A Bengali novel in English

Aruna Chakravarti is a well-known translator. Her English rendering of Sarat Chandra Chatterjee's Srikanta and Sunil Gangopadhyay's Those Days and First Light stand out, not only because of the quality of translation but their compactness as compared to the works in the source language.

The same compactness characterises The Inheritors, her debut novel, which is the saga of a Vaidic Kulin family covering four generations.

Who is a Kulin Brahmin? In her Author's Note, Chakravarti says that in the 11th century, several groups of Brahmins fled Kanyakubj (Kannauj) after it was attacked by Mahmud of Ghazni.

Out of those who took shelter in Bengal, some were designated Kulin by the king Raja Ballal Sen on the basis of nine qualities"""their conduct, humility, scholarship, status, number of pilgrimages performed, devotion, skill in recitation, hours of prayer, and extent of charitable works."

This saga starts in the present and goes back in time, something that brings out sharply the contours of change that the family and its members have gone through.

As the novel opens in the middle of the last decade of the twentieth century, Manomohini Sen, or Mono, as she is known as, meets her cousin Abhishekh at the Koln Hamptbahnhof.

Among other things, they talk about Alo, Abhishekh's mother and Mono's aunt. Alo had left her husband before Abhi's birth and never went back.

She left the diary she had kept for Mono. It is the diary which transports the reader to Majilpur in the early years of the last century. Establishing a link between the past and the present through a diary is quite common in the European literary tradition but offhand one cannot think of any Indian writing in English which has used a diary to link up persons, events, even periods.

When Alo is first given a diary, she asks her Himu Dada what it is for. He tells her that she should keep an account of everything she has seen and done in it, even put down her thoughts and feelings.

When she wants to know of what use they would be, he says, "We're living in momentous times. Change, social and political, is taking place everyday...When your grandchildren see what you've written...they'll understand how we lived, what we thought and felt."

Prophetic words, which take on significance with the passage of time as the diary resurrects the past, revealing secrets which might never have come to light otherwise.

This reviewer feels that given Aruna Chakravarti's English literature background, weaving the novel around the revelations of the diary is a western influence.

This brings one to the fusion of tradition and modernity that the novelist attempts to infuse into her work in many ways. The Renaissance in Bengal had a great impact on the system of education.

People came to Kolkata to study and stayed on to work. There were two sides to this situation. Education was used to get a good job and settle down by characters like Shashi, or join the freedom movement even if it involved terrorist activity.

However, there were characters like Alo's husband Pramatha whose perverted tastes suggest a decadence in the feudal set-up and the effect of education on it.

The novel has a large number of characters and one has to refer to the family tree now and then. The size of Chakravarti's novel is close to the novels she has translated from Bengali into English.

With such a crowd of characters, some remain stereotyped, a few like Alo, Mono, and others emerge as full-fledged individuals. To an extent, this detracts from the intensity of the novel.

I understand that the novel has been pruned extensively. Still, the large number of characters bewilders most readers, especially those unfamiliar with the times and the sociocultural milieu.

The painstaking research that has gone into the novel can be seen in the details that embellish the story. One can cite the example of Asan Bibi brata, which, according to the author, " was the most popular of the pledges taken by the women in the small Bengali community of Delhi to which Shashishekhar and Mrinalini belonged."

Even today this brata is celebrated by many in Chittaranjan Park, which is called the "little Bengal" of Delhi. Chakravarti tells the reader about the origin of the brata. To quote, "The legend was woven round a Muslim woman with extraordinary powers. She could make anything easy for anyone who invoked her aid""be it for the birth of a male child, the marriage of a daughter or the health or fidelity of a husband."

So far so good. However, the generalisation and rationalisation that follow could have been dispensed with or made more interesting as they detract from the fictional value of the book.

This is just one instance, there are others.

A reader familiar with Bengali fiction will relate to The Inheritors instantly, as it conveys the Bengali ambience very well, albeit in English. There are times when one feels that this novel is a translated one and not originally written in English.

To quote a few lines from the description of the Bijoya Sammelan, "The shantijal , water of peace, was brought after dusk and soon afterwards, guests and neighbours streamed into the house. The men embraced each other and the young touched the feet of the elders...Puja had come and gone and another year of waiting lay ahead."

A dense novel to be read slowly in order to be savoured.

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The Inheritors

Aruna Chakravarti
Penguin
Pages: 340
Price: Rs 295