They say every self-respecting Bengali knows his name and has read his books. Mani Sankar Mukherjee, better known by his pseudonym Sankar, is now celebrating a new achievement — the English translation of his 1962 novel Chowringhee has broken all sales records in Indian fiction. In Delhi for a felicitation by his publisher Penguin, the 75-year-old author looks back at life with his characteristic glint of humour.
“When I wrote the book, I didn’t think it would be appreciated beyond Asansol,” he chuckles. Set in the 1950s Calcutta, Chowringhee is an intimate tale of the lives of managers, employers and guests at one of the city’s largest hotels, the Shahjahan. Seen through the eyes of Sankar, the first-person narrator, who lands a job at the hotel as the Greek manager’s secretary, the novel entwines several personal stories to reveal a public history of a city that revels in her own grime and grandeur.
“Chowringhee was my second novel. I’d written my first and it was well received. But soon, critics started calling me a one-book wonder and I feared that they may be right,” recalls Sankar, who started writing because as a poor but educated 19-year-old in post-Independence India, it was the only trade that didn’t cost money.
One evening, he says, he found himself standing at the crossing of Chowringhee Road in central Kolkata, looking at the colonial facade of Oberoi Grand. “Before I started writing, I worked as a clerk for the last British lawyer in Calcutta, Frederick Barwell. He lived in a hotel and I knew everybody there. Standing at that junction, I thought of writing a book about my experiences at a big hotel,” says Sankar, who drew upon the experiences and anecdotes of friends to craft the novel. Soon, Chowringhee became the subject of a film starring Bengal’s matinee idol Uttam Kumar. “The Chowringhee generation was born and it gladdens my heart that the book will be relevant even 50 years from now,” adds the writer.
Translated into English by Arunava Sinha in 1993, the book was given a fresh lease of life by Penguin last year. The books flew off the shelves as Sankar’s simple tale tugged at heartstrings. Soon, he hopes, every self-respecting Indian will have read Sankar.