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Literary Review
Unflattering portrait
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Dahan raises questions regarding translations — between languages and between reality and fiction, says ABHIJIT GUPTA.
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WITH a novel like Suchitra Bhattacharya's Dahan, it is tempting to talk about translation not just in terms of language, but also in terms of the translation between reality and fiction. Dahan was inspired by a real-life incident in Calcutta a few years ago, in which a journalist rushed to the rescue of a woman who was being sexually assaulted by a group of men near the Tollygunj Metro station. Though Bhattacharya claimed that all the characters in her novel were imaginary, it was clear that she was attempting to negotiate the tricky passage from reality to fiction without diluting the immediacy and the horror of the incident.
However, such is inevitably the effect when art draws from life, especially when there is unfinished business in real life. In Dahan, the young men who are arrested on the basis of an FIR filed at the initiative of Jhinuk, the journalist, get off due to lack of evidence and the reluctance on the part of the assaulted woman — Romita — to identify her aggressors. She gets little or no support from her conservative god-bothered in-laws to fight the case. Her husband Palash, who is unsupportive throughout, implies that Romita had asked for it and takes out his aggression on Romita through marital rape. Eventually, the defence lawyer runs rings round Jhinuk, casting aspersions on her morality and motives in rushing to the aid of Romita.
Dahan does not make for feel-good reading. It is an utterly unflattering portrait of some of the least lovable features of Bengali middleclass life. Nevertheless, questions linger, the reader is not satisfied with the anodyne compensations of fiction. In real life, what happened to the men who had assaulted the woman? Were they punished? Did their case come up for trial? Do they walk among us? In asking such questions, perhaps the reader breaks fealty with the novelist, who is, after all, writing a novel and not a police report. But there is also a desire on the part of the reader to be assured of a narrative closure, both in fiction and reality. While the novelist can supply such a closure in fiction, it is beyond her power to do so in reality.
A second level of translation was undertaken when Rituporno Ghosh made Dahan into an award-winning film. Again, there is a degree of unease, almost an air of apology, in the way in which Ghosh shrinks from utilising the possibilities of the medium. The film is little more than a naive and straightforward translation — from text into pictures — with almost no attempt to ask new questions of the narrative. Why bother to make a film if you have nothing new to say about the story?
The final — and most literal — form of translation has been attempted by Mahua Mitra and Srishti publishers. The book is well produced and it is pleasing to see the editor named on the title page. The first impressions are, however, belied by the lack of attention to details — for instance, we are not told when Dahan was first published. We are told that the book won an award but not the name of the award. There is almost no biographical data about Bhattacharya. The translation is workmanlike but fails to recapture the tart, astringent quality of the original. Like most Bengali novels, direct speech occupies a large portion of Dahan. These speeches have been translated with accuracy, but the result is still a halfway house between English and Bengali. Perhaps what ultimately eluded Mitra was the capacity to translate contexts as well as language.
Dahan (The Burning), Suchitra Bhattacharya, translated by Mahua Mitra, Srishti, 2001, Rs. 195.
Abhijit Gupta teaches English Literature at Jadavpur University.
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