Rethinking Sukumar Ray's Abol Tabol as a Multimodal Text Hirak Bhattacharya

Bookbird: A Journal of International Children's Literature, Volume 59, Number1, 2021, pp. 64-69 (Article)

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Sukumar Ray’s Abol Tabol (1923), published originally in Bengali and translated into different English versions, is a fantastic representa-tion of nonsensical verse. In delineating the concept of nonsense and

fanciful beasts, Ray strategically incorporates various artistic sketches of his imagined creatures, creating a whole edifice of multimodal texts.

Multimodality is a theory that analyzes how communication is estab-lished not only through writing but also by incorporating various other modes like gestures, visual forms, colors, and speaking. Multimodal texts are not a recent development in world literature. The history of multimodal

texts dates back to seventeenth-century England. In India, there is a significant oeuvre of multimodal texts as a part of children’s literature. In fact, multimodal texts are strategically used to reinforce the learning capabilities of young learners as multimodality appeals to various sensory perceptions.

Sukumar Ray, the pioneer in half-block printing in India and compiler of one of the best-known books of tales in Bengali, Tuntunir Bai (The Tales of the Tiny Bird; 1910) was an important contributor to chil-dren’s literature in India (Choudhury and

Kishore). In 1921 he founded Sandesh (Sweets), which “proved to be the best juvenile monthly in India” (Sen 311). Ray is most often recognized as one of the first practitioners of literary nonsense in modern India, with Abol Tabol acknowledged as an important endeavor in this domain. Abol Tabol has been translated into several vernacular languages, including Hindi, as well as into English by several renowned personalities, including Ray’s son, the Oscar award recipient Satyajit Ray (1970), and professor Sukanta Chaudhuri (1987).

Children’s literature in India and across continents has incorporated the usage of multimodality in order to appeal to the aesthetic sense of young readers. In various genres like comics, textbooks, picturebooks, early readers, and nursery rhymes, we find the use of multimodality. For instance, The New England Primer, published between 1687 and 1690 by

Rethinking Sukumar Ray’s Abol Tabol as a

Multimodal Textby HIRAK BHATTACHARYA

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printer Benjamin Harris, was the first textbook designed for the Amer-ican Colonies; it used crude woodcut illustrations and religious doctrines to teach reading skills and to promote rote memorization of the Calvinist doctrine (Ford). A Little Pretty Pocket-Book by John Newbery, which is often considered to be the first children’s book, also incorporates woodcut illustrations that became the fashion of that period.

Thakumar Jhuli (Grandmother’s Bag of Stories) by Dakshinaranjan Mitra Majumdar is a collection of folktales from India that follows the structure of a parable and ends with a moral. This collection of folktales is accompanied by graphic illustrations especially targeted to young readers. Pandit Vishnu Sharma’s celebrated work Panchatantra, from twelfth-century India, is a collection of interrelated animal fables in Sanskrit verse and prose, arranged within a frame story. It also employs illustrated graphics to narrate the various situations of the stories. In a similar vein, the illustrated poetry in Ray’s Abol Tabol is an exquisite example of a multimodal text. By associating the texts of his poems with illus-trative sketches, Ray creates a world of juxtaposition, combining various sensory perceptions.

In order to understand Ray’s use of multimodality, we first need to briefly discuss the concept of nonsense poetry. Nonsense is a difficult term to define; Michael Heyman attempts to define it as

a particular kind of play, one that is not pure exuberance, not unre-strained joy, and above all, not gibberish (although these are often elements of it). Rather, it is an art form rooted in sophisticated aesthetics, linguistics and [structured] play with logic. (Heyman et al. xx-xxi)

In other words, there is sense in nonsense literature, even though it plays with the subtle logic of making sense by the employment of “balance between ‘sense’ and ‘non-sense’” (Heyman et al. xxiv).

In Abol Tabol, there is a representation of a wide range of fanciful and real animals, sometimes in a hybrid form that defies the zoological taxonomy of nomenclature. However, there are instances when these real or fanciful animals interact with human civilization and endeavor to create their own spaces in human cultural and social worlds. What is most engaging in Ray’s Abol Tabol are the sketches accompanying these poems. The illus-trations are significant as they delineate Ray’s own aesthetics of nonsense and allow the readers to have a better understanding of the text. At times, the illustrations help us comprehend the text beyond the fixities of text-centered approaches and lead the reader to a creative flight of the imagination.

The poem “Ram Garurer Chhana” (“The Sons of Rangaroo”), for example, presents an imaginary beast with human attributes. The sketch aligned with the poem explains the anatomy of this imaginary beast that shares some similarities with humans. The sketch depicts the

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creature’s hands, arms, head, and face as similar to those of humans, but it also illustrates a long tail and torso that make it more similar to a reptile.

It is perhaps a hybrid animal that exists between human and nonhuman forms. The gloomy expression of its face makes it more human, and the signboard accompanying its abode with the Bengali phrase “Hanshi Nished” (“Laughter not allowed”) appears to be quite humorous as this imaginary beast is literate.

Poushali Bhadury observes that this signboard is signifi-cant for two reasons: First, it explains to the readers that the beast is literate and “closer to human society than imagined. Second, the sign is written in Bengali which places this imag-inary beast firmly within the local cultural context” (33). Unlike the other nonhuman animals, this fabulous animal has an antipathy toward nature. The Sons of Rangaroo “live in constant fear / Of chuckles far and near” as that brings

them merriment and joy. Natural phenomena such as the summer breeze, the stir of leaf and burr, the darkness of the night, and dances of the fire-flies bring them no momentary relaxation. They are not only isolated from human civilization but also equally alienated from nature. The multimodal aspect of this poem helps the readers to decipher the cultural, philosophical, ecological, and semantic codes prevalent within the text, and perhaps it is with the dint of the paratextual elements like the picto-rial description that the readers are able to decode a variety of meanings embedded within the text.

“Stew Much!” (“Khichudi!”) justifies its name by thematically appro-priating the concept of a hotchpotch. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, hotchpotch refers to “a number of things mixed together without any particular order or reason.” In Indian cuisine, Khichdi, or its Bengali variant, Khichudi, is a hotchpotch dish in which rice is mixed with lentils and a variety of vegetables and spices to prepare this dish. In a similar vein, Ray’s “Stew Much!” incorporates the notion of hotchpotch and produces a variety of hybrid or mixed animals like a porcuduck (a combi-nation of porcupine and duck), a stortle (a hybrid of stork and turtle), and a whalephant (a mixed variety of elephant and whale). Such permutations and combinations may appear absurd to contemporary readers, but Ray’s notion of hybridity transcends the natural and emancipates a world of inclusion or juxtaposition. The hybrid creature not only fascinates us by their anatomical features but also hints at the linguistic aspects of such creation. For instance, in the names porcuduck, stortle, and whalephant, we find the use of portmanteaus—that is, combining the meaning and sound of two words. Ray’s sketch conjoined with the poem “Stew Much!” illus-trates the hybridized animals. In fact, without the aid of this graphical representation, it would have been a difficult task for readers to imagine such fanciful beasts.

In “Pumpkin-Grumpkin” (“Kumropotash”), Ray imagines another fanciful beast whose body is similar to a pumpkin. This imaginary beast looks like a mammal and replicates the image of a whale with fin-like

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structures for arms and webbed feet. This beast performs activities like dancing, crying, laughing, running, and calling, which align him with human beings. However, Pumpkin-Grumpkin transcends the liminality of human existence by becoming a metaphor of absolute power and tyranny. The narrator advises readers to follow certain regulations when Pumpkin-Grumpkin is performing the above-mentioned activities. For instance:

If Pumpkin-Grumpkin dances—Don’t for heaven’s sake go where the stable horse prances;Don’t look left, don’t look right, don’t take no silly chances.Instead cling with all four legs to the holler-radish branches. (1-4)

The portrayal of this imaginative beast instills a sense of terror. It is inter-esting to note that “Pumpkin-Grumpkin” foregrounds a set of rules that need to be followed, and this set of rules is similar to that of the judi-cial system persistent in human civil society. However, what dire conse-quences would follow in case of violating these rules is up to the reader’s imagination.

“Dopey-Mopey Olli” (“Hooko Mookho Hangla”) is another animal poem by Ray that portrays an imaginary animal who ponders much over the tactics of killing flies in spite of having two tails. The illustration accompanying the poem reveals that the animal has quite distinc-tive anatomical features. Its mouth is similar to that of a human, it has two short tails, and its feet are short and thick like those of an elephant. Its eyes are oval and its arms look human. Its facial expression clearly reveals its dissatisfaction about not being able to swat the disturbing flies as his tails can only move to the left or right. Such nonsensical matters get a serious treatment in the poem of Ray, and readers enjoy this height of nonsense along with the fabulous graphical representation of “Dopey-Mopey Olli.”

Ray’s use of multimodal forms in Abol Tabol transcends the fixities of biological classification. The fanciful beasts that Ray imagines in his verses compel readers to delve deep into their imagination, and the images subvert conventional thinking about biological evolution itself. The facial expression, gestures, and anatomical features of these beasts are forms of multimodality that help establish a unique kind of communication with the reader in parallel to the textual connotations.

Ray created such fanciful creatures in the early phase of the twentieth century, when printing technology itself was in a flux of development. He was a visionary who felt the need of the hour and unconsciously intro-duced multimodal elements in his canonical work of nonsense rhymes. Abol Tabol may be considered to be one of the earliest instances of multi-modal texts of twentieth-century India. A significant number of poems in it represent a subtle satire of the British administration in colonial India.

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The beastly figure Pumpkin-Grumpkin, for instance, represents the tyran-nical British administrator, and most importantly, the sketch of Pumpkin-Grumpkin creates a sublime sense of awe by representing an animal who is half-human and half-beast in terms of its anatomical features. The young learners of twentieth-century Bengal appreciated these sketches. Even unschooled children could somewhat decipher the meaning of nonsense verse by looking at the fanciful sketches. The sketches strategi-cally helped the readers/viewers to decipher the various semantic codes embedded within the text, and in this way, Ray created a whole edifice of multimodal texts in his Abol Tabol.

Author’s NoteIn this article, the poems “Pumpkin-Grumpkin” and “Dopey-Mopey Olli” are taken from Sampurna Chatterji’s English translation of Sukumar Ray’s Abol Tabol, which bears the title Wordygurdyboom! The poems “Stew Much!” and “The Sons of Rangaroo” are taken from Satyajit Ray’s English translation of the poems of Abol Tabol, which bears the title Nonsense Rhymes.

Works CitedChildren’s BooksChoudhury, Roy, and Upendra Kishore. Tuntunir Bai. Nirmal Sahityam,

2014. Ford, Paul Leicester, editor. The New England Primer. Dodd, Mead and

Company, 1897.Mitra Majumdar, Dakshinaranjan. Thakumar Jhuli. Ashok Book Agency,

2019.Newbery, John. A Little Pretty Pocket-Book. Dodo Press, 2009. Ray, Sukumar. Abol Tabol. Shishu Sahitya, 2018. ---. Nonsense Rhymes. Translated by Satyajit Ray, Writers Workshop, 1970.---. Wordygurdyboom! Translated by Sampurna Chattarji, Puffin Books,

2016.Sharma, Vishnu. Panchatantra. Translated by G. L. Chandiramani, Rupa

and Co., 2011.

Secondary SourcesBhadury, Poushali. “Fantastic Beasts and How to Sketch Them: The Fabu-

lous Bestiary of Sukumar Ray.” South Asian Review, vol. 34, no. 1, 2013, pp. 11-38. Academia.edu, www.academia.edu/28607860/Fantastic_Beasts _and_How_to_Sketch_Them_The_Fabulous_Bestiary_of_Sukumar _Ray.

Heyman, Michael, et al. The Tenth Rasa: An Anthology of Indian Nonsense. Penguin India, 2008.

Sen, Sukumar. History of Bengali Literature. Sahitya Akademi, 1992.

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Hirak Bhattacharya lives in Siliguri, India, and is a state-aided college teacher at Islampur College, North Bengal University. He is presently pursuing his doctoral degree at the University of Raiganj, West Bengal, India. His areas of academic interest include animal studies, children’s literature, disability studies, and women’s writings.

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