"The Indigo Terror" by Satyajit Ray

"The Indigo Terror" by Satyajit Ray  সত্যজিত রায়  (1968, 7 pages)


Indian Literature on The Reading Life

Satyajit Ray (1921 to 1992-Calcutta, India) is a towering cultural icon.   He came from a very distinguished family know for its accomplishments in the arts and literature.   He is universally acknowledged as the greatest of all Indian film directors.   He was given an honorary Academy Award in 1992 for the body of his work.    (There is a detailed article on his life and accomplishments here.)   He was also a very prolific writer.   He wrote numerous highly regarded children's books as well as twelve collections of short stories.  


" The Indigo Terror" is a brilliant story that combines an account of the life of a man in contemporary Indian with some fascinating history lessons and a brilliant dream sequence that seems very real as we read it.   


The lead character Aniruddha Bose works in an office but his real passion is for his work as an amateur short story writer and  his studies of the history of indigo production in India.   He read everything he could find on this topic and really was an expert.  In order to more fully appreciate this story I think it helps to know that during the 19th century the British had a monopoly on the production of indigo dye.   The workers on these plantations were kept in virtual slavery and treated with the utmost cruelty.  Almost 10,000 square kilometers in India were devoted to  the production of indigo.  Before synthetic dyes this was a very lucrative business.   


"The Indigo Terror" does a really good job of making the central character seem real.   He is a single man who lives a simple life of work, reading and writing and time with his family.   One day he gets a letter from an old friend five hours a way by car inviting him to come stay for a week.   He has a car so he takes some vacation time and sets off to go to the house of his friend.   The route will take him through the heart of the old indigo plantation area.   


The scenes on the road are fun.   I really felt like I was on the road in rural Bengali.   He ends up with two flat tires and one spare, in the middle of the night, so he is forced to seek lodging along the way.   It is dark and there are not a lot of houses so he knocks on the first door of the first house he finds.   The people inside are very hospitable and offer him food and tell him he can sleep in a bungalow on the property.   (Interestingly, to me any way, "Bungalow" entered the English language in the 17th century as a borrowed word from Bengali).    


I debated whether or not to tell the rest of the plot.   "The Indigo Terror"  is extremely  intelligent and takes us very deeply into the traumatic effects of colonialism and it is also a lot of fun to read.   I want others to have the pleasure of reading this story so I will not spoil the story for anyone.


I endorse this story without reservations to all.  


You can read it online HERE.  


It was translated from Bengali by Barnali Saha.


Please share with us your suggestion for other South Asian Short Stories.


Mel u

Swami and Friends by R. K. Narayan

Swami and Friends by R. K. Narayan (1935, 78 pages)

  School  Days in Malgudi

The Reading Life R.  K. Narayan Project

Indian Literature

Swami and Friends is R. K. Narayan's (1906 to 2001-India) first longer work of fiction.    I began reading Narayan with the title story in his 1947 collection of short stories, The Astrologer's Day and Other Tales.    I then happily read the other 29 stories in the collection.    I agree with Jhumpa Lahiri in classifying Narayan among the great short story writers of the 20th Century.     (There is background information on Narayan in my prior posts).     Most of his fiction is set in the imaginary town of Malgudi, India.   Each story is a completely stand alone work but the more you read, the more you understand the world of Malgudi.    As I read the short stories and then The Man Eater of Malgudi I thought, "there is a good TV series in these stories" and then I found out there have been numerous TV shows, series, and movies made based on the world of Malgudi.    All of his stories are written in English and have their own beautiful rhythm.   

Swami and Friends  centers on a boy in a private school.   This book is really one that should be read by those into Asian colonial fiction as it shows how the teachers try to turn the students away from the religion they were born into toward the religion of the English, Christianity.    The teachers (all Indians themselves) mock the religion of their students, equating it to idol and devil worship.    It was great to see the students fight back against this.   It is an all boys school (as I guess there were no mixed school) that is run as a profit making enterprise.    Some of the teachers are very dedicated, some oppose British rule and some totally adopt an attitude of complete servility in the hope it will allow them to advance.   We see concerned parents at school conferences,  we get to listen in as couples talk about their hopes and concerns for their boys,  and we get to hear a speaker demanding Independence for India.   

The dominant passion of the boys is cricket.   It was a lot of fun to see them form the Malgudi Cricket Club and watch their big game against another school.   

Narayan is a master at making people come to life in just a few sentences.   He is great at depicting relationships.   We see the shifting balances of power among the school boys (this may be a commentary on Indian politics of the 1930s). Malgudi might not be Bonbay but it is not isolated from politics.    There is real passion in this speech by an opponent of British rule who is trying to stir the emotions of the people of Malgudi  and I think it took courage to include it in Swami and Friends:


"We are slaves to-day,' he shrieked, 'worse slaves than we have ever been before.

Let us remember our heritage. Have we forgotten the glorious periods of Ramayana This is the country that has given the world a Kalidasa, a Buddha, a

Sankara. Our ships sailed the high seas and we had reached the height of

civilisation when the Englishman ate raw flesh and wandered in the jungles, nude."

Parts of this speech are beyond the understanding of Swami and his friends but they do understand this:

"'Just think for a while. We are three hundred and thirty-six millions, and our

land is as big as Europe minus Russia. England is no bigger than our Madras

Presidency and is inhabited by a handful of white rogues and is thousands of miles

away. Yet we bow in homage before the Englishman!"

Swami and Friends also deals directly with conflicts between Hindus (as Swami and his friends were) and people of the Islamic faith.   Of course Narayan did not know in 1935 of the millions of deaths that the Partition of India would produce but he knew there was a deep malaise along a religious divide even in Malgudi.

"He is a nice Mohammedan, belongs to our class.' 'In the Board High School?'

There was just a suspicion of a sneer in his tone. Swaminathan preferred to ignore

this question and continued, 'He has a bicycle. He is a very fine Mohammedan,

calls Mohammed of Gazni and Aurangazeb rascals.'

'What makes you think that they were that?'

'Didn't they destroy our temples and torture the Hindus? Have you forgotten

the Somnathpur God? . . .'

'We brahmins deserve that and more,' said Rajam. 'In our house my father

does not care for New-Moon days and there are no Annual Ceremonies for the

dead.' 

There is a lot in this rich book I have not covered.    Narayan is great with conversations and relationships.    Swami and Friends ("Swami" is the name of the boy the story centers on) is easy to read and follow.    I like his prose style a lot.    This is a delightful funny book  from which there is a lot to be learned.

I would put it as near must reading for those interested in fiction centering around issues related to the British Raj.

I was sent this work and three other novels by Narayan by a very kind reader in New Delhi who wishes not be named.   I think I will next read The Printer of Malgudi.,

Please share  your  experience with Narayan with us.

Mel u

The Man-Eater of Malgudi by R. K. Narayan

The Man-Eater of Malgudi by R. K. Narayan (1961, 136 pages)

Getting to Know More about Malgudi, India

A Town from the Mind of 

R. K. Narayan

The Reading Life R. K. Narayan Project

 Indian Literature on The Reading Life

The Man-Eater of Malgudi is the first novel by R. K. Narayan (1906 to 2001-India-there is background information on Narayan in my prior posts) I have read.    It will not be the last!   I have previously read the thirty short stories in his collection The Astrologer's Day and Other Tales.    I really enjoyed these pre-Partition stories and see Narayan as one of the great short story writers of the 20th century.    I think it takes a little while to understand the nature of his prose but once you do, you will love it.   His stories were written in English, the second language of most of his original readers.  

A lot of Narayan's stories and novels are set in Malgudi, a small town in India that is purely a creation of the imagination of Narayan.    Each work you read makes you appreciate the next one a bit more.

The Man-Eater of Malgudi centers on the life of one of  the town printers.   Before the PC and the desk top printer, a printer was a very important part of almost any business.    No proper wedding could take place without finding a good printer.   Like most businesses, the print shop building was also the home of the printer, his wife and son.    We also get to know his trusty helper, a friend of his that is a poet and loves to hold forth at great length about all the things Nehru is doing wrong in running India.   We get to see the customers come into the print shop and learn how the business works.    The most delicate thing is the collection of fees.    I really liked the conversations in The Man-Eater of Malgudi.     The wife in the story is just a wonderful totally believable person.    At one point when the printer, Nataraj, thought he had so angered his wife that she would always be cold to him in the future I really felt bad for him.    When his wife tears into him when she sees a "public woman" talking to her husband in the print shop about a completely innocent matter, I felt his pain.

The central drama in this story comes when a taxidermist, Vasu, somehow moves into the attic of the building.     He moves in with the idea he will just stay as few days until he finds a place to live.   He turns out to be a monster!   Just to give one example, Vasu invites the printer to go on a brief ride with him (he has a vehicle which is a big thing) and ends up leaving him stuck five hours away in a small jungle town -with no money-while he hunts for animals to shoot for his taxidermy business.    

One bad thing after another starts to happen in the well ordered life of the printer.   The taxidermist has so many dead animals in his room that the neighbors of the printer file a health department complaint on him.     Vasu is a madding manipulative man, he is an expert in martial arts and a crack shot with a gun.   In one just hilarious section Vanu actually files a complaint on the printer for providing him with substandard living conditions.    The printer could actually end up in serious trouble for something caused by the printer and to make it worse he has not received any rent at all.    The printer's friends compare Vasu to a demon out of Hindu tradition, Bhasmasura.     The printer goes to see an attorney (one that owes him money for printing up his business cards) who advises him he will take care of it but of course there are court fees, tips etc to be paid.   The printer suggests the fee be taken from the bill of the lawyer but he is told it is very bad business to "mix accounts".   

In one episode (there are several story lines going on) a temple elephant is said to  be very ill.   Vasu, who can be very helpful and has a strong practical intelligence, tells him they should get the town veterinarian and the three of them will go to the temple.   The elephant returns to health.   Now in an episode that surprised me, it turns out Malgudi has a lot of "loose women".    Vasu begins to have a nightly parade of them up to his room. outraging the printer's wife and neighbors.   Many are prostitutes and I admit I was shocked to find out that Malgudi had so many of them!    One of the women who often visits Vasu finds out that the temple elephant will be in a procession passing in front of the printer's house.   Vasu plans to shot the elephant (which he has evidently bought from a crooked priest) as he passes in front of the print shop and turn the elephant into his greatest piece of taxidermy.    Shooting a temple elephant is totally an outrage to all customs and to have it done right in front of the print shop would be incredibly  bad Karma.   Narayan does a very good job and is pretty frank in describing the appeal the public woman (I guess this is the "sex worker" term in India in 1947!) to him even though he has never been unfaithful to his wife.

I have told enough of the plot to give you a feel of it.   There is a very exciting development near the end of the novel.   I really like how it ended.

For a short novel, there is really a lot to be found in The Man-Eater of Malgudi.  We get a really good feel for life in a small Indian town.   The characters are all just brilliant.    None of the people in the novel are "half characters" and no one is made fun of as a small town backwoods person as a lesser writer might do.   The relationships between the characters are perfect.    

This is a wonderful comic novel with a deep moral vision.   It is also just a lot of fun to read.    I kept thinking "what terrible thing can happen next to the poor printer?"     

I received a copy of this book from a very kind reader from New Delhi who does not wish to be named.   I was also sent five other novels by Narayan and I will, I hope, read and post on all of them soon.    I will next read  Swami and Friends.

Please let me know of your experience with Narayan.   If you have not tried him yet, you might start with "The Astrologer's Tale".

If you have any suggestions for South Asian short stories, please leave a comment.   If you are a Narayan devotee, please give me some guidance.   

Mel u

R. K. Narayan-Three 1947 Stories of Dreams Destoryed

"The Preforming Child" by R. K, Narayan (1947, 7 pages)
"Iswaran" (1947, 10 pages)
"The Evening Gift"  (1047, 8 pages)


The Reading Life R. K. Narayan Project

Posts on Indian Literature

Is There No Hope in Malgudi?

Three Powerful Stories by R. K. Narayan

I am starting to think the imaginary town of Magudi India, the setting of most of the short stories of R. K. Magudi-shortened  from Rasipuram Krishnaswami Iyer Narayanaswami-1906 to 2001-Chennai, India)  is a darker town than even Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio.

All of the stories I will post on today are from the 1947 collection of stories The Astrologer's Day  and Other Stories.    In each story in just a few pages Narayan made me feel I knew the characters and understood much about their lives.   I will just post briefly on each of these stories.   Each one is about hopes so close to being realized only to have them smashed at the moment it seems they will at last come true.    Lives of work and drudgery seem about to take a turn for the better.    All end on a capricious twist of fate brought on by the weakness and venality inherent in the human soul.     I am detecting based on blog statistics a lot of interest in  Narayan which is a very good thing as he belongs among the 20th century  geniuses of the short story (and I have not yet read any of his longer works.)

"The Preforming Child" is both heartbreak and uplifting.    Heartbreaking because a families only hope for a decent future for their daughter has been destroyed and their elated hopes totally defeated.   Uplifting because in the end parental love seems to override the drive for material wealth, even if the drive is for their children.   Their young daughter, at most 12, loves to sing and dance.    She wins a local contest and and a big movie producer wants to bring his financial backer to the parents house to see the child preform as he thinks she has the potential to be a huge movie star.   This means riches beyond the families dreams.    All goes great during the visit-the men  really want to put the daughter into movies (Bollywood is just getting started around 1947)-I do not want to tell the ending as it is a bit of a puzzle as to why it ends the way it does.   What does the girl know or fear?    I will leave the ending of this story unspoiled.   If you have read the story, what do you think of the ending.

"Iswaran" is about a perpetual failure who almost succeeds.   The lead character is trying to get into a good secondary school.   In order to do so he has to pass a standard exam.    He has flunked it so many times he is a laughing stock.   He tries one more time.   He does not even want to go check the board where the results are posted  but he at last gets the courage up to look.   He pasted.   All the laughter will be gone now.   He begins to imagine all the people he will soon be able to look down on and the new future that has opened up for him.     Things do not work out.   I found this a really well done story.

"The Evening Gift"  is just so hilarious and so sad.   I loved the occupation of the central character, he is the paid watch dog of a rich drunk.    A wealthy man pays him to pick him up every night around 600pm and take him to drink.   The man just watches him and no matter what he is to stop the man from drinking at 900pm.  His boss has told him even if he has to use force take him home at 900pm.   The boss has advised him that by 900pm he may well be drunk and will abuse him verbally and threaten to fire him.   He has been told that even if the boss tells him he is fired to take him home and come back the next day like nothing happen has happened.   The worker gets a call from his family saying the need 100 rupees to save the family home.   He tells his boss about it and the boss says. "what that is nothing to me" and he makes the man a gift of the money.    Of course things go bad from here!

You can read these stories and 27 others HERE  (it looks like a sentence or two is missing at the end of "The Evening Gift"-if you have these last few line please e mail them to me-thanks)

If you have experience with Narayan please share it with us.

Mel u

R. K. Narayan-Three 1947 Stories About Things that Almost Happen

"Fellow Feeling"  (1947, 6 pages)
"The Watchman" (1947, 5 pages)
"The Tiger Claw" (5 pages, 1947)

The Reading Life R. K. Narayan Project

 The more I read of the work of the R. K. Narayan (1906 to 2001-Chennai, India) the more I admire him.   Jumpa Lahia (the first great 21th century short story writer to emerge) says  ""Setting aside his plentiful and remarkable novels, Narayan firmly occupies a seat in the pantheon of 19th- and 20th-century short-story geniuses".    I was happy to see that Lahia includes among the geniuses of the short  story Frank O'Connor.    I cannot prove it but I am convinced when O'Connor said in his The Lonely Voice-A Study of the Short Story that the Indian short story was starting to surpass the contemporary (circa 1960) Irish Short story he had Narayan in mind.    

All of the three stories I will talk about today are from his 1947 collection, The Astrologer's  Day and Other Stories.    Most of the stories  included were first published in The Hindu.   The nine stories I have read so far by Narayan all focus on life in an imaginary community he crneated and set his stories in, Malgudi.     Just liked Sherwood Anderson in Winesburg, Ohio Narayan writes about ordinary people in a way that lets us see we think they are ordinary only if that is all we ourselves are.   They are also sort of stories about people who feel they did not get the credit they deserve for a large moment in their lives.   One of the themes of Narayan seems to be how life can change in the blink of an eye.   This was no doubt very clear in 1947 in India, the year of the Partition.


"Fellow Feeling" is set in the third class section of a train.   It really made me in just a few sentences feel I was in a compartment on one of the trains.   The story also lets us see the very real resentment  most people had of the higher caste, normally richer Brahmins.   We also see the hatred   people have for strangers who seem of a different caste than they are.   The action of the story takes place in a train compartment.   A Brahmin comes in the compartment and he tells a drowsy traveler to move to make more space for him.   Then an argument breaks out over the claim of one of the other passengers that Brahmins (whose traditions are vegetarian) have  taken to eating meat and have driven the price so high others can barely afford it.   I have read a couple of articles on Narayan who say the spoken language of his characters "feels wrong".   To me his dialogue is part of his genius.   The people in the compartment all have a language besides English as their basic language but they need to speak to each other in English.   It may be because this is the only language they share or it maybe a class matter in that speaking English well marks you out as upper class.   The spoken English is slang free learned in school style English.   A great near fight breaks out in the compartment.    You can read the story to find out what happens.   The ending was so brilliant I also most felt like applauding.   


"The Watchman" begins when a young woman approaches the station of a night watchman.   She tells him she intends to kill herself.    This story is so compressed and so good I do not feel inclined to summarize it.    One thing I admired in this story was how Narayan made me accept that years had gone by in just a few pages.   The ending leaves us wondering.   Narayan knows how to end a story.


"The Tiger's Claw" deals with something that was a serious problem in the Malgudi area, man eating tigers.  A fear of being eaten by a tiger was part of daily life.   Maybe this is hard of us to relate to but it was a frequent occurrence in India in 1947.   "The Tiger's Claw" is about a man who claims he fought off a tiger.   This would be an incredible feet and people are very skeptical of his story.   I do not want to spoil any of the fun of this story.


Narayan's stories have a very visual cinematic quality.   I felt like I was on the train, that I was a lonely night watchman or that I was telling my story about fighting off a tiger to those who see me as either deluded or just a telling a story to impress.     


I have links to 22 more short Stories by Narayan and own two of his novels.  I hope to post on all of them this year as part of The Reading Life R. K. Narayan Project.

I am, in conjunction with Kals of  Pemberley-Life Between Pages parts of my readings of South Asian short stories will be subsumed in a permanent project A Passage to the British Raj (there is information on this project on the link above).   Any one who is interested is very welcome to join in.    My interest in the South Asian Short story is permanent.

There is background information on Narayan in my prior posts.

All of The Astrologer's Day and Other Stories (30 short stories) can be read HERE


If you have a favorite Narayan, Tagore or South Asian short story please leave a comment.

Mel u

Two Older Short Stories by Authors from Bangladesh

"The Bait" by Narayan Gangopadhyay-নারায়ণ গঙ্গোপাধ্যায়-(1958, 6 pages)
"Boligarto" by Roquia Sakawat Hussain (aka Begum Rokeyo)-বেগম রোকেয়া (1920, 5 pages)

Two Older Stories from Bangladesh

A Passage to The British Raj

Bangladesh became an independent country in 1971 after a terrible conflict with West Pakistan.    Prior to 1947 both counties were under the rule of the British Raj as part of the Crown colony of India.   One of the stories I will post on today, "Boligarto",  is a colonial era short story, the other a story from the time when Bangladesh was part of a Pakistan.    The human costs of the 1971 war for the Independence of Bangladesh was, in large part,  though not entirely, a long term consequence of the era of the British Raj.

"The Bait" by Narayan Gangopadhyay (1918 to 1970-Dinajpur,Bangladesh)

opens with an ordinary man getting a parcel in the mail from a Maharajah (the ruler of a princely estate-a semi-sovereign political entity who ruled over his people but had no power to conduct out of his territory relationships other than as directed by the British-most such rulers accepted great personal wealth in exchange for total subservience to the Raj) with some fancy slippers inside as a gift for him.   The man recalls that eight months ago a poem he had written had pleased the Maharajah and he had been invited to the man's opulent estate.   While there he was amazed by the great wealth of art and exquisite furniture on display in the man's palace.   He is especially nearly overwhelmed by the wonderful food.   At first he is in awe of the ruler and sees him as such a great man he is deeply honored he even speaks to him and is completely dumbfounded when the man treats him almost as a friend.   Then he sees the man sometimes drinks heavily (which is against the religious strictures of both men), he sees the men has all sorts of guns and expensive swords on display, and in the back of his mind he realizes his new found "friend" can kill him with impunity should he annoy him.   Still he goes on and on about  how wonderful the food is and how he loves it so much.   ("The Bait" was first published in a period in which millions of South Asians were near or actually starving to death.)    The Bait it the story metaphorically would then be the trapping of the people of Bangladesh by their rulers control of the food supply.   In the starkest of terms, they had to submit or starve.   In actual story line terms (spoiler alert) the Maharajah ties up a local boy (one of many who come to his estate every day looking for food scraps from his kitchen) and uses him as bait to attract a tiger so he can shoot him.   The man in the story never really understands he is little more than an animal to the Maharajah and the British.   

Narayan Gangopadhyay was a college professor with a PhD from the University of Calcutta.    His field of research was The Short Story.   He wrote many novels, essays, dramas, short stories and children's books.

"Boligarto" by Roquia Sakawat Hussain (she wrote some of her stories under the name Begum Rokeyo-1880 to 1932-Rangpur, Bangladesh) is one of the very first short stories by an Islamic woman from what is now Bangladesh that can be seen as in defense of the rights of women.    She was married at 16 (normal at the time) through an arranged marriage.    Her husband encouraged her to continue reading in English and Bengali and urged her to begin writing in Bengali (even though he was an Urdu speaker by birth).   After his death she started a school for girls which still exists today.    In her essays and other writings she suggested that it was the ultra-conservative Islamic policies of the rulers that served at the pleasure of the British Raj that caused the Muslim portions of South Asian to lag behind other areas in development.   


"Boligarto"   (a region of Bangladesh)  is told in the first person by a young woman.    As the story opens she is sitting on the veranda of her house when a friend of hers approaches the house.    The woman is very active in the Congress Party and is traveling spreading the use of the spinning wheel.   This identifies the woman as an advocate of Independence for India and as  standing up to the monopoly of the British Raj on cloth.   The woman tells her is OK for them to go to Boligarto as one of her cousins is the local ruler there.   The only way the British could rule a huge territory such as India  (especially one in which they shared in most cases no common language with their subjects) was through local puppet rulers.     The fun of this story is seeing all of the near crazy goings on at the house of the Khan.   For example one day the woman of the family had asked to go on a car ride through the town.   The Khan reluctantly agreed but then he put a giant black cloth over the car with holes just for the driver, so no one could see the women, Of course they can see nothing also.   When the women complain, he tells them they are shamefully wanting to go against the teaching of their religion.    The Khan acts as a money lender, also against their religion.    He justifies charging a very high rate of interest by saying he is risking damnation in his efforts to help his people and this entitles him to charge a high rate.


Kals of At Pemberly-Life Between Pages has recently begun a very interesting project,  A Passage to the Raj which will focus on literature from and about India circa 1858 to 1947.   My now life time project on the South Asian Short story will inevitability touch a lot on this era.   We have decided to, where applicable,  cross link our projects.    I know that my project will take me into all sorts of totally new to me places.   Just the history of the era and places is delightfully complicated and intricate.    Both of the stories I posted on today deal directly with issues related to how the British controlled South Asia through puppet rulers who were willing to act as slave masters for the British in exchange for personal wealth and power.   I have noticed a fascination with the trappings of wealth in the stories I have read.    Kals blog has a lot of good information on Indian Literature.   I look forward to learning from her posts and hope this will be a long term collaboration.   I have in the past participated in her event, Tagore Thursday.   Anyone who wants to link up to our project is very welcome to join in.    Kals has historical background information in her introductory post.   


"Boligarto"  can be read HERE

"The Bait"  can be read HERE


Mel u