ONE of the enduring charms of the annual Calcutta Book Fair is that it is home to all kinds of publishers, ranging from multinationals to one-person operations, encompassing nearly every subject under the sun. Sellers of homeopathic nostrums rub shoulders with purveyors of the collected works of L. Ron Hubbard in Bengali, while the indomitable K.C. Pal – whose belief that the earth goes round the sun still burns with an unquenchable flame – turns up uninvited year after year. And in the same cosmological vein, there is the septuagenarian Ranen Ghosh, arguably the only Bengali publisher whose line is exclusively devoted to science fiction. A peep inside his stall reveals lurid covers featuring UFOs and tentacles, and translations of Erich von Daniken’s dubious speculations on extraterrestrial life. It is SF from a distant past, as might have existed in a galaxy far, far away.

But if you were to time travel nearly fifty years back, you would meet a youthful Ranen babu and his friends, about to launch a magazine called Bismoy (‘Amazement’). The nod towards Amazing Stories, the first SF magazine launched in 1926 by Hugo Gernsback, is unmistakable, but there was nearly no precedent for such a thing in the world of Bengali letters. In the vast sea of ‘little magazines’ that came out in the Bengali language, there was just one prior to Bismoy solely devoted to SF – Aschorjyo (Wonder) edited by the prolific Adrish Bardhan.

When I first started going to the Calcutta Book Fair in the early 1980s as a schoolboy, Bardhan’s Fantastic had a stall to itself but there was no trace of Bismoy. Our early SF reading was confined to the fabled ABC – Asimov Bradbury Clarke – but at university, we discovered D – Philip K. Dick, and a host of others, such as Ballard, Sturgeon, Le Guin, Bester, and the inimitable Michael Moorcock, editor of the transgressive, genre breaking New Worlds in Britain of the swinging sixties. But though we looked upon Fantastic somewhat condescendingly, we had no idea that something like Bismoy had ever existed.

And so it was till 2010. The previous year, I had spent five fascinating months among the SF collections of the Eaton Library at the University of Riverside, California, easily the biggest collection of SF in the world. There was no Bismoy there, but what the library had was an extraordinary collection of fanzines, from the 1920s to the present day. SF fanzines were born almost at the same time as the genre itself, the first ever example of a genre which had begun to create its own arcana from year zero. Most of the fanzines in the collection had been mimeographed or cyclostyled in someone’s study or garage. I was immediately hooked. I was familiar with the technology, having fitfully edited a cyclostyled magazine called Jabberwocky during my undergraduate years at Jadavpur University. Sitting in Eaton Library, I saw the thirties and the forties in America through the eyes of awkward male adolescents, hunched over their ribbon-less typewriters and labouring pointillistically with an inkless stylus on stencils or duplicating sheets.

 

The following year I was back in my teaching job and met two young researchers who were both working on Bengali SF. It was from them that I first heard the name of Ranen Ghosh and the magazine called Bismoy. I was then teaching a course on science fiction in the English department, and along with one of my students, Monidipa Mondal, went to visit Ranen babu in his CIT Road residence. His book lined office was a domestic version of his book fair stall, and also doubled up as the office of Pratishruti, the small publishing house that he ran. We were of course more interested in his past than the present. When did Bismoy begin? Were there back issues? Who were the writers/illustrators? Why did the magazine fold up?

Ranen babu answered all our questions with patience and humour. He also readily agreed to our proposal of digitizing all the available copies. There was also some wildly optimistic talk of reviving the magazine, though our enthusiasm flagged somewhat once Ranen babu began to describe the hazards of magazine distribution and commission. I went back to my university, but young Monidipa returned week after week, armed with a digital camera and worked her way through the back issues. She also wrote a very fine term paper on the history of Bismoy which she has since forgotten. Monidipa is currently one of the most promising young SFF writers and her fiction appears regularly in SFF magazines under the name of Mimi Mondal. This article is heavily indebted to her research on Bismoy.

 

A total of 13 issues were digitized by Monidipa, but no one is quite sure exactly how many issues came out. There were more, but the floods of 1999 had inundated Pratishruti’s ground floor office and a few issues were destroyed, possibly beyond the reach of any archaeological tool. This is what Monidipa writes about the genesis of Bismoy:

Ranen Ghosh had worked as the co-editor of Aschorjyo, the first Bengali science fiction magazine. It was primarily owned by the author Adrish Bardhan and ceased publication in 1969. In October 1970 Ghosh received a letter from Sujit Kumar Dhar, a resident of Arambagh in the Hooghly district, expressing his admiration for Aschorjyo and willingness to collaborate on a similar venture in the future. On meeting Dhar, Ghosh found him energetic and enthusiastic but without any financial resources. Financed chiefly by Ghosh, an employee of the Family Section of the Indian Chamber of Commerce at that time, the first issue of Bismoy was produced in April 1971. No traceable copy of this issue exists.

Three more issues appeared in 1971, even as the rest of Bengal was convulsed by the war of liberation in what was then East Pakistan, and would soon become Bangladesh. The cover of the second issue was in peach and black, with four astronauts floating in a background of stars and a pitted planetary surface. The word ‘Bismoy’, followed by an exclamation mark, appears in white in the top right corner, while the words ‘science fiction’ appear in a circle below. The back cover features an illustration by Satyajit Ray from one of his Professor Shonku stories, ‘Golok Rohosyo’, (The mystery of the globe), which appeared in the issue. The issue ran to 96 pages, was priced at one rupee and had a total of six contributions, the longest of which was a novel titled Project Vulcan by Amitananda Das, who was to join Ghosh as co-editor from 1972. The fine print stated: ‘Published by Sri S.K. Dhar, 136 Raja Rammohan Sarani, Calcutta 9, and printed from Novelty Ptg. Works, 144/1 Amherst St., Calcutta 9.

 

Looking at these images in 2011, I experienced a sense of double dislocation. Not only were the images four decades old, they seemed dated even for the 1970s. By that time, SF in the West had moved well beyond astronauts and galaxies. As Michael Moorcock famously stated in one of his early editorials in New Worlds, the new model was ‘William, and not Edgar Rice, Burroughs’. But I also had to admit that something like New Worlds was part of an evolutionary process which had begun half a century ago, with magazines such as Astounding and Amazing, creating a new readership and freemasonry of taste. True, much of the early readership was overwhelmingly male and adolescent, but the radical departures in the genre also grew out of the culture of magazines, fanzines, and pulp. Such a reading community was conspicuous by its absence in colonial and postcolonial South Asia. As I have written elsewhere, the reasons for this lay, at least partially, in the close relationship of early SF with the tropes of imperialism. Much of early SF, with its themes of galactic empire-building and extermination of non-human races, seemed to replicate the colonial project as an imaginary and could not have held any great appeal for colonial and postcolonial societies.

 

Nevertheless, there were sightings in the field from the years of the Second World War, chiefly in Bengali and Marathi. In 1945, a short story called ‘Mosha’ (The Mosquito) appeared in a Bengali annual called Alpana. The author was Premendra Mitra, a poet, novelist and film maker in Calcutta. This was to be the first of over a hundred short stories featuring Ghanashyam Das or Ghana da, whose unpaid-for attic room in a boarding house became the launch pad for the most extraordinary terrestrial and extraterrestrial voyages. In Mitra’s wake came the likes of Adrish Bardhan, Satyajit Ray and Leela Majumdar in Bengali, Narayan Dharap in Marathi, and Jayant Narlikar with his ‘Vaman’ stories in Marathi and English.

So both Bardhan and the Ghosh-Dhar-Das trio were very much swimming against the tide when they decided to launch their SF periodicals. But they did manage to get together a fairly formidable list of contributors. Ray’s stories appeared in at least four numbers, while the name of Premendra Mitra appears at least once. An early, and regular, contributor was Enakshi Chattopadhyay, one of the few women who had broken into an overwhelmingly male bastion. The names of her early stories seem to indicate a different literary sensibility at work – ‘Phul ekti adim smriti’ (The flower is an ancient memory) or ‘Ordhek manobi tumi’ (Half of you is woman), which, according to Monidipa, is likely adapted but not clear from where.

Occasional translations would appear – one suspects unauthorized – of stories by the ABC: Asimov, Bradbury, Clarke. Of these, the most ambitious was a translation of Ray Bradbury’s novel Fahrenheit 451, rendered into Bengali by Abhijit Datta, and appeared in the February 1974 issue of Bismoy. But the most intriguing name among the contributors was that of the legendary poet Tushar ‘Bandmaster’ Roy, who was famous for his impromptu verse making and his poetry performances on the Calcutta maidan. His story, titled ‘Sabdhan! Jontrera jagche’ (Beware! The machines are waking) seems to be a rehash of a well worn SF theme.

 

Would it be accurate to call Bismoy a little magazine? The term was, and still is, a badge of honour worn proudly by small groups or collectives who continue to publish against all odds, with little or no monetary returns. Monidipa’s account of the business model of Bismoy reveals that the magazine had an ambitious print run of a thousand copies, with a production cost of Rs 600 per issue, a considerable sum in the seventies. Advertisements were few, with only the firm of Ectarid, manufacturers of insect repellents, supporting the magazine regularly. As for distribution, Monidipa writes:

Besides selling the magazine to friends and acquaintances, the editors used to ‘hawk’ it themselves at fairgrounds and other places, including the Calcutta Book Fair. Das and Dhar even peddled Bismoy on local trains on the Howrah and the Sealdah routes. Ghosh himself carried bundles of the magazine to office and sold them to clients. In the early phase of distribution, Bismoy was sold to distributors at College Street at a commission of as much as 35-40%.

Bismoy folded suddenly in 1975, with Sujit Dhar allegedly selling off the composing unit and decamping, leaving the editors completely in the lurch. Then, in 1975-6, Adrish Bardhan founded the third – and possibly the last – Bengali SF magazine, titled Fantastic, and most of the Bismoy faithful migrated there. And thus ended Bismoy, and lay buried, as if in a time capsule, waiting to be discovered.

 

Postscript 1: While I was finishing this article, I spoke to Amitananda Das, now one of the editors of the century-old children’s magazine Sandesh founded by Upendrakishore Raychoudhury, Satyajit Ray’s grandfather. His first response at being reminded of Bismoy was to say that the magazine had a large number of spelling errors. But this was deliberate since the limited type often ran out and variant spellings had to be used. Das related how a story written by him had a character called Suranjan, but Dhar changed the name to Binoy so as not to incur the additional costs of buying type for the conjoint ‘nj’. Das also confirmed that there were a total of 17 issues. Did you ever think of reviving Bismoy? No, answered Das decisively.

Postscript 2: Later that evening, I managed to track down Enakshi Chattopadhyay, now in her eighties and resident in Gurgaon. She spoke about her interest in SF, and how her husband, a nuclear physicist, would help with the science/tech aspects, and how the whole family would bounce around an idea before she would turn it into a story. Chattopadhyay still writes the occasional SF story for magazines, and I was able to tell her how a small number of young SF writers had emerged on the scene, in both Bengali and English. We decide to catch up when she is next in Calcutta.

 

* Acknowledgments: Monidipa Mondal, Anwesha Maity, Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay, Arnab Chakraborty, Ranen Ghosh. Some digitized images of Bismoy may be found at http://bismaysf.blogspot.in/