He died on Friday after a fortnight-long illness during which he was shifted to a local Kolkata hospital.
Photo: Wikipedia
Mani Sankar Mukherjee, the legendary Bengali language writer whose bestsellers ‘Kato Ajanare’ (The Great Unknown), ‘Chowringhee’, ‘Seemabaddha’ (Company Limited) and ‘Jana Aranya’ (The Middleman), were translated into many languages and made into movies by famous directors, including Satyajit Ray, is no more.
He died on Friday after a fortnight-long illness during which he was shifted to a local Kolkata hospital.
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This writer met Sankar for the first time in the midst of Covid in 2021 at a small flat on South Kolkata’s Bondel Road, which had books spilling over from racks, peeping from under the sofa and spread all over his dining table, competing for space with the tea cups and jars of biscuits.
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This was the famed novelist’s den where he sat and spun stories based on the myriad characters he met and the society in which they lived.
Those novels which engrossed millions of readers in Bengali as also the many languages into which he has been translated including English, Hindi, Malayalam, Gujarati, French and Spanish, form a body of literature which capture the spirit of the Indian middle class as it evolved in the 1960s and 1970s.
Mukherjee who turned 92 last December was going through a phase of rediscovery by younger readers, when this writer last spoke to him, after new editions and translations of his books by brilliant translators such as Arunava Sinha started coming out in this decade.
In the life of Mani Sankar Mukherjee, who signed his books simply as Sankar, admiration arrived early, and from the most fastidious of quarters.
One morning, when his novel ‘Seemaddha’, a cool, unsparing study of the corporate rat race and Kolkata’s rarefied “Boxwallah” culture appeared in the Puja annual number of Anandabazar Patrika, the telephone rang.
On the line was Satyajit Ray. In his unmistakable baritone, Ray delivered a message at once courteous and proprietary: would Mukherjee, please, refrain from selling the film rights to anyone without first informing him? He was interested.
Ray had been, Mukherjee recalled, a fast reader. The Puja magazine arrived with the morning newspapers; within hours of finishing the novel, the director had made his claim.
The resulting film, ‘Seemaddha’, released in English as Company Limited, joined Ray’s celebrated Calcutta trilogy alongside ‘Pratidwandi’, based on the novel by Sunil Gangopadhyay, and ‘Jana Aranya’, adapted from another of Mukherjee’s own works.
The film went on to win a prize at the Venice Biennale the year after its release, sealing the unlikely partnership between the quiet chronicler of clerks and tycoons and the maestro of Bengali cinema.
Mukherjee’s readers were not confined to cineastes. Jyoti Basu, the austere CPI(M) leader who became West Bengal’s longest-serving chief minister, once told him, with a candour bordering on nostalgia, “I keep reading you … but I used to read you much more when I was in jail.”
The metamorphosis of a High Court clerk into a novelist had been, by his own telling, an act of gratitude. In the 1950s, Mukherjee worked for Noel Barwell, the last English barrister to practice at the Calcutta High Court. That relationship went on to extend beyond the contractual.
Barwell took the young clerk to the movies and out to dinner; he treated him, Mukherjee felt, as a companion rather than a subordinate. When Barwell died, Mukherjee was seized by the desire to commemorate the man “who thought so well of me.”
He had saved Rs 400, no small sum then, and imagined a statue or an oil portrait. Friends dissuaded him; memorialising a man in marble required a fortune. A proposal to have a street named after Barwell foundered on nationalist sentiments. Independent India, a local politician reproached him, could hardly be expected to immortalise an Englishman. And so Mukherjee chose prose.
The tribute became ‘Kato Ajanare’, first serialised in the magazine Desh. It marked the birth of Sankar, his chosen pen name, borrowed from his own middle name. The brilliant, erratic filmmaker Ritwik Ghatak is said to have tried to adapt the book, but the project faltered for lack of funds, an irony not lost on a writer so attentive to the caprices of fortune.
If his debut earned him notice, it also earned him whispers. He was dubbed early as a “one-book author”. Mukherjee prayed the label would not stick.
Salvation arrived, as such things often did in Kolkata, under an awning in the rain. One afternoon, caught in a sudden shower, he stood watching the neon sign of the Grand Hotel flicker against the Colonial buildings on Chowringee Street.
He realised he knew the intimate machinery of grand hotels, their gossip, hierarchies, and discreet scandals, having observed the parade of humanity at the Spencer’s Hotel, where Barwell had stayed.
The result was ‘Chowringee’, published three years before Hotel. Sankar’s fictional Shahjahan Hotel teemed with the grand and the desperate. A flamboyant manager Marco Polo, a debonair receptionist Sata Bose, the hostess Kaberi, and the industrial families who conducted their intrigues in its suites.
The novel acquired cult status, was translated widely, and soon found its way to the screen in a blockbuster featuring Uttam Kumar and Supriya Devi. The murmurs died out as the stars glittered over the movie stars.
Success brought its own delicate encounters. Sir Badridas Goenka, industrialist and the first Indian chairman of the Imperial Bank, summoned the author after the book’s publication.
Mukherjee declined the offer of a chauffeured car and arrived by bus. The tycoon wished to know whether Sankar had been sarcastic in opening the novel with the protagonist saluting the statue of Sir Hariram Goenka, his relative. The question hovered somewhere between reproach and admiration.
Years later, when the British firm Dunlop, where Mukherjee worked, was taken over by R P Goenka, Sir Badridas’s grandson, the writer considered leaving, mindful of old sensitivities.
Goenka disarmed him with a question worthy of Sankar himself: “Can you hang anyone, or a job, without a trial?” He persuaded him to stay, introducing the novelist, with puckish pride, as a man who “in his spare time, occasionally helps me.”
Titles accumulated over the years. Mukherjee was appointed Sheriff of Kolkata, a ceremonial post he wore lightly.
Even in later years, he remained at work, brimming with anecdotes. He liked to ask visitors whether they knew that monks of the Ramakrishna Order serving in the United States wore coats and trousers, as ordained by Swami Vivekananda. He had stories on Dr B C Roy, West Bengal’s first chief minister, which could have scandalised, if they hadn’t come from him in the humorous manner in which he regaled his visitors.
Sankar relished such footnotes of history, the asides that revealed new sides to known figures. In his fiction, as in his life, the clerks noticed titans, and the titans, sometimes, noticed back the clerks.
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