Age Of Innocence

The author of Aparajito can't appear on television chat shows because he died nearly half a century ago. A book launch in the capital is out of question because no advance in hard currency's been offered for the book. The review circuit in London or New York has not told us what to think of this novel. Consequently one of the major fictional texts of our century is likely to remain unnoticed by the media even though it is available in English now. 

In the late '50s Satyajit Ray made three films based on two novels that had already become literary classics in Bangla. The English translation of the first, Pather Panchali (original '29) was published in '68, but it's taken its sequel Aparajito ('32) nearly seven decades longer. Surprisingly, despite the time lag, the English version retains much of the freshness of the original. Gopa Majumdar's prose has a transparent readability, although inevitably some of the sporadic lyricism of Bibhutibhushan's language is attenuated in translation. 

Aparajito traces the growth of an imaginative boy, Apu - from the age of 10 through adolescence to adulthood - as much through events and relationships as through the books he reads and his restless travels. The 472-page novel is more abundant than the Ray film, capturing the whimsical randomness of life and weaving in Apu's frequent ruminations about space, time and ecology. Despite his abject penury, what stays in the reader's mind is not Apu's deprivation, but his sense of wonder that makes even the ordinary luminous, and the lure of the unknown that propels his life. 

Those who remember the village Nishchindipur in Pather Panchali, where barefoot Apu scampered around with his sister collecting wild flowers and berries, would find his urban confinement at the beginning of Aparajito depressing. But Apu's world begins to open out as a scholarship takes him to a boarding school where he reads about the solar system, craters in the moon, Aurora Borealis, the Great Barrier Reef and about the rise and fall of civilisations. He dreams of taking a ship to Sumatra, watching the sun rise from the hills of Kenya and sailing down the Rhine. The book is unashamedly romantic, but not sentimental. Apu reads indiscriminately - mostly books in English - which opens the world for him in concentric circles, with Nishchindipur as the fixed centre. The novel in a way challenges the myth about the alienating effect of colonial education on the Indian middle class. 

The expansion of Apu's horizon continues through a couple of years of college in Calcutta after which poverty forces him to abandon studies. He takes up one humiliating job after another in order to stay in the city and continue to read in the Imperial Library, which drew him like a magnet . Sometimes when he feels totally stifled, he travels to unknown destinations. The most memorable of these interludes is his stay in the dense forest of Madhya Pradesh, working for a mining company. This is the magical centre of the novel, bringing Apu in touch with mysteries of the universe. Incidentally, the terrain described in this section is not too far geographically from the dark space in the middle of Salman Rushdie's new novel The Ground Beneath Her Feet - a void full of silences and mutenesses which no cartographer had fully mapped . While for Rushdie this is the hell every epic hero's journey must include, sinister with the odour of death, Bibhutibhushan invests this space with an inclusive harmony that connects an individual with the larger rhythm of the planet. 

In addition to nature, the other poignant strands of Apu's life are human relationships - friendships and romantic attachments - the most intense being the bond with his wife Aparna who dies as suddenly as she comes into his life, leaving a son behind. When the novel ends, Apu's embarking on a voyage to Fiji, leaving his 8-year-old son with a friend in Nishchindipur, the village of his childhood. In a way the cycle of life continues, because another wide-eyed child now roams the fields of Nishchindipur, even though much has changed in the intervening quarter century. 

The First World War rages in Europe as Apu grows up; but wars and revolutions left Apu untouched . He longed to know the story of the poor common man . Like his author, he too worries about man's arrogance that caused the steady destruction of nature . It is a rich text for today's reader, who might read in it the concerns of a proto-environmentalist or a subaltern historian. On the other hand such a reader might be impatient with a cultural stereotype that idealises the imaginative and irresponsible dreamer, sceptical of organised social action or worldly success.