Nabarun Bhattacharya’s Beggars’ Bedlam pulls no punches. The very first page plunges the reader into a scene of coordinated chaos. The date is October 28, 1999, and multilingual, polyphonic Calcutta still wears two names. While life goes on as always in the narrow lanes and paras of a city that defiantly holds on to the rhythms of a small-town, something sensational is witnessed:

“Rows of severed heads are rolling about on the banks of the Old Ganga. Ergo, something terrible happened last night. Shoved a sack full of the heads and split? So where are the bodies, then? Hacked to pieces, or sliced and diced? (…) At first, there were a lot of skulls, dancing. But when the police arrived, all of them had vanished but three.” 

The extraordinary within the ordinary

“Dancing” skulls in the Old/Adi Ganga (once a stream of the Ganges, now reduced to a site for immersion of ashes), a beleaguered police force, the usual gaggle of the hoi polloi, sitting in observation of this strange phenomenon, and the media, bandying speculations instead of attempting to uncover any version of the truth, all pull the reader into the raucously carnivalesque universe Bhattacharya plots. The extraordinary folds itself within the ordinary with deceptive ease.

Subtly, in its insistence on dates in the October of 1999, the text reminds the mindful reader of its socio-political context. The 1999 General Election had concluded that same month, re-asserting the dominant presence of the CPI(M) in West Bengal, even as the Trinamool Congress had begun its rise to prominence. Politics has always been important to West Bengal. It is no surprise then, that an avowedly radical writer like Bhattacharya pulls politics to the centerstage in what is, effectively, a magic realist tale about the clash of classes, set against the backdrop of the literary history of Bengal.

The premise is as simple as it is devious. Calcutta (as it is referred to in the text) has journeyed from imperialism into modernity, has cycled through Marxist thought into capitalist enterprise, and is the site of a range of oppositional ideologies and identities. Into this melee, Bhattacharya throws his Phyatarus and Choktars, creatures that nudge Bhattacharya’s well-researched and historicised Calcutta into the disruptive dimension of magic realism. Phyatarus first appeared in Bhattacharya’s short stories in the early 2000s. They are agents of anarchy, “able to fly, cause massive mayhem at festivities and in any home and household remotely regarded as happy.”

Madan, DS, and Poet Purandar Bhat, the Phyatarus of Beggars’ Bedlam, are nondescript men, with no pretensions to heroism. They find an alliance with the Choktars, another anomalous category, undefinable in terms of characteristics, and living unidentified within the masses that form the underbelly of any expansive city. Bhodi, the leader of the Choktars, under the tutelage of his father, the Raven (an ancient and wise Dandakak, straight from folklore), rents out rooms for “All Inauspicious Occassions”, assisted by his wife, Bechamoni, and his ancient retainer, Nolen. “There’s none better at panic and pandemonium”, the reader is told about the Choktars. Once every hundred and fifty years, the Choktars and Phytarus come together to “form one and the same party.” They cause disruption and “rattle the world”. It takes no great leap to read the Choktars and Phyatarus as subversive subalterns, exercising agency despite a system that attempts to invisibilise them by divesting them of both voice and narrative.

Together, they launch an offensive on the state power – the industrialists, the politicians, even the intelligentsia that reads Foucault and Bakhtin (both of whom Bhattacharya, with delicious irony, deploys in his own politics) but has forgotten writers from Bangla literary traditions. In a scene as terrifying as it is hilarious, the Police Commissioner of Calcutta is decapitated by one of the “flying discs” of the Choktars and goes about his duties holding it together by increasingly absurd strategems. The metaphor of the headless chicken springs to mind and attaches itself to the absolute helplessness of the state machinery when faced with a people’s uprising. The police, we are told, with much dry humour, “are quite often involved in occult happenings. Such as making a hale-and-hearty person disappear. The police never claim to know magic. Yet everyone knows that the police are the greatest magicians of all.”

Heads of industry and self-serving politicians come in for similar censure, as does the general public that refuses to think critically or to engage with the world outside its petty concerns – “unless something takes place on the television screen, they don’t come to know about it at all.” Bhattacharya’s social critique also finds manifestation in the act of witness. Borhilal, a modest shopkeeper in a modest locality serves as the primary witness in the text, observing the actions of the Choktars and Phyatarus. The Raven, flying over the city, perching on trams and atop buildings is another witness to the complexities of a temporality in flux. “Everything needs a witness”, he announces, gently pulling the reader into the role of this necessary witness to the inequities of his world.

Calcutta, transcending temporality

Calcutta is crucial to the narrative of Beggars’ Bedlam – not as a space of nostalgia or as muse, as has been usual with writers writing the city – but as a space that transcends temporality, existing at once, in the past and the present. Right when the Phyatarus are commenting on the tension between the CPM and the Trinamool in the city, Borhilal, in a dream, has odd bits of Calcutta’s history revealed to him. He learns that before the present-day racecourse was built in 1810, there used to be another where race meetings and race-balls were held as early as 1780.

Bhattacharya’s characters traverse the city from Keoratola to Tollygunge, from Eden Gardens to Maidan and Chowringhee and the Park Street Cemetery, taking the reader into little known alleys and back lanes. Our witnesses – Bohrilal, the Raven, myriad minor characters who appear, observe and are never seen again – all play a role in historicising a city that is “home to several eccentrics and madmen. It has always been. You could even say its’s a tradition.” One of these eccentrics, beloved of the city, is the fascinating Begum Johnson, born of British parents in 18^th century Calcutta, witness to the ascent of Siraj-ud-Daulah and the Battle of Plassey, and interred at St John’s Church, in the heart of modern-day Kolkata. Begum Johnson remains a spectral presence through the text, linking the political excesses of turn-of-the-century Calcutta to the colonial exploitation of the city and its inhabitants, walking that amorphous space between fact and fiction.

Rijula Das’s translation brings alive Bhattacharya’s carnivalesque, ensuring the reader unfamiliar with the source language does not miss either the nuances or the riotous humour of the prose. The Translator’s Notes are a generous bonus, hand-holding the reader into a detailed study of the literary and historical references the text makes. Structured like a serialised magazine publication of yore, Beggars’ Bedlam is a rambunctiously subversive metanarrative, acutely conscious of its constructedness and of the dialogue it establishes with its reader. Aware of its situatedness within a post-truth world, the text challenges any claims to authenticity and verification, with humour hinging on the acerbic. The narrator quotes a letter that he then reports was eaten by termites and can no longer be referred to. A diary entry, similarly, cannot be verified because it was devoured by mice. A letter appealing peace is published in newspapers, signed by everyone from Michael Madhusudan Dutt to Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay, John Stuart Mill, Carl Gustav Jung, and Vladimir Nabokov, but if you were to go searching for it, “no newspapers with that date will ever be found”. In the tradition of the epistolary narrative, it often refers to the reader; only, irreverently, as “Dear Witless Reader.”

Bhattacharya wields irreverence like a sharp knife, imaging the battle between the chaos-makers and the administrative system attempting to counter them as an epic gone absurd, turning it into a commentary on the impossibility of peace in an unequal world. Layered liberally with intertextual references, the novel is a chronicle of its times, contextualising the forgotten history of Bengal’s literature at the same time as it celebrates the chaotic, subversive, and rule-breaking nature of the subaltern, reassuring its world-weary reader that everything changes and nothing does.

Saloni Sharma

Click here to subscribe to ESSF newsletters in English and or French.