CHAPTER IV

HE WHO RIDES A TIGER

The harrowing experiences left incomplete in So Many Hungers, get

completed in He Who Rides a Tiger. The spectre of the Bengal femine and

the problems people encountered are pictured in this novel. The famine is the

valley of the shadow of death through which the characters have to pass

before they attain their full stature as human beings. Of the Hero,

P K.R.Chandrasekhar observes: "Kalo, in particular, chastened and purified by 3

his experiences and sufferings, learns the secret that to be true to one's own

self is the greatest achievement of man".'

The novel reveals that greatest achievement of man in life is to be true

to himself. Kalo, a blaksmith, lived with his only daughter Chandra Lekha

in Tharna town. The girl's unusual cleverness and attainments, the touching

tenderness of the mutual affection of father and daughter are clearly brought

out in the beginning of the story. The shadow of the Bengal famine now

begins to fall over Tharna town. Food grains become scarce and

unemployment becomes an acute problem. Weavers and other traders sell

Chandrasekharan, K. R. Bhabani Battachar ya (Arnold Heinemann f Publichsers (India) New Delhi - 1 ) 1974, p. 9.

their implements for a pittance and leave the town. The author describes the

dawn of the famine thus:

The dark year started three or four months after

Chandra Lekha won her silver medal. It was

almost the darkest in the history of Bengal. A

plague took the land in its grip, the plague of

hunger, in the wake of war.'

Bhattacharya continues to describe the war situation thus:

The Japanese army stood poised at the eastern

front, facing a wall of resistance. But no

barricades had been put up against the enemy

within the borders: no rationing of food grains,

no price control, no checking of the giant sharks

who played the cornering game on a stupendous

scale . . .'

He Who Rides a Tiger, (Delhi : Hind Pocket Book (P) Ltd., 1955) p.18.

Ibid, p.18

The result was hunger, poverty and privation. Bhattacharya painfully

records people's miseries thus:

Barns were empty - the peasants had been induced to sell off their

grain. Markets were empty - the grain was hidden away. The tillers of the

soil, reduced to starvation, had no recourse but to sell land, to buy back the

produce of the land. And now rice was five times the old rate.

"Weavers sold their looms to traders from big cities who toured the

country side for bargains. Artisans sold their tools. Fishermen's boats were

chopped up for fire wood to sell. The plague washed up in fierce tides.

Bengal was dying. Tharna was dying" .4

Kalo is also drawn by hunger and famine to Calcutta in search of job

and food. The capital is the workshop of war weapons. As Kalo's hands are

strong as a hammer, he is prepared for any hard work for the sake of

sustenance. He is so poverty stricken, he has no money to travel from one

place to another, he travels like thousands of people ticketless and boards on

running trains. There are also cries of people in distress.

Hungry, we die . . . . Give us a few grains of

food, Baba. . . . . give us a ride to the great city.

Food even for dogs and cats . . . Take mercy on

the dying ones, Baba, permit us to leave . . . .

Give us a chance to eat, thou ocean of mercy.

God will bless you."

On his way to Calcutta, Kalo is jailed for three months of hard labour

for stealing a few bananas to eat lest he would die. Bhattacharya remarks,

"Thieving was very much out of his line: Dislocated by the hunger of

all times, he was on his way to the great city in search of work and the very

marrow of his bones was ashamed because he had to travel by footboard"."

In depicting the life of Kalo during the period immediately following

his release from prison, Bhattacharya gives a pathetic account of the plight

of the destitutes in Calcutta. Hunger makes him carry dead bodies of

destitutes into Municipal trucks for disposal. Still worse job, he gets in to

procuring girls for flesh trade. Unexpectedly he gets a good brokerage.

One day, in one of the brothels for which Kalo is working as an agent,

he sees a rich customer getting into one of the rooms. Soon after he hears the

plaintive, protesting cries of a woman. The voice sounds strangely like that

of Chandra Lekha. Immediately, the customer leaves the room in anger.

"bid, p.26

Ibid, p.33

Driven by strange foreboding, Kalo enters the room to find to his horror the

girl is none other than his daughter. Realising the gravity of the whole

situation, he locks the girl Immediately out of the hell-like atmosphere. He

brings her to his habitation. She narrates how she became a vict~on to

brothel, which makes Kalo shed tears and at the sametime he was indignat

at the meanrnindedness and cruelty shown by the unscrupulous exploiter. He

remembers the oft repeated words in prison.

"We are the scum of the earth. They hit us where it hurts badly - in

the belly. We have got to hit back".7

Society has now hurt him and his daughter is the worst of viction of

the society's onslaught on the have-nots. He must take revenge upon the

society which is hostile to his family. Totally embittered with the selfish

society that turns the innocent girls into prostitutes and honest men into

thieves, Kalo prepares his revenge. He creates a fake temple and makes a

living for himself and his daughter posing himself off as a brahmin priest.

Soon. he becomes powerful, wealthy, influential and revered. In course of

time his easily acquired prosperity, opulence and social prominence show

signs of corroding his true self.

' Ibid. p.39

But every now and then, he has a pricking in his conscience. AS a

result of this, he is tormented by moral and spiritual conflict between love

and suffering, power and prestige on one side and desire to be honest and

true to himself. He is riding on a tiger. He has to make a right decision to

save himself from the situation. He should either dismount from the tiger and

get killed or kill the tiger of deceit and face the consequence. In his struggle,

he is able to kill the tiger of deceit and make believe; he acts dramatically.

He discloses his identity before a large gathering, a mixed gathering of all

classes and castes. While the Caste Hindus fret and fume for having been

cheated by a blacksmith, praises and felicitations come from other people.

Biten congratulates him thus:

You have triumphed over those others and

yourself. What you have done just now will steal

the spirits of hundreds and thousands of us. Your

story will be a legend of freedom, a legend to

inspire and a ~ a k e n . ~

Bhattacharya focusses the tragic predicament caused by the hunger of

the people, who wish to lead honest life and sincere in their work. They get

caught in the hands of tragic sequences.

Ibid, p.232

Famine and Hunger are the worst tragedies faced by Bengalis. ''The

Great Hunger had struck the land of Bengal in the wake of war: The danger

of the masses of people uprooted from their old earth and turned into

beggars, and the hunger of the all owning few for pleasure and more

pleasure, a raging fever of the times. Uprooted women with their own kind

of hunger had to soothe the other hunger, had to cool the raging pleasure

fever with their bodies" ". This is how Bhattacharya narratzs the bitter days

of femine, the sudden sweep of disintegration, the rootlessness and the end

of human decency. This bitter day found a place in the history. The poverty

killed the grace of Bengalis.

Kalo understands at last how four fifths of his savings has been lost.

The money has been swindled from him by the city sharks. Lekha sells her

. . . medal. She also sells all saleable things. In the famine, Kalo thinks while

at prison that his daughter Lekha may have to roam the fields with hundreds

of others, like a hungry animal, digging out soft wild roots and wading in

pools for a few shrimps.

The very thoughts of his daughter's suffering in the land of famine

make him feel despair and it is a continuous agony for him. A tragic tension

is built up in his mind. After his release from jail, Kalo sees the fields in

Bengal are heavy with yellowing rice. There will be heavy harvest but who

will own it? In the country around Tharna, the peasants have mortgaged their

Ibid, p.54

~ a d d y crops months before they are grown and with that money, they have

bought rice from the dealers at five times the old rates. The money is spent,

the rice is eaten and the peasants continue starving or eat half stomach while

their lands yield rich harvest while they cannot even see or think of

possessing them. The great city is bulglng with uneinployment problem

besides the agony of starvation. These are terrible scenes of poor and the

pitiable condition of the people.

The harrowing experience of poverty to which people are subjected to

by the rulers' mismanagement and maladministration is terrible. Kalo

watches a scavenger employing a rubbish can near the pavement while a few

people in hunger look at hoping to have a few crumbs of food. There are

agonising cries in every street, Kalo hears.

"Baba , . . hunger kills me, Baba . . . give me one sip of rice water

. . . I cannot bear this any more. Baba . . . it was a woman's wail of

desperation, a wail from the bowels of Bengal".Io

Even in this desperate condition, Kalo takes a greater rupee from his

waist cloth and hands to the woman on the streets who asks him alms. When

a sickness keeps raising in his throat, he drinks from a tap and sleeps on the

pavement.

'' Ibid, p.50

Kale sees a funeral p r~~ess ion in which two men at the end of the

~rocession stand in an open car and dip their hands into wicker baskets out

of which they scatter quantities of rice in the street. Once in a while they

fling a palm full of copper coins. An excited crowd of beggars push and

scramble to pick up the coins. Some of them are content with their collection

of rice. Bhattacharya comments on this scene thus: "The chanting of the

Name was meant to propel the departing soul skyward. Without that and the

complicated ritual which followed the departed soul would remain

earthbound. The rice and coppers scattered on the street as well as the

funeral feasts would earn a goodly measure of merit for the soul of this

Brahmin and ensure its warm reception at the portals of heaven,

What would happen to the departing souls of

those dying on the streets? Kalo asked himself.

Were they doomed to be denizens of the seven

hills? For them there was no chanting of the

Name, no scattering of rice, the rice that would

feed their eather form. No Brahmin priest spoke

in timeless words from the Veda or applied the

holy fire to the fleshless faces on the funeral

pyres.

"Would the hundred thousand dead hover in unseen shapes over the

great city eternally? Was heaven meant for the rich alone?"."

Kalo is made to do what he does. That is to become an agent to

procure girls for brothel. For this, the police, the judge, money and the

general public are responsible. Society red-eyed with rage, has branded him

as evil when he has done nothing really wrong. It is a misfortune, he is

engaged in a work which he hates, but no other alternative survival is

available for Kalo. Is it tragic predicament? Society pushes to such a tragic

situation.

In He who Rides a Tiger, Bhattacharya records the misery of the

poor, but also the cruelty of the rich. The situations are so skilfully

developed, and ably presented the harrowing contrast between affluence and

poverty, power and helplessness, goodness and hypocricy. The indignation

of the novelist is all the more poignant because Kalo is forcibly dragged into

the toil. That is the tragic predicament of the protoganist in the novel. Once

his face is painted black he decides to take the mask off and express the real

faces of the human monsters.

' l Ibid, p.53

He does this and gets happiness in his success, though his heart is not

at peace. He is racked by qualms of conscience and beset with Lekha's

gloominess. He has taken personal revenge but not remedied the wail that

comes from the bowel of Bengal.

Kalo, the Mangal Adikari, like the others in the city. bulges with

riches, glitters with loveliness, throbs with life and joy. Kalo is unable to cast

off the unspeakable misery, revolting ugliness, and creeping horror of slow

death. His achievements fail to remove the child hand that lies upon his

daughter's heart, (t glacial wall that has . . . her sprightliness. He is helpless

which is nothing but his tragic predicament. He cannot overcome i t nor can

he find a way out from it. It is shocking to realise that he himself is not out

of that prediction which he has created for the selfish and hypocritical.

Despite his being placed in tragic predicament, Kalo has the courage

to face the situation in order to kill the lie and explode the myth: "Evil is to

be faced and fought with its own knivesu.'* The whole problem they

confront is due to hunger. When the man's basic need is not fulfilled, even

the honest and sincere individual becomes a rebel against the society and the

rulers.

l2 Ibid, p.227

For the tragic predicament here is food, the very essential thing, when

that becomes an unattainable thing, no doubt even the docile individual

becomes a rebel as it is in the case of Kalo. Bhattacharya observes:

Something had seized the people so that their

apathy was broken. Great demonstrations were to

be seen in h e streets almost everyday. They were

not composed of down and outs' among the

hunger-marchers were men from workshops,

students from colleges, clerks from offices.'"

When the entire State is under the grip of famine, the sufferings of the

people is less said the better. It is a real human tragedy, still worst is, it is

a living death. Everyday people lived in hope to have a morsel of food. Low

and middle income group suffered greatly. Their plight is harrowing and the

peasants seeing their children suffer for want of food is all the more a worse

situation. They are in a tragic predicament. The solace they hoped that would

come at least sometime later, is fleeting. No end to their misery is in sight.

When this is the pathetic side, in the otherside of Society as Bhattacharya

observes:

'"bid, p. 167

Kalo had thought over a curious contradiction of

the tones; while men died of hunger, wealth grew

and while kindliness dried up, religion was more

in demand. It was only the outward fotrn of

religion, the shell of ritual, empty within."

Bhattacharya draws the attention of the reader through his artistic

medium to the misguided faith. The evil outgrowth and dogmaticism which

have crept into the lives of the Indian mass in consequence they also fail to

see the realities. In order to drive home that the famine in Calcutta is man-

made, he turns the reader's attention towards the hoarding of food grains by

the unscrupulous rich businessmen and they revel to see the people paying

through their nose heavy price for the purchase of a day's rice. The agony

of the have-nots and happiness of the "haves" and in between the innocent

poor people are caught. It is their tragic predicament. But Kalo stands a man

apart from this social order. According to Shiv.K.Kumar, "It is through this

low born but honest and magnanimous blacksmith, Kalo, that Bhattacharya

presents his humanistic philosophy" . I "

l 4 Ibid, p. 113

Shiv.K. Kumar, "Indo Anglican Literature", Literature in Modern Indian Languages. V.K. Gokak, ed. (New Delhi : Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, 1957), p.284.

The main concern of the novelist in writing He Who Rides a Tiger,

is partly political and mainly economical and social. The Quit India

Movement, people imprisoned for the sake of loving their country, defiance

of bans, hunger strikes in jails are the reminds of the socio-po!itical and

economic situation that prevailed during the pre-independent days.

The tragic predicament that is focussed into the novel is not only due

to the Bengal famine but also the cause of 11 World War. The casual attitude

of the thoughtless British soldiers to the spectacle of hunger and suffering

and their enjoyment of boys fighting for food, reveal the image of India and

the sorry state of affairs that prevailed during the colonial rule in India.

Kalo's own experience shows the nature of the ordeal endured by the

thousands of people. Bhattacharya sketches everything within the resources

of his art when he gives us a view of the plight of the destitutes in the city.

We see the hungry men beaten up by the police. Men die in such large

numbers that the bodies have to be taken away by the truck loads.

He Who Rides a Tiger is a novel that focusses the real problems the

poor confront in their day to day life. Day in and day out their survival

becomes an ordeal; food is not within their reach to acquire, shelter is

beyond their reach, education unthinkable, dress less said the better - that is

the way of their existence. That is their tragic predicament. The caste

Systems come in for chastisement in the novel.

The symbol and agent of protest against the tyranny of caste is shown

in how Kalo's sister Purnima, is hastily given away in marriage to an elderly

widower when the parents discover that a young man of low caste, Basav is

in love with her. Her unhappy married life leads her to comrnit suicide.

When Basav taunts Biten about the cruel incident, he renounces his caste

forthwith, he says that he is no longer a Brahmin and removes his sacred

thread as well.

Here again casteism played the havoc and each individual faces the

tragic situation because of it. As the denunciation of the caste system is one

of the purposes of the novelist, he alludes to it in sensual places in the novel.

The system is so well entrenched that Chandra Lekha's attending school

meets with severe criticism both from the high caste and the low caste people

of Tharna. The point emphasised by Bhattacharya here is that caste became

a habit of thinking as much as a way of life and i t is not that much easy to

eradicate it.

ffl According to K.R.Chandrasekhar, the objective of the novel besides

h

showing the tragic predicament, it portrays:

Two evils - the evil of exploitation which results

in hunger and degradation and the evil of the

caste system. Two characters symbolise the

protest, Kalo against exploitation and Biten

against Caste. IG

Forced by circumstances and inherent compassionate feelings. Kalo

becomes a rebel against social atrocities.

The development of Kalo as a rebel is described in a way as to suggest

that the rebellion in him is a product of a pernicious system which has to be

challenged. Bitcn's imprisonment is the price he has to pay for protesting

against the callous treatment given to the hungry by the authorities. The

agitation to which men desperately resort to when they are no longer able to

bear the pangs of hunger.

When Kalo and Lekha are comfortably settled in the temple, they

witness a procession of destitutes carrying a banner and shouting "Food! we

demand food for the hungry!" Viswanath, the old gardener, joins the

procession though he himself is now safe in the protection of Mangal

Adhikari. The trustees of temple discharge him from the service for action

of rebellion. Bhattacharya indicates the protest against hunger becomes a

broad based movement with which all patriotic people begin to identify

themselves and also that it becomes merged with the larger movement of

national freedom.

l6 Chandrasekharan, K.R. p.70

Besides the patriotic fervour. He Who Rides a Tiger focusses that the

individuals suffer because of social customs and political apathy to remove

the existing social evils. The selfish motives with which people offer worship

at a temple are brought out in the novel through a few episodes. We also get

a glimpse of the motives with which most of these people make their

offerings to the deity. Among them there are people who refuse to give

priority to the sick man whose object is the salvation of the soul.

Bhattacharya seems to suggest that ritualistic worship even in a false temple

with a faked image can be of help to a dedicated worshipper by serving as

an anodyne against sorrow and by avoiding the growth of mental powers

through concentration.

The Bengal famine forms the backdrop of He Who Rides a Tiger and

constitutes the mainspring of Kalo's action. The emphasis shifts in the later

part of the novel to the characters of Kalo and Lekha and to the manner in

which they react to their situation. Lekha's character is steady and of a piece,

and her action shows her consistency despite ups and down she faces in life.

Lekha functions throughout as the keeper of her father's conscience.

The case of Kalo is different. He experiences a moral and spiritual conflict

between love of ease, power and prestige on one side and desire to be true

to himself on the other. He is finally able to kill the tiger of deceit and make

believe when he acquires the moral strength to be himself. The struggle of

Kalo is a struggle for integrity despite the tragic predicaments he faces.

As for the problem presented in the novel i t is one of identity, and

ironically, the problem of ident~ty is Kalo, which is not physical but social.

But the social problems he encounters results in the tragic predicament.

Kalo's tragic predicament starts with the death of his wife while giving birth

to the baby daughter, his aspiration for a change in life style, finds

expression in his naming the daughter Chandra Lekha. We can even say that

Kalo's aspiration for a new status with money, is an unconscious indication

to a problem which ultimately leads to his tragic predicament.

He thinks that people in his area should come and congratulate his

daughter for having secured a medal in an essay writing competition. So

slowly he becomes conscious of a new significance to be attached to his

family. Bhattacharya observes that the father in him "sat expectantly on his

verandah, waiting for the great ones of town to visit his house and pay

compliments to the girl who had put to shame even the great Calcutta city''

but 'no one came'. It was as though nothing had happened in Tharna

town". l7

l7 He Who Rides a Tiger (Bombay, Jaico Publishing House. 1955). p. 1.

Kalo gets so much upset when the people in the area fail to recognise

his daughter's achievement. It soon becomes a sore and gaping wound in the

wake of war and specter of famine stalks the wholz of Bengal. Bhattacharya

sums up the crisis of 1943 : "the plague washed up in fierce tidss. Bengal was

dying. Tharna was dying". '"

The tragedy that strikes the whole of Tharna is so intense that people

are evacuated from the place. It is a ~nisfortune and for Kalo it is a blow to

his high aspiration. He is placed in a tragic situation all of a sudden which

he has least dreamt of. He is forced to leave his town in search of work, any

work, any where it is offered, what he wants is food for himself and to his

daughter.

Kalo is forced to leave his town in search of work and food. The great

exodus begins from Tharna as well as other villages. The hungry marchers

are beaten up mercilessly by the police guarding trains to Calcutta. To kill

his hunger, Kalo steals three bananas and lands up in prison for commiting

the offence. Bhattacharya achieves at this point a vivid and dramatic

development in the portrayal of Kalo's character.

l8 Ibid, p.16

As Ihab Hassan points out that "The disparity between the innocence

of the Hero and the destructive character of his experience define his

concrete, existential, situation^".^' This reveals Kalo's encounter with con-

ventional values - makes him recoil from the reality of inhumanity. He sees

that he is caught in the whirlpool of problems for no fault of his own, from

where begins his tragic predicament.

Bhattacharya shows a good control over the delineaation of Kalo's

character, namely the moral aspect - that is, the way a person reacts to a

situation and translates his reaction into action and the mental process - that

is the way a person thinks about himself and the relevant situation are well

manipulated by the author in the novel.

The novel can be studied as a well ordered and artistic structure of

individual experience in a specified circumstance or how the individual faces

chain of problems which places his tragic predicament. The novelist takes

care to portray the individual's reaction when they are caught unawares or

they undergo agonising problems because it is their tragic predicament caused

by man made situation.

l9 Ihab Hasran, Radical Innocence (Pornection : University Press. 1961).

Either it is Bengal famine or Kalo's imprisonment or for that matter

his daughter's landing in a house of ill fame - all show that the piquant

situation each one is placed in is not in his hands. The complex urban

problems, urban vices, the presence of mass movements, thc faith in

superstitions, belief in fate, all contribute to tragic situations.

According to Syamala Rao in:

He Who Rides a Tiger, Bhabani

Bhattacharya gives us a pathetic picture of

innumerable indignities and cruelties to which

human beings are subjected during the famine.20

The famine caused untold havoc in the lives of innocent people and

pulled down the mankind to a despicable level and honour was its easiest

target and it did everything possible to crush it and destroy i t . It caused not

only the influx of people into the cities but it made them do anything for the

sake of survival.

Because of poverty and hunger for food, people were involved in

various kinds of perverse activities and exploitation. The human essence was

squeezed out and in consequence only a debased human frame was left out.

" Syarnala Rao, B. Bhabani Bhattachrya (Blackie & Sons Pvt. Ltd., Madras, 1988), p.74

Taking advantage of the situation the unscrupulous elements in the society

began to leave, catering to the temptations of the flesh and eyeing up village

damsels in order to sell them for flesh trade. Everything was reduced to mere

bestiality and the law of jungle prevailed.

As Syamala Rao observes:

Bhabani Bhattacharya since he deals with so

calarnitious an affair, makes use of every possible

artistic device to ensure the reader's reaction and

his compressionability. He lays before the evil

that come to prevail without any restraint at all

and the concentration of evil on the limited

canvas of the novel has unfathomably profound

impact . "

Bhattacharya has skillfully structured his novel He Who Rides a Tiger

and exploited the plot in an excellent manner. The theme of the novel

touches the core of the human heart. The novel not only pictures the naked

horror of the famine but also reveals the ruthlessness of the society and

above all the psychological and superstitious nature of the people. Despie

*' Syamala Rao. B. Bhabani Bhattacharya (Blackie & Sons Pvt. Ltd.. Madras, 1988), p.74

of the economic and social injustices meted out to the innocent people

especially the poor. According to Balrarn S Sorot:

Through the story of Kalo, the hero of the novcl.

Bhabani Bhattacharya illustrates that neither a

rigid adherence to the estahlished social code nor

abrupt break from i t is beneficial to man. The

true happiness and the fulfilment in life can be

attained only after a moderation of temperament

with a due regard for the established conventions

and equal awareness of the requirements of the

modern age."

As regards Kalo, he has a firm faith in the traditional values of life.

The caste hierarchy is sunk deep in his spirit which corrodes his finer

sensibilities.

Though unable to understand the validity or the utility of the

established order in society, Kalo never questioned its relevance. His is a

simple set of values. Honesty, hardwork, and faith in law and justice are the

core of his being. His only question is why there is so much of injustice and

22 Balram S. Sorot, The Novels of Bhabani Bhattacharya (Prestige Books, New Delhi : 1991), p.75.

inhumanity in society especially based on caste, power and money. When he

is at loss to find an answer. he gets disillusioned. The oppressive awareness

of his low birth, poverty, hunger, three months's rigorous imprison~nent for

a neglibile offence, his work as a brothel house agent. are the factors which

make Kalo, a social rebel.

Kalo thinks that for his tragic predicament social injustice is

responsible. He throws away old values by which he lived, now he wants to

rise in rebellion against all such values because they gave him nothing, rather

made him a slave to those oppressive ideals, As the tension mounts in his

mind, it becomes unbearable to him. When the opportune moment comes,

Kalo has to make a manly decision "to kill the tiger" and thereby descend to

solid earth from his lofty seat.

Chandra Lekha is bent upon destroying herself for the sake of Kalo :

further forces his decision, and finally, he reveals the astonishing truth that

he is not a Brahmin and the crisis of his spirit ends and Kalo attains his real

self again. His outlook has been broadened. He feels now neither superior

nor inferior to any class or caste. In consequence, Kalo comes to synthesise

the old and the new in his personality. He gets the equanimity of mind with

an equipoise to see things life in good perspective.

When tragic situations in sequences strike him one after another, he

becomes rather mentally upset and curses his stars. But at one stage he

understands that his tragic predicament is nature-made more than man-made.

Of course, human beings with their greed aggravated i t , but thc possibility

of seeing the light after passing through the dark tunnel of' tragic

predicament, he consolidates his position; he now believes that in life,

sometimes a big compromise has to be made, for the sake of survival.

Bhattacharya despite focussing his characters enmeshed in tragic

predicament, fuses the traditional and the modern values in the most

conspicuous feature of his writing. At one stage, he tows with the idea of the

integration of approaches and the blending of values, by far the most

significant idea that Bhattacharya conveys through this novel. In He Who

Rides a Tiger, all the characters are complex, torn by competing loyalties,

precariously balanced between antagonistic forces within and without. But

Kalo becomes the protoganist of the novel who sees the realities, passes

through conventions, lives through agonising episodes ultimately gets into

tragic predicaments. Sometimes he thinks that the entire cause of suffering

he faces is because of certain individuals in the society.

Kalo's fight is not with an individual but with life that make such

people. He is avenging himself by forcing perdition for all who are nurtured

in that life, perdition from which there can never be any escape. He also

presents the theme of trial and error and ultimate realizatio~,.

Kalo starts the drama at the temple purely with the motive of revenge,

acting the part of the Brahmin, Mangal Adhikari, out of necessity. In due

course of time, he experiences a moral and spiritual conflict between love of

ease, power and prestige on one side and desire to be true to himself on the

other. He is finally able to kill the tiger of deceit and make believe when he

acquires the moral strength to be himself.

Often we get the feeling that the entire tragic predicament in the novel

is due to society and its inherent foibles and beliefs.

Belief, in this country, could be likened to its

rivers, he said. The swollen water burst the banks

and flooded the country side, destroyed lives,

eroded the soil and went to waste, while great

areas of dry cornland thirsted and crops failed;

harnessed, put to proper use, the rivers could

irrigate, produce power, add to the country's

riches. In the same way, the people's belief was

a great force which could be guided in good

ways, made creative. When this great force has

ceased to go to waste, it would no longer be a

curse. blighting lives. It would be the country's

truest a ~ s e t . ~ '

sometimes we come across in He Who Rides a Tiger, not a mere

passive suffering. A protest and rebellion also we witness. Even thc simple

and innocent Lekha approves of the idea of rebellion against certain social

atrocities. Though they meekly accept that they undergo suffering. it is their

tragic predicament. When they think that they can overcome the predicament,

they get emotionally excited and want to rebel against the society, that made

them suffer thus. Superstitious people, rigid rituals and orthodoxy have made

the people. The development of Kalo as a rebel is described in such a way

as to suggest that the rebellion in him is a product of pernicious system

which has to be challenged.

A small rebel was born when he sold his tools

and set off for the big city. The rebel grew eyes

and ears in court and prison, with the help of

B-10, gave it a mouth and a protest. Out of the

protest he had ached mutinously, challenging man

and god.24

2"e Who Rides a Tiger (Jaico), p.173

He Who Rides a Tiger (New Delhi : Hind Pocket Books. 1973), p.117.

~ a l o has the courage to face threatening ordeals which confront him

in every sphere of his activity and forces him to ground. According to

Syamala Rao:

Kalo has the courage to dismount the tiger and i t

is this dismounting that is the core of the novel.

Caste is only the scaffolding and famine is

subsidiary. The main things are riding and

dismounting .'5

Inspite of the ordeals and tension, Kalo gets transformed to be better

and humane towards the end of the novel. The transformation in Kalo is the

result of his daughter Lekha's constant endeavour to bring her father from

the ethical void to luminous road wherein he can find a new vigour in life

and purpose in living.

She knows that she cannot imbibe the spirit of the masquerade and so

comes out of its clutches and is prepared to incur the displeasure and hostile

reaction of her father, instead of being a fish out of water in the strange

world. In a way Lekha is a liberating force to Kalo and she opens up his

eyes to see the truth. The supreme sense of belonging overwhelms her. The

daughter effects a sea change towards the end in the life of her father.

25 Syamala Rao, p.78.

REcO~.tiw?~g 101

He Who Rides a Tiger can be studied on various levels of

understanding. It is an ordered and artistic structure of individual experience

in multiple facets of life. It is also the individual's reaction in specificed

circumstances; as a legend or a moral fable of freedom trom k a r , {lf hunger

for power and glory. According to Premananda Kumar. the theme of the

novel is "public and individual morality".

The novel is also a saga of naturalistic prqjecrion

of natural consciousness in the specified era

where the whole psyche of the nation had

suffered. Besides this, it is a novel set in

romantic tone and the growth and development of

individual conscio~sness.~"

The success of the novel is due not only to its theme but also for its

interesting and well sustained portrayal of the characters and situations. He

demonstrates fine control over the delineation of the characters comprising

of two elements - namely moral aspect - that is, the way a person reacts to

Prema Nandakumar's article on "English in Indian Literature since Independence", Ed. by K.R.S. Iyenger (New Delhi : Sahitya

a situation and translates his reaction into action, and the mental process

which is nothing but the way a person thinks about himself and the relevant

situation. These are all well manipulated by Bhattacharya deftly throughout

the novel.

Bhattacharya believed that creative literature should be constructive to

humanity. He believes that there should be a fusion of the ethical values in literature. These values must be presented in such a way that the creative art

expressing them does not become purely didactic. He thinks that if a work

of creative art with a plea for moral values is dubbed as a propoganda, the

writer need not take it too seriously, he can as well ignore it. He observes:

Art must teach unobtrusively, by its vivid

interpretation of life. Art must preach, but only

by virtue of its being a vehicle of truth. If that is

propaganda, there is no need to eschew the

world.27

Bhattacharya maintains throughout the novel the tempo of life as

witnessed in the most populations of Indian cities - the complex of urban

vices and the thin veer of urban sophistication, the presence of mass

" "Literature and Social Reality", The Aryan Path (Bombay), XXVI, IX, September 1955, p.395.

rnovernents, mass hysteria, all found full expression in He Who Rides a

Tiger. Besides this, the novel depicts the rebellious temper of the people of

India who, enraged by famine and inhuman atrocities perpetuated on the

innocents and have-nots. The novelist here is compelled by his crea!ive urge

to bring to focus the innocents caught in the social onslaught and their tragic

pedicament. As Bhattacharya himself observes:

It has been agreed that a novelist should not draw

his material from contemporary reality, since he

is too close to it to be able to read its meaning

and assess its inward nature. This is absurd. The

creative writer has a well developed sensitivity,

though this does not mean that he understands or

shares all emotions. The things he witnesses, the

things he experiences are likely to move him

more intensely than what may be called

recollection at second hand.

Even the historical novel relies as much on the writerms personal

experience as an imaginative evocation. Tolstoy's War and Peace is a good

example. A second point is that a true novelist writes because he must:

If the events of the day have mo~ed him so

deeply that he must have a creative outlet for his

feelings, why should he put those feelings in cold

storage, as it were., and leave them there until the

present time has slipped into the vistas of dion

yesterdays .I"

Being a creative artist, Bhattacharya works spontaneously, covering

the naked realities as he had seen with an artistic touch. In the hands of the

deft writer, the tragic predicament becomes a lucid narration without any

illogical sequences in the novel.

" "Literature and Social Reality". p.395 - 396.