The novel is composed of several vignettes of life in Calcutta, strung together through the experiences of Somnath who is young, from the middle class, and unemployed.
Sankar’s original Bengali novel, Jana Aranya was first published in 1973. It is set in the tumultuous Calcutta (as the city was then known) of the early 1970’s, but could easily be viewed as a metaphor for the many ways in which individuals in urban India are still forced to “prostitute” themselves in order to survive.
The novel is composed of several vignettes of life in Calcutta, strung together through the experiences of Somnath who is young, from the middle class, and unemployed. It was perhaps this collection of vignettes that Satyajit Ray saw as potentially powerful and disturbing when he made a film of Sankar’s novel, and I for one found myself employing a kind of weird double vision (Ray’s excellent visuals superimposed on the printed word) as I read the present translation.
In an “Afterword” dated March 1976, Sankar wrote of the multiple sights and sounds that eventually fused into this hard-hitting critique of his city. His attachment to Calcutta/Kolkata is apparent, as is his eye for detail. He gives us the world of the bhadra lok — its genteel pride, its sentimentalism and clinging to old ways, the role of the family in nurturing togetherness, interlaced with the helplessness of economic depression, urban decay, and the futility of dreams.
The rat race drives Somnath’s friend Sukumar insane while Somnath learns to negotiate the dubious maze of the middleman’s daily grind, increasingly living a lie as he descends into the final ignominy of pimping to please potential clients. Non-Bengali readers who have seen Ray’s film would be familiar with the brutal twist at the end of the novel.
The meticulous translation captures the essence of the novel’s angst. Sankar does not rave but his steady, unrelenting exposé creates a pungent mix that is especially compelling because of its relevance to our own troubled times.
The increased unrest in pockets of India today is a reminder in many ways of the socioeconomic circumstances in which the novel took root, and this latest translated version is an apt warning that the reasons behind the continued present mismatch between growth rates and ground realities should no longer be glossed over.
Vrinda Nabar is former head, department of English, Mumbai University
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