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Journalism of Courage
Earlier this week, Bengali filmmaker Srijit Mukherji announced his next release, a film titled Emperor vs Sarat Chandra, slated for May 2026. The film marks the centenary of Pather Dabi (The Call of the Road), a controversial novel by Bengali writer Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay, first published in August 1926. Although sold out within a week of release, the novel was banned by the British government in India for being seditious. It was not until 1939, a year after Chattopadhyay’s death, that the ban was finally lifted.
Interestingly, this is not the first time that Pather Dabi has caught the attention of filmmakers. In 1977, director Pijush Bose adapted the novel, calling it Sabyasachi, with actor Uttam Kumar in the lead.
Who was Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay? What was Pather Dabi about? And why did it threaten the British administration?
Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay was born to a poor Brahmin family in Bengal’s Hooghly district in 1876. He spent much of his childhood with relatives in Bihar. While interested in philosophy, history, and sociology, Chattopadhyay could not complete his college education due to financial constraints. His determination, however, led him to discover the works of Charles Dickens and George Bernard Shaw.
Influenced by Dickens, Chattopadhyay too began writing. “His social novels, like Dickens’s, preserve the fading picture of a receding age,” notes academic Amitava Das in The Final Question: Saratchandra Chattopadhyay (2000). The simple language and distinct ‘Bengaliness’ in his works earned him a loyal readership.
In 1903, Chattopadhyay left for Burma for work and stayed on for more than two decades. It was here that his activism began. At a time when Calcutta saw the rise of social reformers advocating widow remarriage and women’s education, Chattopadhyay too contributed to the movement.
His works featured characters like Madhabi, a child widow, in Bardidi (The Elder Sister, 1913); Biraj in Biraj Bou (Biraj the Wife, 1914), who upheld her wifely devotion even at the cost of her life; the young widow Rama in Palli Samaj (Village Society, 1916) with her frustrated love in a society that denied widows any respite; or Parbati in Debdas (1917), forced to marry the elderly Bhuban Choudhuri.
Debdas was adapted into several films, including the 2002 Hindi blockbuster, Devdas, featuring Shah Rukh Khan. In The Global 1930s (2017), academics Marc Matera and Susan Kent note, “The characters [in Devdas] are flawed and defy easy categorization as good or evil, their lives marred by the effects of class differences, social convention, and their own choices.”
“Most of Saratchandra’s novels and short stories”, according to Das, “are concerned with the state of women. Their sufferings make up the chief substance of his art.” In Palli Samaj, for instance, Rama is a Hindu widow who cannot be united with her childhood friend and lover, Ramesh. In a letter, cited by Das, Chattopadhyay writes: “Two great-souled people thus end up crippled and frustrated. If I can reach this message of pain to the closed doors of human hearts, I will have done enough.” Through the narrative, Chattopadhyay sheds light on Bengal’s villages, entangled in deep-rooted class and caste struggles.
Literary critics and scholars regard Chattopadhyay as the literary successor to both Bankim Chandra Chatterjee (1838- 1894) and Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941).
In Sabyasachi, a role model for Bengali freedom fighters
Between the First and Second World Wars, Chattopadhyay joined Mahatma Gandhi’s Non-Cooperation Movement. Interestingly, he also shared a close relationship with Subhas Chandra Bose and was in support of armed struggle for self-rule.
Gradually, his writings became critical of the British regime. Through a series of short stories, including Mahesh (1922) and Dena-Paona (Owings and Borrowings, 1923), Chattopadhyay exposed the economic exploitation by the colonial regime. His most striking work, however, was Pather Dabi (The Call of the Road).
The novel is about a Burma-based secret organisation, Pather Dabi, that comprised political exiles from India. Following police repression in early 20th-century Bengal, leaders of the terrorist movement went underground and later fled to other British territories, particularly Burma. “After the release of hundreds of Bengali terrorists from detention in Indian prisons in 1919,” writes Stephen Morton in Terror and the Postcolonial (2015), “many Bengali revolutionary terrorists fled to Burma to avoid being detained. From Burma, these individuals sought to establish new secret societies and to support the violent anti-colonial insurgency movement from outside of Bengal.”
The leader of Pather Dabi is a man named Sabyasachi. Among those who contributed to Chattopadhyay’s conceptualisation of Sabyasachi were revolutionaries like Jatindranath Mukherjee, Rashbehari Bose, M N Roy, Bhupendranath Dutta and Taraknath Das. “Thus the combination of extraordinary physical strength and courage and the capacity to be forgiving and caring came from Jatindranath…organizational ability, particularly the ability to build international networks, from Bose and Roy; western education from Dutta and Das..,” notes Ashish Nandy in The Illegitimacy Of Nationalism: Rabindranath Tagore and the Politics of Self (1994).
According to Morton, Sabyasachi, much like Bose, sought to mobilise the educated, middle-class Bengali youth for a nationalist struggle against the British. Historian Tanika Sarkar concurs, arguing that “the model of political work celebrated in the Pather Dabi” is reflective of the “cult of militant youth power” associated with Subhas Chandra Bose in Bengal during the 1920s.
After the publication of Pather Dabi, Sabyasachi became a role model for Bengali freedom fighters. “A number of memoirs of post-Swadeshi freedom-fighters mention how they took enormous risks and sometimes faced police prosecution to possess or even read the novel and how greatly they admired Savyasachi,” writes Nandy.
Morton adds, “This fictional revolutionary [Sabyasachi]…demonstrated that so-called seditious writing was a crucial rhetorical and political strategy in the struggle against colonialism.”
Chattopadhyay died of liver cancer in 1938, leaving behind a rich literary legacy that has since been translated into nearly every Indian language.
