অনুষ্টুপ বসু র ফেসবুক পেজে এই অমূল্য রত্নটি পাওয়া গেল। দার্শনিক অরিন্দম চক্রবর্তী র লেখা বন্ধু অধ্যাপক স্বপন চক্রবর্তী সম্পর্কে। শেয়ার করার কোনো মানে হয় না তবু করে ফেললাম।
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The philosopher Arindam Chakrabarti on the passing of his friend Swapan Chakraborty:
“Leave Now for dogs and apes! Man has Forever”:
Swapan Chakravorty Leaves Now.
Arindam Chakrabarti
Jalaluddin Rumi admonished us to sell off our erudition and buy bewilderment. Swapan Chakraborty’s erudition was staggeringly encyclopedic, but he did not need to heed Rumi’s advice. Because, he had no shortage of bewilderment either. I have never seen a less smug intellectual/ academic. In 2016, I bullied him into contributing an essay in a Philosophy of Theater special issue of the journal Philosophy East and West. His essay, titled “Being Staged:
Unconcealment through Reading and Performance in Marlow’s Doctor Faustus and Bharata’s Natyashastra” was a tour de force, a dissertation on being and seeming, on the ethical tension
between acting and play-acting. The essay starts by describing the syllabus the doctor Faustus prescribed to himself: “Aristotelian logic, Galenic medicine, Justinian law, Jerome's Vulgate”.
This sounds like a tiny proper subset of what Swapan had read thoroughly. That single paper engages, in a non-name-dropping fashion, with the work of St. Augistine, Petrarch, Machiavelli,
Philip Sydney, Hegel, Debendranath Tagore, Kierkegaard, Heidegger, G.E. Moore, Bernard Williams, Michael Dummett, to say nothing of Bharata and Abhinavagupta and of course Shakespeare. And yet, the paper is unbelievably free from any touch of pomposity. It ends with this quote from what Swapan called Marlow’s “disturbing” play:
“Remember thee!
Yea, from the table of my memory
I’ll wipe away all trivial fond records,
All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past”.
Swapan passed away yesterday, leaving too many fond records on the table of my memory. Last 15th of August, I had to deliver a virtual lecture in Bengali on Freedom, Swadhinotaa and Swaraj. Extremely exhausted, preoccupied with his wife’s serious illness, Swapan joined the Zoom meeting and added absolutely profound remarks on Gandhiji’s phrase “chhutkaaraa” for freedom juxtaposing some obscure texts by Petrarch with Rabindranath’s notions of mukti. But, as always, he was utterly dissatisfied with his own comments. But more than his unparalleled mastery of in Oxford was called Literae Humaniores, what was stunning was his ability to see the relevance of my bookish lecture on different meanings of freedom to cotemporary political events. Within hours of the end of the event, he wrote back to me:
“I am no philosopher or political scientist, but I think that many of the problems you touched upon concern such things as 'autonomy', 'autarky' and 'agency' --- to put your terms in inadequate English. What, for instance, is the meaning of the 'autonomy' of a democratic nation-state in a globalized economy? Ghana's President Akufo-Addo refused European aid in 2017 to move toward 'autonomy' and 'self-reliance' as more important for people's 'agency' than so-called 'development'. His model---utopian as all economists would agree--was that of Thomas Sankara, the assassinated President of Burkina Faso, a revolutionary who tried to reconcile 'autonomy' (he refused all foreign aid, junked the Presidential Mercedes and cycled to office) with a non-Gandhian brand of austerity, self-rule (or 'autarky') and ethical politics. These, I feel, are the crucial philosophical questions for a vision of a political formation (a nation-state maybe) in which equality, at least as a regulative notion, is not at odds with liberty ('democratic' maybe)”
Heaps of memories on my table. In early 1970s Swapan, Sugata Bose, Shomak Ray and myself formed the debating quartet representing Presidency College. Logic and laughter, bitter banter
and boisterous camaraderie, mingled with rehearsing and strategizing for the next ‘shock and awe” campaign’ against St, Xavier’s or Loreto. Four decades later, as I was entering, albeit
shamefully late, a Jadavpur University auditorium to deliver an invited lecture at a Refresher Course of the Comp Lit department, with his disarming signature style Swapan greeted me with: “Arindam, you look tired; just go home, I have told at least 50 people who were waiting for your lecture that you are not coming”. I dithered between mounting annoyance and welling up warmth at his caring closeness. I also met Swapan in more formal settings. At the farthest corner of a huge office with high ceilings, he sat as the Director General of the National Library in Kolkata. Before I could confess that I felt nervous, he beat me to it and said “Come, come sit down, but I am so busy doing admin work that I feel not literate enough to have a conversation with you”. There was no posturing or sarcasm in that spontaneous welcoming. On another very formal occasion, Swapan sat smiling, in a well-draped dhoti, on the dais as the Ananda Puraskar write-up about my work which he composed was ceremonially read out.
Krishna Chandra Bhattacharya, the deepest thinker of early 20th century India wrote in his unfinished commentary on the Gita that if you love someone’s soul, not their appearance or achievements, even your grief—shok-- at losing them to death should transform into the aesthetic rapture of karuna rasa. I am sure Swapan is enjoying the chhutkaaraa, the liberation, the luminous freedom from this politically squalid “adbhut aandhaar” that has descended along with the corona virus on the world and especially in India. And death, Wittgenstein convinced me, is not an event in life. But not being dead when Swapan is no more, is no fun.
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