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Anurag Chauhan
Stew Much: Sukumar Ray’s poem embracing Absurdity and Humour in Man's Imagination
Humor has justly been regarded as the finest perfection of poetic genius.
Humour is so innate to humanity that it is neglected almost all the time. It is like breathing to live but never being conscious of it. Obviosity is the illusion that prevents the human mind from paying attention to what really matters.
We get ourselves so busy in the drama of our own longings, which itself revolves around the atom of our happiness, that we actually fail to realize the origins of it and lose the rationale behind our thoughts and actions.
The sense of humour and hilarity is not a specific entity to be observed but is a moment of absence of our obsessive indulgence into the pendulum of our race of “desire and dismay”.
Robert Willmott once said,
Humour is the pensiveness of wit.
It is a poetic ode to the profound connection between these two enigmatic forces. In the union of wit and humour, pensiveness is set free to dance like fireflies under a moonlit sky. Together, they navigate the twilight realm between profundity and playfulness, bridging the chasm between the profound and the preposterous.
And as James Allen observes in his magnum opus “As a Man Thinketh” that, “If you would perfect your body, guard your mind. If you would renew your body, beautify your mind. Thoughts of malice, envy, disappointment, despondency, rob the body of its health and grace.”
“To think well of all, to be cheerful with all, to patiently learn to find the good in all — such unselfish thoughts are the very portals of heaven; and to dwell day by day in thoughts of peace toward every creature will bring abounding peace to their possessor.”
What is humour is nothing but a moment of absence of our obsessive indulgence into the pendulum of our race of desire and dismay.
“Stew Much” poem by Sukumar Ray
One legendary poet who had that level of intense wit, keen sense of observation and a diverse awareness of humour was Sukumar Ray (30 October 1887 - 10 September 1923), who delved into the depths of creativity and innovation to create classic pieces of nonsense literature, literature of absurdity and humour, which not only interests children but the adults as well even today.
Sukumar Ray, a Bengali writer and poet who is best known for his works of literary nonsense, was the son of a great litterateur and entrepreneur, Upendrakishore Ray Chowdhury, and the father of an acclaimed director, who is widely considered as one of the greatest filmmakers of all time, Satyajit Ray.
In his poem “Stew Much”, Sukumar Ray creates a world of juxtapositions of entirely different species of creatures with physical dissimilitudes, and puts them together to evoke an ironical structure where aspirations are entwined with the unfathomable possibilities and take over the rationality to lead to a sense of hilarity and amusement.
His depiction creates humour over the absurdity of imagining the creatures turning into the products having essential characteristics of two different contrasting species of animals.
Sukumar Ray was an excellent artist too as he used to self-illustrate his own poems. He even went to study Photoengraving and Lithography in London in 1911 on a college scholarship, where he created new methods of halftone blockmaking in printing and published them in two British Journals. There Ray became a Fellow of the Royal Photographic Society in 1912.
Ray’s strong understanding of things that induce certain human emotions and the sense of irony makes “Stew Much” worthy of serious consideration, not just as a masterwork of children’s literature but also as a matter of literary criticism in the form of a positive analysis of his work.
Thomas Carlyle’s words aptly summarize Sukumar Ray’s artistry,
Humor has justly been regarded as the finest perfection of poetic genius.
Satirical Comedy in “Stew Much”
STEW MUCH - by Sukumar Ray
A duck once met a porcupine; they formed a corporation Which called itself a Porcuduck (a beastly conjugation!). A stork to a turtle said, 'Let's put my head upon your torso; We who are so pretty now, as Stortle would be more so!' The lizard with the parrot's head thought: taking to the chilli After years of eating worms is absolutely silly. A prancing goat - one wonders why - was driven by a need To bequeath its upper portion to a crawling centipede. The giraffe with grasshopper's limbs reflected: Why should I Go for walks in grassy fields, now that I can fly? The nice contented cow will doubtless get a frightful shock On finding that its lower limbs belong to a fighting cock. It's obvious the Whalephant is not a happy notion: The head goes for the jungle, while the tail turns to the ocean, The lion's lack of horns distressed him greatly, so He teamed up with a dear - now watch his antlers grow!
Sukumar Ray’s perfection and command over the choice of words attracts one to observe the deeper layers lying beyond the context of mere words.
“Stew Much” poem by Sukumar Ray, although offers little in quantity to go through, the qualitative insights are enough to consume our attention into the conveyed satires on the unrealistic human aspirations and the struggle they go through to fulfil their desires.
Sukumar Ray creates humour out of imagining hypothetical creatures and mocks the irrational ideas that man desires to have in life, and longs to enhance his well-being out of his whimsical imaginations.
A duck once met a porcupine; they formed a corporation Which called itself a Porcuduck (a beastly conjugation!).
Sukumar Ray firstly juxtaposes a duck and a porcupine, and names their combination as “Porcuduck”, which he exclaims as “a beastly conjugation”.
A stork to a turtle said, 'Let's put my head upon your torso; We who are so pretty now, as Stortle would be more so!'
Ray secondly picks up a stork and a turtle, where stork puts its head on the turtle shell (carapace), calling this duo as “Stortle”.
The lizard with the parrot's head thought: taking to the chilli After years of eating worms is absolutely silly.
Sukumar Ray then attaches a parrot’s head onto the body of a lizard, where a lizard desires to change its taste by eating chilli that a parrot likes to eat. Lizard now feels that it was silly to have been eating worms all these years.
Though Ray doesn’t give a name to this new form of creature, we can probably name it as “Lizarrot”.
A prancing goat - one wonders why - was driven by a need To bequeath its upper portion to a crawling centipede.
Ray’s fourth creation is a “Goatipede”, where a joyously jumping goat now wants to crawl like a centipede by attaching its upper portion to the centipede’s limbs.
Sukumar again puts the man’s desire for more on display, and the complex that one feels when they observe what others have and what they don’t.
The giraffe with grasshopper's limbs reflected: Why should I Go for walks in grassy fields, now that I can fly?
The poet now merges a giraffe and a grasshopper together to create a creature that should be called a “Grassiraffe”. Sukumar Ray asserts what Giraffe feels that now as it has got the grasshopper's wings, it can now fly rather than do the “mundane” walking as before.
Ray shows how humans similarly tend to jump from one whim to another, and long for the things they do not have while belittling those that they have at hands right now.
The nice contented cow will doubtless get a frightful shock On finding that its lower limbs belong to a fighting cock.
It is the cow now who has got the limbs of a furious fighting cock. Ray’s depiction creates an instant stream of imagination and hence brings a sudden sense of absurdity and humour within the reader's mind. The new creature can be aptly named as “Cockow”.
It's obvious the Whalephant is not a happy notion: The head goes for the jungle, while the tail turns to the ocean,
Sukumar Ray expresses the creatures’ problems with such absurd compilations, as now he puts up a whale and an elephant together to create a “Whalephant” having the head of an elephant and the tail of a whale.
He says that it is a matter of problem as the head of an elephant is used to the environment of a jungle and just longs to go there while the tail of the whale is accustomed for being in action in the deep waters of an ocean and so tends to move to the ocean.
This conflict reflects the sense of contradiction between a man’s desires and reality, where one realizes that imagination is still subjected to the pits of the real world and cannot escape the limits of what nature allows and what it does not.
The lion's lack of horns distressed him greatly, so He teamed up with a dear - now watch his antlers grow!
Lastly, Sukumar Ray shows the longing of a lion to own the antlers of a deer as he feels distressed for not having them. So, the lion comes up with a deer and acquires his antlers and creates a new creature “Deerion”.
Man's Whimsical Odyssey: Humour, Absurdity, and Imagination
Sukumar Ray, in his “Stew Much”, radiates his witty understanding of human condition and human psychology of materialistic pursuits, and the whims and fancies of an influenced and imaginative mind.
He shows how in the labyrinth of folly, man stumbles blindly, driven by whimsical imaginings to lead himself astray. He dances naively with illusions, forsaking reason in a relentless pursuit of illusory well-being.
Ray portrays how imagination acts as a double-edged sword, which can help us steer into the future but if not kept right, that same sword can lead one astray into the darkness of never-ending longing and desire.
Man’s whims become sirens, luring him away from the shores of reality, leaving him adrift in a sea of delusion. His longing to enhance his well-being becomes a mirage, forever elusive and unattainable.
In his pursuit of fantastical dreams, man disregards the present, sacrificing genuine happiness for the allure of a far-fetched future. True well-being lies not in the whimsical musings of a restless mind but in the embrace of authenticity and mindfulness.
When man abandons the folly of his capricious desires and seeks fulfillment in the present, he discovers the riches of contentment that elude him in the maze of his whims. It is in grounding oneself in reality that one finds the true path to genuine well-being, not in the delusions of whimsical imagination.
Read and Contemplate on the Sigmund Freud's brilliant insights on the future of the illusion between science and religion, and then on the James Allen's philosophical discourse on the effects of thought on human life.
Get your own copy of Sukumar Ray's works from here.
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