Saratchandra Chattopadhyay was born on 15 September 1876 in Devanandapur, a village in West Bengal. His childhood and youth were spent in dire poverty and he received very little formal education. But he began writing as a teenager and was soon to become one of the best-loved Bengali novelists of all time.
Saratchandra came to maturity at a time when the nationalist movement was gathering momentum together with an awakening of social consciousness. Much of his writing bears the marks of the resultant turbulence in society. In his hands, the novel 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.
Apart from Devdas (1917), some of Saratchandra's best-known novels are Palli Samaj (1916), Charitraheen (1917), Nishkriti (1917), Grihadaha (1920), Pather Dabi (1926), Sesh Prasna (1929) and Srikanta (in four parts, 1917, 1918, 1927 and 1933). Saratchandra Chattopadhyay died in 1938.
Sreejata Guha has an MA in Comparative Literature from State University of New York at Stony Brook. She has worked as a translator and editor with Stree Publications and Seagull Books in Kolkata, and now works with Jacaranda Press in Bangalore. She has previously translated Picture Imperfect, a collection of Byomkesh Bakshi stories, and Taslima Nasrin's novel French Lover for Penguin.
Speak the name 'Devdas' and the mind conjures up the visage of a haggard, world-weary, lovelorn soul, driving himself to drink and hurtling on relentlessly on the path to self-destruction. The 'Devdas metaphor, a time-honoured, enduring tragic symbol of unfulfilled love, has captivated readers and film-going audiences for the better part of a century now. But interest in the original Devdas, Saratchandra Chattopadhyay's piece de resistance, has been rekindled recently in the wake of the Sanjay Leela Bhansali film, which is an adaptation of the Bengali novel. This is a good time to take a fresh look at the novel in translation, and to look at the specific ways in which the Devdas metaphor has engaged our imagination over several generations.
Saratchandra Chattopadhyay's Devdas was published in Bengali in 1917. It was written when the novelist was at the height of his powers, in the midst of his most productive phase. Palli Samaj had been published the previous year, in 1916. The year 1917 saw the publication in book form of Charitraheen, Nishkriti and the first part of Srikanta-three of the novels Saratchandra is best remembered by-apart from Devdas.
It was also a time when the forty-year-old writer had just experienced his meteoric rise to fame. Born in Devanandapur, a village in West Bengal, in 1876, Saratchandra had spent his childhood in dire poverty. Having spent some of his youth in Bhagalpur and Muzaffarpur, he left for Burma in 1903, at the age of twenty-seven, after the death of his father. It was from Burma that he started sending his stories and novels to Calcutta journals. Yamuna started serializing Charitraheen (which had been written as early as 1903) while Bharatvarsha staked claim to the serialization of Srikanta. When the stories first began to appear, readers were convinced that writing of such quality could come only from Rabindranath Tagore, Bengal's ruling literary deity, who was perhaps writing under a pseudonym. When it was realized that Bengal was in fact celebrating the arrival of a great new talent on its literary horizons, Saratchandra became a literary sensation overnight.
In 1916 Saratchandra returned to Calcutta from Burma. In 1917 he took up residence in a comfortable house in Samtabed, on the outskirts of Calcutta, and dedicated his life to writing. He was to become India's first professional writer a person who earned his entire livelihood only from writing. He was also to become the most popular novelist of his time, and this was not without reason.
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