'Historians of Redundant Moments' review: Two sisters and their ghosts

In “Historying the Syllabic Landscape”, the opening poem of Nandini Dhar’s Historians of Redundant Moments (2017), the narrator tells us: “A home / is a city. A city is a home.” The second assertion is easy to comprehend: Many of us have found urban spaces to be hospitable and have grown over-familiar with their landscapes. The first claim, that a home is also a city, is a little more difficult to grasp. One could deduce that it refers to tenements being the smallest units — the alphabets — 

that compose a city’s narrative. But, one could also argue that the domestic space, contained with the larger space of the city, contains within it every element of a metropolitan landscape. Dhar, in her debut full-length collection, acts as a cartographer of both spaces.

The book, a winner of the 2016 Numinous Orisons Luminous Origin Literary Award, recreates the Left-ruled Calcutta of the eighties and nineties of the last century. Its central characters are two sisters: Toi and Tombur. Their names are derived from the Bengali word toitumbur, meaning full to the brim. The sisters, like many pairs of siblings, inhabit a common memory, nourished as much by Bengali folktales, as by Vostok publications of Russian classics and fantasies of Nazia Hussain who died tragically young. They also grapple with the inherited memory of the Naxalbari movement, which Dhar describes as “a failed insurrection and its broken archives”. And, like every fairytale, it is inhabited by ghosts, some of people, others of histories rendered obscure.

A character in the tale of Toi and Tombur is Ghost Uncle. In the notes at the end of the book, Dhar explains: “Ghost Uncle was... a left political radical, who, like many young men and women of his generation, was killed by the police in 1973 in an ‘encounter’ after severe torture”. For those us who grew up in the shadow of the Left Front government, Naxalbari was a sort of inherited memory — an ur-event, about which people spoke little, especially to children. The two sisters discover it, metaphorically, in the attic of their middle-class home, and the entire history of the Left in Bengal — from the Tebhaga movement to the Communist Party of India (Marxist)-led government — is rendered, in the poem “No History Book Would Give Us These Stories”, in a series of negatives: “No famines. / No food riots. No rallies. 

No clandestine / meetings. No slogans. No protests. No / chants. /No Chairman no Mao. / No no no.”

The history that the duo excavates in the forgotten corners of their home is redundant, as the title of another poem — “Archiving Redundance” — suggests. Dhar imagines all of stored up in suitcases, with suggestive labels: “1943. 1948. YEH / AZADI JHUTA HAIN. UNDERGROUND. /NAXALBARI LAL SELAM. 1977.” Having corralled these dusty 

memories into the necessary spaces, their mother “settles / for her sweaty afternoon nap — mouth open, snoring.” The history of violence and lost revolutionary hopes, and all its markers — corporeal or otherwise, are consigned to the endless space of forgetfulness that exists in all our homes. It can be accessed only through childish imagination. 

The recent demolition of a statue of Lenin in Tripura, allegedly by Bharatiya Janata Party workers after the party won the Assembly elections in the state, ousting the Left Front government that had ruled it for two decades, prompted commentaries on the withering away of the Communist movement in the country. The incident sparked for me memories of another long-ruling Left government being ousted — in West Bengal, in 2011, when the Trinamool Congress defeated it. Post-communist societies often indulge in Ostalgie, or nostalgia for the socialist past. Dhar’s book would have also been a part of the kitsch had it not been informed by feminist philosophy, which critiques the essentially patriarchal nature of leftist revolutions.

Early in the book she writes: “little girls / should be protected against the sounds of their own laughter.” By the end of the book, the girls have come of their homes and have started inhabiting the metropolis. “This is how the city whittles its own girls, and we let her.” The narrator, Toi, has also experienced loss: “Tombur has resolved, never to be anything older than eleven”. The memories of two sisters growing up in a communist state might seem to be redundant. But through the exploration of the personal, Dhar historicises — as she set out to — the regular, the ordinary. 

This writer’s debut book of poems, Visceral Metropolis, was published in July 2017