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The agent of change

Photo: V. Sudershan

A popular man Mani Shankar Mukherjee

After the success of “Chowringhee”, Mani Sankar Mukherjee’s “Jan Aranya” has been translated into English.

Called “The Middleman”, the book was released by Penguin in collaboration with Crossword recently. Arunava Sinha, who translated “Chowringhee”, has again a done a nice job with the translation.

“Jana Aranya”, which was famously made into a movie by the legendary Satyajit Ray in 1976, is the story of young Somnath Banerjee’s search for a job when thousands of educated young men and women queued up at the employment bureau in search of jobs. Unable to find one despite his education, Somnath decides to get into the order-supply business as a middleman. His ambition drives him to use an ‘innocent girl’ as bait for a contract that will secure the future of Somnath Enterprises. As Somnath grows from an idealistic young man to a corrupt businessman, the book becomes a macabre portrait of the price the city extracts from its youth.

Speaking on the occasion Sankar, 76, shared his inspiration and how he became a writer. He said, “Every dark cloud has a silver lining and my struggle for survival helped me in collecting enough material for fiction writing. I wanted to write a novel which would reflect the pathetic plight of unemployed men and women in the ’70s.”

Sankar is currently working on two biographies — one on seer Aurobindo and another on Swami Vivekananda.

Arunava Sinha, who won the Vodafone Crossword Award 2007 for best work in Indian language fiction translation for “Chowringhee”, said, “Great authors have the ability to tell the past and accurately predict the future as well.”

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