A Young Man's Reckoning in Seventies' Bombay

Soumitro Das has been a journalist, working in an editorial capacity in newspapers including The Statesman, and is now an author.

- MANJIRA MAJUMDAR

Soumitro Das has been a journalist, working in an editorial capacity in newspapers including The Statesman, and is now an author. A postgraduate in comparative literature, Jadavpur University, he earned his doctorate in history and semiology of texts and documents, and his dissertation was on the Trilogy of Samuel Beckett from the University of Paris. Fluent in French, one would have expected him to write in that language. Instead, he returned to India and has been writing short stories in English. His just-published first novel, titled Bombay, a city he grew up in before coming to live in Kolkata, can be termed somewhat of a bildungsroman, though this is more of a coming-of-age story of a young man who has just entered college.

Set in the late seventies during the turbulent days of the Emergency, Bombay is about the protagonist Sam, who tries to make sense of his world through an introduction to drugs, rock and roll, free love, literature, films and theatre through his friends. As is often the case, he is desperately attracted to beautiful college student Isabella Gondola, who is into radical politics. His obsessive love for her, set against the puritan values of his family, a middle-class Bengali family in Mumbai (then Bombay), internalises his own angst and agonies of growing up into adulthood. Should one be macho or sensitive is the conflict that is beautifully captured through lucid storytelling that holds you enthralled from beginning to end. This is definitely a welcome addition to bold writing in English by an Indian author.

Here are some excerpts from an interview.

1. Congratulations on the publication of your very first novel, Bombay. How do you feel?