The duck-porcupine in Sukumar Ray’s Abol Tabol wears an expression of mild, permanent confusion. Generations of Bengali children have filed it away with talking cats and dancing scarecrows as harmless nursery whim.
Well, it is not. Stare at it long enough and the joke sours…a creature stitched from parts that were never meant to share a body, told to go on living anyway.
That was more or less the condition of the Bengal that raised Sukumar Ray, and it was certainly his own condition, writing his last poems in a house on Garpar Road while a disease his doctors could not properly name ate through him.
The ‘comfortable' version of Sukumar Ray is a gifted eccentric, Bengal’s answer to Edward Lear, filling pages with singing gentlemen and grammatical goats for children too young to notice anything underneath. It is a durable reading, mostly because nonsense verse files are easily as harmless, and because nobody quite knows where to place a writer who refused to choose between the nursery shelf and the editorial page.
He did not choose. That refusal was his method. His nonsense does not sit outside the adult world as an escape from it; it sits inside that world’s own logic, wearing its clothes, turning every seam inside out.
Consider an uncle who demonstrates a machine that will fix any problem you name. It only needs one more small adjustment. Always one more, always tomorrow. Read as a nursery poem, it is simply a man fussing over a contraption that never starts.
Then set against the Bengal of the 1910s, thick with colonial commissions, five-year schemes, and committees convened to study the formation of further committees, the machine stops being funny in the ordinary sense.
It becomes an anatomy of bureaucratic stalling so exact that a grown reader recognises the office he sat in that same morning. Sukumar Ray had found something satire rarely manages…an argument that lands before the reader has decided to defend against one.
His mock-scholarly sketch works the same seam from a different angle. It presents an explorer’s diary, reporting ever more improbable beasts under ever more confident Latin names. Silliness on the surface. Underneath sits a very specific target of the colonial appetite for classification, the censuses, taxonomies, and racial categories through which an entire people were measured, filed, and handed back an explanation of themselves by men who had rarely bothered to look.
Ray’s explorer invents a species with total scholarly confidence and no evidence whatsoever. The joke is not on the beast. It is on the idea that naming something is the same as understanding it, which happened to be the working assumption of the government he lived under his whole life.
Translations into English often soften this, mostly because the puns carrying the satire do not easily survive the crossing. Yet even when flattened into English, the structural shape of the argument holds firm, which tells you the primary target was never really the wordplay itself.
The clearest case barely bothers to disguise its motives. Lakshmaner Shaktishel restages a famous scene from the Ramayana: Lakshman lies wounded, and an army needs a healer fetched urgently from the Himalayas. Ray turns it into a committee meeting. General after general rises to deliver a magnificent, circular speech while the wounded man is 'quietly forgotten' on the ground.
Bengali public life of that period ran on oratory...nationalist rallies, Brahmo Samaj debates, and the interminable adda of the educated middle class, all built on the confident assumption that a sufficiently eloquent sentence was itself a form of action.
Ray, who had sat through more such meetings than he wanted, wrote a play in which speechmaking simply replaces rescue, and nobody in the room notices the substitution.
None of this sounds bitter on the page, which is extraordinary, because Ray had every reason for bitterness. He wrote most of Abol Tabol during his final two years, dying slowly of a form of visceral leishmaniasis that Bengali medicine of the 1920s had no real answer for. A writer with less discipline might have let the nonsense curdle into something angrier and more obviously a protest.
Ray tightened his comic control precisely as his body loosened its grip, as if the verse form were the one thing left he could still govern completely. The last poem he wrote, addressed to his young son Satyajit with death plainly close, never once mentions dying. It talks about not being afraid.
Somewhere underneath all four of these tropes—the hybrid that cannot settle on a shape, the machine that never finishes repairing itself, the explorer certain of facts invented an hour earlier, and the committee that speechifies over a dying man—sits the same clear mind.
It was a mind with excellent reasons to distrust systems, and, given how little time he had left, even better reasons to have dropped the subtlety altogether.
He never did. He built it instead into the furniture of a child’s bookshelf, where it has waited for about a century for a reader old enough to notice that the duck-porcupine is not laughing along with him.
It is laughing at the arrangement that made him.
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Mahmud Nawaz Joy is a Dhaka-based freelance feature writer and political analyst