Rajaram Deb has always been in search of an immense carnival. For the central character of Bengali writer Sayam Bandyopadhyay’s novel, Carnival, it means even a flicker of light to escape from the darkness of his existence. The novel, originally published in Bengali as Puranpurush, evokes the inner elements of both a country and a citizen to search for freedom from their dark lives and secrets.
Set in the then Calcutta in the times of India’s First War of Independence, Carnival is mostly the musings of one man. Living in a large house he inherited from his wealthy landlord father, Rajaram is struggling to gain a foothold in the family’s future. His father had passed away several years ago. His mother had died immediately after giving birth to him. When his father was alive, Rajaram had no affection for him because he believed his father was incapable of larger decisions in life. When his aunt Bimalasundari, who lived with his family, too, dies, Rajaram is caught further in the uncertainty of life.
Bandyopadhyay’s debut novel builds a wall of philosophical certitudes around its protagonist, as a tightening political and economic stranglehold by the East India Company chokes the land and its people into submission. Following his aunt’s death, Rajaram is now left with a young woman, an orphan, to care for. Krishnabhabini, the young woman, is the daughter of Rajaram’s uncle from a wedding his family didn’t welcome. Now the sole owner of the family’s wealth, Rajaram starts to ponder over possible new business ventures. In the process, he is consumed by the success of another landlord in Bengal, Dwarkanath Tagore, who has embraced many new businesses, indigo farming, a bank and even brewing liquor with the support of the colonising East India Company.
The novel’s narrative journey through the wandering mind of an idle Rajaram takes a twist with a series of letters he writes to the businessman, Dwarkanath Tagore. The letters, first written in English and continued in Bengali, implore the businessman to accept Rajaram, who has been liberated from his father’s lack of vision, as a partner in his liquor business. None of the letters, however, is completed, as he is unsure of their ending, or delivered.
Bandyopadhyay, who won the Sahitya Akademi Yuva Puraskar for Puranpurush in 2020, delves deep into the nation’s colonial history to examine the scale of human ambition and entrepreneurship without freedom. The novel oscillates between violence at home and outside without saying so much about the perpetrators or their actions. “…Carnival owes as much to Christopher Marlowe and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe as it does to Thomas Mann, Mikhail Bulgakov, and Klaus Mann,” writes the author in the beginning of the novel, in an apparent reference to human beings and their stories transcending time and language.
Carnival shows one man’s attempt to detach himself from history, but in the end becoming a shadow of the past itself. Even the new gas-powered street lamps of Chowringhee, which the East India Company brings in place of the old oil lamps in the middle of the mutiny, are not enough to bring light to his world. On the contrary, translator Arunava Sinha succeeds in illuminating a period drama with an ease of language and elegance befitting its prose and style.
Faizal Khan is a freelancer
Book details:
Title: Carnival: A Novel
Author: Sayam Bandyopadhyay
Translated by: Arunava Sinha
Publisher: Aleph Book Company
Number of pages: 160
Price: Rs 499