Bengali writers know that unless they reach London, nothing will happen: Sankar

My interview with Sankar, published in Scroll.

Sankar (Mani Sankar Mukherjee) is perhaps Bengal's best-selling contemporary writer. Born in 1933, Sankar has published over 70 books, including 37 novels, 5 travelogues, biographies, essays and stories for children. His most widely-read book is Chowringhee (1962), a slice-of-life narrative set in and around a fictitious hotel in central Calcutta. With its cast of colourful characters, Chowringhee was a perfect choice for big screen adaptation, and sure enough, the 1968 film starring Uttam Kumar was a huge hit.

Two more of Sankar's novels, Jana Aranya (The Middleman) and Seemabaddha (Company Limited), were made into films by Satyajit Ray. In recent years, several of his books have also done well in English translation, winning awards and new readers in India and elsewhere. Here he talks about his fraught relationship with the Bengali literary establishment, about being translated, and why English is the gateway to the world.

Did you start your fiction career writing for literary journals and periodicals, or did you first publish directly in book form? 

Since the 1950s, the practice in Bengal is to get serialised in magazines, and that is how my first novel, Kato Ajanare, was also first published. It appeared in instalments in the well-known literary magazine Desh, in 1955. Later it was published in book form.

Did your books become popular with Bangla readers quite early? Were your book sales connected to book reviews, press coverage or literary awards in Bangla? 

Bengali reviewers have been historically very mean-spirited towards me. (laughs) In fact, reviewers would spread canards of every sort about my books. Those who controlled the market were fond of dismissing me. Many of them said I was a one-book author. My books have only received one award in Bangla: for excellent binding.

But your books have always sold astoundingly well. I believe you did some marketing of your own books? I read on your Wikipedia entry that you sold collections of your books in blue packets under the name 'Ek Bag Sankar'?

I never did that. Ek Bag Sankar is just the name of my collection of stories for children. It is a bestselling book. I think it has sold some 100,000 copies, easily. It sold so well that I myself was embarrassed.

When were you first translated?

There was not much English translation in those days, when I started writing. At one point someone thought that the best of Bengal should be translated. But the editor of a Bengali magazine called Achal Patra, he was dead against it. He said, I will fast unto death, because if this English translation happens, then the world will find out from where Bengali writers have been stealing their stories.

Fast unto death!? Seriously?

It was a joke, but only partly. Bengalis, you know, they only talk, they do nothing. (Laughs)

But really, since Tagore's Gitanjali, Bengali writers have known that translation is the gateway to world success. Unless they reach London, nothing will happen.

But you didn't try to get your books translated?

Not really. When Arunava Sinha – he was my daughter's contemporary – said he wanted to translate it in English, I said, if he wants to waste his time, go ahead. And so he had done a translation but it was not published. Many years later, when Penguin Books approached me through my Bangla publisher, I said, there is already an English translation.

The Hindi translation of Chowringhee came out almost immediately after the book was published, and Vikram Seth and Khushwant Singh had both read the book in Hindi. They recommended it to Penguin. Vikram Seth is such a humble person, he was very nice when I met him in London.

In London also, they asked me this question: why so late with the translation? I quoted a Horlicks ad to them, which I once saw in the Statesman: “It is not available, but it is worth waiting for”.

What about the Indian readership for English translations? Do you think it has grown larger/ more interested in Indian language writers, in recent years?

Well, I can say that I got many readers across the country, and the critical attention also helped in getting new Bengali readers. In Generation Next, even the Bengalis don't read Bangla, so having an English edition that they can read is a great thing.

How was the media reception to the English editions of your books different from the Bengali press?

I was in London for the London Book Fair, and Chowringhee got raving half-page reviews in the British press. People say, this one book has given Calcutta a calling card. And good literature cannot survive on scandal value. Who Lady Pakrashi was is of no consequence. (Interviewer: Mrs. Pakrashi is an important character in Chowringhee, and apparently the publication of the novel led to some speculation about her 'real' identity.)

Critics in English write with an open mind. In Bengal, not so. And there is no advertising or marketing of Bengali books. Sometimes it's just a notice.

Could you give me a rough sense of the number of copies sold of your books? For instance, of Chowringhee in English versus Bengali? And if you have the numbers, of any of your other books that have been translated?

Chowringhee in Bangla has sold over 100,000 copies for sure. (Interviewer: The English edition it has sold 30,000 copies, according to Penguin Books India.) And as for Bangladesh, the pirated edition sold in huge numbers. I don't think there is anyone from Bangladesh I have met who has not read Chowringhee! Now, thankfully, there is a legitimate Bangladeshi edition, and that is also doing well.

More recently, there is a non-fiction book of mine on Vivekananda, that has sold 1,70,000 copies in Bangla. It has also been translated in English, The Monk as Man: The Unknown Life of Swami Vivekananda. Who knows why, he is a phenomenon, and I am just an old man. I get incredible phone calls from all over the country. Two days back a reader called from Gujarat, and said, tell me, why did Vivekananda choose to wear gerua colour? Was it because it takes long to get dirty?

Do you think having your writing available in English has changed things for you as a writer?

English is a storehouse of all the ideas of the world. People are reading in it and remembering a language that has not yet conveyed itself to the world. Once you reach English, you can reach even China. So why would you want to write something where the train will not move beyond Asansol?

I believe in Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam, the whole world is one family. Hotel Shahjahan and its characters belong to the world, and not only to Calcutta. 

Picture This: Not a home away from home

In the consumer desert of pre-liberalisation India, filmi hotels were a salacious fantasy. Will we never see them as anything except sites of scandal? 

My BLInk column last Saturday.

Watching Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel got me thinking about hotels in our films. If you’ve never thought about it before, take a moment to close your eyes and remember what hotels were like in the imagined universe of Hindi films until the 1990s. What comes to mind? Men in suits and ladies in saris looking on in appreciation or bemusement as a scantily-clad young woman sashays expertly between the tables? Sometimes the dancer was the only bright spot in a dimly-lit space. Hindi film hotels were glossy fronts for dark dealings of all sorts — from the shady hotel in Howrah Bridge (1958) to Hotel Hilltop, from where murderous train robberies are orchestrated in The Train (1970).

As Jerry Pinto puts it in his book on Helen, Bombay cinema saw hotels “as a dreadful western invention where other ‘western inventions’ — smuggling, illicit or extramarital sex, the black market — thrived”. Respectable people, even if they went on holiday, had holiday homes to go to. Heroes only went to hotel bars for strategic purposes — in search of the vamp (Miss Ruby, Lily or Kitty, the route to the villain’s gang) — or else to drown their sorrows in alcohol when jilted by their lady-love. As the ’70s and ’80s wore on, what had been the preserve of the vamp and the villain emerged as the site of the discotheque, where a guitar-strapped hero might perform for a crazed, youthful audience, or where a misguided sister or a too-modern wife might display her waywardness by dancing with strangers.

Since most of the mainstream Hindi film audience had never been in one, it’s remarkable how much the hotel dominated our cinematic imagination. Or perhaps, it wasn’t surprising at all. Hotels were a fantasy world, which in the consumer desert of pre-liberalisation India, was both desirable and necessarily condemnable. A film that unfolded in a hotel was exciting, but the hero and heroine had to steer clear of the silken debauchery of the milieu. So Teesri Manzil (1966) was a murder mystery in which the hero must clear his name. By the time Namak Halaal (1982) hit the theatres, it was possible to combine the hotel-as-thriller-locale with a broad comic act from Amitabh Bachchan.

In the 2000s , seedy hotels continue to form part of thrillers — Johnny Gaddaar (2007), Talaash (2012). But sexcapades in them are now also a frequent site of comedy — the famous Hotel Decent in Jab We Met(2007) is the first of many. Bittoo Boss (2012) even had a photographer using a Shimla hotel to secretly shoot honeymoon porn. Still, a whiff of scandal continues to cling to the hotel. The Kay Kay Menon-Rajpal Yadav starrer Benny Aur Babloo (2010) pits the bleeding heart humanity of a dance bar against the evils of a five-star hotel. In 2014’s under-watched Bobby Jasoos, when Vidya Balan and her fiancé are ‘caught’ by her conservative Hyderabadi father, it’s their emergence from a hotel that makes all explanations useless. Balan’s other outing this year, Shaadi ke Side Effects, begins with a couple using the inherent disreputability of hotels to spice up their marriage. By the film’s end, hotels have emerged as integral to secret lives less innocuous than a play-acting married couple’s.

What I can’t think of is a single Hindi film in which a hotel is not just a locale but the emblem of an era, as in The Grand Budapest Hotel. When we first see it, the hotel of Anderson’s film has come down in the world, but it still has a threadbare majesty. And the multi-layered flashback, moving from candy-coloured animated jailbreaks to the black and white of war, evokes the civilisation that the hotel once embodied. No amount of extramarital sex within its walls can rob the Grand Budapest of its grandeur. It probably helps that the spirit of the film — zany, not always honest yet somehow always admirable — is the inimitable maitre d’hotel Gustav (Ralph Fiennes in his most freewheeling performance yet). For Gustav, as for his appointed successor Zero, the hotel is not a career but a vocation.

The closest we’ve got is the Bengali film adaptation of Sankar’s bestselling novel Chowringhee (1968) and Uttam Kumar’s much-remembered turn as Satya Sadhan ‘Sata’ Bose, debonair receptionist of the Shahjahan Hotel. Sata’s initiation of Sankar, like Gustav’s of Zero, is the audience’s entry point into the hotel’s inner life. This is 1960s India, and hotel guests are either foreigners (doing important things like eradicating smallpox) or the Indian business class (wheeler-dealers all). The film’s biggest villain is a rich businessman’s wife. But, unlike in mainstream Hindi movies, the immorality of its elite clients does not taint the hotel staff. They are one big family, with class and community differences smoothed over by feudal benevolence and individual friendships. Also remarkable is the number of middle-class working women in the film — a ‘society’ journalist, a ‘hostess’ for a Marwari businessman, an air hostess. But either they’re bad girls, or if they’re good, they’re marked out for tragedy — one is tempted to read something into that. Despite some heavy-handed morality, Chowringhee is the rare Indian film that lets a hotel be something more than a den of vice. It may represent a civilisation in decline, but Shahjahan Hotel still manages to evoke nostalgia.

Published in the Hindu Business Line.