Bhabani Bhattacharya's Novels

BHABANI BHATTACHARYA’S NOVELS

The novel, as a distinct literary form, is of recent birth. It is the latest of many literary forms to be evolved and the most dominant in the 20th century. Finding this form as the most facile vehicle for literary expression, Bhattacharya, one of the older generation of living Indian novelists, has been attracted to and adopted this form. Though he has written a number of short stories, translated the stories of Tagore, written episodes from Indian History and published a book on Gandhi, it is as a novelist–as the author of So Many Hungers, Music for Mohini, He Who Rides a Tiger, A Goddess Named Gold and Shadow from Ladakh–thathe has won recognition and fame from the reading public.

Bhattacharya has his own theory on the purpose and method of writing a novel. On more than one occasion, he has expressed in clear terms what “novel” has meant for him and what he has tried to do and succeeded in achieving through this form. A novelist, for Bhattacharya, is a creative writer, possessing a special gift for such creation and differing from other ordinary men and women in that he is endowed with more than usual sensitivity. In an article in The Aryan Path, he observes: “The creative writer has a well-developed sensitivity though this does not mean that he understands or shares all emotions. The things he witnesses, the things he experiences, are likely to move him more intensely than what may be called recollection at second hand”. ¹ And this unusual sensitivity must be stirred by his power of observation. A true artist cannot exist in an ivory tower of his own and revel in fancies which have no relevance to human life on our earth. On the other hand his observant eyes are keen on noting what is happening around him. He says, ‘I have not missed a single opportunity of observing incidents, happenings where I can gain something for the writer in me. Most of my characters have shaped themselves from real earth”.² Again all truly creative writers are driven by an urge from within him to write. It almost becomes an obsession with them. With Bhattacharya, it is not merely a question of writing for money or to order. On the other hand “it is a compulsion to find an outlet for the living images in him.” This inevitability of an artist’s craving for expression is at the root of all art.

A novelist, then for Bhattacharya is a man among men, gifted with an extra measure of sensitivity and keen powers of observation. What he sees around him creates an inner urge, a compelling need to express himself. Then and only then a novel is born. Speaking about how he became a novelist he observes: “Then the great famine swept down upon Bengal. The emotional stirrings I felt (more than two million men and women and children died of slow starvation amid a man-made scarcity) were a sheer compulsion to creativity. The result was the novel So Many Hungers”. ³

As regards the medium of expression, Bhattacharya has an open mind. He feels that the creative writer must have full freedom to use the language of his choice for any coercion direct or indirect in the choice of medium by an artist, will only hamper the realisation of the purpose he is struggling to achieve. He writes in English and has two valid reasons for choosing English as his medium. First “The English language is a bridge that carries our cultural values to the world–not only to the English-speaking countries but to most of the other countries as well in translation’.⁴ Secondly, in English he meets a challenge. He observes: “I have enjoyed the challenge of this literary problem–expressing Indian life in the idiom of an alien tongue.” Thanks to W. Yeats-Brown who suggested and encouraged Bhattacharya to write in English in order to gain and be assured of a world audience. And this was not a misguided or misplaced hope, for the novelist has attained world-wide renown and his books have been translated into twenty-six languages, sixteen of which are European.

It has been a subject of unending debate if art should have a purpose or not. There are people who declare that all art is recreational: others who maintain that art is primarily didactic: yet others who preach art for art’s sake. Bhattacharya can never accept the concept of novel without a purpose. For him a novel is something concerned with social reality! Time and again, he stresses this point. “I hold,” he observes, “that a novel must have a social purpose. It must place before the readers something from society’s point of view. Art is not necessarily for art’s sake. Purposeless art and literature which is much in vogue does not appear to me sound judgment.” Not afraid of being labelled as a propagandist, he maintains that “Art must teach but unobstrusively by its vivid interpretation of life. Art must preach but only by virtue of its being a vehicle of truth. If that is propaganda, there is no need to eschew the word.”

So, for Bhattacharya an artist has a responsibility to society, to the world in which he lives. He has to work and plead for a better world. And so Bhattacharya interprets in artistic medium people’s hunger for food and freedom, condemns social evils such as–prostitution, exploitation, superstitious beliefs, all anti-life tendencies, stresses the need for mass literacy, attempts to destroy false faith and liberates men’s minds arid makes them self-reliant and self-respecting individuals, pleads for intelligent exercising of franchise and reconciliation of conflicting ideologies, advocates widow remarriage, rebels against child marriage and unfurls his banner against untouchability and barriers of caste.

The modern novel has taken on itself such protean forms that it seems anything under the sun could be safely expressed in that form. Himself very meticulous about his own choice of subject, Bhattacharya feels that the subject matter for a novel must be concrete. Writers of this generation have had the fortune of living at a period when their country faces some turning points of national life and a gifted writer could make use of this turning point as a fit subject matter for his novels. In other words contemporary events lend powerful and fit subjects to expatiate on. To set an example, he deals with the contemporary problems in India as the themes of his novels.

The Quit India Movement of 1942 and the Bengali famine which had swept his own province Bengal in 1943, form the -drop for his first novel So Many Hungers, which was published in 1947. Commenting upon the theme of the novel, Bhattacharya observes: “The novel is concerned with all the intensified hungers of the historic years 1942-’43, not food alone: the money hunger, the sex hunger, the hunger to achieve India’s political freedom.” There are two main strands in the plot of the novel: the story of a young scientist,’ Rahoul which is a representation in miniature of the struggle for political freedom and the story of a peasant girl, Kajoli, whose sad moving tale is a pathetic record of what happened to more than two million men and women who became victims of a famine, engineered by one man with a selfish motive but aggravated by the indifferent attitude and neglect of an alien Government and also by the unprincipled Indians who tried to exploit the situation to mint money. As the Times Literary Supplement very aptly comments, the novel describes a factual and vivid account of one of the most shocking disasters in history.

Viewed as a story, his second novel Music for Mohini (1952), portrays the intellectual and emotional development of the heroine, Mohini, from a care-free and much protected girlhood to the position of a housewife and a mistress of a prominent and very influential house with great tradition. But the novelist’s main concern seems to be of building a new order in India–an evolution of new culture for the masses of a big nation. By the time he came to write this novel, India had become free and it had to evolve her own policy and establish her identity in the fast-growing world. Mohini’s husband Jayadev, a thoughtful idealist, ponders over the implications of the coming change. To him–much more to Bhattacharya himself–political liberty is worth nothing to common man, if it is not a part of general social renascence. His only desire is to extract the essence and best of our deep-rooted tradition and fuse it with the spirit of modern time. When he takes on himself the task of building a new society much through integration, he has to fight with many antagonistic forces, especially his mother who stands for old order and tradition. He does succeed. His vision of the new generation in India is recorded thus: “The newman of his vision, growing to his full stature, was not to be a hollow incarnation, not a spiritless copy of ancient Hindu man. That was as stupid as Hindu moulded in a Western pattern ⁵.”

Bhattacharya’s third novel He who Rides a Tiger (1954), is a novel of protest–protest not only against a political and economic system which degrades human beings but also against an established social order which stamps on men as superior and inferior by virtue of accidence of birth. Though the drop for this novel is the same as his first novel So Many Hungers, the emphasis rests on protest and rebellion and so naturally the accent shifts from mute, helpless and passive sufferings to protest and rebellion. And this is worked out through Kalo, a humble village blacksmith, who takes his revenge on a rigid caste-ridden society by faking a miracle –a miracle that begins as a fraud but truly ends as a legend–and passing himself as a Brahmin priest. At the close ofthe novel, when his fraud is detected, while the caste~Hindus fret and fume, other low caste people hail him as a brother and a champion of their cause. His story becomes a legend of freedom, a legend to inspire and awaken.

By the time Bhattacharya came to write his fourth novel, A Goddess Named Gold (1960), thirteen years vain expectation had passed and independence and freedom had brought no miracle. Here the novelist’s primary concern is to explain the meaning and significance of political freedom–the way in which a country should use freedom and what benefits may be derived if it is rightly used and utilised. A wandering minstrel presents a taveez to his grand-daughter Meera, with a note that it will acquire the power to turn the base metal into gold if she does an act of real kindness. But the taveez fails to act as she enters into a business deal with a Seth on fifty-fifty basis. At the end of the novel, disgusted with the taveez, Meera throws it into the river. Now the minstrel explains the symbolism of the taveez. And herein lies Bhattacharya’s message: political freedom is not a ‘panacea’ for all ills; freedom alone will not and cannot lead a country to prosperity. At best it can create suitable environment and provide splendid opportunity in which men could show forth the best in them and work for their prosperity by living on terms of equality with their fellowmen, practising virtues like love, compassion, etc. Freedom is the beginning of the road where there is no road and no miracle can happen without effort. To quote Bhattacharya’s words: “Brothers, now that we have freedom, we need acts of faith. Then only will there be a transmutation. Friends, then only will our lives turn into gold. Without acts of faith, freedom is a dead pebble tied to the arm with a bit of string, fit only to be cast into the river”.⁶ What matters much is freedom of mind–man becoming self-reliant and self-respecting individual.

Shadow from Ladakh (1966), which won the Sahitya Akadami award for 1967, is the last of the novels so far written by Bhattacharya. Set against the menacing ground of the Chinese aggression against India starting in October, 1962, the novel is a study of Gandhian ethics, reassessing their validity and relevance in the post-independence India–an India faced with problems and challenges of the changing times. It preaches by implication that India needs a blending of divergent sets of values if she is to cope with the challenge of new times–a  plea for a meeting point between Gandhian social ethics and the tremendous forces of science and technology. Satyajit and Bhaskar represent the contrasting contemporary attitudes to life in India. While Satyajit, the exponent of Gandhian philosophy and the guiding spirit of Gandhigram, a model of rural India as envisaged by Gandhi, regards Indian village life as an ideal life, Bhaskar, the Westernised American-trained engineer in a steel plant stands for modern industrialism. In such a situation when different points of views and attitudes are adhered to and practised by persons, with a strong belief of their being in the right, the only possible solution is synthesis–choosing the path of sympathetic understanding, of reconciliation of readjustment. At the end of the novel, we find synthesis on three planes: Synthesis of turbine and spinning-wheel on the economic plane, of Gandhian asceticism and Tagorean aestheticism on the physical plane and of violence and non-violence on the plane of international understanding. Such and only such type of synthesis–finding a suitable meeting ground–alone would ensure the maximum happiness of the maximum. Bhattacharya records the type of synthesis, he envisages thus: “Let there be a meeting ground of the two extremes: let each one shed some of its contents and yet remain true to itself”. ⁷

Bhattacharya is a visionary–an optimist too. His novels end on a happy note–human forces getting upper hand against dark urges and social corruption. He believes in the richness of human soul and the rich spirit sustains him against the evil forces of civilization. If man is against man it is because the economic and social forces compel him to be so. He is not completely bereft of goodness and life-force propels him on. And so he has better morrow.

References

¹ ‘Literature and Social Reality’, The Aryan Path, Vol. XXVI, No. 9, Sept. 1955.
² An Evening with Bhabani,’ Sudhakar Joshi, The Sunday Standard. April 27, 1969.
³ Contemporary Novelists in the English Language, St. Martin’s Press, New York, 1972.
⁴ The Novel in Modern India, P. E. N. Centre, Bombay, p. 42.
⁵ Music for Mohini, Jaico Publishing House, Bombay, 1964. p. 80.
⁶ A Goddess Named Gold, Hind Pocket Books Ltd., Delhi, 1967. p. 303.
⁷ Shadow from Ladakh, Hind Pocket Books Ltd., Delhi, p. 274