Jibanananda Das’s Malloban vis-à-vis Heritage of Memory, Love and Unlove: “A Racket of a Hundred Consciousnesses”

Abstract

Bengali poet and novelist Jibanananda Das’s (1899-1954) posthumously published novel Malloban examines how exactly the very confounding yet the very crucial heritage of human memory runs, works and operates not just within the rigours of the human world but even beyond. This paper, with particular reference to Das’s Malloban, seeks to argue that memory is not just a human prerogative. Nor is memory a wishy-washy wheeling back to the past; rather, memory is a constant itinerary or a wealthy heritage with which the human entities and the corresponding nonhuman ones have got to sustain a dialogue, or, in other words, a lifelong discourse. A dispassionate examination of what exactly memory is or does, may vivify, for us, the intensely paradoxical “willing-unwillingness to wake up, to stay alive” beyond the cliched boundary of “love” and “unlove”. In the entire narrative, memory is not just a frame of reference against which Malloban, the protagonist, endeavours to feel “if nature’s compass-heart is stirring” but he perceives memory to be “a racket of a hundred consciousnesses”. It is only in the multifold embrace of such “hundred consciousnesses” that human beings acquire the ability of identifying their languages with those of the nonhuman, more precisely, “the light, the bird, the sky”. Memory comes as a dawn of disillusionment to Malloban, catapulting him to a never-to-be-snuffed “fight of the subconscious and the unconscious”. The lofty prospect of Malloban’s illumination by dint of surrendering to the fabulous “totality of time” continues to remain a fallacy, a mirage in a desert.