Fiction
City narrative
AJIT DUARA
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Weak in characterisation and plot, Bioscope Man belongs to a tradition of fiction that is obsessed with social and cultural ambience.
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The Bioscope Man, Indrajit Hazra, Penguin Books India, 2008, p. 307, Rs. 299.
Indrajit Hazra is a journalist with The Hindustan Times and in the acknowledgements at the end of his novel, The Bioscope Man, he says he tips his hat to his day job, for, no other company would put up with such nonsense. He is absolutely right about this.
The book is about the days of silent cinema in Calcutta. Abani Chatterjee, son of Tarini Chatterjee, formerly Chief Scheduler of the East Indian Railway, later demoted and relocated to the Misplaced Baggage Department, is about to become India’s first bioscope star when things go horribly wrong. Earlier, his father’s career in the Railways was derailed because he threw up on Adela Quested’s lap — the same lady who made a disastrous appearance in E.M. Forster’s Passage to India. Though Forster’s Quested eventually lay back and thought of England, Hazra’s quest is prolonged.
Years later in The Bioscope Man, Adela, still engaged to the old codger in Passage, Ronnie Heaslop, turns up at the Ladies Cloakroom of the Bengal Club and Abani Chatterjee, now in the bioscope business, goes and falls head first onto her lap. Like father like son, both have a distasteful predilection for going down on the same frigid Englishwoman.
Obsessed with the British
What is it with Indrajit Hazra? Why is he so hung up on the English? A good deal of the novel is a diatribe about the partition of Bengal in 1905 and the shifting of the capital from Calcutta to Delhi in 1911. He tells us about how disastrous it all was for the cultural life of the city and how everything went to seed after that. Curzon, Minto and Hardinge come in for a lot of stick, which is bad enough, but then he goes after old Winston. During a discussion about whether Charlie Chaplin should be called English or American, one of the animated Bengalis inhabiting this novel comes up with this argument: “No, no Shombhu-babu. That doesn’t make him American. Does the British Minister of Munitions become an American just because his mother is American? No, Lahiri babu, Churchill is English.”
There are references galore to period socio-economic gloom, period costume, period food, period politics. Which is all very well but the fact of the matter is that all this does not push the plot forward at all. The author has done huge research, pushed the story into the canopy , then tucked in the ends.
The Bioscope Man is a well-written book in the sense that there is no doubt about Hazra’s command over the language. It is the content one is worried about. Sometimes one wonders which nation he is writing for. In the beginning of the novel he talks about the eating of shingaras and jilipis. Shingaras are, of course, the samosas of Calcutta but take a look at his description of jilipis — “bearing a resemblance to miniature French horns fit for an orchestra of midgets.” No doubt Hazra’s European translators will have a lot of fun with that.
They will also have a lot of fun with the last quarter of the book in which Fritz Lang, German expressionist film maker, turns up in Calcutta to make a film starring Abani Chatterjee. The film is titled: “The Pandit and the Englishman” and is about Pandit Ramlochan Sharma, the Sanskrit tutor of the Orientatlist Sir William Jones. The film is made with great fanfare, but in 1927 the film that is realeased by the UFA Studio in Berlin is not Abani Chatterjee’s film, but Lang’s Metropolis.
Not well-rounded
So The Bioscope Man is one of multiple narratives of the great city of Kolkata. But a weaker one. It belongs to a tradition of fiction that is obsessed with social and cultural ambience, that is exquisitely careful about being historically “relevant”. Which is wonderful. But surely the novel should also have characters and situations that one cares a jot for while reading the tale. When Hazra says that Ronnie Heaslop, is “courting Adela with the determination of an Assam rhino”, it doesn’t make for a well-rounded character. There is caricature, but no soul. The comment is not even likely to win him approval in Kaziranga .
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