Those Days by Sunil Gangopadhyay leaves you astounded. Astounded that giants like Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar and Dwarkanath and Debendra Nath Tagore (Grandfather and Father respectively of Rabindra Nath Tagore) with their towering personalities actually existed and shaped their times. Astounded also at the obscurantism that prevailed in the mid nineteenth century Bengal – all in the name of preserving the traditions and the Shastras.
The book is a mixture of history and fiction and is woven in such a way and you find it difficult to imagine where history ands and fiction begins. Sunil Gangopadhay has undoubtedly spent much time and research to recreate the history of nineteenth century Bengal in such a fascinating way. The significance of the book lies as much in its narrative power and the depth of its characters as the fact that many of the events of that era, even though they occurred in Bengal impacted the whole of India.
In the book, the immense wealth of the zamindars is juxtaposed with their lifestyles – either given over to the pleasures of the flesh or to intellectual pursuits as in the case of the two principal characters, Nabinkumar – supposedly based on the character of Kali Prasanna Singha, a Bengali aristocrat and translator of the Mahabharata into Bengali, and his elder brother Ganga.
The other extreme is exemplified by the likes of Nawab Wajid Ali Shah, whose kingdom is annexed by the British and is exiled into Calcutta in all pomp and splendor as the Nawab reclining in his palki is busy composing Babul Mora¸ which of course decades later would be immortalized by K.L.Saigal.
Although the book is principally the story of Nabinkumar and his brother and their families, it is the peripheral themes and the peripheral characters that will stay and haunt you long after the last page in the book has been turned. The situation of the child widows of the time, deported for life to Benares and often picked up as mistresses by wealthy men of the time, the practices of the kulin Brahmins of the time; who made a living out of multiple marriages even as doddering old men, because of the custom that a unwed woman was doomed will stay with the reader for long. As will the personality of Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar, a man known far less than he deserves to be known.
The lifelong battles of Vidyasagar, a conservative Brahmin in many other ways, to create an environment in which women could be educated and go tom school and also to ensure that they could remarry if they were widowed were not easy battles to fight. In fact, Vidyasagar’s contribution to women’s education and widow remarriage was at the same level as Raja Ram Mohan Roy’s contribution to the abolition of Sati and religious obscurantism then prevalent. Providing even treatment to the British colonialists of the time, Sunil Gangopadhyay candidly admits that both Ram Mohan Roy and Vidyasagar succeeded largely because of the presence of a supportive group of progressive western scholars and administrators in British India like David Hare and John Bethune. Equally candidly the book describes the untold cruelty of the White Indigo planters and the atrocities they committed.
Although a work of fiction at face value, Those Days is a landmark book for reminding us afresh that history is not about politics, kings and queens and rulers and their reigns. That is what we mostly learn about in our history classes in school. Rather history is more about those apolitical giants, often little known if not totally forgotten who shaped our society and perhaps our destiny. It is on their giant and broad shoulders that we rest today and not on the pygmies we so often see surrounding us today.