The English-reading world knows Sunil Gangopadhyay, who died at the age of 78 last year, as the elder statesman of contemporary Bengali literature. A protean writer, he wrote, among hundreds of novels, several tomes of historical fiction, three of which have been anthologized in a new volume, Classic Sunil Gangopadhyay. Bengali readers remember him as one of the iconic figures in the generation after Buddhadeva Bose. To me, his name conjures up two words: “prolific” and “pulp”.
Born in 1934 in Faridpur, Bangladesh, Gangopadhyay grew up in difficult times. He came into prominence as a poet in the early 1950s, when he started a journal called Krittibas to promote new voices in poetry, while he was a student of Bengali literature at the University of Calcutta. His first novel, Atmaprakash (literally, Revealing Oneself), was published in the prestigious Bengali literary magazine, Desh, in 1965. Two of his early works, Aranyer Din Ratri (Days and Nights in the Forest) and Pratidwandi (The Adversary) were made into films by Satyajit Ray. Twice winner of the Ananda Purashkar, one of the most coveted literary prizes for any writer of Bengali, among dozens of other recognitions, Gangopadhyay had a long and happy career by any measure.
On the brighter side, many bleeding hearts are supposed to have been healed by the power of Gangopadhyay’s lines, matches were made, and lives transformed. But more alarming was the creative frenzy that his poems unleashed among young men who grew up reading them. From plangent romanticism to crass libido, the “little magazines”, which published experimental writing in Bengali, exploded with emotions that would be considered insalubrious in any respectable Bengali youth.
Gangopadhyay’s comrade, Shakti Chattopadhyay, was the real deal though. A truly maverick genius who never played to the gallery nor cared for the market, he was a poet’s poet, unlike Gangopadhyay who was more invested in building up a mass-market following.
Gangopadhyay’s enduring popularity is the result of his canny understanding of a fundamental weakness in the contemporary Bengali psyche: An inveterate appetite for kitsch disguised by an almost atavistic sense of entitlement to a glorious literary past. His historical novels, set in the hallowed years of the so-called Bengal Renaissance in the long 19th century, catered to these twin impulses expertly.
Even without reading over a thousand closely printed pages of these translations, it is quite possible to imagine the bravado involved in such an undertaking. To reduce a complex historical period, marked by the flux of reformist movements and radical ideas, into easily digestible vignettes of romance, gossip and anecdotage is no mean feat. Real historical figures—the illustrious Tagores of Jorasanko, rebel poet Michael Madhusudan Dutt, educationist-reformer Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar, actor-playwright Girish Chandra Ghosh, actor Binodini Dasi, scientist Jagadish Chandra Bose, spiritual leader Ramakrishna Paramhamsa, and his disciple, Narendranath Datta (later known as Swami Vivekananda)—appear in a dizzy profusion in these novels, alongside an imagined cast who are emblematic of what Gangopadhyay believed to be the spirit of the age.
Child brides, widows, concubines, lascivious babus: Gangopadhyay invokes the dramatis personae of the iconic Kalighat pat paintings in his endlessly proliferating plots. In keeping with the flavour of the pats, there is a streak of vulgar humour to Gangopadhyay’s characterizations, a close attention to salacious details, and a historical faithfulness that could lapse into idle tokenism.
Misogyny, abuse, sexism, exploitation, he gives us the works. The evil are painted with a tar brush, the good are long-suffering specimens of humanity, tossed between melodramatic highs and lows. Random encounters and episodes are introduced with the sole purpose of providing historical wholeness to the plot. Racy and entertaining, this is the stuff of the television mega-serial, rather than historical fiction, which, in its “classic” 19th-century incarnation actually aspires to be a novel of ideas. As Supriya Chaudhuri put it succinctly in her review of the translation of First Light, Gangopadhyay’s endeavour “is a novelised version of Amar Chitra Katha”.
In the translations, by Aruna Chakravarti and Sreejata Guha, all three novels are rendered fluidly. The English versions may not be as colloquial as the original but are limpid enough to engage those who are looking for easy gratification. They are perfectly serviceable as far as Gangopadhyay’s style and intentions are concerned. He certainly did not aim to write anything magisterial—as a “historical novelist”, he was probably closer to Georgette Heyer than to Walter Scott—or make any apology for taking liberties with historical verisimilitude. His attempt at realism was numbingly mundane, far removed from the mimetic sophistication that brought depth and complexity to the great historical novels of the 19th century.
At the height of his career, which spanned several decades, Gangopadhyay was churning out at least three or four novels for the special issues of several Bengali periodicals that appear during Durga Puja every year, alongside dozens of stories, poems and the occasional articles for a host of other publications, big and small. Given the exigencies of the life of a full-time writer, it is perhaps unfair to expect the edginess of his early work to flow into his later writings. Once he discovered his innate gift for telling a good story, and was feted by a cross-section of readers of popular magazines for it, Gangopadhyay relaxed into a smug confidence that comes from a sense of authority. That he was mostly writing for a less exacting readership, which was happy to be charmed than challenged, may have induced such a complacency.
The pattern is familiar across cultures. William Wordsworth kept at composing lines until his readers were dozing off. Ray’s brilliance gradually began to dull with Ghare Baire (The Home and the World) and hit a dreary low with his last film, Agantuk (The Stranger). There are exceptions, of course. For many years, Jorge Luis Borges wrote a column for the ostensibly women’s magazine, El Hogar, but continued to produce little gems, each a shining example of how seemingly ephemeral writing can endure.
Catch all the Business News, Market News, Breaking News Events and Latest News Updates on Live Mint. Download The Mint News App to get Daily Market Updates.