Book review: Learning from the last sahib about the business of life

Book: The Great Unknown
Author: Sankar
Translated by Soma Das
Viking
268 pages
Rs 350

Kato Ajanarey, The Great Unknown, is Mani Sankar Mukherji’s first novel and even in the English translation, it is striking just how assured a voice Mukherji’s is — worthy of a veteran novelist, which he was not at the time. Mukherji, of course, went on to garner much acclaim under the pen name of Sankar, as the
author of works like Chowringhee, Seemabaddha, Jana Aranya.

Chowringhee was made into a film starring Uttam Kumar, and Satyajit Ray made memorable films of both Seemabaddha and Jana Aranya. In Bengal, Sankar is renowned for his biography of Swami Vivekananda; many people consider Kato Ajanarey to be his best work.

In The Great Unknown, Sankar is the first-person narrator of life as viewed through the prism of the Temple Chambers on Old Post Office Street in Calcutta, where the impossibly young villager comes to work as a babu (clerk/attendant/dogsbody) for the last English barrister in the Calcutta high court. His ‘sahib’ (we never do come to know the Englishman’s name) is indeed a mentor, guiding the novice not so much through a career in law as through the business of life.

The story is set in the Calcutta of the 1950s, and revisits that age with masterly precision. As we read it a full 55 years after it was written, these stories-within-the-big-story — of love, longing, class barriers, betrayal and murder — slowly, insidiously, begin to hold the reader’s attention and what’s more, hold good all these years later.

We read of mysterious femme fatales; of ordinary men and women, and the sacrifices they make for love; of brilliant men who become indigent through strange twists of fate; of the different ways different people deal with all that life throws their way. Underpinning it all, of course, are the common factors of hope and hopelessness, despair and joy.

The characters are all drawn in a taut and controlled manner. There is the bold and lovely Marian Stuart who becomes the obscure Rani Meera Adityanarayan; Biren Bose, who throws away  everything, his wealth, his work, his impeccable lineage,  for the love of a faithless Englishwoman; the comely secretary, Helen Groubert,  who displays the deadly rage of a woman scorned when she charges her lover with breach of promise; the much married Sunanda Sen, who continues to seek love in the midst of betrayal; old Miss Triton, who gets to know the power of Mother Kali in a most unsettling way; sweet Arati, who is inextricably and hopelessly tied to the rogue Amal; Rabindra Kalita, who commits premeditated murder and refuses to recant or repent; Shefali Mitra, who fights tooth and nail to retain the child she considers she own; the rough and tough Greek, Nicholas Droulas, who feels wronged by his shipping company employers; and last but certainly not the least, Sankar’s own boss,  the gentle Englishman,  under whose tutelage the babu learns so much about  life and about the law. 

Soma Das’ translation is efficient at best; she attempts to retain the quaint flavor redolent of another age but sometimes skids towards the edge of sounding dated.

At other times, though, the translation becomes downright tortured, as, for instance, in descriptions like these: “The girl was like a mountain waterfall. Unrestrained health, indomitable energy.”  Or this: “The complete history of a love story was hiding in the jungle of these letters.”

And when describing an unlikely union: “the high-spirited waterfall from the mountains of Shilling could not blend into a suffocating water hole in Nagpur.”

Ultimately, though, the story triumphs. Relating the details of a murder case, Sankar tells us how the judge takes out a black cap and puts it on his head before he somberly pronounces a death sentence. The image is one that stays with the reader.