Sircar’s book on Bengal Renaissance is a work of highly impressive scholarship in its own sphere and deserves to be widely read. It is a tribute to Bengal’s literary heritage
Sanjay Sircar’s Fantasy Fictions from the Bengal Renaissance: Abanindranath Tagore: The Make-Believe Prince (Kheerer Putul) : Gaganendranath Tagore: Toddy-Cat the Bold (Bhondar Bahadur) (Oxford University Press) has to be viewed at three levels — his location of both works, widely known in the Bengali-speaking world, in a new Little Tradition emerging from the massive creative churning of the Bengal Renaissance; the global discourse around children’s literature and fantasy and folk tales; and the quality and authenticity of his English translations of the two works.
Evaluation of translations can be dicey. Views differ. Beginning with the titles, Toddy-Cat the Bold is appropriate but Make-Believe Prince for Kheerer Putul (literally doll made of solidified sweetened milk) would raise eyebrows. He stumbles here and there such as when he translates “Raat ekta ki dedtar par (Toddy-Cat the Bold) as “About one or half past at night.” One or one-and-a-half am is really early morning. A more appropriate translation would have been, “About an hour or an-hour-and-a-half past midnight.” Generally, however, the English renditions are authentic, readable and retain the distinctive flavours of the originals.
Sircar displays impressive knowledge of the history of children’s and fantasy literature, the commonalities in the diverse works in the genre worldwide, and their contribution to identity-assumption/determination. The question, however, remains: Is he right in his contextualisation of the two works in the narrative of the Bengal Renaissance? He traces the latter’s origins to “a multi-faceted socio-cultural transformation” that “metropolitan Calcutta seems to have undergone” as a result of the “various, and sometimes quite disparate, strands of British-Indian interactions throughout the 19th century.” He is right. Further, though the introduction of Western education through instruction in English, primarily the work of the Law member in Governor-General William Bentinck’s council, Thomas Babington Macaulay, was at the root of the transformative interactions, initiating a renaissance was far from his thoughts. His intention was “to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect.”
Of course, British influence alone did not trigger the Renaissance; its advent, as Sircar states, was facilitated by the unorthodox and heterogenous socio-cultural ethos prevailing in Bengal, located at the periphery of the Mughal empire and relatively immune from the orthodoxies prevailing in it. He has rightly stated that the Renaissance marked Bengal’s transition from medievalism to modernity and was characterised by eclecticism and irreverence in discourse and literary explorations. These explorations branched off from the avenues of “high literature” into the alleys harbouring hitherto marginalised sectors including Little Traditions.
The authors of the two translated works belonged to a category known as Bhadralok or gentle folk, a term given its salience in contemporary historical discourse by JH Broomfield in Elite Conflict in a Plural Society: Twentieth-century Bengal where he describes them as constituting a status group in Talcott Parson’s sense of the word rather than a class in the Marxian or Weberian sense. They were “a socially privileged and consciously superior group, economically dependent on landed rents and professional and colonial employment.” He carefully differentiates the Bhadralok from the middle class. They did “not include many middle-class elements like merchants and prosperous peasants, while encompassing some persons from both higher and lower classes.”
Sircar recognises the Bhadralok’s role in the Bengal Renaissance. His statement that the latter is “usually divided into a series of sub-periods,” is, however, problematic. The term “usually” raises questions as there is no consensus on the matter. Also, history is a process of continuous unfolding and an element of arbitrariness invariably attends chronological division of periods — even in the case of macro ones like ancient, medieval and modern. The hazards of such exercises become clear from his earmarking of the first sub-period as being “‘from the beginning’ till 1833.” From which date did the Bengal Renaissance begin? Even the bravest would hesitate to answer.
There have been avoidable sweeping statements. Thus Sircar writes, “It does seem to be the case that after 1765, when the East India Company took over control of large portions of Eastern India from the Mughal emperor Shah Alam, commerce flourished in urban Bengal, and systems of transport and communication were set up, as were a civil administration, a modern bureaucracy, a police service, a new legal system — and institutions of learning.”
While all this is true, Sircar overlooks the devastating consequences of British rule such as the famine of 1770 in which one-third of Bengal’s population perished. Madhusree Mukherjee writes in her preface to Churchill’s Secret War: The British Empire and the Ravaging of India During World War II, “The famine of 1770 set the stage not only for the British Raj (as the imperial era in India would eventually be called) and the chain of famines that occurred throughout the reign but also, ultimately, for the emergence of impoverished and strife-torn South Asia.” And, of course, British plunder of India has been laid bare by RC Dutt in his seminal Economic History of Bengal in two volumes.
All this notwithstanding, Sircar’s is a work of highly impressive scholarship in its own sphere and deserves to be widely read. And, of course, it also deserved an index!
(The author is Consulting Editor, The Pioneer)
