Timeless Tales From Bengal: An Anthology of Bangla Children's and Young Adults' Stories

By Dipankar Roy and Saurav Dasthakur

Buddhadeva Bose, the noted Bengali littérateur, once observed that the greatest treasure of Bangla literature is its children’s and young adults’ literature. The achievements of stalwarts as various as Rabindranath Tagore, Upendrakishore Ray Chowdhury, Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay,Sukumar Ray, Manik Bandyopadhyay, Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay, Sharadindu Bandyopadhyay, Narayan Gangopadhyay, Sunil Gangopadhyay, Satyajit Ray and many others in this realm enable it to match similar traditions existing anywhere in the world.


Their best works also remind us that a good piece for children is also a charming one for the adult.


Their efforts have made Bangla children’s literature a treasure trove that can enamour any child—or anybody—who loves to read. This unique anthology of thirty-four translated stories invites the reader to a feast that offers on the platter most of the sub-genres in the realm: from fantasy, folk tales and animal stories through comic tales, detective fiction and adventure and suspense stories to ghost stories, historical narratives, sports narratives and tales of social consciousness. Enriched with beautiful illustrations, bionotes of the authors, a glossary and an informed Introduction, the book would also be eminently useful to enthusiastic researchers. Between its covers, the volume presents an enjoyable and fairly comprehensive picture of Bangla children’s and young-adults’ short fiction to the non-Bengali readership for the first time in publishing history.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Niyogi
• Release date: Jan 25, 2018
• ISBN: 9789386906236

Book preview

Acknowledgements

Preface

This project was initially conceived as a three-day national-level translation workshop at the Department of English and Other Modern Languages, Visva-Bharati, Santiniketan, way back in early 2014. As we have subsequently realised, this early conception was lacking in a clear idea about the implications of the project. It was more of one of those immature, enjoyable ventures, or adventures, into the enticing world of translation, that too of Bangla children’s and young adults’ short fiction, with little concrete conception either of its justification or of the tangled web that was awaiting at the time when we would start seriously considering publishing the fruits of the workshop in the form of an anthology. Since then it has been a very rich learning curve for us, in more ways than one, a journey in experience, in a way from a blissfully ignorant and exuberant innocence to a state of somewhat more tempered maturity.

First of all, we were clearly inordinately ambitious in wishing to prepare for the non-Bengali English readership a ‘representative’ volume of Bangla children’s and young adults’ short stories in translation. It is only in the process of selecting stories for translation in the workshop, with the administrative ball of the event already rolling fast, that we came to realise the audacity of such a conception. There were so many notable authors and styles involved that it was impossible for us to dish out to our target readership any remotely realistic perception of the incredible richness of the field. We discovered with a pleasant but uncomfortable surprise, in the context of the job in our hands, that there has practically been no writer in the long history of Bangla literature who has not tried her hand, with considerable dexterity, in writing stories for children. Moreover, there were such a great number of genres to consider—from the late-nineteenth-century folk tales and fairy tales to the present-day sci-fi fantasies—that their representation in a single manageable volume was unfeasible in any stretch of imagination. Furthermore, it slowly dawned upon us that limiting the corpus of any cultural production bearing the epithet ‘Bangla’ to the western (that is, Indian) part of the Bengali culture—which we had been rather complacently doing so far—was, to say the least, grievously unfair and essentially self-defeating. Paradoxically enough, it was also impossible to do justice to an equally vibrant and thriving Bangladeshi tradition of children’s and young adults’ short fiction within the limited means that we could possibly afford. Problems compounded themselves thick and fast, and we already began to face the not-so-sweet music of experience, which taught us that the best we could possibly manage was not to produce a ‘representative’ volume in any sense of the term, but to provide our readership with a very tentative, essentially exclusive and fragmented glimpse into the colourful panorama of Bangla children’s narratives. And that is precisely what this volume aims at achieving with all its conspicuous limitations.

However, after the completion of the workshop, we had in our hands twenty beautifully translated stories as an output of the intense endeavour of as many as forty participant-translators—some more experienced and established in the field, others greenhorns but no less enthusiastic—from across the country. Ironically, the number of stories, to our great vexation, now seemed too small for a sizeable anthology. We had no other way but to approach individual translators, who gracefully accepted our request and, finally, helped to make the volume somewhat more reflective of the enormous and versatile reservoir of the domain. If the volume is appreciated by the readership, it would be largely because of the love’s labour of the translators, close to fifty in number.

The stories in this anthology have been arranged chronologically, of course not according to the year of their composition or first appearance, but according to their authors’ year of birth. This may offer the reader an idea about the nature of evolution of Bangla children’s and young adults’ stories and even possibly a peek into the development of Bangla language, albeit through the prism of translation. Chronologically the earliest writer to have been included in the volume is Troilokyanath Mukhopadhyay (1847-1919), and the latest author is Adhir Biswas (born 1955). And there are a host of great authors—some more famous, some less so—between these two whom we have failed to accommodate in the anthology. Yet, in the process of selection, we have tried to be both historical and cross-generic as far as practicable in our approach. It may be appropriate to mention here that during the exercise we have realised that one could never reach a consensus as to what qualifies a story as a work of children’s literature: the mere presence, or even the centrality, of a child figure in a story surely does not make it a part of this category.

The last, but by no means the least, eye-opener came in the form of copyright-related problems, which we so long were blissfully oblivious of, and that explained to us why a volume of such kind did not exist in the market. Of the thirty-one authors, whose thirty-four stories have been included in this anthology, twenty-two had their copyright-holding still intact. This meant that we had to procure the copyright permission for twenty-four stories, which we did, thanks to the kind cooperation of the authors, their legal heirs and other copyright-proprietors. In the process, it has been an honour to meet and personally interact with some of the biggest names in the history of Bangla literature or their heirs and proprietors.

A word on the editorial policy now. We had ten groups of translators in the workshop, with thirteen more individual translators joining the fray later on. We tried to bring in a degree of parity to their works with regard to some outer aspects of language usage, without trying to impose any forced uniformity upon the very palpably variegated individual/group styles. We sought to be consistent across works in terms of culture-specific terminology— for example those pertaining to flora and fauna, food habits and other everyday practices, relational terms, festivities, and so on—and the usage of minor stylistic components, like upper and lower case, italics, inverted commas, and so forth. On a few occasions, however, we made minimal changes in the vocabulary in one or two odd works to make things smoother and happier-reading for our primary target audience—the children and the young adult. Apart from these minor changes, we have tried to retain the colourful diversity in authorial and translational creativity. While we have preferred to leave certain culturally loaded terms untranslated throughout the volume, an exhaustive glossary has been added to acquaint the non-Bengali readers—and even some of their Bengali counterparts—with the implications of some more frequently used topical terms. We did not want to impede the flow of reading by inserting too many notes, which have been kept to the minimum, and used only to explain, as far as practicable, the intricacies of the more nuanced regional terms and expressions, and to enhance the interested reader’s appreciation of certain cultural specificities. We have also added an informed ‘Introduction’ with the aim of providing a somewhat detailed outline of the history, sociology and politics of children’s and young adults’ narratives in Bangla, which the interested, academic-minded researcher may find useful.

We earnestly hope that our efforts will provide both enjoyment for the young minds who are about to set sail for the voyage of life and brief anodyne for the adult souls who are caught in experience in an angst-ridden world. We also hope that this book will encourage publishers to take up similar projects in future because stories for children need to be told.

Introduction

Emile has a mind that is universal not by its learning, but by its faculty to acquire learning; a mind that is open, intelligent, ready for everything, and, as Montaigne says, if not instructed, at least able to be instructed.

Jean Jacques Rousseau

(from Emile, or On Education, 1763)

My dearest young boys! You have no idea how blessed you are. One English poet has stated that as the sun arises in the horizon of one country and sets in another, you too have risen in the sky of our world after having set in the world of gods where you used to dwell previously. Your qualities like innocence, honesty, magnanimity, belief in the goodness of fellow human-beings, complete faith in your parents, ability to be happy all the time and your simplicity are truly heavenly! As man grows older he gradually loses all such qualities… In the Upanishad, our chief Shastra, we come across the advice, ‘Try to assume a boy-like attitude in life, shaking off all your scholarly pride.’ The hallmark of a truly wise man is that he is child-like in his demeanour. Therefore, I salute all you young souls out there. Hail thee! The young soul, the wisest, the sage, the angel! I bow down before thee!

Raj Narayan Bose

(from an article published in Sathi, 1894)

The idea of childish innocence resulted in two kinds of attitude and behaviour towards childhood: firstly, safeguarding it against pollution, by life… and secondly, strengthening it by developing character and reason. We may see a contradiction here, for on the one hand childhood is preserved and on the other hand it is made older than its years; but the contradiction exists only for us of the twentieth century. The association of childhood with primitivism and irrationalism or prelogicism characterizes our contemporary concept of childhood.

Philippe Aries

(from Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life, 1962)

David Lowenthal, in his famous book The Past is a Foreign Country, makes an interesting observation about time travellers. According to him, the golden age the travellers revisit bears little resemblance to any time that ever was. For him, they often end up creating a past out of a childhood divested of responsibilities and an imagined landscape invested with elements they find missing in the present-day world. Lowenthal’s view can be used as an entry point for a discussion on the origin and development of Bangla children’s and young adults’ literature. The reasons are more than one. First, this strand of Bangla literature, like a few others, took definitive shape in colonial times; a period in India’s history when creative artists were trying hard to come to terms with the ignominy of the foreign rule. Writers who started to write with the idea of children and young boys as readers in their minds were also, in a way, time travellers searching for the past glory of a precolonial India. Secondly, as it so often happens in literatures in many other parts of the world, adult individuals who took up pens to write for children in Bangla also gave way to a strong fantasy element and a desire to revisit childhood in their efforts to assume ‘child-like’ (in contradistinction to being ‘childish’) personae so that they could address their young readers in an effective manner. A return, through the creation of imaginative literature, to an almost irretrievably ‘lost past’ of childhood—‘childhood divested of responsibilities’—as a kind of ‘wish fulfilment’ (something very Freudian in nature, one must say) has been a conspicuous motif in the world of Bangla children’s literature since its early days. Thirdly, the formative years of this branch of Bangla sahitya when the writers were trying hard to find their own voice and diction were also the same years in which this part of India witnessed an unprecedented inroad of the marauding forces of modernity into a culture steeped in millennia-old traditions. From the mid-nineteenth century to the early decades of the twentieth, Bengali subjects, to their great surprise, found the world around them changing and changing so fast. Changes in the spheres of political economy and governance, industry and technology, language and education, rural and urban societies and so forth obviously resulted in the disappearance of a number of features and practices of pre-modern ways of life. So, the question might arise, can the evolving nature of Bangla children’s literature be viewed as a means of creating an ‘imagined landscape’ where the missing elements from the bygone era can be accommodated? This is a significant issue because Bangla children’s literature is really the field where we see the meeting of—or even an ‘encounter’ between—the age-old oral traditions of folk tales, rhymes and puzzles, myths and stories belonging to rituals on the one hand and the newly arrived ‘print capitalism’ on the other taking place.

But, before we begin somewhat sketchily mapping the terrain of Bangla children’s literature, let us pen down a few preliminary remarks. So far as children’s literature is concerned, let us remember first of all that there is nothing ‘natural’ about childhood. It is culturally defined and created. It is also a matter of human choice. Factors like consciousness of childhood, patterns of child-rearing and the social role of the child are shaped and controlled by political and psychological forces. The quotations at the beginning of this essay are significant pointers to this particular aspect of the subject under discussion. We have to, therefore, try and contextualise (historically as well as culturally) the child/young-adult figure in the arena of Bangla literature. The diachronic changes in popular perceptions of this figure in Bengal, from a period starting sometime in the middle of the nineteenth century through the twentieth till contemporary times, are significant from this perspective.

In this context, we need to understand the forces at work in the very production of Bangla children’s literature in its book form, the form in which it reaches us. In an attempt to study the modes of production of Bangla children’s literature dialectically we face a few pertinent questions. They are important because in the Bengali book market today books meant for children and the young adult sell more than books for adults. If one takes a look at the weekly bestsellers’ list, published by a leading Bangla daily, one will find that children’s books always top the chart. Production of books for children is big business. Hence, we need to ask, who writes for children? For whom are the books written? How and under what conditions are the books produced? Why are the books written? Where and when, in a comparative manner of speaking, do the writers and the readers for such books exist? How, and with what kinds of distribution system and machineries, do the texts reach from the authors to the readers?

Bangla children’s literature started to develop during the age of colonial modernity. It is common knowledge that issues like identity formation and nation-building project have been central to the history of this literature (Dakshinaranjan Mitra Majumder’s works like Thakurmar Jhuli, published in 1907, when the Swadeshi Movement reached its zenith is an obvious example). However, in the larger societal dynamics, the child has been seen as the future of the nation and at the same time a subject thoroughly excluded from the debates about where the future of India should go in a country where most people, more than half a century after the end of colonial rule, cannot afford the luxury of a ‘childhood’. Furthermore, the categories of gender, class, caste and religion have played crucial roles in the formation of this discourse. Also, here too, like anywhere else in the world, children’s literature is written, published as well as bought primarily by the adult. Its target readers have little to say about the entire process. It will not perhaps be a weak strategy if one begins to trace the major trajectories of the history of Bangla children’s literature with the premise that the chief agency in this discursive field is the urban, Hindu, western-educated, middle-class/upper-middle-class, middle-aged ‘bhadralok’ male who has utilised this genre both as a form and a forum of endless debates about what is ‘fit’ for children to read.

Many consider Kathamala, written by Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar and published in 1856, as the first real specimen in Bangla of what is commonly understood as children’s or young adults’ literature. Vidyasagar had already published two volumes of Varna Parichay, Bodhodoy and Jiboncharit in the early 1850s. But, these books belong to categories like primer or biography whereas ‘katha’ in many Indian languages refers to a ‘story’ and Kathamala is a collection of stories. Hence, the book qualifies as the one with which the journey of Bangla children’s literature begins. It is to be noted here that Vidyasagar had already come up with a Bangla translation of the famous Hindi book Baitalpachchishi. He published this work with the title Betalpanchabingshati in 1847 as a textbook for students learning Bangla, following the instruction of the principal of Fort William College. The twenty-five stories in this collection are adaptations from a collection of Indo-Aryan folk tales called Kathasaritsagar. These tales were collected by Somdevbhatta, a Shaivite Brahmin, about two millennia ago. When Vidyasagar edited the Hindi book in 1852 he referred to the stories as ‘ones belonging to a dark past’—stories that are ‘clumsy attempts at the wonderful sometimes bordering on childishness’. In Kathamala too, published a decade after his earlier collection, he chose stories from the ancient past. But this time he selected stories from Aesop’s Fables that originated in Greece. While introducing these stories for his Bengali readers Vidyasagar wrote: ‘The stories are very interesting; one experiences great entertainment and one also learns important morals in the process.’ The fundamental aesthetic (and, ideological) difference between the two collections is that while the earlier one was a record of the myriad life lived by a human collectivity, the objectivity of the later was to present a moral framework aimed at better living in changing times marked by a logical and scientific temper. It is very significant that the target readers for the first one were adults and the second one was meant primarily for children. Vidyasagar was, thus, all for the consolidation of the education project—the project of training young minds to become modern citizens that got under way with the publication of a number of primers and conduct books around this time—in the world of entertainment as well as reading for pleasure.

This remained the overall drift of the discursivity surrounding the project of supplying children and young adults of a colonial country with reading materials in vernacular until Rabindranath Thakur entered the scene around the turn of the century. One would very much, however, wish, at this point, to puncture the grand narrative of literature for children (of an antiseptic, sanitised and modern kind), as envisioned by Vidyasagar, Madan Mohan Tarkalankar and others. A number of Battala publishing houses had become operational around this time, houses which catered to the demands of the ever-burgeoning market. They thrived on the public’s passion for the sensational and the make-belief—two major hallmarks of popular culture. The Mysteries of the Court of London, Tales from the Arabian Nights—two Battala bestsellers—would be case in point. Battala press also played an important role in transcribing important elements of the oral folk culture of the region and disseminating such elements via print culture. There would hardly be any individual, having the basic reading skills, in Kolkata in the second half of the nineteenth century who would not be familiar with the Battala versions of the Ramayana, the Mahabharata or the Panchalis, composed by Dasharathi Roy or Iswar Gupta. The history of reception of such productions is also rich and multilayered, to say the least. If one goes by Rabindranath’s reminiscences, these books had great popularity even among the ladies of the Thakur household with ‘modern’ education, like Swarna Kumari Devi and others.

However, in 1851, under the patronage of the Education Department of the British Government and tied to the already existing School Book Society, the Vernacular Literature Committee was established with the aim of publishing quality books in vernacular for ordinary readers. This society was a modified form of the Vernacular Translation Society, established a year earlier. In an ‘Advertisement’ circulated by the society it was announced that the officials would offer a reward of Rs 200/- to a writer who would come up with books following the directives and the subjects selected by the society. A look at the terms and conditions for writers who were to vie for the coveted prize would give us a clear indication of the primary coordinates inside which Bangla children’s literature catering to the urban, western-educated, middle-class families would develop in the ‘modern’ world. Children, the future agency of colonial capitalism, must be trained through ‘entertainment’ to adapt themselves to what Jürgen Habermas would call ‘instrumental rationality’ and capitalist work-ethic, unleashed by a process of societal modernization. Let us take a look at the advertisement.

A. The book must be aimed at purifying young readers’ characters through imparting sound morals in them.

B. The book should have one or more of the following subjects as its theme:

a. Natural history and science

b. Descriptions of various places and countries and geography

c. Commerce and travel codes

d. Popular and useful features of everyday science

e. Industrial education

f. Science of education

g. Biographies

h. Morality tales

One should also mention here that one of the chief mottos of Bibidharthosangraho, the journal of this society, was to publish writings on various subjects about our planet with the aim to enlarge the knowledge-base of young boys and girls. The journal was modelled upon the English Penny magazines and it covered a variety of subjects (the word ‘magazine’ originated from the French word ‘magasin’ which means ‘miscellany’ or a collection of many subjects). Eminent personalities like Rajendralal Mitra and Kaliprasanna Singha took up the responsibility of editing the journal. With this journal began the long history of publication of magazines for young readers in Bengal; a history that continues till date. During the last two centuries, many such magazines played a crucial role in shaping the course of Bangla children’s literature. After Bibidharthosangraho showed the way, other magazines like Abodhbandhu (1863), Jyotiringon (1869), Balakbandhu (1878), Balakhitoishi (1881), Arjokahini (1881) and Mukul (1895) followed suit, which aimed at catering to the needs of the young minds.

Then came Sakha in 1883, under the editorship of Pramadacharan Sen, a landmark event in the history of Bangla children’s literature in many ways. First, in the ‘Preamble’ published in the inaugural issue, Sen articulated the objectives of his magazine: it would simultaneously play the role of parents in matters like giving the right advice and that of the teachers in imparting education. Sakha thus gave definitive direction to the ways in which Bangla children’s literature would subsequently develop. Secondly, the chief sections of this magazine were poetry and verse, science and astronomy, news of inventions and discoveries around the world, biographical sketches of famous men, features about strange birds and animals from other parts of the world, history and historical narratives, puzzles, rules of indoor games and translations of famous stories from the West— sections that set the basic pattern of many children’s magazines that followed. Thirdly, some major names in children’s writings in nineteenth-century Bengal, of the likes of Upendrakishore Ray Chowdhury, Shibnath Shastri and Bhuban Mohan Roy, got themselves associated with this magazine. Roy merged his own magazine Sathi with Sakha in 1894 after the untimely demise of Pramadacharan. This was the forum which brought out the first young adult novel in Bangla, ‘Bhimer Kapaal’, and the first detective story written for the teens, ‘Ashchorja Hatyakando’. One must also mention that ‘ Sundorboney Saat Batsor’, one of the first adventure stories in Bangla, if not the very first, though unfinished, began to be serialised in this magazine. After many years, the noted novelist Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay finished the story, finally published as a book in 1952.

Two things need to be mentioned about the fin de siècle Bangla children’s literature which was spearheaded by a magazine like Sathi. First, it still depended heavily on western texts in terms of resources. In fact, this is the field in Bangla literature where books produced in the West got translated in really large numbers. Apart from translations of foreign texts and adaptations from western books, sub-genres like detective story, adventure narrative, ghost story and science fiction and so on also got imported and developed on Indian soil. The translation project initiated by the Vernacular Translation Society was taken up by later children’s writers in a major way. Some notable texts which got translated into Bangla during this phase were Robinson Crusoe, Paul et Virginia, Les Aventures de Télémaque, Tales from Shakespeare, fairy tales collected by Hans Christian Anderson and Brothers Grimm, Gulliver’s Travels and Don Quixote. This trend continued well into the twentieth century. Deb Sahitya Kutir, a publishing house—whose hugely influential monthly Shuktara (1948) continues its run till date—which became a major name in post-Independence Bangla children’s literature scene, came up with its own ‘Translation Series’. The number of its titles crossed hundred in the end. Almost all the major authors of the Western canon and many popular texts like Treasure Island, The Count of Monte Cristo, The Black Arrow, Oliver Twist, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea, The Time Machine, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, to name just a few, were translated under this series. Thanks to the efforts of this house, young readers got the opportunity to taste the best in world literature and prospective writers of Bangla literature could have before them important benchmarks to follow. In this connection, one can say with conviction that for Bangla literature at least two literary genres—adventure stories and sci-fi—have been direct imports from the West. The same cannot be said, of course, about nonsense and fantasy literatures which have had indigenous oral roots in the Bengali and the Indian tradition.

In addition to translations, adaptations were also a regular practice. As notable examples, Khatanchi’r Khata (1922), Buro Angla (1941) and Alor Phulki (1947)—the three accepted classics in the canon of Bangla children’s literature produced by Abanindranath Thakur— are adaptations from western texts like Peter Pan, The Wonderful Adventures of Nils and The Story of Chanticleer. It will not, therefore, be a simplistic overstatement if we say that in a country like India, with its colonial past, the very category of children’s literature, like the newspaper and the novel, is a western import that has been taken over by certain western-educated sections of the Bengali society in a big way and which they eventually have made their very own. Secondly, one can hardly overstate the contributions made by the enthusiastic and immensely talented members of the culturally advanced Brahmo families in the development of this particular branch of Bangla literature. The Brahmos, as a community, during the heydays of this sect, took it upon themselves almost as a mission to produce books and other materials for the consumption of the young members of the Brahmo households. There can be several religio-cultural reasons behind this phenomenon but what is more important for our discussion is that the resultant output is simply staggering in terms of scope and quality. It is impossible to write the history of Bangla children’s literature without dealing at length with the contributions made by the members of the Thakur and the Ray families. Inside the Brahmo fold, Sakha O Sathi paved the way for Balak (1885), the magazine of the Thakur households, founded by Jnanadanandini Devi. Then came Sandesh (established in 1913 and has, so far, had several series and is still going strong), periodically edited by four successive generations of the Rays; Upendrakishore, Sukumar, Satyajit and at present Sandip. Most of the major genres and literary types that we see in vogue today in Bangla children’s and young adults’ literature were showcased in these magazines. Due to the efforts of the contributors of these magazines young readers became fortunate to have many delicious items on their menu—poetry, stories, essays on science and history, dramas, fairy tales, novels, travelogues, indoor games and the like. Moreover, these enterprises were chiefly instrumental in the making of Rabindranath Thakur and Sukumar Ray, the two most glorious names in Bangla children’s literature, as geniuses in this field. Rabindranath contributed fifty-five items in all for Balak, including Rajarshi, the novel, and nine playlets meant to be read as charades. Sukumar Ray felt compelled to contribute to Sandesh when he became the editor of the magazine after the death of his father in 1916. This resulted in the full flowering of his talents as a children’s writer. Almost all of Sukumar’s immortal works, his nonsense verses, his plays, his science-related essays and his stories, were published in the pages of this magazine; many of those anonymously. His first book Abol Tabol was published nine days after his death.

It is not merely that the gifted Brahmos, in their endeavour to serve Bangla children’s literature, enriched it to an enormous extent and helped to establish it as an independent tradition. Their contributions also became crucial in changing its course in a paradigmatic way. Besides, Upendrakishore and Sukumar as graphic artists, illustrators and innovators introduced and perfected the craft of ‘halftone’ prints in this part of the world. Imagination, spontaneity, realism, entertainment, native tradition and creativity—unbounded by any narrow moralising objective—became important ingredients of children’s literature. Texts like Bhutpatrir Deshe (1915), Ha Ja Ba Ra La (1921), Khapchara (1936), and Pagla Dashu (1940), though written in the format of juvenile literature, can also be read as a direct affront against the restrictive, disciplinary boundaries set by a colonial regime for the children’s world of pleasure—something replicated by the native bourgeois class. The authors of these texts also refrained from treating a child, with its ‘childishness’, as an inferior version of the adult. Instead, for the first time in the history of Bangla literature, through the kind of works they produced, they seemed to convey the message that a children’s story which is enjoyed only by children is a bad children’s story.

According to Buddhadeva Bose, the noted Bengali littérateur, the second age of Bangla children’s literature began with the arrival of magazines like Mouchak, Shishusathi and Ramdhanu in the 1920s. For him, Mouchak, more than any other magazine, was instrumental in bringing under one umbrella almost all the powerful writers of the age with the common motive of taking up their pens to write for the young ones. Many works by the big names like Kazi Nazrul Islam, Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay, Tarasankar Bandyopadhyay and Jagadish Chandra Bose were published here. This magazine, therefore, created a trend of publishing works by authors who had already established themselves in the world of adult fiction—a trend that continues even today. Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay, already a doyen in the Bangla literary scene, published his classic young adult adventure story Chander Pahar serially in this magazine. In 1936, following the footsteps of Mouchak, came Rangmashal. With editors like Premendra Mitra, Hemendra Kumar Ray, Debiprasad Chattopadhyay and Kamakshiprasad Chattopadhyay—who themselves were powerful writers for the children and the adult alike, and some of whom had strong moorings in the Marxist ideology—working for this magazine, Bangla children’s literature truly came of age. Due to the social, political and economic changes in India and the world at large concepts like ‘childhood’ and ‘childlike’ underwent radical changes in the 1930s and the decade that followed. Children of Bengal had to experience the devastations of World War II, deaths of millions due to the Great Bengal Famine circa 1942-1943, and the bloody communal riots in 1946 and after, each following the other in quick succession. That is probably why artists had to grapple with the idea that children had become older. On the other hand, some of them also thought that culture as a category must comprise literature for children as one of its elements. One is reminded of the activities and projects undertaken by the Progressive Writers’ Movement and Indian People’s Theatre Association (IPTA) in this regard. Hence, such beliefs encouraged writers of the Rangmashal team to try and give, as a form of praxis, children’s literature a more realistic and socially conscious edge. The magazine subsequently came out with special issues like ‘Gandhi’, ‘War’ and ‘Indian Independence’. Authors like Annadashankar Ray and Manik Bandyopadhyay began to write works of a serious nature for the magazine. They set a trend in Bangla children’s literature. Their approach to writing for young readers whom they wished to present with a slice of life, with a strong dose of realism (‘life as it really is’), encouraged a later-day writer like Moti Nandy. Nandy brought a high degree of authenticity in his sports narratives like Striker (1973), Stopper (1974) and Koni (1975). Subhash Mukhopadhyay, the extremely popular poet, also noted for his communist leanings, was commissioned by Debiprasad Chattopadhyay, the editor of Rangmashal, to write a serialised reportage on the condition of rural Bengal, basing his column on his experiences of different parts of the state in an up, close and personal manner. Such a column became well and truly a first in the category of children’s literature. (This column was later published in book-form with the title Amar Bangla in 1951.) Not that the editors of this magazine overlooked the entertainment factor altogether. Leela Majumdar’s novel Podi Pishir Bormi Baksho, which went on to become an all-time favourite for readers of all ages, was serialised in this magazine. So was Arun Mitra’s translation from the original of the Antoine de Saint-Exupéry classic Le Petit Prince. This magazine also gave its readers for the first time a taste of the genius of Satyajit Ray as a calligrapher and an illustrator. So, we see that Bangla children’s literature had really come a long way from the world of beast fables and morality tales.

This literature, however, once more took a different turn in the 1970s with the arrival of Anandamela in 1975, the periodical published by Ananda Bazar Patrika, the biggest media house in West Bengal. This was the glossiest and the most widely circulated children’s magazine. Readership for children’s literature reached its highest point as the powerful network system of the Ananda Bazar house took the magazine to different corners of the state—to mufassil towns and even to many villages—thereby changing the overall urban character of its readership. Under the able editorship of Nirendranath Chakravarty, a renowned modern poet, this magazine saw the full flowering of the talents of a number of giants in the field—Premendra Mitra, Ashapurna Devi, Satyajit Ray, Bimal Kar, Sunil Gangopadhyay, Shirshendu Mukhopadhyay, Sanjib Chattopadhyay, Buddhadeb Guha and others. Bangla children’s and young adults’ literature now well and truly reached a standard to be able to do justice to the honour bestowed upon it by Buddhadeva Bose when, in 1952, he observed that it was the brightest jewel in the treasure house of Bangla literature and that it could be placed alongside children’s literature written in any other language from any part of the world.

However, the last two decades of the twentieth century saw the emergence of Bangla young adult fiction as a highly saleable product in the Bengali literary scene for reasons like the rise in the literacy rate and the ever-increasing affluence of the great Indian middle class. This resulted in some generic changes in the overall character of the field. Rhymes and verses, fairy tales, stories about the exploits of dacoits, hunting narratives, ghost stories, and tales from history fell out of favour. Science fiction, whodunnit and teenage adventure stories began to rule the roost. As a matter of fact, children’s literature gradually was pushed to the margin and young adult literature occupied centre stage. Bengali kids seemed to arrive at their adolescence bypassing childhood altogether. Magazines for young readers began increasingly to assume the character of Quiz and ‘G.K.’ books. The twenty-first century, thus, began with a challenge for Bangla children’s and young adults’ literature; the challenge of a very complex negotiation with globalisation, satellite television, the internet and social networking. But that is a whole new story.

References:

Aries, Philippe. 1962. Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life. Trans. Robert Baldick. London: Jonathan Cape.

Bandyopadhyay, Debiprasad. 2016. Bangla Kishor Sahityer Itihas. Kolkata: The Sea Book Agency.

Bandyopadhyay, Sibaji. 2009. Bangla Sishusahityer Chhoto Meyera. Kolkata: Gangchil.

__________. 2013. Gopal Rakhal Dwondosamas: Upanibeshbad o Bangla Shishusahitya. Kolkata: Karigar.

__________. 2012. Sibaji Bandyopadhyay Reader. Kolkata: Worldview.

Bhattacharya, France. 2013. ‘ Thakurma o Thakurdadar Jhuli: Ekti Paath.’ In Nirbachito Ekshon Prabandho Sangkalon, vol. I, ed. Soumitra Chattopadhyay and Asrukumar Sikder, pp. 228-247. Kolkata: Saptarshi Prakashon.

Bose, Buddhadeva. 2009. Sahityacharcha. Kolkata: Dey’s Publishing.

Chatterjee, Rimi B., and Nilanjana Gupta, eds. 2009. Reading Children: Essays on Children’s Literature. Hyderabad: Orient BlackSwan.

Dutta-Roy, Teesta. 2014. Bangla Sishusahitya Roybari Parampara. Kolkata: Bangiya Sahitya Sansad.

Garcia, Antero. 2013. Critical Foundations in Young Adult Literature: Challenging Genres. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers.

Ghosh, Siddhartha. 2010. ‘Science Fiction.’ In Nibandho Boichitrer Teen Dashok, ed. Anirban Mukhopadhyay, pp. 485-538. Kolkata: Charchapad.

Kakar, Sudhir. 2012. The Inner World: A Psychoanalytic Study of Childhood and Society in India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.

Lowenthal, David. 1985. The Past is a Foreign Country. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Mitra, Khagendranath. 1999. Shatabdir Sishu-sahitya. Kolkata: Paschimbanga Bangla Academy.

Nag, Arun. 2005. Galpo o Taar Goru. Kolkata: Thema.

Nandy, Ashis. 1992. Traditions, Tyranny and Utopias. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.

Roy, Anuradha. 2014. Cultural Communism in Bengal: 1936-1952. New Delhi: Primus Books.

Sarkar, Sumit. 2014. Modern Times: India 1880s – 1950s: Environment, Economy, Culture. Ranikhet: Permanent Black.

Sen, Rushati. 2010. Chheley Buror Sotyi Mitthye. Kolkata: Patralekha.

Sen, Sukumar. 2008. Battalar Chhapa o Chhobi. Kolkata: Ananda.

Lalit and Labanyo

¹

Troilokyanath Mukhopadhyay

Episode I: The Books of Prize

Today, Lalit came back home with a broad smile on his face. Today he bagged a prize in school. Lalit is a seven-year-old, but a well-demeaned child like him is truly a rare bird.

Lalit was showing his books to his mother. Labanyo, his exulted five-year-old sister, stood close by.

Lalit said, ‘Ma, I got this book because I