5 august 2019V
ictorian novelists have
always taken the idea of the novel
quite literally: a form that invites
reappraisal and transformation. charles
Dickens was constantly changing his
mind as he was writing and simultane-
ously publishing sections from Oliver
Twist in Bentley’s Miscellany. in ‘When
colour is a Warning sign’, the second
‘anti-novel’ collected in subimal Misra’s
This Could Have Been Ramayan Chamar’s
Tale, nirmal Gupta, publisher of Eikhon,
a calcuttan little magazine, expresses
his own ambiguity towards Misra’s
work: ‘it is quite difficult to suddenly
come to any conclusions regarding you
[...] in your writing there are no such
things as sequential events, it appears
outwardly to be only floating images [...]
the question of outright rejection does
not arise because some aspect or another
haunts me.’
v ramaswamy, who has produced a
stupendous translation of Misra’s ‘anti-
novels’, places the ‘anti-establishment’
author at the tail end of the hungryal-
ist Movement and ventures farther in
history to cite Misra’s forebears: Jagadish
Gupta, Manik Bandopadhyay, Kamal
Kumar Gupta, and amiya Bhushan
Majumdar, who were ‘parallel’ to writers
canonised in Bengali literature, like
tagore. By terming Misra as antithetical
to something, as opposed to being ‘paral-
lel’ to it, both ramaswamy and Misra
suggest a confrontation and a conflict.
Janam Mukherjee’s foreword to the col-
lected anti-novels asserts: ‘[Misra’s] writ-
ings [continue] to push at the boundaries
of the middle-class bourgeois mores,
structured towards a pernicious and
predatory socio-political order.’
in the eponymous first anti-novel,
the narrative of ramayan chamar, a
Bihari Dalit working at a tea plantation
in north Bengal, forced into a ‘system
akin to slavery’, and murdered early, is
one filigreed with images surfeit in ba-
budom and a ‘delusion of radical leftism’.
in the seams of Misra’s own narra-
tive jumps, the deep gulfs of Bengali
livelihoods — ‘pimp and gentleman,
professor and idiot, babu and dalit’ —are
laid bare. the word, ‘scissors’, appear
throughout the text not only to signify
the layered divisions within and beyond
it, but to symbolise separatist ambitions
of the disenfranchised that interrupt the
narrative: ‘We, the poor people, offspring
of the disfavoured queen’s womb—the
country’s become independent while
we’re left to forage cow-dung’.although Misra sets a manifesto for
the anti-novel in a preamble subtitled
‘s ubimal versus subimal’, in which he
decries ‘literature [that] begins to speak
in a single mould and tune’, his ideology
is perhaps more ably embodied in the
second anti-novel where he expresses a
desire for ‘many-more-things’ in a story.
the reader, who desires to ‘become one
with the times’ seeks to find truth in
these many-more-things that only the
novelistic form can convey. a novelist’s
duty is to be a trustworthy exhibitor
whose text is ‘simultaneously story, his-
tory, proclamation and personal diary’.
Misra’s text is quite superficially just
that: an amalgamation of newspaper
clippings, soliloquies, and vignettes
arranged in a postmodernist mosaic.
‘When any stationary or moving
thing is presented directly,’ Misra claims,
‘its actual visage cannot be captured.’
Misra’s anti-novels are as much a
reinvention of the novel, that has been
congealed and commodified into a
methodised, stationary, inert ‘cultural
object’, as a critique of the bhadrolok, the
bourgeoisie, whose totalitarian impuls-
es have alienated and antagonised the
rest in Bengal. Much like nirmal Gupta,
i too have found it difficult to extract
something absolute from reading Misra,
constantly changing my mind about
how i feel about his prose. But, i have
come to this realisation: as an anti-estab-
lishment writer, more fertile in Bengali
little magazines than the mainstream
(as this very translation)—a nod perhaps
to his hungryalist forbears—Misra’s
anti-novels might be novels after all:
changing our minds about each of the
many-more-things through a
reappraisal of form and substance. nbooks
Subversive Truth
A Bengali novelist reimagines dissent
By Rohit Chakraborty
This Could have beCome
Ramayan ChamaR’s Tale:
Two anTi-novels
Subimal Misra, translated from
Bengali by V RamaswamyHarper Perennial
296 Pages | Rs 399Illustrations by saurabh singh