In 'Thy Hand Great Anarch', Niradh Chaudhuri writes of Bibhuti Bhushan- the author of the Apu novels made famous by Satyajit Ray.
Whatever the trials of my life as a clerk, I secured great personal happiness at that time by forming a friendship which lasted as long as that friend lived,
and was shared by my wife after I married. This friend was in every way a
remarkable man, and his name was Bibhuti Bhushan Bandyopadhyaya
(anglicized, Banerji). The friendship began by sheer chance.
Soon after I had settled down at 41 Mirzapore Street I saw a young man
coming down the stairs as I was going up. He looked down at me closely and
cried out, ‘Nirad!’ At first I could not make out who it was that was
addressing me so familiarly, but in a moment I recognized the face: it was
that of a fellow-student at Ripon College during the years 1914 to 1916.
Bibhuti was three years older than Nirad. He came from a poorer, Brahmin, family. But, having taken the Arts degree (rather than History), he had a greater knowledge of English literature. Moreover, he kept abreast of popular fiction because he himself hoped to rise by his pen and thus provide for his siblings.
Niradh writes 'Bibhuti Babu never introduced sexual life in the narrow and more lurid sense of the phrase into his novels and stories.
He made his hero Apu mutter to himself in English when he first saw his
bride: ‘They breed goddesses at Slocum Magna.’ (I really do not know
where he got that line of poetry from.)
The line is from J.C Snaith's 'Araminta' published in 1909. The heroine- who is beautiful but, as is becoming in the granddauthter of a Duke, thick as shit- comes from a small village called Slocum Magna. When asked where it is, she mentions, its neighbouring, and, in order of distance, its increasingly negligible parishes before finally hitting upon London Town as, in her estimation, the most neglibilble of all.
She triumphs because the impoverished painter who loves her receives ten thousand pounds for her portrait and thus can marry her & settle down in a hamlet less negligible than any other since it now holds a Goddess from its neighbour- Slocum Magna.
Bibhuti, I believe, had been able to attend College thanks to a benefactor but, after his father's death, had to earn money to help educate his siblings. His own Araminta, child bride, had died but, for most of his life, adventure was his Slocum Magna.
There he had the reputation of being very well-read and well-informed,
although just out of school. But I was not very intimate with him, and was
inclined to think that he was rather over-assertive with his opinions on all
conceivable subjects, a trait or foible common in young Bengalis with an
intellectual turn.
Bibhuti was an artist. Intellectuals were either professional revolutionaries or had family money.
But I had forgotten that impression and was very glad to
meet an old acquaintance again. He asked me where I lived, and when I
told him that I lived in that very house he said he would come and see me,
adding that he himself lived next door.
He came the very evening, and was very pleased to see my books. He told
me that it was not the first time. Two or three years earlier he had seen me
reading in the Imperial Library, with a huge pile of books before me - as he
put it - and was very glad to find that an old fellow-student was still
pursuing his intellectual interests.
A story-teller can pick up a great deal by talking to a historian.
He said that he had also asked me
questions. But I had no recollection of the incident.
After that he told me about himself. He had to give up his studies when
he was in the M.A class for want of means,
Niradh failed his MA.
and was now a teacher in a village
school about twenty miles south of Calcutta, to which he went every day by
train.
Pleny of young writers spend a year or two teaching while learning their craft. Waugh was doing so in England at around this time.
I learned later that he was three years my senior in age, but none of us
felt the difference. He was obviously a bachelor, but he informed me that
he was actually a widower. He had married while still at college, and had
lost his young wife in the great influenza epidemic of 1918, after only a year
of married life.
That, by itself, gave him a theme. What he needed to do was perfect his picture of rural Bengali life.
We soon became very intimate, and I may add that he was one of only
three or four persons outside my family with whom I became at all so in
personal relations. He told me the very first evening that he had already
published a story in the foremost Bengali monthly magazine Prabasi.
founded by Ramananda Chatterjee who also gave Niradh his start in 1928.
As
soon as he mentioned its title I recalled it, for I had read it, and although I
did not remember the name of the writer I had thought that it showed great
originality and a delicate sensibility. I might mention here that in less than
ten years he became one of the leading Bengali writers of fiction. His first
novel, published in 1928, at once established his position, and the book has
now become known all over the world in its film version by Satyajit Ray. It is Pather Panchali.
Niradh does not seem to be aware that Dhan Gopal- a rural Brahmin from West Bengal, just like Bibhuti- had done well out of an autobiographical book published in New York in 1923. If a lyrical account of Brahminical Bengal could earn money in America, why not in Calcutta?
In 1924, as soon as he had written the first few pages, he
read them out to me. I felt so confident about it that I prodded him for three
years to finish it. After its publication as a serial in 1928 I was able to secure
a publisher for the novel in book form.
Dhan Gopal was writing for foreigners. He could afford to over-egg the cake with poetry and philosophy and Hindu spirituality. Indeed, there was a passage in it about a supposed 'tiger-melody' which Kazantzakis seized upon. The Calcutta audience wanted no such foppery.
With his intellectual interests he wanted somebody to talk to.
He didn't find any such person.
He was
very lonely and needed companionship. So, he would come almost every
evening and spend some time with me. The account he gave of his student
days and of his working life since his wife’s death distressed me very much.
Like Dhan Gopal's father (who was also a khayal singer), Niradh's father was a lawyer. By contrast Bibhuti's father knew no English & gained an exiguous living as a reciter of 'katha' (Hindu epics).
When I was at college with him I knew nothing of the poverty in spite of
which he was carrying on his studies. What he told me was afterwards
embodied by him in his novel Aparajita ( The Undefeated). His story has also
been filmed in two parts by Ray,
three parts
and those who have seen the films will
understand what Bibhuti Babu went through. Certainly, it was he who was
undefeated. I, of course, had never to experience anything like that, and
had no idea of the hardships of such a life.
Although by caste he belonged to one of the highest clans of Bengali
Brahmins,
i.e. Shandilya gotra Rarhi Brahmins- who practiced Kulinism. In 'Pather' the miserable fate of Indir Thakrun, the elderly widow, married under Kulinism, who. perhaps, had added prestige to the family, but who was increasingly resented as a financial burden, is seldom explicated- indeed, it may not have been understood- by Kayasths like Niradh or Satyajit Ray. Since Kulinism is peculiar to Bengal, Hindus from other parts of India can't be blamed for being unaware of this local nuance.
socially his family was of the humblest rank of the Bengali
gentry. His father was a Kathak or expositor of Hindu mythology, and these
men stood very low in the priestly hierarchy.
Not necessarily. Such a person, by dint of ability and the patronage of wealthy Mahishya landlords & merchants, might gain a huge following and thus himself become wealthy and politically influential.
This man was poor, and in
addition a Bohemian given to wandering. But he was also a character, and
wrote verse besides keeping a diary, which has survived to be used by
Bibhuti Babu’s biographer. I learned all this piecemeal, for he was
extremely unwilling to speak about his father and family antecedents.
There is an element of mystification in Dhan Gopal. Why is the father- a lawyer- devoting himself to khayal singing? Is it really because of some mystical Oriental philosophy? Or is it because he rejects Capitalist Imperialism and thus has buried himself in some remote rural fastness?
He
even indulged in some amount of mystification about them.
The truth appears to be that Bibhuti's family was high caste Rarhi, Kulin, Brahmin. Since Kulinism had been severely attacked as a cruel custom for over a century by the Brahmos, one could say that the misfortunes of the family was 'karmic' pay-back.
1 was often
puzzled by this, for I came from a class in which talking about ancestors and
parading genealogy was habitual.
Chaudhuris would have had, at some point in time, large feudal estates.
My intimacy with him developed in shared mental life. I might explain that in Bengali society what is understood as social life in the West does not
as a rule extend beyond family and marriage relationships.
Tagore said that to his English friends. But most English people of the period spent a lot of time being bored to tears by their relatives. There were only a few glittering salons or Great Country Houses where wit feasted entirely upon wit or soul flowed upon soul.
What attracted
young Bengalis to one another were mental affinity, intellectual interests,
and tastes.
Alas! all this was better sought abroad.
Money or social position never stood in the way of such
associations.
I acquired a great respect for his mind, which had a wide range of
interests. But I certainly did not expect a young Bengali of his class and
education to show interest in astrophysics and human palaeontology, which
he did. He would talk to me of E. P. Hubble, the astronomer at Mount
Wilson Observatory, and his theories, although he had never been a
student either of mathematics or physics. I had heard about Jeans and
Eddington, and had also read a little by or about them. I had Einstein’s
book on Relativity as well. But I had not heard of Hubble.
His work provided the basis for the Big Bang theory which went against the Aristotelian tradition. It would naturally be of interest to Hindus.
Bibhuti Babu
also showed me Sir Arthur Keith’s Antiquity of Man,
Keith thought humanity had evolved in Europe & then spread outward. Indians would therefore be degenerate creatures. Niradh may have liked this view but Bibhuti was looking for ways to overturn it.
which in spite of his
want of means he had bought. At that time I had only a smattering of human
palaeontology and prehistory, but he created such an absorbing interest in
them in me that I soon went far beyond him, and not only read Boule’s Les
Hommes Fossiles
Boule, equally taken in by the Piltdown Man hoax, agreed with Keith re. the European origin of humanity. He differed from the Englishman by dismissing Neanderthals as ape like creatures.
and other standard works, but also bought the massive
monographs on palaeolithic art by Piette, Carailhac, Breuil and others,
ordering them from Paris.
But for the Depression, those would actually have risen in value.
What I did immediately was to make Bibhuti
Babu buy Burckit’s Prehistory ,
Burckit was a young Englishman whose mentors were eminent French paleo-archaeologists. However, if you didn't believe Europe was super-special, their work was of limited interest.
when it was published in 1923, of course to
read it myself.
It did not take me long to discover that his interest in these subjects was
not strictly scientific. He was an out and out romantic, and was drawn to
them by that.
He would later write some excellent Rider Haggard style adventure stories set in Africa. Nothing wrong with being a romantic, if you hope to entertain with your pen.
Even if he himself and his family had belonged to the
well-to-do section of Bengali society instead of to the poorest, he would
have been a romantic, because the commonplace and staid ease of that class
would have irked him and driven him to break out of it, in spirit at least.
He had read a lot of European literature & wanted to produce Bengali stories and novels which weren't as boring as shit.
But
his poverty-stricken and drab life made romanticism a condition of mental
survival for him. As he told me, even during his hard student days he would
not confine himself to his text-books, to do which was necessary for
examinations, but would read anything that came in his way. He did not do
well in them; nonetheless he became a writer.
With the death of his wife and adoption of the profession of teaching the
necessity became greater. As things stood, teachers in Bengal were very
poorly paid - when they entered the profession they could never hope to
have more than three pounds a month. So, they had to live very bare lives.
Would Bibhuti supplement his income with journalism and some political work? Yes.
What was worse was that as a class they made their mental life equally bare.
In Calcutta those who were inclined that way could enliven their existence
by going into literary or political circles as hangers-on of the established
figures. But in the villages in which Bibhuti Babu worked there was no
question of such relief, for village life was hidebound and trivial and so
withered even in its traditionalism that it could be regarded only as the
fossilized survival of civilized Hindu society.
But people would pay to learn more of what was happening in the villages. The first General Election had been held in 1923. The franchise was bound to be extended further and further. Bibhuti wasn't earning much but he was learning enough to make a niche for himself in the literary world.
The village, at some distance
north of Calcutta, in which he first worked seemed to have been worse than
the normal run of such places. He could not talk to anybody and lived in a
bazaar near the railway station.
To all this was added the desolation of his bereavement. He told me how
he sat in the evenings in his miserable hovel in the light of the flickering oil
lamp and thought of his loss until the whistle of the late train from Calcutta
reminded him that it was time to go to bed. The memories of his wife kept
him from marrying again for twenty-three years. I always noticed a packet
of papers in his breast pocket, and an embroidered hand-made fan by his
pillow. He never referred to them, nor did I ask. But I could easily guess
that the packet contained the few letters his wife had written to him, and
that the fan was made by her. I and other friends of his tried persistently to
get him married again and settled properly. They as well as I at times even
brought proposals. His curiosity would make him go and have a look at the
prospective brides. Once or twice matters went even farther. But in the end
he always managed to give the slip. I joined in three bridal inspections.
His wife’s death led him to an interest which I could not share. It was
spiritualism.
Quite common at that time.
He had already read Myers, Lodge, and Conan Doyle. He
tried to convince me of the reality of the ghostly world by throwing his
authorities in my teeth.
He wrote some good tales of the occult which sold well.
His dependence on one writer provoked me sorely.
He was the German Schrenk-Notzing, whose book on ectoplasmic
emanations disgusted me.
But the popular fiction of the period had plenty of such things. Bibhuti didn't want to remain poor. He wanted to earn money by writing stuff which didn't bore the pants off you.
But just as he could not convince me, I too could
not shake his faith in the survival of the human personality. At last we tacitly
agreed not to discuss this subject, although we talked incessantly on many
others. I continued to hear, however, that to others he preached his faith
eloquently, and in later life he wrote two novels with supernatural themes. I
would add, however, that he showed the stronger side of his preoccupation
with death by buying the little book which Dean Inge wrote on his daughter
who died in childhood. I borrowed it from him and was deeply touched by
it.
Tagore, it must be said, wrote very well in that vein.
I could easily see why he had become a spiritualist, but did not wish to
hurt his feelings by making use of the argumentum ad hominem. I also saw a
gradual shift in his motivation. If at first he wanted to believe in life after
death for the sake of his wife, in his later days he clung to the same faith
from his own love of life. So, belief in after-life became in him not only a
dogma but even a superstition. Yet I could see that he was not religious. All
that he wanted was to be assured of his personal continuity.
Which he certainly achieved as an artist.
I suspected that
his interest in scientific cosmology and prehistory was the product of his
effort and yearning to find a cosmic location for his world of the dead. Even
when approaching death he repeated his credo. He died at the relatively
early age of fifty-six in 1950.
However, it must not be imagined from all this that he was always
mooning about the supernatural. On the contrary, he could be very matter
of fact and concrete. Indeed, in his novels he showed an astonishing
capacity for detailed observation of both nature and human character,
combined with great humour and tenderness in describing what his
observation discovered.
He worked hard at literature.
His hard life had not embittered him, nor made
him a cynic. His sympathy for ordinary people was unlimited, and he was
not repelled even by the squalor in which such people had to live in our
society. Somehow, he could always make them rise above their surround-
ings; I would even say - far above the limitations of their world.
But as he actually lived, he never, even when he had the means to do so,
rose above the shabby ways of the Bengali lower middle class. In fact, he
was quite insensitive to the external amenities of life, and in spite of being
very sensitive, at times too self-consciously so, to beauty in nature, he did
not have any perception of man-made beauty, differing radically from me
in this. His room was never well-furnished, not even tidy. I had often to put
it in some sort of order. He never dressed well, and had no idea of good
living.
Many years later, after my marriage, he became very friendly with my
wife, and would come and talk with her for preference. But instead of
remaining in the sitting-room, he would go straight to her bedroom, and sit
cross-legged on the embroidered bedspread, placidly smoking his biri, the
stinking lower middle-class smoke. My wife would make him throw it away,
and ask the servant to get a packet of respectable cigarettes for him. As I
never smoked, no supply was kept at home.
But the strong side of his loyalty to the shabby life was that, on the one hand, he was never intimidated by wealth to become servile to rich people,
and, on the other, he never became envious of them. He worked for some
time as a tutor in one of the wealthiest families of Calcutta. The drawing-
room of that house was a faithful replica of a room in an English country
house. In fact, these Bengali houses used to be furnished by British
decorators, and often with furniture imported from England. Once he
showed me the drawing-room, but he seemed to be wholly unaware of what
it contained and what it looked like. He was equally indifferent to his
employer’s car - an enormous Cadillac. On the other hand, he could
describe both the owner of the house and his ways with mischievous but
never malicious humour. I have seen very few men who like him were
totally resistant to external pretensions and unawed by it.
Bibhuti Babu will come again and again into the story of my life. At this
point, however, I shall only relate how within a few months I got him settled
at 41 Mirzapore Street, in a room above mine. In this room, with temporary
absences, he lived for nearly twenty years till his second marriage.
One afternoon, a few weeks after I had first met him, he suddenly made
his appearance in my room very proudly with a garland of marigolds round
his neck. He explained that he had come from the farewell meeting at the
school, where he had resigned. This surprised me very much, because he
added that he was not going to a new and better job but had become
unemployed. I did not press him about the reason, nor did he tell me how
he carried on during the period of unemployment. Within a few weeks he
got a very odd job, and it was then that I learned that he had at times to go
without regular meals before he got it. Sometimes he ate a few pice worth of
gram, at others a shopkeeper gave him a full meal on credit. I scolded him
severely, and told him that he should have become my guest. He only
replied that he did not want to bother me.
The job he had secured was queer enough.
No. Bibhuti knew that Keith's 'amity-enmity' theory perfectly described the communal polarization of Bengal in the Twenties.
It was to lecture against the
slaughter of cows on behalf of the Cow Protection Society of Calcutta
patronized by the Marwari millionaire Keshoram Poddar.
The Indian National Congress achieved mass contact through cow-protection leagues. Incidentally, its founder, A.O Hume- though a Scottish ICS officer- was a Vegetarian Vedantin who believed cow protection was essential for agronomic reasons.
He described
the durbar of the great man with humour to me, particularly how he was
always sitting with half-a-dozen telephone sets around him, which brought
him news of the stock market. So, off he went to the southern part of
Chittagong district, to save cows in that predominantly Muslim area of
Bengal. He said a good deal about the opportunity this lecture tour gave
him to learn public speaking. Afterwards he often addressed literary meetings and conferences.
Dhan Gopal was 4 years older than Bibhuti. His generation of emigres tended to move in a Socialist or Marxist direction. But, in Bengal, for a Brahmin, the better course was to gain Marwari patronage by being useful to the Mahasabha.
Soon he gave up this job and became private
secretary to a well-known landowner in Calcutta. I asked him to come over
to the boarding house I was in, and got him the room I have spoken about,
which he shared at first with another literary man, also known to me.
It was then that I learned the story of his resignation. It had a romantic
history behind it.* When working in the school south of Calcutta he had
first taken up lodgings with a Brahmin family of the village. There was a
young girl in it, who found that he was utterly incapable of looking after
himself and so when he was at school she came into his room, tidied it up,
and made everything comfortable. She took a fancy to him, which certainly
could be called love, and after some time she began to leave letters for him.
I have read these, about ten in all so far as my recollection goes. There was
not one explicit word of love in them, but no one could make any mistake
about their spirit. I have never read anything more simple, sincere, and
pure: they gave expression to an intense yearning to serve him, as if she was
saying: Behold your handmaiden! But the girl did not belong to his
subcaste of Brahmins, and so in those days there could be no question of
his marrying her.
A theme worthy of Sharat!
To prevent awkwardness, he first came away to Calcutta,
and then resigned from the school.
This was not, however, the only one of his affairs of the heart, which were
always begun and carried on by the girls and not by him. Somehow he
attracted girls, and in his later years his literary standing helped him. In
those days Bengali girls who were taking to higher education developed a
tendency to fall in love with the writers they admired (of course, novelists
and poets, and never writers like me) without ever seeing them, and
afterwards tried to get personally acquainted, with the sole avowed object of
hero worship. In his own response to these opportunities, Bibhuti Babu did
not adhere to the strict principle he had followed in the affair just
mentioned, but seemed to enjoy the game without getting entangled
himself. He also seemed really to believe that the girls too would not suffer.
If I had read Trollope then, I would have compared him to Johnny Eames.
There was no similarity. Eames saved the life of a rich man and got a bequest. Bibhuti was an artist.
Until I married he would come and tell me about these affairs,
they were Platonic. Nothing wrong with having a muse or being a mentor to an aspiring song-bird.
and I
always scolded him. He never took that seriously, and either thought that I was a puritan and prig, or merely the tail-less fox. After my marriage he
transferred his confidences to my wife who showed a good deal of amused
tolerance of his affairs even to the point of looking on with enjoyment
when one day he brought a little girl of about twelve and about four feet
tall to our house and sat on my wife’s bed with her little hands clasped in
his very big ones.
But one affair made her angry. As it happened, a highly educated
modern Bengali girl fell in love with him and out of that feeling went on
repulsing a most devoted lover of hers. This girl was very well known to
my wife, and a friend of hers who knew the ill-treated young man came to
her and complained about the dog in the manger.
It is one thing to talk poetry. Marriage is a prosaic business.
My wife, of course,
gave a long lecture to Bibhuti Babu, without producing the slightest effect
on him. He would even take a long and uncomfortable journey of three
hundred miles to see the girl when he did not have the slightest serious
intention.
In the end Bibhuti Babu played the game once too well, and was caught
in matrimony, and that at the age of forty-seven.
Bibhuti had educated his younger brother who was able to qualify as a Doctor. It is said that a contractor who had borrowed some money from Bibhuti put a house in Ghatsila in his name. Bibhuti visited it in 1938, thinking it could be a residence for his brother but fell in love with the place. He settled there and got married. Tragically, his brother, who nursed him in his last illness, felt guilty that some negligence of his own had killed his brother. Thus, he drowned himself. For a Hindu, this incident has as much mathos as pathos.
But he did not feel
punished at all, and lived happily ever afterwards. He continued his visits
to my wife, and told her of his married happiness, how his wife would tie
the end of her sari to the end of his dhoti and prevent his getting out of
bed too early in the morning. Now, this is a very effective means of
keeping a Bengali when you do not want to part with him. Bibhuti Babu
himself applied the same method to me without going to its extreme
length. When I went to see him and rose to take my departure he would
seize the flounce of my dhoti and keep it firmly in his closed fist. In that
situation, given the manner in which we wore the dhoti, nobody could get
away without leaving it behind.
His curiosity about women, even when he was not involved in a love
affair, was uncontrollable,
He was a novelist. To be able to accurately depict Bengali womenhood was a valuable work skill.
and it would lead him to situations which were
farcical at his expense.
Here I give some examples. When he was a little boy of about five or six
his father brought him to Calcutta and took lodgings in a slum in a rather
disreputable quarter of the city. Next to their house was a better house,
and a kept woman lived there. She would invite little Bibhuti to talk or to
play with her. Of course, had his father been a normal parent such a thing
could never have happened. He was not, and so Bibhuti became very fond
of the woman. However, towards the evenings she would say: ‘Now, child, go home, for my Babu [protector] will come.’ That must have been before
1900.
Bibhuti turned this childhood memory into a story which was the basis of 'Amar Prem' starring Rajesh Khanna & Sharmila Tagore.
And one day in 1 925 or so he came to the house where I was living with
my brothers after leaving Mirzapore Street, in a state of utter panic and
seemed to be ready to say as Wellington said of Waterloo: ‘It was a damned
nice thing - the nearest run thing you ever saw in your life.’ The story was
this. He quite remembered the house and its location, and, out of an
overwhelming desire to see the woman, had gone to it. By that time it had
become a regular brothel, and when the young women saw my friend with
all his embonpoint they all fell on him, and each one tried to drag him to her
room. Bibhuti Babu told me that he loudly protested his innocence, and
was treated to hilarious and pitiless laughter. At first I also roared with
laughter. But afterwards I gave him a lecture on common sense.
Bibhuti was an artist. He had the common touch. That is why his works have become part and parcel of the sensibility of people my age.
At about the same time he came again and told me that he was going to
see the girl for whose sake he had resigned his job, because he had heard
she was now married and he wanted to find out if she was happy.
He wanted her to see him see her being happy. Nothing wrong in that at all.
I was
horrified and tried to dissuade him. But, of course, he would not listen. The
next day he came again, and from his face I could guess how the visit had
gone. He said that he had just come from the station and related his story.
When he arrived he was received very politely, but before he could inquire
about the girl he heard piercing screams coming from the inner house, and
he was told apologetically that their niece was having her confinement.
Bibhuti Babu added that he did not wait to hear another word, and ran as if
for dear life. I only said that he had got what he deserved.
He got more. Platonic love is all very well. What women really want is baby. Men remain outside that charmed circle and thus approach Durga- who is difficult to approach.
On another occasion, when he was over forty, a very mischievous writer
friend of mine played him a cruel practical joke, and he came to complain
about it to me in furious anger. He said that the wicked man had promised
to show him an Anglo-Indian (Eurasian) prostitute if he would go and wait
in Wellington Square at nine in the evening. He had gone and sat in the
cold on that November night for two hours and neither the friend nor the
prostitute had come. ‘Could you imagine anything more treacherous?’
Bibhuti Babu asked me. The reason for his curiosity was that at that time
Eurasian prostitutes were regarded by Bengali young men as quite the de
luxe things in that line, and so he wanted to find out if their reputation was
justified.
A story featuring such a 'tart with a heart' would have sold well, more particularly because you could plausibly put in bits of Barrett Browning's verse into her mouth.
Yet I know if the woman had come Bibhuti Babu would have
taken to flight, as he actually did on another occasion. This time I was in no
mood to be amused. I told him that I thought he still had some self-respect left not to be led away by curiosity of that order, especially when he knew as
well as I did what the character of our writer friend was.
Probably at the bottom of all this weakness was the fact that Bibhuti Babu
rather piqued himself on his looks. He was a stout man of middle height,
and physically not unimpressive. He also had a very intelligent and pleasant
expression. But nobody would have called him a handsome man. But he
never took that view and he would often twit me on the smallness of my
eyes. He would say that they were like little snails while his were long and
large.
He also had a great fascination with himself, and would ponder over his
personality. He was very fond of Tolstoy’s War and Peace, as I also was, and
he would tell me that he was like Peter Bezukhov.
i.e. represented 'Prakriti'- nature- rather than an artificial, or hot-house, culture. It is to his ears that Tolstoy unseals the great truth that if we cavil at sickness, God won't grant us death.
I, who had no less
fascination with myself, at once replied that I would rather be Prince
Andrew Bolkonsky. Then he suddenly asked me: ‘And who do you think is
Boris Drubetskoi?’ And he took my breath away by saying: ‘Don’t you think
it is X?’, mentioning the name of a friend of mine whom he knew only by
report. That friend, in spite of his great qualities, was something of a
climber, and had in fact pushed his way into the highest circles in Calcutta.
I did not expect Bibhuti Babu would be able to detect such a character.
He didn't. Common report did.
These almost childish weaknesses made him more lovable. But there
was one trait in his character which after two decades of familiarity with him
caused me both puzzlement and dismay. This was a sort of hardness, which
lay at the core of his outwardly soft nature and made him incapable of
strong personal affection for anybody. His stories revealed a deep
compassion and tenderness for the joys and sorrows of humble people
taken in the mass and typicalized as individuals. But personally I saw often
that he could be totally indifferent even to those very near him. It may have
come from his intensely egocentric nature or from the first sorrow of his life
which made him grow a protective callousness. I heard that he doted on the
son of his old age, who was very young when he died.
He was three. Which kid isn't very lovable at that age?
But that sort of love in
an old man is often a form of self-love.
Nonetheless, his egocentric nature showed a good side as well, for he
never felt any envy or jealousy over the success or good fortune of fellow-
writers.
He had worked harder than them and his fame would outlive theirs. Thanks to the Simpsons, who doesn't know the name Apu?
The writer class is not distinguished by this virtue, and in Bengal it
is still less so. Bibhuti Babu was, however, immune to this meanness. Once,
when to my thinking he was being lazy over the completion of his first novel,
1 wrote to him that he must hurry up, because some others - 1 gave names were already becoming well-established without having his ability. He
replied that it did not matter, he did not grudge anybody’s success, nor did
he feel upset by his slowness. He would do what he wanted to do in his time,
and he did.
I think Bibhuti was aware of the vogue in England and America for romances set in out of the way rural districts. Could he supply something of the sort himself? He needed to proceed carefully. You can't just have a rustic Bengali maiden quote 'Urn Burial' or Victor Hugo thought, Strindberg might be all right. This was a matter which required some little research.
Niradh's father was a lawyer and he had elder brothers and other family connections. Thus Bibhuti pretended to be naive and cowardly so as to benefit from such protection as this intellectual friendship could afford him. It is sad that Bibhuti did not live to see his friend's autobiography win the praise of leading English men of letters like J.C Squires & E.M Forster. Like Dhan Gopal, both were from rural Bengal but, from an early age, by their own exertions, made themselves at home in the literature of distant continents
