(Top) A panel from the comic strip Poka, based on Premendra Mitra’s Ghanada story of the same name, illustrated by Subhro Chakraborty; (above) Baron Munchhausen

For the past few weeks, my bedtime reading has been Premendra Mitra’s Ghanada stories. In any other circumstances, this would have been an occasion for unalloyed delight, but my reading pleasure has been tempered by the mild anxiety that I will have to deliver a paper on Ghanada at a science fiction conference in early April, in which I will try to situate him in the tradition of extraordinary voyages popularised by Jules Verne (for such is the theme of the conference).

Well, no one can argue that the Ghanada stories are not about extraordinary voyages and often on a Verneian scale. Verne specialised in sending his heroes to all kinds of inaccessible places, such as the centre of the earth, 20,000 leagues under the sea or to the moon. While the locale of most Ghanada stories is of a terrestrial nature, there are occasions on which he has left the stratosphere, though I have always felt that those were some of Mitra’s less successful stories. In contrast, the ones located on terra firma are shot through with exotic and extreme history and geography, but are never implausible.

But if Ghanada has a truly honourable ancestor, it is likely to be Munchhausen rather than Verne. Karl Friedrich Hieronymus, Freiherr von Munchhausen — to give him his full name — was a real-life Hussar in the Russian military sometime in the middle of the 18th century. He fought some engagements against the Ottoman Turks but became better known for the outrageous tales of valour that he told about himself such as riding a cannonball or pulling himself out of a swamp by tugging on his bootstraps. But on the whole, the Baron was a harmless enough raconteur, known for his probity in business and cherished by the burghers of Bodenwerder, the German town in which he died in 1797.

But an altogether more shady character was Rudolph Raspe, sometime librarian to the Landgrave of Hesse-Kassell and jewel thief. Raspe was a contemporary of Goethe and the sinister magician Count Cagliostro, notorious throughout Europe as one of the most consummate charlatans of the 18th century (in another column, I will explain why I have placed these three people in the same sentence). Raspe fled to England in 1775 and was involved in a mining swindle in Scotland. In between, he saw fit to write The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchhausen, which was published from London in 1785, containing much material which Munchhausen was remotely not guilty of. The good baron was not much pleased, but the damage had been done. Within a year, Gottfried Burger had translated the stories back into German and launched a vogue which continues to this day. Munchhausen has been translated into all major languages — including Bengali (see Bikas Basu’s Gulpasamrat Munchhausen) — not to mention computer games, graphic novels, and films, with Terry Gilliam’s utterly brilliant The Adventures of Baron Munchhausen marking a high point. See also www.baronmunchausen.net for a promising online graphic-novel-in-progress.

The author teaches English at Jadavpur University