in bengali film Aranyer Din Ratri (Days and Nights in the Forest).1970), directed by Satyajit Ray, four young men from Calcutta go on a surprise holiday to Palamu (then Bihar, now Jharkhand). Based on Sunil Gangopadhyay’s novel with the same title, the film begins with a character, Sanjay (Shubhendu Chatterjee), reading a 19th-century Bengali travelogue, palamuBy Sanjib Chandra Chatterjee, brother of Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, author of the national song of India. Vande Mataram. “Bengalis are used to seeing the plains, so even the slightest suggestion of hills fills them with excitement,” reads Sanjoy, watching the landscape change outside the car windows.
Described as “criminally underrated” by American filmmaker Wes Anderson, a 4K restored version of the film was screened at the Cannes Film Festival last year. If the screening arouses any interest among people who do not have access to Bengali culture, they may turn to recently published The Bengali Reader: The best fiction, non-fiction, poetry and plays from Bengali . Translated and edited by Arunava Sinha, the language’s most prolific translator in recent decades, this volume includes a quote palamuGangopadhyay’s poem, and also a quote from Ray’s screenplay for his 1976 film, Jan Aranya (middleman). This volume of nearly 600 pages is the definitive, canon-building anthology of Bengali literature for our times.
This compilation performs three essential functions. Firstly, it offers an ambitious collection of Bengali literature spanning over 200 years, starting from 1800, when the quantity of books and newspapers printed in the language increased significantly with the establishment of the Mission Press at Serampore. Second, it uses translation as a tool for canon-building. American translator and theorist Lawrence Venuti, in a 2008 paper, writes that “Translation contributes to canon building by imbuing the foreign text with the interpretation that has achieved dominance in academic and other cultural institutions.” An anthology of this magnitude, commissioned by an arbiter of Sinha’s reputation, naturally occupies an important place in the market and public discussion, thereby defining the canon.
Therefore, it is important for the editor of such a volume to include the many intersections of gender, caste, class, as well as style and form. Sinha accomplishes this task in two ways – first, by incorporating genres such as recipes, screenplays, speeches, sketches, songs, etc., that have traditionally not found a place in the Bengali literary canon, possibly due to the gatekeeping of upper caste, Hindu, middle class sensibilities. Sinha also includes the writings of those who have traditionally been excluded from this canon, such as folk singers like Lalan Fakir, 19th-century women writers (Rassasundari Dasi, Krishnabhabini Dasi, Binodini Dasi), revolutionaries (Dineshchandra Gupta, Subhash Chandra Bose, Kanu Sanyal, etc.), lyricists (Salil Choudhury, Kabir Suman), Dalits (Adwaita Mallabarman) and Queer (Abhijeet Majumdar). I call them “Unusual Suspects,” and their inclusion is code for democratic desires that are increasingly being overtaken in our time of narrowly defined identities.
Sinha has organized his material chronologically into five disparate periods – The Argumentative Bengali (1818–1890), The Home and the World (1891–1930), The Independent Voice (1931–1949), Revolutionary Fires (1950–1980) and Modern Times (1981–2019). It is possible to debate each of these categories, and even raison d’etre Chronological classification, but for a reader who does not have access to the language, it provides a strong, signposted path through the dense tropical jungle of Bengali literature. The translator also provides a brief introduction to each section, justifying his decision. For example, he argues that the first volume reflects the emerging public sphere in Bengal supported by print culture, Rabindranath Tagore casts a long shadow over the second volume, while the third volume has been described as the “golden age” of the Bengali readership. Communist movements, particularly the far-left Naxalites, fuel the “revolutionary fire” of the fourth section, while the fifth section brings us to our contemporary times.
Each of these sections, naturally, includes the usual suspects. For example, in the first two volumes, a reader will encounter such long-canonical writers as Rammohan Roy, Ishwarchandra Vidyasagar, Michael Madhusudan Dutt, Bankim Chandra, Rabindranath Tagore, Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay, Kazi Nazrul Islam and Swami Vivekananda. Also, these classes, as I mentioned earlier, also included the Lalan Fakirs, who rejected the strictures of religion and caste and influenced Tagore. These include Rassundari Dasi, possibly the first Bengali to write an autobiography, Krishnabhabini Dasi, the first Bengali woman to write a travelogue, and Binodini Dasi, arguably Bengal’s first stage celebrity, whose remarkable life has inspired recent Bengali films.
Like Binodini, Manada Devi, an educated, Brahmin woman who entered sex work in early 20th-century Calcutta, also challenges the patriarchal structures of the public sphere and the act of canon-making. Another notable inclusion is a quote from food writer and chef Bipradas Mukhopadhyay Pak Pronali (Cooking Methods)Provides recipes for Gul-Kebab, Ginger Jelly and Chinese Pineapple Chutney. As scholar Sampan Saha wrote in a 2021 paper, cookbooks like Mukhopadhyay’s addressed the desire of the “Bengali middle class for global tastes”, evident through the proliferation of cakes, custards, jellies, and other similar items. It is this desire for cosmopolitanism that directly challenges recent trends of exclusionist nativism.
Personally, for me, the most satisfying inclusion of the “unusual suspects” are Hungry Generation writers like Malay Roy Chowdhury, Subo Acharya, Shaileshwar Ghosh and Falguni Roy in the fourth volume of the book. (Shakti Chattopadhyay, whose poems are included in this volume, was also an early member of the group, though he later disassociated himself from it.) The Hungry Generation was a loose-knit group of post-independence radical and avant-garde Bengali writers who published their first pamphlet from Patna – specifically, not Calcutta – in November 1961, starting their movement. Apart from Roy Chowdhury, the other signatories were his elder brother Sameer Roy Chowdhury, Shakti Chattopadhyay and Debi Roy, who sometimes used the pseudonym Haradhon Dhara.
In the early 1960s, the group continued to publish its works and also engaged in provocative actions, such as inviting Calcutta literati to take part in a topless procession (which never happened). On 2 September 1964, Malay, Sameer, Debi and two other writers, Subhash Ghosh and Shaileshwar Ghosh, were arrested on obscenity charges. Malay was convicted in a lower court for his poem stark electric jesusHe was ultimately acquitted by the Calcutta High Court on 26 July 1967. His inclusion is satisfying not only because of my personal connection with him, but also because he has traditionally been ignored by the Bengali literary establishment along with the Malays.da He even told me that he could not find any publisher for his novels. This book will probably generate more interest in his work.
A definitive anthology like this one will also be read for its exclusions. A notable exception is Bangladeshi writer Taslima Nasreen, whose novel, shameis translated into English as shameless By Sinha. In fact, the collection features some writers from post-partition East Bengal. Similarly, while Sinha includes screenplays, Bengali theater is not well represented, and playwrights like Girish Ghosh, Utpal Dutt or Badal Sarkar are notable exceptions. Such exclusions are often a function of everyday reasons, such as permissions or author contracts; However, it is always helpful for the reader to be aware of these conditions.
In the introduction to the anthology, Sinha writes: “I have ended with articles to which I personally reacted strongly – mostly with love, often with admiration, sometimes with disappointment, and, on a few occasions, with sadness.” Unlike a typical translator’s note, the introduction is a letter written to Swati and Satyen, the protagonists of Buddhadev Bose’s 1949 novel. Tithidor (Translated into English by Sinha when the time is right and included here). In the letter, Sinha asked the intended readers to imagine that they were time travelers, traveling through 200 years of Bengali literature, becoming “my Bengali readers”. This is a process of creating an identity through literature, and, as I have shown, Sinha’s choice as translator and editor imagines this identity to be inclusive, cosmopolitan, and democratic. This is an essential political task for our difficult times.
Uttaran Das Gupta is a freelance writer and journalist.
