A Literature of One’s Own: British Literary Influence on the Development of Indian

Children’s Genres

By

Debasree Ghosh

A thesis

submitted to the Victoria University of Wellington

in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

in English Literature

Te Herenga Waka-Victoria University of Wellington

2023
 ii

Acknowledgements

The writing of this thesis has been a memorable and cherished experience amidst a
very turbulent set of years. I am so very grateful to the multitude of exceptional people who
have brought this long-harboured dream to the shores of the world.

First and foremost, I wish to extend a sincere and heartfelt thank you to my excellent
supervisors, Associate Professors Dr. Anna Jackson and Dr. Charles Ferrall for their
unwavering encouragement, immensely constructive feedback, brilliant insights, and kind
guidance. Their belief and enthusiasm in my project have inspired me from the day I started
my journey at the Victoria University of Wellington. I would also like to extend my sincere
gratitude to Professor Harry Ricketts who has very kindly offered me invaluable guidance as
an advisor on my chapters on Rudyard Kipling.

Next, I would like to sincerely thank the Faculty of Graduate Research and Victoria
University of Wellington for presenting me with this opportunity to conduct my research. To
all the members of staff who work tirelessly and silently, the supportive librarians, the
fabulous administrators, and the various support staff around the University, thank you for
your tremendous assistance in helping form the backbone of the community.

I would not have been able to reach this moment without the unconditional love of my
family members. To my mother, Nupur, who is my unswerving anchor, to my father, Sujit,
who inspires me to reach for every rainbow in the sky, to my wonderful husband, Vittal, who
wishes for me to constantly expand my horizons of learning, my in-laws, Usha and
Venugopal for their prayers and kind wishes, and my grandmother, Sumita, who left us in the
middle of this journey but also left so much of herself with us, I thank you from every quiet
corner of my soul. To my beautiful little girl Riona, who turned three when this journey
started and my adorable son Rohan, who was born at its peak, I hope that little children like
you will always love reading.

To my many, many friends who are spread across the globe-I thank you for your
companionship, your love, your moral support, and humour-you have wished me in well in
more ways that I can count and been by me through times of rapturous joy and deep sorrow. I
cannot express my gratitude for the moments which we have shared and will continue to
share. A special thank you to Mrinalini, Sohini, Sudipa, Arnav, Sangeetha, Saravanan, Sarah,
Rajorshi, Miru and Suman for their constant support and encouragement. To my wonderful
 iii

cousins for their love and companionship and my extended family of truly wonderful aunts,
uncles and neighbours who inspire me with their goodness and generosity every day.

To my incredible colleagues at the Department of English who have never failed to motivate,
help, and encourage me. I wish to express my gratitude to Sraddha, who has been very
generous with her time and a source of immense support and help. My kind and ever-helpful
office-mates, Patrick, Eleanor and Talia, thank you so very much for the meaningful
conversations and camaraderie. To Amy, Samira and Yuan Yuan who have recently
graduated, thank you for your friendship. A heartfelt thank you to Angelina for her good
wishes.

To my guide and mentor from the National Institute of Education, Singapore, Dr.
Anitha Devi Pillai, who encourages me to do my best every day. To the wonderful teachers of
Literature at Calcutta International School and my excellent professors at Jadavpur
University Department of English, I remain eternally grateful to you.

To the cities I have lived in-to literary Calcutta where I was born, to bustling
Singapore where this project was first conceived to verdant Wellington where I have received
the opportunity to write this thesis-thank you for being my homes, to you I will always
belong, to you I will always be indebted and to you I will always return.

I dedicate this work to the little readers of the world in the earnest hope that they will
always have a literature to call their own.
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Abstract

“We become writers before we learn to write. The rest is simply learning how to put
it all together.” Ruskin Bond

“The 1835 English Education Act of William Bentinck,” states Gauri Viswanathan in
Masks of Conquest (1989) “which swiftly followed Macaulay’s minute of that same year,
officially required the natives of India to submit to the study of English literature” (45),
thereby establishing its presence as an ineluctable result of colonial rule. English literature
played a pivotal role in the colonial project and according to colonialists like the former
governor-general Lord Hardinge and James Mill, would both “control” (Viswanathan, 91)
and endow educated natives with “a chance of having their understandings better
enlightened” (Viswanathan, 91), thereby ‘rescuing’ them from the realms of ignorance. This
thesis argues that Indian children’s literature draws on the influence of English literature and
takes shape in accordance with English genre conventions, while adapting these conventions
to produce a distinct and unique canon of juvenile writing (for children privileged enough to
read), which is far removed from colonial, ‘civilising’ intentions. My research demonstrates
how the consumption of and engagement with British literary genres by Indian writers of
juvenile literature helped define a local literary identity of the colonised child. Significantly,
Indian children’s literature from the 19th century onwards is not merely a derivative
discourse, which would have only furthered the colonial agenda. Instead, its complex
interactions with English literature result in a range of localised adaptations, radical
appropriations, and subtle subversions of British genres, all of which developed in
accordance with the evolving notion of Indian childhood. This thesis focuses on, but is not
restricted to, the literature emerging from Bengal, since Calcutta was the Imperial capital
until 1911 and the seat of colonial education. The chapters on science fiction, the adventure
story, detective fiction and the ghost story set out to survey the field in Bengal before
focusing on close readings of Bengali texts by writers like Satyajit Ray, Leela Majumdar,
Premendra Mitra, Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay and Hemendra Kumar Roy among others,
all of whom acknowledge their debt to English literature. The next two chapters titled “In the
Jungle” and “The Anglo-Indian Conversation” study the lasting influence of Kipling’s legacy
 v

on the English writing of the Bengali-American expatriate Dhan Gopal Mukerji and the
Anglo-Indian writer Ruskin Bond. The final chapter offers a close reading of “Bhondar
Bahadur” (1926), a short story in the vernacular by Gaganendranath Tagore which is inspired
by a classic text of English literature, Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
(1865). The conclusion presents a short reading of Ruskin Bond’s novella, The Blue
Umbrella (1980) to reinforce the arguments of the thesis, meditates on whether Indian
adaptations of English genres have successfully rescued juvenile readers from the peripheries
of readership and offers some insight into the current energies of children’s writing emerging
from contemporary India.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements ii

Abstract iv

Introduction 1

Chapter One: Adventure 17

Chapter Two: Bengali Detective Fiction 50

Chapter Three: Science Fiction 86

Chapter Four: The Ghost Story 117

Chapter Five: The Anglo-Indian Conversation 132

Chapter Six: In the Jungle 152

Chapter Seven: The Post-Carrollean Lives of Alice: An Adaptation of Lewis

Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland in Bengal 182

Conclusion 202

Appendix 208

Works Cited 213

 1

Introduction

“Don’t limit a child to your own learning, for he was born in another time”-
Rabindranath Tagore

This thesis argues that Indian children’s Literature developed by drawing upon both
adult and juvenile English literature and took shape in accordance with English genre
conventions, while also adapting these conventions to produce a literature that has its own
distinct features. The editors of Timeless Tales from Bengal: An Anthology of Bangla
Children’s and Young Adults’ Stories (2018)1 claim that although “nonsense and fantasy
literatures” had “indigenous oral roots in the Bengali and Indian tradition” (21), Bengali
juvenile literature relied heavily on British texts and that

adaptations from western books, sub-genres like detective story, adventure narrative,
ghost story and science fiction and so on also got imported and developed on Indian
soil. (20)

There have been several studies of 20th century Indian children's literature and yet
while many of these focus on the topic of colonialism, and acknowledge its influence on
indigenous fiction, not many have considered colonialism as a precondition of the existence
of the children’s genre in India. This presents the possibility of investigating the lines of
British influence and native subversion of specific genres.2 My research undertakes a survey
of British influence on the development of Indian children’s genres primarily in (but not
restricted to) Bengal, in addition to conducting a critical assessment of the influence and

1
In the introduction, “Kathamala” (1856), a collection of Greek stories from the Aesop’s Fables
written by Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar and published in 1856, is described as the “first real specimen in Bangla
of what is commonly understood as children’s or young adult’s literature” (15).
2
An alternative, contemporary and indigenous approach to interpreting genre fiction is offered by
Anwesha Maity in “Genre Fiction and Aesthetic Relish: Reading Rasa in Contemporary Times,” (2018), where
she analyses genre literature by using the framework of ancient Sanskrit Rasa theory to investigate how genre is
an integral part of Indian-language literature-not merely an offshoot of western imitation/influence” (99). She
demonstrates this through a reading of “Khagam,” a horror story by Satyajit Ray. Later in the thesis I argue that
the genre of the ghost story is exceptional in that it depended upon indigenous traditions of storytelling more
than other genres such as science fiction and the adventure story, which were indeed offshoots of British
influence.
 2

impact of Kipling’s writing on the Anglo-Indian writer Ruskin Bond and the Bengali-
American expatriate Dhan Gopal Mukerji. Apart from the stories by Bond, Mukerji and
Partarp Sharma which were originally written in English, all the other stories which I have
included in my readings were originally written in Bengali.

A city with already a rich literary heritage, Calcutta was the seat of colonial education
and home to The College of Fort William, which was established on the 18th of August 1800,
by Lord Wellesley. Additionally, the city was the Imperial capital until 19113 and home to
The Calcutta Book Society (1817) which supplied textbooks for the other educational
institutes of India. Moreover, The Wood’s Dispatch of 1854 makes the following observation
about the state of Bengal:

In Bengal, education through the medium of the English languages has arrived at a
higher point than any other part of India. We are glad to receive constant evidence of
an increasing demand for such an education, and the readiness of the natives of
different districts to exert themselves for the sake of obtaining it. (qtd. in Acharya
670) 4

However, Poromesh Acharya, in “Bengali Bhadralok and Educational Development in 19th

Century Bengal” (1995), convincingly argues although “Educational development in colonial
India generally has been viewed as the work of the British rulers whose hidden agenda was to
initiate a process of socialisation” (670), it was far from being a passive process of British
decision making. Instead, he claims that the educated elite of Bengal, many of whom were
recipients of early colonial education and active contributors to the realm of juvenile
literature, “not only participated actively in the process but also played a significant role in
influencing colonial policy on education” (670). Therefore, English literature, a seminal
component of British education in India, and its subsequent adaptation into Bengali
children’s writing, became the nuclei around which conversations about the cultivation,
development and evolution of native children occurred.

3
In the Imperial Darbar of 1911, King George V announced that Delhi was going to be the new capital
of British India.
4 Wood’s Dispatch was a formal notice from Sir Charles Wood, the President of the Board of Control
of the British East India Company to the then Governor-General of India, Lord Dalhousie, in which he
suggested that primary education be conducted in the vernacular language, high schools adopt Anglo-vernacular
language and English be used as the language of instruction in all colleges.
 3

In Masks of Conquest (1989), Gauri Viswanathan has made a compelling case for
how English literature played a pivotal role in the colonial project and how it would,
according to the former governor-general Lord Hardinge and James Mill, both “control” (91)
and endow educated natives with “a chance of having their understandings better
enlightened” (91), thereby ‘rescuing’ colonised adults and children from realms of
‘ignorance’. The rise of imperial rule resulted in a critical reassessment of the worth and
status of the native child, who was the active recipient of both colonial and nationalist
projects. Supriya Goswami, in Colonial India in Children’s Literature (2012) puts forth the
argument that:

British and Anglo-Indian children’s literature is burdened with the important mission
of preparing children to do their duty and become ideal imperial citizens who work
tirelessly for the greater good of an Indian Empire. (5)

However, Satadru Sen in Colonial Childhoods: The Juvenile Periphery of India 1850-1945
(2005) argues that the British viewed native children very differently from their own. Sen
argues that while British childhood was defined by its “plasticity and innocence” (1),
colonialism led to a deliberate obfuscation of boundaries between native adults and children
because the latter were viewed as “essentially small, perverse adults” (1), thereby echoing
5
Kipling’s depiction of the “half devil and half child” (1). In another essay, “A Juvenile
Periphery: The Geographies of Literary Childhood in Colonial Bengal” (2004), Sen considers
how the figure of the child was “re-examined and reinterpreted in the cultural and intellectual
climate of colonisation” (para 1) between the 1850s and the 1930s, and comments on how
“the marginal condition of the native child could serve as a model and mechanism for the
marginality of various segments of the colonised” (para 1). He argues that the child was
confined to a “juvenile periphery”:

As the uneasily shared wards of the British and Indian elites, native children became
embroiled in debates about race, nature, civilisation and the impact of colonialism
upon the modern self. These debates were produced within, and productive of, a set
of experimental and institutional spaces that might be described as the ‘juvenile

5
The phrase appears in Kipling’s poem, “The White Man’s Burden” (1897), in which he urged white
Americans to assume control of the people of the Philippines, whom he addressed as “Your new-caught, sullen
peoples/Half devil and half child”
 4

periphery’ of colonial India: schools, reformatories, laws, committees of inquiry,

children’s literature, etc. (para 1)

Their restriction to the “juvenile periphery” reinforces how British administrators

perceived native children as a threat in more ways than one: not only could they topple
existing adult hierarchies but could also initiate British children into native customs. Mark
Tully,6 in his introduction to Last Children of the Raj; British Childhoods in India (2004),
recalls the general horror with which an exchange of cultures was viewed:

I remember our British nanny, when she caught me learning to count Hindustani
from the driver, hitting me across the head and saying, “That’s not your language,
that’s the servant’s language.” Her sole responsibility seemed to be ensuring that we
did not get too close to the servants, and that we only played with other British
children. Of course, nothing was watertight. My grandfather used to undermine my
nanny by teaching us nursery rhymes in Hindustani. (ix)

Imperialists strongly believed that indigenous children could be somewhat uplifted and
civilised by reading English literature which would expose them to desirable models of
childhood and help them realise their implicit shortcomings. Yet, as Homi Bhabha points out
in The Location of Culture (1994), natives were expected to maintain a safe distance from
their refined European counterparts and their emulation was predicated on preserving this
gap. Native children, who were doubly marginalised, firstly as children and then as natives,
were viewed with suspicion and distrust. Moreover, their calculated exposure to English
literature ensured that native children remained in the margins of readership as eternal
outsiders, silent spectators, and passive consumers of narratives in which they had little
agency. But I contend that Indian adaptations of English children’s genres across the colonial
and postcolonial ages rescue them from the “juvenile peripheries” of readership by
empowering them to actively participate in literary conversations which revolve around local
protagonists and relevant thematic concerns. Additionally, characterizations of fictional
Indian scientists, detectives, adventurers, and adolescents endow native children with the
ability to admire their own home-grown literary heroes, heroines and peers, and take delight
in exploring a literary terrain to which they proudly belong. Furthermore, as Sen argues:

6
Mark Tully, the former Bureau Chief of the British Broadcasting Corporation, was born in Calcutta
during the British Raj where his father was a prominent entrepreneur, from where he later moved back to
England. In addition, he is also an acclaimed author.
 5

the attempt to claim the native child was not, however, inherently opposed to British
authorship. It proceeded alongside, and often in alliance with, British efforts to
delineate a juvenile geography that was metropolitan in its structure, “tropical" in its
content, Indian in its production, and that might contain a wider readership of
colonized children. (para 8)

I argue that much of this geography was shaped by native interpretations,

translations, and adaptations of British genres which, in addition to bequeathing local
children a domestic literary sphere, exposed colonised children to foreign literary treasures.
Their introduction to new worlds, ideas, and possibilities, albeit mediated by the Indian writer
through translations and adaptations, echoes John Keats’s response to reading ‘Chapman’s
Homer,’7 (1816) where he views translation as a means for the reader to explore hitherto
unknown “pure serene” islands. For Keats, Chapman translates Homer in a process that is
analogous to the colonial vision of the New World, just as these Indian writers translated and
adapted British works by turning themselves not into objects of the colonial gaze, but its
subjects. Sen cites the claim of Professor Lethbridge of Presidency College that:

the Englishman [had] the responsibility for the accuracy and the purity of the
English, whilst the Native was to take care that the ideas, illustrations, etc., were
suited to the capacity of native children. (Qtd. in Sen 47)

Notwithstanding the underlying colonial intentions behind its introduction to Indian children,
English literature, in all its richness and excellence, provided them with great degrees of
pleasure and entertainment. This is exemplified by the multiple translations of texts into the
vernacular, given the readiness of native authors to read, admire, emulate, and recreate
various literary genres.8 “Imperialism and Nationhood in Children’s Books in Colonial
Bengal” (2018) by Gargi Gangopadhyay sheds light on how, during the 1850s, the Bengali

7
The English Romantic poet John Keats composed his sonnet “On First Looking into Chapman’s
Homer” in 1816 to chronicle his reaction upon reading George Chapman’s English translations of Homer’s
Greek literary works.
8
Sudhindranath Raha (1896-1986) was a prolific translator of English literature who played a pivotal
role in exposing Bengali children to British stories in the vernacular. He adopted the rather symbolic pseudonym
of Sabyasachi (meaning ambidextrous in Bengali) and his engaging translations appeared in children’s
magazines like Shuktara which was brought out by the famous publishing house, Deb Sahitya Kutir in 1948.
Another gifted translator, whose translation of the works of H.G. Wells and Jules Verne appeared in children’s
magazines like Sandesh, was Kuladaranjan Ray, a great uncle of the filmmaker and writer Satyajit Ray. In
Timeless Tales from Bengal, we find mention of how the Vernacular Translation Society ensured the Bengali
translations of classic English texts such as Robinson Crusoe, and Tales from Shakespeare, among others, in the
magazine Sathi which was followed by Shuktara (1948), where this trend of translation continued.
 6

Family Library Series “which was created primarily for women and children” (73) published
the works of Daniel Defoe, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Charles and Mary Lamb’s adaptations of
Shakespeare and Oliver Goldsmith, among many others, which were “devoured” (73) by
eminent scientists like Prafulla Chandra Ray.Leela Majumdar, a prolific and popular writer of
juvenile fiction, was also an avid consumer of English literature and absorbed the works of
Dickens, Scott, and Rider Haggard, among many others. Notably, “by the twentieth century,
this vogue for foreign books as leisure reading had secured a stable niche in the libraries of
urban middle-class Bengali children” (Gangopadhyay, 73).

However, I contend that juvenile Indian readers were compelled to remain in what
Sen calls the “juvenile periphery” (para 1) of the British literary works they consumed
because of their inability to actively participate in fictional adventures. Predictably, British
children’s literature rarely placed an Indian child at the centre of their narratives, and when
they were it was often to humiliate, exoticise or at most pity them. In Stevenson’s poem
“Foreign Children” 9 (1913), a white child asks his native counterpart, ‘O don’t you wish that
you were me?” as though the Indian child would not even want to be the centre of their
world. But writersof native juvenile fiction remodelled English genre conventions in
accordance with the distinctive development of native children and gifted them with a literary
terrain to which they could unhesitatingly and assertively belong.When native writers re-
created British genres of literature, they rescued them from the margins of readership. Hence,
literature, which originally intended to ‘refine’ native children, empowered them instead and
the local adaptations of the English literary genres of science fiction, adventure stories,

9
“Foreign Children” is a 1913 poem by Robert Louis Stevenson whose first few verses read thus:
Little Indian, Sioux, or Crow,
Little frosty Eskimo,
Little Turk or Japanee,
Oh! don’t you wish that you were me?
You have seen the scarlet trees
And the lions over seas;
You have eaten ostrich eggs,
And turned the turtle off their legs.

Such a life is very fine,

But it’s not so nice as mine:
 7

detective fiction, and fantasy fiction, among many others, gifted them with domestic literary
heroes and heroines and settings which they could claim as their own.

Philippe Ariès, in his well-known work Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of

Family Life (1960) makes the contested claim that childhood was ‘invented’ in Europe,
around the 17th century, with some ambiguity as to the precise date. One of his sources
included Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s painting Children’s Games (1560), where children and
adults alike were playing games such as ‘blind-man’s bluff and leap-frog.’ According to him,
children were treated as mini adults who had to make a quick transition into the grown-up
world and were not considered to have special requirements commensurate with their age.
Although there has been much debate about this, historians are generally in agreement that
some essential concept of childhood did emerge around this time and most children's
literature scholars see this as a necessary precondition for the emergence of children's
literature in the eighteenth century.10 The romantic notion of childhood, however, developed
in 18th century Britain and children’s literature as a distinct genre first established itself in the
literary market of England with John Newbery’s publication of A Little Pretty Pocket- Book
in 1744. It follows, then, that specific genres of Indian literature for children can only have
developed after, and drawing on, children’s literature from its colonising country, Britain.

Ariès proposes that one reason for not endowing children with special attributes in
pre-modern Europe was that medical care was under-developed which compelled parents to
remain emotionally detached from their children owing to the high rates of infant mortality.
However, European medicine and standards of hygiene likewise contributed to the
development of ‘a culture of childhood’ in 19th century Bengal, the Imperial capital until
1911. Colonialism led to the creation of a middle-class intelligentsia, which according to
Pradip Bose, in “Sons of the Nation: Child Rearing in the New Family” (1995) focused on
‘‘more intense emotional ties between parents and children within the family and a

10
I recognise that Ariès’s claim is more relevant as a provocation rather than an argument. I would like
to acknowledge that many scholars of childhood, such as Hugh Cunningham, Shulamith Shahar, Barbara A.
Hanawalt, C. H. Talbot, Meradith McMunn and Gillian Adams have challenged Ariès’s claims with new
evidence that childhood and children’s literature did exist before the seventeenth century. For example,
according to Adams, “Ariès’s claim that childhood was not viewed as a separate stage of life is not supported by
the ample evidence of the interest shown during the Middle Ages in discussing and defining the ages and
characteristics of infantia (birth to six or seven years), peuritia (seven to twelve for girls, to fourteen for boys),
adolescentia (the period between biological and social puberty and legal and social majority)…” (1998, p. 4).
Therefore, I would like to reiterate that I completely agree that Ariès’s claim is a contested and debatable one
but British colonialism did influence native writers to re-assess and re-develop the constantly evolving concept
of Indian childhood through their literature.
 8

weakening of ties with relatives outside the immediate family” (118) which in part
contributed to the rise of the nuclear family.But there is very little information on pre-
colonial childhood and this is corroborated by Swapna Banerjee in “Children’sLiterature in
Nineteenth Century India: Some Reflections and Thoughts” (2007). Bannerjee contends that
while scholars like Meredith Borthwick, Chakrabarty, Partha Chatterjee, Geraldine Forbes
and Tanika Sarkar have addressed “the themes of rearing and socialisation of children in the
context of the role of the ideal mother and the ‘good’ wife” in the 19th century, “the question
of children and childhood which constituted the domestic culture, tended to remain marginal
in these studies” (NP). In the introduction to Childhoods in India: Contemporary and
Historical Perspectives (2015), Zazie Bowen and Jessica Hinchy state that “the concepts of
childhood that prevailed in India prior to the nineteenth century represent an under-
researched area” (321). Furthermore, they put forth the interesting argument that:

Moreover, the early modern Indian concept of childhood appears to have been
defined by ignorance-as opposed to innocence, the post-Enlightnment European ideal
of childhood. British colonizers in India articulated this childhood as a state of
innocence, but tended to see Indian children as lacking, particularly from the
nineteenth century. Scholars such as Sudipa Topdar (this issue) and Satadru Sen have
argued that the British colonizers defined Indian children not in terms of innocence,
but rather as perverse and prematurely adult. From the nineteenth century, elite
Indians imbibed some aspects of the European ideal of childhood as a stage of
innocence. However, the nationalist Indian middle-class rejected colonial racialised
concepts of perverse Indian childhood and saw Indian children as the future of the
Indian nation.(321)

While colonial stereotypes of Indian children ensured that they remained in the margins of
readership, I argue that native children’s literature develops out of this very rejection of
“colonial racialised concepts of perverse Indian childhood,” not merely to oppose these
stereotypes but to underscore the value systems and aspirations which would define Indian
childhood.Instead of being reduced to passive consumers of British literature and colonial
knowledge, Indian literature allowed children to become active, engaged readers who could
contribute to the intellectual climate of the time. But while the development of children’s
literature and the concept of childhood itself were predicated on colonial influence, Indian
children’s literatureis not merely a derivative writing which emerged under the influence of
British literature. Rather, it has consciously transcended the trappings of becoming mere
 9

derivative discourse, as this would have only furthered the colonial “civilising” agenda.
Bannerjee persuasively argues against it being “largely derivative from the West” and argues
that that “children’s literature [is] a new epistemic space created by the subaltern subject,
revealing an attempt at parallel assertions of authority made possible by the print media''
(337-351). However, she also acknowledges the undeniable legacy of British literature when
she cites author and critic Buddhadeb Basu who “pointed out that children’s literature in any
language and culture is always adaptive or derivative from indigenous or foreign sources''
(qtd. in Banerjee). One such example of an adaptation of a classic British text for the Indian
child is Abanindranath Tagore’s Khantanchi’r Khata (1922) which is modelled on J.M.
Barrie’s Peter and Wendy (1911). Another “adaptation” which Sibaji Bandyopadhyay points
out, is Narendra Deb’s rewriting of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s Little Lord Fauntleroy (1886)
as Parag O Renu (1944), although the latter adapts itself and its characters to the era of
“parasitical zamindars'' (159) of Bengal.

Scholarly research clearly indicates that far from being derivative discourse, Indian
children’s literature is emphatically political, interrogates British rule and resists any colonial
agenda. In The Gopal-Rakhal Dialectic: Colonialism and Bengali Children’s Literature
(which was first published in 1991 and later reworked in 2013), Sibaji Bandyopadhyay
contends that “In the colonial era, a new genre called ‘children’s literature’ was constructed
within the domain of Bengali literature” (xii). His work undertakes a detailed study of two
recurring archetypal characters who would become ubiquitous in colonial and anti-colonial
discourse. They were first created by Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar for his educational primer
for children, Barna Parichay (1855) and Bandyopadhyay interprets the quietly subservient
Gopal as one who yields obediently to the powers of colonial rule and the bold and rebellious
Rakhal who fearlessly opposes British domination: the recurrent presence of two ubiquitous
and archetypal characters which were the constructs of colonial and anticolonial discourse:

Gopal is emblematic of the forces that countered the babu, the species sponsored by
the East India Company and its Permanent Settlement Act of 1993, a species that
drew its sustenance by severely opposing the peasants. In short, Gopal represents the
bhadralok class positioned against the babus. Gopal, therefore, stands for people who
are contesting the claims of birth, and so-called destinies, on the strength of
education alone. It is redundant to say that this education became mechanical very
soon and the blue-bloodedness of the newbornbhadralok posed innumerable
obstructive barricades at every turn of the path of social mobility for others. Along
 10

with this, there is a deeper anxiety about whether the many liberal Rakhals of
Bengali children’s literature are not partners in the same ritual of obstruction.
Politically relevant to date, this anxiety is at the root of Gopal-Rakhal. (xix)11

The insurgent Rakhal, then, becomes an idol for young freedom fighters and nationalists,
who, unlike the deferential Gopal, refuses to bow down to British rule. Furthermore, in
Colonial India in Children’s Literature (2012) Supriya Goswami asserts that one of the
cardinal roles of Bengali children’s literature was to offer political resistance to imperialism,
particularly in the context of the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857:

There is not only a surprisingly long and rich tradition of political activism in these
children’s texts, but they also draw on a lively cast of characters from colonial Indian
history which include missionaries, mutineers, bogeymen, mimic men, and rule
breakers. (8)

Additionally, Nationalism, Genre, and Childhood in Colonial Indian Children’s Literature

(2021), a PhD thesis by Sreemoyee Dasgupta studies Bengali children’s texts as “potent,
political artifacts with India’s struggle for decolonization” (14).12 While it is undoubtedly true
that children’s literature became a powerful platform for voicing anti-colonial sentiments, as
seen in Sukumar Ray’s subversive book of nonsense verse, Abol Tabol (1923), I argue that
the very act of adapting British genres into an Indian context (and populating them with
Indian characters and concerns) is crucial to local literature avoiding the pitfall of becoming
mere derivative discourse. Additionally, I argue that apart from voicing anti-Imperial
sentiments, juvenile literature in India also confronts the inherent internal problems which
plagued the nation. Troilokyanath Mukhopadhyay (1847-1919), for example, targets the
internal follies of the tyrannical caste system, child marriage, gender discrimination and
colour bias, using adaptations of British genres. One such story is Kankabati, an adaptation of
Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) which has been critically assessed
by Dasgupta in her thesis. Mukhopadhyay’s complex stance is outlined in Indian Genre
Fiction: Pasts and Future Histories (2018):

11
In Caste, Culture, and Hegemony: Social Dominance in Colonial Bengal (2004) the historian Sekhar
Bandyopadhyay contends that the “bhadralok” or Bengali gentleman was a construct of British rule in India and
belonged to one of “the three traditional upper castes” (25) of Bengal. They were a wealthy group of men who
were fluent in English and held administrative jobs.
12
Notably, Dasgupta’s PhD thesis was published in 2021, two years after I commenced work on my
PhD in August 2019.
 11

Troilokyanath Mukhopadhyay, as a pioneer of genre fiction in India, was a staunch

critic of nationalism, even though he was arguably one of the foremost social
reformers of the colonial period…Patriotic yet critical of nationalism,
Mukhopadhyay was well aware of appealing to the popular, and in choosing to write
genre fiction, he was signalling to his elite readership the contemptible ways in
which the masses were exploited by political demagogues and rich landowners…
(18-19)

I contend that domestic literature for children is far from merely imitative because it harbours
an inherent desire to encourage indigenous children to escape parochial alleys and take
tentative steps into a newly emerging global world. While The Boy’s Own Paper exposed its
young readers to the “Orient” through the exotic lens of British colonial adventures, Indian
children’s literature had to carve out its own rationale for exploring foreign lands, to
empower its juvenile readers. In the inaugural issue of the children’s journal Rangmashal
(1936), the talented and prolific Hemendra Kumar Roy ruminates on the importance of
balancing patriotism with cosmopolitanism:

You are the children of Bengal, and you already love Bengal and take pride in her
many glories. But to love one’s own country and to take pride in her is not the same
as blind worship. Bengal lacks a great deal, has many faults, and we must remember
that. Perhaps you do not know that there are countries in the world in which children
are more fortunate than you. Their lives have far greater opportunity and variety. It is
as if you live in a small alley, where walls obstruct your view in every direction, and
there is little room to move about and manoeuvre. And they live in an expansive
field, where you can see to the horizon, and the paths are open in every direction.
You need not envy anybody their good fortune, but you must be determined to
escape the alley… (qtd. in Sen)

Domestic literature, then, acts as a kind of periscope, which enables the very children whom
Roy addresses to escape the “alley” of parochialism and enter a more global and diverse
conversation. I suggest that Bengali children’s literature avoids the pitfall of simplistically
resisting or reacting against colonialism because influential literary figures like Rabindranath
Tagore, despite championing the cause for India’s emancipation for the British and believing
that “as a result of English education, boys did not gain any ‘nourishment of the mind,
expansion of heart and strength of character’ but merely learnt imitation by rote and servility”
(Bandyopadhyay, 114) also vehemently spoke out against blind and parochial nationalism
 12

and famously declared his preference for humanity over rabid patriotism. The rise of
nationalism and rejection of British rule, interestingly, did not translate into an outright
rejection of English literature.

Timeless Tales from Bengal (2018) illustrates how magazines such as Abodhbandhu
(1863), Jyotiringon (1869), Balakbandhu (1878), Balakhitoishi (1881), Arjokahini (1881)
and Mukul (1895) all “played a crucial role in shaping the course of Bangla children’s
literature”(19). One of the earliest of these journals, Bibidharthosangraho, was brought out
by the Vernacular Literature Committee (1851) and modelled “upon the English Penny
Magazines” (19). In its early days it advertised a reward of “Rs. 200” (18) for writers who
could compose books which imparted moral values, scientific learning, and historical
knowledge to its young readers, thereby illustrating the “primary coordinates inside which
Bangla children’s literature catering to the urban, western-educated middle-class families
would develop in the ‘modern’ world” (18). Swapna Bannerjee offers the following
description of the first ever Bengali children’s magazine, Balakbandu (Friends of Boys, 1878)
which was the initiative of the Brahmo13 leader Keshub Chandra Sen but which paid scant
notice to the girl child:

The bi-weekly betrayed refined taste and a different concern: it was well illustrated
with small, neat-type setting and contained poems, stories, short articles, puzzles,
mathematical games, and a Sanskrit Shloka embodying a moral placed in a dialogue
box, all within the limit of eight pages. Significantly, every issue of Balakbandhu
included one or two pieces written by children, most likely boys. (339)

In the 1920s, the tremendously popular and critically acclaimed children’s magazines
Mouchak, Shishusathi and Ramdhanu appeared on the scene, to which literary stalwarts like
Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay, Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay and Jagadish Chandra Bose
contributed. The most influential children’s magazine was Upendrakishore Ray Chowdhury’s
Sandesh (1913), the editorship of which was subsequently taken up by his son Sukumar Ray
and grandson Satyajit Ray. In “Upendrakishore Ray Chowdhury’s “Sandesh”: An
Exploratory Essay on Children’s Literature and the Shaping of Juvenile Mind in Early 20th

13
Keshub Chandra Sen and Upendrakishore Ray Chowdhury belonged to the Brahmo Samaj, which
was founded in 1828 in Calcutta by Raja Ram Mohan Roy. The Brahmo Samaj was a spiritual movement which
questioned certain prejudices and practices within Hinduism such as casteism and child marriage.
Unsurprisingly, members of this movement made major contributions to the world of children’s literature in a
bid to usher in social reform.
 13

Century Bengal” (2012) Roy has pointed out that there was a “sustained effort” (888) by
Bengali authors to write juvenile literature from the 1880s in magazines such as Sakha (1883-
1893) and Mukul (1895-1917), culminating in a Golden Age of juvenile literature with the
creation of Roy Chowdhury’s Sandesh (1913-). Sandesh, which had coloured illustrations
which made it particularly alluring for children and it catered to girls and boys alike; the
cover of the first issue of the magazine features little boys and girls reading.The title of this
magazinehad a significant double meaning: sandesh is a ubiquitous sweetmeat in Bengal,
popular with children and adults alike, but it also means ‘news’ in Persian, and in fact it was
responsible for bringing the ‘news of the world,’ scientific and otherwise, to young children,
in a bid to broaden their minds.

An examination of the early issues of Sandesh reveals Ray Chowdhury’s dream of

instilling in his young readers a great degree of cosmopolitanism and awareness of global
14
issues. Unlike The Boy’s Own Paper in Britain, which was first published in 1879 by the
Religious Tract Society, and whose principal concerns were the promotion of Christian moral
beliefs and glorifying the Empire, Sandesh functions as a telescope through which its young
readers can transcend their confined surroundings, broaden their horizons, and participate in
the dynamic exchange of knowledge around the world with the rapidly unfurling world. For
example, in a 1926 edition of Sandesh, in an article titled “Shekale Aar Ekale” (“The Past and
the Present”, 1926), the editor directly addresses his young readership and lauds Western
scientific inventions like the camera, the typewriter, the printing press, motor engines and
newspapers for ushering in early globalisation and connecting the world through technology:

I woke up early in the morning and shook open the newspaper only to discover that a
World War is waging in Europe. The War only started yesterday but I have already
been informed of it! News from thousands of miles away reach us every day, and all
because of newspapers and telegrams. (19)

Ray Chowdhury, an accomplished and acclaimed printer both locally and internationally,
incorporates photographs of these devices to enhance the visual appeal and thereby champion
the technological progress which accompanied colonialism. Much space is devoted to topics
such as European scientific inventions, botany, astronomy, and geography but he also writes

14
I have read Sandesh in the original Bengali from the following German archive: http://digi.ub.uni-
heidelberg.de/csss/Sandesh/Sandesh_Vol_14.pdf and self-translated sections of it.
 14

at length about local phenomena. In his descriptive piece on the “Kaal Boishakhi,” for
example, which is a storm indigenous to Bengal and its surrounding states, he writes:

Spring is the time when Nor’westers make their presence felt in Bengal/ Bangladesh.
It flies in through the Southern skies and carries into the sky the little green leaves
and blades of grass who suddenly find themselves near clouds. (35)

While Sandesh features a serialised translation of Jules Verne’s The Mysterious Island
(1875), by Kuladaranjan Ray which is replete with illustrations it also includes native tales
from Bengali folklore and stories featuring local boys such as the indolent “Kureram” (21) as
its protagonists. Unsurprisingly, The Boy’s Own Paper, with its twin missions of imparting
moral values to the youth of Britain and extolling the merits of the Empire building project,
featured a host of maritime adventures, tales of exploration and foreign escapades. Typical
titles of some of it stories include “Amid Siberian Forests: A Tale of the Russian Conquest of
Asia” (65), “West Africa Waters: In Wreck of the Cameroon” (360-394), “A Malay
Adventure” (89) and “Up the Hooghly” (311). The Occidental perspectives through which
the Orient is perceived, filtered, described, and fictionalised must inevitably remind us of
Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978). In “Up the Hooghly”, author Dr. William-Forbes Leslie
offers the following description of sailing on the “river Hooghly, one of the mouths of the
sacred Ganges” (311):

Once between the banks, the full force of an Indian sun fell upon our unhappy heads:
even the seasoned pilot took to a sunshade, and soon we had to rig the poop awning
to protect his highness and the captain, who, now that all responsibility was taken off
his shoulders, was as lazy as happy as a school boy on a holiday and continually
refreshed with Burmah cheroots, both of which necessities to an Anglo-Indian the
boy had brought on board for his master’s gratification. (311)

This could be any boy from the Boys Own except of course that it’s an Indian river and the
“master” is a British adult. Leslie explains that in “India, the valet or servant is called the
boy” (311) and in “no paternal sense”, though this certainly sounds like special pleading.
Designating natives as children was a stock device in colonies such as the British thereby
unabashedly underscoring the fraught power dynamic, both racial and social, between the
coloniser and his coloured valet, which was of course common and accepted at the time of
the B.O.P.’s publication. As Chando Roy points out that Sandesh too was unfortunately not
free of some of the social prejudices of its time because its contributors belonged to “an
 15

urban, upper-class, educated Bengali milieu” (903), whose biases towards North Indians,
rural folk and domestic workers emerge in “unguarded moments” (903). Just as in the
B.O.P.working-class characters are treated with a degree of condescension, so in Sandesh,
were they represented through biases which were not “consciously condescending” (903) but
more a result of their socio-temporal setting. Apart from the presence of illustrations which
bind the B.O.P. and Sandesh with a common thread, both juvenile magazines, which hailed
from different continents and had vastly different motivations, did aim to focus, educate, and
celebrate the children to whom the catered.

This thesis argues that Bengali writers have admired,

consumed, emulated, appropriated, modified and even occasionally subverted British genres
to suit the local, juvenile literary climate. The opening chapters focus on adventure stories,
science fiction and detective fiction and demonstrate the influence of British writers like G.A.
Henty, Rider Haggard, Daniel Defoe, Robert Louis Stevenson, H.G. Wells, Arthur Conan
Doyle and Mary Shelley, among others, on the development of these genres in Bengal.
Additionally, they set out to survey the scope and field of these genres across the colonial and
postcolonial periods, before undertaking a close reading of a few selected texts in Bengali by
authors such as Satyajit Ray, Leela Majumdar, Premendra Mitra, Bibhutibhushan
Bandyopadhyay and Hemendra Kumar Roy and Partarp Sharma (who wrote in English).
Notably, Ray, who self-translated several of his works into English, also bestows literary
afterlives upon British Victorian classics like Frankenstein (1818) and Dr.Jekyll and Mr.
Hyde (1886) through his Bengali science fiction while a short story of Mitra’s rewrites
Robinson Crusoe (1719) by geographically decentring Crusoe. My chapter on the ghost story
studies how the rich heritage of oral literary traditions, combined with the haunting legacy of
colonial history, contribute to its development in Bengal much before it gained popularity as
a children’s genre in Britain. The next two chapters primarily examine the complex and
intriguing influence of Rudyard Kipling on the English writings of the Anglo-Indian writer
Ruskin Bond. “In the jungle'' examines how Ruskin Bond and the American-Bengali
expatriate Dhan Gopal Mukerji (who also wrote in English) re-write Kipling’s wilderness and
carry forth the legacy of The Jungle Books (1894-95), while “The Anglo-Indian
Conversation” studies the quiet dialogue between Kipling’s bildungsroman Kim (1901) and
Ruskin Bond’s partly autobiographical Rusty novels. The final chapter on fantasy fiction
undertakes a close reading of “Bhondar Bahadur” (1926) (“Toddy Cat the Bold”) a short
story in the vernacular by artist and writer Gaganendranath Tagore, which was inspired by
 16

Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1864). The conclusion ties up the arguments
presented in the previous chapters through a close reading of Bond’s The Blue Umbrella
(1980) and offers some insight into the current energy of contemporary Indian children’s
writing. Indian writers of juvenile fiction were and continue to be keenly aware of the lasting
changes ushered in by colonialism.15

Indian Independence which greeted India in 1947 can be read as a territorial expulsion
of the British. The haunting legacy of colonialism, of which English literature was and still is
a vital component, has lingered in the minds of native children who have had access to an
English education. But native children in this literature increasingly affirm their identities as
global beings and hold their own in an evolved and postcolonial world. The act of adapting
British genres for children played and still plays a vital role in initiating them into this
process of growth, change and development.

15
I have included Bengali script in some chapters of my thesis such as the ones on science and
detective fiction to demonstrate that I have self-translated some quotations. Specific examples of writers whose
quotations I have self-translated include Nalini Das and Narayan Sanyal.The other quotations which I have
included in my thesis have been translated into English by other translators.
 17

Chapter One:
Adventure

It’s courage, not luck, that takes us through to the end of the road”-Ruskin Bond

Robinson Crusoe (1719), Daniel Defoe’s classic tale of adventure, inspired writers of Bengali
fiction to recreate, imitate, reclaim, and subvert the British genre in Bengal. In
Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay’s well-loved juvenile adventure novel The Mountain of the
Moon (1937), young Shankar who dreams of visiting distant lands claims the fictional
Crusoe, among other real British explorers like Rosita Forbes and David Livingstone as one
of his chief sources of inspiration. Premendra Mitra remoulds Defoe’s text into a
robinsonade16 by making radical racial and gender inversions, while Hemendra Kumar Roy’s
Kumar, from his treasure hunt novel The Ghostly Treasure (1930), once again cites Robinson
Crusoe as his motivator. Moreover, British writers like Rider Haggard and Robert Louis
Stevenson make a strong presence in these works of juvenile Bengali adventure fiction.

A History of the Genre in England and Bengal

In his introduction to Imperialism and Juvenile Adventure (1989) Jeffrey Richards

reminds us that “juvenile literature operates on the lower slopes of this Parnassus of
adventure, steeped in every act of imperialism” (3). The genre of adventure lends itself to
incredible journeys into unknown lands and its European origins seem inextricably linked to
colonialism and its spoils. This is the crux of Martin Green’s argument in Dreams of
Adventure, Deeds of Empire (1979), where he claims that “the adventure tales that formed the
light reading of Englishmen for two hundred years and more after Robinson Crusoe were, in
fact, the energising myth of English imperialism” (3). The heyday of the genre in England
coincided with the height of imperialism. The decade of the 1870s was regarded, in Patrick
Dunae’s words “as the watershed of the new imperialism” (106) and was particularly
important for juvenile literature because it was the year in which the Forster Education Act
was passed. The Act was “a milestone in the history of juvenile publishing” (Richards, 4) and

16
Johann Gottfried Schnabel first coined the term “robinsonade” for the “desert island narratives ''
which emerged after Daniel Defoe’s classic Robinson Crusoe (1719).
 18

publishers like Blackie and Macmillan competed to produce reading material for a “large,
new and untapped source of readers” (Richards, 4). A large number of readers combined with
an increased demand for reading material for “juvenile”readers helped inexpensive and
sensational “Penny Dreadfuls,” also known as “bloods” (Bristow, 11), to become wildly
popular. Easily accessible to young boys, they took their readers on vicarious adventures to
exotic locales. Joseph Bristow, in Empire Boys (1991) provides some data about their
overwhelming popularity:

Some of these stories sold not by the thousand but by the million. They were the first
kind of truly mass reading. By 1870 their market had largely shifted to a ‘juvenile’
readership...The well-educated middle classes were aghast at the unforeseen
consequences of teaching working people how to read. (11)

Although conservative novelists like Margaret Oliphant lamented how “the working classes
preferred to consume despicably low-grade fiction” (Bristow, 12), Bristow points out that
“records of library borrowings in 1892-93 show that juvenile literature accounted for 18.36
per cent of the total number” (Bristow, 15).

Threatened by its incredible popularity, an eminent Christian organisation, the

Religious Tract Society, took on the moral responsibility of founding the more refined series,
The Boy’s Own Paper in 1879, in which, according to Richards, “the Empire was promoted
as the ideal vehicle for the spread of Christian civilisation” (5). However, Richards reflects
that even the worst of the “penny dreadfuls” had set the tone by embedding an unpolished
version of imperialism in the minds of its young readers:

In fact, many of the ‘dreadfuls’ were suffused with racism, patriotism, and crude
imperialism, which will have played their own part in cementing the Empire into the
youthful consciousness. (4)

Adventure, therefore, remained central to The Boy’s Own Paper which ran from 1879 to
1967. Bristow writes that “adventure stories pitched at an acceptably literary level” (21)
continued to grace the pages of the weekly series. Richards reasons that the “boy’s adventure
tale” (3) emerged from a combination of “consumer demand” (3) and the “desire of
influential groups to instruct” (3) young minds. Bristow emphasizes its competitive price of
“one penny” (38), which made the paper affordable and accessible to juvenile readers. Its
popularity and demand were reflected in how the price of the B.O.P. rose to a shilling in only
two years. The price differed depending on the format. Initially an Evangelical impulse
 19

permeated adventure narratives and contributed to the civilising mission of the Empire, as
seen in the books of R.M. Ballantyne, W.H.G. Kingston, Charles Kingsley and Thomas
Hughes who wrote “much-loved children’s stories.” Young boys and Evangelicals took over
and appropriated adult adventure stories like those of Captain Marryat, Defoe and Scott and
converted it into a “model” (Bristow, 3) for “juvenile instruction” (Bristow, 3). The B.O.P,,
then, was fulfilling several diverse roles for its young English readers through its tales of
adventure: it was entertained young minds with thrilling stories, imparted moral principles
along Christian lines, encouraged young boys to feel a sense of belonging to the British
Empire and according to Green, prescribed a specific model of masculinity.The genre lost
much of its appeal with the end of the Second World War and the dissolution of the British
Empire. As Richards rightly points out, the genre of imperial adventure underwent an
“eclipse” (7) by the 1960s. In Ornamentalism (2001), David Cannadine speaks of the rapid
dissolution of the British Empire in the second half of the twentieth century:

During the mere half century between Indian independence in 1947 and the return of
Hong Kong to the Chinese government in 1997, the British Empire, once the earth’s
proudest and biggest, and for three hundred years part of the seemingly immutable
order of things, has passed away into history. (xiii)

The fact that the dissolution of the Empire went hand in hand with the dissolution of the
genre clearly indicates the link between the two. In India, it might be assumed therefore that
the proliferation of English adventure fiction was an ineluctable result of colonial rule.
Although it is difficult to find evidence of the B.O.P. being read in Calcutta (then the capital
of British India), a sizable Bengali middle class emerged in the late nineteenth century and
colonial education became key to their entering modern professions. In his 2018 essay,
“Science for Children in a Colonial Context: Bengali juvenile magazines, 1883-1923” (2018),
Gautam Chando Roy indicates how the tremendous expansion of this class coupled with
contemporary education in Bengal “went on to create the objective condition of an extended,
and moreover rigidly structured childhood for the first time in Bengali society (48-49).

Cannadine asserts that the role of seemingly marginalized subjects such as

“women and children” (xvi) “have been brought to the centre of the imperial stage and the
imperial story” (xvi) by postcolonial scholars. In the days of the Empire, colonial education
in Bengal ensured the rise of a young, bilingual population of readers who yearned for
reading material, much like their English counterparts. Ironically, Bengali children’s
magazines such as Sakha (1883-1893), Mukul (1895-1917) and Sandesh (1913-) emerged
 20

from a curious mixture of colonial emulation and deliberate resistance. Adventure literature
gained momentum as Bengalis slowly began to reject British rule in favour of national
movements. One such movement occurred in the 1880s and its aim was to allow Indian
citizens to hold administrative posts under the colonial government. A modern and
progressive education, it was reasoned, would empower, embolden, and professionally
qualify their children. Adventure would initiate them into a global milieu and allow them to
participate in the larger narrative of the world. The Bengali juvenile magazine intended:

to broaden the cognitive horizon of the young and to instil in them an enduring
interest in the wider world. Hence exotic lands were explored in expeditionary
accounts to, say, the terribly cold, desolate Arctic and the Antarctic, and to the dense,
animal-infested jungles of Africa. (Chando Roy, 52)

While the genre of Bengali adventure was certainly predicated on British colonial examples,
native writers reclaimed it to widen the range of literature available to indigenous children in
a bid to both localise and globalise them. Bengali adventure fiction rescued the Bengali child
from the peripheries of readership and allowed them to dream of escaping their own narrow
confines. While the Indian adolescent protagonist is being presented with freedom (perhaps
from the warring forces of both colonialism and nationalism) and a global identity, his
British counterpart is being instructed in Englishness and Imperialism. Nevertheless,
patriotic sentiments do form an undercurrent in some of the Bengali stories, in that the
protagonists wish to represent their nation on a global platform. It might be the act of
adapting and rewriting British children’s genres which allowed native children to escape
parochial alleys and take tentative steps into a global world, and this trope of travel is
mirrored in the exotic settings of some Bengali adventure stories. In “Upendrakishore
Roychaudhuri’s ‘Sandesh’: An Exploratory Essay on Children’s Literature and the Shaping
of the Juvenile Mind in Early 20th Century Bengal” (2012), Chando Ray meditates on how
adventure was spoken of in “Glowing terms” (901) in the pages of Sandesh, whose editor,
the multifaceted Upendrakishore Ray (a writer, illustrator and printer who regaled his
readers with vivid descriptions of arduous and perilous journeys into dangerous terrain)
lauded the “enthusiasm and persistence” (901) of white explorers who energetically
“discovered the Arctic area” (901) in no uncertain terms.

Indeed, Sandesh seems to have much in common with the format of the B.O.P. It
incorporated riddles, scientific articles, adventure stories and insightful essays. As a pioneer
in the printing industry in South Asia, Upendrakishore ensured that its pages were of
 21

excellent quality. Sandesh was certainly comparable with Bristow’s description of the
contents of the B.O.P:

Occasional and rather lavish fold-out colour plates were issued to be bound into the
page opposite specific articles on general knowledge. Poems, songs (including the
scores), a regular brain teaser on chess, and shorter pieces on field sports stood
alongside essays providing all sorts of information about hobbies, the military and
‘strange but true stories.' (Chando Ray, 41)

The evidence of Bengali readership of the B.O.P.might be in the stories themselves. A New
York Times review has compared Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay’s The Mountain of the
Moon (1937) with a Boy’s Own story. That Bandyopadhyay read the works of writers like
Rider Haggard is plainly evident in The Mountain of the Moon, which seems heavily
inspired by King Solomon’s Mines (1885). Interestingly, Haggard is an author of adult
fiction. Bengali adventure fiction oscillates between being merely imitative and subversive.
The writers have an added responsibility to remain authentic in their emulation of an English
genre to which they are undeniably indebted, but they must also infuse it with a sufficient
dose of “localness” to ensure that it is far from being meekly imitative. Rajshree Mazumdar
explores this idea in her essay on the prolific Hemendra Kumar Roy titled “In Search of
Mammon’s Treasure Trove: Hemendra Kumar Roy’s Use of Travel in Children’s Adventure
Literature” (2019):

The juvenile adventure literature exemplified by Roy’s bestsellers aimed explicitly to

reject colonial denigration of the Indian elite not by disproving the West’s
chauvinist, racist and ethnocentric paradigm of a civilisational pyramid but by
propagating his own mimic and subversive version of it, positioning the educated of
his nation at its apogee. (253)

Bengali writers incorporate the key motifs of English adventure fiction which include
a central quest, a key conflict between the virtuous and the villainous, a circular structure, a
mentor figure, an exotic setting and a clearly demarcated social hierarchy. However, they
feature a young Bengali boy at the heart of their narratives, and we see subtle examples of
subversion in Bengali adventure stories. For the Bengali youth, the quest becomes a rite of
passage from boyhood to adulthood as they brave realities such as racism, home sickness and
physical discomfort. Northrop Frye compares romance to “the wish-fulfilment dream” (186)
 22

and argues that with its “perennially childlike quality” (186) it is laced with longing for
“some kind of imaginative golden age in time or space” (186). Adopting Frye’s description
of adult romance to “juvenile” literature, Anna Jackson and Charles Ferrall argue that the
Victorians created a concept of adolescence which accommodated youthful fantasies with
adult responsibilities:

On the one hand, the hero leaves the world of adult realities to pursue youthful
fantasies that once attained become part of the adult world to which he returns. On
the other, the hero leaves his childhood home on an adventure that requires the
acquisition of adult responsibilities that he continues to exercise upon his return
home. Both forms of circularity thereby reconcile youthful desire with adult
authority, fantasy and realism. (41)

So too the Bengali adolescent hero realises that his or her quest is a means to
incorporate “youthful fantasies” (57) “with an adult world” (57). Juvenile adventure
literature, which is preoccupied with the growth and development of its young heroes,
provides a platform for what Jackson and Ferrallcall “pedagogical exercises” (40) to be
played out:

The axis of the quest also reconciles individual desire and social convention. Very
rarely do boys simply return with treasure of one kind or another and if they do it
must be put to good social use, such as delivering a mother from penury. (57)

While Henty’s Charlie Marryat returns to England with a sum of about “a hundred
thousand pounds,” which helps in the settlement of his family, Shankar uses the fortune he
acquires in Africa to ameliorate the conditions of his village, and he wishes to take two of the
most precious diamonds he finds “home and give to his mother” (Loc 1914).

Additionally, Bengali stories achieve circularity by “embedding the tale of adventure

within a framing story” (Jackson and Ferrall, 50) where the “framing story is both a contrast
to the embedded story and one that resembles it” (Jackson and Ferrall, 51). This imbues the
narrative structure with layers of meta-narrative complexity and weakens the idea of one
central authority, thereby promoting a sense of inclusiveness and underscoring how Indian
writers themselves have been influenced by their British counterparts. Additionally, they
contend that mentor figures “represent the common childish and adolescent desires for more
glamourous and romantic parents” (57). But while British mentors often bear the specific
responsibility of instructing the young protagonist about the workings of the Empire, the ones
 23

who feature in Bengali adventure stories are often socially and also racially distant for their
youthful heroes, as can be seen in Shankar’s choice of a Portuguese explorer, Diego Alvarez,
as the hero’s mentor. While there are examples of local mentors such as Kumar from
Hemendra Kumar Ray’s The Ghostly Treasure, who wish to instil a sense of nationalism in
their tutees, more often than not these adventure stories are set distant in lands such as Africa
and Indonesia, where the Indian freedom struggle holds little relevance or meaning; hence
their mentors have no obligation to imbue these ideals in them, even if nationalism runs as a
strong undercurrent through the text. Mentors are conspicuously absent in a few stories,
perhaps because, unlike their British counterparts, Bengali adolescents are not indoctrinated
in the merits of the Empire but are more preoccupied with self-growth and introspection.

Nationalism and Imperialism and Something Beyond

If English adventure fiction promotes imperialism, then Bengali adventure fiction,

which cannot participate in the narrative of the British Empire, is often concerned with
Nationalism. Travel, thus far associated with Imperial conquest, is reclaimed by Indian
writers who recreate an authentic yet localised reading experience by presenting the magic of
other worlds through native eyes. Sometimes, however, the Bengali adolescent leaves his
home and sails to foreign shores to cast off the parental framework of colonialism to
experience physical, mental, and spiritual growth in a more neutral space far from the warring
forces of both colonialism and nationalism. While the likes of Henty’s protagonist Charlie
Marryat in With Clive in India bears the social responsibility of gaining financial wealth
through participation in the colonial project, Bengali adolescents need to oust their feelings of
racial and ethnic inferiority to prove their capability as native adventurers. The defiance of
youth allows them to dare to defeat what Mazumdar calls “the imperial gaze” (163) which
“had long marginalized Bengalis and effeminate and effete, epitomised in the archetypal
image of the Bengali babu...schooled to work in the vast colonial bureaucracy” (263). It is the
careful positioning of these characters as adolescents, caught in the transition between
childhood and adulthood, which imbues them with potential, courage, and ambition to bring
about a change in the social order. Mazumdar argues that Bengali men were “fed up with
being stigmatised as a frail and effeminate race” (254) and renounced meek submission to
imperial rule in favour of “an equally muscular nationalism” (254). However, I suggest that
the genre allowed Bengali men the space and means to explore not just their “muscularity”
but also their sensitivity and vulnerability. Bandyopadhyay’s Shankar, who makes an
appearance seven years after Roy’s Hemendra Kumar Roy’s Bimal (The Ghostly Treasure),
 24

has much in common with his predecessor. Both writers recognise the need for brawn and
brain in the Bengali adventurer, thereby rescuing him from the colonial stereotype of the
effeminate Bengali. Sreemoyee Dasgupta’s thesis Nationalism, Genre, and Childhood in
Colonial Indian Children’s Literature (2021) demonstrates how “the genre of adventure
fiction in Bengal responded to the discourse on colonial masculinity by creating a manly
boyhood that resisted the stereotype of effeminacy” (184). She cites Mrinalini Sinha’s book
Colonial Masculinity: The ‘Manly’ Englishman and ‘Effeminate’ Bengali in the Late
Nineteenth-Century (1995) in which she outlines how “the term Bengali was used to express
anything that was roguish and cowardly” (15). In contrast, the immense physical strength of
Shankar and Bimal are vividly described by Roy and Bandyopadhyay. Kumar, the reluctant
adventurer who is initially hesitant to undertake a risky albeit thrilling journey (and recalls
the docile Gopal from Barna Parichay) acts as a foil to the courageous Rakhal-like Bimal,
who urges him to be courageous, alleging that Bengali boys fall prey to British abuse and
exploitation because of their lack of mettle and spirit. Tagore’s perspective on the Gopal-
Rakhal binary in the context of British rule in India is outlined by Sibaji Bandyopadhyay, in
The Gopal-Rakhal Dialectic (2015):

It is no wonder, therefore, that in 1895, during a revolutionary moment of turnabout

in Swadeshi thought, paying his due respect to Vidyasagar wholeheartedly,
Rabindranath vehemently rejected the mucheulogised Gopal of Barna Parichay in
favour of the much maligned Rakhal. (xv)

Tagore believed that “bad, disobedient, restless boys” like the intransigent Rakhal (xvi) could
help his country more effectively by dauntlessly standing against British Imperial forces,
unlike Gopal who was deferential to colonial rulers.

Said claims that while the Orient is a Western construct, he also points out that “none
of this Orient is merely imaginative” (9-10). British writers of adventure fiction such as
Marryat, Henty, Conrad, Kipling, and Rider Haggard travelled abroad extensively as
journalists, ship captains and assistants to army officers, unlike Bengali writers like
Bandyopadhyay and Roy who never ventured beyond local shores and were compelled to
rely on their imagination and on British accounts of foreign nations. Nevertheless, the
historical and geographic accuracy claimed by writers like Henty is inextricably intertwined
with the bias of the colonial project:
 25

In the following pages I have endeavoured to give a vivid picture of the wonderful
events of the ten years, which at their commencement saw Madras in the hands of
the French-Calcutta at the mercy of the Nabob of Bengal-and English
influence apparently at the point of extinction in India-and which ended in the final
triumph of the English, both in Bengal and Madras. (Preface)

Nevertheless,in the preface to his translation of Bandyopadhyay’s Chander Pahar/The

Mountain of the Moon, Jayanta Sengupta observes that Bandyopadhyay “makes no pretence
of being accurate” (Loc 101). Hence Shankar frequently encounters tigers whereas Africa
only has lions and Richtersvedlt is, in reality, a far cry from the “impenetrable forested land”
(Loc 48) which is described so vividly. Conceivably, Bandyopadhyay refuses to subscribe to
strict factual accuracy in his descriptions of Africa and this becomes a means of subversion,
as it undermines the supposed veracity of British authors in their accounts of foreign
landscapes.

Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay

One of Bengal’s most cherished writers, Bandyopadhyay (1894-1950), was born and
raised in rural Bengal where he was a schoolteacher in the Hooghly district. The Mountain of
the Moon17 bids a significant departure from Bandyopadhyay’s usual poignant stories about
the realities of rural Bengal such as his famous Song of the Road (Pather Panchali, 1929)
which was made into a famous film by Satyajit Ray. As one of Bengal’s early and cherished
adventure novels, it is replete with local idiosyncrasies yet owes an undeniable debt to
English fiction and simultaneously follows and challenges English genre conventions.
Mukherjee, who translated the novel into English, claims that although there “are similarities
between Chander Pahar and H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines (1885) that does not
diminish from the Bengali masterpiece at all” (34). Bandyopadhyay had almost certainly read
King Solomon’s Mines, one of the first English novels set in Africa featuring the fictional
Allan Quartermain, and both works incorporate “the treasure motif, taken over from
Stevenson, and from now on standard”(Green, 230). Green indicates that Haggard’s “literal
model” (230) consisted of “African hunters like Frederick Courtney Selous, who advised
Rhodes, and planted the Union Jack in Mashonaland in 1891” (230), whereas

17
I have used the Kindle edition of Jayanta Sarkar’s translation of Chander Pahar (1937) titled
TheMountain of the Moon (2011). The printed versions of certain Indian texts were difficult to obtain during the
years of the pandemic.
 26

Bandyopadhyay, who never travelled outside India, repeatedly acknowledges his debt to
British travel writers such as Sir H.H. Johnston, David Livingstone, and Rosita Forbes. His
young fictional adventurer Shankar claims that:

He had always wanted to fly away to far-off lands, to various parts of the globe,
doing deeds that called for courage, bravery, adversity, and adventure. Like
Livingstone, like Stanley, like Harry Johnston, like Robinson Crusoe. He had
prepared himself mentally and physically for a life such as theirs (Loc 166).

S. Bandyopadhyay accentuates the irony of a young Bengali boy uninhibitedly idolising

imperialists because he contends that “Shankar’s ideal men” were predominantly “involved
in the business of expanding the empire” and “uncovered one part of the globe after another
only for indiscriminate destruction (250). However, Bandyopadhyay takes occasional
imaginative liberties in his descriptions of the African terrain to undermine the sanctity of
British accounts. Rider Haggard, who glorified Imperial ambitions in Africa, was posted in
the British colony of Natal in South Africa in 1875, where he served as an assistant to the
lieutenant-governor and gained first-hand experience of its terrain. Unlike him,
Bandyopadhyay, who never had the privilege of international travel, sets magnificent social,
global and personal aspirations for his protagonist Shankar, whose African peregrinations
provide him with a wealth of novel experiences. For example, Shankar is overjoyed upon
seeing the “strange creation” of an aeroplane in Africa because “he had never seen an
aeroplane in India, and he felt lucky that he had finally seen one” (Loc 1839).

Comparisons and contrasts of The Mountain of the Moon can also be made with G.A.
Henty’s With Clive in India: Or,the Beginnings of an Empire (1832) as both works feature
young boys (Shankar and Charlie, respectively) as their protagonists, one British, one Bengali
who set out for foreign shores to further their financial and social ambitions. While Henty’s
Charlie Marryat travels to India to participate in the colonial project, Shankar, who cannot lay
any claim to it, travels to broaden his horizons and experience the thrill of exploring unknown
territory. While it might seem odd to a European reader that Henty and Rider Haggard have
exercised such profound influences on Bandyopadhyay, there are significant departures
which rescue his novel from becoming mere imitations of British text. In an author’s note to
The Mountain of the Moon Bandyopadhyay emphatically states that:
 27

The Mountain of the Moon is not a translation from an English novel, nor is it
inspired by any similar story from another land. The story and the characters in it are
all products of my imagination (Loc 18).

The novel opens with young Shankar just returned “to his home, a small village far away
from the cities of Bengal” (Loc 134) after completing his examinationsin the urban
metropolis of Calcutta. Mukherjee contends that Bandyopadhyay’s characterisation of
Shankar as a young “lower middle-class Bengali boy from a village some distance away from
Kolkata'' (Loc 41) is what sets Chander Pahar apart. He is one of the many “ordinary boys”
(Jackson and Ferrall, 51) with whom the Bengali “juvenile reader can identify and admire”
(Jackson and Ferrall, 51), and whose relatively humble social position allows him more scope
to grow. In contrast, Rider Haggard’s 55-year-old Allan Quartermain is a British game hunter
and English gentleman. Quatermain is thin and wiry but Shankar is emphatically strong and
athletic, which compensates for his status as a lower-middle class Bengali boy.

While European adventurers both real and fictitious have stoked his desire for travel
and exploration, Shankar cannot lay claim to the larger Imperial colonial project which brings
the likes of Henty’s Charlie Marryat to India. His is an exceptional case of a Bengali boy
fulfilling his ambition of traveling abroad at a time when travel seemed inextricably linked to
colonialism. His penchant for geography often sees “him poring over maps of various
countries and locations” (146) and he unhesitatingly takes up a professional opportunity
offered by his neighbour’s son-in-law, who urges him to travel to Africa and renounce his
“cocooned life in a small village” (Loc 223). Unsurprisingly, it is his knowledge of English, a
result of colonial education, which enables him to read a telegram from the neighbour’s son-
in-law, which in turn facilitates a correspondence which results in this job offer. The
Mountain of the Moon’s opening is reminiscent of With Clive in India, Or the Beginnings of
an Empire in that Shankar’s mother, like Charlie’s, confesses that their finances are in a
critical condition and that he must look for a job to support his family. Horrified at the
prospect of her son going to India where he will “most likely die of fever, or be killed by a
tiger, or be stabbed by one of those horrid natives, in a fortnight” (chapter 1), Charlie’s
mother views her son’s posting to India (despite its promises of material rewards and career
opportunities) as a step down. In contrast, Shankar’s journey to Africa elevates him
considerably in the eyes of his family and his parents are elated at the thought of his success.
Although Shankar finds “bliss and fulfilment of his long-cherished dream” (Loc 241) in the
“free and uninhabited grasslands and forests of Uganda…” (Loc 241), he encounters every
 28

stereotypical creature associated with the wilderness, including man-eating lions, a lethal
python and “the most dreaded snake in the whole of Africa-the black mamba” (Loc 468)18.
Hence, what begins as a dream quickly morphs into what Ferrall and Jackson call
“pedagogical exercises” (40), where Shankar’s wits, instincts and reflexes come to his rescue
in the absence of prior experience. As an Englishman in colonial India, Charlie is the
recipient of favours in the grand palaces of Maharajas, but Shankar is without the equivalent
luxuries. During his early days in Africa, Shankar’s young South Indian friend Tirumal, who
had left his home for Africa “because the call of the wild was irresistible” (Loc 269), is
dragged away and consumed by a wild lion. It is then that he awakens to the cruel reality of
the pursuit of adventure in a foreign land, and this anagnorisis is crucial to his attainment of
maturity:

Africa was beautiful, but her beauty was terrifying. The green plains and bushes
reminded Shankar of his native Bengal; but while Bengal was peaceful, quiet and
cosy, Africa was beautiful but deadly. Death dogged you at every step here. It could
trap you at any moment, particularly when you least expected it. Africa had taken her
first sacrifice-the young Tirumal. But that one sacrifice won’t satisfy her; she wanted
more. (Loc 310)

Upon his arrival in Africa, Shankar is employed in assorted jobs, including as a station master
in a deserted town, before he adopts not a British but Portuguese explorer as mentor, Diego
Alvarez, (perhaps recalling s Rider Haggard’s Portuguese explorer Jose da Silvestra), whom
he rescues from the clutches of death. Alvarez tells stories about the great diamond mines of
Africa which his erstwhile mentor, Jim Carter, had hoped to find. However, Jim has been
killed by a mythical monster named the Bunyip, which is bizarrely an Australian creature, and
Alvarez urges Shankar to join him and complete the quest, thereby establishing the treasure
motif borrowed from British writers like Stevenson and Rider Haggard. Thrilled at the
prospect of a challenge, Shankar sets off on a marvellous journey in which Alvarez is
tragically killed by the aforementioned Bunyip, leaving Shankar to complete the most
arduous and demanding part of his quest alone. He accidentally stumbles upon the diamond
mine, traverses the lethal Kalahari Desert on his return journey and finally returns to India a

18
I recognise that the dash should have been a hyphen but I am quoting the translator and replicating
his punctuation here.
 29

wealthy man. However, much as he loves his homeland (“he could hardly wait for his
journey across the Indian Ocean to come to an end” (Loc 1922), the restless Shankar is
determined to return to the African mines. Having intrepidly ventured into the genre
of adventure, the Bengali Shankar cannot possibly allow his quest to end, unlike Rider
Haggard’s Allan Quartermain who declares that he is “almost sick of adventure” at the end of
his escapades, and Henty’s Charlie Marryat who reassures his anxious mother that he is
“done with” his adventures in India, and his impatience to return to England had rendered his
voyage home “tedious in the extreme” (Chapter 30).

Towards the end of the second chapter of The Mountain of the Moon, Shankar
muses on why his fate has brought him to Africa. Apart from Shankar’s personal ambitions
for himself and his community, it also seems to reflect his creator’s desire to rescue the
Bengali adolescent reader and protagonistfrom what Satadru Sen calls “the juvenile
periphery” and navigate his/her way through an authentic if fictitious experience with a local
hero to look up to. Notwithstanding the extent of European influence on Shankar and his
creator, whose knowledge of Africa was mostly obtained from Occidental accounts, the
former’s time there repeatedly reinforces his Bengali identity, in all its lyricism, softness and
vulnerability. There are scenes in which the scenery of Africa and that of rural Bengal begin
to “blend and blur” in his consciousness, thereby indicating that nothing is too foreign,
nowhere is too distant from home:

Shankar might be thousands of miles away from home, but he was still a son of
Bengal, a lover of beautiful things, a gentle poet at heart. Fascinated, from the first
light of dawn till the last rays of the dying sun, Shankar looked at this new Africa
and dreamed...he saw the sliver of the new moon, the same sliver he had seen hung
in the skies back home. (Loc 852)

The harmonious co-existence of the terrains of Africa and Bengal in Shankar’s mind is in
sharp contrast with Rider Haggard’s Quatermain, according to whom “Africa is an imaginary
land, a no-land or utopia. And that no-land is constructed as England’s opposite”
(Bandyopadhyay, 220). However, Africa enables Shankar to shake off his colonised status
and assume the role of the explorer if not that of the coloniser:

the mysterious continent-the Dark Continent-the continent of gold and diamond, the
continent of unknown tribes and cultures, the land of sceneries that one would never
see elsewhere, the land of animals that one would not find elsewhere. How little had
 30

been discovered for Africa! How much was still waiting to be explored. (Loc 281-
282)

Undeniably, the word “discovered” in the context of colonialism is often a euphemism for the
pursuit of material wealth at the cost of the host country’s economy. However, in The
Mountain of the Moon we see how Bandyopadhyay’s exposure to, and discovery of British
literature inspires him to recreate the Bengali adventure genre. This suggests, perhaps, that to
writers like Bandyopadhyay, British exploration of the African continent was not exhaustive,
thereby leaving room for local youth like Shankar to stumble upon hidden treasures in the
deep folds of its forests. Moreover, while Shankar begins his journey in the shadow of his
white mentor, Alvarez, he finishes the most critical parts of it alone after the latter’s death
thereby accomplishing what past European explorers had sometimes failed to achieveby
plantinga metaphorical Indian flag on African soil. Unlike Allan Quatermain, who “dies a
hero’s death in Africa” (Bandyopadhyay, 229), Shankar is a survivor and unlike the former,
whose “desire to travel was in effect a death wish; the conclusion of the novel does not leave
this in doubt” (Bandyopadhyay, 229).

Like Henty’s Charlie Marryat, who renounces a clerical job (for which he originally
travels to India) in favour of joining his mentor Robert Clive’s army, Shankar soon abandons
his job as a stationmaster in favour of joining Alvarez on his quest for diamond mines. Unlike
Quartermain, who could not save the Portuguese explorer Jose Silvestre from the clutches of
death, Shankar (in the early part of the novel) rescues a weak and weary Alvarez from a
similar fate. Later, Alvarez also rescues Shankar several times and the two form a symbiotic
bond with one another before the former is killed by the Bunyip. Although Shankar’s attitude
towards his mentor is unwaveringly respectful, he does at times resent his harsh and single-
minded pursuit of material progress. Jackson and Ferrall have argued in favour of “glory or
societal recognition” (57) as the inspiration behind the quest and alsoimportant to Shankar
who feels he represents the entire youth of Bengal. Robert Clive, Charlie’s true mentor,
acquires a divine and invincible status in the hands of Henty, whereas Shankar predominantly
views Alvarez as a revered but approachable father figure. Alvarez reciprocates by calling
Shankar his son when a European hunter mistakes Shankar for his coolie, thereby breaking
down the perceived barrier between races. Notably, Shankar’s ailing biological father, who,
like Bandyopadhyay had never had the opportunity to leave his homeland, had breathed the
spirit of wanderlust into his son. Bandyopadhyay allows the young Shankar to enjoy the
tutelage of Alvarez, if only for a while, because he recognises that Shankar is over-worked
 31

and exploited as an Indian in Africa. Alvarez commends Shankar on having the “courage” to
leave his homeland for a low-paying job and withstanding “hardship and suffering” (Loc
561). While he offers Shankar the opportunity to experience the fantastic adventure of a
lifetime, he simultaneously binds him to the harsh realities which lurk beneath the
exhilarating veneer of Africa, none of which deter the valiant Shankar:

On the way, Alvarez told Shankar about the dangers of travelling on the Lake: the
bite of the tsetse fly causes sleeping sickness, and an epidemic of this disease had
killed a lot of people in Tanganyika. Also, the route between Mwanza and Tabora
was so infested with lions that travelling in that region was very dangerous. (Loc
760)

Hence, the duty of the mentor in The Mountain of the Moongoes beyond simply underscoring
the glories and spoils of adventure and Alvarez does not refrain from providing his protégé
with excruciating details of the potential ordeals which lie ahead, tribulations which will both
test their relationship, bring them closer and ultimately push them apart.

Alvarez succumbs to the clutches of the Bunyip at a critical point in his journey and
Shankar is compelled to continue his quest alone. But even when the climactic and natural
forces are at their harshest and Shankar thinks he is dying, he still celebrates the spirit of
adventure in the face of his mortality:

But this was the kind of death he would prefer. At least he was not dying slowly and
painfully of malaria in his bed in the village; he was dying like a brave man, like a
hero. All alone and on foot, he had crossed the deadly Kalahari Desert. Before he
dies, he would leave his name carved in stone somewhere in the Chimanimani
Mountains. (Loc 1812)

In one of the most poignant sections of the novel, Shankar establishes his kinship with his
lineage of European explorers as he stumbles upon the skeleton of a failed Italian explorer
Attilio Gatti in a dilapidated cave and fulfils his last wishes of granting him a “burial befitting
a devout Christian” (Loc 1684), a request Gatti had expressed (through a message written in a
bottle) centuries ago. Shankar then finds five large diamonds in his boots, a reward offered by
Gatti for discovering his skeleton. Despite racial differences and Gatti’s assumption that the
reader of his note would be “an educated man and a Christian” (1684), the Hindu (and
educated) Shankar feels a strange affinity his white predecessors and his destiny seems to be
bound with “Gatti and the others who had gone before: Jim Carter, Alvarez and countless
 32

others” (1802). The link with King Solomon’s Mines is unmistakeable as the skeleton of Gatti
recalls the frozen corpse of Jose da Silvestra, the 16th century Portuguese explorer who is
defeated in his mission to carry back African diamonds “through the treachery of Gagool, the
witch-finder” (NP) and leaves behind a treasure map sketched with his blood.
Bandyopadhyay and Rider Haggard both recognise the onerous and gruelling nature of such
treasure hunting and the sacrifices it entails through their graphic and visceral descriptions of
the fates of Europeans and natives alike. It is not for nothing that Shankar recognises the
irony of how youth, an important prerequisite for the genre, is also sacrificed to fulfil its
harsh requirements:

His youth and health had been destroyed in these long months of severe hardship,
lack of food, superhuman effort, and extreme deprivation. There was very little left
of Shankar’s physical strength. (Loc 1768)

However, in a marked departure from Rider Haggard’s work where the white protagonists
emerge victorious, in The Mountain of the Moon the Bengali hero ultimately reaches the
treasure for which white prospectors like Gatti and Alvarez had sacrificed their lives. This is
Bandyopadhyay’s trump card since the young Bengali now succeeds where his European
predecessors had failed.In an anticlimactic episode, Shankar fails to recognise the much
sought-after diamond mines when he eventually stumbles upon them and confuses diamond
with pebbles, thereby underscoring his lack of a strong mercenary motive in contrast to his
burning desire to be remembered as a great explorer and traveller. As Sibaji Bandyopadhyay
astutely observes, Shankar’s acquisition of diamonds “happens almost by chance” (256)
unlike the covetous Quatermain who “even in an extremely perilous situation…has enough
presence of mind to stuff his pocket with gems from the treasure trove” (256). Shankar and
Alvarez’s ‘discovery’ of a hidden and powerful volcano in the depths of a jungle, a
conventional trope in British adventure fiction according to Martin Green, causes a sensation
in the African town of Salisbury. Although Shankar names it after the recently deceased
Alvarez, it might in fact represent the hidden and untapped potential of the Bengali youth
which has beenbiding its time. Disturbingly, Shankar acknowledges that many were “highly
sceptical” (Loc 1897) of his discovery, arguably because an Indian youth making a
remarkable ‘discovery’ was unusual at the time.

Shankar harbours a secret desire to one day “go and conquer the mountain of the
moon” (Loc 169) which is described by a “German explorer Anton Hauptmann” (Loc 169) in
a “geography book by Westmark” (Loc 169) which he often reads by the light of a “diya”
 33

(Loc 169) which is an indigenous lamp. However, his defeatist belief that the “real mountain
would always be afar, always beyond reach” (Loc 174) is shaken by a beautiful but audacious
dream in which he finds himself surrounded by “wild elephants” (Loc 174) in a “dense
bamboo jungle” from where he could see a mountain such as Hauptmann had described
“bathed white in the moonlight” (Loc 179).

What a wonderful, beautiful dream! Maybe this would come true. People said that
dreams you had at dawn came true. Maybe there was truth in this belief. (Loc 180)

Shankar interprets his proleptic “wish fulfilment dream” using a native belief that early
morning dreams would always reach fruition. In addition to fulfilling his personal ambitions
of adventure and travel the realisation of this dream would financially and socially uplift the
remote rural community from which he hails, and this sentiment is often at the centre of
Shankar’s quest. Shankar follows up this dream by visiting the village’s “old, broken-down
temple” to pray to the now absent “pratima” (statue) of God, by tying “a stone in a string” to
one of the roots of the banyan tree” (Loc 191). The dilapidated temple is a recurring trope in
several Bengali stories symbolising a potential and fortitude which can survive the tests of
time and power. Often discouraged by the difficulties of the journey into the heart of African
jungles, the lonely Shankar perseveres with fortitude and courage which are important
attributes of characters like Robinson Crusoe. However, Robinson Crusoe was an adult white
man, whereas Shankar is a Bengali adolescent-who uses this journey to attain maturity and
draws encouragement and sustenance from his indigenous belief systems by recalling the
prophecy of his local village astrologer who had predicted a long life for him.

Shankar’s adventures come to their head during encounters with both the virtuous and
villainous. Significantly, adversaries in British stories are usually natives or bad Europeans,
but in The Mountain of the Moon they are mythical monsters or natural forces, almost as if
Bandyopadhyay recognises that as a colonised person, he cannot enact the coloniser’s
narrative. While Rider Haggard’s centuries old and wizened Gagool does have supernatural
characteristics as a mystical prophetess, she has a human form unlike the enigmatic and
formless Bunyip, the main adversary in The Mountain of the Moon. As an Indian writer,
Bandyopadhyay hesitates to make his villains native Africans, although Shankar does side
with Alvarez against the fierce Matlebe tribe. But as Bandyopadhyay observes, “To a lesser
or greater extent, an attitude of contempt towards the suppressed races is to be found in all
writers of children’s literature” (248), including Indian writers such as Khagendranath Mitra
and Dhirendralal Dhar.
 34

The natural and genetic forces Shankar must contend with are multiple: the capricious
and exquisite mountain range, the dense, unrelenting forests, the harsh climatic conditions,
and his own limitations as an inexperienced boy from Bengal. Interestingly, the legend of the
Bunyip originates from Australian not African folklore, which highlights the extent of the
author’s creative license, though Bandyopadhyay reveals his knowledge of African legends in
an author’s note at the start of his novel where he mentions the Dingonek, an alleged denizen
Congolese jungles. Named after the “Rhodesian Monster” by Europeans, the perplexing,
revered and feared, the Bunyipmight share some traits with Conrad’s Kurtz in Heart of
Darkness (1899). However, while Kurtz is a relentless seeker of foreign ivory, the Bunyip
who is never seen but is recognised by a three-clawed foot mark, is a relentless protector of
local treasure. Strikingly, the Bunyip is analogous to Rider Haggard’s Gagool in that she
fights until the end of her life to protect native treasure from white men whom she mocks:

“Hee! hee! hee!” cackled old Gagool behind us, as she flitted about like a vampire
bat. “There are the bright stones ye love, white men, as many as ye will; take them,
run them through your fingers, eat of them, hee! hee! drink of them, ha! Ha!” (136)

An alternate reading might consider the Bunyip to be a representative of the deep-rooted but
often subliminal and unacknowledged anxiety and guilt which flood the coloniser’s
conscience. Hence, it does not attack Shankar who is more interested in the journey than
material acquisition. Shankar is amazed when he sees the usually courageous Alvarez’s
reaction at the mere mention of the Bunyip:

Evening had given way to night, and, in the darkness, Shankar thought he saw a
slight shudder run through Diego Alvarez’s body. He thought he must be mistaken,
for surely Alvarez was not afraid of anything. Or was he? Did the fearless, the
unconquerable Diego Alvarez really fear something, after all? (Loc 955)

The Bunyip, who kills both Alvarez and Jim Carter before they can reach the coveted
diamond mines, begins as a destructive creature but becomes the guardian of indigenous
treasure and saves it from the hands of European colonisers. The Bunyip spares Shankar and
allows him to find the diamond mines, because he (like the novel’s author and its readers) is
silently supporting the subaltern, marginalised Bengali boy to succeed. In the novel’s
epilogue Shankar receives a letter from an English zoologist. Dr. Fitzgerald, who
hypothesises that the mythical Bunyip is nothing more than an “anthropoid ape” (Loc 1939)
thereby, pulling the reader back into the rational world of Western science. While Henty’s
 35

Marryat fights on the side of the British against another Imperial power, France, theBunyip
becomes the obvious adversary who assaults Europeans in The Mountain of the Moon.

Unlike Henty who lays great emphasis on making his works factual,
Bandyopadhyay’s fiction reinterprets the genre by freely mixing fact and fiction. However,
Henty’s version of history has also been the subject of postcolonial scrutiny as even the title
of With Clive in India: The Beginnings of an Empire reveals his imperialistic slant.
Bandyopadhyay draws attention to how Henty’s novel has a detailed ‘description’ of the
‘Black Hole of Calcutta’, a “dark pit”which symbolises the ‘lamentable stupidity’ and
‘indescribable brutality’ of the Indians (237).This episode of history which plays a pivotal
role in Henty’s novel has also been increasingly questioned by historians as they seek to
exonerate the erstwhile Nawab of Bengal, Sirajud-Dullah from the allegation that he had
purportedly suffocated British prisoners of war in a dungeon at Calcutta’s Fort William in
1756. Satyajit Ray’s “Shonku’s Date with History” seeks to correct the misconception about
‘The Black Hole Tragedy’ through a piece of science fiction, thereby underscoring the
importance of a literary work in making reparations for colonial misrepresentations of
history. Professor Shonku, a brilliant scientist, creates a time machine called the Compudium
which can establish contact with the spirits of deceased souls. He establishes contact with
Siraj ud-Daulah to “satisfy his own curiosity” who with a “lilt in his voice” tells him that the
“British had spearheaded this horrible campaign only to malign him” (Loc 1100)!

Far away from the warring forces of British imperialism and Indian nationalism,
Shankar can enjoy real growth in Africa and attain a level of maturity which allows him to
simultaneously pay homage to his Bengali lineage and his status as a cosmopolitan explorer.
Africa allows Shankar to celebrate his carefully cultivated heroism and his intrinsic
sensitivity and bring an inspiring sense of heroic adventure to the doorsteps of Bengali
children. Additionally, Bandyopadhyay’s memorable novel offers an insight into the complex
psyche of the colonised writer and his hopes and ambitions for native children to travel,
grow, conquer, and return.

Premendra Mitra

Premendra Mitra (1904-1988) is best remembered as the creator of the Ghana-da

stories which emerged as a hybrid genre combining science fiction and the tall tale. What
distinguishes Mitra’s writing is his ability to focus on the minutest of details and yet engage
in hyperbolic flights of improbable fancy.
 36

Mitra’s “The Horrible Crabs” (“Koral Korkot” in Bengali)19, both replicates and
subverts British maritime stories as it takes its reader on an adventure alongside an ambitious
young man from Bengal who encounters swashbuckling buccaneers on foreign shores. “The
Horrible Crabs” opens with a historical record of naval atrocities committed by pirates in the
Komboy region of Indonesia, including looting and destroying ships on that route.20 Although
they remained undefeated by the combined forces of the navy and water police, Mitra tells us
that they made an astonishing and sudden disappearance after a steamer was shipwrecked on
their route in 1880. The narrative then returns to the present day, when an unnamed young
first-person protagonist is invited to his friend Sudhir’s house to a luncheon held in the
honour of Sudhir’s uncle Bankim, a retired doctor, who has returned to India after years of
service abroad. When lunch is served, the boys are startled when Uncle Bankim, after being
served a dish of curried crabs, turns pale and abruptly leaves the table. What is usually
considered a Bengali delicacy surprisingly invokes horror and revulsion in Bankim but after
much persuasion, he assumes the role of a rather reluctant narrator to the group of thrilled
adolescents as his incredible story both justifies his fear of crustaceans and solves the
historical mystery of the disappearance of pirates. The story is therefore circularbeginning
with the framing story of Bankim’s revulsion at the food, explaining how this came (as well
as solving the mystery) in the embedded story, and then ending with him narrating the story
to a group of young boys. Additionally, the circular structure of recalls the recurrent trope of
an elderly family member regaling children with whimsical stories, for example Satyajit
Ray’s The Adventures of Tarini Khuro (compiled by Ananda Publishers in 1985) and Mitra’s
own Ghana-da Series. In most Indian households' family elders are conferred the status of
raconteurs, who endear themselves to children by narrating stories.

Uncle Bankim’s story reveals that as an unremarkable youth from Bengal who has
been dismissed as an academic failure, he changes the course of his life by running away
from home, eventually becoming a medical student in an undisclosed foreign location.
Hence, his journey is not inspired by nationalistic concerns but is rather motivated by his
desire for personal success and ambition. Armed with a medical degree, Bankim returns to
Calcutta for a few months only to succumb to wanderlust again (like Bandyopadhyay’s

19
Unfortunately, I have not been able to identify the exact date of the publication of this story. It
appears in an anthology of stories by Mitra.
20
“Koral Korkot” appears in Mitra’s collection Bhoot, Shikari, Mejokarta, Ebong (pages 187-199) a
volume of juvenile stories compiled in 2009.
 37

Shankar, he seems unable to resist the pull of foreign shores), and sails out to Sumatra,
Indonesia, where he gains employment in a local hospital. Indonesia is a suitably exotic
location far removed from India and mysterious enough to generate curiosity in the minds of
young readers and Bankim’s young listeners.

From Sumatra, he travels to Saigon to obtain vaccines for smallpox. On his return
journey his steamer is attacked by a group of brutal pirates, who abduct him to a marooned
island, enslave him and subject him to torture. Moreover, the island is infested by many
virulent and vicious crabs which are a bright red in colour, symbolic of their desire for human
blood. Bankim manages a narrow escape through a fortunate accident: his success does not
owe itself to strategic planning but to an unintentional mishap of his smallpox vial breaking
and leaking, which kills both the crabs and the pirates. A lone survivor, Bankim barely
survives on grass and collectedrainwater until he manages to make his final escape to
Sumatra where he conceals the truth of his adventure, fearing his story will render him insane
in the eyes of his employers. Although Bankim’s successful escape is a result of chance,
which subverts traditional expectations of a strategic hero, he steadfastly refuses to break his
Hippocratic Oath and inject the villainous pirates with his vial of the smallpox vaccine. His
refusalto engage in unscrupulous acts in the name of self-defence is what makes him a
hero.Bankim, perhaps owing to his own sense of inferiority as a coloured man, chooses to
hide his life-changing adventure from his employers. He tells his young listeners that they
would never have believed him and that his revelation might have cost him his career.
However, I contend that Anglo-Saxon men like Robinson Crusoe would be hailed as heroes
for surviving such ordeals hencenative heroes are still unconfident about claiming a
prominent part in the genre. I interpret “Koral Korkot” as an “anti-romance” (Ferrall and
Jackson, 68) and an “anti-adventure” (Ferrall and Jackson, 68) which is far removed from
conventional generic expectations nevertheless leaves “the adolescent ideal largely intact”
and Bankim’s morality and principles are appropriately recognised and valued by other
adolescent boys.

In a significant departure from British adolescent fiction, the young Bankim does not
have an older mentor figure and so is forced to rely on his wits to defeat the twin forces, one
human and one non-human, which torment him. His traumatic experience undermines his
romantic vision of exploration and teaches him to be independent and resourceful instead.
Unlike Stevenson’s Treasure Island, where pirates like Long John Silver had a distinct
identity, in “The Horrible Crabs” they remain shadowy figures, whose ethnicity isnever
 38

clarified thereby leaving the reader unaware of any racial struggle. Strangely, the lingering
trauma of this past escapade haunts the resilient Bankim well into his advanced age, as he is
unable to exorcise it from his mind. This might be attributed to factors such as his lack of a
counselling mentor, the long years of repression in which he suppresses his story out of fear
of being perceived as insane and the indelible impression it undoubtedly left on his young
mind. It is worth meditating on the price native youth must pay for their lonely adventures on
foreign shores in their pursuit of adventure and glory since Mitra urges us to cast a more
critical look at a genre often dismissed as merely fanciful. Strikingly, Bankim who has single-
handedly, (albeit accidentally) defeated a group of villainous pirates and holds the answer to
an unsolved historical mystery is too embarrassed to disclose this story to his foreign friends
or employers because of his internalised feelings of racial inferiority. Yet he chooses to share
his story with Bengali youngsters’ years later, thereby signalling a shift in traditional
conventions.

Mitra’s contribution to the robinsonade is a complicated short story, with a perplexing

meta-narrative which surprises the reader from the beginning with its title, “Robinson Crusoe
Was a Woman.”21 Ghana-da astonishingly declares that Robinson Crusoe was not a British
man at all, but a Chinese woman of legendary beauty, Na Xu, who was the daughter of a
wealthy merchant Chuan Yu. At the behest of a powerful enemy who threatens their
kingdom, Nan Xu is forcibly betrothed by her father to the evil Chuo Sang. Refusing to be
commanded by patriarchal forces, Nan Xu plans to elope with her lover, Admiral Xi Yuan,
but following what appears to be an unfortunate accident, is marooned on a deserted island.
She leads a solitary life but clings to the futile hope of her lover’s return when one day, to her
horror, a lascivious man approaches her and tells her that centuries have passed since her
disappearance and that the island she inhabits now bears her name and is rumoured to contain
buried treasure.Bereft of hope and forgotten by time, Nan Xu’s ashes eventually melt into the
landscape, and she dissolves into nothingness in a tale which draws attention to the plight of
women in feudal China. Although Nan Xu is referred to as the jewel of China, whose beauty
is very much in the league of Helen of Troy, she is as powerless as a marionette in the hands
of patriarchal forces.

21
I have read the story in Bengali as it appears in GhanadaSamagra 3 (pages 17-26), published in
2001.
 39

Ghana-da, the infamous weaver of tall-tales (who also appears in Mitra’s science
fiction) takes the reader on a dizzying journey ostensibly to present the correct version of
Robinson Crusoe which, according to him, Defoe has misrepresented. He treats his rather
sceptical readers to this hyperbolic flight as a means of rewriting the male centred traditional
robinsonade. Mitra’s story opens on a leisurely evening at the South Calcutta Lakes, where a
group of retirees have assembled to engage in a session of the quintessentially Bengali
“adda” or leisurely conversations, when Mr. Harisadhan’s granddaughter (who is apparently
at an age where she perceives no difference between a man and a woman) points to a little
island in the middle of the lake and declares her intention to become Robinson Crusoe when
she grows up. Amidst the immediate and frantic corrections that follow, one Bengali
gentleman reminds her that Robinson Crusoe was a man. As Martin Green reminds us, the
“most important motif” (81) in Defoe’s novel is “that Crusoe is a man, absolutely alone, and
on a desert island” (81). Ghana-da comes to the classist conclusion that Defoe, as the son of
a 17th century English butcher and a hosiery merchant himself, washopelessly incapable of
grasping the complexities, nuances and layers of the original Chinese story and therefore
changes the race, gender, and fate of his protagonist.

In keeping with the circular structure, Ghana-da embarks on one of his signature tall
tales by delving into the dubious origins of the Crusoe story and goes to extreme lengths to
convince his reader of its credibility, albeit by freely (and characteristically) mixing fact with
fiction. According to him, the urtext of Robinson Crusoe was brought back to Rome from
China by Marco Polo, thereby highlighting the role of colonisation in the transmission
ofliterature, though this urtext was actually by the Italian Romance writer Rusticiano. In a bid
to convince his listeners of the veracity of his version, Ghana-da highlights specific details,
such as Marco Polo’s rendezvous with an eminent Chinese author and collector of folk tales,
San Cao Chi, at a salt mine in the year 1282. Hence, Defoe’s version of Robinson Crusoe is
apparently thrice removed from its original Chinese source. A young Daniel Defoe discovers
it in an antique shop and adapts it freely to suit his literary style and politics. The fluid
structure of the plot meanders from character to character, event to event and continent to
continent, mimicking the journeys of early European explorers. But since the story originates
in China, albeit told by a European, the Eurocentric focus of the traditional robinsonade is
thereby disrupted and inverted. The story does bring attention to the plight of women in
feudal China.
 40

Unlike Jonathan David Wyss’s The Swiss Family Robinson (1812), Christian
ideals do not underpin the text or offer a source of comfort to Mitra’s abandoned heroine.
There are neither cannibals nor a faithful Friday on the island. Here, the real adversaries are
feudal China, the tyrannical king, her patriarchal father, and suitor who punish her for daring
to disobey feudal norms. In the absence of a mentor figure, the text mirrors Defoe’s text (a
robinsonade celebrates the triumph of an individual), but Nan Xu does not seem to be
equipped with Crusoe’s resourcefulness, resilience, or his skills of survival, as, unable to
escape the island, she dies a lonely death. Unlike Wyss’sfamily saga where William, the
father of Fritz, Ernest, Jack, and Franz assumes the role of a mentor figure, Xi Huan’s family
becomes an obstacle in the way of her happiness as opposed to being her refuge. Perhaps
Mitra writes such a feminist story, in which he chooses to sympathise with a Chinese woman
in feudal China who is stripped of all her agency, to resist the ways in which the colonised
have often been feminised. Xi Huan is courageous enough to plan a secret, albeit
unsuccessful revolt and she draws spiritual, emotional, and physical sustenance from her
ability to hold on to love and hope. Furthermore, he draws attention to the fact that the kind
of individualism represented by Defoe is one which caters almost exclusively to the white
Anglo-Saxon man. Arguably, Mitra chooses China over India as the setting for the story and
keeps India at bay, to subscribe to generic conventions of situating adventure narratives in
exotic nations. The tragic, bitter, and cynical ending which is entirely bereft of optimism
certainly challenges the demands of children’s literature and calls attention to the evasive
nature of genres themselves. Notably, Ghana-da condescendingly comments on how Defoe
has converted Robinson Crusoe into a children’s text, whereas Mitra, despite writing for a
juvenile audience himself undermines the adolescent quality of British fiction and converts
Wyss’s adolescent story into a more adult version of the robinsonade. I suggest that Defoe
can be seen as a failed mentor figure who, as the father of this genre, has let the narrative
down by approaching it from the insulated perspective of a British man. “Robinson Crusoe
was a Woman” is a rare adventure story which places a woman, albeit marginalised by
patriarchal forces, at the centre of the plot, where Mitra implies that Defoe’s conversion of
her into a white man has been a deliberate erasure of history.

Hemendra Kumar Roy

Hemendra Kumar Roy (1888-1963) was a prolific children’s writer who edited and
contributed to Bengali children’s journals such as Rongmoshal and Mouchak. An avid reader
of English literature, he translated into Bengali Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in
 41

Wonderland and The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, which was already a very free translation
from the Persian by Edward FitzGerald.
22
The Ghostly Treasure (Jokher Dhon, 1930) is the first instalment of a two-part
adventure series that borrows from Kipling’s “The King’s Ankus” of The Second Jungle
Book (1895) but also culturally appropriates the genre for Bengalis. Roy also draws upon the
treasure motif of British adventure fiction, notably Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island
(1882) but its arcane maps, cryptic symbols, and arduous journeys are crossed with local
motifs such as ancient mantras or sacred chants, dilapidated temples and aged sannyasins or
holy men. But unlike Stevenson and his ilk, Roy meditates on the sinister aspects which
underly such quests, though this recalls the aforementioned “The King’s Ankus” which in
turn was inspired by Chaucer’s “The Pardoner’s Tale” 23.

In it, the brown-skinned Mowgli encounters the White Cobra in a large vault, an
ancient “Warden of the King’s Treasure” (156) not dissimilar to Bandyopadhyay’s mythical
Bunyip and Rider Haggard’s Gagool. The cave he protects is filled with riches beyond
measure but also scattered with the withered skulls of those who had coveted the treasure in
the past. Mowgli is hypnotised by the beauty of a ruby-studded “three-foot ankus”, an
“elephant goad” (160) which he wishes to carry away with him, but the White Cobra
repeatedly warns him that the ankus “is Death” (163). To the black panther and Mowgli’s
mentor Bagheera the glittering, bejewelled ankus represents a crippling yoke, an instrument
designed to torture in which Hathi’s head will be thrust so that his “blood should pour out”
(165), though Mowgli manages to cast it away. Unsurprisingly, the story ends with three dead
men, who had presumably picked up the ankus Mowgli had discarded, lying next to the
“ruby-and-turquoise ankus” and a “half-dead fire” while Ko, the Crow sings a “death-song”
(173), a marked contrast to the end of Stevenson’s Treasure Island (1883). However, Bengali
writers like Rabindranath Tagore and Roy thwart stereotypical European expectations by
shifting the focus from material treasure to the riches of the human soul and view avaricious
pursuit of wealth as reprehensibly as Kipling. Both in Tagore’s “Guptadhan” (“The Secret
Treasure”) and Roy’s Jokher Dhon (The Ghostly Treasure) characters undertake perilous
journeys but they either do not find treasure or reject it because of its vicious nature.

22
Although English translations of Hemendra Kumar Roy’s Jokher Dhon exist, I have chosen to
translate the text myself, and hence I have added the Bengali script of the block quotation.
.
 42

The Ghostly Treasure revolves around the seventeen-year-old first-person narrator

Kumar, and his fearless, slightly older friend Bimal. Kumar has inherited a cryptic
sandalwood box containing a dead man’s skull reminiscent, perhaps, of the skeleton with its
arms outstretched towards the treasure in Treasure Island from his recently deceased
grandfather. Bafflingly, bizarre calculations are scribbled on the skull, and they discover
enigmatic entries containing arcane accounts of an ancient Sannyasin in an accompanying
pocketbook. Notably, Roy juxtaposes the complicated and empirical mathematical equations
with the intuitive wisdom of Indian holy men, thereby achieving a confluence of Western
reason and Eastern mysticism. It is up to Kumar and his friend Bimal to use their cerebral
powers and solve the abstruse riddles concerning a great treasure in a dilapidated temple,
deep in the forests of Assam. Although Kumar is apprehensive about undertaking such a
dangerous mission, the courageous Bimal convinces him to don the garb of an adventurer.
Confident with guns and seduced by danger, Bimal, an accomplished hunter, declares that he
would rather die on a perilous mission than on his bed at home. He urges Kumar to renounce
his native clothes presumably the Bengali ‘dhoti’, in favour of English coats and pants more
suitable for their escapades, in addition to purchasing two foreign masks to serve as disguises.
Their fearless pet dog, Bagha, whose name means tiger in Bengali, is of an indigenous breed
more than capable of scaring away any foreign dog. Seeking the blessings of the powerful,
ten-handed Hindu Goddess Durga, the two friends, accompanied by their man-servant
Ramhari and Bagha set off on their quest, fiercely warding off lethal snakes, tigers, and
madmen on their way. Hot on their heels is their avaricious neighbour Korali, who has long
coveted this treasure. However, their quest for treasure is fruitless as Korali reaches it first,
falls into a gorge holding the treasure and dies a painful death. Both Korali and the treasure
are hence lost forever. As a result of this, the social standings of Bimal and Kumar do not
change at the end of the novel as they return home empty handed. However, they experience
tremendous moral growth through their adventures. It might be argued that their elevated
levels of education and the resources they already had allowed them to venture forth on a
journey which ultimately helped them attain maturity.

Sreemoyee Dasgupta juxtaposes Roy’s “muscular nationalism” (194) to

Bandyopadhyay’s “softer masculinity” (202), the latter exemplified by Shankar’s “poetic”
Bengali soul, which I have also discussed in an earlier section:
 43

by mimicking hegemonic masculinities constructed by colonial discourses, Roy is

perpetuating the toxic elements of these very same discourses, in a manner that is
counter- productive to anti-colonial imaginings of the national self. (195)

To support her argument, she quotes from “Juvenile Peripheries” in which Sen argues that
“Ray hates in Bengalis precisely what he has been told to hate by Kipling and other
delineators of mimicry” (2004). While an undercurrent of “muscular nationalism” (194)
undoubtedly underpins the quest, since Bimal is determined to challenge the colonial
stereotype of the effeminate Bengali man, Roy uses Kumar as a foil to the subtle beauty of
the very stereotypes which Bimal berates. The younger and hence more emotional and
compassionate Kumar (he is seventeen, while Bimal is three years his senior) is keen to touch
his mother’s feet and seek her blessings before embarking on their adventure and he conceals
the real purpose of his perilous journey so as not to worry her. On the cusp of bidding adieu
to his romantic ideals in favour of adult responsibilities, his gradual maturation is the main
theme of the novel. Initially, he naively trusts their avaricious neighbour, Korali, who poses
as his mentor, but his growth occurs in tandem with the revelation of Korali’s villainy. While
reminiscing nostalgically about Bengal during their sojourn, he harbours the apprehension
that he will never be able to return, although he has travelled only as far as Assam which is
hardly as far as Africa. Hemendra Kumar Roy’s “softer” approach to nationalism, which rises
above mimicking British valour, is exemplified by his wistfully lyrical descriptions of the
Assamese forests and the Khashi Mountains. Roy’s home-spun metaphors vividly evoke the
Indian landscape. For example, he compares the red vermilion which streaks the foreheads of
married women in Bengal to the crimson open-fired ovens on which rural meals are often
cooked. While Kumar says he is inspired by Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, Roy allows his
characters to explore the indigenous terrain of Assam, thereby revealing how India too can be
a site of adventure and excitement. Natives often ignore the beauty of the Indian wilderness
and its flora and fauna, and Roy laments that locals take so little pride in indigenous treasures
such as the vegetable “safalang” (a little-known delicacy of the area) and the Assamese
wildflower (which is often exported to foreign countries), but are not valued at home.

While there appears to be no obvious mentor figure as found in British fiction there
are examples of Indian men who more subtly perform this role. The fact that these boys have
to acquire adult responsibilities without the explicit guidance of adults endows them with
more agency and independence than their British counterparts. Perhaps Kumar’s deceased
grandfather, whose cryptic codes Kumar and Bimal decipher, plays the role of mentor by
 44

urging
ing them to combine their cerebral powers with physical strength. However, since the
presence and whereabouts of the secret treasure were revealed to Kumar’s grandfather by an
ancient sage, or sannyasin,, whom he has rescued from the clutches of death, the holy man
might well be the original mentor who initiates the treasure hunt. Conceivably, twenty
twenty-year-
old Bimal, who urges Kumar to shed his fears and inhibitions, can, to a certain extent qualify
as the latter’s mentor although he is not significantly olde
older.
r. Ironically, Ramhari, who belongs
to a significantly lower social class than either boy, emerges as the real mentor. Whilst
Ramhari might appear to be little more than a subservient attendant who cooks and runs
errands, since as Dasgupta points out he “doesn’t
oesn’t seem to have any other goal except to serve
Bimal and keep him safe” (191) the story ends with his words of wisdom, which echo
Kipling’s sentiments in “The King’s Ankus”, when he counsels the dejected Kumar and
Bimal out of their despondence:

It won’t
on’t do for the two of you to sit there like dead statues. So, what if the ghostly
treasure is not a part of your destiny? That you’ve survived this ordeal is the greatest
gift. A treasure which has caused so much trouble, pain and has claimed so many
lives without you even reaching it-what
what evil it might have caused had you found it!
Now, you [Bengali] boys must return to your homeland safely ((91,, self-translation).
self

Not only does Ramhari show a total lack of desire for material wealth, but he also persuades
Bimal and Kumar to see the dangerous potential of the treasure, to recognise the value of
human life, to celebrate the successful completion of a dangerous journey and to appreciate
the security offered by one’s homeland. The financial reward is only seco
secondary to that of
acquiring courage and resilience. Much is gained from this seemingly futile quest, in
particular the realisation of Kumar and Bimal’s potential as explorers and adventurers, but the
greater realisation is their ultimate affinity to Bengal.

The villain of The Ghostly Treasure is not an exotic foreigner who wants to steal
native treasure away from India, but rather Kumar’s greedy and lethal neighbour Korali. Roy
does not pit natives against colonists but rather chooses to focus on the “enemy
“ within” and
 45

thereby restricts his story to the domestic sphere. This is vastly different from British juvenile
adventure fiction, where the villains are usually ‘others,’ including capricious natives and
lethal ‘savages.’ The colonial stereotype of Bengali timidity might be another obstacle which
Kumar and Bimal must overcome. However, Roy’s less than flattering descriptions of a dark
madman whom Bagha attacks in a cave and Korali’s thug-like and swarthy henchmen might
disturbingly indicate a form of internalised racism and class hierarchy. This is referred to by
Dasgupta who notes that “Roy’s perspective on these men who were probably of lower caste
and/or class is evident with their association with darkness and their tendency towards brute
violence” (192). However, Roy also subverts this as Korali Mukherjee is an upper-class
Brahmin who orchestrates his own criminal activities and the seemingly ‘low-class’ but wise
and philosophical servant, Ramhari, is elevated to a seminal position in the text.

There are multiple references to the supernatural “Jokh” or demon, whose invisible
presence, like Bandyopadhyay’s Bunyip, permeates the novel. Considered to be the mythical
protector of the treasure, the ‘Jokh’ remains a ghostly, insubstantial figure, symbolic perhaps
of the baseless nature of fear itself. Although Kumar is apprehensive of the Jokh’s presence,
Bimal refuses to allow it to frighten him. The ironic association between spirituality and
material wealth appears frequently in Bengali literature, and Rabindranath Tagore’s short
story “Guptadhan” (“The Secret Treasure” 1907) might be worth mentioning in the context of
Roy’s novel. Notably, in a significant difference between Jokher Dhon and “Guptadhan”, the
Sannyasi (wise ascetic) in the former leads Bimal and Kumar towards the treasure, while in
the latter he leads the “Guptadhan”s protagonist Mritunjaye away from treasure.
Bandyopadhyay underscores this essential contrast between English and Indian adventure
stories in the chapter “White Man’s Burden, Black Man’s Responsibility”:

When nature beckons generously, Mrityunjoy frees himself from the irrepressible
lust for gold that has been driving him hither and thither all these days. On the other
hand, in English adventure stories, writers like Alfred [sic] Henty never forget to
inform us about the exact income and expenditure of their heroes; they have not
come to the colonies for the mere thrill of travel. (256)

Allegorical in nature, the protagonist’s name, Mritunjaye, (whose name translates as the one
who conquers death) recalls the link between death and greed in Kipling’s “The King’s
Ankus.” Mritunjaye finds a perplexing riddle in their old family temple, and he sets out to
look for the treasure it promises to yield. Although his intelligence guides him to his
destination, he finds that the treasure is enclosed in a stifling, claustrophobic tunnel, and he is
 46

constantly encouraged by the voice of an invisible sannyasi (sage) to reject the riches.
Suffocated, he begins craving the liberty offered by spiritual wisdom and reluctantly makes
the decision to renounce material wealth and emerge from the tunnel to inhale fresh air. The
tunnel can be viewed as a metaphor for Mritunjaye’s conscience which struggles with a
difficult choice between material and spiritual wealth, thereby recalling Kumar, Bimal, and
Mowgli who ultimately reject treasure in favour of spiritual introspection, physical freedom,
and moral growth. “Guptadhan”meditates on the human condition, inner growth, the perils of
greed and the incomprehensible quandaries of those faced with material and spiritual choices.

Sunil Gangopadhyay

Sunil Gangopadhyay (1934-2012) was a former Sheriff of Calcutta and also notable
poet, novelist, and historian, who wrote fiction for both adults and children. His Kakababu
series first appeared in the Bengali children’s periodical Anandamela in 1979. “King of the
24
Emerald Isle” (1980) appears in Gangopadhyay’s The Adventures of Kakababu series and
features the young first-person narrator Shontu, who accompanies his uncle and mentor Raja
Roy Chowdhury, fondly called Kakababu (a Bengali endearment for uncle) on thrilling
adventures during his school holidays. Inspired by Premendra Mitra’s “Mamababu” series,
Gangopadhyay’s Kakababu was the former director of the Archaeological survey of India
before he suffered a severe leg injury which forced him to resign. As a former director of the
Archaeological Survey of India, Kakababu enjoys certain privileges for the services which he
had earlier rendered which gives him ease of access to important documents, receive
clearances for travelling to sensitive areas and request help from various government
departments. The preservation and restoration of threatened and endangered Indian artefacts
appears to be his primary mission and he consciously chooses to be an adventurer over a
detective. It is admirable that he uses his power and influence to empower those who are
marginalised and oppressed, which further elevates him in the eyes of his awe-struck and
adoring nephew and no doubt young readers.

Unlike British mentors who, in addition to promoting the imperial agenda are
expected to inculcate social values in their young wards, Kakababu is an iconoclast, in his

24
The Adventures of Kakababu (2019) has been translated from the original Bengali by Rimi and
“King of the Emerald Isle” was originally titled “Shobuj Deeper Raja” (1980).I have used the Kindle edition
because the printed versions of certain Indian texts were difficult to obtain during the years of the pandemic.
 47

eccentricity not unlike Stevenson’s Long John Silver but also directly resembling him
because of hisamputated leg,who does not conform to expected social rules and nor does he
set conventional standards for Shontu. He confronts his physical disability with great
fortitude and courage and does not flinch in the face of the tremendous physical and mental
hardships. His outlandish behaviour and undeniable brilliance appeal to Shontu who
anticipates his imminent travels and hopes to participate in a foreign mission in “King of the
Emerald Isle”:

if they had to take a plane or a ship, then did it mean that Kakababu was planning to
travel to a really far-off place? He must, right? If it was any old place nearby, they
would have just taken the train. So where would this faraway place be? Africa?
South America??? Shontu felt like doing a little jig in joy. None of his friends had
travelled that far. (84-85)

Kakababu, is, however, committed to protecting national treasures, and hence prefers
domestic tours over international ones. A man of few words, Kakababu reveals his plans and
intentions very slowly and Shontu is disappointed to realise that their trip takes them only as
far as the Andaman Islands, a union territory of India. Kakababu convinces Shontu that the
Andamans, like many other parts of India, laden with the history of colonialism, lends itself
to adventures as well:

Right now, we’re in Port Blair...that would be here, right on the belly of South
Andaman. There are other islands around as well, all named after the British: Neil,
Havelock, Ross...before the British, these islands used to be hunting grounds for
pirates. (119)

It comes as no surprise that such a passionate protector of national treasures, chooses the
Andamans, which also housed the infamous Cellular Jail (also known as Kala Pani, or Black
Water), constructed between 1896 and 1906, as a setting for this story. Built to imprison
members of India’s freedom struggle, it represents the tyranny of Imperial rule. Shontu soon
learns that Kakababu’s has come here to investigate the mysterious disappearances of several
foreign scientists who were visiting these islands. Kakababu discovers that these scientists
have been invading the protected territory of the fiercely private, indigenous ‘Jarawa’ tribe to
procure the valuable remains of a meteorite which had crashed there. Rumoured to be a
terribly violent tribe who “kill all civilised people” (124), Gangopadhyay’s fiction seeks to
undermine these unfair allegations imposed upon them by outsiders who know very little
 48

about their true nature. The king of the Jarawa tribe is, in fact, not a Jarawa at all but a
former freedom fighter named Gunada Talukdar, who had been imprisoned by the British in
the infamous Andaman Jail. He managed to escape the prison years ago but refused to return
to a colonized India, instead choosing to live with the Jarawa community whom he
passionately defends:

What’s “civilised”? Do you really believe that you, with your guns and lies are
civilised, and they are the savages? No one on the island knows how to lie, no one
knows how to steal. (193)

Kakababu’s quest to solve the mystery of the missing scientists questions the ethics of
world-renowned, ‘civilised’ scientists who steal “valuable possessions” (194) from poor
tribes in the name of “scientific enquiry” (194). However, this quest is far from easy for uncle
and nephew alike. Kakababu disregards the warnings of purported well-wishers and ventures
headlong into danger, but in doing so, he represents the Jarawas in the fair and ethical way
they deserve to be introduced to the larger world. This does, however, come at a cost,
especially for the young and vulnerable Shontu who approaches adventure with both a thrill
and trepidation:

Why on earth … did his uncle have to drag him to this dangerous jungle, so far away
from home? Was he even going to make it back alive? And if things weren’t bad
enough as they were, his uncle had now disappeared! How was he supposed to find
his way alone? Why couldn’t Kakababu just have listened, and stayed with Shontu?
(170)

As a mentor, the irascible, impulsive but always well-meaning Kakababu is far from perfect
and sometimes draws his young nephew into adventures far too dangerous for him. Perhaps
he overlooks the fact that Shontu is just a child for whom even the mildest of adventures
might seem overwhelming. Yet, he inspires his young nephew with his unshakeable
convictions and sheer determination to rescue national treasures and artefacts to their rightful
places and owners and restore the glory of misrepresented peoples. Contrary to the
expectations of a children’s story, however, the story ends on a sudden and tragic note, when
the frail and aged Gunada Talukdar, who is convinced by Shontu and Kakababu to visit a
now independent Calcutta, suddenly dies of a heart attack, possibly overwhelmed by the
urban cacophony, dense pollution, and relentless pace of his postcolonial city, which is in
sharp contrast to the pristine and verdant “Emerald Isle”. Hence, Gangopadhyay uses the
 49

British genre of adventure to offer a searing indictment of the past atrocities of colonisation
but also asks his young readers to reflect on whether contemporary adults have adequately
respected their own nation post-independence.

In conclusion, while the Indian adolescent is being presented with freedom and the
need to physically and emotionally challenge themselves, the British boy is being instructed
in imperialism and Englishness. Bengal’s emulation and appropriation of the genre allowed
young indigenous readers to lay claim to their own canon of authentic yet inspired adventure
fiction and brought their heroes closer to home.Young Bengali men like Shankar and
Bimalcourageously venture forth from the comfort of their homes to explore foreign lands
primarily to challenge the colonial stereotype of them being an effeminate race. However, the
celebration of dauntless valour and soft vulnerability of Bengali protagonists by their creators
lends Bengali adventure fiction a unique quality. Moreover, while the successful discovery
and acquisition of foreign treasure by British adventurers mark the end of novels such as
Treasure Island Bengali adventurers do not appear to harbour exclusive hopes of material
gain. Instead, theyseem to take far more delight in planting the flag of Bengal on foreign soil
and leave their valiant footprints on unfamiliar terrain. Furthermore, I contend that the
recurrent motif of mountains (as seen in Chander Pahar and Jokher Dhon) lends the quests a
spiritual dimension as many important Hindu temples are situated atop high peaks.25 Prayer
seems to be an important source of sustenance for these young men whose lives have been
rooted in religious practice, as seen in Shankar’s visits to the local village temple before he
sets off for Africa. And yet, the likes of Shankar constantly take inspiration from British
explorers, both fictional and real like Robinson Crusoe and David Livinsgtone, respectively.
Undoubtedly, Bengali juvenile adventure fiction is indebted to British writers like Defoe,
Rider Haggard and Stevenson but it carves out a space for itself and perhaps goes far beyond
the warring forces of imperialism and nationalism.

25
Notable examples include pilgrimage centres nestled in the Himalayas which consist of high altitude
shrines such as Yamunotri, Gangotri, Kedarnath and Badrinath.
 50

Chapter Two:
Bengali Detective Fiction

“It often seems to me that’s all detective work is, wiping out your false starts and
beginning again.” Agatha Christie

The Shadow of Holmes

Bengali children’s detective fiction is openly and repeatedly indebted to Arthur

Conan Doyle’s iconic sleuth.26 The explicit statement of writing back and paying tribute to
Sherlock Holmes, which dominates much of the juvenile genre in Bengal, is emblematic of
the strong presence of British influence.
27
In Suchitra Bhattacharya’s Keralaye Kistimat (Checkmate in Kerala, 2003) the
detective Pragyaparamita Mukhopadhyay rather wistfully declares that she is no Sherlock
Holmes, whom she obviously admires since much of the narrative centres around her
emulation of his powers of deduction and observation. Although she modestly denies
possessing Holmes’s cerebral powers, her success and fame as a successful Bengali woman
detective seem to belie her statement. Keralaye Kistimat revolves around the mystery of a
stolen Jewish scroll, a case which is adroitly solved by Pragyaparamita, fondly called Mitin
Mashi by her niece, the narrator. Her success is commemorated by the local policeman,
Sathish Menon, who is amazed that she has managed to expose a wily and cunning criminal
where the police have failed. However, the modest Mitin Mashi underplays her role in the
matter by crediting her victory to the many foolish follies committed by the criminal, Mr.
Kurup. She responds to Menon’s mighty praise with:

26
While English writers like Stephanie Baudet have adapted the Sherlock Holmes stories for children
since the 1980s, Premendra Mitra (1904-1988) edited a volume of translated stories titled Sherlock Holmes’er
Kishore Goenda Samagra (The Sherlock Holmes Collection for Children) which were specifically adapted and
illustrated for Bengali children. Additionally, theBengali juvenile science fiction writer Adrish Bardhan also
translated the Holmes stories in a collection called Sherlock Holmeser Abhijan (The Adventures of Sherlock
Holmes, circa 2011).
27
All translations of Suchitra Bhattacharya are my own.
 51

Absolutely not! Mr. Kurup has made so many mistakes that not being able to capture
him would be tremendously stupid! Would you like me to list out his many errors
errors?In
the guise of a gentleman
gentleman… (139)

Continually self-effacing, she attributes her success to her enemy’s stupidity more than her
own cerebral prowess, which seems to indicate the tentative,, uncertain literary space which a
Bengali female postcolonial detective occupies, and her apparent contentment with living in
the shadow of Holmes, her renowned male British predecessor.

In London-e Feluda ((Feluda in London (1989), Satyajit Ray’s

’s eponymous
epony detective
who is more formally known as Prodosh Chandra Mitter, makes his way to the imperial
metropolis and actually visits the fictional address of 221B Baker Street.28Finding that it does
not exist,the usually taciturn Feluda turns to the house next door and respectfully bows his
head in front of 220 Baker Street instead
instead. He reverently declares that he owes his resounding
national and international success as a detective to Holmes, whom he calls his ““guru” the
Bengali word for mentor/teacher. His adolescent nephew and narrator Topshe, describes the
scene thus:

Suddenly, my eyes fell on a sign fixed high up on the wall of a building, that told me
which street we were in. ‘Baker Street’ it said. Sherlock Holmes used to li
live in 221B
Baker Street. Now I knew what Feluda
Feludawas
as looking for. As it turned out, there was no
house with that number, but we found number 220. That was good enough. Feluda
stood before that building and murmured softly, ‘Guru, you showed us the way. If I
am an investigator today, it iiss only because of you. Now I can say coming to London
was truly worthwhile. (553-554)

Perhaps Ray could have arranged a fictive meeting between Feluda and Holmes or at the very
least kept “real” the make-bel
believe address of 221B Baker Street. However, he seems to
consciously underscore the fictionality of Holmes as opposed to the more solid reality of
Feluda for his native readers, which might be his mode of commenting on the intangible

28
I have read all the Feluda stories in their E
English
nglish translations by Gopa Majumdar which appeared in
two volumes titled The Complete Adventures of Feluda (2000).
 52

albeit indelible influence of English crime fiction on the development of the genre in Bengal.
Albeit acknowledging Holmes’s
Holmes’sgreatness, Ray deliberately separates the two detectives, lest
Feluda allow himself to be eclipsed by Holmes’s genius. In contrast, in Ruskin Bond’s Rusty
Goes to London, the titular protagonist saunters through Baker Street and runs into Sherlock
Holmes in Regent’s Park resplendent in “a peaked hunting cap” (Loc 389) bearing “a large
magnifying glass” and “a long, curved pipe” (Loc 389) in Regent’s Park
Park.. He takes one look at
29
him, and he characteristicallyy reveals details about Rusty’s background: “And you, sir, he
replied with a flourish of his cloak, ‘are just out of India, on leave from the office and due to
give a lecture on the radio” (Loc 397). Unlike Feluda, the Anglo-Indian
Indian Rusty,
Rusty who is
biologically British and a writer by profession, does not feel the need to clearly define
himself against the English detective and assert his independent identity
identity.

Narayan Sanyal’s juvenile detective series

series,, conceived in 1971, features his young
sleuth Sherlock Hebo who has been mockingly so named by his elder brother. Sanyal has
great dreams of success and fame for his 15
15-year-old protagonist. We are introduced to young
Hebo in “Gurubiday Porbo” ((“Farewell to the Guru”)) whose title perhaps ironically implies
Holmes, the original guru of this genre: 30
that it is essential to bid adieu to Holmes

Hebo is a detective right from his birth. He is the future Sherlock Holmes of Bengal.
Even if you don’t know Hebo, you certainly know Sherlock Holmes. The immortal
creation of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is known to audiences the world over. Of course,
Hebo’s paternal
aternal uncle writes detective stories in a monthly magazine and his

29
In a chapter titled “The Anglo
Anglo-Indian
Indian Conversation” I have undertaken a detailed analysis of the
works of the Anglo-Indian
Indian author Ruski
Ruskinn Bond (1943), whose autobiographical Rusty series for adolescents has
received much acclaim. Rusty Goes to London (2014) is the third novel in the Rusty series, where his hero
travels to England in pursuit of a profession in writing. The first two novels in the Rusty series are The Room on
the Roof (1957) and Vagrants in the Valley (1987).

30
All translations of Narayan Sanyal are my own.
 53

maternal uncle Ajitendra Babu is a senior police officer. Therefore, he has heard
stories of criminals from his childhood and is well-acquainted with their ways. (7)

This, of course, implies how Hebo’s influences were not limited to British fiction but also
extended to the local criminal cases which were handled by his family members. It might be
assumed that the ways of Bengali criminals and their methods of crimes would revolve
around the immediate geographic and socio-political contexts which they occupied. Priyonath
Mukhopadhyay, one of Bengal’s first detectives who worked for the police force under the
British Raj in Calcutta presented the city with one of its first home-grown detective stories, as
far back as 1892. This is elaborated upon in a later section of the chapter. To put the
argument another way, while the influence of English detective fiction (particularly that of
the oft referenced Holmes) on the development of the children’s genre in Bengal is
indispensable, it also flourished in conjunction with the growth of local systems of law and
order.31

A Brief History of the Genre in Britain and Bengal

While several literary critics seem to agree that America was the birthplace of
detective fiction, with Edgar Allan Poe as its founder, others like T.S. Eliot have argued in
favourof its British origins by declaring Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone (1868) as the first
full-length novel of the genre. The earliest works of detective fiction in the United States
include Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841) and Louisa May Alcott’s response to
the form in her 1865 novella “V.V., Or Plots and Counterplots,” neither of which are full-
length novels, unlike The Woman in White (1859) and/or The Moonstone (1868), the latter
being of import as a tale of the rightful repatriation of stolen colonial treasure. Arguably, an
English detective who preceded The Moonstone’s Sergeant Cuff is Dickens’s Inspector
Bucket from Bleak House (1852) who is commissioned to look for the missing Lady
Dedlockand first suspects but finally exonerates her from false charges of murder. The Boy
Detective (1866), a Penny Dreadful which was serialised over 72 volumes chronicled the
adventures undertaken by a young runaway Ernest Keen and his boss, a police officer.
Arguably, even though it was clearly written before The Moonstone, it was not considered
important enough to be one of the forerunners of the genre owing to its status as a children’s

31
Sanyal also wrote detective stories for adults which were heavily inspired by the fiction of Agatha
Christie and Erle Stanley Gardner, and the protagonist of his adult crime series Kanta, P.K. Basu was hailed as
the Perry Mason of the East.
 54

tale. In 1887, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle introduced Sherlock Holmes, arguably the most
influential of fictional detectives and a global literary icon, through his novel A Study in
Scarlet. Notably, while Conan Doyle’s Holmes stories were not intended for a juvenile
audience, some of his mystery stories appeared in TheBoy’s Own Paper, many of which were
previously rejected by Blackwood’s Magazine. Arguably, then, “Uncle Jeremy’s Household”,
which was rejected by Blackwood’s Magazine in 1885 (and hence possibly written before the
first Holmes story) and published in in 1887, is an early example of his crime fiction for
boys. In this story, Hugh Lawrence assumes the role of a proto-detective and tries to prevent
the villainous Mr. Copperthorne from committing a heinous crime. Agatha Christie, the
“Queen of Crime”, entered the literary arena with The Mysterious Affair at Styles in 1920,
and thereby introduced her Belgian detective Hercule Poirot. Ten years later, the elderly Jane
Marple, an occupant of the village of St. Mary Mead appeared on the literary scene with
Murder at the Vicarage (1930). Like Holmes, both of Christie’sdetectives were single and
mostly unencumbered by romantic or conjugal relationships. Juvenile British crime fiction
was arguably pioneered by Enid Blyton who wrote a plethora of series dedicated to children
between 1942 and 1963. Her Famous Fives, Secret Sevens, Five Find-Outers and The R
Mystery Series, among others, featured amateur detectives in the form of young children who
were out to solve the little mysteries which plagued their towns. Notably, The United States
of America also witnessed the outpouring of a large amount of juvenile detective stories,
beginning with the popular Hardy Boys series which first appeared in 1927 and the Nancy
Drew mysteries written by a group of writers under the pseudonym Carolyn Keene (both of
which were conceived by the American publisher Edward Stratemeyer), and the Connie Blair
books by Betsey Allen between 1948 and 1958.

In Bengal, crime fiction developed in tandem with the introduction of the colonial
legal system in India. The Indian Legal System: An Enquiry (2019) by Mahendra Pal Singh
and Niraj Kumar explains how “colonisers imposed” their legal “tools and institutions on
India with rudimentary reference to Indian traditional laws” (xxxii). While Orientalists such
as the Governor General Warren Hastings and Sir William Jones tried to recognise the
existence of a legitimate pre-colonial legal system which varied from one state to another in
India, Thomas Babington Macaulay introduced English Law in India and the Indian Penal
Code which was adopted in 1870 was drafted as early as 1830and British laws continue to be
used “even after independence” (xxxi). Crime fiction in Bengal might have had its origins in
a retired police inspector’s accounts of his cases in a periodical called Daarogar Daptar in
 55

1892, which was published at the same time as the first Sherlock Holmes story was serialised
in the English magazine Strand. Its author, Priyonath Mukhopadhyay served as a police
detective during the British Raj, and he worked for the Calcutta Police between 1878 and
1911; and Abhijit Gupta points out that his first story was about an offence revolving around
books, titled “Fantastic Author” (1894). This recalls the Southampton born writer, William
Russell who contributed detective stories in the form of police chronicles to Chambers’s
Edinburgh Journal between 1849 and 1852, which was collated into a volume entitled
Recollections of a Detective Police-Officer (1856). The subsequent detectives who emerged
from the Bengali imagination owe a great deal to Arthur Conan Doyle. Panchkari Dey, one of
the pioneers of Bengali fiction and author of Detective Upanyas (1905), relied heavily on
Conan Doyle for his Bengali detective-assistant duo and was one of Holmes’s first Bengali
translators. Although Dey’s works failed to reach great artistic heights, he did cast the die of
detective fiction which was to gain immense popularity in the years to follow.

Lalmohan Ganguli, alias Jatayu, is a fumbling writer of sensational, unrefined, and

uninformed detective stories who appears in Ray’s Feluda stories. His melodramatic fiction
cannot hold a candle up to Ray’s own sophisticated writing and his amateurish fictional
detective Prokhor Rudra, whom Jatayu desperately tries to mould in the image of Feluda,
appears to be a parody of Dey’s fiction. Ray’s caricature of Dey’s detective might be
indicative of how a genre brimming with potential could just as easily be trivialized in the
hands of writers who were not adroit but Bengali juvenile detective fiction vacillates between
low-grade imitations and competent adaptations. The Feluda series, which appeared in the
1960s in the children’s magazine Sandesh, enabled Ray to rescue the genre from absurd and
embarrassing British imitations.

The next significant contribution came from Dinendra Kumar Roy, a schoolteacher
who openly acknowledged the influence of the Sexton Blake novels (1893-present). But
whereas the Sexton Blake novels were essentially the work of collective imagination, and
created by over 200 different authors, Roy takes it on as a singular responsibility.
Undeniably, the colonial project allowed Dinendra Roy to join this literary endeavour and
continue his contributions in Bengali. Interestingly, he did include English passages from
Sexton Blake in his serialised novel Rahasya Lahari (1917), thereby indicating the
increasingly bilingual nature of his young readers. The Sexton Blake novels were known for
their generic quality and Roy is reacting to this formulaic mode of mythic writing and
modifying it for an Indian audience, which becomes a mode of appropriation.
 56

Hemendra Kumar Roy, the aforementioned author of The Ghostly Treasure (1930)
was also a juvenile crime writer who left an indelible impression on the early development of
the genre in Bengal. An avid reader of English literature, who was captivated by Lewis
Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (so much so that he translated it into Bengali), he
created the detective duo of Jayant-Malik who aided the local and hilarious policeman,
Sundar Babu. Although they operate within their local context, they do make use of the latest
European scientific discoveries in their efforts to solve crimes. The titles of these intriguing
stories, such as “The Mystery of Saturn,” “The Monstrous Man,” “Shahjahan’s Peacock” and
“The Curse of Anubis” recall the genres of science and historical fiction and catered to young
adults.

Devoid of the hubris with which we associate the likes of Holmes and Poirot, the
unassumingly brilliant Byomkesh Bakshi, who first emerged from the imagination of the
prolific writer and lawyer Saradindu Bandyopadhyay in 1932, rejects the label of detective
and prefers to be called ‘a seeker of truth’ (satyanweshi). However, “The Avenger” (c.1960),
in which Byomkesh humbly tells a potential client that despite his best and most determined
efforts he is not always successful, recalls Conan Doyle’s “The Adventure of the Yellow
Face” (1893), a rare story in which Sherlock Holmes admits defeat, and in the words of
Watson “it chanced that even when he erred the truth was still discovered”
(NP). Bandyopadhyay appears to consciously widen the gap between Holmes and Bakshi by
allowing his detective to enjoy marital bliss with his intelligent wife, Satyabati, although he
does have a Watson-like assistant in his male friend, Ajit.

Early native writers who chose to address the genre of crime, which is normally
associated with violence and abstruse concepts like justice and retribution, for children,
adopted conscious strategies to rescue their work from becoming merely derivative. A classic
32
example is Sukumar Ray’s “The Detective” (circa 1940), featuring Jaladhar, a parodic
representation like Hebo, where humour deflects any loftiness and satirises both its
protagonist and the genre itself:

Jaladhar’s mama-his mother’s brother-was in the police, and his pishemashai-his

father’s sister’s husband-wrote detective fiction. Hence Jaladhar firmly believed that

32
The English translation of this story appears in Timeless Tales from Bengal: An Anthology of Bangla
Children’s and Young Adults’ Stories (2018) and has been translated from the original story titled “Detective”
by SuklaBasu Sen, Shaona Barik, Chandrima Das and Ritushree Sengupta.
 57

his immense talent in fighting, tricking and eventually catching thieves, dacoits and
conmen could only be found in none other than his own talented uncles. Any act of
theft of any house in his neighbourhood was always marked by his obvious presence
before anybody else could arrive at the crime scene. (112)33

“The Detective '' is one of Ray’s many Pagla Dashu (1940) stories (the Pagla Dashu stories
were posthumously published 13 years after Sukumar Ray’s death) which features its
eccentric and eponymous school-boy protagonist. On this occasion, Dashu as well as a band
of schoolboys of which Jaladhar is a part are plagued by a mysterious thief who is cunningly
consuming their packed lunches. Jaladhar, a self-professed sleuth who is determined to solve
these repeated crimes, is often accosted by his friends sarcastically asking him, “Hey, Mr.
Detective, where are your Coney-catching tricks now?” (113). Not to be discouraged, he
begins to make a serious lists of his suspects including the poor young bearer who has just
joined school. However, the poor bearer, a vegetarian Brahmin, is exonerated when an
enraged Pagla Dashu discovers that his mutton chop has been half eaten and fully desecrated.
When the boys accuse Jaladhar of misleading the investigation, he slyly confesses:

I intentionally misled you. A detective must never spill the beans before he catches
the thief. No professional does that. I alone know who the thief is. (114)

The story ends on a jocular note when Jaladhar’s best laid traps and plans reveal that the
lethal and “strong and stout” (115) thief he had set out to catch is none other than a “huge, fat
tomcat” (116) who could not possibly be turned over to the police. Ray’s inclusion of tongue-
in-cheek references to the gravitas of the genre further supplants our expectations. By
highlighting the comical elements of Jaladhar’s methods of detection, Ray invites his readers
to appreciate the potential of detective fiction to cater to a juvenile audience.

Additionally, adapting this genre for the historically doubly marginalised figure of the
native child, who now occupies a seminal position in the narrative, becomes a significant
statement because, in addition to empowering and validating him or her, it becomes a means
of celebrating the very condition of childhood. Sen has persuasively argued that the native
child was viewed by the colonisers with distrust, suspicion and sometimes derision. However,
in “A Juvenile Periphery: The Geographies of Literary Childhood in Bengal'' (2004) he
argues that:

33
I recognise that there are dashes in place of hyphens but I am quoting the translator verbatim here.
 58

In India between the 1850s and the 1930s, the ‘child’ was re-examined and
reinterpreted in the cultural and intellectual climate of colonialism, and the ‘new
children’ that emerged from these interrogations found various new uses in
colonialist and nationalist projects. (NP)

The prolific outpouring of crime fiction from Bengal becomes a way of gradually rescuing
the colonised child from the clutches of suspicion and obscurity. It empowers native children
to become receivers of knowledge and wielders of influence. An adult Watson is replaced as
the raconteur (and first-person narrator) by younger nephews and cousins like Tupur (Mitin
Mashi’s niece) and Topshe (Feluda’s adolescent cousin) who refer to their beloved adult
sleuths using endearments like mashi (aunt) and da (older brother) but remain sufficiently in
awe of them to narrate their stories from an objective distance. Some works feature children
as young as six as detectives who succeed in solving crimes which adults are incapable of
solving. Writers like Samaresh Bose (1924-1988) and Shashtipadha Chattopadhyay (1941-)
introduced juvenile detectives like Gogol and The Pandav Goenda (The Pandava Detectives)
respectively to further this cause. Nalini Das’s (1916-1993) GoendaGondalu (The Lur
Quartet), features a group of four girlsand skilfully combines the two genres of the school
story with detective fiction. In Ray’s Feluda series, strangely gifted children like Mukul (The
Golden Fortress, 1971) and Nayan (The Mystery of Nayan, 1990), in addition to being pivotal
to the plots, are victims of the evil machinations of wolfish villains, and Feluda feels a moral
responsibility to protect theirinnocence at all costs. In “The Mystery of Nayan” which reaches
its climax amidst the spectacular architecture of Mahabalipuram in the Indian state of Tamil
Nadu, Feluda rescues the titular eight-year-old from the hands of a host of mercenaries who
wish to exploit his uncanny talent of making numerological predictions. Nayan’s near
supernatural powers disappear almost as suddenly and inexplicably as they appear and this
puts his life in grave danger, since his supposed mentors have no use for him any longer.
Feluda’s timely intervention not only saves Nayan from grave peril but also restores him to
the prelapsarian world of childhood, which is unsullied by mercenary and transactional
motives. Similarly, in The Golden Fortress (1971), another 8-year-old, Mukul, is described as
a ‘jatismar’or one who can recall his past life. Despite being committed to scientific reason
and logic, Feluda agrees to help the child at his parents’ behest when he recognises the
dangerous potential of the avaricious villains who wish to capitalise on Mukul’s knowledge
to discover secret treasure. Feluda never judges or questions these children’s mystic powers
just as Ray never provides any rational explanation for them. However, when their powers
 59

are put to test, they emerge with flying colours and thereby add touches of whimsy and
fantasy which are not incongruous to children’s literature. Ray’s “willing suspension of
disbelief” urged his readers to engage in the flights of fancy and imagination which are the
fundamental prerogatives of childhood. By villainising adults who wish to exploit the Nayan
and Mukul for their mysterious talent, Ray can explore the unequal power dynamics which
exist between grown-ups and children. Feluda assumes the role of the protector of their
childhoods by guarding them from avaricious adult villains and drawing safe boundaries
within which the latter can thrive freely.

Much of Bengal’s juvenile crime fiction is sanitised of seemingly mature themes such
as adultery and sexual motives. Ray famously lamented to his wife Bijoya that in adapting the
detective genre for children probably to satisfy parental concerns, he had to exclude the
intrigue and passion which fuelled the adult British crime novels he so admired. In an
author’s note at the end of his Feluda collection Ray reflects:

To write a whodunit while keeping in mind a young readership is not an easy task,
because the stories have to be kept ‘clean.’ No illicit love, no crime passionel, and
only a modicum of violence. I hope adult readers will bear this in mind when reading
these stories. (vii)

Astonishingly, Ray goes to the extreme of nearly eradicating the presence of women entirely
from his Feluda stories to safeguard his detective from any romantic interests (unlike his
guru, who was besotted by Irene Adler). His disavowal of the presence of women in the
genre is at odds with his stance as a feminist filmmaker, as he often put women’s concerns at
the centre of films such as Devi (1960) and Mahanagar (1963). Nevertheless, although his
children’s detective fiction managed to keep romantic interests at bay, it is inundated with
brutal murders, kidnappings and the sort of violence which is never really found in the
English juvenile crime fiction of writers such as Enid Blyton’s Famous Five or Five Find-
Outers.This could have been the result of the haunting and not-too-distant memories of
colonialism in which children and adults alike witnessed violence in a way in which their
counterparts in the Imperial capital might not have. In Shakuntala’s Necklace (1988) one of
the rare Feluda stories about powerful women, for example, Topshe provides a lurid
description of a scene of murder which might not necessarily be appropriate for sensitive of
children:
 60

Seated on this chair, leaning forward on the table, was Mr. Sukius. His head was
resting on the table. The back of his white shirt was soaked with blood. Although his
eyes were open, I knew he was dead. Rarely had I seen a sight so horrible. (525)

This is perhaps Ray’s way of acknowledging that despite his best efforts, a certain degree of
brutality was inescapable in crime fiction for child readers. Hence violence and crime fiction
cannot be torn asunder, and he must cultivate different strategies for his stories to appeal to
children, which becomes a form of appropriation. But he also reflects on how some of
Feluda’s best cases cannot be chronicled by the adolescent Topshe as they would disturb and
traumatise young readers in The Mystery of Nayan (1990):

Besides, you mustn’t forget that Topshe’s readers are mainly children between ten
and fifteen. I have handled so many cases that may well have had the necessary
ingredients for a spicy novel, but in no way were they suitable for children of that
age. (638-639)

Despite this self-imposed limitation, Ray was committed to adapting this genre for children in
the first place and became one of its most prominent exponents in Bengal.

A feature of Bengal’s juvenile fiction which almost becomes a local genre convention
is that it doubles as travel writing. There is a strong evocation of a sense of place which
permeates the narratives of most of these stories, and thereby allows young, middle-class
readers to expand their horizons and educate themselves through vicarious trips around the
world. Additionally, travel accentuates the social mobility of newly emerging postcolonial
detectives who embrace cosmopolitanism and the spirit of adventure in a more sophisticated
and progressive manner than their colonial predecessors. The postcolonial detective, having
taken tentative steps into a colonial genre, also uses his or her newly acquired status to
explore unknown territory and enter unchartered waters. The vivid descriptions of exotic
foreign shores and unexplored indigenous territory stoke the imagination of the native child
and encourage him or her to abandon preconceived stereotypes and embrace new cultures
with an open mind. Importantly, the depiction of local landscapes by native writers also
becomes a corrective exercise of sorts as it allows them to represent India more accurately
than their British counterparts who sometimes exoticise or misrepresent the country. Even
Bandyopadhyay’s titular detective Byomkesh Bakshi, who operates in British India and does
not venture abroad like his successor Feluda, explores remote villages in rural Bengal and
quaint Maharashtrian hill stations like Mahabaleshwar. There has been some debate as to
 61

whether the Byomkesh stories, narrated by his Watson-like adult assistant Ajit, caters more to
an adult crowd than a “juvenile” or young adult one. However, “The Iron Biscuit', which
hinges on Byomkesh’s awareness of the Western superstition of using a horseshoe for
prosperity, has been included in a recent children’s anthology thereby signalling its suitability
for a younger readership.34

The Detective in Bengal

In his introduction to the Postcolonial Detective (2001), Ed Christian describes such

sleuths as:

always indigenous to or settlers in the countries where they work; they are usually
marginalised in some way, which affects their ability to work at their full potential;
they are always central and sympathetic characters; and their creators’ interest
usually lies in an exploration of how these detectives’ approaches to criminal
investigation are influenced by their cultural attitudes. (2)

While Christian cites the case of the English writer H.R.F. Keating’s Inspector Ghote novels
(1964-2009) in arguing that “a postcolonial detective is not always the creation of a post-
colonial writer” (2), the writers with whom I deal with in this chapter are all Indians, albeit
sometimes highly anglicised. Their Bengali detectives do “combine their indigenous cultural
knowledge with western police methods in solving crimes in which the motivation is based
on the local culture” (3). Byomkesh’s deep awareness of the Indian psyche, Feluda’s
devotion to ancient Indian systems of knowledge, Mitin Mashi’s empathy towards the
condition of Indian women, the ability of even younger detectives such as six-year-old Gogol
and The Lur Quartet’s abilityto comprehend the climate of an Indian childhood are somewhat
different to their British models. In Orientalism (1978) Edward Said argues that:

Orientals were rarely seen or looked at: they were seen through, analysed not as
citizens, or even as people, but as problems to be solved or confined, or- as the
colonial powers openly coveted their territory-taken over. (10)

The Indian detective answers such Orientalism by assuming control of the anti-social
elements which plague their society. Driven by the perpetual desire to sanitise society of
misdeeds, these individuals are not “problems to be solved” (Said 10) but those who usher in

34
The anthology is Timeless Tales from Bengal: An Anthology of Bangla Children’s and Young Adults’
Stories (2018).
 62

justice and fairness. Whereas the Bengali people had often been represented weak,
effeminate, and excessively submissive to colonial powers; in this genre they often act with
valour and courage. Homi Bhabha, in The Location of Culture (1994), invokes the condition
of liminality which is a space created by the merging of two borders and Christian
convincingly argues that “the postcolonial detective is this space, this area of overlap, this
space of meeting” (Bhabha, 11). The detective can use the safety net of children’s literature
in Bengal to navigate the choppy waters of crime and punishment. While Bhaba’s theories of
mimicry and hybridity are certainly applicable to the British influence on the development of
the genre in India, most writers exercise sufficient cultural appropriation to ensure that local
detective fiction remains distinctive and unique. In answer to Gayatri Spivak’s question “Can
the Subaltern Speak?” (2008) the answer is a resounding “yes”.

Unsurprisingly, the major themes of detective fiction in Bengal revolve around the
problems which plague a newly emerging postcolonial nation, while some of the earlier
Byomkesh Bakshi tales are situated in the context of India’s struggle for independence. A
preoccupation of several stories is the smuggling of ancient, national heirlooms to foreign
shores, a violation which plagues Feluda and Mitin Mashi repeatedly. The relative ease of
foreign travel facilitates these transgressions, and it is therefore vital that the detective who
takes on these cases is cosmopolitan enough to be comfortable and in control in foreign
countries. Financial corruption and the lingering trauma of discriminatory practices such as
the caste system, the abuses of patriarchy and communal violence also feature in these
stories. The plight of marginalised communities like the Anglo-Indians in post-1947 India is
highlighted in Ray’s The Secret of the Cemetery and Bhattacharya’s The Ghost of Jonathan’s
House. Additionally, some of the juvenile detectives like Bose’s Gogol must work around
abundant adult scepticism. Notwithstanding these sombre themes, the writers make it a point
to bring a pleasurable reading experience for children and entertain them with delightful if
righteous narratives.

The Child as Detective

Nalini Das

Born in 1916, Nalini Das was a member of the illustrious Ray family which pioneered
children’s fiction in Bengal and the granddaughter of Upendrakishore Ray, the founder of the
children’s magazine Sandesh in Bengal. She was educated in Bengal and England and was a
champion for the cause of women’s education and served as a professor at The Institute of
Education for Women in Calcutta. Additionally, she assumed the role of editor for her
 63

grandfather’s Sandesh for many years, and her Goenda Gondalu (The Lur Quartet)
Quartet series
featuring four young girls Kalu, Malu, Tulu and Bulu as detectives, made a regular
appearance there.
35
Goenda Gondalu (1960s) skilfully combines the genres of school and detective fiction. In
her preface to this collection of stories, N
Nalini’s
alini’s daughter and publisher Amitananda speaks of
how her mother was heavily inspired by British fiction, specifically that of Blyton:

As children, my mother and aunt would subscribe to a few British children’s journals
where they encountered stories rreplete
eplete with concealed lockers, secret tunnels, and
strange languages-all
all of which have contributed to her stories. In fact, when Sandesh
was being published, I was copiously consuming the works of Enid Blyton. Seeing
this my mother
other also began reading her ““Sevens”
Sevens” and “Fives” in her bid to write for
children. (Frontispiece
Frontispiece)

Thematically, Das’s stories are in the spirit of Blyton’s as they feature enigmatic
kidnappings, secret passageways, peculiar messages, perplexing riddles, and cryptic treasure
treasure,
all of which
ich replace brutal murders and visceral descriptions of violent crime. But by creating
a group of Bengali girls who are gifted and accomplished, Das reclaimed the genre for native
children, especially girls, who had until then to look overseas for their literary
li role
models. The leader of the little band of detectives, Kalu, is described by the narrator (Tulu)
with both awe and astonishment: Kalu is woven from a different fabric altogether. It is highly
doubtful whether such a courageous, fearless, and dash
dashing
ing girl has ever been born into a
Bengali household. (1). Tulu’s description of Kalu is not at odds with descriptions of
adolescent Bengali adventurers such as Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay’s Shankar (The
(
Mountain of the Moon)) or Hemendra Kumar Roy’s Bimal (The
The Ghostly Treasure)
Treasure whose
mettle and tenacity belie colonial characterisations of timidity and subservience. The choice
of name, Kalu, is of some consequence as it literally translates to “dark,” which is

35
All translations of Nalinii Das are my own, which is why I have included the original Bengali script.
 64

empowering in a society which often discriminat

discriminated against darker-skinned
skinned individuals, and
especially girls. Das creates powerful girls who can inspire others to challenge gender and
imperial stereotypes thereby exercising their agency and intelligence.

While Das’s Gondalu stories set in a girls’ board

boarding
ing school recall Blyton’s school
stories, and are replete with midnight feasts, classroom dynamics and dormitory camaraderie,
they are also unmistakably redolent of the indigenous cultural and geographical landscape.
While English is an important subject, foreign languages such as French are replaced by
Bengali and Sanskrit. The teachers are referred to by the appellation “di,” meaning big sister,
as opposed to the more former addresses of Miss and Madam found in Blyton’s stories. In
addition, the English muffins, tinned sardines, and lemonade of Blyton are replaced with
more local delights such as deep
deep-fried
fried puffed bread, cottage cheese, Bengali sweets, and local
fruit.

The Indian setting of the stories of the Lur Quartet takes on a metaphoric significance
as the four amateur detectives live in a boarding school located in an imaginary location
between West Bengal and Jharkhand, thereby evoking memories of the author’s own
childhood with her cousins in Hazaribagh, while simultaneously establishing a fiction
fictional
landscape which is free from accurate geographic constraints. In addition to contributing to
the mood and atmosphere of Das’s stories, the local setting, replete with its idiosyncrasies,
often becomes the pivot around which the plot hinges. Blyton’s fictional
tional English settings
such as the quaint Kirrin Island featured in the Famous Five series and the magnificent
surroundings of Malory Towers near Cornwall are transposed into partly real and partly
imagined terrain of picturesque North Bengal:

Our schooll building is nestled beside a huge mango orchard. Why, there are at least
20 or 25 mango trees within our compound and all of us girls are not able to finish
the enormous yield of fruit which they bear. And an old and dilapidated Zamindar
house is located on the other side of the fence
fence-and
and it is reputed to be haunted. Its
 65

expansive garden host many more mango trees and we often wonder who eats their
fruit…however, we are situated in a very isolated place. (3)

In one of Das’s earliest stories, simply titled “Goenda Gondalu (c. 1961)” a mystery unravels
around the enormous, ancient, seemingly abandoned house which neighbours their boarding
school. Such architecture and lonely houses were a common sight in places like Hazaribagh,
and it is revealed through the course of the story that the strange noises which were startling
the four girls were linked to the building next door. As the narrative unfolds, it is revealed
that a benevolent zamindar (landowner) used to once live there but after tragedy struck his
family, he donated all his wealth to build a school and moved away. Rumour has it that the
grief of a missing granddaughter had influenced his decisions, and the four girls investigate
and find out she is none other than Anima Di, one of their teachers. In the hope of
discovering his long-lost granddaughter, her grandfather has recently shifted into the
abandoned house next door and has been sending an old beloved pet gorilla into the school
grounds and mango-groves in search of her and the domesticated gorilla is responsible for the
unearthly sounds the girls hear at night.

The clever animal is ultimately able to identify her in a scene reminiscent of the first
ever detective story written in English, Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”
(1841) where his detective C. Auguste Dupin uses his ratiocination to uncover the non-human
murderer, an orangutan who had been cruelly whipped by his master. But unlike the sailor
master of the unnamed orangutan in Poe’s tale, the zamindar’s playful gorilla is well treated
and plays the role of a detective as opposed to a criminal and works in parallel with the four
girls and eventually ensures a reunion between Anima Di and her grandfather, hence alluding
to the strong bonds of filial piety and kinship which are so essential to Indian culture.
Catering to a juvenile readership, Das’s story is devoid of the brutal violence of Poe’s story
and in keeping with the generic demands of children’s literature ends on a joyful note.

Samaresh Bose

Samaresh Bose (1924-1988), who grew up in Naihati, a suburb of Kolkata was better
known for his adult literature (which he wrote under the pen name of ‘Kalkut’) for which he
went on to win the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1980. His series on the 6-year-old detective
 66

Gogol (1977-1988), The Gogol Omnibus (1973),36 marks his conscious departure from the
realm of mature fiction.

“The Squeaks of Rats” (“Idurer Khut Khut”), which features the precocious,
confident, and keen six-year--old
old Gogol, who is gifted with a keen sense of hearing, begins
begin
with Bose’s direct address to his child readers, to whom he says that writing for adults has
“rusted” (3) his mind and he feels very refreshed in the company of children for whom he
wishes to compose exciting stories. Bose’s characterisation of Gogol emp
empowers him while it
also makes allowances for his status as a child:

If you listen to Gogol speak, you will feel that there’s no subject of which he is
unaware. In reality, he might not understand many things, which is only natural. But
his poise, confidence,
nce, body language and clarity of speech can astonish others
others. If
Gogol’s father is approached
roached by a gentleman
gentleman… (2)

Gogol’s idiosyncratic peculiarities recall such European adult predecessors as Holmes and
Poirot but also distinguish him from the tradition he seems to be continuing. Gogol has been
named after the Russian writer Nikolai Gogol, of whom his father is an ardent admirer,
thereby highlighting the popularity of European literature in Bengal. However, it is hard to
escape the incongruity of naming a child after a writer who is remembered for the tradition of
the grotesque, although crime fiction is in some ways inseparable from the grotesque. The
complexities of influence are also evident in Jh
Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake (2003), where
her protagonist spends most of his narrative time reacting against his name, also Gogol,
which his father,, an ardent devotee of Nikolai Gogol had bequeathed upon him. However, in
The Namesake,, Gogol’s father Ashoke has a deeper reason for choosing this name for his
son. He believes that his Russian literary hero rescued him from the throes of death on a
fateful night when he was involved in a train accident. His choice of name for his petulant

36
All translations of Samaresh Bose are my own, which is why I have included the original Bengali
script.
 67

son is his tribute to new beginnings, to Gogol’s birth and subsequent life in the United States,
and old attachments, Ashoke’s childhood in Calcutta where he was introduced to the works
of Nikolai Gogol. However, the name seems to have increasingly “gone native” in Bengal as
it is now a common household name which is not necessarily inspired by the Russian writer.

In keeping with the travelogue form, Bose’s Gogol makes his debut in the world of
juvenile crime fiction by solving his first case in the lush and verdant valley of Kashmir,
where his parents take him for a holiday. The setting of the contested territory of Kashmir
assumes a symbolic form as it intensifies the debate about the presence of children in the
dangerous and very adult genre of crime. Both Gogol and his juvenile reader are mesmerised
by Bose's evocative descriptions of the azure lakes, the houseboats known as Shikaras, the
Jhelum River and the hanging gardens, which seem to urge children to imagine realms which
are outside the ambits of their realities. However, the apparently beautiful atmosphere of
Pahalgaon is tense owing to a recent bank robbery conducted by a few criminals in
Chandigarh who have allegedly entered Punjab in a bid to escape to Pakistan. Coincidentally
(and conveniently), they are hiding in a van in the very same camping grounds where Gogol
and his family have set up their tent. When Gogol hears suspicious noises which sound like
the squeaking of rats from a van which appears to be locked, he alerts his father about his
observations. His father immediately dismisses him by saying that Gogol’s acute sense of
hearing might be playing tricks on him. Disappointed, Gogol confides in the tent-keeper who
requests the police to investigate and, sure enough, they uncover the dreaded criminals
lurking in the van.

Like the English stories, there is ambivalence towards parental and adult figures of
authority since they both recognise and dismiss children, as immortalised with the interaction
between Blyton’s Five Find-Outers and their arch enemy Mr. Goon, the rather ironically
named local police officer. As Nivedita Sen argues in Family, School and Nation: The Child
and Literary Constructions in 20th Century Bengal (2015), “The archetype of obedient
children in a context where their parents were grossly overplaying their authority had
seriously begun to be questioned” (Sen, 3). “The Squeak of the Rats” underscores how many
native adults, like their British counterparts, often disregard the judgement of children as
callow and puerile. Bose indicates that juvenile minds have the potential to make intuitive
and cerebral decisions and that they should not be consistently overlooked by adults. Unlike
Blyton’s or Das’s juvenile detectives, Gogol works on his own and without a band of friends,
and hence it is imperative that the adults in his life give him the support he needs and craves.
 68

In “Strange Noises and a Spell of Fever” an indisposed Gogol disobeys his mother’s strict
orders to remain confined in bed and takes charge of foili
foiling a burglary in an upstairs
apartment when he uses his highly developed powers of hearing to uncover the crime.
Gogol’s gift of hearing helps him overhear adults and hence uncover the questionable acts
which some of them engage in. He gives in to his initial
ial conditioning of self-doubt
self and lack
of certainty: “Gogol
Gogol tried to listen intently, for a minute or so, then closed his eyes and turned
on the side. Perhaps it is his imagination: or it could be thebout of fever which makes you
hear strange noises” (331).

However, he overcomes his feelings of self

self-doubt,
doubt, disobeys his mother who has forbidden
him to leave the bed and telephones the police from his parents’ bedroom and ultimately
emerges victorious. Sanyal’s Sherlock Hebo too faces the same quandary of hav
having to
disobey his parents to pursue his passion and vocation as a juvenile detective. Despite his
obvious talent, his father strictly forbids him to neglect his studies for his future ambitions:

After his resounding success in solving the case at Palash

Palashpur,
pur, Hebo had expected his
father to be proud of him. However, Hebo received no such encouragement. His
father gave him a stern warning to steer clear of any kind of detective work until he
passed his grade 12 examinations. What choice did Hebo have but to put away all his
detective material and sit down to study
study? (8)

Of course, Bose ensures that the story is purified of excessive violence, to spare his very
young readers of any lasting trauma which would deter them from enjoying further stories.

Shashtipada Chattopadhyay (1941

(1941-2023)

Shashtipada Chattopadhyay (1941

(1941-2023),
), a prolific contributor to the world of
juvenile Bengali fiction since 1961, has written a multitude of travelogues, adventure, and
detective stories, the most famous of which is his Pandab Goenda (The Pandava Detectives,
Detectives
 69

1981) series.37 Apart from being a writer, he held a job with the Indian Railways and spent a
few years of his professional career in Ghatshila, a town in the Indian state of Jharkhand.

Loosely based on Enid Blyton’s Famous Five and the Five Find-Outer stories,
Pandab Goenda has a band of youngsters very colloquially called Bombol, Bablu, Bilu,
Bachhu and Bichhu, which are possibly their pet names, a very common feature of Bengal.
Notably, unlike the Enid Blyton books, whose characters always seem to belong to the upper
middle classes, these children live in Howrah as opposed to the posher areas of South
Calcutta and have adopted a one-eyed street dog, Panchu, as their pet, thereby recalling
Timothy and Buster, the beloved pet dogs who feature in Blyton’s series. Chattopadhyay
created yet another series called Goenda Tatar, whose eponymous child hero is the leader of
a detective gang composed of his friends Debu and Shanku, a little orphan girl Sonai, her pet
dog Dogar and a little monkey named Malini. Readers of Blyton will unquestionably find
similarities with Blyton’s R Mystery Series (which includes books such as The Ragamuffin
Mystery and The Rat-a-tat Mystery) where Barney is the young orphan boy whose monkey
Miranda accompanies his owner, Roger, Diana and Snubby and their rather hilarious dog
Looney on their many adventures.

However, the title Pandab Goenda makes apparent Chattopadhyay’s attempt to

localise and culturally appropriate his works for a Bengali audience, as it alludes to the five
Pandava brothers of the Indian epic The Mahabharata, Arjuna, Bheema, Yudishthira, Nakula
and Sahadeva, who were revered for their valour and fearlessness. Notwithstanding the fact
that their collective name is derived from Hindu mythology, the children commit themselves
to logic and reason, as Bablu proudly declares: “There is no room for superstition in the
minds of the Pandab Goenda” (1). However, while the number five undeniably invokes
Blyton’s detectives, Chattopadhyay claims an Indian epic as his source of inspiration.

There are, however, marked differences in Chattopadhyay’s thematic treatment of

familiar motifs from Blyton. While the Famous Five and the Five Find-Outers did solve
mysteries involving smugglers and pilferers, Chattopadhyay’s fiction is darker and not
necessarily cleansed of graphic descriptions of violent and serious crimes like murder and
forgery. Their leader Bablu is armed with a gun, and they have an air of professionalism

37
The story “Ekbinghso Abhijan” appeared in the tenth volume of the Pandab Goenda series, and I
have self-translated sections of it for the purposes of quotation.
 70

which is lacking in most British juvenile crime detectives. Unlike members of Blyton’s series
who usually hold their surreptitious meetings away from their parents in sheds and gardens,
some of Chattopadhyay’s stories feature their clients being hosted in their living rooms in the
presence of adult family members, who are aware of, if not actually involved with their cases.

“Ekbingsho Abhijaan” (1993) revolves around the alleged death by drowning of a

young girl, Sanjukta, who mysteriously starts writing letters stating that she is alive and well
to her father, though he does not know her whereabouts. Her father, Ambika Sen, approaches
Bilu’s parents and seeks the help of the young detectives to help him solve the perplexing
case which takes them to the remote town of Jagatballabpur. The complex story navigates the
murky waters of territory battles, alarming family secrets, international smuggling rackets,
serious medical injuries, and menacing threats, even as the children hum Tagore songs and
travel around various districts of Bengal and states of India like Goya. Chattopadhyay invests
his valiant young Bengalis who represent the valiant youth of Bengal, with an ardent love of
travelling. A Bengali police officer from Goya tells the successful juvenile detectives that
Bengalis from all parts of India wish to greet, meet, respect, and pamper them after they
successfully catch the Anglo-Indian villain Albukirk and prevent him from smuggling Indian
gold abroad. Unlike his predecessor Satyajit Ray, Chattopadhyay is careful to include girls as
a part of the detective group, as they have been marginalised in much of Bengali crime
writing, and the sisters Bachhu and Bichhu play important roles in the narratives.

The Adult Detective for Children:

Satyajit Ray

Often remembered as one of the most talented auteurs of cinema, Ray, who won an
Oscar for his legendary contributions to film-making, was also one of the most prolific and
critically acclaimed writers of children’s literature in the latter half of the twentieth century in
Bengal. Born in 1921, his entry into the world of juvenile fiction was far from accidental,
since his grandfather Upendrakishore Ray was the creator of one of Bengal’s first literary
journals for children, Sandesh,and his father Sukumar Ray also wrote several children’s
classics in his short but brilliant life.

Ray’s detective, the metropolitan, urbane and sophisticated Prodosh Mitra, fondly
known as Feluda, owes much to his cosmopolitan upbringing in Bengal, very much the
intellectual capital of India, although he enjoys travelling to rural areas for work and leisure,
as seen in The Gold Coins of Jahangir (1983) and The Mystery of the Pink Pearl (1989).
 71

Ray’s detective is very much modelled on himself, a liberal, socialist leaning progressive
man who is as comfortable in his home state as he is in any part of the world. Although the
cosmopolitan Feluda is characterised as a professional detective modelled along British lines
(he carries business cards bearing the title of private investigator), he smokes Charminar
cigarettes (indigenous to India) and is equally comfortable in his Bengali skin.

The Feluda stories first appeared when Ray revived his grandfather Upendrakishore’s
children’s magazine Sandesh in 1965 but also appeared in the periodical Desh (Homeland) in
later years. He is accompanied by his adolescent cousin Topshe who fulfils the role of
Watson and faithfully chronicles his cases, in part to meet the generic demands of juvenile
literature and the droll crime fiction writer Lalmohan Ganguly who adopts the pen name
Jatayu, whose presence in these stories give them a unique meta-textual angle as there seems
to be a playful competition between the unrefined, mostly misinformed and yet tremendously
successful Jatayu and the sophisticated, critical Ray who takes his children’s fiction very
seriously. Although it did not match Jatayu’s handsome income, Feluda’s financial success
bears testament to his intelligence and efficiency in a city where the concept of a private
detective is still amorphous and tentative. As Topshe informs his reader in Shakuntala’s
Necklace (1988):

Feluda was earning pretty well these days. He was easily the best known among all
the private investigators in Calcutta. He usually got seven or eight cases every
month, and he charged two thousand for each.Even so, it wasn’t possible to get
anywhere near Lalmohan Babu. (497)

Ganguly’s choice of pseudonym is equally significant as Jatayu was an aged bird who tried to
valiantly rescue Sita from the hands of the demon King Ravana during her abduction in the
Hindu epic Ramayana. Despite being determined and courageous, age had weakened him,
and his wings were cruelly clipped by the Lankan King. Badly injured, he does manage to
give Rama some information of how Ravana was carrying Sita towards the South on his
deathbed. Described by Ray as a “writer of cheap, popular thrillers” (vii) who “serves as a
foil to Felu and provides dollops of humour” (vii), one can’t help but wonder if Ray himself
is not clipping Jatayu’s intellectual and literary wings to prevent him from reaching artistic
heights to provide comic relief to his juvenile readers. On the other hand, despite his obvious
limitations, Jatayu, like his resolute namesake, persists in trying to improve his skills of
writing and research and often consults Feluda for advice and information. Interestingly,
Feluda does not live up to his name which literally means ‘failure’ and thereby indicating the
 72

dry humour which laces Ray’s juvenile fiction. The ever-successful Feluda remains grounded
and ethical throughout the series and his anticipation of failure propels him to greater heights,
although there are times when he, like Holmes, magnanimously and modestly accepts defeat
and failure, as witnessed at the end of Peril in Paradise (1987). Topshe is a play on the name
of a popular fish in Bengal, served as a fried snack to children on festive occasions, and
hence appeals to the (mostly) fish-loving juvenile audience of Calcutta.

Although Feluda mentions his indebtedness to the French crime fiction writer Emile
Gaboriau in “Samaddarer Chabi” and the Belgian cartoonist Hergé, the influence of Holmes
is repeatedly demonstrated.The Case of the Apsara Theatre (1987) begins with a
characteristic tribute to Conan Doyle’s detective whom Feluda often hails as his mentor. His
chronicler Topshe writes:

We had been watching Sherlock Holmes on television. Feluda seemed greatly

impressed. “Don’t Holmes and Watson both seem as though they have stepped
straight out of the pages of a book? If Holmes hadn’t shown us the way, taught us
about method and observation, what would modern detectives have done? We owe
so much to his creator, Conan Doyle.” (435)

The presence of Conan Doyle’s sleuth on Indian television in pre-cable days is an indicator of
his popularity, yet Ray seems eager to present native children with their own home-grown
detective whom they can revere. Another sleuth who is alluded to by Feluda and Topshe alike
is Hergé’s Belgian journalist Tintin. In A Killer in Kailash (1973) Topshe declares:

I was now sitting in our living room immersed in a Tintin comic (Tintin in Tibet).
Feluda and I were both very fond of these comics which had mystery, adventure and
humour, all in full measure. I already had three of these. This one was new. I had
promised to pass it on to Feluda when I finished with it. (337)

While Tibet might seem foreign and exotic to the Belgian Tintin, it is, in fact much closer to
India and Feluda. When Ray filmed his own Feludastory The Mystery of the Elephant God in
Varanasi, a major clue involving an African jungle is revealed in a tense and dramatic scene
as the camera zooms in on the cover of Tintin and the Broken Ear. On a more facetious note,
Topshe observes that one of Jatayu’s newest releases had a “story” which “sounded
suspiciously like a certain Tintin comic (551) and Ray thereby raises concerns about how
inspiration should not give way to blind emulation, a pitfall which native writers must
consciously avoid. Ray ensures that Feluda does not blindly emulate his fictional heroes. He
 73

is very much his own man and yet also a product of his cultural, social, and intellectual
milieu. While Holmes’s methods certainly inspire him, Feluda is defined by his
idiosyncrasies. An awe-struck adolescent Topshe describes him thus in an early story, The
Emperor’s Ring (1966):

Some people think him crazy, some say he is only eccentric, others call him just
plain lazy. But I happen to know that few men of his age possess his intelligence.
And if he finds a job that interests him, he can work harder than anyone I know.
Besides, he is good at cricket, knows at least a hundred indoor games, a number of
card tricks and can write with both hands. When he was in school, his memory was
so good that he had memorised every word in Tagore’s ‘Snatched from Gods’ after
just two readings. (27-28)

Hence, Feluda is characterised in the spirit of Holmes until the final sentence, with its
reference to the renowned Bengali poet, sets them apart. In Shakuntala’s Necklace he
consciously distances himself from fictional American detectives at a party in Lucknow, in
which he explains his teetotalling habits to his hostess, Mrs. Biswas:

What is this? Just orange juice? Don’t tell me you don’t drink!

No, I don’t Mrs. Biswas,’ Feluda replied with a smile. ‘In my profession, it is best to
keep a clear head at all times.

But I always thought private detectives drank a lot.

Perhaps you got that idea from American crime thrillers. (506)

Hence, Ray simultaneously aligns his detective with but also defines him against Holmes and
his American counterparts. The bilingual and bicultural Feluda is a product of colonialism
and its aftermath in Bengal, yet his knowledge of a different culture and language is what sets
him apart from Holmes, empowers him and perhaps makes him more attractive and complex.

As a postcolonial detective in a newly independent India, he is plagued by concerns

and cases which are very relevant to this context. As aforesaid, he is particularly preoccupied
by the smuggling of indigenous artefacts to foreign countries, a thematic preoccupation in
several of Ray’s stories including The Mystery of the Elephant God and A Killer in Kailash.
This reverses the flow of Indian treasures which were presumably stolen and then taken to
Britain, one example of which is the controversial Koh-I-Noor diamond which was ceded to
Queen Victoria following the British annexation of Punjab in 1849. Wilkie Collins’s
 74

epistolary novel, The Moonstone (1868) which was published in Dickens’s magazine All Year
Roundfor an adult readership is remarkable with its theme of the rightful repatriation of
wrongly stolen colonial treasure (in the form of an Indian diamond) which the iniquitous
Colonel Herncastle brings back to England. Just as Collins’s gemstone is ultimately returned
to its rightful place on the forehead of its deity in India, the implicit concern of Tintoretto’s
Jesus (1982), a Feluda story set in Hong Kong and Baikanthapur (a rural district of Bengal) is
the rightful repatriation of a Renaissance painting back to a European museum from India.
The motif of the repatriation of treasure makes it very much like an English story but with an
ironic and significant twist. Much colonial literature which revolved around the “treasure
hunt” theme like Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines (1885), for example, involved
diamonds from Africa being taken back to England, whereas in a strange reversal in
Tintoretto’s Jesus the upper-class Niyogi family of Baikanthupur are in possession of a
priceless Italian painting of Jesus by the Renaissance artist Tintoretto. However,
notwithstanding their upper-class status in Bengal, the Niyogis’ are not affluent enough to
buy an original Tintoretto painting, as the heirloom was a gift to the talented Chandrasekhar
Niyogi who studied art in Rome from an Italian Aristocrat whose daughter he married. Since
Chandrasekhar’s knowledge of indigenous Ayurvedic medicine cured Count Cassini’s gout
where European medicine failed, he is gifted Tintoretto’s painting of Jesus as a token of
gratitude and wedding gift. An Indian villain, Mr. Somani, is keen to smuggle the painting
out of Bengal and sell it to a Hong Kong based Armenian art dealer, Mr. Krikorian, for a
princely sum of money. Although Feluda is able to stall this transaction, it is revealed that
Chandrasekhar’s grandson, a talented artist himself, is keen to return the Tintoretto painting
to a museum back in Europe, far from the thieving eyes of local crooks and greedy agents.
The family and Feluda readily agree and thereby signifying that a European museum is a
safer haven for a Renaissance painting than postcolonial India. Similarly, in Robertson’s
Ruby (1992) Feluda meets an Englishman, Peter Robertson, who visits India to fulfil the last
wishes of his repentant ancestor Patrick Robertson, who “had fought in the mutiny against the
Sepoys” (698) in 1857 and along with some British officers had “barged into the palace of a
nawab and looted” (698) an invaluable ruby to take back to England.But his diaries reveal
that he was deeply regretful of his actions and desperate for someone from his family to
return it to an Indian museum in the future. In addition to recalling Collins’s The Moonstone,
Robertson’s Ruby highlights Ray’s hope for more Englishmen to cultivate their moral
conscience and return colonial loot to his native country. Additionally, Ray also
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acknowledges that individuals, even former colonisers, have the potential and capacity to
evolve with time and situations and look back upon imperialism in a more critical and
contemplative manner while also recognising that the racist attitudes of some Englishmen
will never change. Racism, remorse, and India’s haunted colonial history form the crux of
this final Feluda tale in which he confronts and exposes a racist heir of an exploitative indigo
farmer, Tom Dexter, whose ancestor tyrannised natives during the British Raj. Since Ray
died in 1992, Robertson’s Ruby is his final adventure of Feluda which perhaps makes his
longing for local treasures to be returned even more poignant.

A Killer in Kailash (1973) casts both a critical look at the sorry condition of
postcolonial India and laments her lost heritage while celebrating her glorious past
achievements. As Feluda’s family friend Sidhu Jetha (Uncle Sidhu) who is the self-declared
Mycroft opines:

I think most people would agree that our present downfall notwithstanding, we have
a past of which every Indian can be justly proud…And today, what do we see of this
glorious past? Isn’t it our art, chiefly paintings and sculptures? Tell me, Felu, isn’t
that right? (338)

Uncle Sidhu and Feluda are both appalled at how certain Indians are falling into the trap of
avarice and helping foreigners smuggle ancient native artefacts out of India and selling them
to wealthy art collectors abroad. Uncle Sidhu implores Feluda to solve the case of one such
relic which has been recently stolen from a temple in Orissa:

Our own art, our own heritage is making its way to wealthy Americans, but it’s being
done so cleverly that it’s impossible to catch anyone. Do you know what I saw
today? The head of a yakshi from the Raja-Rani temple in Bhubaneshwar. It was
with an American tourist in the Grand Hotel! (339)

The Raja Rani Temple located in the state’s capital, Bhubaneshwar, is an ancient Hindu
architectural wonder which dates to the 11th century. The theft of a Yakshi’s head takes on
symbolic value as Yakshis and their male counterparts the Yakshas are deities of prosperity
and wealth. Feluda and Uncle Sidhu, however, are more concerned about the damage to
native art and the destruction of heritage and tradition than the precise monetary value of the
statues being covertly smuggled abroad. As the removal of indigenous goods to decorate
European museums was common in colonial times, the smuggling of goods is redolent of
neo-colonialism. In this case, an American tourist claims to have paid “two thousand dollars”
 76

(339) for it and the illegal transaction of invaluable art sickens Uncle Sidhu. In The Mystery
of the Elephant God (1975), a fraud in the guise of a holy sage, facetiously and symbolically
named Maachli Baba (Fish Sage) helps Feluda’s nemesis, a literary parallel to Conan Doyle’s
Moriarty, Maganlal Meghraj to smuggle and transport Indian antiques to foreign shores.
Unlike Moriarty, though, Meghraj is no sophisticated professor although he is very devious
and guileful. He is a raw, crude, and sadistic criminal whose many interests include drug
trade, grand-scale robberies, and gruesome murders but he does give Feluda a great degree of
professional satisfaction as he tells Topshe that he has been “waiting for a man like this”
because “fighting against such a man and winning-worked like a tonic” (511)
presumablybecause it stimulates his intellect and courage.

In Feluda in London (1989), Ray’s sleuth visits England at the behest of his client Mr.
Ranjan Majumdar to uncover the secret behind an old photograph. Mr. Majumdar has spent
much of his childhood in England and an accident has left him with partial brain damage and
memory loss. He is desperate to uncover the identity of an adolescent who is posing with him
in an old photograph and enlists Feluda’s help to go to London and investigate the boy’s
identity. Notably, London rather than India is now the exotic location since it’s known to
readers through their reading but not experience. Jatayu can’t help but compare the
“handsome double decker buses of London with those of Calcutta which he says, by contrast,
look “as though they’ve been chewed and then spat out” (547). The supposed humour of his
observation is suffused with regret at what postcolonial Calcutta has become. The appeal of
London as a dream destination is evident when the comical Jatayu wistfully laments to
himself upon reaching Hong Kong “Can…can one say Hong Kong is like England” (227), a
comment Feluda immediately responds to with a hint of his trademark sarcasm:

‘Don’t worry Lalmohan Babu’, he said without turning his head. ‘Tell your friends
back home that Hong Kong is also known as the London of the East. I’m sure they’ll
be sufficiently impressed.’

‘London of the East? Oh, good. London…of the East…ah, very nice indeed… (227)

Not only does this signify the power of the Occident on the Oriental imagination, but it also
accentuates the prestige associated with it. Notwithstanding years of struggle for freedom or
perhaps because of it, London still holds a charm for many native Indians who look towards
it as a destination to fulfil their ambitions, hopes and desires. However, their visit to London
is also laced with the bitter experience of racism which reaches out from the past and tears
 77

into their present. An Archibald Cripps, an acquittance of the racist Dexter brothers, speaks
disparagingly of “Indian niggers” (555) to which Feluda firmly reprimands and educates him
by saying that there “are no niggers in India. In fact, even in America, Blacks are no longer
called niggers” (555). Feluda’s sharp retort not only underscores the extent of Cripps’s lack
of knowledge and racist views, but it also serves the purpose of standing up for the subaltern
in what was once the imperial capital. Jatayu admiringly tells Feluda that “putting an
Englishman in his place in London is no joke, is it?” (555) No longer cowering under feelings
of racial inferiority, Feluda represents the valour acquired over generations of struggle and
rebellion and can use his intellect and courage to criticise Cripps’s attacks on Indians.

“Feluda in London” centres on the binary of race and class. In Ornamentalism, (2001)
Cannadine argues that British colonies reflected the “elaborately graded social hierarchy”
(14) which flourished in their home country. Clearly demarcated gradations of class were also
seen in India and Ranjan Majumdar, Feluda’s client, hails from the elite upper-middle class in
Bengal as signified by his education, manners, physical appearance, and access to foreign
travel. Upper-class Indians could afford to attend Oxford and Cambridge, unlike the working
and lower-middle-classes in Britain, and yet they faced racism, often from the latter, as
outlined by Sen in “A Juvenile Periphery: The Geographies of Literary Childhood in Colonial
Bengal” (2004): “The first geography-the civilised abroad-is a deceptively inviting space: it
reveals the moulds of citizenship, only to reinvest protagonists and readers in the garb of
colonised inferiority” (NP).

However, Ray’s story accentuates the recurrent contradiction between race and class which
troubles the Cambridge-educatedMajumdars for generations. The privileges accorded to this
family on account of their class, upper-caste status, skin colour and wealth in Calcutta are
insignificant in the face of ethnic tensions in the Imperial metropolis, where race overpowers
class. In London, Feluda learns a little bit about his client’s grandfather who had fought for
Indian independence against the British:

His father, Ragunath Majumdar, had been a terrorist in his youth. I mean, he was
supposed to have made bombs and attacked British officers when he was only a
teenager. But later he became a heart specialist. By the time he began to practice as a
consultant, he had lost all his earlier hatred against the British. It was he who sent
Rajani to England. He wanted to see his son work in England and his grandson
receive his education there. Seldom does one find such a complete change of heart.
(551)
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‘Terrorist’ is obviously a loaded word though perhaps less so at the time and it is qualified
with the word “supposed”.There appears to be a very fine line between nationalism and
terrorism, a problem which haunted Indian thinkers like Gandhi, Tagore, and Satyajit Ray
himself. The more balanced Dr. Sen recounts how he counselled a cynical Rajani, who
believed that “the British still looked down upon Indians,” by arguing that “a few isolated
cases of racism did not mean that every English person was a racist” (551).

At a climactic moment, Feluda discovers that an elderly gardener in Cambridge, Fred

Hookins, has been hiding a dark secret for years. The boy with Mr. Majumdar in the
photograph is revealed to be a certain Peter Dexter who, along with his brother, Reginald,
were well known for their racist and discriminatory attitudes towards Indians. Peter Dexter
allegedly died when he fell off a boat and drowned in the river Cam. However, the truth
emerges when Hookins confesses that Ranjan Majumdar hit Peter with an oar before he fell
into the river unconscious. Feluda combines religions when he notices statues of both
Buddha and Ganesha, gifts from Ranjan in Hookins’s living room and tells him that he will
have to rot in hell if he lies in front of Indian Gods. Intrigued, Feluda questions Hookins as to
what compelled him to shield a murderer and he replies that the pale skinned Indian Ron
(Ranjan) was “a nice boy, so kind and generous” (561) and that:

Had I been in Ranjan’s shoes, I’d have done exactly the same. Peter was abusing him
loudly. He was saying: “It’s only your skin that’s white. If I scratch it, I’ll find it’s
black under the surface. You are nothing but a dirty black native.” If Ranjan lost his
head after this, can anyone blame him? (561)

A cynic might wonder whether the gardener Hookins could accept the pale-skinned, highly
Anglicised, and wealthy Ranjan more easily than he would have shielded an Indian who
belonged to the same class as himself. Indeed, the south Indian Satyanathan who meets
Feluda earlier in the story confesses that he was at the receiving end of far more racist abuse
than Ranjan on account of him being many shades darker. However, it is entirely possible
that Feluda helps his young readers to realise the pitfalls of over-generalisations and
stereotypes. Despite his racial affiliation with Peter Dexter, Hookins makes a conscious
choice to side with the victim of his racial attacks. There always have been and will
increasingly be white skinned people who do not subscribe to discrimination based on race.
Notwithstanding his marginalised status in Cambridge, Ranjan did have a friend to protect
and support his dignity.
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The Feluda stories are unique because of their sheer diversity of content. Since they
were published in Sandesh for children, Ray ensures that most of his stories double up as
travelogues, like much of Bengali juvenile crime fiction. Middle-class Bengali children could
enjoy the thrill of vicarious tours and imbibe a love and appreciation of new cultures and
places, both domestic and international. This exposure also encourages children to encounter
and acknowledge differences which make us diverse and unique. More importantly, Ray
makes it a point to try and stimulate the reader’s interest in our local national treasures,
though they may have, indeed precisely because they have been increasingly suppressed by
the lure of foreign shores. He goes into the most minute of details in a bid to represent his
native country accurately and rescue it from overly exoticized depictions. His pictorial
descriptions of the ancient forts of Rajasthan (The Golden Fortress, 1971), of the primeval
terra-cotta temples in Shantiniketan (Robertson’s Ruby), of the grand and intricate
architecture of Puri’s Jagganath Temple (The House of Death, 1979) and his arresting
account of the Park Street Cemetery in Calcutta (The Secret of the Cemetery, 1977) urge
native readers to take notice of the rapidly forgotten marvels offered by their
country. However, Feluda very clearly prioritises his detective work over the pleasures of
travel, as Topshe explains in Tintoretto’s Jesus:

To tell the truth, I didn’t want to leave Hong Kong so soon, but I knew that Feluda’s
ruling principle in life was ‘duty first’. He would never allow himself to be lured by
the bright lights of Hong Kong before he had solved the mystery of the fake painting,
the murder of Bankim Babu and the poisoned dog in Baikunthapur. (239)

Feluda emerges as an aspirational figure whom children like his own cousin Topshe look up
to with awe and wonder. Unfortunately, in his bid to sanitise his series from adult and sexual
themes, Ray omits women from his Feluda narratives altogether, apart from Shakuntala’s
Necklace, in which the charming Mary Sheela covertly collaborates with Feluda on a case
involving a family heirloom. However, their relationship is fraught with an unmistakable
hierarchical dynamic because Mary Sheela is a self-professed fan of Feluda’s and not his
equal. In elevating the native subaltern detective, he sadly and surprisingly erases another
group of subalterns.

Suchitra Bhattacharya

Born in Bhagalpur in Bihar in 1950, three years after Indian independence from the
British, Suchitra Bhattacharya enjoyed a successful career as a writer of adult and juvenile
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fiction and many of her award-winning literary works were adapted for film and television,
which is a testament to her popularity. Bhattacharya is one of Bengal’s only authors to create
a fully-fledged, professionally accomplished and financially independent adult detective,
Pragyaparamita Mukherjee, fondly called Mitin Mashi (Aunt Mitin)38 by her young niece and
first-person narrator Tupur. Unlike her successful British predecessor, Christie’s Miss
Marple, Mitin Mashi is a married woman who is defined by her familial relationships.
Although the Mitin Mashi stories narrated by Tupur’s are written for a juvenile audience,
Bhattacharya also wrote a parallel series for adults, in which an omniscient narrator
chronicles the graver, darker and more sombre cases Mitin solves. Although Mitin claims to
represent the local woman who has been doubly marginalised by society and crime fiction
alike, she enjoys a host of privileges in the form of her upper caste status, her conventionally
attractive physical appearance, a supportive husband and an immensely helpful domestic
worker, Arati, who enables her to work in the public domain. Tupur, her adolescent niece,
performs the role of her Watson-like assistant by faithfully chronicling her cases and
accompanying her in search of clues and leads.

Ironically, Mitin Mashi acknowledges Sherlock Holmes in several stories but hardly
alludes to Ray’s famous sleuth Feluda with whom she bears striking similarities. Feluda’s
stories pre-date Mitin Mashi’s and although his presence in Bhattacharya’s fictional world is
unacknowledged, he silently permeates much of her narrative space. The influence of Bengali
detectives has slowly but surely begun to usurp European detectives for Bengali readers. Like
her Bengali, male predecessor, she practices yoga every morning to keep physically fit and
has adopted the idiosyncratic mannerisms with which readers associate Feluda (and Holmes):
his occasional reticence, his pacing up and down when in deep thought, the cerebral frown
which crosses his brow when in doubt, his habit of journaling his thoughts and even his
omnivorous reading habits. Even the name of Mitin’s niece Tupur appears to be a play on
Feluda’s young-cousin-cum assistant Topshe. Furthermore, Feluda’s influence goes far
beyond Bhattacharya’s characterisation of Mitin. Some of her plotlines are unmistakably
reminiscent of some well-known Feluda stories, as are her thematic considerations, thereby
suggesting how the influence of Indian detective fiction is slowly usurping British fiction’s
monopoly over the writer’s mind. Sharpa Rahaysa Sunderban-e (The Mysterious Snakes of
the Sunderbans) opens with the mysterious disappearance and possible murder of a pet dog

38
All translations from Bhattacharya’s Mitin Mashi Samagra (2015) are mine.
 81

from scientist Sumantra Sanyal’s house. Sanyal, who lives in the district of Basanti in the
Sundarbans, has been studying the medicinal properties of snakes and he himself disappears
and reappears in an equally mystifying manner. Mitin discovers that an evil twin of the
scientist intent on stealing his brother’s medical formulae for mercenary gain has been posing
as his brother and has removed the dog so that he wouldn’t be discovered. Over the course of
her investigations, Mitin sifts through webs of deceit to bring justice not just to wronged
individuals but to the spirit of scientific discovery itself. This is unmistakeably reminiscent of
Ray’s Tintoretto’s Jesus in which the villainous Nondo Kumar who wishes to smuggle a
painting by the titular Renaissance artist, an heirloom of the aristocratic Niyogi family in
Baikanthapur, disguises himself as a long dead family member, Rudrasekhar Niyogi, and
kills the family’s fox terrier, Thumri, who would have recognised him at once, to avert
suspicions. There are indubitable thematic and plot similarities between Bhattacharya and
Ray’s story, but the latter touches on themes which are seminal to the postcolonial context.

Similarly, in Bhattacharya's Chhokta Sudoku’r (2015) (The Trick of Sudoku) Mitin’s

husband Partha wins a Sudoku competition which gives him and his family the opportunity to
spend a couple of days in Singapore. However, they are flung headlong into mystery and
crime when Mitin discovers that they have become unwittingly complicit in acomplicated
web of deceit as the awarding agency, Penguin Resorts International, is using their award
letter (which the winners must carry from India to Singapore) as a document to smuggle
internal intelligence of the Indian Army to foreign shores. This storyline is not dissimilar to
Ray’s The Bandits of Bombay (Bombaiye’r Bombete, 1976) where the nefarious film
producer Gore disguises himself as Mr. Sanyal and tries to smuggle a priceless necklace
embedded in a hollow book carried by the unsuspecting crime fiction writer, Jatayu, stressing
once again the influence of Bhattacharya’s Indian predecessor on her.

Bhattacharya regales her readers with exhaustive descriptions of the sites Mitin visits
for work, from the verdant backwaters of Kerala to the marshy swamp grounds of the
Sunderbans and even the hyper-urban cityscape of Singapore. Her well-researched travel
writing has a bonus of serving an educational purpose as well, because she enlightens her
young readers about the history, architecture, geography, and diverse customs of different
areas. Singapore has a particular significanceas a former British colony with a substantial
Indian population. Although many Indians had initially travelled there as indentured labour,
they have subsequently gained professional and economic success. It is tempting to draw a
parallel with a subaltern, postcolonial female detective who holds her own in a former centre
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of the British Empire. Since espionage is a central aspect of the story, it recalls Kipling’s
“The Great Game” between Britain and Russia. In The Trick of Sudoku, Mitin discovers that
documents relating to Indian Intelligence are being leaked to foreign agencies abroad, which
she sets out to foil.

An unsung hero of her stories is her domestic helper Arati, who juggles multiple roles
of chef, cleaner and governess to her son Boom Boom to allow Mitin to carry out her work in
a society where women are still expected to perform most domestic duties. The
technologically savvy, financially independent, and free-spirited Mitin owes a great deal of
her freedom to serve in the public domain to Arati who is sacrificing her time and energy for
her employer, in return for a salary which can in turn support her family. Strangely enough,
despite her feminist concerns, the writer does not reveal much information about Arati, who,
for the most part, remains in the shadows of the narratives. As an empowered female
detective in Kolkata, Mitin’s cerebral powers seem to be the prerogative of the educated
middle class, but it might have been exhilaratingly different to have been able to listen to
Arati’s comments and perspectives on a range of cases and pay heed to her point of view.

The Unique case of the Dog Detective: Partarp Sharma, Dog Detective Ranjha

Born in Lahore, Partarp Sharma (1939-2011) is fondly remembered as the “golden

voice of India” for his immense contributions to theatre, documentaries, and short films he
narrated. A celebrated writer for children, he wrote in the ubiquitous lingua franca,
English.Although contemporary English writers like Julia Donaldson have featured detective
dogs like Nell The Detective Dog (2016), Partarp Sharma’s picturesque and vivid stories
featuring his star pet Ranjha are a tribute to a newly independent India which is grappling
with its own hopes and struggles. Although the stories are not set in Bengal and were
originally written in English, I have decided to include them as a pioneering work in this field
of the genre in Indian children’s literature. The treatment of street dogs in India is a
contentious issue for a plethora of reasons which range from the socio-economic conditions
of much of the Indian population, the fear of rabies and their great number. Ranjha obviously
belongs to a family which enjoys an elevated socio-economic status in the expensive city of
Bombay (later renamed Mumbai in 1995), which allows him to enjoy and return privileges
which several of his peers are denied. Sadly, receiving love and indulgence seem to be
prerogatives reserved for dogs adopted by more affluent families in India. However, his dog-
parent Woof ensures that Ranjha does not abuse or misuse his status and instead uses his
position of comfort to bring solace and justice to others.
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Dog Detective Ranjha (1978) is an ode to India as much as it is to the children and
animals he loves. He credits the “people of India” (Frontispiece) who are avid animal lovers
for inspiring him to create a series of stories featuring his astonishingly clever dog detective,
Ranjha. Ostensibly, his country and more importantly the state of Maharashtra play seminal
roles in the narratives. Sharma proclaims that “Some of the world’s earliest animal stories
were written in India” (Frontispiece) and he wishes to continue the tradition of tales like
those from the Panchatantra and Hitopadesha, but with a twist to the genre. Intriguingly, the
Ranjha stories are partly autobiographical as Sharma (Woof in the stories), his British wife
(endearingly called Wuff by Ranjha) and their two daughters did indeed have a dog which
was trained to be a detective dog to help people. Despite his upper-class status, Woof
declares that he does not adopt Ranjha for ostentatious, remunerative, or mercenary purposes
but with the sincere intention of assisting those in need:

I’m not really interested in showing dogs…fact is, I’ve never been to a dog show in
my life. And I don't care about pedigree. I want to train him to be a working dog, so
that he can be of some help to people. (4)

Ranjha became an increasingly popular character and was even featured in several volumes
of Tinkle, an Indian children’s comic book edited by Anant Pai (1929-2011). A feisty German
Shepherd, Ranjha represents the spirit of a country emerging from its newly gained
independence. Unlike other dogs who were spoken to in English, Ranjha declares that he
“was being trained in Hindi, the national language of India” (12) a decision taken by his
owner, Woof. Sharma’s choice of a dog to deliver justice as a vehicle for delivering justice is
justified by the philosophical Tughlak, “the old black Labrador” (6) friend of Ranjha’s who
performs the double role of keeping him in check and imparting vital life advice:

Dogs don’t lie. They can’t. So don’t even bother to try. That’s why humans trust us.
They know we are honest and straightforward. They depend on us more than they
can on most other humans. So, boy, I’m a fat old fogey. I can’t do a quarter of the
things that you can. And I won’t have a tenth of the adventures you will. But
between eating and sleeping, boy, I think. I’m a thinker. And don’t you forget that,
boy. (25)

Set in the bustling city of Bombay and the rolling hills of Mahabaleshwar, the stories are an
ode to the nuances of Indian life, with its economic and class hierarchies, its warmth, and its
social problems such as dowry, communalism and casteism. Sharma also uses his stories to
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comment on the dangers of post-partition communalism. In “The Case of the Washerman’s

Sheets”, Ranjha helps track down a Muslim postman Z.A. Farroqi who had stolen a pair of
sheets that a Hindu “dhobi, or washerman, had put out to dry on some rocks by the river”
(84). Woof realises that this incident might develop into a full-fledged communal fight sohe
decides to diffuse the situation by confronting the postman in private rather than in front of an
angry crowd: “A Hindu-Muslim episode can develop into an incident like a Protestant-
Catholic episode in Ireland’’ (88-89). Sharma’s analogy is obviously an attempt to explain
the situation to a British reader. His cosmopolitan outlook and eagerness to write for a
bilingual audience indicate that he is representing the issues of a newly emerging postcolonial
nation to the wider world. He refuses to give “the rotten element in both communities such a
chance” (88), and the obedient and unquestioning Ranjha learns to accept that “sometimes the
obvious solution is not always the correct answer to the situation” (89).

In addition to exposing ruthless and petty criminals alike, the Ranjha stories reveal
how even an independent India struggles with the burdens of dowry, patriarchal violence, and
inequality. A highly educated urban writer married to an English woman, Sharma claims that
he has always dreamt of training a detective dog who can assist the common people of India
with their multitude of problems. The stories encapsulate the spirit of the urban metropolis of
Bombay and the politics of the seemingly calm villages which dot Mahabaleshwar are replete
with humour and a deep sense of justice. However, there are instances when Ranjha is
viciously attacked and injured, and Sharma rarely flinches from depicting the hard truths of
life and the vulnerabilities of detectives in his children’s writing. The juvenile appeal of the
stories lies in the humour that Ranjha brings to his crime infested fictional worlds generated
through the dog detective’s narration of the stories and his take on crimes which infest the
world. Curiously, despite his independence and talent, Ranjha enjoys the validation he gets
from the human world with which he exists in a symbiotic relationship:

Later, at the wedding of Abdul Rahman’s daughter I was garlanded like a guest of
honour. Both Suleiman and Abdul Rahman made little speeches and then, for the
first time in public, I was called Dog Detective Ranjha. (83)

The Ranjha stories, thus, emerge as a document of history as witnessed by a tracking dog and
his master. Ranjha, whose name means lover in Punjabi, is passionate about ushering in
justice and serving his nation.
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Although Bengali juvenile detective stories follow very closely their British
counterparts, they skilfully adapt, alter, and modify their contexts, characters, and plots to
localcultural, temporal, and geographic contexts. Moreover, writers of these stories often
adapt an adult British genre to a children’s one. For example, in a foreword to Sherlock
Holmes’er Kishore Goenda Samagra (A Collection of Sherlock Holmes stories for
Adolescents) edited by Premendra Mitra, the adult nature of the Holmes stories is directly
alluded to in an address to its juvenile readers:

Is there any one among you who has not heard of Sherlock Holmes? Upon hearing
this question, each of you will shake your heads and exclaim that the adults of your
households regularly regale you with the Holmes stories during the school holidays!
Oh, how courageous and intelligent he is… (my translation, NP)

Sometimes, it is in the use of nouns and pronouns in vernacular children’s literature that this
fiction begins to go beyond merely emulating British and American texts. Additionally, the
settings for many of these stories are in India and even when some fictional Indian detectives
travel abroad their clients and concerns are usually native. The depictions of foreign places
such as Singapore, England and Hong Kong are consciously filtered through the lens of
Indian narrators and characters. Nonetheless, despite modelling themselves on their British
heroes, Indian detectives develop distinctive personalities in relation to their temporal and
spatial contexts. While Holmes and Blyton’s detectives for younger children are
acknowledged and often directly referenced, Indian writers and their detectives slowly begin
to silently influence one another. The very act of addressing crime fiction to a juvenile
readership appears to be the most interesting act of appropriation as it empowers and alerts
them to the iniquities which plague society. Justice becomes an important marker of truth and
life in these stories which have been inspired by but also manage to go far beyond colonial
literature as they highlight relevant local concerns. Notably, writers must make a conscious
decision to steer clear of accusations of plagiarism and establish themselves as unique and
original while generously acknowledging the rich literary debt they owe to British writers.
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Chapter Three:
Science Fiction

“We all have our time machines, don’t we. Those that take us back are memories
…and those that carry us forward, are dreams.” H.G. Wells

British Science Fiction and its Influence on the Creation of a Children’s Genre in
Bengal

Although British science fiction, notably that of H.G. Wells, Mary Shelley, Arthur
Conan Doyle and the English translations of the French works of Jules Verne were
foundational for writers of juvenile science fiction in Bengal, they also contributed to the
foundation of an Indian genre, the significance and the distinctiveness of which can be
recognised by its having its own name, kalpivigyan, a term coined by Adrish Bardhan in the
1960s. Wells’ ‘scientific romances’ enjoyed an immense degree of popularity in Calcutta and
the prolific children’s fiction writer Satyajit Ray has claimed that his grand-uncle
Kuladaranjan Ray’s Bengali and possibly child-friendly translation of Wells’ The Island of
Dr. Moreau (1896) from English was one of the first works of science fiction he encountered
as a boy. In Bengal, the major devices of Wells’ science fiction, such as invisibility, alien
invasions, time travel and extra-terrestrial encounters were also used by Bengali children’s
writers. Wells’ “The Empire of Ants” (1905), which was published in The Strand Magazine,
served as an inspiration for Premendra Mitra whose novella Piprey Puran (1938), (The Story
of the Ants) was first published in a volume of essays called Prakriti (Nature)and which later
appeared in the children’s magazine Ramdhanu (Rainbow). Both stories are set in South
America and revolve around humanity being threatened by ants but unlike Wells’s stories are
written for juvenile readers.

Sukumar Ray, a towering and prolific figure in the world of Bengali children’s
literature who, despite his short life, produced some of its earliest works. He was heavily
influenced by Conan Doyle’s The Lost World (1912), for example in his Heshoram
Hushiarer Diary (1921) which skilfully combines elements of English science fiction with
the absurd and parodic. The story opens with an allusion to the Bengali children’s magazine
Sandesh, when the narrator, who appears to be its editor, makes a direct address to the reader,
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and makes amends for not having previously published the works of the eccentric scientist,
discoverer, and hunter Professor Hushiar, by printing excerpts from his diary. Like his
irascible British predecessor, Professor George Edward Challenger in The Lost World who
leads a team of scientiststo the Amazon Basin of South America, Hushiar and his group of
ten Indian scientists embark on an expedition to the rough terrain of Karakoram near the
borders of Kashmir, nestled amidst the Bandakoosh Mountains with similar ambitions of
‘discovering’ prehistoric creatures. The editor of Sandesh, however, puts in a disclaimer by
suggesting that it is up to the reader to decide on the accuracy of Hushiar’s accounts. His
scepticism about the Professor’s hyperbolic flights of fancy sets a precedent for later writers
of Bengali juvenile science fiction such as Premendra Mitra (1904-1988) whose science
fictions embrace the form of the tall tale. Ray exposes the limitations of the human tendency
to confinethe physical world to narrow definitions, as the scientists are unable to recognise
the animals they encounter, often defining them against what they are not, suchas the
gluttonous animal who is neither monkey nor human or gigantic crocodile like beast whose
head hangs like a bat. A master of the Carrollian Portmanteau which Ray adapted to suit the
nuances of the Bengali language, he coined words like ‘Hanglatherium,’ (greedy animal)
‘Gomratharium,’ (glum animal) and ‘chillanosaurus,’ (screaming animal) to describe the
characteristics of the unworldly creatures Hushiar’s team ‘discovers’ on their journey thereby
adding an indigenous as well as comic aspect and these linguistic flourishes add a decidedly
(and distinctive) comic strain to the genre and rescues it from being mere derivative
discourse. However, unlike Challenger’s team which successfully brings back a pterodactyl
as proof of the success of their expedition to England, Hushiar’s team returns empty-handed
and when his nephew Chandrakhayee claims that strong winds have blown away all the
evidence of their scientific expedition he earns him the label of ‘Golpotharium’ (the creature
who tells stories) by the members of Sandesh’s editorial team, much to his chagrin.

Satyajit Ray’s Dr. Danielli’s Discovery (1988)39continues the tradition of British

science fiction but also extendsand localises Stevenson’s narrative. The Strange Case of Dr.
Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) plays a crucial part in this story and Ray, through his titular

39
I have read the Professor Shonku stories as they appeared in a collection titled The Final Adventures
of Professor Shonku (2020) some of which were translated by Ray himself while the others were translated by
Indrani Majumdar.I have used the Kindle edition as the printed versions of certain Indian texts were difficult to
obtain during the years of the pandemic.
 88

scientist Professor Shonku, makes several direct references to it and thereby introduces this
classic text to native children who may not be familiar with it:

Many of us know of the novel Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, written by the famous
English writer, Robert Louis Stevenson. For those who are not familiar with it, let
me explain the premise of the story. Dr Jekyll was of the opinion that each person
has two sides to him-a wise one and a wicked one. (Loc 1450)

While revealing Italian biochemist Dr.Danielli’s desire to replicate Dr. Jekyll’s drug that
brings an “individual’s vile qualities to the fore and turn[s] him into a violent creature” (Loc
1450), Shonku admits that he has preceded the former in his attempts, having invented the
same drug and its antidote in his laboratory in Giridih and tested it on his pet cat, Newton,
thoughhe is reluctant to introduce it to the world for fear of its potentially terrifying
consequences. Just as Shonku had feared, Dr.Danielli’s behaviour takes a sinister turn when
he endangers the entire scientific community and the lives of innocent people beyond it,
leaving it up to Shonku to administer his antidote to stop the Italian scientist from unleashing
violence. Shonku’s discovery that the scientist’s assistant is the grandson of renowned
Indologist Enrico Petri helps them form a bond which is pivotal to the resolution of the
central conflict. Not only does Ray continue the ethical conversation around scientific
advancements which Stevenson had started almost a century ago, but he is able to place this
conversation in an Indian cultural context. He also highlights the legacy of British science
fiction which is able to transcend its temporospatial context and remain relevant over years
and cultures.

I will return in more detail to Satyajit Ray’s Professor Shonku stories, and in
particular his story “Professor Hijibijbij” later in this chapter, along with the works of
Premendra Mitra (1904-1988), Leela Majumdar (1908-2007), Adrish Bardhan (1932-2019),
and Shirshendu Mukhopadhyay (1935-), to analysing how British genre conventions were
adapted to establish kalpavigyan as a unique genre for native children.

A Brief History of Adult and Juvenile Science Fiction in England

In Keywords (1973), Raymond Williams points out that although the word ‘science’
entered the English language as early as the 14thcentury, it was virtually interchangeable with
art. It was only in 1725 that a more modern notion of science came into existence since prior
to the 18th century there was little distinction between fiction and non-fiction, the former
acquiring a literary sense only later in the century. Although there is some scholarly debate
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around the origins and definitions of science fiction as a genre, it is clear that the British
tradition and the translated works of Verne, whose travel stories deepened the link between
science fiction and globalisation as seen in Around the World in Eighty Days (1872) were the
dominant influences on the genre in India. It is Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern
Prometheus (1818), which is considered by many, including science fiction scholar Brian
Aldiss, as the first work of science fiction. Later, works by Wells, Verne, and Conan Doyle
gave rise to the genre that was extended in the twentieth century by writers such as C. S.
Lewis (author of The Ransom Trilogy), Arthur C. Clarke, (with whom Satyajit Ray
collaborated and whose works he translated into Bengali), Douglas Adams, and George
Orwell.

Science fiction also had a prominent place in periodical publishing and in Britain,
Pearson’s Magazine (1896) used to publish science fiction stories for adults, featuring
authors such as Wells, Conan Doyle, and Griffith. Its editor Haydn Dimmock, possibly
inspired by Hugo Gernsback in the United States, brought out a juvenile science fiction
magazine called Scoops in 1934, which unfortunately dissolved after 20 issues. Significantly,
Conan Doyle made contributions of his science fiction for juveniles toTheBoy’s Own Paper,
such as “An Exciting Christmas Eve, Or My Lecture on Dynamite” (1883). Dimmock, like
Gernsback, wanted his magazine to have a pedagogical approach, and labelled this form of
futuristic fiction ‘science stories.’ Even though his magazine died prematurely, authors like
J.B.S. Haldane, a biologist who wrote My Friend Mr. Leakey (1937), J.P. Martin (whose
Uncle series was first published in 1964 and illustrated by Quentin Blake) and Norman
Hunter, the creator of Professor Branestawm (1937-1970) kept the flag of children’s science
fiction flying in Britain. Hunter used humour to make his stories appeal to children, as his
titular scientist is almost comical in his eccentricity and absent-mindedness, with most of his
inventions being results of outrageous accidents involving his clueless housekeeper Mrs.
Flittersnoop. Indeed, the uproarious nomenclature of central characters including
Branestawm and his friends Colonel Dedshott, Dr. Mumpzanmeasle and Mr. Chintzbitz
further highlights the comic element of the stories which, perhaps because they were written
for children, were not to be taken too seriously.

Science fiction was popular as a children’s genre in 20th century America, notably in
the pulp magazine The Argosy edited by Frank A. Munsey in 1896, which contained ‘lost
race’ stories by the likes of Edgar Rice Burroughs. The editor of Amazing (1926), Hugo
Gernsback published the first short stories of many famous writers such as Isaac Asimov and
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Ursula Le Guin. There remained, however, a great deal of ambiguity as to whether this genre
was remotely meant for children in Europe, despite the cross-over fiction of Wells and Verne.
Most of the themes were sombre and disturbing and the books had to be considerably
abridged before they were deemed fit for children. According to the Encyclopaedia of
Science Fiction, “it seems clear that adult stories containing elements of the fantastic, and
Proto SF in general, have been particularly prone to retroactive diminution (in every sense)
into texts suitable for non-adults” (NP). This sense of science fiction, originally written for
adults, as suitable for children only in an abridged or adapted form, also informed its
reception and adaptation in India.

Colonialism in India and the Birth of a Genre

It was paradoxically the colonial East India Company that introduced European
notions of rationalism to India through the scientists and empiricists of the British Raj. The
climate of colonialism lent itself to establishing scientific activities and institutions in the
Empire, just as the concept of childhood developed in India through the interaction with the
Imperial regime. With the growing interest in children as important citizens, there was an
outpouring of reading material for children.As Debjani Sengupta points out:

European surveyors, plant collectors, mineralogists, doctors and engineers were an

important part of the Company personnel who carried out surveys, created maps,
established printing presses and steam railways, used the telegraph and the steam
vessel. In all these activities they needed the help of Indian assistants and technicians
who eagerly responded to these new experiences and who in turn, popularized the
reading and practice of scientific subjects like physics and chemistry in Calcutta
schools and colleges … The advent of Western science was consolidated in the
nineteenth century in Calcutta with the establishment of the Hindu College in 1817
and the teaching of mathematics, including trigonometry. (41)

Following on from “the colonised Bengali’s awe and respect for western science and
technology” (76), Sengupta, in “Sadhanbabu’s Friends: Science Fiction in Bengal from 1882-
1961” (2003) credits early scientists and rationalists like Akhaykumar Dutta (1820-1886),
Mahendralal Sircar (1833-1904, and founder of the Indian Association for the Cultivation of
Science) and Ashutosh Mukherjee (1864-1924) for establishing scientific education among
the middle class. Along with scientific knowledge, colonialism brought with it a wealth of
English literature to Bengal, opening the possibilities of emulation and adaptation of a
 91

plethora of genres, including science fiction. British and Bengali science fiction share many
common thematic concerns: utopias and dystopias, inter-galactic travels, strange experiments,
eccentric scientists, exotic travels, bizarre inventions, and speculative theories about the
future. Colonial rule also brought to India a growing interest in nurturing children as future
citizens, who could oppose British rule through reason and education. The genre began as
‘science writing,’ rather than science fiction in Bengal, with the hope of exposing young,
malleable minds to European concepts of empiricism and reason, with the aim of
undermining regressive local superstitions and stilted practices. Notably, while early
European science fiction did not necessarily target a juvenile audience, many prominent
writers of Bengali kalpavigyan seemed to dedicate the genre almost exclusively to children.
Sengupta asserts that “Science fiction in Bengal had always been written for children, but not
necessarily with childish concerns” (76) which points to ahigh expectation of the intellect of
the native child by the Bengali author. I assert that these adaptations were a mode of cultural
appropriation by local writers who did not wish their literary output to be interpreted as
merely derivative discourse for adult readers from the West. Additionally, by positioning this
genre as a children’s one, writers were able to take greater imaginative liberties with less
hesitation and fear of censure. The genre soon progressed to fiction, as explained by
Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay in “Kalpavigyan and Imperial Technoscience: Three Nodes of an
Argument” (2018):

The genre of kalpavigyan, after its heyday in the magazine era, gradually became
more attuned to juvenile and young adult literature. With the exception of the work
of those who had started writing kalpavigyan from a background in the hard
sciences, such as Anish Deb, or who were critically invested in engaging with
current scientific knowledge, much of the more simple hand-wavy variety of
kalpavigyan had always appealed to a more juvenile crowd. This is because
kalpavigyan, even in its hand-wavy varieties, was never completely distinguished
from the pedagogic or critical edge of its origins. This is particularly true of the
fiction of Leela Majumdar, Sunil Gangopadhyay, and Shirshendu Mukhopadhyay,
the work of whom, in addition to the fiction of Bardhan and Anish Deb, dominated
the 80s to the 2000s. (117)

As aforementioned, this phenomenon was also witnessed in the United States of America,
when editors such as Hugo Gernsback began devoting a lot of magazine space to juvenile
science fiction, so much so that there was a misconception that the genre had its origins in
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America and not Europe. However, Bengali magazines and journals writing about science
were conscious of both inculcating a love for their nation in children by holding up ancient
Vedic wisdom and of instilling in them knowledge and awareness about the broader world.

In “Science for children in a colonial context: Bengali juvenile magazines, 1883–

1923,” Gautam Chando Roy writes about Digdarshan (Orientation), a picture book brought
outby John Marshman in 1818, containing scientific articles for children. This was distributed
by the Calcutta Book Society. Science writing might have been started by the Europeans, but
Indians were quick to follow.Magazines like Dawn of Knowledge (1831), The Account of
Birds (1844) and Enlightenment (1869) contained several illuminating scientific articles.
Additionally, Roy states that most of the writers who were interested in the education of
children were members of the “Brahmo Samaj,” an elite group of highly educated
monotheistic Hindus who wished to strip the religion of narrow parochialism and regressive
ideals. Members of this group included writers like Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) and
Upendrakishore Ray Chowdhury (1863-1915). The latter’s family can be credited with
spearheading the genre of children’s literature in Bengal, and indeed India.Ray Chowdhury
was a remarkable global figure, towering over the realm of Bengali children’s literature. He
was both deeply spiritual and scientific and was close friends with two of India’s most
eminent British educated scientists, Sir Jagadish Chandra Bose (1858-1937) and Sir Prafulla
Chandra Ray (1851-1944) who were also writers of fiction. Ray established one of the
greatest printing presses in South-East Asia in 1914 and also introduced modern colour block
printing in India. He engaged in many creative experiments in printing, and brought out the
well-known children’s magazine Sandesh, in 1913, which had coloured illustrations which
made it particularly alluring for children.This magazine became the home of several juvenile
science fiction stories which were carried forth by Ray Chowdhury’s son, Sukumar, his niece,
Leela Majumdar (1908-2007), his versatile grandson, Satyajit Ray (1921-1992) and his great
grandson, Sandip Ray (1953-).

Sandesh was packed with scientific essays in its early days andits editor used unique
analogies to make learning appealing for children. For example, Ray Chowdhury compared
the spinning of the Earth to a spinning top, a popular Indian children’s toy. His vivid
illustrations added to the visual appeal for children while the tone he adopted was more
conversational than didactic. The scientific articles featured in these monthly magazines were
varied and cosmopolitan, ranging from vivid descriptions of hot springs in New Zealand, to
the habits and habitats of polar bears in the Arctic Circle. Significantly, there was a conscious
 93

incorporation of a great deal of information about the ecology, flora, fauna, and landscapes of
India. The magazine was bilingual to encourage children to be well versed in English and
their mother tongue, Bengali. Early Indian science magazines were sanctuaries where the
native child could have a secure space to explore the scientific developments of the East and
the West.

Gradually, however, ‘science writing,’ began making space for science fiction, which
also became a means for the discussion of difficult moral and ethical questions. Although
Upendrakishore himself did not venture into the realm of science fiction, he wrote a story
with fantastical elements and whimsy for Sandesh, which would also become features of
Bengali science fiction in the years to come. The story was titled “GoopyGyneBaghaByne,”
(1915) which his grandson Satyajit Ray made into a film in 1969, featuring a singer and a
drummer who are endowed with magical powers which allow them to embark on a series of
absurd and enchanted adventures. After Ray Chowdhury’s death in 1915, his son Sukumar
Ray took up the mantle of Sandesh. He had returned to India after a stint in Manchester,
where he had been studying the science of printing. Having majored in both physics and
chemistry at university, his foray into science fiction was hardly accidental and he
characteristically combined the genres of science fiction and nonsense, drawing inspiration
from English authors such as Conan Doyle and Lewis Carroll. In addition to undertaking a
satiric rewriting of The Lost World, his novella Haw Jaw Baw Raw Law (1921), inspired by
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), begins with a child waking up to a strange and
crazy world, replete with cats working on complicated mathematical calculations and
characters speculating on the seemingly impossible. Sandesh was the chosen platform of
many contributors to the world of juvenile Bengali science fiction.

Early writers of Bengali science fiction included Hemlal Dutta, whose work Rahashya
(1882; The Mystery) with its “tone … of wonder at the rapid automation of human lives”
(Sengupta, 77) appeared in the illustrated magazine Bigyan Darpan whose editor was
Jogendra Sadhu. The eminent, Cambridge-educated scientist, Acharya Jagadish Chandra
Bose, who, among other things, was one of the first to propose that plants were sentient
beings, was a pioneer of what he termed “the scientific mystery” in Bengal. Palatak Tuphan
(The Runaway Cyclone, 1896) was written as an entry to a short story competition and
featured an eight-year-old girl in a pivotal role, although it is unclear whether his story was
solely intended for children. However, this story provides a clear indication of British
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influence on the development of this genre in Bengal in addition to establishing various

modes of literary and cultural appropriation.

Despite featuring several tropes of British science fiction, ranging from an

unexplained storm, a perilous sea voyage and a team of baffled scientists grappling with the
formidable forces of nature, “The Runaway Cyclone” consciously incorporates local motifs,
beliefs and symbols which ironically cut across Bose’s own European rational empiricism
and education. Boddhisattva Chattopadhyay claims that “one sees a nuanced satire
demonstrating Bose’s awareness of the comedy in combining arcane with scientific
knowledge” (443) in this story.Centred on the theme of weather control, “The Runaway
Cyclone” 40 adroitly subverts the notion of British influence by making a bottle of indigenous
hair oil the hero of the narrative. Bose’s story is divided into two parts, the first of which, “A
Scientific Mystery” opens with a description of “a supernatural event… which rocked the
scientific communities of America and Europe” (NP), as a confounded group of leading
scientists are baffled by the sudden disappearance of an imminent and virulent cyclone in
Calcutta, which was predicted to strike with certainty by various meteorological departments
across India. While scientists across the globe try and fail to explain the phenomenon, they
are met with heavy scrutiny and scepticism:

However, despite the attempts of many scientists to follow the trail of the cyclone,
no one was able to discover the cyclone’s new direction. The leading English daily
published the following news: Now it is certain that scientific knowledge is
completely false. Another daily published the following: If science is false then why
should the taxpayers be burdened by the totally unreliable Meteorological
department? Various other dailies joined as chorus: Let it go! Scrap it! (NP)

The second part of the story is told in the first-person by a Bengali, a scientist himself, who
sets off on a recuperative sea journey on the advice of his doctor. Bose’s choice of a first-
person narrator highlights the subjectivity and unreliability of his account, but also
emphasises how knowledge of wider phenomena can operate in arcane ways, thereby
questioning the unquestioned objectivity of Western empiricism. It is not for nothing that his
eight-year-old daughter hands him a bottle of native hair oil, ‘Kuntal Keshari,’ before his

40
I have used Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay’s translation of Bose’s story titled “Runaway Cyclone”
(2013) which appeared in the science fiction journal Strange Horizons.
 95

voyage, ostensibly to enable him to protect his few strands of hair from the brine. Years ago,
the narrator reveals, a Christian British circus owner had voyaged to India with his animals,
and the star attraction of his show, a lion, had lost its ‘lustrous mane,’ owing to a microbial
infection on the ship. Desperate for a remedy, he fell at the feet of a wise old Indian ‘Sanyasi’
(a mystical sage) and implored him to restore the lion to its past glory. The Sanyasi takes pity
on the pleading Sahib and hands him the magic oil, the formula of which had taken shape in
the depths of the mystic’s dream. The oil not only restores the glorious mane of the lion, but
also cleverly undermines the power of Christian missionary conversion by deliberately
upsetting the power dynamic in intellectually empowering the indigenous man who
subsequently exerts both influence and control over the circus owner.

When the cyclone finally begins to approach Bengal and the waves get wild at sea, the
protagonist (who is now on a ship) recalls a scientific article which had stated that oil calms
moving water. He sacrifices his bottle of Kuntal Keshari’ by emptying it into the ocean, and
the waves calm down and the cyclone disappears at once. Therefore, he attributes the ability
to calm the reckless forces of nature to ancient Indian wisdom, thereby undermining Euro-
centric rationalism, as the formula for the oil had not been concocted in a laboratory but had
emerged out of something as seemingly insubstantial and obscure as an Indian mystic’s
dream. By calling attention to how prestigious journals like Nature had failed to explain this
phenomenon, despite being a British educated scientist, Boseindicates the limitations of
Western scientific knowledge in the face of ancient wisdom.

Premendra Mitra (1904-1988)

Debjani Sengupta notes that another notable Bengali science fiction writer Premendra
Mitra believed that “Science Fiction not only talked of Utopias, but that the best of them were
based on firm scientific temperaments and facts'' (78), a statement which makes him more
aligned with Verne than Wells. Mitra (whose short stories I have referred to in the adventure
fiction chapter) was a gifted poet, filmmaker, and writer who received the State Award for
41
Children’s Literature in 1958 for his Ghana-da stories . Notably, two of Bengal’s most
prominent juvenile science fiction writers, Mitra and Ray were both film-makers and hence
their use of vivid visual and almost cinematic imagery. Anwesha Maity argues that “Even
though the primary intended reader here is not the Anglophone reader, Ghana-da explores the

41
The translations of Premendra Mitra here are mine.
 96

limits of possibility within colonial space-time, while simultaneously foregrounding his

Bengali identity” (50).

Mitra, a forerunner of the genre in Bengal, draws inspiration from both Verne (who
was fixated upon scientific and historical accuracy) and Wells (who gave free reign to his
flights of fancy) in his science fiction stories featuring the raconteur Ghanasham Das,
endearingly known as Ghana-da. The endearment ‘da,’ which recurs in many works of
Bengali juvenile literature across genres, roughly translates as older brother and becomes a
device Mitra uses to establish the easy rapport and kinship between the storyteller and the
listener, thereby highlighting the oral tradition of storytelling.As Maity observes, “the series
captures that elusive spirit of narrative expectation which has long informed Bengali oral and
literary practice” (50). Ironically, although the readers must absorb Ghana-da’s imaginative
excesses by adopting Coleridge’s “willing suspension of disbelief,” Mitra maintains an
incredible level of scientific, historical, and political accuracy while also giving free rein to
the powers of his imagination. Mitra’s science fiction oscillates between two extremes, one of
utmost scientific grounding and precision, in the spirit of Verne and the other of hyperbolic
flights of fancy, which recalls Wells. Furthermore, Ghana-da vastly exaggerates the
significance of these scientific facts and sometimes resorts to theories already discredited by
the scientific community. (Maity, 61)

Ghana-da, who resides in the iconic fictional address of “72 Banamali Naskar Lane,
Kolkata-an address as legendary to the Bengali reader as Sherlock Holmes’ 221B Baker
Street is to the reader in English” (49) is characterised as an unexceptional, possibly
impoverished middle-class bachelor who regales his housemates Shibu, Shishir, Sudhir and
Gour with exaggerated and far-fetched narratives. Mitra’s unique approach, then, broadens
the mind of the native child without being overly pedagogic, as he uses Ghana-da’s
hyperbolic stories to both educate and entertain them. Although he writes for children, Mitra
does not refrain from engaging with sombre themes and meditating on the cataclysmic
potential of science as revealed by historical events like the World Wars, the use of the atom
bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Sepoy Mutiny, and the Holocaust.

“Kaach” (1950)

In “Kaach,” (“Glass”) Ghana-da recounts his role in the feverish competition between
the Allied and Axis powers to create the atom bomb during the Second World War. Rather
than focusing on English genre conventions such as extra-terrestrial invasions, parallel
 97

universes and inter-galactic warfare, Mitra transports his reader to an era of grave scientific
misuse, thereby establishing a sombre thematic concern in the garb of a tall tale. Taking on
the persona of the Anglicised “Doss” in stories like “Mosquito” and “Kaach”, Mitra’s stories
take Ghana-da to a multitude of nations thereby allowing him to participate in the broader
narrative of the world. The story opens in the poplar-lined University town of Gatangen,
where Hitler is coercing the leading scientist of Germany, Dr. Otto Haan, to expedite his
work on the atom bomb. Haan is portrayed as an ethical scientist who is being made to dance
to the whims of his dictatorial boss. He hatches a plan to stall Hitler by requesting him to
provide an impossibly large supply of uranium. Undeterred, Hitler summons his assistant,
Paapen to travel to Africa to retrieve the chemical element. In the meantime, the American
President Roosevelt summons Doss to the United States where he is introduced to scientists
such as Niels Bohr and Max Plank and is privy to the details of the controversial Manhattan
Project. Mitra goes into considerable detail about the scientific processes, particularly in his
vivid descriptions of the centrifuge and assembly line. Hailing from India, which he terms a
peace-loving nation, Doss refuses to be a part of the Project. However, Roosevelt implores
him to cooperate with them, citing how destructive a bomb in the hands of Hitler would be.
Roosevelt appeals to Ghana-da’s patriotic side by revealing that Hitler’s victory will defeat
India’s freedom struggle, and this threat to Indian nationalism finally convinces Doss to go to
Africa to stop Paapen from procuring uranium for Hitler. After a series of thrilling
adventures, including a frightening encounter with native African tribes, Doss emerges
successful. Incredibly, the intensity of his conflicts with the African tribes he encounters
seems analogous to the enmity between Martians and humans in Wells’s The War of the
Worlds (1895-97), leaving one to wonder why Ghana-da as an ambassador of India did not
feel a greater sense of affinity with other subaltern people. Astonishingly, he works on behalf
of Roosevelt and America to further the cause of Indian independence but feels no empathy
for indigenous African peoples whom he represents as ‘others’ just as he does the Naazi
forces under Paapen.

The hero of the story turns out to be an assuming piece of the titular glass from a
broken binocular, which Doss uses to catch the sun’s rays and start a fire to successfully
deflect the Nazi forces. He credits his adroit use of this piece of glass for single-handedly
changing the course of history. However, the story ends with Ghana-da’s lament that the next
American President Harry Truman disregarded the requests of all the scientists working on
the Manhattan Project and decided todrop the atom bomb on Nagasaki and Hiroshima.
 98

Ghana-da laments that his valiant efforts to keep the atom bomb away from Hitler’s forces
did not result in a peaceful end. Mitra details the atrocities and disastrous effects of the bomb
on innocent inhabitants which are in stark contrast to the whimsical content of much of the
rest of his narrative. Ghana-da’s assumed importance in the eyes of powerful world leaders
and his ability, as a brown man, to participate in crucial world affairs, renders him both
formidable and aspirational to juvenile readers. Mitra’s choice of an average middle-class
Bengali man as his hero is apt and astonishing as Ghana-da believes he can alter history as
we know it. He often uses his stories to extricate himself from tricky and unpleasant
situations such as repaying a creditor or covering up an untruth. Despite Das’s conversion of
his name to its Anglicised version of Doss, most of the Ghana-da stories reveal a deep love
for India and his deep-rooted patriotic concerns.

“Mahaakasher Atithi” (1989)

“Mahaakasher Atithi,” 42 (1989) “Guests from Outer Space,” is not a Ghana-da story,
but one which subscribes to the standard conventions of science fiction.43Enveloped in a
cloud of uncertainty from its very onset, it is structured like a Chinese box with stories
embedded within stories and carries the meta-textual feature of a story within a story. The
narrator begins with a candid confession of the utter lack of evidence which would have
substantiated his story but appeals to the reader to humour him all the same. In it, an
unnamed narrator visits a decrepit town in Bihar, where he stumbles upon a local villager,
Girdhar. Girdhar confesses that the town is deserted and narrates an outrageous tale of how, a
few days ago, the moon had landed in its blinding glory on the local lake from which
emerged gigantic dragonflies which frightened inhabitants away. Girdhar claims that he was
hypnotised by the icy gaze of the gargantuan insects and following their invasion he has
found several musical stones which are invaluable, strewn across the village. The bewildered
narrator wonders whether Giridhar is high on the native marijuana leaves which grow in the
vicinity but agrees to accompany Girdhar to his home where he claims to have stored the
stones. The juxtaposition of indigenous ‘siddhi’ (marijuana) leaves with the perplexing power
of Giridhar’s imagination further confuses the reader and narrator. After extracting a sum of
money from the narrator in exchange for his story, Giridhar leads him on, but as they
approach his hut, a raging fire breaks out and reduces both his hut and credibility to ashes.

42
The story appears in a collection of Mitra’s science fiction, Kalpabigyan Samagra (2013).
43
This might be a posthumous publication.
 99

The fact that Giridhar demands financial compensation for his tale accentuates the
transactional aspect of storytelling and thereby highlights its meta-textual and self-reflexive
content. Metaphorically, the fire may represent the evasive nature of the genre, which is
expected to rely on valid scientific evidence, but is often more reliant on the power of the
writer’s imagination and the reader’s willingness to participate in the narrative. Additionally,
it might also symbolise how the genre of Bengali juvenile science fiction rises like a phoenix
out of the ashes of colonial literature which are the remnants of colonialism. The atmosphere
and imagery evoked by this tale is reminiscent of Coleridge’s opium induced “Kubla Khan,”
but Giridhar persistently insists on the veracity of his version to the narrator and reader.
Although the story’s narrator keeps lamenting the loss of proof which might have made his
story seem feasible to his readers, he nevertheless feels a strong impulse to narrate his
preposterous tale. “Guests from Outer Space” may be read as Mitra’s passionate indictment
of critics who expect credibility from a borrowed genre which he feels benefits equally from
fantastical and whimsical elements. This recalls Darko Suvin’s claim in Metamorphoses of
Science Fiction (1979) that science fiction was:

a literary genre whose necessary and sufficient conditions are the presence and
interaction of estrangement and cognition, and whose main formal device is an
imaginative framework alternative to the author's empirical environment. (7-8)

This is predicated on the assumption that the driving force of the genre is the author’s
imaginative capacities as opposed to a mere dependence on quantitative scientific facts and
figures. Unlike his Ghana-da stories, Mitra is unconcerned with peppering this plot with
scientific or historical facts in “Guests from Outer Space” and lets his imagination run wild.
Missing is the urgency with which human beings resist and fear Martian invaders in The War
of the Worlds, as the local villagers seem to have quietly accepted defeat and vanished from
this remote village in Bihar, thereby implying a passiveness which challenges the frenzied
pace of many British and Bengali science fiction stories.

Satyajit Ray (1921-1992)

An avid consumer and admirer of English literature, Satyajit Ray’s juvenile science
fiction adopts a distinctive approach in which he does not so much ‘write back’ to English
texts as write alongside them. Ray allows his juvenile science fiction to seamlessly join the
conversation with literary predecessors such as Stevenson, Shelley, Wells, Conan Doyle and
Norman Hunter. Although he makes direct references to British stories, plots, contexts, and
 100

characters, Ray extends and diversifies them well beyond their original temporospatial
contexts.His response to British science fiction is more in the spirit of a conversation than an
outright rejection of British writing. Nevertheless, like J.C. Bose before him, Ray also
subverted Western notions of scientific supremacy by incorporating age-old elements from
the Vedic scientific tradition. Although Ray openly condemned native superstitious practices
and regressive beliefs in films like Devi (1960) and The Enemy of the People (1990), an
adaptation of Ibsen’s play of the same name, he makes allowance for alternative forms of
native knowledge by featuring the brilliant scientist Professor Shonku. By consciously
making a distinction between superstition and ancient indigenous wisdom (which includes
Ayurveda, the ancient study of Indian medicine and certain forms of Vedic Astrology), he
poses a challenge to complete Western hegemony over various forms of knowledge. Just as
Shonku’s appeal lies in the redemptive power of the incomprehensible and arcane, Ray’s last
film, Aguntuk (1991), explores alternate ways of exploring the world as opposed to merely
accepting mainstream Western thoughts and ideas on scientific progress. Nevertheless,
Shonku never rejects the advancements made by the global scientific community and Ray’s
investigations of Indian belief systems aims to enrich the international bank of scientific
knowledge rather than detract from it.

A gifted translator of works of authors like Arthur C. Clarke and H.G. Wells, Ray
ensured that Indian children were not excluded from the British canon but simultaneously
rescued them from the peripheries of readership by choosing a Bengali scientist, Professor
Shonku as his protagonist as an aspirational figure for native children. Ray claims to have
been first introduced to the world of English science fiction through his uncle Kuladaranjan
Ray’s (possibly child friendly) translation of Wells’ The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896).
Curiously, although the fiction of Wells did appeal to boys, it was not meant for juvenile
consumption, whereas Ray’s science fiction catered exclusively to them. In an essay which
appeared in NOW magazine, Ray compares Verne’s quantitative approach to science fiction
with Wells’s more romantic vision:

The first uses available scientific data as a springboard, but never lets the
imagination soar beyond the limits of probability. The second gives freer rein to
fancy, either ignores or circumvents facts, and tries to build conviction on a poetic
plane. (Loc 124)

Ray’s own science fiction, however, is an amalgamation of both these approaches. A close
reading of his Professor Shonku stories reveals how Western science is sometimes
 101

undermined by indigenous knowledge, but Shonkualso continuously subverts native

superstition. Besides his Shonku series, Ray wrote several short series dedicated to the genre,
one of which I will analyse in the following section.

“Professor Hijibijbij” (1971) 44

Ray’s “Professor Hijibijbij”is unique in its blending of the genres of nonsense and
science fiction. Like his father Sukumar Ray, Satyajit was heavily influenced by Lewis
Carroll and Edward Lear. The former had created his own distinct genre of Bengali nonsense
verse, which is immortalised in his collection of poems for juvenile readers, Abol Tabol (The
Weird and the Absurd, 1923). In this story, however, Ray is paying tribute to his father’s
unique nonsense genre by using the framework of science fiction to reference his works while
simultaneously alluding to Wells’s The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896).

“Professor Hijibijbij'' begins with a disclaimer as the narrator is unable to decide upon
a category for it, thereby foregrounding the generic impurity of science fiction, which has
often been an amalgamation of genres like gothic and adventure and in Ray’s case nonsense.
However, Ray adapts his story to highlight the absurdist element of science fiction, where a
scientist is inspired not by any natural phenomenon, but by the extravagant imagination of
another fictional writer, Sukumar Ray. Hence, Satyajit Ray is drawing upon the twin
influences of his father and Lewis Carroll in weaving together this story. The term ‘Hijibijbij’
literally means scribble in Bengali, thereby punctuating the fuzziness of genre boundaries as
well as the frighteningly arbitrary nature of the titular scientist’s intentions. The professor’s
refusal to be labelled recalls Sukumar Ray’s parody of Western science’s tendency to name
and label things in Heshoram Hushiarer Diary, his Bengali adaptation of Conan Doyle’s The
Lost World, and also directs the reader to the sometimes-amorphousnature of science fiction.
What makes this intertextuality particularly poignant is the fact that Ray, who lost his father
at the age of two, later disclosed that he got to know him only through the literary works he
had left behind. Giving his father’s creation a literary afterlife is a way to carry on his legacy
and also complicates ideas of influence.The story is told from the perspective of Himangshu
Chowdhury, who travels to a remote seaside town in Orissa called Gopalpur for a working
holiday where he encounters a strange character who has emerged from the pages of Haw

44
I have read this story in the original Bengali as it appears in the 2015 collection of Ray’s short
stories, Galpo 101.
 102

Jaw Baw Raw Law (1921), another nonsense novel written by Sukumar Ray. Notably, the
narrator reveals that he is a professional translator of English mystery stories into Bengali
who enjoys introducing foreign tales (and therefore genres) to native readers, despite having a
prosaic day job which pays his bills. The setting of the story in a remote Indian town allows
Ray to establish a connection with his middle-class Bengali readers who could afford similar
trips (as tours to foreign lands were and still are reserved for the financial elite). However,
setting the story in Gopalpur establishes the pervasive influence of literature which can
effortlessly reach seemingly obscure small towns.

Ray converts the marginal character of a mad scientist in Haw Jaw Baw Raw Law into
the titular antihero of his story. Himanshu Chowdhury discovers that the professor, with the
help of his gargantuan assistant, Shoshthichoron, (who features elsewhere in Sukumar’s
fiction) is a trained plastic surgeon who wishes to stitch together different parts of various
animals to replicate a mythical hybrid creature featured in the poem “Kimbhut” in Sukumar
Ray’s book of nonsense verse, Abol Tabol. He is willing to go to any means, and finally
succeeds in manufacturing a creature with a human head, lion’s feet, porcupine’s back and a
pair of goat’s horns, which walks into the sea at the end of the story. To bring his experiment
to fruition, the Professor kidnaps a visitor to Gopalpur named Ghanasham, whose face bears a
strong resemblance to that of the illustration to the accompanying poem. The links to British
literature are evident in the figure of an unethical mad scientist, his sinister ways and raucous
laughter, who works closely with a devilish assistant to carry out strange experiments.
Professor Hijibijbij has an uncanny similarity to Wells’ Dr. Moreauwith whom Ray was
certainlyfamiliar. An English physiologist from London, Dr. Moreau specialised in
performing gruesome vivisections on animals for experimental purposes to create hybrid
“Beast Folk'' like the Leopard Man. However, unlike his fictional English counterpart who is
killed by one of his own creations, Professor Hijibijbij emerges as a survivor, although like
Frankenstein’s monster, Hijibijbij’s creation escapes the clutches of his creator and walks
into the sea. Thereby he thwarts the professor’s purpose of keeping the creature captive and
studying itand renders meaningless the brutal endeavour of killing of a man for his head.

“Professor Hijibijbij” emphasises the destructive power of science, which in this case
arises from a sinister interpretation of a literary work. Bengali childhood is synonymous with
Sukumar’s Ray’s seeminglyinnocuous Abol Tabol (1923), (his book of nonsense verse), a
staple in almost every household. Influenced by Carroll, Sukumar Ray became a master of
the ‘portmanteau’ or the combination of different words to give rise to new meanings. Indeed,
 103

the central theme of hybridity becomes a metaphor for the colonised Indian imagination, a
curious amalgam of the East and the West though Ray may be cautioning children against
losing their identities in a sea of varied influences. The narrative’s subversive content is a
departure from Ray’s other science fiction collection for children, The Professor Shonku
series, where the eponymous scientist is not only portrayed as highly ethical and methodical,
but also someone who works to improve the world and instil ethical values in juvenile minds.
Ray claimed that he was influenced by Conan Doyle’s Professor Challenger in his
characterisation of Professor Shonku, some of whose stories will be discussed in the next
section.

Professor Shonku

Professor Shonku first appeared in the literary journal Sandesh in 1961, and his stories
were accompanied by Ray’s black and white sketches.Despite drawing inspiration from
Conan Doyle’s rather truculent and pugnacious Professor George Edward Challenger, who
first appeared in The Lost World in 1912, Ray’s mild-mannered and reserved Shonku retains
his distinctive personality. Unlike Professor Challenger, who is devoted to his wife Jessica,
Shonku is a confirmed bachelor who leads a frugal and spartan existence, his principal
indulgence being coffee and his subscription to foreign scientific journals. Norman Hunter’s
Professor Branestawm series (1933-1983) appears to be another source which inspired Ray
and one from which he consciously deviated. While Professor Branestawm, Hunter’s
eponymous scatter-brained genius, often inadvertently creates extraordinary things in his
‘inventory,’ Shonku is more measured, methodical, and meticulous. Conceivably,
Branestawm’s genius is not unlike that of Scottish scientist Alexander Fleming, whose
revolutionary discovery of penicillin has often been attributed to his chaotic laboratory
conditions. However, there appears to be an extraordinary likeness between W. Heath
Robinson’s early illustrations of Branestawm in Hunter’s books and Ray’s own illustrations
of Shonku. Furthermore, both Shonku and Branestawm live with housekeepers, respectively
Prahlad and Mrs. Flittersnoop, who do not quite understand the extent of their employer’s
genius and their ignorance leads to several plot twists, both calamitous and serendipitous.

Shonku resides in a small town named Giridih with his cat Newton (who is named
after the famous English scientist). This is where Ray’s grandfather Upendrakishore had died
in 1915 and hence Ray establishes yet another personal connection with his famous literary
ancestor. His servant Prahlad, who is unwaveringly devoted to Shonku, is named after a
famous character in Hindu mythology, an ardent devotee of the supreme Hindu deity, Vishnu,
 104

who is believed to protect and preserve the universe. However, his employer’s knowledge
and understanding of the complex workings of the universe are far beyond Prahlad’s grasp.In
Ray’s scientist we see the confluence of cultures, as he is a Bengali at heart but speaks 69
languages and travels to “Europe at least once a year” (Loc 1247). Tellingly,
Shonku’s“Shonku and Frankenstein,” “Dr. Danielli's Discovery” and “Professor Shonku and
the Sphere'' make direct references respectively to the science fiction of Mary Shelley,
Stevenson, and Wells. However, his feet remain firmly rooted in India, almost as though he is
bound by Newton’s famous gravitational pull. Interestingly, Ray exclusively uses the form of
the diary entry to chronicle Shonku’s adventures, in keeping with the literary tradition of
epistolary novels by writers like Aphra Behn and Samuel Richardson.

As the creator of stunning scientific inventions inspired by his Indian heritage, which
range from a wonder-drug ‘Miracurall,’ (which has an Ayurvedic composition), to a gun
named ‘Annihilin,’ and a potent sleeping pill called ‘Somnolin,’ Shonku enjoys a great deal
of respect and honour from the international scientific community, among which he can hold
his own. Ray is not so much reclaiming the genre by appropriation, but rather extending its
domain, thereby showing us the universality of science fiction and its relevance to India.
While his science fiction exposed native children to the merits of Western science, it also
increasingly moved into the realms of whimsy and fancy. Like Professor Challenger, Shonku
doesnot flinch from embarking on spiritual and mystical puzzles in his quest for scientific
discoveries thereby consciously blurring the boundaries between the rational and the
preternatural, in stories like “Professor Shonku and the Bones.” Boddhisattva Chattopadhyay
feels that “what distinguishes Shonku from many of his predecessors in Bangla
kalpavigyantradition is the “seriousness with which the supernatural and the paranormal are
framed by the scientific '' (445).However, the scope and content of the Shonku stories are not
restricted to whimsy and fanciful realms. Like his predecessor Premendra Mitra, Ray often
uses the genre to raise his voice against social and historical horrors like the Holocaust and
underscore the ethical responsibilities of (Indian) scientists to use local resources to prevent
the repetition of such events. In the final Shonku story, “The Tree with the Golden Leaves,”
Shonku invents a medicine from the herb of a native tree mentioned in the ancient Sanskrit
text, the Charat Samhita, and uses it to cure a Jewish Professor of Sanskrit named Heinrich
Steiner who has been attacked by the Nazis.
 105

“Professor Shonku and Frankenstein” (1988)

In “Shonku and Frankenstein,” the influence of British literature makes itself evident
from the title itself as Ray, like a ‘Modern Prometheus’, resurrects the spirit of Mary
Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) and breathes new life into it. The plot centres on Shonku’s
elimination of a Neo-Nazi movement which he achieves by modifying Victor Frankenstein’s
original formula, which allows him to suppress the monstrous leader of the Neo-Nazi group,
instead of breeding one like his predecessor. Anti-Holocaust sentiments underpin several
Shonku stories, which makes him like his literary predecessor, Premendra Mitra and by
raising his voice against Nazi atrocities in a children’s story, Ray urges his young readers to
oppose various instances of injustice in society.

Shelley’s scientist, of course, had not set out to create a monster. Grief-stricken after
he lost his mother to scarlet fever, Frankenstein plunged headlong into an investigation of
breathing life into inanimate objects. Ray’s story opens with Shonku’s invitation to Ingolstadt
to visit Frankenstein’s grandson, Julius, hence Ray extending the lineage of Shelley’s
scientist and bestowing upon him a literary afterlife. The English biologist Saunders requests
Shonku to modify Viktor’s formula to resurrect the deceased Dr. Gillette, who died at a
crucial point in his ground-breaking medical research on cancer treatment. In a letter to
Shonku which sets up the story’s premise, Saunders writes:

I’m sure you have heard of the renowned scientist of the eighteenth century, Baron
Viktor Frankenstein. When Mary Shelley wrote her novel entitled Frankenstein,
people were of the opinion that Frankenstein was a fictional character. But it has
recently come to light that there was indeed a real scientist by the name of
Frankenstein who, like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, had invented ways to revive a
dead body. I'm sure you also know how the story shows how just one small mistake
led to Frankenstein creating a monster instead of a human. Well, one of Baron Viktor
Frankenstein’s descendants actually lives close-by-in the city of Ingolstadt. We’re
thinking of meeting him one day. (Loc 1244)

Upon reaching Ingolstadt, Julius Frankenstein informs Shonku and Saunders, (to their
absolute horror), that Germany is reeling under a neo-Nazi movement which has emerged
under the leadership of the villainous Hans Rudel and is steadily inciting anti-Semitic
sentiment. Shonku successfully modifies Victor’s formula and revives Dr.Gilette, when they
are suddenly accosted by the Neo-Nazi group whose leader Hans Rudel has suddenly died of
 106

a stroke. They force Shonku to resurrect Rudel using Frankenstein’s modified formula.
However, in a clever narrative twist, Shonku replaces Rudel’s brain with that of a Jewish man
the group had murdered by performing a surreptitious organ transplant. Upon resurrection,
Rudel’s brain rejects the sight of his group members, and he turns on them, calling them a
‘notorious’ group, and he becomes a reformed citizen:

After returning home, I received a letter from Julius Frankenstein. He informed me

that nowadays Rudel introduces himself as a Jew. His group has fallen apart; the
people of Ingolstadt are once more living a secure life devoid of any fear. (Loc 1444)

The genres of historical and science fiction merge, and with it emerges the moral
responsibility of a scientist to uphold ethical principles. However, Ray ensures that his
stories, even those with foreign settings and concerns, always incorporate strands of Indian
culture, history, and tradition. Viktor’s nephew, Julius, is an ardent admirer of Indian artand
music and Shonku is pleased to observe that:

When he realised I was Indian, his face glowed. He said, ‘I have many books on
Indian art and many collections of Indian art. Hopefully, there will be an occasion to
show them to you.’ (Loc 1274)

Shonku puts India on the world map not only by demonstrating his own extraordinary
scientific genius, but also by highlighting the valuable aspects of India’s artistic and historical
heritage admired by foreign intellectuals. Additionally, Shonku’s improvement of
Frankenstein’s original formula ensures safety for the community rather than threatening
them, and hence he is able to achieve where his European predecessor had failed.

As already mentioned, while Ray highlights the merits of indigenous knowledge

systems, he does not fail to emphasise the marvellous advancements made by ancient Indian
scientists, upon whose work Shonku often draws. In “Professor Rondi’s Time Machine,”
faced with the choice of going back to a historical era, Shonku chooses to visit King
Ashoka’s veterinary hospital, a spectacular scientific achievement in 232 BC, accentuating
the existence of pre-Western science in India. However, he also uses Rondi’s time machine to
set right a historical misconception about Siraj-Aud-Dullah’s role in the “Black Hole Tragedy
of Kolkata” (1756), whom he absolves of false allegations. Additionally, Ray draws upon
esoteric Indian spiritual practices and the ancient knowledge of astrology through the
character of the powerful and unassuming psychic Nakur-Babu who also appears in
“Professor Shonku and El Dorado” to outline the impossibility of a complete scientific
 107

comprehension of the strange workings of our world. “Professor Shonku and the Bones,”
features a mysterious tantrik, (sage) who casts arcane spells to successfully reassemble the
bones of deceased creatures which astonishes the initially sceptical Shonku, who is forced to
revise his own boundaries of knowledge.

Hence, the Shonku stories are a staggering amalgamation of Western and Indian
scientific thought, a passionate indictment of historical atrocities such as theHolocaust anda
paean to the responsibility of Indian yet global scientists to uphold humanistic values. As
juvenile literature, the stories have a strong moral slant without falling into the trap of
becoming didactic and they entertain children with ground-breaking scientific adventures
which also double as travelogues since Shonku’s diary entries never fail to chronicle the
idiosyncrasies of the different lands he visits.

Leela Majumdar (1908-2007) 45

The ways in which the genre of science fiction was adapted and the forms the stories
took on, were a response to a particular concept of childhood which local writers wished to
uphold. Juvenile fiction writers like Leela Majumdar use science fiction as a platform for the
marginalised by insisting on kindness towards ‘others,’ and a broader vision of the world in
their young readers. Majumdar’s first story “Lakkhi Chhele” (“Good Boy”, 1922) was
published in Sandesh, the first of many works to follow. Leela Majumdar (1908-2007) is one
of the few women to venture into the very male-dominated field of science fiction in Bengal.
Although her space stories draw upon Wells and Douglas Adams for inspiration, her
approach is markedly different in some ways. Unlike Wells, for whom characterisation is
secondary to plot, Leela Majumdar focuses extensively on her characters, conversations, as
well as their backstories. In Majumdar’s science fiction, plot becomes secondary to her vivid
characterisation of interpersonal relationships and their broader humanistic concerns. An aunt
of Satyajit Ray she studied English literature but chose to write exclusively in Bengali. A
unique feature of Majumdar’s stories is her idiosyncratic use of humour which subverts and
strengthens the genre in turns. Unlike her nephew Ray, who translated some of his own
science fiction stories into English just as he translated the works of English writers into
Bengali, Majumdar restricts her writing to her native tongue. Unlike Wells’, whosecharacters
in novels such as The Invisible Man are shadowy and amorphous figures, Majumdar focuses

45
The translations of Leela Majumdar’s science fiction from Kolpo Bigganer Golpo (1982) are mine,
which is why I have included the original Bengali script.
 108

extensively on not just her characters but their back

back-stories,
stories, conversations, and familial ties,
which enable her to meditate on deeper philosophical concerns.

“Akash Ghati” (1982)

“Akash Ghati,”” (“Space Station,)” by Leela Majumdar is a story featuring two young
outlaws from Calcutta who are singled out for an intergalactic journey by their ‘borokaka,’
(older uncle), a mysterious scientist named Bagchi, who claims to live in America. Although
it anticipates the comedic strain of Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
(1985), it outlines the tribulations and trials of two lower-middle-class
class outcasts from Bengal.
Hulo and Ghoton are considered epic failures in Calcutta, having been un
unsuccessful in their
academic and professional fields. They loiter about committing petty crimes and their lack of
importance makes them ideal candidates for the ‘Borokaka,’
,’ Bagchi, their paternal scientist
uncle, to whisk away to a utopian space station, where
here he has synthetically recreated the
natural world. What makes this story uniquely Bengali is the introduction of endearments to
refer to characters, such as ‘borokaka
‘borokaka’which primarily identifies him as a caring uncle rather
than scientist. This is seen in a plethora of Majumdar’s science fiction stories. He assures his
nephews of their safety in the simulated environment that he has created:

Uncle said that “we have tried to recreate the natural environment here, but needless
to say it is much better tthan the world as we know it. Can the real ever be as good as
the artificial? Here there
here is no fear of natural calamities like floods, storms or fires
fires.
However, the six seasons come and go, fire…
fire…” (12)

Bagchi tells them that he had earlier collaborated with two other European scientists who are
now missing from the space station. He reveals to Hulo and Ghoton that the motivation
behind creating this idyllic habitat is to solve the problem of Earth’s overpopulation. Yet, he
is reluctant to bring too many huma
humann beings over for fear of overcrowding. Majumdar reveals
the kinder side of Hulo who yearns to bring his sister withering away in a dingy flat in the
over-populated
populated neighbourhood of Kalighat in Calcutta to the space station so that she can
breathe fresh airr and enjoy the benefits of sunshine.
 109

The space station is served by robots that seem to follow Isaac Asimov’s robotic
rules. Asimov enjoyed a great deal of popularity in Bengal, as seen in Ray’s translation of a
number of his stories into the vernacular. These robots are unquestioningly obedient and do
not harm human beings. Suddenly one morning each of the robots drops down and
inexplicably stops working. The story climaxes with the revelation that the aliens who invade
the space station have been impersonating the robots. Hulo and Ghoton discover this when
they stumble upon the two missing European scientists Koriga and Bino who have returned to
the space station with their families. The aliens are exposed when the robots begin to whip up
jams and jellies, the forte of the European wives of Koriga and Bino which they had not been
programmed to learn. The climax hinges on the stereotype of women belonging to the kitchen
of which extra-terrestrial aliens are obviously unaware. This lack of knowledge leads to their
downfall, and the imposters are ousted from the space station while the robots are restored to
their former duties. Ultimately, Bagchi allows human beings to enter his space station
andHulo and Ghoton find love and the latter is reunited with his sister who regains her health
in the artificially maintained environment. Despite being thematically juvenile, the story is
tinged with an irony towards compartmentalising gender roles which is made even more
poignant by Majumdar’s entry into a male-dominated literary genre. Additionally, it casts a
critical look at theurban disaster that Calcutta has become because of pollution, overcrowding
and the lack of sanitary and civic facilities which necessitates such an alternate world. The
pastoral albeit artificial world of the space station hearkens back to a prelapsarian world, and
acts as a foil to the evils of urban metropolises such as Calcutta. Yet this world is challenged
by the intruders, who shake up the complacency of Bagchi’s scientific paradise and remind
readers of the imminent threats to the environment which lurk in every corner.Perhaps
it would have been more enriching had Majumdar rescued the women in “Akash Ghati” from
the kitchen and put them in the public sphere, although her autobiographical Pakdwandi,
Majumdar reveals strong feminist sentiments.

“Shobdo” (1982)

“Shobdo” (“Sound”) is another short story by Majumdar with a Blytonesque

landscape, in this case the remote and quaint town of Chingrikhali. Like most of her stories, it
is predicated on the importance of familial relations and kinship, which is her way of
reclaiming the genre. The main protagonist is a young child who visits Chingrikhalifor his
‘Durga Puja’ holidays, where a cousin’s grandfather resides. The mention of the Puja
holidays immediately draws in the Bengali child, as it is a festival akin to Christmas during
 110

which an annual magazine, Anandamela, featuring stories for children is published in

October.

Chingrikhali has a strange exoticism to it and is described by the narrator as “romantic

and adventure-laden” (123)46. The river Ganges flows rather wildly through the village,
tortoise meat as soft as butter is served for dinner, and a mad scientist performs top secret
experiments in an abandoned fortress once used as the stronghold of dangerous bandits.
Despite being warned
arned not to venture into the fort by the friend’s grandfather, the young
narrator and his cousin inevitably haunt its vicinity until they are accosted by the ‘mad’
scientist and his assistant Gomez. Hardly as lethal as the reputation which precedes them,
they reveal that they have invented a marvellous device which can capture prehistoric sounds.
Astonished, the boys are made to wear earphones and listen to what the scientist claims to be
the lashings of the Biblical flood, musical ragas by ancient Indian musicians like Tansen and
the earliest noises of primitive human beings, hence the story’s title.However, Majumdar’s
characteristic humour deflects generic expectations, as the bathetic ending reveals that the
grandfather was covertly collaborating with Go
Gomez just to encourage scientific work.
work The
story concludes with the grandfather having a hearty laugh when he hears the boys’ story and
confesses that the scientist is his cousin ‘Gabu,’ (a short form for scientist in Bengali), who is
an eminent and ambitious physics
hysics professor who dreams of making grand discoveries. The
grandfather uses a humble Indian string instrument called the ‘ektara’ to create the sound
effects Gabu thinks his machine captures as a way of motivating his cousin
cousin. The anti-
climactic ending
ing underscores rather than undermines the strength of the story
story. Majumdar
highlights the make-believe
believe aspect of the genre and casts a humanitarian rather than satiric
look at the extravagant aspirations of scientists because a simple Indian string instrument,
instrum the
‘ektara,’
,’ creates majestic illusions to encourage rather than delude the grandfather’s cousin.
The identities
ies of each of the characters are predicated on their relationships to the other, a
significant cultural signpost which appears to be Majumdar’s mode of culturally
appropriating a largely male, white genre. The grandfather and the narrator remain unnamed,
and the scientist, who is also an eminent physics professor, is simply referred to by his
nickname, although their love and concern for each other’s well
well-being
being fuels the plot, thereby
indicating the lack of formality in their cosy circle. For Majumdar, the genre goes beyond its

46
The original text reads
 111

possibilities of mere speculative fiction and encourages a conscious cultivation of familial

ties, kindness, and redemption.

Adrish Bardhan (1932-2019) 47

Adrish Bardhan, a name synonymous with Bengali science fiction, was the chief
editor of the Bengali science fiction magazine Ascharya which emerged in 1963. Ascharjya
(1963) appears to have been directly influenced by Gernsback’s American magazine
Amazing, as the literal translation of the Bengali word 'Ascharya' is 'amazing.'
Dedicated to juvenile literature, his science fiction stories feature the titular Professor Nut-
Boltu Chakra (Nuts, Bolts and Wheels), who gained popularity and (as it were) traction in the
second half of the twentieth century in Bengal. The level of scientific detail and accuracy
with which Bardhan approaches this genre indicates his rigorous research as evidenced in his
professor’s abstruse and esoteric explanations of subjects ranging from the cosmos, dark
matter, and the unusual properties of electricity, among other things and yet the whimsical
nature of his protagonist underscores a certain caprice.Notwithstanding his empirical
approach, the narrator of Bardhan’s stories, Nut-Boltu’s assistant Dinanath Nath, often speaks
of the enraged reactions he receives from sceptical readers who find the stories he chronicles
incredibly preposterous, thereby recalling Mitra’s Ghana-da stories which also juxtapose
eccentricity with hard scientific facts. In the preface to his anthology, The Adventures of
Professor Nut-Boltu (1963), Bardhan (who coined the term kalpavigyan) clearly claims
children as his audience and affirms that just as ghost stories are not written for ghosts, his
science fiction too is not written for scientists. He uses the analogy of a bitter pill (the
science) coated with sugar (his fiction) to describe how he’s adapted the genre for children,
thereby recalling Norman Hunter’s approach in his Professor Branestawm stories.

Professor Nut-Boltu Chakra

“The Professor Scores a Point” (circa 1965, self-translation)

“TekkaDilen Professor” (“The Professor Scores a Point”) opens with Dinanath’s self-
reflexive lament about how his readers are convinced that he is, much like Giridhar from
Premendra Mitra’s “Guests from Outer Space,” intoxicated by marijuana, since he records
such far-fetched and implausible scientific adventures. Bardhan’s narrative includes robots,

47
All translations of Adrish Bardhan’s stories from the collection Professor Nut Boltu Chakra are
mine.
 112

an analysis of the perils of artificial intelligence and alien invasions, all of which recall
British genre conventions. The tale revolves around an unsuspecting young man named
Sushanto who buys himself a seemingly innocuous radio which houses the sinister forces of a
highly sophisticated alien intelligence. A professor at a local university in Calcutta, Sushanto,
his friend and psychologist Dharani Dasgupta, and his wife Amala are horrified when the
radio sprouts appendages and begins to blatantly control their lives. Only the reader is privy
to the fact that the radio is a robot called “Ronko” which has been devised by an alien from
an unknown galaxy. However, the story cannot transcend patriarchal limits since Amala, who
is confined to the kitchen, is endowed with a very limited understanding of the scientific
phenomena, and dismisses the robot as a ghost, almost as though Bardhan denies the ability
to think beyond the superstitious and the supernatural.

Initially helpful, Ronko washes and dries dishes and lights Sushanto’s cigarettes, but
slowly begins to determine what books he is allowed to read, what vices he needs to eschew,
and he controls his thoughts by hypnotising all of them with unworldly light-beams and
assuming absolute control. The fundamental question Bardhan explores is whether human
arrogance can be threatened by extra-terrestrial intelligence and whether humans can use their
limited brain capacities to deflect these forces. When approached for help, Nut-Boltu
succeeds in his mission of saving Sushanto’s family (and to a larger extent humankind) by
drawing inspiration from but also rationalising ancient Indian epics and British literary texts.
When he learns of the radio from Dharani, he assumes the role of a scientific detective and
concludes that dark matter, cosmic dust, and a strong current of cosmic electricity have
amalgamated to form this vicious robot. Strikingly, he alludes to Rider Haggard’s Ayesha,
The Return of She (1905) which deals with alchemy to justify his fanciful explanation,
thereby drawing inspiration from a British text but immediately deflecting it by referring to
the ancient Indian epic Ramayana. Nut-Boltu offers a scientific interpretation for the burning
of Lanka by Hanuman’s (the Hindu Monkey God’s) tail, which he proposes was actually a
burning comet. He converts Dharani Dasgupta into a monkey by trapping him in an Argon
Box and commands him to set his tail alight on electricity and destroy the robot. By
combining the influences of British and Indian texts Bardhan can bring the narrative to its
successful conclusion.
 113

Shirshendu Mukhopadhyay (1935-) 48

“Grohantore,” (“Between Planets”)

Born in Mymensingh, Bangladesh, in 1935, Mukhopadhyay who resides in Bengal

continues to write prolifically for adults and children alike. His popular children’s novels
have been converted into the graphic novel format by Sujon Bandopadhyay who has showed
that there is a sustained interest in his works. Initially a schoolteacher, Mukhopadhyay’s
children’s fiction encompasses a plethora of genres ranging from the comic, the gothic and
science fiction. He is currently associated with literary magazines in Kolkata, where he
resides.

Mukhopadhyay's “Grohantore” by Shirshendu Mukhopadhyay rejects a super-

scientific, clinical and mechanised society in favour of a mundane yet human existence.
Mukhopadhyay inverts Majumdar’s “Akash Ghati” by having his protagonist reject a
seemingly perfect extra-terrestrial society in favour of a flawed and polluted Calcutta. The
tale opens with its protagonist, Barun-Babu, frustrated by life’s financial, professional, and
emotional struggles. Exhausted by running a household and supporting his family, he yearns
to escape the monotony of his existence in Calcutta. A sudden meeting with a stranger on a
tram seems to offer him an escape route. In India, trams are unique to Calcutta, a lingering
remnant of its indelible colonial heritage. The stranger whisks Barun-Babu 2500 light years
away, on an egg-shaped spaceship, to a land where nobody ages and he becomes twenty-five
again. The stranger tells him that here he won’t be plagued by age, hunger, emotions,
memories, or illness in a land devoid of humanity and is solely run by robots.

However, Barun-Babu has been transported here for a reason: to enable the robots to
study the human failing of fear. Soon, Barun-Babu rebels against his idyllic captivity and it is
the power of his fear which transports him back to his seat on the tram, where he is awakened
from a deep slumber by the ticket collector. The protagonist chooses to embrace the trials and
tribulations of humanity over a perfect yet clinical existence. Yet, the introduction of the
dream-motif subverts the credibility of the story, as in Mitra’s “Guests from Outer Space,”
and is almost tantamount to the rejection of intergalactic travel, a concept borrowed from
British Literature. Instead, Mukhopadhyay chooses to firmly plant his story in the little

48
This story appears in a recent collection of Mukhopadhyay’s stories, Kishore Kalpavigyan O
Rahasya Galpo Samagra (2022).
 114

idiosyncrasies of Calcutta as the spaceship takes off from a prominent landmark the
‘maidan,’ a wide expanse of parkland often referred to as ‘the lungs’ of the city, thereby
allowing us to fleetingly appreciate that such green spaces and imaginative liberties still exist
amidst its urban cacophony. Bengali recipes float nostalgically around Barun-Babu’s mind as
if he is seduced by the strange alien to leave the city in which he was born. The fact that he
reverts to his middle-class Bengali existence in Calcutta is a testament to the tug of his
hometown, appealing because of its imperfections, just as the negative emotion of fear is
shown to be a crucial aspect of human existence.

Indrapramit Das (1984-)

A contemporary writer of science fiction, the Bengali Das grew up in Calcutta and
subsequently moved to North America to study creative writing where he completed a Master
of Fine Arts degree from the University of British Columbia. His fiction has gained traction
in international literary circles and been published in a multitude of science fiction journals
including Clarkesworld Magazine, Asimov’s Science Fiction and Strange Horizons. In an
interview he has expressed his desire to certainly “keep writing about Kolkata in the
future”(Das) and with theirony of a brown-skinned English author contributing to what is
nevertheless still a predominantly white genre in the 21st century. Millennial writers of
science fiction like Das and his contemporary Samit Basu now cater to an English speaking
and young adult audience despite making frequent allusions to Indian mythology, systems of
knowledge and history. Das contends that the science fiction he wrote as an adolescent
growing up in Calcutta featured only white characters, thereby drawing attention to the city’s
colonial heritage and his belief that the genre was still predominantly white.He consciously
started harking back to Indian socio-political concerns and incorporated Indian people into
his narratives only after he settled in the United States as an adult. In “Writing Global Sci-Fi:
White Bread, Brown Toast” (2016) he says:

Why the white boys? I’d say living in the aftermath of centuries of invasive
European colonialism might’ve had something to do with it. Hence my typing these
words in English, instead of my native Bengali. Hence the often white writers and
protagonists I grew up reading, watching, emulating, and ultimately recreating, when
I decided to insert my obtrusively brown self into the life cycle of pop art. Sci-fi was
always a thing distinctly familiar yet foreign. Mainstream Indian writers or
filmmakers didn’t do sci-fi, despite the elephant-headed gods and giant monsters and
flying monkeys in our legends. But Anglophone Indians were and are a sizable
 115

consumer of foreign sci-fi. I’d grown up absorbing it from wrinkled VHS tapes,
cathode ray tubes and pre-multiplex “cinema halls,” from Star Wars to Star Trek
(why choose one; I loved both), E.T. to Jurassic Park. (NP) 49

In The Gopal-Rakhal Dialectic (2015), Bandyopadhyay observes how children belonging to

the upper echelons of Bengali society slowly drifted away from the vernacular and how local
literature itself was on the decline post 1980. Despite mentioning Spielberg’s E.T., which
Satyajit Ray famously claimed was plagiarised from his short story “The Alien,” (which he
had written as a Hollywood script), Das does not claim Bengali writers as his influence. In
addition to writing short stories like “Breaking Water” and “Kali-Na”, he is also the author of
full-length novels. His critically acclaimed work The Devourers (2015), featuring a college
professor and historian Alok Mukherjee, juxtaposes English genre conventions such as time
travel and dystopian visions with Indian mythology and history. Although contemporary
science fiction by Bengali writers such as Das transcends linguistic boundaries and domestic
constraints to cater to a global readership, they refuse to reject their rich cultural heritage. In
his own words, “Even at its darkest, science fiction and fantasy were freedom from the
smallness of Earth” (NP).

His short story “Breaking Water” (2016) takes the reader to an apocalyptic world
where the dead never die. They remain corpses but resurrect themselves and undergo a
process of slow decay until they have to be cremated. The children of dying parents need to
sign a consent form allowing doctors to puncture the deceased’s earlobe and brainstem
thereby eradicating a possible resurrection. Although his thematic concerns are universal, he
sets his story in Calcutta, where at the beginning a domestic cook, Krishna, is standing on the
banks of the Ganges, witnessing the resurgence of the first dead body. While Das revisits the
myth of the Hindu God of death, Yama, the language of his dystopian vision is universal. A
strong feminist undercurrent runs through his narrative, which is told from the point of view
of a young female journalist who is tasked with the duty of reporting on this extraordinary
phenomenon. Though she resides in postcolonial Calcutta, replete with expensive coffee
shops selling lattes and mochaccinos, nuggets of indigenous knowledge offer her moments of
epiphany. Another story, his award-winning “Kali_Na” features two Durgas: one, the
traditional Goddess who has now been morphed into a grotesque and commercial Artificial

49
Cited from Writing Global Sci-Fi: White Bread, Brown Toast | Tor.com
 116

Intelligence System and a young ‘Dalit’ girl who is repeatedly marginalised by society
because of her caste.50 Centred on and around a young girl, Das implores his young adult
readers to cast a critical look at the many injustices which prevail in a modern India,
including the discriminatory caste system.

Science fiction in Bengal has come a long way from its early days as non-fiction in
magazines such as Sandeshto the hard-hitting stories of today. The influence of the West has
been all-pervasive but writers of science fiction from its earliest days in Bengal still
sufficiently Indianisedand reclaimed the genre. “The Runaway Cyclone,” by the scientist
Bose is an early example of the seamless confluence of Western empiricism with Indian
mysticism. Authors like Ray and Mitra have used the genreto repeatedly condemn the
Holocaust, among other historical atrocities, and haveconsciously written for children to
entertain them and simultaneously inculcate moral values. The recurrent trope of deliberate
exaggeration, as seen in Mitra’s Ghana-da stories, lends the genre a fantastical touch,
possibly indicating authorial commitment to writing imaginatively for children. Ray ensures
that science is not restricted to merely being a Western, colonial import by consciously and
consistently incorporating indigenous forms of knowledge, such as ayurveda and astrology in
his science fiction stories.He thereby undermines European hegemony over scientific
developments through his world-remowned fictional scientist Professor Shonku who is
passionately Indian, a globe-trotter and a magnificent inventor. Mitra, on the other hand, uses
the trope of the tall –tale to examine and interrogate global scientific developments like the
Manhattan Project through the lens of his Bengali protagonist Ghana-da.Furthermore, many
wentieth century Bengali authors like Leela Majumadar and Adrish Bardhan who extensively
read English literature chose to write in an Indian language and situate Indian themes and
concerns within a global framework. However, they successfully maintained a universal
appeal in their re-creation of this predominantly European genre by extending and re-
interpreting the classic works of Shelley and Stevenson, among others. Notably, although
contemporary Indian authors from Bengal like Das write exclusively in English, they
purposefully hearken back to Indian mythology and folklore to address problems which
plague modern society.

50
Kali_Na appeared in the 2019 anthology The Mythic Dream.
 117

Chapter Four:
The Ghost Story

“One need not be a chamber to be haunted. One need not be a house. The brain has
corridors surpassing material place.” - Emily Dickson.

In “The Haunted Nursery: 1764-1830,” Dale Townshend argues that English children’s
literature as a genre emerged during the Enlightenment whichmeant that there was no place
for the ghost story for children in the18 th, 19 th and early 20 th centuries. An exception was the
increasingly popular genre of the explained haunting stories in which apparent ghosts emerge
as counterfeit ones because the denouments offer rational explanations for supposedly
supernatural events. Townshend argues that the rejection of children’s ghost stories in
England is tantamount to the rejection of oral traditions of storytelling as epitomised by
cultural personae such as the “Old wife” (17) as he points out that there was a conscious
avoidance of supernatural elements in English children’s literature, where “the mere ghost of
a ghost-was expelled from the realms of respectable literature for children” (16).
Furthermore, she highlights how popular writers like Mary Wollstonecraft and Maria
Edgeworth, among others, subscribed to the Lockean ideal of education which would cleanse
children’s literature of all things mystical.Enlightenment philosopher John Locke as far back
as 1693 in Some Thoughts Concerning Education strongly advocates the importance of
keeping “...children from frights of all kinds; when they are young” (qtd. in Townshend 176).
He argues that “fearful Apprehensions” (176) and “terrible Objects” often “shatters and
discomposes the Spirits” (176) of young children (176). Townshend is, of course, referring to
a particular moment in British literary history which only lasted until the mid-twentieth
century, after which not only were ghost stories very prevalent but in fact constituted many of
the classics of the period. Examples of these texts include Penelope Farmer’s Charlotte
Sometimes (1969), Tom’s Midnight Garden (1958) by Philippa Pearce, When Marnie Was
There (1967) by Joan G. Robinson, Penelope Lively’s The Ghost of Thomas Kempe (1973)
and A Stitch in Time (1976), among many others. Most of these stories are based around time
travel where a protagonist such as Maria from Penelope Lively’s(1976) connects with the
ghost of another little girl, Harriet, from a long lost age. There were some exceptions to this
in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, such as Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol (1843)
and an episode from The Pickwick Papers (1836) titled “The Goblins Who Stole a Sexton”,
 118

which feature ghostly apparitions and goblins that ironically humanise his protagonists, the
miserly Ebenezer Scrooge, and the misanthropic Gabriel Grub, respectively. Additionally,
supernatural forces make their presence felt in “In a Closed Room” (1904), a spine-chilling
novella by Frances Hodgson Burnett, where paranormal forces help the pale and other
worldly Judith leave her robust, working-class surroundings and parents, to which and whom
she cannot possibly adapt. But The Secret Garden (1911) can be read as one of several
examples of the gothic-explained because Mary Lennox discovers that the ghostly noises
which troubled her belonged to her cousin Colin Craven. Indeed, Lynne Vallone has offered
an alternate perspective in “Uncanny Visitors: The Child Ghost in Haunted Children’s
Literature” (2007), where she contends that English children’s literature has always been
haunted:

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), A Child’s Garden of Verses (1885) and

Peter Pan (1904/1928) are each ghost stories and Lewis Carroll, Robert Louis
Stevenson, and J. M. Barrie men haunted by Uncanny-Children. (NP)

Nevertheless, as Townshend has argued, early English children’s literature was founded on
the rational and the rejection of oral storytelling and the children’s ghost story was barely
present as a genre in 18th and 19th century English literature.

In contrast, ghost stories were prevalent in Indian children’s literature from much
earlier on. In “Indian Ghosts: A Love Affair” (2017), Tabish Khair writes that “ghosts do not
need to arrive in India from the West: India has always had its ghosts” (270). He traces the
origins of the cultural presence of supernatural powers back to “Hindu religious traditions”
(270) which were “rooted in oral cultures” and “notoriously difficult to date” (270).
51
Examples of this genre from Bengal include “Gupi Gyne Bagha Byne” (1913) by
Upendrakishore Ray which appeared in the children’s magazine Sandesh, and the immensely
popular collection of oral tales by Dakshinaranjan Majumdar, Thakurma’r Jhuli (1907)
(Grandmother’s Bag of Tales). Featuring a plethora of gothic elements ranging from
indigenous monsters (rakshashas), unearthly landscapes and strange hybrid animals,
Thakurma’r Jhuli serves as a testimony to the whole-hearted endorsement of Bengal’s rich
oral cultural heritage. These uncanny tales can be read as acts of literary resistance in the
days of the British Raj when nationalistic sentiments reigned supreme and Sibaji

51
These characters were alluded to by Salman Rushdie in his 1990 children’s novel Haroun and the
Sea of Stories.
 119

Bandyopadhyay quotes Tagore’s preface to Majumdar’s text of which he asks, “Is there
anything more swadeshi than Thakurmar Jhuli in our country” (38)?” Hence, Tagore
underscores the importance of exposing Bengali children to their rich, indigenous oral
tradition, “its particular diction, its old-fashioned naivete and folksy style” (Bandyopadhyay,
39). Released at the zenith of the Swadeshi Movement which gripped Bengal between 1905
and 1908 52, these home-spun stories for children seemed to offer a refuge and destination for
local children, although Bandyopadhyay highlights the “conjugation of opposing ideas'' (38)
which exist in Tagore’s preface which indicates the complex merging of the cultures of
Britain and India: “It is not only that the conjugation of opposing ideas, such as the factories
of Manchester and ‘swadeshi’ are there, but also that the entire text displays a proliferation of
contrasting binaries” (38).

It is not as though ghosts were not a part of the adult English imagination. As David
Punter in “The English Ghost Story” points out “Ghosts have always been with us” (179) and
were an intrinsic part of “ancient Western culture” (179). He sketches the tradition of the
English ghost, beginning with the apparition of Hamlet’s father, before he moves on to early
writers of paranormal fiction, like Conan Doyle, H.G. Wells and M.R. James. Although none
of these writers wrote specifically for children, there was a concerted effort to keep juvenile
literature from the ghost story. The presence of ghosts is surprisingly prevalent, even in the
“gothic explained” which throbs with ghostly potential, even as writers like Newbery took it
upon themselves to negate the effects of frightening oral tales on children and stamp out
superstition and irrational fears from young minds. His The History of Goody Two-Shoes
(1762) features the orphaned Margery who subverts a ghostly phenomenon through her
adventures in a church. The anticlimactic ending of The History of Goody Two-Shoes, in
which the reader is provided with a logical explanation of a ghostly phenomenon, is very
much in the spirit of the mock ghost story tradition or “the gothic explained” which enjoyed a
great degree of popularity in children’s literature of the time. The publication coincides with
the appearance of one of England’s first adult gothic novels, Horace Walpole’s The Castle of
Otranto (1764), and its popularity among adult readers may have been precisely because it
was written for them rather than children. But “gothic explained” certainly made its presence

52
The Swadeshi Movement was formally started in August 1905 from the Town Hall of Calcutta in the
wake of the recent partition of Bengal and involved the total rejection of foreign goods in favour of local
merchandise.
 120

felt in The Boy’s Own Paper (1879-1967) which featured several formulaic mock ghost
stories representative of the attitudes of the time. These included “The Tables Turned: A
Varsity Yarn," by Rev. B.E. Evans, "Jack and John, Their friends and Their Fortunes" by Mr.
Elloart and "The Bullet-Proof Apparition: A True Ghost Story" by F. Wood. While all of
them ridicule the idea of being frightened of ghosts, “The Bullet Proof Apparition” goes a
step further by underscoring the deleterious effects which result from irrational beliefs. It
narrates the story of “the rather boyish and undignified proceedings'' (534) of three young
officers, Thornton, Andrews, and Waters who are divided on the subject of ghosts. While
Thornton is openly sceptical, Andrew and Waters openly harbour superstitious beliefs and
decide to play a trick on their cynical friend when they dress up as apparitions to test the
unsuspecting Thornton’s nerves in a graveyard. Fearing a violent reaction, they cleverly
replace the bullets in his pistol with counterfeit ones, but little do they realise that once his
gun fails, the determined Thornton chooses to hit out at the apparition with his sword only to
discover that he has stabbed and seriously wounded his friend Waters who has disguised
himself as the apparition. Although he recovers slowly, Waters, Thornton and Andrews learn
their lesson the hard way and refrain from indulging in such acts in the future in what
emerges as a cautionary tale for young boys. Furthermore, Sean Ferrier Watson, in his
doctoral thesis demonstrates how similar sentiments prevailed across the Atlantic and how, in
1907, the American writer Mary Bradley published a poem, “Twelfth Night Story” in St.
Nicholas, An Illustrated Magazine for Young Folks, in which a “young nursery maid is
subsequently punished for telling her young wards a scary story” (NP). Even in Bengal, the
great educationist’s Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar’s (1820-1891) early ghost stories questioned
the presence of the supernatural by deflecting it with logic. In Ray’s “GupiGyneBaghaByne,”
the titular protagonists, a tone-deaf singer called Gupi and an out-of beat drummer Bagha
have been driven away from their respective villages on account of their cacophonous music.
They meet each other in a forest and stumble upon a benevolent King of Ghosts (the popular
Bhooter Raja, who is firmly embedded in Bengali popular culture) who wholeheartedly
endorses their musical talent and bestows the boons of unlimited travel, of an ever-flowing
supply of food and the ability to stupefy audiences with their music. Ray’s King of Ghosts is
far from malevolent as he not only empowers them but also helps rehabilitate the
marginalised Gupi and Bagha back into the very society that had previously disowned them.
Ray is commenting on the way children were generally denied agency and pushed to the
peripheries of social systems which are run by native and imperial adults.
 121

It is worth asking why the most talented and cerebral writers of juvenile (and adult)
fiction in Bengal, such as Rabindranath Tagore, Upendrakishore Ray, Hemendra Kumar Ray
and Premendra Mitra chose to write ghost stories for children in the early later days of the
Empire. This legacy of was carried forward by twentieth century writers like Leela
Majumdar, Satyajit Ray, Shirshendu Mukhopadhyay, and Sunil Gangopadhyay, some of
whose stories I will briefly look at later. Haunted by the presence of Imperial forces in pre-
independent Bengal and the lingering trauma of post-1947 colonialism, I argue that the
juvenile ghost story, which repeatedly references colonialism, was a means for writers to
represent the complexity of the colonial experience to native children, albeit often
humorously.53 Even the postcolonial stories emerging from Bengal look back to the colonial
past for inspiration, as opposed to looking towards the contemporary juvenile spectral tales
emerging from Britain, though many of the featured ghosts are more humorous than
frightening. As Indian children were, according to Sen, (“A Juvenile Periphery”) looked
upon with suspicion and distrust; the juvenile Bengali ghost story enabled its young
protagonists to show great degrees of empathy and acceptance for non-human “others” as
they befriend conventionally feared spectres who reciprocate their feelings. Additionally, the
children’s ghost story becomes a means of questioning colonial stereotypes of bequeathing by
exploring how differences are not restricted to questions of race and ethnicity alone. By
exposing native children, albeit imaginatively to the existence of life beyond their limited
knowledge, the writers push them to broaden their own horizons and thereby become more
aware and accepting of differences than adult colonists. An anonymous poem from the early
twentieth century Bengal, “The News of the Haunted House” (“Poro Bari’r Bhooter
54
Khobor”) revolves around two young school children, Titu and Mithu, who gather the
courage to go and visit a haunted house and are surprised when the “dark and scraggly” ghost
they encounter emerges as a hospitable and generous host who treats them to an array of
delicacies and is kind enough to drop them home in an enchanted car. Far from terrifying

53
I recognise that the chapter on the ghost story is significantly shorter than all my other chapters.
Perhaps this is a testament to the fact that Bengali juvenile literature was so heavily reliant on British influence
that even though this genre developed in resistance to colonial rule, the volume of Bengali stories was
significantly lower than in other genres where British children’s stories were more prolific. When the Golden
Age of the ghost story established itself in Britian in the second half of the twentieth century, we see many more
ghost stories for children appearing in Bengal-but a lot of them still look back to the colonial past for
inspiration.
54
This poem appeared in a children’s journal circa 1960 but I have not been able to locate the specific
issue.
 122

them, the ghost, happy to have visitors, goes out of his way to give them a good time and
thereby subverts their conventional expectations. Furthermore, the interaction between the
ghost and Titu and Mitu, reveals how a deep-rooted fear of the unknown often obfuscates
reality. Hence, the ghost story in Bengal enables children to exercise a greater degree of
empathy and acceptance, even towards their non-human counterparts, which was lacking in
the Imperialist literature which tended to dehumanize native children.

The juvenile ghost story in Bengal becomes a means to confront and document
history, challenge colonial stereotypes, reflect on the past and most importantly ruminate on
the act of “othering” those who are different from the ruling class. Additionally, it highlights
the haunting, poignant but inescapable legacy of colonialism in Bengal. In Calcutta, legends
of colonial hauntings of buildings built during the British Raj thrive in popular culture. For
example, Hastings House, the home of India’s first Governor Warren Hastings (1732-1818) is
allegedly visited by its former occupant in an elaborate horse-drawn carriage on some nights,
while the spirit of Lady Metcalfe, daughter of India’s Viceroy George Curzon, supposedly
roams the corridors of the National Library. In particular, the allegedly unjust execution of
Maharaj Nandakumar becomes the subject of two ghost stories for children. “Two Beggars”
by Bailai Chand Mukhopadhyay 55 is a testament to how the ghost story becomes a means to
revisit, rectify and perhaps even reclaim history. The story opens with the description of “a
burnt and dark-skinned” (221) beggar who sits by the side of a “congested road in Varanasi”
(221) but is revealed to be Warren Hastings in disguise. A miraculous transformation occurs
when another beggar, described as a “wizened, skeletal figure” (222), empties “his sack of
alms” (222) onto Hastings’s cloth whereby Hastings assumes his true golden-haired form and
pleads for forgiveness from the second beggar who is none other than Maharaj Nandakumar.
Nandakumar had been appointed as a tax collector for the East India Company in 1764 to
replace Hastings, but the former had brought allegations of bribery against the latter. Hastings
had retaliated by accusing Nandakumar of forgery andthe latter was tried and ultimately
executed under India’s first chief justice Elijah Impey. The situation took a grave turn when
Burke and Macaulay accused Impey and Hastings of committing a judicial murder. The genre
of horror allows two historical figures, lost in the brutal tangles of history, to forgive and

55
Born in 1899, the multi-faceted Bali Chand Mukhopadhyay was a physician and author known by
his pen name, Banaphul, which translates as wildflower. “Two Beggars” appears in the anthology Timeless
Tales from Bengal: An Anthology of Bangla Children's and Young Adults' Stories (2018).
 123

embrace one another. Ironically, Banaphul employs the genre to humanise the violent past of
Hastings and Nandakumar
dakumar as the story ends with them embracing one another. The ghost
story allows Banaphul the space to make allowances for these supposedly ruthless and
remorseless colonial administrators to indulge in reminiscences, thereby making amends with
the past and
nd ushering in a sense of closure to historical misadventures.

Maharaja Nandakumar’s execution left an indelible impression on Bengal, which is

reflected in a later ghost story by Leela Majumdar, “Jugantar” (The End of an Era) which
appeared in her volume of ghost stories, Shob Bhuturey (1983)56, All Things Ghostly.
Ghostly The
story features an unnamed narrator and his friend Goopi who have both fared exceedingly
badly in their annual school examinations. Repeatedly reprimanded by their parents for their
dismal performance, they decide to take on the rrole
ole of stowaway passengers and board a ship
which is due to depart for the Andamans from the docks of Calcutta. The two friends meet at
midnight, but their plans are foiled when they encounter an elaborately designe
designed and richly
57
upholstered horse-drawn
drawn carriage near the iconic Eden Gardens and, mistakenly assuming
it belongs to a theatre company, they rush to the rescue when one of the horses loses its
horseshoe and begins whining in pain. An exquisitely dressed man in archaic clothing
emerges from the carriage and requests them to locate a blacksmith to help his horse. They
board the carriage and are repeatedly reminded of the urgency of the situation because a man
called Nandakumar’s life is at stake. Overwhelmed bby
y the sudden grandeur they’ve
encountered and ignorant of the presence of blacksmiths in the vicinity, the two friends enter
a cycle workshop run by their friend Shambhu, and they try to explain the situation to him at
an unearthly hour. However, once they convince him to help re-shoe
shoe the horse, they emerge
on the road only to see that the carriage and its occupants have disappeared into thin air.
Visibly pale, Shambhu tries to enlighten them about what they just witnessed:

A lot of people have seen that carriage, but not for long. King Bahadur had been very
keen to save Maharaj Nandakumar’s life. But he could not reach there in time. That’s

56
All translations
ations from Majumdar’s Sab Vuturey (1983) are mine, which is why I have included hte
original Bengali script.
57
Established in 1864, The Eden Gardens
Gardens,, the arena of many of Sachin Tendulkar’s greatest innings, is
the oldest cricket stadium in India and the third largest in the world.
 124

what you have just seen. This is what you have just seen. Saying this, he pulled us
towards his house. (30
30)

Frightened, shaken, but most importantly sorrowful, the two boys run back to seek refuge in
the familiarity of their homes and renounce all plans of running off to unknown lands.
“Jugantar” becomes a fictional platform not just to meditate on historical oc
occurrences but also
to lament the possibilities which could have been. Moreover, it highlights how unresolved
efforts and unfulfilled episodes continue to haunt the psyche of not only those who are long
dead, but also those still living. Majumdar’s choice ooff this sensitive historical topic for a
children’s story reveals how historical regrets should be recognised and identified by young
readers who need to be aware of the colonial past.

However, Majumdar’s ghost stories refrain from simplistically pitting nnatives against
the tyrannical forces of colonisation because the reader does encounter ghosts of white
‘sahibs’ and ‘memsahibs’’ who are magnanimous, caring and warm.. Her short story “Nataraj”
(1983) regales the reader with the tale of the eponymous young rrural
ural cook who credits the
ghost of “a green-eyed, red-haired,
haired, middle
middle-aged
aged memsahib, who was fluent in Bengali and
generous as could be” (50)) with teaching him the most delectable foreign recipes58. She used
to be Nataraj’s spectral neighbour when he worked for a despotic Bengali man and always
helped him out of difficult culinary situations and even gifted him a special picture book.
“Nataraj'' indicates how larger historical narratives often tend to overlook the little players
who defied stereotypical repre
representations
sentations and went beyond what was expected of them. The
‘memsahib's’’ kindness is in stark contrast to the exploitative behaviour of Nataraj’s native
male employer in what is a reversal of the expected power dynamic.

The colonial past forms the backdrop oof “Indigo” (1968),

), another short story by
Satyajit Ray in which the protagonist, Aniruddha Bose, becomes lost on his way to visit a
friend in Dumka and is forced to spend the night in an old bungalow “constructed during the
time of the Raj” (156)) because hhee gets lost on his way to visit a friend in Dumka. The
‘chowkidar’’ (caretaker) informs him that the bungalow used to belong to a ‘‘sahib’ who was
an erstwhile “indigo planter” ((156).
). Suddenly, the weight of history descends upon Bose as
he remembers a play written by Dinabandhu Mitra (1830
(1830-1873) called Nildarpan (The Mirror

58
The original text reads thus:
 125

of Indigo59, 1860) which chronicled the Indigo revolt of Bengali farmers against the
dishonourable practices of British planters. The reference to Mitra’s play underscores how
history is still fresh and that writers have a responsibility in keeping these memories of
resistance alive. Amazingly, Bose wakes up to find that he himself has turned into a British
Indigo farmer:

By some devilish trick I had turned into a nineteenth century Englishman with a
sallow complexion, blond hair and light eyes from which shone a strange mixture of
hardness and suffering. (160)

Ray attempts to humanise a character who has been the recipient of much censure and hatred
for his ruthless actions. The transformed Bose finds himself compelled to write a diary entry
which is akin to a suicide note, dated 1868, in which the Englishman is full of remorse and
shame for his deeds as someone who “couldn’t resist the lure of indigo” (161). He confesses
that he has “treated the natives here so badly that there is no one to shed a tear at my passing
away” (161). Fearing that his beloved dog Rex will be clubbed to death because of his
master’s reputation, he takes out a gun and shoots him before placing the muzzle of his pistol
to his own ear. This is a terribly disturbing story for a sensitive juvenile reader, and one can’t
help but feel sympathy for a character who seems to rue his past. By making a native Bengali
transform into an Englishman, Ray may be underscoring how a certain section of locals and
not just Englishmen, were also complicit in the process of Indigo farming. The next morning
Bose is back to himself, and he learns that the previous night was “the hundredth anniversary
of the death of an English indigo farmer in Birbhum” (163). The ghost story, then, becomes a
space where colonialism and domestic follies can simultaneously be questioned and critiqued.
60
“The Maths Teacher, Mr. Pink and Tipu” (1982) also by Satyajit Ray, employs
gothic tropes to undermine a prosaic literary vision which chains children to Lockean logic
alone. Although this story appeared in the sixties, by which time Britain had entered the
Golden Age of the children’s ghost story, Ray chooses to make a direct and admiring
reference to one of Bengal’s first collections of Gothic stories, Majumdar’s Thakurma’r Jhuli
(1904) by Majumdar.While the story isn’t strictly a ghostly tale, it demonstrates how Gothic

59
“Indigo” has been translated into English by Gopa Majumdar in a collection of Ray’s short stories,
The Collected Short Stories (2012).
60
This story has been translated into English by Gopa Majumdar and appears in the collection titled
The Collected Short Stories (2012).
 126

tropes and elements of fantasy are crucial, if not fundamental for a child’s development by
taking their readers into the world of a schoolboy, Tarpan Chowdhury, fondly called Tipu,
who is enamoured of European and Bengali fairy tales featuring “Kings, queens, princes and
demons…” (483). Trouble arrives in the form of a new mathematics teacher, Mr. Nahari, who
is horrified at Tipu’s reading habits and pounces upon his copy of the popular collection of
Bengali folk tales Thakurma’r Jhuli exclaiming:

You should read about great men, about explorers, scientific inventions, the
evolution of man-things to do with the real world. You belong to the twentieth
century, don’t you? Foolish, ignorant people in villages might once have enjoyed
such absurd stories. Why should you? If you do, you ought to go back to a village
school and try learning maths with the help of rhymed couplets. Can you do that?”
(484)

Tipu tries to defend himself by arguing that great Indian epics like the Ramayana and the
Mahabharata which are “full of tales of demons and monsters” (484) and feature gothic
characters such as Hanuman and Jambuvan are in many ways foundational to Indian
culture.61 Mr. Nahari follows up his tirade by intruding on Tipu’s domestic sphere and
admonishing his parents for allowing Tipu to read literature which will sow “the seed of
superstition in a young mind” (487) and he reminds his father of the “enormous
responsibility” (487) adults have in raising rational, modern human beings, thereby recalling
the nineteenth century British attitude to juvenile ghost stories. Reluctantly, Tipu reconciles
himself to relinquishing fiction for “the biographies of Vidyasagar and Suresh Biswas,
Captain Scott’s expedition to the South Pole, Mungo Park’s adventures in Africa, the story of
steel and spaceships…” (488) although his mother is very disappointed by the teacher’s
views on childhood. Help arrives in the form of a “strange creature” (479) who reminds Tipu
of “Rumpelstiltskin” (482) and one of “Snow White’s seven dwarfs” (482). This creature,
who is possibly an alien, claims to have been exiled to Earth to make Tipu happy. This “Pink
Man” evokes Freudian notions of the uncanny (unheimlich) to make Tipu’s math teacher
reconnect with those aspects of his childhood which a colonial education might have
repressed. It is revealed that Mr. Nahari was fond of riding horses as a child, and he stumbles
upon a racehorse named Pegasus which belongs to a certain Mr. Bishnuram Babu who lives

61
The Divine Monkey Hanuman is the mythical companion of Lord Rama in the Hindu epic
Ramayana while Jambuvan is the King of Bears in the same epic.
 127

near Tipu. Mr. Pink puts his plan into action one night by helping Pegasus sprout wings and
fly off with the maths teacher on his back, far into the sky, rising “higher and higher until it
disappeared among the stars,” thereby recalling the Greek myth of Perseus and Medusa,
much to the amazement of Tipu who, crouched behind a bush witnesses the absurd episode.
Soon after, the Pink Man vanishes and does not make a re-appearance, but the incident
shakes Mr. Nahari’s rigid beliefs and he emerges from the incident a different man. He visits
Tipu’s father and encourages Tipu to start reading fairy tales again perhaps out of some
Freudian recognition of the uncanny Ray might have considered

Mr. Nahari must reconnect with a childhood memory of horse-riding to rekindle his
empathy for young, imaginative souls and allow his unidimensional vision of children’s
literature to broaden. Ray consistently refers to both European and local folklore and thereby
undermines any simplistic binary between rational colonialism and irrational native beliefs.
Indeed, much like European fairy tales, the marvellous stories from Thakurma’rJhuli also
tried to inculcate certain moral values such as loyalty, honesty, and bravery through the
course of their narratives.
62
Shirshendu Mukhopadhyay’s (1935-) “The Smell is Highly Suspicious” introduces
the reader to a world in which ghosts unobtrusively exist alongside human beings in the
small, secluded railway settlement of Domohani, where natives work for “railway sahibs”
(Loc4792) The story documents how the development of railways during the British Raj led
to increased employment opportunities for native workers under the British who are
described as good employers, but also reveals that Domohani is in fact a haunted place,
though haunted by helpful and industrious ghosts who show absolute obedience to their
employers: “They are very good. They come whenever we call them. They are not men, they
are ‘they’” (382). Although they do engage in small acts of mischief, they primarily help the
new workers who have settled their and their families with domestic and clerical chores.
Although the narrator’s great grandfather, an outsider and visitor to Domohani, claims that
the “highly suspicious” smell of the town indicates the presence of ghosts, the narrative ends
with a comic reversal when a ghost informs him that he smells “highly suspicious” (385)
which mortifies and silences him. Mukhopadhyay’s story delves into how our perceptions of

62
Mukhopadhyay’s story, originally titled “Gandhota Khub Sandehojanak” has been translated by
Angshuman Kar, Amrit Sen, Debmalya Das and Himadri Shekhar Dutta and appears in the anthology Timeless
Tales from Bengal: An Anthology of Bangla Children’s and Young Adults’ Stories (2018).
 128

“others” are highly subjective and often flawed. In “At Peneti” (“Penetite”), another short
story by Leela Majumdar, ghosts help a young boy overcome the incessant bullying he is
facing at school.

Writers like Buddhadevah Bose in “The Old Woman at the Metro Theatre” 63critique
the rapid pace of industrialisation and urban migration ushered in by colonialism. Dipshikha
Sahoo’s Urbanization in India During the British Period (1857–1947) explores how colonial
“capitalism shaped and imposed urban patterns in India” (NP), and in Bose’s story two
friends decide to enjoy the summer holidays in Calcutta by enjoying the various gifts of
64
colonial modernity. They avail themselves of a tram ride to the air-conditioned Metro
theatre but fail to enjoy themselves as they constantly sight the “macabre, skeleton-like
figure” of an old woman who comes close to them and desperately begs for money. The
narrator reveals that the more he “tried not to look at her, the more… [his] eyes fell on her.
Horrible!” (262). Unfortunately, they encounter her at various parts of their day’s journey,
including inside the Metro theatre. The narrator says:

She was a complete misfit amongst the foreigners and the polished Bengali crowd. I
can’t describe how repulsive she was looking. It was strange that she was not being
chased away. Such beggars were not seen in this locality before. (263)

Her presence in the seemingly sophisticated urban space accessible only to those who can
afford it, is looked upon as jarring and offensive by the two friends who joke that she must’ve
driven here in a “Rolls Royce” (263). It is only after they return home that they find out that
an old, homeless woman had been found dead the day before beneath a tree in front of the
narrator’s house, and the members of the corporation had to finally take her unclaimed body
away. The story is a poignant indictment of urban arrogance which ridicules poverty
overlooks the lives of those whom it cannot include or accommodate, as the ghost of the
unnamed old woman haunts the very places which would have denied her entry during her
lifetime. Bose ensures that she disconcerts the two urban boys through her constant presence,
as if reminding them that they cannot forget those who do not have the same privileges as
they enjoy. The haggard, possibly starved old woman’s treatment at the hands of a seemingly

63
Bose’s story, originally titled “Metrote Buri” has been translated by Somdatta Mandal, Indrani Das,
Pritam Bandyopadhyay and S. Siddharth and published in Timeless Tales from Bengal: An Anthology of Bangla
Children's and Young Adults' Stories (2018).
64
The tram network, which still exists in Kolkata, was established in 1902 in Bengal.
 129

advanced society decries the lack of compassion and kindness in a supposedly progressive
world.

The irrelevance of the rural realm in the wake of colonial urbanisation is outlined in
65
“The Spell” by Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay in which an unemployed cook stumbles
upon a gentleman who leads him to an “old, jungle-enclosed house” (157) where he is
employed as a cook and caretaker. Soon the owner of the house, a man named Nibaran
Chakrabarty, leaves for Calcutta, never to return. He is warned by the few outsiders he meets
that the house is a breeding ground for ghosts, but the rural setting and the haunted house
gradually casts a spell of indolence over him:

A strange lethargy gradually overtook me. Idleness had never agreed with me-by
nature I was a hard-working person. Now it seemed that a lifetime of strenuous
labour was taking its toll-doing nothing was quickly becoming my preferred activity.
(166)

He confesses that he enjoys living “among” (169) ghosts and has resigned himself to a life of
inactivity. Bandyopadhyay is using the ghost story as a vehicle to comment on how rapid
urbanisation has rendered work and workers in rural areas redundant and unnecessary
although their labour, too, supports the towns and cities. This story carries a moral weight as
it is intended for children who need to realise the increasing inequity of a developing world.
66
Sunil Gangopadhyay’s (1934-2012) “Walkie Talkie” builds upon the gap which
already exists between the adult writer and the juvenile reader as it explores how a child’s
belief system and imaginative powers cannot always be rationally explained by the reasoning
abilities of adults. A young Dipu has gone for a visit to the Bengali countryside with his
family where he begins collecting an assortment of dried branches, starting with the “branch
of a mango tree” (363) which the adults find dull and unremarkable. They are annoyed when
he claims that the pieces of wood and flint which he collects resemble all the adults in his
life. An imaginative child, like Lively’s Maria, Dipu is an avid reader of comics like the
Tintin series, and he befriends and speaks to trees and “the branches, stones, shiny metal

65
Bandyopadhyay’s story, originally titled “Maya” has been translated into English by Tathagata
Bannerjee in Timeless Tales from Bengal: An Anthology of Bangla Children's and Young Adults' Stories (2018).
66
Gangopadhyay’s story, originally titled “JyantaKhelna” has been translated into English by Abhijit
Gupta, Ananya Dutta Gupta, Debayan Deb Burman and Parantap Chakraborty and appears inTimeless Tales
from Bengal: An Anthology of Bangla Children's and Young Adults' Stories (2018).
 130

foils, birds’ feathers: all these were living toys to him” (368). His parents are very displeased
with him, and his father exclaims that “The boy’s nuts. What odd games he plays!” (367).
The story takes a sinister turn when the people with whom Dipu associates begin to mirror
the fate of the toys. When a cleaning lady accidentally drops a stone, he has named after his
grandmother, she suddenly dies. When a branch which reminds him of his uncle snaps, his
uncle breaks an arm. Dipu repeatedly requests his parents to be careful of his toys and treat
them with respect. Although his parents try to dismiss the occurrences as coincidences, they
realise how important Dipu’s make-belief world is to him. The mystery is left unresolved, but
Dipu’s parents are sufficiently frightened into buying him a host of new dolls and statuettes
of dead people such as “Vivekananda, Napoleon, Buddha, Krishna, Christ, a soldier, a sailor,
a hunter, Tagore, Sivaji and so on” (374). The mystifying occurrences force them to pay heed
to incidents which are beyond their limited scope of understanding and question their
assumed superiority. The story does not promote superstition in as much as encourages adults
to empathize with the power of a child’s imagination. A similar impulse fuels Satyajit Ray’s
67
short story “Kutum Katam” where a man named Dilip brings home a “part of a broken
branch” which resembles a “four-legged animal” (658). The branch comes to life and makes
impatient noises and movements at night but is put to peace when Dilip’s friend (and the
first-person narrator) suggests that they revisit the spot from where the former had acquired
the branch. There they stumble upon “another branch, which might have been a twin of the
first one” (663) and they carry it back and place the two next to each other and thereby
placate them. “You separated them. Hence all that wailing” (663), his friend admonishes him.
The bewildered Dilip tries to find a scientific explanation for how to inanimate branches can
yearn for one another, but his friend ends the story with a quote from Shakespeare’s Hamlet,
another ghostly play from another time and place: “There are more things in heaven and
earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy” (663). Perhaps, too, the story alludes
to Keats’s “negative capability”, “that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties,
mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason” (1817). Significantly,
while the philosophies of these English writers fuel the story, the title of the story alludes to
Abanindranath Tagore, nephew of Rabindranath and a children’s writer and illustrator, who
was also in the habit of collecting realia from forests which he called “Kutum Katam”. In
doing this, Ray underscores that his story is not only influenced by the West but by a former

67
I have read the translated version of Ray’s story by Gopa Mujumdar in The Collected Stories (2012).
 131

Bengali writer. The children’s ghost story in Bengal thereby becomes a means of
acknowledging that it is impossible to rationalise and justify everything with ‘sensible’
empiricism.

Hence, while the juvenile ghost story in Bengal might have started with the intention
of establishing an indigenous genre which was influenced by local oral traditions, it has been
incessantly haunted by the ghost of colonialism and its aftermath. Arguably, the shadowy
formlessness which the reader associates with spectres becomes a means of remembering and
defining the imperial experience both by the writers and young readers of this genre.
 132

Chapter Five:

“The Past is always with us, for it feeds the present”-Ruskin Bond

The Anglo-Indian Conversation

This chapter explores the complex influence of Rudyard Kipling on the critically acclaimed
children’s writer Ruskin Bond, because their personal and literary lives are bound together by
the shared thread of Anglo-Indianism. I argue that Ruskin Bond’s autobiographical Rusty
series, which includes The Room on the Roof (1957), Vagrants in the Valley (1987) and Rusty
Goes to London (2004), conducts a silent conversation with Kipling’s Kim (1900), a
bildungsroman which has exerted a considerable influence on the Indian literary terrain and
fuelled the determination of a host of native writers to write ‘back’ to it. Franco Moretti, in
The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture (1987), underscores the
connection between the material form of modernity, “youth” (5) and its symbolic form, “the
bildungsroman” (5), which he defines as “the novel of formation,” “of education” and “of
initiation” (15). Kim and Rusty are two young protagonists who attempt to reconcile their
divided identities in a dynamic world, even as the Anglo-Indian identity undergoes a
significant change from Kipling’s time to Bond’s post 1947 India. These bildungsromane
cannot fully resolve the complex predicaments of their protagonists, and their struggle for
identity is analogous to that faced by many Anglo-Indians. Social class and its connection
with the bildungsroman are central to Moretti’s argument and this is of great import in the
context of the Anglo-Indian identity which is premised on a divide between nature and
nurture. The Anglo-Indian bildungsroman also becomes increasingly entangled with the
question of class and its shifting dynamics the current members of the erstwhile ruling class
are now reduced to pariahs. Since Kim and the Rusty novels depict a nation on the cusp of
change (Kim is set during the era of Imperial rule in India whereas the Rusty novels are set in
the newly postcolonial India), they recall Moretti’s idea that the bildungsroman reconciles
youthful desire with the demands of a modern nation. Rusty and therefore Bond, exemplifies
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the nascent and newly emerging India where aboy of British origins can consciously choose
to adopt an Indian identity.

Kipling’s bildungsroman has had a tremendous impact in India, paradoxically through

the resolve of eminent authors to write back against it.While writers such as Sarath Kumar
Ghosh, Rabindranath Tagore, T.N. Murari and even Sashi Tharoor have boldly written back
to Kim, Ruskin Bond silently acknowledges. The Rusty novels are an implicit homage to Kim
and are less oppositional than these re-writings of Kipling’s novel.68 There has been little
criticism which has looked at these works in relation to one another, although Bart Moore-
Gilbert’s essay “Kipling and postcolonial literature” discusses the various writers who
countered Kim by reacting against Kipling’s imperial ideology. In Sarath Kumar Ghosh’s
epic novel The Prince of Destiny (1909), Kipling is not explicitly mentioned but “his
supposed imperial politics are recurrently the object of biting commentary” (155).
Rabindranath Tagore, who was furious at being described as ‘India’s Kipling’ (155), also
“dismissed Kim, which he read in 1902, as exemplifying ‘western exaggeration’ about India”
(155), and his novel Gora (1910) “which appropriates many of Kim’s themes and tropes”
(155) is a “specific riposte to Kim” (155). Mulk Raj Anand is “extremely disobliging” (156)
about Kipling, and he vows to “rewrite Kipling’s Kim…from the opposite point of view”
(157), while T.N. Murari confesses that “by taking on Kim as the central figure of my text”
(157), he “wanted to finally turn him against his creator” (157). Anand undermines Kim by
describing itas a “fairy tale glorifying...a fantasy boy” (156), while Murari’sThe Imperial
Agent (1988) and The Last Victory (1990) allow Kim to enjoy a literary afterlife eight years
after the events of Kipling’s novel, where he continues to engage in espionage while sailing
on the choppy waters of emerging Indian nationalism. Eventually, Murari’s Kim “becomes
progressively disillusioned with British rule and throws in his lot with Gandhi, before being
killed in Jallianwala Bagh” (156). Moore-Gilbert argues that “the anti-colonial politics of
Murari’s texts are unequivocal” (156). In Shashi Tharoor’s The Great Indian Novel (1989)
“Kipling appears in a double guise, each facet being equally negative” (156). Amidst all this
negative backlash which Kipling has received from subsequent writers of adult Indian fiction,
Ruskin Bond’s quiet conversation with Kim in the Rusty novels seem to be layered, nuanced,
sympathetic and yet critical. In a curious manner, while Bond is greatly indebted to his

68
The Southeast Asian Review of English is a peer-reviewed journal which has published my paper on
Bond and Kipling titled “Silent Conversations” on the 15th of December 2021.
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literary predecessor, there are times when he appears to deliberately weaken the connection
they share. This might have its roots, at least partly, in their shared Anglo-Indian heritage,
although the concept of being an “Anglo-Indian” has experienced a significant change over
time. As an Indian writer, Bond must have found himself at the heart of the tempestuous
criticism hurled at Kipling by these writers his peers. Children’s literature allows Bond to
make allowances for Kipling, empathise with him and accommodate a more sensitive,
solicitous reading of Kim. Like Kim, the first two novels in the Rusty series The Room on the
Roof (1957) and Vagrants in the Valley (1987) are set in India, whereas Rusty Goes to
London (2004) is set in England. Kim is set in the pre-partition era of the British Raj and the
Rusty novels in the nation’s fledgling postcolonial state. They follow in a picaresque tradition
with the titular protagonists seeking out mentors and adventures in an episodic manner as
they travel across India.

In Anglo-Indian Identity: Past and Present, in India and the Diaspora (2021) Robyn
Andrews identifies the origins of the Anglo-Indian community in the British men who came
to India between 1858 and 1947 during the British Raj. Both Kipling and Bond are British,
and this is reflected not just in their physical appearances but also in Kipling’s imperial
allegiances and in Bond’s success as an English writer in India. However, while Anglo-
Indianism deepens the connection between the two authors it also ironically thrusts them
apart, because, as aforementioned, the marginalised status of an Anglo-Indian in Bond’s
postcolonial India is quite distinct from privilege enjoyed by Anglo-Indians in Kipling’s time.
The racist and imperialist legacies of Kipling and his generation made it particularly difficult
for Bond and his Anglo-Indian peers to be accepted by the Indian community at large. With
mounting pressure from the Indian freedom movement, the English government set a
deadline for the British to entirely withdraw from India. This decree threatened Anglo-
Indians who realised that they had to stay on as natives, even as they were viewed with
mistrust and hostility by many members of the Indian community because of their firm
allegiance to the British and the East India Company during colonial rule. Ultimately, the
Government of India Act (1935) defined and protected the status of their threatened
community. In Anglo-Indian Women in Transition Pride Prejudice and Predicament (2017)
Sudarshana Sen outlines the insecurity the community felt once India achieved
Independence:

The other Indian communities had also built an impenetrable wall of prejudice and
rejection around the Anglo-Indians, coining such pejorative labels as the ‘Anglos’.
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So, the two generations—one born before independence and the other born
afterward—were socialized in an Anglo-Indian culture in which their coloured skin
was a matter of concern and their connection with a male European progenitor was
important, where to know and understand European ways of life determined their
status and, above all, where being an Anglo-Indian mattered most. Similarly,
knowledge about India was confined to books read in school and knowledge of other
cultures and languages was not important but was thought to be functionally helpful
to survive in India. (4-5)

Kipling was born into a life of privilege in his “Mother of Cities, Bombay, in 1865, to the
celebrated artist and sculptor John Lockwood Kipling (who went on to become the principal
of the prestigious Jeejeebhoy School of Art) and Alice Kipling, both of whom considered
themselves to be Anglo-Indians. The five-year-old Punch, Kipling’s fictional counterpart in
his autobiographical short story “Baa Baa Blacksheep” (1888) is well aware of his elevated
position as a white child within the little microcosm of his home and behaves with an air of
unmistakable authority towards his array of domestic helpers, “the ayah and the hamal and
Meeta, the big Surti boy, with the red-and-gold turban” (407), and they in turn love and
respect him unconditionally. But this idyllic Indian childhood, replete with the privileges
afforded by his class and race, is replaced by the abusive and shocking treatment he receives
at the hands of the diabolical Mrs. Holloway in a foster home in Southsea, England (which
Kipling called “The House of Desolation”), where his parents sent him and his sister for five
years, while they remained in India. Although Punch promises his group of subservient
domestic helpers that he would return to them as “Burra Sahib Bahadur!” (410) his young
mind quickly realises that his Anglo-Indian identity does not afford him any advantages in
Southsea: “As the unquestioned despot of the house at Bombay, Punch could not understand
how he came to be of no account in this new life” (416).

In contrast, Bond was born almost seventy years after Kipling - to Edith Clarke and
Audrey Alexander Bond, a former English teacher who joined the Royal Air Force in 1939 -
at a time when the Anglo-Indian community had begun to face pressure from the mounting
momentum of Indian national movements. This shift in the socio-economic status of Anglo-
Indians is reflected in Bond’s autobiographical short story “The Room of Many Colours”
(1999) which is set almost a century after “Baa Baa Blacksheep,” in which the Britishers who
chose to remain are increasingly marginalised and reduced to shadows of their former selves.
In “The Room of Many Colours”, Bond’s father is keenly aware of the peripheral status of
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Anglo-Indians and prepares his reluctant young son for an imminent return to England by
telling him that they “have to go away one day. You see, it’s hard to explain, but it isn’t really
our country” (83). Disturbingly, the young Bond is repeatedly subjected to taunts and racial
slurs such as “red monkey” even as the government of India felt compelled to offer them a
protective constitutional status. Unlike Punch’s deferential servants in “Baa Baa Blacksheep,”
Bond’s Christian ayah does not flinch from offering her critical views on colonisation and
candidly claims that “(India) belongs to the King of England, and the jewels in his crown
were taken from India, and when the Indians get the jewels back the King will lose India”
(83)!

Andrews argues that Anglo-Indians “tend to be more English than Indian” (NP), and
while this may be true of members of the community in Kipling’s time (Kipling famously
referred to himself as “The Englishman”), Bond makes his loyalties very clear in an interview
to The Times of India when he emphasises that he “never lost an opportunity to stress the fact
that he is “an Indian not just by birth but also by choice” (NP). Unsurprisingly, Bond had to
fight the oppressive memories of his colonial predecessors like Kipling to establish his
loyalty to the India he loved. While Bond cannot ignore the compelling pull of Kipling’s
literary legacy, he clearly struggles to accommodate his imperialist and racist ideologies
which are evident in poems such as “The White Man’s Burden” (1899). Despite reminiscing
fondly about his Indian childhood, Kipling, unlike Bond, makes it very clear that he is an
Englishman whose loyalties lie strictly with the Empire. While Kim is ostentatiously native
and furtively British, Rusty is openly Indian but only grudgingly British. In an essay titled
“Kipling’s Shimla” (2018), Bond rapturously recreates Kim’s journey as he travels across the
hill station: “Simla beckons. I must return. And, like Kim, I will take the last bend near
Summer Hill and look up and exclaim: ‘Ah! What a city.’” (NP)

Furthermore, in “Life at My Own Pace,” Bond underscores his obvious associations with
Kipling, and draws upon their shared Anglo-Indian childhoods in India. However, while he
expresses his love for Kipling’s “great gray formless India” (Loc 10340), he also speaks of
the difficulty of being accepted:

Most domiciled Europeans and Anglo-Indians were apolitical. That the rule of the
Sahib was not exactly popular in the land was made plain to me on the few occasions
I ventured far from the house. Shouts of ‘Red Monkey’! Or ‘White Pig’! Were
hurled at me with some enthusiasm but without any physical follow-up.” (146)
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In Vagrants in the Valley (1987), the homeless Rusty takes refuge in an old and abandoned
church, a synecdoche for the plight of the postcolonial Anglo-Indian, who at his core, is
anxious to belong, ‘unbelong’ and perhaps re-belong. The church valiantly stands tall but is a
relic of a bygone era binding Rusty to his lost past. With its buried dead and empty halls, the
church represents a deep sense of displacement and alienation. It is reminiscent of another
poem “Second-hand shop in a Hill Station” in which Bond speaks of “lost causes, lonely
lives” (261) and “ten thousand broken dreams” (261). Like his creator, Rusty learns to accept
the “paradox that India could be as cruel as it could be kind” (147). An independent India
reluctantly accommodates Rusty but often forces him to cast a critical yet nostalgic look back
at his British roots. For Kipling’s Kim, British India is the land he was born into, and he lives
in the folds of its Imperial rule. He has known and perhaps will know no other India than this.
Unlike Rusty, his Britishness is not a legacy he struggles with so much as an intriguing,
secret life he explores.

The tropes of abandonment, orphanhood, and filial alienation are common to Kipling,
Bond, Kim, and Rusty and prompt one to wonder how aligned fiction is to autobiography in
the context of these novels. Although Kipling’s privileged childhood appears to be so far
removed from his “street urchin” Kim, one wonders whether Kim, much like The Jungle
Books, can indeed be read as an extrapolated autobiography. Through his protagonist, Kipling
explores a version of India he would never dream of engaging with but ironically draws upon
his own experiences of an Indian childhood, thereby making Kim a ghostly metaphor for a
native childhood which would haunt him through his adult life. It appears the ‘Englishman’
in Kipling is playing out a secret, alarming native fantasy as “a poor white of the very
poorest” (1), which his personality and upbringing would vehemently disavow. Harry
Ricketts, in his biography of Kipling, The Unforgiving Minute (1999), convincingly argues
that Mowgli is an extension of Kipling’s childhood:

What is most striking in Mowgli’s story, from a biographical point of view - as it

unfolds in ‘Mowgli’s Brothers’, ‘Kaa’s Hunting’, and “Tiger! Tiger!’ - is watching
Kipling once more rewriting aspects of his own childhood. The pattern of
abandonment was repeated no fewer than three times: twice in ‘Mowgli’s Brothers’,
which opened with him losing his human parents and closed with him being cast out
by the wolf pack; and again, at the end of ‘Tiger! Tiger!’, when he was rejected by
the village. Mowgli became, in effect, a super-orphan. (206)
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Ricketts points out that Mowgli’s “amphibious” (208) nature is reflected in his name which
means frog; he has the ability to blend into different environments, much like the chameleon-
like Kim, a master of disguise, and indeed Kipling himself who, according to Ricketts could
lead “a kind of double life, part American, part English, which did not lock him into either
(208).” In Vagrants in the Valley (1987), Rusty draws a tenuous parallel between himself and
the displaced Mowgli, a triple orphan who loses his human parents and his adoptive and
jungle families. Rusty and Kim have been brought up by foster parents, Rusty by the
stentorian Mr. Harrison and Kim by a “half-caste woman” (1) who “insisted with tears that he
should wear European clothes” (4). As Mowgli is caught between his identities of man and
wolf, Kim and Rusty try to reconcile their lineage with their surroundings. Kipling records
his harrowing experiences in the “House of Desolation” in Southsea, where his fictional
counterpart Punch faces relentless physical and psychological abuse from his guardian Mrs.
Holloway in “Baa Baa Blacksheep” (1888), which deepened his sense of alienation from his
parents. The young Kim’s unfettered spirit and free-will, despite having mentor figures,
seems to be a wish-fulfilment fantasy for Kipling. Bond’s writing often reveals his
estrangement from his mother, who was a lot younger than his father, as he reminisces about
the break-down of his parents' marriage and her subsequent remarriage. His father, with
whom he shared a deep bond, tragically died of malaria in Calcutta while Bond was a 10-
year-old schoolboy in Simla and his absence haunts his life and stories. Bond has often
claimed that Rusty is clearly autobiographical and The Room on the Roof, written during his
brief, homesick stint in England, is a tribute to his Indian childhood and he admits that “Rusty
the boy was the author as a boy” (Loc 73).69 Kim and the Rusty novels follow their
protagonists on expeditions not just physically across India but also deep within themselves,
thereby allowing their creators to reflect on their past lives and meditate on fractured
identities. Interestingly, the names Kim and Rusty appear to play on the names of their
authors as Rusty resembles Ruskin and Kipling and Kim are not unlike. Rusty and Kim’s
British roots are reflected in their physical appearance which not only distinguishes them
from their peers but undermines their affinity to India. However, just as Rusty’s constant
wanderings have made his skin scorched by the fierce sun, Kim too has been “burned black
as any native” (1). When he finally acknowledges his affinity to Kim in Rusty Goes to

69
I have had to use Kindle editions of the Rusty books by Bond because the printed versions of these
texts were difficult to obtain owing to the pandemic.
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London, Rusty emphasises that “times have changed” (53), signifying the transfer of socio-
political power from the Empire to the newly independent nation.

The presence of servants and ayahs or native nannies was common in the lives of
Anglo-Indian children during the Empire. It can be argued that the ayahs, with whom these
children spent much time, simultaneously deepened and bridged the gap of their already
divided identities. On the one hand, they initiated their charges into their native languages
and cultural practices, but their predominantly obsequious behaviour ensured that the
presumed racial hierarchy was intact. In “Baa Baa Black Sheep”, Kipling reveals how
Punch’s knowledge of Hindustani, “once his second speech” (410), was picked up from their
servants. Despite pronounced differences in their social stations, the relationship between
Punch-baba and his ayah was premised on mutual affection and intimacy in sharp contrast to
the treatment he received at the hands of Mrs. Holloway and her son in Southsea. Bond
fondly recalls relishing the act of chewing ‘paan’, Indian betel leaves, with his Ayah and
mastering the art of Hindustani abuse from his bearer in “The Room of Many Colours”
(1994). Mark Tully, in his introduction to Last Children of the Raj, British Childhoods in
India, (2004) recalls how his British nanny was horrified when she realised that their driver
was teaching him Hindustani and hit him “across the head” (ix) exclaiming “that’s not your
language, that’s the servant’s language” (ix). These ayahs, who were gifted raconteurs, often
regaled British children with Indian folktales in the vernacular which aroused their curiosity
and creativity. Bond recalls that his ayah loved him “deeply and was always filling” his
“head with strange and wonderful stories'' (Bond, 83), often from works such as the
Panchantantra.Indeed, Kipling’s “Rikki Tikki Tavi” which appears in The Second Jungle
Book was inspired by “The Loyal Mongoose” who appears in the fifth book of the
Panchatantra titled Apariktisitakarakam. Kim’s Lama too regales his chela with tales from
the Jataka, such as “the story of the elephant with the leg-iron” (275). Additionally, Bond
asserts that Rusty’s name has emerged from the pages of the Panchatantra, ``that collection
of wise and witty fables from India and beyond” (Loc 74). Kipling’s “The Potted Princess”
(1893), an alternative version of “Baa Baa Blacksheep” features his Ayah enthralling Punch
and Judy with an incredible story about a potter. Since their parents inhabited worlds which
were so vastly different from their ayahs, their presence further deepened the gulf between
nature and nurture. In his autobiography Something of Myself (1937) Kipling recalls his
afternoons with his Portuguese Roman Catholic ayah and his Hindu bearer Meeta who would
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tell us stories and Indian nursery songs all unforgotten, and we were sent into the
dining-room after we had been dressed, with the caution ‘Speak English now to Papa
and Mamma.’ So one spoke ‘English,’ haltingly translated out of the vernacular
idiom that one thought and dreamed in. The Mother sang wonderful songs at a black
piano and would go out to Big Dinners. (3)

Despite these apparent connections between the writers, Bond’s hesitancy, and reluctance to
fully embrace and acknowledge Kipling no doubt stemmed from Kipling’s active promotion
of the Empire. Bond wished to silently converse if not suppress his affiliation with Kipling to
prove his allegiance to India. He fears being misjudged as a supporter of colonialism if his
acknowledgement of their connection is too pronounced. I argue that the realm of children’s
literature enables Bond to accommodate a writer whose writings he admires but whose
politics he questions. In the Rusty novels there appears to be a conscious avoidance of
Kipling which co-exists with a simultaneous acknowledgement of his literary influence.Bond
has often openly declared his indebtedness to writers like Dickens, Stevenson, and M.R.
James. In Rusty Goes to London (2004), Bond describes a debilitating eye condition
diagnosed as “Eale’s disease” which he contracted owing to malnutrition and his excessive
reading.70 He must have been aware that Kipling, too, famously suffered from the visual
debilitation which began in Southsea. In Something of Myself (1937), Kipling laments how
his “eyes went wrong, and that he “could not well see to read” (16). However, when he refers
to other authors with visual impairments, Kipling is significantly absent:

I had to go to hospital for some time. The condition was diagnosed as Eale’s Disease,
a rare tubercular condition of the eye, and I felt quite thrilled that I could count
myself among the ‘greats’ who had also suffered from this disease in some form or
another-Keats, the Brontes, Stevenson, Katherine Mansfield, Ernest Dowson-and I
thought, if only I could write like them, I’d be happy to live with a consumptive eye!
(22)

The implicit conversation between the two writers remains at the margins of the narrative and
is only fully acknowledged in the third novel, Rusty Goes to London (2005), when the
fictional Rusty meets the ghost of Kipling. In that novel Bond finally conjures up an
imagined conversation between Kipling and Rusty in the Indian section of the Victoria and

70
The chapter “The Man who was Kipling” from Rusty Goes to London also appears as a short story in
the collection Delhi is Not Far. I have used the references from the latter.
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Albert Museum and thereby alludes to the shared colonial heritagewhich had brought them
both to India. Bond’s resurrection of Kipling allows them to engage in a conversation which
attempts to contextualise and criticise the latter’s imperialist beliefs and draws upon Kipling’s
rich literary heritage to interpret the anxious condition of Anglo-Indian identity in post-1947
India. As Bond tells Kipling: “I’ve spent most of my time in India-not your India, but an
India that does still have much of the colour and atmosphere that you captured” (55).

The chapter is titled “The Man who was Kipling” and recalls the name of Kipling’s
short story “The Man Who Would Be King” (1888). Possibly, Bond is reluctant to engage
with Kipling in an independent India which still nurses the wounds of its colonial past.
Therefore, he delays his encounter with Kipling until the third book of the Rusty series (the
first two books were set in India) and confronts his ghost, a shadow of his former self, in
distant Britain. The chapter begins on a note of disavowal because Rusty initially and almost
deliberately fails to recognise the bespectacled Kipling71:

I was sitting on a bench in the Indian section of the Victoria and Albert Museum,
when a tall, stooping, elderly gentleman sat down beside me. I gave him a quick
glance, noting his swarthy features, heavy moustache, and horn-rimmed spectacles.
There was something disturbing about his face and I couldn’t resist looking at him
again. (50)

Bond’s use of the word “disturbing” may be significant as several postcolonial readers of
Kipling regard him as such. Salman Rushdie explores this idea when he says of Kipling is “a
writer with a storm inside him, and he creates a mirror-storm of contradictory responses in
the reader, particularly, I think, if the reader is Indian” (“Kipling” 74). Rusty maintains his
avoidance and hesitates to acknowledge his literary debt to Kipling, who asks him “Tell me,
whose books do you read” (50)? Rusty mentions names like Maugham, Priestley, Thurber,
Bennett and Wells and only mentions Kipling when he sees a “sad shadow pass across” (50)
his “companion’s face” (50). He finally musters up the courage to admit “Oh yes, and
Kipling…I read a lot of Kipling” (50), almost in spite of himself.

Bond uses the exchange to fulfil two purposes: to allows Kipling an opportunity to
defend himself and to justify his own avoidance of Kipling thus far. Kipling laments to Rusty
that “The trouble these days is that people don’t know me anymore-I’m a familiar, that’s all.

71
This chapter appears as a short story in the collection Delhi is Not Far
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Just a name for outmoded ideas” (50). However, Kipling reminds Rusty that he belongs to a
different age and time. He responds to Rusty’s allegation of being too “militant…too much of
an Empire man…too patriotic for your own good” (52) with “I believed that the Empire was
a fine and noble thing. Is it wrong to believe in something?” (52) Initially, Rusty seems quite
patronising towards Kipling but gradually gives the latter an opportunity to contextualise his
views. Bond might feel that their shared heritage allows him the prerogative of an
assessment. Kipling goes on to tell Rusty that much of Kim is devoted to action and
adventure and that unlike Bond, he does not have the privilege of socio-political hindsight:

You must remember, my seven years in India were very youthful years. I was in my
twenties, a little immature if you like, and my interest in India was a boy’s interest.
Action appealed to me more than anything else. You must understand that. (52)

The setting of a museum allows Kipling to engage in a tryst with history from the perspective
of the present, to re-evaluate his ideologies. However, Rusty (and therefore Bond) firmly
feels that Kipling’s passion for India is not diluted by his devotion to the Empire. His love for
the nation permeates each page of Kim and invites the reader to appreciate the nuances of the
vast and diverse country:

No one has described action more vividly, or India so well. I feel at one with Kim
wherever he goes along the Grand Trunk Road, in the temples of Banaras, amongst
the Sahranpur fruit gardens, on the snow-covered Himalayas. Kim has colour and
movement and poetry. (52)

This is the moment when Rusty is in complete alignment with Kim with whom he “feels at
one” (52). The fictional platform solidifies their relationship in a way the real world cannot.

The duality in Kim is discussed by Jan Montefiore, whose sympathetic yet critical
reading offers a way to synthesise the seeming contradictions in the novel and allows her to
claim that Kim is a rare “colonial fiction that takes ethnic and cultural otherness as a source of
pleasure, not anxiety (81):

To recognise how deeply Kipling’s imperialist beliefs are interwoven with the
narrative harmonies of his fiction does not, as Said emphasised in his own critical
account of “this great work of art,” mean that those who dispute Kipling’s beliefs can
take no pleasure in this novel. On the contrary, a critical account of Kim needs to
begin by acknowledging the glowing lyricism of its love for the India of Kipling’s
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childhood, for the people and for the land itself, the “broad smiling river of life”
which is also the dust that heals Kim at the end. (88)

In “The Man who was Kipling,” Bond affirms his identity by quoting several lines from his
poem “The Penalty” (1932) in which he laments the faithful “star” he “whistled” and “cast”
away. I contend that this star symbolises the beloved India of his childhood from which he
distanced himself as an adult. Does Bond’s choice of poem give Kipling an opportunity to
apologise for his imperialist beliefs? Kipling’s recitation of “The Penalty” therefore prompts
one to think that Bond seems to want to redeem Kipling as much as he wants to redeem
himself. Rusty reassures Kipling that his “star hasn’t fallen yet” (54) as they part with one
another. Ironically, when he asks the English gatekeeper of the museum if he knows Kipling,
the gatekeeper is clueless and confirms Kipling’s fears of having been relegated to obscurity.
Rusty further prods him by asking him whether he has read The Jungle Book and the
gatekeeper confuses it with Tarzan (1912). The chapter ends with Rusty wandering down the
streets of London looking for Kipling but unable to find him in the “boom of London’s
traffic” (54) which juxtaposes with the “boom of the Sutlej River” (54) in his mind and
encourages the reader to ruminate on whether Kipling has indeed been judged too harshly.

Kim and the Rusty novels challenge what Homi Bhabha calls “the validity and
authenticity of a pure cultural identity” (83) and “mimicry” as both Rusty and Kim occupy a
liminal “third space” (143) in which they are simultaneously included and excluded from
Indianness. In The Location of Culture (2004), Bhabha argues that native “Others” were
coaxed to adopt the values and cultures of the coloniser to fulfil the “civilising mission” of
the colonial project. I argue that we see a partial reversal of this in Kim and Rusty, who
attempt to erase certain aspects of their British lineage in exchange for an authentic and
meaningful Indian one, since they realise the importance of assimilating with their physical
and cultural surroundings. Their behaviour is in stark contrast to, for instance, Macaulay’s
desire for Indians to adopt English in manners and customs. Bhabha underscores the fallacy
inherent in the colonial rhetoric of “mimicry,” where the process of imitation is never quite
complete, and the gap between the original and the replica becomes a process for sabotaging
cultural hegemony. This “gap” becomes a means by which the coloniser can maintain his
authority which would otherwise be threatened if the colonised became exact replicas of
them. Notably, Rusty and Kim maintain this “gap” as well and leave their acts of mimicry
deliberately incomplete. Kim’s decision to uphold this gap may not be as deliberate as
Rusty’s, as he is a small part of “The Great Game,” which is controlled by those much higher
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than him. Sen argues in Colonial Childhoods (2005) that “to emulate was not to mimic; it
was to admire” (157). While both Kim and Rusty admire India, they also keep a safe
distance. Towards the end of Vagrants in the Valley, Rusty sits on a train having embarked on
his long journey to England. When his Indian friends’ wave to him certain of his return,
Rusty feels that he will never see them again, prompting us to feel that he is coping with
simultaneous acts of severance and re-birth. Kim, on the other hand, seems more comfortable
in his many skins and his charm makes him an inconspicuous and successful British spy.
Rusty uses this ‘gap’ to his advantage as he never completely renounces his British identity
which affords him professional opportunities as an English teacher and writer, though he
repeatedly expresses his affinity to India. He emulates natives through disguise and habit,
once a Hindu Street urchin, the next moment a Pathaan, and a “sahib” the next. Bhabha’s
essay “Of Mimicry and Man,” begins with a quote by Lacan:

The effect of mimicry is camouflage...it is not a question of harmonising with the

background, but against a mottled background becoming mottled. (Jacques Lacan,
‘The Line and Light’ Of the Gaze) (qtd. in Bhabha 121)

This seems particularly relevant to Kim, who is a master of disguise, but ironically his native
disguises only serve to underscore his efficacy as a British spy. He bears a resemblance to
Bond’s grandfather, who is described in “From Small Beginnings” which incidentally begins
with a quotation from Kim:

A man may have a hundred disguises, but in the end it is his posture that gives him
away. Like my grandfather, who was a master of disguise and successfully roamed
the bazaars as a fruit vendor or basket maker. But we would always recognise him
because of his pronounced slouch. (141)

Kipling’s profession as a journalist also afforded him opportunities to juggle many avatars.
Bhabha, who belongs to a minority community of Parsis himself, claims that “cultures must
be understood as complex intersections of multiple places, historical temporalities and sub-
cultures” (128). This is seen in the cases of Rusty and Kim who engage in a “translation and
negotiation” (Bhabha 38) of their British and Indian identities in order to work with the
contradictory strains of “languages lived and learned” (x). Rusty is in fact more Anglicised
than Kim, having grown up in the European part of Dehra, whereas Kim’s rather feral
childhood has seen him prowling around the streets of Lahore.
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Rusty and Kim align themselves with adopted mentor figures, both alive and
deceased, who endow them with purpose and direction, and their identities are predicated on
others to a considerable extent. While on the one hand the boys seem to be travelling through
India to fulfil their inner needs of realising themselves, they are also defined by the
aspirations of their mentors. Rusty has been brought up under the strict tutelage of an English
guardian Mr. Harrison whom he despises and rebels against. However, he does not renounce
English, his biggest professional asset. Kim, brought up by a native half-caste woman, thinks
and dreams in the vernacular and uses his native charm to be a successful British spy. Rusty
inherits an expensive first edition of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
(1865) from his late father, which he sells to fund his expedition to England, where he hopes
to pursue a literary career. Kim, on the other hand, wears a talisman of three papers he
inherits from his late Irish father, Kimball O’ Hara, around his neck. One is his “ne varietur”
(2), one his “clearance certificate” (2), and the last is his “birth certificate” (2). It is the
discovery of these papers which leads him to be recognised as a Britisher worthy of joining
the army, receiving an English education (which the Lama sponsors upon discovery) and
eventually helps him become a British spy. Teshoo Lama, who is ostensibly Kim’s primary
mentor, plays an interesting role in upholding Kim’s dual identity, because he literally binds
Kim to Indian soil as they wander across the country, but he also funds his English education,
to help him reconnect with his Englishness. Kim is both guided by (and protects) the Lama
but also seeks refuge in the mentorship of Mahbub Ali, Lurgan Sahib and Creighton, whose
wishes he ultimately fulfils. In a rare moment of self-examination, Kim asks himself, “Who is
Kim-Kim-Kim?” (265) thereby encapsulating his quandary over his identity, but it seems that
he would rather remain in duality than choose a fixed path or mentor. In contrast, Rusty’s
mentors are primarily native children. He consciously rejects the mentorship of the older Mr.
Harrison and aligns himself with Somi, Kishen, Ranbir and Sudheer the Lafunga. Rusty
selectively re-aligns himself with India in the space of the forbidden bazaar. Rusty is initially
“angry and ill-mannered” (Loc 332) towards Somi who introduces him to bazaar life but is
soon spurred to subservience by his laugh and “obeys him without demur” (Loc 332).
Ironically, while Somi secures Rusty the position of an English teacher in Kishen’s house, he
also facilitates Rusty’s orientation into the Indian experience in the bazaar and actively
discourages Rusty’s decision to go to England. Rusty’s only adult mentor is Mr. Pettigrew
who is characterised as a lover of India reluctant to leave, post 1947. One could draw a
comparison here with Colonel Creighton, who is greatly attached to India and is fluent in
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Hindi. Ironically, both Creighton and Pettigrew also lead the boys away from India. While
Pettigrew urges Rusty to sail forth to England for professional success, Colonel Creighton
initiates Kim into the British espionage service. In Vagrants of the Valley, Rusty firmly tells
Mr. Pettigrew that he aligns himself with India and is reluctant to travel to England, just as
Kim often reassures himself of not being a “Sahib”. Similarly, just as Mahboub Ali
contributes to handing Kim over to the British, Sudheer the Lafunga funds Rusty’s journey to
meet his aunt and reunite with his father’s English heritage. While the popular Kim is
described as the “Little Friend of all the World” (4), Rusty is often referred to by Somi, who
has catalysed his entry into the Indian side, as “best favourite of friends” (Loc 332),
underscoring the extent of their attachment to their surroundings and peers.

The motif of travel through the landscape of India is common to Kim and the first two
Rusty novels. Although Kipling, in Something of Myself has described Kim as a “nakedly
plotless and picaresque” (228) novel, his character’s journey is far from desultory. Kim’s
wanderings represent his divided identity, as he is involved with both the Lama’s spiritual
quest for the River of Arrows and Mahbub Ali’s espionage services for the British
government. Significantly, he often tells the Lama that he is not a “Sahib” but his“chela”
(386), pitting the one against the other and thereby implying that a “sahib” is a leader. Rusty
rejects being a chela or an acolyte in Rusty Goes to London and yet again distances himself
from Kim in a direct reference to the novel:

I could have stayed in one of the two ashrams, but I had no pretensions to religion of
any kind and was not inclined to become an acolyte to some holy man. Kim had his
lama, the braying Beatles had their Master, and others have had their gurus and
godmen, but I have always been stubborn and thick-headed enough to remain my
own man-myself, warts and all, singing my own song. Nobody’s chela, nobody’s
camp follower. (Loc 2267)

Kim’s desire to spy for the Empire does not seem to arise from any great patriotism. Rather,
the intrigue and it offers seduces him as does his awe for the formidable Arab horse-dealer.
His loyalty to India is ultimately tested by the prophecy of the “Red Bull on the Green Field”
(123), which is revealed to be a flag from his father’s Irish regiment. Yet, he does not yield
entirely to the compelling pull of his British destiny. His fondness for and devotion to the
Lama and India are never undermined in the novel. Rusty’s journey to England only
reinforces his love for India and he yearns to return to his homeland as soon as possible.
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While both Rusty and Kim have strong affiliations with India, they both appear to
betray the country, Rusty by embracing English and leaving for England and Kim by
adopting the role of a British spy. In Kim (1901), Kipling both embraces different facets of
India and constructs a subversive undercurrent. However, there are conflicting views about
the novel’s ending. Edmund Wilson, in “The Kipling that Nobody Read” (1941), claims the
denouement of Kim represents an “ethical and artistic betrayal” (NP) as he becomes a British
spy who will “exploit his knowledge of native life for preventing and putting down any
native resistance to the British” (NP) thereby betraying his mentor, the Lama. This view is
supported by Harish Trivedi, who feels that Kim is in effect intimating that he will not
“come” (NP) and that he has indeed betrayed the Lama, as their visions seem irreconcilably
different at the end of the novel. However, in Kipling’s Art of Fiction 1884-1901 David
Sergeant highlights how “opposites can be complementary and can invite a creative
compaction” (162). Kim’s profession as a spy does not necessarily impede his personal
predilection for India, or his devotion to his native mentors. I agree with Sergeant, since
serving as a British spy might not necessarily be viewed as a betrayal of the Lama, as the
latter himself has funded his English education at St. Xavier’s. The Lama often expresses
wonder at Kim being a “Sahib” in a voice ringing with admiration and wonder. Ironically, it
is the Russian man’s assault on the Lama which leads to Kim uncovering the espionage
papers, so Kim’s seemingly disparate quests converge. Furthermore, by the end of the novel,
the Lama has arrived at the “Threshold of Freedom” (413) and is bereft of any binding
national or racial identity. Despite not having a religious bone in his body, Kim yearns for the
Lama when he is away, and tells him in the concluding chapter, “I am not a Sahib, I am thy
chela,72and my head is heavy on my shoulders” (386). This problematizes the notion of the
Tibetan Lama being simplistically associated with India and since Kim’s association with
him never wanes, the idea of betraying India remains amorphous, as despite being a chela,
Kim has not made a promise to go down a spiritual path himself. Arguably it is Rusty’s
decision to physically leave India to pursue a career as a writer in England which may be
viewed as a betrayal, although his ardent aspiration for ‘going native’ is seen in his violent
rebellion against Mr. Harrison, whom he physically assaults. Mr. Harrison is portrayed as a
martinet who had shut off native India like a forbidden a cesspool of sin from Rusty and
thereby heightened his desire to escape. For Rusty, India is forbidden fruit its appeal lying in

72
The word ‘chela’ in Hindi literally translates as servant.
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its freer and more inclusive community, whereas Kim, who has never faced such restrictions,
loves India in a more organic and spontaneous manner.

Education plays a seminal role in the lives and careers of Rusty and Kim. Rusty’s
English education is viewed as an imposition from Mr. Harrison, whereas Kim’s English
education is a benediction from his Bhotiya benefactor, Teshoo Lama. However, Rusty’s
education is his asset, and he uses his predilection for English literature as his passport to
England, notwithstanding the fact that it was the tyrannical Mr. Harrison’s contribution to his
life:

Since his parents had died, Rusty had been kept, fed and paid for, and sent to an
expensive school in the hills that was run on exclusively European lines. He had in a
way been bought by Mr. Harrison. And now he was owned by him. And he must do
as his guardian wished. (11)

His role as Kishen’s English teacher is the logical result of his Anglo-Indianness, whereas
Kim, before his exposure to an English education at St. Xavier’s, relied on letter writers from
the bazaar to communicate with Mahbub Ali and Teshoo Lama. However, while Rusty loves
the English language, Kim speaks and dreams in the vernacular, although he does eventually
write professional letters in English to Mahbub Ali. Kim coaxes sahibs like Creighton to
speak the vernacular and tells Lurgan Sahib that despite learning Angrezi within two months,
he “cannot read it well” (229). Kim refers to St. Xavier’s School as a “madrissah” but is
ambivalent at best towards his education, though it does serve him well. He realises ‘where
examinations led’ (177) and that St. Xavier’s looked down upon boys who went “native
altogether” (177). His education proves useful whenhe uses the times-table to counter Lurgan
Sahib’s hypnotism and later when he is sifting through the Sahib’s papers. However,
although he appreciates aspects of school, he finds life there restrictive and strangely at odds
with his native identity:

The atmosphere suited him, and he throve by inches. They gave him a white drill suit
as the weather warmed, and he rejoiced in the new-found bodily comforts as he
rejoiced to use his sharpened mind over the tasks they set him. His quickness would
have delighted an English master; (177)

However, he fervently tells Mahub Ali of his love for the people of the “great and beautiful
land” (193) of India:
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To the madrissah I will go. At the madrissah I will learn. In the madrissah I will
learn. In the madrissah I will be a Sahib. But when the madrissah is shut, then I must
be free and go among my people. Otherwise, I die. (193)

The use of the phrase “my people” is a key to understanding his loyalties to native life,
despite his English education. Resisting English in favour of the vernacular is Kim’s
conscious way of underscoring his native affinities.English becomes a complex entity which
oscillates Homi Bhabha-like between “Bombay Street food, spicy, cheap…” (x) and an
“archaic” “carved almirah that engulfed you in the faded smell of mothballs and beautiful
brittle linens” (x). English is a professional tool, but it can also alienate them him from his
immediate surroundings. It remains unclear as to what language Rusty uses in conversation
with his indigenous friends Somi, Kishen, Ranbir and Suri. In the opening chapter of The
Room on the Roof, Rusty feels alienated and left out as he cannot converse in the vernacular
Punjabi, whereas Kim’s command of the vernacular can even surpass that of any native.
Debashish Bandyopadhyay claims that Rusty identifies with “the dialogic nature of the
anxiety of a double bind” (18). While partly true, I argue that he needs to discard one identity
to dress himself in the garb of another, if only for a while. When Rusty is reading an English
book, his friend Kishen notices that his absorption makes him oblivious to his Indian
surroundings. Rusty’s linguistic capability is a lingering legacy of the colonial past but
nevertheless fundamental to his very experience of Indianness.

Both Rusty and Kim cast off their British identities in the buzzing space of forbidden
bazaars and native festivals. While Kim is often seen “yelling at a Hindu festival” (5), it is at
the Hindu festival of Holi to which he is invited by Ranbir that Rusty is ‘coloured’ in the hues
of the festival and is literally ‘unwhitened,’ to a point of being unrecognisable to Mr.
Harrison. An infuriated Mr. Harrison punishes Rusty which catalyses his rebellion against his
European upbringing, although he refuses to ‘unwhiten’ his mind from the influence of
English literature. In a parallel scene, Kim is painted in a thick blue dye with much ritual and
ceremony by a blind Muslim woman, Huneefa presided over by Mahboub Ali and later
Hurree Babu. There is, however, a major difference: Kim’s “painting” will allow him to
embark on a successful career as a spy for the British, whereas Rusty’s body, painted with
Holi colours, severs his immediate link with his British surroundings. Yet, the severance
remains partial, as the legacy of India’s colonial past is tougher to erase than the most
stubborn of colours. The bazaar becomes an alluring, feral space, which is symbolic of the
‘real’ India, and is deemed completely unsuitable for refined white boys. As the drummer-
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boy tells Kim that “the bazaar’s out o’ bounds. If we go there, we’ll get a dressing down. You
come back” (141). A similar sentiment is echoed by the missionary’s wife in The Room on
the Roof, who believes that the bazaar is the microcosm of all the misery and evils of the
Orient. It becomes analogous to Bhabha’s “Third Space,” brimming over with potential for
new identities to be forged. It is here that Rusty befriends Somi and renounces Mr. Harrison’s
tutelage. It is here that Kim communicates with the Lama through letters, defying his peers in
his English school. The bazaar becomes a key to the ‘real’ India, which hastens their
alignment to the country. In Stevenson’s poem, “Foreign Children,” (1885) a white child,
wary of the dangers of the colonies, asks his oriental peers, “Oh, don’t you wish that you
were me?” In the Rusty novels, we see a reversal of these lines. Rusty befriends the likes of
Somi, Kishen and Ranbir, who openly pity his boring, white childhood. He begins to
experience life only when he can escape from sanitised European boundaries. While the
speaker of “Foreign Children” says “You have curious things to eat/ I am fed on proper meat”
we know what he would prefer.

Rusty and Kim are united in their love for bazaar food which further cements their
commitment to ‘going native.’ Rusty favours the chaats and gol-guppas 73sizzling with fats
in the shops at the bazaar over English lemonade, the thought of which “offends” him, while
Kim craves “mutton stewed with butter and cabbages” and “the forbidden greasy sweetmeats
of the bazars” (178) over the bland European food served at St. Xavier’s. In Rusty Goes to
London, the protagonist waxes eloquent about the redeeming qualities of British food but
secretly confesses his love for koftas, a type of Indian meatball he grew up on. Kim, like
Rusty, would obviously recoil at the thought of a genteel ‘white’ upbringing, but unlike Rusty
who consciously rejects it, he has never had one. Growing up on the streets of Lahore, his life
has been full of native adventure, but he does use his access to all things indigenous to
become a successful British spy. Kim could not have succeeded in espionage had he not been
exposed to the ‘perils’ of the streets of India.

To conclude, one cannot help but wonder how these two writers have negotiated their
identities through their novels and characters and how Bond quietly establishes his
connection with Kipling and Kim. A quiet conversation between the two writers emerges
from a space of divided loyalties to their biological inheritance, cultural capital, and

73
“Chaats” and “Gol-Guppas” are examples of indigenous and affordable street food which are
ubiquitous in India.
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immediate contexts. Kipling never ceased to be Anglo-Indian in the nineteenth century sense
of the term. Kim is dedicated to the eponymous protagonist’s adventures, by an author
seemingly different from but also strangely aligned to his creation. Kipling recreates a native
atmosphere through the peppering of his prose with vernacular phrases and idioms and an
eponymous protagonist who speaks Angrezi (English) haltingly but the vernacular with a
poetic fluency. Bond’s choice of title, The Room on the Roof, is more meditative. Rusty’s
room is a donated, temporary space atop his friend Kishen’s house, simultaneously attached
to it and severed from it. This is where he re-constructs history to make sense of his
formlessness, give direction to his narrative and emerge from the ashes of colonialism.
Unlike Virginia Woolf, who speaks of the necessity of a private room to write in “A Room of
One’s Own,” (1929), Rusty writes nothing in his room. Perhaps the English language is not
an adequate vehicle to convey his sense of unbelonging and re-belonging to a postcolonial
nation of many languages and heterogenous experiences. Rusty’s postcolonial imagination
must re-interpret his new reality in a more idiosyncratic language. Since the self-other divide
is so complicated, it is not a simplistic transition for either Kim or Rusty, for there always
looms large a possibility of a return, a possibility of a collapse.

For Rusty and Kim to grow up they need to settle upon an identity. Bond, like Rusty,
consciously chooses an indigenous one and returns to India and makes it is home forever.
Kipling’s maturation entails a partial renunciation of his Indian childhood in favour of an
English one, though it is much more complicated than a simple erasure. Bond uses his
English literary influences, particularly that of Kipling and writes exclusively in English but
writes of Indian villages which surround his hometown in the hills. Most of his stories are not
set in the urban metropolises of India, though Delhi finds a space in his literary world
because of the time he’d spent there with his father. Much of Bond’s work draws upon his
autobiography and meditates on his formative years as he endlessly ruminates upon what it is
to be an Anglo-Indian in an independent India. Kipling, while acknowledging the extent of
India’s influence on his childhood, remains an imperialist Englishman for much of his adult
life, and his formative years, important as they are, do not define his identity in the way they
do for Bond. However, the legacy of literature, of Anglo-Indianism and of the bildungsroman
itself are handed down from Kipling to Bond which he silently but decidedly acknowledges
through the Rusty novels.
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Chapter Six:
In the Jungle

“The jungle is dark but full of diamonds.” Arthur Miller

“In the Jungle” explores the cultural appropriation and adaptation of an Indian genre
which was spearheaded by an Englishman. Specifically, this chapter places Kipling’s The
Jungle Books (1894-1895) at its heart and studies a few arterial texts which have radiated
from it over the years. I am going to discuss some ways in which native jungle stories have
developed in response to but also sometimes against Kipling’s contributions to the field. Two
seminal writers whose works I will consider alongside Kipling are Dhan Gopal Mukerji
(1890-1936) and Ruskin Bond, who extend, revive, readjust, and even rewrite Kipling’s
genre, and acknowledge his undeniable debt. The chapter will be divided into three sections,
the first on Kipling and the next two on Mukerji and Bond, respectively.

There appear to be both obvious resemblances and marked differences between the
three writers which are crucial to their writing of the genre. The status of the eternal outsider
can be accorded to the British Kipling, the Anglo-Indian, the Bond of British ancestry, and
the American expatriate Mukerji, all three of whom led “amphibious” (Ricketts, 208) double
lives but are also intrinsically linked to India and each other by virtue of spending their
formative years there. However, while Bond, despite a brief stint in England chose to spend
most of his childhood and adulthood in India, Kipling and Mukerji were physically separated
from it after their youth.Tellingly, both Kipling and Mukerji wistfully recreate the Indian
jungle from the geographically removed United States of America: Kipling, from in his house
Naulakha in Vermont and Mukerji from his apartment in New York. In The Unforgiving
Minute (1999), one of Kipling’s biographers, Harry Ricketts, makes astute connections
between the writer’s traumatic childhood years in a boarding house in Southsea between the
ages of six and eleven and the Mowgli stories.74

74
Kipling’s harrowing short story “Baa Baa Blacksheep” (1888) recounts the five traumatic years the
writer and his sister Alice spent in a foster home which he named The House of Desolation in Southsea, under
the rule of the tyrannical Mrs. Holloway, while their parents remained in Bombay. Featuring their fictional
counterparts Punch and Judy, “Baa Baa Blacksheep” notes how childhood abuse can haunt people well into their
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The Jungle Book could not have been conceived without the Southsea 'orphanhood’,
but it was living in America that allowed Kipling to imaginatively revisit those years
and convert loss into gain. (208)

The safe distance of adulthood and America allow the two writers to both disengage and re-
engage with their pasts from a critical, nostalgic, and sometimes objective perspective. To
their foreign, juvenile audience, their depictions of Indian childhoods and jungles might have
an exotic and fascinating appeal. Yet, by choosing complex, enigmatic, and ultimately
impenetrable jungles which are wild spaces to which humans can never fully belong Kipling
and Mukerji further underscore their outsider status. Amidst the sometimes terrifying and
sometimes gratifying portrayals of the trials and tribulations of forest life, both authors
confront and acknowledge the traumas, complications and relentless maelstrom of emotions
and events of their youth.

“Instinct and Appetite: Animal Stories,” which is the second chapter of Angelina
Sbroma’s excellent thesis Intimations of Mortality: Death in Children’s Fantasy (2018),
meditates on the inherent connection between animals and children:

There is ample evidence in the first Victorian fantasies of childhood of how closely
the child and the animal are aligned in children's books. There is Tom, the water-
baby, moving back up the evolutionary chain towards personhood, and both Alice in
Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass are filled with animal characters.
Wonderland begins, after all, with a rabbit attempting to outrun his pocket watch,
and Looking-Glass ends with a "provoking kitten" ignoring Alice's question of who
dreamed it all. (51)

Kipling’s jungle stories pay homage to, recount and meditate on both the pleasant and
unpleasant aspects of his childhood, while for Mukerji the genre becomes a means to
document his indigenous identity. Bond’s approach to the jungle genre is devoid of
autobiographical elements, as opposed to his Rusty stories and his concerns are primarily
postcolonial and environmental, although they feature and are written for a juvenile audience.

According to Bhattacharya, Mukerji “was as much engaged in finding a new audience

as he was in rewriting Kipling's Indian jungle” (10) and his vividly intense and visual jungle

adult lives, and Kipling had very much felt like an orphan, abandoned by his biological parents, during his
Southsea years whereas Judy was the recipient of better treatment.
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stories pay homage to Kipling, whom he referred to as “a brilliant painter of Indian life” (3-
4), although he significantly and deliberately deviates from The Jungle Book’s themes, style
and characterisationin works such as Hari, The Jungle Lad (1924), Hindu Fables for Little
Children (1929)and Gay-Neck; The Story of a Pigeon (1927). The English-speaking audience
Mukerji was writing for is introduced to the awe-inspiring magic of Indian forests through an
observant, reverent and yet distant omniscient narrator. Having migrated to Japan in 1910 and
then subsequently to the United States of America from where he never returned, the physical
and spiritual space of the jungle assumes a Blakean significance for Mukerji, a prelapsarian
world to which he could never and did not ever return. As a contemporary of Kipling, he
might have felt a compulsion to contribute to the genre through the filters of his ‘authentic’
memories of an Indian child who grew up on the fringes of the ‘Kajangal’ forest in Bengal,
whereas Kipling never physically visited Mowgli’s Seonee, an actual jungle in Madhya
Pradesh, which is the setting for The Jungle Books. In Bond’s introduction to the 2014 edition
of The Jungle Book (published by Rupa Publishers in India), he comments on this:

Kipling did not spend much time in the Indian jungles. He was essentially a city
man-Lahore, Allahabad, Simla, and the big railway junctions. Most of his jungle
love came from his father, Lockwood Kipling, who had spent most of his life in
India, and whose book, Beast and Man in India, provided Rudyard with themes and
background material for his jungle stories. (Loc 40)

Drawing inspiration from Kipling’s “Rikki Tikki Tavi,” Mukerji uses the fable as a vehicle
for his short-story collection Hindu Fables for Little Children (1929) and refers specifically
to the Panchatantra (c. BCE) in his footnotes for stories like “Monkey Vanaraj,” although he
renounces the fable in favour of realism in his novel Hari, The Jungle Lad.

Bond reacts against Kipling’s approach to the jungle genre by rejecting the ‘fabular’
mode in favour of a more realistic one. The Jungle Omnibus (2014), his collection of jungle
stories which he wrote and compiled over many years, are resonant and replete with echoes
of Kipling but with quiet conversions, readjustments, and contrasts. Apart from a handful of
stories which feature other characters, the main actors in The Jungle Books are Mowgli, Shere
Khan, recurring animals such as Baloo, Bagheera and Akela and the people who inhabit the
village on the fringes of the forest. In contrast, the stories in Bond’s collection are not
connected by a common set of characters and the choice of the word “omnibus” is indicative
of its inclusive yet diverse nature. As aforementioned, environmental concerns are at the
forefront of Bond’s collection which recalls one of Kipling’s non-Mowgli stories, “The
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White Seal” from The Second Jungle Book which narrates the tale of Kotick’s rehabilitation
of his seal community to safer waters. Child protagonists such as Bisnu (“Panther’s Moon”)
and Sita (“Angry River”) grapple with the overwhelming forces of nature and remain on the
fringes of the jungle as opposed to Mowgli and Mukerji’s Hari who try and live within it.
Although the tradition of Indian fables had its roots in the Aesop’s Fables, it emerged as a
popular children’s genre only after colonial intervention. Not only do Mukerji and Bond
extend and take forth Kipling’s legacy, in some ways they re-write it in keeping with the
idiosyncratic concerns of their times, contexts and individual beliefs.

Ricketts explores the influence of Rider Haggard’s Nada the Lily (1892) on the
inception of The Jungle Books. Ricketts recounts how Kipling acknowledged his debt in a
letter to Haggard in 1895 which “started” (206) him “off on a track that ended in my writing a
lot of wolf stories” (206):

You remember in your tale where the wolves leaped up at the feet of a dead man
sitting on a rock? Somewhere on that page [page 103]?? I got the notion. It’s curious
how things come back isn’t it? (qtd. in Ricketts 206)

It is crucial to note that Haggard was not the only English writer to exert an influence over
Kipling’s jungle oeuvre. “The King’s Ankus,” which appears in The Second Jungle Book
(1895), is influenced by Chaucer’s “The Pardoner’s Tale” (1387-1400) which revolves
around the elusive concept of ‘Death’ and draws attention to the perils of excessive
materialism. However, another source of inspiration for “The King’s Ankus” is an episode
from The Jataka Tales (C. 300 BC -400 AD) which Peter Skiing has classified as “one of the
oldest classes of Buddhist literature” (162-163), and which Kipling’s oriental childhood
certainly exposed him to.

In addition, Kipling might well have drawn upon the rich tradition of the English
animal story when he composed The Jungle Book and The Second Jungle Book between the
years 1894 and 1895. While Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland chronicles, among other
things, its titular protagonist’s interactions with a range of talking animals, Anna Sewell’s
1877 novel Black Beauty revolves around its eponymous and anthropomorphic black horse,
who engages the reader by recounting the various vicissitudes of his life. Charles Kingsley’s
The Water Babies (1863) also makes mention of talking insects, such as the caddisfly who
first makes young Tom aware of his transformation from a terrestrial to an aquatic being.
Although Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Peter Rabbit was published in 1902, justafter The
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Jungle Books, many of her earlier books, which she wrote as early as 1893, may have been
read by Kipling.

However, I aim to complicate Kipling’s imperial reputation by exploring the ways in

which he welcomed native influences, and in turn influenced other native writers, in his
conception of The Jungle Books. Kipling’s ayah, who regaled him and his sister (and their
fictional counterparts Punch and Judy) with oral retellings of tales from the ancient Indian
anthology of animal stories, the Panchatantra exerted a considerable influence on his
imagining of the Indian wilderness. Ironically, however, the Panchatantra itself, written in
Sanskrit, a complex language reserved for ‘upper caste’ members of society, was never
intended to be read by Indian children. The fables were intended to serve the specific social
purpose of imparting moral education to aristocratic Indian princes. However, oral traditions
of these stories lingered in the colloquial, collective memory and were passed down
generations and as Max Muller famously declared, animal fables had their source in Sanskrit
tales. “Rikki-Tikki-Tavi,” from The Second Jungle Book was inspired by “The Loyal
Mongoose” which appears in the 5th book of the Panchatantra, titled Apariktisitakarakam.
Similarly, in “Monkey Vanaraj” from Mukerji’s Hindu Fables for Little Children (1929), the
author’s footnote notes this influence: in which he writes: “This story appears in its purest
form in the Panchatantra. But I give it in the form in which my nurse related it to me when I
was a child in India” (58).

Notable is his translation of ‘ayah,’ (a word which Kipling and Bond both use) as
“nurse” which reinforces Mukerji’s awareness of his Western audience just as Kipling and
Bond anticipate an Indian one. A similar anthology of Indian animal stories, The Hitopadesha
(c.12th century),was translated into English by the founding member of the Asiatic Society,
Sir Charles Wilkins, and these translations by Englishmen from Sanskrit to the more
vernacular English helped popularise the genre among children in India. In 1967, Anant Pai
founded India's first indigenous comic series The Amar Chitra Katha, which was replete with
illustrations and simple English re-telling of stories such as the ones from the Panchatantra.

Although several critics have persuasively argued that the prevalence of the British
Raj underpins most of the stories in The Jungle Books, colonial concerns and their resulting
tensions appear to be secondary to the idea of orphanhood and abandonment, tropes which
also recur in the works of Mukerji and Bond. I argue that the jungle becomes a metaphor for
the arcane and primeval nature of childhood for Kipling and the writers who took inspiration
from his jungle genre. The British biographer and Kipling scholar Roger Lancelyn Green
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(who was also a populariser of Greek myths for children), argues in Kipling and the Children
that “everyone - or perhaps every boy - has inhabited a ‘jungle’ of childhood, at once wild
and secure, in which he learns the Law by which he will live when he leaves it, as he must if
he is to become an adult” (97). This statement casts the jungle as a metaphor for the protected
haven (and tangled web) of childhood, where one needs to grow and develop in response to a
set of primitive yet fair rules. In “Kipling as a Children’s writer and The Jungle Books”
(2011), Jan Montefiore quotes Rosemary Sutcliff, the prolific children’s writer, who argues
that The Jungle Book reconnects Kipling with “the small unlived pocket of childhood in
[him]self” (97), particularly because the story of Mowgli’s abandonment was written when
his first child was a baby, which might have led him to recollect his ‘exile’ from the
paradisiacal realm of childhood in Bombay and his entry into the miserable ‘House of
Desolation’ in Southsea. Ricketts also makes astute associations between Kipling’s childhood
with that of Mowgli’s:

What is most striking in Mowgli’s story, from a biographical point of view - as it

unfolds in ‘Mowgli’s Brothers’, ‘Kaa’s Hunting’, and “Tiger! Tiger!” - is watching
Kipling once more rewriting aspects of his own childhood. The pattern of
abandonment was repeated no fewer than three times: twice in ‘Mowgli’s Brothers’,
which opened with him losing his human parents and closed with him being cast out
by the wolf pack; and again at the end of ‘Tiger! Tiger!’ when he was rejected by the
village. Mowgli became, in effect, a super-orphan. (206)

Ricketts argues that Mowgli’s “amphibious” (208) nature is reflected in his name which
means frog and his ability to blend into different environments, much like the titular Kim and
indeed Kipling himself who, according to Ricketts could lead “a kind of double life, part
American, part English, which did not lock him into either” (208). However, Ricketts asserts
that despite being a “super-orphan” Kipling ensures that Mowgli (who is originally a
woodcutter’s son) is compensated by a host of foster-parents, who compete with one another
for his love, respect, and attention in the jungle. Indeed, the fiercely protective wolf mother is
called “Raksha,” which means protection in Hindustani and her compassion and love shields
Mowgli with the same intensity with which the Woman’s mistreatment of Kipling in
Southsea scars him. At the same time, like Akela, the solitary wolf leader, whose name
means alone, Mowgli the amphibian can belong nowhere and to nobody and inhabits a fluid
realm between the jungle and the human world.
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Kipling’s exploration of the Indian Jungle paved the way for a new genre for Indian
children, who immersed themselves in the adventures of the brown-skinned Mowgli, a
protagonist of English stories who was, ironically, not a foreigner. It is to Kipling’s credit that
his protagonist Mowgli is a native, brown child who blends into the jungle of Seonee despite
being human, just as the juvenile Kipling blended into India despite being British. By
consciously choosing a native protagonist, Kipling seems to pay tribute not only to the
genre’s Indian origins but also to his comfortable Indian childhood, which he recounts in
Something of Myself (1937). While on the one hand, Mowgli’s ‘wildness’ makes it easier for
Kipling to portray him as a native, some secondary literature has read Mowgli as a “coloniser
figure,” who can out-stare animals in their own setting. Critics such as John McClure have
considered his hypnotic gaze on animals as akin to a white coloniser’s gaze. Yet, Kipling
repeatedly ensures that Mowgli’s ‘nativeness’ is never under-played, that his brownness
defines him and that he falls in line with the primordial and unquestioned laws of the jungle:
“Oh hear the call/good hunting all/that follow the jungle law.”

Over time, The Jungle Books have been completely reabsorbed into Indian popular
culture and have hence moved a considerable way from the original. The indigenous and
sustained appeal of Mowgli led to The Jungle Books entering the middle-class imagination
not only through the novels, but comic books, translations, local television shows and
movies, especially in the decade of the 1990s. Walt Disney’s animated adaptation of The
Jungle Book was dubbed into Hindi and aired on the national television channel Doordarshan
on Sundays to attract a school-going audience. It featured a popular Hindi song, “Jungle
Jungle Baat Chali Hain,’ as its title track, composed by the eminent Urdu lyricist Gulzar,
which underscored his identity as an indigenous child, dressed in a loincloth (chaddi pehen ke
phool khila hain) who is privy to the little secrets of nature. Mowgli, Bagheera, Shere Khan
and Baloo have been featured on a plethora of local children’s merchandise in India,
including sharpeners, rulers, coffee mugs, cushions, and wallpaper. Young bilingual readers,
who were increasingly comfortable with English, could relate to Mowgli and explore their
own little jungles of imagination in an increasingly crowded, urbanised, and industrial India.
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Dhan Gopal Mukerji

A little remembered writer even in Bengal, where he spent only his childhood,
Mukerji’s life appears to be nothing short of remarkable, as outlined in his autobiography
Caste and Outcast (1923) in which he meditates upon his divided identity by recounting his
growing years in Bengal and his adult life in America. Unlike Kipling, whose early years
were spent within the urban boundaries of his “Mother of cities” Bombay (which is now
known as Mumbai), Mukerji grew up in a village near Calcutta which was on the border of a
forest named ‘Kajangal,’ which establishes a literal connection between the woods and his
childhood. For Mukerji, the jungle becomes a utopic space, despite being fraught with its
own hierarchies and power dynamics, where diverse species can coexist without the need to
flee its borders. Poignantly, Mukerji took his own life in distant America and only revisited
India through the filters of his memory. The Indian jungle, a setting for much of his juvenile
literature, becomes his means to return, albeit temporarily to the primal space of his lost
childhood, where diverse animals can coexist in both harmony and conflict. The jungle
becomes a fantasy of racial, class and caste diversity, where, despite competition, hierarchies
and unfavourable conditions, each animal finds his place among the dense foliage, and no one
feels the need to leave home as he had. Sadly, Mukerji’s jungle stories are almost completely
forgotten by Indian children, and they never received the popularity which The Jungle Books
still enjoy, just as Bond’s The Jungle Omnibus has never been considered a significant part of
his oeuvre. Perhaps, the jungle story is increasingly becoming a lost genre in India.

The son of Kishorilal Mukerji, a distinguished Indian classical singer, lawyer and
Vaishnavite, a sect belonging to the spiritual sect of Hindu Krishna worshippers, Dhan Gopal
75
rejected the sanctimonious and puritanical Brahmincal customs of India and followed his
brother Jadugopal Mukerji, who headed the underground Bengali revolutionary party
“Juganatar,” at the University of Calcutta. An ardent supporter of Mahatma Gandhi,
Jadugopal dedicated his life to fighting Imperial rule and was imprisoned without a trial.
Concerned that their second son would also get embroiled in dangerous politics, Mukerji’s
parents sent him off to study the science of industrial machinery in Japan, although he was
passionately committed to the Indian struggle for independence. A declared Leftist and
anarchist, Mukerji was disappointed with the inhuman working conditions of Japanese

75
Brahmins were accorded the title of the priestly class by the hierarchical Hindu Indian caste system.
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labourers and decided to move to San Francisco. In America, he attended the University of
California, Berkeley and subsequently Stanford, from where he obtained a degree in
Metaphysics. Despite marrying Ethel Ray Dugan, an American artist, of which his
conservative Hindu family never approved, and enjoying a prolific and celebrated career as a
children’s writer in New York City, he committed suicide at the age of 46 in 1936 (eleven
years before India gained independence from the British) having grappled with feelings of
marginalisation, alienation, and a sense of betrayal for most of his adult life. He was the first
author of colour to receive the Newbery Medal for Gay Neck: The Story of a Pigeon in 1928,
which bears striking similarities to Kipling’s Kim, despite being conceived as a fable.

Although his views on politics were diametrically opposed to Kipling’s imperialism,

Mukerji also viewed himself as a “super-orphan” like Mowgli and his creator. Like Kipling,
he carried a sense of abandonment with him into his adult life, having rejected his
Brahminical upbringing in favour of a revolutionary one, his Indian existence for an
American one, and having had to physically distance himself from a cause he believed in at
the insistence of his parents. His marriage to a Caucasian woman, with whom he had one son,
Dan Gopal Jr., might have further deepened the divide with his parents in India. The deep-
seated anxiety about his lack of belonging to a specific country, or people or cause finds
expression in his passionate descriptions of the Indian jungle, woven from the literary fabric
of his childhood memories, and he dedicates his collection Hindu Fables for Little Children
(1929) to the memory of his mother while Hari, The Jungle Lad (1924) is conceived as a
eulogy to his father.

In his preface to Hindu Fables for Little Children, Mukerji justifies his choice of
subject by claiming that “There may be finer stories than these, but none more instinct with a
sense of the ‘wise conduct of living’” (frontispiece). Although he fears the fastidiousness of
young readers and comments on the difficulty of writing for children “between the ages of
four and eight” (frontispiece), his writing occasionally appears dense and overtly formal
despite being directed to incredibly young children. Conscious of a Western audience, he
intends to expose them to the beauty of the oral Indian fable which upholds moral values by
celebrating animals who commit themselves to the well-being of others. Tellingly, Mukerji’s
Leftist ideologies are reflected in his jungle stories as he never misses an opportunity to
valourise humble, oppressed and usually marginalised animals like bunnies, cows, pigeons,
deer, and monkeys and elevates them beyond their traditional roles as easy prey for mightier
and more powerful animals like lions, tigers, and crocodiles. A champion for the underdogs
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in India, Japan, and the United States, Mukerji led a passionate indictment against the plight
of exploited factory workers in Japan, criticised the tyranny of upper-caste domination in
India and fought for the rights of African and Native Americans. Possibly, this explains his
predilection for bringing animals who have been traditionally marginalised or even
overlooked to the forefront of his narratives. Notably, Mukerji’s portrayal of tigers in Hindu
Fables for Little Children (1929) is parodic at best and they are often depicted as shallow,
unintelligent, and stupidly cruel creatures, incapable of exercising will or authority. His tigers
are bereft of the stately dignity of Bond’s and nor do they possess the majestic malevolence
and shrewd cunning of Kipling’s Shere Khan.

In “Bunny the Brave,” we encounter an ungainly tiger who appears in the absence of
the Elephant King, who has taken leave of his kingdom to enjoy a well-deserved holiday. The
description of Mukerji’s tiger belies that of Blake’s regal tiger who burns “bright” and is
alluded to by both Bond and Kipling in their animal stories. Mukerji subverts the
conventional expectations of the mighty tiger since his hero is a bunny: and allows a small
and often dismissed creature, a bunny rabbit, to emerge as his hero:

The old fellow opened his mouth full of teeth and sharp as knives, then roared. This
he did thrice, as if to clear his throat. Then he said in a mean, hard voice: ‘I see that
you have no king in your jungle’ (11).

This tiger is a power-hungry intruder who tries to disturb the equilibrium of the jungle by
declaring himself king. Too lazy to hunt, he orders the animals to send him their children to
feast upon every night. Unsurprisingly, Mukerji ensures he is defeated by a cheerful and
optimistic young rabbit, Bunny, who tricks him into jumping into a well by convincing him
that his own reflection in the water is a menacing competitor he must fight. The humble
rabbit epitomises the qualities of love and sacrifice as seen in “Bunny in The Moon,” where a
young rabbit named Snow, who is as white as Kipling’s seal Kotick, but assumes the role of a
sacrificial lamb as opposed to a white saviour, renounces his life by jumping into a fire and
roasts himself to provide a meal for a weary traveller who is actually the moon in disguise.
To honour his goodness, the moon asks God to allow the soul of Snow to be conjoined with
his so that “not only men but animals too, such as the elephants, love and look up to him”
(38). Snow’s choice of words and the associations between purity and whiteness might be
indicative of a colour bias, which was (and still is) prevalent in India. In “Bunny the Brave
Saves a Brahmin Priest”, a diminutive rabbit rescues an old Brahmin from the clutches of a
ravenous tiger with ease, thereby questioning the latter’s association with wisdom.
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In “The Cow, Golden Horn,” the humble yet sacred domestic cow is elevated to a
position of heightened power from which he can deceive and defeat a tiger. Golden Horn is
the King’s prized cow who is on a walk with her son Jewel Horn when she is interrupted by a
tiger who openly stalks them for prey. She boldly “scolded” (52) the tiger: “Who are you?
How dare you interrupt our evening walk”? (52) Clever Golden Horn capitalises on the
tiger’s greed, lures him with her jewel-tipped horns and convinces him not to eat her and her
son as she can bring him wealth and profit. Excited, the tiger shouts “capital idea”(55), and
names her “Cow of Plenty” (55) but just as he edges near to loosen the jewels from her horns,
Golden Horn instructs her son to tear into his stomach and hurt him until the tiger “did not
dare to get on his feet. Instead, “he slunk away out of the sight of the two cows” (56). Not
only does Mukerji reverse the hierarchy of the jungle, but his socialist sympathies also
critique an obsolescent capitalism. Keeping his juvenile readers in mind, Mukerji spares the
avaricious tiger’s life and hence prevents his young reader from witnessing a violent death.

The most important thematic consideration of “The Escape of The Stag Barasingh” is
the exhilarating escape of a deer which is honoured him with a name. The narrative gallops at
a frenetic pace to allow the wild Indian deer, who is caged in the “famous zoo of New York
City” (19), a chance to escape. It is worth asking whether Mukerji, a resident of New York
who feels restricted to the racial margins of America sees the trapped stag as a symbol of
himself. The hunted deer features in the works of both Kipling and Bond, but Stag Barasingh,
who is liberated by Mukerji, ends his story with an assertive and stridently onomatopoeic
declaration:

Now behold me as I stand on the ledge of a rock and gaze upon the blue lake.
Bhawnk! Bhonk! Do you hear me? I am free! - Bhoonk: I am free! (29)

The near-complete absence of human characters defines Mukerji’s collection of fables. When
present, they are secondary to animals and easily defeated, like Barasingh’s American
‘keeper’ Mr. James. In “Pigeons of Paradise” we encounter a solitary human creature in a
raging flood who is entirely at the mercy of two loving and unselfish pigeons. A pigeon is
also the character in his most famous work Gay-Neck; The Story of a Pigeon (1927)76 set
against the backdrop of the First World War.

76
Gay-Neck is also known by his Bengali name, Chitragreeb in the 1928 novel.
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Mukerji’s representation of the simian in “Monkey Vanaraj '' is significantly different

from the raucous and lawless “Bandar-Log” of The Jungle Books. Inspired by the
Panchatantra, “Monkey Vanaraj '' explores the friendship between a baboon, Vanaraj, who
lives atop a mango tree on the banks of the river Godavari in Andhra Pradesh and a crocodile
named Kumeer, the Bengali word for crocodile. Kumeer’s avaricious wife is a Lady
Macbeth-like figure who coaxes and cajoles her husband to deceive his friend Vanaraj as she
wants to feast on him and obtain a pearl which is hidden in the folds of his heart. Wracked
with guilt, Kumeer refuses to betray his friend but ultimately gives in to his wife’s wishes.
However, at the last minute, Kumeer's conscience compels him to confess his intentions to
Vanaraj and the monkey uses his wits to gather himself to safety. The story ends on a happy
note and Kumeer is dealt a much kinder fate than Kipling’s Muggermautch (the Hindi word
for crocodile) who is finished off by the white “mutiny child” in “The
Undertakers.”77Mukerji’s monkey becomes the flagbearer of intelligence and loyalty, in a
significant departure from Kipling’s “Bandar-log,” who uphold chaos, lawlessness and
deceit.

The final story of the collection, “Raghu, The Son of a Cook,” advances Mukerji’s
desire for merit to triumph over a predetermined caste system in India. Strangely, it features
no animals but a young child, Raghu, who has a burning thirst for knowledge but is deprived
of educational opportunities owing to his family’s financial plight. He toils in the kitchen of a
rich man’s household to help his mother, the household cook, all the while praying to the
Divine Mother, a Hindu Goddess, for help. Fortunately, a kind Brahmin who is the village
teacher observes him and admires his tenacity and the story ends on a triumphant note when
the Brahmin volunteers to teach the young boy for free and helps him overcome the tyranny
of the caste system as the penniless young and possibly “low-caste” boy becomes one of the
greatest teachers in the world. In a society which is historically plagued by the discriminatory
practices at the higher end of this rigid hierarchical ladder, the generosity of the Brahmin is
pleasantly surprising and uncharacteristic, but it punctuates Mukerji’s commitment to raising
people and animals beyond their fate.

In contrast, we witness a complete reversal of Mukerji’s attitude towards tigers in his

novel Hari, The Jungle Lad (1921), where Hari is reprimanded by his father for wishing that

77
“The Undertakers” was first published in 1894 and later collected in The Second Jungle Book in
1895.
 164

a tiger was dead. Hari refers to the tiger as the “Striped One,” (68) but his father finds this
description reductive and rebukes his son thus:

Nay, Thoughtless One, the tiger is a noble man; terrible, indeed, but remember that
there are many, who by reason of their baseness, are more dangerous! Part of his
strange power, it may be, lies in his enemy’s consciousness that he is more exalted
than they. (68)

His father further defends them against unfair perceptions and silently accentuates their status
as the noble national animal of India:

Tiger never attacks man, as thou knowest, unless by some means he has already
tasted human blood; moreover, he does not mind eating carrion when very hungry.
Never would he kill man wantonly, the Mighty One. (68-69)

Set in the heart of a dense Indian forest, Hari, The Jungle Lad, is sentimental novel rich in
visual imagery. Having grown up near the jungles of Bengal, Mukerji rewrites Kipling’s
jungle to make it more authentic and personal. While the positioning of Hari as both part of
an outsider in the jungle recalls Kipling’s characterisation of Mowgli, Mukerji’s Hari
maintains his distance from the animals, thereby indicating that humans should not even
presume to fully understand the mysterious workings of this distinct kingdom.

Nevertheless, echoes of The Jungle Books resound throughout Hari, The Jungle Lad.
The reader immediately recognises Kipling’s stories when he or she encounters a blood
thirsty tiger, not dissimilar to Shere Khan, who plagues Hari’s village with frequent visits.
Intent on carnage and destruction, he targets domestic animals and human beings alike. Since
the discriminatory British law did not allow Indian hunters to carry firearms Mukerji
hearkens back to Kipling and borrows his use of the “Red Flower,” to defeat the tiger:

By Red Flower Bagheera means fire, only no creature in the jungle will call fire by
its proper name. Every beast lives in deadly fear of it and invents a hundred ways of
describing it. (31)

In a visually striking scene, which is reminiscent of the one in which Mowgli threatens to
“ram the Red Flower” (39) down Shere Khan’s gullet” (39), Hari’s father sets a spool of
Gandhi’s red “Home-spun” cloth on fire by dousing it with butter and throwing it out on his
courtyard to vanquish the prowling tiger. Horrified, the tiger jumps to his death by falling on
the pole meant to spear himand is clubbed to death the following morning. Just as Mowgli’s
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use of fire ensures his removal from the forest and his alienation from its animals, the act of
defeating the tiger marks a proleptic end for the humans of Hari’s village. While Shere
Khan’s death at the hands of Mowgli ensures the safety of the jungles of Seonee, strangely,
the defeat of Mukerji’s wild tiger unleashes fury on the village and its inhabitants and
destroys them. Just before the dead tiger can be skinned and his claws distributed as
talismans, a catastrophic flood sweeps through the village and carries away most of the
livestock and people.

Natural disasters, like the floods which destroy the villages in Hari, The Jungle Lad
and later in Bond’s “Angry River,” allow their child protagonists to catch up with Mowgli’s
resilience, determination and physical capabilities which were results of his upbringing in the
jungle. Apart from destroying his home, the flood ends Hari’s languorous and indolent early
childhood, where, despite repeated reprimands from his mother, Hari is confident that his
status as a child protects him from the needs of domestic chores and labour. Mowgli is denied
this indulgence from the very beginning by his non-human mentors: even as a man-cub, he is
initiated into the workings of the jungle by Father Wolf, Baloo and Bagheera, who instil in
him the rules of the jungle and the responsibilities he needs to undertake:

He grew up with the cubs, though they, of course, were grown wolves almost before
he was a child, and Father Wolf taught him his business, and the meaning of things
in the jungle, till every rustle of grass, every breath of the warm night air, every note
of the owls above his head, every scratch of a bat’s claws as it roosted for a while in
a tree, and every splash of every little fish jumping in a pool, meant just as much to
him as the work of his office means to a business man. (Loc 33609)

The chaotic flood further bridges the gap between Hari and his predecessor Mowgli when his
mother takes ill and dies soon after the flood. Hari’s father falls back on his status as a Rajput
and decides to renounce the shattered remnants of his rural home in favour of a life as a
poacher in a jungle with his son. Hari’s education commences in the forest, which serves as
his classroom:

The Jungle is in many ways a very good school both for animals and little boys. My
father was so convinced of this that he never troubled about any other kind of
education until I was older. (73)

Baloo finds his parallel in Hari’s father who educates him in the stentorian tradition of
Kipling’s strict but well-meaning bear. However, Hari is unwaveringly respectful towards his
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father unlike Mowgli who sometimes resents the well-meaning Baloo’s methods of corporal
punishment in “Kaa’s Hunting” and retaliates by “making the worst faces he could think of”
(49) at his teacher and petulantly calling him a “fat old” (48) bear. Whereas Mowgli’s
experiences educate him in the rules of the jungle, Hari and his father’s exposure to the
wilderness enables them to become professional poachers. As his father’s apprentice, Hari’s
days and nights are devoted to slaying tigers, panthers, and bears for their skins for an
income. Ironically given that they are poachers, Hari’s father warns him that the most
“dangerous” (126) of all animals is man who “is more terrible than the leopard, more greedy
than the jackal, wilier than the serpent and more foolish than the monkey!” (126)

Despite his matchless skill and wit, Hari’s father’s education of his son makes him an
enemy of the jungle as it teaches him the art of hunting. Furthermore, his understanding of
the complexities of the wilderness is necessarily filtered through the lens of human
experiences, unlike Mowgli’s teacher Baloo, who acknowledges the fundamental difference
between man and beast, and establishes the primacy of the latter when he tells Bagheera: “A
Man cub is a mancub, and he must learn all the Law of the Jungle” (47). While the
carnivorous Mowgli is taught to hunt “for food, but not for pleasure” (47), Bagheera
commands Mowgli to “never touch cattle because he had been bought into the Pack at the
price of a bull’s life” (26). Despite their reverential treatment towards the forest, Hari and his
father are rude intruders who exploit its resources. Ironically, despite embracing careers in
poaching, both father and son sanctimoniously attribute their strictly vegetarian diet to their
‘upper-caste’ status and condemn both human meat eaters and carnivorous animals.
Curiously, the ethics of consciously killing animals for their hides and tusks, albeit for an
income, is never brought into question. Moreover, in the chapter “Hunting and Trapping”
Hari justifies his father’s profession by telling King Parakram that “the jungle is being
destroyed with so much killing pursued for pleasure and not for a livelihood as my father and
I kill” (160), and his father makes a peculiar distinction between “cruel slaughter” (161) and
“hunting” (161). Significantly, the discriminatory Indian caste system, which dictates their
vegetarian diets, has no place in the jungle which follows its own non-human laws. Contrary
to the demands of the narrative, however, the first-person narrator, Hari is sometimes acutely
and scathingly critical of hunting for material gain, thereby making one wonder as to the
extent of Mukerji’s sympathy with his human characters:

They (the city people) invariably speak of the tiger as “the quarry,” a thing to shoot.
They call the elephant “the ivory,” for the ivory is all that interests them in elephants.
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The fawn (whose peasant name is The Shy One) “mriga,” is to them only a thing to
hunt and the very name they give to hunting is “mrigaya,” meaning chase. (129)

In contrast to Mowgli’s amphibious name, Hari derives his name from Lord Krishna
thereby drawing attention to Mukerji’s own Hindu Vaishnavite78 lineage. Hence, unlike
Mowgli, who can blend in more easily, by virtue of his dual nature, Hari, who is unable to
completely sever ties with his past, remains on the forest’s fringes, as an eternal outsider who
quietly observes the jungle with awe, foreboding and respect, akin to Mukerji himself living
in the United States of America. Upon his formal acceptance by the Council of Wolves led by
Akela, when Bagheera sacrifices a bull to “buy” him and Baloo vouches for him, Mowgli
lives in harmony with the jungle, albeit temporarily, and prefers his identity of a wolf over a
human. In contrast, Hari does not live in harmony with the animals and does not have a
particular enemy like Shere Khan who relentlessly persecutes him. Moreover, the association
between Krishna and Hari is ironic because notwithstanding the divine association of his
name, Hari and his father do exploit the jungle for personal gain and professional needs of
poaching. Notwithstanding the fact that he is banished from the forest at the end of
“Mowgli’s Brothers,” the jungle is a home to which Mowgli’s beloved foster wolf parents
belong, and one to which he can always return. Arguably, the complex, indecipherable,
persistently mutating yet unshakeable jungle in which Hari and his father live takes onthe role
of Mukerji’s protagonist, as it is a space which Hari will never be able to fully comprehend or
integrate into. Perhaps the most memorable feature of this narrative is the author’s dazzling
use of imagery which encourages the reader to believe that he is indeed an authority on the
forest. Hari often regales the reader with evocative, vivid, and lyrical descriptions of animals
in their natural habitats even as father and son’s intention of utilising the environment for
their own benefit is evident:

Just as the elephants were finishing drinking, between the moonlit spaces emerged
the horns of a stag. The silver light dripped down his horns and flanks like rain…No
doubt he was the pride of the jungle, the most beautiful creature that you can
imagine. His silver body - he seemed made of silver in the moonlight - dipped
halfway into the water he drank… (62-63)
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Hari, The Jungle Lad lacks the narrative urgency of The Jungle Books and the stories of
Bond’s The Jungle Omnibus. Instead, it meanders in a slow, episodic manner with no
pressing concerns of plot and storyline. No spectacular events occur as Hari chronicles
different stages of their lives in the jungle. What comes closest to a climax is when they cross
paths with Kari the Elephant, reputed to be the “the most famous elephant in India '' (163)
who rescues them from the wrath of a fierce tigress. Like Bagheera, Kari claims to have been
raised among humans and been “driven into the jungle by the wanton brutality of meat-
eating, wine drinking men '' (167) and he possesses the nobility of Kipling’s regal black
panther. By introducing Kari, Mukerji sets up a premise for a sequel, Kari the Elephant
(1922), who becomes the ethical voice of the forest by protesting the vicious capture of
animals for the pleasure of man. At the end of Hari, The Jungle Lad, Kari revolts against the
capture of a rhinoceros for King Parakram’s Zoo and breaks the cage into “many fragments
of steel” (215), once again recalling Bagheera who often recounts his own escape from the
King’s court in Oodeypore to Mowgli.

No animals are given the gift of speech in Mukerji’s stories as they are in The Jungle
Books.Hari and his father can only try to read and interpret the body language of various
animals who never directly communicate with them, causing the jungle to remain an
immutable conundrum. This is Mukerji’s critique of Kipling’s characterisation of animals
who have been built around their interactions with Mowgli rather than being portrayed
faithfully and idiosyncratically, but also raises questions as to whether Hari is really and truly
a “Jungle Lad”. Mukerji’s language is far more archaic than Kipling’s even though he was
writing a few decades after The Jungle Books. Kipling uses far more native, colloquial Hindi
words than Mukerji, who uses indigenous vocabulary sparingly preferring the more formal
and antiquated Sanskrit when he does. As an Indian writer catering to a foreign audience, he
is more conscious of his use of English to gain acceptance than either Kipling or Bond. Hari,
The Jungle Lad can be read as an adult Mukerji’s earnest longing to be reunited with his
father, his boyhood, and his childhood home near the wilderness of ‘Kajangal’ to which he
never physically returned.

Ruskin Bond

Like those of Kipling and Mukerji, several stories of Bond’s The Jungle Omnibus
(2014) incorporate autobiographical elements and once again the wilderness, which seems
inextricably linked to orphanhood, becomes a metaphor for reclaimed childhood to which lost
children can return as adults. The choice of a mysterious setting to recount and recreate their
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own turbulent boyhood days allows Kipling, Mukerji and Bond to deconstruct romantic
myths of childhood as an idyllic state. In his autobiography, Lone Fox Dancing (2017), Bond
draws a parallel between himself and the titular animal and recalls harrowing but seminal
episodes of his childhood whichinclude the dissolution of his parents’ marriage, his mother’s
abandonment of her family for a younger Indian man, his father’s premature death in
Calcutta, his unhappy times at a boarding school in Simla and his lack of a proper home
thereafter. Bond treats the jungle as a metaphor for the unpredictability of youth where
children like himself are forced to accept and confront the cruel vicissitudes of life.

Despite a preface for a 2018 edition of The Jungle Books in India, The Jungle
Omnibus is devoid of direct references to Kipling, but it does have subtle allusions and quiet
tributes. In Vagrants in the Valley, his sobriquet Rusty draws an analogy between himself and
Mowgli, as both are trapped in dual identities. Just as Mowgli, caught between man and wolf
says, “I am two Mowglis' ' (Loc 34429), the autobiographical Rusty claims to be caught
between his British and Indian selves. While the undercurrent of orphanhood is omnipresent
The Jungle Omnibus, the overt concerns of Bond’s stories are primarily environmental, and
he converts Kipling’s fabular mode into a realistic one. Bond silently nods to Kipling’s “The
White Seal”, where Kotick the eponymous seal and saviour “led his mate and the other seals
from the killing-grounds of their ‘home’ nurseries to a safe haven ‘in the sea where no man
comes” (Ricketts, 208), because he shares the same concerns about the influence of humans
on the forests and criticizes the deleterious effects of rapid urban industrialisation on forests.

In The Jungle Books, Kipling includes a “queue of would-be-foster-parents, falling

over each other to look after him: Father and Mother Wolf, Akela the Lone Wolf, Baloo the
Bear, Bagheera the Black Panther and Kaa the Python” (Ricketts, 207) as well as his
adversary Shere Khan, although stories like “Rikki Tikki Tavi” and “The White Seal” do not
include them at all. Conversely, The Jungle Omnibus, which is not bound by a set of common
characters, features children who remain somewhat on the fringes of his plots, whereas
stories like “Copperfield in the Jungle” (where Bond indicates his preference for reading
Dickens in the forest guest house as opposed to joining a jungle expedition) feature a version
of Bond himself at the centre of their narratives. Although making multiple references to the
undemanding relationship between animals and children, The Jungle Omnibus offers a
searing indictment of adult avarice and the mindless materialism that leads to the abuse and
exploitation of the environment:
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Very rarely do leopards and tigers attack humans. But with our towns and cities
growing so rapidly, and eating into forest lands, there is bound to be some conflict
between humans and creatures of the wild. We must allow them their own space.
They kill only for food. Humans kill for a large number of reasons - land, money,
power, racial superiority, religion, all kinds of passion, greed and desire. Animals
have simple needs, and all they want is to be left alone. We are the interlopers. (x)

Although Bond includes various versions of himself, the law of the jungle remains a mystery
to his human characters, and nobody is able to read it with accuracy. Humans can only
observe animals who keep their thoughts to themselves. Sita and Bisnu, who feature in
“Angry River'' and “Panther’s Moon” respectively, do exercise a considerable amount of
narrative agency, but they are mostly spectators of the larger forces of nature which often
threaten to overpower them.

Unlike Mukerji’s collection of fables Bond’s inclusion of poems between his stories is
similar to The Jungle Books. However, just as Kipling’s stories are accompanied by
illustrations by his father John Lockwood Kipling, Mukerji’s stories contain “many
illustrations” by Kurt Wiese which lend them a visual appeal. Bond, however, chooses to rely
on the vividness of his verbal imagery to illustrate his tales. Notably, there are striking
similarities between some of his descriptions of jungle life and Kipling’s, such as their
accounts of herding buffaloes. As Kipling describes “Herding in India is one of the laziest
things in the world” (102), so Bond describes them indolently wallowing in the muddy water
of the jheel (lake) in “Tiger, Tiger Burning Bright.”

As in much of his oeuvre Bond’s stories set in the wilderness are about coming of age
and allow his young protagonists the chance to develop and mature. “Angry River” (1972)
draws attention to how animals have always been an intrinsic part of Indian childhood.
Stories for Hindu children often involve Gods and their associations with their animal
companions:Krishna is a cowherd, Kartikeya rides a flamboyant peacock, the Goddess of
Learning, Saraswati, is never without her swan and the fiery Durga is always abreast of her
lion. This makes animal stories an obvious choice for Indian writers. In the preface to her
retelling of Indian folk-stories, Seasons of Splendour (1985), Madhur Jaffrey speaks of the
recurring presence of animals and their seamless connection with the divine as exemplified
by Ganesha, who has the head of an Elephant and the divine Hanuman who is of simian
descent. Sita, the adolescent protagonist of “Angry River”, remembers the stories her now
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ailing grandmother told her as a child. Almost all of them involved animals and explored the
mirthful, easy relationship between beasts and Hindu Gods:

She had done her best to look after the old lady, remembering the times when
Grandmother had looked after her, had gently touched her fevered brow and told her
stories-stories about the gods: about the young Krishna, friend of birds and animals
so full of mischief, always causing confusion among the other Gods. and Indra, who
made thunder and lightning; and Visnu, the preserver of all good things, whose steed
was a great white bird; and Ganesh, with the elephant’s head; and Hanuman, the
monkey-god, who helped the young Prince Rama in his war with the King of
Ceylon. (122)

As the title suggests, the capricious river unleashes her malevolence on Sita recalling the
opening pages of Hari, The Jungle Lad. Sita, like Mowgli, is an orphan who lives with her
aging grandparents in a remote village on the banks of a river. When her grandmother is
taken ill her grandfather rows her to a hospital in the nearest town, leaving Sita to fend for
herself and thereby re-establishing the abandonment motif encountered in the Mowgli stories.
The onslaught of the sudden and terrible flood both traumatises and strengthens Sita, who
needs to rely on her wits and intelligence to help her survive, while animals and their once
secure habitats perish before her eyes. Sita survives by clinging on to a branch of an old
peepal79 tree and enjoying the company of a solitary crow, whose presence seems to validate
her existence while it desperately tries to save its own speckled eggs:

But though the crow was miserable, its presence brought some cheer to Sita. At least
she was not alone. Better to have a crow for company than no one at all. (127)

Unlike Mukerji’s Hari, she does not have an adult to guide her through the havoc wreaked by
nature. Even the only toy she possesses, a ragdoll named Mumta, her constant companion in
the absence of friends or siblings, is dragged away by the merciless river, whose unrelenting
force signals the abrupt end of her childhood. However, she relishes the company of Krishan,
a young, flute playing boy with a boat, who miraculously rescues her and reminds the reader
of the Hindu God Krishna, with whose stories and legacy Sita is familiar. Krishan is an
allegorical figure, emblematic of the deep influence of her deceased grandmother’s religious

79
The evergreen Peepal tree is indigenous to the Indian subcontinent and is considered to possess
medicinal qualities in addition to being revered as sacred.
 172

stories on Sita which fill her with hope, memory, and the will to survive the natural
catastrophe.

Although the turbulent transformations of life weaken her link with the prelapsarian
realm of childhood, Sita emerges victorious at the end of the flood and is reunited with her
recently widowed grandfather. But something within her has changed forever. The elderly
grandparent and the mature granddaughter work together with strength and resilience to
rebuild their hut and their lives and Sita grows up amidst the struggles which ultimately
define us. Like the “amphibious” Mowgli, Sita displays a “chameleon tendency” in her
“ability to adapt successfully to different environments” (Ricketts 208) and survive the
wounds of childhood. Nature is portrayed in her splendour, indifference, malevolence and
benevolence and the omniscient narrator forgives the river at the end of the story despite the
havoc it has caused:

It was a good river, deep and strong, beginning in the mountains and ending in the
sea. Along its banks, for hundreds of miles, lived millions of people, and Sita was
only one small girl among them, and no one had ever heard of her, no one knew her-
except for the old man, the boy and the river. (142)

The enigmatic, cruel, and beautiful wilderness becomes a mirror for Bond’s own turbulent
childhood just as “Angry River” is a metaphorical recollection of his own orphanhood
revisited through the more objective and distant lens of adulthood.

The titles of both Kipling’s “Tiger! Tiger!” which is the episode from The Jungle
Book where Mowgli finally slays Shere Khan, and the last story of Bond’s The Jungle
Omnibus, “Tiger, Tiger, Burning Bright” invoke William Blake’s famous poem “The Tyger”
(1794), which suggests the fabular nature of The Jungle Books but also draws attention to the
association between jungles and the innocence of lost childhoods. Kipling evokes the
frightening aspects of the tiger’s “fearful symmetry” created by “immortal hand or eye,”
whereas Bond’s tiger suggests a more ecological reading of the forces of nature. Bond
ensures that his tiger which “burns bright in the forests of the night” does not conjure up the
“deadly terrors” of Shere Khan.

The image of Mowgli “skinning” (110) his slain mortal enemy Shere Khan “as though
he were alone in all India'' (112) upon his climactic and strategic killing of his foe is well
known to all readers. Whilst Mowgli enlists the help of Akela and a herd of buffaloes to
initiate a stampede which tramples Shere Khan to death, Kipling emphasises how this was
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ultimately the man cub’s battle to fight. The popular Disney movie The Lion King
(1994)copies this motif, thereby reinforcing the popularity and acceptance of The Jungle
Books in popular culture.Mowgli ensures that there is no dignity in Shere Khan’s death and
declares to the wolves: “Brothers, that was a dog’s death” (110). When Buldeo wishes to skin
Shere Khan for “there is a hundred rupees on his head” (111), Mowgli is adamant that he
wishes to finish his “very old war” (112) with Shere Khan on his own. Ironically, conquering
Shere Khan and claiming his skin alienates Mowgli from both animal and human worlds, as
the mercenary Buldeo feeds into local superstition by weaving a “tale of magic and
enchantment and sorcery” (115) among the village-folk. Additionally, there seems to be an
undeniable hint of communal tension as Shere Khan is an Islamic name while Mowgli’s
village, to which Messua belongs, is replete with temple bells, conches and a priest who
seems predominantly Hindu. Hence, “Tiger Tiger'' ends on a note of double abandonment, as
Mowgli declares that “Man pack and wolf pack have cast me out,” (121) though Kipling
assures his young readers that Mowgli will be reincarnated in another “story for grown-ups''
(121). He is referring to “In the Rukh '' (1893), written before The Jungle Books, in which
Mowgli tells Gisborne Sahib of his general hatred for tigers. It is significant that he meets his
adversary in the Sahib’s Mohammedan cook Abdul Gafur, with whose daughter he ultimately
elopes. However, by falling in love with her, Kipling effectively clears any religious
prejudice readers might have associated with Mowgli, although he carries the trauma of Shere
Khan’s tyranny into adulthood.

Bond’s treatment of his tiger is in deliberate contrast to Kipling’s depiction of Shere

Khan in “Tiger, Tiger, Burning Bright.” While its title recalls Kipling’s pivotal chapter in The
Jungle Book, he rescues his endangered tiger from negative associations and endows him
with the gifts of renewal, rejuvenation, and the hope of fathering future offspring.
Significantly, the tiger is the national animal of India, and perhaps this is why Bond, who
repeatedly reinforces his affinity with and love for India, chooses to represent it as the
creation of an “immortal hand,” which is diametrically opposed to Mowgli’s perception of
Shere Khan as a lowly “cattle-thief (108)”. This is revealed in a conversation between two
young boys Ramu and Shyam who live in the village bordering the forest:

Ramu remembered something that his grandfather had once said. ‘The tiger is the
very soul of India, and when the last tiger goes, so will the soul of the country. The
boys lay flat on their stomachs on their little mud island and watched the monsoon
clouds gathering overhead. ‘The king of our forest is dead,’ said Shyam. ‘There are
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no more tigers.’ ‘There must be tigers,’ said Ramu. ‘How can there be an India
without tigers? (166-167)

The tiger’s association with “nobility” (196) recalls the noble panther Bagheera from The
Jungle Books who often invokes the “Broken Lock” that freed him from the King of
Oodeypore’s court.

“Tiger Tiger Burning Bright” opens on the left bank of the Ganga, at the Himalayan
foothills where “there is a long stretch of heavy forest” (166). Bond mourns how humans are
harming the ecosystem through hunting and deforestation. The eponymous protagonist of this
story is a lone tiger who has managed to survive the ravages of natural catastrophes and the
loss of his family through human atrocities. His mate has been shot by “trophy hunters” (174)
and his two cubs have been trapped by men who exported them to a zoo and a circus:

There was a time when the forest on the banks of the Ganga had provided food and
shelter for some thirty or forty tigers; but men in search of trophies had shot them all,
and there now remained only one old tiger in the jungle. Many hunters had tried to
get him, but he was a wise and crafty old tiger, who knew the ways of men, and he
had so far survived all attempts on his life. (167)

The reverence and awe with which Bond treats the national animal of India makes his stand
very clear. He is a champion for their survival and is clearly appalled at their mistreatment at
the hands of nocturnal hunters who covet his “beauty - his stripes, the gold of his body, his
fine teeth and his skin on a wall” (168). Bond’s sentiments find echoes in two children, Ramu
and Shyam, who belong to the nomadic community of Gujjars whose families make their
living by selling buffalo milk and butter and who bravely venture into the edge of the forest
to graze their buffaloes in the muddy waters, despite being acutely aware of this tiger’s
presence in the vicinity. Notwithstanding their knowledge that a tiger’s skin is worth six
hundred rupees (it has gone up six times since the time of Kipling’s “Tiger! Tiger!”), the
boys treat the animal with respect and kinship, which the tiger duly reciprocates. Ramu
requests Shyam to call the tiger “uncle, or maharaja” (171), thereby indicating the position of
respect reserved for him in Bond’s Indian jungle in sharp contrast to Kipling’s jungle. Ramu
becomes indebted to the tiger who saves him from the attack of a wild female bear, whose
aggressive personality is reminiscent of Baloo, but who is devoid of the latter’s commitment
to teaching young cubs the “laws of the jungle.'' Thus, Ramu devises a scheme to save him
from being hunted down by a group of American hunters who have infiltrated the jungle.
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Bond’s tiger reposes in the confidence that the villagers will not harm him if he leaves their
livestock alone and he refrains from touching or tasting human flesh.

However, the onset of a drought and a forest fire leads to a turning point in the story
and reinforces how natural calamities can provoke the calmest of creatures. Famished and
weak, the helpless tiger attacks one of the domestic buffaloes and feasts on him which in turn
enrages the adult Gujar community who vows to hunt him down, despite Ramu and Shyam’s
protests that he must have been ravenous. Shyam’s father, Kundan Singh, vows to kill the
tiger with “a double-barrelled gun of ancient vintage” (187) which his father had bought from
an “Englishman” (187) as though an Indian weapon would fail to do the task. As Bond has
established a link between the tiger and the very soul of India, it might be fitting that an
Englishman’s gun is the chosen weapon of destruction. In contrast, the animals in Kipling’s
“Letting in The Jungle” perceive the Englishmen as saviourssince they “would not let honest
farmers kill witches in peace” (70) and hope that they will prevent the village from burning
Messua and her husband at the stake in return for having protected Mowgli.

In “Tiger Tiger Burning Bright,” Kundan Singh, is temporarily paralysed and

overwhelmed by the magnificent tiger and is unable to shoot him as he misses his aim. He is
in such awe of the animal that he feels his liver turn to water upon seeing him causing Bond’s
tiger to escape with only a slight injury. However, when he attacks yet another domestic
buffalo for food, the enraged village elders renounce their English guns and use local tins and
drums to frighten away the tiger and they shoot him on a bridge and the tiger is carried away
by the swirl of the river. The villagers assume he is dead and while a semblance of peace
returns to the forest, the humans who drove him away sense his loss keenly and feel that they
have ripped apart the core of the forest:

they began to feel that the forest was no longer a forest. It had been shrinking year by
year, but, as long as the tiger had been there and the villagers had heard it roar at
night, they had known that they were still secure from the intruders and newcomers
who came to fell the trees and eat up the land and let the flood into the forest. But
now that the tiger had gone, it was as though a protector had gone, leaving the forest
open and vulnerable, easily destroyable. (196)

Bond’s tiger is depicted as a noble protector, a guardian spirit who is far removed from his
literary predecessor Shere Khan whom the reader loathes and fears as much as Mowgli.
Unlike Kipling, however, Bond refuses to let his “mighty animal” (195) die and allows the
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river to transport him to a distant village where he is relieved at the lack of human scent and
overjoyed when he smells a tigress who responds to his roar. The story ends on a note of
hope and the possibility of a union between the two as Bond endows his tiger with the gift of
an afterlife that Kipling had bestowed on Mowgli.

Although Bond deviates from Kipling's fictional treatment and representation of

tigers, there are some remarkable similarities. Jan Montefiore argues that “The Jungle Beasts
possess not only a Law but a lively oral culture, in which wisdom is passed down through
storytelling” (103). The same can be said of the humans in the stories who pass down legends
and lore about jungle beasts. In The Jungle Book, Buldeo regales the village-folk with tales of
a ghost-tiger whose body was “inhabited by the ghost of a wicked, old money-lender, who
had died some years ago” (97), the proof of which lies in the tiger’s limp which resembles
that of the moneylender, Purun Dass. Mowgli dismisses the story as “cobwebs and moon-
talk” (97-98) as he believes that Shere Khan is a “beast that never had the courage of a
jackal” (98). A similar story is narrated by Ramu’s grandfather, about a bania who is turned
into a fearsome man-eating tiger. Bond’s allusion to Kipling is through a version of Buldeo’s
story and this secures the relationship between the writers, although the children in his story
refuse to vilify the tiger.

Rewriting a genre, as Bond does, is nevertheless a form of homage to Kipling. While

Shere Khan mistreats and threatens Mowgli, Bond’s unnamed tiger, bereft of religion or
caste, protects the Gujjar children Ramu and Shyam, who in turn protect him. In Bond’s
postcolonial story, the dissolution of the British Raj allows the tiger to dream of survival and
even rebirth in a newly independent land which is finally independent of Imperial rule.
Bond’s narrative does not play on the tension between tiger and human as much as it does on
the effects of human activities on the forest. There is no sympathy afforded to Shere Khan
who is divisive, malicious, and deceitful, and a threat to the forest leadership. However, Bond
also depicts his tiger as a ferocious hunter and there are vivid and visceral descriptions of his
killing and consumption of a gentle chital (deer) as he growls with “pleasure” (174) and a
recollection of a time when he attacked a buffalo in his youth not out of hunger but the
youthful folly of bravado. In Mowgli’s tale the buffaloes are instrumental in the killing of
Shere Khan and in Bond’s story the tiger succumbs to its temptation of buffalo meat and
antagonizes the villagers. Additionally, tracking buffaloes and deer serve as a test for young
wolves in The Jungle Book as described in “Hunting Song of the Seonee Pack:”

And a wolf stole back and a wolf stole back

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To carry the word to the waiting pack,

And we sought and we found and we bayed on his track

Once, twice and again! (42)

However, Bond undermines the assumption of Mowgli’s narrative that a man-cub and tiger
cannot co-exist in the same forest. In “The Leopard,” he explores this idea by quoting from a
D.H. Lawrence poem, “There was room in the world for a mountain lion and me” (6), since
he believes that children and wild animals can live together. He bears the conviction that
human children and tigers are not mutually exclusive.

In another story, “To See a Tiger,” Bond describes his almost futile trip to a forest rest
house to see a tiger from its veranda where he is fuelled by steaming cups of tea. Although he
keeps vigil diligently for several nights, he is wildly unsuccessful. However, on his way
home on a jeep a tiger “magnificent” (160) and “full-grown” (160) appears in the middle of
the road and gives them a “quick, disdainful glance” (160) before walking “majestically”
(160) into the jungle. This is reminiscent of a scene from Vagrants in the Valley where Rusty
and Kishen have a similar encounter. Bond is building up to a Kiplingesque moment of
confrontation only to consciously abort it through a sudden anti-climax. This is a repeated
motif in many of his stories where he almost alludes to and then deliberately steers clear of
Kipling. The story ends with Bond’s ironic dismay at having spent three sleepless nights but
then witnessing its majesty in broad daylight. Bond declares that “the only real Englishman
left in the world were to be found in India” (160) at his friend’s suggestion that he cheer his
spirits with another cup of tea. Tea, the symbol of Englishness, couldn’t help in his pursuit of
a tiger in the wilderness at night. However, in another short story, “The Tiger in the Tunnel,”
Bond does portray a sinister tiger which had been “preying” (104) on men “for years” (104)
who attacks and kills Baldeo, a tribal watchman whose duty is to oversee the passing of trains
at night. The hero of the story is his locally made axe, a weapon which finally succeeds in
injuring and trapping this evil tiger which is ultimately run over by a train. Bond’s choice of
the name Baldeo recalls the tall-talking Buldeo from The Jungle Book. However, Baldeo,
Bond’s watchman, becomes a guardian of the village by defeating a menacing and lethal
creature, unlike Kipling’s Buldeo who is a dishonest mercenary. Bond seems to endorse
tigers who do not interrupt human life or pose a threat to people in general, as can be seen in
the facetious closing lines of his poem “Tigers Forever” inThe Jungle Omnibus:

May there always be tigers.

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But not so many, that one of them

Might be tempted to come into my room

In search of a meal! (99)

Hence, Bond’s Jungle stories are full of echoes of Kipling with quiet readjustments and
contrasts.

The next section demonstrates a complete reversal in Bond and Kipling’s treatment of
panthers in The Jungle Books and “Panther’s Moon”. During Mowgli’s early days in the
jungle, Bagheera is his constant companion and, along with Baloo the bear, teaches him the
“Laws of the Jungle” whereas the relationship between Bisnu and the sinister panther who
haunts their village of Manjari is far from pleasant. Kipling ensures that the noble Bagheera is
also fierce and feral, more so because of his early association with humans having been
incarcerated in a cage at the “King’s Palace in Oodeypore” (29) where his mother had died
amidst men. However, being “no man’s plaything” (29), he had escaped his imprisonment
while still retaining an emotional bond with humankind. In one instance, he tells Mowgli that
“because Ihad learned the ways of men, I became more terrible in the jungle than Shere
Khan. Is it not so?” (29) “Yes”, responds Mowgli, “all the jungle fear Bagheera - all except
Mowgli” (29). Notwithstanding his fiery temperament, Bagheera treats Mowgli with
tenderness and affection and refers to him as “Little Brother,” and the intimate relationship
between them is portrayed through their body language, when Mowgli often rests his head on
“Bagheera’s beautiful black skin” (27) and the panther often warns Mowgli about Shere
Khan’s designs on his life:

He loved better than anything else to go with Bagheera into the dark warm heart of
the forest, to sleep all through the drowsy day, and at night to see how Bagheera did
his killing. Bagheera killed right and left as he felt hungry, and so did Mowgli-with
one exception. (26)

Both Mowgli and Bisnu set out to avenge the mistreatment of their loved ones and their
personal tragedies spur them to help society at large. While Bisnu’s calamities are brought
upon by a sinister panther haunting their village, Mowgli receives support and respect from
Bagheera. Sickened by the sight of his adoptive mother’s Messua’s blood when the villagers
attack her, Mowgli is determined to take revenge on the perpetrators of this violence in
“Letting in the Jungle.” Bagheera is awed by Mowgli’s resolve and power when he witnesses
how Mowgli summons Hathi the elephant to help him destroy the village whose inhabitants
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victimised Messua. The adolescent Bisnu, on the other hand, is motivated to take on the
panther following the loss of his beloved pet dog Sheroo and the physical wounds the panther
inflicts upon his young friend Sanjay. Bisnu emerges as the saviour of the village as he fights
the vicious panther, which is in complete contrast to Mowgli’s special and unprecedented and
respectful relationship with Bagheera.

Set in the remote village of Manjari which is nestled in a tucked away corner of the
Garhwal Himalayas, “Panther’s Moon” tells the story of young Bisnu who at twelve
considers himself to be the head of the family. Named after one of the most powerful Hindu
Gods, Vishnu, “The Preserver '' of the Universe, Bisnu lives with his sister Puja, a widowed
mother and a pet dog, Sheroo. Determined to educate himself and secure a future for his
family, Bisnu valiantly trudges to a school in the distant town of Kemptee every day after
offering morning prayers to the elephant-headed Lord Ganesha, the Hindu God of new
beginnings, whose half-animal, half-human form symbolises the synergy between man and
beast. While the story centres around a ghastly panther, its characters derive spiritual solace
by keeping faith in the elephant-headed God. We learn, however, that the panther, having
been maimed by a careless hunter, has been forced to become a man-eater owing to a bullet
in his leg. Hence, in Bond, humans and animals are increasingly at odds because of casual
hunting not because man and beast are inherently opposed to one another. Additionally, Bond
ensures that the complex panther is not an outright, unidimensional, and crude villain by
stating that a “panther is an enigma” (53).

The simple lives of Bond’s characters are rudely disrupted by the arrival of a
ferocious and cunning panther in the village which attacks the vulnerable and the able with
equal ease. His victims include Sanjay, a nine -year-old boy who suffers gruesome injuries,
Bisnu’s strong dog Sheroo, an old lady who succumbs to throat injuries inflicted by him and
the fit and active village postman Mela Ram whose blood-stained clothes indicate his painful
end. Although the panther poses a threat to the entire village of Manjari, his battle with Bisnu
quickly becomes personal after his beloved dog Sheroo is viciously killed by the panther.
Subsequently, the panther repeatedly tries to attack Bisnu and his family and even brazenly
attempts to invade their domestic sphere by scraping on the walls of their hut, but Bisnu
outwits him by hitting his head with a fishing spear. On another occasion, the panther, who is
as determined to capture Bisnu as the latter is to defeat him, confronts Bisnu in the forest
which forces the boy to climb a tree and wait for help from his fellow villagers in
desperation. The climax of the story unravels during the harvesting season when the panther
 180

begins tracking his sister Puja in an open field, but Bisnu, alert to his presence, leaps at him
while the village elders rush to his support and finally manage to kill the animal. In a scene
reminiscent of The Jungle Book, the locals declare their intention of selling the panther’s skin
for a good price in the city. The creature’s claws, deemed to be powerful talismans, are first
offered exclusively to Bisnu but are later distributed to all the small fry of the village at his
magnanimous insistence. The story ends on a note of victory where a feast is held, and the
villagers celebrate Bisnu’s courage and the death of the panther in a scene not dissimilar to
the joyous commemoration of Shere Khan’s death:

“There will be a feast at my house tonight,” said Kalam Singh. “Everyone in the
village must come. And tomorrow we will visit all the villages in the valley and show
them the dead panther, so they may move about again without fear.” (56)

Ultimately, however, Bisnu’s battle with the panther transcends the personal and
becomes an act of social survival and a battle for a connection with the larger world. Manjari,
already a remote and isolated village, is further cut off from all civilisational ties when the
panther kills the lone mailman, Mela Ram, who kept the narrow doors of communication
open between Bisnu’s village and the outside world. In addition, the panther’s shadowy
presence prevents Bisnu from pursuing his education, as his mother is concerned about the
long and arduous journey to the Kemptee school by foot. Narrative agency rests squarely on
Bisnu’s young shoulders and it is he who needs to ensure that Manjari returns to and retains a
link with the outside world. Throughout the story his sister asks him for some glass bangles
from the township of Kemptee which Bisnu only remembers to buy after the panther’s death.
The blue and white bangles for Puja symbolise not only the peace and tranquillity afforded by
the death of the panther, but also the harmony which ensues at the end of a successful
transition which allows the outer world to enter Manjari. In contrast, Bagheera prepares and
strengthens Mowgli for his transition into wider human civilization from his microcosm of
the forest as he begins to anticipate Mowgli’s imminent rejection by the jungle:

‘Oh, thou art a man’s cub, ‘said the Black Panther, very tenderly; ‘and even as I
returned to my jungle, so thou must go back to men at last, -to the men who are thy
brothers, -if thou art not killed in the Council. (29-30)

In what appears to be a deliberate reaction against Kipling’s characterisation, Bond gifts his
tiger with the noble attributes of Bagheera and converts his panther into a mean and hateful
villain like Shere Khan. While Kipling’s panther is Mowgli’s wise and able mentor, Bond’s
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panther becomes Bisnu’s Shere Khan-like tormentor. Notably, at the end of the story Bisnu
declares himself “a man” (59), almost as though his encounter with and demolition of the
panther has resulted in the end of his childhood.

The jungle is a genre which has appealed to generations of children both within and
without India. It offers an escape from the mundane realities of urban existence, but it also
becomes a platform where metropolitan concerns can find a symbolic arena. Moreover, the
jungle also serves as a metaphor for the diverse struggles of childhood. For writers like
Kipling, it also provides an avenue to rectify past wrongs. As Ricketts argues:

Equally gratifying for Kipling was Mowgli’s eventual outwitting and destruction of
Shere Khan the Lame Tiger, the malevolent would - be - foster - parent who, like the
giant or witch in the fairy story, wanted to eat the hero. Shere Khan stood for Mrs.
Holloway, and his sidekick, Tabaqui the jackal, her son. (207)

The “hero” (207) here can be a symbol of the state of Kipling’s childhood which Mrs.
Holloway did her best to devour. Kipling’s stories can then be read as an act of retrospective
wish-fulfilment for his helpless childhood self. Bond’s love of nature and his decision to
renounce the lure of big cities in favour of a simple life in the foothills of the Garhwal
Himalayas, make the jungle a natural choice of setting for him. However, his stories also
serve as a reminder of the choppy waters of childhood which he had to navigate to emerge
into adulthood. Bond encapsulates the human condition when he says: “The plainsman looks
to the hills for the needs of his spirit, but the hill man looks to the plains for a living” (29).
Mukerji’s literal exile from the country of his birth with which he was nevertheless
preoccupied for most of his literary life, finds expression in the jungle where he can lose
himself in the depths of a free but feral India. In its simplest form, India becomes a metonym
of the innocent, prelapsarian world Kipling inhabited before he was sent to Southsea. In order
to reclaim his lost past, the jungle of his world must be cleansed of villains who pose a threat
to it. However, despite the earnest contributions of talented writers like Mukerji and Bond,
Kipling remains the critical and canonical writer of jungle stories in India and The Jungle
Books continue to command immense respect and favour among its young readers.
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Chapter Seven:
The Post-Carrollean Lives of Alice: Adapting of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in
Wonderland in Bengal

“Alice thought to herself "I don't see how he can ever finish, if he doesn't begin.”
― Lewis Carroll

This chapter examines the impact on and influence of Lewis Carroll’s classic text, Alice’s
Adventures in Wonderland (1865) in Bengal and surveys a range of texts which were inspired
by itbefore finally undertaking a close reading of Gaganendranath Tagore’s “Bhondar
Bahadur” 80 (1926) which has been variously translated as “Otter the Great,” “Otter Rex” and
“Toddy Cat the Bold.”While “Bhondar Bahadur” never makes an unequivocal reference to
Carroll’s text, the latter casts a recognisable shadow over the narrative. In addition, it exerts a
considerable influence on Bengali writers like Sukumar Ray who was heavily inspired by
Carroll’s nonsense genre, as seen in his classic text Haw Jaw Baw Raw Law (1921) and
volume of poetry Abol Tabol (1923). Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland has been
instrumental in the development of the fantasy genre in Bengal and has also been translated
for a juvenile Bengali audience by Hemendra Kumar Ray. The rationale for placing this
chapter late in the thesis is the contemporary renewal of interest in the origins of Bengali
fantasy fiction suggested by two recent 2018 translations of Tagore’s text which have rescued
it from the obscure margins of literary history." Sanjay Sircar’s English translation of
Tagore’s short story appears in Fantasy Fictions from the Bengal Renaissance (2018) and is
titled “Toddy Cat the Bold”, which the translator converts into a chapter book like Alice.81
This volume also contains a second translation of a novella by Gaganendranath’s brother,
Abanindranath, Kheerer Putul (The Sweetmeat Doll), which is also considered to be
influenced by Carroll. A second translation of Tagore’s work, “Otter Rex”, appears in a
collaboration of Debarati Bandyopadhyay, Anshuman Bhowmick, Reema Sen and Sumanta

80
A Bhondar is a species of a type of Asian civet cat.
81
I have read the Kindle edition of Fantasy Fictions from the Bengal Renaissance (2018) because the
printed versions of certain Indian texts were difficult to obtain during the years of the pandemic.
 183

Gangopadhyay. While Sircar’s choice of title highlights the virtue of courage which
82
characterises the eponymous Toddy Cat, “Otter Rex” alludes to Oedipus Rex as the
translators take a “high” tragic text and make it more local and domestic. “Otter Rex”
demonstrates significant deviations from Sircar’s translation, “Toddy Cat the Bold”. Firstly,
unlike Sircar who chooses to retain some of the Bengali nomenclature and phrases and makes
his translation consciously bilingual the second group of translators, perhaps anticipating a
more English readership, use Anglicised names. Hence, Budhhimanta the wise rabbit, Parrot
Saheb, Elder Brother Bhondar of Sircar’s translation become Sir Sagacious, Mr, Parrot, and
the Ancient Otter respectively. The only exception is the elderly Queen, Joteburima, an
appellation which draws attention to her bedraggled hair, whose original name is maintained
in both translations. Secondly, the first-person narrator remains unnamed in Otter Rex, unlike
in Sircar’s translation where he is referred to as Old Boy, thereby drawing attention to the
genre of fantasy which allows an aged man to transform into his five-year-old self, to partake
in this story. Additionally, since “Otter Rex'' appears in an anthology of varied stories, it is
not accompanied by a detailed introduction and is more compact than Sircar’s “Toddy Cat the
Bold.” In this chapter, I focus on Sircar’s translation which divides “Bhondar Bahadur”,
originally an uninterrupted piece of prose into ten distinct chapters. He structurally
appropriates it to allude to the ten days of the Hindu festival of the Goddess Durga with
which Tagore’s original story opens.

In an exhaustive and informative introduction, Sircar acknowledges that while Kshitis

Roy undertook the first translation of “Bhondar Bahadur” which he titled “Otter the Great” in
1962, very little critical work has been conducted on Tagore’s short story. Significantly,
Sircar uses the term “epigonous” (179) to describe Tagore’s adaptation of the classic English
text, as it is far from a direct imitation of Carroll’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865).
Nevertheless, like Alice in Wonderland, it is a dream story featuring talking animals, a range
of odd characters from Indian folklore and culture, a series of strange incidents and Indian
rhymes. Tagore takes Carroll’s English text and adapts it into an adolescent one with a
didactic slant and his decision to convert a full-length work into a short story is another mode
of appropriation. While Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland essentially engages in
different forms of play, there is a more structured, pedagogical aspect to “Bhondar Bahadur,”

82
Oedipus Rex (first performed in 429 BC) is an ancient Athenian tragedy by the Greek playwright
Sophocles and is one of his three surviving Theban plays.
 184

which converts it into a YA or “juvenile” text replete with the mentors, nationalist concerns
and inter-generational dynamics we have seen in the adventure stories in chapter one of the
thesis.

In his introduction to the 1998 Penguin Classics edition of Alice’s Adventures in

Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass (1871), Hugh Haughton invokes the immense
popularity of these works in England among adults and children alike, and how along “with
the Bible and Shakespeare, it is reputed to be the most quoted of English texts” (xii). The
universal appeal and intrigue of Alice, however, has never been restricted to England, and it
has been translated into 174 languages. Antonie Zimmerman’s German translation of
Carroll’s work Alice’s Abentuer in Wunderland (1869), Vladimir Nabokov’s Russian version
in 1923 and the Japanese Fushigi no Kuni no Arisu in 1927 by Saisuke Nagasawa are a few
examples. Significantly, the Harvard Library makes note of how Nabokov’s version contains
significant departures and cultural appropriations which make it more appealing and relevant
to the Russian context such as renaming Alice Anya and a historical reference to the
Napoleonic occupation.

Carroll’s Alice undoubtedly enjoyed a varied and fascinating set of afterlives in

Bengal. In “A "Moderately" Bengali Alice: Tracing Moderate Nationalism in Trailokyanath
Mukhopadhyay's (1847-1919) Kankabati,” Sreemoyee Dasgupta makes a compelling
comparison between Mukhopadhyay’s Kankabati (1892) and Carroll’s works:

a central female protagonist slips into a dreamscape where she encounters the strange
and the wondrous; has adventures in unfamiliar and somewhat exotic settings; meets
a variety of curious and fantastic anthropomorphic creatures and finally, returns to
the realm of reality. (2)

A former curator of the Indian Museum of Calcutta, Mukhopadhyay was a prolific, bilingual
writer who travelled widely through Europe and adapted and translated into Bengali the
works of English writers such as Conan Doyle, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Lord Lytton. Most
strikingly, in Kankabati, he uses the framework of Carroll’s text to stir up sentiments which
are at once anticolonial but also critical of indigenous practices such as forced marriages for
young girls. Dasgupta further argues that Kankabati is a “text of a very particular historical
moment (2) which “portrays the early stirrings of nationalism (also known as Moderate
Nationalism) and a social discourse best represented by a fluid movement between the old
and the new, reality and fantasy, between the possibilities and improbabilities of
 185

contemporary Bengali society” (2). Dasgupta mentions that the similarities between
Kankabati and the Alice books have been pointed out by earlier writers like Tagore and
Hemendra Kumar Roy which indicates the early consumption and absorption of Carroll’s
work in colonial Bengal.

The artist Abanindranath Tagore, Gaganendranath’s brother, wrote the novella

“KheererPutul” (“The Sweetmeat Doll”) which is replete with loquacious animals and
elements of fantasy in 1896. Sircar regards this work as yet another adaptation of Carroll,
noting its unusual “Alice-like journey” and indeed “The Sweetmeat Doll” resembles Through
the Looking Glass in its use of nursery rhymes and the presence of loquacious animals,
although it mindfully draws upon oral folklore and traditions of oral storytelling. Nephews of
the Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore whose family spear-headed the artistic and cultural
aspects of the Bengal Revolution, Gaganendranath “adapted and went beyond the techniques
of Far Eastern art and Cubism (338), while Abanindranath was

influenced by Whistler’s Aestheticism, experimented in the Mughal style and with

Chinese and Japanese calligraphic traditions, used images from The Arabian Nights
to depict colonial Calcutta, and believed that Indian traditions could be adapted to
express a progressive pan-Indian national culture. (338)

Since Gagenendranath was a member of the Brahmo Samaj 83 which aimed to synthesise the
merits of European and Asian cultures, his adaptation of a classic English text is unsurprising.
The brothers were raised and educated in colonial India at the peak of local nationalist
movements. The Bengal School of Art which was associated with the Indian Swadeshi
84
Movement and endorsed by officers of the Raj encapsulates the inclusive spirit of Tagore
and that of his only literary work inspired by Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, “Bhondar
Bahadur” (1926).

Hemendra Kumar Roy’s Ajab Deshe Amala (1934) 85 was the first Bengali translation
of Alice. Significantly Carroll’s heroine is called Amala, a Bengali name which recalls

83
The Brahmo Samaj, established in 1828 by the Bengali social reformer Raja Ram Mohan Roy,
aimed to spread awareness of Monotheism and questioned what they believed to be superstitious Hindu
practices during the Bengal Renaissance.
84
Swadeshi Movement-This movement towards self-sufficiency which started in Calcutta in 1905 was
a Nationalistic Movement which put a curb on foreign goods.
85
Ajab Deshe Amala translates as Amala in an Uncanny Land, and the translations are mine.
 186

Nabokov’s renaming of his Russian Alice Anya, and these acts of re-naming become a mode
of cultural appropriation. The word “Ajab” in Bengali means strange and further highlights
the uncanny nature of Wonderland. Interestingly, while Ray’s translation does not interfere
with Carroll’s plot, he does alter the local flora, fauna, and food to cater to the palettes of
native children. For example, the “daisy-chain” (7) Alice considers weaving before going
down the rabbit hole is transformed into a bunch of “Bakul flowers” (12) in Ajab Deshe
Amala. Furthermore, the magic potion which Alice consumes which diminishes her size has
“a sort of mixed flavour of cherry-tart, custard, pineapple, roast turkey, toffee, and hot
buttered toast” (11), whereas the same potion which Amala tastes recalls quintessentially
Bengali delicacies:

She raised the bottle to her mouth and had a little taste of the liquid. It tasted of
pineapple chutney, mango pickle, a sour curry of Hilsa fish, cottage cheese and an
assortment of delectable chocolates. (Roy, 13)

Roy chooses to depict food which will appeal to the juvenile Bengali palate by creatively
rather than precisely translating the edible fare of Carroll’s text. This creative license does not
alienate Roy’s readers from the original work but rather allows him to establish a more direct
connection with Bengali children who can more clearly relate to and relish the flavour of
local delicacies familiar to them.

Nevertheless, although these great stalwarts of literature have considerably

contributed to the Bengali afterlife of Carroll’s works, very little attention has been paid to a
short story written by Gaganendranath Tagore called “Bhondar Bahadur” (1926). The story
was conceived in response to a request made by Gaganendrath’s grand-nephew, Mohanlal
86
who produced a handwritten children’s magazine Deyala” (177) for a contribution.
Initially, his instincts as a visual artist prevailed and he contributed some fabulous paintings
which Mohanlal refused to accept on the grounds they would be wasted in an amateur
magazine and reserved them for when Dadabhaiyer Deyala would be formally published in
print, and which sadly never happened. Instead, Mohanlal implored his grand uncle for a
story, and it is little wonder that the artist’s story, rich in visual imagery, thereby offers an
answer to Alice’s famous question, “what is the use of a book” (7) which is devoid of

86
The magazine was named by Abanindranath Tagore, and Deyala refers to the “smiles and
movements of infants while dreaming (177).
 187

“pictures or conversations”? (7) Evocative descriptions such as Bhondar’s eclectic army, is

testament to the visual richness and unique imageryof the work:

I clambered up the dark stairs, panted my way to the fourth-floor terrace, and saw
that our terrace was now absolutely packed with thousands and thousands of
bhondars, many mewling cheetahs and many species of hares and squirrels. All of
them were dressed as sepoy soldiery, garbed in red tunics and breeches with turbans
of various colours on their heads; some with shields and swords, some with bows
and arrows in their hands, and then again some holding cudgels and maces: all
standing erect in serried ranks. (272)

This gives a clear description of the hierarchical organisation of this strange army which is
led by a “roly-poly dog in hat and coat, riding on a red wooden horse (272) named Bakmal
who refers to the toddy cat as “The High King” (272). Yet, realistic as the portrayal of the
rigid power structures which exist within an army may be, Tagore’s descriptions underscore
the strange, fairy tale-like aspects of this unusual, whimsical work which topples taut societal
divisions. Despite being an artist, Tagore did not illustrate his only work of fiction, possibly
because his nephew steadfastly refused to waste his uncle’s paintings for a non-professional
magazine, whereas Carroll took great pains to employ a professional illustrator, John Tenniel,
who was as much of a perfectionist as the author himself, for the publishedversion of Alice’s
Adventures Under Ground (1865). According to Haughton, Carroll himself had “produced
his own home-made illustrations for the original” (lxxv) hand-written manuscript in contrast
to Tagore.

The plot hinges on the dramatic kidnapping of the regal and eponymous civet cat’s
son, Nichua, by their “age-old enemy” (256) the “Two-Faced Rakshasa-demon of the
Chutupalu Jungle” 87 (256) and focuses on a father’s desire to rescue his son. The story opens
when the Toddy Cat implores the unnamed, aged, male human narrator (presumably a
childhood friend the narrator has conjured up from his childhood) to join a mission to rescue
his kidnapped son Nichua. Apparently, the civet’s family has been residing in a broken pillar
of the narrator’s family mansion for generations. He readily agrees to accompany the Toddy
Cat’s army and with an intelligent rabbit, Buddhimanta the Wise, to rescue young Nichua.
This isTagore’s first significant departure from Carroll, as the human and animal protagonists

87
Rakshasha translates as a villainous demon.
 188

are both significantly advanced in years. The genre of fantasy makes allowances for these
mature characters to participate and enter the world of children’s literature, which Jacqueline
Rose has famously argued in The Case of Peter Pan, Or The Impossibility of Children’s
Fiction (1984) is very much about adult concerns and dynamics. Unlike Alice’s rather
desultory adventures, Gaganendranath’s tale takes its reader on a clearly defined quest, as an
eclectic but purposeful band of anthropomorphic animals and human beings set out on a
specific mission to rescue Bhondar’s son, Nichua, from the clutches of an evil villain. I
suggest that Tagore appears to take Carroll’s English text and adapt it into an adolescent one
with a didactic slant. While the framing of Wonderland, which is situated by the banks of a
river, is at once realistic and whimsical, Tagore’s Chutupalu Jungle is far from it. Rather it
assumes a symbolic form, almost with the intent of being instructive. Moreover, while Alice’s
Adventures in Wonderland essentially engages in different forms of play, there is a more
structured, pedagogical aspect to “Bhondar Bahadur,” which includes more mature themes
such as kidnapping, mentoring and nationalism. While Alice tumbles into Wonderland out of
curiosity, the Old Boy succumbs to the compelling pull of nostalgia. Ironically, however, the
prospect of a temporary return to childhood appears to be a very conscious decision on the
part of the Old Boy who ensures that he is wide awake before embarking upon his adventure:

On that night, there was no more sleep for me; I splashed a little water on my face
and hands, and, lighting a cigarette, seated myself and began to doze off. (272)

This binary between appearance and reality is further reinforced when Toddy Cat invites Old
Boy into his house located “inside the broken pillar” (273), a further attestation of the
marvellous powers of juvenile imagination which nevertheless erode over time:

I was dumbstruck at the sight of his house. I had never seen anything like it before. It
was a deep blue porcelain house of seven apartments. On its four sides were huge
gardens. In them, there grew various sorts of coloured-paper trees on which bloomed
many kinds of cork flowers-there could be no estimating their number. (274)

Even in this dream world, Tagore is careful to emphasise its fictional nature since the Old
Boy’s subconscious search is for the splendour and ingenious powers of a child’s mind.
Unlike Alice, who longingly desires to enter “the loveliest garden” (11) which she sees
through a small passage, Old Boy uses the wisdom of his years to plunge right into the heart
of his youthful memories. Aware of the brevity of life and his time in a world so far removed
from his present reality, he wastes no time in solving riddles and mysteries like Alice. He
 189

temporarily exits the “dark hall” (12) of his adult life and immediately enjoys the pleasures
Alice needs to work towards:

How she longed to get out of that dark hall and wander about among those beds of
bright flowers and those cool fountains, but she could not even get her head through
the doorway. (11)

The narrative of “Bhondar Bahadur” hinges on the ambiguous pivot of seeming and being
and the Old Boy’s participation in the story is predicated upon the difference between adults
and children. While children’s literature is (debatably) about children, adolescent fiction
meditates on the difference between children and adults, which this text very effectively does,
since the kidnapped son of Toddy Cat, Nichua, needs to exercise adult responsibility to
defend himself whereas Toddy Cat magically transforms the elderly narrator into his five-
year-old child self to enable him to participate in the rescue mission. In a particularly tense
scene from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, a rather heated interaction between the
heartless Queen of Hearts and Alice ends with the former’s inevitable exclamation of “Off
with her head!” (66) The King of Hearts kindly but “timidly” (66) intervenes with “Consider,
my dear: she is only a child” (66)! The condition of childhood is the prerequisite for both the
entry and survival in Carroll’s mythic world as much as it is in “Bhondar Bahadur” because
the narrator’s entry into entry into fantasy land is predicated on his becoming a child again.
The aged narrator must consume a potent “fig-like fruit…a slimy cherry plum” (Loc 274)
handed to him by the Toddy Cat for him to transform into his five-year-old self again. In
contrast, the potions, cake, and magic mushrooms consumed by Alice only serve to diminish
her size and does not change her age in the least. Furthermore, when the subject of the quest
is first broached by Toddy Cat, the Old Boy is still an adult so his decision to travel into this
illusory sphere is a conscious and measured decision, motivated by his mature desire to aid
his old and valued friend. Alice, on the other hand, is motivated to follow the rabbit down his
hole more out of ennui and curiosity and does not have a pre-determined purpose. Ironically,
despite being magically transformed into his five-year-old self, the Old Boy sets off on a
rather adult quest with Toddy Cat’s army. Additionally, although kidnapping is not
necessarily a comfortable theme for children, its grim significance is not overlooked by the
elderly narrator and the Toddy Cat. Alice, on the other hand, makes use of the reckless
abandon of childhood to consciously explore worlds so different from her own and ventures
on a more rambling and erratic quest.
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Notwithstanding his plea for the nameless narrator’s support and his apparently
marginal position in a crumbling column within the house, Toddy Cat’s demeanour, attire
and mannerisms are indicative of power and nobility, as he is “arrayed very gorgeously in
gorgeous velvet” and puffs a “cigar” (256), thereby indicating that both animal and human
are on par and suggesting that this story is about upper-class characters who have the means
to indulge in whimsical flights of fancy. Alice’s reminiscences of her household servants and
governesses also suggest certain privileges in her ‘real world. ‘Sircar bestows the archaic
name of “Old Boy” upon the narrator, in keeping with the class dynamics, which alludes to
an English upper-class idiom, recalling, perhaps F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby
(1925) which was written in the same decade as “Bhondar Bahadur” and in which Gatsby
affected certain mannerisms, such as referring to his friend Nick as “Old Sport” to legitimise
his entry into the upper echelons of the fashionable society of America.

Significantly, while “Down the Rabbit Hole” opens with a dejectedand spiritless Alice
“beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank and of having nothing to do
(9), “Toddy Cat the Bold'' begins on a joyously festive note as it is set during the Hindu
festival of Durga Puja. Unlike Alice, Tagore’snarrator is very far from bored as he
enthusiastically listens to the “tremendous festive hubbub,” “the firecracker ‘bombs’” the
88
indigenous sounds of “dhak drums” and “shehnai pipes” (256) which are juxtaposed with
“three bands of English musical instruments” (256). Not only does this lucid auditory
imagery conjure up a vivid picture for Tagore’s readers, but it also shows the seamless
confluence of Eastern and Western cultures in Bengal. Notably, the celebrated climax of
Durga Puja which commemorates the defeat of the evil demon Mahishashura at the hands of
the virtuous and powerful Goddess Durga is continuously mirrored in the plot of Tagore’s
story, where the former finds a parallel in Nichua’s kidnapper, the shape shifting Rakshasha
(demon). This is reinforced by Sircar’s translation of the title of his first chapter, “Bhondar
Arrives: The Call to Battle,” which recalls the climactic confrontation between Durga and
Mahishasura often depicted in temples and pictures. Hence, indigenous Hindu mythology
exerts as much of an influence on Tagore as Carroll’s text does. Additionally, the ancient
Hindu epic the Ramayana 89 is subtly alluded to by Tagore because the “Rakshasa” (demon)

88
These are Indian string and percussion instruments.
89
The Ramayana is an ancient Hindu epic composed between the 8th and 4th centuries BCE which
narrates the story of the mythological Rama and his wife Sita.
 191

infested Chutpulu jungle recalls the wilderness where Rama, Sita and Lakshmana were
banished for fourteen years. The motif of kidnapping echoes Ravana’s act of taking Sita
hostage and there are direct references to the mythical bird Jatayu which puts up a valiant
fight to stop Ravana. Sadly, the feminist angle of Durga Puja, where the powerful, ten-armed
Goddess who can vanquish a villain who is invincible to male Gods, is missing from Tagore.
Despite the presence of some strikingly memorable female characters like the ‘Jate Buri’,
Tagore’s story subscribes to the pull of patriarchy as those who valiantly lead and join the
quest are all unquestionably male. Furthermore, the gender dynamics which the Old Boy
witnesses inside Toddy Cat’s palace simply reinforces the marginalised condition of women
in colonial India. The exaggerated, stereotypical depictions of Toddy Cat’s hysterical wife
and the peripheral existence of his daughters Umno and Jhumno ensure that Tagore’s story is
a male centric one.

We went into a very splendidly decorated room, and I saw the lady of the house,
Mistress Bhondar, lying prone on a gold bed, crying, and her two daughters Umno
and Jhumno, sitting at her head, fanning her. (Loc 274)

Not only are women not a part of the quest for Nichua, but Toddy Cat also brushes aside an
offer of a hearty repast from his wife and hence refuses to let her exercise skill as a cook, as
he declares he has vowed to fast until the successful completion of his quest.90 This is indeed
a great deviation from the Alice books in which its heroine survives in the strange terrain of
Wonderland without any male help.

Both Alice and the Old Boy are bound by the thread of their dual identities. An
idiosyncrasy which sets Alice apart is that she is “very fond of pretending to be two people”
(12) and often pits herself against herself:

She generally gave herself very good advice (though she very seldom followed it),
and sometimes she scolded herself so severely as to bring tears into her own eyes;
and once she remembered trying to box her own ears for having cheated herself in a
game of croquet she was playing against herself, for this curious child was very fond
of pretending to be two people.(12)

90
While Toddy Cat brushes aside an offer of food, he does accept a betel leaf from his wife, a popular
after-dinner refreshment, thereby further highlighting the ornamental and insubstantial position of women.
 192

The unnamed Old Boy of “Bhondar Bahadur” is also a divided personality because he is
simultaneously young and old as the oxymoronic name granted to him by Sircar indicates.
However, unlike Alice, the Old Boy is not really a child but is just performing a temporary
role of being one. Although Alice is often impulsive and unthinkingly tumbles headlong into
bizarre situations, at other times she exercises a great degree of maturity and caution. For
example, when she follows “a rabbit with either a waistcoat-pocket, or a watch” (7) down “a
large rabbit-hole under the hedge” (7), she does not think twice of the consequences: “In
another moment down went Alice after it, never once considering how in the world she was
to get out again” (8). Before she consumes the magic potion, she exercises utmost vigilance
and recalls the rules of the real world, before venturing to take a sip:

It was all very well to say ‘Drink me, but the wise little Alice was not going to do
that in a hurry.; No, I’ll look first,’ she said, ‘and see whether it’s marked “poison or
not’; for she had read several nice little histories about children who had got burnt,
and other unpleasant things, all because they would not remember the simple rules
their friends had taught them…” (11)

However, his years of adulthood have made the Old Boy more stoic and philosophical than
Alice whose juvenile mind is more genuinely perturbed by and reacts virulently to the
perplexing behaviour of characters like the Mad Hatter and the Queen of Hearts. When
Toddy Cat’s army realises that they have missed the train at the station of Kamalapuri, the
Old Boy declares that they “all put our hands to our heads, and sat down on the platform”
(Loc 4722) in a resigned rather than agitated manner.

In the chapter “Advice from a Caterpillar”, Alice confesses to the titular insect that
she has lost her sense of identity and is disoriented because she is not herself and “being so
many different sizes in a day is very confusing” (39). It can be inferred, then, that Old Boy’s
drastic and sudden change in age silences him to a large extent and he is more an observer
than an active participant in the adventures which unfold. The Old Boy is reduced to the role
of a rather passive spectator who seems to be quietly savouring his temporary return to
childhood while possibly anticipating or dreading his imminent return to adulthood whereas
Alice, secure in herchildhood, is much more adventurous and free-spirited. Since Alice is
much more involved in the events of the novel, she needs an omniscient narrator to chronicle
her adventures on her behalf, whereas the Old Boy has the luxury of assuming the role of the
first-person narrator from a more objective distance.
 193

“Bhondar Bahadur” comes to a sudden and abrupt halt when the reality of the
narrator’s adult world seeps into his consciousness and wakes him from his nostalgic dream.
All at once, Old Boy is stripped of his illusions and is unable to maintain his grip over fantasy
as he reverts to the present tense:

With a start, I look up and see that I am seated in a chair on the second-floor
verandah with the arrangements for early morning tea set out on the table in front of
me, Fakir stands to one side. And our neighbour Purna-babu, hookah in hand, sits in
a chair in front of me, newspaper in his lap, dozing. (294)

This indicates the impossibility of remaining for long in the exclusive world of juvenile
literature once characters like the Old Boy have been tainted by years of adulthood. His
realisation of returning to the mundane world of adulthood undermines his desire to partake
in further childhood fantasies unlike Alice, who, having experienced her fantastic adventures
at a tender age carries them into her adulthood:

and how she would keep, through all her riper years, the simple and loving heart of
her childhood; and how she would gather about her other little children, and make
their eyes bright and eager with many a strange tale, perhaps even dream of
Wonderland of long ago; (102)

Ironically, despite being a child, Alice journeys into Wonderland on her own and has no
mentor to guide her whereas the Old Boy thrives under the tutelage of multiple mentors, such
as Toddy Cat whom he refers to rather intimately as Elder Brother or Bhondar on multiple
occasions, the wise hare Budhhimanta and Parrot Saheb, all mature figures who lead the
quest for Nichua. Remarkably for a children’s story, Tagore’s tale is full of elderly characters
who, despite their very old age, are constantly engaged in their work. Alternatively, since the
story is being narrated by Old Boy who has suddenly been transported back to his childhood,
the characters surrounding him might appear much older in comparison to his five-year old
self. Despite being physically marginalised in a crumbling column of a grand but dilapidated
mansion, Toddy Cat assumes both power and responsibility and is in possession of wondrous
powers and tools. His magic wand, “Tal-Betal-siddha lathi, my Ghoulie-Ghostie Magic-
Mastery Staff” (256) is at once competent and incompetent, as suggested by the literal
translation of its name as ‘in sync and out of sync or rhythm’. Sircar draws parallels with
European literature when he describes the staff or wand as:
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a comic (but not mad) original figure, a little like Harold the Broomstick, property of
‘Angela’ the witch in Stella Benson’s Living Alone (1919), or Merlin’s animated
household objects in T.H. White’s The Sword in the Stone. (Loc1938)

While magic wands are a staple of European fantasy literature, there are no local equivalents,
perhaps, because their powers are not available or effective in an Indian context.

Like Carroll, Gaganendranath makes full use of the dream narrative and does not cut
back on imaginative excesses within his fictional world. He even goes a step further by
questioning hierarchies within the animal kingdom when he valourises the humble “Bhondor”
or “Bhaam”, amalodorous nocturnal pest. In a lengthy and critical preface to his translation,
Sircar outlines the debates about the translation of “Bhondar”and how they range from otters
to the large and small Indian civets who occupy relatively marginal positions in the pecking
order of indigenous beasts.Tagore’s choice of an aged, marginalised creature who is also
advanced in his years counters ageism and points to the uncertainty of generic
compartmentalization and the suitability of subjects and characters for a children’s story.
Children’s literature merges with the genre of fantasy to elevate the “bhondar” beyond his
perceived status and enjoy the power and respect which he effortlessly commands. Indeed,
the adjective bahadur which is used to describe him means brave and valiant, qualities which
are not at odds with his personality. Sircar points out that the word bahadur

was used in titles awarded by the British to loyal natives, in the equivalent titles ‘Rai
Bahadur’ for Hindus (and such people as my Indian Christian great-grandfather, who
had a ‘Hindu-seeming name’) in the north, ‘Rao Bahadur’ for Hindus in the south,
‘Khan Bahadur’ for Muslims and Parsees and ‘Sardar Bahadur’ for Sikhs (253).

Hence, it can be argued that Tagore’s choice of adjective also alludes to the diverse and
secular nature of a colonised India which makes allowances for the coexistence of multiple
religious communities. Toddy Cat himself is aware of his high rank in this fantastic animal
kingdom as he bestows a “chiding thump” (283) on Buddhimanta the rabbit and tells him that
he sees “no need to give a detailed account of ourselves in such exalted terms to a mere
parrot-bird” (283) upon being arrested by Parrot Saheb at Kamalapuli. Indeed, the very sight
of “Elder Brother Bhondar’s lordly bearing and the lustrous grace of the chain of elephant
pearls at his throat” (284) visibly pales Parrot Saheb who begs “Maharaj-Bahadur” (284) for
forgiveness. Furthermore, it is soon revealed that the Parrot’s son has also been kidnapped by
the same demon who has abducted Nichua, and he joins Toddy Cat’s quest as a concerned
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parent. However, Tagore ensures that the eclectic group of rescuers work as a team, despite
minor arguments, and that their joint purpose is more important than individual greatness.
Notwithstanding his mettle and tenacity, Toddy Cat does not shy away from showing his
vulnerability and emotions to the little band he leads. At one point when he fears defeat he is
overcome with emotion and exclaims:

After taking so much trouble, after losing all our troops, after coming such a
distance, are we finally to return home with empty hands? Those of you who wish to
do so, return; I have decided that on that ocean's edge, on a pyre of grass, I will take
leave of life. (286)

Despite its very obvious status as a children’s story, or perhaps, precisely because of this,
Tagore presents Toddy Cat as a character of emotional excesses who is willing to sacrifice
his life if he is unable to rescue his young son from the clutches of the demon. Not only does
this underscore the intense familial ties which define native culture, it also highlights the
responsibilities Toddy Cat, as an adult, feels for his offspring.

Compellingly, in both Carroll’s and Tagore’s works, the personal histories and back-
stories of the animals are often left unfinished, thereby prompting the reader to wonder
whether the genres of fantasy and nonsense can ever make room for detailed and rational
recollections of past events. Since Tagore’s use of the interrupted back story becomes a
technique which appears to be directly influenced by Carroll, it might also be interpreted as a
metaphorical nod to the limitations of genres in general and the difficulty faced by adult
authors who try to entertain children with versions of their childhoods. In “Bhondar
Bahadur”, Carroll’s “White Rabbit'' is replaced by the wise hare Buddhimanta. He is not
cryptic and aloof like the hare whom Alice encounters but an enlightened soul and erstwhile
“king of Kusumvati Nagari, the City of Flowers” (289) who holds the solution to many of the
obstacles which barricade the way of Toddy Cat’s army. When Buddhimanta begins to
recount a thrilling episode from his past when he, as the former king of the City of Flowers,
wished to disguise himself like “Shah-en Shah Badshah Haroun -al-Rashid” (289) from the
Arabian Nights and prowl around his city at night, he is abruptly interrupted by Toddy Cat
who “irritatedly” (290) implores the team to focus on the quest, much to the disappointment
of the curious Old Boy (who is a five-year-old at this point in the narrative). In a similar
scene in “A Caucus-Race and a Long Tale” in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Alice
implores a Mouse, “who seemed to be a person of some authority” (23), to narrate his story to
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her, but the “easily offended” (28) Mouse just walks away as he deems Alice an inattentive
listener:

‘You promised to tell me your history, you know,’ said Alice, ‘and why is it you
hate-C and D,’ she added in a whisper, half afraid that it would be offended again.
(26)

While the interrupted anecdote can be attributed to the urgency and commitment with which
Toddy Cat treats his quest, it is the whim and caprice of the animals of Wonderland which
accounts for its existence in Carroll’s story. In truth, Alice quickly learns to unlearn or at least
repress a lot of her past habits so that she does not aggravate the animals in Wonderland. For
example, when she innocently recalls her pet cat Dinah and mentions him to Mouse, he
begins “bristling” (20) all over, thereby alerting Alice of the need to suppress the stories
which pepper her own reality. In contrast, the Old Boy is revisiting aspects of his childhood’s
sentimental fantasies which might not be altogether alien to him and therefore he has a lot
less to learn or unlearn.

In “Bhondar Bahadur’s” dreamland, the reader encounters two seminal non-animal

characters who fuel the plot. The first is an ancient apothecary, a “Baidya Buro” (280), who
specialises in Ayurveda, the primordial Indian approach to medicine, of whom Tagore
provides a vivid and rather exotic description:

and at the foot of the banyan tree, we saw the Baidya Buro, the Aged Apothecary of
Ancient Times, sitting on a huge termite mound, pounding and grinding medicine in
a mortar made of black touchstone. On all four sides of him were set out big and
small open-mouthed phials of various colours, many sorts of fruits and flowers, and
bunches of dried leaves. (280)

The aged banyan tree, revered for its medicinal properties, holds special import in Indian
culture as it symbolises longevity and eternity and is capable of growing special roots from
its branches. Its expansive, non-discriminatory canopy offers shelter to living beings and is
traditionally associated with the resting place of Lord Krishna. Hence, it is an apt choice of
place for the apothecary to set up his workshop and increase his credibility in the eyes of the
Indian reader. Furthermore, it is a symbolic tribute to the group of aged characters who are
out on a rescue mission. The apothecary’s magic herbs and pills protect the band of rescuers
from being attacked by the many “rakshasas” (281) of the jungle. The tiny cake “beautifully
marked in currants”, (12) the palatable potion which tasted of “cherry tart, pine-apple, roast
 197

turkey, toffy and hot buttered toast” and the magic mushrooms in Alice’s Adventures in
Wonderland are replaced in “Bhondar Bahadur” by the “frightfully bitter potion” (281) of the
Apothecary, who urges them to consume his medicine as a protective measure:

And here, take a packet of fear-annihilating pillules, five ripe gall-fruit myrobalan
plums, two fig flowers, and in this mortar, pound them well with a half seer-measure
of water from the constellation Swati, and swallow it up. (281)

Bizarre as the ingredients might sound, the team does not hesitate to consume this revolting
concoction as its members trust the apothecary’s authority and experience, unlike the
bewildered Alice, who feels compelled to debate with herself before she consumes any of the
food, no matter how delicious. In time, the apothecary directs the band of seekers to the
house of his bedraggled granddaughter, “the Jater-buti, the shaggy-tressed, matted-haired
Top-Knotted Old Woman” (280), who can help them in their quest for the “Rakshasa” (280)
who has kidnapped Nichua. However, the narrator’s awe-struck description of the “Top-
Knotted Old Woman” whom they encounter in her enchanted palace belies her grandfather’s
description of her, thereby pointing to the differences in the perceptions of children and
adults:

Her garb was a sari of needle-flower jasmine, on which was set a border of ‘moon-
bright jasmines’, chrysanthemums. On her neck were seven coils of night jasmine
flowers. On her head was a wonderful crown of fresh blades of bent grass, on which
lay drops of dew that shimmered like diamonds. In her two years were ear hoops of
the flowers of ‘eternal married good fortune and its caresses; the cayenne jasmine-
and on her forehead effulgently glowed an auspicious dot of the ‘evening star’, the
rock jasmine flower. (293)

The highly romanticised description which emerges from the point of view of the five-year-
old Old Boy is at complete odds with the apothecary’s unflattering description of his
granddaughter as a dishevelled old lady. This could well be a testament to the former’s
imagination which he is exercising to its fullest as the story is slowly but surely approaching
its end and with it his imminent return to adulthood.

It is worthwhile to draw a comparison between the Queen of the Chutupalu Jungle,

the “Top-knotted Old Mother,” with the queens whom Alice encounters in her adventures in
Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass (1871). The Queen of Hearts is accompanied by
her King as they sit on their respective thrones in “Who Stole the Tarts.” Vengeful, irascible,
 198

and capricious, Carroll’s queens cannot be more different from Tagore’s benign sovereign
who sits on her throne and radiates what according to the Old Boy is “an unfamiliar sort of
light” (293). She extends her hospitality and gratitude to the little group and informs them
that Nichua and Parrot Saheb’s son, the victims of the rakshasa’s kidnapping, have emerged
as war heroes by defeating the evil demon. Ever mindful of Toddy Cat’s high social rank, in
the reflected glory of which the other group members bask, she addresses him with utmost
respect:

Maharaj, your son Nichua is well. For seven days and seven nights, he fought the
Two-Faced Rakshasa, cut out his two tongues, and gave them to my cat to eat.
Gladdened by his bravery, I have appointed him Raja of the Chutupalu Jungle. Now
he sits on a gold throne with the royal umbrella over his head and reigns in
happiness. Parrot Saheb, your son too has shown great bravery-he stood continuously
beside Nichua in battle. I have appointed him Minister to High King Nichua. (293)

Strikingly, Tagore’s queen has bestowed Nichua with wealth and position, both of which he
has earned and not inherited from his father. Toddy Cat’s son has been able to prove his
worth in a distant land and gained the queen’s respect and affection by dissociating himself
from his influential father, thereby questioning the purpose and necessity of his father’s
elaborately planned rescue mission. The anti-climactic quest takes the form of a ramble
through a lost past in which the Old Boy and his fantastical playmates from his long-gone
childhood have no place, as they have been usurped by the underestimated, younger,
perfectly competent, and more efficient youth, who have beaten them to battle and rendered
them redundant. However, Toddy Cat’s excessive concern for his son indicates the close
bonds of filial piety which are a crucial aspect of Indian culture, and the adults are
characterised as persistent and responsible parent figures that remain committed to their
independent children. Interestingly, Toddy Cat’s seemingly purposeful quest is ostensibly at
odds with the title of the journal, Dadabhaiyer Deyala, in which “Bhondar Bahadur” was first
published, and which literally translates as a little child’s daydream. The idea of the ‘deyala’,
an unfocused act of idle day-dreaming which babies are believed to indulge in, is ultimately
reinforced in keeping with the dream motif of the story.

Undoubtedly, both Carroll’s and Tagore’s works adopt a dizzyingly frenetic pace,
although “Bhondar Bahadur,” being a much shorter work, seems more intense, frenzied, and
fast-moving and ends on an equally abrupt note. Sircar observes that there is:
 199

much vertiginous, jerky, up and down movement-with an effect which might be

likened to that of a handheld camera in a film-which signals disorientation from
ordinary experience and prepares for and ‘acclimatises’ the fantasy experience. (181)

Perhaps this is a nod to the rough transition between childhood and adulthood which Tagore
underscores through his energetic narrative. Unlike Carroll’s books, which are full of longer
poems like “The Walrus and the Carpenter,” Tagore keeps his poetic references hearkening
back to such Bengali folklore as “The Song the Army Sang” short and crisp, in keeping with
the format of the short story. Sircar consciously infuses a few original Bengali words into his
English translation of the Bengali nursery rhymes (such as Agdoombagdoom) which Tagore
had incorporated to retain the authenticity and local flavour of the original text.

In “Bhondar Bahadur,” Chutupulu Jungle is juxtaposed with an increasingly

urban Calcutta to create two distinct worlds. The Old Boy draws attention to the bustling,
modern metropolis which colonial Calcutta was and where the presence of fabled demons
seems very incongruous:

Hearing Elder Brother Bhondar’s words, I said ‘What a disaster! The ravages of a
rakshasa in a city as big as Calcutta! This sort of thing was never heard of before.
Would it not be the right thing to make an immediate report on the telephone to the
burra-saheb superintendent of police? (256)

By contrast, Alice does not venture into a bucolic Wonderland from any urban setting such as
London because immediately before going down the rabbit hole she is sitting with her sister
on what is presumably a grassy riverbank near “the confused clamour of the busy farm-yard”
(110) which was her home. Hence, Wonderland is more of a bustle of activity than the more
rural home she leaves behind, thereby increasing its appeal and excitement in her young eyes.
The characters encountered in Wonderland appear to be more dynamic, argumentative, even
more strident than the ones we encounter in the Chutupulu Jungle, as the change of setting
has already caused a dramatic shift in the Old Boy’s perspective.

Both Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and “Bhondar Bahadur” end when the
protagonists awaken from their astonishingly peculiar dreams. Ultimately, Alice’s awakening
saves her from a rather violent and uncertain outcome, as she tries to confront the Queen of
Hearts who has just ordered her execution:

You’re nothing but a pack of cards!

 200

At this, the whole pack rose up into the air, and came flying down upon her; she gave
a little scream, half of fright and half of anger, and tried to beat them off, and found
herself lying on the bank, with her head in the lap of her sister, who was gently
brushing away some dead leaves that had fluttered down from the trees upon her face
(100).

Carroll, the protective adult author, appears to intervene at a critical moment in the narrative
and rescues his heroine from a miserable fate, just as he steps in during a violent
confrontation between Alice and the Red Queen towards the end of Through the Looking
Glass. However, even though her awakening brings immediate relief to Alice, she cannot but
help wishing to go back to a world which offered her an escape route from a dull and
monotonous existence:

So she sat on, with closed eyes, and half believed herself in Wonderland, though she
knew she had but to open them again, and all would change to dull reality-the grass
would only be rustling in the wind, and the pool rippling to the waving of the reeds-
(101-102)

Likewise, in “Bhondar Bahadur” the narrator appears to be disappointed and taken aback by
his jolting return to adulthood and the abrupt disappearance of the Queen (Jate-Buri Ma)
whose earthy beauty had just enchanted him. Unlike the intense and heated interactions
between Alice and the inhabitants of Wonderland at the close of her books, the Old Boy
relishes the calmness of his last few hours the land of childhood fantasy where his little group
“dined, and listening to the song of that Blue Bird, we went to sleep (294). Eventually, albeit
reluctantly, both Alice and the Old Boy return to the secure worlds of their beloved friends
and family members, Alice to her sister, to whom she recounts her dream in a way that is
almost reminiscent of Coleridge’s reconstruction of his opium-induced dream in writing
“Kubla Khan” (1797) while Old Boy, now literally old, returns to the company of his loyal
servant Fakir who is setting up his morning tea and notices that his hookah-smoking
neighbour Purna Babu is sitting on a chair, “newspaper in lap” (294) and sleeping in front of
him. The unread newspaper may be read as a symbol of the escape from reality which the Old
Boy has just indulged himself in but which he will now inevitably have to confront.

Since Tagore’s story, published in the decade of the 1920s is set in the era of the
British Raj in Calcutta, perhaps a nationalistic reading of the story would not be amiss. The
two-faced Rakshasa appears to be a common enemy who plagues all the characters
 201

irrespective of religion. Parrot Saheb, for example, indicates that he is not a Hindu as his
religion does not permit him to be cremated and underscores that he might be a Muslim or a
Christian. Toddy Cat’s quest to annihilate the common enemy unites this group towards a
common cause and the two-faced Rakshasa could be read as a metaphorical representation of
British colonists, who, in the name of progress and rule, were exploiting national resources
and denying the youth of India the professional opportunities they deserved. The not-too-
distant memories of The Swadeshi Movement (1905-1908, which, among other factors, was a
result of Lord Curzon’s decision to partition Bengal) emphasised the reliance on domestic
products and a rejection of foreign goods and may have inspired Tagore to put together this
native, self-sufficient army of justice seekers. However, there is nothing in the text to
explicitly suggest that we can equate the two faced-Rakshasha (an Indian demon) with British
colonists apart from his two tongues, which might symbolise the dual identities of the
Imperialists inhabited as rulers of India and citizens of Britain. Significantly, Toddy Cat’s
army misses their train (a colonial gift to India, as the country’s first passenger train ran
between Bombay and Thane in 1853) but the very platform of Kamalapuli station starts
moving to help them on their journey. Conceivably, this signifies how the desire for freedom
from British rule is embedded in the very soil of India and the moving platform expedites
their journey.

While Lewis Carroll’s classic children’s work continues to enjoy universal appeal
there appears to have been a recent revival in interest of Bengali juvenile literature and in
particular the ones which focused on adaptations of seminal English texts such as
Gaganendranath’s only work of fiction. “Bhondar Bahadur” emerges not only as a tribute to
the Alice books but indeed to the rich oral and folk heritage of Bengal which appears to
seamlessly connect to the legacy of colonial English literature.
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Conclusion

The magic of fiction seems to be the more specific you are, the more universal you
will end up becoming.” Shyam Selvadurai

In “The Blue Umbrella'' (1980), a novella by Ruskin Bond, the “probably ten” (11) year-old-
Binya is a young resident of a small town in the Garhwal Himalayas where she lives with her
mother and younger brother, Bijju. One day while performing her daily ritual of leading their
domestic cows home from grazing, she suddenly stumbles upon a group of foreign
picnickers:

Binya, standing in the shadows, between the trees went unnoticed; and for some time
she watched the picnickers, admiring their clothes, listening to their unfamiliar
accents, and gazing rather hungrily at the sight of their food. And then her gaze came
to rest on a bright blue umbrella, a frilly thing of women, which lay on the grass
beside its owner. (13)

Unable to control herself, the enamoured Binya enters a transaction with one of the
‘memsahibs’ and exchanges her domestic leopard’s claw pendant for the azure parasol, the
likes of which had never been seen in her small town or even in neighbouring cities like New
Delhi. It is tempting, as a conclusion to this thesis, to view this blue umbrella as a metaphor
for the introduction of English literature by British colonisers to Indian children in the hope
of ‘civilising’ them through a measured exchange of cultures. Binya’s act of gazing upon the
“picknickers” from a safe distance, perhaps, reflects the silent native child who could partake
of the pleasures which English literature offered them, albeit from the distant margins of
readership. Notwithstanding its initial and disturbingly sexist perception of being superficial
and frivolous, the blue umbrella, like literature itself, evolves into a complex and nuanced
entity which is both admired and envied by the local villagers. Over time and in Binya’s
hands, the blue umbrella adapts itself to the local weather and becomes somewhat altered in
appearance:

First the summer sun, and now the endless rain, meant that the umbrella was
beginning to fade a little. From a bright blue it had changed to a light blue. But it was
still a pretty thing, and tougher than it looked… (45)
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The umbrella is particularly desired by a local shopkeeper named Ram Bharosa, whose status
as an adult does not prevent him from becoming childishly obsessed with it. The sight of the
umbrella in Binya’s hands reduces Ram Bharosa to a shadow of his former self, so much so
that he resorts to unfair means to acquire it. He is shunned and ostracised by the local
villagers because of his unethical actions towards the young Binya, who, on the other hand, is
increasingly troubled by the shopkeeper’s emotional and physical state. She ultimately gifts it
to an overjoyed and grateful Ram Bharosa and in “that moment it belonged to both of them”
(20) 91. In the hands of the adult shopkeeper, the umbrella is no longer confined to its status
of belonging to an individual but becomes a shared and communal entity:

It is always left open outside the shop, and anyone who wants to borrow it may do
so; and so in a way it has become everyone’s umbrella. It is faded and patchy, but it
is still the best umbrella in the village. (65-66)

The final transaction is completed only when Ram Bharosa generously gifts Binya another
indigenous talisman, that of a bear’s paw, which a silversmith shapes into a locket on a silver
chain at his behest. While Binya’s new ornament recalls the first leopard’s claw pendant
which Binya had given the foreign lady in return for the parasol, it could be read as symbolic
of the gift of local literature (adapted from British literary genres) which Indian writers gifted
their children. Moreover, Binya’s role in ushering in the foreign object to the small town is
immense and she exercises a great deal of trust in deciding to hand over its responsibility to
an adult who has behaved both unethically and irresponsibly.

The very concept of childhood itself was imported to India during colonial rule and
the role of children and their literature in anticolonial politics has been the subject of brilliant
studies by scholars such as Sibaji Bandyopadhyay, Supriya Goswami and Satadru Sen, to
name a few. However, the girl child was systematically denied the luxury of childhood at a
much earlier age than their male counterparts owing to the prevalent custom of binding them
in marriages with much older men. It was only in 1929 that the Imperial Legislative
Assembly, at the behest of the Indian judge Har Bilas Sarda (1867-1955) passed the Child
Marriage Restraint Act which decreed that girls and boys could not be legally married before
the ages of 14 and 18 respectively. A century earlier, in 1829 the Brahmo social reformer
Raja Ram Mohan Roy worked tirelessly alongside the British Evangelist William Carey and

91
The line does not appear in Biniya’s Blue Umbrella (1995) but is included in an earlier
edition/version. In chapter six of The Blue Umbrella (1992).
 204

Lord William Bentinck, the Governor General of India, to pass the Bengal Sati Regulation,
which abolished the inhuman ritual of Sati ordering young widows, many of whom were very
young girls, to be burnt at the funeral pyres of their husbands. However, the British
government did not strictly implement the Child Marriage Restraint Act for fear of alienating
92
powerful and conservative religious groups. “The Notebook” (1891) is Rabindranath
Tagore’s poignant indictment of the destruction of young Uma’s childhood and literary
aspirations by her older brother Gobindlal and husband Pyarimohan who are emblematic of
the supposedly educated adult Bengali men of British India. Tagore’s tone is cynical and
critical, and the story opens with an account of the young protagonist’s eager entry into the
world of literacy:

Uma has been a nuisance ever since she learned to write. Every wall of the house is
smeared with scribbling in charcoal-rain splutters, leaf sways. (38)

However, when she is nine years old her parents arrange her marriage to Pyarimohan, a
“literary associate” (40) of her brother Gobindalal and her mother advises her “trembling”
(41) daughter to “always listen to your mother-in-law, do household chores, don’t be
occupied with your studies” (40). It is agreed that her governess Jashi will spend a few days
to help Uma settle into her husband’s house and she thoughtfully takes along the titular
notebook, which, in fact, becomes a symbol of the girl’s lost childhood:

This exercise book was a part of her paternal house where she was born but lived for
a very small period; a short history of her life in the enclosed cocoon of her parental
home written in an immature curved handwriting. It was a taste of affectionate
girlish independence in her premature married life. (41)

Ultimately, the precious notebook full of her childlike musings becomes an object of ridicule
and derision among her sisters-in-law and is cruelly snatched away by Uma’s husband
despite her “earnest supplication” (45). Tagore ends his story on a bitter note when he turns
the focus to Pyarimohan’s “notebook full of his varied essays, infested with the thorns of his
subtle theories” (45) which nobody can possibly snatch or destroy. Hence, not only did the
adult writer have to rescue the girl child from the margins of readership but indeed from the

92
The English translation of Tagore’s original story titled “Khata” appears in Timeless Tales from
Bengal: An Anthology of Bangla Children’s and Young Adults’ Stories (2018) and has been translated by Amlan
Das Gupta, Bipasha Raha, Shuddhasattwa Bannerjee and Anindita Chongdar.
 205

margins of an adult, patriarchal society which doubly suppressed them. Therefore, the gift of
juvenile literature can be read as empowering. Gautam Chandro Roy addresses this in
Upendrakishore Roy Chowdhuri’s ‘“Sandesh”: An Exploratory Essay on Children’s
Literature and the Shaping of Juvenile Mind in Early 20th Century Bengal” (2012) where he
claims that it was “only towards the end of the 1920’s” (902) when girls began to occupy
important narrative space and that, despite his love and sympathy for them, “Roychoudhuri”,
the founder and editor of the children’s magazine Sandesh, perpetrated “gendered
perceptions” of girlhood and advocated for them to be obedient, dutiful and possibly
submissive.

This thesis has claimed that Bengali and Anglo-Indian children’s literature is
undoubtedly indebted to English literature and that colonialism is a pre-condition for the
existence of local literary genres. While it was initially imported into India as a tool for
controlling young minds, English literature, in addition to providing a pleasurable reading
experience for children, also served as a telescope through which they could view distant and
diverse worlds. The outpouring of translations of English fiction in Bengali children’s
magazines like Sandesh and Shuktara are testaments to the important role they played in
young lives. However, I claim that the desire to specifically adapt these English genres by
local writers emerged from the desire to rescue juvenile readers from the tentative margins of
readership and gift them with a domestic literary terrain which they could unhesitatingly
explore. Furthermore, providing them with a local literary haven of their own also reduces the
famous “rupture” between the child reader and adult author of which Jacqueline Rose
famously writes. Hence, in response to the question of whether adaptations of English genres
have successfully placed the Indian child at a central position of readership, the answer
appears to be a resounding yes. My research has explored how domestic and Anglo-Indian
literary landscapes have become populated with home-grown fictional scientists, detectives,
adventurers, and explorers whom local children could proudly claim as their own. They can
be led by the fearless Shankar, a humble boy from a small village in Bengal, to the depths of
the Kalahari Desert in Africa where his European predecessors had failed to reach. They can
bask in the global glory of the marvellous but unassuming Professor Shonku whose ground-
breaking inventions emerge from his laboratory in the small Indian town of Giridih. They can
cheer along with the ebullient “Lur Quartet '' as the four young girls embark on adventures
which are as exciting as the Blyton stories which inspired their author, Nalini Das. They can
endearingly refer to Ray’s attractive and suave detective as their older brother, Feluda,
 206

whereas he is known more formally as Prodosh Mitra, Private Investigator to the adult and
professional world. If Kipling’s Kim can be seen as a metonymy for the divided identity of
the British boy growing up in colonial India, Bond’s Rusty continues to negotiate this divided
Anglo-Indian identity in a postcolonial nation. Seonee, the setting for The Jungle Books
featuring the brown-skinned Mowgli paves the path for Hari’s jungle which then makes way
for Bond’s jungle, as the narratives evolve from the fabular to the ecological in keeping with
the changing demands of the Indian literary and environmental climates. Carroll’s Alice
emerges as the aged and unnamed Bengali narrator of a short story in which he must return to
his childhood to participate in the genre of juvenile fantasy. Finally, the lingering ghosts of
colonialism merge with the richness of India’s oral traditions to collectively haunt the genre
of the children’s ghost story.

To conclude, I would like to reiterate the symbiotic relationship which emerged

between British and Indian literary genres, and how they continue to enrich one another. The
rich legacy of English literature is both valued and cherished in an independent and
postcolonial India and has been fundamental in shaping the development of children’s
writing. While undeniably questioning colonial rule, establishing “swadeshi” tropes through
collections like Thakurma’r Jhuli (1904) and interrogating imperial stereotypes, juvenile
literature poses challenges to the follies existing within Indian society, lifts children out of the
intellectual, physical, and social confines of their domestic boundaries and motivates them to
assert and not negate their idiosyncrasies. Additionally, iconic characters like Satyajit Ray’s
Feluda could never have existed, by his own admission, without his creator’s exposure to
Conan Doyle’s writings. However, out of this deep interaction between British and Indian
literary cultures emerges something complex, new, and rewarding, something which inspires
native children with confidence and daring and encourages them to become more confident
readers of local and foreign texts. Unfortunately, in his brilliant work The Gopal-Rakhal
Dialectic (2015) Sibaji Bandyopadhyay laments the sad decline of vernacular children’s
literature from the decade of the 1980s:

Even after independence and partition, there was a growing market for children’s
literature in West Bengal for quite a few decades. But when I started writing Gopal-
Rakhal at the end of the 1980s, it was quite evident that the market was on the
decline. And today, at least in the upper-class Bengali society that is well-versed in
English, the sub-genre of Bengali children’s literature has become virtually extinct.
(xix)
 207

These upper and middle-class children who are recipients of an English education are
increasingly unable to read stories in the vernacular, and hence a lot of contemporary Indian
children’s and YA writers like Mitali Perkins and Sudha Murty choose to write in English.
However, they still render their narratives sufficiently Indian by underscoring local thematic
concerns, vividly describing indigenous settings, accentuating their stories with local
vocabulary, and situating their characters within the Indian context. The Magic of the Lost
Temple (2015) by Sudha Murty features the highly urbanised Nooni, “a twelve-year-old
tomboy” (Loc 72) from Bangalore, who embarks on a magnificent adventure at her
grandparent’s native village in Karnataka and which rotates around the pivot of ancient
Indian mythology. In the Kolkata-born author Mitali Perkins’s Tiger Boy (2015) bilingual
Neel, a young resident of the Sunderbans, “a mysterious, one-of-a-kind mangrove forest”
(133), is at first reluctant and then compelled to accept a scholarship to study in “St. James
Secondary Boarding School” (127-128) in Kolkata to ameliorate the conditions of his
hometown. However, his strong command of Bengali and English makes him a natural
contender for this prestigious scholarship in an English medium school. He confesses to his
Headmaster that:

“I didn’t want to leave the Sunderbans, sir,” he said slowly. “But I see now that I
might have to, to learn how to keep the good things here good-for us, and for the
trees, and the animals-and maybe even make things better.” (122)

Contemporary writers of YA and children’s literature from Bengal, like Samit Basu who is
best known for his Gameworld Trilogy (2004-2007), also choose to write in English. Bond
continues to regale his readers with his charming stories set in the landscapes of Dehra and
Mussourie in English and is spearheading the legacy of Anglo-Indian literature in India. One
hopes that the vernacular literary terrain local authors worked so hard to carve out for local
children during and after colonisation will once again see a revival and a rebirth among the
bilingual youth of Bengal and indeed the entire nation.
 208

Appendix

Authors referred to, in alphabetical order:

Name of Author Dates Major Works Referred Genre(s)

to:

1. Bardhan, Adrish (1932-2019) The Adventures of

Professor Nut-Boltu Science Fiction

Bhattacharya, Suchitra (1950-2015) The Adventures of Deetective

Mitin Mashi Fiction

Bond, Ruskin (1934-present) The Rusty novels Anglo-Indian

The Jungle Omnibus stories

Jungle Stories

The Blue Umbrella Stories from the

Mountains

Bandyopadhyay, (1894-1950) The Mountain of the Adventure

Bibhutibhushan Moon Fiction

“The Spell” The Ghost Story

Bose, Jagadish Chandra (1858-1937) “The Runaway Science Fiction

Cyclone”

Chattopadhyay, (1941-2023) The Pandava Goenda Detective Fiction

Shashtipada Series
 209

Bose, Buddhadev (1908-1974) “The Old Woman at The Ghost Story

the Metro”

Bose, Samaresh (1908-1974) The Gogol Omnibus Detective Fiction

Das, Nalini (1916-1993) The Goenda Gondalu Detective Fiction

Series

Das, Indrapramit (1984-present) The Devourers Science Fiction

Kipling, Rudyard (1865-1936) Kim The

Bildungsroman

The Jungle Books Jungle Stories

Gangopadhyay, Sunil (1934-2012) The Adventures of Adventure

Kakababu Fiction

Majumdar, Leela (1908-2007) Shob Bhuturey The Ghost Story

Kolpo Biganer Goppo Science Fiction

Mitra, Premendra (1904-1988) The Ghana-da Series Science Fiction

“The Horrible Crabs” Adventure

Fiction

“Robinson Crusoe The Robinsonade

 210

was a Woman”

Mukhopadhyay, Balai (1899-1979) “The Two Beggars” The Ghost Story

Chand

Mukhopadhyay, (1935-present) “Grohantore” Science Fiction

Shirshendu “The Smell is Highly The Ghost Story

Suspicious”

Mukhopadhyay, (1847-1919) Fantasy Fiction

Kankabati(189
Trailokyanath 2)

Mukerji, Dhan Gopal (1890-1936) Hari, The Jungle Lad Jungle Stories

Hindu Fables for

Young Children

Ray Chowdhury, (1863-1915) “Goopi Gyne Bagha Science Fiction

Upendrakishore Byne”

Sandesh The Ghost Story

Educational

articles and

fiction for

children

Ray, Sukumar (1887-1923) “The Detective” Parody of

Detective Fiction
 211

Heshoram Hushiarer Science Fiction

Diary

Abol Tabol Nonsense verse

Haw Jaw Baw Raw Fantasy Fiction

Law

Ray, Satyajit (1921-1992) The Felu-da Series Detective Fiction

The Professor Shonku Science Fiction

Series

“The Maths theacher, The Ghost Story

Golapbabu and Tiku”

“Indigo”

Roy, Hemendra Kumar (1888-1963) The Ghostly Treasure Adventure

Fiction

Ajab Deshe Amala Fantasy Fiction

Sanyal, Narayan (1924-2005) Sherlock Hebo Detective Fiction

Sharma, Partarp (1939-2011) Dog Detective Ranjha Detective Fiction

Tagore, Abanindranath (1871-1951) The Sweetmeat Doll Fantasy Fiction

Tagore, Gaganendranath (1867-1938) “Toddy Cat the Bold” Fantasy Fiction

 212

Tagore, Rabindranath (1861-1941) “The Notebook” Realism

Family Relationships

The Ray family

Upendrakishore Ray Chowdhury (creator of Sandesh and the father of Sukumar Ray)

Sukumar Ray (Author of Abol Tabol and the father of Satyajit Ray)

Satyajit Ray (Author of the Felu-da and Professor Shonku series and the father of Sandip

Ray)

Sandip Ray (Contemporary film-maker and the son of Satyajit Ray)

Nalini Das (An aunt of Satyajit Ray)

Leela Majumdar (The grand-daughter of Upendrakishore Ray Chowdhury and an aunt to

Satyajit Ray)

Sukhalata Rao (The daughter of Upendrakishore Ray Chowdhury and sister of Sukumar Ray)

The Tagore Family

Debendranath Tagore (The founder of the Brahmo religion, 1817-1905)

Rabindranath Tagore (The youngest son of Debendranath Tagore)

Abanindranath Tagore (A nephew of Rabindranath Tagore, and the younger brother of

Gaganendranath Tagore)

Gaganendranath Tagore (A nephew of Rabindranath Tagore)

 213

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