Exploring the glorious literary heritage of Bengal

The first time I went to India, nearly 30 years ago, I was sent as a young novelist by the British Council. Unusually, my first encounter with the country was Kolkata, a city I loved instantly. At the first event, after I had finished reading, an audience member gently asked if I liked Indian novels. I thought I was prepared, and mentioned R.K. Narayan, Salman Rushdie, Anita Desai and Vikram Seth. The questioner smiled. ‘Those are all writers in English,’ he said. ‘What about writers in Indian languages?’ I was stumped.

Perhaps many people of generous reading habits have the same block without knowing it. The liveliness of English-language writers of Asian ethnicity is widely appreciated, even if the author has never lived in one of these countries and hardly speaks any language other than English. But lying just out of reach, often unsuspected, are some glorious literary cultures. The most magnificent and extensive, I suspect, is Bengali, and this anthology, edited by Arunava Sinha, is a splendid guide to unmapped lands.

Included is a story by Buddhadeva Bose, which sums up the accepted character of the Bengali nation. A schoolteacher makes a mistake in construing a sentence in Bengali. He puzzles over a verb; he tries to discover the etymology, and, failing, decides to work on a dictionary of the language. His family grows up, and the demands of learning clash with the need to provide a dowry. Society is changing. At the end of Partition, the teacher’s wife is dead and his work lies in tattered boxes in a refugee camp. Still, the labour has been borne. The forces of the Bengali mind – family, debate, the violence of history – triangulate, make a sort of sense, and move on.