Sankar (1933-2026): Chronicler of cosmopolitan moral anguish in the pursuit of success

Every time Sankar rang me to talk about a translation, he would identify himself as Mani Shankar, conduct the conversation briskly, and disconnect the call as soon as the discussion had ended. Not for him the slow winding down of an exchange once the business at hand had been dealt with.

On Friday, February 20, his death in Kolkata at the age of 92 followed the same rule. Arguably the most popular writer ever in the Bengali language – his 1962 novel Chowringhee gets a new edition regularly even today, more than 60 years later – Sankar had left word that he should be cremated without fuss or delays. Everyone was to be told, there was to be no waiting for anyone.

During most of those 92 years, though, Sankar loved telling long-drawn-out stories. And despite writing a string of hugely popular novels that have gone on to gain critical acclaim as well, he never made up any of them. Deprived of the chance of a formal, sheltered education by the early death of his father, and compelled to earn a living as a teenager to support his family, Sankar pounded the pavements of Calcutta in search of work, met, spoke to, and observed countless individuals, and spun all that he heard into the stories that regaled generations of readers.

Every one of his novels came from real life, and he made no bones about disclosing this. In notes accompanying Jana Aranya (The Middleman) and Seemabaddha (Limited), for instance, he explicitly cited the sources who told him of the incidents that were the respective centrepieces of these novels.

Later in his writing life, as he lost touch with those very people who brought him the tales he wove into his novels, Sankar turned to writing about real-life people, from Swami Vivekananda to Ramkrishna Paramhansa’s wife (the book on the latter provocatively titled Mr and Mrs Chatterjee). But these were not accounts of their spiritual arcs – on the contrary, they turned revered figures into flesh-and-blood humans without diminishing their status.

Unable to resist telling stories, Sankar wrote extensively about his travels around the world, always putting together anecdotes and incidents to illuminate the general with the light of the specific. His other passion was food, whose history he chronicled with visible delight in his books, presenting an aspect of Bengali life that did not make it to literature often despite its delicious dominance even of the quotidian existence.

The underdog’s story

Perhaps because of his own struggles, Sankar sided instinctively with the journey of the underdog trying to make it in life. Mirroring his own life, his protagonists are self-made, lacking either an inheritance or patronage. While many of Sankar’s contemporaries examined sociopolitical realities, class struggles, and the individual’s existentialist angst, for him, life consisted of travelling upstream against the tide of power, control, and money, in order to attain success defined by survival first and triumph afterwards.

From Shyamalendu in Seemabaddha, through Kamalesh in Asha Akankha (translated into English as Unlimited), to Somnath in Jana Aranya – the three novels brought together under the title Shorgo Mawrto Pataal (Heaven, Earth, Hell) – they are all strugglers in the world of corporations and business, often guided by canny yet generous operators. The system is not on their side, the facade of fair play crumbles quickly, and dreams are constantly under threat.

In telling the stories of such individuals – almost always men, with the exception of Paromita in Nagar Nandini (The Daughter of the City) – Sankar laid bare the inner conflicts of the white-collar worker in search of success, revealing an internal moral landscape in a way few other writers did. Without intellectualising them, he exposed the inevitable contradiction between the pursuit of success and adherence to moral standards.

Perhaps it was this that made so many readers – hardworking professionals and their families – see themselves in the protagonists of Sankar’s novels as ambitions and anxiety lock horns with each other. No wonder Satyajit Ray chose to film two of his novels – Seemabaddha and Jana Aranya – as part of his Calcutta trilogy in the 1970s.

A long-standing inhabitant of the corporate world, Sankar knew its murky underbelly only too well. Engaged for public relations by the RP Goenka Group, he was witness to many of the manipulations in the mercantile domain, all of which added richness and realism to his stories of individual trajectories in this ethically dubious universe. And PR, as the redoubtable Natabar Mitra tells Somnath in Jana Aranya, was the only thing that mattered.

“Nobody noticed that Natabar Mitra had arrived. Adak was acquainted with him. ‘What’s that you said?’ Mitra roared.

‘Complete nonsense. Why are you stuffing this young man’s head with your tales of once-upon-a time? If hard work were everything, porters and rickshaw-pullers would have been Calcutta’s richest.’

Somnath stared at him in surprise.

Mitra said, ‘The only thing that counts in business is PR.’

‘What on earth is that?’ Adak asked, annoyed.

Natabar Mitra smiled. ‘Public relations.’

Somnath looked on like a fool.

Mitra said, ‘Still don’t get it? It all depends on your relations with the powerful people who will buy what you’re selling.’

Looking at Somnath’s uncomprehending look, an impatient Mitra growled, ‘You still haven’t understood? Elsewhere in India people are born with this knowledge.’”

— From ‘The Middleman’

Intimate witness

Sankar’s storytelling is marked by close observation of his characters and their daily lives. His ear for conversation was extraordinary, and much is revealed about the people in his novels through what they say to one another. Events are often seen unfolding from the point of view of another character, or of an invisible presence, and almost never the lofty perspective of the ubiquitous narrator. Close attention to sights, sound, textures, colour, taste – everything that the senses can capture – makes his novels readymade worlds for readers to step into and experience. Much of the memorability of his words owes itself to this storytelling technique.

Conveying a world-view through his characters rather than directly through the narration also enabled Sankar to pass on his morality without seeming overbearing. In Chowringhee, while the narrator Shankar’s sympathies lie with the exploited women, the laundryman Nityahari responds to the goings-on in the hotel – many of them beyond the puritanical limits of middle-class Calcutta – by going to the holy river for a bath every morning. Sankar doesn’t shy away from revealing what goes on, but he doesn’t provide moral sanction either. Perhaps this was what convinced his readers to read him without feeling they were committing transgressions of their own.

Read extensively not just in Bengali but also in translation across India in languages like Hindi and Malayalam besides English, Sankar was, in a sense, the last of Calcutta’s chroniclers in fiction. His city was familiar both to those who lived in it and outside it – even in countries as far as the UK, Italy, France, Spain and China. He wrote of a sensory cosmopolitanism, experienced in everyday life, that no longer exists in the flattened urban landscapes of globalisation and its attendant standardisation. Shahjahan Hotel in Chowringhee can never be re-created, in life or in fiction.

“Towards the end of the nineteenth century, the English poet Rudyard Kipling, on a visit to Calcutta, had taken shelter for the night at another ancient hotel. Having become acquainted with the dreadful nights of this dreadful city, on his way back to the hotel at the dead of night he stopped – quite near where I had paused. The arrogant poet of colonialism had said, ‘All good Calcutta has gone to bed, the last tram has passed, and the peace of the night is upon the world. Would it be wise and rational to climb the spire of that kirk and shout: O true believers, decency is a fraud and a sham. There is nothing clean or pure or wholesome under the stars, and we are all going to perdition together. Amen!’

There in Calcutta at midnight, without a job, and without shelter, I too could have prayed for the same perdition. But despite all my grievances and anger, hurt and resentment, I couldn’t do it.

Elated at the thought of perdition, damnation and destruction, the proud poet of the west had said, amen – so be it. But the countless stars in the sky gave me hope, gave me strength. Generous and infinite, time stretched before me. This sin-infested city would surely be sanctified some day by the healing touch of the good.

For the final time I looked back at my dear inn – the indefatigable red light of Shahjahan still blinked on and off.

I strode ahead.

— From ‘Chowringhee’.