Timeless stories in Bangla literature

Great literature, it is said, transcends time. Hamlet and King Lear are as relevant and enjoyable today as they were when Shakespeare wrote them in late 16th century and early 17th century.

But there is another way literature transcends time. A story that overwhelms you when you read it as a young man might appeal to you in a substantially different way in later life. The experiences are different, but both will convince you of the timelessness of the theme explored and the characters portrayed. That is also a mark of great literature.

As a school student, this writer experienced Rabindranath Tagore’s masterly art of story-telling while reading The Holiday or The Homecoming as part of the curriculum. The protagonist, Photik, is a naughty 13-year old boy whose mother decides to send him to Calcutta to her brother.

This is almost like a punishment for the young boy who pines for his carefree village life. His uncle tells him he can return only during the autumn holidays. Disillusioned and disheartened by the cruelty of his aunt and cousins, Photik runs away in the hope of reaching his village. He is brought back by the police in the middle of a downpour and, soaking wet, soon falls ill. By the time his mother rushes to bring him home, Photik has bid everyone good bye. Before his death, he tells his sobbing mother that the holidays have finally arrived for him.

Reading the same story almost after five decades, thanks to the pandemic-induced lockdown, the charm of that short story has not waned a bit. As a teenage reader, it was possible to empathise with Photik and question the logic of his mother’s decision to send him away from home.

But for a sexagenarian, the same story offered a perspective that was enriched by Tagore’s depiction of the antithetical value systems in rural and urban India. There is a short section that offers a sharp commentary on the social challenges for anyone entering their teens. A teenager often has to deal with the conflict between the intense desire to continue behaving like a child and society’s expectations of more mature behaviour. 

At 13, Photik was tormented by his failure to deal with that conflict and paid the price by dying young. Little has changed in our society today, where expectations of a set pattern of behaviour, linked to the age of a person, are still quite rigid. The troubling thought is that the Photik that Tagore wrote about in the late 19th century exists today and suffers from the same conflicts in the second decade of the 21st century.

There is no dearth of such timeless characters in Bangla literature. Premendra Mitra was primarily a poet and a short story writer of fine sensibility. He, too, was one of those Bangla writers who could easily achieve that timelessness with his characters. 

Mitra’s short story Discovering Telenapota explored the dark world of false hope and broken promises. For a young man, the story could ignite a certain idealism, prompting him to promise to himself that he would never offer false hope or break promises, contrary to what Niranjan did in the story. But re-read the story when you are older and the characters raise the same eternal questions of hope and promises. What you also appreciate is the subtle art of story-telling and the clever use of the future tense with the help of which the author creates a sense of uncertainty and unreality around every character at Telenapota. This is a sentiment that even Mrinal Sen failed to evoke in his film, Ruins, which was based on the same story.

Mitra’s range as a writer was vast. He was also the creator of a comical character called Ghonada. Almost every Bengali must have enjoyed the exploits of Ghonada in solving mysteries, leading a team of expedition to mountains in Africa or traversing two Pacific islands separated by the International Date Line and thus beating a deadline for signing a contract.

A bachelor, Ghonada would never buy his cigarettes, but cadge them from one of his fans who hung around him to listen to his stories. When you read Ghonada’s adventures as a young boy, you fall in love with him, believing his every word. As an old man, your love for Ghonada is no less, except that you are now more acutely conscious of your power to exercise a willing suspension of disbelief while reading about his exploits.

There are many other such characters created by Bangla authors. Mitra’s Ghonada made his first appearance in 1945 and was quickly followed by Narayan Gangopadhyay’s Tenida, a boastful young man, who failed in academics but impressed everyone with his honesty, equanimity, quick-witted response to difficult situations and courage. 

In 1965, Satyajit Ray would launch Feluda through Sandesh, a magazine founded by his grandfather Upendrakishore Ray Chowdhury. In the same year, Ray introduced Prof Shonku, a fictional scientist, in a story about his space adventure, also published in Sandesh. Feluda became more famous as a fictional detective solving mysteries with his native intelligence. Prof. Shonku earned greater popularity with his innovative devices like Annihilin, a pistol that could annihilate any living being. Not surprisingly, both Feluda and Prof Shonku continue to be popular with children and older readers. 

But the common thread that runs through Photik, Niranjan, Ghonada, Tenida, Feluda and Prof. Shonku is that in spite of belonging to different worlds they remain timeless in their appeal to readers, irrespective of their age. 

Pandemic Perusing is an occasional freewheeling column on books and reading by our writers and reviewers