The Final Question

by Saratchandra Chattopadhyay

  Ajit suddenly felt like a sailor in sight of the shore. He eagerly exclaimed, ‘Is that what you wish, Ashu Babu? I never dreamt of it. I’ve repeatedly talked of marriage, and Kamal has repeatedly shaken her head and said no. I’ve offered to make over to her all my property, whatever I have—to surrender decisively to her; but she hasn’t agreed. Kamal, today I appeal to you again before all these people, please give me your consent. Let me give you all I have and feel free. It’ll save me from the stigma of deceitfulness.’

  Nilima looked on in surprise. Ajit was shy by nature: everyone was astonished at his unbounded eagerness in front of so many people. Today he wanted to give up all title to himself. He felt no need to hold anything back.

  Kamal looked him in the face and said, ‘Why, what are you so afraid of?’

  ‘Maybe I’m not afraid, but …’

  ‘Let the day of “buts” first come.’

  ‘When it comes, I know you won’t take anything from me.’

  Kamal laughed and said, ‘So you do know! Then that’ll be the tightest bond with which to hold you.’

  She paused and continued, ‘You may not remember how I once told you not to build your house so solidly as to leave no opening anywhere. That would only make for a tomb, not a room for a living man to lie in.’

  ‘I know you said so’, replied Ajit. ‘I know you don’t want to hold me in bondage, yet I want it. But how shall I bind you? I don’t have the strength.’

  ‘Strength is of no use,’ said Kamal. ‘Rather bind me by your weakness. I’m not so cruel as to cast a helpless creature like you adrift in the world.’ She glanced at Ashu Babu and went on to Ajit: ‘I don’t believe in god, or else I would pray that I might die only after having shielded you from all the blows of the world.’

  Nilima’s eyes filled with tears. Ashu Babu also wiped his moist eyes and said solemnly, ‘You needn’t believe in God, Kamal. It’s all the same, my dear. Your self-surrender will take you up to God in glory one day.’

  Kamal laughed and said, ‘That would be a bonus for me worth more than the usual reward.’

  ‘Very true, my dear. But take it from me, my blessing will never be in vain.’

  Harendra said, ‘Ajit, you haven’t had any dinner. Come downstairs.’

  Ashu Babu said with a smile, ‘Is this all that your learning has taught you? Can it be that Ajit hasn’t had his dinner while Kamal has eaten her fill here? She never lets that happen.’

  Ajit shyly admitted that he was right. He had had dinner at home.

  Remembering that it was their last evening together, no one wanted to break up the party; but it had to end in view of Ashu Babu’s health. Harendra came up to Kamal and said in a low voice, ‘At last you’ve got the genuine article, Kamal. I congratulate you.’

  Kamal whispered back in the same way: ‘Have I? At least bless me that it may be so.’

  Harendra did not say anything more, but it struck him that Kamal’s tone seemed less confident than he expected. But that was how things were. That was the law of the world.

  Beckoning to Kamal from behind the door, Nilima wiped her tears and said, ‘Kamal, don’t forget me.’ She could not say anything more.

  Kamal bent down and made her namaskar. She said, ‘Didi, I’ll come back. But before I leave, I’ll make a request of you. Don’t ever reject the good in life. Its real shape is the shape of happiness: it appears only in that form and in no other. Whatever you do, Didi, don’t agree once again to slave without reward in Abinash Babu’s house.’

  ‘It’ll be as you say, Kamal,’ promised Nilima.

  When Ashu Babu got into the car, Kamal touched his feet in the Hindu manner. He laid his hand on her head and blessed her once again. He said, ‘I’ve got the clue to a new truth from you, Kamal. Liberation doesn’t come from imitation, only from knowledge. This makes me afraid that what has brought liberation to you may plunge Ajit in dishonour. Save him from such a fate. That charge is yours from now on.’

  Kamal understood the hint.

  He went on, ‘Let me remind you of what you yourself once said. Since that day I have often thought that the history of pure love is the history of civilization, its life. At this moment of parting, I won’t pick an argument over the definition of purity. I won’t sully your departure with the breath of my complaint. But remember this old man’s words, Kamal: an ideal is for a few people only. That’s why it has value. It would be mad to drag it into the crowd: its goodness would vanish, its burden grow unbearable. From the Buddhist to the Vaishnava period, there have been many sad instances of such misery all over the world. Are you about to bring that sorrowful revolution into this world, my dear?’

  In a soft voice, Kamal replied: ‘That’s my nature and my duty, Kakababu.’

  ‘Your nature and your duty?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Kamal. ‘Kakababu, a higher ideal will be born out of the sorrow you’re so afraid of; and when it’s served its purpose, a still nobler ideal will rise from the essential substance of the corpse. The good always repays its debt by sacrificing itself in this way at the feet of the better. That is the path of human liberation. Can’t you see, Kakababu, that the external practice of sati changed during the Raj but its inner fire is still blazing, turning everything to ashes in just the same way? How will it be extinguished?’

  Ashu Babu could not speak immediately. He only sighed, and the next moment he suddenly burst out: ‘Kamal, I’ve not yet been able to break the fetters put upon me by Mani’s mother. Call it blind attachment, call it weakness—I don’t know what it is, but when I lose this fascination I’ll have lost much of my humanity along with it. It’s a treasure that a man wins through long devotion. Well, goodbye. Come, Basdeo.’

  A telegraph-man stopped his bicycle and alighted before them. There was an urgent message. Harendra opened the envelope and read it by the car’s headlights. It was a long message from the doctor at a small government hospital in Mathura district. He gave the following account.

  One of the shrines in the village had caught fire; the idol, worshipped so long by so many people, was about to be destroyed in the blaze. Seeing no other way to save it, Rajen entered the flaming shrine and rescued the idol. The deity was saved, but the rescuer was not. After suffering silently for two days, he proceeded to ‘the heavenly abode’ of Govindji.1 Ten thousand people chanting hymns took out a procession with his mortal remains and cremated them on the bank of the Yamuna. At the time of his death, he had asked for this news to be sent to Agra.

  This was a bolt from the blue. Tears choked Harendra’s voice, and the clear moonlit night turned utterly dark before their eyes.

  ‘Two days!’ cried Ashu Babu. ‘Forty-eight hours! And so near us. Yet he didn’t send a message!’

  Harendra wiped his tears and said, ‘He didn’t think it necessary. We wouldn’t have been able to do anything, so he didn’t want to put us to trouble.’

  Ashu Babu raised his folded hands to his forehead and said, ‘This means he didn’t accept any human being as his own, only this country—this India. Yet God! Grant him a place at your feet! Whatever you do, don’t obliterate the breed of Rajens from your world!—Basdeo, start the car.’

  The loss perhaps hurt no one more than Kamal, but she did not allow the vapours of grief to subdue her voice. Her eyes seemed to spout fire. She exclaimed, ‘What’s there to mourn? He’s gone to heaven.’ To Harendra she said, ‘Don’t cry, Haren Babu, ignorance always extorts sacrifice in this way.’ Her clear hard tone pierced everyone like a knife blade.

  Ashu Babu went away. In the grief-stricken stillness, Kamal led Ajit to the car and climbed in. ‘Let’s go, Ramdeen,’ she said.

  Notes

  Preface

  1. Awara Maseeha: the title of Vishnu Prabhakar’s Hindi biography of Saratchandra (1973).

  2. In the journal Parichay, Phalgun 1344 (February–March 1938).

  3. In the journal Bharatbarsha, Chaitra 1344 (March–April 1938).

  4. In Sahitye Art o Durniti (‘Art
and Corruption in Literature’): presidential address at a literary conference at Munshiganj, 1925.

  5. In Taruner Bidroha (‘The Revolt of Youth’): presidential address at the Bengali Youth Meet in Rangpur, 1929.

  6. From ‘Art and Corruption in Literature’ (see above).

  7. Ibid.

  8. Saratchandra reports this in a letter to Radharani Debi, 30 Vaishakh 1338 (May 1931).

  9. Letter to Dilipkumar Ray, 30 Vaishakh 1338 (May 1931).

  10. In his essay ‘Saratchandra’ in Sahityer Satya (The Truth of Literature) (Calcutta: Lipika, 1960).

  Introduction

  1. Published in Bijali, 6th Year, No. 13; as in Sharatsahityasamagra, ed. Sukumar Sen (Calcutta: Ananda Publishers, 1985), p. 1996.

  2. For the social history of this period, see Meredith Borthwick, The Changing Role of Women in Bengal 1849–1905 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984); Sambuddha Chakrabarti, Andare Antare: Unish Shatake Bangali Bhadramahila (Calcutta: Stree, 1995); Ghulam Murshid, Reluctant Debutante: Response of Bengali Women to Modernization, 1849–1905 (Rajshahi: Sahitya Samsad, Rajshahi University, 2nd impression 1983); J. Krishnamurti, ed., Women in Colonial India: Essays on Survival, Work, and the State (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1989); Bharati Ray, ed., From the Seams of History: Essays on Indian Women (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995).

  3. ‘Narir Lekha’, published under Saratchandra’s pseudonym, ‘Shrimati Anila Debi’, in the journal Yamuna, 1913; see Sharatsahityasamagra, pp. 2076–81.

  4. See Rassundari Debi, Amar Jiban; Kailashbasini Debi, Atmakatha; Debi Saradasundari, Atmakatha; Nistarini Debi, Sekele Katha, in N. Jana et al. eds, Atmakatha, vols 1 and 2 (Calcutta: Ananya Prakashan, 1981). Many other personal narratives of women have been recovered and printed over the past two decades. On the work of Rassundari (possibly the first autobiography in Bengali as well as the life record of an exceptional woman), see Tanika Sarkar, Words to Win: The Making of Amar Jiban, A Modern Autobiography (New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1999). On the genre, see Malavika Karlekar, Voices from Within: Early Personal Narratives of Bengali Women (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1991).

  5. Rup o Ranga, January 1924–May 1925. Binodini’s autobiography, Amar Katha o Anyanya Rachana (My Story and Other Writings) was first published in 1912 (Revised edition, Calcutta, 1987). For an English translation, see Binodini Dasi, My Story and My Life as an Actress, trans. and ed. Rimli Bhattacharya (New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1998).

  6. In a different context, Tapan Raychaudhuri points out that Raja Rammohan Roy invoked the Shaiva tradition to justify the practice of taking a Muslim mistress: ‘Transformation of Religious Sensibilities’, Surendra Paul Memorial Lecture, reprinted in Perceptions, Emotions, Sensibilities: Essays on India’s Colonial and Post-colonial Experiences (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 101. On the complex of emotions and experiences involved in intimate relations between men and women during the late nineteenth century, see another essay in the same volume, ‘Love in a Colonial Climate’, pp. 65–95.

  7. See Rajat Kanta Ray, Social Conflict and Political Unrest in Bengal, 1875–1927 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1984), pp. 277–84, citing the C.F.Andrews Papers, Andrews to Tagore, 15 June 1921.

  8. Quoted in Narir Mulya: see Sharatsahityasamagra, p. 1951.

  9. Ibid.

  10. Rabindra-rachanabali, vol. 12 (Calcutta: Visvabharati, 1942), p. 490. My translation.

  11. Nationalism in India, 1917, in The English Writings of Rabindranath Tagore, ed. Sisir Kumar Das, vol. 2 (New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 1996), p. 462.

  12. Swadeshi ideals were spread all over Bengal in 1906–07 through the proliferation of samitis and the impressive growth of a national volunteer corps. Some of these samitis promoted markedly extremist ideas; an example being the Dacca Anushilan Samiti, set up in 1906 by Pulin Behari Das and initiating young boys of nine to twelve into a culture combining Hindu spirituality with rigorous physical exercise. Pulin Das was deported in 1908 and the samiti banned the following year, when it became a secret terrorist organization.

  13. In The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Marx speaks of the human engagement with history ‘under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past’, when ‘the tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living’. It is in periods of revolutionary crisis, Marx continues, that human beings ‘anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, and from them names, battle-cries and costumes’. This passage is relevant to some of the concerns of the book, but I suggest a different need: the need to consult the past in order to understand the present. See Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works, vol. 11 (New York: International Publishers, 1979), pp. 103–4.

  Chapter 1

  1. Cooks in orthodox upper-caste Hindu households were traditionally Brahmans.

  2. A sect of‘reformed Hindus’, sometimes seen as a separate religious group, who brought about significant social and spiritual reform in early modern Bengal.

  3. The fact that Ashu Babu employed a Muslim chef (probably to cook in the Mughlai style) shows his liberal, even unorthodox, views and lifestyle.

  4. That is, go to the women’s quarters.

  5. That is, one without, the other with, items of food forbidden to orthodox upper-caste Hindus—no doubt cooked respectively by the aforesaid Brahman cook and Muslim chef.

  6. Thought to be carnally stimulating items of food, and thus eschewed by orthodox Brahmans and other spiritual-minded persons.

  7. A word of various meanings. As emerges later, used here as a customary appellation for one’s son-in-law. But the word is also used of gurus and holy men; hence the puzzlement on the part of the company.

  8. Such as an iron bangle, shell bangles or vermilion in the parting of the hair.

  Chapter 2

  1. A low caste.

  2. A term for a legally void compact to live together, traditionally undertaken in the name of the God Shiva, whose own marriage to Durga or Parvati was of a wilful and unorthodox nature. Here carries a pun on the name Shibnath (Sanskrit: Shiva-nath, i.e. ‘Lord Shiva’).

  Chapter 4

  1. As his surname ‘Gupta’ indicates, Ashu Babu belonged to the caste of Vaidyas or physicians.

  2. Following an episode in the Ramayana, a common Bengali proverb talks of putting a necklace or garland of pearls on a monkey, which cannot appreciate it. Here, of course, Ashu Babu self-deprecatingly refers to the wedding garland that Mani’s mother put on her undeserving husband.

  3. An old measure of weight, about 35 kilograms.

  Chapter 5

  1. A preliminary of the Hindu marriage, when turmeric paste from the groom’s house is sent to the bride to be used in a ritual bath.

  2. A female brahmachari, an ascetic who eschews consorting with the opposite sex.

  Chapter 6

  1. Asceticism as defined particularly by sexual abstinence. (Cf. note on brahmachari[ni], note 2, chapter 5.)

  2. Sanskrit Shivani, feminine of Shiva, a name for the God Shiva’s consort Parvati or Durga. Shibnath no doubt chose this name to match his own. (See note on Shaivite marriage, note 2, chapter 2)

  Chapter 7

  1. The God Shiva. According to legend, Shiva drank up the poison that formed in the sea and threatened to destroy the Gods and the earth.

  Chapter 10

  1. A physician practising the traditional Indian style of medicine: hence a member of the Vaidya or physician caste, to which Ashu Babu and Ajit belong. (See note1, chapter 4.)

  Chapter 11

  1. A contemptuous distortion of the servant’s name ‘Jadu’.

  2. Uncle. A ‘kaka’ is one’s father’s younger brother, but the term is widely used as an affectionate address for men of the appropriate age.

  3. A sea voyage was traditionally held to be a spiritual offence. Brahmans, and sometimes other high-caste men like the Vaidyas, would carry out rites of penance after a voyage, if they undertook one a
t all.

  Chapter 13

  1. A woman’s term of address for her husband’s younger brother or cousin. Nilima’s use of this term for Harendra bears implications for her sense of her relationship with Abinash as well as with Harendra.

  2. The third eldest brother (or, as here, cousin).

  3. A newspaper published from Allahabad and widely read in northern India.

  4. ‘Bride-elder-sister’, the term of address for the wife of one’s elder brother or cousin. (Cf. implications of ‘Thakurpo’ in note 1.)

  5. The Goddess of bounty. Here said complimentarily of Nilima, especially as their visit would ensure a good meal for the boys.

  6. Chaitanya, the spiritual leader and social reformer of medieval Bengal, renowned for his genial and forgiving spirit, among other virtues.

  Chapter 14

  1. Ascetic, holy man. At the Charak festival, on the last day of the Bengali year, sannyasins would undergo various kinds of public mortification, such as being hoisted from a pole by a hook piercing their backs.

  2. A haunt of idle people, like the erstwhile house of a wealthy Calcuttan of that name.

  Chapter 22

  1. A mother Goddess representing the universal nourishing and sustaining principle, but commonly taken as a Goddess of food and bounty, identified with Durga.

  Chapter 24

  1. The English transliteration is ambiguous. The reference, ironic of course, is to Brahma the ultimate Godhead, whose three manifestations are Brahma the creator, Vishnu the preserver and Shiva the destroyer. But the word is extended to mean the Vedas and their study, and asceticism generally—that is, the pursuit of a brahmachari.