Shantanu Ray Chaudhuri

Sankar captured Kolkata’s post-Independence transformation with rare intimacy and insight. My tribute to his works, tracing his major novels and their afterlives, reflecting on his moral vision, quiet realism and enduring relevance as the chronicler of a city’s ambition, compromise and conscience.

On 20 February, with the passing of Sankar, Bengali literature lost one of its most compelling chroniclers of the city and its conscience. Born Mani Shankar Mukherjee, he wrote under the deceptively simple pen name ‘Sankar’, fashioning a body of work that was at once accessible and quietly incisive, popular yet piercingly observant. Few writers have mapped Kolkata’s post-Independence transformation with such intimacy. Fewer still have entered the bloodstream of both literature and cinema as decisively as he did.

Sankar belonged to that rare breed of storytellers who understood that a city is not merely brick and tramline, but aspiration, compromise, hunger and illusion. His Kolkata, especially of the 1960s and ’70s, was a crucible. The old bhadralok certainties were fraying; corporate ambition was on the rise; unemployment festered; moral codes bent under economic pressure. In novel after novel, Sankar captured this churn, neither sermonizing nor sentimentalizing. He observed, recorded, and let his characters live out the consequences.

If one were to name the book that made him immortal in the popular imagination, it would be Chowringhee. Set in the glamorous yet claustrophobic world of a grand Kolkata hotel, the novel opened up a universe that Bengali readers had rarely seen from the inside. Hotels, in Sankar’s hands, became metaphors for modern urban life: transient, performative, stratified. Reception desks and corridors turned into stages on which class, desire, loneliness and ambition played out in fleeting encounters. Chowringhee was not merely a bestseller; it was an anatomy of a city discovering its own cosmopolitan mask. The glitter of cabaret nights, the loneliness of the Anglo-Indian hostess, the moral dilemmas of the young protagonist – each strand revealed how Kolkata was negotiating its colonial inheritance and postcolonial anxieties. The fact that the novel inspired two Bengali film adaptations speaks to its durable appeal. Yet even on screen, its beating heart remained literary: Sankar’s ability to give minor characters depth and to make fleeting moments linger.

If Chowringhee revealed the city’s façade, Seemabaddha and Jana Aranya explored what lay beneath the polished surfaces of corporate boardrooms and middle-class homes. In Seemabaddha, Sankar turned his gaze to the emerging corporate culture of Calcutta. The novel is a study of ambition – cool, calculating, relentless. Through its protagonist, a rising executive in a British-era firm, Sankar dissected the moral compromises demanded by success. Targets had to be met, reputations managed, crises manufactured or concealed. The corporate ladder, he suggested, was greased not only with efficiency but with ethical erosion.

With Jana Aranya, Sankar’s lens shifted to the other end of the economic spectrum: the educated, unemployed youth of 1970s Kolkata. Here was a generation trapped between degrees and despair, family expectation and shrinking opportunity. The novel’s protagonist, Somnath, is pushed into the morally murky world of middlemanship, brokering deals, navigating corruption, compromising dignity. In charting his descent, Sankar captured the suffocating atmosphere of a city scarred by economic stagnation and political unrest. Here, as elsewhere, Sankar refrains from melodrama. He reveals instead the slow erosion of certainty, the quiet bargains struck under economic pressure. He understood that the tragedy was not in one man’s fall, but in a society that left him with no clean choices.

The novel stands as a document of its time and, disturbingly, as a mirror for many times since. Drawing upon his own long association with the mercantile world, including his tenure in public relations with the RP Goenka Group, he understood the subtle manipulations and ethical evasions that lubricated ambition. As Natabar Mitra wryly observes in Jana Aranya, in this world perception, public relations, was everything.

Running beneath these narratives of ambition and compromise is an acute sensitivity to interior conflict. Sankar laid bare the white-collar worker’s moral landscape without turning it into thesis. He rarely sermonized. Instead, he allowed contradictions to surface through dialogue, gesture and detail. His ear for speech was extraordinary; much is revealed in his novels through what characters say, and what they leave unsaid. Events often unfold through partial perspectives, never from an omniscient height. Sensory detail – sight, sound, texture, taste – renders his fictional worlds palpable. Readers step into them rather than merely observe them. A moral restraint is evident, even in the apparently flamboyant Chowringhee. While the narrator’s sympathies lie with the exploited women of the hotel, the laundryman Nityahari responds to its nightly excesses by immersing himself in the Ganga each morning, seeking ritual purification. Sankar neither sanitizes nor sanctions. He trusts readers to inhabit the ambiguity without feeling complicit.

And then there is Koto Ajanare, the quiet wellspring from which much of Sankar’s later world seems to flow. Overshadowed in public memory by the cinematic afterlives of Chowringhee, Seemabaddha and Jana Aranya, it is, in many ways, his most intimate book. If Chowringhee stages the spectacle of the city and the other two anatomize its ethical bargains, Koto Ajanare turns inward. It listens for the unspoken, traces the formation of a conscience, and lingers over the fragile spaces between gratitude, ambition and loss.

The novel draws deeply from Sankar’s own early life. Still in his teens, he lost his father, an event that altered not only his circumstances but his sense of the world, and made him the chronicler of urban life that he became. Financial necessity pushed him into employment as a clerk to Noel Frederick Barwell, the last British barrister of the Calcutta High Court. Those years were marked by a string of humble occupations, and meeting and observing a cross-section of humanity: clerks and lawyers, businessmen and brokers, hotel staff and hopeful job-seekers. Each job and each meeting became a lesson in the city’s hierarchies and humiliations, all of which would later reappear, transmuted into fiction. Perhaps because of his own early struggles, Sankar instinctively aligned himself with strivers. His protagonists are rarely heirs to comfort or beneficiaries of patronage. They are self-made men, sometimes anxious, sometimes calculating, negotiating systems tilted against them.

Barwell’s sudden death left a profound mark on the young Sankar. The relationship between the struggling Bengali youth and the ageing English barrister was not merely professional; it was formative. Sankar would later recall how he searched for a way to honour the man who had shaped him, dreaming first of erecting a statue, then of naming a street after him. When neither proved possible, he chose the only memorial he could truly build: a book. That act of remembrance became Koto Ajanare.

In writing it, Sankar was not simply recounting episodes from a clerk’s life in the High Court; he was recovering a vanished moral universe. The novel meditates on mentorship, loyalty and the strange intimacies forged across cultural and colonial divides. It is about the education of a young man, not only in law, but in dignity and doubt. Beneath its narrative runs a current of bereavement: for a father lost too soon, for a mentor gone abruptly, for a world on the cusp of change.

That is why Koto Ajanare feels different in texture from the novels that followed. It is less panoramic, more reflective; less concerned with the machinery of institutions, more with the shaping of a self. Its emotional timbre is softer but no less resonant. If the later books show characters navigating systems, this one reveals how a sensibility is formed in the first place, through hardship, gratitude and the ache of unfinished farewells. In returning to those early, uncertain years, Sankar created not only a tribute to Barwell, but a testament to the making of a writer.

Ritwik Ghatak, that other restless genius of Bengali art, recognized its power and began adapting it for the screen. That the film remained incomplete feels tragically apt: both Sankar and Ghatak were, in their own ways, chroniclers of incompletion, of promises unfulfilled, relationships fractured, histories interrupted. The very fact that Koto Ajanare did not receive the cinematic afterlife of the other novels may have contributed to its relative neglect. Yet on the page, it remains luminous, perhaps more layered and introspective than its celebrated siblings. It demands a slower reading, a deeper surrender.

What binds these diverse works is Sankar’s unwavering commitment to contemporaneity. He wrote about his time, not in abstraction but in granular detail. Office files, hotel registers, job interviews, sales pitches – these were not incidental props but structural elements of his storytelling. He elevated the mundane into the meaningful. In doing so, he expanded the canvas of Bengali fiction, which had long been preoccupied with rural life, romantic nostalgia or overt political allegory. Sankar insisted that the modern city, with its paperwork and pragmatism, was worthy of literature.

His prose was lucid, almost deceptively so. He avoided stylistic flamboyance, preferring clarity and narrative drive. This made him immensely readable and popular, but popularity sometimes invites critical condescension. Over time, however, it has become clear that beneath the smooth storytelling lay sharp social insight. He documented the transition from colonial hangover to corporate ambition, from idealism to cynicism, from community to competitive individualism.

In the Kolkata of the 1960s and ’70s – a city of strikes and soirees, of boardrooms and boarding houses – Sankar found his material. He was neither a revolutionary firebrand nor a detached aesthete. He was a witness. And like all great witnesses, he chose his vantage points carefully: a hotel reception desk, a corporate office, a young man’s cramped home. From these seemingly limited spaces, he sketched a panoramic portrait.

His legacy in Bengali literature rests not only on the individual brilliance of Chowringhee, Seemabaddha, Jana Aranya and Koto Ajanare, but on the continuum they form. Together, they map a society in flux. They ask uncomfortable questions about success and survival. They reveal how systems shape souls. In later years, as the ordinary men and women whose stories had once fuelled his fiction were lost to time, Sankar turned increasingly to real lives. He wrote about figures such as Swami Vivekananda and Ramakrishna Paramahansa, titling the latter book with provocative ordinariness: Mr and Mrs Chatterjee. These works did not dwell on spiritual exaltation; instead, they restored flesh and fallibility to revered names without diminishing their stature. Even here, Sankar’s instinct was to humanize rather than to mythologize.

On 20 February, as readers paused to remember him, one was reminded that Sankar’s characters still walk among us: the ambitious executive, the anxious job-seeker, the lonely hotel employee, the introspective dreamer. The trams may well be extinct, the skyline altered, the corporate logos updated. But the moral crossroads remain eerily familiar. In the end, Sankar gave Kolkata back to itself. Not as myth, not as monument, but as lived experience. That is no small gift. And it ensures that long after the obituaries fade, his pages will continue to turn, quietly illuminating the city he loved and understood so well.