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To read poetry
requires thought. Developing the mental faculty for discovering, expressing, or
appreciating the poetic insights could occupy a better part of one’s creative
lifetime. As they say, in order to enjoy poetry, a person does not need to be a
poet. One only needs to learn to
appreciate the beauty in such creative works. With my somewhat rudimentary
sense of appreciation for the poetic beauty of the verses.....sharing with you
few beautiful verses, simple yet deep, exploring one single recurring thought –
Praising eternal beauty of the nature and the UNKNOWN force behind its
creation.
First poetry is by
lesser known Marathi poet Suryakant Khandekar. Pan. Hridayanath Mangeshakar also brilliantly composed and rendered this work. The composition literally
follows verses' meaning. The thought in the poetry enfolds in itself an element
of Unknown, and delineates the beauty of nature and things therein, yet
completely hidden from the view an element unknown which manifests itself in this
beauty.
त्या फुलांच्या गंध कोशी
सांग तू आहेस का
त्या प्रकाशी तारकांच्या
होतीसी तू तेज का
त्या नभाच्या नील रंगी
होऊनिया गीत का
गात वायूच्या स्वराने
संग तू आहेस का ||
मानवाच्या अंतरीचा प्राण तू आहेस का
का वादळाच्या सागराचे घोर ते तू रूप का
जीवनी या वर्षणारा तू कृपेचा मेघ का
आसमंती नाचणारी तू विजेची रेघ का
त्या फुलांच्या
गंध कोशी … .. || 1 ||
जीवनी संजीवनी तू
माउलीचे दूध का ?
कष्टणार्या बांधवांच्या रंगसी नेत्रात का ?
मूर्त तू मानव्य का
रे बालकांचे हास्य का ?
या इथे अन त्या तिथे रे सांग तू आहेस का ?
त्या फुलांच्या
गंध कोशी … .. || 2 ||
This recurring
thought appears in one of Sri Aurobindo’s poems known as “WHO”. This piece of
poetry raises similarly questions, embedding within itself an answer to them
In the blue of the sky, in the green of
the forest,
Whose is the hand that has painted the
glow?
When the winds were asleep in the womb of
the ether,
Who was it roused them and bade them to
blow?
He is lost in the heart, in the cavern of
Nature,
He is found in the brain where He builds
up the thought:
In the pattern and bloom of the flowers He
is woven,
In the luminous net of the stars He is
caught.
In the strength of a man, in the beauty of
woman,
In the laugh of a boy, in the blush of a
girl;
The hand that sent Jupiter spinning
through heaven,
Spends all its cunning to fashion a curl.
These are His works and His veils and His
shadows;
But where is He then? by what name is He
known?
Remember the lyrics of the track that was played at the
beginning of each episode of Bharat Ek Khoj. This is Nasadiya Sukta from
RigVeda, first the original Sanskrit version followed by its Hindi translation.
Notice again axiomatic eternal question of the creation in nature.
सृष्टि से पहले सत नहीं था
असत भी नहीं
अंतरिक्ष भी नहीं आकाश भी नहीं था
छिपा था क्या, कहाँ
किसने ढका था
उस पल तो
अगम अतल जल भी कहां था
सृष्टि का कौन है कर्ता?
कर्ता है वह अकर्ता
ऊँचे आकाश में रहता
सदा अध्यक्ष बना रहता
वही सचमुच में जानता
या नहीं भी जानता
है किसी को नही पता
नही पता
नही है पता
नही है पता
Yet another simple but profound poesy
portraying this thought is from this Hindi Movie “Boond Jo Ban Gayee Moti” sung
by Mukesh
हरी हरी वसुंधरा पे नीला नीला
ये गगन
के जिस
पे बादलों की
पालकी उड़ा रहा
पवन
दिशाएँ देखो रंगभरी ,
चमक रही उमंग
भरी
ये किस
ने फूल फूल
पे किया सिंगार
है
ये कौन
चित्रकार है , ये कौन
चित्रकार
ये कौन
चित्रकार है .. ..
तपस्वीयों सी हैं
अटल ये परवातों
की चोटियाँ
ये सर्प
सी घूमेरादार , घेरदार घाटियाँ
ध्वजा से ये
खड़े हुए हैं
वृक्ष देवदार के
गलीचे ये
गुलाब के , बगीचे ये
बहार के
ये किस
कवी की कल्पना
का चमत्कार है
ये कौन
चित्रकार है .. --------------------------------------- P.S. updating this post as I forgot to mention that this Song from movie "Boong Jo Ban Gayee Moti" was written by noted lyricist Bharat Vyas who has also penned the immortal prayer song "Ae Malik Tere Bande Hum" from movie "Do Aakhein Barah Haath".
Gazing up into the heavens dotted with innumerable stars,
who wouldn’t be moved by its manifestation or mystified by its expanse? Standing
before the open vastness of the ocean or magnificent sight of snow capped
Himalayas, how wouldn’t one feel that sudden surge of emotions aroused from deep
within? Who wouldn’t be exalted, discovering the irresistible
simplicity and beauty of a mathematical idea? Who wouldn’t get smitten by
the utter brilliance of an artistic or musical work?
Sense of Sublime, as the above situations bespeak of, and
its very nature is a fascinating subject in philosophy and psychology. We would
discuss some of its dimensions.
The sense of sublime, primitive in its existence and central
to human experience, would manifests itself in all such contexts described. As Grant
Allen in his work The Origin of the Sublime puts it– “There is perhaps no feeling
in nature more strangely compounded and more indefinably singular than that we
call sense of Sublime”. It is inexplicable feeling blended with awe and
unspeakable joy, fear of something mysterious, or veneration for something profound.
This experience of sublime may be evoked
in all pursuit of religion, philosophy, science, arts etc. Nobody is left
untouched by this experience. This is how precisely Erwin Chargaff, famous
biologist whose contribution in understanding of the structure of DNA was not acknowledged
by Nobel Committee, reflects this emotion in his article in Journal Nature –
“It
is the sense of mystery that, in my opinion, drives the true scientist; the
same blind force, blindly seeing, deafly hearing, unconsciously remembering, that drives the larva into the butterfly. If [the
scientist] has not experienced, at least a few times in his life, this cold
shudder down his spine, this confrontation with an immense invisible face whose
breath moves him to tears, he is not a scientist.”
What Chagraff delineates as “confrontation with an immense invisible face whose breath moves him to
tears” is what we define the moments of
sublime.
Philosophers and psychologists have tried to
conceptualize this state of mind as “Aesthetic Appreciation”. Edmund Burke’s famous
treatise, A Philosophical Inquiry into
the Origin of Our Ideas of The Sublime and Beautiful, was a breakthrough in
the uniting idea of sublime in philosophy with psychology. In his work, he posits
that the effect caused by the great and sublime is ‘Astonishment’ and can be reckoned
as ‘of the highest degree’; while others are its inferior effects such as
reverence, admiration and respect. According to evolutionary biologists Keltner
& Haidt, ‘Awe’ as an experience can include –
“Both a perceived vastness (whether of power or magnitude) and a need for accommodation, which
is an inability to assimilate an experience into current mental structure.”
We can clearly identify this definition of ‘Awe’ with our
subjective experience. When we are confronted with objects of physical grandeur,
supreme works of arts and science, or religious or philosophical ideas, a sudden
awareness dawns which transcends our current understanding of the nature of
things, followed by an emergent overwhelmingness, so overpowering that our
mental faculty is at loss to accommodate its sheer depth, mystery or might.
There has always been a clear debate amongst early philosophers
either to associate or discern the Sublime from Beautiful. M a r k o U r š i č
* in his essay, Sublimity of the Sky
from Kant to Sayantana and beyond, examines this difference as given by Emmanuel
Kant in his treatise Critique of Judgment (1790)–
“The
Beautiful in nature is the question of the form of the object, and this
consists in limitation, whereas the Sublime is to be found in an object devoid
of the form, so far as it immediately involves, or by its presence provokes a
representation of limitlessness, yet with a superadded thought of its totality”
What it means is that our perception of beautiful exists as an aesthetic idea in our mind and is not a characteristic of the
object being perceived. It is a concept
in the mind of the subject and is intuitive in nature. It cannot be given an adequate
perception that would realize the cognitive whole symbolized in the concept. This wholeness of cognition in the concept transcends
all possible experiences and hence by virtue of this limitation of mind to
perceive that experience it cannot become recognition.
However, the argument takes a
deviation when Kant says that the whole could exist as the “general without
concept” in the “aesthetic idea” given to the subject of the perception. Hence this is an experience subjective
which pleases “in general and without a concept”.
Sublime, according to Kant, exists as an “aesthetic idea”
in the mind, and these aesthetic idea coveys the idea of infinity or
limitlessness in a more cognitive form i.e. the wholeness in the cognition
could be recognized in the aesthetic idea. Sublime is more inner than the beautiful.
Kant also discerns between “mathematical” and “Dynamical”
sublimes in nature. Mathematical sublime happens by the immeasurableness of the sublime such as the night sky or the cosmos
which overwhelms our imaginations capacity to comprehend it or hold it. This
inadequacy in our “faculty of senses” evidences its “smallness”. “Dynamical
sublime purely refers to immeasurableness
of the might of nature. We might experience fear by stormy ocean, thunderous
clouds or volcanoes while knowing ourselves that we are safe and hence without
being afraid. While the above analysis is more inclined towards sublime
in nature, it is equally applicable to the sublime in arts or sciences.
One depiction
which comes very close to the idea of sublime is the scene from the movie “Contact” based on novel by Carl Sagan
where Ellie, the protagonist, is transported with her alien aircraft via a
series of wormholes to far reaches of the cosmos. The sequence is breathtaking
in its depiction as it shows her journey through space-time continuum which
culminates into a sublime moment when she encounters with spectacular view of
the cosmos.
When she returns she has no evidence to prove what she
had been through. And when she is asked to prove the experience, in its response she says something
which would only reinforce what has been discussed earlier
- I had an experience. I can't prove it. I can't even
explain it. All I can tell you is that everything I know as a human being,
everything I am, tells me that it was real. I was given something wonderful.
Something that changed me. A vision of the universe that made it overwhelmingly
clear just how tiny and insignificant and at the same time how rare and
precious we all are. A vision that tells us we belong to something greater than
ourselves that we're not - that none of us is alone.
Truely, Sublime is a visceral feeling indescribable in
words.
PM Manmohan Singh is on a visit to Bangladesh on 6 and 7th
of September. This visit was touted as historic and of import by the media and there is
reason to do so. This was first in last 12 years when an Indian PM was on a
visit to our eastern neighbor. The visit was of crucial significance within the
context of India’s bilateral agreements involving the disputed border and
sharing of teesta river water between both the countries. This was aptly
referred to by the economist as 'a watershed agreement in the annals of a
bizarre geography'. In this context, it would be interesting to know the
current state of affairs in the relations between the two countries and more
interesting, to study what makes this geography so unique.
The border that we share with Bangladesh unlike our other geographical
neighbors such as Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan, Sri Lanka, Maldives or Myanmar, has
one of the most bewildering feature called "enclaves complex" which
exist along Bangladesh's northern border with India and is called Cooch Behar
enclave complex. The story behind this enclave complex is too compelling to
tell and has deep historical and political bearings.
An Enclave, as Wiki puts it, is a territory whose
geographical boundaries lie entirely within the boundaries of another territory
i.e. fragments of one country which are entirely surrounded by other. The word
"enclave" entered into the dictionary of British diplomacy in 1868
and owes its etymological origin to Latin word "clavus" which means
'embedded and surrounded'.
In his book "Stateless in South Asia: The making of the India Bangladesh Enclaves”, Wilhelm Schendel refers to about 250 such enclaves
surviving in the world today and are found mainly in three geographies -
western Europe, eastern fringes of former soviet empire and south Asia. Most of
the enclaves in south Asia are found along the borderland of India-Bangladesh. Cooch
Behar, as the territory falling into the Indian side of the border called, is a
district in north Bengal which once had been the seat of the princely state of
Koch Bihar, ruled by the Koch dynasty. Cooch Behar possesses almost 200 exclaves out of which 106 are in
Bangladesh. Of those, 3 are counter-enclaves (enclaves within enclaves) and world’s only counter-counter enclave i.e. a patch of Bangladesh that is
surrounded by Indian Territory itself surrounded by Bangladeshi territory.
The border between India and Bangladesh runs for 4096 km where
its entire stretch splits up into
flat/plains (in West Bengal, Assam-Barak Valley, Tripura), riverine (southern
extremity of West Bengal border and of Assam) and hilly/jungle (in Meghalaya).
Along its length it touches border with Assam, Tripura, Mizoram, Meghalaya and in
the longest stretch 2,217 km with West Bengal.
In his scholarly work titled Waiting For the Esquimo, Brenden Whyte chronicles the history of Bengal
and of Cooch Behar dating from Mughal and British period (1500-1950) to Indo-Pakistan
period (1947-1970) till formation of Bangladesh in 1971. It would be worthwhile to spend some time on the crucial periods of this history.
The Mughal Period
About 1200 AD much of the Bengal was conquered by Muslims enlarging
the Mughal Sultanate except the northern part which was overrun by local tribes
called Koch. During the same time, Assam was ruled by Asom dynasty. Muslim
rulers from central and south Bengal, under the patronage of Mughals tried
several times to attack and occupy kingdoms of north Bengal, but could not succeed. 1500 - 1600 AD saw the
rise to power of Koch dynasty, the rulers of Behar. Around that period, Muslim
rulers such as Sher Shah Suri, Suleman Kararani who ruled Bengal, invaded this
region several times. Finally, Emperor Akbar removed Kararani from Bengal and
added it to Mughal Empire with Koch’s help. However, the powerful landlords of Cooch Behar
retained possession of their land surrounded by the area of Mughal state giving
a tough fight to the Mughals. The period between 1600 -1700 AD was chaotic due
to dynastic wars and fight for succession within Koch Dynasty. Taking advantage
of this condition, Mughals under Eebadat Khan begun occupying the outlying
regions called Chaklas, of the
dynasty. These Chaklas were
established by Mughals replacing the previous divisions called Sarkars for easy administration and
Zamindars of these and nearby Chaklas
paid allegiance to Mughal. The remaining region remained under control of Kochs.
Whyte lays
importance on the crucial peace treaties happened in 1711 and 1713 between the
kingdom of Cooch Behar and the Mughal Empire which ended a long series of wars
in which the Mughals wrested several districts from Cooch Behar thus leading to
the formation of enclaves. This is because the Mughals were not able to remove
some of the powerful overlords of Cooch Behar from some of these Chaklas. So these lands were still held
by these chieftains even though they were annexed from that state and were ‘enclaved’
in Mughal land. Similarly other side, disbanded Mughal soldiers who occupied
lands inside reminder of Cooch Behar retained their allegiance to Mughal Empire
although detached from it and ‘enclaved’ inside Cooch Behar. The Mughal Empire
never considered these enclaves as problematic as they lacked the scientific
methods to earmark boundaries.
The British
Period
Over time
Mughal Empire disintegrated and eventually the Nawab Nazir of Bengal became the
de-facto ruler till the time East India Company established itself in India in mid-18th
century. After Robert Clive defeated Siraj-ud-daula at Plassey in 1757, Mir
Jafar, uncle of nawab, was enthroned who was later replaced with his son-in-law
Mir Kasim. The control of Bengal was slowly passed onto East India Company with
the granting of Diwani of Mughal Bengal and enclaves of Cooch Behar.
The company
accidently in 1814 discovered existence of Cooch Behar enclaves, their
jurisdictions being held independent of company control and had no authority of
magistrate. Such regions were then natural sanctuaries for notorious offenders
fleeing the police.
British indirectly
ruled north Bengal, and so the Maharaja and his administration were retained
under their rule and eventually Cooch Behar survived as princely state till the
end of colonial rule. Being the principality, Cooch Behar saw little unrest for
independence from British rule.
Post-Independence
After the
colonial rule ended, princely states had only two options either to join India
or join Pakistan. Cooch Behar was end up being wedged between India and east
Pakistan. As Wilhelm Schendel puts it succinctly “The Mughal outliers in
Cooch Behar had become part of British India and then part of Pakistan, whereas
the Cooch Behar outliers in Mughal territory had become part of princely state
and then part of India”. Eventually in 1971, as a result of Bangladesh
liberation war and Indo-Pak war, East Pakistan seceded to form Bangladesh. Remarkably,
even after being a part of such an eventful history involving frequent changes in
dominion, the enclaves survived.
Post 1971
Relations between India and newly formed Bangladesh were pleasant
since solving the boundary problems were not on the priority of newly formed
independent state. In 1972 signing of trade
agreements led to trade movements across border in specified commodities. The
agreement expired after one year and then never reinstated. In 1974, a treaty
was signed between two countries called Indira-Mujib Treaty. This treaty listed
15 sectors of boundary to be demarcated and agreed that enclaves of both the
countries in others region shall be exchanged expeditiously with no
compensation for loss of Bangladesh and with exception to few enclaves which
shall be retained by Bangladesh. India also agreed to lease an access corridor between
Dehagram and Bangladesh known as Teen
Bigha. Teen Bigha was one such attempt to connect the Bangladeshi enclaves
to their ‘mainland’. India ratified this agreement in 1980
after passing a bill in parliament. However, the implementation did not happen
due to 1) Dispute regarding the transfer and terms of lease of Teen Bigha to Bangladesh 2) an ongoing
dispute regarding use of this land by anti-India elements and illegal
immigrants to cross over into India, and the agreement remained a pipe dream. After
lot of political and social hullabaloo, eventually in 1992 Teen Bigha was transferred to Bangladesh.
The condition of those stuck in those enclaves is beyond
what we call livable. They are virtually cut from all amenities like water
electricity roads, hospitals, schools etc. They are trapped into a no-man’s
land with limited ingress to their ‘mainland’ and even need a visa to get that
access. This resulted in rise in illegal border crossing.
Fencing the Border
Border between India and Bangladesh is highly porous which also
makes it highly conducive to illegal immigration and smuggling of goods. To
curtail this, in late 1984, Indian Government announced its plan to fence the
border. The construction started in two phases. Phase I began in 1987 and
completed fencing only 20% of border while Phase II started in 2000. BSF was deployed
to guard the border. However, the illegal immigration continued and over time condition
worsened due to rise of terrorism. This border became notorious for enforcing a shoot-to-kill order
against Bangladeshi migrants by BSF.
Notwithstanding the daft of agreements between both the
countries, little progress has been made from both the sides raising ire of the
people trapped between disputed borders. The
economist puts this plight of those living in this limbo pertinently-
“A few years ago, away
from Cooch Behar, on the eastern border with India, I met a man who lived smack
on the border between Tripura state and Bangladesh. His living room was in
Bangladesh, his toilet in India. He had been a local politician in India, and
was now working as a farmer in Bangladesh. As is typical in such places, he
sent his daughters to school in Bangladesh, and his sons to India, where
schools, he thought, were much better. To his mind, the fence dividing the two
countries was of little value. But, he conceded, “at least my cows don’t run
away anymore.”
