DOCSLIB.ORG

Reworkings of the Robinson Crusoe Trope in Bengali Literature the Title of My Paper Is a Vague Attemp

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Reworkings of the Robinson Crusoe Trope in Bengali Literature the Title of My Paper Is a Vague Attemp Ghana da was Postcolonial: Reworkings of the Robinson Crusoe trope in Bengali literature The title of my paper is a vague attempt at resonance, lost in translation, with the title of the short story that caught my attention some time back: “Robinson Crusoe meye chhilen”, or “Robinson Crusoe was female”. And of course Ghana da was not postcolonial – not overtly. Consciously at least, nor was his creator Premendra Mitra. For those of us who are not altogether familiar with the institution of Ghana da, a bit of an introduction would not altogether be amiss. Ghana da appeared on the Bengali literary scene in 1945 in a short story titled “Mosha” or “Mosquito”. It was published in Alpana, a Puja barshiki. Four comrades, so to speak, feature in his stories. They are Shibu, Sisir, Gour and Sudhir. Shibu, as has been pointed out, is based on the great humourist and satirist, Shibram Chakrabarty. And Sudhir, a narrator in whose voice we hear the first few stories, fades in gradually. Sudhir was also Premendra Mitra’s own pet-name. Ghana da is a middle- aged man, tall, lanky, with a voracious appetite. Leela Mazumdar would write (quoted in the introduction to Ananda’s Complete Ghana da) “I have known many gastrophiles who have brought ruin upon their happy homes doing exactly this: Even if they are not cooking themselves, they will supply those who are with descriptions of food preparation from Riga, Mikiu, the Congo, or Bodrum, in torturous detail.” This brings together succinctly the two principle preoccupations of Ghana da: eating and story- telling – especially with an eye on the far off and fantastic. As the saying goes, long have readers and skeptics resigned themselves to the fact that there has not been a single significant incident in the world over the last century or so in which Ghana da has not played a role. Ghana da lives for the most part – lives on the edge, one might say – in a mess-bari. As Amlan da points out in the introduction to the collection of his translations, a mess-bari does not quite translate into a boarding house. The mess-bari would be an assemblage where individuals would stay paying reluctant rents. Many of the favourite characters in Bengali fiction of the early and mid 20th century are based in mess-bari-s. Shibram Chakrabarty, mentioned earlier, set most of his stories in the 2 mess-bari. Most of these, as Amlan da notes, would be located either in Central or in North Kolkata. The setting itself would dictate a kind of all- male cast – or perhaps in rare cases all-female – but I’m not sure how popular these are. The all male cast is again something that is characteristic of a fairly prominent body of literature for children in Bengali. One thinks of the similar Teni da of Pataldanga, and his gang, or indeed of Felu da. Ghana da lives on the edge even beyond his mess-bari arrangement. He lives on the edge of credulity and always running the risk of getting caught. But he won’t get caught. We are never sure if we are happy when he wriggles out of a tight corner, or if our sympathies lay with those who were trying to catch him out. He has a sense of entitlement that is annoying and endearing at the same time. The author too keeps an accurate tab on the number of cigarettes Ghana da has claimed. While in the first few stories Ghana da distributes evenly the privilege of offering him cigarettes, by the time we get to “Nuri”, we find that Sisir is the consistent supplier, and that Ghana da has till then borrowed 2357 cigarettes from him. Premendra Mitra was a remarkable man himself. The writer of several novels, he worked in the film industry when it was in its formative stages here. He wrote short stories, and won fame as a poet. He wrote in 1944 in “Why I write” that for him, “Writing is not merely a recreational pastime, or a personal luxury. It is a great responsibility to express in human terms the enormous impenetrability of valuable knowledge that surrounds the human experience.” One of the reasons behind writing Ghana da – perhaps ‘reason’ is too strong a word – let’s say one of Premendra Mitra’s own interests that informs Ghana da, is science. He was a student of the sciences, though he did not become a scientist himself. Surajit Dasgupta, editor of the Ananda Complete Ghana da writes that in conversation Premendra Mitra has once revealed that shortly after the death of Chittaranjan Das, when Calcutta was gripped by communal riots, he went off to his birthplace, Varanasi, and there met Manoranjan and Kshitindranarayan Bhattacharya, two brothers from Calcutta. The three of them discussed many a scheme to develop a strand of children’s literature in Bengali that would feature the scientific developments of the world. 3 Mitra quickly penned a novella, which was published shortly afterwards. His Ghana da stories are extremely well-researched, but that never gets in the way of a fertile imagination – neither of creator, nor of character. From this, let me abruptly shift to a brief discussion of Crusoe in Bengal. In the 1719 novel, The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe written by Daniel Defoe himself, Crusoe does come to Bengal. I have not finished reading the novel in its entirety, but from the chapters that I did get to read while preparing for this paper, it appears that there was a mutiny on his ship when they had reached Bengal, and he found himself stranded here. He clarifies that his main difficulty resulted from the fact that he had arrived “without any concern with the East Indian Company”, and it would, therefore, be difficult to find a ship out. He writes, “I then took a good lodging in the house of an Englishwoman, where several merchants lodged, some French, two Italians, or rather Jews, and one Englishman. Here I stayed for nine months, considering what course to take.” But this is taking Crusoe in Bengal trope too literally. As I suppose is the case in most parts of the English-speaking world, Robinson Crusoe features in some form – abridged, fragmented – in school syllabi. In an essay titled “Household Words: an account of the Bengal Family Library”, Abhijit Gupta draws our attention to the work of the Vernacular Literary Society of Bengal that was founded in 1851. It was responsible for the first publishers’ series in the Bengali language – the Bengal Family Library. The first book that the Society decided to translate was none other than Robinson Crusoe. The translation done by J. Robinson, here I agree with Abhijit da, is a good read. A copy of possibly the fourth edition (or subsequent) is available at the National Library, but earlier editions can perhaps be located in Uttarpara Library. Abhijit da quotes from a note to the first edition of Paul and Virginie, where Hodgson Pratt writes, Mere Translation would not meet the great objects which this Society intends to keep in view. There is not only a difference of language between the people of India and of England. We must recognize the far greater difficulty of a difference of ideas, associations, and literature. The instruction [italics mine] communicated to the masses require somewhat more than mere 4 employment of the vehicle of native language – the form in which it is conveyed must appeal to ideas and feelings already existing… In accordance with this view two of our number undertook to adopt the text of Robinson Crusoe…we did not hesitate to change the scene, to make Robinson Crusoe the son of an Armenian merchant in Calcutta, and to wreck him on one of the islands of the Eastern Archipelago. Over the next few years, however, the Society’s views underwent change, and they considered the adaptation in “bad taste”. The fourth edition has the original names restored and is a more literal, direct translation. The 1857 report showing the sale of the Society’s titles in the first five years (1851-86) Abhijit da cites in his article records that barring the Almanac for Bengali Year 1262, which sold 1427 copies, the highest selling title was Robinson Crusoe, which sold a thousand copies – remarkably of the thousand that were printed. Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare sold only 317 out of the 1500 that were printed. The sales of Robinson Crusoe did take a hit around three years later, when, as the Friend of India commented, that they wished fiction was sold even more, “but all classes are interested in Robinson Crusoe and can comprehend the ‘Ugly Duckling’.” Ashutosh Mukherjee’s library included a copy of The New Robinson Crusoe: An Instructive and Entertaining History for the Use of Children of Both Sexes, written by J.H. Campe. Campe took issue with Rousseau’s views on the roles of culture and nature in the growth of the child. He felt that Rousseau “allows Nature too much; and where he thought he found her defective, he has not always been able to find the best means of supplying her defects.” The preface goes on to discuss a passage from Rousseau’s Emile, or On Education (1762). Rousseau writes, Might there not be found means to bring together so many lessons of instruction that lie scattered in so many books; to apply them through a single object of a familiar and not uncommon nature, capable of engaging the imitation, as well as rousing and fixing the attention even at so tender an age?....
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Premendra Mitra - Poems
    Classic Poetry Series Premendra Mitra - poems - Publication Date: 2012 Publisher: Poemhunter.com - The World's Poetry Archive Premendra Mitra(1904 - 3 May 1988) Premendra Mitra was a renowned Bengali poet, novelist, short story writer and film director. He was also an author of Bangla science fiction and thrillers. <b>Life</b> He was born in Varanasi, India, though his ancestors lived at Rajpur, South 24 Parganas, West Bengal. His father was an employee of the Indian Railways and because of that; he had the opportunity of travelling to many places in India. He spent his childhood in Uttar Pradesh and his later life in Kolkata & Dhaka. He was a student of South Suburban School (Main) and later at the Scottish Church College in Kolkata. During his initial years, he (unsuccessfully) aspired to be a physician and studied the natural sciences. Later he started out as a school teacher. He even tried to make a career for himself as a businessman, but he was unsuccessful in that venture as well. At a time, he was working in the marketing division of a medicine producing company. After trying out the other occupations, in which he met marginal or moderate success, he rediscovered his talents for creativity in writing and eventually became a Bengali author and poet. Married to Beena Mitra, he was, by profession, a Bengali professor at City College in north Kolkata. He spent almost his entire life in a house at Kalighat, Kolkata. <b>As an Author & Editor</b> In November 1923, Mitra came from Dhaka, Bangladesh and stayed in a mess at Gobinda Ghoshal Lane, Kolkata.
    [Show full text]
  • Balika Badhu: a Selected Anthology of Bengali Short Stories' Monish Ranjan Chatterjee University of Dayton, [email protected]
    University of Dayton eCommons Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Department of Electrical and Computer Publications Engineering 2002 Translation of 'Balika Badhu: A Selected Anthology of Bengali Short Stories' Monish Ranjan Chatterjee University of Dayton, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: http://ecommons.udayton.edu/ece_fac_pub Part of the Computer Engineering Commons, Electrical and Electronics Commons, Electromagnetics and Photonics Commons, Optics Commons, Other Electrical and Computer Engineering Commons, and the Systems and Communications Commons eCommons Citation Chatterjee, Monish Ranjan, "Translation of 'Balika Badhu: A Selected Anthology of Bengali Short Stories'" (2002). Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications. Paper 362. http://ecommons.udayton.edu/ece_fac_pub/362 This Book is brought to you for free and open access by the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at eCommons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications by an authorized administrator of eCommons. For more information, please contact [email protected], [email protected]. Translator'sl?rcfacc This project, which began with the desire to render into English a rather long tale by Bimal Kar about five years ago, eventually grew into a considerably more extended compilation of Bengali short stories by ten of the most well­ known practitioners of that art since the heyday of Rabindranath Tagore. The collection is limited in many ways, not the least of which being that no woman writer has been included, and that it contains only a baker's dozen stories (if we count Bonophool's micro-stories collectively as one )-a number pitifully small considering the vast and prolific field of authors and stories a translator has at his or her disposal.
    [Show full text]
  • Barnita Bagchi (Utrecht University) Ār Konakhāne/'Somewhere Else
    Cracow Indological Studies Vol. XX, No. 2 (2018), pp. 163–178 https://doi.org/10.12797/CIS.20.2018.02.08 Barnita Bagchi (Utrecht University) [email protected] Ār konakhāne/‘Somewhere Else’: Utopian Resonances in Lila Majumdar’s Autobiographical Writing* SUMMARY: This article examines the autobiographical writings of Lila Majumdar, 1908–2007, a writer most famous for zany, fantastical, defamiliarizing, speculative fiction for children and young adults. Majumdar was an influential maker of cul- tural history. While her natal Ray/Raychaudhuri family comprised master entertain- ers who simultaneously brought reformist, innovative values into the public sphere of the arts, the leading woman writer from this milieu, in her autobiographical and memoir-based volumes Ār konakhāne (‘Somewhere Else’, [1967] 1989), Pākdaṇḍī (‘Winding, Hilly Road’, [1986] 2001), and Kheror khātā (‘Miscellany’ or ‘Scrapbook’, [1982] 2009), imaginatively created utopias. These ‘otherwheres’, to use a word that captures ­utopian connotations that she creates in her writing, give voice to the mar- ginal and the liminal. We find in her autobiographical writing the dual urge of longing for a utopian elsewhere, and a dissatisfaction with all the places one finds temporary mooring in. KEYWORDS: Lila Majumdar, modernity, utopia, gender, reformist, autobiography In memory of Professor Jasodhara Bagchi, 1937–2015, pathbreaking scholar of Bengali women’s writing and culture Remembering and haunted by lost and elusive spaces, connecting homes and worlds, building fragile everyday utopias, representing * An earlier version of this article was presented at an international work- shop on ‘Opening up Intimate Spaces: Women’s Writing and Auto biography in India’, at the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland.
    [Show full text]
  • Comics and Science Fiction in West Bengal
    DANIELA CAPPELLO | 1 Comics and Science Fiction in West Bengal Daniela Cappello Abstract: In this paper I look at four examples of Bengali SF (science fiction) comics by two great authors and illustrators of sequential art: Mayukh Chaudhuri (Yātrī, Smārak) and Narayan Debnath (Ḍrāgoner thābā, Ajānā deśe). Departing from a con- ventional understanding of SF as a fixed genre, I aim at showing that the SF comic is a ‘mode’ rather than a ‘genre’, building on a very fluid notion of boundaries between narrative styles, themes, and tropes formally associated with fixed genres. In these Bengali comics, it is especially the visual space of the comic that allows for blending and ‘contamination’ with other typical features drawn from adventure and detective fiction. Moreover, a dominant thematic thread that cross-cuts the narratives here examined are the tropes of the ‘other’ and the ‘unknown’, which are in fact central images of both adventure and SF: the exploration and encounter with ‘unknown’ (ajānā) worlds and ‘strange’ species (adbhut jāti) is mirrored in the usage of a lan- guage that expresses ‘otherness’ and strangeness. These examples show that the medium of the comic framing the SF story adds further possibilities of reading ‘genre hybridity’ as constitutive of the genre of SF as such. WHAT’S IN A COMIC? Before addressing SF comics in West Bengal, I will first look at some interna- tional definitions of comic to outline the main problematics that have been raised in the literature on this subject. In one of the first books introducing the world of comics to artists and academics, Will Eisner looks at the me- chanics of ‘sequential art’ (a term coined by Eisner himself) describing it as a dual ‘form of reading’ (Eisner 1985: 8): The format of the comic book presents a montage of both word and image, and the reader is thus required to exercise both visual and verbal interpretive skills.
    [Show full text]
  • Rabindranath Thakur 1861—1941 Family and Bites.Org.Inmilieu Dwarakanath
    bites.org.inRabindranath Thakur 1861—1941 Family and bites.org.inmilieu Dwarakanath Original family surname: Kushari Rarhi Brahmins, village: Kush, Burdwan district of Bengal Ancestors were “Pirali” Brahmins – Brahmins who had converted to Islam Dwarakanath Tagore – grandfather Well-versed in Bengali, English, Arabic, Farsi as well as legal matters bites.org.in Ventures in banking, insurance, shipping Very prominent citizen of Kolkata at that time [give years] Passed away in London Debendranath One of the founders of the Brahmo Samaj (1843) Deeply spiritual, but did not renounce his considerable material possessions Spirit of detachment bites.org.in Master of the Upanishads Milieu Family at the forefront of the Bengal Renaissance Literary magazines Dhrupad musicians, Western classical music performances at home – in bites.org.inthe courtyard Jorasanko Thakurbari The ancestral house bites.org.inof the Thakur-s bites.org.in Panoramic view Jorasanko Thakurbari The courtyard for bites.org.inperformances The Ambience Immersed in music, plays Brahmo Samaj meetings, in which prayer songs played a very big part bites.org.in Many prayer songs were written by father Debendranath bites.org.in Travels: India bites.org.inand England Awakening of the poet After Upanayan, left Kolkata with his father Shantiniketan, Amritsar, the hill station Dalhousie Acquaintance with the classical poetry of Kalidasa When he was 16, he completed a collection of poems called “Bhanusingher Podabolee” “Gahanakusumakunjamajhey” bites.org.in The story
    [Show full text]
  • Visva-Bharati, Santiniketan Title Accno Language Author / Script Folios DVD Remarks
    www.ignca.gov.in Visva-Bharati, Santiniketan Title AccNo Language Author / Script Folios DVD Remarks CF, All letters to A 1 Bengali Many Others 75 RBVB_042 Rabindranath Tagore Vol-A, Corrected, English tr. A Flight of Wild Geese 66 English Typed 112 RBVB_006 By K.C. Sen A Flight of Wild Geese 338 English Typed 107 RBVB_024 Vol-A A poems by Dwijendranath to Satyendranath and Dwijendranath Jyotirindranath while 431(B) Bengali Tagore and 118 RBVB_033 Vol-A, presenting a copy of Printed Swapnaprayana to them A poems in English ('This 397(xiv Rabindranath English 1 RBVB_029 Vol-A, great utterance...') ) Tagore A song from Tapati and Rabindranath 397(ix) Bengali 1.5 RBVB_029 Vol-A, stage directions Tagore A. Perumal Collection 214 English A. Perumal ? 102 RBVB_101 CF, All letters to AA 83 Bengali Many others 14 RBVB_043 Rabindranath Tagore Aakas Pradeep 466 Bengali Rabindranath 61 RBVB_036 Vol-A, Tagore and 1 www.ignca.gov.in Visva-Bharati, Santiniketan Title AccNo Language Author / Script Folios DVD Remarks Sudhir Chandra Kar Aakas Pradeep, Chitra- Bichitra, Nabajatak, Sudhir Vol-A, corrected by 263 Bengali 40 RBVB_018 Parisesh, Prahasinee, Chandra Kar Rabindranath Tagore Sanai, and others Indira Devi Bengali & Choudhurani, Aamar Katha 409 73 RBVB_029 Vol-A, English Unknown, & printed Indira Devi Aanarkali 401(A) Bengali Choudhurani 37 RBVB_029 Vol-A, & Unknown Indira Devi Aanarkali 401(B) Bengali Choudhurani 72 RBVB_029 Vol-A, & Unknown Aarogya, Geetabitan, 262 Bengali Sudhir 72 RBVB_018 Vol-A, corrected by Chhelebele-fef. Rabindra- Chandra
    [Show full text]
  • Nandan Gupta. `Prak-Bibar` Parbe Samaresh Basu. Nimai Bandyopadhyay
    BOOK DESCRIPTION AUTHOR " Contemporary India ". Nandan Gupta. `Prak-Bibar` Parbe Samaresh Basu. Nimai Bandyopadhyay. 100 Great Lives. John Cannong. 100 Most important Indians Today. Sterling Special. 100 Most Important Indians Today. Sterling Special. 1787 The Grand Convention. Clinton Rossiter. 1952 Act of Provident Fund as Amended on 16th November 1995. Government of India. 1993 Vienna Declaration and Programme of Action. Indian Institute of Human Rights. 19e May ebong Assame Bangaliar Ostiter Sonkot. Bijit kumar Bhattacharjee. 19-er Basha Sohidera. Dilip kanti Laskar. 20 Tales From Shakespeare. Charles & Mary Lamb. 25 ways to Motivate People. Steve Chandler and Scott Richardson. 42-er Bharat Chara Andolane Srihatta-Cacharer abodan. Debashish Roy. 71 Judhe Pakisthan, Bharat O Bangaladesh. Deb Dullal Bangopadhyay. A Book of Education for Beginners. Bhatia and Bhatia. A River Sutra. Gita Mehta. A study of the philosophy of vivekananda. Tapash Shankar Dutta. A advaita concept of falsity-a critical study. Nirod Baron Chakravarty. A B C of Human Rights. Indian Institute of Human Rights. A Basic Grammar Of Moden Hindi. ----- A Book of English Essays. W E Williams. A Book of English Prose and Poetry. Macmillan India Ltd.. A book of English prose and poetry. Dutta & Bhattacharjee. A brief introduction to psychology. Clifford T Morgan. A bureaucrat`s diary. Prakash Krishen. A century of government and politics in North East India. V V Rao and Niru Hazarika. A Companion To Ethics. Peter Singer. A Companion to Indian Fiction in E nglish. Pier Paolo Piciucco. A Comparative Approach to American History. C Vann Woodward. A comparative study of Religion : A sufi and a Sanatani ( Ramakrishana).
    [Show full text]
  • Modernisms in India
    Modernisms in India Modernisms in India Supriya Chaudhuri The Oxford Handbook of Modernisms Edited by Peter Brooker, Andrzej Gąsiorek, Deborah Longworth, and Andrew Thacker Print Publication Date: Dec 2010 Subject: Literature, Literary Studies - 20th Century Onwards, Literary Studies - Postcolonial Literature Online Publication Date: Sep 2012 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199545445.013.0053 Abstract and Keywords This article examines the history of modernism in India. It suggests that though the dis­ tinctions between modernity, modernization, and modernism are particularly complicated in the case of India, they remain crucial to a historical understanding of the ‘modern’ in all its senses. The article argues that the characteristic feature of Indian modernism in In­ dia is that it is manifestly social and historical rather than a hypostasis of the new as in the West. It contends that modernisms in India are deeply implicated in the construction of a secular national identity at home in the world, and in this respect answer a historical need to fashion a style for the modern as it is locally experienced. Keywords: modernism, India, modernization, modernity, national identity, hypostasis THE distinctions between modernity, modernization, and modernism are particularly com­ plicated in the case of India, but remain crucial to a historical understanding of the ‘mod­ ern’ in all its senses. Modernity, as a social and intellectual project, and modernization, as its means, are associated with the influence in India of Europe and of Enlightenment ra­ tionality from the eighteenth century onwards. Modernism, as an aesthetic, is far more limited in period and scope. Nevertheless, just as recent cultural criticism has proposed the existence of ‘alternative modernities’1 not native to the West, so too our attention has been drawn to ‘alternative modernisms’, or ‘modernisms at large’.2 The question of peri­ odicity, as of location, is complicated by the historical fact that modernism as an aesthetic was simultaneously restricted and elitist, and international and democratic.
    [Show full text]
  • Romantic Archives: Literature and the Politics of Identity in Bengal Author(S): Dipesh Chakrabarty Source: Critical Inquiry , Vol
    Romantic Archives: Literature and the Politics of Identity in Bengal Author(s): Dipesh Chakrabarty Source: Critical Inquiry , Vol. 30, No. 3 (Spring 2004), pp. 654-682 Published by: The University of Chicago Press Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/421165 JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms The University of Chicago Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Critical Inquiry This content downloaded from 117.240.50.232 on Fri, 19 Jul 2019 07:53:17 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Romantic Archives: Literature and the Politics of Identity in Bengal Dipesh Chakrabarty 1. Introduction A letter from a friend in Calcutta recently put to me this question: Will the investment in Bengali literature that marked Bengal’s colonial moder- nity survive the impact of globalization? Bengalis have lost their appetite for [Bengali] literature, [said my friend]. “The reading habits of the Bengali public have changed so much that were someone to write a Pather Panchali [a famous novel published in 1927] today, they would not be able to attract the attention of readers unless a well-known filmmaker created a hyped-up film ver- sion of it.
    [Show full text]
  • Literary Cultures in History Reconstructions from South Asia
    Literary Cultures in History Reconstructions from South Asia EDITED BY Sheldon Pollock UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS Berkeley Los Angeles London 8 The Two Histories of Literary Culture in Bengal Sudipta Kaviraj INTRODUCTION A general reading of the history of a particular literature requires, first of all, a principle of organization. Histories of Bangla literature usually offer a narrative of continuity: they seek to show, quite legitimately, how the liter- ary culture develops through successive stages—how literary works of one period become the stock on which later stages carry out their productive op- erations. These studies are less interested in asking how literary mentalities come to be transformed or how a continuing tradition can be interrupted, or in speculating on possible reasons behind these significant literary turns. In an attempt to move away from these conventional histories, which record unproblematically the sequential narrative of the production of texts and their authors, this essay gives attention primarily to two questions. The first is: What were the major historical “literary cultures,” that is, the sensibilities or mentalities constructed around a common core of tastes, methods of tex- tual production, paratextual activities (like performance, recitation, or other use in religious, nonliterary contexts), reception, and the social composition of audiences? The second question, closely related to the first, is: How do literary cultures, especially deeply entrenched literary cultures, change? The treatment of Bangla literary history in this essay, therefore, focuses more on textualities or text types than on individual texts, and it offers hardly any literary-critical analysis of major canonical works. A figure like Rabin- dranath Tagore is treated with relative neglect, since he does not represent a phase of serious interpretative contention or rupture in literary production I thank Sheldon Pollock for detailed comments on this paper at different stages of its prepa- ration.
    [Show full text]
  • Ramakrishna Mission Vidyamandira Belur Math, Howrah, 711202 Central Library List of Books : Reference & Others Acc
    RAMAKRISHNA MISSION VIDYAMANDIRA BELUR MATH, HOWRAH, 711202 CENTRAL LIBRARY LIST OF BOOKS : REFERENCE & OTHERS ACC. NO. CALL. NO. TITLE OF THE BOOK AUTHOR PUBLISHER YEAR PRICE SUBJECT HEADING 44638 R032/ENC 1978 ENYCOLPAEDIA BRITANNICA ENCYCLOPAEDIA BRITANNICA, ING 1978 150 ENCYCLOPEDIA-ENGLISH 44639 R032/ENC 1979 ENYCOLPAEDIA BRITANNICA ENCYCLOPAEDIA BRITANNICA, ING 1979 100 ENCYCLOPEDIA-ENGLISH 44641 R-032/BRI 1981 ENYCOLPAEDIA BRITANNICA ENCYCLOPEADIA BRITANNICA, INC 1981 100 ENCYCLOPEDIA-ENGLISH 15648 R-032/BRI 1982 ENYCOLPAEDIA BRITANNICA ENCYCLOPAEDIA BRITANNICA, ING 1982 100 ENCYCLOPEDIA-ENGLISH 15649 R-032/ENC 1983 ENYCOLPAEDIA BRITANNICA ENCYCLOPAEDIA BRITANNICA, ING 1983 100 ENCYCLOPEDIA-ENGLISH 17913 R032/ENC 1984 ENYCOLPAEDIA BRITANNICA ENCYCLOPAEDIA BRITANNICA, ING 1984 350 ENCYCLOPEDIA-ENGLISH 18648 R-032/ENC 1985 ENYCOLPAEDIA BRITANNICA ENCYCLOPAEDIA BRITANNICA, ING 1985 100 ENCYCLOPEDIA-ENGLISH 18786 R-032/ENC 1986 ENYCOLPAEDIA BRITANNICA ENCYCLOPAEDIA BRITANNICA, ING 1986 100 ENCYCLOPEDIA-ENGLISH 19693 R-032/ENC 1987 ENYCOLPAEDIA BRITANNICA ENCYCLOPEADIA BRITANNICA, INC 1987 100 ENCYCLOPEDIA-ENGLISH 21140 R-032/ENC 1988 ENYCOLPAEDIA BRITANNICA ENCYCLOPEADIA BRITANNICA, INC 1988 100 ENCYCLOPEDIA-ENGLISH 21141 R-032/ENC 1989 ENYCOLPAEDIA BRITANNICA ENCYCLOPEADIA BRITANNICA, INC 1989 100 ENCYCLOPEDIA-ENGLISH 1 ACC. NO. CALL. NO. TITLE OF THE BOOK AUTHOR PUBLISHER YEAR PRICE SUBJECT HEADING 21426 R-032/ENC 1990 ENYCOLPAEDIA BRITANNICA ENCYCLOPAEDIA BRITANNICA, ING 1990 150 ENCYCLOPEDIA-ENGLISH 21797 R-032/ENC 1991 ENYCOLPAEDIA
    [Show full text]
  • The Pen Souvenir Revolt
    THE PEN SOUVENIR REVOLT underground literature published during the emergency A Letter from a Father to his Son written by Gour Kishore Ghosh, from prison The author of the following letter is a journalist of repute on the staff of Calcutta's "Ananda Bazar Patrika". He was arrested on October 6, 1975 for allowing this letter to be published in Kolkata, a Bengali monthly edited by Jyotirmoy Datta. Later Bhumiputra of Baroda was asked to deposit a security of Rs. 25,000 for publishing the Gujarati version of this letter. Copies of it were made and circulated by the underground network. So you understand that I resent very much the fact dean that my freedom as a writer has been taken away; I For some time now I have been thinking of having a cannot reconcile myself to this situation. Not merely few words with you about myself. For about two that, I want to register publicly my protest against this months now something has been troubling me. I find wrong. But whenever I think of protesting, your face, no remedy for it. The only relief that I can expect is to the faces of your sisters, of your mother and of your unburden my mind to you. grand-mother all appear before my minds' eye. Some of At your age —you are only thirteen—much of what I you are young. Some helpless and some old. All of you shall speak now may seen incomprehensible. Yet the are dependent on me. All these years I have tried to reason I write to you alone of my trouble is that you provide you with a secure home.
    [Show full text]