BHABANI BHATTACHARYA’S NOVELS
H.
G. S. ARULANDRAM
The
novel, as a distinct literary form, is of recent birth. It is the latest of
many literary forms to be evolved and the most dominant in the 20th century.
Finding this form as the most facile vehicle for literary expression,
Bhattacharya, one of the older generation of living Indian novelists, has been
attracted to and adopted this form. Though he has written a number of short
stories, translated the stories of Tagore, written episodes from Indian History
and published a book on Gandhi, it is as a novelist–as the author of So Many Hungers, Music for Mohini, He Who
Rides a Tiger, A Goddess Named Gold and Shadow
from Ladakh–that he has won recognition and fame from
the reading public.
Bhattacharya
has his own theory on the purpose and method of writing a novel. On more than
one occasion, he has expressed in clear terms what “novel” has meant for him
and what he has tried to do and succeeded in achieving through this form. A
novelist, for Bhattacharya, is a creative writer, possessing a special gift for
such creation and differing from other ordinary men and women in that he is
endowed with more than usual sensitivity. In an article in The Aryan Path, he observes: “The creative writer has a
well-developed sensitivity though this does not mean that he understands or
shares all emotions. The things he witnesses, the things he experiences, are
likely to move him more intensely than what may be called recollection at
second hand”. 1 And this unusual sensitivity must be stirred by his
power of observation. A true artist cannot exist in an ivory tower of his own
and revel in fancies which have no relevance to human life on our earth. On the
other hand his observant eyes are keen on noting what is happening around him.
He says, ‘I have not missed a single opportunity of observing incidents,
happenings where I can gain something for the writer in me. Most of my
characters have shaped themselves from real earth”.2 Again all truly
creative writers are driven by an urge from within him to write. It almost
becomes an obsession with them. With Bhattacharya, it is not merely a question
of writing for money or to order. On the other hand “it is a compulsion to find
an outlet for the living images in him.” This inevitability of an artist’s
craving for expression is at the root of all art.
A
novelist, then for Bhattacharya is a man among men, gifted with an extra
measure of sensitivity and keen powers of observation. What he sees around him
creates an inner urge, a compelling need to express himself. Then and only then
a novel is born. Speaking about how he became a novelist he observes: “Then the
great famine swept down upon Bengal. The emotional stirrings I felt (more than
two million men and women and children died of slow starvation amid a man-made
scarcity) were a sheer compulsion to creativity. The result was the novel So
Many Hungers”. 3
As
regards the medium of expression, Bhattacharya has an open mind. He feels that
the creative writer must have full freedom to use the language of his choice
for any coercion direct or indirect in the choice of medium by an artist, will
only hamper the realisation of the purpose he is struggling to achieve. He
writes in English and has two valid reasons for choosing English as his medium.
First “The English language is a bridge that carries our cultural values to the
world–not only to the English-speaking countries but to most of the other
countries as well in translation’.4 Secondly, in English he meets a
challenge. He observes: “I have enjoyed the challenge of this literary
problem–expressing Indian life in the idiom of an alien tongue.” Thanks to W.
Yeats-Brown who suggested and encouraged Bhattacharya to write in English in
order to gain and be assured of a world audience. And this was not a misguided
or misplaced hope, for the novelist has attained world-wide renown and his
books have been translated into twenty-six languages, sixteen of which are
European.
It
has been a subject of unending debate if art should have a purpose or not.
There are people who declare that all art is recreational: others who maintain
that art is primarily didactic: yet others who preach art for art’s sake.
Bhattacharya can never accept the concept of novel without a purpose. For him a
novel is something concerned with social reality! Time and again, he stresses
this point. “I hold,” he observes, “that a novel must have a social purpose. It
must place before the readers something from society’s point of view. Art is
not necessarily for art’s sake. Purposeless art and literature which is much in
vogue does not appear to me sound judgment.” Not afraid of being labelled as a
propagandist, he maintains that “Art must teach but unobstrusively by its vivid
interpretation of life. Art must preach but only by virtue of its being a
vehicle of truth. If that is propaganda, there is no need to eschew the word.”
So,
for Bhattacharya an artist has a responsibility to society, to the world in
which he lives. He has to work and plead for a better world. And so
Bhattacharya interprets in artistic medium people’s hunger for food and
freedom, condemns social evils such as–prostitution, exploitation,
superstitious beliefs, all anti-life tendencies, stresses the need for mass
literacy, attempts to destroy false faith and liberates men’s minds arid makes
them self-reliant and self-respecting individuals, pleads for intelligent
exercising of franchise and reconciliation of conflicting ideologies, advocates
widow remarriage, rebels against child marriage and unfurls his banner against
untouchability and barriers of caste.
The
modern novel has taken on itself such protean forms that it seems anything
under the sun could be safely expressed in that form. Himself very meticulous
about his own choice of subject, Bhattacharya feels that the subject matter for
a novel must be concrete. Writers of this generation have had the fortune of
living at a period when their country faces some turning points of national
life and a gifted writer could make use of this turning point as a fit subject
matter for his novels. In other words contemporary events lend powerful and fit
subjects to expatiate on. To set an example, he deals with the contemporary
problems in India as the themes of his novels.
The
Quit India Movement of 1942 and the Bengali famine which had swept his own
province Bengal in 1943, form the back-drop for his first novel So Many Hungers, which was published in
1947. Commenting upon the theme of the novel, Bhattacharya observes: “The novel
is concerned with all the intensified hungers of the historic years 1942-’43, not food alone: the money hunger, the
sex hunger, the hunger to achieve India’s political freedom.” There are two
main strands in the plot of the novel: the story of a young scientist,’ Rahoul
which is a representation in miniature of the struggle for political freedom
and the story of a peasant girl, Kajoli, whose sad moving tale is a pathetic
record of what happened to more than two million men and women who became
victims of a famine, engineered by one man with a selfish motive but aggravated
by the indifferent attitude and neglect of an alien Government and also by the
unprincipled Indians who tried to exploit the situation to mint money. As the Times Literary Supplement very aptly
comments, the novel describes a factual and vivid account of one of the most
shocking disasters in history.
Viewed
as a story, his second novel Music for
Mohini (1952), portrays the intellectual and emotional development of the
heroine, Mohini, from a care-free and much protected girlhood to the position
of a housewife and a mistress of a prominent and very influential house with
great tradition. But the novelist’s main concern seems to be of building a new
order in India–an evolution of new culture for the masses of a big nation. By
the time he came to write this novel, India had become free and it had to
evolve her own policy and establish her identity in the fast-growing world.
Mohini’s husband Jayadev, a thoughtful idealist, ponders over the implications
of the coming change. To him–much more to Bhattacharya himself–political
liberty is worth nothing to common man, if it is not a part of general social
renascence. His only desire is to extract the essence and best of our
deep-rooted tradition and fuse it with the spirit of modern time. When he takes
on himself the task of building a new society much through integration, he has
to fight with many antagonistic forces, especially his mother who stands for
old order and tradition. He does succeed. His vision of the new generation in
India is recorded thus: “The newman of his vision, growing to his full stature,
was not to be a hollow incarnation, not a spiritless copy of ancient Hindu man.
That was as stupid as Hindu moulded in a Western pattern 5.”
Bhattacharya’s
third novel He who Rides a Tiger (1954),
is a novel of protest–protest not only against a political and economic system
which degrades human beings but also against an established social order which
stamps on men as superior and inferior by virtue of accidence of birth. Though
the backdrop for this novel is the same as his first novel So Many Hungers, the emphasis rests on protest and rebellion and so
naturally the accent shifts from mute, helpless and passive sufferings to
protest and rebellion. And this is worked out through Kalo, a humble village
blacksmith, who takes his revenge on a rigid caste-ridden society by faking a
miracle –a miracle that begins as a fraud but truly ends as a legend–and
passing himself as a Brahmin priest. At the close of the novel, when his fraud is detected, while the caste~Hindus fret
and fume, other low caste people hail him as a brother and a champion of their
cause. His story becomes a legend of freedom, a legend to inspire and awaken.
By
the time Bhattacharya came to write his fourth novel, A Goddess Named Gold (1960), thirteen years vain expectation had
passed and independence and freedom had brought no miracle. Here the novelist’s
primary concern is to explain the meaning and significance of political
freedom–the way in which a country should use freedom and what benefits may be
derived if it is rightly used and utilised. A wandering minstrel presents a taveez to his grand-daughter Meera, with
a note that it will acquire the power to turn the base metal into gold if she
does an act of real kindness. But the taveez
fails to act as she enters into a business deal with a Seth on fifty-fifty
basis. At the end of the novel, disgusted with the taveez, Meera throws it into the river. Now the minstrel explains
the symbolism of the taveez. And
herein lies Bhattacharya’s message: political freedom is not a ‘panacea’ for
all ills; freedom alone will not and cannot lead a country to prosperity. At
best it can create suitable environment and provide splendid opportunity in
which men could show forth the best in them and work for their prosperity by
living on terms of equality with their fellowmen, practising virtues like love,
compassion, etc. Freedom is the beginning of the road where there is no road
and no miracle can happen without effort. To quote Bhattacharya’s words:
“Brothers, now that we have freedom, we need acts of faith. Then only will
there be a transmutation. Friends, then only will our lives turn into gold.
Without acts of faith, freedom is a dead pebble tied to the arm with a bit of
string, fit only to be cast into the river”.6 What matters much is
freedom of mind–man becoming self-reliant and self-respecting individual.
Shadow from Ladakh (1966),
which won the Sahitya Akadami award for 1967, is the last of the novels so far
written by Bhattacharya. Set against the menacing background of the Chinese
aggression against India starting in October, 1962, the novel is a study of
Gandhian ethics, reassessing their validity and relevance in the
post-independence India–an India faced with problems and challenges of the
changing times. It preaches by implication that India needs a blending of
divergent sets of values if she is to cope with the challenge of new
times–a plea for a meeting point
between Gandhian social ethics and the tremendous forces of science and technology.
Satyajit and Bhaskar represent the contrasting contemporary attitudes to life
in India. While Satyajit, the exponent of Gandhian philosophy and the guiding spirit of Gandhigram, a model of rural
India as envisaged by Gandhi, regards Indian village life as an ideal life,
Bhaskar, the Westernised American-trained engineer in a steel plant stands for
modern industrialism. In such a situation when different points of views and
attitudes are adhered to and practised by persons, with a strong belief of
their being in the right, the only possible solution is synthesis–choosing the
path of sympathetic understanding, of reconciliation of readjustment. At the
end of the novel, we find synthesis on three planes: Synthesis of turbine and
spinning-wheel on the economic plane, of Gandhian asceticism and Tagorean
aestheticism on the physical plane and of violence and non-violence on the
plane of international understanding. Such and only such type of
synthesis–finding a suitable meeting ground–alone would ensure the maximum
happiness of the maximum. Bhattacharya records the type of synthesis, he
envisages thus: “Let there be a meeting ground of the two extremes: let each
one shed some of its contents and yet remain true to itself”. 7
Bhattacharya
is a visionary–an optimist too. His novels end on a happy note–human forces
getting upper hand against dark urges and social corruption. He believes in the
richness of human soul and the rich spirit sustains him against the evil forces
of civilization. If man is against man
it is because the economic and social forces compel him to be so. He is not
completely bereft of goodness and life-force propels him on. And so he has
better morrow.
1
‘Literature and Social Reality’, The
Aryan Path, Vol. XXVI, No.
9, Sept. 1955.
2 An
Evening with Bhabani,’ Sudhakar Joshi, The
Sunday Standard. April 27, 1969.
3 Contemporary Novelists in the English
Language, St. Martin’s Press,
New York, 1972.
4 The Novel in Modern India, P.
E. N. Centre, Bombay, p. 42.
5 Music for Mohini, Jaico
Publishing House, Bombay, 1964. p. 80.
6 A Goddess Named Gold, Hind
Pocket Books Ltd., Delhi, 1967. p. 303.
7 Shadow from Ladakh, Hind
Pocket Books Ltd., Delhi, p. 274