The Tale of Hansuli Turn

Tarashankar Bandyopadhyay, Ben Conisbee Baer

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780231520225
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Asian Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

A terrifying sound disturbs the peace of Hansuli Turn, a forest village in Bengal, and the community splits as to its meaning. Does it herald the apocalyptic departure of the gods or is there a more rational explanation? The Kahars, inhabitants of Hansuli Turn, belong to an untouchable "criminal tribe" soon to be epically transformed by the effects of World War II and India's independence movement. Their headman, Bonwari, upholds the ethics of an older time, but his fragile philosophy proves no match for the overpowering machines of war. As Bonwari and the village elders come to believe the gods have abandoned them, younger villagers led by the rebel Karali look for other meanings and a different way of life.

As the two factions fight, codes of authority, religion, sex, and society begin to break down, and amid deadly conflict and natural disaster, Karali seizes his chance to change his people's future. Sympathetic to the desires of both older and younger generations, Tarashankar Bandyopadhyay depicts a difficult transition in which a marginal caste fragments and mutates under the pressure of local and global forces. The novel's handling of the language of this rural society sets it apart from other works of its time, while the village's struggles anticipate the dilemmas of rural development, ecological and economic exploitation, and dalit militancy that would occupy the center of India's post-Independence politics.

Negotiating the colonial depredations of the 1939–45 war and the oppressions of an agrarian caste system, the Kahars both fear and desire the consequences of a revolutionized society and the loss of their culture within it. Lyrically rendered by one of India's great novelists, this story of one people's plight dramatizes the anxieties of a nation and the resistance of some to further marginalization.

Part

1

One

At night in the thick jungle of Hansuli Turn someone’s whistling. No one knows if the spirit’s a god or a demon. Everyone’s terrified. Especially the Kahars.

***

Almost at the midpoint of the Kopai river there’s a famous river bend called Hansuli Turn—meaning that where the river doubles back on itself in a very tight curve, its figure is just like a crescent-shaped hansuli necklace. In the rains, as it encircles the green fields, the hilly Kopai’s red earth-filled, water-brimming bend looks like a golden hansuli on a dark girl’s neck. In the spring months, when the water flows clean and clear, then it’s like a silver hansuli. That’s why the bend is called Hansuli Turn. Within the river girdle, surrounded by the thick bamboo groves of Hansuli Turn, the settlement of Bansbadi occupies about one hundred acres inside the ward of Jangol. North of Bansbadi, on the other side of a few small paddy fields, lies Jangol village. Bansbadi’s a small village. Around the four sides of two ponds are thirty or so Kahar huts. Genteel society in Jangol village—potter Sadgops, farmer Sadgops, spice-merchant-caste homes, as well as one barber-caste and two weaver-caste houses. Jangol’s boundaries are broad; maybe one and a half thousand acres of good cropland, and lots of fallow too—about a hundred and fifty acres of it abandoned on the Saheb Tracts that used to belong to the English indigo planters.

Recently the respectable caste-Hindu masters, the gentlefolk of Jangol village, have had quite a fright. The Kahars of the little hundred-acre-bounded Bansbadi village, which is to say Hansuli Turn’s Kahars, said—The good sirs are “scairt.” Meaning scared. They would be. It seems someone’s whistling at night. For a few days the whistle came from exactly midway between Jangol and Bansbadi, from the first westward curve of that Hansuli Turn—thick with wood-apple and saora trees, a terrifying place for ordinary mortals, the Brahmin ogre’s den. Then for a few days it rose from the thorn-infested jungle on the Kopai riverbank on Jangol’s eastern side. Then for a few days the whistle rose from a little farther off—moved toward Hansuli Turn. Now the whistle rises from somewhere in the middle of Bansbadi’s bamboo groves.

The gents have done a lot of investigating. They blasted gunshots into the night, went yelling out of the village a couple of nights with guns, sticks, clubs; came, went, and looked all around in the light of powerful, footlong flashlights. Yet not a clue did they find. But the whistle still rang out nonstop. The police station is twenty or thirty miles away. It was reported there too. Sub-Inspector came for a few nights, but he couldn’t get a single lead either. Yet it’s true that the sound keeps circling around the riverbank. Hearing all this, he made a conjecture.

Sub-Inspector is from East Bengal—he said, something’s happening in the river. “Life by a river, year-long worry-giver.” Think, ruminate a while. If you mull it over then you’ll get it.

“Life by a river, year-long worry-giver”—the phrase is obviously a saying from oral tradition, coming down through the generations in the land. It’s never a false statement, but just as the land splits the sayings split too, and thus, in Jangol village of Hansuli Turn’s Bansbadi, this saying doesn’t fit right. It doesn’t fit this western region of Bengal. It was meant for that other region of Bengal. A member of the Ghosh family of Jangol village does business in Calcutta. He buys and sells coal, and also trades in jute. Sire Ghosh has been all around that other part of Bengal. He says—Now over that side’s a river country. Water and land all mixed up. Rivers running full a twelvemonth; tide comes in, water pours over riverbanks, brimming in green fields; flow tide then ebb tide, and the field water just going back down into the river; when the river course empties, banks surface. But it’s still a couple feet below the banks at most, no farther down. So what’s the river then, this or that, one or two? Like the flow of Ganges-Jamuna, dark and eerie; their folks get the shakes setting off to cross from one side to the other. And just one stream? Where one stream comes and joins from, where the flows split and go—can’t tell. It’s like a seven-stranded water necklace—not a hansuli! River bends ever end over there? “Eighteen Bender,” “Thirty Bender,” river looks different every turn. Betel and coconut trees both sides—not in rows—not orchards—like a forest. And so many other trees, so many creepers, so many flowers, if you haven’t seen you couldn’t imagine. You want to see more than you ever can. Narrow little creeks going from the big river into the thick coconut and betel forests, creek on creek. Tiny boats plying those creeks. Little villages of tin-roof bamboo-wattle huts hidden under coconut and betel shade. These narrow creeks go by one village and right through the middle of another—from one village right into the next. The little boats of that land are like our oxcarts. Harvest going up from field to yard by boat, going from yard to market, to trade post and harbor; this village’s folks going around in those same boats to their marriage kin in that village, newlywed girls going to their in-laws’ places, girls coming home to their parents’ places; groups of pals going to fairs and games. Farmers going to fields—going by boat too, sailing off alone with their sickles and plows in a boat. River with no end, no beginning, like the Milky Way in an autumn sky—sitting at the head of the tiny boats, like banana-stick rafts on that river, rudder gripped in left hand and armpit, scull in right hand and foot, moving along. Ghosh son bursting with talk about that land can’t say it all. Sitting on those riverbanks—’course it’s a worry.

As he speaks of worry, fear spreads in Ghosh son’s eyes—sometimes he gets goosebumps. If you go farther down, that seven-stranded necklace of a river merges into one again. Then the river is shoreless. As if the seven-stranded gold necklace around the neck of Lakshmi of Wealth has turned to the python’s grip on the neck of Monosha of the Snakes; river’s even hissing like a python. Rising, swelling, wave on wave, like the swaying of a thousand cobra hoods. With all this, sometimes a few bits of black cloud appear in the sky—flashes of lightning play right upon them, as if someone’s firebuilt fingers beat out the music of the “Terror Drummer” of those Black Clouds. Heaven and hell shake with the beat of his dreadlocks. Then the python flings and flings its huge shape and dances, striking with its thousand hoods—crazed in an orgy. Storm beats the river water. That storm washes everything away—homes and villages, trade posts and harbors—humans, cows, the insect world. Suddenly no tempest, no storm, everything seems to be peace and quiet, nothing anywhere—suddenly on the riverbank half a village stars to shudder and shake, turns and rolls straight over into the fathomless womb of the pythonlike river. Folk there have to keep one eye on the lap of the sky all year round—looking out for bits of black cloud; and the other eye to the earth’s breast, like sandalwood covered in green grass and crops—looking for signs of cracking. Yep, yearlong worries there, all right.

Sub-Inspector’s from that place, that’s why he said what he said. But Hansuli Turn’s an altogether different kind of place. Hansuli Turn’s a place of iron-willed earth. People battle with the earth here far more than with the river. If it’s “parchtime,” the height of cruel summer, that is, the river dries and turns to desert, sand as far as the eye can see—on one side water no more than knee-deep somehow trickles along, like a motherless little girl with feeble body and miserable face, somehow inching forward. Then earth becomes stone. Grass shrivels away, earth heats up like forged iron; hoes and shovels won’t cut, strike with a hoe or shovel and the blade bends; hit with a pickaxlike thing and it’ll cut a bit, but with each blow sparks fly. Waterways and lakes, ponds and tarns fill with cracks. Then it’s only the river that keeps folks going; it’s the river that gives water. Here, worry about the river isn’t yearlong.

Here, four months’ river worry. From Asharh to Ashwin, the rainy months. After Asharh, the motherless little girl grows up. Youth fills her body. Then suddenly one day she becomes a witch. Just as a Kahar girl suddenly fights with mother-father-brother-sister-in-law, curses the neighbors, leaves home for the village, hair flies loose, cloth drops from the shoulder, eyes spit fire, she pelts rocks at anyone who comes for her; runs off directionless, completely out of her mind, tarnishing family honor; so does that full river one day suddenly rise in flood. A witch incarnate! No mercy—no mercy, gone completely out of her mind, she takes off screaming and calling like naked Kali, raising a rumbling roar as if with a hundred mouths, directionless. Village, settlement, field, corpse-burning ground, carrion pit, from home’s Lakshmi shrine to garbage dump—she tramples and scatters whatever’s in her way as she goes. And for a day or two, even. Occasionally it’s massive; it’s four or five days later that good sense returns. When her rage passes, the Kahar girl sits quietly at the edge of the village, comes step by step into her backyard, lies down and weeps or sings softly, you can’t quite tell which—and just like this the Kopai comes down to her banks; having sprung her banks, she sinks a little below them and flows on with a gentle sound. She’ll do this six or seven times, no more, in the space of four months. Maybe once during that time, or perhaps once every two or three years, she’s yet crazier. The Kopai’s just like a Kahar lass.

But the girl’s done wrong, ruined honor. Even if Kopai floods don’t smash your home you do still suffer, indeed. When the water goes down, steam rises from the sodden fields; countryside fills with flies and mosquitoes. Humans move; above moving human heads, swarms of droning mosquitoes also move; human bodies shiver; bites bring up swollen welts on limbs. Flies sit in layers upon cows’ bodies; unable to dislodge them by tail swipes, cattle shake their horns nonstop, sometimes jump with all four legs in the air. Farmers help out; bind spliced palm leaves together like a broom, and with this swat flies and drive them off. Just a few days after, “maloyria” fever starts.

There’s more—misery of the Kopai’s flood. Every two or three years the Kopai hill river of the Santal Parganas suddenly floods. It’s called “Flash Flood,” and now and again a “gubagha,” a leopard, or two gets caught in that flood current, is washed down to these unlikely bends of Hansuli Turn, gets caught in the bamboo-grove edges of Bansbadi village’s riverbank. Sometimes dead, sometimes alive. If alive, the leopard makes a home in these bamboo groves. Then come bears; one or two a year of those bastards. Strange, those fellows, when dead, never remain trapped in the bamboo groves when they die. Live tigers hardly ever turn up; same with dead. In a whole generation there were two—one dead and one alive. The Ghoshes of Jangol pulled the dead one out and showed its skin to the district Saheb, thus gaining a gun. It was the Kahars who killed the live one; the spice merchants got a gun by showing its skin. If a bear comes it’s still the Kahars that kill; every flood time, if they see one on their searches of the bamboo groves after every flood, they give chase and kill with club, cudgel, spear, pike, bow and arrow, and celebrate, dancing wildly; transfixed by their own bravado, they down huge quantities of liquor. And it is here there are wild pigs that, in spite of the Kahars’ clubs, cudgels, spears, pikes, have set up a regular outpost. Not, of course, in Bansbadi’s bamboo thickets, but a bit farther away in the Saheb Tracts. With the ravages of the Kahars, they don’t get away with settling in the Bansbadi area. Their great gathering place is in the brushland, in the ruined offices of the indigo works. At night a horde of swine runs grunting along the river’s edge, digs up earth with tusks, eats roots. Now and then one or two are thrown off the horde and enter the village. Someone stumbling across them gets hurt. Then the Kahars take up arms against them. Not arms, traps. They have an amazing ruse for killing wild pigs. In the middle of two-foot strips of bamboo is tied a foot-long, strong, wiry cord with a sharpened hook at the end. As bait on the hook, banana and fermented liquor dregs. Ten or so of these things are scattered on path and field. Drawn by the sweet smell of liquor dregs, the damn pigs come snuffling along the ground and gobble them up with delight; hooks stick straight through their tongues or jaws. They then try to release the hooks by pulling with their hoofs—which has the opposite effect, as the hook’s wire enters the hoof cleft and the hoof cleft gets stuck on the bamboo strip at the end. At one end the hook catches in the tongue, at the other end a cord-yoked hoof catches on the bamboo strip; the poor piggy bastard has one leg up and stands there like that on three legs. In the morning, the Kahars all come with clubs in hand, beat the pig to death, and drag it off for a sacrificial feast.

Sometimes crocodiles appear too. Nearly all are fish-eating. When they come the crocodiles get down into the Jangol gentry’s fish-filled ponds. They don’t want to come up. Boom-bam, the gents bring rifles and fire bullets; the crocodile surfaces, dives, and sticks up its snout in a different corner. Sitting up on the banks, puffing their pipes, the Kahars watch with amusement; yet by the riverside of Hansuli Turn’s Bansbadi there are deeps where a huge, voracious man-and-cow-eating crocodile comes—folks here call it “ghariyaal.” Then the Kahars don’t sit quiet. They come out in a posse; yellow turmeric smeared all over, they carry spades, axes, staves, spears, and a very long bamboo pole with a rope noose tied on one end. All along the riverbanks they hunt for the crocodile’s den. If they find sign of the devil’s lair in a hole at the edge of the bank they excitedly block up the mouth of the hole while diggi...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Introduction
• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3
• Part 4
• Part 5
• Final Part
• Acknowledgments