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Literary Review
Remote and relevant
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The most welcome thing about this translation of Aranyak is that it has been made. This unusual work should have been introduced to non-Bengali readers long back, says SUKANTA CHAUDHURI.
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THE first welcome thing about this translation of Aranyak is that it has been made. This unusual work should have been introduced long ago to readers who do not know Bengali. It is of original and enigmatic form: a thin veneer of fiction over a substantially autobiographical account of the writer's engagement with a vast tract of forest that covered northern Bihar 80 years ago. It is simultaneously an account of nature and of people living amidst nature; a graphic account of a townsman's transformation in that milieu; and a confessional as well, for the writer was employed to destroy that forest, settle cultivators on the land, and extract revenue for the landlords.
Today we are familiar with somewhat similar forms and techniques, through works like Amitav Ghosh's In an Antique Land. But Aranyak remains in a class of its own. The time-gap since it was written has lent its nostalgia a dimension of despair; at the same time, the environmental message has acquired a new urgency. Its theme is disturbingly remote and disturbingly relevant.
Given the implications of the title, the most impressive feature of the book is its pervasive humanity. This needs stressing in view of the translator's modishly achronic remark, from the vantage-point of 21st-Century radical chic, that the forests seemed "unpeopled" to Bibhutibhushan only because the tribals did not register on his bhadralok vision. The tract in question was sparsely populated by any standard. But against this setting, the writer presents a sustained and moving chronicle of human life: the grinding poverty of its denizens, the simplicity of their lives and thoughts, their extraordinary toil and as extraordinary quietude and resignation: above all, the dignity that invests their humble lives. It is a tale of suffering, victimisation and urban guilt; of an undramatic yet titanic struggle, redefining an entire landscape; and, at times, of a self-oblivious creativity lost to "advanced" societies almost by definition.
The forest is everywhere, with its beauty, its menace and its endlessly suggestive silence; but it chiefly acquires significance from its impact on the human spirit. This spirit emanates from the people who have their homes there: the bhadralok observer merely records their lives, presenting his account as sober homage to a supposedly "inferior" way of life. To miss this is to miss the point of the book, to lose out on the good it might do us. It is usually misguided to speak of books doing us good, but Aranyak must rank as an exception.
Rimli Bhattacharya's translation is competent and easy flowing. The occasional ineptitudes of phrasing and idiom bring home the alien flavour of the setting, especially when incorporated in the speech of the forest-dwellers. They sit less happily in the body of the narrator's text. Sometimes they may simply be wrong: "nutcrackers" chop supari, and "opera glasses" (field glasses, surely?) are used to view the forest. We hear of that unbotanical phenomenon, a "bamboo reed", and the unzoological ascription of polecats and cheetahs to the region.
The Bengali is sometimes misunderstood, as when "Mohuree" is taken as part of a name, fear is said to contribute to the udaas mood, and om (warmth) is interpreted as the Hindu holy word. Jyathamashai, used by a tribal princess of her great-grandfather, does not mean "elder uncle" but simply "respected elder". This is a sampling of the translator's lapses, some of them serious ones; but for less exacting readers, they do not detract materially from the readability of the text.
The introduction is not without insight; but it is scrappy and, as already noted, rather too inclined to apply judgmentally the subalternist ideology of a later age. A truer judgment would place the work in the proximate ancestry of subaltern studies. A laudable feature is the cognisance taken of Bengali scholarship — indeed, the recognition, all too rare in English, that most Indian literature not only appears in other languages but generates considerable critical activity in them.
The notes and glossary needed more careful preparation. There are elaborate notes on Heliodorus, Marco Polo and the East India Company, but amin, baramashya, kos/kros and char are left unexplained. The mention of "kilos" is not only anachronistic but contrary to the translator's professed policy.
In a word, the work would have benefited from a little more professionalism in translation and editing. This does not negate the boon to readers without Bengali, who will now have attractive access (doubly so for the fine production) to a strikingly distinctive masterpiece.
Aranyak: Of the Forest, Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyaya, translated by Rimli Bhattacharya, Seagull, 2002, Rs. 425.
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