The Unlikely Sleuth

If you were born in an average Bengali household it’s most likely that you already knew Badshaahi Angti,Indrojaal Rahashya and everything in between like the little of your palm,even before you started decimal divisions. And if there was one person who stood before blonde teenage sleuths and American thrill hunters after Feluda,it had to be Kakababu. Sunil Gangopadhyay’s half-crippled,brooding detective was almost Bengal’s Indiana Jones-come-true. He could land just the perfect punch,dodge bullets James Bond-style and give his captors nightmares in broad daylight. The former director of the Archaeological Survey of India was definitely more testosterone than Feluda and while the ‘intelligence agencies’ of the country came running to him every other week,we wished the writer had given him the other leg back,to kick some serious butt. And as he solved riddles buried in exotic islands and insurmountable mountain caves,Gangopadhyay’s 1974-creation,kept generations hooked on to the wonders of Bengali children’s writing.However,for those who couldn’t accompany Kakababu in such wondrous journeys ,thanks to their inability to read or comprehend the Bengali language,Kakababu could have been just a strange utterance that meant nothing. Which is why the English translation of two Kakababu novels,The Dreadful Beauty and The King of the Verdant Island ,is probably a beginning of a love story for many Non-Bengali children (and come to think of it,those Bengali children who are not very comfortable with their mother tongue). And considering the pedigree of the translators,it can safely be presumed that both these books will be definitely better than the slipshod scam that passes off as translation of Bengali classics nowadays (if you don’t believe us try going through the latest translation of Byomkesh Bakshi novels). The Dreadful Beauty has been translated by Nirmal Kanti Bhattacharjee,a renowned scholar,translator and editor. He has been associated with the world of books as Director,National Book Trust and as Regional Secretary,Sahitya Akademi. Tridiv Chowdhury,author of numerous short stories and non-fiction pieces,has translated The King of the Verdant Island. This is Chowdhury’s first translation work.