Off the old block

Manuel Puig Vasily Grossman Mikhail Bulgakov Graham Greene Yasar Kemal Dhan Gopal Mukerji Howard Fast and Carlos Fuentes are just some of the writers Tathagata Bhattacharya grew up reading There were also Bengali writers like Michael Madhusudan Dutt Troilokyanath Mukhopadhyay Adwaita Mallabarman and Bibhutibhushan BandyopadhyayldquoWe always had books aroundrdquo the journalist and firsttime author tells us ldquoDuring our time there wasnrsquot much else to do You either played outside or read a book There was no internet and the television wasnrsquot switched on till six in the evening I think we were also quite lucky because as children we got to read a lot of world classics translated into BengalirdquoBhattacharyarsquos first novel General Firebrand and His Red Atlas Seagull Books a dystopian work on fascism and the power of resistance replete with talking animals ghosts of historical figures magic and the supernatural is slated for release this monthThe son of cult Bengali writer Nabarun Bhattacharya and the grandson of playwright and actor Bijon Bhattacharya and writer and activist Mahasweta Devi Bhattacharya admits that as a child one doesnrsquot really realise that one is living with very famous peopleldquoThey had no airs about themrdquo he tells us ldquoI grew up in a very normal householdrdquo His prolific and multiple awardwinning writer grandmother was a compulsive buyer of books and would send him things to read all the time ldquoShe was a voracious reader of lsquotrash booksrsquordquo he chuckles ldquoShe said they helped her unwind She had a huge collection I mean hundreds and hundreds of these potboilers I was always into serious fiction but there was a time when I was about 18 when I was staying with her at her place in Ballygunge and took seriously to the James Hadley Chases the Modesty Blaise books and Wilbur SmithrdquoHe adds ldquoWhen yoursquove grown up in a family like that you tend to have the same aspirations Besides my father had told me a long time ago that I was going to write fiction toordquoThe writing of the book he recalls was almost cathartic ldquoI lost my father in 2014 my grandmother in 2016 and then my mother in 2017 And since I am an only child like my father we have been a small close unit In that time of grief I had no confidence and I became very insecure I felt everybody was leaving me I was a wreck and this book kind of saved me I had this strange sense that I had to write this otherwise I would be finished that this was my only wayrdquoGeneral Firebrand follows a frantic story with multiple narrative threads and characters which include a despotic government head a brave and troubled resistance leader a wildlife photographer documenting birds a 15000dollar cognacsipping Black Panther fantastic figures in communion with powerful natural forces and historical characters like World War II Soviet sniper Lyudmila Pavlichenko nicknamed Lady Death and credited with killing 309 enemy combatants or prominent Red Army commander Konstantin RokossovskyThe book also shines a light on the authorrsquos special interest in warcraft and defence strategy which manifests in his precise descriptions of military operations ldquoI have been interested in military history ever since I was in high school not just modern military history but going back a couple of thousand years I have studied military strategy extensively which includes war college journals and research papers on manoeuvre warfare During my journalistic years I also covered the defence beatrdquo reveals the author ldquoWhat a lot of liberals donrsquot understandrdquo he adds ldquois that this world has actually been shaped by warsmdashthe technology the science everything has been shaped from penicillin to the world wide web Everything has come out of defence research and todayrsquos geopolitics is shaped by war It is a very important determinant in human historyrdquoBhattacharya agrees that there are unwitting similarities the novel bears with his fatherrsquos work given that it too was often described as belonging to the dystopian fiction and magic realism genres ldquoAlso I have tried in my own way to write in a sort of language that is not very polished I didnrsquot want the words to come as a breeze to the reader so that he or she is not very comfortable I wanted the words to be jagged to be like a dagger that hurt I didnrsquot want a very safe middleclass vocabulary Irsquove tried to maintain an irreverence that was also there in my fatherrsquos writing although he wrote in Bengali There is no similarity between for example the lsquoRabindrik Banglarsquo followed by a lot of writers and my fatherrsquos Bengali which had a very different kind of strength zing and bite I wanted the same with my languagerdquoThere are also characters from Nabarun Bhattacharyarsquos works that populate Tathagatarsquos novel like Marshal Bhodi Bechamoni Raven or Dondobayosh Civet Cat or Bonberal and Begum Johnson ldquoWhen my father died in 2014 he couldnrsquot finish his last novel The Bengali publisher who published it left 20 blank pages towards the end of the book for readers to finish it themselves So I used some characters from that novel so as to give them a sense of closurerdquo says Tathagata But while the element of political satire is present in the works of both father and son Bhattacharya is careful to point out where they differ ldquoHe wrote in Bengali and his satire was centred on Bengali society and the politics in Bengal The political reality that I live in is very differentrdquoIn a novel full of places with madeup names Calcutta is the only realworld city used as a prominent settingmdashas the rebel forcesrsquo selfdeclared capital ldquoThere is obviously your familiarity with the cityrdquo says the writer ldquoItrsquos a city I know better than any other city I have walked every stretch it Irsquove been stranded in the most horrendous rains there Irsquove been part of its political processions I know what the dark underbelly of that city is like That city has built my character itrsquos a city that lives in me I wanted to pay my dues to itrdquoHe adds that there is something about its history that warranted its inclusion ldquoCalcutta is known for its culture of politics and protest its culture of putting up a human barricade against abusive power because the state which the people are fighting against in the novel is a fascist state Calcutta was an obvious choicerdquo