For the crow's cause and caws

Interesting how the crow becomes the recurring theme for narratives in the subcontinent. This has been happening for a quiet a long time.

Crow, the rational bird, has inspired writers and thinkers for a long time.  Why crow? Is it a democratic choice? Is it because of its ubiquity? Omnipresence?

Crow is like that silent buddy in your friend’s gang with whom you do not necessarily talk to everyday, but his or her absence explains the awkward lackluster of the day’s hangout.

(There was an article I had stumbled upon a few days ago, which claimed that Indian crows are gradually taking over the eastern African coastal line, pushing the native birds towards the interiors.)

Suskumar Ray, (whose numerous literary offspring were as prodigious as his earthly progeny – Satyajit Ray) was perhaps the first (nonetheless still the best) non sense writers I have come across. He showed us that nonsense literature is absolutely no nonsense stuff. Much later, when academic hermeneutics helped us decipher the convoluted postulates of Lacanian psychoanalysis in Alice in wonderland, we instinctively went back to the apparently infantile nonsense verses of Sukumar Ray, just to realize that there is indeed more to heaven and earth… (And it gets more interesting after denouncing the existence of heaven altogether)

Sukumar’s story ‘Ha-ja-ba-ra-la’ had a character called the ‘kageshwar kuchkuche.’ (kageshwar comes from ‘kak’ – the crow, and kuchkuche is the onomatopoeia associated with the blackness of the crow)

Kageshwar was the accountant, wearing the stereotypical round rimmed clerk specs, and as the accountant is expected to, he carried a pen, a notebook and an ever confused countenance of continuous calculation. The reader, quite ‘normally’, gets bewildered at his calculating techniques. Just like kageshwar was bewildered to know that the ‘normal’ way of counting one’s age is adding up years! How can it be so? Age cannot only increase! After a point of time, age is bound to follow a reverse order… and then it should rise again after the age decreases for a few years.

After much contemplation, one might conclude that Kageshwar’s calculations were not merely ‘wrong,’ actually, at some subversive level, it was critiquing the whole concept of ‘mathematics’ which human being staunchly, and quite irrationally, cling on to… And being a rational scientific person himself, Sukumar did not practice the heresy of blindly defying ‘all that is western,’ which is the contemporary RSS-Boko Haram talisman.  Kegeshwar’s logic encompassed the whole dynamics of age, human behavior, tantrums, psychology, giddiness, life and of course – numbers. The humor here provided a contemplative space to distinguish between ‘Science,’ its ramifications, its influence, and more importantly, its reception.

The old talking crow, Dandabayosh, was one of the key figures who helped bring about an alternatively armed revolution by the deprived masses in the streets of Kolkata in radical writer Nabarun Bhattacharya’s novel ‘Kangal Malshat.’ Dandabayosh the crow was this ancient observer, who was the witness to the passing of various milieus, regimes and ideologies. He shared a special camaraderie with the ghost of the late queen Victoria. He can smirk away high brow neo liberal intellectuals and their theories by retorting – “I keep your Nietzsches in my pocket like so many nickels and dimes”

Can we not say that Kakkassery Bhattathiri could muster the bravado of never bothering about any rules of untouchability, and nonchalantly denounce the ways of the symbolic order because he could identify crows from one another at the age of 5?

Can we not say that the crows left Abdul after realizing that he was tying himself up with the alluring banalities of family life, the samsara?  

That is the power of the crow. Crow, the passerine alter ego of the common man – the aam aadmi. The aam admi party conveniently owned the symbol of the broom… And guess what, in Bengal, the crow is also known as the jhadu-dar bird.