His fiction deals very largely with social problems, and with tyrannies 'that have obsessed the modern Bengali life against reason and humanity'. He thus had the inestimable advantage of viewing his land and people from outside. Mention of Rangoon above reminds us that he lived for many years in Burma, serving in a Government office. Very few of his fellow-novelists have had his experience of life. In Bengal perhaps I am the only fortunate writer who has not had to struggle'. Since then I have been writing regularly. This became at once extremely popular, and made me famous in one day. I sent them a short story, for their magazine Jamuna. But sheer volume and force of their letters and telegrams compelled me at last to think seriously about writing again. I promised most unwillingly-perhaps only to put them off till I had returned to Rangoon and could forget all about it.
When almost hopeless, some of them suddenly remembered me, and after much persuasion they succeeded in extracting from me a promise to write for it. Some of my old acquaintances started a little magazine, but no one of note would condescend to contribute to it, as it was so small and insignificant. A mere accident made me start again, after the lapse of about eighteen years. But I soon gave up the habit as useless, and almost forgot in the long years that followed that I could even write a sentence in my boyhood. Probably this led to my writing short stories when I was barely seventeen. over and over again in my childhood, and many a night I kept awake regretting their incompleteness and thinking what might have been their conclusion if finished. I have not his work now-somehow it got lost but I remember poring over those incomplete mss. Father was a great scholar, and he had tried his hand at stories and novels, dramas and poems, in short, every branch of literature, but never could finish anything. The first made me a tramp and sent me out tramping the whole of India quite early, and the second made me a dreamer all my life. From my father I inherited nothing except, as I believe, his restless spirit and his keen interest in literature. I received almost no education for want of means. In Sarat Babu's own words, 'My childhood and youth were passed in great poverty. But he lost everything, so that the novelist's father was poor. His grandfather had been an extremely wealthy man.
SARATCHANDRA CHATTERJI was born at Devanandapur, a small village in the Hugli District of Bengal, on September 15th, 1876.
0 kommentar(er)
