Light and Shade-commentary

Light and Shade-commentary

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আঁধার আলো (Light and Shade) Facebook post

আঁধার আলো (Light and Shade) Daily Poet blog post

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JB to Arjun:

No dualism......dark and light sit together.......c’mon if you are Bengali you should remember Pala/Sena and your Buddhist heritage......

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Arjun to JB:

I had written this four years ago and had not thought about it for a long time. It showed up in my FB "memories" and I read it as if written by someone else. I liked parts of it and so I shared it. 

But on reading it again a couple of times today, I realized that the poem is in fact largely about the first line of your first comment, "No dualism...dark and light sit together...". 

So it says, for example, "from (the Muslim and Hindu) hells there come the winds of heaven."
And so too about the heat of the noon sun being present in the moonshine of the cool night; about civility and barbarism marching side by side; about the good and the bad coexisting in every faith, with the darkness alongside the light; about finding many who are virtuous and kind in every country--and (yet) finding the country's history bathed in bloody mayhem... 

The last two lines of the first stanza say that just as there is compassion in every heart, so also there is rage.

The last stanza notes that there is an angel in each heart, and side by side a "monster" holding on to malice. 

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That last stanza might be interpreted as duality in the Abrahamic or Zoroastrian sense.

However, at a deeper level, it simply points out that the seemingly opposite qualities in each of the pairs mentioned are in fact aspects of the same whole--and so are not really separable. 
In the various parts of the poem, this "whole" is in turn the physical universe, a faith, a country, a human heart, etc.

Of course (not explicit in this piece) there is the ancient, basic concept of yang being in yin and yin being in yang, with each giving rise to the other, like the in-breath and the out-breath, and every cyclic process that we--and everything else--are part of or composed of.

2023 March 10, Fri.

Berkeley, California

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Note 1: Bengali-speakers in both Bangladesh and India refer to their language as "Bangla" (pronounced Baangla). 

I probably used both of the two common Bangla/Bengali words for "hell", one (jahannam) from Arabic and one (nawrok) from Sanskrit naraka, because these are from the two main religious streams extant in Bengal. The followers of the two faiths have been at loggerheads and worse, but both have contributed to the regional and subcontinental culture. Common ground at a deeper level was found again and again, with Buddhist, bhakti and sufi traditions contributing and combining in many ways. 

(Buddhism of course was almost exterminated in Bengal as well as in all of India, except along its borders, through a history that involved violence but mainly remains obscure. However, its influence remains in many ways.)

Perhaps for the same reason, I used the Persian/Farsi name for "angel" (farishtah/farishteh) and the Hindu one for  "fairy" (pori in Bangla/Bengali speech, parii in Hindi). Both "farishtah" and "parii" might perhaps be cognate--etymologically related--to the English word "fairy".  🤔

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Note 2: Bengali has lost the distinction (in speech, though not in traditional spelling) between the short and long vowels i and ii--as well as between the short and long vowels u and uu. So parii, in speech, would become pari, with the i being intermediate in length between long and short. However, a process called "vowel harmony", also found in Turkic and other languages, makes the closed vowel i change the preceding short a into a closed, rounded o. So pari, in speech, becomes pori.

The term Farsi (pronounced Faarsi) for the Persian/Iranian language comes from the Arabic pronunciation of the Persian word Paarsi, still used by and for Zoroastrian people settled for a very long time in India. These had fled persecution in medieval Persia/Iran when the initial religious tolerance they were granted after the Muslim Arab conquest of Persia turned later into intolerance and persecution.