Extinctions by Sharmistha Mohanty Review by Vedant Srinivas
Extinctions by Sharmistha Mohanty
Review by Vedant Srinivas
Publisher: Context
Publication Date: September 12, 2022
ISBN: 9395073330
Pages: 112
Everything and Nothing: On Sharmistha Mohanty’s Extinctions
Sharmistha Mohanty’s works have always been characterized by a certain largesse, a ceaseless seeking to incorporate in her writing that which lies between and beyond words, to constantly explore and push the boundaries of how one experiences and creates literature. Extinctions, like her other books, assumes a similar in-between status, hovering somewhere between poetry and prose, fiction and non-fiction, and literature and philosophy.
What one encounters in Extinctions is a varied collection of impressions, longings, memories, and ruminations, broken down into short segmented chapters. The vignettes range from musings on objects and events specific to the Indian subcontinent – the process of making kajol from a lamp, the intricate embroidery of kantha sarees, the barely perceptible smile of a dvarapala (temple guardian), the etymological explanations of Sanskrit words such as abhimaan and rta – to more abstract and encompassing ideas, as seen in chapters with titles like “Sunset,” “Ritual,” “Everything,” “Soil,” and “Words.”
Much of Extinction’s power lies in Sharmistha’s spare and elemental handling of the English language, resulting in passages of astonishing intensity. For instance, a grandmother’s one-handed gesture of holding a chin is described in this manner: “It is less definite than holding a face in both hands, or gathering another in one’s own arms, more precarious. The face is held at the point where it spreads the least yet where its completion is acknowledged.”
In another chapter titled “Forest,” to walk away into the forest is to “answer the need for distances… where what is tamed can return to wildness, where intention can lose its way… where all that has narrowed can widen again.” There is a sense in which everything seems to resonate with everything else, almost as if held together by a mnemonic trace that, though perceptually absent, remains deeply felt.
This co-mingling of human and non-human presences is present in the very first chapter titled “Street,” a long two-and-a-half page passage replete with commas and semicolons. Along with containing a profusion of elements – buildings, trees, vendors, music, the vehement orange glow of the sky – the street also acts as the repository of multiple temporalities: it is simultaneously geological (the hill at the end that is a consequence of a volcanic eruption almost 65 million years ago), mineral, and vegetal. Anonymous and solitary, the street also contains within itself an animated presence –
“now the street exhales, stirring the fallen leaves that choke the gutters, but keeping to itself the uncontrollable fluctuations beneath things.”
In similar fashion, we are later made privy to a grey staircase, the way the light falls on the landing, and to the banister that has been grasped innumerable times. It is in the climbing up and coming down the stairs that the entire gamut of human existence seems to be contained, from birth, longing, anguish, pleasure, acceptance, and finally to death. “A daughter ran down joy to meet her father. A father climbed pain. Servants walked up exhaustion. A wife climbed what should be.” It is always the indefinite a, a life, a place, streets, stairs, forests, non-individualized places where the sedimented history of humanity simultaneously seems to unfold, and where the congealed residue of human thought and action remains etched.
Indeed, civilizational inheritance in Extinctions is not merely material; it is at the same time intangible and felt, often encrusted in singular ways of being and feeling. It is there in the stark demeanor of one’s grandparents: “Their poise came from a deep alternation of action and inaction, an inheritance of centuries, expressed only through certain lives like theirs, where instinct and discernment had become one.” It is also expressed in the calls (pukaar) of fruit-sellers, knife-sharpeners, and wandering folk singers: “The call is neither joy or pain, not assertion or negation, not a question or an answer. It is being calling to itself, becoming more than it can ever know.”
What Sharmistha seeks to evoke above all is a sense of wonder at the fact that one is and exists. Moving beyond the realm of secular disenchantment, it is to experience awe and rapture – to stand outside oneself, as the original Greek word ekstasis implies – at the vast and diverse unravelling of history of which we are necessarily a part, simply by virtue of being alive. A wish for the “inexpressibly wide and broad, for the earth as well as the skies, for the unharnessing of human life.”
This comes across most succinctly in a chapter titled “Zebra,” in which Sharmistha recounts the episode of the Abyssinian zebra that was presented at the court of emperor Jehangir. Historical facts abound: the zebra brought by Mir Ja’far in 1621, Jehangir’s initial bemusement at seeing the animal, his diligent entry in his book the Tuzuk-i-Jehangiri, and the subsequent painting drawn by Ustad Mansur. And yet, despite the unambiguity of factual history, “there is beauty here, in the compassionate accuracy of the painting, in Ustad Mansur’s gifted hands, in Jehangir’s capacity for wonder, in the painting left behind for other ages which experience the wonder, not of the zebra, but of the painting and how it came to be.”
The feeling of wonder, however, is not to be equated with a nostalgia for the past. Along with the broadness of living comes various forms of exploitation, marginalization, and loss. Thus, nature is bountiful, but also terrifyingly indifferent. There is widespread ecological catastrophe being propelled by capitalism. Things – rituals, objects, gestures – that have existed for thousands of years are slowly being eroded away by a utilitarian existence.
In a particularly charged chapter titled “Mourning,” Sharmistha ruminates on our hyper-consumerist lifestyles and the colonial histories that undergird it:
.“Mourn these worlds trapped in the new, the continuous need for the original, for inventions.
Mourn the worlds that have reshaped continents, diverted rivers and rearranged time and space.
Mourn the cartographers making maps in their own image, expanding and contracting land masses.
Mourn the universal values made from a manipulated universe.”
Here, to mourn is not just to look back but also to reflect on where we are now. It is to take a pause and focus on what has endured, and what has been lost forever. And finally, it is to acknowledge, for it is only in acknowledgement that lies the possibility of renewal and hope.
Freed from the fixity of linear narration, Extinctions functions both as invocation and eulogy, and as a summons to attention towards that which is and has been, though now perched precariously on the brink of extinction.
“In the fading light there remains only a melon’s luminous curve.”
Sharmistha Mohanty is the author of Book One, New Life, Five Movements in Praise, and a book of poems, The Gods Came Afterwards. She has also translated some of Tagore’s fiction. Mohanty’s work has been published in journals such as Poetry, World Literature Today, Granta, and The Caravan. She is the founder and editor of the online literature journal Almost Island.
Vedant Srinivas is a writer, critic, and filmmaker from New Delhi, India, with an academic background in philosophy, literature, and cinema. He has contributed peer-reviewed essays, articles, and book reviews to various renowned journals. His (fiction) writing has appeared in magazines like Unpsychology Magazine, The Chakkar, Hakara, Borderless Journal, and E-Fiction India.
20 September 2023
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