When Buddhadeva Bose's Raat Bhorey Brishti (It Rained All Night) was published in 1967, it raked up a controversy in Calcutta (Kolkata). The book was deemed pornographic by a Sessions Judge and the poor author was made to stand in a cage during the course of the court hearings, in retrospect, by a somewhat deranged judge. The Calcutta High Court quashed the charges of pornography brought against Buddhadeva Bose and the novella went on to become a critical as well as commercial success.
Clinton B Seely, scholar of the Bengali language and Emerituus Professor of Bengali at the Department of South Asian Languages and Civilisations, University of Chicago, has done a fine translation of an important Bengali fiction written at a critical juncture in its history.
It Rained All Night reads like an intimate diary written by two people, namely Maloti, a pretty middle class Bengali and her academic husband, Nayonangshu. Each presents a point of view about Maloti's affair with Jayanto, a journalist and a man of action, who happens to be a friend of the family. The writing is strong and confessional. The first paragraph sets the tone.
"It's over - it happened - there is nothing more to say. I, Maloti Mukherjee, someone's wife, and someone's mother - I did it. Did it with Jayanto. Jayanto wanted me, and I him. Perhaps Nayonangshu thinks we did it before, but no - tonight was the first time. Tonight - four hours ago. On this bed. Where I'm now lying." This could well be written by a 20thcentury heir of Gustave Flaubert. The rest of the narrative has this directness but is acutely sensitive to the mental-emotional makeup of the two protagonists. There a patina of melancholy that the narrative has, and which distinguishes it from the angst, often pseudo, that informs such fiction in India and abroad.
The melancholy of Bose's characters is typical of the sensitive, Bengali middle class of the 1960s; it is touched by both wistfulness and romance. Nayonangshu's hurt at his wife Maloti's rejection of him, at a fundamental, sexual level is remembered as an interior monologue, so are her thoughts about him, and Jayanto. Force of habit, the rituals of everyday living, the necessary chores of keeping house, and of course, the presence of Maloti and Nayonangshu's little daughter, Bunni, keeps the couple together. Jayanto's completing the triangular relationship through his virility and his ability to answer Maloti's sexual and emotional needs with discretion and charm is what provides the ballast for the estranged couple to go on living.
What makes Bose so different from the writers of today, is his gift of suggesting a world of deep sexual passion, rather than showing it with brutal candour. To make love so alluring and yet so real, without crudeness, is not given to many of us. If one were to draw an analogy from painting, his writing in this case, has the delicacy and the toughness of a work by the Japanese Old Master Utamaru. The author's own reading was wide and deep and eclectic. He was one of the pillars of the Department of Comparative Literature, Jadavpur University, Kolkata.
Bose's literary conception of love was no doubt his own, but it was also influenced by his reading. Amongst his contemporaries, his ideas about love were in spirit inspired by Manik Bandopadhyay, particularly two books - Dibaratrir Kabbo and Putul Naacher Iti kautha. The example is not as farfetched as it appears. Bose was, for all practical purpose, a City Man, while Bandopadhayay spent crucial years growing up in undivided rural Bengal. His innate understanding of primordial sexuality got transformed thanks to the metaphorical intervention of Sigmund Freud, whose writings both admired. Bose balanced Bandopadhyay's and Freud's conception of sexuality with his own, imbibing from the traditions of love depicted in the Bengali Vaishnav Kirtan.
Earthiness, and yes, a certain sense of romantic regret - inherited from the Bengali Kirtan tradition, of course, refracted, though not consciously - is present throughout It Rained All Night. This sense of loss, at once universal, is also local, and can be linked not only to the Bengali Vaishnav tradition, but also, to the syncretic tradition of the Bauls.
Nayonangshu's final interior monologue, which concludes the novella, is full of romantic existentialism but not without making a detour. "One day they'll awake from their dream - Maloti and Jayanto. And Nayonangshu. No more suffering, desire will die, the body will decay, and this blazing anger will leave only a handful of ashes. That will be it."
The story is still like a breath of fresh air 47 years after its publication in Bengali. Most writers usually learn nothing from their seniors whose credentials they regard with suspicion. The young aspiring writer, alive to the complexities of human relationships, will read this short work with pleasure and for profit.- The writer is an art and literary critic.
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