Entering The Maze: Queer Fiction of Krishnagopal Mallick

By Krishnagopal Mallick

Krishnagopal Mallick is a literary rarity: sub-editing for an English daily, giving it up to print and publish Bengali little magazines at a press set up at his own home, and then producing essays, short stories, travelogues, memoirs, and novels marked by a dazzling candour and a beguiling lucidity. His words transport us to a North Kolkata of trams, lanes and by-lanes. His unselfconscious prose pulls us into a life lived with honesty and joy.

Rarely has Bengali literature witnessed such clear-eyed narratives of public and private violence, sexuality, and humour. These translations introduce to the readers a craftsman of deadpan story-telling who infuses North Kolkata with a queer radiance unmatched in Indian writing. Once one enters the maze of Krishnagopal Mallick, one cannot emerge unmoved, unchanged, unaffected.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Niyogi
• Release date: May 10, 2023
• ISBN: 9789391125905

Book preview

Introduction

First, the bare facts. Krishnagopal Mallick was born on 3 June 1936 and died on 24 March 2003. He studied Bengali Honours at Presidency College. During his time at college, he published a short story titled ‘Napunsak’ and an essay titled ‘Atha Nām Sankirtan’ in the college wall magazine. Discontinuing his Masters, he served as sub-editor at The Statesman from 1963 to 1967. In 1967 he got married, took voluntary retirement from the newspaper, set up Jagaddhatri Press and started to publish as Adhuna Prakashani, which ran till 1981. He began publishing little magazines such as Galpakabitā, Kaurab, Hāwā 49. The first issue of Galpakabitā was published in June 1967 and the first book published by Adhuna appeared in October 1968. The magazine and the imprint closed down in February 1973. However, the printing press ran till 1982. ¹ He started publishing his own work in 1987, and saw his last publication in January 2003. For many years, he published prose and poetry under the pseudonym of ‘Nirmalendu De’. He mostly wrote essays and short stories. His novellas/novels are Āmār Premikārā (My Girlfriends), Byuhaprabesh (Entering the Maze), Ajab Safar (Strange Trip), Koto Ki Je Guinness er Kachakachi (Much that is Close to Guinness), Basudhoibo Kutumbokom (All the World’s a Family), Namesake, Shyamār Ghare Cār Din (Days with Shyamā). He is thought to have created the format of the ‘pocket book series’. On speaking to his daughter-in-law, I learnt that he used to draw too, and that a few of his drawings are still in the possession of the Mallick family. He was survived by his wife, Bharati, who died in 2020, son, Durjoy and daughter-in-law, Susama.

A cursory glance through his writings will reveal an entirely conventional male writer living and working in North Calcutta, his great devotion to the family deities Shinghabāhinī and Rādhāgobinda, his detailed accounts of family lore, his taking up smoking at fifteen, even his relationships with women. But what makes him stand out in the midst of all the other Bengali writers, past and present, is the unabashed expression of his homosexuality. He never uses the term ‘bisexual’ to classify his sexuality. It would be difficult to find any other writer in Bengal, or indeed in India, who has the candour to state in print that homosexuality is the driving force of his life (as he says in ‘Bandhur Panthā’), or as mentioned by himself, ‘By nature, I am 112.5% homosexual’ (in Āmār Premikārā). The latter line is the first sentence of that novella.

It is important to note that Mallick consistently uses the 19th century English term ‘homosexual’ instead of the 20th century term ‘gay’ or the more recent 21st century term ‘queer’. Also, nowhere does he use the Bengali term ‘samakāmi’ (supposedly coined by Girindrashekhar Basu in 1929) or indeed the more genteel ‘samapremi’ which is of contemporary coinage. His use of ‘homosexual’ is rather appropriate because his idea of ‘homosexuality’ is one that is pathological. In ‘Bandhur Panthā’ he refers to it, albeit indulgently, as ‘rog’ (disease). However, that should not lead us to think that he is guilt-stricken and traumatised. Nowhere do we find him expressing anything other than amusement at, and delight in, his homosexuality. To call him ‘gay’ would be not quite le mot juste, because ‘gay’ signals the political mobilisation and action of the 1960s—an aspect Mallick does not regard a part of his sexual identity. He sees it as personal and, does not regard gender/ sexuality as political. There is a politically incorrect lack of concern about issues such as consent, paedophilia, sexual harassment, which may not endear him to contemporary socio-political sensibility. But that does not prevent us from wondering how many persons do we know who are married, have children, and yet have put their homosexuality down in unambiguous, clear print for public perusal. The frank and unapologetic expression of his homosexuality confounds the patronising, liberal view of queer individuals as continually suffering, permanently traumatised and ashamed of their identity. It is extraordinary that this man, born during the British Raj, did not imbibe any of the homophobia, especially internalised homophobia, enshrined in the Indian Penal Code in 1861 and finally read down first by the Delhi High Court six years after his death.

In his ‘Omnibuser Bhūmikā’ (Introduction to the Omnibus), published in May 1992, he expends over four pages on the ‘five and a half’ relationships (including the Platonic relationship mentioned in ‘Bandhur Panthā’) that he has had with several young men, starting from his involvement with a young man during his college days, to his last homosexual affair which lasted for a few days. In most cases, the young men appear to have conducted their relationship with him while also being involved with a woman. And yet, in his accounts, there is no sign of proprietorship or jealousy. He is fascinated by sexuality in general, and bisexuality in particular. He ends the section on his homosexual relationships with a quote from his last lover: ‘What’s the matter with me? On my way to her house, why do I get angry if I peek through your window and don’t see you? Even if I meet her, the time spent feels insipid. I keep remembering that I didn’t see you, I didn’t see you’. Mallick adds, ‘I didn’t know the answer to that. I still don’t know.’²

Anyone who came in close contact with him was left in no doubt about his sexuality. Abhik Chattopadhyay was given rather a guided tour of College Square as a cruising site by Mallick one night, leading the former to say, ‘I hope you don’t consider me a homo or something.’ This elicited an expletive from Mallick, and the reply that his sharp eye of a ‘confirmed homo’ had revealed Chattopadhyay, as soon as they were acquainted, as someone who had not an iota of homosexuality in him.³

Mallick never considered his homosexual activities as being in opposition to, or in conflict with, his identity as a married man. Nowhere does he express a fear of the law, however risky his behaviour seems. In world literature, the person who comes close to his level of candour is André Gide. However, while the French Nobel laureate got married at 26, and embarked on a relationship with a 15-year-old boy at the age of 47, he did not live under the same roof as his wife at that time, unlike Mallick. Also, Gide’s marriage was unconsummated. His one child, a daughter, was born of a woman to whom the author was not married. Admittedly, Gide’s apologia for homosexuality—Corydon (1924)—was published the year after the birth of his daughter; it is a manifesto and not an autobiography, not even a fictional one. There is also the example of Jacob Israel de Haan. In some ways he comes close to Mallick as a point of comparison because he published his novel Pipelines (1904)—regarded as the first Dutch gay novel—while being married to Johanna van Maarseven. The novel provocatively features two men in love and one of whom is called Joop—nickname for Jacob. In India, the only person who can be regarded as his kindred spirit—although they never met—is the Gujarati artist and writer Bhupen Khakhar. Khakhar was a mere two years older than Mallick and died five months after him, in the same year. Similarities? Unabashed about his homosexuality, brimming with joie de vivre, creating art that is not ‘difficult’, migrating to art from a different profession, encouraging young talent, keenly aware of the aesthetics of religion, producing art till the end. There are, however, two glaring differences between them. First, Khakhar never married and instead had a publicly acknowledged long-time companion. Second, Khakhar is internationally famous and has had retrospective exhibitions at the National Gallery of Modern Art in two Indian cities, and at the Tate Modern, in London. Krishnagopal Mallick’s books, however, are long out of print. Even professors of Bengali literature plead ignorance of his name.

As if writing about homosexuality in Bengali is not rare enough, what makes Mallick’s work even more astounding is his use of the author surrogate who is also called ‘Krishnagopal Mallick’. While there are quite a few examples of author surrogates in literature as such, one needs to search hard to find one in the realm of queer literature. One such example that may be put forward is Christopher Isherwood. Admittedly, although his writing career started in the late 1920s, but he came out as homosexual only in the 1960s; there are fictional works by him in which there is a character called either ‘Christopher Isherwood’ or ‘William Bradshaw’ (his middle names). The use of an author surrogate invariably suggests one question in the mind of the reader: is the author making it up or did it all really happen? The author will, of course, prefer that the question is left hanging over the text without the satisfaction of an answer. In the case of Mallick, this question becomes even more urgent, given the contents of the narrative: did he really spend the better part of an evening walking around North Calcutta trying to help a lost young boy find his house? Was he really threatened with violence by a well-built young man for copping a feel of his crotch? Did he really experience reciprocated love with a boy called Manoj when they were both in school? We will never know. Perhaps, much more importantly, it does not matter. What does matter is that these stories are in print and their material presence, at least as literature, is beyond doubt. In 2004, the magazine Kaurab published a memorial volume on Mallick, in which Kamal Chakraborty quotes at great length from Mallick’s memoir Hujugani. About Byuhaprabesh (Entering the Maze), Mallick is quoted as writing:

Driven and indeed inspired by a sense of duty to accord homosexuality a dignified position in Bengali literature I began writing [the novel] in a carefully planned and yet entirely frank manner, never taking recourse to the imagination. My own life helped me. Maybe this novel is not even a novel; more of a history or biography or a document of my teenage years in which I revealed fully all that was good or bad, decent or indecent, virtue or vice. Nowhere did I feel any need to hide anything. As a result, when it was published in Hawa 49, it got as much praise as condemnation. I took both upon my head, realizing that I was right to write as I did.⁴

We are living at a time when Indian publishing has woken up to the lucrative potential of queer writing. The reading list of Bengali queer novels is not very long. One can trot off the few names without much effort: Māyā Mridanga (1972) by Syed Musāfā Sirāj, Pourush (1984) by Kabitā Sinha, Brahmabhargab Puran (1993) by Kamal Chakraborty, Antaheen Antareen Proshitobhortrika by Mānabi Bandopadhyay, Chander Gaye Chand (2003) by Tilottamā Majumdār, Holde Golap (2014) by Swapnomoy Chakraborty, and Prem Samakāmī (2021) by Himādrikiśor Dāsgupta. There are short stories such as ‘Mallikā Bāhār’ by Kamal Kumar Majumdar. Mention must also be made of Bāmābodhini by Nabaneeta Deb Sen. In Gorā aar Binoy: An Interpretation of Tagore’s novel Gorā (2002), Tapabrata Ghosh makes an entirely convincing case of how homoeroticism informs the friendship of the two male characters in the novel. On the occasion of the book’s release, Ghosh had delivered a talk which has been added to the book’s 2021 edition. In that talk, he identified an obvious homoerotic charge in the verses composed by the members of the Gadāi-Gaurānga sect, and spoke at great length about how the migration of young men to Kolkata in the 19th century—a society that was strictly homosocial—created conditions where erotic friendships between men formed effortlessly. And of course then there is Śibrām Chakraborty’s Chele Boyeshe (Boyhood, 1925) in which boys and young men are frequently shown to be enamoured of each other’s beauty and ‘brotherly’ kisses are often exchanged.

It goes without saying that the list above is not exhaustive, but cursory. Without going into the possible reasons behind Mallick’s languishing in obscurity, this volume seeks to introduce him into the as yet meagre canon of Bengali queer writing, and through translation, add him to the rapidly expanding canon of Indian queer writing.

The three narratives translated in this volume are his most sustained expressions of homosexuality and deserving of greater attention than has been their fate till now.

I have often smiled while translating Mallick because his irreverent, almost Rabelaisian, voice has rung clear as a temple gong with dazzling regularity. The titles of his stories have also been thought up with a mixture of irony and reflection. I was amused by the