Pather Panchali—arguably the best-known novel in the Bengali language—was written by my grandfather Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay exactly a century ago. Since then, it has proved to be a machine in perpetual motion: excitement around it remains undiminished and critical interpretations abound.

I had been curious about the conjuring that can make one piece of literature persist while many others fade away. I curated a month-long exhibition—“God of the Little Road: The Life and Work of Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay” (March 24 to April 19)—at the Kolkata Centre for Creativity, supported by Emami Foundation, in an attempt to pop the hood and peer inside.

Using his manuscripts, pages with quickly jotted plots, an odd scribble behind a mark sheet, artefacts, photographs, his pens, a watch, I attempted to recreate the person beyond the stereotypes. Both as a reader and a descendant—an accidental legacy that comes with what I believe is a responsibility towards his readership.

We are lucky that much of his papers still exist. My grandmother Rama had quickly collected these at a moment of great haste. When leaving her old life behind, she carried his manuscripts and journals but also what had immense emotional value for her: the light blue sari with a narrow golden border she was wearing when she first met Bibhutibhushan, a sholapith garland from their wedding night, pebbles found in the author’s pocket the day he died, the cigarette case in which he kept his beedis, train tickets. Each artefact was a temporal key, all the more dear in the face of tragedy, which had struck the family twice, in quick succession, fragmenting it forever.

But I am getting ahead of myself. Looking back from the present, knowing the beginning and end of each story, the past compresses into a narrative sandwich where everything happened all at once; these artefacts—like the expanding bellow of an accordion—help unpack the times. Let us look first at how unlikely it was for Bibhutibhushan to succeed as an author.

My grandfather came from an impoverished rural family. His father, Mahananda—the son of an ayurveda practitioner—was a Sanskrit pundit and an itinerant bard who had learnt his trade in Benaras. Mahananda was also a keen traveller who, in his youth, had walked until Peshawar, and a writer who had printed at least one farce (its four extant pages are eminently readable). Since he had a penchant for literature, not for finance, he returned to his village with a wealth of, chiefly, experience. At his death, Bibhutibhushan was left with the disparate inheritance of a keen literary sense and downright penury. Much of the family’s responsibility fell on his young shoulders.

Bibhutibhushan struggled through college: despite graduating with distinction, he discontinued his postgraduate and legal studies due to financial hardship. A few jobs followed in quick succession, as did deaths in the family. He first wife, Gouri, died in a cholera epidemic just over a year into their marriage, leaving Bibhutibhushan devastated. He had agreed to the marriage as a matter of strategy—Gouri was the daughter of a rich attorney—but had quickly fallen for his young bride.

Tragedy and scarcity

Constant tragedies—one of his sisters was to die the same year, followed by his mother—coexisted with scarcity. At one point in his life, he owned just a single dhoti; on the occasions he washed it, he waited for it to dry, wrapped in a gamchha (a thin cotton towel). Decades later, when he was a top author and my grandmother was married to him, she asked him about his practice of having just rice and salt on one day each week. He explained that it was meant to be a reminder of his days of struggle, when he had lived on little more than this.

Out of college and left with a family of dwindling but needy members, Bibhutibhushan initially had the good luck of finding a job as assistant headmaster in a rural school. But he had to leave it soon, failing to cope with the raging village politics there. He secured another job in another rural school shortly after. This is also when he was first bitten by the literary bug. He found the material for his first short story, “Upekshita” (The Neglected), in a local widow’s tribulations. The story was a success, yet his empathy for the woman started a scandal in the conservative village society. To protect her reputation, Bibhutibhushan decided to quit this job.

In the words of Nirad C. Chaudhuri—a close friend and witness to Bibhutibhushan’s life at the time—the next “job he secured was queer enough. It was to lecture against the slaughter of cows on behalf of the Cow Protection Society of Calcutta patronized by the Marwari millionaire Keshoram Poddar. He described the durbar of the great man with humour to me, particularly how he was always sitting with half-a-dozen telephone sets around him, which brought him news of the stock market. So, off he went to the southern part of Chittagong district….” (Thy Hand, Great Anarch, 1987).

Bibhutibhushan writes about this same experience in Abhijatrik (The Explorer), an assorted travelogue:

“In front of a Marwari farm, I spotted an advertisement looking to employ two people. Looking no further, I entered the office. It belonged to the famous businessman, Keshoram Poddar….

[He] asked me in Hindi—…Can you deliver a speech?

I was mystified, speech about what? But with the job-market in the doldrums, backing off or hesitating would mean getting disqualified. Speech was a simple thing, if Keshoramji were to ask me, ‘Can you dance?’ I would have agreed readily.”

Needless to say, this stopgap arrangement did not last for long. He quit it at the first opportunity and walked deep into the Arakan-Yoma forests (in Myanmar), befriending postal runners taking the mail to Burma.

Fight for subsistence

My grandfather’s early life was dictated by an incessant fight for subsistence. Most people in his predicament would usually submit themselves to a life of soul-killing drudgery as a clerk in some merchant office, a life that would cancel out any possibility of creativity. In his famous children’s novel, Chander Pahar (Mountain of the Moon), his protagonist has a premonition of that life: “Inevitably, he would have to take up the job at the jute mill. This meant, he understood, that all his dreams would be shattered. So, the popular football centre-forward, district high jump champion, well-known swimmer Shankar would end up becoming a babu at a jute mill?”

This struggle between the demands of survival and the call of creativity, along with the early loss of ties that bind, shaped his world view in many ways. Left without the human anchors most of us take for granted in our lives, he had to devise a philosophical framework to moor him to the world. He not only found it for himself but also left it for his readers in his books. It boiled down to the belief that that while there is a lot of suffering in the world, there are also ways to negotiate it.

Over and above his obvious mastery of the medium, I think it is this simple, practical belief that draws readers to his books. His work is always a celebration of the neglected individual, the marginalised: it is not a valorisation of class struggle but an expression of solidarity. The subterranean didacticism of his work speaks of an agnostic mind, with a strong belief in omnipresent nature and a peripatetic god who takes an individual on a journey through the wonders of the world.

Bibhutibhushan was the product of a syncretic age, which valued the ancient scriptures and Western methodologies of knowledge in equal measure. He filled up the gaps in liberal rationalism with his belief in nature and an itinerant god. This is nowhere more apparent than in the novel often considered to be the earliest example of ecological fiction in India: Aranyak. The conflicted protagonist of this meditative novel is torn between his deep love for wild nature and his duty as the manager of a large expanse of forest land to cut it up and distribute it among farmers for cultivation.

The narrative was based on Bibhutibhushan’s own experiences in Bhagalpur, where he worked in the employ of a prominent landowner. The idyllic isolation of the location also inspired his semi-autobiographical bildungsroman, Pather Panchali.

Bibhutibhushan’s fictional counterpart, Apu, demonstrates an indomitable spirit despite being battered by fortune. Apu’s guardian spirit is pather debata: the path personified as an itinerant god who quietly assures him that life is greater than the sum of its sufferings, that the journey itself is of essence. “The god of the little road smiles gently and says—ignorant boy, did you think my path ends at the bamboo grove of your village, at the foot of the thug Biru Roy’s banyan tree, or by the steps of the Dhalchit ferry? Across the fields of Sonadanga, beyond the Ichhamati river, past the lotus pond of Madhukhali, across the ferry over the Betrabati, the path goes on, and on, and on.… Toward another land beyond this; from sunrise to sunset; from the limits of the known in search of the unknown….

“Across day and night, across life and death, through months, years, famines, and epochs, it carries on…. Even when your worldly dreams would lie buried beneath a blanket of moss, my path would still not end.… It will go on, and on…. Ever onward….” (Pather Panchali, my translation).

Popping open that cover after a century for the exhibition was a revelation of sorts. I am glad I could share with visitors much of what I had rediscovered about the novel. Such as the fact that Bibhutibhushan in an early note describes Apu as “a citizen of the cosmos” (visitors were often taken aback by the fact that much of extensive notes is in English). Also, that Pather Panchali was named Durer Bari (The Faraway Home) in the first draft.

Bibhutibhushan’s manuscripts

Bibhutibhushan is often thought to be an intuitive author, writing spontaneously, emotionally, inspired by nature. Anything but. The manuscripts showed viewers for the first time how meticulously he revised Pather Panchali, expanding upon some characters, compressing others. Bringing in Durga’s character is a major example of this: not a part of early drafts, she was brought in later, when Bibhutibhushan was inspired by a scruffy child by the roadside in Bhagalpur to create Apu’s sister. Also, in a later draft, Apu’s despair is compounded over pages.

Increasingly, I read Pather Panchali and its sequel, Aparajito, as chronicles of my family’s past. Also as coded messages from another time, helping us find the way. It is especially edifying to know in this unhinged present, which glories in excess, that happiness can be something simple, gifted free by life and nature.

What made the exhibition even more worthwhile was the sheer number of people who visited it, interacting with the artefacts, reading for hours. The village in Pather Panchali, Nishchindipur—literally, a place of peace—is modelled on the village Bibhutibhushan grew up in, Barakpur (in Jessore in undivided Bengal, now in North 24 Parganas in West Bengal). My long-term dream is to create an archive there, to give the author back to his readers.

My grandmother Rama met the middle-aged Bibhutibhushan in the late 1930s, when she was 16. What started as an epistolary romance ended in marriage, notwithstanding my grandfather’s warnings that he would pass away much sooner than her. That premonition proved to be true. Ten years after their marriage, he was to die unexpectedly at his home in Ghatshila (now in Jharkhand), leaving my grandmother a young widow of 27 with a 3-year-old child. To deepen the tragedy, his doctor brother poisoned himself after being accused by some of botching up his treatment. The family went into free fall.

My distraught grandmother had a dream when she was leaving behind their, until recently, happy conjugal home. In the dream, Bibhutibhushan said: “Kalyani [his pet name for her], why have you packed those worthless utensils? Take my books instead.” She woke up and repacked the boxes with his books and papers, replacing the household goods that are always prized in a typical home.

I do not believe in dreams, but I do believe in the prescience she showed that day in packing the right stuff for future generations.

Trinankur Banerjee is a designer, researcher, curator, and storyteller. He works across forms of representation, bridging literature, history, and visual culture with imagination.

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