PART-II
The Roots Below and the Shoots Sprouting
From the immediate next generation we find Trinity Rai, Yumita Rai, Ayushri Subba, Sashi Sherpa and others, and again, missed names are inadvertent. One name that most people may not be aware of is Karma Choda Bhutia, whose remarkable works I have had the opportunity to edit, and whose books will be shortly published. We shall come to him later, and there is a reason behind that.
Yumita’s poems anthology And the Hills Chose to Speak has set a milestone in poetry from the hills, and though she is from Darjeeling, but yes, going by history, Darjeeling was a part of Sikkim anyway, and we are lucky to have her now settled in Sikkim. The best thing about the power of her poetry us that it influenced a very young girl, just 15, write her first poem!
And close on their heels comes the GenNext. At the moment we have Yangchen Lhamu, Karma Bhutia and Samson Lama. But they are not all that the Sikkimese renaissance has in its arsenal. We know of some other fantastic talents who are being readied at the moment. They are the U-19 of Sikkimese literature and we shall soon bring them to the fore in Sikkim Knowledge Group.
Here we must note the contributions of stalwarts from other fields of social fermentation: photography, paintings, social activation, environmental activism, etc.
As one can recall, the Bengal renaissance included other forms of intellectual fermentation in the arts. In that sense we have Meena Ongmu, Ajit Sharma, Wangyal Dorjee Barfungpa and Cooldeep Mukhiya, whose photographic works are nothing less than divinely inspired, and they expose to the world Sikkim’s intrinsic – and still intact fabulous spiritual wealth. In fact, the formation of the Photographic Club of Sikkim itself is a long jump in this renaissance.
Then there are others like Dr Namgyal T Sherpa, whose contribution is intangible and beautiful beyond description. Interestingly, there are two persons who stride the political and literary worlds with consummate ease. One is Narsing Nirzat, a retired forest department official and a wild card entry into secular political bashing of die-hard fundamentalists; the other is Dr Dilip Pandey, who is a travel writer, commentator and a writer and promoter of young writing talents, who works with the human resources department.
In the world of environmental activism there is the unbeatable couple, Ganden and Usha Lachungpa, and if taken as a single unit, they are the encyclopaedia of Sikkimese wildlife, both flora and fauna. There is also a rare birder, Suraj Gurung, whose first coffee table book is making waves. And nothing less than wonder strikes me when I read about the Save Teesta movement’s younger lot.
In sports, there is the humane manager, Lobsang Tenzing, whose role in cricket in Sikkim has been accentuated by his sterling performance as India’s U-19 team manager abroad.
Not to forget two other persons of entirely different age brackets and work areas: one is the most important of Sikkim’s scholars today: PT Gyamtso, whose depth of knowledge in the history of Sikkim is mesmerising. And along with him, one must mention young Shital Pradhan, who is an unparalleled curator of Sikkim and a researcher per excellence on off beat subjects. Philately, numismatics, collection of rare photos to research article: Shital is a wonder.
In the sphere of architecture, there is the indefatigable Kailash Pradhan, who also brings to the table a unique political consciousness that is holistic but has been blackballed largely by the establishment. And the works of Prava Rai and Ayushri Subba in spreading the reading habit amongst children, often of meagre financial backgrounds, is something which is yet not fully understood.
The contributions of any of these can take pages upon pages, but they form a sort of bedrock of the renaissance. No essay on this revolution in the offing – however small – can afford to exclude these luminaries, for that would mean excluding the basis on which such a renaissance must stand.
Back to Literature
But our focus in this essay is more on literature. I was first exposed to that by young Sashi Sherpa, whose book on four women living in Delhi was the first literary work from Sikkim I had the pleasure of editing and titling (Four Blades of Grass). It was Sashi, once a reporter in Weekend Review that I edited, who told me about Pankaj Giri and Trinity Rai, and Trinity put me in touch with Yumita Rai. And later, she also put me in touch with both Yangchen Lhamu and Karma Doma Bhutia.
Though Sashi happens to be my protegee, what marks these others whom I found later is a stark difference. Sashi’s novel was marvellously crafted, and yet, she was writing about things outside Sikkim. But Pankaj, Parshu, Kishan, Jiwan Rai, Ashim Basnet, and of course, Trinity and others, are producing Sikkimese literature on Sikkim.
Their themes, characters, landscapes of the happenings and the mental landscapes of their characters are all so rooted in and on Sikkim, that these writers will form the literary bulwark of the literary renaissance of Sikkim.
I shall start with Parshu Dahal because that is the first Sikkimese literature that I came across, and not for any other reason. I was told of his book of short stories, The Lama Who Never Was, and when I read it, I found that it is almost Chekovesque. They were all rooted in Sikkimese ruralities. And what remarkable beauty, what compassion with which the writer looks upon the ills of his own motherland. Each of the stories are worth making a Sikkimese film on, and had I had the dough, I’d make them myself. May be I shall do a larger review of his book later, but I shall say unequivocally that one needs to read Parshu’s stories to understand Sikkim’s backwaters.
I shall jump over here to Trinity Rai’s work, simply because these differ from Parshu’s in their setting: Parshu, a senior police official, lives in the villages; Trinity brings the life of urban Sikkim to focus. Her short stories are micro in size, none more than 1,200 words. And yet, the nuances that she breaks into of urban Sikkim is unique. Love life is one of her major areas of work, but she also has some remarkable socially critical stories, and these too carry the aroma of urban Sikkim. And she, like Parshu, also deserves a full review of her works.
Sashi had mentioned to me about Pankaj Giri, and when Karma Choda Bhutia effused about his latest, The Unforgettable Woman, I felt compelled to buy that. And what a book it is! Since I have already reviewed that book, I shall not go into its depth, but suffice it to say that Parshu, Pankaj and Trinity share the same characteristics: the smell of the rain falling on the parched Sikkimese soil, the aroma of the ferns and ripening cardamom bushes, the sounds of crickets and the paramount presence of the undying reverence for Mount Khangchendzonga.
The reason I mentioned Anton Chekov in Parshu Dahal’s context – and I can bring in Tagore and Sharat Chandra Chatterjee (or Dickens and Tolstoy) into this discussion as well – is that these all-time greats represent their times, their society, their lifestyles and their social concerns. In fact, Trinity, Parshu and Pankaj bring to the table varieties of typically Sikkimese literary buffet.
Ashim Basnet’s book, The Eyes and Jiwan Rai’s Chase of the Past are unique and again, very Sikkimese. Like Parshu and Trinity, Ashim and Juwan also differ in their settings: Jiwan Rai is focussed on rural Sikkim while Ashim takes his Sikkimese characters out to Calcutta where we see their Sikkimese consciousness in a foreign context. I shall excuse myself from commenting on them because frankly, I have not been able to finish either. But again, Jiwan Rai is more rural and Ashim Basnet more urban, much like Parshu and Trinity are. I am committing myself to reviewing these two books in the near future.
Need for a Salon
But the very fact that all these authors have come up almost back-to-back and without sharing ideas a-priory, but got to meet each other later, reflects one very startling thing: that there is a range of talented writers who share the same Sikkimese concerns, especially social.
This again is a hallmark of any renaissance anywhere. No one organised them and handed them a Ten Commandments of literary awakening. A dominant thought process surfaces during a critical juncture in the life of a society, and the thought grows like a vineyard. Botticelli did not consult Michael Angelo or Da Vinci before painting “The Birth of Venus”, and yet, the same concerns, the same style and the same social roots were infused in that European Renaissance.
The fact that each of these Sikkimese brilliants have independently awakened themselves marks out that peculiar conjunction of crises of Sikkimese society today, and I shall prove this by a singular example.
Karma Choda Bhutia is a forty-something brilliant young man born to an immensely rich family from Ravangla, I happened to meet him four years ago at his resort, and he started discussing his ideas about film script writing. He told me three stories, each surpassing the other in beauty.
Eventually, we worked together on a novel which we later named Terma: The Wisdom Gem. In this, a young Lepcha man loses his wife to Covid 19 and enraged, the man starts out to ‘kill’ Covid itself and goes to search for a Terma, one of the secret prescriptions left hidden by Guru Padmasambhava to deal with future apocalypses.
His search takes him from Pemayangtse monastery to Borong, the four holy caves, and then to a remote village on the way to Tholung Goen, where he thinks the terma might be hidden. But in that village, he meets a Lepcha shaman, who explains that there is no Covid in their village, nor shall there ever be, because they had retained the best of human traditions alive. And to the young man’s question where the terma might be, the Lepcha bonthing points out to the youth himself.
The stunned young man then realises that Covid itself is the terma, a secret prescription that is teaching humanity the value and need for returning to a less materialistic, less all-devouring, consumptive lifestyle that we pride as being “modern”.
Notwithstanding the brilliance of the ide itself, the reason I mention Choda’s book is this is perhaps the summation of the combined concerns of Pankaj, Parshu, Trinity, Khangchen, Karma Doma Bhutia and others who have all risen virtually on the shoulders of each other – without realising that – at this very critical juncture of Sikkim as a society: the fall of the ideals of honesty, truth, compassion and the understanding of impermanence. I shall write my reviews of Trinity, Parshu, Jiwan and Ashim within these paradigms.
No one is fool enough to suggest that any of these writers can alone carry the renaissance on her or his own. And this is the need for a salon, a system that was widespread in the literary and artistic worlds of France in the 18th and 19th centuries. A salon is a private gathering of select individuals with shared social concerns, where such issues as mentioned above are discussed.
In fact, under our last crowned Chogyal, there was such a formation which discussed various political and social issues. Out of that salon had arisen quite a few reform actions in the erstwhile kingdom.
I propose strongly that such a salon be created by these intellectuals themselves, may be convened by a more senior person, and the name foremost in my mind is the octogenarian Mr PT Gyamtso. And the sooner we get this done, the better for Sikkim to give the full blast of a much needed renaissance.
(Concluded)
(Sujit Chakraborty is Founder-Editor & Admin, Sikkim Knowledge Group https://www.facebook.com/groups/1016930669122164)