A Babu's tale PDF
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Samar Sen at 1hc Editorial Desk ., . " , Google U~IVER~IT'f' Of M CH GAN Trans/ared by ASOK MITRA FormLrly oft M lndi.aia Civil Service 2 Oancndra Mitra Lane Calc.uua 700 004 • India u'N llf P. 'TY Of Mlr:ttlGAN (/f'{(tl ©AsokMitra Published: June 1991 PN Cover design : Shuvaprasanna 531-t ,SL./ A3Z8 lffftl Rs. 50.00 Published by Arijit Kumar PAPYRUS 2 Ganendra Mitra Lane, Calcutta 4 Composed by 40B Prem Chand Boral Street. Calcutta 12 AsTitAGRAPIIIA Printed by G. C. B. & Co PvT. Lm. 45 Arabinda Sarani, Calcutta 5 Google Original from Digitized by UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN C..L PL-tfio-S'i 3-ll-4'3 I undertook this translation to celebrate Samar Sen's seventieth binhday and was delighted when MJ. Akbar took it in that spirit and promptly published in on consecutive Sundays in The Telegraph magazine from 17 November 1985 onwards. Around the year 1936 I came to know about two dozen men who have since kept me wondering what kind of Bengal or Calcutta could have produced them. They were so different from those we usually see around us today and of whom I cannot feel overly proud. They were a variety of people from different worlds. This was the time, one must remember, when Calcutta was most catholic in sympathies and tolerant of dissent, not given to counting the cost, ever ready to espouse a lost cause. There was no dearth of people make you sit up and take note. to Unlike today none of th.em took themselves seriously but were willing to . take you that way. What was so refreshing, and even more so in retrospect today, was their passion for common decency. All of them spurred, as being beneath them, the sweet sickly smell of success, even when it was within easy reach. They were a different breed of babus from those who went bcfo re and came efter. Samar's comment on the translation was he could hear his chirpy Scottish Church College voice all right, but filtered through a staid Presidency College accent I retorted I was glad sixty years o{ association had not sullied my academic caste. Shuvaprasanna, true born son of Calcutta and one of the few survivors of that breed which forms the subject of this study readily acceded to my request and designed the jacket of this book in honour of Samar's memory. 18.6.91 AsoK MITRA Google Original from Digitized by UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN Google Original from Digitized by UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN CONTENTS TRANSLATOR'S NOTE 9 CHAPTER ONE 23 CHAPTER Two 30 CHAPTER 'fHREE 35 CHAPTER FOUR 39 CHAPTER FIVE 52 CHAPTER Six 54 CHAPTER SEVEN 62 CHAPTER EIGIIT 67 CHAPTER NINE 74 Google Original from Digitized by UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN Google Original from Digitized by UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN TRANSLATOR'S NOTE In Hemingway's The TorrenJs ofS pring, Yogi Johnson calls a couple to of Indians passing along the road who come over and ask whether the big l white chief 'got chew of tobacco' or carried liquor. Yogi hands them a package of Peerless and his pocket flask and says, 'Listen, I am about to address you a few remarks about the war. A subject on which I feel to I deeply.' As he addresses them on how the war went by successive stages in a good soldier, one of the Indians goes to sleep on the other's shoulder. 'Well, how did you like the speech ?' Yogi asks the Indian who is awake. White chief educated like hell ... Was white chief in the war ?' 'I landed in France in May 1917.' 'I thought maybe white chief was in the war from the way he· talked.' the Indian says. 'Him', he raises the head of his sleeping companion, 'he got VC. Me, I got DSO and MC and bar, I was tnajor in the Fourth CMRS.' I have lived oil the fat of the land, talked and taught of poverty, income distribution and malnutrition in international forums for a quarter of a century. I know a little about oppression; I have been part of its cunning machine. But I would hate to be caught like Yogi Johnson holding forth on resistance, never having been in it • I have of course seen the face of resistance in bits and pieces in the forties, the late sixties and the middle seventies. Always from coigns of safety though, for I am not of the stuff of which heroes are made. But now, since 1975, with everybody helping himself liberally to garibi hatao, I feel very confused who is oppressor and who is resister. How quickly or how oft en they interchange their roles, while clambering up and down the gadi. Frankly, I am quite disoriented. This is a translation of the 1978 (first) edition of Babu Brittanta incorporating small additions and corrections which Samar Sen communicated to me soon after it was published. I had made the last major translation in 1961 for the Sahitya Akademi of Rabindranath Tagore's Chaluranga. There were one of two short stories by Manik Bandyopadhyay thereafter. What had drawn me to them was the tradition of prose that was truly prose but managed to speak at many levels : transparent, direct on a straight course, unadorned by opaque ornament, lean and sinewy. Samar's prose attracted me by the same token. What was more, it had the right note of self-deprecation which, among other things, makes an autobiography readable. I did the first three chapters in 125 : 2 9 Google Original from Digitized by UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN 1978 bul pul the book away lesl the Yogi Johnsons among the contributors lo Fronlier should feel incensed thal a dyed-in-the-wool bureaucrat was defiling the image of the Great Campaigner. Samar's seventieth birthday ( 1986) was meanwhile drawing near and I thought a translation of his own autobiography might be a more fittingfeslthrifl on the occasion than the volume recently published 'in his honour'. Besides, there might be readers interested to know what men like Samar Sen have meant to people like me. Around the year 1936 I suddenly came upon about two dozen men who have since kept me wondering what kind ofB engal or Calcutta could have produced them. They were so different from those we usually see around us, and of whom I cannot feel overly proud. They were a variety of people from different worlds. To name only some of them. My teachers Prafullachandra and Rabindranarayan Ghosh and Susobhanchandra Sarkar ; Buddhadev Bose, Bishnu Dey, Jyotirindra Maitra and Chanchalkumar Chatterjee, poets and excellent human beings (one of them later donned an illfitting unifonn and insisted on wearing it as long as he lived, which hurt his verse); Radharaman Mitra and Bankimchandra Mukherjee, of whom one was no longer an activist, while the other was very much one, to both of whom Samar introduced me; Jamini Roy, beckoning one to explore the depths of Bengal's form and grace; Ninnalkumar Bose, a wandering scholar who knew almost everything about everything in India and certainly about Calcutta; Sunil Janah and Prithvis Neogy, fantastically versatile and surely two of the finest men I have ever known; Pulinbehari Sen, again from a different world of editing and book production; Sombhu Mitra, who revolutionised the stage and playacting; Dineschandra Sen, Samar's own grandfather, whom I knew mainly through his writings and who had the gift of giving you a feel of Bengal's creative society and how it has unfolded itself down the ages; oddly enought, so some might think, Samar's f:ither, Arunchandra Sen, whose courage of conviction and eccentricity I could not but admire because I have always lacked them so; and, not least, Samar himself. And yet this was the time, one must remember, when Calcutta was most catholic in its sympathies, not given to counting the cost, and ever ready to espouse a lost cause. It was an exhilarating climate ofs truggle, disse,nt, involvement in whatever was happening anywhere at home and in the wide world. From the troubled world of the United States and its fiery writers; the Spanish Civil War; the French Popular Front; Nazism and Fascism in the heart of Europe; hope in the Soviet Union; to the perfidy in China and hope yet again in Yenan. And of course the turmoil al home and the new philosophy sweeping like wildfire through clositered gaols of an alien government or carried furtively between innocent textbook 10 Google Original from Digitized by UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
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