In The Elements on Eloquence (2013), Mark Forsyth makes some very pleasant heavy weather of Raymond Chandler’s specimen of synesthesia in The Little Sister: “She smelled the way the Taj Mahal looks by the moonlight.” Published in 1949, it is a novel that one might easily suspect of having been read by someone like the Indian poet and film-lyricist, Gulzar.
A self-confessed plagiarist, of sorts, Gulzar has borrowed metaphors and motifs from modern astronomy, Mirza Ghalib, Thomas Stearns Eliot. Why not Chandler then? But what makes me suspect so? One of Gulzar’s oft-quoted turns of phrases, one that got him into trouble with critics and censorship-fanciers, is from a song he penned for the film Khamoshi (1969): “humne dekhi hai un ankhon ke mehakti khushboo” (“I have seen the blooming fragrance of those eyes”). A much reformed cousin of Chandler’s, wouldn’t you say? In a film whose music was garlanded by Hemanta Mukherjee, one might have expected none the less.
The moonlight beaming down upon her fragrance that masks the Taj Mahal or the fragrance of his eyes breezing through the branches of someone’s memories! That clearly strikes one as the natural offshoot of the same soil.
In a world where censorship, the social ostracism of genii, and Shakespearean loots-and-plunders from Plutarch’s history are vehemently looked down on, how can we expect such treasonous meanderings in the art of the spoken image?
Adieu synesthesia! This is no country for you. I bid thee the best of my “farewell farewells,” to quote Thomas de Quincey’s tongue-in-cheek alliteration—a figure of rhetoric we have gladly mortgaged to the chatbots of today. Naysayers and the humorless were always a part of this world. But today those in power represent a bureaucracy that would much rather enslave itself to artificial intelligence than the beauty that human senses can afford.
Arup K. Chatterjee 