Sāhitya Webjournal of the Comparative Literature Association of India Numbers 8 (September, 2019) ISSN 2249-6416 EDITOR: Prof. Jatindra Kumar Nayak Advisory Board: Prof. EV Ramakrishnan Professor Emeritus, Central University of Gujarat Prof. Dorothy Figueira Distinguished Research Professor, University of Georgia Prof. Harish Trivedi Former Professor, University of Delhi Prof. Tapati Mukhopadhyay Former Director of Culture and Cultural Relations, Visva Bharati Prof. Kavita A. Sharma President, South Asian University Prof. Ipshita Chanda Professor, English and Foreign Language University Prof. Anisur Rahman Senior Advisor, Rekhta Foundation Prof. Ameena Kazi Ansari Professor, Jamia Millia Islamia Prof. T.S. Satyanath Former Professor, University of Delhi Prof. Subha Chakraborty Dasgupta Former Professor, Jadavpur University Prof. Jasbir Jain Director, Institute of Research in Interdisciplinary Studies, Jaipur Prof. Jancy James Former Vice Chancellor, Central University of Kerala Prof. Suchorita Chattopadhyay Professor, Jadavpur University Prof. Kunal Chattopadhyay Professor, Jadavpur University Dr Sarvchetan Katoch Saheed Bhagat Singh College, University of Delhi Dr Prasad Pannian Associate Professor, Central University of Kerala Dr Mrinmoy Pramanick Head, Dept. of CILL, University of Calcutta PUBLISHER: Prof. Chandra Mohan Sahitya is a refereed journal (ISSN 2249-6416) (Online) published from Delhi and Kolkata by the Comparative Literature Association of India Copyright for essays published here rests with the contributors. Copyright for translations published here rest with the translators. 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CONTENTS Page Editorial 1 – 2 Returning of Chaka to a Star: Impact of Jibanananda Das in Binoy Majumdar’s poetry 3 – 19 Ayan Chatterjee Canonization and ‘Horizontal comradeship’: the narratives of Indian literature 20 – 34 Bipasha Som The ‘Unity and Diversity’ Problematic: A Critique of Comparative Literature in India 35 – 45 Ishani Dutta The Komagata Maru Incident 46 – 64 Ragini Chakraborty Travelling Across Languages: Translation and Plurilingualism in Interlingual Travel 65 – 78 Saswati Saha The Victimization of People in a Conflict Ridden Zone: Manipur and Nagaland 79 – 93 Seram Guneshwori Devi Critiques of Nation and Gender in South Asia: Akhtaruzzaman Elias’ Khwabnama and Savitri Roy’s Trisrota 94 – 112 and Swaralipi Soma Marik Adi-dharam and Jharkhandi Culture: Understanding Adivasi existence in relation to the environmental 113 – 130 identity and environmental heritage of Adivasi-Moolvasi communities of Jharkhand Sudeshna Dutta Re-reading Women’s Writing: ‘Sarika Caged’ and ‘Unpublished Manuscript’ 131 – 140 Susmita Ghosh Hegemonic Historiography vis-a-vis Subversive Politics: A Comparative Study of Heroic Uprising in India 141 – 152 and Africa Vandana Sharma BOOK REVIEW Jareela (The Castrato) by Bhalchandra Nemade [translated by Santosh Bhoomkar] 153 – 155 Swagata Bhattacharya Editorial This issue of Sāhitya comes after a gap of two years, due to our organisational constraints. In this issue, we present a set of exciting essays related to various aspects of Comparative Literature, which have been included alphabetically. Ayan Chatterjee’s paper takes up the issues of influence and reception, core concepts of French Comparative Literature, and reads them in the context of Modern Bangla poetry. Talking about reception within the intralingual context, the paper breaks the age-old myth that comparative literature happens only when two or more languages/literatures interact. Bipasha Som’s article hints at the importance of retaining the essence of ethnic identity in literature in the era of globalization in order to form a canonized national literature. She brings back the discussion of writing India in English and how this has been suspected as not appropriate enough to describe experiences that are essentially Indian. Ishani Dutta’s paper is singularly important because it takes up the major concern of the disciplinary study of Comparative Literature in India today. Explaining the difference between Comparative Literature as practiced in the West and elsewhere, the paper attempts to show how the reformulation of the discipkine needs to go beyond raising questions of methodology. Ragini Chakraborty’s essay focuses on the well-known Komagata Maru incident, one of the enduring examples of racial exclusion practiced at one time by the Canadian state; what is remarkable about this essay is the way the author uses literary representations of the historical incident and fuses them with personal interviews to arrive at her analysis. Saswati Saha’s paper takes up the topic of travel and translation, understanding translation as a contact zone in interlingual communication. The author’s study of the translation of Gulliver’s Travels into Bangla has opened up a model to bring together Translation Studies and book history to reconceptualise the reception of literary genres and themes as translational phenomena. Seram Guneswari Devi’s paper transports us to the north-eastern states of India and highlights the political conflicts that have become the everyday reality of people inhabiting marginal spaces. Using the works of Temsula Ao, Tayenjam Bijoykumar Singh and Yumlembam Ibomcha, the paper makes an interesting argument about violence and violation of human rights, thus forging a comparative approach towards Conflict Studies. Soma Marik takes up for her perceptive paper, Akhtaruzzaman Elias’ Khwabnama and Savitri Roy’s Trisrota and Swaralipi and attempts to understand them in terms of their location on questions of gender and nation in South Asia. Sudeshna Dutta has taken up the issue of harmonious co-existence of man and nature and the ecological balance reached Sāhitya. Vol. 8, Sept. 2019. ISSN: 2249-6416 1 therein in an adivasi society which is conflicted by ideas of development and rehabilitation. This paper deals with the environmental concerns that threaten to cripple the world today. Susmita Ghosh’s article takes up two feminist texts ‘Sarika Caged’ by Saroj Pathak and ‘Unpublished Manuscript’ by Ambai to talk about the specificities of women’s writing and why it is important to talk about women’s writing in general to understand the laired complexities of their existence in the patriarchal world. Vandana Sharma brings in the concerns of subalternity and hegemonic historiography by comparing works of Mahasweta Devi and Ngugu wa’ Thiong’o. This issue also carries a book review by Swagata Bhattacharya of Bhalchandra Nemade’s Jareela (The Castrato). As this issue goes online, I remember with fondness and gratitude, Professor Vasant Sharma, former CLAI Treasurer, whom we lost some time ago. Professor Sharma was instrumental in bringing out this journal and he edited it over several issues. I dedicate this issue of Sāhitya to his memory. — Jatindra Kumar Nayak Sāhitya. Vol. 8, Sept. 2019. ISSN: 2249-6416 2 Returning of Chaka to a Star: Impact of Jibanananda Das in Binoy Majumdar’s poetry Ayan Chatterjee1 Abstract: Modern Bangla poetry started its journey in the 3rd decade of the 20th century. Jibanananda Das, Buddhadev Bose, Amiya Chakraborty, Sudhindranath Dutta were some of the notable modern poets of that period. In 5th decade, Bangla poetry had some brilliant young poets again. Some of them were inspired and influenced by Jibanananda. Binoy Majumdar was one of them. The impact of Jibanananda’s poetry was very prominent in his works. Though later he managed to find his own parole. This essay aims to do an intralingual reception study which relates these two important poets of Bangla literature, Jibanananda Das (1899-1954) and Binoy Majumdar (1934-2006). We will try to analyze the impact of Jibanananda on the poetic works of Binoy Majumdar here. Keywords: Reception, impact, poetry, Jibanananda, Binoy 1Ayan Chatterjee is working as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Bangla, Maharaja Srischandra College. He has completed MA and M.Phil and PhD from the Department of Comparative Literature, Jadavpur University. He can be reached at [email protected]. Sāhitya. Vol. 8, Sept. 2019. ISSN: 2249-6416 3 I Reading of a text becomes problematic mainly in two ways. Firstly, a certain text always remains the function (f)1 of chronotope. So we should not try to analyse it as a separate, alienated one. Secondly, the idea of connecting a text with another one may appear in the ‘horizon of expectation’ of a reader anytime. If we try to look into the matter in the light of ‘dominant-residual-emergent’, then we can find that no text in true sense can be termed as ‘new’ because it always receives something from its predecessors either positively or negatively. It is needless to say that the concept of the dominant-residual-emergent ( Williams, 121) is not static rather a minute differential of a continuous process which changes from time to time. We can relate this dynamicity with the dynamic nature of the systems in Poly system theory. Over all it can be said that reception study is one of the most significant tool of Comparative Literature even in this morning saga of Cultural Studies. This essay aims to do an intralingual reception study which relates two important poets of Bangla literature, Jibanananda Das (1899-1954) and Binoy Majumdar (1934-2006). We are going to analyze the impact of Jibanananda- the most significant Bengali poet after Rabindranath