Samaresh Basus Tana Poren: Towards a Formalist Reading Judhajit Sarkar Department of Comparative Literature, Jadavpur University

Paul de Man is supposed to have defined theory as controlled reflection on the formation of method (Bal 2003). One might very well take issue with this statement by recounting, a la Amiya Dev, the etymological basis of the word method (meta +hodos= going/moving after) that is situated, if not in contradistinction then at least at a certain conceptual distance, from what theory means. Needless to say, we seldom remember this distinction and thus, often confuse method as something readymade, something not arrived at from the material at hand but as something that can be applied to the material lock-stock and barrel. Eikhenbaum says in The Theory of the Formal Method,
The so called formal method grew out of a struggle for a science of literature that would be both independent and factual; it is not the outgrowth of a particular methodology. The notion of a method has been so exaggerated that it now suggests too much. We neither discuss methodology nor quarrel about it. We speak and may speak only about theoretical principles suggested to us not by this or that ready-made methodology; but by the examination of specific material in its specific context. (Eikhenbaum 1965)

The purpose of this essay is not to launch an attack on the Formalist principles which, Eikhenbaum suggests, can be derived only by the examination of specific material in its specific context. As a student of Comparative Literature located in the Indian literary context, one can hardly disagree with the fact that principles, whether Formalist or otherwise, by which a text is to be analyzed must be provided by the understanding of the text itself, by going after it for some amount of

time. However, I would like to begin by confessing my discomfort with Eikhenbaums position regarding method as that convolutes to a considerable extent what the word actually suggests. I must also mention at the very outset that what follows is nothing but an attempt at practicing the methodology that Comparative Literature equips its students with, and that comes very close to what Eikhenbaum calls examination of specific material in its specific context. The material that I intend to use in this study is Samaresh Basus 1979 Bangla novel Tana Poren under the light of what is generally understood as the Formalist mode of criticism. Though historically it is not possible to identify a formalist school of literary scholarship with a specific agenda, there are however certain tools of understanding ascribable to the works of the group of scholars belonging to the Moscow Linguistic Circle, spearheaded by Roman Jakobson and OPAYAZ, led by Viktor Shklovsky. The extent to which these tools are relevant to the Indian literary cultures in general and to the chosen text in particular is what this study intends to scrutinize. The approach in such a situation cannot but be centrifugal, that is one must move from the text to the tools of understanding and not vice-versa in order to check whether with the help of these it is possible to conceptualize a coherent methodological framework that can be utilized to situate the present text in a particular literary system and thus, understand its location better. But before that some words of clarification on the selection of this specific text. Samaresh Basu holds an interesting position in Bangla literary culture. An intellectual bent evidently toward Marxian ideology, he however institutionally belonged to a group that the Bengali Marxists of that time condemned as upholder of petit-bourgeois principles. Basu, therefore, was looked at skeptically by his fellow Marxists and even identified as a part of the reactionary forces. It is not the right place to decide who was at fault (in any case a fruitless task) but a certain similarity can be evidenced between the intellectual climate of West Bengal in the late 1960s and 70s

and that of the immediate years in post-Revolution Soviet Union, an age to which the so-called formalists belonged. It is well known that the tag formalist was in itself a pejorative one and hardly describes the nature of the scholarly outcome of the formalists i. The culture of hostility, occasionally militant, that prevailed between Marxism and Formalism in the Soviet in the late 1920s and 30s was largely reflected in Bangla literary culture in the turbulent years of 60s and 70s, where too Formalism was often identified with reactionism. It would be foolishness to imagine identicality between these two situations, distant in both time and space. What nevertheless is worthwhile to note is the culture of disbelief between these two critical tendencies in their various avatars. In West Bengal, of course, there has in actuality been no group identifiable as Formalists. People perceived as threat to progressivism and therefore, tagged Formalists by the Indian Marxists were mostly writers and not, like the Russian Formalists, scholars of literature. Hence, when I try to situate Basu within this culture of mutual inhospitality all that I try to do is to clarify the structure of feeling that informed the writing of a text like the present one. No text, anybody would understand, can be formalist. But then the most crucial question that awaits answer is what the concept of form at all means in the context of Indian literatures. My reading of the present text reveals and this is what I plan to discuss in what follows, that approaching the texture of Indian literary texts demands a necessary overlap between the critical standards of both Marxism and Formalism. An exclusively formalist approach to Indian texts is bound to fail if not buttressed by a clear understanding of what Marxism would call the historical forces at work within the literary system to which a given text belongs. Let me begin with the very title of the text. Tana-poren has come to imply tension in colloquial Bangla and is mostly used regardless of the original context in which it originated. This is a classic example of the metaphorical meaning of a word becoming its dominant use, the actual meaning appearing to have been lost almost entirely in transit. In the context of handloom tana-poren means warp and woof. Wikipedia

informs and rightly enough that the basic purpose of any loom is to hold the warp threads under tension to facilitate the interweaving of the weft threads (italics mine). But when this signifier is dislocated from its original context of signification and applied in another, it is only natural that the sign produced in that changed context would also be somewhat different. The process through which this changed meaning of a word pushes all other meanings of it into oblivion and becomes, in Jakobsonian terms, the dominant, is informed by several factors, one of the most crucial of which is the repeated literary use of the word with its changed meaning. Such recurrent uses of a word in literature create a certain threshold of expectation for the reader and it is from this threshold that he begins interpreting the meaning of the word. The plot (provided we are talking in terms of the narrative mode) contributes to this process of meaning-making deliberately. Therefore, the moment the word tanaporen appears on the page the reader of standard Bangla prose immediately recognizes it from his previous readings as tension, albeit of a particular nature. In the context of Bangla literature this particular tension has been meticulously constructed, from Bankimchandra downwards, as the tension prevailing largely in manwoman relationship. With a few exceptions here and there, tana-poren between the man and the woman can even be said to be leitmotif running through most Bangla mainstream narratives. This, then, is the horizon of expectation that the title of Basus novel creates for the reader. But as the narrative progresses one realizes soon enough that the dominant meaning of tana-poren is the least of Basus intentions:
... , , , , ? , -

According to Shklovsky, After we see an object for several times, we begin to recognize it. The object is in front of us and we know about it, but we do not see itArt removes objects from the automatism of

perception(Shklovsky 1965). The question of course is, how does art do it and in order to achieve what? Let us suspend the second question for the moment and concentrate on the first. Literary artistry removes the object or more precisely, the resources used to represent that object in language from the automatism of perception in several ways. One of the most important tools provided by Formalism to understand these ways is defamialirazation. If we accept that literature is a semiotically organized slice of reality, we will perhaps also accept the existence of certain tools of organization which are used repeatedly to signify a particular object. These tools, in case of literature, are words. We have talked about how a particular meaning of a word becomes dominant as a result of regular use, both in and outside literature. This process can justifiably be called the process of familiarization or in Shklovskys terms automatization/ habitualization and habitualization devours works, clothes, furniture, ones wife.And art exists that one may recover the sensation of life (ibid.). Words, needless to say, have lives of their own. Populating the words with meanings in a way so that they bring back the freshness of sensation is the task by which literature can be identified as a distinct field of human enterprise, a task that Formalist poetics has taught us to call the construction of literariness, that which makes a given work a literary work (Jakobson 1921). Defamilirization works as one of the most foundational devices through which literariness is engineered and it is with the help of this conceptual tool that literature can be distinguished from all other realms of conscious human activity. In the above-quoted excerpt from Basus narrative one level can be evidenced where this defamiliarization is operationalized. By resituating the phrase tana-poren in its original context of signification, by laying the metaphor bare, the narrator constructs an old signified. But this old signified unsettles the perception of the reader of standard Bangla prose, who has long been habitualized in the changed meaning of the word- defamilirization realized here in the very name of the text. But Formalism has also taught us not to construe form merely as an envelope of the content, to see form and content as divorced

from and imposable on each other. The agenda of Formalism (if any) has been directed toward, in Eikhenbaums words, the analysis of form understood as content (ibid.). This understanding of the form as content vis--vis Basus narrative becomes clearer as one follows the unfolding of plot of Tana Poren. Within the first ten pages of the novel the reader is posited with the context against which the meaning of tana-poren is to be interpreted. The plot of the narrative is located in the context of the baluchori handloom industry of Bishnupur in Bankura. In , the author informs us that baluchori is the marvelous creation of the badshahee era. The meticulous process of deindustrialization by the British had destroyed the whole community engaged in weaving baluchori sarees. But in the beginning of the last century the industry was revived again through the efforts of Akshaykumar Patranga of Bishnupur. This is the spatio-historical backdrop against which the plot of Tana Poren is set and it is this context that supplies the narrator all his peculiar phrases, metaphors and images. Tana-poren is one such phrase, whose actual meaning appears to be also its dominant meaning in the context of the narrative. But appearance is often deceitful and in the realm of literature, even this deceit is carefully constructed. Tana-poren has a far greater role to play in Basus narrative than it initially seems to have. The central protagonist is Tana Poren is Panchanan Kint, the most talented young baluchori designers and weavers of Bishnupur. A disciple of Abhay Khan Ostad, Panchanan or Panchu is married to choto bou Moti, has four children and is responsible for taking care of his old father, now blind and incapable of working with the loom anymore. A considerable part of the plot describes the events of one day. The present author is not even remotely capable of providing the details of these descriptions. If the aesthetic function can be singled out as the defining feature of literary language, then one must submit that without paying close attention to the language of the text it is impossible to construct any method of reading that aesthetic function. I shall be coming back to this shortly. For the time

being, let us concentrate on the events of the first day. There are many descriptive sub-streams, sometimes running parallelly and suddenly overlapping each other. But the two most noticeable events which stand out clearly are, (a) Panchus dream of drawing a new baluchori design and his efforts at yielding the flawless result and, (b) Motis chance encounter at Jamuna with Tuki, the wife of Jogen Beet, Panchus chief rival. As per plot constructing, these two streams seem to be running parallel to each other. But as the narrative unfolds, it is slowly realized that both of them are inextricably connected. In both of them and consequently, in the context of the narrative too tana-poren serves as the central metaphor, as the dominant that guarantees the coherence of the narrative structure. In Shklovskys words, A work is created artistically so that its perception is impeded and the greatest possible effect is produced through the slowness of perception (ibid.). In Tana Poren the process of affecting this slowness is indeed slow enough. It is only when one is half way through the narrative that one begins to realize that the dominant meaning of tana-poren that the narrator had constructed by revitalizing its literal meaning has its metaphorical extension too. The triangular relationship that the narrator creates between Panchu, Moti and Tuki is sustained and understood most effectively by the metaphorical implication of the word tana-poren as tension. In fact, once the triangle is established the hyphen placed between tana and poren begins revealing its significance clearly. It then seems to have been a tool for predicting the gap that will consequently appear between Panchu and Moti. The metaphor however operates on another level also. Panchus dream regarding his new design, its approval by Abhay Ostad and the subsequent events where baluchori starts losing its ground of commercial relevance again, thus putting a traumatic end to the weaving of the design into a new saree all these have tana-poren as the threading element, the single-most crucial principle of structuring. The last few sentences of the novel read:
... , , , - ,

The readers perception is slowed down by making him travel a long way through the dense path of meaning making of a single signifier, from its metaphorical meaning to the literal and then extending that literal meaning towards several lines of metaphorical significances. Needless to say, this is not a phenomenon that occurs regularly in practical language, although it is only by using the resources existing in the practical language that the effect of the poetic language is achieved and literariness is formed. Whether we identify practical language with prose and poetic language with verse is another question, which I intend to discuss presently. Excerpts previously quoted from Tana Poren makes one thing clear. The language of the text is certainly Bangla but it is not the kind of literary Bangla that began to be standardized during the colonial times. Standardization follows its own mechanisms and has several layers. But the one factor that can be said to be present in all linguistic standardizations is the attempt to purge the language of its local, rustic usages as much as possible. Following the trajectory of standardized literary Bangla one can see two principle streams- the overtly Sanskritized prose of Bankimchandra with the excess of tatsama words and the prose style with the exuberance of tadbhaba words of which Rabindranath can be said to be the most prolific practitioner. But both these styles with which the ordinary Bengali reader is most familiar with pay little attention to the sounds that the Banglas of different geographical locations within and outside the political boundary of Bengal make. The narrator of Tana Poren tells us:
? ? ...- -

This may remind the readers of Indian literatures of the comment of Bharatendu Harishchandra that what one calls Hindi changes after each kos. The same thing perhaps applies to all the Indian languages which

went a similar process of standardization, preached by the colonizers and practiced by the local bourgeoisie. The narrator of Tana Poren uses two varieties of Bangla, the tadbhabized Bangla and the local Bangla of Purulia, thus straining the readers comprehensibility of the automatized literary Bangla. This results in the construction of Tana Porens literariness in a different way. According to Jakobson one of the features by which Formalism can be characterized is by the analysis of the sound aspects of a literary work (ibid.). The narrator of Tana Poren invites the readers to pay close attention to the sound of the words that he uses in the text- mimesis, so to speak, in the context of Indian literatures has this added strand to it. Form, in such cases, does not just buttress the content but becomes the content itself. This is well known in poetry, but here this is novelist Samaresh Basu who contributes to its formation by placing the practical language side by side with the standard poetic language that culminates ultimately in the literariness of the text. Comparative Literature teaches us to hear the sounds which go into the making of this distinguishing feature of literature. And this can very justifiably be called Comparative Literatures formalist legacy. ___________________________________________________________________________ References:
1. Bal, Mieke. From Cultural Studies to Cultural Analysis: A Controlled Reflection on the Formation of Method. Interrogating Cultural Studies. ed. Paul Bowman. London: Pluto Press. 2003. 2. Basu, Samaresh. Tana Poren. Kolkata: Anjali Prakashani, 2007. 3. Eikhenbaum, Boris. The Theory of the Formal Method. Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays. trns. Lemon and Reis. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. 1965. 4. Jakobson, Roman. The Dominant. Readings in Russian Poetics: Formalist and structuralist Views. Ed. Ladislav Matejka and Krystyna Pomorska. Michigan: Michigan Slavic Publications, 1978. 5. ----. Modern Russian Poetry. trns. Lemon and Reis. Prague, 1921.

6. Shklovsky, Viktor. Art as Technique. Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays. trns. Lemon and Reis. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. 1965. 7. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loom. 22/02/2013

Hereafter I shall not be putting the word formalist within quotes, as with the change of context what this word initially signified has also changed and now is used in a general sense for conveniences sake.