The pantheon of Bengali literature lost an eminent member with the death of author Buddhadeb Guha on Sunday. He was 85. Guha died of post-Covid complications at a nursing home at 11.25pm after a cardiac arrest, family sources said.
Guha contracted Covid-19 in April and was hospitalised for 33 days. He was admitted to the hospital for the third time since then on August 1.
The author is survived by his daughters, Malini and Sohini. His wife, Rabindrasangeet exponent Ritu Guha, had passed away in 2011.
Guha was a chartered accountant by profession but became a popular author early in life. He was a colourful personality, who took up hunting at the age of 10. But he refused to be called a hunter.
“I am not a hunter. And never was one. I am a forest walker (bonochari)…. The true forest walker is he in whom there is a nature lover, anthropologist, ornithologist, botanist, zoologist, poet and a connoisseur of literature. He should have empathy towards people of his own country and other countries too (translated from Bengali),” he wrote in his introduction to Bonjyotsnar Sobuj Andhakarey.
He himself answered to much of the description.
His fictional character Wrijuda, a popular figure in children’s literature along with his sidekick Rudra, was a hunter-turned-conservationist.
Guha spent his early years in what is now Bangladesh, and drew on his memories in Rangpur and Barisal in his Wrivu series.
His intimacy with the woods of eastern India is reflected in his writings, with Jungle Mahal being his first story collection — and his favourite, by his own admission — to be published in the early 1960s. The singer Malabika Kanan, he writes in the introduction to the first volume of Jungle Sambhar in 1997, had laughed so hard on reading Jungle Mahal that it cured her of nervous breakdown.
But love, relationships and the human mind could form as dense a foreground as the jungle in the backdrop in his writings, as evident in Madhukori, serialised in the magazine Desh from 1984-85.
He was conferred Ananda Purashkar in 1977.
In school, Guha was the captain of the cricket team of Tirthapati Institution, under whom football icon Chuni Goswami would play his first cricket match. Guha did his graduation from St Xavier’s College.
Guha was also a noted singer and a proficient illustrator, sometimes doing the artwork for his own books.
Mourning his death, chief minister Mamata Banerjee described Guha as one of the foremost writers in Bengali literature whose death will leave a void. “Buddhadeb Guha will be remembered for Koeler Kachhe, Kojagar, Ektu Usnotar Jonyo, Madhukori, Jangalmahal, Choroibeti and other books,” she said.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi said Guha’s writings were “multifaceted and displayed great sensitivity to the environment”.
Guha’s last rites were performed at the Keoratala burning ghat.
