Preface

Anyone who traces the course of my literary journey from its beginning will notice that the novel Chokher Bali arrived as something unlooked-for --- unexpected not only in my own work, but in the landscape of Bengali literature at that time. What signal came to me from without, what inward prompting gave rise to it --- that is a question not easily answered. The simplest reply is this: the old, tireless demand of the monthly journal for an unbroken serial story. Srishchandra was bringing out a new series of the Bangadarshan.

My name was put forward for it, though I gave my assent without any particular gladness of heart. To inherit the reputation of a celebrated predecessor is always a precarious undertaking; I was sensible of considerable diffidence on that score. Yet wherever in my nature the contest between reluctance and compliance has been waged, I have almost invariably come off the worse --- and so it was on this occasion. We once savoured the pleasures of Bishbriksha in the pages of the Bangadarshan --- in those days such pleasures were fresh and new.

The same journal might be revived under a new series, but the first season could not be repeated. That gathering had dissolved; the new editor was compelled to turn the road at a different corner. My fellow-editor Shailesh believed that I could supply the full measure of fiction for the journal's yearlong feast. I was, accordingly, to gird myself for the task --- as though, by the civil law of monthlies, one were entitled to demand a proper allowance from the editor. The commission, in truth, came from without.

I had never before set my hand to a tale of such magnitude; I had produced showers of short stories. I resolved that this new story must be forged in the workshop of the present age. The devil's cultivation of the poison-tree was no less vigorous then than now, though its field is different --- or at least, within the territory of fiction, it is. The image of our times is very sharp; to smother it with decoration and ornament is to blur it, to destroy its modern character. So when I could no longer evade the demand of the story, I descended into that inner workshop of the mind where, under the assault of fire and the blows of the hammer, figures of tempered metal are wrought into being.

No Bengali novel before this one had attempted to lay bare that merciless process of human creation. Thereafter, Gora, Ghare-Baire, and Chaturanga appeared, one by one, on the open road outside that curtain. Nor is that all: in the design of my shorter tales, my pen did not shrink from the rough touch of the world. Nashtaneer, Shasti --- these, too, belong to the literature of unsparing truth. Later still, in the poems of Palataka, that same confrontation with the world continued.

The new series of the Bangadarshan drew my mind, on the one hand, into the whirlpool of political and social reflection, and on the other, into close, unrelenting contact with human character --- in fiction, even in poetry. This tendency had begun, quietly, even in the Sadhana period; Sabujpatra gave it a fuller marketplace. The story of Chokher Bali has been struck and made terrible from within by a mother's jealousy. That jealousy gave ugly licence to a passion in Mahendra which, under ordinary circumstances, would never have bared its teeth and claws in so savage a fashion.

It was as though the gate of the beast-yard had been thrown open, and the violent events rushed out, unrestrained. The method of this new literary era is not to narrate the sequence of events, but to dissect them and draw out the truth that lies at their core. That very method is what reveals itself in Chokher Bali. Baisakh, 1347 Rabindranath Tagore