Calcutta’s coldest day this ‘winter’ — the season is now on its way out — was a risible 12.5°Celsius. Anglophone Calcuttans, condemned to remain stuck in a city that is warming perceptibly, much like the rest of the world, thus cannot be blamed for turning to literature to savour the chill in the air and in their bones — albeit figuratively. Over a decade ago, the writer, Richard Hirst, had compiled a set of literary works that claimed to unveil the heart of winter in the northern hemisphere. The list, published in The Guardian, would make this year’s winter-starved Bengalis reach out for their beloved winter accoutrements — muffler, scarf and balaclava — with pleasure.
Among Hirst’s ‘Winter Literature’ is William Wordsworth’s poem, “Lucy Gray”, where winter acquires its dark, menacing, deathly form; there is also James Joyce’s short story, “The Dead”, in which, Hirst writes, “The snow itself represents death, the great equaliser, [that] come[s] to bury the everyday dreams and heartbreaking anxieties which consume Joyce’s characters.” Snow, with its abundance and desolation, envelops the ambience of another short story — this one is by Ted Hughes — that also makes it to Hirst’s tales of/on winter. What would be apparent to readers from sunnier climes is that most of Hirst’s Winter Literature depicts the season as a time of privation, suffering, even oblivion. This chimes with a well-established Western philosophical tradition and a literary canon that have, over centuries, undoubtedly been shaped by and responded to the climatic harshness of the northern winter as a season. As David Bouchier, a British-American essayist, notes, rather cheekily, in a piece titled “The Philosophy of Winter”, the end of the civilised world in Homerian philosophy was marked by cold, mist and clouds. Dante’s “Inferno”, he also reminds us, is not entirely an incinerator; the ninth and final circle of hell comes wrapped in sheets of ice.
Surviving this unforgiving season, the wise man/lady from the West would whisper, depends on the ability to recognise the importance of interiority — the gift to look and learn from within. Rilke’s winter is tellingly a season of musings, a time to nourish the inner garden of the soul. Albert Camus, too, was to discover within him “an invincible summer” but this awareness takes place “in the depths of winter”. Such scrutiny often leads to virtuous transformation of the soul: Ebenezer Scrooge’s metamorphosis in Charles Dickens’s The Christmas Carol echoes the idea of turning empathy and kindness into tools of human survival during this decidedly cold time.
But the Calcuttan, or equally, those hailing from temperate or hotter parts of the world, would, in all probability, find the West’s literal and spiritual wrestling with winter puzzling. For what was once winter here — not the months of mild temperature that pass off as winter in this city these days — was far different from the season of death in the West. Instead, in this part of the world, winter was a time meant to be spent in the pursuit of all-too-fleeting pleasures. In a recent video on YouTube, Sanjib Chattopadhyay, the octogenarian Bengali novelist — the twinkle in his eyes remains undiminished — decided to enumerate some of the delights that wintry Calcutta once had to offer to its residents. The era that Chattopadhyay refers to was Calcutta’s winters of the 1930s and the early 1940s when temperatures used to dip well below the disappointing 12.5°C that is called winter these days. Chattopadhyay’s memories glitter with anecdotes about orderly Christmas celebrations by the British in the stretches around Park Street and Theatre Road, days that sparkled with iridescent light and clear skies and cold nights spent sheltered under quilts, leisurely strolls along a Maidan that was lusher, magical visits to the chiriakhana and, the novelist added, the lingering aromas of sun-baked leps, tasty gur, fresh kamalalebu as well as the sight of housewives putting jars of achaar and bodi to dry on terraces flooded with light.
Chattopadhyay’s reminiscences — the residents of another, older Calcutta would concur — also underline an essential difference between the winters of the West and the East, so to speak. Unlike in the former geographies where winter remains a season that strengthens our bond with all that lies within, in the East’s decidedly tropical habitations, winter was the time to resuscitate the community’s organic relationship with all that lay out there — from rediscovering the pleasures offered by open, domestic spaces, such as the balcony and the terrace, to heeding to the hypnotic pull of once distant lands in ‘Paschim’, be it Madhupur or Simultala and beyond.
This kind of fond recollection of a dying — not fleeting — season, a kind of ‘seasonal nostalgia’, is likely to acquire a contagious dimension across the culturescape in the near future. This is because science has already spotted signs of winter’s inevitable weakening in most parts of the country. An analysis of century-long weather data compiled by the India Meteorological Department has shown that India’s traditionally cooler months have been warming faster than their hotter counterparts over the last one hundred years. The January-February stretch, the cold season, has, for instance, been warming by 0.73°C whereas the corresponding figure for March-May, the onset of summer, was 0.62°C. This goes to show that seasons like winter are rapidly becoming indistinguishable from the other domineering ones, heralding the effacement of not only a specific kind of weather but also the cultural life and rituals that surround it.
Our reaction to the imminent death of a season is nostalgia that soon acquires a performative dimension. This kind of wistfulness for the fading winter seems to have been transformed into a prolific site of cultural production. Image and text, on social media and in the printed format, are replete with murmurs of a distinct longing for a season that is turning, perhaps never to return. All this lamenting is poignant but worthless in reviving winter’s dimming fortunes. This is because the passing of a season, its irrefutable transformation, is not seen as something that needs to be resisted and fought for politically: by the means of civic engagement and contestations, by the means of the vote. The idea that winter’s terminal fate or, for that matter, the disappearance of Shorot and Hemanta from Bengal’s calendar of seasons could be a matter that would inform or even decide an electoral contest is thus inconceivable.
What is put up instead is a performance, a charade, in honour of a season that is in the winter of its existence. Little wonder then that even as western disturbances repeatedly devour the northern wind, and a light chill triumphs over the cold, and a grey smog erases Chattopadhyay’s skies of crisp luminescence, Calcuttans, sweating in heavy woollens, deem it fit to troop out to savour a winter that exists only in their minds and memories.
uddalak.mukherjee@abp.in