Weird Creatures: The Sense and Nonsense in Sukumar Ray’s Fantastic Bestiary
Nonsense poetry has long since existed in the peripheries of mainstream literary discourse due to its ambiguous nature. The particular literary works generally considered as nonsense evade clear-cut definition, thereby making sustained discussions harder. And yet, this refusal to be boxed in and defined is an advantage, as it makes nonsense literature a consummate agent for timely socio-political critique.
Nonsense poets often use anthropomorphic animals to camouflage this layer of criticism to evade censorship. By mapping the human and non-human world onto each other, these poems invite the reader to look upon the oft-ignored ills of mainstream society. This goal is aided further by the accompanying illustrations which, rather than being secondary to the poems, act as extensions of the critique. This essay seeks to explore Ray’s criticism of the colonial influence on Bengal by examining his poems and illustrations involving fantastic creatures.
Ray’s poetry is heavily influenced by the pioneers of western literary nonsense as well as Bengali folk tales. What make his works so distinguished is that Ray offsets his fantastic creatures against the familiar background of urban Bengal rather than some distant imaginary land and that he utilises these creatures to criticise not the larger socio-political climate of the time, but some particularly problematic behaviour that arose out of the colonial influence on early twentieth-century Bengal. “You can find more nonsense”, ventures Michael Heyman, “when you go to places where there has been a lot of political tragedy” (Nath). This stands particularly true for Ray’s nonsense. In the Abol-Tabol, the imperial overhang in Ray’s choice of form and his deployment of the fantastic is undeniable.
Poushali Bhadury points out that Sukumar Ray has a “preoccupation with hybridity, one of the most pressing sociocultural issues of colonial India” (Bhadury 12), and this becomes quite apparent in the very first poem, ‘Khichuri’ or ‘Hotch-Potch’. Here, we encounter the first of Ray’s nonsensical creatures, such as the porochard, storkoise and whalephant. In their bodies, different animals melded with each other by “defying the grammarians” (1). The image-text binary in the poem highlights the incongruity of these portmanteau creatures as they seem almost “crudely spliced together” (Bhadury 19). Our knowledge of the real species leaves us puzzling over how a cow’s head and a cock’s body or a giraffe’s head and a grasshopper’s body can ever be joined together. This presents a powerful “visual critique of the politics of forced and/or unthinking cultural amalgamation” (Bhadury 20) by pointing out that the cultures of the colonisers and the colonised can never be in a synergy; when two cultures clash, there will always exist a power imbalance wherein one culture will gain prominence and dominate over the other, just like in the composite creatures of this poem, the control will always lie with the creature that retained its head.
‘Kimbhut’ or ‘Super-beast’ presents another facet of the issue of hybridity through a satirical rendering of those particular members of the native populace who had no qualms about abandoning their own culture and embracing the manners of the colonisers in hopes of gaining access to the upper echelons of society or to further their careers. Kimbhut desires desperately to acquire traits of other animals he finds attractive — “voice like the cuckoo’s refrain” and the trunk of an elephant; a lion’s mane and the strong legs of a “lithe kangaroo”; the scaly tail of a lizard and a bird’s wings. Yet, when he manages miraculously to acquire all these, his excitement turns into an “anguish intense” wondering whether people will jeer at him or call him a disgrace. The illustration heightens this crisis of identity that is conveyed through his distressed cry, “Oh what can I be?” (17). In this creature’s grotesque body, incongruous features fight for dominance, ultimately reducing the composite beast to one of such confusing countenance that it becomes an object to be mocked and pitied, rather than something that inspires terror like Carroll’s Jabberwocky.
Ray’s anti-colonial sentiments are markedly discernible in ‘Kumro-Potash’ or ‘Pumpkin-Puff’. The eponymous Pumpkin-Puff is an entirely novel creation of Ray’s imagination rather than an amalgamation of real animals. This capricious autocrat dictates every movement of the community he seems to lord over and the absurdity of the situation is heightened by the arbitrariness of the regulations. The readers are prescribed to “cast [their] eyes aslant” if Pumpkin-puff dances, “sing hymns to Radha-Krishna” if he cries, and “perch upon a single leg beside the kitchen door” if he roars (10). It is made apparent by the narrator that the repercussions of not responding to the Pumpkin-puff’s seemingly innocent actions exactly as directed would be unimaginably dire. Intriguingly enough, while Pumpkin-puff is the one who terrorizes this community, it is the narrator, presumably also a human being, who enables and enforces this constant oppression by issuing the warnings.
Even more interestingly, Pumpkin-puff does not belong to some distant fantastic land as does the Jabberwocky, instead, he “compels us to be mindful of his wishes by prowling around our house” (Satyajit Ray, Introduction n.pag.). By placing Pumpkin-Puff in such homely settings, Ray “subtly points out that close surveillance of the downtrodden subjects is one of the strategies of power exercised by the ruling authorities” (Bhadury 26). The power imbalance is further highlighted by the illustration where Pumpkin-puff is a humongous half-naked rotund figure that dominates the sketch, and the lilliputian human being clings to a branch in the background.
Steeped in Ray’s ‘kheyal-rawsh’ or ‘spirit of whimsy’, his nonsense serves as the “perfect vehicle for such subversive satire, given its propensity for ridicule and delight, which nevertheless underscores the grimness of the colonial situation” (Bhadury 27). Ray’s creatures serve not only as a commentary on the pitiable status of those who end up caught between two worlds, not belonging fully to either but also as a warning to those who wanted to follow suit by abandoning their own identity or becoming complicit in the oppression of their kin. This endeavour is monumental in its scope because Ray imbues a predominantly British form with quintessentially Bengali flavours and wields it as a weapon of critiquing the colonial government, thereby strongly proclaiming that while Indians are subjugated by the British, they are, in no way, intellectually inferior to their colonial overlords.
Sources
Bhadury, Poushali. “Fantastic Beasts and How to Sketch Them: The Fabulous Bestiary of Sukumar Ray.” South Asian Review, vol. 34, no. 1, 2013, pp. 11–38. George A. Smathers Libraries, https://ufdc.ufl.edu/IR00009134/00001. Accessed 30 Jul. 2021
Nath, Dipanita. “‘Nonsense Is a Way to FIGHT Power’, Says MICHAEL HEYMAN.” The Indian Express, 1 Dec. 2016, indianexpress.com/article/lifestyle/art-and-culture/michael-heyman-doctor-of-nonsense-way-to-fight-power-4405761/. Accessed 30 Jul. 2021.
Ray, Sukumar. The Select Nonsense of Sukumar Ray. Translated by Sukanta Chaudhuri. Introduction by Satyajit Ray. Oxford University Press, 2019.
