[Reader-list] Crime Pulp Fiction tradition of Bengal

[Debkamal Ganguly]

Dear friends of cyber-saraikhana,

This is my first posting on the theme of pulp tradition of crime-thriller in Bengal. I already have started to look for the samples of different crime-thriller series published over the years and amazed to see the prolific production of the genre over the decades. I have traced names and writers of many of those series, but actually finding those cheap paperbacks would be challenging, expectedly most of those series are out of circulation.

 

One of the most significant text for study will be series of �Guptakatha� (secret tales), which was initiated by Bhuban Chandra Mukhopadyay, the first sample, �Haridas-er Guptakatha�, published way back in 1871. This is a kind of indigenous genre, developed in Bengal, which was a synthesis of crime, scandal of higher class, yellow journalism of the city, eroticism, chase, black magic, witchcraft and other engrossing materials. In its prime days, the series of publication was considered as a disgrace to the then �Enlightenment culture� of Bengal, by the cultural elites there. Till now I could only follow its content not directly, but from the discussion of famous linguist Sukumar Sen. Here is an open request to the knowledgeable members of Sarai reader list, if a clue can be floated about sourcing of those fantastic books of Bangla Guptakatha series. It will be really helpful for me.

 

I could locate a, short essay written by Panchkori Dey, who was hailed as one of the major initiators of crime tales in Bengal, where he tried to connect the tradition to the story of Daniel in Old Testament of 2000 BC approx. and subsequently Sukumar Sen refers to the old Sanskrit and Pali literature for the continuation of that tradition in India. The observations are sensible, but whether one can find an ideological positioning to put an effort to trace the source of crime stories to such antiquity, might be a question to be asked. Specially in case of Panchkori Dey, who seemed to be overwhelmed by the technique of the sleuths used by e.g. Edgar Allen Poe or Sir Arthur Conan Doyle as he mentioned in his article (the focus on rationality, the undeniable power of flow of logic etc as a metonymy of Enlightened Europe), used kind of non-rational intuitive techniques like chance, co-incidence etc as narrative tools to build the story. Even the sleuth of his novels, Arindam, as the
 writer stated, at times depend on this chance or co-incidence factor, though at times it is shown that Arindam doesn�t lack the quality of assuming a chain of logic to perceive the unknown, as similar as Sherlock Holmes. Whether these opposite tendencies and techniques adopted by him and some of his followers show a sign of inherent subconscious resistance to emerging modernism (in the sense of Partha Chatterjee)? It is too early to comment.

 

Till next posting,

Debkamal     



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