Does Sandipan Chattopadhyay Deserve a Wider Audience?

As I picked up Ten Days of the Strike, I realised, with a start, that the name Sandipan Chattopadhyay (1933-2005) has surprisingly low recall value today relative to many other Bengali novelists or storytellers of his generation.

This, I reckon, would have been inconceivable in the 1960s or 1970s when Sandipan was in his prime. Admittedly, he had formidable competition from the likes of Sunil Gangopadhyay, Atin Bandopadhyay, Shyamal Gangopadhyay, Shirshendu Mukhopadhyay and a couple of others – his contemporaries, all of them. And yet scarcely any of his peers had made the kind of dramatic impact on debut as Sandipan Chattopadhyay did with his longish short story Bijoner Rakta Mangsho (Bijon’s Flesh and Blood) in 1960. And, when he was busy giving finishing touches to his Kritadas Kritadasi (Slave Man, Slave Woman), also published in 1960, an ecstatic Sunil Gangopadhyay, who happened to have access to the story’s several drafts, wrote to a friend how he believed Sandipan’s new work was profoundly reshaping Bengali fiction. The friend in question was Samir Roychoudhury, one of the first movers of the Hungryalist movement, and Sunil knew Samir’s tastes only too well to recommend to him anything that was not tonally new, or did not depart radically from the conventional.

How come, then, that a writer whom his distinguished compeers held in such awe has slipped into relative inconspicuity in a mere 20 or 30 years’ time, even as his contemporaries continue to engage – deservedly, it must be said – the current-day reader’s attention?

Ten Days of the Strike, Arunava Sinha’s offering of 10 Sandipan Chattopadhyay stories in English translation, serves to show why such a question is moot. These are stories of stunning, raw power, and the first-time reader will more likely than not wonder why she hadn’t chanced upon Sandipan’s work anytime before. Of these 10 stories, two – Banabehari and I and I Support the Arab Guerrillas – are novellas while three others – Bijon’s Flesh and Blood, Meerabai and Slave Man, Slave Woman – are long stories running to between 25 and 33 pages each.

Together, they span the four decades from 1960 to 2000, with Banabehari and I (2000) bringing up the rear. Overall, it can be said that a fair sampling of Sandipan’s extensive repertoire – minus his polemical writing, of which there exists a not insignificant corpus – is presented through the 330+ pages of Sinha’s book. As an anthology of Sandipan’s ‘stories’, therefore, the book succeeds in large measure in living up to what its jacket promises. 

Stylistically, the stories here fall into two broad groups. The three stories of the first group – the eponymous Ten Days of the Strike, With Ruby in Diamond Harbour and The Ivy Shome Murder Case (1978) – follow more-or-less clearly traceable story lines that, however, lead to barely-anticipated denouements. All three stories also suggest that Sandipan dearly loved the crime thriller genre.

The other stories play out discursively, at times chaotically, spurning all familiar notions of how a narrative should evolve by way of an interplay of characters and situations, moving back and forth across time and space, often not only counter-intuitively but also inscrutably, dreams weaving seamlessly into ineluctability, the quasi-real blotting out certitude with rare but gay abandon. These are narratives deeply sceptical of their own capacity for narration, stories fully aware that the act of representation itself confronts a  crisis. The writer’s mistrust of his own bona fides – and therefore, of the integrity of own artistic equipment – both underlines and exacerbates that scepticism:

“I have learnt to consider almost everything a mistake, a lie. Most of all, my own sincerity. Yet if a dawn seemed beautiful or if I marvelled at one of the famous scenes of the world, the sun setting behind a castle, I put my hand on my own shoulder and asked, ‘Do you really feel this way or have you learnt this from books?’ Or, ‘Are you charmed because this is how it’s supposed to be?’ Examining very complicated mixtures of good and bad, I asked, ‘Is this wonder geuine or feigned?’ Repeatedly turning the averted face of sorrow with soft caresses, so it would look me in the eye, I enquired, ‘Are you a lie too, sorrow?’”

[Slave Man, Slave Woman, pp 215-16]

Sandipan Chattopadhyay was arguably the first post-modernist of his generation of Bengali writers. But he did not come to postmodernism via any theoretical engagement with postmodern thinking but by way of his own evolving world view, his Weltanschauung. And truth be told, his postmodernism was a blend of existentialism, absurdism and such allied ingredients as well.

Sandipan’s canvas is populated almost solely by the solitary, city-dwelling male who is amoral, feckless, and diseased in equal measure. He sleepwalks through all of life, from the cradle to the burning ghat, with precious little to look forward to, or even to look back on. He is as much the Bijon of Bijon’s Flesh and Blood as the Rana of I Support the Arab Guerrillas or the I of With Ruby in Diamond Harbour/The Last Metro. Binge drinking or a sexual fling does seem to perk him up every now and then, but, knowing full well what to expect from such interludes as also what comes after, he continues to go through life unencumbered by any desire to squeeze meaning out of anything. His bonds to other humans show up as wholly functional, or contractual, and their purely human aspect is necessarily framed in terms of slapstick as in Ten Days of the Strike or remains bafflingly fleeting, as in Slave Man, Slave Woman. The unbearable emptiness of being does not overwhelm him, because he has not known what fullness feels like, or if it is even worth the trouble trying to find fullness.

Maybe a caveat will be in order. Banabehari and I  does open with visions of a full, human life – or rather, of the possibility of imagining plenitude – but when everything is eventually blown into smithereens, you realise that a fuse lay all the while under your hopes, waiting to be lit. I Support the Arab Guerrillas seems to suggest that it was in the very nature of such hope that it would be subverted. Atrophy and decay had been written into the very genes of the enterprise even as it was being conceived, and, inevitably, “…hope would be hope for the wrong thing”. Sandipan, it turns out, had joined the (still undivided) Communist Party of India in the early 1950s. It’s not clear when he handed back his membership card, but his stories from 1960 – three such are included in this anthology – tell us that, by then, he had lost faith. Or, maybe – it just may be – that he still held on to the belief that “…the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting”. But scraps of such a belief  – though not very hard to find in his polemical writing or his memoirs – are scarce in the universe Sandipan’s protagonists inhabit, a universe blanketed in unmitigated blackness. Sinha’s anthology stands testimony.

Sandipan’s prose shares with postmodernists two of their trademark devices – self-reflexivity and inter-textuality. Analogous, even identical, images and word pictures float in and out of his stories, as do favourite literary tropes and metaphors. The awkward reddish patch covering about nine inches of the skin on the lover’s shoulder (presumably signalling the onset of leprosy), or a blue hand severed from a corpse and lying forlorn on a railway track recurs often enough, as do references to ‘barren’ wives who Sandipan’s protagonist is often married to, and a lover speaking in a ‘husky’ voice whenever she is expected to. Rana’s late night ordeal in I Support the Arab Guerrillas in which his face is smashed in by goons in a comic encounter, or his hitching a ‘lift’ on elephant-back late on a bleak winter night hark back to Kolkatar Dinratri (not included in this anthology). This self-reflexivity is clearly deliberate. Among other things, it helps clothe the narrative in banality, ejecting any residual emotionality out of it.

Sandipan’s stories regularly reference other texts, mostly from European modernists, but also the Bengali poet Jibanananda Das’s – and, interestingly, more from Jibanananda’s fiction than from his poetry. Camus’ The Outsider is drawn upon often enough, even quoted from, also pastiched in some descriptions. The way an attempted suicide is handled in The Revolution and Rajmohan is strongly reminiscent of Camus’ treatment of the motif. I hear persistent echoes from Kafka’s The Trial in Bijon’s Flesh and Blood.  Manuel Cervantes and his Don Quixote crop up quite often, for example in Sandipan’s pen portrait of the lovers’ rendezvous in the Netarhat forest bungalow in The Last Metro. The ever-truehearted Sancho Panza weeps inconsolably when he fails to rouse the dead knight for another great exploit, the last ever – and, as he reads about it, Shelley’s jilted lover sheds copious tears himself, though he knows how absurdly laughable he looks. Dostoyevsky also happens to find frequent mention, while the reader is put in mind of Samuel Beckett, and at times also of Jean Genet, as she reads some of Sandipan’s stories, for example Ruby Kokhon Asbe? (When Will Ruby Arrive?), not anthologised by Sinha.

The point about Sandipan’s use of inter-textuality is that he is probably trying to site his own work in a broader, trans-national tradition which encompasses other cultures as well. Indeed, the poet-critic Sankho Ghosh had once commented that, to him, Sandipan Chattopadhyay looked to be the one modern-day Bengali writer whose sensibility was most like a European’s. Sandipan himself has often gone on record about how someone like the great Bengali novelist Manik Bandopadhyay needed to be seen as part of the European tradition: nothing that had gone before Bandopadhyay in Bengali literature, Sandipan (rightly) felt, could possibly account for the explosive, verily elemental, power that Manik Bandopadhyay’s fiction appeared to pulsate with.

The success of a work of translation should typically be judged by (a) the readibility of the created text, and (b) how much of the original’s flavour is retained in the transcribed text. On the first count, Arunava Sinha has done remarkably well. Ten Days of the Strike is an eminently readable collection of long and short stories. And Sinha succeeds – in large measure, though perhaps not wholly – in recreating the rhythm and the gait, the complexion and the tone of the original Bengali. This is no mean feat, for two reasons.

One: Sandipan’s prose ranges from the Sanskritised tatsama to street lingo, from the lofty to the profane, with equal felicity, and often in almost the same breath.

And two: his prose can at times be highly expressionistic, at others, dreamlike, and, at any rate, is always intensely personalised. In fact, Sandipan was given to  obssessing  with the layers and sub-layers of the meanings of words and texts, as Sunil Gangopadhyay, one of his closest friends and a wordsmith himself, testifies in his memoirs. It’s only an intrepid translator, then, who dares take on someone like Sandipan Chattopadhyay, and Sinha has shown himself both willing and capable to pick up the gauntlet. However, I am not sure that Sinha’s predilection for retaining, unchanged, some words and even phrases from the Bangla vocabulary – ‘thakurjhi’. ‘kajol’, ‘thakurpo,’ et al – is particularly well-advised. Couldn’t he, with his exceptional skillsets, have found a way around these peculiarly native Bangla expressions?

A couple of editorial omissions, however, beg the question. I find it extraordinary that an important product from such a well-established imprint doesn’t feature even a short introduction to the author and his work. The skimpy ‘About the Author’, limited to just three sentences and provided at the book’s end, may at best pass for the blurb. And it’s not easy to see why the stories have been arranged in no particular order (chronological or thematic) or why none of them indicates the year of their first publication. Even a rudimentary search on the net might have sufficed to fill this gap. One hopes a way will be found to remedy these gaps at the first opportunity. 

We may close by revisiting the question we had asked in the beginning: what explains the near-amnesia surrounding Sandipan Chattopadhyay? The answer, I suspect,  is to be found mainly in his very strengths, which, though plentiful, militate against easy popularity: the unremitting blackness of his vision; his  unapologetic cerebrality; his repudiation of the idiom of realism /naturalism; the prolix brilliance of his vocabulary; his penchant for formal innovativeness. To this we may add the one indubitable handicap inherent in his artistic equipment: a canvas that cannot be said to be capacious enough to admit of a wide diversity of dramatis personae.

Finally, Sandipan’s women are, more often than not, unidimensional beings whose strongest suit is not a sensitivity of spirit. There is a certain lack of empathy in how they were fashioned by the author’s imagination. The unabashed male-centricity of Sandipan’s narrative art detracts from the greatness it could otherwise have laid claim to.

And yet Sandipan Chattopadhyay deserves better than oblivion and neglect. Ten Days of the Strike will hopefully show why.

Anjan Basu can be reached at basuanjan52@gmail.com