Once again the literary fraternity lost another stalwart Sunil Gangopadhyay, the legendary and one of the brightest stars of Indian literature, on 23rd October 2012. Considered by critics as the ‘Tagore’ of contemporary Indian literature, his death is a great void. “Bangla literature has lost its ‘guardian”, is what noted Bangla writer Samresh Majumdar remarked.
Gangopadhyay heralded a new style in Bangla literature. His unique style of writing endeared him with every genre from the veteran to the adult to young lads. Just like Kelucharan Mahapatra, the doyen of Odissi, who passed away dancing till his last breath, barely a couple of days of his last performance at Gandhi Auditorium, Lucknow, on the eve of Utkal Divas (Odisha Day) on 1st April 2004, Sunilda, as he popularly called, was writing till his death. An unfinished short story and an article were found at his desk.
The most important project, on which he was working, at the time of his death, Chhotoder Mahabharata, the children’s version of the epic, which had been serialized in a leading magazine for over years, remained incomplete. The organizers of the International Kolkata Book Fair, due to be inaugurated in January 2013, has decided to dedicate the 37th Edition of the Book Fair in his memory, as Sunilda was associated with it since its inception in 1976.
Born on 7 September 1934 at Maichpara in Faridpur, in present day Bangaldesh, to Kalipada and Meera Gangopadhyay, Sunil came as a refugee to Kolkata in 1947 following the Partition of India. His life began in a small rented house in Grey Street. The family suffered extreme poverty initially. Gangopadhyay did his schooling in Town school. He admitted to Surendranath College for Intermediate in Science, City College for BA Hons in Economics, and Calcutta University for Master’s in Bangla literature.
Gangopadhyay, though he was just in his teens, was forced to find employment and tried his hand at various odd jobs: private tuitions, working part-time in a grocer’s shop, clerical job in a pharmacy godown, and trainee in an insurance company, as he was eldest in a family of four. In UNESCO’s Literary Project on Adult Education in the village of North 24 Praganas. Gangopadhyay got a permanent job at the Central Medical Store in Kolkata and served till 1963. He, however, managed to complete his Master’s degree in Commerce from Calcutta University in 1954.
In a telecast interview, he once said: “In the family library there were some English poetry books- Poems of Tennyson being one of them. My father was not fond of Bangla poetry at all, but my mother was an avid reader of Bangla fiction. Perhaps the taste for literature was inherited from my mother”.
Besides, he was influenced by Tagore, Bishnu De, and Jibanananda Das. Gangopadhyay, in his adolescence, got a copy of the Tagore’s anthology Sanchita and was immensely taken up by it. Gangopadhyay, in his article ‘My Discovery of Jibanananda’, writes a detailed description of how, once standing in the queue before a ration shop he found himself reciting some lines of Jibanananda and `forgot the noisy, ugly surrounding.
He visited States University of Iowa, USA, on a scholarship to join International Writing Programme. On this visit, he later wrote the novel Sudur Jharnar Jole (On a trip to a Fountain Abroad). On his return, he devoted himself to writing under various pseudonyms, i.e.’ Nil Upadhyay’, to report literary activities in foreign countries; as ‘Nillohit’, to write highly light-hearted belles-lettres in magazines and journals. Some of these delightful pieces have been collected in volumes like Nillohiter Antarang, Nillohiter Chena Achena, etc.
He assumed the role of a critic and commentator under the pen name ‘Sanatan Pathak’, to review books and write literary criticism. These articles have later been published in a volume entitled Sanatan Pathaker Chinta. He admits that during those days, I wrote poems, essays, short stories, and travelogues, but never attempted novels. His forays into writing novels were not planned.
One day, he suddenly got a call from Sagarmaya Ghosh of Desh, the then most popular and prestigious magazine, who requested him to write a novel for the Puja issue of Desh. He confessed, “It was really a big surprise for me because I had never thought of writing a novel and I didn’t know anything about the nuances of writing a novel. And surprisingly enough, you won’t believe, soon in one day I found that I had completed writing a full novel”.
Starting his career as casual journalist with Anand Bazar Patrika Group, Gangopadhyay retired from there as a senior editor of Desh. In 2002, Gangopadhyay was appointed the Sheriff of Calcutta during Left regime for one year, and belonged to CPM’s intellectual group. His literary pursuits brought him countless awards like Bankim Puraskar (1982), Anand Puraskar (1986), Vidyasagar Puraskar (for Juvenile literature), Rammohan Puraskar (for his total literary performance), Hindu Literary Prize (2011), etc. Associated with several literary movements and cultural activities, he is associated with Sahitya Akademi as its Vice President from 2003-2007 and as its President since 2008, and with Pather Panchali Organisation and Paschima Banga Shishu Kishore Academy as their President.
Sunilda, one of the peal eminent writers of India, won the prestigious Saraswati Samman for the year 2004, for his acclaimed novel Pratham Alo (First Light, 1996), a sequel to his earlier novel Sei Somoy (Those Days, 1981-82), a quasi-historical narrative about the events which took place between 1840 and 1870, a period that witnessed a unique movement in Bengal. Pratham Alo, a raw depiction of Partition, set between 1880 and 1910, with a cast of 75 characters, brings to a conclusion the story of Sei Somoy.
Both the novels are mega-narratives decked and decorated on the same lines, and the one enriches another. They are designed as discrete texts linked by some common themes and characters. Pratham Alo, translated into English by Aruna Chakravorty, entitled First Light, takes over from where Sei Somoy left. It is a magnificent novel set at the turn of the 20th century in Bengal where the old and young India is jostling for space.
The novel narrates the story of a young man during the country’s freedom struggle, blending imaginative insights with historical facts. Prominent among its many characters, Rabindranath is used as a nodal reference in Gangopadhyay’s multidirectional novel. “The story-teller in Gangopadhyay has successfully clued into the detail. Some revered men of the era, who ushered in the foundation of Indian nationalism, are given feet of clay. The author has shown their vulnerabilities as also their humanities”, mentions his Saraswati Saman citation.
A chronicle of the whole nation waking up to a new, modern sensibility, Pratham Alo is a rich and comprehensive portrait of Bengal. Sensitively portraying the dilemma of Swami Vivekananda who abandons his Brahmo Samaj leanings and surrenders himself completely to his Guru, Gangopadhyay offers a poignant tale of loneliness and ambiguous love based on Rabindranath Tagore’s relationship with his beautiful, ethereal sister-in-law Kadambari Devi, which is found in Tagore’s novel Nosto Nir.
In the ‘Introduction’ to the English translation of Pratham Alo, Aruna Chakravarti writes, “Gangopadhyay, however, is non-judgmental and herein lays the strength of his novel. A judicious balance is maintained, on the whole, between the fact and fiction, and the large cast of characters is well controlled”.
His other magnum opus, the new experiment of Bengali fiction in which history and fiction live side by side in two volumes, Sei Somoy was also translated into English, and entitled Those Days, by Aruna Chaakravorty. An epic novel, it appeared in the Bangla journal Desh for over a period of two and half years, and was subsequently published in two volumes in 1981-82. Even though the second part is a continuation of the first, the two-part novel can be enjoyed as either volume separately as well.
This historical fiction, a bestseller more than a decade after its first publication, uses vast panoramic views and lovingly reconstructed details to provide an unforgettable picture of the events that took place between 1840 and 1870, a period of the Bengal renaissance. Sei Somoy is the result of in-depth research into the crosscurrents of socio-intellectual life of the period.
Gangopadhyay writes in his epilogue to the novel, “It is a novel, not a historical document. My personal view is that the Bengal renaissance, as we understood it, manifested itself not in the span between 1825 and 1845 as Shibnath Shastri suggests but in the three decades between 1840 and 1870”. For its evocative power and vigorous expression, Sei Somoy was acclaimed widely as an outstanding contribution and was chosen for the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1985.
To quote Ashapurna Devi, another prominent Bangla novelist: “I marvel at the fact that all these years a Mahabharata like epic was in the making for readers of Desh and through them for all the fiction loving countrymen. In a way, Sei Somoy is indeed like the Mahabharata with a wealth of characters- good, bad, indifferent, the wealth of incidents, the range, the branches and sub-branches…”
The story revolves around the immensely wealthy Singha and Mukherjee families, and the intimacy that grows between them. Aruna Chakravarti says, “It presents a bold and startling deviation from the Marxian search for man’s salvation that was Sunil’s forte in his work of the seventies”. Of course, both Sei Somoy and Pratham Alo are more of a literary creation than a historical document. However, Gangopadhyay has triumphantly penned another classic history based work Purbo Paschim (East and West) in two volumes in 1988-89. With his usual vigorous expression he set the backdrop of the biggest exodus in human history – the 1947 Partition of India.
The novel holds back three decades, from the mid’50s to the late’60s, of those tumultuous times covering West Bengal, East Bengal in Pakistan, later turned Bangladesh, vis-à-vis the social and cultural problems of the people of both countries in the post-and pre-Partition era. It revolves around two Bengali college friends, one Hindu and the other Muslim, but soon takes into its expanding orbit other characters, families, and issues. Though separated by the political division, each one is caught up in his own problem. This novel won him the Anand Puraskar for a second time. Considered as a historical document than a novel, the political and social scenario of the two Bengals has been dealt with great skill in Purbo Paschim.
Though he is famous for these three classics, some of his well-known fictions are: Arjun, Partidwandi, Aranyaner Din Ratri, and Eka Ebong Koyekjan. However, Atmo Prakash (Self-Revelation, 1967), which appeared in the autumn issue of Desh, was his first novel. Well received by readers as well as critic, it is a powerful portrayal of the frustration or ennui of the youth of Calcutta (now Kolkata). It was so bold that there was an outcry, with some calling it obscene. With this publication he soon rose to become the leading and most popular novelist of Bengal.
Pratidwandi is set in the very volatile period of the late ‘60s in Calcutta when corruption was rampant and Naxalite movement was in full swing. It narrates the story against the backdrop of discontentment, growing frustration and seething anger, emerging communism, changing values, diminishing tolerance and the bleak future confronting the youth in the ‘60s. It explores a picture of a big city in all its detail. It was very well-received and after that Gangopadhyay spun out novel after novel with contemporary Calcutta, its young men and women hailing from middle-class.
His novels have dealt with the lives and problems of the middle-class during the 19th and 20th centuries in Bengal. They are often based on actual incidents from his life, many of them quite trivial. His novel: Aranyer Din Ratri (Days and Nights in a Forest), and Pratidwandi (The Adversary) have been made into films by celluloid luminary Satyajit Ray, with considerable changes which created a different kind of atmosphere, away from the mood of the original.
In Aranyer…, there are four friends, belong to lower middle families, eager for adventure, though they don’t have money to buy train tickets. The main theme was the sheer celebration spirit of the youth. Restless but without means. Ray changed it. They were travelling by a car, apparently from upper middle class background. Mrinal Sen has also made a film based on his short-story ‘Ora Tinjon’.
This apart, several of his shorter fiction and novels have been filmed and broadcast on Radio and TV. Sei Somoy was serialized both in Hindi and Bengali. Widely translated into almost all Indian and foreign languages: English, French, German, and Russian, he nevertheless has gained enormous popularity abroad.
He has written the script for Hindi film ‘Sodh’, based on his story Garam Bhat Athaba Ekti Bhuter Galpa (Story of streamed Rice or Just a Ghost), which won him the Golden Lotus (Best Film Award) in 1980. Recently his film Moner Manush, depicting the biography of Lalan Fakir, a Baul singer, was made into a film by Goutam Ghosh.
The filmmaker retained the same what Sunilda carried the modern consciousness of Bengal in his novel. Gangopadhyay had been appointed as script advisor for Ian Smith’s film ‘The City of Joy’, based on Dominique Lapierre’s book, shot in Calcutta in the mid-‘80s. This apart, Sunilda was a good Rabindrasangeet singer, as well, a good actor who acted in plays.
With over seventy years of life till date and a vast body of works, Gangopadhyay has made quite a distinguished reputation for himself in several genres of writing; be it as a poet, novelist, script-writer, dramatist, essayist, journalist, critic to name a few. He was reckoned as one of the most outstanding modern writers and his novels enjoy tremendous popularity, because of his racy style and contemporary themes. Some of his novels have sold as many as 50,000 copies. But he declares poetry to be his ‘first love’, then anything else.
He wished to be remembered and known more as a poet than as a novelist, and has written over 2,000 poems. His reputation was first established as a lyric poet. In his early years, he along with Dipak Majumdar and Ananda Bagchi had brought out about some distinct changes to the basic form of Bengali poetry. These poets with the true spirit of revolution had experimented with the poetic rhythm, usage of words, and even new form in poetic themes. When experimentation in poetry was still rare and style dominated by Tagoreana in the post-Tagore era, Sunilda, along with Budhadev Basu, and Shakti Chattopadhyay, experimented not only with form and style but also with content.
This experimentation gave birth to Kirttibas, the epoch-making magazine, in 1953, which became a platform for a new generation of poets experimenting with many new forms during the ‘50s and ‘60s. After the third issue, Gangopadhyay exclusively took over the editorship. As the founder-editor he writes, “Rabindranath had already passed away before I finished my high school. Yet he continued to exist pervasively in the pages of the leading literary papers as well as in the sensibility of the greater part of Bengali intelligentsia…”
The poems of Kirttibas group came to be dubbed as ‘confessional’ poetry. The new poets indulged in neology, allusions and myths, but in a less obscure and more intelligible manner. Since then Gangopadhyay developed a very distinctive style in voicing the spirit of the youth and in his depiction of love and life. Works of Gangopadhyay, which have captured the hearts of the youth for so many generations, are a fine blend of the romantic, and the mystic and reflect the varied mood that every individual experiences at some or the other time in his live.
He is equally versatile in describing every kind of human sentiment, using a style which is most true to life. His poems have always created the finest imagery. In theme, diction, imagery, and idiom, and above all in emotional and intellectual status, his poetry offers something new. Gangopadhyay plays with words in a lively and creative manner and has added a new dimension to love poetry through the purity of passion. The ‘Nira’ series of his love poems was probably the most intensely romantic sequence written in Bengali.
Ekti Chithi (One Letter), appeared in Desh in 1951, created a niche for him in Bangla poetry scene. His extremely popular poetry collection are; Eka ebong Koyekjan (1958), Amar Svapna (1972), Bandi Jege Achhi (1974), Hathat Neerar Janya (1978), Sadarista Tomar Sange (1985), Jagaran Hemabarna (1974), Ami ki Rakam Bhabe Benche Achhi (1975), Danrao Sunder (1975), Esechhi Daiba Piknike (1977), etc. Besides, most of his collections are in the volumes of Kavita Samagra. The Murmur in the Woods (2003), an English translation of some selected poems from Kavita Samagra, is an attempt to capture the poet in all his moods of romance, anger, love, despair and hope, and also protest against social evils.
However, Gangopadhyay has shown his dissatisfaction with his own poems evident in the introduction to his book of poems, ‘Ami Ki Rakam’. He once admitted, I sat with as many of my poetic creations as I could find and went through them patiently. It was a painful exercise. Some made me write in agony. I threw away the particularly offensive ones. Slowly the floor is heaped with rejected poems. The air is full of my unsuccessful efforts. There are only a few left on the table. This scares me. I feel helpless. I begin to be doubtful my worth…” But one remarkable quality of his poetry is the deceptive casualness.
Gangopadhyay has an uncanny power to produce something new with his language. Equally adept in prose, he has written fine novels and short stories in the genre of science fiction. Lal Jungel (The Red Forest, 1984), a short story, is based on the concept of anti-matter. Rakshaser Pather (The Stone of a Demon, 1983) is of a strange island having a stone of hypnotic charm; wheareas Neel Manusher Sansar (The World of the Blue Man, 1985) takes the reader to the world of the young man Sajay and others who have undergone strange changes in pigment through their contact with other planets beyond the earth.
The contribution of Gangopadhyay to children’s fiction is enormous which have easily captured the imagination of the younger readers. He has written over thirty five novels, most of which appeared in Anandamela. They include: Halde Badir Rahasya o Dine Dakat (1978), Jayanta Khelna (1976), Satyi Rajputra, Tin Number Chokh (1974), Sabuja Dviper Raja (1978), and above all the Kakababu series. He has created interesting characters like the detective Kakababu, the crippled adventurist, accompanied by his young adult nephew Shontu, and his friend Jojo. His last Kakababu novel Shontu and Jojo appeared in this year’s Puja edition of Anandamela for children.
Sunilda successfully tried his hand in drama too and made his debut with Praner Prahari- a three-act play, Jyostna Kumari, and Raja o Rajsabhay Madhbi. Under the direction of veteran director Bibhas Chakravarti, his play Jyotsna Kumari was successfully staged in 1993. He was also known for his unique style of prose and travelogue writing. To name a few they are: Baraniya Manush Smaraniya Bichar, Kabitar Janma Ebam Anyanya, Sanatan Pathaker Chinta, Russia Bhraman and Svarga Nay, etc. Besides, he showed his talent exclusively in history, i.e. Agniputra and Itihaser Talbhanga. In Ardhek Jiban (Half A Life), his autobiography, Sunilda wrote about the trauma and tribulations of Partition, his growing up in Calcutta amidst the post-Independence crisis of a refugee influx from then East Pakistan, and the food crisis.
Though initially adopting writing as a ‘pastime’, in a 56 year long writing career, Gangopadhyay has penned more than 250 volumes in different genres: travelogues, children literature, science fiction, shorter fiction, plays, features, reviews of literature, and essays. The Library of Congress has in its collection 180 titles of Gangopadhyay including translations and a criticism on Gangopadhyay.
The bohemian poet of the mid-‘60s, Sunilda became popular after Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay, Tarashankar Bandopadhyay and Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay. Sunil Gangopadhyay: A Reader (2009), edited by Enakshi Chatterjee, published by the Sahitya Akademi, is selections from Bengali writings of Gangopadhyay, which attempts to take stock and to pick and choose from the rather large corpus of poetry, fiction, essays, and plays.
Widely traveled, Gangopadhyay had attended a number of national and international conferences and seminars. He was invited in ‘World Poetry Conference of Yugoslavia’ in 1986; ‘Indian Festival’ in Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria in 1988; and in Japan by the ‘Bangladesh Japan Friendship Society’ of Japan. He was one among the ten Indian Observers to visit Bangladesh on the invitation of Sheikh Hasina, the then Prime Minister of Bangladesh, and as Observer of ‘UNESCO’s Conference’ in 1995. Regarded as a self-confessed atheist he once called God a “cruel rumour” that took away the lives of crores of people. He has always championed the cause of communal harmony.
# Dr. Ashok K. Choudhury, an independent lit critic, is with Sahitya Akademi, New Delhi.
