Samaresh Basu in translation
Samaresh Basu was sixteen years younger than Manik Bandyopadhyay, and revered him. In somewhat awed tones Samaresh speaks of how a letter exchange with the legendary author of Dibaratri'r Kabya left an indelible mark on him. In his autobiography Nijeke Janar Jonney (an excerpt of which is reprinted above) he wrote that after his first story Adaab was published in the Kolkata monthly journal Parichay, "over-enthusiastic at the publication…I immediately sent another story, in reply to which he (Manik) wrote: 'Since your second story will not protect the good name that you've earned by your first one, I'm returning this. But please send a new story at the earliest…' That was the first stamp of rejection that I received in my life. But now I feel that it was an extraordinary stamp. That rejection kept in check the over-enthusiasm of a new writer, kept awake his powers of observation and thinking, aroused the questioning faculties of a contemplative mind…" Both authors had in common membership of the Communist Party of India, and both wrote in a penetrating way about the dispossessed and the marginalized. But there were significant differences too: Whereas Manik Bandopadhayay joined the party late, in 1944, coming to it in a series of deliberate moves and conscious radicalization, the opposite was true of Samaresh Basu. He joined it in his youth, and participated enthusiastically in its activities. But unlike Manik whose early death perhaps spared him, it led to a year in jail for Samaresh, in 1949-50, after the party was outlawed, and later despair at CPI's doctrinaire and dogmatic mind-set and practices. Samaresh left the party to devote himself full-time to writing. The experience, however, was one Samaresh was to mine extensively and deeply for his fiction, for a series of short stories and novels, one of the most notable of which was the 1964 short story Sweekarotti ('The Confession') included here in this collection of translations by Sumanta Banerjee of Samaresh Basu's short stories, and published by Thema of Kolkata (2003). This story, in fact, is the best of the lot here, plunging straight with shirt sleeves rolled up into its story and then laying bare in tautly wired prose the savagery and brutality of police interrogations and custody, themes to which Samaresh was to return later in his stories of the Naxalite era: "They then took me to the SB (Special Branch) cell. It was around 10 am, 22 December. I didn't have a watch. But I guessed…from the winter morning, and the sight of the streets during my drive from Lalbazar to Lord Sinha Road, that it should be ten in the morning. I was was however overwhelmed with a feeling of dizziness. I hadn't slept the whole night. Theat room in the Lalbazar lock-up, that dim, unflickering light, those strange graffiti all over the four walls of the room. And that half-insane prisoner…" Sumanta Banerjee's 18-page introduction to Samaresh Basu and his writing in this book is a knowing and affectionate one. Sumanta Banerjee himself is a well-known author of several books, most notably of Calcutta's colonial period (The Parlor and the Street: Elite and Popular Culture in Nineteenth Century and Dangerous Outcaste: The Prostitute in Nineteenth Century Bengal) as well as of the city's Naxalite period (The Simmering Revolution: The Naxalite Uprising) and therefore well-situated to write about Samaresh and his fiction. He gives us a close-up of Samaresh's later phase, after the author left the Communist party, and began to write the novels and stories that were to make him popular. Sumanta struck up an acquaintance with Samaresh through addas at the Parichay magazine offices, then got to know him better in the 1960s when Sumanta became a journalist and Samaresh became a prized asset of the Anandabazar-Desh group through to the 1970s when they spent time together in Delhi. Samaresh was a restless soul, with a sponge-like ability to soak up experiences and people, who was unique among Bengali/Calcutta writers in the sense that he was midway between the Bengali writer of village life, and the urban writer whose locale was Calcutta city. Samaresh, in fact, was the first writer to record, in fiction, life in Calcutta's suburbs. He lived in Naihati for most of his life, which during those times, was a developing suburban area that was "half-rural, half-urban…whose inhabitants follow a lifestyle that is usually tuned to the timing of the railway stations that arrive and depart from their stations." It was the rhythm of this life, the commuters, the hangers-on at these railway stations that he captured in his novels and stories. When he shifted from Naihati for Calcutta proper later on, Samaresh came into contact with a new, cosmopolitan set of Bengalis, ones who were not Bengali fiction's traditional professional class of clerks, doctors, lawyers and schoolteacher, but were a different, uthti sort, more like journalists in major newspapers, ad executives, sales people living high on huge commissions, corporate people on the up and go. During this phase, Samaresh's fiction was peopled with new characters and themes, examining a new, brash, upper middle class ethos and affluence, of "love and raw eroticism" that did not fit the old, traditional Bengali fictional mould. He did this with zeal and anger in novels like Bibar and Prajapoti, and the class he depicted fought back, hauling Samaresh to court on charges of obscenity. Samaresh tired of it eventually, and moved back to Naihati. Reading those works makes one wonder what he would have done with present-day Kolkata, which contains slums totaling roughly 1.7 million inhabitants (bigger than even the famed chawlas of Mumbai), nestling side by side with Kolkata's uber-rich 'cyber coolies' whose homes they clean and who they chauffeur, a city where political elites and business tycoons are enmeshed in a huge network of money in whose nexus a ruthless, politicized and well-paid underground mafia has grown up. One feels that Samaresh would have relished this material for his fiction. But Samaresh died in April 1988. And no one has really replaced him.
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