Ideas, Thoughts and Memories: Bengali Literary Essays: A Selection in Translation is collection of Bangla literary essays starting from Bhudeb Mukhopadhyay (1827–1894) to the contemporary Anita Agnihotri (b 1956) has been edited and compiled by Kalpana Bardhan who is a social scientist by training and a translator from Bangla by vocation. The anthology is a labour of love, showcasing 46 essays by 31 distinguished authors in the language. In subject matter too, the volume is significant as it showcases a great diversity of voices but more of that later.
Under one roof
In his Foreword to the volume, Ashis Nandy perspicaciously comments that this book is “Kalpana Bardhan’s reminder to a new generation of Bengalis…of a lost world, and perhaps even a lost skill” that the Bengali literary sphere once boasted of: a veritable crop of writers who used Bengali both for their creative work and serious nonfiction, in contrast to those who used English or Bangla alternately for one or the other. Professor Nandy asks another pertinent question towards the end of his piece: “Is this book then only a lovable but doomed venture?” because so few of our children, born and raised elsewhere other than in Bangla-speaking milieu, can access the language, let alone read it. He continues to state that he would “like to believe that … the new generations of diasporic Bengalis, eager to know the culture of their ancestors but unable to do so, will find in the following pages clues to their own way of coping with their unacknowledged sense of exile and to a new multicultural sensitivity that their adoptive culture cannot otherwise provide”.
This is one of the strongest reasons for this book’s genesis but it provides another to me: I read Bangla but it is such a treat to get my hands on a volume where all the essays I have longed to read, scattered in books and magazines, now find a congenial home and put within my reach!
The volume gives the reader access to a wonderful array of themes and writing styles of writers, poets, academics and thinkers whose forays in non-fiction are justly celebrated. We have a brilliant description of “Calcutta’s Markets” in Raghab Bandopadhyay’s piece, just as we have Saraladebi Chaudhurani’s “Our Festival” on the Tagore household. We have historical event-based essays like Abul Mansur Ahmad’s “Mahatmaji’s Assassination”, while Gaur Kishore Ghosh’s “An Atheist’s Gandhi-Journey” reminds us of our intellectual debt to the Mahatma.
Essays on class, history and on culture and the arts jostle with each other as do memoirs and reminiscences. Hayat Mamud’s “Not Ashamed being just a Bengalee” is a tour de force on what it means to be a Bengali in contemporary South Asia, with its critique of Bengali sub-nationalism, while Partha Chatterjee’s “The Isolation of Jogen Mondol” discusses an important historical figure in Bengal’s pre-partition caste politics. Other gems are the artist Ganesh Pyne’s “Deliberately he swims against the current” and Sukumari Bhattacharji’s historical assessment of Mrichchhakatika. The list goes on and the reader is invited to read and savour and ruminate on a rich but motley crop of writings.
An idea of India
Apart from the diverse subject matter, the volume begs a set of other deliberations that are equally significant: translation and the work of a translator. The editor’s Introduction raises some pertinent questions regarding the paucity of good translations, the reasons for the selection of her material, and why translating a literary work is a craft. Bardhan flags a perennial problem in translating the vernacular: the dearth of good translations by good translators. She states in her Preface that “we need not only to produce translations, but also to evaluate and study them, and have a regular forum for review and criticism” and urges a supportive eco-system of re-translations of important literary works. The culture that grows around translating (and re-translating) literary works from one language to another still remains a neglected area in our literary endeavours. We are unique in the fact that a sizeable portion of our population speaks in two or more languages, and many write in more than one. That is a strength that we have failed to nurture and utilise at the grassroots.
Last but not least, the book would have done with a list of contributors at the end that would have given a reader, not familiar with many names, a sense of time and context. Although the endnotes supply some information, at times they are inadequate. Except for a die-hard Ray fan, no one would know outside Bengal the name of Karuna Bandopadhyay, who acted in some of Satyajit Ray’s most iconic films. I missed one or two essays by Kazi Nazrul. Some notable theatre practitioners are missing as well. Some of the pieces would have profited with a stricter editorial intervention (as in the titles, for example) while in parts the translation reads strangely, as in page 251, the character Abhimanyu in Sisir Das’s “Lad & Maiden” states: “You didn’t hear wrong. Now I remember a time when I was small; my tutoring in warfare hadn’t started yet. It was evening; my father was playing chess with my mother…”
Bardhan’s anthology fills a most necessary gap in reaching out to an audience who would otherwise not be able to access this stimulating crop of writers in Bangla. For many of us, it is a reminder to take translation seriously as never before. In more ways than one, this anthology, with its bouquet of distinct voices, lives up to a significant need in our idea of India.
Debjani Sengupta teaches at Indraprastha College for Women, University of Delhi and translates both fiction and non-fiction from Bangla.
Ideas, Thoughts and Memories: Bengali Literary Essays: A Selection in Translation, edited by Kalpana Bardhan, Anustup Prakashani.
