Narayan Sanyal - Overview of His Works

Overview of His Works

Sanyal wrote numerous books that dealt with various topics, such as children, science, art and architecture, travels, psychiatry, technology, refugee problems, history, biographical pieces, encyclopaedia of animals, social novel and Devadasi-related.

Interestingly, this talented author also preferred writing books on deep shadow of many world famous works. One of the most popular Sci-Fictions Nakshatraloker Debatatma, is based on the transformation of human race from primitive creature to civilised intelligent species controlling the whole earth. Then it deals with Jupiter exploration and a super intelligent Computer HAL. The three parted book is an inspiration of 2001: A Space Odyssey by Arthur C. Clarke. In his book, Sanyal named HAL as Jantra-Na, in his mother tongue Bengali, it ambiguously means 'not a machine' as well as 'pain'.

His most popular work is Biswasghatak written about the Manhattan project that developed the first US Atom Bomb. This book is based on the shadow of Brighter than a Thousand Suns: A Personal History of the Atomic Scientists (1970), by Austrian Robert Jungk.

Another book Timi Timingil is on Whales. This stands on an article published in Readers Digest.

He also wrote a series of detective fiction called the Kanta (Thorn) series. All of the stories were inspired from various foreign novels.

Apart from this series, he wrote Bishupal Bodh: Uposonghar, which is basically a completion of Sharadindu Bandyopadhyay's unfinished Byomkesh Bakshi story: Bishupal Bodh. NarayanBabu fulfilled some terms given by Bandyopadhyay's friend Pratul Chandra Gupta, who edited Bandyopadhyay's works. Samaresh Basu, as the editor (also a friend of Sanyal) of Mahanagar, a magazine, published it in a Puja issue.

It must be clearly mentioned that Sanyal did not just copy, he took the central theme and then adopted in proper Bengali atmosphere, so that the reader can find it as their homely incidents. For this reason some changes in the original plot and a few anachronisms (that suit, e.g. offering a chair to the accused & the witness at the courtroom in India—- which is not generally the practice) necessarily occur in his writings, and he was fully aware of that facts. Besides, he everywhere mentioned the source, the changes he made in his script and why these are necessary. He also tried to keep the nomenclature resembling the original ones so as to offer his gratitude. He often referred P. K. Basu to "the Perry Mason of the East", as he was inspired to create Basu from this masterpiece of Erle Stanley Gardner.

It is undoubtedly accepted by all that NarayanBabu was one of the finest authors in Bengali and he was a class apart from the flock of contemporary Bengali writers those who too dependent on sentiment and emotional overdose in their writings and too dependent on monopolist Bengali media/publication groups in commercial front.