Nabarun Bhattacharya
Encyclopedia
Nabarun Bhattacharya (born 23 June 1948) is an India
n Bengali
writer deeply committed to a revolutionary and radical aesthetics. He was born at Baharampur
(Berhampur), West Bengal. He is the only child of actor Bijon Bhattacharya
and writer Mahashweta Devi.
He is most known for his anarchic novel, Herbert (1993), which was awarded the Sahitya Akademi Award
, and adapted into a film by the same name
in 2005, by Suman Mukhopadhyay
.
, first Geology, then English, from Calcutta University. Between 1973 and 1991, he occupied important posts at a Soviet news agency. He traveled through Soviet Union, China and Japan. He edited various magazines and journals. At present he is the chief editor of the Bengali magazine, 'Bhashabandhan'. His wife, Pranati is a retired professor. Their only child Tathagata is a journalist. He lives at Golf Green, South Kolkata.
Nabarun over the years consistently contributed to various little magazines, which together constitute a promising alternative mode of literary culture in Bengal that challenges the influence of big capital. It is equally noteworthy that his writing style deconstructs the gentle middle class ethos of the Bengali society. Most of his characters belong to the lower strata of existence. His fictions reinvigorate the received Bengali language with forceful idioms and expressions from the margins, which might often bombard the chaste taste of a Tagore
an upper and middle class, still very much under the spell of a 19th century Victorian sensibility.
, Bankim prize and Narasingha Das prize. It was made into a film
by Suman Mukhopadhyay
(who debuts as a director with this film), and won international acclaim. Suman in fact returns to Nabarun for his third feature film, Mahanagar@Kolkata, which is made from three different stories of Nabarun, 'Ak Tukro Nyloner Dori' (A Piece of Nylon Rope), 'Aamaar Kono Bhoy Nei To?' (I Don't Have Anything to Fear, Do I?) and 'Aangshik Chandragrahan' (Partial Lunar Eclipse). For a detailed discussion of the novel Herbert, see Herbert (Bengali novel)
, who was basically from a theatrical background, dramatized Kaangaal Maalshaat and it created a history on the Bengali stage. Before this, another play titled Fyataru was made from various stories of the Fyataru series by another Kolkata theatre group. Though it is mentioned that there are innumerable Fyatarus, we encounter only three of them. First, DS, known only with these initials, derived from Director's Special (a brand of whiskey). He also carries an attache case with DS imprinted on it. Next, Madan, whose name's original meaning is cupid, but the colloquial Bengali sense is that of a dunderhead. The third Fyataru, and arguably the most popular one among the readers, is Purandar Bhat. He is a bawdy poet, in addition to being a Fyataru, and most of the language of his poetry is very much Rabelaisian. His first name Purandar means destroyer of cities (in Rigveda Indra is called Purandar), and the surname Bhat means talking nonsense and rubbish (though Bhat is a North Indian surname, it's not found in Bengal, and the only meaning of Bhat available to a Bengali reader is the aforementioned one). In Kaangaal Maalshaat, Purandar fakes his suicide to avoid paying his impending rents to his landlord, and leaves a suicide note written in couplets, titled "Chutia Prithibi" (The Fucking World). Below is an English translation of that. Note that Purandar's year of birth coincides with that of Nabarun.
(This is translated by Tamal Dasgupta. Note:"Meni" is pussycat in Bengali, while "ledikeni" was a sweet made in honour of a British Viceroy's wife. This sweet is sausage-shaped)
pointed out, "it remains the harsh truth that the dead can be raised only in revolutionary imagination. There is no literal way in which we can compensate them for the sufferings they received at the hands of the ruling order." These lines of Eagleton meaningfully apply to Nabarun's Herbert as well.
Street dogs of Kolkata
are persecuted and eliminated by humans in a holocaust-like manner in this magic realist novel, Lubdhak. The ideology and politics of science and rationality, the dominant social order manufacturing 'objective', 'analytical', 'dispassionate' (all are actually covers for their bias and class dominance) discussions in order to annihilate the dogs in a manner distinctly reminiscent of the Nazis' 'scientific' extermination of Jews
are brilliantly depicted by Nabarun.
An important strategy of Nabarun's revolutionary imagination is to evoke legend and myth which come to rescue the victims of an oppressive reality, the victims of an exploitative science and rationality. Now, Lubdhak is a star, the brightest star on the night sky, also known as Sirius
. It is more familiarly known as the 'Dog star', owing to its prominent position in its constellation, Canis Major
(Big Dog). Lubdhak,as if the ancient, mysterious, cosmic protector of dogs surveying his kind from the sky, sends punishment to the humans, who have sinned against nature. Anubis
, the ancient Egyptian deity guarding the gate between life and death, also comes to facilitate in a mass, almost biblical exodus of the dogs from the city of sin, that is, Kolkata, which is about to experience a massive earthquake as a part of the cosmic punishment.
In an interview, Nabarun has said that once he used to be a hardliner communist, but he is no longer so; what is the most prominent ideological change in him, in reply to this question, interestingly, he says "I am no longer anthropocentric". Perhaps Lubdhak is an illustration of this standpoint (that expresses solidarity with the nature and creatures subjugated by men) which Nabarun posits against the hubris
of a narcissistic human civilization. The recording of the interview is available in the internet. In this same interview, he emphasizes the role of democracy and the necessity of siding with the marginal.
India
India , officially the Republic of India , is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by geographical area, the second-most populous country with over 1.2 billion people, and the most populous democracy in the world...
n Bengali
Bengali people
The Bengali people are an ethnic community native to the historic region of Bengal in South Asia. They speak Bengali , which is an Indo-Aryan language of the eastern Indian subcontinent, evolved from the Magadhi Prakrit and Sanskrit languages. In their native language, they are referred to as বাঙালী...
writer deeply committed to a revolutionary and radical aesthetics. He was born at Baharampur
Baharampur
Baharampur is a city in the West Bengal state of India. Baharampur is the sixth largest city in West Bengal and situated in central part of West Bengal. Baharampur is nominated for becoming the municipal corporation...
(Berhampur), West Bengal. He is the only child of actor Bijon Bhattacharya
Bijon Bhattacharya
Bijon Bhattacharya was a prominent Indian theatre and film personality from Bengal.Bijon was born in 1917 at Faridpur in a Hindu Brahmin family, and was early a witness to the destitution and penury of the peasantry of that land...
and writer Mahashweta Devi.
He is most known for his anarchic novel, Herbert (1993), which was awarded the Sahitya Akademi Award
Sahitya Akademi Award
Sahitya Akademi Award is a literary honor in India which Sahitya Akademi, India's National Academy of Letters, annually confers on writers of outstanding works in one of the following twenty-four major Indian languagesAssamese, Bengali, Bodo, Dogri, English, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Kashmiri,...
, and adapted into a film by the same name
Herbert (2005 film)
Herbert is a 2005 Bengali-language film that was directed by veteran theatre director Suman Mukhopadhyay. It was based on Nabarun Bhattacharya's Sahitya Akademi Award winning novel of the same name.-Awards:This film won the following awards:...
in 2005, by Suman Mukhopadhyay
Suman Mukhopadhyay
Suman Mukhopadhyay or Suman Mukherjee is a prominent contemporary Indian filmmaker and a theatre director.-Career:He has done theatre productions ranging from European drama to major adaptations of Bengali masterpieces. Among which are Teesta Paarer Brittanto and Samay Asamayer Brittanto,...
.
Personal life
He studied in KolkataKolkata
Kolkata , formerly known as Calcutta, is the capital of the Indian state of West Bengal. Located on the east bank of the Hooghly River, it was the commercial capital of East India...
, first Geology, then English, from Calcutta University. Between 1973 and 1991, he occupied important posts at a Soviet news agency. He traveled through Soviet Union, China and Japan. He edited various magazines and journals. At present he is the chief editor of the Bengali magazine, 'Bhashabandhan'. His wife, Pranati is a retired professor. Their only child Tathagata is a journalist. He lives at Golf Green, South Kolkata.
Works
Nabarun is renowned as a fiction writer, and justifiably so. But he writes poems as well and Ei Mrityu Upotyoka Aaamaar Desh Na (This Valley of Death Is Not My Country) is arguably his most acclaimed collection of poems. An interesting dimension of his career as a creative writer is his complete refusal to have any connection with the Anandabazar group, the biggest media and publishing corporate house in Bengal while as a matter of fact, most of the major writers in some way or other, have bowed down before this immensely powerful cultural establishment called Anandabazar.Nabarun over the years consistently contributed to various little magazines, which together constitute a promising alternative mode of literary culture in Bengal that challenges the influence of big capital. It is equally noteworthy that his writing style deconstructs the gentle middle class ethos of the Bengali society. Most of his characters belong to the lower strata of existence. His fictions reinvigorate the received Bengali language with forceful idioms and expressions from the margins, which might often bombard the chaste taste of a Tagore
Tagore
Tagore is the name of a prominent Bengali family of intellectuals, writers and artists, generally known as the Tagore family.People - Jorasanko branch of the Tagore family...
an upper and middle class, still very much under the spell of a 19th century Victorian sensibility.
Herbert
His important publications include Herbert (Bengali novel), a Bengali novel that was awarded Sahitya Akademi AwardSahitya Akademi Award
Sahitya Akademi Award is a literary honor in India which Sahitya Akademi, India's National Academy of Letters, annually confers on writers of outstanding works in one of the following twenty-four major Indian languagesAssamese, Bengali, Bodo, Dogri, English, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Kashmiri,...
, Bankim prize and Narasingha Das prize. It was made into a film
Herbert (2005 film)
Herbert is a 2005 Bengali-language film that was directed by veteran theatre director Suman Mukhopadhyay. It was based on Nabarun Bhattacharya's Sahitya Akademi Award winning novel of the same name.-Awards:This film won the following awards:...
by Suman Mukhopadhyay
Suman Mukhopadhyay
Suman Mukhopadhyay or Suman Mukherjee is a prominent contemporary Indian filmmaker and a theatre director.-Career:He has done theatre productions ranging from European drama to major adaptations of Bengali masterpieces. Among which are Teesta Paarer Brittanto and Samay Asamayer Brittanto,...
(who debuts as a director with this film), and won international acclaim. Suman in fact returns to Nabarun for his third feature film, Mahanagar@Kolkata, which is made from three different stories of Nabarun, 'Ak Tukro Nyloner Dori' (A Piece of Nylon Rope), 'Aamaar Kono Bhoy Nei To?' (I Don't Have Anything to Fear, Do I?) and 'Aangshik Chandragrahan' (Partial Lunar Eclipse). For a detailed discussion of the novel Herbert, see Herbert (Bengali novel)
The Characters Called Fyataru
His magic realist writings introduced a strange set of human beings to Bengali readers, called Fyataru (fyat: the sound created by kites while they are flown; otherwise, fyat has also a hint of someone worthless, deriving from the words foto, faaltu; uru: related to flying), who are an anarchic underclass fond of sabotage and are capable of flying whenever they utter the mantra 'fyat fyat sh(n)aai sh(n)aai' (This mantra was made into a song by the popular Bangla band Chandrabindoo in one of its albums). They appear in his books Mausoleum, Kaangaal Maalshaat, Fatarur Bombachaak and Fyatarur Kumbhipaak. Suman MukhopadhyaySuman Mukhopadhyay
Suman Mukhopadhyay or Suman Mukherjee is a prominent contemporary Indian filmmaker and a theatre director.-Career:He has done theatre productions ranging from European drama to major adaptations of Bengali masterpieces. Among which are Teesta Paarer Brittanto and Samay Asamayer Brittanto,...
, who was basically from a theatrical background, dramatized Kaangaal Maalshaat and it created a history on the Bengali stage. Before this, another play titled Fyataru was made from various stories of the Fyataru series by another Kolkata theatre group. Though it is mentioned that there are innumerable Fyatarus, we encounter only three of them. First, DS, known only with these initials, derived from Director's Special (a brand of whiskey). He also carries an attache case with DS imprinted on it. Next, Madan, whose name's original meaning is cupid, but the colloquial Bengali sense is that of a dunderhead. The third Fyataru, and arguably the most popular one among the readers, is Purandar Bhat. He is a bawdy poet, in addition to being a Fyataru, and most of the language of his poetry is very much Rabelaisian. His first name Purandar means destroyer of cities (in Rigveda Indra is called Purandar), and the surname Bhat means talking nonsense and rubbish (though Bhat is a North Indian surname, it's not found in Bengal, and the only meaning of Bhat available to a Bengali reader is the aforementioned one). In Kaangaal Maalshaat, Purandar fakes his suicide to avoid paying his impending rents to his landlord, and leaves a suicide note written in couplets, titled "Chutia Prithibi" (The Fucking World). Below is an English translation of that. Note that Purandar's year of birth coincides with that of Nabarun.
- The Fucking World
- Purandar Bhat
- (1948-1999)
- Why there isn't any drama in my life
- So I'll crawl on the cottonfield with a fife
- Why to have a dream in vain my life begs
- Am a house gecko, I eat flies and lay eggs
- My death surely doesn't yield a headline and all
- I'll break law by pissing on a castle's wall
- For my death there wouldn't be a weeping meni
- From the name of Lady Canning there's ledikeni
- One foot on heaven and one foot on hell, hanging
- One cannon and two cannonballs dangling.
(This is translated by Tamal Dasgupta. Note:"Meni" is pussycat in Bengali, while "ledikeni" was a sweet made in honour of a British Viceroy's wife. This sweet is sausage-shaped)
Lubdhak
Another major fiction of Nabarun is Lubdhak, a novel that effectively employs a revolutionary imagination. Terry EagletonTerry Eagleton
Terence Francis Eagleton FBA is a British literary theorist and critic, who is regarded as one of Britain's most influential living literary critics...
pointed out, "it remains the harsh truth that the dead can be raised only in revolutionary imagination. There is no literal way in which we can compensate them for the sufferings they received at the hands of the ruling order." These lines of Eagleton meaningfully apply to Nabarun's Herbert as well.
Street dogs of Kolkata
Kolkata
Kolkata , formerly known as Calcutta, is the capital of the Indian state of West Bengal. Located on the east bank of the Hooghly River, it was the commercial capital of East India...
are persecuted and eliminated by humans in a holocaust-like manner in this magic realist novel, Lubdhak. The ideology and politics of science and rationality, the dominant social order manufacturing 'objective', 'analytical', 'dispassionate' (all are actually covers for their bias and class dominance) discussions in order to annihilate the dogs in a manner distinctly reminiscent of the Nazis' 'scientific' extermination of Jews
Jews
The Jews , also known as the Jewish people, are a nation and ethnoreligious group originating in the Israelites or Hebrews of the Ancient Near East. The Jewish ethnicity, nationality, and religion are strongly interrelated, as Judaism is the traditional faith of the Jewish nation...
are brilliantly depicted by Nabarun.
An important strategy of Nabarun's revolutionary imagination is to evoke legend and myth which come to rescue the victims of an oppressive reality, the victims of an exploitative science and rationality. Now, Lubdhak is a star, the brightest star on the night sky, also known as Sirius
Sirius
Sirius is the brightest star in the night sky. With a visual apparent magnitude of −1.46, it is almost twice as bright as Canopus, the next brightest star. The name "Sirius" is derived from the Ancient Greek: Seirios . The star has the Bayer designation Alpha Canis Majoris...
. It is more familiarly known as the 'Dog star', owing to its prominent position in its constellation, Canis Major
Canis Major
Canis Major is one of the 88 modern constellations, and was included in the 2nd-century astronomer Ptolemy's 48 constellations. Its name is Latin for 'greater dog', and is commonly represented as one of the dogs following Orion the hunter...
(Big Dog). Lubdhak,as if the ancient, mysterious, cosmic protector of dogs surveying his kind from the sky, sends punishment to the humans, who have sinned against nature. Anubis
Anubis
Anubis is the Greek name for a jackal-headed god associated with mummification and the afterlife in ancient Egyptian religion. In the ancient Egyptian language, Anubis is known as Inpu . According to the Akkadian transcription in the Amarna letters, Anubis' name was vocalized as Anapa...
, the ancient Egyptian deity guarding the gate between life and death, also comes to facilitate in a mass, almost biblical exodus of the dogs from the city of sin, that is, Kolkata, which is about to experience a massive earthquake as a part of the cosmic punishment.
In an interview, Nabarun has said that once he used to be a hardliner communist, but he is no longer so; what is the most prominent ideological change in him, in reply to this question, interestingly, he says "I am no longer anthropocentric". Perhaps Lubdhak is an illustration of this standpoint (that expresses solidarity with the nature and creatures subjugated by men) which Nabarun posits against the hubris
Hubris
Hubris , also hybris, means extreme haughtiness, pride or arrogance. Hubris often indicates a loss of contact with reality and an overestimation of one's own competence or capabilities, especially when the person exhibiting it is in a position of power....
of a narcissistic human civilization. The recording of the interview is available in the internet. In this same interview, he emphasizes the role of democracy and the necessity of siding with the marginal.
List of Major Works
- Kaangaal Maalshaat (Hooghly: Saptarshi Prakashan, 2003)
- Herbert (Kolkata: Deys, 1994)
- Lubdhak (Barasat: Abhijan Publishers, 2006)
- Ei Mrityu Upotyoka Aamaar Desh Na (Hooghly: Saptarshi, 2004)
- Halaljhanda o Onyanyo (Hooghly: Saptarshi, 2009)
- Mahajaaner Aayna (Kolkata: Bhashabandhan, 2010)
External links
- http://www.facebook.com/pages/Nabarun-Bhattacharya/109565561553
- http://textualities.net/nabarun-bhattacharya/an-indian-writer-in-japan/