A verdant landscape punctuated by villages and towns streaming through which, rivers aplenty, makes Bengal a fertile place for literature. Oftener than not, the poems, stories, novels and plays born in this part of the land were easy-going, like the ones who penned them down. Romanticism inherent in most of these writings is not the pang of an artist to break the mould, but it is adopted as an escape route well-marked by platitudes. When it comes to realism, instead of a well-drawn perspective, the authors cherry-pick the situations and characters who embalm the crudities so that the readers can be happy with the rosier aspects of life. Even when some contemporary authors take refuge in the local history, their plotlines get ironed up to present a chronicle of both real and imagined events devoid of layers to suit the cliched method of storytelling.
Like exceptions though, literary works emerged in which stalwarts like Manik Bandyopadhyay, Jagadish Gupta, Satinath Bhadhuri, Mahasweta Devi, Debesh Roy and others mapped the darker realities – the ones in which men and women grapple to find their worth confronting adversities as individuals, the transitory societies, ruthless administrations and more importantly, the protagonists themselves.
While some of these narrators are well-acknowledged, the oeuvres of some are celebrated only among a smaller number of discerning ones. In this context of such a shadowy domain of the readers, where can we place the writings of Amalendu Chakraborty? As we harp for an answer, it’s also important to delve into the tricky idea of popular literature in the land of Tagore.
As a Bengalee saying goes, narratives are what they were born with. These narratives generally deal with the traditional notions of morality. So, for writers to cherish in the readers’ minds, a line is drawn between the good and the bad.
Once a writer attempts to blur this line, (s)he risks adulation, which is supposed to be due to conforming to the predefined standards. Despite the fact that Bengal regales the illicit relation between Krishna and Radha, for example, most readers for generations are unhesitant about being judgmental even before they browse the books!
Indian writers like Dharambir Bharati, Amrita Pritam, Kamala Das, Ismat Chughtai, Binod Kumar Shukla, and Perumal Murugan excelled themselves when they had conveyed ideas and incidents that they ardently felt to be told or retold. Had they cared for any pre-judgement of readers, most of the ideas that come through their writings, would have only burdened their vivacious minds. They truly served literature by being unashamedly themselves. Once they committed their pens to papers, they stopped responding to any tag associated with their names.
Despite the richness of Bengali literature, there has always been a serious dearth of authors who could surpass the immediacy of reaching straight to the readers’ minds. Publishers, over time, lap up such manuscripts, which they happily transform into profit-making books which run edition after edition, sometimes without the knowledge of the authors concerned. All said and done, while unburdening the expectations of readers, they have been bogged down by their ideas and incidents worth telling, which they never wrote.
So, while figuring out the place where Amalendu Chakraborty belongs in Bengali literature, one can dare say that he remained under the detriments of a literary tradition in which a fine balance is of paramount importance. Without being capricious or self-indulgent he was one of the rarest few authors who writes only when he felt he could not be without writing. In every novel and story, he pierced the veneer of hypocrisy, nefariousness and self-centred aspirations that ail various strata of the semi-urbanized society of West Bengal at large.
In a classical sense, the function of literature has been a tool of enlightenment for people. While they feel happy reading a particular body of literature, quite a large number of books also trigger cathartic experiences for readers. But post Second World War, a significant portion of world literature has been engaged to figure out the reasons for treachery, inequity, violence, arrogance and indolence inherent in traumatized and yet aspiring societies at various corners of the globe.
With the twentieth century coming to an end, societies across the world witness the isolation of individuals while fulfilling personal aspirations at all costs – to become rootless for one and then to become a habitual consumer. These individuals are not only the easy targets of a cut-throat economy adhering to corporate culture but also of the political class run by shrewd manipulators who thrive by further dividing any collective.
Amalendu Chakraborty as an author, focused on these isolated individuals. In his stories and novels, he continued to map such journeys in which the protagonists, instead of rejuvenating by amending themselves, go deep down into crises. He takes his readers into this darkness, so that by the time these journeys end and confrontations take place, the readers can see how he blurred the line as the protagonists face the mirror and find the antagonists staring at them.
Mrinal Sen’s Akaler Sandhane (1980) as an instance, is based on one of the Amalendu Chakraborty’s stories. The conscientious film director (Dhritiman Chatterjee) who arrives at a village to recreate the great famine of Bengal in 1943, escapes from the location with his unit shelving his dream project. Reason? He perpetrates characteristically the same crimes of callous ignorance and inequitable distribution of resources that caused one of the largest calamities in humankind.
The contributor once toyed with the idea of filming Chabita (The Key), one of his stories portraying a happy successful nuclear family. One late night as they stood in front of their dream apartment, the man discovered that he had lost the key to enter home. It’s a strange night when standing right outside the door, they crave to be with their kins from whom all ties were severed in the spree of fulfilling their aspirations.
What makes Amalendu Chakraborty unique from his predecessors, contemporaries and also his successors, is to use his narratives for intense introspection. Obviously, for most readers, his serious intent of delving into their minds must be too piercing, to say the least. He was not a writer in the sense, of other professional writers of his time which was since the 1960s. Most of his writings were the results of his friends who are also editors of ‘little magazines’. Staying most of the time restricted among the subscribers of magazines like Baromas, some of his stories and novels like Jabojjibon do enjoy somewhat a wider readership.
However, many of his novels and stories remained yet undiscovered after they were published in such magazines. It’s noteworthy that Adway Chowdhury of Boibhashik and Ishan Banerjee of Dro Bidro Mudron with the help of Priyadarshi Chakraborty, the author’s son, have published his two novels and a story, which gives us a scope to rediscover him once again.
The first novel Door Theke Dekha arcs the journey of a weaver’s son who becomes a bank officer. While he struggles to accommodate himself into an out-and-out corrupt system, his ageing father finds it increasingly difficult to retain his identity and his being, as the rural society is plagued by a corrupt political system which supports inequity unabashedly.
Guhachitro, his other novel in the book, resonates with a rare mastery of poignantly unfolding a real-life tragedy, exploring deep into the minds of bereaved family members who remained trapped in their sufferings. No, the author was not inviting his readers to go through a cathartic experience, (unlike many of his contemporaries) but like a physician, diagnosing through the symptoms, the ailments that continue to plague the affluent, self-content, ‘happy’ families.
In Arjo Parakrom: Du Hajar Choy, the maiden story of the book, the author elaborates on the precariousness of a homeward-bound urban family stuck on a highway in North Bengal at night. Unlike the protagonist of his story Chabita, who introspects, Arjo Parakrom: Du Hajar Choy deals with the layers of conflagrating relationship between the nouveau riche from the city and the people in a remote village. While the author indulged quite some space to criticise the entitlement of patriarchy, he is also careful to convey the worsening of the relationship between villagers and the urban gentry. ‘We have to take care of your well-being lest the police harass us in case something untoward happens,’ says a villager to doubting elites, which sufficiently highlights the tension apparent in a radically changed social and political ethos of a state vis-à-vis country bereft of peaceful cohabitation.
Amalendu Chakraborty staunchly believed in equity as an ideal Communist would. Instead of using it conveniently as a badge, however, he dedicatedly used the ideal to probe far below the surface in his writings to know why the world around him has been the way it is. His politics is to infect his readers with a rare consciousness about the vacuity in the drive to defy values and relationships to fulfil material aspirations. Thus, what glows in his writings is his conviction that ‘no voice is wholly lost’.