Manik Bandhapadya's Short Stories
This is the centenary birth year of Manik Bandopadhay. He was born on 19 May 1908 in a small town called Dumka in Bihar. Writing came to him by accident. The story is that when he was a student at Presidency College, during an adda in the college canteen, a friend dared him to publish a story in Bichitra, at that time a well-known Kolkata publication that published only the best of writers and writings. He took up the dare and put in a story in the editor's box. He signed it off as 'Manik' (his nickname) Bandopadhyay. The story, named 'Atashimami,' was published, it created a stir, and at age twenty Manik Bandopadhyay was well launched on his literary career. From now on he would live solely on the earnings from his writing--in fact, in true Marxist fashion he famously said that a writer was a "pen-wielding labourer" who must be paid for his labour. It was a courageous decision to take, since writing was an ill-paid job in his time, and is sadly reflected in the fact that Manik Bandopadhyay died prematurely in 1956, barely forty-eight years old, dogged by penury and ill-health. Within the short time that Manik Bandopadhyay did write, he proved to be relatively prolific, though from 1951 he was hampered by bouts of bad health. His first collection of short stories--also titled Atashimanni--was published in 1935. For the next five years (except for 1936 when two novels, Padmanadir Majhi and Putulnacher Itikatha were published) he came out with a collection of short stories every year. Though 1941 and 1942 were relatively lean years as far as short stories were concerned, from 1943 till 1949, especially during the latter part, Manik Bandopadhyay kept publishing short story volumes on a regular basis. It was from 1950 onward that Manik Bandopadhyay turned his attention to the longer novel form, to the detriment of his short story output. Manik Bandopadhyay's fiction, especially his short stories, reflects the fact that he lived through a period of crisis and upheaval in Indian history. The Depression of the 1920s cast its pall all over the world. In rural Bengal there was a gigantic shift in the nature and terms of landholdings, whereby huge numbers of subsistence cultivators were turned into sharecroppers. It was this "tragedy of land relations," as Manik Bandopadhyay termed it, which led not only to the man-made famine of 1943, but also undermined Bengal's tightly-knit rural communal life that subsequently marginalized and dehumanized a large part of its population. The period was characterized by the consolidation of radical trends within India's working class, and by the formation of the Indian Communist Party. This particular social and political environment provided Manik Bandopadhyay with the raw material for his stories. Allied to it was a mode of writing that was shaped to a certain extent by the-then Kallol group's rejection of Tagorean 'romanticism.' The age demanded that men and women be portrayed 'realistically,' not through the distorting lens of a repressive, middle-class sexual ethos. While Manik Bandopadhyay, too, had read his Freud, his writing was also shaped by social, political and economic realities. He was interested not in depicting sexuality in the abstract, but one that existed within a definite set of power relations, be it family or society. It is this particular vision that lends Manik Bandopadhyay's writing its peculiar and original force, the fact that a character's criminality (say a Bhikku, or Modhu the thief) and sexual lust is not a thing detached from society but arises from within it, as a brutalized mode of self-expression in a brutalizing world. Manik Bandhapadya is a writer who has not been translated widely in Bangladesh. This volume, Selected Stories, edited by Malini Bhattacharya and published by Thema in Kolkata, is therefore a welcome one to readers who can't read him in the original Bangla. Its 265 pages contain 16 of Manik's short stories by different translators. Acknowledging the fact that any selection of Manik Bandyopadhyay's short stories will seem arbitrary, Malini writes that two principal considerations guided the choices made. One was to display the "sheer range and variety of the author's narrative enterprise." The second was to publish them in order of "three chronological divisions" that "roughly correspond to the author's most creative periods in short stories." This particular ordering does give one an idea of the author's artistic development. The book also contains four reprints of short pieces on Manik Bandyopadhyay by four writers/reviewers. Among them, Saleem Peeradina's 'When the Pen becomes a Scalpel' is notable for its comparative examination of Selected Stories with Saadat Hasan Manto's Kingdom's End and Other Stories, while Aparna's piece, 'Towards Art of the People,' concisely charts Manik Bandyopadhyay's progress towards his final, Marxist phase. This second edition of 2003 is also an improvement on the first one published in 1988, where the publisher updated the 1988 translations using more authoritative Bangla texts that were published during the ensuing period to make some necessary emendations. The book reminds us, even in translation, of how compelling a writer Manik Bandopadhyay was, and why his hold on his Bangali readership has remained strong through the decades since his death.
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