A towering figure in Bengali literature whose words mapped the ambitions and moral compromises of urban India, Mani Shankar Mukhopadhyay, better known as Shankar, passed away on Friday at a private hospital on the outskirts of south Kolkata at 92.
West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee and senior Bharatiya Janata Party leaders mourned his death, saying Shankar’s passing had left a void that could never be filled.
“Bengal’s cultural world has suffered an irreparable loss,” Banerjee wrote on X.
Born into a middle-class family in Howrah, Shankar authored around a hundred stories and novels. Among them, Simabadhya and Jana Aranya were adapted into landmark films by Satyajit Ray in 1971 and 1975, respectively, as part of Ray’s Calcutta Trilogy, which portrayed the struggles, compromises and relentless rat race of urban life.
Director Pinaki Bhusan Mukherjee’s Chowringhee (1968) emerged as another landmark film, featuring Uttam Kumar as protagonist Sata Bose, a hotel executive, owing to the lifelike characters Shankar created in the novel.
Legendary filmmaker Ritwik Ghatak had begun shooting a film based on Shankar’s first novel — Kato Ajanare — in 1959, but the project remained unfinished.
Director Basu Chatterjee adapted Shankar’s novel Maan Samman into the film Sheesha (1986), which was also centred on corporate life.
The writer received several honours during his career, including the Sahitya Akademi Award in 2021. A research-based book on Swami Vivekananda was Shankar’s last major literary project. Shankar also worked as an executive for a Kolkata-based power company for around 50 years.
“Shankar lost his father when he was a teenager and had to face an immense struggle to survive. While working as a clerk for Noel Frederick Barwell, the last British barrister at the Calcutta High Court, he got himself admitted to Kolkata’s Ripon College for a degree. He had to work as a hawker on the streets and do various odd jobs to make ends meet,” author and educationist Pabitra Sarkar said.
Sarkar added: “Shankar’s first novel is considered his biggest creation for the portrayal of some extraordinary facets of human character.”
