Dear Reader,
Great literature has a habit of accosting you unexpectedly—something innocuous reminds you of a passage you read long ago, and that sudden flash of memory bathes the usual in a rare glow. This happened to me yesterday, as I was admiring the rain-drenched devil’s trees (Alstonia scholaris) gleaming green in the traffic-clogged streets of Bengaluru. Called chhatim in Bengali, the trees are known for their strongly scented flowers, which bloom in late autumn.
Watching the trees glisten, I thought I smelt the absent flowers’ phantom fragrance; this was accompanied by a mental image of the trees growing in profusion on a mountain slope, their whitish-green flowers strewn like stars on the black rocks below. The image, vivid in memory as if based on a scene I had witnessed in real life, is actually from the pages of a book—Aranyak (Of the Forest, 1939) by Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay.
It comes towards the end, when the narrator, Satyacharan, makes one last trek to his beloved Dhanjhari hills (somewhere in the Chhota Nagpur Plateau) before leaving the wilderness behind once and for all. His heart is breaking, and all around him the chhatim flowers breathe out their heady, cardamom-like aroma. “As I stood there, soaking the atmosphere of the place in, I knew that this lovely afternoon was to join the ranks of some of the most favourite memories that I would cherish for the rest of my life” (translation: Bhaskar Chattopadhyay).
Although Bandyopadhyay is chiefly known outside Bengal for Pather Panchali and its movie adaptation by Ray, he wrote many novels and short stories that are equally touching and profound. His love for nature, bordering on devotion, is apparent in all of them. But Aranyak stands out for its depiction of untamed, unbound nature—different from the controlled, domesticated nature as portrayed in, say, Pather Panchali—which is as cruel as it is attractive. Nature is not a backdrop but a character in Aranyak, moulding Satya and others like him who are receptive to its influence. But the novel is also a lament for the death of nature, brought about by unbridled greed.
Long before bulldozers were lined up to fell trees and clear forest lands in our times, Bandyopadhyay understood how avarice can flatten all things beautiful and worthwhile. “Such a vast and rich tract of priceless forest land was nothing short of a national treasure; had this been any other country, there would have been laws passed to turn this land into a protected national park. Wearied and exhausted from their day-to-day lives, men and women from the cities would have come here to spend a few quiet days in contact with nature. But that was not to be.”
And he had no doubt about the identity of the destroyers either: not the usual targets—the indigent masses who inhabit or till the earth for subsistence—but the landlords who lease them the land to extract revenue from it. The feudal zamindars of Bandyopadhyay’s time have now been replaced by capitalist conglomerates, but the structure of exploitation remains the same.
Nature, the chief actor in Aranyak, is surrounded by a large cast of human figures who are not related to one another but are connected to the forest, either as its keepers or its despoilers. In Satya’s scheme of things, good and evil are clearly demarcated, and he has no time for the latter group—the philistine, propertied class, the landowners, moneylenders, even his own employers, the zamindars of Mymensingh (now in Bangladesh), on whose acres in Bihar’s Purnia he finds employment as a manager.
At the heart of the novel is an unresolved contradiction: if the forests Satya so loves are fated to disappear, he himself has signed their death warrant as the zamindars’ deputy, parcelling out the woods to lessees and collecting rent in the form of crops grown on the cleared patches. Of course, if he had not done it, someone else in his place would have, but the guilt persists. He tries to make up for it by distributing some of the land among the poorest, who need it for survival, and by writing off their rents in the initial years. He also confesses the wrongdoing to his readers, hoping for expiation, while knowing in his heart that the forest gods will never forgive him.
Satya is a romantic idealist. As a city-bred man, he initially misses Kolkata when he takes up the job in the remote forest, but soon falls in love with the wilderness. In Kolkata, he had belonged to the throngs of jobless youth, living in a hostel and barely pulling through, but the dire poverty he encounters in Bihar takes him aback. The landless agricultural labourers he meets there—most of them from the marginalised Gangota caste—widen the horizons of his head and heart, acquainting him with ways of life entirely different from his own.
He is educated, from a powerful caste and middle-class family, unlike the labourers, who have almost nothing of their own. They survive on boiled China grass or pulse grist, eaten with salt and chillies. Rice, essential to many Indian diets, is a luxury for them. How do they survive hunger, homelessness, loneliness, lack of education, the absence of any means of entertainment? Satya questions them again and again, like Wordsworth grilling the old and impoverished leech-gatherer in “Resolution and Independence to find out his mantra of survival: “How is it that you live, and what is it you do?”
Gradually, he uncovers their “secret”—they are like the rocks of the forest, not just living in nature but a part of it. Nature is their parent, friend, and provider. In this, they are precisely what Satya wants to be but can never become, removed as he is from the state of nature by his cultured sensibilities. Contemporary readers might wonder whether his attitude towards the forest-dwellers is one of sympathy rather than of empathy (most of them address him as “huzoor” and are dependent on his generosity), but he does try hard to become one of them, listening intently to their stories, breaking bread with them (unthinkable for a Brahmin of his time), and helping them in whichever way he can. He might not be woke enough for 2026, but by the standards of 1939 he is a rebel, guided by his faith in the holiness of the heart’s affections.
It is this rebellious nature that makes him take so easily to the forest, whose expanses call out to him, whispering of a freedom not to be found in the stifling confines of a city. It is a freedom so vast that it negates the call of civilisation, and is dangerous as such. Satya knows that he cannot embrace it entirely—he must ultimately return to the city—but for as long as he remains, he belongs to it. He also belongs to the people there. Satya envies them their innate connection to the earth and their ability to be wholly themselves.
They are as fey as the forest—Jugalprasad, the accountant with no talent for moneymaking; Raju Pandey, the unworldly cowherd with a knack for homeopathy; Dhaturia, the young orphan set apart by his artistic talent; Dhaotal Sahu, the compassionate moneylender; Dobru Panna, the tribal king with no kingdom; and his granddaughter, the elegant and guileless Bhanumati, whose only prized possession is a mirror gifted by Satya. It is as if their poverty elevates them, granting them a dignity the rich cannot possess.
Diametrically opposed to them are the unscrupulous moneylenders like Rashbehari Singh, or the affluent city picnickers who chatter incessantly and leave behind “dozens of empty tins of jam and condensed milk” in forests. Satya is somewhere between these two categories—the poet, the outsider, who sings of the Eden he cannot inhabit, and his longing is predicated on loss.
The descriptions of nature in Aranyak are intoxicating. Sadly, Chattopadhyay’s functional English translation fails to bring out the poetry. Native trees, wild flowers, moonlight, brooks, birds, foxes, and vines decorate the pages; Satya’s adoration is inscribed in his deeply felt account. Here, for instance: “The forests of Saraswati Kundi... had the power to infuse mirth in every pore of my body, just like a lively tune would. They took me to a languid, dreamlike state. I had spent countless afternoons sitting in silence in the shade of a tree by the calm waters of the lake, and my mind would wander away from the chirping of the birds, the fragrance of the freshly bloomed flowers of the wild neem and the bounty of water lilies right in front of me. Having spent hours lost in my own thoughts, I would suddenly realize that night was falling, and that it was time to head back home.”
Elsewhere he says: “To those who don’t see beauty in a jungle flower, to those who have never felt the irrepressible desire to heed the call of the horizon, the true meaning of living will forever remain unknown, and this planet they call home will always remain alien to them.”
A spirit runs through Aranyak: pagan, benevolent, all-pervasive, and itinerant, like the nomadic labourers of Labtulia. Writing about Bandyopadhyay in the essay “A Citizen of the Cosmos,” Trinankur Banerjee says, “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.”
Trinankur happens to be Bibhutibhushan’s grandson. Recently, he curated a month-long exhibition of the writer’s memorabilia and manuscripts in Kolkata. He writes about the show and Bibhutibhushan’s legacy in a moving essay here.
As the bulldozers get ready to uproot the millennia-old rainforests of Great Nicobar, let us keep in mind Bibhutibhushan’s assessment of those who cannot find beauty in a wild flower.
See you again soon.
Till then,
Anusua Mukherjee
Deputy Editor, Frontline