| Nabarun Bhattacharya | |
|---|---|
| Born | June 23, 1948 Baharampur (Berhampur), West Bengal |
| Occupation | writer, editor |
| Language | Bengali |
| Notable work(s) | Herbert (1994) |
| Notable award(s) | Sahitya Akademi Award (Bengali) |
| Relative(s) | Bijon Bhattacharya (Father) Mahashweta Devi (Mother) |
Nabarun Bhattacharya (Bengali: নবারুণ ভট্টাচার্য) (born 23 June 1948) is an Indian 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.[1]
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. [2]
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He studied in Kolkata, first Geology, then English, from Calcutta University.[1] 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 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 Tagorean upper and middle class, still very much under the spell of a 19th century Victorian sensibility.
His important publications include Herbert (Bengali novel), a Bengali novel that was awarded Sahitya Akademi Award, 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.[3] 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).[4] For a detailed discussion of the novel Herbert, see Herbert (Bengali novel)
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[5]). They appear in his books Mausoleum, Kaangaal Maalshaat, Fatarur Bombachaak and Fyatarur Kumbhipaak.[6] Suman Mukhopadhyay, who was basically from a theatrical background, dramatized Kaangaal Maalshaat and it created a history on the Bengali stage.[7] 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)
Another major fiction of Nabarun is Lubdhak, a novel that effectively employs a revolutionary imagination. Terry Eagleton 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.[8]
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