Mitra The Spoilt Child, A Tale of Hindu Domestic Life

1. Auflage 2022
ISBN: 978-3-98744-876-8
Verlag: OTB eBook publishing
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 203 Seiten

Reihe: Classics To Go

Excerpt: BABURAM BABU, a resident of Vaidyabati, was a man of large experience in business affairs: he was famous for his long service in the Revenue and Criminal Courts. Now to walk uprightly without taking bribes when engaged in the public service, is not a very long-established custom. Baburam Babu?s procedure was in accordance with the old style, and being skilful at his work, he had succeeded, by servility and cringing, in imposing on his superior officers; as a consequence of which he had acquired considerable wealth within a very short time. In this country a man?s reputation keeps pace with the increase of his riches or with his advancement: learning and character have not anything like the same respect paid to them. There had been a time when Baburam Babu?s position had been a very inferior one, and when only a few individuals in his village had paid him any attention; but later, as he came into the possession of fine buildings, gardens, estates, and a good deal of influence in many ways, he found himself with a host of friends as his followers and advisers. Whenever during his intervals of leisure he went to his house, his reception-room would be crowded with people. It is always the case that when a man has a sudden accession of wealth there is a rush of people to him, just as the shop of a sweetmeat seller will become full of flies as long as there are sweetmeats to be had. At whatever time you might visit Baburam Babu?s house you would always find people with him: rich and poor, they would all sit round and flatter him, the more intelligent among them in indirect fashion only, the lesser folk outright and unblushingly, agreeing with everything he said. After some time spent in the way we have described, Baburam Babu took his pension, and remained at home occupied in the management of his estates and in trade.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Mitra, Peary Chand

Leseproben

PREFACE
The author of this novel, Babu Peary Chand Mitter, was born in the year 1814. He represented the well-educated, thoroughly earnest, and courteous Bengali gentleman of the old school. His life was devoted to the good of his fellow-countrymen, and he was especially eager in the cause of female education. In the preface to one of hisworks, written with that object in view, he writes:— “I was born in the year 1814. While a pupil of the Páthshálá at home, I found my grandmother, mother, and aunts reading Bengali books. They could write in Bengali and keep accounts. There were no female schools then, nor were there suitable books for the females. My wife was very fond of reading, and I could scarcely supply her with instructive books. I was thus forced to think how female education could be promoted in a substantial way. The conclusion I came to was that, unless womanhood were placed on a spiritual basis, education would never be productive of real good. For the furtherance of this end I have been humbly working. ” Amongst the books he published with this end in view are the ‘Ramaranjika,’ the ‘Abhedi,’ and the ‘Adhyátwiká.’ The ‘Ramaranjika’ deals with female education under different aspects, and gives examples drawn from the lives of eminent Englishwomen, as well as biographical sketches of distinguished Hindu women, drawn from history and tradition. Of the ‘Abhedi’ the author says:— “It is a spiritual novel in Bengali, in which the hero and heroine have been described as earnest seekers after the knowledge of the soul, and as obtaining spiritual light by the education of pain.” Of the ‘Adhyátwiká,’ the author tells us:— “It brings before its readers the conversation and manners of different classes of people, in different circumstances, which have been pourtrayed in different styles, and which may perhaps be useful to foreigners wishing to acquire a colloquial knowledge of the Bengali language.” Babu Peary Chand Mitter was a man who keenly felt the evils in society around him, and he used his pen in the cause of temperance and the purity of thedomestic circle as against drunkenness and debauchery; amongst his writings having this object in view is the ‘Mada Kháoya bara dáya,’ or ‘The great evils of dram-drinking.’ It is a novel marked by great humour, and shows the author to have been a satirist of no mean power. Besides these novels he wrote ‘The Life of David Hare’ both in Bengali and in English. He also contributed essays to The Calcutta Review, and an American publication called The Banner of Light, besides writing articles for the Agri-Horticultural Society of India. Babu Peary Chand Mitter died in 1883. The novel ‘Alaler Gharer Dulál,’ or ‘The Spoilt Darling of an Ill-regulated House,’ was written more than forty years ago, and was very well received, as the criticisms of the day show. The Calcutta Review of the day says:— “We hail this book as the first novel in the Bengali language. Tek Chand Thakur has written a tale the like of which is not to be found within the entire range of Bengali literature. Our author’s quiet humour reminds us of Goldsmith, while his livelier passages bring to our recollection the treasures of Fielding’s wit. He seems to be familiar with Defoe, Fielding, Scott, Dickens, Bulwer, Thackeray, and other masters of fiction.” Other critics of the day compared him to a Moliére or a Dickens. Mr. John Beames, in his ‘Modern Aryan Languages of India,’ writes:— “Babu Peary Chand Mitter, who writes under the nom de plume of Tek Chand Thakur, has produced the best novel in the language ‘Alaler Gharer Dulál.’ He has had many imitators, and certainly stands high as a novelist. His story might fairly claim to be ranked with some of the best comic novels in our own language for wit, spirit, and clever touches of nature. He puts into the mouth of each of his characters the appropriate method of talking, and thus exhibits to the full the extensive range of vulgar idioms which his language possesses.” In an introductory essay on Bengali novels, in his translation of Babu Bunkim Chandra Chatterjee’s novel ‘Kopal Kundala,’ Mr. Phillips writes:— “The position and character of Bengali literature is peculiar. A backward people have, so to speak, rushed into civilization at one bound: old customs and prejudices have been displaced, uno ictu, by a state of enlightenment and advanced ideas. The educated classes have suddenly found themselves face to face with the richest gems of Western learning and literature. The clash of widely divergent stages of civilization, the juxtaposition of the most advanced thought with comparative barbarism, has produced results which, though perhaps to be expected, are somewhat curious. If one tries to close a box with more than it can hold the lid may be unhinged,— new wine may burst old bottles. The colliding forces of divergent stages of civilization have produced a literature that for want of a better expression may be called a hybrid compromise between Eastern and Western ideas. So we find that the Bengali novel is to a great extent an exotic. It is a hot-house plant which has been brought from a foreign soil; but even crude imitations are better than the farragos of original nonsense, lists of which appear from time to time in the pages of the Calcutta Gazette.” The above remarks are merely general, and there exist of course, bright and notable exceptions, among whom may be mentioned the names of Peary Chand Mitter (the father of Bengali novelists), Bunkim Chandra Chatterjea, Romesh Chandra Dutt, and Tarak Nath Ganguli. The ‘Alaler Gharer Dulál’ of Peary Chand Mitter may be called a truly indigenous novel, in which some of the reigning vices and follies of the time are held up to scorn and derision. A deep vein of moral earnestness runs through all the writings of Peary Chand Mitter, and he takes the opportunity to interweave with the incidents of his story disquisitions on virtue and vice, truthfulness and deceit, charity and niggardliness, hypocrisy and straight-forwardness. Not only general vices, such as drinking and debauchery, but particular customs, such as a Kulin’s marrying a dozen wives, and living at their expense, are condemned in no measured terms. The book is written in a plain colloquial style, which, combined with a quiet humour, procured for it a considerable degree of popularity. As further evidence, if such were wanting, of the popularity of this novel, it may be mentioned that it has been dramatized, having been published in the form of a natak or play, by Babu Hira Lall Mitter. The leading characteristics of the novel, as they have appeared to the translator, are the humour, pathos, and satire that pervade almost every page of it. The humour, though it may occasionally be broad, can never be called coarse, and much of it is the cultured humour that might be expected from a writer well acquainted with his own ancient classics. If Thackeray is the type of the cultured humorist of the West, Peary Chand Mitter is the type of the cultured humorist of the East. The pathos is especially noticeable in some of the scenes which the author has pourtrayed for us with such vivid reality where the poor are brought before us. We see the utter dependence of the poor upon the generosity of the rich, a generosity that is rarely appealed to in vain: there is pathos too in the scene that brings before us the ryot and his landlord; and in the scenes in the zenana and the bathing-ghât where we have an insight into the lives and the thoughts of both the upper and lower classes of the women of the country. There is a deep pathos in the scene that brings before us the old man at Benares, spending the evening of his days in reading and meditation, in “The Holy City:” it is a scene that gives us an insight into the deeper religious side of the Hindu character. The satire is only merciless where it is directed against the vices of drinking and debauchery, or against the custom of the much marrying of Kulins, or the marrying of old men to young girls, or solely for money. In other cases it is not unkindly, especially where it is directed against that not uncommon failing both in the West and the East, which Shakespeare has immortalized as ‘too much respect upon the world,’ ...