Saturday, July 5, 2008
[vinnomot] Human Documentation of Hatred
Human Documentation of Hatred
Troubled Galaxy Destroyed Dreams: Chapter 18
Palash Biswas
http://troubledgala
Not the novel, it's the name of the novel that confused everyone;
from the critics to the writer of the ad script that appeared on the
back cover of the book to promote circulation. The Puppets? Well,
they all assumed that Bandopaddhyay must have portrayed people as
puppets of their destiny. This was the conclusion of judging critics.
But those who cared not to judge and kept the novel breathing for
twenty odd years, knew better. They realised that it was a dissent
against those who make people puppets. It's not a vigorous revolt;
but a sympathetic mild and persistent protest."
Manik Bandopaddhyay,
novel 'Pootool Naacher Itikotha' (The Puppets' Tale as translated by
the UNESCO).
Mind the lmperilist Linguistics!
Have you read Tara Shankar Bandopaddhyaya?
Gano Devata?
Hansuli Banker Upokatha?
Particularly , while you read Hasuli Bank , you have to be amazed to
see the logic of Industrialisation. the language is same as used by
Buddhadeb Bhattacharya! Capitalism begins with Language and culture.
mind , you Buddha himself a Poet and the nephew of legendary
revolutionary Indian poet Sukanto Bhattachary had been the minister
of Information and culture. Nandan Premises has been his empire for
long. He intercepts Taslima Nasrin as well as Redical Cinema by Joshy
Joseph or Ananda Patbardhan.He is the man running Bangla academy and
his man Pabitra Sarkar has tried his best to correct Bengali diction.
Buddha has been the Brand Bangla nationality. He has been the Brand
Bangla culture. Now Buddha happens to be the best brand of capitalist
Marxist indiscriminate Industrialisation and Urbanisation. Buddha
uses the same language as the Aarkathies (middlemen) used in Hansuli
bank Industrialisation. The logic of development remains the same and
same happens to be the Muscle Power! though much more polished,
elite, sophisticated post modernised , machinized!
You may also identify Brand Buddha diction in Rangbhoomi and Godan by
Premchand. You may get it right there in Putul Nacher Itikatha,
Itikathar pare and Padma Nadeer Manjhi by Manik Bandopadhyaya. You
may hear the echoes in Hardy, Dickens, Shaw, Tolstoy, Camus, Yashpal,
Rahee Maum Raza, Akhtarzzuman and even the works of African and Latin
american Literature.
It happens to be the language of Imperialism!
Here you are! It is the linguistics of Post Modern Hindu Zionist
White Galaxy Order run from the Oval House in Washington DC!
Tarasankar Bandyopadhyay (1898-1971): Tarasankar remains the best
chronicler in Bengal so far as the decline and decay of the feudal
fabric is concerned. Hansuli Banker Upakatha (The Tale of the
Crescent Bend of the River Kopai) is one of his most outstanding
novels.Great Bengali writer and recipient of prestigious 'Jnanpith
Award' Tara Shankar Bandopadhyay'
upon the village life of Bengal. The Village life tradition prevalent
from centuries had been disturbed due to introduction of machine-
culture born from western Industrial Revolution. Main theme of
Ganadevta is the influence of Industrial Revolution and machine-
civilization upon village life and how all these were responsible in
making their life topsy-turvy. Honoured with the Jnanpith Award this
novel has been acknowledged as one of the world's best novel.
Kavi, Hansuli Banker Upakatha, Nagini Kanya and Ganadevata are
considered classics in Bengali literature.Tarashan
was a universally accepted author among all Bengali readers. His
novels and short stories kept the aged and the youth engrossed.
Novelist Tarashankar Bandopadhyay was one of the famous triad
of 'Bandopadhyays'
and Manik Bandopadhyay. THE STORY OF A POET Tarashankar Bandyopadhyay
in his novel Kabi (1942, The Poet) presents Netai, a 'dom' (an
untouchable community) as the protagonist.
To me, these works are the perfect Human documentation of Hatred
inherited by the caste Hindus against the slave, bonded out caste,
underclass, subordinate labours tortured in the feudal set up of
Indigenous production system.Tara Shankar was opposed to
Industrialisation and urbanisation. But he never advocated any
Insurrection against the ruling Brahminical class.Tarashankar, of
course, wrote a novel Aranya Banhi with the theme of Santhal
Insurrection.
But politically he never allowed any space for either tribals or the
scheduled castes. The Bengali Brahmin Kayastha feudal lords emerged
thanks to Permanent Land Settlement system introduced the colonial
rulers which ultimately failed during the World Wars.
Industrialisation broke the back bone of Feudal Set Up. It also broke
the caste system in limited sense. The British were responsible for
the rare opportunities of education and professional mobilisation
breaking the glorified Hindu Varna Vyvastha, which prescribed
specific job for every Hindu by birth.The taboo was broken with
education and industrialisation.
Even in modern times while the industrialisation and urbanisation
drive, particularly SEZ, uproot the SC, ST, OBC and minority
communities most, the Insurrection against this Imperialist
Industrialisation is led by the Brahmins. Say,Medha Patekar, Mamata
bannerjee, Mahashweta Devi, Ulka Mahajan and so on.
Tara Shankar did very well to expose all these sentiments of the
ruling class.In every novel Tara Shankar justified the varna
vyavastha. Chandi Mandap opens with a Village Meeting against such
professional mobilsation. Even in Arogya Niketan, a novel dealing
with Life and death, Tarashankar opposed modern medicines and
supported traditional medical care.
Tarashankar always adopted a strategy to divide the Indigenous
castes. He never exposed the Brahmins or kayasthas, the Higher
castes. his villains have been always the lower caste Hindus. As we
see the Chhirupal in Ganodevata. he threw Satchasi and Sadgope
landlords against the landless labour classes and defended the High
caste feudal lord. We may see the clear cut difference while he deals
with High cast affairs as in Sapto Padi, Bipasha and Jalsaghar. No
exposure of sexual behaviour remains the constant characteristics of
these novels. tarashankar never exposed any scandal involving a caste
Hindu woman while he presents the details of the sexual behaviour and
the anarchy of sex amongst the Indigenous castes and classes. We see
the heights is Hansuli Banker Upokatha and Nagini Kanya with a
gimmick of anthropology.
The Culture Hero Karali Kahar in Hansuli Banker upokatha is
responsible to end the slavery of the caste system in the best
interest of his brethren. He introduces the Industrial revolution.
But he is painted as a monster from the beginning who betrays his
paramour Paakhi for the sexual affair with Subasi, the second wife of
banwari, the Chief who is engaged lifelong with every affairs with
Kahaars and happens to be affectionate to Karali for this transition.
Tarashankar never experimented with his caste hindu heroes or
heroines as far as sex is concerned as if in Tara Shankar time, all
SC ST women were sex starving or sex maniacs and all the caste Hindu
women were Sat Savitri.
Even portarying Rai Kamal, a baishnavi and socilly outcaste woman,
Tara Shankar behaves restrained in disguise of love philosophy and
spritualism. But he never spares any of the Bgdi woman in Ganodebata,
particularly Durga.
In kavi, which I read as a boy of primary school, Tara shankar never
hides his intense hate for the Untouchables. He dismisses the folk
tradition of Kavigan,as an untouchable affair. The hero Nitai being a
DOM by caste is never spared for his low origin.
My Guru Tara chandra Tripathi used to say that Gandebata by
Tarashankar and Chowrangee by shankar are the best novels ever
written by any Indian novelist. We believed that. We got a Hindi
translation of Chowrangee, translated by raj kamal chowdhari. but we
could get an english translation of Gana Debata from the mid lake
Municipal library.The justification of caste system pinched me at
that time, but we were rather spell bound by the mastery of the
details with surgical precision. later, in Dhanbad, I stubled with
the original novels in earlier eigties and was stunned to encounter
with the Brahmincal psyche and their Aesthetics of Hatred based on
caste discrimination!
We never knew anything about Bangladeshi literature in nainital days.
At that time we were at best the readers of Bimal Mitra and Samaresh
basu thaks to hindi translations. Shankar novels were also popular.
But we read Bimal Mitra most. Bimal Matra rose to eminence with his
classic trilogy Saheb Bibi Golam (The Master, The Lady and the
Slave), Kadi Diye Kinlam (Bought With Money) and Ekak, Dasak, Satak
(Ones, Tens, Hundreds) spread over nearly three centuries of Bengal's
social history. The thematic vein of his novels, on individual
planes, is the travails of men of integrity within a value empty
milieu.
Samaresh Babu (1924-'88): One of the pioneers of Post-Second World
War Bengali fiction, Samaresh Babu wrote 87 novels, 200 short stories
and 20 travel-based novels. Ganga is one of his well-known novels.
It is true that we encounter with the entire feudal setup with its
innermost socil fabrics in Tara Shankar Novels. We find day to day
details of every caste and every class, their life, livelihood, folk,
culture, dialects, superstitions, tabbos, festivals, traditions,
infights, community life, say every thing for the first time.Bankim
had been Romantic and he never dealt with his time. he rather
preferred to write period novels , romances which were quite detached
with his time. Bankim Chandra was a very learned man and wrote,
besides novels, many religious discourses and essays. His place in
Bengali literature as the pioneer of fiction is still very high. But
his novels suffered from a religious or moral bias. He followed, in
the treatment of his novels, the long loved dictum of punishing sin
and applauding virtue. The inevitable result was that his characters
did not develop on human lines.He had to satisfy orthodox society
which was always watchful that no wrong ideal entered into society
through literature. This was something like the tradition of
eighteenth century Classicism in English literature.
In an essay that critically review's folklore's disciplinary position
vis-à-vis history and culture, Kirshenblatt-
temporal dislocation between the site of origin and the present
location of particular cultural forms signals the presence of
folklore. Kirshenblatt-
heterogeneous, layered and composed of multiple strands that are
interconnected in rather haphazard and contingent ways. This sense of
contingency comes about through the juxtaposition of different time
scales such that the idea of locality or location becomes the
conceptual frame within which the heterogeneous and circulating
strands that we call culture come to cohere, if only for a moment.
However, as Kirshenblatt-
comes to be viewed as a spatial category it is a temporal one, and by
constituting the present as a series of disjunctive moments, folklore
creates a gap between the contemporaneous and the contemporary.
Tarasankar mainly flourished during the war years, having produced in
that period a large number of novels. His celebrated novels are
Dhatridebta, Kalindi, Panchagrm, Gonodebata, Kabi, Arogyaniketan,
Jalsaghar, Raskali, Hansulibaker Upakatha and so on.
Set during the period just before World War II, Ganadevata, is the
saga of Shibkalipur, a small village on the banks of the river
Mayurakshi in the Birbhum district of present West Bengal. Through
the interactions and conflicts between myriad range of characters who
stand as typical representatives of their social class – Aniruddha
(Samit Bhanja), a rebellious blacksmith who along with his carpenter
friend Girish refuse to continue under the traditional barter system,
Debu Pundit (Soumitra Chatterjee), the much respected pillar of
society who gets radicalized and questions the system for its
injustices and prejudices, Chhiru Pal (Ajitesh Bannerjee) the nouveau-
riche village strongman, Jatin (Debraj Roy) a freedom fighter under
house-arrest, Durga (Sandhya Roy), a clever and free-spirited
prostititute and a host of characters including the wives of the
principals and other inhabitants of the village – the film unravels a
slice in the history of a typical Bengal village caught within the
wheels of change.
Hansuli Banker Upokotha is a 1962 film made by Tapan Sinha starring
Kali Bannerjee, Dilip Roy, Robi Ghosh and others. Set in 1941, the
movie explores life in rural bengal, the realities of the Zamindari
system that was responsible for much of the social inequalities in
bengal, as well as the changes in social perceptions with time.
Even Akhtarazzuman Ilius considered Tarashankar a master of Bengal
chronicles. He presented his time with full details. Though he was
partial enough to sympathise with the decaying feudal class to which
he himself belonged.With Manik and Bibhutibhushan, Tarashankar
Bandyopadhyay (taaraasha.nkar bandyopaadhyaaY) completes the famous
triad of the "Banerjee"s (or Bandyopadhyaays) of Bengali
literature.Tarashan
works feature a realistic picture of the many-colored fabric of life
in rural Bengal in a pioneering modernist style of prose in fiction.
Tara Shankar never adopted the ways of expression as adopted by
Thomas Hardy or Charles Dickens while dealing Industrialisation.
Hardy and Dickens also exposed Industrialisation and capitalism. Tess
of D`urberville has been a fantastic display of the broken wings of
Indigenous production system. While all the satire and pathos in
Dickens novels were targeted against the theme of Industrialisation
and urbanisation. Both of them never advocated permanent slavery for
the Indigenous slavery. Their Humanism did not deprive the out castes
at any level.
It is amazing to note that all the prominent Novelists and Prose
writers from West Bengal never dared to expose the eternal slavery of
eighty five percent Indigenous people, the SC, ST, OBC and Muslims.
They tried their best to sustain Caste system based Ruling
Brahminical hegemony. Some critics identify the Bengali dalit
literature with the writings of Tara shankar, Sharat, Manik and
Mahashweta.
It is a pity as these excellent artist of creative literature never
rose above caste line or caste interest.
It is quite surprising that a magical theme like Padma Nadir Manjhi
by Manik Bandopadhyay overlooked the Caste system and Varnashram. He
even did not care the routine details of daily adventures of the
Fishermen.
In fact, Manik emphasised much on class division and class struggle.
Overseeing caste contradiction he miserably failed to highlight the
fabrics of social realism. A dalit Writer Adawait Mallaburman wrote
Titas Ekti Nadir Naam based on the theme of Fishing lifestyle. it
ddealt with the caste system with details. Even the classic like
Putul Nacher Itikatha lacked the details of caste Divided society. So
strange! Mahashweta Debi is known to voice for the tribals, but she
never tried to expose the prevalent Caste system in Bengal and the
Brahminical hegemony. Contrarily all Muslim writers from Bangladesh ,
led by Akhtarruzamman Ilius, Selina Hussain, Kabir, Azad and Abubakar
Siddiki did the trick with mastery.Just we may accept that the
novelist and short story writer, Manik Bandyopadhyay, was profoundly
influenced by Marxism and by Freudian psychoanalsyis. Putul Nacher
Itikatha (1936) and Padmanadir Majhi (1936) reveal his Marxist
leanings as they do his psycholgical approach.
Premendra Mitra (1904-1988) was an adroit short story writer, using
language skilfully to convey his themes and create characters. His
stories encompass a variety of subjects ranging from struggle for
living to politics and sociology.
Long before independence, Jasimuddin wrote Nakshi Kanthar Math and
Sojan Badiar Ghat depicting all dimentions of caste community fabrics
in rural Bengal. In Sojan Badiyar Ghat he exposed the Brahminical
Hegemony without any mercy. We never saw any other example of this
courage either in prose or poetry.
The realism in Literature is well substituted when the writers
indulge in introducing romance in it. Tarasankar Bandopadhya is
grouped with those writers of the third decades of the twentieth
centuries who broke the poetic tradition in novels but took to
writing prose with the world around them adding romance to human
relationship breaking the indifference of the so called conservative
people of the society who dare to call a spade a spade. Tarasankar's
novels, so to say, do not look back to the realism in rejection, but
accepted it in a new way allowing the reader to breath the truth of
human relationship restricted so far by the conservative and
hypocrisy of the then society.
Tarasankar learned to see the world from various angles. He seldom
rose above the matter soil and his Birbhum exists only in time and
place. He had never been a worshipper of eternity. Tarasankar's chief
contribution to Bengal literature is that he dared writing unbiased.
He wrote what he believed. He wrote what he observed.
His novels are rich in material and potentials. He preferred
sensation to thought. He was ceaselessly productive and his novels
are long, seemed unending and characters belonged to the various
classes of people from zaminder down to pauper. Tarasankar
experimented in his novels with the relationships, even so called
illegal, of either sexes. He proved that sexual relation between man
and women sometimes dominate to such an extent that it can take an
upperhand over the prevailing laws and instructions of society. His
novel `Radha' can be set for an example in this context.
His historical novel `Ganna Begum' is an attempt worth mentioning for
it's traditional values. Tarasankar ventured into all walks of
Bengali life and it's experience with the happenings of socio-
political milieu. Tarasankar will be remembered for his potential to
work with the vast panorama of life where life is observed with care
and the judgment is offered to the reader. and long ones, then any
other author. He is a region novelist, his country being the same
Birbhum.
Tara Shankar Bandopaddhyay is well known for his exposures on caste
system with folk Lore, legends and Myths. But the master rather used
the caste as a tool to defend the decaying Feudal class in Bengal. He
could not escape the Caste hatred of his class. His haterd is full of
Venom while he dealt with his known indiegenous communities.
Illiterate and never knew how defamatory have been all the details
put forward as works of art. He never dared to expose all the
scandals and wrong deeds of the high caste literate Bhadralok as
Sharat dared. The new trend of lyric poetry was manifested in Kavigan
and Jatra. Tappa (a light classical variety of amorous songs),
especially the songs of Nidhu Gupta also known as Nidhubabu became
popular during this period. These songs were composed and presented
purely for entertainment and therefore were not intended to be of
high literary value. These were however somewhat refined later by
coposers such as Gonjla Gaen. Kavigan also became popular among the
urban people. Some famous poets of this period include Bhola Moira,
Anthony Firingee, and Thakur Singh. But Tara Shankar tried to
underplay its significance while describing all these elements of
Rurl life as an anthropological aboriginal abusive substandard
deculturisation. The best example of this destruction may be quoted
as Kavi.
India, including Bengal, is a country of many races, cultures and
communities, at various stages of social development and status.
There are many worlds within a single world, many smaller discourses
within a larger discourse. In fact, certain communities apparently
belong to a different world, with a time lag of centuries. Their
poverty, hard struggle for existence, social and cultural milieu,
myths and popular beliefs, which differed considerably from those of
mainstream South Asians, predictably provided material to fiction
writers. The most famous of such novels are Nagini Kanya Kahini (The
Tale of the Snake Maiden) and Harruli Banker Upakatha (The legend of
Harruli Bank) by Tarashankar and Araryak by Bibhutibhushan. Here myth
and reality, nature and man, the real and the imagined community
merge in a magical manner. From slightly different angle, Padma Nadi
Majhi (The boatman of the Padma river) by Manik, Titas ekti Nadir Nam
(Titas is the name of a river) by Adytia Mallaborman, (himself a
member of the fishing community), portray, in an unforgettable
manner, the lives of people who derive their livelihood from the
great rivers of East Bengal. In the next generation, Samaresh Basu
created a novel with a similar background, Ganga, Satirath Bhaduri,
the Bihar-based Bengali fiction writer, based his classic novel on a
parallel between an ancient and medieval epic and low class, low
caste village life in Eastern Bihar. Jhorai Charit Manas in seen as
the modern counterpart of Ramcharitmanas of Tulisdas. The background
is the Gandhian movement, culminating in the great rising of August
1942. Satirath, one of the greatest Bengali fiction writers, has
probably been more popular and influential in Bihar than in Bengal.
The Second World War and the disastrous Bengal famine predictably
left their marks on Bengali fiction and the three Banerjees, Subodh
Ghosh, Narayan Gangopadhyay, Romesh Sen, Monoj Bari and many, many
others. Their novels, Chintamoni by Manik, Madyantar by Tarashankar,
Ashani Shanket (Danger signal) by Bibhuti Bhushan are certainly
noteworthy but are probably eclipsed by the short stories of the
period. If we could choose the best among many top ranking examples,
Namuna (Model or Example) by Manik might win the prize. It
illustrates, not just the physical suffering and death, but the total
evasion of moral values, hidden by the face saving figleaf of
hypocrisy, on the part of the "respectable" classes. The subsequent
upheavals, anti-British agitations, the great peasant revolt of
Tebhaga also influenced Bengali fiction in the years just before and
after independence. Again, perhaps, the palm goes to Manik, for his
novel Chinha (The mark) and short stories, such as Choto Bokulpurer
Jatri (Traveller to Choto Bokulpur).
Tarashankar wrote in a variety of genres but was primarily a
novelist. His political ideas are reflected in his novels. His themes
include communal riots, war, famine, the political implications of
economic inequality, the independence movement, social conditions,
the conflict of modernism with traditionalism etc. He wrote a total
of 131 books. Prominent among his novels are Chaitali Ghurni (1931),
Jalsa Ghar (1938), Dhatri Devata (1939), Kalindi (1940), Kavi (1944),
Gana Devata (1943), Panchagram (1944), Hansuli Banker Upakatha
(1947), Arogya Niketan (1953), Radha (1956), etc. Some popular movies
were based on his novels, among them, Dui Purus, Kalindi, Arogya
Niketan, Jalsa Ghar, etc. He published three volumes of short
stories. His famous short stories include 'Rasakali', 'Bedeni', 'Dak
Harkara', He was also an artist and produced some fine paintings in
his later years.
Tarashankar was associated with a number of literary organisations
and became Vice President (1956) and President (1970) of the vangiya
sahitya parishad. He led the Indian delegation of writers at the
Asian Writers' Conference in Tashkent (1957). He was President of the
Prabasi Banga Sahitya Sammelan (Kanpur, 1944, Calcutta, 1947) and the
All-India Writers' Conference (Madras, 1957).
Tarashankar received a number of awards, among them Sharat Smriti
Puraskar (University of Calcutta), Jagattarini Svarna Padak (Calcutta
University), Sahitya Akademi Puraskar, Jnanapith Puraskar, Padmashri
and Padmabhusan.
Tarashankar Bandopadhyay was born in 1898 on July 23rd, in Labhpur
village in Birbhum district of West Bengal. His father Haridas
Bandopadhyay was the ancestral zamindar of that area. After
completing his schooling in the local high school he took admission
in St. Xavier's College, Calcutta for pursuing his intermediate
studies.
While studying in St. Xavier's College he got involved in the non-
cooperation movement for India's freedom. As such, he was interned at
his ancestral home in 1921. He was interned once again in 1930 for
similar reasons.
After his release he devoted himself to social work in his village.
He worked tirelessly among the villagers during epidemics, which gave
him an opportunity to observe the plight of the ordinary village
folk. He mixed freely with the so called lower classes of dom, bagdi,
sadgop, and bauri which was against the existing social customs. His
love for fellow beings irrespective of class and creed is reflected
in his short stories and novels.
Tarashankar Bandopadhyay was a versatile writer who had written on
various topics. However, one most important aspect of his writings
was his experimentation of human relationships, be it the zamindar or
the laborer. A few of his works include:
Ganadevata – This novel depicts the efforts of a schoolmaster to
remove tyrannies from a village. This novel was recognized by the
Jnanpith Award in 1967. This was made into a Bengali cinema by the
same name.
Jalsaghar – In this novel Tarashankar Bandopadhyay experiments with
the gradual decay of the feudal system and values, and the rise of
commercialism. This novel was immortalized by Satyajit Ray.
Abhijan – This masterpiece by Tarashankar Bandopdhyay traces the
exploits of a cab driver in a society filled with hypocrites.
Rai Kamal – Rai Kamal is a love story of three wandering Vaishnav
minstrels who share a bitter sweet relationship.
Bicharak- This novel portrays the dilemma of a judge in passing a
verdict for a murder case.
Kavi - This is a narration of a gypsy poet who moves around with a
group of dancers and prostitutes.
Byomkesh Bakshi, a sleuth created by Tarashankar Bandopadhyay, and
his murder mysteries are a favorite among the younger readers.
His other works include Aamar Sahitya Jibon (My Literary Life), Aamar
Kaaler Kathe (Tales of my Times), Hansuli Banker Upakatha, Kalindi,
Jogobhrashto, Radha, Panchogram, Sandipan Pathsala, Tarashankar
Rachanaboli, and Tarashankar Bandopadhyayer Bachhai Golpo.
Tarashankar died in Calcutta on 14 September 1971.
India constitutes the largest part of the subcontinental land mass
of South Asia, an area it shares with six other countries, including
Nepal, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. It has highly variable landforms,
that range from torrid plains, tropical islands, and a parched desert
to the highest mountain range in the world. This entire geopolitics
is ravaged by Feudal set Up of society bonded in Intense cate
hatred.India was ruled by the British government after 1858 through a
viceroy and a council, although several hundred "princely states"
continued to maintain a measure of independence. The Indian National
Congress, founded in 1885, slowly moved from a position of advisor
and critic for the British administration toward demanding the
transference of power to native Indian politicians. In 1930, the
Indian National Congress, led by Jawaharlal Nehru and Mahatma Gandhi,
adopted a policy of civil disobedience with a view to achieving full
national independence. It was to be a long struggle, but independence
was achieved in 1947, with the condition that predominantly Muslim
areas in the north would form a separate country of Pakistan.
Mohammed Ali Jinnah was to be Pakastani's first prime minister, while
Nehru became the prime minister of the Republic of India. The
departure of the colonial authorities, including the British armed
forces, was peaceful, but the splitting off of Pakistan caused a
massive population movement and bloodshed on both sides as a result
of "communal passions." A quarter century later, the eastern wing of
Pakistan split from that country to become the independent country of
Bangladesh.
India is home to several thousand ethnic groups, tribes, castes, and
religions. The castes and subcastes in each region relate to each
other through a permanent hierarchical structure, with each caste
having its own name, traditional occupation, rank, and distinctive
subculture. Tribes usually do not have a caste hierarchy but often
have their own internal hierarchical organization. The pastoral and
foraging tribes are relatively egalitarian in their internal
organization. In an economy based on agriculture, the ownership of
land is the key to survival and power. In most parts of the country,
the majority of the acreage is owned by a politically dominant caste
that is likely to be a middle-ranking one, not a Brahmin one.
However, the various regions still have different traditions of land
tenure and associated systems of land taxation.
Tarshankar always justified the Caste system and inherited subhuman
livelihood. He expressed his brahminical innermost hatred against the
outcastes in all his novels. In Nagini Kanya and Hansuli Banker
Upokatha he adopted a gimmic called anthropology to digest the
aboriginal indigenous social fabrics , life and livelihood.
Superantural created the Mythological semi Mythological theme full of
Tabboos in disguise of legends, folk, festivals and Purans. His
Mythomania focused on a full fledged Sexual Anarchy as a cultural
campaign against particular castes as Bagdi in Gana Devata, Kahars in
Hansuli Banker Upokatha and finally the Bedes, snake charmers in
Naginikanya. Tara Shankar Bandopaddhyay who hads been the President
of Sahity Academy in India after suniti Kumar Chattopadhyaya, was in
active politics and joined the Indian Parliament as a Rajya Sabha
member. During twenties and thirties while the Indian feudal class
was losing ground in a new world order emerging and dismissing feudal
set up of production. The decaying Feudal lords, specially the High
caste hindus organised themselves in so called National struggle of
freedom. Mind you, this class always supported the rulers since
Muslim India. In British India, this feudal class always sided with
the rulers wheneevr the Indigenous people led by tribal revolted in
Insurrections.
1857, thanks to a Brahmin , Mangal Pandey. But the Bengali elites
were celebrating the Renaissance at the time and supported East
India Company. they never supported Siraj, the last Nawab of Bengal
who lost the Battle of Plassy for India. They also helped East india
company in Repression of different Peasant uprising from Sanyasi
vidroh to Indigo Revolt. But during the span of worldwars and
recession all of them turned patriot.This class was against
professional mobilisation of scheduled Castes, Muslims amd Tribals.
They were against any attempt of liberalisation. They were against
education and enlightenment amongst their subordinate inherited
slaves and Bonded labours.
The gist is that the SC ST OBC in particular and the Muslims are much
more concerened with the unilateral Brahminical dominance in the
society. They consider Industrialisation and Urbanisation the fittest
opportunity to break away with the bondage of Caste System. For
example, the Central Bihar based sceduled caste Rikshaw Pullers,
Coolies and others feel at home in Metro Kolkata, because it is a
liberation from the caste system. I have seen it countrywide
whereever the Dalit Bengali refugees are resettled. They feel free
and independent out of Bengal because the caste factor reamins
immunised all over there. so much so, that within a span of single
generation the dalit refugees have no feeling for their lost homeland.
India has a rich literary assemblage produced by its many different
regional traditions, religious faiths, ethnic subcultures, and
linguistic groups.
India has only recently seen the last of the rural serfs who for
centuries supplied much of the basic farm labor in some parts of the
country. There are still numberless landless wage laborers, tenant
farmers, and landlords who rent out their extensive lands, and rich
peasants who work their own holdings.
In modern times, an expanding investment scene, combined with
continuing inflation, has formed the background to an extensive
import and export trade. The major industries continue to be tourism,
clothing, tea, coffee, cotton, and the production of raw materials;
in the last few years, there has been a surge in the importance of
the computer software industry. Russia, the United States, Germany,
and Great Britain are among the major importers of Indian products.
The division of work is based on gender. Age also separates out the
very old and the very young as people unable to perform the heaviest
tasks. Those jobs are done by millions of adult men and women who
have nothing to offer but their muscles. Beyond these fundamental
divisions, India is unique in having the caste system as the ancient
and most basic principle of organization of the society. Each of many
hundreds of castes traditionally had one occupation that was its
specialty and usually its local monopoly. Only farming and the
renouncer's life were open to all.
Classes and Castes. The caste system is more elaborate than that in
any of the other Hindu or Buddhist countries. Society is so
fragmented into castes that there can be twenty or thirty distinct
castes within a village.
This society has a hierarchy of endogamous, birth-ascribed groups,
each of which traditionally is characterized by one distinctive
occupation and had its own level of social status. Because an
individual cannot change his or her caste affiliation, every family
belongs in its entirety and forever to only one named caste, and so
each caste has developed a distinctive subculture that is handed down
from generation to generation.
Hindu religious theory justifies the division of society into castes,
with the unavoidable differences in status and the differential
access to power each one has. Hindus usually believe that a soul can
have multiple reincarnations and that after the death of the body a
soul will be reassigned to another newborn human body or even to an
animal one. This reassignment could be to one of a higher caste if
the person did good deeds in the previous life or to a lower-status
body if the person did bad deeds.
The highest category of castes are those people called Brahmins in
the Hindu system; they were traditionally priests and intellectuals.
Below them in rank were castes called Ksatriya, including especially
warriors and rulers. Third in rank were the Vaisyas, castes concerned
with trading and land ownership. The fourth-ranking category were the
Sudras, primarily farmers. Below these four categories and hardly
recognized in the ancient and traditional model, were many castes
treated as "untouchable" and traditionally called Pancama. Outside
the system altogether were several hundred tribes, with highly varied
cultural and subsistence patterns. The whole system was marked not
just by extreme differences in status and power but by relative
degrees of spiritual purity or pollution.
A curious feature of the caste system is that despite its origins in
the Hindu theory of fate and reincarnation, caste organization is
found among Indian Muslims, Jews, and Christians in modern times. In
the Buddhist lands of Korea, Japan, and Tibet, there are rudimentary
caste systems, their existence signaled especially by the presence of
untouchable social categories.
The major cities in modern times—Bombay (Mumbai), Madras (Chennai),
Calcutta (Kolkata), New Delhi, and Bangalore—were essentially
residential creations of the British administrators. Architecturally,
professionally, and in other ways, they are therefore the most
Westernized cities in India today. In these cities and their suburbs,
there is now a developed class system overlying and in many respects
displacing the more traditional caste system. As a consequence, there
are many modern cases of intercaste marriage in all the cities,
although this practice remains almost unthinkable to the great
majority of Indians.
There are many symbols of class differentiation because each caste
tends to have its own persisting subculture. People's location in
this stratification system thus can be gauged accurately according to
the way they dress, their personal names, the way they speak a local
dialect, the deities they worship, who they are willing to eat with
publicly, the location of their housing, and especially their
occupations. The combination of all these subcultural features can be
a sure sign of where individuals and their families are situated in
the caste hierarchy.
Patriarchal" is the word most commonly used to describe the
traditional Indian family and the gender relationships within it.
This is true in all family systems except the defunct matrilineal
system of the Nayar castes in Kerala. Within all branches of
Hinduism, priests can only be male, though they may be boys. In
Islam, the leaders of a prayer group are males. In Zoroastrianism and
Roman Catholicism, only men can function as priests.
It is said that a woman must first obey her father, then her husband,
and then her son; this seems to be the normal pattern as she goes
through life. The opinion of the male head of household is especially
important in the arrangement of marriages, because in most religious
communities these are effectively marriages between two families. At
such times, romantic preferences get little consideration. Since it
is the male head who typically controls the family's finances, it is
he who pays or receives a dowry at the time of a child's marriage.
Although older women may be very influential behind the scenes, they
wield little legal authority in property and marriage matters.
Early in the fifteenth century two poets brought Bengali literature
into prominence: Chandidas and Vidyapati, with the latter writing in
Sanskrit as well as Bengali. Contemporary with them were two Telugu
poets, Srinatha and Potana, as well as the best-loved Hindi poet,
Kabir (1440–1518). Kabir wrote in a medieval regional language
closely related to Sanskrit. Although Kabir was a low-caste Hindu, he
drew inspiration from Sufism and criticized the caste system,
ritualism, and idolatry. He was followed in 1540 by the first
important Muslim poet of India, Mohamed of Jais who wrote the
allegorical poem Padmavat in Hindi. Contemporary with Kabir was one
of the greatest of woman poets, the Rajput Mirabai, who wrote in both
Hindi and Gujarati. A century before her, Manichand had written an
important historical novel in Gujarati.
Sarat Chandra, a Bengali novelist of the first half of the 20th
century, has described the landscape of his southern Bengal Region
and has interacted through his characters a deep psychological
response appropriate to the region and time. His work forms an
excellent resource base to reconstruct the region of his time and
establish phenomenological relationship through the feelings
expressed by the characters of his novels. Sarat Chandra's Home
Region is a stream-filled area with people's activity directed to
agriculture, though Calcutta was already established as a center of
westernization and modernization. Feudal exploitation, Zamindars'
tyrrany, degenerative caste-division, child marriage, prohibition of
widow's right to remarry, decaying extended family and losing person-
to-person relationship of the traditional Bengal were some of the
characteristics of the regional cultural geography. The cities,
particularly Calcutta, had started to show signs of modernization:
industries, equal rights to women, widow re-marriage and elitist
ideas. Bramho Samaj was pioneering the social modernization. In
summation, the Home Region, being a transitional stage of decaying
feudalism and incipient industrialization, was engaged in a struggle
between the old and the new, decadent traditional and modern, rural
and urban, caste rigidity and liberal social customs, religious
fanaticism and rationalism. Sarat Chandra's work, particularly,
provides an inroad to understand the cultural aspects of his Home
Region.
With the spread of Western colonialism from Europe and North America
to Asia, Africa, and South America also came the spread of its by-
product; Western modernism. Though social-realist movements varied
considerably within Chinese, Indian, and Soviet contexts, in general
they denounced the bourgeois and colonialist values expounded in
Western art and literature.Coloniza
generally savage (to use a colonialist term) from the perspective of
colonial and postcolonial subjects. The intrusion of colonial
politics in the daily lives of individuals is addressed in the form
and content of works by Tagore, Senghor, Mahfouz, Achebe, Walcott,
Soyinka, and Goodison. Other including writers—Premchand, CÈsaire, al-
Hakim, Neruda, Devi, El Saadawi, and Yehoshua—responded to social,
political, and economic concerns at a regional or local level.
In India, the British colonial education system, which had been in
place since the early 1800s, made the colonizer's language—English—
part of public life. English continues to be the language of
government there though over two hundred languages are spoken in
India. Though English-language literatures are well known outside
India, literatures in regional languages such as Kannada, Urdu,
Sindhi, Bengali, Hindi, and Tamil represent other aspects of Indian
life.
In addition to experiences of Western colonialism in Africa, African
writers also address issues related to the slave trade and to the
African diaspora. At universities in Paris in the 1920s and 1930s,
black intellectuals from Africa, the Caribbean, and the United States
came together to articulate positive images of blackness. Out of the
négritude movement came important interventions in both politics and
literature.
South American literature is often associated with magical realism, a
mixture of fantasy and realism, made popular by authors such as
García Márquez and Rulfo. The generally political nature of magical
realism in South American writing was often missed by earlier
generations of Western readers, who were too amazed by the
imaginative creativity of magical realism. Simultaneously, writers
resisted Western literary conventions and wrote in regional styles.
In a different, though related, fashion students of Indian society
have made a distinction between "Great traditions" and "Little
traditions" (Redfield 1955, Sinha 1957); or between desha (regional,
provincial) and marga (sanskritic, global). Folk rituals, belief
systems, and the cultural institutions of rural India are thought to
reveal an interaction between the forces of globalization and
parochialization, or margi and deshi aspects (Marriot 1955, Sinha
1957, Trautman 1997). For most scholars this interaction is a long-
term and largely unconscious process. However, the historian Hitesh
Ranjan Sanyal (2004) holds a somewhat different view. In his study of
a small principality in one of the border regions of West Bengal, he
shows how the semi-tribal Mulla court, in what is now the Bardhaman
district, produced political institutions that self-consciously
integrated aspects of what was then thought of as "high culture"—i.e.
the culture of the Mughal court in North India—with indigenous
elements taken from local tribal and peasant communities. Many such
peripheral principalities were declared to be tributary states owing
formal allegiance to the great, though distant, Mughal Empire. The
geographical distance between the central authority and these border
states gave the latter some degree of autonomy. Thus, they were able
to selectively adopt elements of Mughal culture while retaining much
of what was traditionally available. The Mughal presence was thought
to be alien but distant enough to be non-threatening, and could
therefore become a site for experimentation with novelty. Traces of
this self-conscious adoption of high culture aspects is, according to
Sanyal, still visible in the peasant societies of these border
regions, for instance in the cultivation of particular genres of folk
songs that can engage with forms of novelty. Sanyal says that many
genres of folk song in Bengal have been cultivated into popular forms
that require different kinds of performative contexts. He suggests
that folk culture is constituted at three different levels: jana
(local), desha (regional), and marga (global or pan-Indian). He says
that the deshi or regional level acts as a site of mediation between
the local and global levels.
Unfortunately Sanyal does not develop this theme further. However, as
several scholars have tried to show, the conception of a cultural
region is important in the study of folklore's engagement with forms
of modernity (Morinis 1982, Blackburn 2003, Chatterji 2005). Self-
conscious reflection on context, style, and the process of
transmission actually occurs precisely at this level. Further, this
is the level at which the local is conceived of as such and thus also
is the level at which "metadiscursive practices for creating,
representing and interpreting" folk discourses are developed (Briggs
1993). In this essay I examine some contemporary attempts at
producing new kinds of folk discourses in a deliberate attempt to
empower certain marginal groups in West Bengal. These attempts, as I
will show, are part of a larger movement for the articulation of a
distinctive regional identity in which folk culture plays a central
role.
Even though the folk have played an important part in articulating
ideas about Bengali culture and tradition, there have been no
significant grassroot reformist movements of the kind that have taken
place in Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu.1 West Bengal, governed as it is
by a combination of communist and socialist parties for three
decades, is typically identified with a kind of middle class
radicalism. Most reforms have been top down, including those that
were initiated by an "enlightened" elite in the colonial period (Basu
1992). Instead the folk are perceived as an abstract category—an aid
to the process of "traditionalization
Briggs (1993) to identify "aspects of the past as significant to the
present" (ibid. 1993, 109). Folklore comes to represent the authentic
voice of the folk, a living museum from which Bengal's history may be
excavated.
Mahashweta Devi's Vyad Kaand (The Book of the Hunter) and Nilakanth
Ghoshyal's Bhumi Kanya (Earth Maiden), both fall within the Bengali
nationalist tradition of historiography, which assumes Bengal's folk
traditions had a seminal role in shaping her culture (Dutt 1990, Sen
1985). In keeping with a modern political perspective, they use folk
tradition as a site for articulating contemporary concerns. However,
in the forms in which they have become available for literary
interpretation, these folk traditions have already been mediated
through inscription. The role of folklorists in bringing oral
traditions to print in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries has
been extensively studied in India (Blackburn 2003, Sen 1960), but the
relationship between writing and oral literature has a much older
history. Mangala kavyas, long narrative poems about specific gods and
goddesses, written from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century in
Bangla, circulated in oral forms long before they were written down.
According to Clark (1955) these poems have two distinct levels—the
popular and the learned—and he believes that there is a chronological
relationship between the two levels. The oral lore was re-inscribed
in an orthodox Brahminic literary canon, but the fact that the medium
was Bangla rather than Sanskrit allowed for its mass circulation, a
fact that holds true today as much as it did in the medieval period.
In the preface to her novel, Mahashwta Devi says that the Chandi
Mangala Kavya of Kavikankan3 Mukundaram is the inspiration for this
work. The epic poem is composed of several different stories that
bear little connection with each other: an autobiographical account
of the composer's journey to a new settlement in a different part of
Bengal that reveals, according to critics, a detailed knowledge of
the current socio-political state of the society (Bhattacharyya 1976,
Devi 2002); the Vyad Kaand, the story of the hunter Kalketu and his
wife Phullara; and the adventures of the merchant Dhanapati, his two
wives Khulana and Lalona, and his son. According to scholars such as
T.W. Clark (1955) and Ashutosh Bhattacharyya (1976) these stories
show evidence of the evolution of the cult of Goddess Chandi from
that of a benign protector of forest life to a more malevolent deity
who deliberately brings misfortune to coerce humans into giving her
worship (Bhattacharyya says that the poetic text was written at a
time when distinctions between different groups of goddess
worshippers were becoming blurred. However, he bases his hypothesis
on the text itself and not on other historical sources).4
According to the preface of The Book of the Hunter, Mahashweta Devi
was inspired by the Vyad Kaand of Kavikankan Mukundaram's epic poem,
where he describes the lives of nomadic, forest dwelling tribes such
as the Shabars. She describes the clash between contrasting forms of
life through the experiences of two couples, the migrant Brahmin
priest Mukundaram and his wife, and Kalya and Phuli, a young Shabar
couple. She explores the culture of the Shabars and how they cope
with the erosion of their way of life as new settlements encroach on
forestland. In the novel, the Brahmin Mukundaram is seen using his
experiences with the forest dwelling couple to depict the characters
of Kalketu and Phullara, both re-incarnations of demi-gods who were
cursed to suffer mortal birth. He invokes the Goddess of the Great
Forest (Abhaya or Reassurance) through the voice of the hunter
Kalketu (Devi 2002, vii).
Mahashweta Devi says that Mukundaram's personal experience with
hunter-gatherers in medieval Bengal inspired her to write a novel
that would help in the re-historicization of the Shabar tribe. Apart
from being a renowned novelist, Mahashweta Devi is also a well-known
activist who has worked among former "criminal tribes" like the
Lodhar and Kheria Shabars of Central India.5 She thinks of this novel
as an attempt to re-create the lost oral lore of the Shabars and
thereby restore their self-respect. The novel is based on her
experiences with the Shabars and with the stories that they have
published about themselves and their lore in her journal, Bartika.
The novel is interesting not only in that it seeks to re-inscribe a
medieval literary text in the form of an experimental Bangla work
using contemporary stylistic devices, but also because of the way
that the author seeks validation both from the Shabar community as
well as from the Mukundaram's life experiences. She says that she was
inspired by Mukundaram's own endeavour, which combined direct
experience and acquired knowledge of the socio-political events of
sixteenth-century Bengal.6 She weaves fragments of the mangala kavya
story of Kalketu and Phullara into her own narrative in a way that
both subverts it and gives it authenticity. Thus, whilst in the
mangala kavya, the goddess gives Kalketu a boon that makes him the
founder and chieftain of the city of Gujarat; it is not because of
his devotion to her or to forest creatures but rather, to put a break
on his wonton destruction of forest dwelling animals.7 Instead,
Kalketu becomes the first priest of a new goddess cult and, according
to Devi, an ancestor of one of the priestly clans of the Shabar. In
the novel, an old rogue elephant representing the forest goddesskills
Kalya as he inadvertently ventures into the sacred grove where
hunting is forbidden. This act of transgression and his untimely
death lead to his transfiguration into a clan ancestor and demi-god.
The character of Mukundaram (who is responsible for this
transfiguration) is opposed to the deceitful Brahmin priest in a
Shabar origin myth who betrays the hospitality of his tribal hosts by
trying to steal an iconic symbol of the forest goddess. The Brahmin
is killed by the goddess, and the Shabar people condemned to
destitution. Their lot will change only when a Shabar hunter is able
to find and trap the golden iguana, the vahana (vehicle) of the
goddess, as Kalketu once did.
Devi draws on the authority of the myths published by Shabar
activists in her journal, Bartika, to validate her version of the
Kalketu story rather than on stories that are orally narrated. In
fact, she stresses that the stigma of the label "criminal tribe"
imposed on the Shabar in colonial times gave them a form of cultural
amnesia so that they forgot their oral lore.8 In this context, the
attempt to re-historicize the Shabar is interesting, though somewhat
paradoxical. The Shabar voice must first be entextualized before it
can be re-inscribed in Devi's novel. Similarly, when she refers to
Kabikankan Mukundaram's first-hand knowledge of the Shabar and the
forest, it is at the moment when the forest and the Shabar's
distinctive way of life is about to be destroyed. Thus she refers to
the names of trees mentioned in the Chandi Mangala that are felled
when Kalketu clears the forest to make his settlement.
Kirshenblatt-
not reduce orality when it was first introduced but rather enhanced
it. She also says that inscription creates a gap between words and
speakers, a space that allows for creative innovation (ibid. 1998,
309). In the example discussed above we see how an act of inscription
by a Brahmin in the sixteenth century—the compilation of oral
narratives about the goddess Chandi into a written text—led to a
proliferation of similar texts. Thus, not only are there several
other versions of the Chandi Mangala compiled by other authors in the
medieval period, but there are also more recent oral and painted
narratives in Bengal's folk tradition based on the Chandi Mangala
Kavya.9 Similarly, Mahashweta Devi's novel has inspired popular plays
on the same theme and has even became the theme of a Durga puja
pandal10 in Calcutta last year (Ghosh 2000).
Bankimchander Chatterjee (1838-1894): Bankimchander, the finest
product of the 19th century renaissance is regarded as the pioneer of
the novel in Bengal. His first fiction to appear in print was
Rajmohan's Wife. It was written in English and was probably a
translation of the novelette submitted for the prize. Durgeshnandini,
his first Bengali romance, was published in 1865. The next novel
Kapalkundala (1866) is one of the best romances written by
Chatterjee. Mrinalini, Vishbriksha, Chandrasekhar, Rajani,
Krishnakanter Uil (Krishnakanta'
(The mission house of the Anandas, 1882), Devi Caudhurani,
Kamalakanter Daptar (The Scribbling of Kamalakanta, 1875; enlarged as
Kamalakanta, 1885) are some of his great works. Bankim Chatterjee was
superb story-teller, and a master of romance. He was a path finder
and a path maker. Chatterjee represented the English-educated
Bengalee with a tolerably peaceful home life, sufficient wherewithal
and some prestige, as the bearer of the torch of western enlightment.
No Bengali writer before or since has enjoyed such spontaneous and
universal popularity as Chatterjee. His novels have been translated
in almost all the major languages of India, and have helped to
simulate literary impulses in those languages.
Rabindra adopted the folk in his poetry and had been always very
strong philosophically and spritually. But he never dealt with social
febrics. All Sharat protagonistas have been Brahmins only. He never
cared for the SC, ST, OBC or Muslims. His theme had been Brahminical
all the time.
Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941): Gurudev Rabindranath Tagore, mystic,
philosopher, musician, painter and Nobel laureate for literature is
among the leading personalities of Modern India. He was awarded the
Nobel prize in Literature for his collection of well known poems
Gitanjali. Rabindranath Tagore entered the field of Bengali Novel
following the glorious tradition of the great pioneer novelist
Bankimchandra Chatterjee (1834-'94). His first two novels
Bauthakuranir Hat (Daughter-in-
Saintly King, 1887) are historical novels. Chokher Bali (Eyesore,
1903) is one among the great social novels he wrote. His other
notable works include Sonartari, Kalpana and Chitra. In 1901, Tagore
established Shantiniketan, (near Bolpur, Bengal) an institution
blending Indian and Western methods of education.Between 1916 and
1941, Tagore published 21 collections of songs and poems and held
lecture tours across Europe, the Americas, China, Japan, Malaya,
Indonesia etc. In 1924, he inaugurated the VISVA BHARATI UNIVERSITY
at Shantiniketan, an All India Centre for culture.Tagore'
classics, renowned for their lyrical beauty and spiritual poignancy.
He is remembered for his literary genius. In Tagore's own words, "The
world speaks to me in colours, my soul answers in music". Crescent
Moon is his famous book of poems. Tagore was also the author of our
National Anthem Jana Gana Mana. Gora is one of his best novels. His
book Sadhana is known for its philosophical significance.
Just read, Aranyer Adhikar by Mahashweta Debi and read Aranya Banhi.
Both deal with indigenous tribal insurrection against colonial rule.
Aranyer Adhikar deals with Munda Revolt. Mahashweta Di recognises the
nationality element and never shows any instinct of hatred agianst
Mundas.aranya bnhi deals with Santhal revolt. Tara Shankar novels are
based on the landsacpe and humanscape of Birbhum. Bir is a Santhali
word which means jungle. Once upon a time the entire area was covered
by Jungle as it had been the case for post moderm Metro kolkata which
was once covered by the sundervanas. Aboriginal people inhibited in
these areas. Tara Shankar always dealt with the Santhals as an
anthrological entity and never recognised the nationality element. As
he had been always the advocate of west Bengal brand brahminical
Bengali nationality which never allowed any space for other
nationalities.
Mahasweta Devi (1926): Considered one of the boldest of Bengali
female writers since late 1950s, Mahasweta Devi wrote novels and
short stories based on historical subjects as also on topics of
social and political relevance. She has brought out the rebellious
spirit of the tortured people of the past and the present with a rare
blend of fact and fiction. Aranyer Adhikar (Rights over Forest) is
one of her great novels. She is also a crusader for the rights of the
tribals. She was given the Jnanpith award in1996 for her contribution
to Indian literature. Hazaar Chaurasi Ki Maa, Rudali, Nati, Bioscoper
Baksho, Hajar Churashir Ma, Chatti Munda O Tar Tir are considered to
be her masterpieces.
Bengali Novels occupy a major part of Bengali literature. Though the
first Bengali novel was Alaler Ghorer Dulal, the Bengali novel
actually started its journey with Durgeshnondini written by Bankim
Chandra Chattopadhyay in 1865. According to Ananda Sanker and Lila
Ray, 'when the novel was introduced in Bangla in the middle of the
19th century, the form itself was new, the prose in which it was
written was new, the secular tone was new in a country hitherto
wholly dominated by religion, and the society in which and for which
it was written was new' (Page 168). But some great novelists like
Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay, Rabindranath Tagore, Tara Shankar
Bondopadhyay, Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay developed the newly
introduced genre in such a way that `new' changed into `matured'
through their works. Almost all these literary activities went on in
full swing in Kolkata. Dhaka, on the other hand, could not
participate in the early stage but literature created by and of the
people of Bangladesh area later on flourished with notable success.
Bengali or Bangla as a Bengali would say, is also a member of the
Indo-European family of languages. It takes its birth from a form of
Prakrit or Middle Indo-Aryan to finally emerge from the Apabhramsa-
Avahatta in the tenth century. The Bengali script has been derived
from the Brahmi alphabet of the Ashokan inscriptions (273 to 232BC).
History of Bengali language has been divided into three eras – Old
Bengali (950-1350), Middle Bengali (1350-1800) and Modern Bengali
(1800 to the present day). Old Bengali is survived only through a
collection of forty-eight poems (1050-1200) known as the charva
songs. These were composed by the siddhacharyas (enlightened ones)
who were mainly Buddhist.
originates from and is neatly intertwined with the classical Indo-
Aryan Sanskrit language and literature. But the influence of other
non-Aryan languages on Bengali cannot be ignored. It is now more or
less accepted that Bengali and languages of neigbouring states belong
to the Austric (or Austro-Asiatic) family of languages. Whilst
Bengali carries the distinct mark of the Indo-Aryan social and
cultural values, expressions or syntactic and grammatical
constraints, according to Professor Sunitikumar Chatterjee, "there
is, of course, the preserve of Kol and Dravidian (the Santals, the
Malers, the Oraons) in the western fringes of the Bengal area, and of
the Boda and Mon-Khmer speakers in the northern and eastern
frontiers." It then follows that literary works in Bengali would also
bear some unmistakable affinities to non-Aryan "phonetics,
morphology, syntax and vocabulary" including myriads of symbolisms
defining the local customs and traditions foreign to the Aryan or
Vedic literature.
Professor Nihar Ranjan Roy (in his Bangalir Itihas: Adiparba)
concluded that "... in addition to Sanskrit, there were two other
languages in vogue in Bengal in the 9th and 10th centuries: one was
derived from Souraseni and the other derived from Magadhi. The latter
is said to have evolved later into Bengali. Some writers would write
pad, doha and verses in both languages and the readers [reciters and
listeners] too would understand them equally well."
Middle Bengali covers a huge period. The 15th century mostly covered
the narrative poetry genre, the theme being mainly of religious
content. Among these, Krittivas' Ramayan has been credited to be a
classic. Other narrative poems include Srikrishnavijaya by Maladhar
Vasu and Srikrishnakirttan by Baru Chandidas. Literary exploits of
the 15th century also include Chaitanyamangal or Chaitanya Bhagavat
(1540), the biography of Saint Chaitanya, by Brindavan Das. In the
16th century Bengali literature contained narrative epic poems
dealing mainly with the stories of popular goddesses like Chandi
(Chandimangal by Kavikanan Mukundaram Chakravarti) and Manasa.
Towards the end of this century there was a wave of Vaishnavism and
this gave way to the new lyrical activity in the form of music
combined with poetry.
The 17th century has nothing much to boast of, except for its secular
romantic verse tales that were written solely by Muslims. Even the
Muslims of Arrakan, who had close intellectual contact with Bengal,
were active in literary pursuits in Bengali. Daulat Kazi, the first
Bengali Arrakanese poet wrote the romantic verse tale Sati Mayana.
Eighteenth century saw Bengali literature take an affinity to secular
poetry and the narrative verse. Rameshvar Bhattacharya'
Sivasankirttan portrayed Shiva as a poor farmer and Gauri, his wife,
as a human heroine. The end of the eighteenth century saw two new
forms of poetry come into age, the Kavi and the Panchali.
Nineteenth century was the period when the actual literary
renaissance of Bengali took place. Michael Madhusudan Datta (1834-
1873) and Bankim Chandra Chatterjee (1838-1898) were the founders of
the modern age in Bengali literature. Madhusudan was the first
Bengali poet to write in blank verse and combined western influences
into the essence Indian literature. His Meghnadvadhkavya (1861)
written in blank verse has the same flavour of Milton's Paradise
Lost. Madhusudan treated Meghnad, one of the villains of Ramayana, in
the same human angle as Milton portrays Satan, absolutely away from
the traditional approach.
The first Bengali theatre was established by a Russian adventurer,
Gerasim Lebedoff (1749-1818). For about 25 years productions were
mostly adaptations of Sanskrit or English plays with exceptions like
Dinabandhu Mitra's Nildarpan (1860).
The evolution of Bengali Literature started in the later half of the
19th century. The first truly romantic Bengali novel is Bankim
Chandra's Durgeshnandini (1865), while the first Bengali novel of
social realism is Peary Chand Mitra's Alaler Gharer Dulal (1858). The
leading novelist of the age was Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, who gave
the nation its national song Vandemataram from his political novel
Anandamath. This century also saw the advent of the periodical press
in the form of Digdarshan (a monthly magazine) and Samachardarpan (a
weekly), both published by the Serampore missionaries. Drama and
literary prose also saw a huge renewal in this age. The great
dramatists of the 19th century were Girishchandra Ghosh (1844-1911),
Amritlal Bose (1853-1929) and D L Ray (1863-1913), and the great
prose writers were Debendranath Tagore and Ishvarchandra Vidyasagar.
Bankim Chandra Chatterjee who finally dropped curtain on the Loric
period by publishing his masterpiece Durgeshnandini. Bankim's novels
can be classified into three groups: the first is full of English
style romanticism; the second is modelled on Pyarichand Mitra (such
as Vishbriksha, Krishnakanter Will) and finally those novels that
were based on historical events (such as Mrinalini, Rajshingha and
Sitaram).
The Tagore period, which followed the Bankim period and co-existed
with the Sarat Period, has to date been the most defining period in
Bengali literature. Its essentially distinctive universal appeal,
richness and variety of literary styles demand separate treatment and
stratification. Tagore was not just a Bengali poet or writer. Tagore
was a world phenomenon. Tagore's short stories are many and varied in
their contents, tastes, presentation, universal appeal and inherent
literary beauty. They differ from those of his cotemporary writers,
they differ from even his own novels and plays. In the latter, Tagore
used quite a distinct aristic licence. He went on to draw a much
bigger picture. Here he observed and depicted people in their family
and social settings. His penetrating insight into human minds and the
many intricate ways they relate to other people around them in love
and in conflict, in victory and in defeat, in happiness and in misery
allowed him to map characters and stories precisely with a language
that derived its adulthood from his pen.
Inspired by Bankim Chandra Chatterjee's writings, it was novelist
Sarat Chandra Chatterjee who brought modern bengali literature to the
masses. His piercing analysis of human love, faith and frailties is
unparallel. His intimate understanding of the social goings-on and
the sympathetic albeit affirmative way he portrayed the unpriviledged
and the women in his stories testify his paramount love and affection
for the deprived. His lovingly and masterfully crafted words, used by
ordinary people of the street, and immaculate writing style made him
easily one of the world's best loved novelists. Like Bankim Chandra,
he was a common man; he understood the common person's dilemas with
life and living conditions.
Saratchandra Chattopadhyay (1876-1938):
Bengali novel originated from Bankimchandra, Tagore modernised it and
Saratchandra set the trends of realism and protest in it. Some of
Saratchandra'
and basic realism. These include Bindur chele (Bindu's Son, 1913),
Ramer Sumati (Ram Returning to Sanity, 1914), Araksanya (The Girl
Whose Marriage is Overdue, 1916), etc. Saratchandra'
writings show striking influence of Bankim Chandra Chatterjee. In
Devdas (written in 1901, published 1917), Parinita (The Married Girl,
1914), Biraj Bau (Mrs. Biraj, 1914) and Palli Samaj (The Village
Commune, 1916), the themes and their treatment are not very much
different from the older Chatterjee's but they are presented in a
modernistic setting and in an easier and more matter-of-fact
language. To name some important works : Srikanta in four parts
(1917,1918,1927,
(1914), Palli Samaj (1916), the first part of Devdasa (his first
novel) and his first published short story Mandir (1904). It may be
noted that these (with the exception of the last two part of
Srikanta) belong to the first phase of Chatterjee's literary career,
that is up to 1913. Grihadaha (Home Burnt, 1919). Datta (The Girl
Given Away, serialized 1917-19) and Dena-Paona (debts and demands,
1923) and Pather Dabi (The Demand of the Road, 1926). are his other
works.. His last complete novel Ses Prasna (The Final Question, 1931)
is an attempt at the 'intellectual' novel where the meager theme is
inflated by high brow talks on problems of the individual and of the
society relating principally to love and marriage.
His novels and short stories appealed to people of all walks of life.
His mastery on this branch of the Bengali literature was so complete
that it is not at all surprising to note that remaining under the
full glare of Tagore's creative genius, Sarat Chandra was never to be
influenced by it. On the contrary, Tagore has been so moved by his
stories that even he could not resist from the occasional forray into
the latter's familiar territory.
In `Charitraheen' (`Characterless'
of love from an entirely new angle, showing supreme indifference to
conventional morality, and the effect of this book on the Bengali
public was shocking. The novel deals with a love-episode between an
educated young man of middle-class family and a maid servant in a
boarding house where the young man used to live. No other Bengali
writer had up till then dared portray the character of a `low-class'
woman from this standpoint. Bankim Chandra in his famous
novel, `Krishnakanta'
Zamindar youth for a beautiful widow, but the story ends in the
murder of the woman in vindication of conventional morality. But in
Sarat Chandraji's story there was no suggestion of punishment or
obloquy to the lovers concerned. At once there was a hue and cry from
all quarters. The magazine which was publishing the novel serially,
stopped publishing it as soon as some of its subscribers intimated
their desire to discontinue subscription if the novel continued to
appear.In his next novel `Devadas,' a youth is found to be led astray
by the failure of his early love, taking to wine and women. Parbati,
the object of the love of Devadas, did not forget him even after she
had been married to another man. Such affairs exist in real life, but
their portrayal in literature was forbidden until Sarat Chandra broke
this law. It was impossible to find fault with his work simply on
account of his attitude of all-pervading sympathy with the fallen,
all social victims or rebels. People read his books for his style, if
for nothing else.
Sarat Chandra is at his best in his masterpiece, `Sreekanta.' Many
consider it to be his autobiography, but it is a peculiar combination
of biography and fiction. I heard him remark on one occasion that the
writing of this book did not tire him. On the contrary, whenever he
felt tired and spent up, he found pleasure in writing one or two
chapters of this book. It was just like the valve of a running
engine, designed to let in fresh air and fresh light. The book is
really marvelous and it would be difficult to give its complete
picture within a narrow compass. I hear that it has been translated
into French and selling in the streets of Paris. I do not know if it
has been translated into any other language of the Continent.
His novel `Pallisamaj' (Village Society) attracted a great deal of
notice. It gave a true and vivid account of life in the villages,
with its petty jealousies and ignorance, superstitions and
sillinesses. The great artist Sarat Chandra spun a love-drama around
two beautiful souls against the background of village cruelty.
Ramesh, the hero, was a bachelor, but Rama, the heroine, was a widow,
although she had almost no memory of the man to whom she was married.
But Hindu society has no solution for this apparent maladjustment,
for widow-remarriage is not the general custom. The impulses of sex
are allowed to go underground and thrive on people's sufferance.
Sarat Chandra attacked the fabric of this moribund Hindu society and
attacked powerfully. This want of a solution for the Ramesh-Rama
affair and its consequent loss to society of normal, orderly life,
rich in every sense of human progress, moved all readers of the book
to thinking. It was claimed to be one of the best productions in
Bengali literature and, naturally, ran into many editions like most
of his other works.
Other writers of the Sarat tradition included famous novelists like
Tarashankar Bandyopadhyay, Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay (celebrated
author of the Apu trilogy), Manik Bandyopadhyay, Balaichand
Mukhopadhyay (pen-name was Bonofool), Abadhoot and Vimal Mitra.
A contemporary of Bibhutibhusan Bandyopadhyay - author of the Apu
Trilogy (directed by the Oscar winning film director Satyajit Ray),
Pather Panchali, Aparajto and Apur Sansar), and to a lesser extent
that of Saratchandra Chatterjee, Manik Banduopadhaya'
fledged novel Janani (Mother) was published in 1935 - his first, not
serially published before. But it was not until his next two novels
came out, would the reading public ever realise what treasure awaited
them! Classed among the best of world literature heritage of the
twentieth century were Bandyopadhyay'
Padma Nodir Maajhi - both published in 1936.
Pootool Naacher Itikotha (the Puppets' Tale), first appeared serially
in the clebrated Bharatbarsha in 1935. 1936 saw the publication of
this, much debated and widely translated2 serial novel in book form
along with his most popular and universally acclaimed Padma Nodir
Maajhi (Padma River Boatman, tarnslated by Barbara Painter and Ian
Lovelock3), which faithfully and lovingly depicted the rural life of
his native East Bengal. Partly serially published in the Purbasha
magazine, this novel, too, was translated in many Indian, Asian and
European languages 4.
Bibhuti Bhushan Bandyapadhyay (1894-1950): An inimitable lyricist in
prose, Bibhuti Bushan extended the perceptive world of Bengali
fiction by his single contribution to the appreciation of the beauty
of rural Bengal. He is renowned for his novel Pather Panchali (Saga
of the Road) which was made into a great film by Satyajit Ray.
Aparajita, a sequel to Pather Panchali is another of his great novel
Some of the stories that Bibhuti had written earlier show him at his
best. Among these may be mentioned Umarani (first published in 1922)
and Pui-mancha (The Kitchen Garden Scaffolding; first published
1925). These and his later short stories are collected in more than a
dozen volumes, such as Meghmallar (1931), Mauriphul (1932), Jatra
Badal (1934), etc. Banerjee's novels are not a few and they include
besides those already mentioned: Dristipradeep (The Look- a lamp,
1935), Aaranyak (The Wild, 1949), Adarsa Hindu Hotel (1940), Bipiner
Samsar (Bipin's Home, 1941), Devayan (Spirit's Path, 1944), Icchamati
(1949) etc
Troubled Galaxy Destroyed Dreams: Chapter 18
Palash Biswas
http://troubledgala
Not the novel, it's the name of the novel that confused everyone;
from the critics to the writer of the ad script that appeared on the
back cover of the book to promote circulation. The Puppets? Well,
they all assumed that Bandopaddhyay must have portrayed people as
puppets of their destiny. This was the conclusion of judging critics.
But those who cared not to judge and kept the novel breathing for
twenty odd years, knew better. They realised that it was a dissent
against those who make people puppets. It's not a vigorous revolt;
but a sympathetic mild and persistent protest."
Manik Bandopaddhyay,
novel 'Pootool Naacher Itikotha' (The Puppets' Tale as translated by
the UNESCO).
Mind the lmperilist Linguistics!
Have you read Tara Shankar Bandopaddhyaya?
Gano Devata?
Hansuli Banker Upokatha?
Particularly , while you read Hasuli Bank , you have to be amazed to
see the logic of Industrialisation. the language is same as used by
Buddhadeb Bhattacharya! Capitalism begins with Language and culture.
mind , you Buddha himself a Poet and the nephew of legendary
revolutionary Indian poet Sukanto Bhattachary had been the minister
of Information and culture. Nandan Premises has been his empire for
long. He intercepts Taslima Nasrin as well as Redical Cinema by Joshy
Joseph or Ananda Patbardhan.He is the man running Bangla academy and
his man Pabitra Sarkar has tried his best to correct Bengali diction.
Buddha has been the Brand Bangla nationality. He has been the Brand
Bangla culture. Now Buddha happens to be the best brand of capitalist
Marxist indiscriminate Industrialisation and Urbanisation. Buddha
uses the same language as the Aarkathies (middlemen) used in Hansuli
bank Industrialisation. The logic of development remains the same and
same happens to be the Muscle Power! though much more polished,
elite, sophisticated post modernised , machinized!
You may also identify Brand Buddha diction in Rangbhoomi and Godan by
Premchand. You may get it right there in Putul Nacher Itikatha,
Itikathar pare and Padma Nadeer Manjhi by Manik Bandopadhyaya. You
may hear the echoes in Hardy, Dickens, Shaw, Tolstoy, Camus, Yashpal,
Rahee Maum Raza, Akhtarzzuman and even the works of African and Latin
american Literature.
It happens to be the language of Imperialism!
Here you are! It is the linguistics of Post Modern Hindu Zionist
White Galaxy Order run from the Oval House in Washington DC!
Tarasankar Bandyopadhyay (1898-1971): Tarasankar remains the best
chronicler in Bengal so far as the decline and decay of the feudal
fabric is concerned. Hansuli Banker Upakatha (The Tale of the
Crescent Bend of the River Kopai) is one of his most outstanding
novels.Great Bengali writer and recipient of prestigious 'Jnanpith
Award' Tara Shankar Bandopadhyay'
upon the village life of Bengal. The Village life tradition prevalent
from centuries had been disturbed due to introduction of machine-
culture born from western Industrial Revolution. Main theme of
Ganadevta is the influence of Industrial Revolution and machine-
civilization upon village life and how all these were responsible in
making their life topsy-turvy. Honoured with the Jnanpith Award this
novel has been acknowledged as one of the world's best novel.
Kavi, Hansuli Banker Upakatha, Nagini Kanya and Ganadevata are
considered classics in Bengali literature.Tarashan
was a universally accepted author among all Bengali readers. His
novels and short stories kept the aged and the youth engrossed.
Novelist Tarashankar Bandopadhyay was one of the famous triad
of 'Bandopadhyays'
and Manik Bandopadhyay. THE STORY OF A POET Tarashankar Bandyopadhyay
in his novel Kabi (1942, The Poet) presents Netai, a 'dom' (an
untouchable community) as the protagonist.
To me, these works are the perfect Human documentation of Hatred
inherited by the caste Hindus against the slave, bonded out caste,
underclass, subordinate labours tortured in the feudal set up of
Indigenous production system.Tara Shankar was opposed to
Industrialisation and urbanisation. But he never advocated any
Insurrection against the ruling Brahminical class.Tarashankar, of
course, wrote a novel Aranya Banhi with the theme of Santhal
Insurrection.
But politically he never allowed any space for either tribals or the
scheduled castes. The Bengali Brahmin Kayastha feudal lords emerged
thanks to Permanent Land Settlement system introduced the colonial
rulers which ultimately failed during the World Wars.
Industrialisation broke the back bone of Feudal Set Up. It also broke
the caste system in limited sense. The British were responsible for
the rare opportunities of education and professional mobilisation
breaking the glorified Hindu Varna Vyvastha, which prescribed
specific job for every Hindu by birth.The taboo was broken with
education and industrialisation.
Even in modern times while the industrialisation and urbanisation
drive, particularly SEZ, uproot the SC, ST, OBC and minority
communities most, the Insurrection against this Imperialist
Industrialisation is led by the Brahmins. Say,Medha Patekar, Mamata
bannerjee, Mahashweta Devi, Ulka Mahajan and so on.
Tara Shankar did very well to expose all these sentiments of the
ruling class.In every novel Tara Shankar justified the varna
vyavastha. Chandi Mandap opens with a Village Meeting against such
professional mobilsation. Even in Arogya Niketan, a novel dealing
with Life and death, Tarashankar opposed modern medicines and
supported traditional medical care.
Tarashankar always adopted a strategy to divide the Indigenous
castes. He never exposed the Brahmins or kayasthas, the Higher
castes. his villains have been always the lower caste Hindus. As we
see the Chhirupal in Ganodevata. he threw Satchasi and Sadgope
landlords against the landless labour classes and defended the High
caste feudal lord. We may see the clear cut difference while he deals
with High cast affairs as in Sapto Padi, Bipasha and Jalsaghar. No
exposure of sexual behaviour remains the constant characteristics of
these novels. tarashankar never exposed any scandal involving a caste
Hindu woman while he presents the details of the sexual behaviour and
the anarchy of sex amongst the Indigenous castes and classes. We see
the heights is Hansuli Banker Upokatha and Nagini Kanya with a
gimmick of anthropology.
The Culture Hero Karali Kahar in Hansuli Banker upokatha is
responsible to end the slavery of the caste system in the best
interest of his brethren. He introduces the Industrial revolution.
But he is painted as a monster from the beginning who betrays his
paramour Paakhi for the sexual affair with Subasi, the second wife of
banwari, the Chief who is engaged lifelong with every affairs with
Kahaars and happens to be affectionate to Karali for this transition.
Tarashankar never experimented with his caste hindu heroes or
heroines as far as sex is concerned as if in Tara Shankar time, all
SC ST women were sex starving or sex maniacs and all the caste Hindu
women were Sat Savitri.
Even portarying Rai Kamal, a baishnavi and socilly outcaste woman,
Tara Shankar behaves restrained in disguise of love philosophy and
spritualism. But he never spares any of the Bgdi woman in Ganodebata,
particularly Durga.
In kavi, which I read as a boy of primary school, Tara shankar never
hides his intense hate for the Untouchables. He dismisses the folk
tradition of Kavigan,as an untouchable affair. The hero Nitai being a
DOM by caste is never spared for his low origin.
My Guru Tara chandra Tripathi used to say that Gandebata by
Tarashankar and Chowrangee by shankar are the best novels ever
written by any Indian novelist. We believed that. We got a Hindi
translation of Chowrangee, translated by raj kamal chowdhari. but we
could get an english translation of Gana Debata from the mid lake
Municipal library.The justification of caste system pinched me at
that time, but we were rather spell bound by the mastery of the
details with surgical precision. later, in Dhanbad, I stubled with
the original novels in earlier eigties and was stunned to encounter
with the Brahmincal psyche and their Aesthetics of Hatred based on
caste discrimination!
We never knew anything about Bangladeshi literature in nainital days.
At that time we were at best the readers of Bimal Mitra and Samaresh
basu thaks to hindi translations. Shankar novels were also popular.
But we read Bimal Mitra most. Bimal Matra rose to eminence with his
classic trilogy Saheb Bibi Golam (The Master, The Lady and the
Slave), Kadi Diye Kinlam (Bought With Money) and Ekak, Dasak, Satak
(Ones, Tens, Hundreds) spread over nearly three centuries of Bengal's
social history. The thematic vein of his novels, on individual
planes, is the travails of men of integrity within a value empty
milieu.
Samaresh Babu (1924-'88): One of the pioneers of Post-Second World
War Bengali fiction, Samaresh Babu wrote 87 novels, 200 short stories
and 20 travel-based novels. Ganga is one of his well-known novels.
It is true that we encounter with the entire feudal setup with its
innermost socil fabrics in Tara Shankar Novels. We find day to day
details of every caste and every class, their life, livelihood, folk,
culture, dialects, superstitions, tabbos, festivals, traditions,
infights, community life, say every thing for the first time.Bankim
had been Romantic and he never dealt with his time. he rather
preferred to write period novels , romances which were quite detached
with his time. Bankim Chandra was a very learned man and wrote,
besides novels, many religious discourses and essays. His place in
Bengali literature as the pioneer of fiction is still very high. But
his novels suffered from a religious or moral bias. He followed, in
the treatment of his novels, the long loved dictum of punishing sin
and applauding virtue. The inevitable result was that his characters
did not develop on human lines.He had to satisfy orthodox society
which was always watchful that no wrong ideal entered into society
through literature. This was something like the tradition of
eighteenth century Classicism in English literature.
In an essay that critically review's folklore's disciplinary position
vis-à-vis history and culture, Kirshenblatt-
temporal dislocation between the site of origin and the present
location of particular cultural forms signals the presence of
folklore. Kirshenblatt-
heterogeneous, layered and composed of multiple strands that are
interconnected in rather haphazard and contingent ways. This sense of
contingency comes about through the juxtaposition of different time
scales such that the idea of locality or location becomes the
conceptual frame within which the heterogeneous and circulating
strands that we call culture come to cohere, if only for a moment.
However, as Kirshenblatt-
comes to be viewed as a spatial category it is a temporal one, and by
constituting the present as a series of disjunctive moments, folklore
creates a gap between the contemporaneous and the contemporary.
Tarasankar mainly flourished during the war years, having produced in
that period a large number of novels. His celebrated novels are
Dhatridebta, Kalindi, Panchagrm, Gonodebata, Kabi, Arogyaniketan,
Jalsaghar, Raskali, Hansulibaker Upakatha and so on.
Set during the period just before World War II, Ganadevata, is the
saga of Shibkalipur, a small village on the banks of the river
Mayurakshi in the Birbhum district of present West Bengal. Through
the interactions and conflicts between myriad range of characters who
stand as typical representatives of their social class – Aniruddha
(Samit Bhanja), a rebellious blacksmith who along with his carpenter
friend Girish refuse to continue under the traditional barter system,
Debu Pundit (Soumitra Chatterjee), the much respected pillar of
society who gets radicalized and questions the system for its
injustices and prejudices, Chhiru Pal (Ajitesh Bannerjee) the nouveau-
riche village strongman, Jatin (Debraj Roy) a freedom fighter under
house-arrest, Durga (Sandhya Roy), a clever and free-spirited
prostititute and a host of characters including the wives of the
principals and other inhabitants of the village – the film unravels a
slice in the history of a typical Bengal village caught within the
wheels of change.
Hansuli Banker Upokotha is a 1962 film made by Tapan Sinha starring
Kali Bannerjee, Dilip Roy, Robi Ghosh and others. Set in 1941, the
movie explores life in rural bengal, the realities of the Zamindari
system that was responsible for much of the social inequalities in
bengal, as well as the changes in social perceptions with time.
Even Akhtarazzuman Ilius considered Tarashankar a master of Bengal
chronicles. He presented his time with full details. Though he was
partial enough to sympathise with the decaying feudal class to which
he himself belonged.With Manik and Bibhutibhushan, Tarashankar
Bandyopadhyay (taaraasha.nkar bandyopaadhyaaY) completes the famous
triad of the "Banerjee"s (or Bandyopadhyaays) of Bengali
literature.Tarashan
works feature a realistic picture of the many-colored fabric of life
in rural Bengal in a pioneering modernist style of prose in fiction.
Tara Shankar never adopted the ways of expression as adopted by
Thomas Hardy or Charles Dickens while dealing Industrialisation.
Hardy and Dickens also exposed Industrialisation and capitalism. Tess
of D`urberville has been a fantastic display of the broken wings of
Indigenous production system. While all the satire and pathos in
Dickens novels were targeted against the theme of Industrialisation
and urbanisation. Both of them never advocated permanent slavery for
the Indigenous slavery. Their Humanism did not deprive the out castes
at any level.
It is amazing to note that all the prominent Novelists and Prose
writers from West Bengal never dared to expose the eternal slavery of
eighty five percent Indigenous people, the SC, ST, OBC and Muslims.
They tried their best to sustain Caste system based Ruling
Brahminical hegemony. Some critics identify the Bengali dalit
literature with the writings of Tara shankar, Sharat, Manik and
Mahashweta.
It is a pity as these excellent artist of creative literature never
rose above caste line or caste interest.
It is quite surprising that a magical theme like Padma Nadir Manjhi
by Manik Bandopadhyay overlooked the Caste system and Varnashram. He
even did not care the routine details of daily adventures of the
Fishermen.
In fact, Manik emphasised much on class division and class struggle.
Overseeing caste contradiction he miserably failed to highlight the
fabrics of social realism. A dalit Writer Adawait Mallaburman wrote
Titas Ekti Nadir Naam based on the theme of Fishing lifestyle. it
ddealt with the caste system with details. Even the classic like
Putul Nacher Itikatha lacked the details of caste Divided society. So
strange! Mahashweta Debi is known to voice for the tribals, but she
never tried to expose the prevalent Caste system in Bengal and the
Brahminical hegemony. Contrarily all Muslim writers from Bangladesh ,
led by Akhtarruzamman Ilius, Selina Hussain, Kabir, Azad and Abubakar
Siddiki did the trick with mastery.Just we may accept that the
novelist and short story writer, Manik Bandyopadhyay, was profoundly
influenced by Marxism and by Freudian psychoanalsyis. Putul Nacher
Itikatha (1936) and Padmanadir Majhi (1936) reveal his Marxist
leanings as they do his psycholgical approach.
Premendra Mitra (1904-1988) was an adroit short story writer, using
language skilfully to convey his themes and create characters. His
stories encompass a variety of subjects ranging from struggle for
living to politics and sociology.
Long before independence, Jasimuddin wrote Nakshi Kanthar Math and
Sojan Badiar Ghat depicting all dimentions of caste community fabrics
in rural Bengal. In Sojan Badiyar Ghat he exposed the Brahminical
Hegemony without any mercy. We never saw any other example of this
courage either in prose or poetry.
The realism in Literature is well substituted when the writers
indulge in introducing romance in it. Tarasankar Bandopadhya is
grouped with those writers of the third decades of the twentieth
centuries who broke the poetic tradition in novels but took to
writing prose with the world around them adding romance to human
relationship breaking the indifference of the so called conservative
people of the society who dare to call a spade a spade. Tarasankar's
novels, so to say, do not look back to the realism in rejection, but
accepted it in a new way allowing the reader to breath the truth of
human relationship restricted so far by the conservative and
hypocrisy of the then society.
Tarasankar learned to see the world from various angles. He seldom
rose above the matter soil and his Birbhum exists only in time and
place. He had never been a worshipper of eternity. Tarasankar's chief
contribution to Bengal literature is that he dared writing unbiased.
He wrote what he believed. He wrote what he observed.
His novels are rich in material and potentials. He preferred
sensation to thought. He was ceaselessly productive and his novels
are long, seemed unending and characters belonged to the various
classes of people from zaminder down to pauper. Tarasankar
experimented in his novels with the relationships, even so called
illegal, of either sexes. He proved that sexual relation between man
and women sometimes dominate to such an extent that it can take an
upperhand over the prevailing laws and instructions of society. His
novel `Radha' can be set for an example in this context.
His historical novel `Ganna Begum' is an attempt worth mentioning for
it's traditional values. Tarasankar ventured into all walks of
Bengali life and it's experience with the happenings of socio-
political milieu. Tarasankar will be remembered for his potential to
work with the vast panorama of life where life is observed with care
and the judgment is offered to the reader. and long ones, then any
other author. He is a region novelist, his country being the same
Birbhum.
Tara Shankar Bandopaddhyay is well known for his exposures on caste
system with folk Lore, legends and Myths. But the master rather used
the caste as a tool to defend the decaying Feudal class in Bengal. He
could not escape the Caste hatred of his class. His haterd is full of
Venom while he dealt with his known indiegenous communities.
Illiterate and never knew how defamatory have been all the details
put forward as works of art. He never dared to expose all the
scandals and wrong deeds of the high caste literate Bhadralok as
Sharat dared. The new trend of lyric poetry was manifested in Kavigan
and Jatra. Tappa (a light classical variety of amorous songs),
especially the songs of Nidhu Gupta also known as Nidhubabu became
popular during this period. These songs were composed and presented
purely for entertainment and therefore were not intended to be of
high literary value. These were however somewhat refined later by
coposers such as Gonjla Gaen. Kavigan also became popular among the
urban people. Some famous poets of this period include Bhola Moira,
Anthony Firingee, and Thakur Singh. But Tara Shankar tried to
underplay its significance while describing all these elements of
Rurl life as an anthropological aboriginal abusive substandard
deculturisation. The best example of this destruction may be quoted
as Kavi.
India, including Bengal, is a country of many races, cultures and
communities, at various stages of social development and status.
There are many worlds within a single world, many smaller discourses
within a larger discourse. In fact, certain communities apparently
belong to a different world, with a time lag of centuries. Their
poverty, hard struggle for existence, social and cultural milieu,
myths and popular beliefs, which differed considerably from those of
mainstream South Asians, predictably provided material to fiction
writers. The most famous of such novels are Nagini Kanya Kahini (The
Tale of the Snake Maiden) and Harruli Banker Upakatha (The legend of
Harruli Bank) by Tarashankar and Araryak by Bibhutibhushan. Here myth
and reality, nature and man, the real and the imagined community
merge in a magical manner. From slightly different angle, Padma Nadi
Majhi (The boatman of the Padma river) by Manik, Titas ekti Nadir Nam
(Titas is the name of a river) by Adytia Mallaborman, (himself a
member of the fishing community), portray, in an unforgettable
manner, the lives of people who derive their livelihood from the
great rivers of East Bengal. In the next generation, Samaresh Basu
created a novel with a similar background, Ganga, Satirath Bhaduri,
the Bihar-based Bengali fiction writer, based his classic novel on a
parallel between an ancient and medieval epic and low class, low
caste village life in Eastern Bihar. Jhorai Charit Manas in seen as
the modern counterpart of Ramcharitmanas of Tulisdas. The background
is the Gandhian movement, culminating in the great rising of August
1942. Satirath, one of the greatest Bengali fiction writers, has
probably been more popular and influential in Bihar than in Bengal.
The Second World War and the disastrous Bengal famine predictably
left their marks on Bengali fiction and the three Banerjees, Subodh
Ghosh, Narayan Gangopadhyay, Romesh Sen, Monoj Bari and many, many
others. Their novels, Chintamoni by Manik, Madyantar by Tarashankar,
Ashani Shanket (Danger signal) by Bibhuti Bhushan are certainly
noteworthy but are probably eclipsed by the short stories of the
period. If we could choose the best among many top ranking examples,
Namuna (Model or Example) by Manik might win the prize. It
illustrates, not just the physical suffering and death, but the total
evasion of moral values, hidden by the face saving figleaf of
hypocrisy, on the part of the "respectable" classes. The subsequent
upheavals, anti-British agitations, the great peasant revolt of
Tebhaga also influenced Bengali fiction in the years just before and
after independence. Again, perhaps, the palm goes to Manik, for his
novel Chinha (The mark) and short stories, such as Choto Bokulpurer
Jatri (Traveller to Choto Bokulpur).
Tarashankar wrote in a variety of genres but was primarily a
novelist. His political ideas are reflected in his novels. His themes
include communal riots, war, famine, the political implications of
economic inequality, the independence movement, social conditions,
the conflict of modernism with traditionalism etc. He wrote a total
of 131 books. Prominent among his novels are Chaitali Ghurni (1931),
Jalsa Ghar (1938), Dhatri Devata (1939), Kalindi (1940), Kavi (1944),
Gana Devata (1943), Panchagram (1944), Hansuli Banker Upakatha
(1947), Arogya Niketan (1953), Radha (1956), etc. Some popular movies
were based on his novels, among them, Dui Purus, Kalindi, Arogya
Niketan, Jalsa Ghar, etc. He published three volumes of short
stories. His famous short stories include 'Rasakali', 'Bedeni', 'Dak
Harkara', He was also an artist and produced some fine paintings in
his later years.
Tarashankar was associated with a number of literary organisations
and became Vice President (1956) and President (1970) of the vangiya
sahitya parishad. He led the Indian delegation of writers at the
Asian Writers' Conference in Tashkent (1957). He was President of the
Prabasi Banga Sahitya Sammelan (Kanpur, 1944, Calcutta, 1947) and the
All-India Writers' Conference (Madras, 1957).
Tarashankar received a number of awards, among them Sharat Smriti
Puraskar (University of Calcutta), Jagattarini Svarna Padak (Calcutta
University), Sahitya Akademi Puraskar, Jnanapith Puraskar, Padmashri
and Padmabhusan.
Tarashankar Bandopadhyay was born in 1898 on July 23rd, in Labhpur
village in Birbhum district of West Bengal. His father Haridas
Bandopadhyay was the ancestral zamindar of that area. After
completing his schooling in the local high school he took admission
in St. Xavier's College, Calcutta for pursuing his intermediate
studies.
While studying in St. Xavier's College he got involved in the non-
cooperation movement for India's freedom. As such, he was interned at
his ancestral home in 1921. He was interned once again in 1930 for
similar reasons.
After his release he devoted himself to social work in his village.
He worked tirelessly among the villagers during epidemics, which gave
him an opportunity to observe the plight of the ordinary village
folk. He mixed freely with the so called lower classes of dom, bagdi,
sadgop, and bauri which was against the existing social customs. His
love for fellow beings irrespective of class and creed is reflected
in his short stories and novels.
Tarashankar Bandopadhyay was a versatile writer who had written on
various topics. However, one most important aspect of his writings
was his experimentation of human relationships, be it the zamindar or
the laborer. A few of his works include:
Ganadevata – This novel depicts the efforts of a schoolmaster to
remove tyrannies from a village. This novel was recognized by the
Jnanpith Award in 1967. This was made into a Bengali cinema by the
same name.
Jalsaghar – In this novel Tarashankar Bandopadhyay experiments with
the gradual decay of the feudal system and values, and the rise of
commercialism. This novel was immortalized by Satyajit Ray.
Abhijan – This masterpiece by Tarashankar Bandopdhyay traces the
exploits of a cab driver in a society filled with hypocrites.
Rai Kamal – Rai Kamal is a love story of three wandering Vaishnav
minstrels who share a bitter sweet relationship.
Bicharak- This novel portrays the dilemma of a judge in passing a
verdict for a murder case.
Kavi - This is a narration of a gypsy poet who moves around with a
group of dancers and prostitutes.
Byomkesh Bakshi, a sleuth created by Tarashankar Bandopadhyay, and
his murder mysteries are a favorite among the younger readers.
His other works include Aamar Sahitya Jibon (My Literary Life), Aamar
Kaaler Kathe (Tales of my Times), Hansuli Banker Upakatha, Kalindi,
Jogobhrashto, Radha, Panchogram, Sandipan Pathsala, Tarashankar
Rachanaboli, and Tarashankar Bandopadhyayer Bachhai Golpo.
Tarashankar died in Calcutta on 14 September 1971.
India constitutes the largest part of the subcontinental land mass
of South Asia, an area it shares with six other countries, including
Nepal, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. It has highly variable landforms,
that range from torrid plains, tropical islands, and a parched desert
to the highest mountain range in the world. This entire geopolitics
is ravaged by Feudal set Up of society bonded in Intense cate
hatred.India was ruled by the British government after 1858 through a
viceroy and a council, although several hundred "princely states"
continued to maintain a measure of independence. The Indian National
Congress, founded in 1885, slowly moved from a position of advisor
and critic for the British administration toward demanding the
transference of power to native Indian politicians. In 1930, the
Indian National Congress, led by Jawaharlal Nehru and Mahatma Gandhi,
adopted a policy of civil disobedience with a view to achieving full
national independence. It was to be a long struggle, but independence
was achieved in 1947, with the condition that predominantly Muslim
areas in the north would form a separate country of Pakistan.
Mohammed Ali Jinnah was to be Pakastani's first prime minister, while
Nehru became the prime minister of the Republic of India. The
departure of the colonial authorities, including the British armed
forces, was peaceful, but the splitting off of Pakistan caused a
massive population movement and bloodshed on both sides as a result
of "communal passions." A quarter century later, the eastern wing of
Pakistan split from that country to become the independent country of
Bangladesh.
India is home to several thousand ethnic groups, tribes, castes, and
religions. The castes and subcastes in each region relate to each
other through a permanent hierarchical structure, with each caste
having its own name, traditional occupation, rank, and distinctive
subculture. Tribes usually do not have a caste hierarchy but often
have their own internal hierarchical organization. The pastoral and
foraging tribes are relatively egalitarian in their internal
organization. In an economy based on agriculture, the ownership of
land is the key to survival and power. In most parts of the country,
the majority of the acreage is owned by a politically dominant caste
that is likely to be a middle-ranking one, not a Brahmin one.
However, the various regions still have different traditions of land
tenure and associated systems of land taxation.
Tarshankar always justified the Caste system and inherited subhuman
livelihood. He expressed his brahminical innermost hatred against the
outcastes in all his novels. In Nagini Kanya and Hansuli Banker
Upokatha he adopted a gimmic called anthropology to digest the
aboriginal indigenous social fabrics , life and livelihood.
Superantural created the Mythological semi Mythological theme full of
Tabboos in disguise of legends, folk, festivals and Purans. His
Mythomania focused on a full fledged Sexual Anarchy as a cultural
campaign against particular castes as Bagdi in Gana Devata, Kahars in
Hansuli Banker Upokatha and finally the Bedes, snake charmers in
Naginikanya. Tara Shankar Bandopaddhyay who hads been the President
of Sahity Academy in India after suniti Kumar Chattopadhyaya, was in
active politics and joined the Indian Parliament as a Rajya Sabha
member. During twenties and thirties while the Indian feudal class
was losing ground in a new world order emerging and dismissing feudal
set up of production. The decaying Feudal lords, specially the High
caste hindus organised themselves in so called National struggle of
freedom. Mind you, this class always supported the rulers since
Muslim India. In British India, this feudal class always sided with
the rulers wheneevr the Indigenous people led by tribal revolted in
Insurrections.
1857, thanks to a Brahmin , Mangal Pandey. But the Bengali elites
were celebrating the Renaissance at the time and supported East
India Company. they never supported Siraj, the last Nawab of Bengal
who lost the Battle of Plassy for India. They also helped East india
company in Repression of different Peasant uprising from Sanyasi
vidroh to Indigo Revolt. But during the span of worldwars and
recession all of them turned patriot.This class was against
professional mobilisation of scheduled Castes, Muslims amd Tribals.
They were against any attempt of liberalisation. They were against
education and enlightenment amongst their subordinate inherited
slaves and Bonded labours.
The gist is that the SC ST OBC in particular and the Muslims are much
more concerened with the unilateral Brahminical dominance in the
society. They consider Industrialisation and Urbanisation the fittest
opportunity to break away with the bondage of Caste System. For
example, the Central Bihar based sceduled caste Rikshaw Pullers,
Coolies and others feel at home in Metro Kolkata, because it is a
liberation from the caste system. I have seen it countrywide
whereever the Dalit Bengali refugees are resettled. They feel free
and independent out of Bengal because the caste factor reamins
immunised all over there. so much so, that within a span of single
generation the dalit refugees have no feeling for their lost homeland.
India has a rich literary assemblage produced by its many different
regional traditions, religious faiths, ethnic subcultures, and
linguistic groups.
India has only recently seen the last of the rural serfs who for
centuries supplied much of the basic farm labor in some parts of the
country. There are still numberless landless wage laborers, tenant
farmers, and landlords who rent out their extensive lands, and rich
peasants who work their own holdings.
In modern times, an expanding investment scene, combined with
continuing inflation, has formed the background to an extensive
import and export trade. The major industries continue to be tourism,
clothing, tea, coffee, cotton, and the production of raw materials;
in the last few years, there has been a surge in the importance of
the computer software industry. Russia, the United States, Germany,
and Great Britain are among the major importers of Indian products.
The division of work is based on gender. Age also separates out the
very old and the very young as people unable to perform the heaviest
tasks. Those jobs are done by millions of adult men and women who
have nothing to offer but their muscles. Beyond these fundamental
divisions, India is unique in having the caste system as the ancient
and most basic principle of organization of the society. Each of many
hundreds of castes traditionally had one occupation that was its
specialty and usually its local monopoly. Only farming and the
renouncer's life were open to all.
Classes and Castes. The caste system is more elaborate than that in
any of the other Hindu or Buddhist countries. Society is so
fragmented into castes that there can be twenty or thirty distinct
castes within a village.
This society has a hierarchy of endogamous, birth-ascribed groups,
each of which traditionally is characterized by one distinctive
occupation and had its own level of social status. Because an
individual cannot change his or her caste affiliation, every family
belongs in its entirety and forever to only one named caste, and so
each caste has developed a distinctive subculture that is handed down
from generation to generation.
Hindu religious theory justifies the division of society into castes,
with the unavoidable differences in status and the differential
access to power each one has. Hindus usually believe that a soul can
have multiple reincarnations and that after the death of the body a
soul will be reassigned to another newborn human body or even to an
animal one. This reassignment could be to one of a higher caste if
the person did good deeds in the previous life or to a lower-status
body if the person did bad deeds.
The highest category of castes are those people called Brahmins in
the Hindu system; they were traditionally priests and intellectuals.
Below them in rank were castes called Ksatriya, including especially
warriors and rulers. Third in rank were the Vaisyas, castes concerned
with trading and land ownership. The fourth-ranking category were the
Sudras, primarily farmers. Below these four categories and hardly
recognized in the ancient and traditional model, were many castes
treated as "untouchable" and traditionally called Pancama. Outside
the system altogether were several hundred tribes, with highly varied
cultural and subsistence patterns. The whole system was marked not
just by extreme differences in status and power but by relative
degrees of spiritual purity or pollution.
A curious feature of the caste system is that despite its origins in
the Hindu theory of fate and reincarnation, caste organization is
found among Indian Muslims, Jews, and Christians in modern times. In
the Buddhist lands of Korea, Japan, and Tibet, there are rudimentary
caste systems, their existence signaled especially by the presence of
untouchable social categories.
The major cities in modern times—Bombay (Mumbai), Madras (Chennai),
Calcutta (Kolkata), New Delhi, and Bangalore—were essentially
residential creations of the British administrators. Architecturally,
professionally, and in other ways, they are therefore the most
Westernized cities in India today. In these cities and their suburbs,
there is now a developed class system overlying and in many respects
displacing the more traditional caste system. As a consequence, there
are many modern cases of intercaste marriage in all the cities,
although this practice remains almost unthinkable to the great
majority of Indians.
There are many symbols of class differentiation because each caste
tends to have its own persisting subculture. People's location in
this stratification system thus can be gauged accurately according to
the way they dress, their personal names, the way they speak a local
dialect, the deities they worship, who they are willing to eat with
publicly, the location of their housing, and especially their
occupations. The combination of all these subcultural features can be
a sure sign of where individuals and their families are situated in
the caste hierarchy.
Patriarchal" is the word most commonly used to describe the
traditional Indian family and the gender relationships within it.
This is true in all family systems except the defunct matrilineal
system of the Nayar castes in Kerala. Within all branches of
Hinduism, priests can only be male, though they may be boys. In
Islam, the leaders of a prayer group are males. In Zoroastrianism and
Roman Catholicism, only men can function as priests.
It is said that a woman must first obey her father, then her husband,
and then her son; this seems to be the normal pattern as she goes
through life. The opinion of the male head of household is especially
important in the arrangement of marriages, because in most religious
communities these are effectively marriages between two families. At
such times, romantic preferences get little consideration. Since it
is the male head who typically controls the family's finances, it is
he who pays or receives a dowry at the time of a child's marriage.
Although older women may be very influential behind the scenes, they
wield little legal authority in property and marriage matters.
Early in the fifteenth century two poets brought Bengali literature
into prominence: Chandidas and Vidyapati, with the latter writing in
Sanskrit as well as Bengali. Contemporary with them were two Telugu
poets, Srinatha and Potana, as well as the best-loved Hindi poet,
Kabir (1440–1518). Kabir wrote in a medieval regional language
closely related to Sanskrit. Although Kabir was a low-caste Hindu, he
drew inspiration from Sufism and criticized the caste system,
ritualism, and idolatry. He was followed in 1540 by the first
important Muslim poet of India, Mohamed of Jais who wrote the
allegorical poem Padmavat in Hindi. Contemporary with Kabir was one
of the greatest of woman poets, the Rajput Mirabai, who wrote in both
Hindi and Gujarati. A century before her, Manichand had written an
important historical novel in Gujarati.
Sarat Chandra, a Bengali novelist of the first half of the 20th
century, has described the landscape of his southern Bengal Region
and has interacted through his characters a deep psychological
response appropriate to the region and time. His work forms an
excellent resource base to reconstruct the region of his time and
establish phenomenological relationship through the feelings
expressed by the characters of his novels. Sarat Chandra's Home
Region is a stream-filled area with people's activity directed to
agriculture, though Calcutta was already established as a center of
westernization and modernization. Feudal exploitation, Zamindars'
tyrrany, degenerative caste-division, child marriage, prohibition of
widow's right to remarry, decaying extended family and losing person-
to-person relationship of the traditional Bengal were some of the
characteristics of the regional cultural geography. The cities,
particularly Calcutta, had started to show signs of modernization:
industries, equal rights to women, widow re-marriage and elitist
ideas. Bramho Samaj was pioneering the social modernization. In
summation, the Home Region, being a transitional stage of decaying
feudalism and incipient industrialization, was engaged in a struggle
between the old and the new, decadent traditional and modern, rural
and urban, caste rigidity and liberal social customs, religious
fanaticism and rationalism. Sarat Chandra's work, particularly,
provides an inroad to understand the cultural aspects of his Home
Region.
With the spread of Western colonialism from Europe and North America
to Asia, Africa, and South America also came the spread of its by-
product; Western modernism. Though social-realist movements varied
considerably within Chinese, Indian, and Soviet contexts, in general
they denounced the bourgeois and colonialist values expounded in
Western art and literature.Coloniza
generally savage (to use a colonialist term) from the perspective of
colonial and postcolonial subjects. The intrusion of colonial
politics in the daily lives of individuals is addressed in the form
and content of works by Tagore, Senghor, Mahfouz, Achebe, Walcott,
Soyinka, and Goodison. Other including writers—Premchand, CÈsaire, al-
Hakim, Neruda, Devi, El Saadawi, and Yehoshua—responded to social,
political, and economic concerns at a regional or local level.
In India, the British colonial education system, which had been in
place since the early 1800s, made the colonizer's language—English—
part of public life. English continues to be the language of
government there though over two hundred languages are spoken in
India. Though English-language literatures are well known outside
India, literatures in regional languages such as Kannada, Urdu,
Sindhi, Bengali, Hindi, and Tamil represent other aspects of Indian
life.
In addition to experiences of Western colonialism in Africa, African
writers also address issues related to the slave trade and to the
African diaspora. At universities in Paris in the 1920s and 1930s,
black intellectuals from Africa, the Caribbean, and the United States
came together to articulate positive images of blackness. Out of the
négritude movement came important interventions in both politics and
literature.
South American literature is often associated with magical realism, a
mixture of fantasy and realism, made popular by authors such as
García Márquez and Rulfo. The generally political nature of magical
realism in South American writing was often missed by earlier
generations of Western readers, who were too amazed by the
imaginative creativity of magical realism. Simultaneously, writers
resisted Western literary conventions and wrote in regional styles.
In a different, though related, fashion students of Indian society
have made a distinction between "Great traditions" and "Little
traditions" (Redfield 1955, Sinha 1957); or between desha (regional,
provincial) and marga (sanskritic, global). Folk rituals, belief
systems, and the cultural institutions of rural India are thought to
reveal an interaction between the forces of globalization and
parochialization, or margi and deshi aspects (Marriot 1955, Sinha
1957, Trautman 1997). For most scholars this interaction is a long-
term and largely unconscious process. However, the historian Hitesh
Ranjan Sanyal (2004) holds a somewhat different view. In his study of
a small principality in one of the border regions of West Bengal, he
shows how the semi-tribal Mulla court, in what is now the Bardhaman
district, produced political institutions that self-consciously
integrated aspects of what was then thought of as "high culture"—i.e.
the culture of the Mughal court in North India—with indigenous
elements taken from local tribal and peasant communities. Many such
peripheral principalities were declared to be tributary states owing
formal allegiance to the great, though distant, Mughal Empire. The
geographical distance between the central authority and these border
states gave the latter some degree of autonomy. Thus, they were able
to selectively adopt elements of Mughal culture while retaining much
of what was traditionally available. The Mughal presence was thought
to be alien but distant enough to be non-threatening, and could
therefore become a site for experimentation with novelty. Traces of
this self-conscious adoption of high culture aspects is, according to
Sanyal, still visible in the peasant societies of these border
regions, for instance in the cultivation of particular genres of folk
songs that can engage with forms of novelty. Sanyal says that many
genres of folk song in Bengal have been cultivated into popular forms
that require different kinds of performative contexts. He suggests
that folk culture is constituted at three different levels: jana
(local), desha (regional), and marga (global or pan-Indian). He says
that the deshi or regional level acts as a site of mediation between
the local and global levels.
Unfortunately Sanyal does not develop this theme further. However, as
several scholars have tried to show, the conception of a cultural
region is important in the study of folklore's engagement with forms
of modernity (Morinis 1982, Blackburn 2003, Chatterji 2005). Self-
conscious reflection on context, style, and the process of
transmission actually occurs precisely at this level. Further, this
is the level at which the local is conceived of as such and thus also
is the level at which "metadiscursive practices for creating,
representing and interpreting" folk discourses are developed (Briggs
1993). In this essay I examine some contemporary attempts at
producing new kinds of folk discourses in a deliberate attempt to
empower certain marginal groups in West Bengal. These attempts, as I
will show, are part of a larger movement for the articulation of a
distinctive regional identity in which folk culture plays a central
role.
Even though the folk have played an important part in articulating
ideas about Bengali culture and tradition, there have been no
significant grassroot reformist movements of the kind that have taken
place in Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu.1 West Bengal, governed as it is
by a combination of communist and socialist parties for three
decades, is typically identified with a kind of middle class
radicalism. Most reforms have been top down, including those that
were initiated by an "enlightened" elite in the colonial period (Basu
1992). Instead the folk are perceived as an abstract category—an aid
to the process of "traditionalization
Briggs (1993) to identify "aspects of the past as significant to the
present" (ibid. 1993, 109). Folklore comes to represent the authentic
voice of the folk, a living museum from which Bengal's history may be
excavated.
Mahashweta Devi's Vyad Kaand (The Book of the Hunter) and Nilakanth
Ghoshyal's Bhumi Kanya (Earth Maiden), both fall within the Bengali
nationalist tradition of historiography, which assumes Bengal's folk
traditions had a seminal role in shaping her culture (Dutt 1990, Sen
1985). In keeping with a modern political perspective, they use folk
tradition as a site for articulating contemporary concerns. However,
in the forms in which they have become available for literary
interpretation, these folk traditions have already been mediated
through inscription. The role of folklorists in bringing oral
traditions to print in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries has
been extensively studied in India (Blackburn 2003, Sen 1960), but the
relationship between writing and oral literature has a much older
history. Mangala kavyas, long narrative poems about specific gods and
goddesses, written from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century in
Bangla, circulated in oral forms long before they were written down.
According to Clark (1955) these poems have two distinct levels—the
popular and the learned—and he believes that there is a chronological
relationship between the two levels. The oral lore was re-inscribed
in an orthodox Brahminic literary canon, but the fact that the medium
was Bangla rather than Sanskrit allowed for its mass circulation, a
fact that holds true today as much as it did in the medieval period.
In the preface to her novel, Mahashwta Devi says that the Chandi
Mangala Kavya of Kavikankan3 Mukundaram is the inspiration for this
work. The epic poem is composed of several different stories that
bear little connection with each other: an autobiographical account
of the composer's journey to a new settlement in a different part of
Bengal that reveals, according to critics, a detailed knowledge of
the current socio-political state of the society (Bhattacharyya 1976,
Devi 2002); the Vyad Kaand, the story of the hunter Kalketu and his
wife Phullara; and the adventures of the merchant Dhanapati, his two
wives Khulana and Lalona, and his son. According to scholars such as
T.W. Clark (1955) and Ashutosh Bhattacharyya (1976) these stories
show evidence of the evolution of the cult of Goddess Chandi from
that of a benign protector of forest life to a more malevolent deity
who deliberately brings misfortune to coerce humans into giving her
worship (Bhattacharyya says that the poetic text was written at a
time when distinctions between different groups of goddess
worshippers were becoming blurred. However, he bases his hypothesis
on the text itself and not on other historical sources).4
According to the preface of The Book of the Hunter, Mahashweta Devi
was inspired by the Vyad Kaand of Kavikankan Mukundaram's epic poem,
where he describes the lives of nomadic, forest dwelling tribes such
as the Shabars. She describes the clash between contrasting forms of
life through the experiences of two couples, the migrant Brahmin
priest Mukundaram and his wife, and Kalya and Phuli, a young Shabar
couple. She explores the culture of the Shabars and how they cope
with the erosion of their way of life as new settlements encroach on
forestland. In the novel, the Brahmin Mukundaram is seen using his
experiences with the forest dwelling couple to depict the characters
of Kalketu and Phullara, both re-incarnations of demi-gods who were
cursed to suffer mortal birth. He invokes the Goddess of the Great
Forest (Abhaya or Reassurance) through the voice of the hunter
Kalketu (Devi 2002, vii).
Mahashweta Devi says that Mukundaram's personal experience with
hunter-gatherers in medieval Bengal inspired her to write a novel
that would help in the re-historicization of the Shabar tribe. Apart
from being a renowned novelist, Mahashweta Devi is also a well-known
activist who has worked among former "criminal tribes" like the
Lodhar and Kheria Shabars of Central India.5 She thinks of this novel
as an attempt to re-create the lost oral lore of the Shabars and
thereby restore their self-respect. The novel is based on her
experiences with the Shabars and with the stories that they have
published about themselves and their lore in her journal, Bartika.
The novel is interesting not only in that it seeks to re-inscribe a
medieval literary text in the form of an experimental Bangla work
using contemporary stylistic devices, but also because of the way
that the author seeks validation both from the Shabar community as
well as from the Mukundaram's life experiences. She says that she was
inspired by Mukundaram's own endeavour, which combined direct
experience and acquired knowledge of the socio-political events of
sixteenth-century Bengal.6 She weaves fragments of the mangala kavya
story of Kalketu and Phullara into her own narrative in a way that
both subverts it and gives it authenticity. Thus, whilst in the
mangala kavya, the goddess gives Kalketu a boon that makes him the
founder and chieftain of the city of Gujarat; it is not because of
his devotion to her or to forest creatures but rather, to put a break
on his wonton destruction of forest dwelling animals.7 Instead,
Kalketu becomes the first priest of a new goddess cult and, according
to Devi, an ancestor of one of the priestly clans of the Shabar. In
the novel, an old rogue elephant representing the forest goddesskills
Kalya as he inadvertently ventures into the sacred grove where
hunting is forbidden. This act of transgression and his untimely
death lead to his transfiguration into a clan ancestor and demi-god.
The character of Mukundaram (who is responsible for this
transfiguration) is opposed to the deceitful Brahmin priest in a
Shabar origin myth who betrays the hospitality of his tribal hosts by
trying to steal an iconic symbol of the forest goddess. The Brahmin
is killed by the goddess, and the Shabar people condemned to
destitution. Their lot will change only when a Shabar hunter is able
to find and trap the golden iguana, the vahana (vehicle) of the
goddess, as Kalketu once did.
Devi draws on the authority of the myths published by Shabar
activists in her journal, Bartika, to validate her version of the
Kalketu story rather than on stories that are orally narrated. In
fact, she stresses that the stigma of the label "criminal tribe"
imposed on the Shabar in colonial times gave them a form of cultural
amnesia so that they forgot their oral lore.8 In this context, the
attempt to re-historicize the Shabar is interesting, though somewhat
paradoxical. The Shabar voice must first be entextualized before it
can be re-inscribed in Devi's novel. Similarly, when she refers to
Kabikankan Mukundaram's first-hand knowledge of the Shabar and the
forest, it is at the moment when the forest and the Shabar's
distinctive way of life is about to be destroyed. Thus she refers to
the names of trees mentioned in the Chandi Mangala that are felled
when Kalketu clears the forest to make his settlement.
Kirshenblatt-
not reduce orality when it was first introduced but rather enhanced
it. She also says that inscription creates a gap between words and
speakers, a space that allows for creative innovation (ibid. 1998,
309). In the example discussed above we see how an act of inscription
by a Brahmin in the sixteenth century—the compilation of oral
narratives about the goddess Chandi into a written text—led to a
proliferation of similar texts. Thus, not only are there several
other versions of the Chandi Mangala compiled by other authors in the
medieval period, but there are also more recent oral and painted
narratives in Bengal's folk tradition based on the Chandi Mangala
Kavya.9 Similarly, Mahashweta Devi's novel has inspired popular plays
on the same theme and has even became the theme of a Durga puja
pandal10 in Calcutta last year (Ghosh 2000).
Bankimchander Chatterjee (1838-1894): Bankimchander, the finest
product of the 19th century renaissance is regarded as the pioneer of
the novel in Bengal. His first fiction to appear in print was
Rajmohan's Wife. It was written in English and was probably a
translation of the novelette submitted for the prize. Durgeshnandini,
his first Bengali romance, was published in 1865. The next novel
Kapalkundala (1866) is one of the best romances written by
Chatterjee. Mrinalini, Vishbriksha, Chandrasekhar, Rajani,
Krishnakanter Uil (Krishnakanta'
(The mission house of the Anandas, 1882), Devi Caudhurani,
Kamalakanter Daptar (The Scribbling of Kamalakanta, 1875; enlarged as
Kamalakanta, 1885) are some of his great works. Bankim Chatterjee was
superb story-teller, and a master of romance. He was a path finder
and a path maker. Chatterjee represented the English-educated
Bengalee with a tolerably peaceful home life, sufficient wherewithal
and some prestige, as the bearer of the torch of western enlightment.
No Bengali writer before or since has enjoyed such spontaneous and
universal popularity as Chatterjee. His novels have been translated
in almost all the major languages of India, and have helped to
simulate literary impulses in those languages.
Rabindra adopted the folk in his poetry and had been always very
strong philosophically and spritually. But he never dealt with social
febrics. All Sharat protagonistas have been Brahmins only. He never
cared for the SC, ST, OBC or Muslims. His theme had been Brahminical
all the time.
Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941): Gurudev Rabindranath Tagore, mystic,
philosopher, musician, painter and Nobel laureate for literature is
among the leading personalities of Modern India. He was awarded the
Nobel prize in Literature for his collection of well known poems
Gitanjali. Rabindranath Tagore entered the field of Bengali Novel
following the glorious tradition of the great pioneer novelist
Bankimchandra Chatterjee (1834-'94). His first two novels
Bauthakuranir Hat (Daughter-in-
Saintly King, 1887) are historical novels. Chokher Bali (Eyesore,
1903) is one among the great social novels he wrote. His other
notable works include Sonartari, Kalpana and Chitra. In 1901, Tagore
established Shantiniketan, (near Bolpur, Bengal) an institution
blending Indian and Western methods of education.Between 1916 and
1941, Tagore published 21 collections of songs and poems and held
lecture tours across Europe, the Americas, China, Japan, Malaya,
Indonesia etc. In 1924, he inaugurated the VISVA BHARATI UNIVERSITY
at Shantiniketan, an All India Centre for culture.Tagore'
classics, renowned for their lyrical beauty and spiritual poignancy.
He is remembered for his literary genius. In Tagore's own words, "The
world speaks to me in colours, my soul answers in music". Crescent
Moon is his famous book of poems. Tagore was also the author of our
National Anthem Jana Gana Mana. Gora is one of his best novels. His
book Sadhana is known for its philosophical significance.
Just read, Aranyer Adhikar by Mahashweta Debi and read Aranya Banhi.
Both deal with indigenous tribal insurrection against colonial rule.
Aranyer Adhikar deals with Munda Revolt. Mahashweta Di recognises the
nationality element and never shows any instinct of hatred agianst
Mundas.aranya bnhi deals with Santhal revolt. Tara Shankar novels are
based on the landsacpe and humanscape of Birbhum. Bir is a Santhali
word which means jungle. Once upon a time the entire area was covered
by Jungle as it had been the case for post moderm Metro kolkata which
was once covered by the sundervanas. Aboriginal people inhibited in
these areas. Tara Shankar always dealt with the Santhals as an
anthrological entity and never recognised the nationality element. As
he had been always the advocate of west Bengal brand brahminical
Bengali nationality which never allowed any space for other
nationalities.
Mahasweta Devi (1926): Considered one of the boldest of Bengali
female writers since late 1950s, Mahasweta Devi wrote novels and
short stories based on historical subjects as also on topics of
social and political relevance. She has brought out the rebellious
spirit of the tortured people of the past and the present with a rare
blend of fact and fiction. Aranyer Adhikar (Rights over Forest) is
one of her great novels. She is also a crusader for the rights of the
tribals. She was given the Jnanpith award in1996 for her contribution
to Indian literature. Hazaar Chaurasi Ki Maa, Rudali, Nati, Bioscoper
Baksho, Hajar Churashir Ma, Chatti Munda O Tar Tir are considered to
be her masterpieces.
Bengali Novels occupy a major part of Bengali literature. Though the
first Bengali novel was Alaler Ghorer Dulal, the Bengali novel
actually started its journey with Durgeshnondini written by Bankim
Chandra Chattopadhyay in 1865. According to Ananda Sanker and Lila
Ray, 'when the novel was introduced in Bangla in the middle of the
19th century, the form itself was new, the prose in which it was
written was new, the secular tone was new in a country hitherto
wholly dominated by religion, and the society in which and for which
it was written was new' (Page 168). But some great novelists like
Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay, Rabindranath Tagore, Tara Shankar
Bondopadhyay, Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay developed the newly
introduced genre in such a way that `new' changed into `matured'
through their works. Almost all these literary activities went on in
full swing in Kolkata. Dhaka, on the other hand, could not
participate in the early stage but literature created by and of the
people of Bangladesh area later on flourished with notable success.
Bengali or Bangla as a Bengali would say, is also a member of the
Indo-European family of languages. It takes its birth from a form of
Prakrit or Middle Indo-Aryan to finally emerge from the Apabhramsa-
Avahatta in the tenth century. The Bengali script has been derived
from the Brahmi alphabet of the Ashokan inscriptions (273 to 232BC).
History of Bengali language has been divided into three eras – Old
Bengali (950-1350), Middle Bengali (1350-1800) and Modern Bengali
(1800 to the present day). Old Bengali is survived only through a
collection of forty-eight poems (1050-1200) known as the charva
songs. These were composed by the siddhacharyas (enlightened ones)
who were mainly Buddhist.
originates from and is neatly intertwined with the classical Indo-
Aryan Sanskrit language and literature. But the influence of other
non-Aryan languages on Bengali cannot be ignored. It is now more or
less accepted that Bengali and languages of neigbouring states belong
to the Austric (or Austro-Asiatic) family of languages. Whilst
Bengali carries the distinct mark of the Indo-Aryan social and
cultural values, expressions or syntactic and grammatical
constraints, according to Professor Sunitikumar Chatterjee, "there
is, of course, the preserve of Kol and Dravidian (the Santals, the
Malers, the Oraons) in the western fringes of the Bengal area, and of
the Boda and Mon-Khmer speakers in the northern and eastern
frontiers." It then follows that literary works in Bengali would also
bear some unmistakable affinities to non-Aryan "phonetics,
morphology, syntax and vocabulary" including myriads of symbolisms
defining the local customs and traditions foreign to the Aryan or
Vedic literature.
Professor Nihar Ranjan Roy (in his Bangalir Itihas: Adiparba)
concluded that "... in addition to Sanskrit, there were two other
languages in vogue in Bengal in the 9th and 10th centuries: one was
derived from Souraseni and the other derived from Magadhi. The latter
is said to have evolved later into Bengali. Some writers would write
pad, doha and verses in both languages and the readers [reciters and
listeners] too would understand them equally well."
Middle Bengali covers a huge period. The 15th century mostly covered
the narrative poetry genre, the theme being mainly of religious
content. Among these, Krittivas' Ramayan has been credited to be a
classic. Other narrative poems include Srikrishnavijaya by Maladhar
Vasu and Srikrishnakirttan by Baru Chandidas. Literary exploits of
the 15th century also include Chaitanyamangal or Chaitanya Bhagavat
(1540), the biography of Saint Chaitanya, by Brindavan Das. In the
16th century Bengali literature contained narrative epic poems
dealing mainly with the stories of popular goddesses like Chandi
(Chandimangal by Kavikanan Mukundaram Chakravarti) and Manasa.
Towards the end of this century there was a wave of Vaishnavism and
this gave way to the new lyrical activity in the form of music
combined with poetry.
The 17th century has nothing much to boast of, except for its secular
romantic verse tales that were written solely by Muslims. Even the
Muslims of Arrakan, who had close intellectual contact with Bengal,
were active in literary pursuits in Bengali. Daulat Kazi, the first
Bengali Arrakanese poet wrote the romantic verse tale Sati Mayana.
Eighteenth century saw Bengali literature take an affinity to secular
poetry and the narrative verse. Rameshvar Bhattacharya'
Sivasankirttan portrayed Shiva as a poor farmer and Gauri, his wife,
as a human heroine. The end of the eighteenth century saw two new
forms of poetry come into age, the Kavi and the Panchali.
Nineteenth century was the period when the actual literary
renaissance of Bengali took place. Michael Madhusudan Datta (1834-
1873) and Bankim Chandra Chatterjee (1838-1898) were the founders of
the modern age in Bengali literature. Madhusudan was the first
Bengali poet to write in blank verse and combined western influences
into the essence Indian literature. His Meghnadvadhkavya (1861)
written in blank verse has the same flavour of Milton's Paradise
Lost. Madhusudan treated Meghnad, one of the villains of Ramayana, in
the same human angle as Milton portrays Satan, absolutely away from
the traditional approach.
The first Bengali theatre was established by a Russian adventurer,
Gerasim Lebedoff (1749-1818). For about 25 years productions were
mostly adaptations of Sanskrit or English plays with exceptions like
Dinabandhu Mitra's Nildarpan (1860).
The evolution of Bengali Literature started in the later half of the
19th century. The first truly romantic Bengali novel is Bankim
Chandra's Durgeshnandini (1865), while the first Bengali novel of
social realism is Peary Chand Mitra's Alaler Gharer Dulal (1858). The
leading novelist of the age was Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, who gave
the nation its national song Vandemataram from his political novel
Anandamath. This century also saw the advent of the periodical press
in the form of Digdarshan (a monthly magazine) and Samachardarpan (a
weekly), both published by the Serampore missionaries. Drama and
literary prose also saw a huge renewal in this age. The great
dramatists of the 19th century were Girishchandra Ghosh (1844-1911),
Amritlal Bose (1853-1929) and D L Ray (1863-1913), and the great
prose writers were Debendranath Tagore and Ishvarchandra Vidyasagar.
Bankim Chandra Chatterjee who finally dropped curtain on the Loric
period by publishing his masterpiece Durgeshnandini. Bankim's novels
can be classified into three groups: the first is full of English
style romanticism; the second is modelled on Pyarichand Mitra (such
as Vishbriksha, Krishnakanter Will) and finally those novels that
were based on historical events (such as Mrinalini, Rajshingha and
Sitaram).
The Tagore period, which followed the Bankim period and co-existed
with the Sarat Period, has to date been the most defining period in
Bengali literature. Its essentially distinctive universal appeal,
richness and variety of literary styles demand separate treatment and
stratification. Tagore was not just a Bengali poet or writer. Tagore
was a world phenomenon. Tagore's short stories are many and varied in
their contents, tastes, presentation, universal appeal and inherent
literary beauty. They differ from those of his cotemporary writers,
they differ from even his own novels and plays. In the latter, Tagore
used quite a distinct aristic licence. He went on to draw a much
bigger picture. Here he observed and depicted people in their family
and social settings. His penetrating insight into human minds and the
many intricate ways they relate to other people around them in love
and in conflict, in victory and in defeat, in happiness and in misery
allowed him to map characters and stories precisely with a language
that derived its adulthood from his pen.
Inspired by Bankim Chandra Chatterjee's writings, it was novelist
Sarat Chandra Chatterjee who brought modern bengali literature to the
masses. His piercing analysis of human love, faith and frailties is
unparallel. His intimate understanding of the social goings-on and
the sympathetic albeit affirmative way he portrayed the unpriviledged
and the women in his stories testify his paramount love and affection
for the deprived. His lovingly and masterfully crafted words, used by
ordinary people of the street, and immaculate writing style made him
easily one of the world's best loved novelists. Like Bankim Chandra,
he was a common man; he understood the common person's dilemas with
life and living conditions.
Saratchandra Chattopadhyay (1876-1938):
Bengali novel originated from Bankimchandra, Tagore modernised it and
Saratchandra set the trends of realism and protest in it. Some of
Saratchandra'
and basic realism. These include Bindur chele (Bindu's Son, 1913),
Ramer Sumati (Ram Returning to Sanity, 1914), Araksanya (The Girl
Whose Marriage is Overdue, 1916), etc. Saratchandra'
writings show striking influence of Bankim Chandra Chatterjee. In
Devdas (written in 1901, published 1917), Parinita (The Married Girl,
1914), Biraj Bau (Mrs. Biraj, 1914) and Palli Samaj (The Village
Commune, 1916), the themes and their treatment are not very much
different from the older Chatterjee's but they are presented in a
modernistic setting and in an easier and more matter-of-fact
language. To name some important works : Srikanta in four parts
(1917,1918,1927,
(1914), Palli Samaj (1916), the first part of Devdasa (his first
novel) and his first published short story Mandir (1904). It may be
noted that these (with the exception of the last two part of
Srikanta) belong to the first phase of Chatterjee's literary career,
that is up to 1913. Grihadaha (Home Burnt, 1919). Datta (The Girl
Given Away, serialized 1917-19) and Dena-Paona (debts and demands,
1923) and Pather Dabi (The Demand of the Road, 1926). are his other
works.. His last complete novel Ses Prasna (The Final Question, 1931)
is an attempt at the 'intellectual' novel where the meager theme is
inflated by high brow talks on problems of the individual and of the
society relating principally to love and marriage.
His novels and short stories appealed to people of all walks of life.
His mastery on this branch of the Bengali literature was so complete
that it is not at all surprising to note that remaining under the
full glare of Tagore's creative genius, Sarat Chandra was never to be
influenced by it. On the contrary, Tagore has been so moved by his
stories that even he could not resist from the occasional forray into
the latter's familiar territory.
In `Charitraheen' (`Characterless'
of love from an entirely new angle, showing supreme indifference to
conventional morality, and the effect of this book on the Bengali
public was shocking. The novel deals with a love-episode between an
educated young man of middle-class family and a maid servant in a
boarding house where the young man used to live. No other Bengali
writer had up till then dared portray the character of a `low-class'
woman from this standpoint. Bankim Chandra in his famous
novel, `Krishnakanta'
Zamindar youth for a beautiful widow, but the story ends in the
murder of the woman in vindication of conventional morality. But in
Sarat Chandraji's story there was no suggestion of punishment or
obloquy to the lovers concerned. At once there was a hue and cry from
all quarters. The magazine which was publishing the novel serially,
stopped publishing it as soon as some of its subscribers intimated
their desire to discontinue subscription if the novel continued to
appear.In his next novel `Devadas,' a youth is found to be led astray
by the failure of his early love, taking to wine and women. Parbati,
the object of the love of Devadas, did not forget him even after she
had been married to another man. Such affairs exist in real life, but
their portrayal in literature was forbidden until Sarat Chandra broke
this law. It was impossible to find fault with his work simply on
account of his attitude of all-pervading sympathy with the fallen,
all social victims or rebels. People read his books for his style, if
for nothing else.
Sarat Chandra is at his best in his masterpiece, `Sreekanta.' Many
consider it to be his autobiography, but it is a peculiar combination
of biography and fiction. I heard him remark on one occasion that the
writing of this book did not tire him. On the contrary, whenever he
felt tired and spent up, he found pleasure in writing one or two
chapters of this book. It was just like the valve of a running
engine, designed to let in fresh air and fresh light. The book is
really marvelous and it would be difficult to give its complete
picture within a narrow compass. I hear that it has been translated
into French and selling in the streets of Paris. I do not know if it
has been translated into any other language of the Continent.
His novel `Pallisamaj' (Village Society) attracted a great deal of
notice. It gave a true and vivid account of life in the villages,
with its petty jealousies and ignorance, superstitions and
sillinesses. The great artist Sarat Chandra spun a love-drama around
two beautiful souls against the background of village cruelty.
Ramesh, the hero, was a bachelor, but Rama, the heroine, was a widow,
although she had almost no memory of the man to whom she was married.
But Hindu society has no solution for this apparent maladjustment,
for widow-remarriage is not the general custom. The impulses of sex
are allowed to go underground and thrive on people's sufferance.
Sarat Chandra attacked the fabric of this moribund Hindu society and
attacked powerfully. This want of a solution for the Ramesh-Rama
affair and its consequent loss to society of normal, orderly life,
rich in every sense of human progress, moved all readers of the book
to thinking. It was claimed to be one of the best productions in
Bengali literature and, naturally, ran into many editions like most
of his other works.
Other writers of the Sarat tradition included famous novelists like
Tarashankar Bandyopadhyay, Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay (celebrated
author of the Apu trilogy), Manik Bandyopadhyay, Balaichand
Mukhopadhyay (pen-name was Bonofool), Abadhoot and Vimal Mitra.
A contemporary of Bibhutibhusan Bandyopadhyay - author of the Apu
Trilogy (directed by the Oscar winning film director Satyajit Ray),
Pather Panchali, Aparajto and Apur Sansar), and to a lesser extent
that of Saratchandra Chatterjee, Manik Banduopadhaya'
fledged novel Janani (Mother) was published in 1935 - his first, not
serially published before. But it was not until his next two novels
came out, would the reading public ever realise what treasure awaited
them! Classed among the best of world literature heritage of the
twentieth century were Bandyopadhyay'
Padma Nodir Maajhi - both published in 1936.
Pootool Naacher Itikotha (the Puppets' Tale), first appeared serially
in the clebrated Bharatbarsha in 1935. 1936 saw the publication of
this, much debated and widely translated2 serial novel in book form
along with his most popular and universally acclaimed Padma Nodir
Maajhi (Padma River Boatman, tarnslated by Barbara Painter and Ian
Lovelock3), which faithfully and lovingly depicted the rural life of
his native East Bengal. Partly serially published in the Purbasha
magazine, this novel, too, was translated in many Indian, Asian and
European languages 4.
Bibhuti Bhushan Bandyapadhyay (1894-1950): An inimitable lyricist in
prose, Bibhuti Bushan extended the perceptive world of Bengali
fiction by his single contribution to the appreciation of the beauty
of rural Bengal. He is renowned for his novel Pather Panchali (Saga
of the Road) which was made into a great film by Satyajit Ray.
Aparajita, a sequel to Pather Panchali is another of his great novel
Some of the stories that Bibhuti had written earlier show him at his
best. Among these may be mentioned Umarani (first published in 1922)
and Pui-mancha (The Kitchen Garden Scaffolding; first published
1925). These and his later short stories are collected in more than a
dozen volumes, such as Meghmallar (1931), Mauriphul (1932), Jatra
Badal (1934), etc. Banerjee's novels are not a few and they include
besides those already mentioned: Dristipradeep (The Look- a lamp,
1935), Aaranyak (The Wild, 1949), Adarsa Hindu Hotel (1940), Bipiner
Samsar (Bipin's Home, 1941), Devayan (Spirit's Path, 1944), Icchamati
(1949) etc
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