ABSTRACT
Tagore’s short story, titled Tārāprasanner Kirti or The Achievement of Tārāprasanno (1891), tells the story of the worldly failure of a Bengali intellectual who devotes his life to the composition of a scholarly treatise on Indian philosophy. The unintelligible jargon and incomprehensible content of Tārāprasanno’s literary attempts are praised only by a certain section of critics who ‘had not read anything apart from translations of Reynolds’s London Rahasya [The Mysteries of the Court of London]’. Tagore comments: ‘if instead of the trash that we (nowadays) get in the name of fiction, some serious books with this kind of theme were written more frequently, Bengali literature would have been richer’.1 A later Bengali author, Rājsekhar Basu, supports this view of Reynolds’s fiction widely held by Bengali intelligentsia:
The disdain exhibited by two of its leading literary figures does not, however, reflect the high regard in which many of the Bengali public held George William MacArthur Reynolds and his brand of novels in the nineteenth century. Reynolds was not translated as semi-pornography, as intellectuals of the day imply. In fact all Reynolds’s novels in the National Library, Calcutta, are from the collection of Sir Āshutosh Mookerjee, the second Indian Vice-Chancellor of the University of Calcutta, who was a graduate in Mathematics and Physics, and a High Court judge known as ‘the Tiger of Bengal’ for his fierce integrity. Among Reynolds’s Bengali translators are the names of many respected nineteenth-century literary figures, proving that not all had a ‘highbrow’ reaction to Reynolds’s sensationalism.3 The
eminent poet Bihārilāl Chakrabarty translated Reynolds’s Loves of the Harem (1855), with the title Abarodh Prem, in 1885. Bihārilāl was a highly regarded literary figure of nineteenth-century Bengal, and was also known as a blood relative of Tagore.4 Another respected writer, Kāliprasanna Chattopādhyāy, was a veteran who had been commissioned by the publisher Ārya-Sāhitya-Samiti to translate ‘standard’ English novels for consumption by the Bengali reader.5 Chattopādhyāy translated Reynolds’s The Young Duchess (1857-58) as Rāni Krishnakāmini (1889), Mary Price (185152) as Mary Prais (1893), and The Soldier’s Wife (1853) as Sainik Badhu (1895).
