Review: Carnival by Sayam Bandyopadhyay
Translated from the Bengali by Arunava Sinha, the novel, which is set in Bengal in 1857, is an adaptation of the legend of Faust
Sayam Bandyopadhyay’s novel, Puranpurush, which won the Yuva Sahitya Akademi Award in 2020, is the latest adaptation of the legend of Faust and is inspired by all the others that have preceded it, from Marlowe to the Mann(s). In the legend, Faust is a successful but dissatisfied man who makes a pact with the devil to sell his soul in exchange for knowledge and power only to regret it later when there’s no scope for redemption.
Translated from the Bengali by Arunava Sinha, the book’s English title, Carnival recalls Bakhtin’s theory of the carnivalesque, of utter chaos. This sets the stage for the reader to enter the protagonist’s atypical mind. The novel begins with Rajaram Deb waiting in his room on the dawn of July 6, 1857 for Mephisto’s associates to arrive and accompany him to the much-anticipated carnival. A landowner, who has slowly lost all desire to engage with the world outside his room in his ancestral mansion, in his youth, Rajaram had wanted to partner with the elite businessman, Babu Dwarkanath Tagore.
He had lived with his father, Debram, and his aunt in the house where he was born. His mother had died giving birth to him. His aunt later brought a spiritual daughter, Krishnabhabini, to live with them. After his father’s passing, Rajaram had considered contacting Tagore. But his letters had remained incomplete as he found himself scribbling irrelevant details of his life. After the elders died, Rajaram and Krishnabhabini continued to live in the house with a punkah-puller, a charioteer, and a couple who cooked meals and looked after the household.
One day, Rajaram finds a couple of dictionaries: one, an English dictionary with its pages torn; two, an English-to-Bengali dictionary that was given to him by his home tutor. As he browses through the tattered pages of the first, he is enticed by the word, “carnival”. The meaning of the word in both the dictionaries brings no comprehension. Rajaram was home-schooled and knew English but wasn’t well-versed in the language.
One day, his lawyer-neighbour invites him to a feast where a poet and political leader is the chief guest. Rajaram, driven by his excitement to meeting someone who might help him with the meaning of “carnival”, steps out without caring about dressing up. His only concern is to understand the word he keeps uttering excitedly. As he learns the meaning, “an immeasurable ecstasy”, Mephisto approaches him with the offer of a Faustian bargain.
Hypnotic prose entices the reader as the twin courtiers of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, appear in 1857 Calcutta. Bandyopadhyay skilfully creates a plot that culturally adapts the preceding tales of Faust’s madness by setting it in colonial Calcutta with a protagonist who could have been aware of the characters he meets if only he were educated in English at Hindu college, which was infamous among the landowner class as a place where the youth created mayhem. This instance of the English canon entering an upper caste Bengali household and meeting with intrigue and resistance, is emblematic of the response to the rise of British colonialism in India.
The pace of the narration aligns with Rajaram’s anticipation of the carnival and jumps from the present to the past throughout, creating temporal distortions. The ironic presentation of his character brings about a dark humour. The reader can only see him as someone who was tactfully prohibited from joining the tragedy of Faust even as he inhabited it. His lack of ambition for knowledge and power dissociates him from his literary ancestry even as the reader is taken by surprise upon the arrival of Mephisto.
Rajaram’s disinterest in the rising rebellion against the British in India further adds to his anti-heroism. The absurdity of the story and Rajaram’s mind are showcased in his choice of a kitten over his unborn child as his heir. His class superiority is playfully challenged by the presence of an adjutant stork accompanying Mephisto. The bird refuses to look at or interact with Rajaram. Now endangered, such storks were common in 19th-century Calcutta where they often scavenged through garbage.
The only woman in the story, Krishnabhabini meets a fate that’s similar to Hamlet’s Ophelia and Faust’s Gretchen. Yet, she makes an appearance during the most-awaited carnival in ways that evoke fear in Rajaram, making it perhaps a spectacle of vengeance. Rajaram’s inexplicable desire for the carnival is preceded by nightmares depicting extravagant celebrations, grotesque images, and bloody scenarios. Consider this fever dream of his frenzied mind:
“And then the image again… the two men perspiring profusely. Strangely, the red on their skin flows with their sweat. They turn alert upon realizing this and have a quick discussion, whose conclusion they convey to the old woman. She gets to her feet, terrified, as though she’s trying to stop them. But they kick her, and she is flung to the floor. Then one of the two red men pulls out an enormous sword from his garments, while the other one slaps the young man resoundingly. The man with the sword plunges it into the young man’s stomach. Blood gushes out. The old woman stares, transfixed. One of the two men dispassionately asks for the plate the old woman was eating out of. It still holds some food. The man smears the blood flowing from the young man’s body on this food. Then both of them stuff the food, now streaked with blood, into the old woman’s mouth.”
The anachronistic presence of legendary literary characters adds to the absurdity of this brilliant Indian adaption of the Faustian bargain. The temporal distortions in the narration, an isolated protagonist and his inexplicable obsessive tendencies, and the overall chaos leaves the reader with an existential question: what happens when there’s no one to bear witness to a life?
A deft piece of translation, Carnival is an excellent addition to Indian English literature.
Akankshya Abismruta is an independent writer.