Locating Postcolonial Hero In Bangla Speculative Fiction Part II— Debraj Moulick

Mary Shelley’s popular novel Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus (1818) deals with a similar plotline where the main protagonist Victor Frankenstein tried to revive a dead human body and incidentally created a dreaded monster known as Frankenstein. Satyajit Ray’s Shonku and Frankenstein is a tribute to Mary Shelley’s classic. It is not only a mere adaptation but it glows in its own light. Victor Frankenstein in the original story creates a monster but Shonku’s wit created a reformed human being who was a dreaded hate monger before the resurrection. Satyajit Ray was a humanist and never supported any idealism or religious belief which separates one human being from another. Thus, he was very vocal about the formation of Nazi group in Germany. The concept of the resurrection of the dead has always been a popular phenomenon in speculative fiction suspended animation and cryonics are used in order to revive the dead bodies.

Ray’s “Swarnopornee” (“The Golden Leaves’ ‘) focuses on a young Shonku who devises a modern pill from golden color leaves mentioned in the ancient Ayurvedic text Charak Samhita of India. It traces the origin story of Miracurol, a tablet capable of curing any kind of disease. “Swarnopornee” actually provides a glimpse of Shonku’s early life, his family origin, his education, relationship with his father and the valuable life lessons taught by his father. However, on the broader aspect, it chronicles Shonku’s rise to fame among the international circuit and his first foreign visit to London, United Kingdom. Shonku also travels to war-torn Nazi Germany on the request of a fellow Jewish youth. Shonku travels to Germany in order to save the life of Jewish Sanskrit expert Stenrick from the clutches of Gestapo, who was hell bent on wiping out the Jew population from Germany. Shonku was pressured to cure Goering, a top ranking Nazi official. However, Shonku saves the entire family of Stenrick with the presence of mind and out of sympathy towards them by striking a life risking deal with Goering. It is a remarkable incident where a colonized scientist gains international recognition for his remarkable scientific discovery (with the aid of ancient Indian medical texts) in London (the Colonizer’s nation ) and later on risks his own life to save an oppressed family in distant as well as perilous Germany from one of the most dreaded force of that time , Nazis.

In “Dr Schering Memory”, Dr Schering survives a fatal car accident which kills two other scientists. However, he loses his memory. When all the big names of the European Medical world fail to deliver; Professor Shonku is asked to help the patient and Shonku arrives at Dr Schering’s residence in the continent with his newly invented gadget Remembrain. Remembrain was like a fashionable helmet with a mesh of complex wires. When it is worn by a subject, the person can refresh any memory at any given point of time. Shonku with the aid of his device exposed the dark side of Dr Schering who was actually involved in the murder of those two scientists owing to professional jealousy. Once again Shonku wins over the European antagonist with sheer courage and investigative skills.

In “Black Night of Professor Shonku ”, the protagonist faces a dangerous opponent, himself. His doppelganger poisons his image as a well-established scientist and tries to obliterate his stature in the scientific community by giving hate speeches and personally attacking other scientists. However, Shonku along with Summerville finds out the truth about another scientist Gropius in Innsbruck, Austria. Gropius was an evil-minded scientist who tried to damage Shonku’s image (by presenting the doppelganger across the European scientific circuit) out of professional covetousness. However, Shonku along with his friend Somerville investigated the matter of a mysterious doppelganger which was none other than a humanoid robot created by Gropius himself. Shonku decided to get rid of such a nasty lookalike and destroyed it with his Annihilin gun. The following lines from the science fiction “The Black Night of Professor Shonku”, reveals Shonku’s act of shooting his disgusting doppelganger with Annihilin gun:

I took out my Annihilin gun from my pocket. I’ll attain my final freedom only when I can erase this gruesome twin of mine forever from the face of the earth. (The Mystery of Munroe Island and Other Stories, pg. 101)

Doppelganger means look alike. It is a very common phenomenon if there is a person X in one place, it is said there is an exactly identical person present somewhere in that earth or in the parallel earth.

Also, P.B Shelley’s famous work Prometheus Unbound (1820) also deals with the curious case of sinister double or more accurately doppelganger. The following lines provide testimony to the above fact:

Ere Babylon was dust,

The Magus Zoroaster, my dead child,

Met his own image walking in the garden.

That apparition, sole of men, he saw.

For know, there are two worlds of life and death:

One that which thou beholdest; but the other

Is underneath the grave, where do inhabit

The shadows of all forms that think and live

Till death unite them and they part no more…[1]

(Shelley)

“Shonku’s Golden Opportunity” projects the tale about alchemy where Shonku visits Manvel Saavedra’s house in Spain in order to perform the alchemy and establish a scientific base about the practice of alchemy – turning other metals into gold. Shonku being an expert in paranormal seeks the blessings of famous Arabian Alchemist Yeben Yahan. However, he learns from Jahan’s prophecy that the price of the gold is the price of life. Shonku never wanted to gain monetary benefit from it, however, his another co-worker Mr. Blackmore tries to grasp the formulae at the gunpoint, only to be pushed by the canine companion into the liquid prepared by Shonku and his team which turns him into a golden object. Thus Shonku’s purely scientific curiosity won over the antagonist’s lust for gold.

Shonku being a world-renowned scientist along with Somerville of England and Papadopoulos of Greece were invited to a remote village in Norway. A weird scientist named Alexander Crag invited them to help him revive from dead. Shonku and his team revive the deceased person from death only to be tricked into captivity. However, Shonku and his team battle the evil force of Crag – the mad scientist with God Complex, his android robots and a mysterious gas known as Hypnogen which hypnotizes the target. Shonku being a scientist always wanted to experiment but he never made anyone a pawn for his motive. Shonku and the team finally save themselves from the clutches of the insane scientist and register another triumph over a European antagonist in the speculative fiction “Hypnogen”.

In the speculative fiction, “Professor Shonku and the Curious Statuettes” goes to Norway’s Sulitjelma town on the demand of well-known craftsman Mr. Lindquist so as to posture for a statuette. However, in the last some portion of the narrative it was uncovered that Mr. Lindquist used to make little statues by infusing a particular serum into the body of the human subject and they used to achieve smaller than normal frame by a procedure of sub-atomic scaling down in the body and in this way executing the subject. This was a horrific and cruel experimentation on humanity. The most inhuman aspect of this experimentation was that all the figurines were alive and helpless. One of the incidents from science fiction throws some more light into the above fact mentioned by the researcher, where Shonku was witnessing the horrifying experimentation performed by Mr. Lindquist on one of his six dolls. It reads as follows:

Slowly, Clemeau stopped thrashing his arms and legs. Then Lindquist struck his body with the same object, and he became inert and lifeless once more. Lindquist placed the statuette upright on its feet and locked the door. I remained where I was, horrified yet mesmerized . Lindquist seemed unaware of my presence.(The Diary of a Space Traveller and Other Stories ,191-192).

Shonku was wearing a self-designed carbon thin vest underneath his shirt which kept his passing into a state of unconsciousness. Mr. Lindquist was experimenting on another chemical which would enlarge the objects to a mammoth version of itself. The presence of a gigantic Lemming (a small rodent creature) inside a cage was proof of his experimentation. Shonku with the aid of Ackroyd got hold of an antidote which could transform the objects into their original sizes and injected them to regain their former structure. Professor Shonku exhibited commendable valor and vanquished the European enemy through a primed mind and enormous control over his nerves.

[1] 2. Shelley, Percy B. Prometheus Unbound: A Lyrical Drama. London: E. Arnold, 1904. Print. Act 1

Also, read Locating Postcolonial Hero In Bangla Speculative Fiction (Part I) by Debraj Moulick, and published in The Antonym: