The Final Question Read online

  Translated by

  The Department of

  English, Jadavpur University

  ‘Like Dickens, Saratchandra had a bag of wonderful tales’

  The Hindu

  The Final Question (Shesh Prashna) is one of Saratchandra Chattopadhyay's last novels and perhaps his most radically innovative. The novel caused a sensation when it was first published in 1931, drawing censure from conservative critics but enthusiastic support from general readers, especially women.

  The heroine, Kamal, is exceptional for her time. She lives and travels by herself, has relationships with various men, looks poverty and suffering in the face, and asserts the autonomy of the individual being. In the process, she tears apart the frame of the expatriate Bengali society of Agra, where she lives. Through Kamal, Saratchandra questions Indian tradition and the norms of nationhood and womanhood.

  The Final Question transcends time and will appeal to readers of all ages.

  PENGUIN CLASSICS

  THE FINAL QUESTION

  SARATCHANDRA CHATTOPADHYAY (1876–1938) was born in Devanandapur, an obscure village of Bengal. His childhood and youth were spent in dire poverty as his father, Matilal Chattopadhyay, was an idler and dreamer and gave little security to his five children. Saratchandra received very little formal education but inherited something valuable from his father—his imagination and love of literature. He started writing in his early teens and two stories written then have survived—‘Korel’ and ‘Kashinath’.

  Saratchandra came to maturity at a time when the national movement was gaining momentum together with an awakening of social consciousness. Much of his writing bears the mark of the resultant turbulence of society. A prolific writer, he found the novel an apt medium for depicting this and, in his hands, it became a powerful weapon of social and political reform. Sensitive and daring, his novels captivated the hearts and minds of thousands of readers not only in Bengal but all over India.

  Some of his best-known novels are Palli Samaj (1916), Charitraheen (1917), Devdas (1917), Nishkriti (1917), Srikanta in four parts (1917, 1918, 1927 and 1933), Griha Daha (1920) and Sesher Parichay published posthumously (1939).

  The Final Question

  SARATCHANDRA CHATTOPADHYAY

  Translated by

  Members of the Department of English

  Jadavpur University

  Edited by

  ARUP RUDRA

  and

  SUKANTA CHAUDHURI

  CONTENTS

  Preface by Amitava Das

  Introduction by Supriya Chaudhuri

  Translators’ Note

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Notes

  Editors’ Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  Editors’ Acknowledgements

  THIS TRANSLATION IS THE COLLECTIVE EFFORT OF SEVERAL members of the Department of English, Jadavpur University. The first draft was prepared by Shirshendu Majumdar, Sipra Dasgupta (Mukherjee) and Sunish Deb. This was then worked over by the editors, who accept responsibility for all shortcomings. The project was conducted under the the UGC Special Assistance (DSA) Programme of the Department.

  We are grateful to Dr Amitava Das of the Department of Bengali and Professor Supriya Chaudhuri of the Department of English for contributing the Preface and Introduction respectively.

  The Bengali text followed is that in the sixth edition published by Gurudas Chattopadhyay and Sons, Calcutta (no date).

  Department of English

  Jadavpur University, Calcutta

  October 2000

  ARUP RUDRA

  SUKANTA CHAUDHURI

  Preface

  MORE THAN SIX DECADES AFTER HIS DEATH, SARATCHANDRA Chattopadhyay or Chatterjee (1876–1938) remains the most popular Bengali novelist ever, not excepting Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941). He was not a saint or sage, but the most extraordinary of ordinary men. A recent biographer, himself an eminent Indian writer, has described him as ‘the great wayward soul’.1 In life he was sometimes a wanderer, sometimes an ascetic; but his fiction takes domesticity as its accustomed point of reference.

  Saratchandra inherited his wanderlust from his father Matilal. Matilal too was a poet and fiction writer, but his dreams remained unrealized—owing to poverty, but also from a wilful inconsistency of purpose. Much of Saratchandra’s childhood and youth were spent among relatives in Bihar; his college education could not be completed for lack of money. But he was an enthusiastic student of science, philosophy and history, and more particularly of anthropology and sociology: Herbert Spencer’s Descriptive Sociology influenced him deeply. He was also an avid reader of Dickens, Balzac and Bernard Shaw. His vast personal library was destroyed in a fire in Yangon.

  Saratchandra is a committed writer. This makes him more overtly emotional than either Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay (1838–94) with his classical, ethically attuned world view, or Rabindranath with his unremitting engagement with artistic form. Saratchandra’s target readership lay among the middle and lower middle classes. At a reception in the Calcutta Town Hall on his fifty-seventh birthday, he openly professed his

  allegiance to those who have only given to the world but obtained nothing from it; those who are deprived, weak and oppressed; who are human beings, yet of whose tears humanity has taken no account; who, leading helpless stricken lives, have never discovered why they have everything, yet have no rights over what they have … Their pain has freed my utterance; they have sent me to tell humanity of the allegations laid at its door by human beings.

  Saratchandra lacks detachment: this may have enhanced his popularity. The writer Pramatha Choudhuri (1868–1946) suggested two other reasons for that popularity:

  First, his language … Saratchandra’s language is simple, lucid and dynamic; it has a flow. His second virtue is that his novels do not imitate any English novel. The only ingredient of his narrative is what might happen, and does happen, in Bengali society.2

  His social novels, like Dickens’s, preserve the fading picture of a receding age. As Rabindranath said, ‘He belongs entirely to his country and his age. That is no light matter.’3

  Saratchandra’s creativity flows out of a contradiction: he is full of tenderness and nostalgia for the very society that he castigates. He admits as much in his 1916 essay, Samajdharmer Mulya (‘The Value of Social Order’). From 1903 to 1916, Saratchandra sought his living far away from Bengal, in Myanmar. His first novels and stories chiefly present an earlier phase of his experience, the rural Bengali life of the nineteenth century. In that milieu, life within the joint family was marked by an almost medieval obscurantism. The so-called Bengal Renaissance of the age was largely confined to the urban élite. At a time when Calcutta was witnessing campaigns for widow remarriage, women’s education and women’s freedom, Saratchandra’s village annals present Madhabi in Bardidi (The Elder Sister, 1913), the suffering child widow; Biraj in Biraj Bou (Biraj the Wife, 1914) with her tormented chastity and wifely devotion, even at the cost of her life; the young widow Rama in Pallisamaj
(Village Society, 1916) with her frustrated love, in a community divided against itself; or Parbati in Debdas (1917), forced to marry the elderly, previously married Bhuban Choudhuri.

  Yet in the midst of this, when Surendranath in Bardidi asks on his deathbed, ‘Are you my elder sister?’, Madhabi’s reply frees her individuality from the confines of a socially determined identity: ‘I am Madhabi.’ In Pallisamaj, Rama cannot be united with Ramesh as she is a Hindu widow. ‘Two great - souled people thus end up crippled and frustrated,’ writes Saratchandra. ‘If I can reach this message of pain to the closed doors of human hearts, I will have done enough.’4 He shows the defeat of the individual spirit at the hands of a cruel society in many other works of this period: Chandranath (1916), Arakshaniya (The Girl Who Must Be Married, 1916), Swami (The Husband, 1918), or Bamuner Meye (The Brahman’s Daughter, 1920).

  In his later works, Saratchandra came to treat of certain new encounters between society and the individual. These explorations continued through the entire period between the two world wars. This was when he played his part as a dedicated fighter for independence. He joined Mahatma Gandhi’s Non-Cooperation Movement; yet he also supported the armed struggle for self-rule, and had a warm friendship with Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose. His political novel Pather Dabi (The Call of the Road, 1926) was banned by the British government. He also exposed the economic exploitation of the colonial order in short stories like Mahesh (1922) and novels like Dena-Paona (Owings and Borrowings, 1923).

  But his works strike the clearest note of modernity where he presents the individual’s protest against the tyranny of society. Kiranmayi in Charitrahin (The Rake, 1917), Abhaya in Shrikanta, Part II (1918), or Achala in Grihadaha (The Burning of the Home, 1920) not only voice the social protest of the Hindu wife or widow but radically reassess the relationship between woman and man. Shesh Prashna (The Final Question, 1931) belongs here too.

  The Final Question is not unexpected in the total context of Saratchandra’s work. He had raised the same issues not only in the seminal essay Narir Mulya (‘A Woman’s Worth’, 1923) but also in various novels and short stories. Over half a century earlier, Ibsen had placed Nora Helmer in an impasse without apparent solution. Saratchandra professed the same inconclusiveness in presenting similar problems: ‘I have never, on any pretext, tried to foist my private opinion anywhere … My writings present problems but no solutions, questions to which no answer is to be found. I have always held that it is for the man of action to find solutions, not the man of letters.’5

  Most of Saratchandra’s novels and short stories are concerned with the state of women. Their sufferings make up the chief substance of his art. In the land-based economy of a quasi-feudal society, women counted as a species of animate landed property. They were akin to that destitute class ‘who have only given to the world but obtained nothing from it’. Until the Hindu Succession Act of 1956, they had no effective right to property. Saratchandra, indeed, held that the ideal of chastity and the orthodox discipline of widowhood were concocted by a male-dominated order to retain its hold over women even after their menfolk’s death. ‘Single-hearted love and chastity are not quite the same thing: if this truth does not find place in literature, where will it survive?’6 He therefore undertakes a virtual inner history of women’s liberation through his narratives of ‘fallen’ women, widows, and even married women seeking an independent life in love. Abhaya in Shrikanta had taken a lover in spite of having a husband. She tells Shrikanta:

  His [her husband’s] wife, his children, his love—none of this is mine any more. Tell me, Shrikanta Babu: would my life have blossomed into fulfilment if I had stuck to him nonetheless, like a kept woman? Was it the greatest mission of my womanly birth to bear the pain of that frustration all my days? … Should I have denied the great love of my life simply to make a lifelong truth of a single night’s wedding rites, that have become as false as a dream to husband and wife alike?

  In his early work Alo o Chhaya (Light and Shadow, written by 1903 although published in 1917), the narrator had observed: ‘Man and woman indeed, but not husband and wife. You may frown and say, “is it then illicit love?” I would say, “It is a deeply pure love.” ‘Moved by this ‘pure love’, Abhaya in Shrikanta could say of the offspring of her extramarital union: ‘The children of our sinless love will be inferior to none in this world … They have been conceived in truth; truth will be their greatest resource.’ Marital life, on the contrary, could harbour an insidious unchastity. Rabindranath has shown in Jogajog (Relationships, 1929) how Kumu’s thwarted womanhood was trapped in a loveless, distasteful physical relationship with her husband.

  Saratchandra had compiled the histories of nearly 500 ‘fallen’ women under the title Narir Itihas (The History of Women). The manuscript was lost in the fire that destroyed his house in Yangon. But the task consolidated his conception of women: the essay ‘A Woman’s Worth’ bears testimony to that. He admitted how men use women: ‘The man does not face very many problems: there are many ploys open to him. Only the woman has no route of escape.’7

  He also had the perspicacity to see that this helplessness and waste were linked to the woman’s lack of economic independence. Gnanada in Arakshaniya illustrates this poignantly. When an aged aspirant to marriage comes to inspect her as a prospective bride, she decks herself with cheap powder and coconut oil before a cracked mirror in the stifling heat: no one comes to lend a hand. Her pathetic efforts induce even her infant nephew to lisp, ‘Aunty has dressed up like a clown!’ She was well aware that such a marriage would lead to imminent widowhood; yet she wanted to be free of the mutually burdensome dependence on her relatives.

  Clearly, most of the questions in The Final Question were not raised there for the first time: they had evolved in course of Saratchandra’s career. Sumitra in Pather Dabi had said, ‘Woman must overcome the fascination of a futile married life.’ Kamal in The Final Question wishes to grasp everything with reason and logic. Sumitra anticipates her stance: ‘Something doesn’t become true simply because many people have been saying it for a long time. That is simply a cheat.’

  Kamal does not consider divorce to be dishonourable: she wants the relationship between man and woman to ‘one day… become as free and natural as light and air’. She will live with Ajit but not marry him, because marriage would create a morgue, not a bedchamber.

  Such matters were being widely debated in Europe as well. Bertrand Russell had raised the issue in his Marriage and Morals (1929): ‘Love can only flourish as long as it is free and spontaneous; it tends to be killed by the thought that it is a duty.’ Kamal too agrees that ‘the history of the love between man and woman was the most authentic history of human civilization’. Simultaneously, she brings up questions of politics and patriotism: her debate with Rajen on the encounter of East and West reminds one of the debate between Sandip and Nikhilesh in Rabindranath’s Ghare-Baire (The Home and the World, 1915).

  But ultimately, it is the question of her womanhood that becomes for Kamal the final question. She seeks an answer beyond the bounds of male constructs and institutions. This gives a special import to the novel’s location in the city of the Taj Mahal. For Kamal, the Taj is not a symbol of undying love: it is a monument to the artistic self-indulgence of the polygamous Shah Jahan, using the memory of Mumtaz Mahal as a mere pretext. The locale of the novel silently absorbs the substance of the fiction.

  The Final Question created a sensation when it was published. A woman wrote to Saratchandra that if she had the money, she would print the book and distribute it free of cost like the Bible.8 But clearly, such a response would not have been possible if the book had lacked intrinsic literary merit.

  In another letter, Saratchandra wrote: ‘In The Final Question, I have tried to indicate what truly modern literature should be like—to show that the pivot of literary hyper-modernity does not lie in the attitude, “We’ll write thundering obscenities—of course we will”.9

  This reaction compares interestin
gly with that of Rabindranath in the 1920s and 1930s, when, influenced by the continental writing of the time, Bengali literature was turning more and more to the depiction of poverty and a romanticized preoccupation with sex. In essay after essay, Rabindranath deplored such ‘hyper-modern’ literature, calling it ‘the curry powder of reality’, ‘the arrogant flaunting of poverty’, ‘the unrestrained play of lust’. Saratchandra had protested against this attack in his essay Sahityer Riti o Niti (‘Modes and Principles of Literature’, 1927). He too had his differences with the ‘hyper-moderns’, but he wished to guide them towards a more constructive path rather than to suppress their movement altogether. Hence Tarashankar Bandyopadhyay (1898—1971), one of the leading exponents of the modern Bengali novel, could say, ‘In the current of Bengal’s literary life, Saratchandra marks the movement most proximate to ours.’10

  It was his standpoint as a liberal humanist that made Saratchandra so receptive to new developments in his native literature. Yet the same standpoint made this annalist of Bengali life universal in reach and appeal. His works have been translated into virtually every Indian language, and many others as well. Romain Rolland, reading Shrikanta in translation, thought it worthy of the Nobel Prize.

  AMITAVA DAS

  (Translated by Sukanta Chaudhuri)

  Introduction

  IN A LETTER TO A FEMALE CORRESPONDENT1 WRITTEN AT LEAST partly in response to the public outrage with which Shesh Prashna (The Final Question, 1931) was received, Saratchandra said that his purpose was not the reform of society; as a writer, he wrote of human problems, but could offer no solutions to them. One of the major difficulties that the reader of The Final Question encounters is the curiously unresolved nature of the novel, both in formal and in thematic terms. Far more than even Tagore’s Ghare-Baire (The Home and the World, 1916), The Final Question uses the narrative strategy of the open ending to posit a genuine uncertainty, not simply about the future, but also about our understanding of the past. Yet this state of uncertainty is reached through a process of strenuous dialectic, so unremitting as to constitute a formidable test for the serious reader of this novel.