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English Barmaids and Slaves in Calcutta

Bappa Chakravarty
Mani Sankar Mukherji, popularly known in Kolkata as simply Sankar,' has written many a book, fiction and nonfiction alike, with some bestsellers among them. One of the more popular of Bengali novelists, he hit it big from the very start when he started serializing a novel in Desh magazine in the 1950s, and has continued to write through the 60s down to the present
day. While he has been dismissed by critics as a writer practiced at producing potboilers, that may be a little bit of a facile generalization. Sankar is of a generation of Bengali writers who began writing at a time when the 19 century European realist novel had a great hold on their imagination, and one can see the marks of that both in the sweep and careful characterization in their works. Not for that age the dessicated intellectualism that is our lot today - they liked Zola and Dickens. A novelist like Sankar (which is how the ordinary Bengali reader referred to him) took pride in the telling of a tale, following the dictates of plotting, characters and suspense, and in being responsive to readers' demands. Perhaps it tells something about his qualities in the above departments that two of his novels. Seemabaddha and Jana Aranya. were turned into movies by no less than Satyajit Ray. as Company Limited' and The Middleman' respectively. No doubt it was his sharp observation and intimate knowledge of Calcutta life at all levels that drew the legendary film director s attention. It was a knowledge gained first-hand by Sankar, who when he first came to Calcutta from Bongaon village (near the present Indo-Bangladesh border) before the Second World War. worked variously as a street hawker, a typewriter cleaner, a part time school teacher and a clerk in a jute and gunny broking firm to earn a living - jobs that provided the material for the beginning pages of Chowringhee.
Now this classic novel Sankar is known by among Bengalis of a certain generation has been made available for a newer set of readers of English language fiction by Penguin India, as well as for those readers to whom the Bengali original remains inaccessible. Chourringhee was a huge hit when it first came out in 1962, followed by translations in all the major Indian languages. Set in 1950s Calcutta, it is a sprawling saga of the lives of managers, employees and guests at a huge Calcutta hotel, the Shahjahan. Shankar, its newest employee and the book's narrator, the wide eyed adolescent from the small neighbourhood of Kashundia who had years ago. crossed the Ganga on the steamer Amba to gape at the high court," proves to be the perfect foil to the big bad city. His voice is that particular blend of naivete and guile that is necessary to spin this story to its conclusion. Here is the full story of an older Calcutta, its seamier underbelly of unfulfilled desires
and broken dreams exposed, with its bars and nor Westers and liasions both licit and illicit, the "Keshto Cafe, situated next to Ripon College," and Samar Sen's poetry.
The city thus itself emerges as a central character in the human drama, and what unfolds is not just a story of individual lives but also the chronicle of a metropolis now vanished, as can be glimpsed at by the excerpt reproduced here, where Hobbs the old Englishman tells of a time when Calcutta had Englishwomen as barmaids and a thriving, if not well-publicized, slave trade. Shankar's tale weaves together the stories of several people whose lives come together in the suites, restaurants, bar and backrooms of the hotel - the enigmatic manager Marco Polo, the debonair receptionist Sata Bose (who can quote Omar Khayuum on hotel management, It's difficult for a country to get a good prime minister, but it's even more difficult to get a good hotel manager ), the tragic hostess Karabi Guha, and Hobbs the Englishman who knows everything about the city that was worth knowing. And Phokla Chatterjee!
A large number of the characters in the book were modeled on real-life people and semi-celebrities, and this was an extra special allure of the book for readers, who while reading could also speculate richly on who was the model for whom. The book gives us a close look of the reading tastes of a previous generation of Bengalis, especially women, who tended to be inside their homes and have few pastimes, of which novel reading and the occasional film were the dominant ones. I, in fact, remember,
both my mother and my grandmother being avid readers of Bengali novels, and though I cannot recall if I ever saw this book in their hands during the long hot afternoons when they picked up their thick paperback novels after finishing with their household work, I am absolutely sure they could not have easily put down this page-turner once they had begun it. Perhaps a later generation will like it too, for its sturdy, old-fashioned values, in an English translation by Arunava Sinha that reads easily. Mr. Sinha is a journalist who was born in Kolkata and read English literature at Jadavpur University. His previous translations of modern and contemporary Bengali writers have been for Calcutta Skyline, a city newspaper. He now resides in New Delhi.
On the front cover of the book is a quote from a Vikram Seth review, and I can't resist reproducing it "I read Choivringhee many years back in Hindi translation and lost myself in it for days. It was a wonderful experience - both gripping and moving. I...hope (this English translation) gets the wide readership it deserves." Reading Vikram's words, one has to wonder whether Sankar's novel, in some way, was the seed that later sprouted as the gigantic tree of A Suitable Boy. There are striking similarities between the two books in terms of plot devices and characterization, but most of all in the desire of both authors to write a sprawling human saga that encompassed a whole generation and its culture.
Bappa Chakravarty is a journalist and sometime critic based in Bangalore