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Journalism of Courage
Just before World War II, in rural Bengal, where global stirrings were seldom felt, my grandmother, a callow fangirl of 17, went to meet Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay. The celebrity writer of Pather Panchali was well in his 40s. Little did she know that an unlikely epistolary romance would bloom and, in a few years’ time, she would marry him.
But she’d chosen an unfortunate day to meet him — Bandyopadhyay’s widowed sister, Janhavi, was lost in the river Ichhamati that very day. A thorough search had not yielded a body, convincing everyone that she had been dragged away by a riverine crocodile. Bandyopadhyay though, beyond the obvious fatigue, did not betray any dismay at being accosted at such an inopportune time for an autograph. Taking young Rama Chattopadhyay’s booklet, he signed a short adage — “Movement is the essence of life, stagnation death”.
If one were to summarise Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay, those would be the very words to use. Considered one of the finest writers in the Bengali language during his lifetime, he was a rolling stone; hammered by fortune with constant bereavements, he had neither let misery weigh him down, nor did he seek material gratification. He had been a roving lone traveller — both in self and in spirit — till the last decade of his life, when he got married for the second time (his first wife, Gouri, had died of cholera a year after their marriage, before Rama was even born), bid adieu to the city, and looked forward to settling peacefully in his ancestral village.
Born in rural Bengal in abject poverty 125 years ago this month, Bandyopadhyay had inherited an unlikely fascination for the unseen from his minstrel father, Mahananda. A chronic failure in pecuniary pursuits, Mahananda was a traveller par excellence. After studying Hindu scriptures in Varanasi, he had once managed to walk till Peshawar. While a young Bandyopadhyay seemed to have been unhappy with his father’s long absences, he also inherited Mahananda’s nomadic wanderlust and love for storytelling. In his own youth, he briefly worked as a Hindu pracharak (promoter) in Chittagong (now in Bangladesh). By his own admission, he considered the job worthless but was in desperate need to earn a living. Soon after, he would quit it to journey into the formidable Arakan-Yoma forests of Myanmar, deeper and deeper, with one postal courier handing him over to the next, proving himself to be his father’s son.
A lattice woven of austere hardship on the one hand and, in spite of it, a deep spiritual contentment, provides much of the texture of Bandyopadhyay’s life and work. Pather Panchali — the loosely autobiographical bildungsroman that had instantly catapulted the writer to fame in the late 1920s — is, at one level, a timeless story of the simple charms of life in a Bengal village; yet, on another, it is a cruel narrative of neglect, of the harshness of people towards each other, oppression, discrimination and abject penury.
Bandyopadhyay, a master craftsman, rounds off the jagged edges, delving upon tragedies only so long as they are not missed. Apu, the imaginative protagonist, escapes quotidian grief by escaping into his personal world of myth and fantasies. Unlike Satyajit Ray’s 1955 screen adaptation, where Apu and Durga finally get to see a train through a kansh-grass field in an iconic scene, Bandyopadhyay had chosen to deny the fulfillment of Durga’s yearning: on her deathbed, she asks Apu if he will show her a train someday.
The trope of spiritual wealth amidst material frugality recurs through Bandyopadhyay’s literary works. In Chander Pahar (Mountain of the Moon, 1937), a pacey children’s fiction set in Africa, he typically denies the protagonist Shankar any overt affluence. When Shankar finds the diamond mine he had been looking for, he doesn’t recognise the raw crystals for what they are; later, to find his way out of its labyrinthine caverns, he uses those very diamonds as markers. He finds out only later, through the letter of a dead Italian traveller, that his pockets had been full of untold wealth.
In a diary from the early 1940s, Bandyopadhyay reflects, “An important value of life is despair: poverty is an asset; loss, penury, failure great valuables… A life that has not known tears is a desert. Let me be frightened of a life full of happiness, prosperity, and affluence.” Perhaps, it is then fitting that he didn’t live to see how the Chander Pahar film franchise has been such a money-spinner with two of the highest-grossing films in Bengali. Or how Pather Panchali is considered to be the third-highest-grosser (by cumulative collection), making the austere Bandyopadhyay, ironically, the most commercially successful Bengali author.
Over four decades since the author’s death in 1950 from a cardiac arrest, that would suddenly rupture the family, his once-bashful bride, now hardened and in her 60s, would try to instil those same principles in us on our way to school. Usually dressed in a simple cotton sari, she would point out the botanical names of the foliage by the roadside. Our grandmother’s formative years had been shaped by her husband’s intense love for nature, and she had been an eager student. She would slowly reconstruct Bandyopadhyay for us through anecdotes, writings and aphorisms: breathing life and spirit into an inanimate plaster of Paris bust here, a coarse twill shirt there, pages of quickly jotted manuscripts, or a broken leather case in which he would carry pen, paper and ink. She would try and nurture the same love for nature in us, we who were now caught in a world hurrying towards urbanisation.
In most of his writings, nature is a throbbing, living character. Of these Aranyak (Of the Forest; written between 1937 and 1939, published in 1976) probably stands out the most as his meditative treatise on nature. When an urban Satyacharan is appointed as the estate manager to clear forest land and resettle farmers for cultivation in the remote Bengal-Bihar border, he is intensely frustrated by the isolation. But the forest grows on him, and its simple people become his own.
Towards the novel’s end, when nearly the entire jungle has been scoured, the author tries to dearly hold on to one small serene grove, Saraswati Kundi. Bandyopadhyay laments the destruction wrought by humans 80 years ago, in the early days of what would soon become a global overexploitation of natural wealth. Nature was still abundant and its levelling was carried out without guilt. Bandyopadhyay’s prophetic thoughts mirror an urgent truth in the modern world, which frantically looks for sustainability sitting atop a mountain of consumption, confounded, wondering what went wrong. “None of the fields that once lapped the horizon exist anymore…Labtulia has become a mere slum today. As far as one can see, roofs of dense tenements jostle each other…they have trammelled unfettered earth, dividing her into little plots,” he writes in Aranyak.
Trinankur Banerjee is a Delhi-based illustrator and writer
