Almost all reputed novelists and litterateurs of the Bengali language had tried their hand at literature for the young, with varying degrees of success. Satyajit Ray, one of the greatest minds of modern India, spent all his life writing for children and teens in Bengali. Some of my favorite Bengali writers, Ashapoorna Devi, Sunil Gangopadhyay, Shirshendu Mukhopadhyay, Moti Nandy, were all very competent at literature for the young. One of the best of the lot was Buddhadev Guha.
A good, solid, reasonably famous writer for the older reader (Koel’er Kachey and Madhukari are fine novellas), where he shone was when writing for the young. No one but for Satyajit Ray’s Feluda of that time would compare with Guha’s Rijuda, for me.
Ruaha is my favourite Rijuda-story, and is one of only two stories where the writer takes Rijuda away from India, and to the African forests. The previous, Guguno-Gumbar-er deshey was when Rijuda and Rudro have taken on a group of poachers and animal traffickers, have been betrayed by their companion and failed, and Rijuda was shot and left to die, only to be rescued and brought to safety by Rudro. Ruaha is the continuation of that story, where to finish off the work left unfinished, Rijuda and Rudro travel to the Ruaha National Park in Tanzania. They are joined in their quest by Titir Sen, a super-intelligent, super-pretty, champion-shot, super-everything-really girl, and few would debate that it is the addition of Titir, along with the addition of Africa, that makes the story the best of all Rijuda stories.
A lot of Guha’s writing, including those for an adult readership, was with the backdrop of the Indian forests. His stories, though, are in most cases very urban, with urbane protagonists in a forest backdrop. You could reasonably debate that this did not allow the reader to see the perspective of the actual people of the forest, thus our experience would be incomplete. But I think Guha, a part of the urbane, cultured and moneyed elite of the Bengali society, wrote about what he knew.
Rijuda’s stories are classified among the treasured lineage of Indian shikaar stories, continuing the heritage of Jim Corbett and Kenneth Anderson. Reading the oeuvre though, while there indeed is some shikaar in most of the stories, the stories are more about the forests — how they look, what they smell like, how they are. Guha has mentioned that he is saddened that once in a while, he has had to include a shikaar to the story on the demands of the publisher, while what he had meant to write was just about the forests.
Many of the stories are about the group’s travel across a forest. And in the evenings, when the forest resort is enveloped with the ambient night-sound of the wild, when the group has gathered in the drawing room while the dinner is being cooked, Rijuda would light up his Meerschaum pipe, settle down in his armchair, and regale his group of friends with stories of some long-ago hunts that he or some friend of his was a part of. They are beautiful. I wish I were part of such an evening gathering.
Shom Biswas
Twitter@spinstripe
The writer is a business development executive in Hyderabad