and hope to grasp at least in a limited way their personal trajectories and world-views in the face of a changing paradigm of cultural and knowledge discourse of our country.”
Broken Mirror: Conversations with Artists and Thinkers, Chinmoy Guha, Primus Books.
