Abstract
Somdatta Mandal’s translation of Manik Bandyopadhyay’s The Murderer fills up a great lacuna in the study of Indian bhasha literatures in English that is in turn related to the domains of Indian Writings in English and Translation Studies, alongside the sub-domain of studying Bengali writings in English translation.
Prabodh Kumar Bandyopadhyay who wrote as Manik Bandyopadhyay (19 May 1908–3 December 1956) is one of the seminal figures of the Bengali literary world. In his short life ridden with severe financial crisis and health problems as he suffered from bouts of epilepsy since the age of 28, he produced as many as 38 novels, more than 300 short stories published in 16 books during his life time, as well as poems, essays on literature and a play. Quite a few of his works have been translated into other Indian languages as well as foreign languages and some have been adapted into films. The significance of his writings can be gauged from the fact that the film The Day Shall Dawn (Jago Hua Savera), directed by Akhtar. J. Kardar or Ajay, a well-known Pakistani film director and producer in 1959 was based on his story. The film is an Urdu language production, shot in East Pakistan and is the recipient of many international awards. It was the first Pakistani film that was submitted for the Oscar awards in the ‘Best Foreign Film’ category and remains till today as the top ten Pakistani films. The fact that his story was adapted into a film by a Pakistani liberal democratic national and selected to be submitted for the Oscar awards despite the continuous political tension with Pakistan both before and after 1947 and 1971 is indicative of the fact that his contribution to literature has the power to rise above narrow chauvinistic nationalisms that are a malady in the countries of the Indian subcontinent.
Somdatta Mandal’s translation of Bandyopadhyay’s last novel Khooni as The Murderer that was posthumously published in book form, after lying neglected for almost five decades when its full text was discovered along with several of his unpublished works “in the eleventh volume of his complete works (that was) published by Paschimbanga Bangla Academy in December 2007” (‘Introduction’, p. 9, parenthesis mine). This novel was initially “published in 12 instalments in a monthly journal called Nutan Jibon from its Pous 1350 B. S. to Baisakh 1352 B. S. issues (roughly CE 1943–44)” (‘Introduction’, p. 9) which incidentally coincides with the time period when he formally joined the Communist Party of India and became involved as a political activist.
The translator’s brief introduction to the novel mentions the publication history of the novel. She mentions how scholars learnt through his diary entries that attempts were made during his lifetime to publish it, and in fact a contract was signed by the author with General Printers and Publishers Limited on 25 December 1944, but somehow the book remained unpublished. The serialised publication was found in a terrible condition in a library in North Kolkata with its pages moth-eaten, owing to which the full text of the narrative could not be put together. So in an “incomplete state, with ellipsis signs (…) for the undeciphered portions, the novel was published” (‘Introduction’, p. 10) as late as 2013 by Deep Prakashan, Kolkata and the translator uses this as her source text “to bring Manik Bandyopadhyay closer to a pan-Indian and especially non-Bengali readership” (Ibid.).
One wonders why Mandal presumes that her English translation would have no appeal to international non-Bengali readers as there are several instances of Indian texts having a far richer life in critical discourse in English in the nations of the Global North rather than in India. For instance, Jyotirmoyee Devi Epar Ganga, Opar Ganga translated as The River Churning is a major text on which as many as eight doctoral dissertations in the universities of USA while the English version remains out of print even today in the home turf. It is indeed a shame that our efforts at preserving texts, maintenance of books or films in libraries is totally inadequate, and many a time we have to take recourse to British or American libraries to find copies of these works. Mandal’s translation of the first Bengali novel by an anonymous lady, Manottama, came to light in the Bengali literary world after the manuscript was found in British archives, where it was very carefully preserved, though there were no readers of it and the text could not be catalogued properly, indicates why there is so much to learn from the histories of publications and the modes in which texts can and must be preserved, as every text in the public domain is a national heritage, no less than historical monuments, though its splendour is not demonstrated physically, but has an intellectual importance that helps to develop the discourses on the history of ideas, as these are the pure mental images by which we live.
The novel The Murderer is a very interesting read as the narrative deals with the life of a not very well-to-do Bengali babu Mukunda and his newly wed wife Kamini. After losing his job as a low-paid clerk, he was assailed by poverty and shame as he could not find the courage to share this news with his wife for he feared that she would treat him with derision. Mukunda managed to make both ends meet by first using up all his savings and then quietly selling his wife’s gold ornaments one by one, which was kept locked in a trunk with the key in his custody for safe-keeping. With no job for six whole months, he lived protecting his secret and feared that at “any moment, … the palace of lies he had built might tumble down” (p. 13). With no hope of finding another job, he kept pretending that he had to leave for office, and every day he would leave for work at the stipulated hour, while away his time, and duly return home, enjoying the attention that his wife paid him. At night, while his wife peacefully slept beside him, he would remain staring sleepless, sometimes admiring her loveliness and imagining what would her reaction be if she found out the truth. Fear of that moment would fill him with disgust and he would then think of how he would murder her.
Quite suddenly such an opportunity came when he decided to remain at home saying he had taken leave from the office for three whole days, and Kamini immediately pleaded that they pay a visit to Manu’s house—one of her relatives, and she wanted to be decked up with her ornaments and show off her new necklace, as the latter had come to show her the pair of gold bangles, she got made using her mother-in-law’s ornaments. Mukunda was aghast as that critical moment had arrived when all his lies would be revealed and while shaving, he contemplated whether it was best to commit suicide or murder his wife using the razor he had in his hand. One thing led to another, as he tried dissuading her from opening the trunk containing her wedding ornaments saying that he could not find the keys and when she started pestering him, he said that he remembered he had some urgent work. When Kamini demanded explanations and started asking questions as she had found his behaviour weird, Mukunda, who was known to be a timid person, became intensely angry. As his back was turned on her, she could not see his expression, and so she continued shouting at him when he could not tolerate the situation anymore. “[D]esperately fuming with anger” he felt that “[t]his Kamini was his enemy, the curse upon his life. What an unbelievable affair it was that he had kept the news of losing his job from her because she would be in distress. He was almost losing it to have kept the news a secret one, from her month after month” (p. 21). He picks up his “beautiful walking stick” and suddenly began beating her “shapely youthful body” which would arouse him even if he “imagined touching it” (Ibid.). After five hard strokes of the stick when her wailing did not stop, he “clasped” her “throat with both hands, and like a lunatic started shaking her” (p. 21) till she fell silent forever.
Mukunda disposes her body by getting a death certificate by duping Doctor Abhoy, his friend who came to his house three hours after the incident to ask him to return the loan he had taken is equally significant, as Abhoy was smart enough to realise that Kamini had not fainted suddenly, as Mukunda claimed though he wrote that she had died of heart attack and asked him to pay rupees five hundred. Abhoy, like his former employer Dhandas Dutta knew how to take advantage of situations like this and profit from it. When Mukunda said he had no money, Abhoy asked him to take off the necklace and bangles of the dead Kamini and pay him ignoring Mukunda’s involuntary admission of murdering his wife as by then, his nerves had snapped and he was overcome by tears that streamed down his face uncontrollably.
How Mukunda carries on with his life, after being re-employed by Dhandas Dutta, who had now started the business of printing, how he deals with his sense of guilt and extreme loneliness, the impact of poverty that turned him from a timid man to an unfeeling, deranged brute comes full circle with his realisation that he was not the murderer of his wife Kamini. It was the circumstances and the class of people that colluded together to “create a perverted and fearful ambience in his mind” (p. 69) that made him commit the act in a neurotic frenzy for which he could not be held accountable. The responsibility of the murder of Kamini solely lay with “the society, education, culture, and environment—all controlled by these murderers”, that made him do what he did—kill the wife that he loved. When Kamini’s mother with her sons and daughters came to visit him with a proposal of marriage with Jamini, the twin sister of his deceased wife, Mukunda told them that he had quit the job of Dhandas, and felt much lighter as the burden of living a life of lies and deception was finally over.
The manner in which Bandyopadhyay intertwines psychological realism with social realism makes his novels a dialectical study of the individual and/in/against society culminating in a resolution that foregrounds how social beings may emerge through a politico-economic understanding of how human beings are compelled to think and feel owing to their human condition. The resolution of complexities can happen only through a critical realisation of situations that are socially exploitative and oppressive and through one’s suffering, transformations can happen making men conscious beings, capable of acting ethically for collective welfare.
Mandal’s translation quite adequately captures Bandyopadhyay’s narrative style and the linguistic rhythms of the Bengali source text that uses both chalit bhasha and sadhu bhasha, which is not easy to carry across in English. The translation of Khooni is surely a contribution to Indian bhasha literatures in English translation that offers a wonderful portrayal of society, The story is interesting for the common reader as well who might pick it up thinking that it belongs to the genre of crime fiction or a thriller, only to find that the slim, beautifully brought out book can be judged by the cover design that is a splash of red over the image of one half of a man’s face and a black and white photograph mode submerged in the grey ambivalence of twentieth–twenty-first century existence that need not make a mockery of poverty by criminalising it like Arvind Adiga’s The White Tiger (2008)—40th Booker Prize Winner. Winner with a short shelf life. Priced at just Rs. 300/-, the book with an attractive hardcover is pocket-friendly as well. The size is perfect as well to be carried anywhere one wishes to go and the racy style of the narrative that spins forth images of a disturbed mind in a kind of a whirl is undoubtedly an engaging read. It definitely has a thrill that is quite different from popular fiction and the theme is relevant even today, as the social contradictions that the narrative addresses remain in terms of a corruption even today.