Bangla Literature

Essencelessness, Lack of Self and the Abject Human Condition: Rethinking Jibanananda Das’s “Bodh”

/
260 views

Biswarup Das
Department of English, Jamaldaha TDH School, Coochbehar, West Bengal, India.
Rupkatha Journal, Vol. 15, Issue 3, 2023. https://doi.org/10.21659/rupkatha.v15n3.13
[Article History: Received: 11 July 2023. Revised: 24 August 2023. Accepted: 25 August 2023. Published: 26 August 2023]
Full-Text PDFIssue Access

Abstract

The present article strives to explore the “nausea” that emerges in an individual from the sense of the lack of a priori meaning in the world and the non-existence of the self through the development of the persona’s thoughts in Jibanananda Das’s 1930 poem “Bodh.” The persona is found perturbed by a flummoxing “sense” right at the outset. His striving to comprehend what the sense is about and reflection on the enterprises of his past and the probable future eventually lead him to realize that whatever he encounters around or action he can get involved in is devoid of essence. He also finds the existence of his self unsubstantiated. His realization proves anguishing and alienates him from the rest of humanity by evoking in him feelings of forlornness and life’s absurdity. The whole argument concerning the persona’s development of thought and his final apprehension and agony will be carried out by taking into account Jean-Paul Sartre’s ideas of essencelessness and nausea.

Keywords: Essencelessness, existence, meaning, nausea, self, sense, world.
Citation: Das, Biswarup. 2023. Essencelessness, Lack of Self and the Abject Human Condition: Rethinking Jibanananda Das’s “Bodh”. Rupkatha Journal 15:3. https://doi.org/10.21659/rupkatha.v15n3.13 

From Tattered Past to Triumphant Present: Weaving Partitioned Lives by a Dalit Girl-child in Kalyani Thakur Charal’s Novella Andhar Bil O Kicchu Manush

///
458 views

Atreyee Sinha1 & Shuchi2
1Research Scholar, National Institute of Technology Mizoram. ORCID: 0000-0001-6755-2019. Email: atreyee.lterature@gmail.com.
2Assistant Professor, National Institute of Technology Mizoram. ORCID: 0000-0001-9462-8664. Email: shuchi.hss@nitmz.ac.in.

Rupkatha Journal, Vol. 14, Issue 4, December, 2022. https://doi.org/10.21659/rupkatha.v14n4.15 
Abstract Full-Text PDF Issue Access

Abstract

Inherited memory reflects the intensity of the impact of incidents, experienced by the ancestors on the descendants, and in the case of the partition of Bengal, these memories of memories are about both the violence-induced partition and its distressful reverberations as well as about the amiable and delightful past habitation in East Bengal. However, the awful commotion that the survivors confront steals all the researchers’ attention, pushing the amicable exhibition in the past land to the background. Again, the transportation of memory to the second generation of these refugees assists them to reconstruct as well as to dismantle the eulogized notion of the lost land and look to analyze the past incident in a more pragmatic way that consequently leads to a dichotomous intellection of the two generations, as can be found in the novella Andhar Bil O Kicchu Manush (Waterbody Named Andhar and Some People) by Bengali Dalit writer Kalyani Thakur Charal. The juvenescence dealing with the postmemory of past times by the progeny of the refugees, more specifically by a Dalit girl in this novella, paves the way for further study on the class, caste, and gendered space of Dalit women in partitioned Bengal from the perspective of a child. A deductive, analytical, and objective method has been used in this research to comprehend the factual local historiography of a particular community in a specific locality of the border region of West Bengal through a fiction based on the collective memory of the populace.

Keywords: postmemory, Bengal, Namasudra, refugee, childhood, second-generation

You might be interested in

Octavio Paz Meets Malay Roychoudhury: The History of El Corno Emplumado and the Evolution of a Poetics

///
326 views

Tirtha Prasad Mukhopadhyay1 & Alfredo Zárate-Flores2

1&2 Universidad de Guanajuato

Rupkatha Journal, Vol. 14, Issue 3, September 2022, Pages 1–10. https://doi.org/10.21659/rupkatha.v14n3.02

First published: September 20, 2022 | Area: Latin America | License: CC BY-NC 4.0

(This article is published under the themed issue “Across Cultures: Ibero-America and India”)
Abstract Full-Text PDF Cite
Octavio Paz Meets Malay Roychoudhury: The History of El Corno Emplumado and the Evolution of a Poetics

Abstract

In this article, we explore how the destinies of some poets were intertwined in the history of publications of El Corno emplumado, a Spanish-English bilingual literary journal that was edited by Octavio Paz among others and published in Mexico from 1962 to 1969. The epistolary relationships that El Corno emplumado engendered contributed to the writing ethic of an entire generation. The poets developed the flipped metaphor as a descriptive fall for differential semantics, as a rhetorical figure or strategy which endows words with sensations that differ from the immediately embodied or corporeal moments they represent. El Corno thus unites Allen Ginsberg, Octavio Paz, Ernesto Cardenal, Malay Roychoudhury, Shakti Chattopadhyay, and others in the recognition of a global style or poetics. We discuss epistolary contents from within the orbit of El Corno Emplumado to understand how the dialogue between Paz and Malay offers hermeneutical insights into the surreal, Hungry poetics born in the middle of the last century. Above all the history of Malay Roychoudhury’s poetic rebellion, his incarceration, and the bitter protest against this incident in USA and Latin America strikes a chord of union in the dialogic narrative of the two vast continents of America and India.

Keywords: El Corno Emplumado, Eroticism, Interior experience, Hungryalist, Surrealism

Full-Text PDF Cite

You might be interested in

Reading Tradition in Food: An Interdisciplinary Study of Bengali Food Writing

//
315 views

Nilanjana Debnath

Assistant Professor of English, Koneru Lakshmaiah Education Foundation.

Email: njd.nilanjana1@gmail.com

 Volume 13, Number 4, 2021 I Full-Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v13n4.11

Abstract

Food Studies has been a prominent part of Interdisciplinary Studies in the West from the 1980s and it is catching up in India as well. A close study of recipes and other forms of food writing can offer insights into the everyday culinary negotiations and the constitution of a cultural ‘tradition’ of taste. These insights of gastropolitics may help us better understand the functioning of subliminal hegemonic technologies and everyday resistance to the same. In our era of postcolonial globalization, where domination and subjugation happen through micro-politics of power, our readings of food writing may open new doors of reading and theorizing heritage and history.

Keywords: Food writing, recipes, cookbooks, Bengal, tradition, everyday, embodiment, taste.

Gender Subtexts in Collusive Linkages between Bhadralok Ethos and Colonial Law in Select Daroga Daptor Narratives

//
219 views

Tapti Roy

PhD Research Scholar, Department of English, Jamia Millia Islamia. ORCID Id: 0000-0001-9354-1882. Email: subterraneanhominin@gmail.com

 Volume 13, Number 3, 2021 I Full-Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v13n3.39

PlumX Metrics

Abstract

Crime writings can be said to have originated in Bengal in the last decades of the 19th century with the emergence of narratives of seemingly true criminal investigations compiled by real-life darogas like Girish Chandra Bose, Priyanath Mukhopadhyay, and Bakaullah. These non-canonical accounts though rendered in simplistic narrative techniques to report cases that may appear inconsequential to present-day readership not only set the field for more complex fictional works of criminal investigation but also laid the foundations of a new genre of vernacular popular fiction favoured till date. It can be mentioned here that the criminal investigation accounts of Priyanath Mukhopadhyay were serialised as Daroga Daptor for a significant span of a decade which owing to its elements of thrill, mystery, and instruction were immensely coveted by the readers. The significance of the Daroga Daptor narratives for the purpose of the paper however lies in its reflections of the contemporary socio-legal setup comprised of responses towards sexual mores, socio-ethical strictures, and gender positions. In this context, the objective of the paper is to analyse select narratives of Daroga Daptor with females as victims or accused, namely the novel Adarini and the short story “Promoda”. Initiating the process with an overview of the office of the daroga emphasising on the popular associations of daroga with sloth and corruption, the paper will note the manner in which Daroga Daptor marked a paradigm shift in the popular imagination with regards to the intellectual abilities and sensibilities of daroga. Proceeding with the analysis of the aforesaid narratives, the paper by emphasising the 19th-century gender roles with respect to hypermasculine bhadralok norms and tenets of colonial law will situate the women characters as existing in an ambiguous position within the colluding grounds of the two apparently opposite masculine factions. The paper thus will establish the 19th-century native female body as a passive pliable vessel for various ideological experimentations reading them as perpetually incarcerated within the dynamic limits of an efficient, promptly adaptive, and multifariously hegemonic masculine order.

Keywords: 19th century Bengal, Gender relations, Daroga Daptor, Crime Writing, Bhadralok, Priyanath Mukhopadhyay

You might be interested in

Consciously eco-conscious: An eco-conscious re-reading of Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay’s Moon Mountain as young adult literature

//
296 views

Narendiran S1 and Dr. Bhuvaneswari R2

1Research Scholar, School of Social Sciences and Languages, Vellore Institute of Technology, Vandalur – Kelambakkam Road, Chennai-600127, Tamilnadu, India. Email: narendiran10@gmail.com. ORCID iD: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9280-9178

2Assistant Professor (Sr.), School of Social Sciences and Languages, Vellore Institute of Technology, Vandalur – Kelambakkam Road, Chennai-600127, Tamilnadu, India. Email: bhuvanadoss@yahoo.co.in. ORCID iD: https:// orcid.org/0000-0003-4660-7118

 Volume 13, Number 2, 2021 I Full-Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v13n2.25

PlumX Metrics

Abstract

A better physical environment is quintessential for a comfortable life; this conscious of environment has been one of the post-world-war effects. The predominance of colonialism is accompanied by exploitation of forest and environment.  Since then, land is nothing more than a resource that conferred wealth and materials for the colonizers. The depletion of forest for agriculture and urban development is a historical phenomenon. It is then aggravated by industrial revolution and colonization. The legacies of colonialism have influenced the mindset of the colonized. Recently, the scarcity of the resources and climate change are the rising concerns of the world. This is mainly because of the humans’ insensitivity towards nature and literature plays an effective role in spreading the need for being eco-conscious. This article highlights the role of young adult narratives in spreading social awareness and interprets the classic Indian young adult novel Moon Mountain by Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay, which has symbolic references offering ecological insights. The journey of the protagonist through the African continent is critiqued to highlight the enfeeble consciousness about the natural ecology of an individual who seizes material development. This study partly brings out how the colonial legacies continues to influence the contemporary environmental challenges, and discusses the literary relationships between nature and youth influence readers’ attitudes towards the contemporary anxieties such as climate change and related environmental crises.

 Keywords: Eco-consciousness, Habitat, Young, Adult, Environment, Nature

Positioning the Gendered Subaltern: Body, Speech and Resistance in Mahasweta Devi’s Narratives

///
292 views

Joe Philip,1 Renu Bhadola Dangwal2 & Vinod Balakrishnan3

 1Research Scholar, English, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences. National Institute of Technology, Uttarakhand, Srinagar, Garhwal, Uttarakhand-246174, Email id:joephilip.phd14@nituk.ac.in. ORCID: 0000-0002-7593-046X

2Assistant Professor, English, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences. National Institute of Technology, Uttarakhand, Srinagar, Garhwal, Uttarakhand-246174, Email id: rbdangwal@nituk.ac.in. ORCID: 0000-0002-7929-1570

3Professor, Department of Humanities, National Institute of Technology, Tiruchirappalli, Tamil Nadu-620015, Email id: vinod@nitt.edu

 Volume 12, Number 5, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n5.rioc1s16n5

 Abstract

The postcolonial theory locates subaltern women as ‘doubly effaced’ and distanced from achieving agency to speak and participate in resistance. Due to her diversified colonized identity, much of the critical thought does not see any possibility for subaltern women participating in resistance. This line of argument implies a critical space in which the engagement with problematics inevitably leaves out subaltern women in the emergent resistance discourse. Moreover, such a position is suggestive of perceiving human activity and experience in closed terms and an intent to preserve subalternity. The present paper argues that, if perceived through a wider understanding of the concept of resistance, subaltern women may be seen to achieve agency as they communicate their plight vocally or silently and participate in resistance. Taking inferences from the literary narratives of Mahasweta Devi like Imaginary Maps, Breast Stories, the paper examines the strategies Devi employs to bring marginalized women into resistance and establishes that the ‘body’ emerges not only as a site of oppression but also as an important trope of power and resistance in her stories.

Keywords: gendered subaltern, doubly colonized, agency, hegemony and resistance.

Women and Agency in Bankim’s Rajmohan’s Wife and Tagore’s The Home and The World

///
274 views

Manju Dhariwal

Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, The LNM Institute of Information Technology, Jaipur. ORCID: 0000-0002-1579-1218, Email: manju@lnmiit.ac.in

 Volume 12, Number 5, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n5.rioc1s16n3

Abstract

Written almost half a century apart, Rajmohan’s Wife (1864) and The Home and the World (1916) can be read as women centric texts written in colonial India. The plot of both the texts is set in Bengal, the cultural and political centre of colonial India. Rajmohan’s Wife, arguably the first Indian English novel, is one of the first novels to realistically represent ‘Woman’ in the nineteenth century. Set in a newly emerging society of   India, it provides an insight into the status of women, their susceptibility and dependence on men. The Home and the World, written at the height of Swadeshi movement in Bengal, presents its woman protagonist in a much progressive space. The paper closely examines these two texts and argues that women enact their agency in relational spaces which leads to the process of their ‘becoming’. The paper analyses this journey of the progress of the self, which starts with Matangini and culminates in Bimala. The paper concludes that women’s journey to emancipation is symbolic of the journey of the nation to independence.

Key Words: Swadeshi, Nationalism, Female agency, Patriarchy, Liminality

Unraveling the Social Position of Women in Late-Medieval Bengal: A Critical Analysis of Narrative Art on Baranagar Temple Facades

///
202 views

Bikas Karmakar1 & Ila Gupta2

1Assistant Professor, Government College of Art & Craft Calcutta. bikaskarmakar@gmail.com

2Former Professor, Department of Architecture & Planning, IIT Roorkee. ilafap@gmail.com

 Volume 12, Number 5, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n5.rioc1s16n2

Abstract

The genesis of the present study can be traced to an aspiration to work on the narratives of religious architecture. The Terracotta Temples of Baranagar in Murshidabad, West Bengal offer a very insightful vantage point in this regard. The elaborate works of terracotta on the facades of these temples patronized by Rani Bhabani during the mid-eighteenth century possess immense narrative potential to reconstruct the history of the area in the given time period. The portrayals on various facets of society, environment, culture, religion, mythology, and space and communication systems make these temples exemplary representatives for studying narrative art. While a significant portion of the temple facades depicts gods, goddesses, and mythological stories, the on-spot study also found a substantial number of plaques observed mainly on the base friezes representing the engagement of women in various mundane activities. This study explores the narrative intentions of such portrayals. The depictions incorporated are validated with various types of archival evidence facilitating cross-corroboration of the sources. The study sheds light on the crucial role played by women in domestic spheres and their engagement in social activities. The portrayals act as indispensable visual evidence for a holistic understanding of the life of women in Late Medieval Bengal. However, with the passage of time, the temples have been susceptible to the processes of decay necessitating the need for conservation and urgent restoration of this invaluable heritage site.

Keywords: Terracotta temples, Baranagar temple facades, women of Late Medieval Bengal, narrative art, Murshidabad temple architecture.

 

Book Review: A Primal Issue: Stories of Women by Subrata Basu

//
172 views

Number of Pages: 144. Publication Year: 2020. Publisher: Orient Blackswan

ISBN: 9789352879045. Price: Rs. 295.00/-

Reviewed by 

Ms. Adishree Vats

Assistant Professor, Department of English Studies, Akal University, Talwandi Sabo, Punjab. Email: vatsadishree8@gmail.com

 Volume 12, Number 4, July-September, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n4.20

The book, “A Primal Issue: Stories of Women”, is a gripping, enthralling anthology of analytical stories, translated by Subrata Basu, and written originally in Bengali by Jagdish Gupta, a “trailblazer” (p. xv) of modernist movement in India. With its epicentric plunge on the word “primal”, the book very meticulously exhibits a valorous investigation of interdictions and anathemas existing in the splendid post-Tagore chapter of Bengali literature. This revelatory compendium stresses on Jagdish Gupta’s seven translated stories, all originally published between 1927 and 1959, with females as chief characters, scrutinizing the intense connotations of life at personal as well as societal levels.  Every chapter is dedicated to one story so as to undrape the aggregation of the dilemmas, quandaries, and predicaments of Bengalis in general and women in particular for whom the repugnance of conservatism continues to exist. The stories unsparingly underscore the barbarous realities of the society, such as polygamy, child-marriage, widow-remarriage, women’s oppression and marginalization..Full Text PDF

1 2