Perfectly All Right?

SARAT CHANDRA CHATTOPADHYAY died when he was 62. And his literature died young as well. By the late ’50s, barely two decades after his ...

SARAT CHANDRA CHATTOPADHYAY died when he was 62. And his literature died young as well. By the late ’50s, barely two decades after his death, the author suffered his final humiliation. Only the upstart and the uninitiated gifted a set of Sarat Chandra novels at Bengali weddings.

Devdas was a work only the rest of India and the mofussil population raved about. The Kolkata aristocracy shunned both Sarat Chandra and Devdas. Their grouse—Sarat Chandra’s vision was too limited.

His women were of two kinds, Paro and Chandramukhi. The two characters were simplified evocations of Lakshmi and Urvashi, respectively. How could you possibly prescribe a novelist like him for the postgraduate Bengali literature syllabus? He had never visualised the Bengali woman beyond her house and hearth.

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Discarded from the syllabi in major universities, Sarat Chandra’s complete works gathered dust in old teak cupboards. Only two of his novels—Pather Daabi (it concerned an interesting perspective on the freedom struggle) and Ekadoshi Bairagi (the Marxist critics admired this work’s dissection of poverty) made their way into an academic’s must-read list. These two books were part of my Comparative Literature postgraduate syllabus at Jadavpur University in the early ’80s.

And Devdas became an integral part of the Bengali idiomatic expression in a very derogatory way. Anyone who made the slightest effort to drink away his sorrows was a Devdas. In a post-Naxalite, almost-macho Kolkata, Devdas was an abuse which seriously hurt. The character received no sympathy in the age of drug abuse. If someone called you Devdas, it meant you’d just been jilted. Devdas wavered on the brink of obsolescence and literary grime because it lacked spunk.

Sarat Chandra’s autobiographical work, Srikanto, his other major novels, Bardidi or Grihadaha had been made into forgettable but moderately successful commercial Bengali films in the ’50s. From the ’70s, these works were being avoided, if not shunned. And it was all because of that same complaint—Sarat Chandra and the new Indian feminism of the late 20th century walked in two different directions. Every Sarat Chandra woman, portrayed as kitchen queens-turned-martyrs, underlined only one kind of nobility—that of sacrificing each of their living moments for the men in their lives—husband or brother.

Yet, long before Mills & Boon arrived with happy endings and took over the roadside bookstalls near Gariahat and Gol Park, every 15-year-old girl in Kolkata read romances like Datta, Dena Paona and Parineeta. In Datta, a story waiting to be shot in Hindi,

Bijoya is a rich heiress who falls in love with a disorganised but immensely lovable doctor and is able to marry him despite the protests of her family.

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The Bengali film, hardly memorable, starred Suchitra Sen and Soumitra Chatterjee. It is a mushy romance and the backdrop of the story—the Bengal countryside of the zamindari days—will be difficult to relate to. Whoever makes a Bollywood film will have to think of a contemporary locale like Vidhu Vinod Chopra and Pradeep Sarkar conceived for Parineeta.

Parineeta was the first love story I gobbled up quietly one May afternoon during my long summer holidays when I was 14. It was a 120-page novella, which did not take more than three gripping hours to finish. My disappointment came later when I saw the Bengali film. Soumitra Chatterjee played Shekhar, Moushumi played Lolita, and they did not kiss on screen.

Parineeta means married woman. The novel must have seriously influenced at least three generations of Bengalis because even in the ’70s, if you wanted to tell your Bhowanipore friends that you’ve just had your first kiss, you punched the air and said, ‘‘Yes, PARINEETA’’.

But Bengali men and women no longer talk about Parineeta. I don’t recall Parineeta finding its way into any Bengali conversation of literary merit. Only middle-aged women unabashedly discuss the storyline. How the suspense is kept alive till the end; how Lolita remains a virtuous girl all along; how that one kiss and the exchange of the garland (not necklace as in the altered plot of the latest Chopra production) meant a serious marriage vow to her.

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In our postgraduate days, Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay, the litterateur who penned the national song—Vande Mataram—was regaining lost ground. At least 30 years senior to Sarat Chandra, Bankimchandra was being applauded for his ‘right and balanced attitude towards women’. Critics lavished praise on him because he wrote about women monks who took up arms to fight the British in Anandamath. He conceived of powerful woman characters like Devi Chowdhurani and Tilottama as well as Ayesha (Kapalkundala).

All three great Bengali film-makers, Satyajit Ray, Ritwik Ghatak and Mrinal Sen steered clear of Sarat Chandra. Ray returned to Rabindranath Tagore over and over again. He went back to the great novelist Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay for the Apu trilogy and another of his great films, Asani Sanket. Sarat Chandra’s stories disappeared from the Bengali celluloid screen before the arrival of Eastman Colour.

Last heard, Sarat Chandra is gaining some respectability. New PhDs are being done in Kolkata on the late author’s mastery over plot. And the scholars who are showing a renewed interest in the author are apparently women impressed by the late author’s storytelling ability.

Sarat Chandra had created a world of flawed men and perfect women. How could he have known that it would eventually be women who’d accuse him of not infusing imperfections in the right quantity?