SOMAK GHOSHAL

Lost and Found: The Forest Diaries of Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay¹

The word “lost” comes from the Old Norse los, meaning the disbanding of an army, and this origin suggests soldiers falling out of formation to go home, a truce with the wide world. I worry now that many people never disband their armies, never go beyond what they know. - Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

One morning, he is up very early. The dial of the wristwatch next to his bed says 4.30 a.m. Restless, he steps outside the bungalow for some fresh air. All around him, the land is still, covered in moonlight. He stares, enchanted, at the morning star twinkling in the distance, at the wispy outline of the mountain range on the horizon, and before he knows it, he is back to his childhood—the family home in a bamboo grove in Barrackpore², his long-departed parents, so fresh and vivid—as though he is a little boy again.

In reality, he is a householder pushing fifty, standing in the middle of a forest, feeling overwhelmed. “Life is beautiful. Divine!” he would later write in his diary. But, for now, he simply sends out a silent prayer to the universe: “Let me be born again and again to my parents, send me back to my beloved Barrackpore a hundred times over, in every life that is granted to me hereafter.” As the night comes to an end, he dreams of a neighbour from the distant past, a sister-figure, unrecognizably young, serving him a meal with a care and love that reminds him of his mother. Day breaks over Saranda Forest³, a land thick with vegetation, overlaid with precious minerals and ores, home to sambar and chital deer, the odd tiger and leopard, and the people of the Ho, Sabar and Munda tribes, among others.

I remember his avuncular smile as I climb up the watchtower. I have seen his face, with its sliver of a moustache, many times on the cover of The Collected Works of Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay, all twenty-odd volumes purchased by my father some years ago from the Calcutta book fair. Custom-wrapped in plastic sheaths, the books rest on a shelf above his bed, within easy reach. Every morning, he sits on the balcony, reading a few pages as he sips his black tea, until the newspaper vendor tosses up a rolled-up Jugantar⁴, signalling it’s time for a second cup, and a change of reading. And now, seventy years after Bibhutibhushan travelled through these parts, we are standing on the land we have both read about in his books.

It feels unreal that just the other day I was spending sleepless nights pacing up and down the terrace, teaching myself mathematical formulae and historical facts, preparing for my board exams. Every few hours, I would take a break, turn off the lights, and look up at the sky, the colour of curdled milk. Sometimes a night owl would fly by, its screech piercing the still air. But here in the forests, the sky is inky black with stars blinking all over like fairy dust. As my father catches up with me on the watchtower, he points out the constellations. "That’s Kalpurush,” he says, “there’s the warrior with his sword and his dog.” It’s like I am a little boy again, standing with him on the terrace of our Calcutta home on an evening, during the scorching summer months, trying to get through a bout of power failure. “Is mother also among those stars?” my seven-year-old-self longs to ask him. For that’s what my father had told me a few months ago, when he took my mother away for treatment to another city and returned all alone. And now, the seventeen-year-old me wants to ask him that same question again. But I don’t. We don’t talk about her, ever. At that moment on the watchtower, we do not need to either.

It’s the 1940s, the last phase of the war. A whole new world order is being unmade and re-made, but the woods remain unmoved, looking inward, their gaze steady and eternal. As he travels through the wilds of Chota Nagpur plateau, Bibhutibhushan carries with him his own forest of memories, unkempt and treacherous. Once a schoolmaster, then a manager of estates, he has achieved his true ambition at last. He is finally a writer of serious repute—though his days of hardship are not yet over.

He has scores of devoted readers in Bengal and beyond. In fact, he is something of a celebrity among his people. In the course of his travels, he is frequently accosted by strangers to attend impromptu literary meetings. He is much sought after by admirers to give speeches, felicitated by local clubs and fledgling cultural organisations. He is always affable, even when he must decline the invitation. People know his love of good food. The wives of forest officials insist on having him over for a home-cooked meal. Gregarious and likeable, he is the antithesis of a haughty genius—though genius he certainly is. He has enough of the genteel bhadralok about him, but also an aura of rustic simplicity, a gift of empathy. He pays equal attention to all creatures great and small. Quick to curiosity, he bonds easily with humans and animals, rivers and mountains. Above all, Bibhutibhushan feels an umbilical pull towards plants and trees. On one of his strolls by the Ichhamati river, he pauses to look at the profusion of trees around him. “All of them have known me since I was a boy,” he writes, “I feel any moment they will cry out, ‘Look! How that little fellow has grown!’”

Already he has published a dozen-odd novels—the most famous of them, Pather Panchali (1929), would be immortalised, five years after his death, in a world-famous movie by Satyajit Ray (Song of the Little Road, 1955). For now, in the turbulent early years of the 1940s, Bibhutibhusan is on the road, having disbanded his army, as Rebecca Solnit would say, eager to lose himself to the hills and forests. A lifelong keeper of diaries, he documents his journeys—into the interiors of eastern India, to the holy city of Puri on the sea—in intimate detail. Wherever he goes, he pays close attention to the flora and fauna. He is a collector of people, friends and strangers, whose goodwill and hospitality keep him fed and sheltered. With his calm but curious stare, he doesn’t miss much: the frugal diet of the forest-people; the back-breaking labour of the Ho women that earns them a pittance of 17 paise a day but cannot dim their smiles; the pain of a Munda widow weeping over her husband in her ramshackle hut of dried leaves. In her keening, Bibhutibhushan hears the universal strain of inconsolable loss. He cannot understand a word of what she is saying. He doesn’t need to.

As he travels through the rugged and rocky terrain of the Chota Nagpur plateau, he discovers nature in all its tender as well as ferocious majesty. Trekking along an inclement slope to catch a glimpse of the rising sun, or bathing in the crystalline waters of a mountain brook, he finally feels close to the original mission with which he had prefaced his travels—to leave behind a record of “everyday history” that isn’t required to live up to the standards of “high literature”. With writing as whimsy, a tool to master the art of paying attention, he may even be able to shed some of the sorrows weighing down on his heart.

The last of these intentions remains unspoken in the brief note with which Bibhutibhushan begins Hé Aranya Katha Kao (literally, Speak, O Forest, 1948), the sixth volume of his diaries, and the last one to be published during his lifetime. If you study his life thus far, the appeal of nature as a palliative to loss and suffering will seem like a corollary. Like great art, nature can become a medium of mourning, one that is articulated and enacted through the realm of feelings rather than words. And so, a decade after my mother’s death, I begin to understand this truth as I go out on walks by myself. Armed with a notebook and pen, I doodle, sketch, pour out words on paper with an abandon I have never felt in all my seventeen years. It’s like releasing a long-held breath at last, a surrender to the senses, an unclenching of muscles.

Between 1942 and ’47, as he wanders in the forests of Singhbhum and Manbhum⁵, Bibhutibhushan also undergoes a catharsis wrought by the alchemy of nature and literature. At 48, his life is scarred by tragedies. His youthful marriage to Gouri Devi in 1917 had ended with her death after barely two years. Three decades later, her absence still haunts him.

One day, as he sits in a forest bungalow looking at the rows of mountains around him and writing in his diary, he does something out of character. Usually, Bibhutibhushan is unconcerned with the conventions of diary-keeping. His prose flows on, with little regard to dates, except for the intimation of time passing in the broadest of strokes: days and weeks go by, a new month is heralded all of a sudden. On this day, though, he notes down the date: 21 November. It’s the date on which Gouri Devi passed away. Time stops, if for a moment. But even as he remembers his young wife’s last day on earth, Bibhutibhushan is overcome by the urgency of the present. He wants to rush back to his second wife Rama, who is at home, far away in the plains.

Although his second marriage lasts longer than the first, Bibhutibhushan’s quota of grief isn’t over. In 1942, Rama Devi falls ill with typhoid while she is pregnant. The couple’s first child, a daughter, dies shortly after her birth. A similar fate awaits the Bandopadhyays in 1944, when they have a stillborn daughter. With the arrival of a son in 1947, they find some solace. But three years later, Bibhutibhushan, at 56, is dead of a heart attack, leaving behind his wife, infant son, and a legacy that no literary figure in Bengal has since rivalled.

In Hé Aranya Katha Kao, Bibhutibhushan mentions the loss of his two children as dry facts, betraying little emotion, though he and his wife were devastated. Perhaps in the 1940s, when one in five infants died at birth in undivided India, the prospect of parenthood was always fraught with the possibility of imminent grief. There were other catastrophes on the horizon, too, beginning with a deadly cyclone that crashed over Midnapore in 1941, leaving behind a vast trail of destruction along the Bay of Bengal. But the worst was yet to follow.

In 1943, with World War II raging and the embers of the once-mighty raj beginning to flicker over the Empire, the British unleashed what is described as a “man-made famine” over Bengal. Provoked by the Japanese occupation of neighbouring Burma, the British adopted a “scorched earth” policy, creating a mounting inflation and severe food shortage that ended up killing millions in the province (the estimate is between 2-4 million people), before the crisis spilled over to other parts of the subcontinent. Skeletal men, women and children went around begging for a few sips of starch and fighting with strays over scraps of leftovers. Bodies piled up on the streets, as carrion-feeders feasted on putrefying flesh. The sights and sounds of those hellish days remain etched in the plays of Bijan Bhattacharya, the art of Somnath Hore and Chittaprosad Bhattacharya, and the photographs of Sunil Janah.

Although Bibhutibhuashan doesn’t directly address the famine in Hé Aranya Katha Kao, he is deeply troubled by the hunger and abjection among the tribal communities. (He would reflect on the impact of the famine in wrenching detail in his fiction, most memorably in the novel, Ashani Sanket, published in 1944, and adapted for the screen by Ray, as Distant Thunder, in 1973.) More than once during his travels, Bibhutibhushan is struck by the fate of the forest-people, forced to subsist on a meagre diet lacking in nutrition. Yet he is also struck by their resilience and refusal to let industrialization destroy their way of life. Ancient as the forests, the tribes have their roots going deep into this land of their ancestors. The more he observes their simple ways, the keener he is to surrender himself to nature, to let the earth, and all the ordinary and exotic trees that grow on it, provide him the refuge he longs for.

And yet, despite his worshipful adoration of nature, Bibhutibhushan is all too keenly aware of a split in his soul: he knows he is, at once, a beneficiary of modernization, progress and commerce, and also a devotee of nature. Although the forests soar in his heart, he feels no hubristic sense of ownership over them. Bibhutibhushan knows, indeed he is often reminded, that he isn’t, can never be, of the forest—the phrase translates into the Bengali word, Aranyak, the title of one of Bibhutibhushan’s best-loved novels—like the tribal communities are. He is startled, even slightly stung, when a Munda girl asks him with a touch of imperiousness, “What are you doing in our forests, huh?” Her reproach makes him feel like a trespasser.

But there are worse interlopers than him in these parts. From the mining mafia to the avaricious traders of precious teak and sal wood, the forests are thick with intruders. As the sun sets over the Empire, colonial timber merchants are looting India’s forests as fast as they can and sending their ill-gotten gains back to Britain. Between the greedy foreigners and local timber racketeers, the forests are being wiped out apace. By the late 1990s, Saranda Forest has become a tourist hub, with city-dwellers like my father and I being driven around safaris through clearings that were once thick with vegetation, and families posing for photographs by the brooks and dales of yore.

This brutal erasure isn’t everything that Bibhutibhushan witnesses. As he makes his way through the bushes, getting bramble and burr on his clothes, he sees scenes of everyday miracles too. One day, as Bibhutibhushan halts before an ancient sal tree, the 135-year-old behemoth, nourished by wind, water, soil and sun, all the vital forces of the universe, fills him with a primal wonder. “This sal was a puny sapling when my great-grandfather was a young man, and my grandfather hadn’t even been born,” he muses. “What incredible power resides in it that turned a mere two-inch sapling into this giant—one that’s still growing?”

From another corner, the forest speaks to him in a different accent. One afternoon, as Bibhutibhushan enters a jungle path, he feels, even in broad daylight, a wave of terror. Afraid of falling prey to a tiger, he hurries back to the car. As he is driven away, he sees a brook flowing by. Its gurgling reminds him of the words of the ethnographer and British commissioner of Chota Nagpur, Major General Edward Tuite Dalton, who had, not too long ago, also tread over this same terrain. “In the reserved forests the wooden glens and valleys, traversed by rivers and hill streams, have a peculiar charm,” Bibhutibhushan notes down in his diary a typical passage by Colonel Dalton. “Here will be found pools, shaded and rock-bound in which Diana and her nymphs might have deported themselves.” The Bengali writer passes over the Orientalist ardour of the foreigner without comment. But the irony is unmissable, though unstated. For even in his rapture, Dalton doesn’t forget to stake a claim over the land on behalf of fellow Europeans. He must transpose the culturally alien universe of the Greek myths on this corner of the subcontinent for it to become worthy of admiration. The woods are lovely, dark and deep. And they are lost to marauders and looters from near and afar.

Returning to nature, even with the best of intentions, can feel like a double-edged sword. For even as it fulfils and enriches us, nature can also make us keenly conscious of the brokenness of our world, of species becoming extinct, trees being felled, rivers dammed up, the inhabitants of the forest losing their way of life. Bibhutibhushan knows this truth, but also believes in the omnipresence of the divine. In his diary, he notes down words from Spinoza, Russell, Sir James Jeans and Max Planck, passages rich with the Big Questions of religion, science, God and humanity. “These words support my feelings,” he adds in Bengali, “all the feelings I have written about in different sections of this diary…. The ultimate mystery of life [that all great thinkers want to crack] has its roots in the sky above, in the branches and leaves of the trees, in the dust of this earth.”

He sees the proof of this belief one day, when he is back in Barrackpore. On a sultry afternoon, Bibhutibhushan takes the boat to the nearby village of Madhabpur. As he sits by a field lush with paddy under an overcast sky, he is struck by a contradiction in the creator of the universe. The One who keeps all the planets, stars, sun, hydrogen, helium and other gases burning bright has also created this tranquil village scene, resplendent with green. “What a strange contrast,” he slips in the English word, for nothing else can convey the force of his epiphany.

Another time, a decade ago in 1933, as he is travelling by train with fellow writer Parimal Goswami through the Chota Nagpur plateau, Bibhutibhushan is besieged with euphoria as he sees a burst of palash flowers, burning like flames, in the surrounding forests. “Look, look!” he cries out like a child, crazed with excitement. Lost to the present, he bursts out into a kirtan, the lyrics of the devotional song tripping off his tongue in a garbled frenzy. Suddenly, he grabs his friend’s hands and shouts: “Parimal-babu, you must give in to this madness, there’s no escape from it!”

And now, as he walks in the forests of Singhbhum and Manbhum, trailed by loss, he begins to rediscover small joys hidden away in nooks and crannies. With the death of his wife and children, he had felt pieces of his being breaking off and scattering in the winds. During these wanderings, he stumbles upon those lost fragments among the bushes of orchid, the flowing streams, and pure mountain air. The pieces no longer form a whole. But there is, in their coming together, a sense of recovery, an awakening of the imagination. He plans an epic novel, set along the Ichhamati River, telling the stories of the people living on its banks. He feels the presence of an inscrutable creative force as he reaches the closing pages of his diary. And so, he ends with a story.

Travelling back to the mining town of Chiria one day from the small village of Ankua, in a trolley arranged by the labourers working in the local mines, Bibhutibhushan is lost in thought. He has been moved by what he’s seen of the lives of the people in this region, shorn of every luxury. “Austere”, he adds the English word. But it is precisely at this moment that the mystical spirit of the forest decides to play a prank.

Without warning, the air begins to get heavy with a rich fragrance, as though of some exquisite perfume manufactured in Ghazipur, that hub of master perfumers. The atmosphere is suddenly quite the opposite of simplicity and sparseness. Mystified, Bibhutibhushan asks a coolie if he has stuffed a cotton wad soaked in attar into his ears. When the poor man denies doing any such thing, he accosts his companion. “Is that the smell of your hair oil?” he asks him. No, no, his friend tells him, it’s just the heady aroma of the flowers of the forests.

As Bibhutibhushan looks around, he cannot see anything special, except for bunches of orchids, which are all odourless. Yet, for all the fourteen miles they travel, the smell does not leave them once, intense, thick, cloyingly sweet. He doesn’t know what it is but still feels lightheaded with joy. It’s the rush that a young boy feels as he stands on a watchtower next to his father on a moonlit night, looking for his mother among the stars, waiting for the animals to come out of the forests to drink from the stream that flows in the distance.

He breaks into a smile.

¹ The Bengali writer Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay (1894-1950) is a unique figure in the history of Indian literature. One of the greatest stylists since Rabindranath Tagore, he was hardly known outside of Bengal during his lifetime. A prolific writer, he left behind a rich corpus of work in his relatively brief lifespan. Most of his stories, novels, and books of narrative nonfiction are set in rural Bengal, painting realistic portraits of village life and society. An avid traveller who loved the natural and tribal history of eastern India, especially the Chota Nagpur plateau, Bibhutibhushan left behind a legacy as tall as the transcendentalists of America and the British Romantic poets. This essay is grounded in his reminiscences and historical facts but informed by an imaginative interpretation of his life and work.

² A suburban town in West Bengal.

³ Currently part of Jharkhand, India.

⁴ A popular Bengali daily, published out of Calcutta (now Kolkata), that has gone out of print.

⁵ Parts of the states of Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh in modern-day India.