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Among Bengalis worldwide, the name Sukumar Ray is magical. He is the inimitable creator of funnies and whimsies, adorable animal hybrids, and peculiar humans who tell tales in playful prose and verse. His are books with pictures and conversation. “Porcu-duck” is a duck and porcupine joined together in Sukumar's drawing, as is “stortle”, a stork with a turtle's torso. Imagine an insecure old boss in a crazy British government office who is convinced all the clerks working under him are thieves.
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| Father's childhood in Ray's imaginative drawing |
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He cracks up one morning and croaks hoarsely at his underlings, believing his whiskers have been stolen. “Man is slave, moustache is master, losing which man meets disaster,” he declares.
Sukumar Ray (born in 1887) was a quintessential Bengali, but like most Bengalis who were products of the Anglo-Bengali cultural encounters in colonial India, he was a cosmopolitan. His father Upendra Kishore Ray, a contemporary and friend of Rabindranath Tagore, provided him with a role model. Upendra Kishore was a reputed printer and publisher, and the author of theoretical works on printing in the British journal Penrose . He wrote storybooks for children which he charmingly illustrated and published himself. He was the founder and editor of an extremely popular children's magazine, Sandesh , which literally has the double meaning of candy and news.
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| Sukumar Ray followed in his father's footsteps. Upon matriculating from the City School, he joined Presidency College where he did a double major in physics and chemistry. During his college days, Sukumar started an organization and named it “The Nonsense Club”. He composed two plays for the members of the Nonsense Club to act in. The first is Jhalapala ( What a Pain!). Another play, Lakshmaner Shaktishell ( The Gauntlet at Lakshmana ), takes an episode of the Ramayana to depict a hilarious scene in operatic verse with some of the funniest lines one can find in Bengali literature. |
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Sukumar Ray went to England to study printing techniques in 1911. Around this time (1912), Tagore had reached London with a translated text of the Gitarjali, which was to win him the Nobel Prize in 1913. Before this occurred, Sukumar read a paper on Tagore's poetry to an English Society meeting in 1912. It was the first article in English to appear on Tagore in London's Quest Magazine. He accompanied Tagore in 1913 during his Nobel Prize tour in England. Upon receiving a first in his final exam and winning a bronze medal in October, 1913, Sukumar returned home. Soon after, he married Suprabha, the daughter of Jagat Chandra Das. |
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In 1915 Upendra Kishore passed away. Sukumar took over the charge of U. Ray and sons, the printing press his father had set up, and assumed the editorship of Sandesh . His first piece of writing for Sandesh was Khitchuri ( Hotch Potch ); later it was published as Abol Tabol ( Nonsense Rhymes ). He registered his diverse interests in nonsense rhymes, illustrations, and graphics in his “khero khata” or “red notebook”.
Sukumar Ray's own cover design, done on his death bed, for his first collection rhymes.
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‘Porkuduck', dear to all Bengali children, is
also Sukumar's creation |
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Sukumar also helped orchestrate key support among his contemporary Calcutta luminaries in the arts and sciences for establishing the “Monda” Club. The word “Monda” puns not only on candy in Bengali but also Monday in English, the day of the week the gathering met. At the club all subjects under the sun were discussed --- literature, poetry, philosophy and sciences. And no one was spared, not even Tagore, from the club's banter and satire. Sukumar would compose ingenious invitation cards to members when he felt their enthusiasm for Monday meets flagging.
In 1921 when he was 33, Sukumar came down with the deadly “black fever”. During the same year, his wife Suprabha gave birth to their only child Satyajit. |
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| Even when he came down with a high fever, Sukumar continued to write and illustrate for Sandesh . He wrote his classic Ha Ja Ba Ra La (H-J-B-R-L) during this period. It was written in lovely pictorial prose with occasional sprinkles of spectacular verse. Inspired by Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865), HJBRL is about a dream world. Like Alice, the youngster in HJBRL faces a dull reality. In this case it is a mountain of math and grammar homework. He lapses into a midday reverie that lands him face to face with a cat that magically comes out of a handkerchief. He meets a massive raven who scribbles furiously away on a tiny board and stares at the boy with a cocked head. A little man, barely over a foot tall with a shiny bald head, bumps into him. He flips his hookah like a telescope to size him up. Then there is Sir Gramma-baron, the goat. And as with Alice, there is a great trial. If Carroll parodies Victorian technology and Victorian fascination with invention, Sukumar Ray mocks the obsession with math and grammar in British colonial education in India. To the massive raven Sir Crowsfeet Blacketyblackblack, the arithmetic is neither lowest common multiplier nor the greatest common denominator. It is either trigonometry or division. |
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The other memorable creative works of Sukumar Ray during this period of critical illness include a history of the Brahmo Samaj for the youth, a treatise on the theory of the alphabet, and a children's edition of the Mahabharata in verse. While convalescing in Jodipur on the Ganges, he did a beautiful landscape painting of the sunset on the river. He completed the covers and illustrations of Abol Tabol and Ha Ja Ba Ra La . Sadly, he didn't live to see these two wonderful works on print. The last poem in Abol Tabol shows his awareness of his impending death.
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‘Anglican cow', an oblique reference to the anglicized Bengali Babus |
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“Before I say “Bye” to you folks/ I wish to say my say: / Silly Millie Busy Buddy Hoax, To the nice, night is day. / As whimsy is whipped / Rhymes do not stop, / I find myself shipped / To land without a prop. / Should words run, where's the rein / That disciplines the drum? / Who's there to stop the train / That carries the bags—Ho and Hum? Night is day, light is dark, / All our secrets are sound, / Here all the hounds do bark, / Elephants with legs up, are found, / The Queen Bee is about to fly, / The bad boy is good and shy.” The last few lines are particularly poignant: “The lunar chill of the ancient past/ Slowly yet surely lulls me to sleep. / So, now I sing my very last, / And leave some “Silly Rhymes” to keep.” |
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Sukumar Ray's cover design
done in opaque water colour for Sandesh |
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Tagore came to see him in his last days and sang for him. On September 10, 1923, Calcutta was shaken by an earthquake. Soon after, the same day, Sukumar Ray passed away. For over two and a half years, he had fought back the deadly fever until he succumbed to it. He was only 36. In his introduction to the collected works of Sukumar Ray for children, Satyajit had this to say about his late father's influence on him: “I was two and a half years old when my father passed away. I had little or no opportunity of getting to know him "son-to-father" in the family environment. Later, I got to know him from his writings and drawings. His notebooks, the ‘khero khatas', two issues of a hand-written magazine, and the stories and anecdotes my mother and other relatives told me about him helped me recognize him as my father.”
On humanity
" Humanity, living apart in its own sequestered grooves, armed with the prejudice of conventions and external forms, finds itself called upon to respond to the stimulus of a wider appeal and express itself in terms of a wider sympathy." - SUKUMAR RAY, in London, 1912
( Quoted from The Spirit of Rabindranath Tagore ) |
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| Contributed by DKB (translation of Sukumar's verse is by the contributor) |
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