In tribute : Syed Mustafa Siraj
A writer's writer . . .
The death of Syed Mustafa Siraj re-taught me two lessons. Excellence is appreciated by the thoughtful minority only. And the media get excited only over very popular figures.
Syed Mustafa Siraj was not exactly unpopular. But he was not as popular as Sunil Ganguly or Shirshendu Mukherjee. Like Manik Bannerjee or Bimal Kar or our own Syed Waliullah or Syed Shamsul Huq, he was a writers' writer. He was better than all the popular novelists. He was an excellent writer who knew his land and its people like the palm of his hand. He didn't live in an ivory tower and was always 'matir kachhakachhi'.
Let me begin with his devoted support for our great War of Liberation. He filled the pages of Anandabazar, the popular Calcutta daily, with his brilliant articles on Bangladesh, Bangabandhu and the Mukti Bahini in 1971. He was a journalist with Anandabazar for twenty five years. Please remember that he was born in a state where the common Muslim, being part of the minority, grows up with a soft corner for the Middle East and Pakistan. Gifted men like Kazi Nazrul Islam and Syed Mustafa Siraj certainly thought differently! They were progressive and secular. The latter wrote on our 1969 movement for democracy too. He watched with great interest and wrote passionately on our battle for freedom and its final preparation. And Kazi Nazrul Islam? Asked in the 1930s to support the demand for Pakistan, the great poet thoughtfully commented: Pakistan? A piece of Saudi Arabia on the secular soil of the sub-continent? It won't last long!
Syed Mustafa Siraj was a brilliant practitioner of magic realism. His Sahitya Academy Award winning novel Aleek Manush testifies to this statement. He got the award in 1994. He also got the Bankim Purashkar, the Ananda Purashkar, the Bhuwalka and Narasinghdas awards. He left nearly one hundred and fifty novels and more than three hundred short stories. Neel Gharer Nati is his first novel. It was published in 1966 and became quite popular. Uttar Jahnabi, Trinabhumi, Kingbadantir Nayak, Padmabati, Jaltaranga, Dabanol, Chumki and Gangaputra are some of his finest novels. Inti Pisi O Hatbabu, Bhalobasha O Down Train, Hijal Biler Rakhalera and Taranginir Chokh are some of his collections of short stories. He also wrote detective stories on public demand and they predictably became bestsellers. He wanted to give up writing these Colonel Niladri Sarkar stories but couldn't because they fetched him the money needed for a decent living. Satyajit Ray (and yours truly too) liked these thrillers a lot. It may be remembered that Ray himself wrote a lot of Feluda stories to keep his 'ovens hot'. His great movies didn't earn enough money! Forgetting such ironical truths, it may be mentioned here that Colonel Niladri is a detective with a difference. He is aged, very intelligent, is eccentric, has a Santa Claus beard, loves nature, is an ornithologist, smokes a pipe, is a butterfly collector, is jovial and quotes proverbs and rhymes.
Like his Colonel, Syed Mustafa Siraj loved nature. As a writer he explored man's relationship with nature and society. He loved the villages of West Bengal. His fiction is almost totally based on rural Bengal. He was a realist and not a romantic. It was not nostalgia for him but man's battle for survival. His works carried the fragrance of the soil. He also wrote poems as a young man. Aleek Manush was published serially in the 1980s in Chaturanga, the famous literary journal founded by the legendary Humayun Kabir. It was published as a book in 1989. Syed Mustafa Siraj practised magic realism much before it became a craze in the east. Ranir Ghater Brittanto, his short story, was made into Faltu, a feature film by Anjan Das about an orphan's struggle. Murshidabad played a central role in his fiction. Aleek Manush was also based on Murshidabad and dealt with the different cults within the Muslim community there.
Syed Mustafa Siraj was born in a village named Khoshbaspur in Murshidabad in 1930. His was a respectable family and his father Syed Abdur Rahman Firdausi was a renowned freedom fighter and a Persian scholar. Siraj was a bohemian young man who joined Aalkap, a folk drama group, where he played the flute and taught dance and drama. He was a Marxist and was with the Gananatya Sangha. One day he got tired of his Aalkap work and started writing poetry and short stories. A little later, from his late twenties, he wrote only short stories and novels. He did so till his last days. He died from a heart attack in a Kolkata nursing home. A cyst was earlier detected in his colon. He died on Tuesday, September 4, and was 82. He was buried in his native village the next day.
Syed Mustafa Siraj was a widely translated writer. He was translated into all the major Indian languages. His short stories were translated into English by Nivedita Sen, a Delhi University professor. Aleek Manush was translated into eleven Indian languages. Shahitya Academy published the English version of the novel.
Before his death Syed Mustafa Seraj was the seniormost among the several Syeds contributing brilliantly to Bangla literature. He was a gem of a writer and an excellent person, very scholarly and wise and liberal. Shirshendu Mukherjee calls him his 'noble and lovable' friend. Abul Bashar eulogises his 'noble mentor'. Rural West Bengal has lost its best living spokesman.
Junaidul Haque writes fiction and essays
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