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City In Mourning After Festive Frenzy
A tearful farewell to Sunil on final journey
TIMES NEWS NETWORK

Kolkata: Sunil Gangopadhyay was at his desk hours before he suffered a heart attack around 1.30am on Nabami, writing in solitude even as the city was in the middle of frenzied Puja celebrations.
Two days later, after bidding farewell to the goddess, Kolkatans and fans of the writer from across Bengal were out on the streets again, this time in silent mourning to catch a final glimpse of Gangopadhyay during his last journey through the streets that idolized him as one of the greatest contemporary icons of Bengali literature.
A multitude of people — writers, film and theatre personalities, politicians and scores of fans —joined Gangopadhyay’s cortege, blurring not only the young-old divide but also, albeit momentarily, the acrimony between the Trinamool Congress and the Left as leaders from both sides walked in unison to pay their respects.
Chief minister Mamata Banerjee led the tributes and was joined by her cabinet colleagues, but the government’s response had initially been lukewarm. When Gangopadhyay died on Tuesday, the CM issued a note of condolence and said minister Subrata Mukherjee would represent the government at the Thursday’s cremation. That Mamata did not commit to a greater role had perhaps to do with Gangopadhyay’s stated Left leanings.
But sensing the mood on Thursday morning, when people from all walks of life gathered at Rabindra Sadan, Mamata and her team landed up and stole the show from Left leaders who had, till then, taken the lead in organizing the farewell.
Former CM Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee expressed deep sorrow at the loss. “I have known him since 1964. Through his writings, he depicted various aspects of society. He created several excellent characters. He was an extremely nice person. The Bengali literary world will always remain indebted to him,” he said.
Though Bhattacharjee retreated minutes before Mamata’s arrival, Left leaders Surjya Kanta Mishra and Rabin Deb were present alongside Trinamool ministers Partha Chatterjee and Saugata Roy.
Among the mourners were writers Shankar, Samaresh Majumdar and Shirshendu Mukhopadhyay and filmmakers Goutam Ghose and Mrinal Sen. “Sunil’s writing had a philosophical air. It was as though he had attained a rare spiritual insight,” said Shankar. Majumdar said he felt numbed and paralyzed. Mukhopadhyay, who had lost a friend of 50 years, half of which was spent as colleagues, too could barely speak. ‘Heartbroken’ CM leads mourners
Addressing a gathering of Gangopadhyay’s fans atRabindra Sadan, Mamata said, “We were all heartbroken when we heard of his demise. This loss is irreplaceable. But then, a poet and writer like Sunil-da never dies. Hewilllivetilleternity through hisworks.”
She then stole the show from the Left by walking alongside the cortege from Rabindra Sadan to Keoratola. The impromptu decision took the police by surprise. They had a tough time keeping the crowd at bay as thousands walked singing ‘Anandalokey…’, ‘Aguner poroshmoni…’ and ‘Tumi nirmalkoro…’
Singing in chorus with tears streaming down her cheeks was Shanghamitra Chakraborty,whowon theKrittivas Award this year. She had come from Burdwan to pay her tributes to the author. “My world crumbled on hearing the news of his death,” she recounted.Urmimala Basu recollectedher firstconnectwiththe litterateur. It was through the novel Atmaprokash’. "Though we did not know Sunilda at that time,weusedto addresshim by his first name among our friends. He taught us bohemianism,"shesaid.
The writer’s body was consigned to flames around 2pm in the presence of his son Souvik, who arrived from Boston late on Wednesday.
On his desk, meanwhile, a short story and an article remain unfinished.



We spent so many evenings
over tea and adda. Memories rush back to me of a life we shared together. It will never be the same again, to use a cliché, but such an apt one. I met him in 1967 for the first time and since then, he had been a dear dada
Samaresh Majumdar
We sat beside
each other and worked as colleagues for more than a quarter of a century. Can you imagine my loss? It is like losing a limb
Shirshendu Mukhopadhyay

Seventy-eight years is a life span that cannot be called short. But Sunil Gangopadhyay’s death, even at this age, looks harshly premature. One knew that he was not keeping well — he even looked it — but he treated age as a mental state, and never gave up living.
Till his 75th year, he said he did not think about aging at all. With his passing, the singular history of the triumph of a little magazine and its editor turns into a memory. It was Sunil who began with the little magazine Krittibas in 1953, and gate-crashed into the protective world of popular newspapers and journals to eventually become one of the most favourite authors of the Bangla reading public.
On his own admission, poetry was his ‘first love’. He had to sit to write prose, but poetry came to him herself, secretly, in the late hours of night, and forced him to attend to her. Putting the last line of a poem on paper, he said, gave him more satisfaction than lovemaking. He wanted to be remembered more as a poet than anything else.
He will, however, be remembered for many things more. It was as a poet and editor and publisher of a poetry magazine that he first attracted the attention of the Bengali intelligentsia. This was also when his ability to lead was established. Like all youngsters in Kolkata (then Calcutta) bitten by the poetry bug, he had been a Coffee House habitué, where we first watched him and his friends from a distance. His central prominence in the company was never lost on others.
A time came when he had to take up prose. He said he had to do this out of the compulsion of providing for his middleclass family with a refugee background after the early death of his father. The family was struggling to survive in a somewhat alien city, which would anoint him Sheriff in 2002. Once he began handling prose, his creative and critical selves broke all boundaries. Short stories, novels, adventure fictions, lighter prose pieces, literary notes and reviews, travelogues, personal essays, not excluding a few plays and verse dramas, flowed incessantly from his pen. And his readers lapped them up.
Although it was his prose, mostly fiction, that brought him prizes and popularity, he never abandoned his poetry. Most of it appeared in little magazines. His earthly success did not prompt him to shun poetry, and he remained ever grateful to a source that had also nurtured him.
Whether in poetry or prose, he seldom went for fancy gimmicks or experiments, unlike some of his more ambitious contemporaries. He let the ‘notun riti’ (new style) of the mid-Fifties Bangla short stories, a go by. I remember one of his short novels, Mayakananer Phul (The Flower of the Illusionary Garden) had made an experiment of sorts by dropping finite verbs of sentences. That was the only time he did something like that. His prose was simple and attractive, with a natural sense of effortless humour, and he depended more on content for the appeal of his fiction than trying to foreground the language.
Even his minor works, some of which were a retelling of old narratives like Sonali Duhkha (adopting the Tristan and Isolde legend) or Radhakrishna keep the reader glued. He could, with a surprising felicity, bring out the deep human contents of these old myths, told and retold hundreds of times over. His unfinished retelling of The Mahabharata for children also bore witness to that.
Sunil had an unusually keen sense of his own power and its limitations. Whenever he felt that his creativity was strained for the time (it came back to him soon after) he went back to retelling old themes. He presented lives of men in fiction, for example those of Ustad Amir Khan or the Bengali theatre icon Sisir Kumar Bhaduri. He did considerable research when he wrote about the past. His Sei Somoy (That Time), a twovolume novel about Nineteenth Century Bengal, is evidence of that, as is Pratham Alo (The First Light), which tells of a young girl’s crush on Tagore. Even his Moner Manush shows that he consulted everything that was important about Lalan Fakir.
Contemporary life also received a lot of attention from him. His first novel, Atmaprakash (1966) and Aranyer Din Ratri, if somewhat reflexive in theme, his Arjun (A hero of a refugee colony), Pratidwandi, Jiban Jerokom, Aka Ebong Koyekjon capture the turbulent days of the late Sixties and Seventies, and the angry youth that was caught in the crossfire of political turmoil. He had a healthy and natural attitude towards sex, and never overdid it to attract the voyeur.
He was very popular with young readers. Some 35 Kakababu-Shontu tales of adventure vie with Satyajit Ray stories on shelves in Bengali households, and his poems for children are also fascinating. I rate his short stories, including gems like ‘Garom bhat o jyanto bhuter golpo’ and some stories from Shajahaner Nijaswa Bahini, among the best in Bangla literature.
Every Bengali has to have an encounter with Rabindranath Tagore, the supreme cultural presence. Most of us succumb meekly to this imperial influence, whereas there is also a tradition of beginning with some sort of resistance and then arriving at a compromise. Or there is an ambiguous stance, of surrender inside and rebellion outside. Sunil, after the rebellious years, became as ardent a Tagore devotee as anyone could wish. He could recite hundreds of Tagore poems from memory and sang his songs. He also had a CD of Tagore songs to his credit.
He was pained to see the decline of Bangla language in the so-called Englishmedium educated population of both Bangladesh and West Bengal (or is it Paschim Banga now?). He spearheaded many movements for an expansion of Bangla in the state’s school syllabus.
In his autobiography, Ardhek Jiban (Half a Life) and also in various interviews, he touchingly tells about his decision to come back to his Bangla speaking land to address a Bengali audience as a poet and author, forsaking temptations to work and live in the USA.
Our grief is all the more inconsolable that he could not find time to write about the remaining half of his life. His broad humanist outlook, that shunned all communal and sectarian considerations and looked at man essentially as man, endeared him to Bengalis across the border. I am sure it was also at the basis of his appeal to a much wider Indian or international audience.
He will, however, be also fondly remembered as a man with a great heart. He helped innumerable poets find a foothold in the highly competitive and often heartless literary arena, and was ever protective of their interests. As president of Sahitya Akademi, he gave new direction to its activities, and the 150th birth anniversary of Tagore was ably planned and conducted under his leadership. He outlived his image of an ‘angry young man’, and developed into an elder-brother figure, with a somewhat pro-Left posture. The largeness of his heart could ignore petty shafts of jealousy that were hurled at him, for political and other reasons. Though he set up residence in south Kolkata later in life, at heart he ever remained a north Calcutta boy, where he said his moorings were.
He passes away at a time when his cultural leadership is most needed for his people. Like the characters of one of his famous poems, he did not keep his word, to be with us, when we took his presence for granted.
(The writer is a former vice-chancellor of Rabindra Bharati Univerisity and a well known linguist)
SHEI SHOMOE
Born Sept 7, 1934, at Faridpur, Bangladesh
Started Krittibas in 1953
Married Swati Gangopadhyay in 1967
Son Sauvik born in 1967
First novel Atmaprakash
Bankim Purashkar in 1982
Sahitya Akademi Award in 1985 for Shei Shomoe
Sahitya Akademi president in 2008
Sheriff of Kolkata in 2002
IN REEL
Satyajit Ray filmed two novels Pratidwandi and Aranyer Din Ratri
Tapan Sinha filmed the Kakababu story Sabuj Dwiper Raja
Goutam Ghosh filmed Moner Manush