Review of Indrajit Hazra’s novel The Bioscope Man

The Bioscope Man
By Indrajit Hazra
Publisher: Penguin
Pages: 308, Price: Rs 299

“The absence of parents is the first precondition for freedom,” Milan Kundera wrote in Life is Elsewhere. For Abani Chatterjee, born in the same year as the motion pictures, freedom arrives pretty early and pushes him on the road to fame. A mishap during a train journey turns his father into a hateful, broken man. To escape the tyranny of tending to her always inebriated husband, Abani’s mother Shabitri hoodwinks reality and starts faking a coma. As his father fades away and his self-willed mother enters a vegetative state, Abani starts living life on his own reckless terms.

As a teenager, he continues to urinate from the window and dig his nose in public. When he learns that he has been forced to drop out of school because of his father’s alleged nationalist credentials, he turns as stealthy as a house-cat and keeps slipping out of the Chatterjee household to discover Calcutta on his own. With the help of his enterprising uncle Shombunath Lahiri, he enters the world of moving pictures. And in the process enjoys a quick climb to the pinnacle of glory: boy caught pasting posters one moment, publicly adored poster-boy the next.

He starts as a projectionist’s assistant at the Alochhaya Theatre, graduates into being a prompter, and by a lucky twist of fate ends up playing the title-character of Prahalad Parameshwar. He subsequently essays the roles of Othello, Ram, Parasuram and Shivaji, and his silent movies lead to resounding success. He starts getting recognised in street corners and quaint cafes, and is nothing short of being a star.

Hazra successfully experiments with technique, so we find three interludes interspersing the narrative like the titles of the silent films: the stylised stories of Prahalad, Anandhamath and the Black Hole of Calcutta. These bioscopes starring Abani are instant hits with the masses because of their daring portrayal of intimacy and undercurrents of nationalist chic. Yet, he views freedom fighters as “criminals with ambition” and maintains his nonchalance towards nationalism even as various upheavals rock the subcontinent.

Here, brown men (teeming with Bengali pride) share a love-hate relationship with mems: Abani chooses corrosive satire to attack the shape-shifting Annie Besant, though he initially finds her “American” and desirable; Shombu Mama is infatuated with bioscope diva Faith Cooper; and Abani labours under the weight of his undeclared, one-sided love for his onscreen sweetheart Felicia Miller.

On hearing the news of Felicia being shipped to Australia by her disapproving father, Abani enters a trajectory towards ruin when he mistakenly enters a ladies’ restroom. The man with the “bioscope in his bones” falls from grace and spends a decade playing minor roles.

One day, out of the blue, he gets a call to work in an international production. He meets German director Fritz Lang, the man with the monocle, who is planning to do an “India film” on Sir William Jones, the Orientalist. Following a visit to Kalighat, Abani manages to convince Lang to do a film on Jones’ Sanskrit tutor Ramlochan Sharma instead.

He hopes that this bioscope will push him back into the waters to which he once belonged. What follows is a distinctively sad story about the longing for fame.

Hazra’s third novel is about every elemental idea that makes us melt: love and languages transgressing boundaries; films and the freedom struggle defining our identities. The inventive narration enables one to savour the teasing, tongue-in-cheek novel where no character can really resist fate.

For a work of fiction with the central theme of pretence and deception, The Bioscope Man is not only enchanting, but also remarkably authentic.

Published in the New Indian Express on Sunday

And if you find time, pls. read Hazra’s interview to Ipsit Mohapatra in the same issue here