Remembering, repeating, and working through Devdas

Corey K Creekmur

doi:10.4324/9780203933299-22

If only for the last century, no Indian ever sees Devdas for the first time. It is less convincing to assert that no Indian ever reads Devdas for the first time: while the stark novella by Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay (1876-1938),2 first published in Bengali in 1917 and soon translated into other major Indian languages, enjoyed a remarkable vogue and has endured for an often adoring audience, it is clear that the early adaptation of the story into a film by Naresh Chandra Mitra in 1928, and repeatedly thereafter by other filmmakers in both official and unofficial remakes, has ensured a deep familiarity more approvingly associated with ancient, sacred, and mythic rather than modern, secular, and popular texts. In contrast to the Mahabharata and Ramayana, the sweeping Sanskrit epics that still animate popular South Asian narratives, it may seem premature to identify the concise Devdas as a “classic,” except in the careless way we label some texts “modern” or even “instant” classics. And since the term is usually offered as a designation of “timeless” literary value as well as a marker of antiquity, the celebration of Devdas as a “classic” in either sense certainly remains debatable or premature. Devdas is a story its readers have probably loved more than admired, and so critical estimations of the work (including its mature author’s own apparently dismissive opinion of his early text) have had little negative impact on the tale’s resonant and persistent appeal. As Meenakshi Mukherjee emphasizes, “Irrespective of the fact that serious present-day literary critics prefer to leave him [Saratchandra] alone, his highly durable grassroots popularity is a phenomenon of continuing cultural significance in modern India, proving adequately, if proof were needed, that despite surface differences there is a common Indian substratum of literary taste at the mass level” (Mukherjee 1985: 102).3 If the power the story has exerted cannot finally be explained by the original text’s intrinsic qualities, there is no denying its accumulated effect: since its appearance almost a century ago, Devdas has never been forgotten, in large part because it has never been allowed to collect dust, unlike other musty “classics” that are dutifully acclaimed but largely unread, and rarely remembered with affection despite their esteemed status.

Remembering, repeating, and working through Devdas

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