Sukumar Ray
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Abol Tobol
Sandip Roy, Oct 22, 2023: The Times of India
When the great actor Soumitra Chatterjee was asked what two books he would take with him to the afterlife, he said one would be Rabindranath Tagore’s ‘Gitabitan’. The other he chose was ‘Abol Tabol’, the legendary book of Bengali nonsense verse by Sukumar Ray. Curiously, his last recordings before Chatterjee’s own death were four poems from ‘Abol Tabol’.
‘Abol Tabol’ recently turned a century old but it remains not just beloved, but as fresh as it appeared in 1923. The Ramgorurer chhana is still forbidden from laughing. The rotund Kumropotash lives by all manner of peculiar rules. The babu who thinks someone has stolen his moustache is as ridiculous as ever.
The wordplay appears to defy translation but most of the 53 poems have been translated and transcreated by several eminent writers including Sukumar Ray’s filmmaker son Satyajit. That edition from Kolkata-based Writers Workshop included a frontispiece photo graph of baby Satyajit on his mother’s lap. Satyajit was just two when Sukumar died in Kolkata at the age of 35 in 1923. Nine days later, ‘Abol Tabol’, which he had painstakingly edited and proofed from his sickbed, was published.
Its longevity might be testimony to the power of sheer nonsense. Academic Sukanta Chaudhuri, who did the first full-fledged translation of ‘Abol Tabol’, says the “quality of great nonsense literature is that it’s both sense and nonsense. It appeals at two levels even to the adult and the child.” That certainly holds true for ‘Abol Tabol’.
Yet its appeal could have faded as times and tastes change. We grow up and abandon the things that gave us pleasure as children. But ‘Abol Tabol’ never tried to be fashionable or woke, so it never went out of fashion. Perhaps the real reason ‘Abol Tabol’ remains so vibrantly alive is that Ramgorurer chhaanas and Kumropotashes still walk among us. The babus and bureaucrats, the attention-seekers and wannabes, the pompous and the pretentious were all types that Ray skewered with relish. We cannot but chuckle watching them get their comeuppance in his rhymes and illustrations. When Ray’s pugilists in boots and dhotis erupt into fisticuffs because one called white red and snored all night and tell each other “Choprao tum speak ti not” we might well be witnessing a 1923 Twitter/X fight. Except, even at his most sardonic, Sukumar Ray was never a troll. Poet Sampurna Chattarji, who also translated Ray, says his poems provided “that much needed thing (especially these days) — a place of sanctuary, refuge, laughter — even: escape.”
The rhymes are so catchy they seem deceptively simple. But Michael Heyman, who edited ‘The Tenth Rasa An Anthology of Indian Nonsense’, says even Rabindranath Tagore tried his hand at nonsense verse and then admitted Ray’s was better. Tagore talked about baal rasa (the tenth rasa) as something “pure and childlike,” says Heyman. Nonsense, as Ray envisioned it, was about kheyaal or whimsy. That, says Heyman, is actually a “complex concept that bridges, in some ways, the child and the adult, silliness and seriousness, play and contemplation.”
Ray is often compared to Edward Lear. And while he did turn Lear’s Father William into an 88-year-old man who liked to dance upside down, there is never a sense that he is in any way trying to be the Indian Lear. His poetry is gleefully and madly Bengali. Lear’s creatures live in a world of fantastic fairy tales but even the strangest creatures Ray creates could live right next door to me in Kolkata. They even come with aunts and uncles. That’s why it’s appropriate that when a Durga Puja pandal from Nabin Pally club in North Kolkata paid tribute to the book this year, it incorporated the neighbourhood’s buildings into the fun. All the houses were painted white with black outlines depicting arches, balconies and balustrades and, of course, a menagerie of characters from the book.
Unlike many things celebrating centenaries, ‘Abol Tabol’ has not been pickled in nostalgia. That’s because for all its Bengaliness, it’s never parochial. Poet Ranjit Hoskote says the Ray family’s contribution to a modern Indian culture “was at once intensely engaged with the local and cosmopol itan in its expansiveness.” That’s why even now, 100 years after the poems came out, Ray’s humour still helps us make sense of our daily lives. In Ray’s world of bizarre rules and rulings, “those who sneeze without permission are thrashed in gentle admonition”. His Baburam snakecharmer needs to provide two snakes that bite no one, never hiss and only eat milk and rice. The minister of Bombagarh sits on the king’s lap and plays a pot. Sukumar Ray’s nonsense keeps making more and more sense in the 21st century. That is why it is only fitting that instead of marking 100 years of Sukumar Ray’s death, we are celebrating 100 years of Abol Tabol’s life.
