Bashabi Fraser (Diaspora Dual Identities)

Bashabi Fraser

Suitcase

 

This battered suitcase is my companion of old

Its dents and stains hold stories untold

It has made transnational journeys through years

Defying borders and custodians of fears.

A whiff of jasmine escapes as I lift

The lid under which are memories and gifts -

A temple bell tinkling from a pluralist shrine

A white cotton sari drenched in her silent brine

A flute from a cowherd waking to the muezzin’s call

My school choir’s photo harmonising our hall

A bursting ripe jackfruit beside delectable mangoes

Karabi[1] with madhabi[2] and a bedewed tuber rose

A soft quilted kantha[3] from recycled cloth

Handstitched by Thakuma[4] for my daughter at birth.

Fresh mountain mists wrap tea leaves in a tin

Ma’s songs on a tape, still sweet and serene

A feather from a pigeon floating free from its flight

A string from the intense blue of an ambitious kite

A plate of Sal leaves with teardrops from my stream

An ember from pyres where countless more gleam

A glass from a tea stall sweetened by friends

In interminable addas[5] and debates without end

A neat sheaf of letters in Baba’s elegant hand

Recounting the days I have not yet left behind.

 

The 1st of Baishakh

 

It is New Year today

In my native Bengal

Where I know friends and

Relatives will incessantly call

To seek my Baba’s blessing

And Pishi’s assurance

Of her love’s endurance

In the blossoming of spring

With its fresh beginning.

 

Keep the southern door

Ajar, Gurudeb[6] would say

Let the wind of Baishak

Enter without delay

Let the harbingers rain

Soak the dusty plain

Let the rivers be replenished

Let the meadows be embellished

 

Let the deep roots feel revived

Bring the paddy fields alive

See the mountains respond

To a pulsating bond

Coursing through land and sea

In a dance of unity

That envelops those I love

With a peace from above.

 

My Boat

 

I had considered myself washed ashore long ago

And had built my timber hut with care,

Keeping it warm in winter, cool in summer,

Lighted, airy, well-stocked and comfortable.

 

It was one of many houses

Indistinguishable as I liked it to be

But mine once I entered it -

A world I got lost in willingly.

 

Then one day a storm blew away

The walls that fenced me in

And I saw a white refreshing expanse

Uplifting itself to reach the sky;

I realised that my world had been washed away

Overnight, for there was a call

For me, to leave all and dare.

 

So, I found a boat, and put my all into it -

Me, mine and my life -

And we set forth - for I knew

That the shore was there beyond the blue

Pushed away for the time being

But waiting for me and mine

To build again - an edifice in stone.

 

Bashabi Fraser is an award-winning poet, children’s writer, translator, editor and academic. A transnational writer, her work traverses continents. Her awards include a CBE (2021) for Education, Culture and Cultural Integration, Doctor of Literature Honoris Causa from Swami Vivekananda University (2025), the Indira Gandhi Gold Plaque by the Asiatic Society of India, (2023), UK Bengali Convention Lifetime Achievement Award, 2022 and declared Outstanding Woman of Scotland by the Saltire Society in 2015. She has published 31 books and is widely anthologised as a poet. Bashabi is a Trustee on the Board of Scottish PEN and Hon’y President of the Intercultural Poetry and Performance Library, India.

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[1] Oleander

[2] An evergreen liana with white scented flowers.

[3] Handstitched quilt often made from recycled saris and dhotis that is distinctive of Bengal.

[4] Paternal grandmother.

[5] A Bengali word that indicates an informal conversation amongst a group pf people, usually friends - on diverse subjects, which can go on for hours.

[6] A reference to Rabindranath Tagore; literally it means the divine teacher.

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Setu, April 2025

Finding Habitat in the Universe: Bashabi Fraser’s Journey into the Heart of the State of Being and Becoming

Habitat by Bashabi Fraser

Luath Press Ltd, Edinburgh, 2023

ISBN: 9781804250938

Paperback £9.99

Review by: Sunil Sharma

Bashabi Fraser is on a literary quest, an existential search, like some classic authors seeking moral answers to fundamental questions of being and becoming in a crass age.

The eminent professor and poet, among other avatars, is deeply engaged with the meaning of living in all its complexities and dimensions on a degraded planet. The lyrical effort births a new book; a book of arresting poetry that not only witnesses the grimness of being situated in the bleak landscape of the new millennium but also, simultaneously registers protest in an idiom that immediately connects with an equally-alert readers with similar and shared concerns and values for survival and sustainability of ecosystems.

Bashabi, as a creative explorer of the effects of the post-industrial reality, poses the question through this latest collection of engaged poetry: What constitutes habitat? What are its various dimensions? 

In brief, nature of habitat in a rapidly-altering world…and, of being and becoming in scary contexts of interdependent existence of species and their interconnections.

And she proceeds to provide logical and cryptic answers; in the process, also unravels many dimensions of an overwhelming sense of foreboding that attends the empirical state of Homo sapiens in an age of unmitigated, human-made crises and cyclical disasters caused most notably by extreme climate change, among other grave challenges like poverty, pollution, wars and ethnic cleansing; the condition of being human, in the post-truth culture of manipulation and brazen political class out to destroy the democratic ideals, and the only liveable planet, for their own selfish purpose---clinging to power at any cost.

Habitat comes as a departure from your regular poetry which is largely formalist and self-reflexive; it is highly philosophical and political in nature and scope. 

It is a battle cry for some fine causes on behalf of the silent majority.

The poems take a fresh look at locating elusive meaning in a world that has come to resemble a post-apocalyptic planet for every sensitive soul, and finds strategies of surviving wastelands, via deep engagement and commitment, thereby resisting official versions and status quoist mentality of the conservative power structures.

Bashabi’s new aesthetics is a heroic attempt at finding new habitats and decoding the existing ones: The spaces inhabited by us as cognitive beings, creating values.

Beginning with the white space, typical habitat to verbal constructs and realms, home to new epistemes.

Bashabi deconstructs it in the following lines:

The white space

Is like a still lake

Undiscovered in

An emerald grove,

Its silence borne

From the depths

Of a forest

From which

It was torn –

The screams

Of death

Unuttered…

Continuing further, the poet talks of giving voice, animating this space, through words, images and syntaxes unique: 

Of rustling leaves,

The shooting

Desires of tendrils

The wisdom

Of the dark bark

And ambition

Of branches

Waiting to find

A voice to spill

Over and fill

The white space.

(“The White Page”, p. 15)

A whole universe is packed within the covers of this book: 128 pages of adventures, recordings and unpacking newer experiences and living moments and moods in intense, sometimes trance-like, state. Birds, cats, friends, landscapes, stars, skies, winds keep on emerging before your startled eyes. Earth, freedom, joy, fear, waves, mountains, mists, the elemental nature converse directly to a poetic soul in a heightened space of cognition.

Here, some stirring lines, released by the sight of fireflies:

They whisper, they beckon, they urge

Us to join their dance of true freedom

From fear

They lift up our spirits with sparkle and glitter

They scatter our suppressed thoughts and stall

Our tears.

(“Fireflies”, p. 18)

 

Deforestation, degradation of the planet, melting of ice, among other worrying signs, occupy the poet worried about the sustainability of our only home.

As each year we release new fumes

Of eight billion tons over our homes

In heat-trapped carbon dioxide

And methane that now provides

An encasing warmth that chokes this earth

This swirling mass that gave us birth.

(“As the Ice Melts”, p. 23)

Her critical gaze takes in the entire phenomenology; ecology of the organic and inorganic life and articulates the concerns felt by every conscientious citizen wishing for the sustainability of earth, as a real habitat. 

When habitats get threatened by callous actions of selfish and greedy governing elites, Bashabi registers her/our combined angst and anger at the plight of the wounded earth, the primary source of life, the original mother in every civilization, old or current.

Poetry becomes political and engaged in the Sartrean sense and beyond in her able hands.

As a committed academic and creative, Bashabi Fraser gives a clarion call for immediate and informed action; poetry urging us as thinking and caring souls interconnected with the universe and other forms of life, for meaningful and productive praxis, as both collective and individual acts can ensure a green future for coming generations:

Peep into your hedge and see the fledglings grow

Let your vision embrace hilltops clad in tranquil snow

Feed the fox that wanders free

Release the wasps to liberty

Return the bats to forests where no footsteps go.

(“The distant and the Near”, p. 123)

Oscillating between many distinct cultures and identities, covering panoramic landscapes, inner/outer, Habitat makes us understand the realities of living in a society heading for apocalypse and urging us for undertaking initiatives to stop and arrest that slide into hell through public action and literary-philosophical-ethical art, in the time of cholera.

Highly-recommended for seekers of serious writing in a mass market!

***

(Bashabi Fraser is Professor Emerita of English and Creative Writing at

Edinburgh Napier University and Director of the Scottish Centre of

Tagore Studies (ScoTs). She is also an Honorary Fellow at the Centre

for South Asian Studies, University of Edinburgh, Honorary Vice

President of the Association of Scottish Literary Studies (ASLS) and a

Royal Literary Fund Fellow. She has edited and authored 24 books and many articles.)

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Setu, May 2024

Bashabi Fraser, CBE

Bashabi Fraser

Bashabi Fraser is Professor Emerita, and a former Professor of English and Creative Writing. She is the co-founder and Director of the Scottish Centre of Tagore Studies and Chief Editor of the academic and creative e-journal, Gitanjali and Beyond. Bashabi is also a Royal Literary Fund Fellow at the University of Dundee and an Honorary Fellow at the Centre for South Asian Studies at the University of Edinburgh. She is the author of From the Ganga to the Tay, an epic poem.

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Authors, A-Z

Bountiful April: Bashabi Fraser, CBE

Bashabi Fraser

With two conflicting declarations of what you stand for -
‘The cruellest month’[1] and a month of ‘shoures soote’[2]
I come to you April – not forgetting an assassination
Of an epoch-changing good man, or the call for a
Pilgrimage as green shoots bring new hope and fervour
To the devotees of poetry, but bolstered by our own
Manifesto which bridges continents as it recalls
The birth of the bard on the banks of the Avon,
While celebrating the new beginning in Bengal -
As Baisakh[3] is ushered in with Rabindranath’s songs
And rhythms and rituals sanctify the New Year
From the Punjab to Assam, from Kashmir to Kerala.

April is the month when our gaze lifts upwards,
Scanning the horizon for lonely clouds to drift
Across the firmament to coalesce as a colony
Bringing - not April showers - but wild Nor’westers
With the thunder of the gods and the flaming crackle
Of blinding light, breaking the silent darkness with
The drenching promise of renewal and plenty.
So after the chatak[4] has waited with open beak
Through the drought of Chaitra[5], praying for
Reviving rain, it is bountiful April that opens
The floodgates of hope and continuity for poets
To sing rivers to new life and tripping vitality.

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[1] T.S. Eliot describes April as the cruellest month in The Waste Land. He wrote it when the  Spanish Flu pandemic ravaged the world. Walt Whitman commemorates the death of Abraham Lincoln in April in ‘The Death of Lincoln’.
[2] From the first line of the ‘Prologue’ to The Canterbury Tales by Chaucer.
[3] The first month in the Bengali, Assamese and Tamil calendar, and the coming of spring for people across India.
[4] The pied crested cuckoo.
[5] Chaitra is the last month in the Bengali calendar (and the first month in the Hindu calendar). 

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Setu, April 2023

Poetry: Bashabi Fraser, CBE

Bashabi Fraser

A Sharp Equation

With spring came a fresh impetus

Implemented by the melting snow

Somewhere in the crystal north -

It urged the burn to flow

Swiftly and push back the sludge

Of duckweed to the loch’s 

Limits, creating the free territory

For the hatch of cygnets to swim amok,

Watched by the bright cautious eyes

Of graceful parent sentinels

Ready to flare up if a playful dog

Or a curious camera came dangerously close.

The five brown youngsters have billowed

To ripeness till it is time to be shoved out

To make room for their next set of siblings

To emerge and know the same currents

Of cautious care of 2 + 5 that has to be

Maintained in loch and burn with no room

For claims or rivalries from an older brood.

***

A lonely Race

A river’s journey is long and lonely 

Like the veteran long distance runner

A challenge from start to finish

An adventure at every ripple of my flow

I have no consort or companion

No mother’s arms, no sibling’s rivalry -

I am a witness through time

I revel in reminiscence and reflection

I mirror heaven’s fury and kindness

I salute panoramic vistas

I lash past every urban sprawl

And lap around humble villages.

I am a solitary meanderer

Journeying to my finishing line

Which does not make me a champion

But swallows my singular identity

In a churning burial ground of eternal oblivion. 

Edinburgh 4/5 Sept. 2016

***

2020

The life that we knew

Of crowds of all hues

Waiting in queues

For known destinations

In quotidian missions

With hopes and visions -

Have all disappeared.

That life of coffee and cake

Of picnics by lakes

Of grand social bakes

That lunch with a friend

That parcel to send

That play at the end

Of the day – have been snatched away.

And on each lonely day

With hope held at bay

And a fear here to stay

We hear the wave crashing

Like a breaker smashing

From distant shores

Against our clamped doors.

***

Triveni and Mamilla

This is the Triveni , the confluence where three

rivers of culture converge, the Mohona  of merging

histories. Here the fez and kippah brave the noonday

sun where the crown of thorns has withered to allow

olive and lemon trees to nurture and sustain the city’s

diversity, watered by the clouds rising from the mountain

stream of Nahal Katlav and the neighbouring Jordan. 

This is where the Prophets of the confluence found the shade

of leafy comfort and the droplets of quenching coolness.

Here the Sahabah  found rest, contemplating on the 

hills beyond, and thousands found solace at their side

when their tired bones returned to the dust from which

life once sprang. So let them lie and let us light a candle of 

hope to those who sleep and for those who pass as they

know that this is the democratic corner where pundit,

pauper and priest rest from Byzantine’s splendid days, 

through time, pleading to us to desist from ruffling 

the dust that holds many layered secrets of possible harmony.

***

1. Triveni is another name for the confluence where three rivers meet at Allahabad in India.

2. Mohona is a confluence.

3. Disciples of  the Prophet Mohammed.

***

Bashabi Fraser is Professor Emerita, and a former Professor of English and Creative Writing. She is the co-founder and Director of the Scottish Centre of Tagore Studies and Chief Editor of the academic and creative e-journal, Gitanjali and Beyond. Bashabi is also a Royal Literary Fund Fellow at the University of Dundee and an Honorary Fellow at the Centre for South Asian Studies at the University of Edinburgh. She is the author of From the Ganga to the Tay, an epic poem.

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Setu, December 2022

Poetry: Bashabi Fraser, CBE

Bashabi Fraser

The Blooming Lotus

 

Like many hands folded

In meditative prayer

The lotus stands in peaceful

Silence, restful on its ample

Leaf, the waters below

Tranquil and reflective.

Then imperceptibly each

Petal unfurls, one by one

In unhurried, purposeful

Choreographed agreement

Revealing the inner core

A sublime beauty, the

Irresistible dedication of

Utter surrender to truth.

***

 

Swinging High: in Kensington Gardens

Part I

 

The sky bent down to touch me

Each time I swung over the bar

I could close my eyes and still see

The tree tops and knew that the

Flowers would be there when I swished back

To their butterfly intensity, hugging the green.

 

It was a game we played, daring one

Another to swing higher and higher

And then parachuting down in one fell

Swoop of effortless touchdown.

 

I saw her before she saw me

My mother resplendent in her sari

As she walked towards the trapeze

Artists. I flew over the bar, caught a

Glimpse of the tree line and then jumped

In ecstasy. My dress swirled like a cancan

Dancer's. I landed on my running feet

And flew into my mother's sweet embrace.

I could feel her soft heart thudding

As she gathered me in her ample arms

Whispering urgently, 'promise me you will never jump

Like that again!' I was startled by the request

But nodded and kept my word.

 ***

 

My Trapeze Artist: in Kensington Gardens 

Part II

 

My friend had dropped in with her

Twin daughters who tore through

The house looking for their playmate.

I knew where she was and walked

To Kensington Gardens to bring her

Home. She was swinging dangerously

Above the bar, pretending to be

The star swinger of skydom.

She saw me and flew off her seat -

Her pink dress ballooning up like

A floating umbrella lost in a Norwester.

My shriek froze. She landed on her agile

Feet and ran to me, oblivious of my

Relief to see her moving and unbroken.

***

 

Bashabi Fraser, CBE is an award winning poet, children’s writer, editor and academic. She is the recipient of a CBE (2021 New Year Honours) for Education, Culture and Integration and declared Outstanding Woman of Scotland by Saltire Society in 2015. Bashabi has authored and edited 22 books, published several articles and chapters, both academic and creative and as a poet, has been widely anthologised. Her recent publications include Patient Dignity (2021, in press), Rabindranath Tagore, a critical biography (2019), The Ramayana, A Stage Play and a Screen Play (2019).

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Setu, April 2021 :: Icebergs in the Mind: Memory, Dream and Desire

Border Traffic: Bashabi Fraser

Bashabi Fraser

The father left even before

The child’s shriek declared

His right to live.

She fell in love with his kicks

Inside her before his little legs

Wrestled with the air.

Her father had been without

Work after a machine ripped

His nimble hands.

Her mother had the house

To nurture, a kitchen

Flame to keep alight.

So she had to find work

And this man in the pub

Could lead her there

Across the border one dark

Frosty night, while her child

Slept unaware

Of her wet face, her

Trembling fingers in his hair

Till she crept away

Her mother’s cheese and bread

Her father’s woven blanket

Her child’s photo

Amongst her choice possessions

As she followed the dream

Of the promised land

With three women friends

In a journey that began

On a high tide

Of nervous hope, in a speeding car

Driven by shadowy men

Across a whispering border.

Where more shadowy men

Hurled them into hotel rooms

With bleeding beds

Which had seen unspeakable

Acts unfold where once

Free women crumpled

Into unrecognizable heaps

Of battered flesh and bone

Their youth shattered

Their daylight stolen

In addresses unknown

Where companions too tired

To comply were shot or knifed

While her gagged mouth

Stifled her screams

Till one unannounced day

An indomitable wave

Of feminist scrutiny

Floodlit her captor’s

Boat where she lay

Handcuffed and muffled

Her son’s face caressing

Her submerged dreams

Her parents beckoning

Her back. The phantasmagoria

Froze as a new wave of power

Released her bonds.

The haven of sheltered

Souls, restored to recognition

And security 

Made heaven seem redundant

As here was the bliss of

Recovered dignity

From where the journey to her

Waiting bairn could begin

With renewed hope.

Setu, September 2020

Poetry: Bashabi Fraser

* Author of the Month *

Bashabi Fraser

After the final exams: in the schoolyard 

We are back in that moment
When the present stretches
Like the pine trees around us
Sun-tipped and comfortably still.
That moment when the past
Has been folded away
With lavender flowers
In a chest of drawers –
Each for one class of every year
That we have packed, parcelled
And closed decisively.
With exams over. we can lounge
Lazily like the school cat
Taking in the vistas of range
On range of wooded hills,
Unchallenged by their daring
Crests, spellbound by their magic.
The future awaits beyond these
Mountains, unravelling on the plains
Below – invisible for now.

The wind has not galloped here
To propel the falcon in flight
Who hovers in an opal sky
Beyond our vision and intent.
This is that moment which we share
With friends who have been friends
For years, this moment between
The past and future, when we
Have no ambition or idea,
No anxiety, mission or fear
Of what awaits us.  Happy
For now in this unhappening
Moment, a present when
Life knows the bliss
Of not turning back or moving on -
Van Gogh’s sunflowers reflecting
The sun’s captivating glance.
***

My daughter learns to swim

The arguments had seemed endless
She had just turned seventeen
Her driving lessons could begin
But I laid down a condition
She should first learn how to swim
And then we would book the lessons
She so longed for behind the wheel
I reasoned swimming was a life-saving
Skill and one which would let her join in
With her mates on weekend getaways.
The resentment drew barbed wires
Between her and me till we were in Goa
Where one charming Dutch trainer
Shared the pool with us. Would he teach
My lass I hesitantly asked
Learning she was eighteen, the seventy year
Old jauntily volunteered. She was furious
But could not refuse a gracious offer.
An hour later I was called to the poolside
She stood on the edge marking my approach
Once I was there, she raised her arms
And dived in, rippling across the pool
Each stroke a rhythmic arch
Her body like an arrow set free
Challenging the length and pirouetting back
To where I stood watching
The most splendid solo performance of a superb artist.

(28 May 2017, Kolkata)
***

The Unexpected Visitor

I heard the peal of thunder
Break the sky asunder
I heard the palm tree crash
With lightning’s blinding flash
When you appeared at my humble door
Your face illuminated
Your garment agitated
You stood expectantly, not cowered
By the fierce downpour.

I looked at you with wonder
What had urged you to surrender
To the vagaries of this tumultuous night
When the river rose in rage
And all the birds took flight
From which hell’s gate had you run away?
But I did not question you
I only welcomed you
To this sanctuary which holds storms at bay.

Setu, July 2020

Poetry: Bashabi Fraser

Bashabi Fraser

In our wee garden

For Neil

You call it our prison yard

Where the inmates are released

Once a day to exercise just enough

To let the prison doctor declare

Them fit enough to avoid

Hospitalisation, ready for the next

Round of torture in their cells.

I call it our survival circuit

Which we enter at our pleasure

Stay as long as we will without

Surveillance, caressed by a mild sun

Enveloped by a free wind, soothed

By a swatch of colours alluring birds

Who gift us with unsolicited melodies.

How many Springs have gone by

When we ignored our wee garden

And sought the burn flowing to the lake

Where a walkway took us amidst

A host of gliding swans and ducks?

We were unaware of a feast at home

Served by an undemanding host

Of daffodils, tulips, narcissus,

Hyacinths, lantana and bluebells

A marvellous spring offering.

Today the dunnocks watch us

From our hedge, the blackbirds

Hop across our path, undaunted

And the doves remind us of love. 

Ganapati at St Andrews[1]

Your impish humour is evident in your elephant head

With its indicative size and weight, choosing a tiny rat

As your carrier, to transport you wherever your fancy leads.

So here you are at this sea swept University town, holding court

On the Fife coast, with your sister Lakshmi and brother, Kartik

On either side, surrounded by indigo and scarlet, our patron

Of arts and science. I have seen you awakened from tantric

Moments of meditative stillness, caught in the rhythmic abandon

Of creative dance as the dancing Ganapati. Will you now bless

Our every fresh venture as you rest between the acts, your lotus

Hands holding the world's love and power as Parvati and Shiva's son,

Our remover of all obstacles, our fortune granting scribe, our salvation?

Note:

[1] Commissionedby the StAnza Festival to commemorate an Indian glass painting of Ganesh in the University of St Andrews collection.

Bashabi Fraser is Professor Emerita, and a former Professor of English and Creative Writing. She is the co-founder and Director of the Scottish Centre of Tagore Studies and Chief Editor of the academic and creative e-journal, Gitanjali and Beyond. Bashabi is also a Royal Literary Fund Fellow at the University of Dundee and an Honorary Fellow at the Centre for South Asian Studies at the University of Edinburgh. She is the author of From the Ganga to the Tay, an epic poem.

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Local 2020 :: Setu, June 2020