ASIATIC, VOLUME 8, NUMBER 2, DECEMBER 2014

Kylus Chunder Dutt, A Journal of Forty-eight Hours of the Year

1945. Ed. Somdatta Mandal. Sodepur, Calcutta: Shambhabi, 2014.
85 pp. ISBN: 978-93-83888-15-3.

The history of a book‟s journey ever since its publication is often as interesting
as a detective story. Due to painstaking (re)search efforts by “scholar-
detectives,” sometimes spanning continents, a book perceived to be lost in
history resurfaces miraculously. While reviewing the Penguin version of the
English translation of a book of Urdu stories titled Angaare (2014) for an Indian
national daily, I was pleasantly surprised to discover that it was retrieved from
oblivion and restored to memory by the efforts of two scholars. It was originally
written by a collective of Muslim progressive writers and published in 1932.
Since the radical nature of the stories incited the anger of the conservative
Muslim society, it was proscribed by the government of the United Provinces in
1933. Published copies of the book were destroyed by the police. Only five
copies survived. Shabana Mahmud and Khalid Alavi, through a persevering
search, discovered the copies and later republished them in 1988 and 1995
respectively. Perhaps more interesting is the case of Kylas Chunder Dutt‟s
fictional work in English interestingly titled A Journal of Forty-eight Hours of the
Year 1945. It is a futuristic narrative of a revolt by the natives of Calcutta under
the leadership of a daring “nationalist” young man called Bhoobun Mohun who
was educated at the Anglo-Indian College. It was originally published in 1835 in
Calcutta Literary Gazette, or Journal of Belles Lettres, Science, and the Arts (Vol. III,
New Series No. 75, 6th June 1835) edited by David Lester Richardson who was
the Principal of the Hindoo College where Dutt himself was a student. Its
content was considered to be “seditious” by the British colonial establishment.
Since contemporary researchers surprisingly did not find it in important libraries
or archives in India or abroad, scholars involved in the field widely surmise, as
does Somdatta Mandal, the editor of the volume under review, that it must have
been withdrawn, confiscated or destroyed by the colonial authorities. Pallab
Sengupta during the course of his Ph.D. research in the 1960s came across a
copy of the particular issue of the Calcutta Literary Gazette in the Uttarpara Public
Library located in Uttarpara near Kolkata, copied the entire work from it, and
later even published in a Bengali quarterly in 1965 an article in Bengali with a
Bengali translation of the text and a commentary on it (Chatuskone, Aswin 1372
BS issue). But when he later returned to the library to consult the original again,
he could not trace it. Later scholars like Subhendu Mund and Alex Tickell could
not find it either in the National library in Calcutta or anywhere else in India or
abroad. But the search, as Mandal observes in her “Foreword,” continued
throughout the twentieth century. Alex Tickell could not trace that particular
copy in the British India Library in England. He even visited Calcutta in search

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 A Journal of Forty-eight Hours of the Year 1945

of the elusive issue of the Calcutta Literary Gazette. Then quite accidentally he
stumbled upon the work in a second-hand bookshop in Leeds and published it
in 2005. In a Wasafiri (Vol.21 No.3) article titled “Midnight‟s Ancestors: Kylas
Chunder Dutt and the Beginnings of Indian-English Fiction,” Tickell compares
his own search for the lost “treasure” with the plot of a detective story and
observes that “the hidden hinge of the plot is actually its more familiar
component,” implying that the treasure had all along been lying invisible near
the seeker of the object – in England itself:

The work of colonial acquisition had already been done for me by a

Victorian missionary, E.J. Barton, who had survived the Indian climate in
the mofussil or country town of Gaya long enough to bring his library
home to a Northumbrian parish. Holding his copy of the Gazette, I
remembered the words of a Bengali academic I‟d spoken to about the find,
who said acerbically: „You should have known it was in the UK, after all,
aren‟t all our treasures over there?‟ (Qtd. in Mandal 28)

It was undoubtedly a worthy “find” for Alex Tickell as it is the first fictional
work in English by an Indian English writer, although it is not the first Indian
English narrative – the credit for the latter, as Subhendu Mund points out, goes
to Dean Mohamet‟s Travels of Dean Mohamet (1794), the text of which was
reissued by Michael H. Fisher, a historian, in 1996 (13 n1). (In Mandal‟s edition,
however, the cover page mentions Dutt‟s text as the “first published narrative”
by an Indian English author although on the inside cover page it has been
rightly mentioned as “the first Indian fictional narrative in English.” It seems to
be a careless mistake on the part of the publisher who has not tallied the
manuscript with the cover page he has prepared before going to the press).
Moreover, the retrieval made the “seditious” content of the work accessible to
the postcolonial readers who might have been ignorant of the explosive anti-
colonial nature of early works like Kylas Chunder Dutt‟s A Journal of Forty-eight
Hours of the Year 1945 or his cousin Shoshee Chunder Dutt‟s The Republic of
Orissa: Annals from the Pages of Twentieth Century which was published ten years
later. The latter work is also futuristic and, like the former, speaks of a rebellion
(this time a successful one by the tribals in Orissa) against the British.
Considering the thematic similarity of the works, scholars like Meenakshi
Mukherjee, Alex Tickell, Subhendu Mund and now Somdatta Mandal discuss
the two works together.
Mandal has rightly realised the importance of the text for postcolonial
readers all over the world, particularly in India, because Kylas Chunder Dutt‟s
text, like his cousin‟s, foregrounds the existence of the resistant literature very
early in the history of Indian English literature. Earlier Tickell himself in the
Wasafiri article mentioned that he was motivated by “[t]wo potent myths”:

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 Himadri Lahiri

The first… is the dream of finding the lost work. Because it echoes the
normal process of critical investigation (with its trail of minor revelations),
but also coincides so readily with literal treasure-seeking…. The second
myth is one of origins, of finding a fixed essential starting point for a
specific cultural phenomenon. (Qtd. in Mandal 27)

Tickell successfully re-establishes the genesis – “a fixed essential starting point”

– of Indian English fictional writing. Mandal, in her carefully edited and low-
cost edition, disseminates the newly gained knowledge and makes the text
available to a wider readership. In this way she helps dispel what had been,
historically speaking, an amnesia induced by the repressive colonial system and
thus performs an act the like of which Ali Behdad in his memorable book
Belated Travelers calls “anamnesic,” an act which is very much part of the
postcolonial project.
Dutt‟s seventeen-page text in Mandal‟s edition (44-60) opens with a
quotation from a speech by Junius Brutus which sets the tone of the story:

And shall we, shall men, after five and twenty years of ignominious
servitude, shall we, through a fear of dying, defer one single instant to
assert our liberty? No, Romans; now is the time; the favourable moment
we have so long waited for is come. (44)

“[I]gnominious servitude” and the urgency to come out of it and assert liberty,
even though through violent means, constitute the theme of the text. A group
of young men launch a spirited armed movement against the British in the
“metropolis” of Calcutta under the able leadership of a twenty-five-year old
young man Bhoobun Mohun. He is “a protagonist who embodies all the
revolutionary magnetism of the romantic rebel-hero” (Tickell 63). The time of
the setting is 1945 (missing the actual Indian independence in 1947 by just two
years) – one hundred and ten years into the future – and the author imagines a
passionate but unsuccessful uprising against the better armed, better trained
colonial force. Alex Tickell feels that the short fictional works of both the Dutts
– Kylas and Shoshee – are “set in the future” presumably to “avoid official
censure” (60). At the first gathering of the rebels Bhoobun Mohun draws the
attention of the crowd to the fact that the people of “Indostan” have to suffer
much humiliation because of their subjugation by the British. He addresses
them as “My friends and countrymen” and calls for the emancipation of “the
natives from the thraldom of oppression” (47). He also asks them to “unite in a
body, and it shall be the most glorious scene that India has beheld, when we
effect the overthrow by one powerful and deadly blow of this system of
injustice and rapacity” (47-48; emphasis added). The same address is repeated in
his last speech delivered after the rebels are effectively defeated and Bhoobun
Mohun is captured. Immediately before he is put to death on a scaffold, he

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addresses those in front of him in a similar fashion: “My friends and

Countrymen! I have the consolation to die in my native land … I have shed my
last blood in defence of my country and …I hope you continue to persevere in
the course you have so gloriously commenced” (60, emphases added). There is
clearly an unambiguous sense of nation and anti-colonial nationalism in the
work – the first time it happens in an Indian English fictional work. Mandal in
her “Foreword” mentions Saurabh Bhattacharyya as opining that the work
offers „a rather fragmented imagination of the nation forming a kind of fictional
idealistic backdrop of the uprising‟ (29). Tickell too observes, “Considering the
author‟s youth and background we cannot expect Kylas‟s short story to present
a sophisticated account of proto-nationalist uprising against the British…” (63).
To this reviewer, however, the “author‟s youth and background” are not the
only important factors, the time span and length of the story also matter. And
both the short time span (forty-eight hours) and the length (seventeen pages)
make it impossible for the author to make the nationalist vision comprehensive.
The author works out a nationalist spirit that moves the characters and the
thrust of the plot. The mention of the “national convention” as the forum for
implementation of the idea of India/“Indostan” into a reality makes the
presence of an active/activist (Young Bengal?) intelligentsia palpable.
Nationalism in the modern sense of the term may not be present in all its
ramifications but the representation offers a foundational moment on which the
spirit of nationalism would be built up in future.
Bhoobun Mohun‟s speeches immediately remind us of Mark Antony‟s
speech in Shakespeare‟s Julius Caesar. Indeed, as Tickell points out, there are
echoes of canonical texts like those of William Shakespeare, Edmund Burke,
Thomas Paine and P.B. Shelley. The narrative is “a creative dialogue with the
curricular texts of the Hindu College, and echoes canonical English literary
works in its set piece soliloquies and gladiatorial scenes” (Tickell 63). I have
already mentioned two of the “soliloquies” (addresses) earlier. As to the
“gladiatorial scenes” the text gives detailed accounts of two – one that occurs in
the midst of the first meeting referred to above and the other towards the end
when Bhoobun Mohun, along with his comrades, marches towards the Fort
(William) and fights the British. The first meeting is interrupted by the
appearance of Red Coats and the “proclamation of dispersal” (as per the Riot
Act) is read out aloud. But it produces resistance rather than compliance: “Go
tell them that sent thee that we have resolved to hurl Fell Butcher [i.e. the
present ruler Lord Fell Butcher] from his seat, we have renounced the allegiance
of the feeble and false Harry of England, and that we mean to abide by our own
laws and parliaments!” (49). A fierce battle ensues in which the protagonist
plays a very important role. His valour is described in glowing terms – he is like
a rebel-hero taken as if from the pages of a romantic work. In the last
“gladiatorial” fight also he emerges as a hero. He fails to win the battle and is

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 Himadri Lahiri

put to death but he does certainly envisage the moment of his death as an
inspirational and foundational one.
Kylas Chunder Dutt‟s fiction is a third person narrative in which the
narrator describes the entire forty-eight-hour proceeding of events from some
distance but whose sympathy seems to lie clearly with the rebellious group of
men. The narrator seems to have left scope for ambiguities and irony to play on
the minds of the readers. He, for instance, calls the rebels “patriots” (49) and
“conspirators” (53) in the same breath; he also refers to the rulers with
apparently eulogistic but inherently ironic and subversive terms like “humane
viceroy” (59), “our noble lord” (59) or “most merciful ruler of India” (59). The
authorial attitude is also evident in the naming of his British characters – Lord
Fell Butcher and Col. John Blood-thirsty. This too conforms to the tradition of
British satirical writings.
Somdatta Mandal as the editor of this historically important work
provides a long thirty-five page “Foreword” (7-42) – the word “Introduction,” I
think, would have been more appropriate. In the first section she elaborately
offers biographical details of not only Kylas Chunder Dutt but also the
illustrious Dutt family to which he belonged. In the second section she
contextualises the text by offering a picture of the contemporary educational,
socio-cultural and political developments. The third section which is called
“The Search for the Narrative and Locating the Text” provides a minute
description of the search that led to the “discovery” of the text and details how
scholars have responded to it. The fourth section analyses the text
comprehensively. What I appreciate most is the Appendix where she includes
Dutt‟s articles “India under Foreigners” and “Adieu,” and a third one on Kylas
Chunder Dutt (“Notes on Kylas Chunder Dutt, First Editor, the Hindu Pioneer”)
by Kalyan Dutt whose great-great grandfather was Kylas Chunder Dutt. The
book, I am sure, will be very useful not only for the students of colleges and
universities but also for serious scholars in the field.
Works Cited

Behdad, Ali. Belated Travelers: Orientalism in the Age of Colonial Dissolution. Durham:
Duke UP, 1994.
Dutt, Kylas Chunder. A Journal of Forty-eight Hours of the Year 1945. Ed. Somdatta
Mandal. Sodepur, Kolkata: Shambhabi, 2014.
Mund, Subhendu. “Kylas Chunder Dutt: The First Writer of Indian English
Fiction.” 1-15. www.academia.edu. Web. 5 October 2014.
Tickell, Alex. Terrorism, Insurgency and Indian-English Literature, 1830-1947. New
York: Routledge, 2012. Google Book Search. Web. 30 Sept. 2014.

Himadri Lahiri
The University of Burdwan, India

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