Ranganathan

Ranganathan is a southern Indian businessman who visits Calcutta repeatedly to buy goods, and his brief appearances connect the city’s commercial bargaining with its hotel nightlife. He is presented both as a shrewd negotiator, able to secure a substantial purchase from Agarwalla, and as a cautious visitor anxious about the very entertainments he wishes to experience. His conduct does not settle into either simple piety or simple hypocrisy: business, fear, prayer, drinking, and curiosity about cabaret sit side by side in his visits.

Identity and Business

Ranganathan comes from Bangalore, where, according to Phokla Chatterjee, his familiar surroundings include tamarind and sambar and a wife Chatterjee disparages as a witch. That description is Chatterjee’s teasing account, not an independent portrait of Ranganathan’s home life. In Calcutta, Ranganathan is a business visitor who stays only a few days at a time. Karabi Guha later says he comes from the south frequently and buys a great deal of material to take away with him.

Agarwalla is said to regard Ranganathan as someone who controls the market’s rises and falls. The remark positions him as a commercially consequential buyer rather than a passive guest: he knows that goods are available and uses that knowledge to press Agarwalla for better terms. When Agarwalla cannot make much progress with him, he sends him to Karabi. Ranganathan and Agarwalla ultimately conclude the deal, with Ranganathan taking all the stock Agarwalla has. The transaction makes his bargaining leverage concrete: the negotiation that had stalled ends in a sale of the entire available inventory.

A Cautious Visitor to Calcutta

Chatterjee describes Ranganathan as new to Calcutta and unfamiliar with its entertainment districts. He wants excitement, but fears for his life, his heart, and disease; those anxieties keep him from venturing alone into the places he would like to visit. Chatterjee presents himself as Ranganathan’s guide, turning the businessman’s uncertainty into an opportunity to escort him toward the city’s nightlife.

The hotel scene gives this caution a social setting. As alcohol circulates, Ranganathan, whose hair is grey, sips Cinzano while Phokla Chatterjee drinks White Label and asks for Dimple Scotch. Chatterjee jokes that Ranganathan’s choice of an Italian drink sits oddly beside the Scottish origin of Connie and the whisky, invoking the maxim of doing as the locals do. Ranganathan answers that his blood pressure is the reason. When Chatterjee urges him to drink a proper measure, Ranganathan says that he is not accustomed to whisky. Phokla makes his age—fifty-two—the punchline, treating such inexperience as unbelievable in Calcutta. The exchange shows the pressure to perform worldly ease even as Ranganathan openly claims unease.

Prayer, Cabaret, and the Business Deal

Karabi’s account adds another, more revealing juxtaposition. Ranganathan wants a drink but fears getting drunk; he nevertheless drinks and then leaves for another hotel to see the cabaret, with Agarwalla paying. Karabi says he has asked about the cabaret girl shortly before taking off his shoes to say his evening prayers. Agarwalla flatters him for remembering to serve God wherever he is, but Karabi reports that Ranganathan explains his regular prayers as a response to fear of his wife: without the evening prayer, he says, she will not give him dinner. His observance is real as an action, while his own account makes domestic consequence—not an avowed spiritual motive—the reason for it.

Karabi’s recollection does not present the cabaret excursion as a change of heart so much as a decision made despite his stated apprehensions. Ranganathan drinks, becomes tipsy, and goes to see the performance at another hotel, while his earlier anxiety about alcohol and illness remains part of how he has been described. The contrast also marks Agarwalla’s role: hospitality is not merely social, since he pays for the excursion while trying to advance a business relationship.

The commercial purpose succeeds. Ranganathan agrees to buy all of Agarwalla’s stock and praises the business culture of Calcutta and Bombay, describing their commerce as governed by more scientific standards and their businessmen as skilled sellers rather than department-store-trained salesmen. Later, after Karabi has selected Old Smuggler for him, he is reported to be stumbling and to joke that Agarwalla should open a school because many local businessmen do not know how to sell. He links the stress of negotiating with them to the rise in his blood pressure, comparing it with the strain of negotiating with his wife. The jokes carry the same subject from his earlier excuse into business: pressure is at once a physical concern, a bargaining complaint, and a comic measure of resistance to other people.

Characterization and Narrative Role

Ranganathan emerges through contrasting accounts rather than an extended private viewpoint. Chatterjee’s introduction casts him as a nervous newcomer in need of a guide; the hotel scene exposes him to teasing for his unfamiliarity with whisky; Karabi’s account places prayer beside curiosity about the cabaret and shows him negotiating effectively. Each perspective modifies the last without erasing it. His wariness is not proof that he abstains, and his prayer does not prevent him from pursuing entertainment; nor does his appetite for nightlife make him a careless drinker, since fear of intoxication and his blood-pressure concern recur in the accounts.

His brief arc is defined by movement between apprehension and practical action. He arrives wanting experiences he is afraid to seek, accepts the assistance and paid hospitality offered around him, and leaves with a successful purchase. His remarks about sellers and bargaining turn the hotel’s entertainment into part of a commercial encounter, while his comments about his wife make domestic authority an unexpected counterpoint to his business confidence. Through Ranganathan, the narrative brings together the hotel’s overlapping worlds: commercial negotiation, paid entertainment, public performance of religious respectability, and the private anxieties visitors carry into the city.