A Kolkata exhibition celebrates writer Bibhutibhushan, creator of Apu

Recently, when I needed to read Pather Panchali—one of the great Bengali novels, now approaching its centenary—I discovered that my Gen Z cousin owned a copy. Given the current state of Bengali literacy among younger readers, it was the last place I would have looked. But perhaps what I overlooked was the singular place Pather Panchali holds in the Bengali imagination: it exists not as one but two great works of art. Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay’s first novel is also Satyajit Ray’s first film; and for many, the film remains a gateway to the book. My cousin had bought it for a school assignment comparing the two. She read only parts of it, but the fact that it continues to circulate in classrooms, booklists and online reading groups suggests how enduringly alive the novel remains.

An exhibition at the Kolkata Centre for Creativity on Bibhutibhushan’s life and work—titled God of the Little Road, on till 19 April—anticipates this centenary. The book was published in 1929, but a hundred years ago, he was writing it. The exhibition, put together by his grandson Trinankur Banerjee, focuses not on the finished classic but on the process of its making: the notes, drafts and fragments that shaped it. It shifts attention from the aura of the book to the labour behind it—to a young writer, still uncertain of his place, at work on what would become one of the most recognisable novels in Bengali literature.

At the time, Bibhutibhushan was 31, working as an estate manager in Bhagalpur, Bihar, surrounded by acres of forest and farmland. Before this, he had moved through a series of schoolteacher postings, until he came under the patronage of a north Calcutta aristocrat, who sent him to oversee his estates. He loved nature, and the landscape left a deep impression on him. It also placed him in a position of contradiction: he was tasked with supervising the clearing of forests for cultivation, a responsibility that troubled him deeply. That tension would later find fuller expression in Aranyak (1939). But here, in this period of isolation and immersion in the natural world, it seems to have fed into Pather Panchali, another work drawing, in part, from lived experience.

MASTER CLOCKMAKER

At its simplest, Pather Panchali tells the story of a poor Brahmin family in the village of Nischindipur: Harihar, moving from place to place in search of priestly work; his wife Sarbajaya, holding the household together with a stern, often anxious resolve; their daughter Durga, a restless wild child, and her younger brother Apu (pronounced Opu in Bengali), through whose eyes the world reveals itself. It is through him that we encounter life in its first intensities—discovery, curiosity, the beginnings of desire.

Apu’s story mirrors Bibhutibhushan’s own in striking ways. He, too, grew up in poverty in a village by the Ichhamati (a river that is also the subject of his last novel, Ichhamati, published in 1950). His father, Mahananda, much like Harihar, was a storyteller who travelled from village to village, reciting from the Puranas and local folktales. Financial constraint meant that formal education was often uncertain; like Apu, Bibhutibhushan turned instead to books—whatever he could find. Both lives are marked by early encounters with loss, by the untimely deaths of those close to them. And like his character, he carried within him the beginnings of a writer—a trajectory that continues in Aparajito (1931).

And yet, for all its intimacy with lived experience, Pather Panchali is also a work of remarkable concealment. Beneath its apparent simplicity lies a writer of method and discipline. The notebooks on display show Bibhutibhushan taking extensive notes, drafting and redrafting, thinking through structure and tone—only to efface that labour in the finished text. As Banerjee observes in his curatorial note, he was “a master clockmaker concealing intricate mechanisms behind an elegant dial.”

Those notebooks reveal a mind working across multiple threads at once. While writing Pather Panchali , he was already sketching what would become Aparajito, and at one point even considering an alternative title—'Durer Bari'.

Banerjee recalls that his grandfather’s handwriting could be nearly impenetrable. Though the family has had access to these notebooks since the time of his father, novelist Taradas Bandyopadhyay, it is only recently, with the help of high-resolution scans, that parts of them have begun to yield.

What they reveal most clearly is a philosophical framework underlying the novel. At its centre lies the idea of suffering. The question, as Banerjee suggests, is how one lives with it. In Bibhutibhushan’s notes, phrases such as “philosophy of wonderment” and “philosophy of ananda” recur—suggesting a way of moving through suffering by a sense of wonder about the world and deriving pleasure from beauty. “The pleasure is just the simple pleasures of living… of not really wanting a lot,” he says. In one striking note, Bibhutibhushan describes Apu as “a citizen of the cosmos”, hinting at a way of seeing the self as part of something larger than individual circumstance.

You see this perspective most clearly in the novel itself, in moments that might otherwise seem incidental.

EYE FOR NATURE

There is a scene in Pather Panchali where Harihar shows Apu the ruins of a British-era bungalow near their village. Seen through Apu’s eyes, it appears “like the skeletal remains of a prehistoric, gigantic and ferocious creature.” For a moment, Bibhutibhushan shifts the scale of perception, transforming a local ruin into something vast, almost geological. It is a small detail, but one that gestures towards his wider interests—palaeontology, natural history, even astrophysics.

This attention to the natural world runs throughout the novel. Bibhutibhushan writes about plant life with a botanist’s precision—bamboo groves and “ancient gardens of mango and jackfruit”, but also the smaller presences, from ghetu (Hill Glory Bower) and hogla (elephant grass) to gandhabhedali (skunk vine) and telakucha (ivory gourd). These details are not incidental; they reflect a way of seeing. As Banerjee suggests, it emerges from “a sense of being part of an incredibly large, complex expanse of time and space… where one is just a point, and where even death does not quite feel like an end, but a continuation.”

Pather Panchali was written between 1925-27, began to be serialised in 1928 in the now defunct Bichitra magazine, and appeared as a book in 1929. Its reception was immediate. Readers responded with an intensity that marked it out as something unusual; critics such as Mohitlal Majumdar remarked on the seeming improbability of such a debut, as though Bibhutibhushan had arrived fully formed with a first novel that already carried the weight of a classic.

THE OUTLIER

Part of what made the response so strong was that the book did not quite belong to its moment. Bengali literature in the 1920s was shaped by the towering presence of Rabindranath Tagore and the popularity of Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay, even as a divide emerged between the modernist Kallol group and the conservative Shanibarer Chithi. Between these poles, Pather Panchali appeared as an outlier. “At this point, Bibhutibhushan comes in with something entirely different,” says Banerjee, “a kind of Bildungsroman, about a person coming of age.”

The idea of filming Pather Panchali came to Satyajit Ray in 1944, while he was illustrating its children’s edition, Aam Atir Bhepu. He would later describe it as “one of the most filmable of all Bengali novels”, drawn to its “humanism, lyricism and its ring of truth”. The film took its shape from the book itself. “The script had to resemble some of the rambling quality of the novel,” Ray wrote, “because that… contained a clue to the feel of authenticity: life in a poor Bengali village does ramble.”

The film would go on to achieve a life of its own, bringing Bibhutibhushan’s work to a global audience.

If Pather Panchali remains the most visible entry point into Bibhutibhushan’s work, it is only one part of a remarkably varied body of writing. There is Aranyak, drawn from his years in the forests of Bhagalpur; Chander Pahar (1937), an adventure story set in Africa; and Adarsha Hindu Hotel, a food story set in a modest eating house. Then there are his supernatural stories. Taken together, they suggest a writer difficult to contain within a single label—at once a romantic and a modernist, attentive to both the experiential and the spiritual.

All of which makes the image that emerges from the archives all the more striking. In Bhagalpur, the same man who would go on to write Pather Panchali could be seen riding out on horseback with a rifle, setting off to hunt birds. It is an image, Banerjee notes, that sits uneasily with the familiar portrait of Bibhutibhushan as the gentle, almost self-effacing village schoolteacher. And yet, taken together, these fragments point to something larger—a life lived with a certain openness to the world, a way of seeing that Bibhutibhushan himself once described as that of “a citizen of the cosmos”.

At Kolkata Centre for Creativity till 19 April; closed on Sundays.

Zico Ghosh is a journalist based in Kolkata.