Tarashankar Bandyopadhyay
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A brief biography
Debasis Konar & Someswar Boral, Oct 10, 2022: The Times of India
KOLKATA/BOLPUR: Novelist Tarashankar Bandyopadhyay was nominated for the Nobel Prize in literature in 1971, the year Pablo Neruda ultimately won. This information has come out in the public domain only recently, after the Nobel committee released the list of all 137 nominations of 1971 after a 50-year embargo on making the knowledge public.
According to the Nobel website (nobelprize.org), Tarashankar had been nominated from India by author Krishna Kripalani, who was the secretary of The Sahitya Akademi. "The statutes of the Nobel Foundation restrict disclosure of information about the nominations, whether publicly or privately, for 50 years. The restriction concerns the nominees and nominators, as well as investigations and opinions related to the award of a prize," according to the website.
The author is a Padma Shri and Padma Bhushan awardee. He also won the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1956. He died in 1971, aged 73.
Neruda won the literature Nobel in 1971 "for a poetry that with the action of an elemental force brings alive a continent's destiny and dreams", according to the official website. But Tarashankar may have lost out because of difficulties in translating him.
"There is nothing to lam-ent the Nobel miss," Basudeb Bandyopadhyay, nephew of Tarashankar, said, on hearing the news at the author's ancestral village in Birbhum's Labhpur. "We had heard about this on the literary grapevine after his death in 1971, but now it's official," he added.
'Received all major Indian literary awards’
Basudeb Bandyopadhyay, nephew of Tarashankar Bandyopadhyay, said the author had "received all major Indian literary awards. He was the first to get the Jnanpith award for Bengali literature in 1966, and he was very happy with it since it was very prestigious. He did not have any qualms about not being recognised globally. He was happy being recognized by the people of Bengal.... People of Labhpur still hold him in high regard, and there lies his success as an author - for being loved and respected even five decades since he passed away."
Researcher and professor Aditya Mukhopadhyay said he was informed that Tarashankar had made it to the final stages but lost out, way back in 1987, as he was starting out on his PhD thesis on the author's life and works. "There were challenges in translating Tarashankar's works. He used typical Bengali words which imbued his text with local flavour, but which was extremely difficult to express in other languages," Mukhopadhyay said.
Tarashankar met Tagore, India's first Nobel laureate, in Santiniketan in 1932. He went on to write 65 novels.
