Sense in Nonsense

In a dank forest an old crank asked if I would know/ ‘In half an acre of ocean how many jackfruit grow?’/ I estimated roughly and said, ‘Begging your pardon—/ Just as many as the prawns growing in your garden.’ (Sukumar Ray’s For Better or for Verse.)

Browse at will for other funny, delightfully mad, strangely wise and oddly foolish bits of nonsense prose, rhyme and doggerel. But these pages are not all slithy toves and borogroves. The Tenth Rasa greatly benefits from the ballast of Michael Heyman’s introduction, which examines the cultural history of nonsense — a pretty wild and woolly genre, but a genre nonetheless. Going straight to the writings is perfectly enjoyable, but the great treat of this volume is in what you didn’t know about nonsense, so skip the introduction at your own peril.

It was Rabindranath Tagore who pointed out that the nine rasas of classical Indian aesthetic theory ignored what he called baalras, or children’s rasa, which was nevertheless everywhere in the joyful, nonsensical traditional Bengali nursery rhymes called chhoda. Sukumar Ray, father of Indian nonsense writing (and also of Satyajit), went further, describing this the tenth rasa as the rasa of whimsy — a passable translation of kheyaal. Ray, writing in the wake of Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear, rescued the idea of nonsense from the nursery and the margins of hasya rasa (comedy/happiness), elevating it to the status of a serious and complex genre.

Heyman and his colleagues talk about the universal pleasurableness of nonsense, of the joyousness and play that it involves; about India’s particular heritage of nonsense, in folk traditions like ulti bhasa and abol tabol and in the influence of English writers. They talk about how something can be as meaningful as it is meaningless, and differentiate jokes, which make sense, from nonsense, which does not. And they talk also of the subversiveness of the nonsense genre, which can, like the court jester, get away with murder while playing the fool.

It’s true that this is an intuitive genre, so that if you don’t fundamentally get nonsense, you will see no point in Sampurna Chattarji’s lines: Idli lost its fiddli/ Dosa lost its crown/ Wada lost its wiolin/ And let the whole band down.

Or: There was a fish who called himself/ THANKYOUBHERYMAACH./ Till the fisherman caught and salted him/ And ate him with boiled starch.

... contd.

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