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Taking the Road Less Traveled through West Bengal

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In the late 2000s, when the three-decade-long Left Front rule in West Bengal was crumbling, Parimal Bhattacharya began to travel outside the well-trodden urban centres to different parts of the region. Moving between the personal and the political, and between travelogue, journal and memoir, Field Notes from a Waterborne Land takes the reader on a journey across a fascinating land peopled with unforgettable characters. Read an excerpt:

Moments before her death, her eyes fixed on my face, Ma had called out the first syllable of a name that only she and I knew: Apu. It was the name she had chosen for me before I was born. But I wasn’t given this name.

‘That’s an unlucky name,’ Thamma, my grandmother, had declared. ‘Boys with that name are fated to have an unhappy life.’

Apu, the fictional hero in Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay’s novels Pather Panchali (The Song of the Road) and Aparajito (The Unvanquished), is a poor Brahmin’s son who grows up with his sister in the lush green surroundings of a village in Bengal. Unrelenting poverty marks their lives. His sister dies of malaria; the family shifts to Benares, where his father too dies. Apu, a callow boy now, returns with his mother to the village and begins to work as a priest. But he is bright and ambitious, and despite all the hardships, goes to Calcutta for higher studies. His mother dies, and a series of misfortunes hounds Apu throughout his adult life.

I never found out if Thamma had read the novels, or had seen Satyajit Ray’s films based on them. But after my grandfather’s death, Thamma was the unchallenged matriarch of 16 Vidyalankar Road. Ma’s presence there was like that of a silent shadow. But she had built around her a world of her own with a few ordinary things: books from a neighbourhood lending library, a popular literary magazine named Nabokallol which the newspaper boy delivered every month, and a Murphy radio set. After I began to go to school, Ma assigned me the duty of going to the public library twice every week to bring books, mostly novels and travelogues, for her. Even at that age, I could guess that the name I was never given, Apu, had come to her from a book.

Much later did I learn that my grandfather used to encourage Ma’s passion for reading. There was much sourness between him and his wife, and perhaps that was why Thamma suspected anything that came from books. She had outright rejected the name her son’s wife had wished to give her grandson.

But sometimes, in brief moments of intimacy during my childhood, Ma would address me as Apu. Those were exclusive moments between a mother and son, rare, and filled with a feathery light. Perhaps Ma had wanted to evoke that light one last time by calling me Apu. But she spent her breath before her lips could get together to intone the second syllable.

***

When it comes to naming children, Apu has never been particularly popular in Bengal. And yet, for nearly a century, Apu has remained the most popular fictional character in Bangla literature, more popular than Gora or Devdas, the eponymous heroes of the two famous novels by Rabindranath Tagore and Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay respectively. Gora is a foreigner by birth, an idealist, and Devdas is a profligate, whose undying devotion to his childhood love cannot salvage his image. Apu, in contrast, is essentially a boy next door, and he best symbolizes the aspirations of the educated Bengali middle class. Generations of men have seen their dreams reflected in Apu’s youthful ambitions. In his attachment to the beauty of rural Bengal, generations of migrants uprooted by Partition have found a home for their nostalgia. In his wide-eyed fascination for Calcutta, too, the cosmopolitan longings of middle-class Bengalis have found a mirror. Apu’s move from the village to the city, his devotion to learning, his ambition to rise above his situation through education, even the muddle of his later life, sum up the story of the bhadralok – educated urban middleclass and mostly upper-caste Hindus that emerged in Bengal during the nineteenth century.

I come from this class. Like Apu, I am a Brahmin’s son, and my father was a teacher. But the parallels end there. I didn’t grow up in a village, nor did I face such hardships and loss so early in life.

My first encounter with Apu was through an abridged version of his story. Satyajit Ray, who would later make the famous Apu trilogy, had illustrated the book. It was titled Am Antir Bhenpu, A Mango-seed Whistle, and it is here that I met my hero for the first time. I had barely begun to learn the alphabet then. In a square tin box where I kept my drawing books, abacus and other toys, there was this illustrated storybook that someone had gifted me a little prematurely. But what fascinated me most during that unlettered phase of my life were the black-and-white drawings by Ray that I can still recall vividly, more black than white and drawn like woodcut prints. They depicted the adventures of a small boy and her older sister. I cannot remember exactly when that little book began to cast a spell on me. Perhaps it was during the long summer afternoons in the preschool days when all members of the household would be taking a siesta. I’d sit on the cool red stone floor of a shuttered room and turn the pages of the book, to kill the endless hours when the sun blazed outside and nothing stirred, until each detail in the pictures imprinted itself in my memory. The shadings became the shadows under the deep stairwell of our ancient house, through which the whiteness of the paper oozed, like light seeping through dust-coated windowpanes. There were trees massed up behind thatched mud huts, a hair-parting path rambling across village fields, with a bullock cart on it, and a row of toddy palms that resembled toy fans sold in fairs. There was also a goddess with a betel-leaf face glowing amid dark brambles. By the following summer, if I remember correctly, the rows of mute letters that had appeared like a marching army of black ants began to speak to me. I learnt to read.

I read the unabridged novel much later. Before that, I saw the movie, alternately perching on the knees of my mother and an aunt, and peering over a row of dark heads. It was a matinee show in a movie house in our small town. I was too young then to grasp the visual language of cinema, to make a story out of successive picture frames projected on a screen. What has stayed with me from that adventure, though, is the scene of pouring rain and a girl dancing in it and swinging her head full of long, thick hair, like a spirit. And then she died and morphed into a spirit, and her young brother was walking along a village path with an oversized umbrella tucked under his arm, like a grown-up man.

That is all I remember of my first viewing of Pather Panchali. It was already a classic, released nine years before I was born.

Field Notes from a Waterborne Land
About the Book - Field Notes from a Waterborne Land

In the late 2000s, when the three-decade-long Left Front rule in West Bengal was crumbling, Parimal Bhattacharya began to travel outside the well-trodden urban centres to different parts of the region - from the Sundarbans to tribal Jangalmahal, from the…

About the Author - Parimal Bhattacharya

PARIMAL BHATTACHARYA, a bilingual writer and translator, is an associate professor of English in the West Bengal Education Service. He is the author of No Path in Darjeeling Is Straight, Bells of Shangri-La and Field Notes from a Waterborne Land. Nahumer…

To read more, order your copy of Field Notes from a Waterborne Land, by Parimal Bhattacharya today!

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