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Parallel reading of history from the subaltern point of view is not only possible, but it also often proves to be revealing. It often unearths a new discourse, which challenges the canonized history or even subverts it. This paper offers a reading of a recent Bhasa (Bangla) novel Machh Master (The Expert Angler) where the Naxalite Movement that rocked Bengal in the sixties, has been narrated and analysed from the viewpoint of one dalit subaltern. The novel attempts to create a binary between this ‘uncorrupted’ world/mode of existence and the civilized, sophisticated, intellectual, but essentially ‘corrupted’ urban world. In this natural savage world and its eco-system, the urban, elitist Naxalite movement turns out to be nothing but an imposition and an intrusion. At the end, disillusioned Neul detaches himself from this movement, goes back to, and embraces Nature in a desperate bid to get back his pre-lapserian mode of existence. Neel, chief agent of the Naxalite movement, too is influenced by these children of Mother Nature, and undergoes a transformation. This paper explores this interesting role of Nature in this new reading of the history of mankind. Right from its inception, Civilisation has alternately lured and repulsed man. There has often been a feeling of being trapped within its cruel, intricate web, followed by an irresistible desire to go back to the primitive state. Consequently, Primitivism has been taken up by many artists down the ages, as a fond project. Primitivists like Marshall Sahlins, unfailingly seek to expose and challenge all the multiple forms of power that structure the civilised society. They draw our attention to the fact that prior to civilisation, there not only existed ample leisure time,but the essential merits of the primitive society were considerable gender equality, and social equality, a non-destructive approach to the natural world , the absence of organised violence, no mediating or formal institution. It is civilisation that inaugurated warfare in its shrewd forms, concepts of property, and most dangerous of all, entrenched hierarchies. The most horrific aspect of civilisation is that it begins with and relies on an enforced renunciation of instinctual freedom. Domestication, according to primitivists, is nothing but a Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities (ISSN 0975–2935) Volume I, Number 2, Autumn 2009 URL of the Issue: www.rupkatha.com/journalvol1no2.php PHP URL of the article: www.rupkatha.com/swarupduttamachhmaster.php PDF URL of the article: www.rupkatha.com/0102subalternangstswarupduttamachhmaster.pdf © www.rupkatha.com 104 Rupkatha Journal Vol 1 No 2 power, a shrewd application of stratagems that civilisation uses to control life according to its strictly ordered logic. The mechanisms of domestication – taming, schooling, caging, intimidating, coercing, contracting, governing, enslaving, even terrorizing and finally murdering, cumulatively build up a process that wishes, apparently, to reduce the uncertainties and dangers of life, and ensure a completely safe and organized existence, but ultimately to change the ecology from a free to a totalitarian order. In the process, the spontaneous, natural human bonds are mutilated, leading us to a fractured and distorted life. The other devastating aspect of civlisation, but closely related to the totalitarian order, is the senseless usurpation of Nature. The primitivists have always pointed to the stage when nomadic human population relied only on hunting for its sustenance. A gradual shift from this mode to a sedentary and settled existence through agriculture had greatly affected the ecological balance, because this had necessitated the end of open sharing of the resources that formerly existed. With the emergence of the concept of ownership, man started to hoard up natural wealth, laying the foundation for social hierarchy. This entailed greedy exploitation of the natural resources and ultimately destruction of the natural habitat. That is why the primitivists advocate rewilding, learning how to live together in non-hierarchical and non-oppressive communities, and doing away with the domesticating mindset in social patterns. To the primitivists, “rewilding” suggests living within one’s bioregion, being intimately connected to the land, water, climate, plants, animals, and general patterns of their bioregion. For them, rewilding and reconnecting with the earth is a life project. Let us now explore the world of Machhmaster (the Expert Angler) from this angle. A Bangla novel written by Swarup Dutta in 2005, Machhmaster has already bagged two awards, one of them being the Kathasahitya award given by the Bangla Academy this year. It is a story of an investigating, dream-stricken dalit angler, Neul, who spends his days deciphering the secret code of still pondwater. To him, a pond is not the business-warehouse of aquatic harvest, but a strange blue world full of colour, beauty and mystery. Neul is almost a feral child, an ideal primitive, who refuses to be domesticated by the society. He is a savage entity whose life is so surely identified with wild Nature that he becomes an inseperable part of it. 105 The Noble Savage and the Civilised Brute We first meet him at the top of a date-palm tree, engaged in extracting palm juice. He has lost his mother when we meet him, and he has soon placed himself in the lap of nature, who seems to have made up for this loss. From the natural world of flora and fauna, he draws his sustenance instinctively, and in such an unsophisticated way that at once places him temporally and spatially at a point remote from the civilised society. In the entire novel, Neul refuses to conform to any established, enforced social customs or traditions. He refuses to be tamed by ‘reason’ of civilisation. He neither has the minimum expertise to manage the household, nor does he know how to cook food. Most of the day, this half-naked savage forages for his food in the damp marshy lands around the ponds of the village and is satisfied with wild berries and stems: Neul encircles the solitary Bhabai pond, Laxman sayar and Ballal sayar. Now, in this late afternoon he is lying supine on the side of one of the ponds. For a long time, he is observing the tenacity of a small kingfisher. Suddenly he feels hungry. He gets down to the water. The edges of the pond are strewned with onion-grass. He uproots a fat tuft. Like a washerman, he gives the tuft a few blows and puts the root in his mouth. The pungent taste of the onion is missing. It’s rather a bit watery! Not bad after all. Neul pulls out another tuft, again and again and again... then, for a change of taste, he shifts to lotus-stalk... again a change of taste with the relish of lotus-lobe...with the satisfaction of a gentle calf, Neul feels sleepy as he continues to chew lotus-lobes. This close proximity with Nature gives him more of an animal status than that of a human being. And he is one of the keenest explorers of Nature. He has the minutest knowledge of the aquatic world of Nature as well as that of the land at his fingertips. Studying the direction of the wind, he can understand that a storm is in the offing. He does not bother to perform the sradh ceremony of his dead mother, but knows his natural habitat so perfectly that while others fail to detect a fish in the dry pond, he exhibits an adroit skill in tracing the catfishes deep under the mire. He is the self-appointed watchman of all the ponds of his village: Which fish is developing a hump, which katla is bearing a wound in the mouth, the ruhu with white spots on the gill, the water-wort which is causing disturbance to the fishes, on which ponds boals are attacking others, on which pond traces of ferry-net have been noticed at night...— 106 Rupkatha Journal Vol 1 No 2 all these are known to Neul. Pond owners come to him for many such information and ask him the preventive measures. He helps them all, and that too for free. And most importantly, he is not a fisherman who exploits the natural resources more than is necessary for his daily sustenance. Rather, he has profound love for these fishes. Hunting them with the agility of a leopard, he lets them go back to their habitat with the love of a mother. The day when for the first time in his life, his prey, a big mirik fish, eludes him, he is only too happy, for a bond of natural kinship with the fauna of the water-world gives him a sense of relief that he has not killed the fish! In a masterly description of a boar-hunting, we find Neul instinctively empathise with the hunted animal. Or elsewhere, bitten by a snake, he still empathises with its fear, for he finds it pregnant, and lets it go most tenderly. Interestingly but not surprisingly, in the novel the first fantasy that arouses his manhood is that of the mermaid, and he finds relief to this first sexual stimulation in the throat-deep water, where he is more comfortably placed than on the land. Juxtaposed against this is the picture of the civilised brute. The novel, we must remember, is set against the turbulent times of the late sixties in Bengal. In the second half of the sixties, India faced a terrible shortage of food. In 1965, the total production of foodgrain came down to as low as 6.33 crore tonnes. Even a large-scale import could not raise the daily supply of food per head to more than 408.2 gms. An acute crisis of rice gave rise to blackmarketing. Rice was becoming costlier every day, widening the gap between the landowners and the landless farmers to an unbridgeable extent. Through this gap the Naxalite Movement made its entry with its agenda of revolution aimed at demolition of this economic difference among the rich landowners, the petit bourgeoisie, and the marginalised, dalit have-nots, marking the beginning of a conflict. The uncivilised, illiterate, yet innocent, marginalised people on the one hand, and the educated, well-informed, civilised yet shrewd, br

“The Noble Savage and the Civilised Brute: Nature and the Subaltern Angst in Swarup Dutta’s Machh Master (The Expert Angler)