The City of Love: a Novel

This is not a book-review, consider this as an introduction. I have just finished reading the latest novel by Rimi B Chatterjee – my admirable blogger-friend whom I quote so often – titled The City of Love. How can I forget that this blog was titled Love’s Ragpicker till not many day’s ago? And that the idea was to spin a novel around a couple of characters? It is just a coincidence that the originating fable of the idea called ‘love’s ragpicker’ was also set in the period which is the backdrop of The City of Love.

I.

That period: “half century after Vasco da Gama’s historic landfall in India”, the novel begins around 1510, when one of the four leading characters of the novel, Chandu aka Sadashiva aka Kalu aka Kalketu is born. The novel ends when he is somewhat twenty-six. 1510; about 30 years after Martin Beiham’s adaptation of the compass for nautical use, followed by the ascension of King John II in the Portuguese throne beginning a series of patronage of seafarers towards the Indian Ocean, Columbus’ voyage, mapmaking growing into a thriving business in Europe, Hernan Cortez launching Spanish attacks on the Aztecs, Juan Sebastian de Elcano completing the first circumnavigation of the globe.

A decade more than half a century of the Gutenberg Bible, the authorization by Pope Sixtus IV of the Spanish Inquisition to combat Jews, Moors and other heretics, the conquer of Granada and the persecution of the Muslims and Jews in Spain, during Martin Luther’s “95 theses”, the Ottoman seize of Vienna, the breaking away of the Church of England from the Roman Catholic Church, couple of decades after Kabir and during Mirabai and during the heydays of Chaitanya Mahaprabhu.

Well. Happening! Exploration, piracy and trade of spices and diamonds and men; tensions in the cartography of power and changing co-ordinates of belief and religion along with the new insatiable thirst for knowledge is in the backdrop of the novel. The setting zooms in to Bengal, from Chittagong to Gaur, after the bouts in the Indian Ocean. Chittagong was a port known to the Mediterranean and Arab traders since the 10th century. It was called Porto Grande by Portuguese and Venetian voyagers, the city of Bengala as described by many Portuguese writers during those days and was described by João de Barros in 1552 as “the most famous and wealthy city of the Kingdom of Bengal.”

It was also the era of the Shahi dynasty of Bengal, starting with Husayn Shah’s regime (1493–1519), who is rumored to have been a direct descendant of the prophet Muhammad and an Arab who emigrated to Bengal. The Shah, although known to be a devout Muslim, did not discriminate against the Hindu minority in Bengal, was a wise and benevolent ruler, an active patron of the arts, and a great builder of public works. The novel ends during Humayun’s succession of Babar, the founder of the great Mughal dynasty, in Delhi.

II.

Important places in the maritime spice trade (1510 – 1540)

Its difficult to explain why this period in Bengal’s history haunts me so much. Let me declare, I am thoroughly underread, but I experienced an overread childhood. There is probably something during those days of manic reading which left deep impressions of that era of Bengal’s history in my mind. Probably also because that period remains the earliest moments of history visible in the present: primarily architectures. And you have the great Chaitanya cult, the moment which stays audible even now. Before I turned into an atheist somewhen during my teenage, I was – well, there were powerful influences – highly steeped into spiritualism (not religion) and the stories of the great apostles of the Bhakti movement – Chaitanya, Mira, Kabir etc – was etched deep in me. Added: the knowledge of Sufi and Baul traditions. To sum up, those great spiritual movements with less scriptures but great songs and actively resistant to all sorts of dominant religions fornicating with power. Nabadwip was like a great university those days and many modern writers – including Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay – described this period in Bengal’s history as more of a counterpart to European Renaissance than the 19th century under British colonialism. The Raj – or the period of British colonialism – pops up in our horizon of awareness once we mention colonialism; thanks to Rimi B Chatterjee for shedding light on the period preceding and it was really more confusing and exciting as such.

Rimidi’s novel builds up the ambiance of the era to a great effect, surely a result of her toils at the Center of Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta. It is a difficult thing to achieve in English and I also initially had the queer feeling of reading a Bengali historical novel garbed in English, something she cleverly circumvents by centering the initial chapters on the only European protagonist of the novel. There is something in the rhetoric she uses. How does one recreate things which is so crystallized in Bengali, Farsi and other Islamic languages (she uses the exotic terms very sparsely, any other writer would have overdone it begging for a glossary!)? She has done it and borrows a lot from known styles of English literature, thus lessening a probable wall of language to climb up and cross into a history which is too steeped in events to comprehend quickly.

But then, she shows how, this part of my country was essentially polyglot those days and a cauldron of – to communicate quickly if not aptly – multiculturalism. The ports of Chittagong were thralled by strange maritime European, Middle-Eastern and Burmese faces, the rulers were Muslim, the Hindu (well, this was not the term during those days) population was also cohabitating with the tribals. The common term describing the pirates – Bargi, the western Indians, and harmad, the Europeans – were coined during those days. Bengal was certainly an important location to be eyed upon because of its maritime geographical position and for the next four centuries at least it will remain as such.

(This map gives a closer look of Bengal, click the image for further explanations)

III.

So we have four principal characters in this novel. Strangely, I identified with the European one more closely, than the others. Symptomatic? Might be. The story starts with Fernando Almenera, a Castillian trader who is rather intellectually inclined, in a blind-gueese pursuit of a fuzzy knowledge which will enlighten him. His spiritual Godfather – Father Solomon, a Jew, of “the Merchant of Light, a secret society formed to study the Hermetic texts and the Kabbalah” – is persecuted as being anti-church by the invading Holy League “of Spain, the Medicis and the Papal States”. Fernando is forever haunted by his brief affair with Solomon’s daughter Esther, whom he initially protected and then abandoned when he escaped in the sea-route for a search of fortunes. He suffers extremes throughout the novel, just escaping death in the beginning, befriends enemies and is always carrying – along with scabbards – a book too. Always resigning and submitting to the shifting tides of the times he settles for a decade for more in the tropical locale of Bengal to fall in love and lose it again. Here is a firangi (a ‘Frankie’; thanks for the etymology of the word describing the white man) who is really out there to carve his destiny, shedding all identities which he was handed over during his birth and only retaining the vestiges of a resistant spiritual education and memory of a short-lived love-affair. A counterpoint to Chandu – the only upper-caste Hindu protagonist with whom I would have culturally identified more readily – Fernando is an essentially modern character born in the heydays of Western modernity. He survives through surrenders and he is too tired to practice cunning like his more lively Moorish friend Daud Suleiman al-Basri. The strange unknown lighthouse of knowledge he is in pursuit of ends in the discovery of love, for which he undergoes elaborate processes of de-culturation (coined this just now!) and once he loses his love again, the man resigns from the land with which he became one for so long. Fernando is not your colonial figure, the Robinson Crusoe out there to master lands and men Fridays; an essential adventurer, he gives in to mutations of identities and risks with a haunting resignation to unknown tomorrows, almost a Paul Gaugin in Tahiti without the artistic vocation. Daud, instead, is a man who survives through cunning. A more assertive and hedonist character, his trajectory helps us in sketching the rapidly changing political scenarios of the land. I need to re-read to discover this character more, he is always defined in relation to Fernando – whom he calls Jaan – and the political and trade intrigues.

Chandu, as I said before, is more culturally identifiable to me. The novel is also about him because a strand of the narrative is an anachronistic Bildungsroman of this Bengali Brahmin boy (anachronistic; because the Bildungsroman was a novelistic project steeped into modernity). We follow him from his birth to his early youth which tellingly lacks closure. Fathered by a strong patriarch Bhairavdas, a powerful Shaiva-Tantric priest whom you are bound to dislike, he grows up surrounded by strongly sketched women with surreptitious resistance to his father’s abhorring sectarianism. So in counterpoint to Fernando’s Father Solomon, Chandu has his father whose pact with the neighboring Hindu king to oust the growing ‘infidel’ presence in the locality misfires (this novel has a gallery of father-figures, look out also for the benign Sufi mendicant Pir Baba, Alamgir the pirate-boss and also a couple of strong maternal figures). Before he is initiated as the successor of his father into Tantrism – the elaborate passages of which is as strange and eerie to me as it would be to any non-Indian reader – he spends his childhood under the secretive tutelage of Bajja, the main female protagonist, who also happens to be the midwife during his much-coveted birth. The boy roams about in the nature with this tribal girl eight years older than him and interestingly recalls the Apu-Durga imagery (from Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay and Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali). The girl is worldly-wise, wild and wanton while the boy is full of questions and wonders, of course awed by his father’s presence. In an interesting twist of things, the erotic and libidinal in Chandu is roused during the secret rituals of initiation under Bhairavdas and he tries to involve Bajja in the proceedings with disastrous results. He will lose the girl for the time being and as he leaves the locale forever towards Gaur – in the midst of the journey losing his father and his fate changing forever in the process – he is haunted with his love and guilt for Bajja. Sodomised and about to be sold as a slave, Chandu is rescued by the Pir Baba, as an apprentice to whom he grows up to be a skillful Sufi singer.

And finally the woman. Bajja, or Bajra, the thunderbolt. Well to use the much abused cliche, this blinding flash of a thunderbolt is ‘the dark continent’ as well as the epicenter of eros in the novel. Strangely, here is a character, which encapsulates the spirit of the time in her quest for “spiritual freedom” more vehemently than the others. Strangely because, she is always in the periphery of the things: doubly-subalterned as a woman and a tribal, she never comes close to the intrigues of trade and power in which the others trickle in and out. She appears as the care-a-damn midwife during Chandu’s birth who just lifted the infant away to claim her pay after few months. Literally a daughter of nature, we never know about her parents or her home. We only watch her growing up into a dark and straight-spined erotic goddess, almost embodying the ominously seductive witch in the frightful tales Chandu listened to during his infanthood. She grows up as the magic-woman in Chandu’s eyes, imposes on herself a severe rite of pain after the event which severs her from the boy forever and ultimately becomes the Tantric sadhika in whose amorous spell Fernando speechlessly succumbs only to be deserted in the final chapters. If Fernando turns out to be the more cerebral in, Chandu as someone who is bewildered in, the quest, Bajja embodies both the quest and the destination. Yes, Chandu finds her in the final chapter of the novel and they find ‘the city of love’. In a brilliantly written passage, you can feel her presence in every line even when she is never mentioned once: when an undressed Fernando is bathing in a pond and has the eerie feeling of being persistently watched. A reader like me can discern the rhetoric of the feminine gaze and the objectification of the male because I know my bit of Vaishnavite literature (and the mischievous reversal of the Krishna myth, it is man’s dresses which are being hidden when he is bathing) but it will still come across if you don’t know it. Yes, the erotic is one of the primary drives of the novel and the novelist handles it brilliantly because she is never squeamish since she never intended it to be titillating. Rather, the erotic is freed and redeemed in the novel from the early passages of the hideous Tantric practices to the final flourishes steeped into the ambiance of the Bhakti cult, never making it explicit.

IV.

That, as an introduction to the novel. I told you, this is not a review and Love’s Ragpicker will, of course, pursue the idea of ‘the city of love’ further. I told you, it is an era which haunts me and I am glad to find a novel which verbalizes certain foundations of thought which I was vaguely aware of and tried to articulate in the early months of this blog. Glad to find out a novel on love similarly embroiled in bloody times of power and feud as this and Rimidi’s blog is engaged in in the past few months. As I mentioned earlier in this blog, always yearned for a love-story which encapsulates the zeitgeist, a Weltanschauung of an era. Got one. Ending with an excerpt about that zone left undiscussed in this post: the city of love. This is from Bulla Shah, Sufi poet from Punjab (with a little help from the author):

I have got lost in the city of love;
I’m being cleansed, withdrawing myself
From my head, hands and feet.
I have got rid of my ego,
And have attained my goal.
Thus it all ended well.
O Bullah, the Lord pervades both the worlds;
None now appear a stranger to me.

This is from the novel:

Sailors have long known of it. They never talk about it, and these days perhaps it can’t be seen any more. But back in the time when a trader might be in sight of port, his ship heavy with nutmegs, camphor, rice and sandalwood, his eyes squinted against the glare of sunlight on water and his brain buzzing with calculations — back in that time, he might look up for a moment and see a phantom city shimmering upside down in the clouds. Rooted in heaven, it would seem to stretch its spires and minarets to him in impossible loveliness, but even as he laid his hand on a rope to climb to it, it would be gone. And for a moment his rubies would dim, and his camphor smell stale, and even the sea itself turn leaden and lustreless, if that city were forbidden to him.

‘You are specially chosen,’ he said softly, ‘to have seen the City of Love, Ashqabad.’

‘But what is it?’

‘A place which lovers, all kinds of lovers, make out of their love. Its walls are music, and if you look closely at its stones you will see that each grain in them is a musical note. If you want to live in it you have to love something with all your being, whether it is the Name, or a woman, or even a tree. Lovers think they are alone in their passion, but all love is the same and draws them together without their knowing, like a great sparkling net. When they love, they walk the streets of that city, and smell the fragrance of its flowers; their feet stir the dust of its squares, their bodies are painted with the light and shade of its trees. Everything in that city is there because someone loves it. If you love, you own the key to its gates. To remain there forever, you must expand your love to embrace the world, even the bad things in it, but especially you must love the lovers. For love is the most abused thing on earth. Everywhere there are obstacles to it, hatreds of it, people who want to chain it and destroy it and hurt it, because love is dangerous to them and their way of thinking. Love breaks rules, knocks down walls, inspires the weak to stand up to the strong, turns the evil away from their villainy. It does all this with towering courage, taking so many wounds, so much calumny, so there must be a sanctuary, somewhere, where no one hurts love, or the world will end.’ Pir Baba smiled at Kalu. ‘Whom do you love, child?’

Kalu looked down. ‘A girl,’ he said. ‘A girl who broke down walls for me.’