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New Delhi, Aug. 31 -- The English-reading world knows Sunil Gangopadhyay, who died at the age of 78 last year, as the elder statesman of contemporary Bengali literature. A protean writer, he wrote, among hundreds of novels, several tomes of historical fiction, three of which have been anthologized in a new volume, Classic Sunil Gangopadhyay. Bengali readers remember him as one of the iconic figures in the generation after Buddhadeva Bose. To me, his name conjures up two words: "prolific" and "pulp".
Born in 1934 in Faridpur, Bangladesh, Gangopadhyay grew up in difficult times. He came into prominence as a poet in the early 1950s, when he started a journal called Krittibas to promote new voices in poetry, while he was a student of Bengali literature at the University of Calcutta. His first novel, Atmaprakash (literally, Revealing Oneself), was published in the prestigious Bengali literary magazine, Desh, in 1965. Two of his early works, Aranyer Din Ratri (Days and Nights in the Forest) and Pratidwandi (The Adversary) were made into films by Satyajit Ray. Twice winner of the Ananda Purashkar, one of the most coveted literary prizes for any writer of Bengali, among dozens of other recognitions, Gangopadhyay had a long and happy career by any measure.
But his legacy is quite another matter. Gangopadhyay was perhaps the most versatile writer of his generation, moving among poetry, novel, short story, play and journalism with remarkable agility. His lyrics addressed to the elusive "Neera", a young lady imagined by him as the epitome of womanhood, set the hearts of generations of middle-class Bengali boys aflutter. From aggressive sexualization to worshipful adoration of the beloved, these verses capture a range of emotions that were considered a necessary rite of passage for pubescent Bengali boys in the 1970s and 1980s.
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