The passing of Sankar on February 20 brought a flurry of deeply felt social media posts. One of them, put out by the scholar Nandini Bhattacharya, touched a nerve. Writing in Bengali, Bhattacharya outlined the profound culture shock she had felt as a student of Presidency College in the 1970s, when she realised that Sankar, an author she had grown up enjoying, was considered a literary lightweight, even trivial—in Bengali, a pati lekhok. The fact that a publisher brought out a collection of his stories with the title Ek Bag Sankar (A Bagful of Sankar) had triggered a flurry of laughter. Was someone whose book was associated with fish-vending packets even a “writer”? Was his writing really meant for the literary palate?

Bhattacharya’s poignant post evoked the passage of time through which Sankar eventually came to be published in English translation by Penguin and drew scholarly attention. Time took away the “lightweight” epithet. But did it really add gravitas to Sankar’s oeuvre? I could not help but comment on the post and touch on the riches of the “middlebrow” in modern and contemporary Bengali literature.

One had to agree that Sankar was indeed considered part of the popular middlebrow, unlike those who had earned the bracket of the literary highbrow—Buddhadev Bose, Manik Bandopadhyay, Ashapurna Devi, Samaresh Basu. Even Sunil Gangopadhyay, widely popular and quickly part of the commercial behemoth, the Anandabazar group of publications, was considered radically literary, doubtless due to his lyrical style and bohemian vision of life. As was the more politically subversive Mahasweta Devi, who, as Sohini Chattopadhyay recently reminded us, was strategically excluded by the bhadralok literary establishment and its awards. But Sankar, along with writers like Bimal Kar and Ashutosh Mukhopadhyay, commanding between them a readership that vastly exceeded that of the revered literary heavyweights put together, remained for the longest time, consigned to the group that readers loved and from which intellectuals kept a distance.

But the adjective “beloved” with which many of us readers identified Sankar seductively strained that distinction. In that social media conversation, Bhattacharya used the Bengali expression “bhalo laga”, for which the neutral “liking” is perhaps a better translation than the earthier and carnal “enjoyment”. But this is also a dreamy and dazed sort of “liking”, for a writer who becomes a dear friend and a family member.

Sea of humanity

Though I never met Sankar, a strange connection made him an imaginary part of my family. I grew up with my grandmother’s stories about Barwell Saheb—Noel Frederick Barwell, the last English barrister of Calcutta High Court. It was as his junior that my grandfather started his career before he became a public prosecutor. Also starting his career as a clerk to Barwell, Sankar launched his literary life with a mesmeric account of the High Court and the lives eddying around it. This was the book Koto Ojanare, translated by Soma Das as The Great Unknown. Sankar’s first book, where many of the stories and characters are from the writer’s real-life experience of the law, would perhaps be called a nonfiction novel today. It left a mesmeric mark on me from which I have never recovered.

Jana Aranya—the forest of people—was the title of another Sankar novel, but the phrase captures most of his literary oeuvre. Humanity was what he knew, and the mindboggling sea of humanity, in all its colours, depths and waves was he brought to life in all his novels, through the decades in which Calcutta had the cosmopolitan spirit to embody a microcosm of the world.

The luxury hotel became the carnivalesque centre for this human ocean in Chowringhee, the novel which, thanks to Arunava Sinha’s popular translation, is possibly Sankar’s best-known book beyond readers who read him in Bengali. That was a dream title, as Chowringhee is the erstwhile name of the great avenue in the heart of Calcutta that brought its human plenitude together in its still-beating Anglo-colonial heart. While this city reveals a spectrum of human qualities, it is also a shady and shifty place, as hinted in the title of Satyajit Ray’s film, The Middleman, based on Jana Aranya. A kindred gnawing conscience unfolded through the human limitations depicted in Seemabaddha (Limited), which also became a memorable Ray film.      

Ray did not distinguish between the literary and the popular while choosing novels for adaptation. But Chowringhee’s great success on Calcutta’s commercial stage in the 1970s says much about the precise nature of Sankar’s place in literature. Starring film actors Tarun Kumar, Sabitri Chatterjee and Supriya Devi, the play cast the unforgettable Miss Shefali, then Calcutta’s reigning queen of the cabaret, as the tragically colourful Karabi Guha from the novel.

The commercial stage, as I discovered while researching The Firebird, my novel set in the world of Calcutta theatre, was a unique genre that died with the rise of TV and video and the aggressive negligence of the ruling communist party, which favoured the left-leaning group theatre. But the commercial stage gave a roaring performative life to the fiction of many of the beloved writers whom the elite establishment would hesitate to admit in its literary canon, such as Sankar, Subodh Ghosh, Saradindu Bandopadhyay, Bimal Kar, and Ashutosh Mukhopadhyay.

His legacy

Theatre, now a marginal art in India, brought to life the powerful drama of human life that has historically challenged the distinction between the beloved and the respected. Look no further than William Shakespeare at Globe Theatre, who imagined the stage as a place of profit rather than art. So did Charles Dickens, whose wildly popular Victorian novels would scarcely make the cut for high art by the standards of modernists such as Henry James. This, too, is the legacy of Sankar.

By entering with a bag of fish, he entered the Bengali heart in ways that the more elevated and embellished caskets could not. Thanks to evocative translations, the universal humanity of the people-forest in the fish market has now spread far beyond those who swear by this palate.  

Saikat Majumdar is the author of five novels, including The Firebird and The Scent of God, and four books of nonfiction, most recently, The Amateur.

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