The Dead Weight of Bengali Literature
“Chaos
often breeds life, when order breeds habits.” – Henry Brooks Adams.
Yet, truth itself is a mountain of weariness. If there had been only a single lie in the world, death might perhaps have sealed it into permanence. The French have a phrase – La Vie en Rose – life seen in rosy hues. In Camus’ The Fall, La Vie en Rose was not poetry, but the false glitter of a youth’s life drowned in self-deception. For in this world, what unfolds cannot be untruth. The very phenomena of human life twist truth into falsehood and falsehood into truth. The difference lies here: in truth abides an endless melancholy, while falsehood is cradled in gaiety. Humanity flees from truth, fashions instead a magical realism in which the heart may dwell at ease. The lover adores a parrot, dreams of a serpent-maiden for his bed. The clash between imagination and reality is staged in this manner, through the upper chambers of consciousness and the subterranean caverns of the unconscious. Thus does a thinking man wander in desperation, seeking the trace of truth within books, or the touch of imagination within lived reality.
History tells us that within the life and work of every great writer there lie certain definitive chapters. When a writer merely writes, he is but a craftsman of words. When he conjures an image out of imagination, he becomes an artist. When he sets forth a new creed or ideology, he becomes a philosopher. And when, finally, he teaches an entire people the moral law of humanity, he becomes a prophet. Writers, in truth, record human history more vividly than historians. For the writer observes the present with impartial eyes and envisions the future with the inner sight of imagination. When Kafka wrote In the Penal Colony, Hitler had not yet risen in Europe. Yet two decades before the Nazi ascent, Kafka described that very killing ground which history would later curse by the name of “concentration camp.” In the twentieth century, Freud revealed that every son secretly harbors the wish to slay his father — the wound of parricide gnawing at the male psyche. And long before Freud, in the nineteenth century, Dostoevsky had written The Brothers Karamazov, centering on just such a tortured youth, possessed by the urge to kill his father. Hermann Hesse once wrote a story of only four pages: the subject was a ritual of a primitive tribe. He described the ritual alone and stopped. That was all. Writers of “happiness” and writers of “sorrow” alike lost their temper: “What? No plot, no message? Only description? Is this literature?” Yet Borges, Carpentier, Cortázar — their tales were built of sheer description, where purpose and predicate were elusive, ambiguous, resistant to the clean cuts of meaning. But critics wanted the simple divisions of black and white — Hollywood morality tales. In reality, good and evil are but threads twisted together, yet the modern writer weaves a two-dimensional world. And at the very time school textbooks proclaim that our universe is six-dimensional! Thus the old-school critics condemned these works as “incomprehensible.” No formulaic tales, no religious fervor, no bodily titillation: only fractured fragments of life. A young man waiting for a girl after office hours, smoking nervously. Sujata’s love crumbling under the assault of breast cancer. Sandeep quarrelling with Dipanwita because he returns home late. Time ticking, story shifting, life unraveling — this endless cause-and-effect, soaked in human sentiment: “This is literature!” they declared. But to narrate life beyond cause and effect — that is a vast and complex literary element. To accept it is never easy.
And yet abroad, a few Kafkas, Camuses, Márquezes were born. In Bengali literature, however, the old rules and rituals still hold sway. Pots and pitchers, vermilion and bangles, stories of hearth and altar — this is the stuff of fiction. No emerging form, no new experiment. Again and again the same stories, the same manner of writing. Sentimental effusions, cheap pornography, sprawling prose that flows too easily. So easy that the reader never stumbles, never halts — the words enter through the surface, rush along the body’s channels, and depart at once, leaving no trace. Only entertainment. As if Brad Hensar’s Documentary Age has ended, and the serial age of television has begun. For decades now, black-market literature has swamped Bengali prose, infected with the virus of commercial dailies. The result? When a Class Ten student was asked to name a modern Bengali writer, he answered: “Sarat Chandra.” When my schoolteacher once asked me, “Whose stories do you enjoy most?” I hesitated a little, and replied, “Bibhutibhushan.”
The question is: why, after Rabindranath, Tarashankar, and Bibhutibhushan, has Bengali literature produced nothing of equal weight? At best, a few works of some international mention. But nothing that stands wholly apart from the forebears — nothing outside the tiresome binary of “happy” or “unhappy” writing. Very few examples of experimental prose can be found in postmodern Bengali literature. Writers here are unwilling to leave behind order, neatness, the empire of form, and leap into disorder. Yet a chaos, a pandemonium, was needed alongside the heritage of ordered prose. In poetry, Jibanananda once delivered this message. But no successor advanced it, none gave it strength. Prose literature sank instead into the playful trivialities of Sunil Ganguly and the swamp of soft-porn narratives.
Foreign writers — especially Latin Americans — shattered the conventions of how human emotions were to be represented. But in post-independence Bengal, no comparable mastery arose. Who will break away from the herd and write differently? Future generations wait in silence. And finally let me say: truth may be as wearisome as a barren mountain, and imagination as elusive as mist, but in the discovery of imagined truth lies the true triumph of literature. Into this new and unknown path, someone, someday, must venture — if Bengali literature is to remain alive.
Yet, truth itself is a mountain of weariness. If there had been only a single lie in the world, death might perhaps have sealed it into permanence. The French have a phrase – La Vie en Rose – life seen in rosy hues. In Camus’ The Fall, La Vie en Rose was not poetry, but the false glitter of a youth’s life drowned in self-deception. For in this world, what unfolds cannot be untruth. The very phenomena of human life twist truth into falsehood and falsehood into truth. The difference lies here: in truth abides an endless melancholy, while falsehood is cradled in gaiety. Humanity flees from truth, fashions instead a magical realism in which the heart may dwell at ease. The lover adores a parrot, dreams of a serpent-maiden for his bed. The clash between imagination and reality is staged in this manner, through the upper chambers of consciousness and the subterranean caverns of the unconscious. Thus does a thinking man wander in desperation, seeking the trace of truth within books, or the touch of imagination within lived reality.
History tells us that within the life and work of every great writer there lie certain definitive chapters. When a writer merely writes, he is but a craftsman of words. When he conjures an image out of imagination, he becomes an artist. When he sets forth a new creed or ideology, he becomes a philosopher. And when, finally, he teaches an entire people the moral law of humanity, he becomes a prophet. Writers, in truth, record human history more vividly than historians. For the writer observes the present with impartial eyes and envisions the future with the inner sight of imagination. When Kafka wrote In the Penal Colony, Hitler had not yet risen in Europe. Yet two decades before the Nazi ascent, Kafka described that very killing ground which history would later curse by the name of “concentration camp.” In the twentieth century, Freud revealed that every son secretly harbors the wish to slay his father — the wound of parricide gnawing at the male psyche. And long before Freud, in the nineteenth century, Dostoevsky had written The Brothers Karamazov, centering on just such a tortured youth, possessed by the urge to kill his father. Hermann Hesse once wrote a story of only four pages: the subject was a ritual of a primitive tribe. He described the ritual alone and stopped. That was all. Writers of “happiness” and writers of “sorrow” alike lost their temper: “What? No plot, no message? Only description? Is this literature?” Yet Borges, Carpentier, Cortázar — their tales were built of sheer description, where purpose and predicate were elusive, ambiguous, resistant to the clean cuts of meaning. But critics wanted the simple divisions of black and white — Hollywood morality tales. In reality, good and evil are but threads twisted together, yet the modern writer weaves a two-dimensional world. And at the very time school textbooks proclaim that our universe is six-dimensional! Thus the old-school critics condemned these works as “incomprehensible.” No formulaic tales, no religious fervor, no bodily titillation: only fractured fragments of life. A young man waiting for a girl after office hours, smoking nervously. Sujata’s love crumbling under the assault of breast cancer. Sandeep quarrelling with Dipanwita because he returns home late. Time ticking, story shifting, life unraveling — this endless cause-and-effect, soaked in human sentiment: “This is literature!” they declared. But to narrate life beyond cause and effect — that is a vast and complex literary element. To accept it is never easy.
And yet abroad, a few Kafkas, Camuses, Márquezes were born. In Bengali literature, however, the old rules and rituals still hold sway. Pots and pitchers, vermilion and bangles, stories of hearth and altar — this is the stuff of fiction. No emerging form, no new experiment. Again and again the same stories, the same manner of writing. Sentimental effusions, cheap pornography, sprawling prose that flows too easily. So easy that the reader never stumbles, never halts — the words enter through the surface, rush along the body’s channels, and depart at once, leaving no trace. Only entertainment. As if Brad Hensar’s Documentary Age has ended, and the serial age of television has begun. For decades now, black-market literature has swamped Bengali prose, infected with the virus of commercial dailies. The result? When a Class Ten student was asked to name a modern Bengali writer, he answered: “Sarat Chandra.” When my schoolteacher once asked me, “Whose stories do you enjoy most?” I hesitated a little, and replied, “Bibhutibhushan.”
The question is: why, after Rabindranath, Tarashankar, and Bibhutibhushan, has Bengali literature produced nothing of equal weight? At best, a few works of some international mention. But nothing that stands wholly apart from the forebears — nothing outside the tiresome binary of “happy” or “unhappy” writing. Very few examples of experimental prose can be found in postmodern Bengali literature. Writers here are unwilling to leave behind order, neatness, the empire of form, and leap into disorder. Yet a chaos, a pandemonium, was needed alongside the heritage of ordered prose. In poetry, Jibanananda once delivered this message. But no successor advanced it, none gave it strength. Prose literature sank instead into the playful trivialities of Sunil Ganguly and the swamp of soft-porn narratives.
Foreign writers — especially Latin Americans — shattered the conventions of how human emotions were to be represented. But in post-independence Bengal, no comparable mastery arose. Who will break away from the herd and write differently? Future generations wait in silence. And finally let me say: truth may be as wearisome as a barren mountain, and imagination as elusive as mist, but in the discovery of imagined truth lies the true triumph of literature. Into this new and unknown path, someone, someday, must venture — if Bengali literature is to remain alive.
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