December 3 was Mani Bandopadhyay’s death anniversary. This is part two of a two-part series on his work. Read part one here.
The overarching theme of Manik Bandopadhyay’s short stories is that of the individual at odds with their social existence.
Powerful, though mostly faceless, forces – economic, social, cultural, and instinctual– are relentlessly pulling the individual in sundry different directions all at the same time, and often the best that the beleaguered individual can hope for is a toehold in bare survival. As much as man may believe himself to be freeborn, he is forever grappling with these forces, far bigger than himself, which are hemmimg him in from every side, and the more unequal or closed the society, the more numerous and stronger the bonds tying the individual down, accentuating his unfreedoms. Manik’s point of departure was the India of the 1920s through the 1930s. It was a society riven with multiple, deep-running crises: the crisis of late colonialism, of hugely exploitative feudal land relations being further hobbled by escalating land-alienation among the tillers of the soil, of predatory capitalist enterprise exacerbating poverty, deprivation and inequality, and of a steady erosion of all societal and familial value systems hitherto providing a platform, however fragile, for human social intercourse between communities and neighbourhoods. Then came the 1940s, and along came War and the great Bengal famine of 1943-44, a cataclysm that tore Bengali society apart, irretrievably, as it turned out. Partition and the communal conflagration of 1946-48 bring up the rear of this tumultous season. And Manik tracked the individual’s dazed passage through this racking time with a pitilessly unwavering gaze.
He had had an itinerant childhood, thanks to his father whose government job transferred the family from small town to small town across Bengal, Bihar and Orissa every few years. Blessed with keen eyes and equally keen ears, the young boy eagerly absorbed and processed impressions and experiences not only of middle-class life but also of that of society’s poorest sections: boatmen, poor peasants, landless labourers, weavers, village artisans, street vendors and the like. Even lives lived at society’s far margins, by beggars, tramps and all kinds of drifters, did not fail to engage his attention. He read avidly and widely in Bengali literature, and later in European literature in translation (Knut Hampsun, Bernard Shaw and Sigmund Freud are three names he himself mentions somewhere, but Ibsen and Gorky also likely caught his eye).
“I read stories and novels eagerly to understand real life. Deeply moved from reading them. I searched life to understand the life in the stories and novels. My question often concerned the problem of romantic love and the physical side of it, love in literature and love in real life. I could not find the literature’s rarefied love in either the middle-classes or the underclass… Being given to genteel sentiments myself, I started to see their familiar expressions as foppish, revolting lies… The very literature that moved me at one level, held me in spell, also aroused a furious complaint, made me ask bitterly, angrily, if there was no remedy to this (chasm)… This conflict grew unbearable in my youth – after I started writing, its ferocity subsided with increase in my ability to acknowledge and accommodate this complex reality.”
Manik’s concern for the exploration of sexuality, especially its repressed and socially frowned-upon aspects, stayed with him right through his life, but, as he himself attests above, it came to be somewhat tempered in later years, patently by other concerns which loomed larger. Meanwhile, the sanctimoniousness, the myriad insensitivities and hypocrisies, and the rapacity that Manik believed lay at the very heart of genteel, middle-class living emerged as a major theme. He also probed with seemingly obsessive intensity the triggers and many shapes of schadenfreude in human behaviour, in times of crisis, in particular. The other powerful motif in Manik’s short stories is the debasement, indeed the utter dehumanisation, of individuals and whole communities caught in the vortex of monumental social upheavals. In later years, when he had embraced the Marxist world-view, however, the spectacle of man as a marionette in the hands of destiny/society no longer intrigued him. Instead, Manik’s canvas began to be populated with humans who believed they had it in them to stand up to destiny. From foregrounding the solitary individual’s struggles with society, Manik’s later stories began to locate struggling individuals inside their immediate as well as wider communities, and capture the dynamic of the larger battles these communities found themselves caught up in.
Primeval, Manik Bandopadhyay.
It’s not uncommon to find, in discussions of his fiction, a line being drawn between Manik Bandopadhyay in his early, ‘Freudian’ phase and he in his later, ‘Marxist’ period. It’s true that Manik’s Weltanscaung evolved through the 1930s, until he arrived at a largely Marxist intellectual orientation. But it’s important to understand that change as a process, rather than as a dramatic shift. It was not, for Manik, a leap from one disjunct phase to another, but a fairly steady movement forward in his explorations into the socialized character of human reality – a reality he had recognised from his earliest years as a writer. As he grew in experience, his perspective widened to take in, and identify the links between, the many different facets of that reality. His initiation to Marxist thought facilitated the process of identifying these linkages while, at the same time, deepening his own commitment to bringing them home to his readers. As for his ‘Freudian’ concerns for what the insides of the human mind looked like, how it reacted to different stimuli, and how such responses varied from one individual to another, these continued to be valid concerns for him throughout his life. The anatomy of human sexuality was of abiding interest to him, but, as his vision matured, he also learnt to recognise how sexuality was woven into existing power structures across families and communities. In that sense, Manik Bandopadhyay blazed the trail for later writers who happened to concern themselves with the politics of sex and gender.
Pragaitihasik (‘Prehistoric’, 1937) tells the story of Bhikhu the beggar whose struggle to cling precipitously to a decidedly sub-human existence is as pitiless as it is amoral. The most primitive of appetites and desires drive this man’s lust for life, but Manik refuses to be judgemental towards him, instead allowing the reader a peek into the rascal’s surviving reserve – however puny or perverse – of humanity. There is not a trace of mawkishness here, nor of morbidity, just as there is no phony moralising or cynicism.
In Chor (Thief, 1933), Madhu, the bandit, is an outcast even in his lowly cowherd community. He steals without compunction – because he cannot eke out a living any other way – but when he sets his heart on a big booty he is sure will please his capricious wife whom he dearly loves, the wife runs away with the son of the very man Madhu robs. A broken man, Madhu can yet tell himself that he is no different from others, because ‘everyone steals’.
Nilmoni in Atmahatyar Adhikar (The Right to Suicide, 1933), a stone-broke but ‘high caste’ man pitted against hunger, disease and ghastly weather on a stormy night, rails pitilessly against his harried wife and hapless daughter because he is dying for a smoke. Pushed by torrential rain out of their miserable hovel and obliged to seek shelter in a prosperous but sneering neighbour’s house, Nilmoni magically recovers his equanimity after a quiet smoke.
Sarisrip (Reptilean, 1939) tells the nightmarish story of an ‘upper-caste’ landowning family in ruinous moral decay. The putrescence of familial and social bonds is so complete here as to make the reader very nearly hold her nose. Every character in the narrative and its every strand seem to have been soaked through with unnaturalness, and, ironically, only the half-witted Bhuban remains untouched by the contagion.
In the dystopian world of Holudpoda (Burnt Turmeric, 1942), the only properly educated man in a bleak, far-away village calls out the village excorcist plying his obnoxious wares – until he himself succumbs to the crushing weight of the community’s appalling irrationalities and delusions. He submits to the same charlatan’s tricks-of-trade and ‘confesses’ to a murder he had had nothing to do with.
A far mellower story, and one with an altogether different flavour, is Somudrer Swad (Salt of the Sea, 1943). Nila, a young woman born into, and destined to pass her entire life within the dreary confines of, lower-middle class life, thirsts unceasingly for a glimpse of the sea – a wish to remain sadly unfulfilled. She fondly remembers her father, who had promised to show her the sea but died before he could make good that promise. In a somewhat similar vein, Sarasi, the unremarkable middle-class housewife of Keranir Bou (The Clerk’s Wife, 1940), exults over her unexpected escape from the tethers of a repressive joint family set-up. All her unsatisfied longings, unspelt fears and inchoate thoughts about what life might have bestowed upon her surge uncontrolled into her mind as she surveys, from the rooftop of her new quarters, the big city stretch out in all directions around her.
Among the stories foregrounding famine, Nomuna (A Sample, 1946) stands out. A down-and-out village priest is obliged to give away his marriage-age daughter in prostitution in exchange for a couple of sackfuls of rice. So as to give himself peace of mind, however, he insists on solemnisng his daughter’s ‘marriage’ to the procurer first, and performs the prescribed rites in a bizarre ‘ceremony’. The buyer-procurer, a little awed by the solemn wedding rites, toys with the idea of treating the girl as his second wife – until a fat wad of currency notes is pushed into his hand by the brothel’s ‘madam’ who has located a wealthy new patron for the fresh recruit. In Chhiniye Khayni Keno? (Why didn’t they snatch and eat?, 1945), another famine story, Manik searches for an answer to the question that apparently troubled Jawaharlal Nehru: “Why did Bengal’s starving peasants choose to die passively rather than snatch rice, of which there was plenty, from hoarders and black-marketeers?” – a question over which some sociologists also agonised at the time. Jogi the brigand comes up with an explanation which is as common-sense as it is startling.
No volume of Manik Bandopadhyay’s stories can be complete without his narratives of human resistance to oppression, and both anthogies feature some incandescent tales of ordinary men and women standing up for their rights and their dignity. In Shilpi (Craftsman, 1946), village weavers find themselves with their backs to the wall as middlemen and profiteers price their traditional products out of the market and compel them to do piecework weaving at rock-bottom prices. As it is, the War raging in Europe and elsewhere has devastated colonial India’s rural economy, and the weavers now find themselves staring at ruin. But, led by Madan, they decide to rebuff the slimy Bhuban Ghoshal’s overtures: they will not accept yearn for piecework. One night, however, startled neighbours wake up to the sound of the loom rattling in Madan’s house. Has the intrepid Madan capitulated, then? Is he working with Bhuban’s yearn on the sly? – No, as it turns out. Madan was working the empty loom so that he didn’t get muscle cramps from idleness. The craftsman’s genes in him oblige him to work the loom everyday – but Madan will never compromise on his principles.
Sathi (Conjugal Relations, 1948) is the story of a desperately poor sharecropper’s family set aginst the backdrop of the historic Tebhaga movement of 1946-47. The share-cropper’s wife fails to fetch her husband his lunch while he is slogging in the paddy-field in the hot afternoon – because there is no food in the house. In a fit of rage, the man beats the wife mercilessly, deriving perverse pleasure from the pain he inflicts. Shame and remorse take hold of the man soon enough, however, and he stops. And when the battered, starving wife, rather than turning on her husband, vows to somehow get him food, if need be by stealing from or killing ‘the Nandis who have tonnes and tonnes of rice stacked up’, the distraught husband begins to regard her with new respect, like a comrade-in-arms.
In Haraner Natjamai (Haran’s Grandson-In-Law, 1947) and Chhoto Bokulpurer Jatri (Travellers to Chhoto Bokulpur, 1948), Manik, the proud Communist partisan, immortalises the Tebhaga uprising – a movement with a singular record of mobilising poor peasants against the combined might of the land-owner class and the machinery of the state. They bear testimony to that stirring time when the marginalised and the dispossessed challenged social inequities and class arrogance , and they capture the Zeitgeist with elegance and felicity. Equally importantly, they are wonderfully chiselled, crisp narratives – uplifting and humorous in equal measure.
Manik was a consummate prose artist, unparalleled in Bengali fiction in economy of expression and sharp visualisation of complex characters. For more than half of his creative years, he preferred sadhu bhasha or the literary turn of speech to kathya bhasha or the colloquial idiom in his work – a preference which, from the outside, appears counter-intuitive, considering that he was writing realist fiction. And yet he pulled this off with great success, indeed with elan. Wry humour and a sustained lyricism of tone were his other important attributes. Here is the closing paragraph from Pragaitihasik/Primeval, published when he was 29:
“It’s the selfsame moon, perhaps, that still visits the earth. But the stream of darkness which Bhikhu and Panchi inherited from their mothers’ womb, nursed deep inside themselves, and which would now lie hidden in the fleshy folds of their offspring, is, indeed, primordial. This darkness has ever defied the light of the earth in the past and will continue to defy it in the future.”
As long as we choose not to engage seriously with a story-teller of Manik Bandopadhyay’s calibre and range, I think we are doing ourselves considerable disservice.
Anjan Basu can be reached at basuanjan52@gmail.com.
