What Do You Have On The Menu That's Totally Tasteless?

Syed Mujtaba Ali
(Translated by Naeem Mohaimen)

[Excerpt from a project on the impossibility of translating Syed Mujtaba Ali]

The last time I dated a Bengali woman, we reveled in our language alignments. We could gibboth freely about other New Yorkers, in front of them, by switching lingua. It was much better than when I used to talk to my slightly hard-of-hearing friend Zahin in Bengali about an uber-glam passerby. He would ruin the effect by swiveling his head and saying (in English) “Who? Where? Oh, you mean her?” What's the point of having your own language if you have simultaneous dubbing...

Things go better with Coca Cola, and things go better with Bengali. This is a sly way to think of Syed Mujtaba Ali - one of the most widely read Bengali (or Bangali or Bangla) writers of pre- and post-Partition India. Ali's ambivalence on Partition, and his comfort with a Bengali cultural scene that was (seemingly) pan-religion, created a schizophrenic position in divided India. His tart, essay-length response to Jinnah's declaration that Urdu would be the “state language” of Pakistan damaged his older brother Murtaja Ali's early career in the Pakistan civil service. Mujtaba's wide interests, exorbitantly far-flung travels and knowledge of eight languages made him a popular dinner companion, short story master, travel writer, cultural ambassador, and goppobaj in the Bangla tradition.

But his work remains, in some forms, supremely untranslatable. Ali's wit depends on inserting English, French and German phrases, references, jokes, locations and beauties into, rubbing against, jostling and rudely interrupting the flowery path of Bengali language. Rendered into English, there is a curious bland flattening of distinctions. All this is to say that, gentle reader, I wish you would read this in the original Bengali. So I could whisper in your ear, “There goes a real beauty.”
--Translator's Note

[And so we enter "British-Indian Exchange of Views", written by Mujtaba Ali in Bengali in December 1945, the eve of the nightmare of Partition...and here I have cobbled together a translation -- but the juice, the essence, is somewhat lost. But read on anyway...indulge me]

British: I invited you to Firpo the other night. You made some excuses and left. Later I learn you were seen that night at Amjadia Hotel. Firpo's food is cooked by the tri-universe famous chef de cuisine. And you ignore him to go eat that savage's cooking?

Indian: Before I debate the other qualities of your cooking, I must draw your attention to something very basic. I don't know if you have noticed yet, but your cooking is badly missing three of the six essences: bitter, tart and spice. Sometimes there is a drop of spice, but that too trapped in a bottle. Even after two hundred years of home rule, you still fear and suspect that object. So before accepting your invitation, I can already say that whatever else your "tri" cooking may have, it lacks diversity. How many tunes can you possibly play with salt and sweet? You want to fight the lyre with a two-stringed instrument? Even Amjadia's “savage” can beat your chef any day. Secondly, yes I come to secondly, there is no difference between your kitchen and your dining table. You place a basket full of broken bottles on the table, call it a cruet! In case a guest has difficulty swallowing your bland boiled and flame-charred creation, he has to become his own master chef at your dining table. To add some fat you pour olive oil, to add sting you spread mustard, to make it bitter you sprinkle pepper--the bottle's holes are blocked up, so your arm may actually separate from its socket trying to wrestle the pepper out. The coward chef dare not even add salt--have you noticed that eighty percent of your guests sprinkle salt BEFORE they take a sip. So there you are, pour salt! When you find the object still tasteless, you start showering it with some peculiar liquid called sauce. Bhai, I'm the son of a bhadralok, in my house cooking is always completed in the kitchen.

British: Well, there are differences in taste the world over…
Indian: Don't try your high theories on me. If that were so, why don't you just light a flame at the dining table and let everyone cook their own meat? Some prefer their meat rare, some well done -- why leave that choice to the chef? The truth is, even though there is difference in palate, the cook has learnt the middle path over time. Even though there is difference in taste, wise men prefer Shakespeare and Kalidas.

British: But Amjadiyas eat with their hands, they have no cutlery.
Indian: Actually they do. By now the subcontinent, under your influence, has become so uncivilized that even Indians are trying to use knife and fork. Why they would want to take up that filthy habit…

British: Filthy habit? What do you mean?

Indian: Absolutely. There are your knife, spoon, fork. There is your napkin. Just give them a good rub, and see how much dirt comes off. And what doesn't come off will slide off with food juices and slide into your stomach. Even if my fingers have dirt, I can go to that toilet and wash with soap. If you walk in that direction with your cutlery, the manager will call the police on you. And here's my last word: I am putting my own fingers in my mouth; your fork has probably traveled through millions of diseased lips and orifices. The Chinese are much cleaner than you, they walk into restaurants with their eating sticks.

British: Well, anyway...
Indian: Yes, this conversation is hurting your feelings. I had a Bengali Christian friend. He tried to eat hilsha fish with a fork--he wanted to be a sahib badly. The fishbones became lodged so badly in his throat, his own bones made a permanent home in the graveyard. (tears)

British: Aha! Well why not just stop eating fish then!

Indian: Why don't the English stop eating bacon-eggs, French stop drinking champagne, Germans stop eating sausage? Bengalis can stop eating fish, they can also fast unto death, they can also commit suicide. You, sitting here in Bengal, if you don't get your tinned bacon, you want to set up a commission to investigate “British Tradition in Danger”. And I won't eat fish on the edge of the Ganges? How can you even say that!

British: Be that as it may…(ahem). But now your women do all the cooking. Is that all they do? Why do they accept this cruel segregation?
Indian: You have to ask when you meet them.

British: But we never get a chance to meet with them.
Indian: That is our extreme good fortune.

British: (worried) Is that quite fair? Are we really that bad?
Indian: Mister, I don't know about good-bad. We jumped into your loving embrace in 1757. We lost the self-rule gamcha and for two hundred winter years, we are sinking into poverty-disaster-filth. We still haven't made it onto dry land. That's the story of the men, so the women have already quit you and are hiding inside the harem.

British: That is only the exterior. What about your culture, your tradition…
Indian: Another day for that. Right now I have to go into the streets and sing Quit India.

artwork by apurba das