Murder in Bengal
Abhijit Gupta
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No, this is not another article about the depredations of the underworld in our fair city. True, I am wearing gangster shades as I write this article but that is merely protection from the glare of the monitor. Today, my subject matter is crime fiction in general, and the fictional detective in particular. Take a bow, Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot, Pheluda et al.
It was my good fortune to be present at what might well have been the first ever seminar on crime fiction in India. Organised by the department of English, Jadavpur University, this seminar was sensationally titled ‘Murder in the English Department’.
Happily, no one was dead at the end of the two-day seminar, though on one occasion, a power cut plunged the entire auditorium into pitch darkness, giving ample opportunities for murder.
Since the 19th century, Bengalis have first been avid readers, and then writers, of crime fiction. Sherlock Holmes may have walked the streets of faraway London, but Baker Street is no less familiar to the average Bengali than, say, Beadon Street or Bowbazar.
The spectral hound of the Baskervilles may have haunted the Dorset moors but that did not prevent us from seeing the "footprints of a gigantic hound" on the alluvial soil of Gangetic Bengal.
The comic genius Poroshuram even brought Holmes in person to Calcutta, in a brilliant story called 'Nil Tara' (‘The Blue Star’) where the super sleuth more than meets his match in one Ardhendu Mustafi.
Like its predecessors in England and France, Bengali crime fiction began with what we may call ‘police fiction’-- the more or less truthful memoirs of retired police officers.
The first ever work of crime fiction in the Bengali language was ‘Banamali Daser Hatya’ (‘The Murder of Banamali Das’) in the ‘Darogar Doptor’ series.
Another early example were the exploits of the real life ‘daroga’, Banka-ullah, written up his Dr Watson, Kaliprasanna Chattopadhyay.
But it was not long before the figure of the private eye, or the amateur private detective -- who typically assists a bumbling constabulary -- came to occupy the centre-stage of crime fiction.
The decades immediately after independence saw Bengali crime fiction at its most fecund. Many readers of this column will have grown up on a childhood diet of Kiriti Roy, Byomkesh Bokhsi, Hukakashi, Bimol-Kumar, Joyonto-Manik... the list could go on endlessly.
These heroes -- with the exception of Byomkesh -- more properly belonged to the genre of pulp fiction than crime fiction.
Till Quentin Tarantino hit upon the happy -- but by no means original -- idea of rehabilitating the cops and hitmen of forgotten Fifties pulp in Pulp Fiction, they had inhabited a half-forgotten, ill-lit corner of our consciousness, always well-dressed, always giving chase or being chased, superbly suave even in the direst of vicissitudes.
All this changed with the coming of Sharadindu Bandopadhyay’s Byomksesh Bokshi. Byomkseh threw away the three-piece suit, the rakish fedora, the regulation brier and slipped into the eminently more comfortable dhuti-panjabi.
He even threw away the word detective and chose to describe himself as satyanweshi, or truth-seeker. Along with his trusty lieutenant Ajit, Byomkesh featured in some of the finest -- and most original -- crime stories written in Bengali.
Prior to Sharadindu, originality of plot had not been a strength of Bengali crime fiction. The most persistent offender in this regard was the prolific and entertaining Hemendra Kumar Roy, many of whose plots were lifted lock, stock and barrel from western classics.
On the other hand, to Roy falls the credit of creating the most bumbling bobby of them all, the gluttonous and overweight Sundar-babu, whose inflections on the monosyllable ‘hoom’ could convey the whole gamut of human emotions.
The high seriousness and erudition of the Byomkesh stories were however suitably counterpointed by the execrable productions of Sashadhar Datta and Swapankumar.
Their respective protagonists, Mohan and Dipak Chatterjee, were the source of a host of unforgettable one-liners which have become the stuff of legend.
Some random examples: ""OÏs®a Yw Yw LÏlu¡ HLV¡ h¡ÏSu¡ ®Nm''; ""HL q¡®a Ïlimi¡l, HL q¡®a R¤Ïl, AeÉ q¡®a jÉ¡f''; ""c£fL QÉ¡V¡S£Ñ p¡h®jÏl®e L®l f¤L¤®l ®e®j ®N®me''z Some of these howlers may well be apocryphal but Bengali literature would be the poorer without them.
Coming to Pheluda from Mohan and Dipak Chatterjee may seem almost anti-climactic. And indeed, by the time Satyajit Ray started producing crime fiction for Desh, the golden age of Bengali crime fiction was all but over.
For over two decades, Ray dominated the field like no one had done before but it was also true that fewer and fewer practitioners were producing crime fiction with any degree of seriousness.
After Ray’s death, the situation has further worsened and the only genre that features crime any more is the adventure story written for juvenile readers.
The disappearance of the Bengali crime novelist -- there’s a mystery well worth pondering over! And if the gumshoe were ever to return to walk the streets of Calcutta, his first case could well be ‘The Mystery of the Vanishing Writers’.
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