Letters from the Asylum: Rediscovering two tormented artists

A journalist is given a book of poems to read by her colleague and friend. She finds herself immediately hooked. She hadn’t read the poet before and now wants to read more. Certain things about him intrigue her: his lifelong obsession with a single woman, his unique use of mathematics and bold engagement with the erotic in his poetry, his involvement with an avant-garde literary movement and then withdrawal from the same, and return (from Calcutta) to the border village he grew up in. Driven by curiosity, the journalist visits the late poet’s home in this village - Thakurnagore, a Matua stronghold - and finds that it is run by a Trust who have enough arrangements in place to offer hospitality to a stranger who comes unannounced. There she accidentally meets a woman who had looked after the poet in his last days and to whom, strangely, he had left a bundle of papers. Not knowing what to do with them, this woman gives it to her for safekeep. Her curiosity is so overwhelming that she can’t wait till she returns home to read them, sneaking back to the unlocked home of the poet instead and unpacking and starting to read there itself. She discovers in them letters written during his time in a mental asylum in Calcutta. Some are addressed to him by a renowned filmmaker – a refugee, like him, from East Bengal, who had made the Partition theme his own and died an untimely death. This is a revelation – she had no idea they were in the same place at the same time. She brings home the packet; shares her secret with her parents, later her friend. Within a few days she is on to something: through a string of successive serendipitous meetings – first with a film critic and scholar, next a film director who had made a biopic of the filmmaker, and then with his widow who lived alone – a new world opens up for her. What follows is her immersion in the letters of the two men – more discoveries about their lives and vulnerabilities as artists, and coming into contact with some people who knew them and the theatre group one was a part of. The idea that was first suggested by the film director - of turning the letters into a play - takes shape, and she gets intimately involved with it.

This is the frame narrative of Maitreyee B. Chowdhury’s debut novel – Letters from the Asylum: A Novel of Art, Madness, and Memory. The poet is Binoy Majumdar; the filmmaker, Ritwik Ghatak; the ‘Asylum’ of the title, Gobra Mental Hospital in Calcutta, where the artists were incarcerated in the 1960s (when they also collaborated on a play). Chowdhury, a poet, has a wide range as a writer: from a history of the Hungryalists to a book on Uttam-Suchitra's enduring appeal. This debut novel continues and extends her engagement with Bengal's cultural icons, particularly in the domain of poetry and cinema, and gives us a narrative of great cultural significance – throwing fresh light on two of the most tortured creative minds in post-Partition Bengal.

The letters

Ina, the journalist in the novel, finds some 40 letters between Binoy and Ritwik – apart from some “chits, scribbles and notes” by Binoy. About half the letters are reproduced in the narrative, of which the majority happen to be from Ritwik to Binoy. Only a handful are direct responses to each other, though in the remaining, their awareness of each other’s presence in the hospital and their whereabouts is obvious. There is a lot in common in what they write to each other – their inability to understand why they are here in the first place and their obvious preoccupation with madness, their empathy for fellow inmates some of whose stories they share, their excruciating experience of electric shock therapy, the curse of sleeplessness, the longing for homes past and present, the solace drawn from nature, and the redeeming power of art – the very art that failed them; films in one case and poetry in another. In the topsy-turvy world of the asylum, they both find their ultimate refuge in writing. Apart from their letters to each other - which emotionally anchor them and both admit is the best part of their life in Gobra - Binoy writes a book of poems, Hashpatale Lekha Kabitaguchchho; and Ritwik, a play, Shei Meye, which is performed within the asylum, with both patients and medical staff as part of the cast.

The letters, constituting one-third its length, make Maitreyee’s fictional debut a part epistolary novel. There is also an interesting play with multiples genres in it – apart from the epistolary format, there is also a play and a play-within-a-play: the first is the play that the letters are turned into (with Amrita Pritam’s Tumhari Amrita as reference) when Ira gets in touch with the theatre group Bohurupee and they decide to stage it; and the play-within-the-play is the staging of Ritwik’s Shei Meye within it, which was written and performed in Gobra. The ending is changed, though – the patient playing the part of the protagonist had gone home cured; here, she is not.

The artists

With the letters, Maitreyee accomplishes a tremendous feat: delving, with the utmost empathy, into the mind of two controversial artists who pushed the boundaries of their art, were misunderstood in their lifetimes but granted iconic status later. Ritwik landed in Gobra after almost two decades of immersion in films, with an impressive body of work, which unfortunately didn’t find its audience. This was tragic irony: as he had left theatre (having been inducted into IPTA very young) for films precisely because of its potential to reach a much larger audience. “Ultimately, it was a defeat of my ability to communicate with people, which is what hit me the most, he confesses, in one letter”; in another, admits, “I realise now that I do not know how to make films that everyone understands, films where everything is explained to an audience which is not involved enough to understand the art.” He never accepted the Partition, and couldn’t understand how others could forget it. The reception of the second film in his Partition trilogy (Komal Gandhar, 1961) hit him hard. He thought he wouldn’t be able to “make anything after that failure”, but he did; “the love of the art” ensuring that he kept at it till his “last breath.”

He is furious at his incarceration, at society’s cruel dismissal of people like him: “Since we don’t understand your work, nor speak the language you chose to communicate in, you must be put in somewhere where we don’t need to see you, where you cannot work, where you will not be heard.” But he is defiant: “I laugh at those who thought this would kill me. Ritwik cannot be killed so easily, you fools! I will say what I have come to say, and I will do that whether you like it or not!”

At one point, he writes: “You cannot be a bhadralok and make my kind of films, Binoy.” By ‘bhadralok’, he primarily means a class here and its attendant ‘politeness’ which is reflected in its art – but class in Indian society is always intimately/integrally related to caste as well. If there’s one thing that Binoy knew well, it was, what it is not to be a ‘bhadralok’. Born into a Matua/Namashudra family, the humiliations of being low-caste would define his very existence. Nowhere more so than in Calcutta. It didn’t matter what he had earned by dint of merit and labour: education in the best of institutions - Intermediate at Presidency College and Engineering in Shibpur - followed by a respectable job at Durgapur Steel Plant, before he left everything for poetry.

“When I am amongst bhadraloks, I am the lowest in the caste ladder, the Chandal ", he writes bitterly to Ritwik. “For them, my poetry is an insult to the craft. Do you know that for the longest time no one would publish me? They say cities are like the sea, they take in everything and vomit it all out, that they are all-forgiving. But cities are made up of people – the same people, who in spite of their busy lives never forget to remind you who you are. I knew that there were some lines that I could never cross, that I should not. It is a lie that education is an equaliser. Gayatri is also upper caste, she will never look at me, I feel, though I have looked at her again and again and again.”

Gayatri Chakraborty (later Spivak, the renowned postcolonial critic) was the great love of his life, a one-sided obsession that produced many poems but left him lonely. “Where there is absence of love, there begins a solitary confinement so deep that it lasts a lifetime”, he rues once. His mental illness had started long before his admission into Gobra, he tells Ritwik, and some of his friends didn’t expect him to survive: “Sometimes I think the most controversial thing I might have done is to be able to write for so long, to survive for so long, to just stick around”. And then there is the admission, almost a prayer: “There is this unbelievable beauty in the ability to write, to compose. I hope it never leaves me.”

The novelist’s imaginative recreation of the minds of two artists branded insane by society is the most arresting part of the novel. But the strength of the epistolary part ironically weakens the frame narrative – though it’s structured interestingly, with chapter titles drawn from Ritwik’s films and Binoy’s books. It seems, not just Ira, but the novelist herself is overwhelmed by the letters. The first five chapters, where Ira is on a discovery streak, reads like a mystery novel, and successfully builds up a tension – which somehow dissipates once the letters start getting read; with several of the remaining chapters just becoming narrative vehicles for presenting the letters, leaving little room for characters and interpersonal relationships to develop.

The novel still does the great service of bringing the story of Binoy and Ritwik to new readers in English.