Radha Prasad Gupta : রাধাপ্রসাদ গুপ্ত

As we celebrate his birth centenary, I recall Shatul Kaku , who was deeply embedded in the Calcutta psyche. He presents a fascinating paradox. He was a bibliophile, a historian, a writer in both English and Bengali, a gastronome, a cineaste, a collector of paintings. A raconteur and a polymath.

Much has been written about him and yet so little is understood of him as a human being going beyond his intellectual persona. But today I wish to speak not of him but of a man who was the daily moral and intellectual compass to many. From Satyajit Ray to Vasant Choudhuri. From Santi Chowdhury to Nikhil Sarkar. From Ian Jack to Raghubir Singh and many more, at a time during which Calcutta reached the peak of its glory, as well, because he contributed so decisively to the making of Calcutta in its magnificent phase.

I enjoyed an unusually warm personal relationship with him going back to my childhood days. I am honoured that Shatul Kaku looked upon me as a member of his extended family, a relation which I enjoyed over the years, much more after the passing away of my father.

He had extraordinary intellectual powers, a brain that retained as easily as sharing his knowledge with others. It is an honour that to mark the centenary of this extraordinary man who had a close relationship with my father, a man gifted with bibliophilic knowledge and intellect himself.

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As far back as I can remember seem to know Satul Kaku or Radha Prasad Gupta. I knew him from my childhood days but came nearer to him in my youth. I remember him presenting me a box of sweets in my fifth birthday. He was a dear friend of my father, Nirmal Chandra Kumar, the antiquarian and was like a family member. Every other day he would drop in to our home in the evening on his way back from his office at Tata Steel and spend a considerable amount of time rummaging through antique books, prints and map. And the visits would end with a sumptuous meal prepared specially by my mother.

For long I thought he really was my father’s own brother for who else would be so close as to visit often, spend time and enjoy an ‘adda session’. My parent doted on him, send him fish at his home and even arrange for sugar and tinned baby food during the Pakistan war, when everything was rationed. My relation grew with these errands and other as with each visit I learnt a lot. History of Calcutta. The earliest historian of Calcutta Busteed was a doctor thrown out of Great Britain, Baptist Mission Press was entrusted to print the Exam question papers because of their Catholic integrity and the Jews of Calcutta arrived in the late 18th century from Arab countries and Iran and are called ‘Baghdadi’ Jews. And many more. He was a store house of knowledge and always had an original up his sleeve which coming back home I could not find in any of the books in my father’s large library.

Radha Prasad Gupta was born on 14th. December 1921 in Cuttack, Orissa, where his grandfather B.D. Gupta had become the first Indian principal of the town’s most important educational institution, Ravenshaw College, after a distinguished career as the professor of mathematics at Presidency College, Calcutta. Gupta and his five siblings grew up in some style in a large bungalow but his father died young and he reached Calcutta around the outbreak of the Second World War, to study economics. He settled in Calcutta and became a part of the Calcutta intelligentsia.

For several years after university, Gupta did nothing very much by way of a living. He was, in the words of a friend, a bohemian, in the true intellectual sense He spend his days endless coffee, late-night disputation, some private tutoring. The balance of his time was spent among the second-hand bookstores in the narrow lanes of old Calcutta, searching for 18th and 19th century books, prints and ephemera. It is in one of such sojourns that he met my father Nirmal Chandra Kumar in one of the College Street book shop and Kumar brought him home, which housed his library. Thus began a lifelong relation with Nirmal Kumar.

Kumar encouraged him to build his own collection and he began modestly with Bengali books, which were not that expensive. R P lamented to me latter that my father had persuaded him to add to his collection the famous Elephantine Folio of Thomas & William Daniell, which he declined in spite of Kumar being agreeable to take only the cost price and that too in instalments. A complete set of Daniell was then auctioned at Christie's for 2 Crore 72 Thousand Rupees. In later years his flat became a treasure house of such things. He built up a prized collection of Kalighat pats, the pictures painted as souvenirs for pilgrims to Calcutta’s Kali temple of which RP became a world authority.

‘Many visitors to the city who had more than a passing interest in the history and society of that great city would, if they were lucky enough , eventually land on the doorsteps of R.P.Gupta’s flat in the southern suburb of Ballygunge’ wrote Ian Jack in the obituary of Gupta in The Independent , London. And if any of them had an interest in rare books and prints, would be taken over or referred to Kumar by Gupta. Not only that R.P or Shatul as he was popularly known, made it a point to introduce all men of letters in India, particularly in Calcutta to Kumar, he would personally take them over and introduce them. Thus over years, Kumar was introduced to Jean and Krishna Riboud, Satyajit Ray, Kamal Kumar Majumder, Shanti Chowdhury, Nikhil Sarkar, Raghubir Singh, Jean Racine, Marie Seaton, N.J.Nanpooria and a host of others.

Most of the days when RP visited my father on his way back from Tata Steel in Chowringhee , where he worked as the PR Manager he was accompanied by an avid lover of books. He would enjoy introducing them to a world of books and looked at their awe that such a place existed in Calcutta. Since the library had rare books on all subjects-arts, history, music, botany, paintings, ornithology, you name it, there was nobody who returned without an intellectual treat.

Books were a passion for Radha Prasad Gupta. He talked endlessly over phone with Kumar on books. Books that have just arrived from London, books, which are bided in auctions, books that have appeared in catalogues, books that have surfaced after many years of hibernation. It was books, books and books. But that was not the end R.P himself was a prolific writer, he as Ian Jack writes ‘was many things: a bibliophile, a writer in both English and Bengali, a gastronome, a cineaste, a collector of painting. Supremely, and in the traditions of his city, he was also a talker, with an exquisite, magpie gift for anecdotes and recherché facts and, eagle-like, for triumphant assertion’.

R.P. loved books. It did not matter to him that he might not be able to buy it. For that was not the point. He would like to go over the books. Read the books. Recommend the books. And even helped Kumar find the right home for the book. Sometime when Kumar mentioned the name of a buyer whom RP did not approve, he would say ‘But Oh. He does not read books’. He loved to interact with other book lovers whom he met at Kumars and most often than not, he would recount some tales on a subject on which the person is deeply interested, for him to be floored. I remember of an Englishman who originally hailed from Somerset. R P narrated facts on Somerset to set the man thinking hard. Here was a man sitting in Calcutta, talking about Somerset, as if he has lived there all his life. To be told in the next minute that he has never set his foot on the place and all he said was from his knowledge from books. He knew many cities by heart. His knowledge was wide, even to imbibe information on wines. He could give details of the wine countries and seeing the label locate the exact region from where the grapes came and their uniqueness.

I found the name Radha Prasad, a gift of the iconic consort of Krishna a little bewildering. I asked Satul Kaku one day and he explained that it was more an extension of Radharani an incarnation of Goddess Lakshmi, whom his mother worshiped. He was a gift of Goddess Laxmi but was more near to Saraswati, the Goddess of Learning. He was well-born but far from rich, and therefore ideally suited to join one of the world’s most remarkable metropolitan populations: the Calcutta middle-class-the earliest middle-class in an otherwise feudal Asia-whose cultural, political and religious enthusiasms filled almost every household with musical instruments, argument, poetry and later Marxism, and which grew out of Bengal’s long encounter with British imperialism and western thought. If there is any truth in the saying that modern India was most moulded by the two individuals who had never been there, Queen Victoria and Karl Marx, then the people of Calcutta exemplified that idea at its fullest.

However RP ‘s allegiance lay with Victoria. He was a prominent Anglophile, a person who is fond of English culture. He was an authority on British history particularly Calcutta which ranged from social, political, to paintings, literature and even their foods habits. He knew all the British Calcutta painters like the back of his hand and could recognise their style and content. Most of them are anonymous passing under the broad name of company painters. Scholars and researchers from India and abroad referred to him for their work. I have personally met Mulk Raj Anand at the house of Shatul Kaku, residing at his home to do extensive work on the Bengal Erotic Art. I do not know if this has been published.

One of his closest friends was Satyajit Ray, the famous film maker. R P had taken a job at J. Walter Thompson, and soon after appeared playing the Chaplinesque role of a lightweight boxer in a cinema commercial for an Indian cigarette brand. In the ring he was faced with an opponent three times his size. He took a puff of the advertised cigarette, and thus fortified stepped forward to knock the giant flat out. The commercial had been scripted by an executive at a rival agency, Satyajit Ray. The two men became, and remained until Ray’s death in 1992, close friends. During the financially troubled shooting of Pather Panchali in 1955, it was R P who, on learning that John Huston was in town, took the rushes to his hotel and badgered the American director into watching them, which led to Huston’s vocal encouragement of Ray and news of his film in Hollywood.

From 1956, he worked as a public relations executive for the Tata Iron and Steel Company and was head of its PR department when he retired in 1980. Even when offered an extension he politely refused stating that he looks forward to his retirement as he can spend time with his books and writing. During his tenure he published a calendar with paintings of contemporary painters thus introducing a host of modern artists like Anjali Ela Menon to HM F Hussain to the common household.

He turned to writing after retirement, publishing regularly in Bengal’s leading literary magazine, Desh, and in its foremost Bengali-language newspaper, Ananda Bazar Patrika. English-language newspapers throughout eastern and northern India also used his pieces, which were mainly informative, anecdotal and historical. He was not, unusually in India, addicted to sweeping political opinion about the contemporary state of the country. Often he wrote with erudite mischief and wit. Two of his books in Bengali, Kolkatar Firiwalar Dak Aar Rastar Awaj, "Street Cries of Calcutta" published in 1984 and Mach Aar Bangali, "Fish and Bengalees" published in 1989, delighted his large Bengali audience. He also wrote a biographical account titled Stan Kal Patra,"Place in time" published in 2000 which has a chapter dedicated to my father.

R P’s real concern, I think, was language, and particularly the interplay between Bengali and English. He examined the relationship between language-use and language-immersion patterns that affect first and second language performance in Bengali-English speaking multilingual. He once told me that language performance was measured by two lexical tasks—a picture-word task and verbal fluency measures—in both Bengali and English. He loved puns-a typical Calcutta affliction-and collected them. His friend Ray was the subject of one, the nickname "Orient Longman", because he was tall and famous in the West.

Of course, it was the way he told them made it all the more interesting. He was a raconteur, one who told stories with wit and humour. Once when I visited him I found a French gentleman with whom he was conversing at ease. The conversation ranged from the French literature Rousseau to the poet Baudelaire. Then it took a turn to Godard and went on to discuss the nuances of the tragic relation in the films of Claude Chabrol. He also pointed out the humour in French advertising to the fashion in vogue in the street of France. All of this was woven in one large maze held by a majestic style of speech. I was introduced to the gentleman as Jean Riboud who told me that he has visited my father’s library and had enjoyed the hospitality of my mother who cooked a special item of ‘Shukto’ a Bengali delicacy for him. Much later, I learned that Jean Riboud was the Chairman of the French offshore oil drilling company Schlumberger and he had married Krishna, the niece of Somen Tagore.

It is in later years when I was working in Ananda Bazar Group of publications that I came close to Satul Kaku. By then RP had retired and he was into writing in a regular way. Every other day I was called by one editor or the other to get a writing for their publication. One day it was Aveek Sarkar for Anandabazar the other day it was Sagarmoy Ghosh for Desh. Today it is for Kalkatar Korcha edited by his friend Nikhil Sarkar and then tomorrow it was Aveek Sarkar for The Telegraph. I loved it. For Satul Kaku and myself. R P always used to say that there is a fun writing for 'formaisi lekha' , commissioned writing and this was it at its height. For me the world had come a full circle. It was RP who used to visit my home every other day and now I visit him practically every day. Those days were a great leap forward for me. Each of the article I went for was discussed and analysed once written. R P started dropping in to our office often and it was a pleasure to receive him. He made it a point to see me in office before he met the others. Before he left he invariably landed with my boss Arup Sarkar for an 'adda' session which he said he enjoyed the most. Among the Brother Sarkars, he was more fond of Arup than Aveek. Once, standing in the next box of the office urinal he started reciting T S Eliot’s Waste Land. Needless to say that the deliverance of the other gents in the stand became a work in progress as they stood spellbound with their 'dicks' in their hand. I was told that he had translated T.S. Eliot as well as several Bengali poets into Oriya and could recite them without a flaw.

R.P. Gupta, who died in Calcutta on March 9, 2000, was awarded the West Bengal Government’s Vidyasagar prize for a lifetime’s contribution to Bengali letters. I personally think that had he continued writing he would have received the Ananda and many more awards.

On his demise I felt that have lost my father for the second time. For many days I did not leave my library and wept like a child. The Gods do not create the likes of him anymore.