Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay – författare

Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay was one of the greatest writers in modern Bengali literature, best known for his autobiographical novel Pather Panchali, which, along with another of Bandyopadhyay’s books, formed the basis for Satyajit Ray’s classic Apu Trilogy. In this semi-autobiographical novel, Satyacharan is a young graduate in 1920s Calcutta, who, unable to find a job in the city, takes up the post of a ‘manager’ of a vast tract of forested land in neighboring Bihar. As he is increasingly enchanted and hypnotized by the exquisite beauty of nature, he is burdened with the painful task of clearing this land for cultivation. As ancient trees fall to the cultivator’s axe, indigenous tribes—to whom the forest had been home for millennia—lose their ancient way of life. The promise of ‘progress’ and ‘development’ brings in streams of landless laborers, impoverished schoolmasters and starving boys from around the region, and the narrator chronicles in visionary prose the tale of destruction and dispossession that is the universal saga of man’s struggle to bend nature to his will. Written in 1937–39, and now available in English translation, Aranyak is an unforgettable account of hard lives in a place of vanishing beauty, preserved here for all time by a brilliant artist.

Restless Waters of the Ichhamati is a celebration of flora and fauna, particularly of the profusion of commonly found plantife that flourishes in most regions of Bengal. The gaze of a slow-moving attentive river-farer brings into view glimpses of vibrant plantife, traces of human habitation and changes of sky and water in the course of seasons. These are signs, evoking the flow of time in which generations unknown haveived and those unborn willive along the Ichhamati's banks as it wends its way through Jessore district towards the Bay of Bengal. Born of this tension between the ephemeral and the forever, the novel's own riverine course dispenses with chapter breaks”a writer's decision that the translation follows.