LITERATURE original of which was written about ten years after .Putulnacher.' Itikatha). 9 One cannot think of anything in Western literature with which Father Panchali can be compared. The narrative mode cannot be labelled realistic, nor is it totally lyrical or romantic. The question of whether there has been any Western influence on this work is not easy to answer. The author, like his protagonist, seems to have done a great deal of unsystematic reading of English literature. Bul, instead of his own sensibility being altered by such reading, it seems to have absorbed all this aind yet remained essentially itself, but richer. The strength of the novel is its wholly unselfconscious evocation of a world where man has not become estranged from nature, where objective reality and the subjective world of imagination can still be part of an organic whole. The choice of a child as the central consciousness in the first part is, of course, crucial to the effect sought to be created- and may even be the reason why the novel has withstood the passage of tim'e during which it has often crossed linguistic boundaries. 1. Two different translations into English are now available; (i) The Song of the Road, trs. T. W. dark and Tarapada Mukherjee (George Alien & Unwin, London, 1968); (ii) Pother Panchali (in three parts» tr. Monika Varma (Writers Workshop , Calcutta, 1973) The first is scrupulously faithful to the original, but leases put the last six chapters. The second is a complete but somewhat free translation. The sequel, Apa rajito, has not yet been translated into English. 2. See the piece 'Calcutta* in his The World of Twilight (Oxford University Press. Calcutta, 1970), pp.77-7B 3. See his 'Three Bengali Novels' in The Literatures of India : An Introduction, ed. Edward C. Dimock and others (University of Chicago Press. Chicago, 1974)^ p. 236. 4. See his *Afterword' in Pother Panchali, Part III, translated by Monika Varma. 5. For a detailed contrastive study of these two novels, see Meenakshi Mukherjee, *The House and the Road: Two Modes of Autobiographical Fiction*, in Commonwealth Literature: Problems of Reponse,\ ed. C.D. Narasimhaiah (Macmillan (India, Madras. 1981 \ pp. 148-64. 6. The Song of the Road, op. cit., pp. 303-4 7. Gerow, op. cit, p.236. & Guha, op. cit, p.iii. 9. See her *Two Cases of Conscience and Alienation", Jadaupur Journal of Comparative Literature, XI (1973') pp. 107-23. 32 July-September 1983