This Could Have Become Ramayan Chamar's Tale: Two Anti-Novels

by Subimal Mishra, V. Ramaswamy (Translator)

Subimal Misra—anarchist, activist, anti-establishment, experimental anti-writer—is a contemporary master, and among India's greatest living writers. This Could Have Become Ramayan Chamar's Tale is a novella about trying to write a novella about a tea-estate worker turned Naxalite named Ramayan Chamar, who gets arrested during a worker's strike and is beaten up and killed in custody. But every time the author attempts to write that story, reality intrudes in various forms to create a picture of a nation and society that is broken down and where systemic inequalities are perpetuated by the middle- and upper-classes which are either indifferent or actively malignant.

When Colour Is a Warning Sign goes even further in its experimentation, abandoning the barest pretence of narrative and composed entirely as a collage of vignettes and snippets of dialogue, reportage, autobiography, etc.

Together these two anti-novels are a direct assault on the vast conspiracy of not seeing that makes us look away from the realities of our socio-political order. In V. Ramaswamy s translation, they make for difficult, challenging but immensely powerful reading.

Genres: Fiction, India

296 pages, Kindle Edition

Published January 25, 2019

About the author

Subimal Misra is a Bengali novelist, short story writer and essayist. He is known as a maverick and audacious experimentalist in contemporary Bengali literature.

Subimal Misra started his literary career at the end of 1967. From then on, he is writing only in Bengali Little Magazines and has never penned a single word for any commercial magazine. Strong critique of the complacent and decadent bourgeoisie, his writings are starkly political. His use of calligraphy, space and visually expressive letterings gives a new dimension to his writings.

Heavily influenced by Jean-Luc Godard, Subimal Misra uses various cinematic techniques, like montage, jump-cut etc., in his literary works.

Reviews

[Vartika]

A Must Read

Subimal Misra's works are Anti-Novels in the most unpretentious sense of the word: a fierce criticism of the estabishment, of liberal, bourgeoisie 'morality', which breaks down the affectations of "fine words like elections, democracy, human rights and so on," urging the readers to recognise the duplicity of politics as we know it, and of intellectualism — of all isms. It proclaims:

What have you done with your science? What have you done with your humanism? Where is your dignity as a thinking reader?

Indeed: what have we done? Why haven't we?

This is a provocative book, an intensely anarchist one, and; as the blurb says; "a direct assault on 'the vast conspiracy of not seeing' that makes us look away from the realities of our socio-political order."

[Saswati Saha Mitra · Rating 5 out of 5]

This Could Have Become Ramayan Chamar’s Tale by Subimal Misra, translated by V. Ramaswamy, is that book that breaks the scale.

Written almost 40 years ago in Bengali literature and only recently translated into English, this book is an epitome of Post-modernist writing in non- English languages. This is by no means an easy book. If you are looking for that straight fiction, skip this.

If you are looking for a book that challenges the form of the novel, demonstrates vast erudition of contemporary politics, literary and philosophical discourse and tears both the ego of the writer as well as the reader apart, then this is your book. As the cover suggests, it could have been a book about a tea planter’s toil and death but it isn’t. By using a Derrida like technique of pastiche, Misra gives us fragments of dialogues, newspaper cutting, statistics, historical facts, reportage, all loosely building a picture of violence, greed and moral collapse in India in the 80s. When you read this 40 years later, you realise this is a writer ahead of his time. Nothing has changed.

The second novella is even more fragmented where the symbolism of a colour is the central premise but you realise at the end it is the voice of a writer trying to challenge the reader, targeting our bourgeois sensibilities as well as disrupting the very form of writing.

I love, love, love this anti-novel. It reminds you of what more writers should be doing today, experimenting with form, function and giving voice to the marginalised. It’s unfortunate that a book like this does not figure in the post-Modernist canon as a glorious example of both craft and translation. It deserves that place.

I challenge you to read this book.

[Literary]

What is one supposed to talk about when talking about the diseased shape of their own country? What purpose does a reader serve as a citizen in this tedious process of exposing and reinventing the conditions defined under the questionable category of equality and freedom? What differentiates between the reality perceived from one's choices of lifestyle and the one demanded out of survival necessity is, while both are influenced by political and social conformity, the latter is inclusively a humanitarian concern. The purpose of literature cannot simply be thrown into a distiller formed out of literary devices, genres and themes, and dismissed onto the readers. Whatever is to become of a writing is the blend of a writer's objective and a reader's attentive reception of it. To assign premeditated definition to a work is to obstruct a reader's independent opinion, deliberately leading them into the adherence of preassigned perceptions.

Two Anti-Novels is a neoteric translation of two of his anti-novels (published in 1984) by V. Ramaswamy after 35 years. Subimal Misra brings about disintegration of a reader's prejudices and comfort, their conscience to be dismembered thoroughly inside the torture chamber of the horrendous reality of a third world country dedicated to glorifying high definition images of its fabricated sense of independence. It is deliberately provocative and a quintessential postmodernist piece of work off the bounds of English literature. Strong critique of the complacent and decadent bourgeoisie, Misra's writings are starkly political and controversial.

It's the terrifying reality of the western dystopian world of Orwell's 1984. Misra shoves readers into the world of newspaper cuttings, blazing world of sex and cinema, the reality of violence, the apathy of a deadened society, monstrosity of casteism and classicism, and the absurdity of — ‘Stop shouting! The neighbouring country will hear it.' What is intolerably disturbing is its relevance even after so many years which though can be claimed as visionary, undeniably indicates the extent of the failure of power and politics in serving their purposes.

No reader leaves untainted.

[Abhay Nanda · Rating 4 out of 5]

A new genre should be created for writings like these. Exceptional way of putting together a book. Also, the statements made in this book, still relevant.

[Khandaker Batwinu Kabir Bin Zillur · Rating 4 out of 5]

Subimal Misra's Two Anti Novels stands as one of the most provocative and deliberately unsettling works in modern Bengali literature, a text that refuses to comfort its readers with the familiar architecture of traditional storytelling and instead confronts them with the raw, unmediated chaos of urban existence in 1970s Kolkata. The book, which collects two interconnected narratives, Actually This Could Have Become Ramayan Chamar's Tale and The Lost Poem, represents a radical departure from the conventions that had long governed Bengali fiction, emerging from the punk literary movement that Misra himself helped catalyze during a period of intense political and social upheaval in West Bengal. To engage with this work is to enter a literary space where the boundaries between author and narrator, between reality and hallucination, between the acceptable and the taboo, become not merely blurred but actively dismantled, creating a reading experience that is as intellectually demanding as it is emotionally exhausting. The very title announces its transgressive intent: these are not novels in any conventional sense, but rather anti novels, texts that define themselves through opposition, through what they refuse to do, through their systematic dismantling of readerly expectations regarding plot, character development, moral resolution, and linguistic propriety. The first and more substantial of the two narratives centers on Ramayan Chamar, a Dalit leather worker who inhabits the margins of Kolkata's urban landscape, eking out an existence on the city's footpaths and in its shadow economy, and Misra's decision to make such a figure his protagonist represents a significant intervention in the class and caste politics of Bengali literature, which had historically been dominated by upper caste, middle class perspectives even in its most progressive iterations. The narrative does not offer us Ramayan Chamar's story in any complete or satisfying sense; rather, as the title suggests, it presents us with what could have been his tale, the story that society prevented from being told, the life that was systematically denied the conditions necessary for narrative coherence and meaningful self realization. This structural incompleteness is not a failure of craft but a deliberate aesthetic and political choice, reflecting the reality that for India's most marginalized populations, the bourgeois ideal of the integrated self, the protagonist who learns and grows and achieves resolution, remains an impossible fiction, a luxury that their material circumstances do not permit. Misra's prose style in this narrative is aggressively anti literary, deploying the coarse, vulgar, and sexually explicit language of the Kolkata streets in direct opposition to the refined shadhu bhasha that had dominated serious Bengali fiction since the nineteenth century, and this linguistic rebellion serves multiple functions: it authenticates the narrative voice as emerging from the social world it describes, it shocks the respectable reader out of complacent consumption, and it asserts the right of the marginalized to representation in their own idiom rather than in the polished tones of their social superiors. The sexual content in particular, which is graphic and frequent, has generated significant controversy and has led some critics to dismiss Misra as a mere provocateur, but a more generous reading recognizes sexuality here not as gratuitous titillation but as one of the few domains of autonomy and pleasure available to those excluded from the formal economy and political citizenship, a site of resistance against the totalizing poverty that otherwise defines their existence. The narrative structure itself mirrors the disordered lives of its characters, eschewing linear progression in favor of fragmentary episodes, dream sequences, and sudden shifts in perspective that disorient the reader and refuse the consolation of narrative mastery over chaotic material. This formal experimentation connects Misra to broader modernist and postmodernist traditions, yet the specific historical and geographical coordinates of his work, the particular texture of Kolkata in the aftermath of the Naxalite movement, give his anti novel a local specificity that resists easy assimilation into global literary categories. The second narrative, The Lost Poem, extends these concerns through its meditation on creative loss and the impossibility of artistic production under conditions of extreme social constraint, suggesting that the missing poem is not merely an individual misfortune but a structural feature of a society that systematically devalues and destroys the creative potential of its subaltern populations. Together, these two narratives constitute a sustained assault on the institutions of literature and the social formations they sustain, demanding that readers recognize their own complicity in the systems of exclusion that prevent Ramayan Chamar's tale from ever achieving full articulation. The critical reception of Misra's work has been deeply divided, with some celebrating him as a pioneering voice of subaltern literature who opened Bengali fiction to social realities it had long ignored, while others condemn his methods as exploitative, arguing that the graphic representation of poverty and sexuality risks aestheticizing suffering and reproducing the very objectification it claims to critique. There is merit in both positions, and the most responsible critical engagement with Two Anti Novels must hold these contradictory assessments in tension, recognizing simultaneously the genuine radicalism of Misra's formal and political interventions and the legitimate concerns regarding his representation of women, who appear in the text primarily as objects of male desire and violence, and the potential for his shock tactics to substitute for rather than enable genuine social analysis. The translation of this work into English by V. Ramaswamy, published in 2019, represents a significant event in the global circulation of Indian literature, though it inevitably involves losses as well as gains, with the particular rhythms and historical resonances of Misra's Bengali prose proving difficult to capture in another linguistic medium. For contemporary readers, separated by decades from the specific political context that generated this work, Two Anti Novels retains its power to disturb and challenge, even as some of its references and immediate concerns may require historical contextualization to fully appreciate. The book raises enduring questions about the relationship between aesthetic form and social content, about the ethics of representing poverty and marginalization, about the possibilities and limits of literature as a vehicle for political transformation, questions that remain urgently relevant in an era of continuing inequality and increasingly sophisticated debates about representation and cultural appropriation. Misra's refusal to provide his readers with the satisfactions of conventional narrative, his insistence on the anti in anti novel, can be read as a form of respect for the complexity of the social reality he engages, a refusal to simplify or beautify conditions that are fundamentally unacceptable, yet it can also be experienced as a foreclosure of the empathetic connection that literature has traditionally enabled, a withholding of the humanizing gestures that might build solidarity across social divisions. Ultimately, Two Anti Novels demands to be read not as a failed novel but as a successful anti novel, a work that achieves its effects precisely through its systematic negation of novelistic conventions, and its place in the canon of Bengali literature seems secure not despite but because of its difficult, divisive character, its refusal to please or to console. For readers willing to endure its challenges, the work offers a rare encounter with literature as pure negativity, as the systematic dismantling of the comfortable assumptions that allow us to consume stories of poverty and oppression without genuine engagement, and in this negation there remains, paradoxically, a kind of affirmation, the assertion that even in the most constrained circumstances, the desire for narrative, for meaning, for connection, persists and demands expression, even if that expression can only take the form of an anti novel, a tale that could have been but never was, a poem that was lost before it could be written.

[Rhea · Rating 4 out of 5]

"It is becoming clear that to keep the hegemony unchallenged, people's helplessness and impotence has to be ensured and perpetuated."

ATTN: POSSIBLE SPOILERS

I bought this book out of curiosity; who the hell is Ramayan Chamar?
What I discovered is so much more than that. Through his writing, Subimal captured the inconstant treatment of people of the masses (the 99%) and the 1% while people below the poverty line are nothing more than speckles of dust in the street.

Some of the topics are all-too-familiar; the shifting of blames between authority figures, how the public tend to favor sensationalism over facts and objectivity.

His writing style is not the most conventional one. Though at the end, Subimal asked us the readers 3 important questions:
"But what have you done with your science? What have you done with your humanism? Where is your dignity as a thinking reader?"

[Samantha Blasbalg]

DNF at 13%. I couldn't follow what was happening. There were a lot of non-English words that were left untranslated that weren't obvious from context (don't know what I would have done in a physical book without the ability to tap and hold and get definitions from the dictionary or, more frequently, Wikipedia). The style of the writing also jumped around from poetry to prose, from subject to subject, and while I was really excited to read this book, it just felt like I was lacking way too much context to be able to understand it.

[Abhijeeth Reddy]

A completely different approach to writing a novel. Not sure if it worked for me completely, but I did feel compelled at times and reflective of the mood of the book.

[Lisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is not, in some sense, a light or easy read. And yet, the discontinuous nature of it also makes it seem easy to read, it doesn't allow to latch on to a storyline but nor does it want you to.