A Selective Study in Post-Colonial Bengali Cinema - always yours

9|Journal of Bengali Studies, Vol. 1, No. 2
abound” (Lee, “Storm Advisory: Cyclone of a Life on the Horizon”). In this article we shall see that
Herbert can tell us a thing or two about Bengali Cinema, and reading of certain motifs from the
text-film duo of Herbert will lead us into a corresponding study of certain trope from the history of
Bengali cinema. The attempt is not just to read Herbert as a symbolic/allegorical history of Bengali
culture/Cinema in the second half of the twentieth century. Rather, there are simultaneous readings
of the crisis of Bengali culture and the communist hegemony and the personal crisis and tragedy of
Herbert Sarkar in this article. There have been two English translations of Herbert till date, but all
references to the novel in this article are made to the original Bengali text, and excerpts from the
novel, wherever they occur in this article, are translated by the present writer.
The literary cinematic exchange/transference economy that is at work between Herbert the
movie and Herbert the novel needs to be looked at keeping in mind the nuances of textual
transmission, determined by the physicality of a particular medium. Even a certain issue of the little
magazine where Herbert was first published and the copy of a hard-bound edition of Herbert will
differ from each other: though both might be carrying the same text, the novel will have different
textual expressions and embodiments and sensual forms in each case. However, differences in
mediums are as valid as the interactions among them. Instead of fetishizing the medium of cinema
and the literary medium as two isolated and fortified domains, concretely separated by technology,
strategy, registrar and history, we can look at the literary cinematic interaction that is at work in the
text-film duo of Herbert as transaction of a text across mediums where each medium is coterminous
with another, and they together exist within a complex matrix of interrelationship.
Herbert is an extraordinary character. When history hovers over an enchanted Kolkata
shrouded in the mist of memory and oblivion, the surreal conditions of coexistence between past
and present can be called Herbert Sarkar, the protagonist of the novel and film Herbert. Herbert is a
cryptic history of the degeneration of Bengal in the later half of twentieth century, which is
contrasted and compared in the novel with the (once celebrated but now f orgotten) literature of