The Observant Owl
Kaliprasanna Sihna
Permanent Black, Rs 295

Satire, it is said, is the best form of observation. It punctures the pretentious and puts across the most withering of criticism in a humorous manner, making everybody but its target laugh, and, at the same time, making it abundantly clear why he had been chosen, and his offence. During the 19th century on, many such works appeared in Indian languages, but they are now either forgotten, or no longer available.

Such, happily was not fate of one of the most famous satires of the nineteenth century, Hootum Pyanchar Naksha by Kaliprasanna Sinha, first published in 1862. It is still widely read in the original Bengali, and is now available to us in its first ever English translation by Swarup Roy of Belur Math’s Ramakrishna Mission Vidyamandir and with a foreword by Partha Chatterjee. Roy has done justice to a hard task, and his rendering reads smoothly, while retaining the flavour of its Bengali original’s pungent and witty style, and his annotations add to our enjoyment.

In nineteenth-century Bengal, an age when extraordinary people were a dime a dozen, Prasanna Sinha stands out. At the age of 13, inspired by the ideas of that great sage, Isvarachandra Vidyasagar, he founded a society to champion widow remarriage, and gave Rs 1000 to each person who married a widow. One of the earliest Bengali playwrights, he edited a number of journals. His translations of the Mahabharata and the Bhagvad Gita into Bengali are still read today. He defrayed the legal costs of James Long when he was tried for sedition for his translation of Nil Darpan. This mercurial figure died young, aged 30.

... contd.