Sunday,16,2018
Professor Swapan Chakravorty
Rabindranath Tagore Distinguished Professor in the Humanities at Presidency University, Kolkata
(Interviewed by Sri Abhishek Sarkar in 2012)
AS: In which year did you pass your BA and MA and from which institutions? When did your first encounter with Shakespeare take place?
BA from 1972 to 1975, Presidency College, Calcutta. MA from 1975-77 at Jadavpur University.
And then I left JU in 1978 in February. In those days the exams used to get delayed. The situation was
slightly better at Jadavpur. But at Calcutta the backlog could stretch up to two-three years. Then I
joined the State Bank in February 1978. I returned to teaching in November ’78 and have been
teaching since. Of course, with breaks. I went as Commonwealth Academic Staff Scholar to Oxford
in 1988, came back in ’91, and I am on leave, on lien rather, as Director General of National Library.
Once in a while, I have been a visiting fellow, once at the University of London and another time at
the University of Malaya. I think these are not important, but wherever I have been, I mean except
for the University of London, where I was doing book history, I have always taught a bit of
Shakespeare, I have even taught at a community college in Virginia. Nowadays I don’t travel because
of my health. But whenever I have done so, a bit of Shakespeare was thrown in some way. About your
question…
AS: Where were you first taught Shakespeare?
School. We were taught Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar for our Senior Cambridge. That means from class
9 to 11 we had to read Julius Caesar in our syllabus. But I started reading Shakespeare much earlier. My
father had a Complete Works which was printed here in the press of The Statesman and published by, I
think, Standard Literature Company or some other house like that. It was a huge tome of a book, very
ornately bound, with a portrait on the flyleaf, a frontispiece and dramatis personae preceding the playtexts –obviously a very attractive book. I’d been reading it for a very long time, but the only trouble
was that there was no glossary or notes. So I sort of… it’s a good thing… it was a good thing for me,
I learned to make sense of Shakespeare without much help from teachers, family or notes. I remember
my sisters had to read Shakespeare as part of their compulsory English course for college, and the poor girls had to buy Indian editions with notes at the foot of the page. Usually these were edited by
someone called D.N. Ghosh, I…
SB: From Bangabasi.
I don’t know where he was from. By that time I was almost making fun of the notes. I was in high
school, but I had read Shakespeare ‘properly’ and I had already grown supercilious. The edition in
which I read Julius Caesar was a fine edition, called the ‘Oxford and Cambridge edition’. Although it
was called Oxford and Cambridge, it had nothing to do with John Dover Wilson’s New Shakespeare
published by Cambridge or any Oxford scholarly edition. It was simply an edition for those who would
take the high school certificate examinations conducted by Oxford and Cambridge, especially in the
colonies. I forget the name of the editor. But as for the teaching of Shakespeare, well, we were asked
to memorize Shakespeare in our school and, although it might sound mechanical now, it was no better
with the teaching of Bangla in Bangla schools. You had to recite poems by heart. That’s why you have
people who are over 60 years now, and they can recite a number of poems even if they have done
nothing in their lives other than sell soap or something, because in school they were made to memorize
these verses.
I remember that I used to feel a deep guilt that I never memorized in that way. My memory was very
strong, but I never memorized anything that way. I must…I remember someone who could recite a
whole soliloquy by Shakespeare and was impressed. Our teacher at Jadavpur University, Kitty Scoular
Dutta, she said… We used to refer to her as Mrs Dutta and not Professor Dutta, I don’t know why…I
was impressed by someone reciting Shakespeare from memory at some seminar, I was very young
then. She asked me, “O Swapan, how many songs of Rabindranath do you know?” I asked, “By heart?”
I said, “Maybe several hundreds. I wouldn’t be able to put a figure.” Then she asked me, “Have you
read them and memorized them?” I answered, “No.” “It is the same with this man. He has probably
seen it, acted on stage or heard it on the radio or something.” That’s how people get to remember
Shakespeare. But we had no such opportunity.
It was a good thing—to come back to your question—it was a good thing that we were made to get
our ears attuned to the accents and the rhythms of blank verse of the prose. Though we knew back
then that this was not how English was spoken either in England or the England of Shakespeare’s
time, and we’d never fool ourselves into imagining that the Romans spoke English in this vein or that
the Greeks did or that the plebs in Julius Caesar would be using the same accent as Brutus or Cassius
or Caesar himself. And we were sometimes asked to act out bits of the play, and that itself was fun. Especially when Caesar strained to catch what someone said, claiming to be deaf in one ear. We had
to act it out in class. So we were made to see. It was not just plain rote learning.
AS: What school was this?
Calcutta Boys’ School. We were taught by Anglo Indian school teachers and also one Malayali teacher.
You see, I think that there is a lot to be said in favour of their ways. The bright students would work
for themselves. For all, including laggards, English language was compulsory. But you studied English
Literature because you chose to study it. But at that stage someone who didn’t care about poetry
couldn’t scan and hated reading Shakespeare. For that person, this method was a prophylactic against
failure. If in the Senior Cambridge examination you failed in the English Language paper, you failed
the entire examination. Fortunately this was in the English Literature paper. But still it was important
to do well in both.
When we were in college we studied Macbeth and As You Like It. This was part of what was called in
Calcutta University the Second Part, that is, Part 2 of the B.A. Honours course. We also had to read a
certain number of sonnets. Unlike most colleges, Presidency had a tradition of having students study
Shakespeare for all three of their undergraduate years. So we started reading both the plays quite early.
Professor Sailendra Kumar Sen, who was a fine textual scholar, taught us As You Like It. And
Professor Arun Kumar Das Gupta was the best teacher that I have ever met. Here or elsewhere. He
taught us Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Apart from other things of course—Keats, the lyric, history of
literature. I don’t remember all. Professor Sukanta Chaudhuri taught us some poems from the
Renaissance period towards the end. I most certainly remember him teaching us Wyatt and Sidney,
and I think he did Shakespeare’s sonnets with us. I remember doing the sonnets with Sukanta-da in
the tutorial classes in my third year. And also As You Like It. He was very young then, had just returned
from his first stint at Oxford. He must have been 24 or 25 years old, and we were the first batch of
students he ever taught.
The complete experience of being taught Shakespeare came from Arun-babu’s classes. Sailendra
Kumar Sen taught us how to read a text, a printed text of Shakespeare which has been mediated at a
number of stages—scribes, compositors, editors, especially in the eighteenth century. He was
especially good on the eighteenth century onwards, and had written a book on Capell and Malone
[Capell Amd Malone: And Modern Critical Bibliography, 1960], and modern critical bibliography. From the very beginning we were taught that the book or the text that we had in our hands has been mediated even by actors, people who decided on even the length of lines. Taraknath Sen, who we narrowly missed being taught by, wrote a very well-known essay in those times on Shakespeare’s short lines, although nowadays we believe that several of his conclusions are debateable. But the meticulousness and thoroughness of the way in which Shakespeare was understood and taught at Presidency was remarkable. When I edited the Diamond Jubilee number of Presidency College Magazine
Phanibhushan Chakraborty, who had been Chief Justice of India, wrote a piece on his teachers—
Prafulla Chandra Ghosh and others who taught Shakespeare. That was the old theatrical style, Phiroze
Dastur also wrote a piece, which included his memories of being taught Shakespeare, recited and
explained by great teachers—the kind of style that you found in Shishir Kumar Bhaduri, Perhaps you
know that Shishir Kumar Bhaduri was for a while a teacher at Presidency College.
AS: Not at Presidency…what is now Vidyasagar.
No. For a while he taught at Presidency. He and Shrikumar-babu [Shrikumar Bandyopadhyay] used
to share the adjacent desks in the Common Room, I was told. Many people taught Shakespeare in
Calcutta. In those days, people had many options – Scottish Church College, Ripon College – they
were good colleges. Presidency was not just the only college where you found good teachers.
But we also missed the teaching of Amal Bhattacharya. He had influenced many people at Jadavpur
University. These were the people who tried to understand the Renaissance in terms of social factors,
using the kind of historiography we find since Burckhardt. Round 1860 Burckhardt provided a text
book definition of The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy, a definition which we learnt to question.
Many Marxist colleagues at Jadavpur were influenced by Amal-babu’s teaching. Amal-babu nurtured
more than camp followers. For example, when Arun-babu taught us Shakespeare he also taught us to
read Arnold Hauser, the Marxist historian of art. He almost forced me to read Hauser’s Mannerism while teaching Macbeth. It was a kind of encyclopaedic approach to studying Shakespeare that the Marxist Amal-babu too represented.
Arun-babu combined in him the genius of all these scholars. He taught us how to read a text
meticulously, even if it was to question Shakespeare’s own understanding of certain things, for
example, did Shakespeare understand how the crossbow functioned then when the idea of screwing
courage to “the sticking-place” was referred to in Macbeth? For that he spent two classes, showing us
pictures of the crossbow. And the way he used to read the lines. For example, after the night spent by
Macbeth discussing the murder with his wife, when he used to read the lines “which is which” he used
to pronounce the words in the way he had read “foul is fair” one year earlier. The echoes ring still in
my head. We learnt to love the poetry. He taught us poetry: more than drama, he taught us poetry and
the depth of it. And he would refer to all kinds of things. He taught us Shakespeare’s Sonnets in
passing. He would sometimes mention a sonnet and explain it to us. For example “Th’expense of spirit in a waste of shame,” Sonnet 129, he used to refer to this while explaining the waste of Macbeth’s
love. It has sexual connotations, talking about orgasm, but he would explain the double-ness of lust
and love in terms of the Neo-Platonic philosophy of time, of the spiritus (the expense of ‘spirit’) which
mediates between heaven and earth, between mind and matter between soul and body. The spirit is
nimble, as we get to learn from some of the other sonnets: a sense reserved in the French esprit. And
the ambivalence of that is made meaningful simply by the presence of word: not just disembodied
word, but embodied word. The notion is there in the Christian religion, “word was made flesh,” says
St John’s Gospel, which is said to be influenced by Neo-Platonic thought. So what we got in sum was
a way of entry. ‘A Dialogue between the Soul and the Body’ by Andrew Marvell was taught in class by
Arun-babu, with no apparent connection with Macbeth. As soon as he came across “the primrose way
to the everlasting bonfire” he used to talk about Marvell.
There are many things I have forgotten. But what I do remember clearly are his tutorials. In the first
class I had him as my tutor, he asked me “What have you read?” Which is a difficult question to
answer: what have I read? I had read all kinds of stuff. “No, no, what kind of poetry have you read?”
So I said, “Auden.” I was reading a book of Auden at that time. So he said, “Okay,” and gave me two
poems—two ballads, really ballad pastiche, to write on. And then when the writing was over I was
loafing around near the corridor, near the portico, near the stairs, the majestic stairs. He said, “You
have to swear to me that you have written it yourself.” I said, “With help from this book and that.”
He looked a little disappointed. “You are in college, you are supposed to read books. You can’t
manufacture things.” The next day when I went back to his tutorial, he handed back the tutorial essay
and said, “Read all the plays by Aeschylus, by Sophocles, and plays by Euripides and come back to
class.” He didn’t say it in my way; he had a very soft voice and a soft manner of speaking. But what
kind of torture was this? And when I went back he did not ask me any question, nothing, he didn’t
set any question. Instead he brought out two poems by Hopkins, and said, “You write on ‘Golden
Echo’ and ‘Leaden Echo.’” And so I sat there in the Professors’ Common Room and wrote on those
poems. But why was he making me read all the rest? After two or three such episodes, when I began
to think he was slightly kinky, he asked me, “Are you enjoying Auden better now?” And then the
pieces started to fall into place. I saw that he was training me to read poetry in English, especially the
poetry of Europe and England, that unless I had this background, I would never be able to read. I
said I was reading ‘New Year’s Letter’, a long poem by Auden. He never made me feel small. Like
some of us we tell our students, “You haven’t read this? You must be ignorant.” Even today when he
says something, he starts with, “Of course, as you know…” Of course, we don’t know; he knows
everything. I at least don’t know. But he would start his sentence like this: “Of course, you know that
in Jaeger…” How many of us have read Werner Jaeger? But he’s read Paideia and he would start his
sentence like that. There was great humility and great grace in the way he conducted himself, and many of us have become teachers because of such teachers. I can’t say that we have done justice to his
reputation. We have been third-rate teachers, but in Arun Babu and Sankha Ghosh (who were friends
in college), we had role models of how a teacher ought to conduct himself.
Why am I saying all this to a question on Shakespeare? Because you must understand that Shakespeare
fell within a kind of barely disguised hierarchy in Presidency College that I often hated. The “best”
teacher, and preferably the least scandalous male teacher, would get to teach Shakespeare. And the
best among them would get to teach Shakespeare’s major Tragedy. I was not taught by Subodh
Chandra Sengupta, nor Taraknath Sen. Later, the mantle would fall on someone else, as it did on
Amal-babu, and Sailen Sen. There was a sort of apostolic succession. Like you I was young once, and
I was not comfortable with that. Arun-babu never made us feel that he had this invisible mantle on
him although he was loyal to the pantheon. Those who didn’t were unhappy. The eminent poet Bishnu
De taught at Presidency College, but he never fitted in, He felt positively relieved when he left.
Buddhadeb Basu taught at Ripon College, but he never fitted into the kind of ambience there. So there
was a great tradition – almost a Brahmanical hierarchy in Shakespeare studies in Kolkata, which did
not take into account the live genius of many poets and scholars of English who could not fit in. If
you read Buddhadeb Basu’s autobiography – not Amar Joubon but Amader Kabita Bhavan – you’ll find
him talking of his resignation from Ripon College. There was only one word used to describe his
feeling at the parting: swasti or relief –the relief that these people felt at not having to teach anymore.
So it is not as if that only Presidency had created a pantheon. Even Calcutta University had one of its
own. The University perhaps was perhaps a little more open: it had more room for all kinds of
teaching.
In our time, Jyoti Bhattacharya was a well-known teacher there. I didn’t get to be taught by him, but
I knew him well when I started teaching at Calcutta University as Guest Lecturer from 1980 to 1985.
I heard him lecture a number of times; he used to teach in a different way. For example, when he
taught King Lear he used to recall Brecht when reading the lines “so young yet so untender,” Jyotibabu talked about Brecht’s poems, you have to be cruel in order to be kind, or lines to that effect
from The Good Woman of Setzuan. He would also cite the prayer in the Aiterya Upanishad (the same
prayer is there in many texts, Debendranath Tagore included it in Bramho dharma and it became an
important mantra for the Bramho sect), all the way from vań me manasi pratishtā to pratishtimāveeravarmaedhi ). Jyoti-babu used to stress the lines vań me manasi pratishtā mano me vaci pratistham – whatever is in my mind, let it be expressed through my tongue, let my tongue express that which is in my mind. This gap between tongue and heart is what King Lear is also about. So that is another way of approaching the teaching of Lear, and he would also refer to the possibility and impossibility of teaching King Lear, referring to Lamb’s essay. What does the actor do? Because after all, the actor does not speak his or her own lines, it is as if they speak someone else’s line. It is almost metatheatrical. Consider the first scene of Lear, where you are supposed to speak the truth. What is truth in any case? It is not external to language. He would start talking about Leo Spitzer, and other philosophers of language. I haven’t been taught by him, but I have attended some of these lectures, and this was not the kind of textual focus that we found in other classes.
So there were many kinds of teaching; if you are interested in teaching Shakespeare in the classroom,
all kinds of approaches were possible. In Sailendra Kumar Sen’s class, we were taught how the text
would be ‘constructed’ through mediations tracked using certain Enlightenment criteria. What is
authenticity? What did people such as Edmund Malone believe in? They were the children of the
Enlightenment. What is an authentic text? How do you tell a fake? Samuel Ireland had published some
Shakespeare documents which were clearly forgeries. Theobald had claimed that his Double
Falsehood was adapted from a Shakespeare-Fletcher play named Cardenio, which in its turn was based
on a text by Cervantes. So how do we establish a text through the Enlightenment? I’d always thought
that Sailen-babu was a bit out of place, in a world which always suspected Enlightenment methods.
The meticulousness with which he would even talk about…for example when you are reading Twelfth
Night, the laugh lines described as lines in the new atlas, perhaps a reference to the rhumb lines in
Linschoten’s map that replaced the Ortelius’s. This may be inaccurate, there are other candidates for
the new map, one was printed under the supervision of Hakluyt. But it is a way, though arguable, of
dating Twelfth Night. I forget the accepted date… 1600-1601. He would actually take the trouble of
looking at the map and seeing what the differences are and if they can be taken as evidence, although
he did not teach us Twelfth Night. He taught us many ways of dating, he taught us how to date and how
to tell authorship. The front matter in the Arden editions which would give us the date and
authorship…he would teach us those things.
When I came to Jadavpur, I was taught by Professor Dinesh Chandra Biswas. His method was that of
the old school of recitation. He did not stop at that. While reading Twelfth Night, he tried to sing some
of the songs, an attempt which was, I must say, rather disastrous. He was not at all tuneful. But he
was extremely caring of the students. He used to teach three or four plays and Marlowe and finish the
syllabus at the right time, and take four classes a week and he was never late. The person to whom I
owe the most was Professor Kitty Datta, and that was not because of anything she taught in class. She
taught us Spenser, the Metaphysical poets, Browne, Walter Scott, and more. I registered under her as
a PhD student, and she taught me how to conduct research. What to read, how to go about it, what
to change and what not to change.
I will end this conversation with just one story, While I was doing this research, sometimes I would
waste time on distractions. For example, once I wanted to find out Guillaume du Vair’s work and its
influence on French Neo-Stoicism, and I asked Arun-babu a question. Next day a postcard comes,
খুদে খুদে মুক্তোর মতন লেখায় (written in small pearl-like letters), on how in The Meaning of
Stoicism (1968), the classical scholar Ludwig Edelstein speaks about why Socrates was like a man playing ball. Socrates was a proto-stoic martyr to many from Epictetus to Lipsius. There are certain things you can control and there are certain things outside your control, belonging to the world of apatheia. Indifference. Some things, on the contrary, you can control, like Socrates could control the manner of his own death. The stoics made this difference and hence they considered him a proto-stoic martyr. Arun-babu cited Epictetus and showed why he was talking about Socrates at that point. All within 50-60 words. That was the kind of teacher I had. If you ask me a question I will never be able to write like that. So I am embarrassed when someone calls me a good teacher. Arun-babu would write 20
such postcards a day. And that kind of dedication made all the difference.
The rules of pedagogy were at times secondary. When I was ill with a tubercular abscess in the chest,
I needed a certain kind of injection. I needed Streptomycin shots. One manufacturer’s Streptomycin
was reliable, but it was not available in the market, I think the company was Parke Davis. Hence I was
taking shots made by Hindustan something. And he did not like it. So the next day Bhaswati, my wife,
goes to Lady Brabourne College where she was then teaching, and finds on her desk an entire case
which Arun Babu had ordered from the manufacturer’s headquarters in Bombay. I had to take 65
shots. There were almost 48 in the case. So when you want me to speak on pedagogy, I’d much rather
have this episode recorded. These people made us teachers. When Bhaswati and I were first trying to
go abroad for the first time, we found that the agent had tricked us. Our name was on the waiting list
in the train to Delhi where we were to appear for an interview. I reached Howrah station with Bhaswati
nearly in tears for we needed travel in an unreserved compartment to get to the interview on time.
Before the train was shuffling out of the platform, I caught a glimpse of Arun-babu through the
waving crowd, making his way toward the compartment. He just wanted to see us before we left. Our
memories of being taught Shakespeare are intertwined with such things, characteristic of Arun-babu
used to call “a daily beauty.” That too is a quotation from Shakespeare. Othello.
AS: What texts were taught at Jadavpur?
Professor Biswas taught us Twelfth Night. Antony and Cleopatra and King Lear were taught by Professor Jagannath Chakraborty. He used to ask one of us play Lear and someone else to read Cordelia’s lines and then go to sleep. My roll number was 747, and he asked me to sound like a Boeing. That’s all I remember of him. He was not interested in teaching, and he once said to someone that at his age he preferred itching to teaching. He was a fine poet in Bengali, a good writer and a knowledgeable
analyst of poetry. But he was not a good teacher. You can write it, you can quote me.
AS: Did they prescribe any secondary texts in class?
Hmm, Arun-babu did that as well. Shakespeare and the Nature of Man (1943) by Theodore Spencer for
instance. The title of Sukanta-da’s first book, I guess, was partly derived from it.
AS: Who had asked you to read Theodore Spencer?
We were handed a list at the beginning of the year. We also were advised to read the two volumes of
E. K. Chambers’s William Shakespeare: A Study of Facts and Problems (1930) and the two volumes of Sir Alexander Walter Raleigh’s Shakespeare’s England (1916).
AS: Were expletives and sexual references discussed?
Always, at Presidency, that is. Professor Biswas didn’t, He used to say, “Vulgar, my friend,” and move
on. Supriya-di once recalled that when reading a Touchstone-and-Audrey scene Sailen-babu had said,
“Young love is a beautiful thing.” That was as sentimental as Sailendra Kumar Sen could possibly be
in class.