Browsing Through Bani Basu

One of the major novelists in Bangla today Bani Basu (b.1939) continues to surprise her readers with her range of themes and diversity of narrative modes. Her work is marked by a rare blend of intellectual sophistication, emotional warmth and concern for human values. Until recently she was teaching English Literature in a college in Kolkata. Three of Bani Basu’s novels are available in English translation : The Enemy Within (Antarghat), Fallen Man (Kharap Chheley), and The Birth of Maitreya (Maitreya Jatak).

In one of Bani Basu's novels ( Pancham Purush, 1990 ) a professor from Calcutta is confronted, after his lecture at the Pune Film Institute, with a question by a Swedish researcher. It is about Satyajit Ray's film Gharey Bairey (The Home and the World) where in the last sequence, all colour is wiped out from Bimala's clothes to indicate that she is now a widow. Why is this projected as the ultimate tragedy? Johan wants to know if the director believed that widowhood is a tragedy in itself, even when the bond between the husband and wife is of duty rather than love. Professor Mahanam Roy considered the question and answered :

In the social context against which the story unfolds, widowhood was definitely considered an irrevocable curse. A woman, however enlightened, would not be able to free herself completely from this samskara. Nor would she know how to break out of the socio-religious frame in which she was enclosed. Bimala would now lose all the freedom she enjoyed while her liberal husband was alive. So widowhood is indeed the final tragedy for her. (my rough translation from Bangla)

Johan wants to know in that case was Nikhilesh actually wanting to punish Bimala by embracing death? The professor concedes the possibility but is not sure if this is consciously done. "Nikhilesh is indeed the most complex character in the film. His death could be seen variously as the revenge bid of a man defeated in love, an act of bravado to prove his superiority over his rival or an attempt to discharge a landlord's responsibility towards his subjects."

Johan presses his query further by bringing in the example of a widow from another Ray film - Aranyer Din Ratri (Days and Nights in a Forest). Her husband committed suicide while living abroad. This beautiful woman lives with her husband's family at the fringe of a forest where four young men have come for a holiday. She offers herself at night to one of them. Johan wants to know why this man refuses her after leading her on during the day.

"What is the obstacle? His rejection of her seems to me inhuman. Why would the director not permit them to come together? Goddard would have."

The professor smiled, "Johan, if our art did not share at least three quarters of the cultural assumptions of the society, it would have been unreal. The film makes it clear that the physical purity of an upper caste woman is considered more sacred than that of a tribal woman."

"Even when the woman wants it?"

"Even then. This young man might have flirted with her, but he had not bargained for sexual intimacy. He is conscious of the circumstances and the consequences of the act. Also, there is an instinctive inhibition."

"Why? Is it because she is a widow?"

Mahanam was a little uneasy.

Johan said, "Then, from 1905 [the time of action of the Tagore novel on which Ray's film is based] till about fifty or sixty years later, has there been no change in the attitude towards widows? I consider this young man selfish, his sexual hesitation a sign of cowardice."

Mahanam said, "I agree. But if he had surrendered to that moment's temptation, we would have considered him even more selfish."

"Strange!" Johan exclaimed as he scribbled in his note book. Mahaman wondered what kind of verdict he would pass on our morality.

The Swedish researcher's question continued to trouble Mahanam long afterwards. However much he tried to theorise the differential cultural determinants of our response to art, he could not deny to himself the lack of certain basic human values in our own tradition specially with reference to women :

Sympathy for the weak, the sick and the deprived is a universal human trait. But the widow in Aranyer Din Ratri has not been treated with compassion - she is projected as a grotesque figure. .. The film is an excursion into the unfamiliar, the bizarre. Four friend have come to the forest to get away from the monotony of Calcutta. They encounter unknown nature, unusual people, different customs - not just unfamiliar, but strange, eerie. By projecting the widowed woman as part of the uncanny atmosphere, we have done grave injustice to her. That is why Johan as a human being feels revolted .

This debate on Satyajit Ray is by no means an important section in the novel Pancham Purush. It is almost an incidental aside - part of a process of concretizing Mahanam Roy's character, like a later passage in the novel when he reflects on the cave paintings of Ajanta. But by highlighting this portion I wanted to draw attention to two issues. One: the cultural implications of widowhood must have continued to exercise Bani Basu's mind because her next novel Shwet Patharer Thala (The Dinner Plate Made of Marble, 1991) explored in depth both the continuing (though relatively invisible) prejudices of society as well as the unacknowledged inhibitions in the mind of a young educated woman widowed in late twentieth century. But Bani Basu is by no means a writer about woman's suffering alone. Her oeuvre is marked by a remarkable variety, vivacity and innovative energy, of which more later. Two: the passages about film quoted above give some indication of an inquiring and wide-ranging mind able to look at an issue from several angles. One of the reasons I am attracted to the work of Bani Basu is the writer’s razor-sharp mind. True, intellect alone need not be a guarantee of the quality of a novel, and polemics are not essential ingredients of good fiction. It is possible to cite major writers who are not necessarily cerebral. But the presence of a lively mind and an analytical ability definitely adds an intellectual excitement to a novel. No two of Bani Basu's novels are alike, each one explores a different segment of experience where imagination is backed by research; she experiments with a variety of narrative modes, realism and irrealism sometimes co-exist in startling ways; she is capable of completely changing her language to suit the theme.

As an example of the latter, one can take Moom (1998) which focuses on a Marwari family settled in Kolkata for generations. The language is Bangla laced with Hindi, the kind many Marwaris in Calcutta use. Such a hybrid language - if used at all in Bangla literature in the past - has only been done for comic effect, and always briefly. Bani Basu dares to write an entire novel in this mixed language quite seriously, without any trace of condescension or mockery. This may well be the first time that a Marwari is not used as a stereotype in Bangla literature. A Marwari businessman has always been a stock figure of fun and derision, never an individual. In a city where the Marwari presence is very important in the economic sphere, and increasingly so in civic life too, it is surprising that people from this community have never figured more than marginally in Bangla fiction and film.

Moom is a fascinating novel, and not only for its subject matter. The title refers to the name of an ebullient and self-willed Marwari girl of twelve who mysteriously appears halfway through the novel. She is simultaneously a vividly presented realistic character and a phantom figure from the realm of allegory and folklore hinting at a dark family secret . Hridaynarayan Agarwal's family in Chittaranjan Avenue, Kolkata, had always been plagued by an excess of daughters - and in trying to meet the repeated demands for dowry it nearly became broke. "Ladki dushman. Pray to bhagwan that he does not send any more girls to us." The novel uses the trope of milk in insidious ways, generally as a source of life - warm and soothing - till on the last page it turns into the fluid of death when the stunned reader realises that twelve years ago a new-born girl-child was killed in this house by pushing her face into a bowl of milk.

The deliberate mismatch between the potentially comic lightness of language and the grim unravelling of a family saga of murder, gives the novel Moom its peculiar spine-chilling quality. The casual use of the supernatural is closer to the tradition of folktales where ghosts can sometimes be friendly and entirely domesticated , rather than the global mode of magic realism. Also, one does not feel that a community is being indicted from outside. The characters seem to be victims of a system they cannot step out of - demonstrating the way cultural codes can overpower an individual's rationality and control, something we witness daily in our country.

Maitreya Jatak ( 1996) is the most ambitious of Bani Basu's novels. Set in Gautam Buddha's time, this 431-page ( large format, small print ) meticulously researched novel is in my view a major work which would have made her place in Bangla literature secure even if she wrote nothing else. The research does not weigh down the narrative; the large cast of characters come alive vibrantly; reflections on politics and religion are leavened by pragmatism and humour; issues like ecology, conversion, gender, identity and nation ( King Bimbisar asks : “Tell me Chanak, what is this Jambudweepa?”) seemed to be charged with contemporary relevance. In a brief preface the author says Maitreya Jatak is not Buddha’s biography, nor is it a historical romance. It is an attempt at recontructing a period, an age we need specially to look at from our crisis-laden present. The writer modestly denies any ability to evaluate Gautam Buddha’s spiritual life. Her interest is in the man behind the image and the quotidian details of desh and kaal that made his emergence possible. The language of narration in this novel differs from the language of dialogue, the latter tending towards Pali in spelling and pronunciation. One marvels at the creative energy and erudition (never obtrusive) that sustains this massive novel till the last page.

It is amazing that the author of Maitreya Jatak could shift gear so completely to weave a rollickingly funny contemporary yarn the very next year (Meyeli Addar Haalchaal, 1997). It is a story about a group of women of dissimilar ages whose gossip sessions are riveting in their irreverence, wit, racy language and high spirits. It challenges the belief that adda (a Bangla word to which a great deal of cultural value is attached, means “meandering conversation undertaken only for the pleasure of it without any specific topic or purpose” ) is basically a male preserve. Bani Basu casually undermines the myth about the victimhood of women by showing the agency of this lively group of women, whose flippantly started games begin to show up the basic vulnerability of men. What began as a sport slowly turns serious and the novel which initially appeared to be a comic tour de force acquires a depth and unexpected pathos.

Each of Bani Basu's books stretches the boundary of experience normally dealt with in Bangla fiction and some of her novels joyously play with semantic, lexical as well as narrative conventions. Each novel examines a different world. In Gandharvi the author steeps herself completely in the discourse of Hindustani classical music. Radhanagar brings together two very unlike milieus - a Vaishnava clan in a Bengal village where life revolves around a temple and the Anglo-Indian community in Calcutta. One of her early novels Antarghat - which consolidated her status as a writer (as different from reserved category of `woman writer') broke an uneasy silence of history by focussing on those drop-outs from the Naxal movement who purchased their security and success by secret acts of betrayal. The novel ruthlessly excavates their submerged guilt and projects their need for self-justification after they resurface two decades later.

A brief essay cannot do justice to the range and depth of this prolific writer. She turned to writing somewhat late, when she was well into her forties. Since then she has written seventeen novels in addition to several collections of short stories which may be a measure of the author's abundant vitality, but it also makes the reader afraid that she might burn herself out sooner than necessary. I do not know how it is in other Indian languages, but in Bangla, once a writer has gained a certain recognition, there is relentless pressure on her to produce more and more, faster and faster. Over-production tends to affect the quality of even those writers who begin with unusual promise. Very few writers have been able to resist this demand for constant visibility. ( Moti Nandy is an honourable exception. Even Mahashweta Debi has published nearly hundred titles.)

Once in an interview I had asked Bani Basu if she resents this constant pressure to produce and whether she would have been able to write better if she wrote less. She replied: “The answer is yes and no. Of course the rule of the game is publish or perish. Writers are forgotten very easily. If you are not constantly in public view, you will recede from the minds of readers. This has happened to the best of writers. So the pressure is constantly there. How far you succumb to the pressure depends on you. But it is also true that sometimes I work best under pressure. I might not have written all that I have so far if I did not have to meet deadlines.”

Indeed there is very little trace of haste in what she writes. Each seemingly effortless novel is finely chiselled, replete with detailed research (whether it is about the Buddhist era or about the street slang used by lumpen youth in Kolkata today), minute care and innovative ways of presenting a story. Evidently the pressure of the literary situation in which she works does not affect her creativity.