writers have offered such terms as asangata shaitya (Panigrahi), alukuchi - malukuchi (J.R Das), ana^bana (Dash Benhur, J.R Das). According to Niranjan Behera, the Bathudi tribe of Mayurbhanj call naughty and obstinate boys and girls ‘ bai'jhaia ’. He also suggests that the word bai refers to madness or whim, and tagged to an alliterative nonsense, the resulting term, bai'jhaia , is indeed closest to the idea of nonsense. 18
Some Indian formulations of nonsense make interesting reading. Somehow, the term is seen as pejorative and as a genre some established writers consider it infra dig to experiment with nonsense. Sometimes an apologia is also pressed into service. Tagore, for example, offered not one but two elaborate explanations, when his nonsense collection, Khapchhada (1937) was published. The title means incongruity/mismatch, but it is also a pun on chhoda. Imagining an audience who had purportedly urged him to write non-serious verse, he says,
You urge me to write simply
but it isn’t simple at all to write simply.
... It is difficult to write nonsense . . .
The term that I translate here as ‘nonsense’ is ‘jaa-taa’, which literally means balderdash but is not being used here pejoratively. It is an equivalent of abol tabol. If he is equivocating here about his attempt to write nonsense, it may have been because such poetry was seen as childish, not behoving—in his own self-image—a writer of his stature. In 1937 he writes equally apologetically in his second prefatory verse addressed to Rajshekhar Basu whose knowledge of Sanskrit was legendary. Tagore invokes the high canonical traditions with numerous allusions to Puranic myths and justifies the high status of nonsense.
Should you see that the outer covering has come off the old man.
If his utterances do not have any bearing on sense, and his mind is crazy,
18 Behera’s letters to the author dated 2 February 2004 and 1 November 2004.
Or, that it has reached the furthest limits of caprice, and you blame it all on his education,
Then shall I speak of why Brahma has four faces.
Then he goes on to recount the function of the four faces of Brahma, and concludes,
In the fourth, waves of excitement break the dam of sanity.
From such an impact, p’haps nonsense swirls up.
Thus, the disciple of Brahma, the poet says,
‘No matter how much you laugh at me It will be on record
That imagination plays with creativity But it is no less crazy about miscreation!’ 19
This shows how Tagore infuses an element of high seriousness into nonsense, even if his admirers do not take these efforts seriously. His Khapchhada is not very often talked about and it has remained untranslated as a whole.
In his autobiography, Kalindi Charan Panigrahi, a major Indian poet who wrote in Oriya, recalls how he along with some friends like Annada Sankar Ray (who as a Bengali must have borrowed the concept from Sukumar Ray) formed the ‘Nonsense Club’ in Cuttack in the 1920s. He thinks of nonsense as that which ‘pleases us by a sequence of sweet sounding word patterns or syntax but through contradiction and paradox, or incongruity or absurdity’. He calls those literary creations ‘Nonsense’ which draw their inspiration from the traditional Oriya ‘nanabaya geeta ’ or those children’s rhymes and folk tales which fill the young and old alike with the kind of rasa described above (Panigrahi, 369). More recently, Bengali poets and critics like Sankho Ghosh and Shivaji Bandopadhyay have dealt with the subject of nonsense in book'length studies. Ghosh entitles his book Kalpanar Hysteria (The Hysteria of
19 Rabindranath Tagore, Rabindra Rachanabali Janma Shatabarshiki Edition, Vol. 3, Calcutta: Government of West Bengal, 1960, 439-40.
Imagination), which in itself offers a view of nonsense as imagination run wild, not very different from Tagore’s interpretation of the source of nonsense as the torrential eloquence of‘miscreation’.
Traditional Indian nonsense has now been collected and printed in book form in different Indian languages. But they are not museum pieces. They survive to this day mainly through regional oral and folk traditions and continue to be part of the living tradition in rural India. They have also mutated through their appropriation by the stage, modem and postmodern arts, as well as FM radio, advertisement and TV As the inclusion of dialogues and songs from Bollywood shows, Indian nonsense is alive and well. The process started by Sukumar Ray when he adopted nonsense for the stage plays Jhalapala and Lakshmaner Shaktisel has progressed to reach Indian theatre, cinema, and beyond. With the Indianization of MTV, the ultimate symbol of postmodernist culture, nonsense has returned to its rightful position in mass consciousness.
I would like to conclude by invoking here Adi Sankaracharya’s formulation in his Sanskrit treatise I: A rtham anartham bhabaya nityam . It is taken usually as an indictment of materialist aspirations: ‘Remember always that artha (money) is the source of all anartha (calamity).’ But it also could mean ‘ artha (meaning) is the source of all anartham (trouble)’, ‘ artha (meaning) is the source of all anartham (non-meaning)’, or, even, ‘meaning is contrary to its own self’. The saying takes us back to what we started with about the category ‘Indian nonsense’—that it is part of India’s traditional epistemology, and second, nonsense, like parody, is caused as much through authorial intention as through readerly intervention.
Sumanyu Satpathy