Book review: Three Stories by Jibanananda Das

Title: Three Stories
Author: Jibanananda Das (Translated by Chandak Chattarji)
Publisher: Paperwall
104 pages
Price: Rs 200

Rare is the Bengali who doesn't know at least a few lines of Jibanananda Das's iconic poem Bonolata Sen by heart. Equally rare is the non-Bengali who hasn't heard of this poem, on which rests the reputation of this most reclusive, most enigmatic, most challenging of Bengali poets in the post-Tagore era. Less known is the fact that so much of Das' reputation was posthumous. But even less known is the fact of Jibanananda Das the poet's fiction.

That fact is now well revealed in a slim volume released by Mumbai-based publishing house, Paperwall, Three Stories by Jibanananda Das translated by Chandak Chattarji. As the poet and translator Ranjit Hoskote writes in his foreword to the book: "It has been a privilege to discover Das, the writer of fiction through Chandak Chattarji's elegant and sensitive translation of three of the master's short stories, Chhaya Nat (Shadow Play), Gram o Shohorer Galpo (Tale of City and Village), and Bilash (which retains its original title here). The first two stories were written in the 1930s; internal evidence suggests that the third was written during the mid-1940s. Each of these stories is characterised by a musicality of structure: motifs are introduced, tempi are built up, passages are developed, whether through the solo voice exploring its own labyrinth of conflicting emotions (as in Shadow Play) or through the varying relationships among a trio (as in Tale of City and Village) or across an ensemble of voices that rise, fall away and converge again (Bilash)."

The result is – as Hoskote goes on to demonstrate – enigmatic, haunting and memorable, the fruits of a poet's "secret life". Or, as eminent Malayali litterateur K Satchidanandan puts it: "While the insights are those of a poet, these stories marked by Jibanananda's deep involvement with Bengali landscape, cuisine and culture, transcend his lyrical impulse to become proper, if technically innovative, short stories with the touch of a master of the genre. Chandak Chattarji's English versions have been able to capture the provincial setting and style of the original narratives keeping intact their nuanced psychological implications and larger insights into the human condition."

So what kept Das' short fiction in the shadows for so long? Some of the reasons can be found in the essays that follow the three stories. Whether their delayed entry into the world was on account of "the dilemmas of an excessive self-awareness" or the author's fear that the then-reader of Bengali literature was not ready for "such newness of form, such modern gestures" – the now-reader can decide for himself or herself.

After decades of obscurity for this master-modernist of 20th century Bengali poetry, the time seems ripe for lovers of Jibanananda Das' poetry to get a taste of his prose. As Amalendu Bose puts it, the source of his poetry and fiction was one – "the tremendous agitation of the spirit that Jibanananda had experienced in his quest to understand the true nature of man and express it through the medium of language."