Pirate ghosts and island wives: Review of Amar Mitra’s Dhanapatir Char, translated by Jhimli Mukherjee Pandey

Bengali writer Amar Mitra brings together folklore and hard-nosed realism in this novel

Governments and bureaucracies are obsessed with categorisation, that things stay in their boxes, that ideas stay within the lines drawn around them. 

Dhanapatir Char: Whatever Happened to Pedru’s Island? by Amar Mitra, and translated from Bengali by the late Jhimli Mukherjee Pandey, is what happens when this view of the world runs into an older, more mutable world. The book chronicles a year in the life of a char, or an island formed by the accretion of silt. 

This is the ecosystem at the edge of the Ganges delta, where the river meets the sea, where the land fragments, where nothing is fixed, everything is fluid, where borders and faiths, histories and myths blur into each other. It is a fractal landscape that encloses a finite area, but has an infinite perimeter.

Dhanapatir Char: Whatever Happened to Pedru’s Island?

Amar Mitra; trs Jhimli Mukherjee Pandey

Penguin eBury Press

₹599

Dhanapatir is literally founded on a legend. A giant tortoise swims all the way from Lisbon, carrying the island on his back, and goes to sleep. The aged Dhanapati is the ‘sardar’ of the island, seventh in line, descended from the fearsome Portuguese pirate Pedru, who first settled on the island. Mysteriously, Dhanapati and the tortoise are also one and the same. There are echoes of myths everywhere, from the Kurma avatar of Vishnu to Sufism’s Khwaja Khidr, who rides on a fish in the world’s oceans bringing succour to sailors. This amphibian-ness extends to the nature of the tale as well, with its mix of folklore and hard-nosed realism.

Temporary family

The island is left abandoned for six months, when the “tortoise chief” is awake. In the month of Ashwin, “after Goddess Durga returns home, he goes back to his slumber”, and people arrive on the island. Fishermen leave their families behind and take up “island wives”, a bond dissolved by the coming of spring. Till then it is “…an island that gave a husband to those who didn’t have a mate, a family to those who never had a home”.

Into this idyllic world, intrudes the mainland. A rapacious trader, helped by corrupt officials, pursues an island woman, while the ‘sardar’ tries to hold them at bay, inspired by Kunti, his young wife trained in witchcraft.

Mitra, through Pandey’s adept translation, employs dialogue as well as snatches of songs and chants to set up a repetitive cadence of stories endlessly told and re-told. There are ghosts of Portuguese pirates and invocations to “ma kamala, the goddess of wealth”. There are scenes when “water-coiled moonlight washes the reef” while a lustful male views a woman who is no longer charming as a “river that is dying due to too much silt”.

It is as if the inhabitants who “daydream about the island, their families of six months, the white waves of the Kans grass, the blue boundless sky and the seagulls that soared above” speak in a hidden tongue.

The writer is a freelance journalist and graphic novelist.