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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
By now, it’s an old joke: Molière’s Bourgeois Gentilhomme discovers that he has been speaking something called “prose” all his life without knowing, and is delighted by the idea that it could be the basis of a literary genre. Bengalis, by contrast, would not realise this until the 19th century. Texts had always been in verse — recounting fabulous, myth-infused adventures that ranged far from life’s mundanity. It took prose, of the kind that has eventually been anthologised in The Penguin Book of Bengali Short Stories, to bring Bengali literature back to reality.
That reality had been ruptured by the British capture of India in the second half of the 18th century, which came about via Bengal, whose people subsequently acquired a taste for reading about their tumultuous reality in novels and newspapers — the first to be printed in India. These had been proliferating ever since the printing press arrived from Europe.
Short stories came about amid this “explosion of writing”, Arunava Sinha, the editor of this anthology, points out, the form having been “taken from the West, due to the spread of English literature in Bengal”.
The Bengali short story embodies this paradox of empire. On one hand, the British instigated cataclysmic changes that Bengalis resisted and critiqued in their writings. But the colonisers also introduced modern literary forms and printing technology, without which this literature — largely nationalist and anticolonial — could never have existed.
The sudden, fraught emergence of modernity is the background to the stories in this anthology, which otherwise has little in the way of a common thread. These 37 narratives were each penned by a different writer across three centuries, from the 19th to the 21st. Most are appearing in English for the first time, in translations by Sinha, the most prolific Bengali translator at work today.
The anthology opens with a ghost story by Rabindranath Tagore, Asia’s first Nobel laureate. In “Dead or Alive?” (1892), the widow Kadambini is wrongly presumed to have passed away. Shortly before her scheduled cremation, she wakes up and escapes, hiding out with an old friend. Nothing paranormal happens, or not quite; after all, how does one write about ghosts in a world that no longer believes in them? Kadambini’s ghostliness is an internal, psychological state. In this naturalistic rendering of a ghost story we can observe India’s supernatural traditions being reshaped by European social realism.
“The Philosopher’s Stone” (1948), by the satirist Parashuram, reflects a similar tension between the mythological and the rational in its own hilarious way. Paresh, a lawyer with delusions of grandeur, stumbles across a pebble that turns base metal into gold — long rumoured to exist in Hinduism — and with it destabilises the world. The author was a chemist who had made bombs for India’s freedom struggle; throughout his writings, he bemoaned the way his country preferred, like Paresh, to cling to superstitious fantasies.
Parashuram’s story is one of many here that have been translated into film, adapted by the Oscar-winning director Satyajit Ray — himself a masterful short story writer also represented in the book. Ray’s subtle “Pikoo’s Diary” (1970) centres on a boy observing what he doesn’t realise is his mother’s affair. Other writers here — Sankar, Narendranath Mitra, Humayun Ahmed — were known for producing stories for the screen, too, and Sinha’s selections testify to the special relationship between the Bengali short story and Bengali cinema. The anthology often feels cinematic, panning across the cityscape of Kolkata.
That city is the only recurring character in the book, and a very well-observed one too. The authors are usually from there or lived there some time, members of the Hindu bhadralok — as Bengal’s bourgeois gentlemen are known — who had imbibed Western culture in Kolkata’s famed colleges.
Since that is how the short story entered South Asia, Sinha’s West Bengali selection bias has some justification. But most Bengalis, overwhelmingly, are Muslims from East Bengal, today’s Bangladesh. Yet only six Bangladeshi writers are represented here — admittedly an improvement on Sinha’s previous anthology, The Greatest Bengali Stories Ever Told (2016), which had none.
Indeed, this book’s problem is its marginalisation of Bangladeshi literature, reifying a border that India’s politicians have lately become more mindful of. Why the absence of stories by, say, Syed Mujtaba Ali, the greatest Bengali wit and raconteur? Or by Kazi Nazrul Islam — Bangladesh’s own Tagore — who, being steeped in the folk culture of rural Muslims, would have offered the anthology a counterpoint to its largely urban, Westernised aesthetic?
In Bengali, it is traditional to describe a collection of stories as a mala, or necklace. This one would have been strung together flawlessly — were it not missing a few pearls.
The Penguin Book of Bengali Short Stories edited and translated by Arunava Sinha Penguin £35, 512 pages
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