Owl’s Eye Views

Such, happily was not fate of one of the most famous satires of the nineteenth century, Hootum Pyanchar Naksha by Kaliprasanna Sinha, first published in 1862. It is still widely read in the original Bengali, and is now available to us in its first ever English translation by Swarup Roy of Belur Math’s Ramakrishna Mission Vidyamandir and with a foreword by Partha Chatterjee. Roy has done justice to a hard task, and his rendering reads smoothly, while retaining the flavour of its Bengali original’s pungent and witty style, and his annotations add to our enjoyment.

In nineteenth-century Bengal, an age when extraordinary people were a dime a dozen, Prasanna Sinha stands out. At the age of 13, inspired by the ideas of that great sage, Isvarachandra Vidyasagar, he founded a society to champion widow remarriage, and gave Rs 1000 to each person who married a widow. One of the earliest Bengali playwrights, he edited a number of journals. His translations of the Mahabharata and the Bhagvad Gita into Bengali are still read today. He defrayed the legal costs of James Long when he was tried for sedition for his translation of Nil Darpan. This mercurial figure died young, aged 30.

There are two important facts to remember about Hootum. It was one of the first books to use the language of everyday life (chaltibasha) as opposed to more formal prose (sadhubasha). In the original Bengali, it is now, in fact, a language that is no longer used much, except in satires. The other is that Sinha could well have written his book in a different way, as he himself notes at the beginning of the book. Why, then, did he choose this particular style? Because Sinha was consciously experimenting with a new mode of expression: “[We took] possession of the Bengali language. But we found nothing new to engage ourselves in. The situation was such that everyone dabbled in everything. We therefore decided to begin writing sketches like this.” At one point he notes that he was writing in the aftermath of the Nil Darpan affair: “…after the Nil Darpan row I couldn’t muster enough courage to hold up a mirror before ferocious monster. So I chose to paint myself like a jester and clown before my readers.”

Hootum is a very special book because it captures Calcutta and its people in a particular period of time. The old Calcutta was beginning to fade away, and a new Calcutta, modernising, with old class and caste distinctions giving way to new ones, was coming into being. Sinha mercilessly lampoons the nouveau rich, whom he disliked, even as he gently pokes fun at others. In Hootum, we see the old and the new side by side, interacting with, and observing, each other. Sinha walks us through the high and low of his Calcutta, a city teeming with life. And thanks to Hootum, still very much with us in letter and spirit, if not in reality.