Durgeshnandini , livre ebook

Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay

THE CHIEFTAIN S DAUGHTER
Translated from the Bengali by Arunava Sinha
Contents
About the Author
Introduction
Part One
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Part Two
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Translator s note
Follow Penguin
Copyright
PENGUIN CLASSICS
THE CHIEFTAIN S DAUGHTER
BANKIM CHANDRA CHATTOPADHYAY (1838-94) was the preeminent Bengali novelist of his day and is considered the father of the modern Indian novel. He was one of the first graduates of Calcutta University and had an extremely successful career as a district magistrate in the Indian Civil Service. He also wrote the country s national song, Bande Mataram .
ARUNAVA SINHA translates classic, modern and contemporary Bengali fiction and non-fiction into English, and has thirty-four published translations to his credit. Twice the winner of the Crossword translation award, for Sankar s Chowringhee (2007) and Anita Agnihotri s Seventeen (2011), and the winner of the Muse India Translation Award for Buddhadeva Bose s When The Time Is Right (2013), he was also shortlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction prize in 2009 for his translation of Chowringhee . Besides India, his translations have been published in the UK and the US in English, and in several European and Asian countries through further translation.
Introduction
B ANKIM C HANDRA C HATTERJEE (1838-94) was one of the outstanding figures of that social and intellectual ferment often referred to as the Bengal Renaissance. His myriad-minded genius articulated itself with equal aplomb in fiction, satire, and essays on social, ethical, and religious problems. When he began editing the journal, Bangadarshan in 1872, it was hailed as an unprecedented cultural event. Its intellectual range, quality, and variety have never really been surpassed. Although he wrote his first novel, Rajmohan s Wife in English, he was obviously not satisfied and turned to writing fiction in Bengali. Between 1865 and 1869, he published his first three novels- Durgeshnandini, Kapalkundala, and Mrinalini -which occupied the margins of history and romance, realism and fantasy. With his fourth novel, Bishabriksha, he turned away from the remote to familiar social experience and its dilemmas.
However, despite its obvious affinity to romance, Durgeshnandini (1865) merits enjoyment and critical scrutiny as one of the earliest novels in India. No doubt, Peary Chand Mitra s Alaler Gharer Dulal was published earlier but it is more of a satirical sketch than a full-fledged novel. Apart from the fact that romance as a genre has not received the critical attention that has been given to the realistic novel, from the very beginning Durgeshnandini has not been considered as pure romance but as a blend of history and romance. As the historian Jadunath Sarkar has put it in the Bangiya Sahitya Parishat edition of Bankim s novels, many of the events and male characters are historically accurate while the women are products of the imagination; some events are historically incorrect because Bankim s source, one Alexander Dow, has been proved to be totally unreliable.
The historical background is the Mughal-Pathan conflict in eastern India at the time of Akbar. There is a reference to the same conflict in Bankim s second novel, Kapalkundala (1866) as well. In Durgeshnandini, Jagatsingh, son of Akbar s general Mansingh, is initially successful in containing Pathan insurgency in Bengal. When Fort Mandaran falls to the guile of the Pathans, its master, Virendrasingh, is executed and Jagatsingh is seriously wounded and imprisoned. Bimala, Virendrasingh s second wife, takes revenge by murdering Katlu Khan, the Pathan leader. On his deathbed, Khan offers truce and a treaty resolves the conflict. It is during these campaigns that Jagatsingh and Tilottama, Virendra s daughter, fall dramatically in love (in the very opening chapter of the novel) and Ayesha, Khan s daughter, is irresistibly drawn to the prisoner, Jagatsingh, while she nurses him back to health.
Durgeshnandini introduces Bankim s life-long preoccupation with the role of overpowering passions in human life, often disruptive of settled and sober domesticity. Such emotional intensity can hardly be traced back to the English novel of that time, although comparisons have always been made with Walter Scott. A subtler but more pervasive Western influence on Bankim s fiction is perhaps that of Shakespeare. Bankim himself had argued in his essay on Bhavabhuti ( Uttarcharit ) that there was not much room in Sanskrit aesthetics for accommodating the passions in their sudden and ungovernable fury, gripping us like passive victims in their clutches. In another essay, Shakuntala, Miranda and Desdemona , he compares the world of Kalidasa to the paradisial garden, but for Shakespeare the analogue he finds is that of the tempestuous sea.
Headlong, impetuous love is generated, and indeed heightened, against a backdrop of enmity and political upheaval. We may see prefigured here the link Tagore will explore between political turbulence and the release of erotic passion in Ghare Baire or Char Adhyay. Durgeshnandini contains the germ of the Romeo-Juliet story, in so far as the lovers are initially trapped in a long-standing family feud. Somewhat in the manner of Shakespeare, the uncertainty of the political conflict is transmitted to the urgency and intensity of love in the novel. Though courted patiently by the deserving Muslim nobleman Osman, Ayesha, the Pathan princess, hopelessly falls in love with the Hindu prince, Jagatsingh, arch-enemy and prisoner of her father Katlu Khan. These unforeseen happenings seem to take us from history to the realm of fantasy and wish-fulfilment. But the passions in Bankim s fiction play an emancipatory role, transporting the reader along with the characters to a visionary domain, that of the incalculable, removed from the obsequious colonial servitude that stifles the mind and spirit and which Bankim never failed to attack in his satirical sketches. There is perhaps a biographical urgency in all this. Being one of the two first graduates of Calcutta University, Bankim was promptly inducted into the colonial service and had to give up his legal studies. He considered this appointment as deputy magistrate and deputy collector a curse upon his life.
Even the story and the plot of Durgeshnandini is the consequence of a history of unbridled, though not emancipatory, lust: here the passions enslave and thereby take on the role of something akin to fate. Swami Abhiram had been a remarkably intelligent and studious scholar, but irresistibly drawn to the pleasures of the flesh. The illegitimate child born out of his sexual liaison with a local woman near Fort Mandaran was Tilottama s mother. Exposed and humiliated, Abhiram exiled himself to Varanasi and pursued his studies further. But such was the ungovernable force of his sexual urge that a second liaison, this time with a low-caste woman, produced Bimala s mother. Again, what brings together the widower Virendrasingh and Bimala is reckless passion.
If the novel, in this description, seems to suggest a potpourri of sentimentalism, melodrama, and wild fantasy, it is more than redeemed by its poetry as also by a contrapuntal irony scaling down that poetry. Once again, we may recall Shakespeare who uses similar, contradictory, strategies to transform the sensational and sentimental crudity of his sources. Bankim s poetic language with its sinuous rhythm and sonorous power extracts the most it can from the inexhaustibly varied euphonic resources of Sanskrit. According to his younger brother, Purna Chandra, when Bankim, apprehensive of grammatical and stylistic errors, read out the manuscript to a select gathering, one of the pundits present declared that he had been so carried away by the language as not to notice any flaws; another asserted that the flaws had beautified the language further ( Bankim Prasanga ).
In historical terms, the novel marks the culmination of an attempt made by several learned authors and translators of Bankim s time to infuse the sinewy and resonant energy of Sanskrit into newly-emerging Bengali prose. Vidyasagar, the great social reformer, grammarian, and educationist, had not fully succeeded in this venture since his Sanskritized vocabulary was not entirely unburdened of erudition. Bankim s language, by contrast, is authentic Bengali and yet in its exalted register capable of opening up an order of reality for its readers far beyond the drab banality of Bengali social life in colonial times. Thus we enter on the wings of this language, a plane of intensity bordering upon the tragic. This can no longer be mistaken for the fake melodramatic strategies of sentimental romance.
As a counterpoint to the high poetic register we have a low register anchored in humdrum routine life involving, for example, soldiers banter, maidservants commonsensical chatter and above all, the farcical scenes centred on the clownish figure of Vidya Diggaj. The language used here is colloquial with an earthy, demotic tang that establishes a doubleness of style that is yet another of Bankim s achievements. Before him, the high and the low styles in Bengali had been kept apart: Kaliprasanna Sinha translated the Mahabharata int