Bengali
Fascinating collage
SAYANTAN DASGUPTA
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From pulp fiction to little magazines, Bangla literature today is spreading out in diverse directions.
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Photo: Shiv Kumar Pushpakar
Sunil Gangopadhyay
Sixty-odd years after Independence, contemporary Bangla fiction presents a fascinating collage of varied, and often contradictory, trends and preoccupations. On one hand, it has successfully moved beyond metropolitan Kolkata and started to focus on non-urban, non-middle class lives and lifestyles with a consistency that cannot be missed. Writers like Mahasweta Devi, Debesh Ray and Abhijeet Sen continue to highlight the plight of marginalised communities, bringing to its acme a trend pioneered in the 1940s and the 1950s by Manik Bandyopadhyay, Tarasankar Bandyopadhyay and Bibhutibhusan Bandyopadhyay.
On the other hand, there is a burgeoning and highly visible body of pulp fiction penned by established, market-friendly writers. This brand of fiction wallows in clichéd themes of love and lovelessness, employs a predictable narrative structure and is often sexually explicit. This kind of writing in Bangla finds an easy outlet in the festival numbers of literary periodicals brought out by big publishing houses. While the writers who belong to this group are too many to mention individually, one author who stands out even while catering to this market is Sunil Gangopadhyay. His experiments with the historical novel and his attempts to explore the grey areas between fiction and history put him in a league of his own.
Thriving tradition
One also notes the continuation of the little magazine tradition in Bengal. The little magazines, which are published not only from Kolkata itself but also from small towns, successfully showcase writing from the districts. This has made the corpus of contemporary Bangla literature more varied and exciting. Very often, these little magazines cater to localised readerships and this gives the writings they carry a culture specificity and a local flavour of their own.
There is also the troika of Tilottama Majumdar, Suchitra Bhattacharya and Bani Basu, three women writers who have commanded a fair degree of attention in the field of Bangla fiction for a number of years now. They write mostly about the urban experience and their works often carry streaks of feminism though, as several critics have pointed out, the feminist politics in their writings often lapses into the simplistic as the writers capitulate to perceived demands of the market. Mahasweta Devi’s hard-hitting enunciations of the twin concerns of class and gender have failed to find successful reiteration in the hands of any other writer from Bengal. Another prolific writer who continues to chart her own path is Nabaneeta Dev Sen; her entertaining and thought-provoking sketches, often written in the first-person, are characterised by a tongue-in-cheek humour and represent another dimension of Bangla literature.
Contemporary Bangla literature has seen some startling experiments with language. Nabarun Bhattacharya, perhaps the most exciting figure of Bangla literature today, is at the helm of these experiments — he has pioneered this trend and consistently tried to defamiliarise the Bangla language by coining new words and sprinkling them liberally in his works. This almost Brechtian technique forces the reader to slow down and to question the linguistic and cultural assumptions one would otherwise probably have taken at face value.
A different sensibility
Another remarkable trend in contemporary Bangla literature is the emergence of Dalit writing. While the term “Dalit literature” was coined in the late 1950s and while there has been a strong and very visible Dalit movement in Marathi and Gujarati literatures, Bengal has not traditionally been associated with any such movement. In fact, scholars had largely assumed that there existed no substantial body of Bangla Dalit literature, perhaps because caste-based oppression was not very common in Bengal. It is only a recent article by Manoranjan Byapari in Economic and Political Weekly that has brought the spotlight to focus on a largely ignored and hitherto invisible body of Dalit literature in Bangla. A powerful body of Dalit literature has been building over the last three decades or so in Bangla, one that is very different in terms of its aesthetic sensibilities and political commitment from those of “mainstream” Bangla literature. While poetry is probably the most favoured genre of Bangla Dalit literature, the Bangla Dalit novel offers fascinating insights into how Dalit writers have brought autobiographical and historical elements into their “fiction”, thereby blurring generic boundaries even further.
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