The Greatest Bengali Stories Ever Told is the latest addition to translations of modern and contemporary Bengali fiction and non-fiction by Arunava Sinha. Winner of several awards, Sinha is probably the most prolific among the people who are now translating titles from various Indian languages into English.
For a whole new generation of people in various Indian diasporas and elsewhere, Sinha would probably go down as the most important portal through which many who-can-read-no-Bengali had their first (and maybe only) initiation into the tales that regaled the earlier generations.
The volume under review is a collection of 21 short (but not always too short) stories written over a period of more than a hundred years, selected by Sinha himself. The book has stories of classic short-story writers—Rabindranath Tagore, Tarashankar Bandopadhyay and Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay and post-Independence generation of authors such as Nabarun Bhattacharya and Amar Mitra. The collection includes some known gems of Bengali literature—Tagore’s Kabuliwala, Sarat Chandra’s Mahesh, Banaphool’s Homecoming, Tarashankar’s Music Room (made famous by Satyajit Ray’s film Jalshaghar), Sunil Gangopadhyay’s Post-Mortem and Sanjib Chattopadhyay’s The Marble Table; it also includes some lesser known pieces such as Moti Nandi’s News of a Murder, Mahashweta Devi’s Urvashi and Johnny, Satyajit Ray’s Two Magicians and Ashapurna Debi’s Thunder and Lightning.
There is a problem that inevitably afflicts any anthology with the ambitious label ‘the greatest stories’—no two people are likely to come up with identical lists, upon being asked. Thus, any reader would inevitably ask why this particular story was chosen, and why not some other. In that sense, this volume is no different either. Many of the selections are self-evident choices, being milestones of Bengali literature written by master craftsmen (such as Tagore, Sarat Chandra, Bibhutibhushan, Tarashankar, Sanjib, Sunil); in other cases, even though the choice of the authors was unexceptionable, the tale chosen is quite baffling (for instance in case of Ray, why choose Two Magicians, why not Gagan Chowdhury’r Studio, or Khagam, or Batikbabu?). Some omissions among authors are equally baffling—surely Saradindu Bandyopadhyay and Lila Mazumdar have written pieces better than some selected here? The point is, the author must have had a reason for selecting these stories, but that rationale has not really come through when he says that read with his ‘mon’— what else do you read with?
A final point of criticism about a volume that was, on the whole, quite enjoyable. In any kind of anthology of works spanning over a long time, it is not enough for the life-span of the author to be given. Even if the pieces are arranged roughly in chronological accordance with the dates of the authors, publications worldwide consider it to be absolutely imperative to indicate the actual year in which a particular work was first published. This helps the reader to identify the vintage of a story, and maybe even figure out why the author said what he did in the way he did it. That said, Sinha must be congratulated upon producing yet another work of fairly high calibre. Tagore wrote his Kabuliwala more than half-a-century before Sanjib Chattopadhyay wrote the Swet-pathorer Table or Sunil Gangopadhyay wrote the Post-Mortem. It is not an easy task to translate each of these three in such a way that preserves the distinctive tones of different authors writing at different times. Sinha does precisely that, and he does it with such ease that it appears effortless.