Mani Shankar Mukherjee

It’s nostalgia after 50 years. Well, that’s another ingredient which tickles the Bong-palates...err...minds to their hearts’ content after long animated adda-sessions and savoury culinary delights.

Exactly the same was noticed when 78-year-old eminent Bengali author Mani Shankar Mukherjee, more endearingly known as Shankar, was recently felicitated at South Kolkata’s Starmark Bookstore on the occasion of celebrating the golden jubilee year of his cult novel, Chowringhee.
The book, which later went on to earn a household name over the following decades, was first published on June 10, 1962. To the uninitiated, the evergreen title was also made into an eponymous movie in the year 1968 starring the then matinee idol of Bengali cinema, Uttam Kumar, and was equally adjudged a blockbuster by popular tastes. Also, a play was enacted on stage after the novel became an instant best-seller.
Usually a media-shy person and always preferred to maintain a low-key in the lone corners of his authorship, the much adorable and down-to-earth Shankarda was overwhelmed by a sudden flood of pervasive fanfare and a tremendous amount of undivided attention that he drew from legions of readers, well-wishers, friends and patrons alike from all walks of life on an eventful day of commemorating Chowringhee on the completion of its 50 glorious years.
In fact, this is the most fascinating part of the celebratory episode. “The creator stands to witness the raging success of his creation which continues to gallop like an unstoppable stallion is simply a rare and unprecedented case on the literary calendar. Not many litterateurs have been fortunate enough to watch such an occasion unfold before their eyes,” concedes Sudhansu Sekhar Dey of Dey’s Publishing which took over the task of printing the tome’s Bengali version after Baak Sahitya had left off. The latter owns the credit of publishing the inaugural edition of the book. Set at the backdrop of 1950s, Shankar incorporated himself as a pivotal character in the moving tale and narrated the entire saga through his eyes in first-person. The account basically thrives on his observation, interpretation, his own analysis and sometimes via his straight reportage of events and incidents occurring on the hotel premises. He would record all as a mute witness. He married the fact with the imaginary to spice up a compelling page-turner. He etched out his part as an ambitious young man who is rendered jobless after doing errands of a dutiful secretary to an English barrister, whose untimely demise threw him into dire straits. He began to sell wastepaper baskets from door to door and as he settled down to in the nearby landmark of Curzon Park, he bumped into an acquainted passer-by who promised to bail him out of his fiscal crisis by finding him a respectable job at one of the oldest and reputed hotels in the city.
Thus the narrator-writer made inroads into the hotel to script a success story of his literary life. How far this reflected the writer’s own life-story in reality beyond the book is still unknown, as he wishes to retain the suspense even after 5 decades. “Let the curiosity-factor be there. It keeps alive the aura around the book — a much-required aspect to continue the discussion at length. I’m happy that the book is still the talk of town and everybody’s raising a toast to it,” the septuagenarian writer said.
“My mother would often chide and accuse me of being an akaalpakko which as an adjective aptly fits the bill for a young, mischievous boy showing a palpable precocious maturity when weighed in the light of his fragile age. I guess, the term became both my forte as well as my foible. Since I started writing from a tender age, my luck now shines on me to see my tome clock 50 consecutive summers. You may call it a fluke or anything else,” he quips, citing a probable reason behind the extraordinariness of an ordinary affair like unveiling a book which ran into its 111th edition. This essentially speaks oodles of its unparalleled popularity, more so in vernacular literature with its multiple translations across a global plane.
With his sense of humour still intact, Shankar’s witty satire has always spilled out in his literary texts which effortlessly documented urban life and city-centric themes, its multifarious shades, unending drudgeries and various facets, woven into a complex cobwebbed plot that deepens and thickens like a mist of mystery with characters, their psychological turmoils, internal demons and efforts to grope for outlets of solutions.
Clad in a crispy, ironed dhoti-kurta, a trademark get-up of a typical Bengali Bhadralok, seems a soft-spoken, reticent Shankar da with a bespectacled wide-eyed glance of a child-like amazement, has been living upto this most familiar essence of his personality from the dawn to dusk of his life. And nope, he is not a tired writer who unlike the renowned English essayist Charles Lamb never let the wood enter his soul, despite doing a constant clerical job at his professional desk. Disallowing the fatigue to pull his collars down and collapse his creativity, Shankar da kept on pushing his pen tirelessly. “I still love to fill in my fountain pen and ink pages after pages in glee,” he utters non-chalantly.
The then young writer hunting for a suitable plot for his second novel after his launchpad Kato Ajanare (translated as The Great Unknown) to wipe off his staunch detractors’ incisive tag of allegation that misconstrued and castigated his credentials as nothing more than a one-book author, now in his twilight years with silver streaked strands smiles satisfactorily to see the gala celebration of his book amidst succeeding generations of amused readers, listeners and curious autograph-seekers.