A meaningless world: Sartre, Camus, Waliullah, and Badal Sircar

Existentialism is a philosophical theory and a literary perspective. Its central proposition is that the world has no a priori meaning or purpose. Yet life has value. Therefore, human beings strive to discover the meaning and worth of life within their own environment and circumstances. Humans create the meaning of life in their conscious and subconscious minds and apply it through action and freedom.

A somewhat different philosophy is absurdism. According to this philosophical viewpoint, humans seek the meaning of life, but the indifferent world does not provide it, thereby creating a tension that Camus calls the ‘Absurd’, yet one must confront the adversities of a meaningless life. To live through defiance or revolt against an irrational world is the absurdist response. The main contributor of absurdism is Albert Camus.

The most successful in applying existentialism in literature is Jean-Paul Sartre. According to him, existence precedes essence—existence or being precedes essence. We are born; therefore, we exist; we shall determine our essence and the purpose and flow of our lives after birth. I shall apply Jean-Paul Sartre’s above idea to the animal world five hundred and forty-one million years before the emergence of humans. At that time, the complex eye, as preserved in the fossil record, appeared in a kind of aquatic arthropod called the trilobite. Later, it created its new essence— somewhat like the essence of spreading across all oceans. The complex eye-bearing aquatic arthropod, the trilobite, became one of the most successful groups in the aquatic world. Due to catastrophic climate change 252 million years ago, the Earth suffered terrible destruction, known as the Permian Extinction. 90 percent of all creatures, including the trilobite, became extinct. For the once-great invader trilobite, the earth ultimately proved meaningless. Today, countless trilobites lie crushed in rocks and stones across the corners of the earth. Therefore, it seemed to me in my own poetic privilege:

“Now your existence lithified

on the rocks

like billions of other fossils

The destructive decay of eras

covered you and your prey

with a transparent shroud

of Marxian equality

You are now equal to all

Perhaps, you were emperor,

monk, preacher,

liar, cultist, conspiracy peddler

or ordinary lover

There are no signs,

no placards,

no semiotics,

no witness

Nothing preserved

except your naked self

Your existence lithified

over millions of years,

time squeezed

upon your rocky being”

From Abu K M Sarwar’s “Trilobite” (Ellipsis: A Journal of Art, Ideas, and Literature, 2024)

In the unrestrained caravan of the space–time continuum, the human world is meaningless, just as the trilobite’s is, unless the meaning is created by one’s own actions and choices.

At the root of existentialism lies anxiety. And here enters the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard. Almost a hundred years before Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, Kierkegaard wrote The Concept of Anxiety (1844). Anxiety arises from freedom, not from chaos or the absence of order. Freedom offers a wide spectrum of options, but also the burden of choice. This is natural. Anxiety, guilt, and death— these are bound to human existence. Many have called Søren Kierkegaard the father of existentialism.

In the historical backdrop of literature and philosophy, existentialism is a broader literary and philosophical perspective. Where the contributions of Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger, Beauvoir, and Merleau-Ponty are inscribed in golden letters.

Besides Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, existentialism in literature has been applied by Dostoevsky, Franz Kafka, Simone de Beauvoir, André Malraux, Samuel Beckett, Edward Albee, and Harold Pinter. It may be mentioned here: André Malraux, even in old age, wished to join the Bangladesh Liberation War as a soldier. During the Spanish Civil War, he joined the frontline as a fighter.

In Indian literature, significant experimentation, inquiry, and application of existentialism occurred in the latter half of the twentieth century. Worth mentioning are: Bengali playwright Badal Sircar’s Ebong Indrajit; Marathi playwright Mahesh Elkunchwar’s Pratibimbo and Chintamani Khanolkar’s Ek Shunya Bajirao; and Odisha’s Manoranjan Das’s play Aranya Fasal.

In Bengali literature, we see, in scattered form, the application of Western philosophical insight. Among successful novels from West Bengal may be mentioned: Samaresh Basu’s Bibor, Jagadish Gupta’s Nidrita Kumbhakarna and Asadhu Siddhartha, Manik Bandopadhyay’s Dibaratrir Kabya, Bimal Kar’s Nirbasan, Buddhadeb Basu’s Shesh Pandulipi; in poetry Sudhindranath Dutta’s Dashami; and in drama Badal Sircar’s Ebong Indrajit and Baki Itihas. In Bangladesh, the pioneers are Selim Al-Deen and Aly Zaker in drama, Syed Waliullah in the novel, Jyotiprakash Dutta in the novella, and Syed Shamsul Haq in poetry and fiction.

In Bengal’s eternal spiritual culture, the counterpoint to existentialism truly prevails. Yet in many of Jibanananda Das's poems, there are hints of the vast waves of existentialism. In Jibanananda Das’s poetry, death strikes in a strange dance. In his poems, death repeatedly reminds us of the existential tension. In extreme solitude, I, myself, feel that I arrange my offering of reverence in poetic language to Jibanananda in the very imagery he created—

“The weary traveler, burdened by life’s unbearable weight, seeks deliverance

beneath the tram wheels in the icy darkness,

where the blue moonlights had died like Śrāvastī.

Beside the river Dhansiri, in this relentless darkness,

Is this how you wished to sleep forever?

…

As though the barn owl, the seagull, and the dragonfly gaze upon

the sandalwood pyre,

the exquisite, sorrowful glow of yellow and red.”

(Sarwar, M. (2014). Shobjatra: Obirum Ghume (Trans.), Anulipi Antarango Muhurte, Academic Press & Publishers Library, p. 53)

From Jibanananda Das’s immersion in the meaninglessness of existence and the continuum of death, a different motif emerges in the work of Syed Waliullah—one of the brightest stars of Bengali literature—who painted an extraordinary picture of the decay of values for the sake of survival (or the compulsion of existence). His published original works include three novels, three plays, and two collections of stories. During one of the most creative periods of his forty-nine-year life, he lived abroad— his grave lies in Paris. In the prose literature of then–East Bengal, he was a pioneer of the modernist trend. Lalsalu, translated into English as Tree Without Roots, is a remarkable creation. With a firm hand, he exposed blind faith and superstition in the name of religion. In a harshly adverse environment, a masterful impostor named Majid becomes the central character of the novel, struggling for his own existence.

Waliullah begins Majid’s world of worthlessness with these words: “Shorn of crops, the restless urge of the inhabitants of this densely populated region to escape seems to keep even the hazy sky in constant terror. There is nothing at home. Sharing, looting, and in some places even killing mark the end of all efforts.”

No crops, hunger, conflict, and an “indifferent world”— fiercely hostile. Majid’s desolate world seems like a blurred echo of Antoine Roquentin from Sartre’s Nausea or the silent indifference encountered by Camus’s Sisyphus. Majid is afflicted by emptiness and the burden of meaninglessness. Using the false sanctity of the shrine covered with red cloth, he seeks to give meaning to life. He is a man who exists in a world without inherent purpose. There, he chooses his own free will, however corrupt it may be, as the outward expression of his essence that he creates.

Leaving behind his foodless, homeless, conflict-ridden, hopeless village, he first took shelter in the nearly deserted forest of the Garo Hills. There, by chance, he encountered a government officer out hunting. From their conversation, he learned that the officer’s ancestral home had once been in a village called Mahabbatpur. Like many educated middle-class families, the officer’s family had left Mahabbatpur and settled in the city. A wicked idea stirred in the cunning Majid’s mind. Majid arrived in Mahabbatpur; there, he turned the grave beside the abandoned house of that officer’s family into a shrine. Exploiting the villagers’ illiteracy and blind superstition, he began his new life through a trade of lies and deception. For his existence, this was his own free choice— an important element of existentialist literature. The scheming Majid, deceiving the villagers in the name of the shrine, became a wealthy householder. Two wives, Rahima and Jamila, joined his household. At the end of the novel, a devastating storm, flood, and hail destroy the entire village.

Majid used the village elder Khalek for his own survival. Existentialist elements are scattered throughout this novel. But unlike Sartre’s Nausea, Camus’s Caligula, or Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, it does not pursue existentialist philosophical discourse. Lalsalu is a magnificent novel. Yet, from the perspective of European existentialism, its emergence as an existentialist novel is somewhat questionable. It may be mentioned that Tanvir Mokammel’s film adaptation of Lalsalu, in the direction, production, and screenplay, received the National Film Award for Best Film.

Now, let us move on to the drama. The absurd dramatic mode in Bengali theatre began with the writings of Badal Sircar. His play Ebong Indrajit marks the birth of the modern era in Bengali drama. The characters of the play are Amal–Kamal–Nirmal / and Indrajit, Masima, and Manasi. The writer himself is also present in the play. In his 1982 English essay The Changing Language of Theatre, he wrote: “…Indrajit is a prototype, not a character.”

In this play, the individual is fragmented—Amal, Kamal, Bimal, and Indrajit dissolve into the space–time continuum. They are shattered by the inner inconsistency and meaninglessness of a transformed life. Amal–Kamal–Bimal and Indrajit move from home to school, then to college, and then to employment. They revolve within the machinery of livelihood, circling endlessly. In the chains of rules and order, society and family become walls of obstruction.

Indrajit wanted to break conventional norms; he dreamed of a different kind of life. But he could not. Bowing his head before despair and failure, he too was forced to join the herd and enter the monotonous flow of ordinary life.

The playwright’s line addressed to Indrajit is: “We too are the ghosts of the accursed Sisyphus. We too know that the stone will fall. Even as we push and push it upward, we know this pushing has no meaning. That peak of the mountain has no meaning.”

The play's final movement reminds us of Albert Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus. In Ebong Indrajit, the features of both existentialism and absurdism are fused in a close embrace. Therefore, with respect, I differ from the literary critics of the past. Ebong Indrajit is a new kind of play—fiercely original, its emergence shaped by a hybrid of existentialism and absurdism in a new mode.

While Jean-Paul Sartre in the 1940s was experimenting with the literary application of existentialism and Albert Camus with absurdism, at that very time— in 1944— Jibanananda Das, the poet of Ruposhi Bangla, wrote a garland of lines in “One Day Eight Years Ago”:

“The aswattha limb,
Did it not protest? Did not fireflies in cordial throngs
Appear before you?
Did not the blind and palsied owl come and
Say to you: "old lady moon has sunk in the flood, has she?
Marvelous!
Let's now catch a mouse or two!"
Did not the owl screech out that raucous news?”

(Karmakar, P. (2023). A Day Eight Years Ago (Trans.). Setu Magazine, July 2023. https://www.setumag.com/2023/07/translated-poems-jibanananda-das.html)

Like the owl, Indrajit, Sisyphus, Majid, and Roquentin live on with the monotony of a meaningless world.

Dr Mostofa Sarwar is professor emeritus at the University of New Orleans, former visiting professor and adjunct faculty at the University of Pennsylvania, and former dean and former vice-chancellor of Delgado Community College. He can be reached at asarwar2001@yahoo.com.