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The Wire
01-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Wire
Kolkata's Vietnam Connection: A Forgotten Chapter of Familiarity
Kolkata: For any city, the past is an echo of the times it has lived through. Fifty years ago, in 1975, May Day in Kolkata had transformed itself into a spontaneous and triumphant celebration of the defeat of US imperialism and Vietnam's victory, celebrated as the reunification of the two sundered parts of the country, was declared official. From a show of working class solidarity and strength, which is how Kolkata has always celebrated May Day, it became both, the city's salutation to the 'sheer human courage and resilience' of the people of Vietnam as in iconic director Satyajit Ray's Pratidwandi (The Adversary), 1970, and an occasion for yet another remarkable show of solidarity. On April 30, 1975, the day North Vietnam Army's troops and tanks rolled into Saigon – now Ho Chi Minh City – Kolkata, the only city that could, hit the streets as news spread of the US defeat. Veteran Communist Party of India (Marxist) leader Rabin Deb recalled he was also on the streets, participating in a rally of celebration. On May Day, apart from the Left trade union leadership, the CPI(M)'s leadership were at Sahid Minar, the favourite rally ground of the city; it was large, well-connected to public transport and accessible from both the railway stations – Howrah and Sealdah. It was not as challenging and vast as the sprawling Brigade Parade Grounds. The crowds spilled out of the Sahind Minar grounds and among them were students, like now-retired professor Pranab Basu; distinguished scholar of films, theatre and the performing arts like Samik Bandopadhyay, and Professor Tridib Chakraborti, an expert on Vietnam-India relations. There were thousands of others, those who were inspired by the slogan ' Tomar Naam, Amaar Naam, Vietnam, Vietnam, ' (Your name and my name is Vietnam, Vietnam). Or, they had read the poetry of Beerendra Chattopadhyaya, a fiery radical poet and Mangal Charan Chattopadhyaya and one of the foremost poets of the 20th century in India, Subhas Mukhopadyaya, also known as 'padatik kobi' (footsoldier of poetry). Or, they were people who probably watched the iconic theatre personality Shombhu Mitra's version of Badal Sircar's The Rest of History. Master of his craft, Mitra substituted Vietnam as an example of The Rest of History, because the name, place and the people and their heroic struggle were proximate, immediate, familiar and significant for Bengali alternative theatre goers. In the original version by Sircar – a pioneer of street theatre in India, an experimentalist and a legend – he had used Congo as the example. The substitution was striking because Vietnam had become an unmissable part of the public discourse. In the Bengali imagination, the war in Vietnam was the most important event of the 'past decade' – more important than Apollo 16 docking on the moon. The reason, as Dhritiman Chatterjee says in Pratidwand i, is that five years before Vietnam's liberation, it was so 'unpredictable.' Against US imperialism In the late 1960s, especially after 1968, Bengalis talked all the time about Vietnam and its 'heroic struggle' to defeat US Imperialism armed with inadequate fire power against B-52s flying carpet bombing missions, of helicopters with American soldiers armed with machine guns strafing the rice paddies, of the resilience and courage of the physically puny, rice-eating people who were fiercely waging war against a 'superpower'. In the Bengali imagination, there was a trace of identifying with the North Vietnam Army forces fighting, apparently, insuperable odds. A city and a polity that had coined ' Tomar Naam, Amar Naam, Vietnam, Vietnam ' as a war cry against 'US imperialism and neo capitalism,' where a street in 1969 was renamed Ho Chi Minh Sarani, only because the US Deputy Consulate Office was located on it, where a bust of Uncle Ho had been installed so that all manner of communists and emotionally connected individuals could garland the sculpture, made itself a distant outpost of a liberation movement in East Asia. Inside the National Library, India's largest library by volume and for public record, there is a small corner, dedicated to Vietnam. It opened in 2016, as the first country-specific section within the National Library. And then there is Ho Chi Minh. Like Che Guevara, Ho Chi Minh's face is familiar; it is printed on T-shirts and is always included in the line up of legendary communist leaders. He remains an icon even today, though the details of what he did beyond fighting French and US imperialism have been forgotten. Not all the cadres of the dwindling CPI(M) and the CPI recall that 'Uncle Ho' visited Kolkata more than once; he made a halt in 1946 on his way to Paris to attend the preliminary round of negotiations for the peace accord, which incidentally collapsed. There is a plaque at the Great Eastern Hotel, described by Mark Twain as the 'Jewel of the East,' installed after the grand building was taken over and renovated by the Lalit Group. In 1958, Ho Chi Minh visited again, probably on a stop over on his way to Paris. That visit is significant; it explains why Ho Chi Minh is so much a part of the city's history and its imagination. In 1958, Ho Chi Minh went to the office of Swadhinata, the evening daily of then undivided Communist Party of India, to meet Dhiraranjan Sen, who was injured in a rally organised in support of Vietnam's struggle in January 1947. The British police had fired on rallyists and two people were killed. They were the first martyrs of the movement in India that supported Ho Chi Minh's fight to liberate Vietnam from French colonial rule. When Madam Nguyen Thi Binh visited Kolkata in 2007, the public welcomed her with a massive rally. This was not her first visit. She had come earlier, probably for the first time in 1973. However, this time the turnout was huge; the enormous Netaji Indoor Stadium with a seating capacity of 12,000, was packed. People also gathered outside the stadium just to be in the presence of the lady who stood up to Henry Kissinger and was part of Vietnam's negotiating team for the peace accord. She was inspiring. In 1989, Kolkata hosted General Vo Nguyen Giap, the man who defeated the French army and ended its colonial rule by winning the Battle of Dien Bien Phu. He paid his respects at the Ho Chi Minh statue, met the leaders of then ruling CPI(M)-led Left Front, including chief minister Jyoti Basu, attended a public reception and dominated the headlines the next day in the Bengali print media. Since 1947, when the first rallyists of the Vietnam liberation died in police action, Kolkata's relationship to Vietnam has been visceral. Samik Bandopadhyay is now 85 years old; his encyclopedic memory is awe inspiring. Even so, the vividness of his recall of the day Vietnam was liberated is remarkable. He says, 'We celebrated on the streets, joined the rally and celebrated at home, too.' Vietnam was a place not out there somewhere in the vast world; it was a place to which the Bandopadhyay family felt connected with, much like many other Bengalis. However, there was a key difference: Samik Bandopadhyay's eldest brother, Subrata Banerjee, was posted in Vietnam when he joined the British Army, post 1942, on directives issued by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union that the world war had become a peoples' war. Serving in Vietnam, Banerjee made friends; these friends then made tracks to visit him in Kolkata. The distance was bridged by the emotional attachment between spirited Bengalis inspired by the courage and resilience of the Vietnamese people. Other notable visitors Kolkata has hosted many visitors. Back then, after Independence and before globalisation and the digital revolution, the city was a magnet for a particular kind of world leader. Writing for the New York Times in 1955, the day General Secretary of CPSU Nikita Krushchev, who was Stalin's successor, and Premier Nikolai Bulganin flew in, A.M, Rosenthal, who later became the newspapers managing editor, painted a picture of the city: 'Late into the night, the streets of India's largest city were jammed with people hoping to get a glimpse of the Russians. This was by far the largest crowd to greet the Soviet leaders. Oldtime residents of Calcutta said they had never seen anything like it, not for Mohandas Gandhi or Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, nor for Indian Independence day.' The reason why world leaders came to the city, then called Calcutta, was its 'reputation of being India's most leftist and turbulent city.' The turbulence was packed away when the city played host; the people took over and transformed a formal visit into, as Rosenthal wrote, 'the welcoming crush of one of the largest crowds in Indian history'. 'More than 2,000,000 Bengalis turned out to greet Soviet Premier Nikolai A. Bulganin and Communist party chief Nikita S. Khrushchev and turned a day of welcome into a security officer's nightmare,' he wrote. Calcutta-Kolkata's police experienced in managing huge shoving, pushing, excited and determined crowds had to rescue Krushchev and Bulganin from the car in which they were travelling and put them into a secure police van. The crowds remained an index of the size of mobilisations by political parties for decades to come. Nelson Mandela also visited the city. So did Yasser Arafat. The public receptions were exceptional. West Bengal and the city always converged at the reception venues, regardless of the effort it may have been to travel from other districts into Kolkata, on packed trains – even the 27 special trains that ran for the Krushchev-Bulganin visit. When the first democratic election, following the end of monarchy, in Nepal was won by the Left coalition headed by Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) and Pushpa Kamal Dahal, alias Prachanda, a contingent of its leaders had arrived in Kolkata to receive a hero's welcome at Esplanade East on August 15, 2008. The victory was celebrated in Kathmandu and Kolkata, almost as though Esplanade East was a rally space in Nepal, except for the fact that the crowds who clogged the thoroughfare were Bengalis and resident Nepalese. Kolkata knew how to make itself a vibrant extension of whatever was happening in the world. It broke the tall window panes of the American Centre in 1968, as thousands of students and anti-American pro-Vietnam rallyists took to the streets, protesting the visit of Robert Mcnamara, then US Secretary of Defence, and a key figure in the decision to use Agent Orange, increase bombing and escalate the intensity of the war in Vietnam. It knew it had to make itself seen and heard when relief ships carrying wheat from Punjab – some donated and some purchased – were flagged off from Haldia port to Cuba after tougher US sanctions were imposed in 1992. Like the characters in Badal Sircar's play, the horizon of Kolkata, like that of its immensely aware, educated and conscientious middle class, seems to have closed in on itself. The tendency to behave like frogs in the well was always there. Vivekanda used the word Kupamanduka to describe the Indian condition, whereas conscience keeper and the voice of the Bengali spirit, Rabindranath Tagore lamented that Bengal as the mother had nurtured Bengalis, not humanity.
Time of India
10-06-2025
- Politics
- Time of India
Hyphen-hype
A former associate editor with the Times of India, Jug Suraiya writes two regular columns for the print edition, Jugular Vein, which appears every Friday, and Second Opinion, which appears on Wednesdays. His blog takes a contrarian view of topical and timeless issues, political, social, economic and speculative. LESS ... MORE The weaponisation of a commonly used mark of punctuation, and how best to counter it The minister of Punctuation, Propaganda, and Fake News was addressing his aides and assorted flunkies. There is good news and there is bad news, said the minister. First, the good news. The good news is that our Operation Hyphen worked even better than we anticipated. The terror attack we masterminded triggered an inevitable response from The Adversary who promptly launched multiple strikes against the terrorist training camps we've established. So far so good, said the minister, while his aides and assorted flunkies nodded in obsequious agreement. With the escalation of hostilities which we so cunningly had provoked, international attention, not to mention alarm, got focused on the face-off between us and the adversary, as we had planned, said the minister. This was the good news, he continued. Our Operation Hyphen was crowned with success because in the eyes of the international community we and the adversary got re-hyphenated. Or, to be more precise, clarified the minister, we and the adversary got re-re-hyphenated, after having been repeatedly de-de-hyphenated. The hyphen, explained the minister, which is not to be confused with the N dash or the M dash, or the minus sign which it resembles, is one heck of a juju of a punctuation mark. Its name derives from the Greek 'Huphen', which in late Latin became 'hyphen' and means 'together'. The first recorded use of the hyphen to join two words, and by implication, give them equal value or status was by Dionysus Thrax, the great Greek grammarian (170-90BC), pronounced the minister. Thanks to the hyphen we got equated with The Adversary, even though we are a bankrupt military dictatorship and The Adversary is the world's most populous democracy and the fifth-largest economy to boot, he gloated. That's good news, he said. Unfortunately, he continued, the bad news is that The Adversary has made it abundantly clear to all concerned that to counter our hyphen, if necessary it is ready to come up with an even bigger juju of a punctuation mark: the Full Stop… Facebook Twitter Linkedin Email Disclaimer Views expressed above are the author's own.
Irish Independent
28-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Independent
Madeleine Keane on books: Stars descend for festival season and Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year announced
We're in full festival swing. After 10 (mostly) sun-drenched days, a superb International Literature Festival Dublin concluded last weekend. A personal highlight was interviewing Michael Crummey. The charming Canadian won the Dublin Literary Award (worth €100,000) for his dark, compelling masterpiece The Adversary. Kudos too to Dublin City Libraries who sponsor this life-changing prize. Register for free to read this story Register and create a profile to get access to our free stories. You'll also unlock more free stories each week.
Irish Times
24-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
Dublin Literary Award winner Michael Crummey on losing his belief in redemption: ‘It feels like a pretty dark time'
'I'm dealing with a pretty bad case of impostor syndrome at the moment. I mean, I'm thrilled out of my mind, of course, but I just can't quite believe it yet.' Author Michael Crummey has just found out he's this year's winner of the Dublin Literary Award . Sponsored by Dublin City Council , the prize is unique in that nominations are submitted by librarians and readers from a network of libraries around the world. It also offers a uniquely large prize pot: the winner receives €100,000. Having been longlisted four times (in 2003, for River Thieves, in 2007, for The Wreckage, in 2016, for Sweetland, and in 2021, for The Innocents), and shortlisted once before (in 2011, for Galore), Crummey says he 'made a point of not spending that money in my head when I was shortlisted'. Also, he was up against fierce competition this year – the shortlist included the Booker Prize -winning Prophet Song, by Irish author Paul Lynch , and the Booker-shortlisted and National Book Award-winning James, by Percival Everett . Now that he can start counting his chickens, Crummey says he'd like to 'give a little chunk of money to both of our daughters, which I've never had the ability to do before. And my wife and I have some things around our house that we would like to get done.' READ MORE The 59-year-old speaks via video call from said house in his native Newfoundland, where the winning novel, The Adversary , is set. In fact, all of Crummey's six novels so far are set on the east-Canadian island. 'When I started out, I really felt the desire to try to get this place on paper,' he says. 'Newfoundland was largely an oral culture right up until my parents' generation ... There were a handful of Newfoundland writers in the generation before us, but they were outliers – they were so rare that there was no such thing as a literature of Newfoundland.' But another reason he's compelled to write about the place is that it's simply 'the most interesting place I've ever been'. 'Because it's an island, and has been isolated for so long, it's a place and people unto itself. The people here had to rely on themselves in so many ways: for survival, first of all, and also just to make a life for themselves, to entertain themselves, to build a world.' We speak about the Irish influence on the island, which he says is 'palpable in just about every community'. [ Newfoundland communities are 'most Irish' outside Ireland, genetic study finds Opens in new window ] 'There's what they call the Irish loop on the Avalon [Peninsula], and those communities are almost 100 per cent Irish. The mayor of Waterford was over here a number of years ago, and he said when he was on the southern shore of Avalon, he felt like he was in Waterford – just hearing people speak, and their names, everything. There's a non-broken line of descent from those original Irish settlers.' Michael Crummey: 'I don't know if I would have written a book like The Adversary 20 years ago. It feels to me like the world is embracing ideas and people who feel like violence and cruelty and disdain for people who have less is to be celebrated.' Photograph: Chris Bellew/Fennell Photography The early 19th century, a period during which many of these settlers were arriving to work as labourers, is the setting for The Adversary. A Cain and Abel-inspired fable, the book tells of a feuding brother and sister in the harbour town of Mockbeggar, a place whose harsh climate and corrupt power systems make life a fight for survival. The sister, Widow Caine, wears men's clothing, and will resort to any means to secure the kind of power and agency enjoyed by her brutish brother Abe, who is also fixated upon his own sense of importance and superiority. Though it can be read as a stand-alone, Crummey says he wrote The Adversary as a companion piece to his previous novel, The Innocents, which told of a brother and sister orphaned and left alone in a small cove not far from Mockbeggar. 'I've always thought that the engine of that book was their love in the circumstance that they find themselves in. But because the book was called The Innocents, I kept thinking about Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience, and I started to wonder, could I do what he did where he took Songs of Innocence and flipped it on its head? I think he said he was writing those sequences to show the two contrary natures of the human soul. So really, The Adversary was a deliberate attempt to write the worst of who we are as human beings.' You just have to look at people like Trump and Putin and Netanyahu – the list is endless. I think they are who they appear to be … In most cases, they get worse — Michael Crummey The present age, in which 'the worst of who we are as human beings is on the ascendance, particularly in the political realm' was part of what gave rise to the story, Crummey says. 'It feels like a pretty dark time. I don't know if I would have written a book like The Adversary 20 years ago ... It feels to me like the world is embracing ideas and people who feel like violence and cruelty and disdain for people who have less is to be celebrated.' While writing, Crummey deliberately avoided a redemption arc for his central characters. And while Caine and Abe are adversaries, this is not a hero/anti-hero set-up. Rather, both central characters are anti-heroes. Narratively, this presented a challenge: how do you write characters who don't change? Crummey's approach was to turn the focus to the characters around the Widow and her brother. 'It's about what happens when you find yourself in the orbit of a black hole, and how everyone, in the end, gets pulled into that abyss.' He likens the scenario to Trump's relationship with the United States. 'When he was elected the first time, endless numbers of commentators said, 'We don't have to worry too much because there will be adults in the room, and they will curb the worst of his impulses.' And, of course, they all left or got fired or else decided [to] get on the train and become enablers. And that's what happens in this novel. People either decide to get on the train, or they're pushed aside, or destroyed.' The current political climate has made Crummey 'more misanthropic' than he used to be, he says. I have always said that ignorance has been my best friend in this whole process - not knowing how bad I was at the start, not knowing how long it was all going to take — Michael Crummey 'I've lost the ability to believe that redemption, or a personal change, can come over anybody. You just have to look at people like Trump and Putin and Netanyahu – the list is endless. I think they are who they appear to be ... In most cases, they get worse, as well.' Misanthropic may be the word he uses to describe himself but across the screen Crummey seems a gentle and open type, with endless passion for his work. Michael Crummey likens his narrative approach in The Adversary to Trump's relationship with the US: 'People either decide to get on the train, or they're pushed aside, or destroyed' Writing, he says, 'felt like a vocation from the beginning, but a ridiculous vocation. It felt a bit like saying, well, I want to collect bottle caps for a living.' Growing up, he followed his mother's influence and became 'the reader in the family', but it wasn't until he went to university to study English that writing became a serious pursuit. Poetry came first, then prose. Through his 20s, he worked 'crappy jobs' to support his vocation, publishing in journals and honing his craft, before releasing his debut collection of poetry, Arguments with Gravity, when he was 30. His debut short story collection, Flesh and Blood, came soon after. 'I think if someone had told me when I started out that it would be 13 or 14 years before I published my first book, I might have given it up or not started. But I have always said that ignorance has been my best friend in this whole process, you know, not knowing how bad I was at the start, not knowing how long it was all going to take.' [ Paul Durcan: 'Poetry was a gift that he loved to give others' Opens in new window ] Crummey's early work saw much success, including several award nominations and wins, but it wasn't until his third novel, Galore, that he began to feel he knew what he was doing as a writer. 'I don't know any writers who don't struggle with a sense of impostor syndrome,' he says. '[Being a writer] feels like it's something you keep having to prove to yourself. But I think [Galore] was the first time I wrote a book where I felt that's the book I was meant to write, and everything I had done up to that point felt it was leading me to a place where I was capable of writing that book.' The only problem with such an achievement, of course, was how to follow it. 'For a long time, I did feel like that novel was a roadblock. I'd written the book I wanted to write, so what do you do after that? But luckily, I have carried on, partly because I'm no good at anything else.' Of late, Crummey has been working on a poetry collection and some film scripts, though he also says he's 'starting to sneak back into that novel space in my head'. We joke that having won the award, all of that will go out the window. 'Now that I have some laurels to rest on, maybe I should just rest on my laurels,' he laughs. 'But I quit my day job about 25 years ago, and that felt like a fairly reckless thing to do. It always felt temporary. But I'm starting to think – I'm almost at retirement age – and I am starting to think I might make it through and as a writer. There's no certificate to put on your wall [to say you've qualified], but maybe that's the real sense of accomplishment and blessing – to think: no, this is it, this is my life, and I'll be able to do it until I decide I'm done with it.' The Adversary by Michael Crummey is published by Vintage Canada. Michael Crummey is the 30th winner of The Dublin Literary Award, sponsored by Dublin City Council.
Extra.ie
23-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Extra.ie
Canadian author Michael Crummey wins Dublin Literary Award for The Adversary
Michael Crummey, a Canadian author, has earned this year's Dublin Literary Award for his book The Adversary. Sponsored by Dublin City Council, books are nominated by public libraries across the globe, recognising both writers and translators. This year marked the awards' 30th year running. The prize of 100,000 makes this honour the most valuable annual prize for a single work of fiction published in English. 'To have won the Dublin Literary Award leaves me thrilled and deeply, deeply grateful, said Crummey. 'It's something I will carry with me always.' 'I would not be here today without the Buchans Public Library, the library in my hometown. It's like a small mining town, maybe 1,500 people down 70km of a dead-end road. But the library was the place where I found the world outside my town, and it just gave me such a sense of possibility. So the fact that the Newfoundland public libraries that nominated the book for this award are still opening me up to the world and sending me out into the world that just makes me so thrilled.' The Adversary is set in an isolated outpost, where an act of sabotage sends a man and a woman down a long road of mistrust and revenge. It was nominated by Newfoundland and Labrador libraries in Canada, and chosen from a shortlist of six novels from Argentina, Ireland, the Netherlands and the US. The longlist of 71 books was nominated by 83 libraries from 34 countries. At Dublin's International Literature Festival, Lord Mayor and Patron of the Award Emma Blain announced the winner alongside Dublin City Council CEO Richard Shakespeare. 'The award celebrating 30 years is a source of pride for us in our UNESCO City of Literature, said Shakespeare. It has supported writers, translators and readers over the years, and brings the world closer through the power of imaginative storytelling.'
