Kotwal: medieval law enforcer or policeman.
Urey: a somewhat derisive Bengali descriptor for someone from Bengal's neighboring province, Odisha.
anna: monetary unit equivalent to one-sixteenth of a rupee in India, no longer used.
bel: the stone apple fruit.
[In this razor sharp satirical poem, the renowned Bengali humorist, satirist and limericks wizard, Sukumar Ray (1887-1923), SR, portrays a dark, draconian realm where the laws are, simply put, entirely irrational and out-of-whack. SR was a fiction and limericks master on a par with (some might even argue greater than) Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear. His satirical writings- collections of nonsense verses, accompanying cartoons and sketches, and also children's stories are in an absolute class which stands out in all of Indian writing, and I daresay match up to anything else in any other language. They are incomparable, inimitable, brilliant, and despite some of the light-heartedness, are loaded with deeper political and social meaning. SR's father, Upendrakishore Ray Chowdhury (1863-1915) was an accomplished Bengali author of children's stories, and also an inventor and entrepreneur who established family printing presses, and also introduced successful literary magazines. SR's son, perhaps the one who achieved the greatest international fame, was the illustrious filmmaker, Satyajit Ray (1921-1992) who was also an accomplished author and artist. These three together (not counting other remarkable members of the family) made up a significant branch of the Bengal renaissance of the 19th and early 20th centuries.
In this poem, which is self-explanatory, SR describes a land of purely capricious and whimsical laws, a virtual banana republic, where the subjects under the 1984-esque regime, are treated to repression and punishment for the most trivial and inconsequential infractions, including such acts as sneezing, snoring, or even looking a certain way. These seemingly innocuous examples set up in the poem have their echoes in a great many racial, social and economic tyrannies around the world, and SR brought many such repressive oddities, and related hypocrisies into question in much of his nonsense writing, including the ground-breaking Abol Tabol, and also HaJaBaRaLa, Pagla Dashu and others. Added to SR's many achievements, one might also mention his early recognition of the genius of Bengal's greatest renaissance figure, Rabindranath Tagore, as early as 1912, when he (as a young 25-year-old) enabled Tagore's introduction to the literary circles of England and also to the immigrant Indian and Bengali communities during Tagore's momentous 1912 visit to London, leading to his receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature a year later. MRC]
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(Article changed on August 23, 2019 at 23:09)
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