Thok! A sharp dagger flew in and embedded itself in the desk.
‘Who’s that?’
It’s a world where daggers go thok . Phones go tring tring . The women drink gimlets. A lovelorn robot reads Jean Cocteau. The men drink a double Scotch and are well-built and suave. Or, to be more precise, “Hemanga was a well-built man, something of a misfit in an ordinary Bengali family.” Dipak’s shampooed hair blows in the light breeze as he chases The Moving Shadow.
The Moving Shadow is also the name of Arunava Sinha’s translation of “electrifying Bengali pulp fiction”, with a gun-toting femme fatale on its cover. He writes that Bengali pulp has a long, rich and colourful history going back to Haridaser Guptokatha ( Haridas’ Scandals ), which was published serially from 1870 to 1873. Pulp fiction is called “pocket books” in much of India. In Bengal they were Battalar Boi , cheap chapbooks literally sold under the banyan tree. Nothing remains to mark the legendary tree, but the cluster of Battala printing presses endures in Bengali literary lore, credited for churning out everything from religious almanacs to erotica, much to the disapproval of missionaries such as Reverend James Long and the Bengali elite who looked down on them while devouring books based on gory real-life scandals like the case of Elokeshi, whose husband, a government employee, decapitated her with a fish knife after discovering her affair with the mahant of Tarakeshwar temple.
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Pulp is, of course, not unique to Bengal. The doyen of Hindi pulp is Surender Mohan Pathak, the man who created the debonair investigative journalist Sunil, Vimal the shape-shifting Robin Hood of Mumbai underworld, and Sudhir, Dilli ka khaas kism ka haraami (the redoubtable rogue of Delhi). Malayalam had Muttathu Varkey and Kanam EJ. “There was a joke that Kanam EJ used to write with both hands, such was the demand for his novels from magazines,” says journalist G Pramod Kumar. But he wrote so much that he often forgot what cliff-hanger he had ended his last chapter on. The magazine editors would wait outside his house to remind him. Then he would produce the next chapter in an hour or two.
Gujarati pulp fiction has Bholabhai Golibar, who writes under the pen name Atom Golibar. In Marathi, there were the Arnalkar brothers — Baburao and Madhulkar — a “two-man pulp factory”, according to the blog Pop Goes the Slop. Baburao wrote some 1,180 books before he died in 1996, many featuring the “bhel-gobbling newspaper reporter-cum-investigator Sanjay”! His 1,180 sounds impressive, but fellow Marathi writer Gurunath Naik has surpassed it with over 1,200 books, starting with The Kiss of Death in 1957. A few years ago, Blaft Publications in Chennai created quite a buzz with its translations of racy Tamil pulp, stories with titles like Sweetheart , Please Die and Dim Lights , Blazing Hearts . Volume 3 just came out in 2017.
When the first volume came out, Rakesh Khanna, the editor-in-chief of Blaft, thought the greater appeal would be in an American niche market used to hard-boiled pulp nostalgia. But they proved hugely popular in India. Pritham Chakravarthy, who was roped in for the translation, admitted that she just had to put her feminism aside and “have a ball”. She even found a 1933 guide to writing pulp.
1. The title of the book should carry a woman’s name — and it should be a sexy one like Miss Leela Mohini.
2. Don’t worry about the storyline. Your story must absolutely include a minimum half-dozen loves and prostitutes, preferably 10 or a dozen murders, and a few sundry thieves and detectives.
3. You can make money only if you are able to titillate. If you try to bring in any social message, forget it. Beware! You are not going to lure your women readers.
The new Bengali anthology focuses on crime, sci-fi and horror rather than sex, though Maqbool in The Secret Agent is addicted to beautiful women and whisky.
‘Today you look like Helen of Troy,’ said Maqbool. ‘You know what? If I hadn’t been engaged to Arati, I would have run away with you tonight. Do you know what the Bible says? Stolen fruit is the sweetest.’
Sinha says while there is a bodice-ripping variety of Bengali pulp, he skipped it because “it’s almost pornographic, poorly written, more eye-roll than oh my God.” Perhaps true to Bengali stereotype, he quips that “most of the stories foreground intellect and carry on the themes of loss and longing that so inform Bengali literature”. Just without Bengali mothers. But there is sexism galore. In Coptotronic Love , by Muhammad Zafar Iqbal, one of the pioneers of Bengali science-fiction, the scientist realises he has fallen in love with his assistant Bula, who was due to take her Honours examination in physics. When they get married he hands Bula “all responsibility for running the house”. Her physics degree never comes up again.
Instead of sex, there are thrills and chills, sometimes at the stroke of the midnight hour, sometimes from a ventriloquist’s dummy. What might surprise many is the anthology includes well-known writers like Premendra Mitra and Satyajit Ray, not the usual names that come to mind when you think pulp. “It’s actually the established ‘literary’ writers who did a more interesting job in these genres,” explains Sinha. Most Bengali novelists, he writes, liked to think of themselves as “all-rounders” and tried their hand at a more “genteel form of pulp fiction”, detective or horror, pulp gone bhadralok, if you will. These are stories often with a twist in the tail, and sometimes, contrary to Tamil pulp’s rule number 3, even a bit of a social message. Sinha writes that a former police inspector, Priyanath Mukhopadhyay, active from 1878 to 1911, delved into his case file to create true crime stories, ripped literally from the headlines in his periodical Darogar Daptar , or The Inspector’s Files . In the 1900s, Bengalis were gobbling up books with titles like Murder or Unmurder and The Severed Arm .
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But, in general, pulp got sales but little respect. It came out in the Ma magazines in Kerala — Malayala Manorama , Mangalam , Manorajyam — which were called the painkili (pulp) weeklies, and had circulations of over a million each but were regarded as really “lowbrow”, says Pramod Kumar, and “people reading them were indeed looked down upon”. There’s now an award given out in Muttathu Varkey’s name to Malayalam writers but he himself was never acknowledged as a writer of any great repute by the mainstream. Pritham Chakravarthy remembers her mother and aunt locking the more raunchy pocket books in the cupboard. Women read them on buses and trains before discreetly slipping them into the handbag when they reached work. Pathak says he was roundly ignored by the literary establishment until a few books were translated into English, this despite Painsanth Lakh ki Dakaity selling over 2.5 million copies over 40 years. He said in an interview that in India, English books are “treated like respectable housewives” while Hindi books are “harlots who are looked down upon by the high-nosed English-speaking crowd.”
But pulp has its own problems. Khanna of Blaft says they brought out four books by Ibne Safi, the Urdu writer famous for Jasoosi Duniya and ImranSeries , and looked at other languages but it quickly got hairy. “One is that in a lot of Indian languages, pulp authors were doing a lot of plagiarism … ‘transplanting’ novels from English, pretty much doing a straight translation, just changing Roger to Rajesh, Chicago to Chandigarh, burgers to samosas and not crediting the original.”
In many ways the heyday of pulp is over. Television serials now offer a daily dose of pulp for those who want it. Internet offers an instant fix. The writers are fading away. When Blaft tracked down pulp writer Ramanichandran, they found a mild-mannered grey-haired grandmother, whose husband ran a shop selling kumkum and vibhuti near a temple and did all the talking for her. She busied herself making coffee, answering the door and taking her granddaughter to dance class. It was hard to imagine she was the one who described “Gunaseelan lying on an ornate bed surrounded by liquor bottles and a harem of scantily-clad women”.
Sinha says he didn’t track down the Bengali writers, many of whom are gone anyway. But their bios make fascinating reading. Vikramaditya was in the Indian Foreign Service. Gobindolal Bandyopadhyay had at least four pen names. Adrish Bardhan edited Bengal’s first science-fiction magazine. But the one that stood out for Sinha was Swapan Kumar, whom he calls the “acme of the sensationalist school”. Kumar, not his real name of course, had three personas — detective fiction writer, astrologer and sex-advice expert. “He deserves a biography, which I’d really love to write,” says Sinha.
Until then we have his fiction.
Try as you might, you cannot stay away. I sense that you will receive an invitation to track me down. Fate will force you to follow me. But beware! This is my final warning.
Sincerely.
The Moving Shadow.
Sandip Roy, the author of Don’t Let Him Know, is based in Kolkata