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Sasthi Brata

© Mrinal Bose

Who is Sasthi Brata?

For those of you who do not know or may not have heard of Sasthi Brata, he is a well-known and controversial writer of the seventies who burst on the literary scene with his debut novel MY GOD DIED YOUNG. A Bengali Indian, he was brought up and educated in Calcutta, and later went to London where he married a British lady and subsequently settled. Though he studied physics in the university, he devoted himself to writing full time and lived by it in the truest sense of the term. In his heyday, he was adored as an author and the toast of bibliophiles across India and abroad.

I remember I had discovered him through his debut novel about three decades ago. One day while I was waiting for the train on my way back from college, the title dangling from the railway bookstall grabbed my attention. The blurbs on the back cover – extracts from rave reviews from the all of the world’s big English dailies – filled me with curiosity and fascination for the author. I bought a copy immediately, and got down to reading it. It claimed my next few hours, and I was totally engrossed by it until I finished it. Needless to say I was converted a Sasthi Brata admirer on the very day.

MGDY was a huge success. It gave Sasthi Brata both fame and money. Autobiographical in nature, it had a refreshingly different – unpretentious, bold and a no-holds-barred style – voice which captivated the readers. Sasthi Brata cared neither for the conventional Indian society nor for any political correctness. He in fact challenged them, and put down his own version of life, which was not very lofty, but candid and unhypocritical nevertheless. For an Indian writer, he also incorporated sex in his writing in healthy doses. All very delectable, but what I didn’t like about him was that he hated almost everything Indian and was sort of Anglophile.

Soon he came out with his second novel. Surprisingly, it was so lurid and titillating, and created so much fuss that the Indian Government banned it without any delay. Never did I get to collect or buy a copy, but the title of the book sent me a frisson of shock and disgust. The title: The confessions of an Indian woman-eater. How could one embark on such a nasty subject after his initial success, I wondered then. It is, of course, naïve to think that he wrote it on his own. He must have been, I presume, under pressure from his publishers to churn out another bestseller on time.