Triveni Journal

1927 | 11,233,916 words

Triveni is a journal dedicated to ancient Indian culture, history, philosophy, art, spirituality, music and all sorts of literature. Triveni was founded at Madras in 1927 and since that time various authors have donated their creativity in the form of articles, covering many aspects of public life....

Sarat Chandra Chatterjee

Abani Nath Roy

The advent of Sarat Chandra Chatterjee in the field of Bengali literature was rather unexpected. In the nineteenth century, Bankim Chandra Chatterjee was the undisputed monarch in the realm of Bengali literature. Bankim Chandra was a very learned man and wrote, besides novels, many religious discourses and essays. His place in Bengali literature as the pioneer of fiction is still very high. But his novels suffered from a religious or moral bias. He followed, in the treatment of his novels, the long loved dictum of punishing sin and applauding virtue. The inevitable result was that his characters did not develop on human lines. The reason is not far to seek. He had to satisfy orthodox society which was always watchful that no wrong ideal entered into society through literature. This was something like the tradition of eighteenth century Classicism in English literature.

Close upon Bankim came Rabindranath Tagore. He composed innumerable poems and wrote songs, essays, novels, and short stories. He brought lyricism into Bengali poetry; his poems breathed a freshness, an elegance and beauty which were hitherto unknown in Bengali literature. Tagore is admittedly a greater poet than a novelist, though as a writer of short stories he has hardly an equal. To Sarat Chandra Chatterjee, however, Bengali literature owes the beginnings of the realistic novel. It was left to Sarat Chandra to humanise Bengali fiction or, in other words, to introduce such characters into fiction as are more human and real than idealistic. Several years before he began writing, Sarat Chandra had left Bengal and was employed in the Rangoon Secretariat. He had outwardly no touch with Bengali literature. People in Bengal did not know him. He had written a short story in the annual number of the Kuntalin magazine in the name of his elder sister Anila Devi and obtained. the first prize. But when all of a sudden, he wrote the story, ‘The Child of Bindu,’ in the monthly magazine Jamuna, the reading public were surprised. There were many who took it to be a composition of Rabindranath under a pen-name. But the instalments of the story continued and Rabindranath denied its authorship. ‘The Child of Hindu’ was followed by ‘Charitraheen,’ half of which was published in Jamuna but not completed. The writings had the stamp of a man of real power who wielded his pen with great facility. The people had, however, no opportunity of knowing anything about the development of Sarat Chandra’s art; he took everybody by storm. The output was mature and the standpoint definite.

‘The Child of Bindu’ deals with the love of a barren woman for her sister’s son and her desire to bring the boy up as her own, and the various complications that this desire led to in a joint Hindu family. The theme was not a bit new, but the treatment of the relations of the woman with her husband’s elder brother, his wife, and other members of the family is very original and fine. An out-and-out native of the soil, Sarat Chandra chose a theme which was essentially Bengali in outlook.

In ‘Charitraheen’ (‘Characterless’) Sarat Chandra treated the theme of love from an entirely new angle, showing supreme indifference to conventional morality, and the effect of this book on the Bengali public was shocking. The novel deals with a love-episode between an educated young man of middle-class family and a maid servant in a boarding house where the young man used to live. No other Bengali writer had up till then dared portray the character of a ‘low-class’ woman from this standpoint. Bankim Chandra in his famous novel, ‘Krishnakanta’s Will,’ had dealt with the love of a handsome Zamindar youth for a beautiful widow, but the story ends in the murder of the woman in vindication of conventional morality. But in Sarat Chandraji’s story there was no suggestion of punishment or obloquy to the lovers concerned. At once there was a hue and cry from all quarters. The magazine which was publishing the novel serially, stopped publishing it as soon as some of its subscribers intimated their desire to discontinue subscription if the novel continued to appear.

But Sarat Chandra was not to be daunted. He continued to write. In his next novel ‘Devadas,’ a youth is found to be led astray by the failure of his early love, taking to wine and women. Parbati, the object of the love of Devadas, did not forget him even after she had been married to another man. Such affairs exist in real life, but their portrayal in literature was forbidden until Sarat Chandra broke this law. It was impossible to find fault with his work simply on account of his attitude of all-pervading sympathy with the fallen, all social victims or rebels. People read his books for his style, if for nothing else.

His novel ‘Pallisamaj’ (Village Society) attracted a great deal of notice. It gave a true and vivid account of life in the villages, with its petty jealousies and ignorance, superstitions and sillinesses. The great artist Sarat Chandra spun a love-drama around two beautiful souls against the ground of village cruelty. Ramesh, the hero, was a bachelor, but Rama, the heroine, was a widow, although she had almost no memory of the man to whom she was married. But Hindu society has no solution for this apparent maladjustment, for widow-remarriage is not the general custom. The impulses of sex are allowed to go underground and thrive on people’s sufferance. Sarat Chandra attacked the fabric of this moribund Hindu society and attacked powerfully. This want of a solution for the Ramesh-Rama affair and its consequent loss to society of normal, orderly life, rich in every sense of human progress, moved all readers of the book to thinking. It was claimed to be one of the best productions in Bengali literature and, naturally, ran into many editions like most of his other works.

But Sarat Chandra is at his best in his masterpiece, ‘Sreekanta.’ Many consider it to be his autobiography, but it is a peculiar combination of biography and fiction. I heard him remark on one occasion that the writing of this book did not tire him. On the contrary, whenever he felt tired and spent up, he found pleasure in writing one or two chapters of this book. It was just like the valve of a running engine, designed to let in fresh air and fresh light. The book is really marvelous and it would be difficult to give its complete picture within a narrow compass. I hear that it has been translated into French and selling in the streets of Paris. I do not know if it has been translated into any other language of the Continent.

The book is written in the first person. Four volumes of the book have already appeared, but the story has not ended or, in other words, the career of Sreekanta has not attained a finality. From this, it seems probable that the author will take it up when he finds himself in a reminiscent mood again. We have so far got in the book three love-episodes, viz. that of Rajlakshmi, Abhaya, and Kamalata, all exquisitely beautiful in delicacy, tenderness and depth. All are the accounts of girls whom society regards as fallen or undesirable, whom society has given no status. Abhaya is rather a bold type for Hindu society; ill-treated by her husband, she left him and went to live with one Rohini who loved her but to whom she was not given in marriage. It is needless to say that no society will subscribe to such anti-social ideas, for it abhors its own dismemberment. But the truth must be told that men have so long laid great stress on society and its moral laws alone and neglected the natural promptings of the human heart. The result has been, as might have been anticipated, that men were thrown under the wheels of a cruel and insensate society and powdered to dust.

Sarat Chandra belongs to the same society but deals with its maladjustments with a sympathy and pathos that is hard to surpass, and though it cannot be said that the regeneration of a new social order is an accomplished fact in Bengal, it is apparent that the seeds thereof have already been sown by Sarat Chandra and their ripening and fructification are only a question of time.

Sarat Chandra is also noted for his easy and fluid modes of expression. His all-embracing sympathy for men and dumb animals, even in their weaknesses, overwhelms the reader. After Sarat Chandra, it is difficult to mention the name of any other novelist of the same order and range of interest. Sarat Chandra writes with great restraint, understanding and caution, and transforms his subject matter into art. His imitators, if they can be called so, have, on the other hand, failed to translate their subject matter into art. Sarat Chandra shows signs of drift towards barren intellectualism in his later compositions, of which ‘Sesh Prashna’ (The Last Question) and ‘Bipradash’ are the best illustrations. But he still holds a sway over the Bengali public, not for his intellect but for his breadth of mind and humanism. He is far and away the finest Bengali novelist of the modern generation; indeed, he is our first realist.

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