Today, December 3, is Mani Bandopadhyay’s death anniversary. This is part one of a two-part series on his work.
In a short article titled Keno Likhi (‘Why I Write’) he contributed to the manifesto of the Anti-Fascist Writers’ and Artists’ Association (AFWAA) in 1944, Manik Bandopadhyay says, somewhat tersely: “I write to communicate to people things that there is no other way of telling them”.
The sentence attests to two things he believed in.
One, that he had to write. In other words, Manik had a vocation to be a writer, and he knew it.
And two, the things he had to tell his readers were, Manik believed, important for them to hear. He knows that his readers need to know what he is going to tell them. There’s no faux modesty here, much less any effort to please his audience. “I must bear testimony”, the writer seems verily to say, “and readers can choose not to take notice at their own peril”.
Elsewhere, Manik elaborates on the same theme of the ineluctability of his choice of a writer’s career:
“Even as I was pursuing an undergraduate Honours degree in Mathematics [in the storied Presidency College in what was then Calcutta], I left college to plunge into writing, to everyone at home’s consternation. I did this because I had begun to sense an imminent upheaval in the world of literature. I knew that, at such a critical juncture, it would be inexcusable to waste my time doing anything other than write.”
Here then was a young man who in his early twenties had discovered his calling. Science, of course, had been his first love. But, in a fundamental sense, he didn’t seem to feel that his career choice was at odds with his intellectual orientation, which, he believed, was that of a man of science:
“My love of science; my penchant for a world view based on asking ‘why’ so typical of men of science; my resolve even as a student to take writing with great seriousness and desist from producing popular trash – these signs clearly indicated to me that, even though I might, at a stretch, become some kind of a poet if I badly wanted to be one, my true and proper vocation was a novelist’s.”
Finally, there was this startling disclosure, appearing in the 1944 essay I quoted from at this article’s beginning:
“I am, in large measure, familiar with the history of how my attitudes evolved ever since I was about two-and-a-half years old.”
The deadpan tone sets off the audaciousness of the statement. But readers with more than a passing acquaintance with Manik Bandopadhyay’s writings will immediately recognise its authenticity. Intellectual integrity is what defined the man and his work. Those readers particularly who have studied his (published) journals and letters know with what unrelenting intensity Manik went on examining the inner-most recesses of his own mind right through his grown-up years. He did that with the same cold efficiency with which he prised open the hearts and souls of his dramatis personae. And he never shrank from recording – in his diaries or his stories – what he discovered inside. We see the man of science at work here.
Manik published his first story at age 20. Plagued by ill health and financial worry for much of his adult life, he died of an epileptic stroke on December 3, 1956 when he was only 48. But, remarkably by then, he had published no fewer than 260 short stories and 40 novels – still an imperfect count, possibly, because there are likely a not-insignificant number of stories and novellas (lying scattered across less-known magazines at his death) not published/anthologised in book form yet.
He wrote many essays about the writer’s craft and about trends in contemporary narrative literature, and left behind not a small corpus of his poetry as well. A prodigious literary output, by any standards. And yet, in the last 10 or 12 years of his life, he had also to make time for his responsibilities with AFWAA (later called the Pragati Lekhak Sangha, or Progressive Writers’ Association) as a member of its presidium and, from 1944 when he joined the party as a member, with the Communist Party of India, too. And he embraced these duties also with characteristic punctiliousness and energy. In the charged atmosphere of the Calcutta communal riots in 1946-47 and again in 1948, he worked diligently with peace committees in many of the more seriously disturbed parts of the city. His journals record how, often enough, he had to run the gauntlet of jeering crowds of fanatical Hindus baying for the blood of their Muslim neighbours.
Through all of this, however, his pen never seemed to flag. Indeed, he couldn’t afford to rest on his oars, either. He was a professional writer, deciding early on that he would write whole-time and never seek any other employment. Manik liked to describe himself as a ‘pen-wielding labourer’, no more, no less – and he meant what he said. His publishers often gave him a raw deal, but he never budged from his original resolve of not making a career in anything other than writing.
Edited with an introduction by Malini Bhattacharya. Published by Thema.
Some of Manik’s novels, notably Padma Nodir Majhi (‘Boatman of River Padma) and Putul Nacher Itikatha (A Puppets’ Tale), count among the best to have come out of Bengal, indeed India, in the 20th century. Both are available in translation in several Indian and multiple European languages including English, Czech, and Hungarian; Padma Nodir Majhi additionally in German, Russian, Chinese, Dutch, French, Bulgarian, Slovak and Italian also. Darpan (‘Mirror’), Chinha (‘Signs’) and Shahartoli (‘Suburbia’) are also avaialble in translation in English (all three), Hindi (Darpan) and Czech (Shahartoli).
But for readers with no access to Bengali, the vast majority of his novels remains, sadly, out of reach to this day. What is really galling for the Manik aficionado, however, is that, to the non-Bengali speaking reader, he is not even known as a major writer of short stories, let alone as someone deserving of a place among the great practitioners of the craft in the 20th century.
I am aware of no more than three bools of English translations of his stories in all these years (not counting anthologies featuring three stories or fewer), and only two of them are still in print, albeit barely so: Primeval and Other Stories, an anthology of 11 stories edited by Debiprasad Chattopadhyay (published by People’s Publishing House in 1958, last reprinted in 1988); and Selected Stories: Manik Bandopadhyay, a selection of 16 stories edited with a fine introduction by Malini Bhattacharya (published by Thema in 1988, reprinted in 2003). The third anthology, Wives and Others, translated and introduced by Kalpana Bardhan and published by Penguin Books in 1994, is no longer in print.
Here, one cannot help noting, is a case of sad neglect of one of the truly outstanding story-tellers of our time. In the second part of this article, we will draw from some of the the stories making up the two anthologies still in print – and referred to above – to attempt a brief survey of the world of Manik Bandopadhyay’s short fiction, with the hope that new readers may be persuaded to explore this fascinating world.
For now, let us recall what Manik said in an interview, given shortly before his death, about the business of writing short stories:
“Writing short stories can be a fascinating experience. You have to concentrate real hard. Since the tempo is fast and you need to keep pace with it, your mind knows no rest. Every moment I spend writing a short story, I feel greatly excited. “
Clearly, he set great store by the short story writer’s craft. And what a treasure-house of stories Manik Bandopadhyay has left behind.
Anjan Basu can be reached at basuanjan52@gmail.com.
