Days and nights of the forest

Years ago a television producer had commissioned me to interview Sunil Gangopadhyay the finest writer of Bengali prose who was also considered by many to be the best contemporary poet That was almost a decade before Sunil passed awayThe interview was scheduled for a monsoon afternoon It had been raining heavily since the previous evening and Kolkata had decided to take a day off as streets and lanes rapidly disappeared under water Therersquos no way he will come to the studio in this weather we might as well call it off I told the producer But Sunil did come and he wasnrsquot late either We chatted for a while had coffee and then settled down for the interviewThe dense shaal forest shimmering in the early autumn morning light in Dhalbhumgarh is what brought Aranyer Din Raatri to life Representation PicThinkstockI found Sunil to be a great raconteur and an effortless communicator who once he warmed up held me spellbound with his masterful ability to recall events and make them come alive without so much as shifting in his chair What was equally remarkable was his humility He was the storyteller not the storyIt was while talking about his early years that he mentioned how he and his friends including Shakti Chattopadhyay all of them poets would travel deep into rural Bengal and Bihar explore forests and lead a Bohemian life that was all the rage in the 1960s and 1970s It was more than the shallow mystical flower power of the times it was intense and to an extent daringly reckless mdash you pushed yourself to the brink and then pulled backFor Sunil Shakti and others it was their most creative years which they spent rescuing Bengali prose and poetry from sloganeers and pamphleteers masquerading as writers There was nothing dark and desolate about what they wrote there was passion and ebullience Even unrequited love was to be celebrated and treasured not mourned overOne such lsquotriprsquo thatrsquos the word Sunil used was to Dhalbhumgarh ldquoFour of us decided we should get out of Kolkata we needed a breath of fresh air So we just got into a train at Howrah station We had not even purchased tickets for the journey the idea was to get off at a place that would catch our imaginationrdquo As Dhalbhumgarh approached they were enchanted by the dense shaal forest shimmering in the early autumn morning light and they decided to get off at the tiny stationThe next few days were a journey of discovery for Sunil an exploration of the way we who live in cities look at forests and their tribal dwellers and the way they look at us The mahuasoaked story of that lsquotriprsquo appeared in a puja baarshiki annual literary magazines published during Durga Puja in 1967 as Aranyer Din RaatrildquoOne day I think it was Ashtami I received a call The person at the other end had a deep baritone voice and introduced himself as Satyajit Rayrdquo Sunil said ldquoI couldnrsquot believe myself Satyajit Ray Calling merdquo The master filmmaker told Sunil that he had just finished reading Aranyer Din Raatri and wanted to make a film based on the novel Could he get the rights Sunil of course said yesThe eponymous film was released in 1969 and was a big hit marking Rayrsquos shift to contemporary issues and 1960s Bengali middle class angst Like many other films directed by Ray Aranyer Din Raatri or Days and Nights of the Forest as it was titled for foreign audience featured Soumitra Chatterjee Rabi Ghosh and Aparna Sen Pahari Sanyal and Kaberi Bose were there tooThe surprise inclusions were Samit Bhanja and Subhendu Chatterjee And the biggest surprise was the inclusion of Simi Garewal who played the role of a seductive young tribal woman Duli lisping in halfBengali halfSanthali her large kohllined eyes as intoxicating as the heady smell of mahua even before it has been dried and fermentedRay elevated Sunilrsquos portrayal of the eternal conflict between man and nature and the clash of two worlds one in which we live and the other inhabited by tribals to cinematic brilliance Next year in 1970 Ray produced a second film based on a novel written by Sunil Pratidwandi was an urban story in sharp contrast to Aranyer Din RaatriThat afternoon after the interview was over and we were smoking cigarettes over coffee Sunil reverted to Aranyer Din Raatri ldquoYou know I felt honoured by Ray deciding to make a film based on my novel But I do wish he had consulted me on the script When I saw the film it was a lot different from my bookrdquo he told me Which is true If you read the book and then watch the film the differences become stark But Ray would argue that he was making a film while Sunil was writing a novel The medium forced the changesMeanwhile Dhalbhumgarh has changed as has all of Chhota Nagpur as the plateau was called in the past Jharkhand is only part of the region symbolised by Dhalbhumgarh in Aranyer Din Raatri The dense shaal forests have disappeared thanks to the timber mafia and the rude intrusion of lsquourbanisationrsquo has changed the lives of forest dwellers the Santhals the Mundas the Bhumij the Lodhas and the Sabars forever You wonrsquot find Dulis dancing to the throbbing beat of madol or tribals happily high on mahua singing Tusu songsWhen we were growing up in Jamshedpur we would often go for school picnics to nearby jungles beyond Subarnarekha or Domohoni where Subarnarekha meets Karkai redolent with the smell of shaal mahua and tendu Those forests have been plundered by dikus with the help of tribal collaborators The animals are gone too All this happened many years ago the loot is being talked of now In the name of lsquodevelopmentrsquo and lsquoempowermentrsquo we have destroyed the culture of the forest the days and nights of carefree existence of an entire people now belong to the distant pastThe writer is a senior journalist based in the National Capital Region His Twitter handle is KanchanGupta