Set in the early to mid-19th century in British-occupied India, Sayam Bandyopadhyay’s Carnival, at the outset, focuses on a middle-aged recluse living in Calcutta. Despite becoming a landowner at his father’s death, Rajaram Deb prefers a monotonous life confined to the walls of his bedroom—often at the cost of his responsibilities—barring rare moments of socializing. This self-imposed seclusion is made all the more notable by the initial sparks of public uprisings in the world beyond those walls, culminating in the Indian Rebellion of 1857.
Bandyopadhyay opens the story on a night uncharacteristically chilly for early July, with Rajaram waiting to be escorted to a certain celebration, “the ultimate carnival”, the nature of which remains obscure. The author then doubles back to the years and incidents preceding this moment of anticipation, fleshing out the protagonist from a curious child to a dissatisfied youth and eventually, an aloof man.
A fellow Bengali named Dwarkanath Tagore of unprecedented accomplishments had interrupted Rajaram’s routine as he found himself swinging between admiration and insecurity, comparing his lackluster life to that of the industrialist. Months of introspection lead to years of pining, paving the way for a bewildering cascade of events spurred on by two dictionaries and the single English word of the book’s title.
Drawing from the story of Faust, the author builds on Rajaram’s discontentment to explore the human obsession with glory and greed. The encounter with a man called Mephisto and a native adjutant stork, coupled with the former’s associates named Rosencrantz and Guildenstern apparently walking through the streets of Calcutta, echoes the sentiment voiced in the book’s preface: “The nature of words that remain behind a veil is the same in all eras.” People divided by time, language and space are tied together by the common thread of human experience.
In a similar vein, Bandyopadhyay also expands on the fundamentals of identity and purpose. He displays a “conflict of self” both in the protagonist’s series of fickle business ambitions, growing more far-fetched and deranged over the years, as well as the irony underlining the fixation of a man named Rajaram with a couplet lauding Ravan’s resurrection. From the hired help—Shashi and Latu—and his aunt’s “spiritual daughter” Krishnabhabini, who share a roof with him, to the neighboring lawyer acting as a conduit for news and gossip, the side-characters make for white noise in the overwhelming interiority of a man stuck in the bog of his desires and grandiosity.
Stasis had invaded Rajaram, his life, his surroundings. How was he to escape? Which way lay freedom?
Writing in a style replete with flashbacks and foreshadowing, Bandyopadhyay deploys vivid imagery in his book, whether it’s the unassuming overhead punkah bearing witness to the different rungs in Rajaram’s life or the climactic extravagance reminiscent of Pieter Bruegel’s 16th-century painting The Fight Between Carnival and Lent, cinematically blending the mundane with the surreal. In the Bengali Puranpurush (winner of 2020 Sahitya Akademi Yuva Puraskar) to English, Arunava Sinha bridges the two languages while maintaining the lyricism of the text, here as if panning to a close-up shot of Rajaram,
Thin lines of tears escaped the corners of his eyes and trickled down his cheeks. They rolled past his ears too and dropped like beads on the chequered floor. The drops on the right on black squares, the drops on the left on white ones.
This moment of pointed intimacy reflects the author’s knack for making opposites collaborate with each other. Bandyopadhyay positions the landscape of colonial India on the brink of a doomed rebellion in parallel with the mixed connotations of a Faustian bargain, blurring the lines between reality and myth. He sets a novel almost two centuries in the past but relays history more as an afterthought, choosing instead to restrict his narrative to one man’s deficient perspective.
He takes the predictability of the human condition and combines it with feverish absurdities. While the book reads like an intricately detailed secret, the writing often wanders in a maze of hyperbole and symbolism that may require multiple revisits.
A contemplative kaleidoscope that might not, in its unconventional structure, be to everyone’s liking, Bandyopadhyay’s Carnival is nonetheless a unique contribution to Indian literature in English translation and well worth lingering over.