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

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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

Boundaries as Crossovers: The Shoreline as a Digressive Site in Ramkumar Mukhopadhyay’s Dhanapatir Sinhalyatra (2010)

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Upamanyu Sengupta

Assistant Professor of English, Maharashtra National Law University Mumbai. Orcid ID: 0000-0001-7483-8916. Email: senguptaupamanyu@gmail.com

 Volume 12, Number 3, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n3.31

 Abstract

A prose retelling from the sixteenth century verse composition of Mukundaram Chakrabarti’s Kavikankan Chandi of the merchant Dhanapati’s voyage to Sri Lanka, Ramkumar Mukhopadhyay’s award-winning Bengali narrative Dhanapatir Sinhalyatra (2010)[Dhanapati’s Journey to Sri Lanka] is richly digressive. These digressions feature two types of stories: first, tales from the inhabitants along the shoreline as they await the arrival of Dhanapati’s fleet and second, myths drawn from Ramayana and Mahabharata relating the spatial sanctity of the places the fleet passes by. This paper examines these digressions through the spatial category of the shoreline which functions as a zone of seamless crossover between the voyage and the stories. It is here that boundaries between the two become fluid and human stories set across different times and places segue into one another. If, as Ross Chambers argues, digressions demonstrate a ‘permeability of contexts’, shorelines in Dhanapatir Sinhalyatra trigger associations which drift away from the voyage to render it more tangible through an assemblage of the ports the fleet traverses and the stories that unfold in them. Shorelines are also sites for reversal of gazes as the focalizer keeps shifting from the voyagers to the waterside inhabitants who witness the fleet pass by. Here the narrrative veers away from a sequential, ordered and cohesively narrowed telling to a sense of place based on non-linear, decentered, and dilatory meditations of simultaneity.

Keywords: digressions, crossovers, shorelines, assemblage, sense of place

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Syed Mujtaba Ali’s Deshe Bideshe: an Indian’s perspective on Afghanistan

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Abhijit Ghosh

Assistant Professor of English, Balagarh B. K. Mahavidyalaya, Hooghly, West Bengal. Email: abghosh2002@yahoo.co.in

 Volume 12, Number 3, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n3.23

Abstract

Syed Mujtaba Ali’s Deshe Bideshe, first published in 1948, is a travel account of enduring popularity based on his experiences in Afghanistan during the years 1927 to 1929. In this reading I wish to concentrate on the distinctive quality that sets it apart from the typical travel writing of the age produced by the colonial encounter. Mujtaba Ali’s experience of colonialism in India combined with his profound sense of history makes him uniquely capable of providing a glimpse of Afghanistan during a period of social and cultural transformation. His portrayal of the Afghan identity in confrontation with external colonial forces and internal upheaval is not only invigorating but also challenging because it is not directed at demystification or categorization as in colonial texts aiming to comprehend the oriental. His colonised self-consciousness finds in the independent Afghan a cause to celebrate and thus allows us to explore his work as a postcolonial text. According to Justine D. Edwards and Rune Graulund, postcolonial travel writing “subverts both colonial claims to truth making, as well as the nexus between travel and domination” (Postcolonial Travel Writing: Critical Explorations, 3). Therefore, while a typical European travelogue like Robert Byron’s The Road to Oxiana (1937), written a few years after Ali’s visit provides an unabashed view of Afghanistan as a historical artefact requiring British protection, a colonised Indian’s account of Afghanistan hits out at the “nexus between travel and domination” and seeks to initiate a south-south dialogue inspired by the hope of regional collaboration.

Keywords: travel narrative, Afghanistan, colonialism, postcolonial text, Robert Byron

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Russia through the Eyes of the Tagores: Travelogues of Rabindranath and Saumyendranath

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Sajal Dey

Department of Russian Studies, the English and Foreign Languages University, Shillong Campus, Umshing-Mawkynroh, Shillong, Meghalaya, India. Email: sajaldey07@gmail.com

 Volume 12, Number 3, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n3.22

Abstract

Two Tagores, two visionaries; one as a poet-educationist, another as a revolutionary-politician, both from colonial India, then reeling under the British yoke, visited Russia at about the same time. While the elder Tagore, Nobel-laureate Rabindranath, was moved by the huge scale of development, mainly on the educational front, — the younger and the more rebellious one, Soumyendranath, studied deeply, paused, and raised questions, debated and disputed the gap between the so-called socialist theory and practice in Soviet Russia. Rabindranath wanted to visit post-revolution Russia for quite some time. After a few futile attempts his desire was ultimately fulfilled in 1930. What he primarily wanted to see was the all-embracing spread of education in the Soviet system and its results. His Russiar Chithi, or Letters from Russia bears testimony to his impression of the new ‘awakened’ Russia. In the very first line of his first letter from Moscow he writes, “In Russia at last! Whichever way I look, I am filled with wonder.” In spite of a few adverse comments that he made later on, this feeling of ‘wonder’ about Russia lasted throughout the collection. Soumyendranath, grandson of Rabindranath’s elder brother Dwijendranath, was one of the pioneers of communist movement in India. After a short period of romance with Gandhism that failed to answer some of the basic questions he had in his mind, Soumyendranath was attracted to socialism. He went to Russia in 1927, took lessons of communism from Bukharin himself, got admitted in the Lenin course at the Marx-Engels Institute, and also learned Russian language very well. A formidable intellectual, Soumyendranath never faltered to express his opinion even in Stalinist Russia. He debated with Bukharin, disputed Gorky’s opinion regarding proletarian literature, and opposed the Kuusinen Thesis in the sixth world congress of Comintern held in 1928. Shortly after that he went away, but came back to Russia in 1930 along with Rabindranath. His travelogue Jatri or The Wayfarer, among other things, carries his impression of Russia.

In this paper a comparative study of these two outlooks of the two Tagores has been undertaken, showing how these two great minds differed, as far as Russia was concerned, as evident from the travelogues and books they wrote and other related materials. Their personal relationship as well as literary and ideological influences on each other is one of the pivotal points of investigation. The important thing kept in view was that, both of them in their own way represented the country they belonged to, and their lifelong mission was emancipation of their homeland and its people, again in their own distinctive ways.

Keywords: Russian revolution, socialism, Tagores, Rabindranath, Soumyendranath

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Bengali Hindu pilgrims and travellers to the Himalayas from the late 19th to the late 20th century

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Nilanjana Sikdar Datta

Former Associate Professor of Sanskrit, Dumdum Motijheel College, Kolkata. Email: nil_sd54@hotmail.com

Volume 12, Number 3, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n3.06

Abstract

Bengali travel narratives have a rich repertoire of works that focus on travel as pilgrimage undertaken to the Himalayas, especially to the famous holy shrines of Kedarnath and Badrinath and to Kailasa and Manas Sarovar. This paper focuses on the changing nature of Himalayan pilgrimage down the centuries. The first part discusses two lesser known pilgrimages to the Himalayas where two monks of the Ramakrishna Mission order, namely Swami Akhandananda and Swami Apurvananda undertake their journey in 1887 and 1939 respectively. Their travelogues were published many years later by Udbodhan Karyalaya, the official mouthpiece of the Mission. In both the narratives we get details of the travails of travelling in those times with very little financial security and material comfort. The second part of the paper discusses issues raised by Umaprasad Mukhopadhyay in his travelogue Pancha Kedar where he tells us how, with changing times, the manner of travelling to the same holy places have undergone remarkable changes. The discussion then focuses upon another observation by the famous writer Narayan Sanyal who in his book Pather Mahaprasthan laments the demise of the original trekking routes of the pilgrims. In 1986, Saroj Kumar Bandyopadhyay visited Kailasa and Manas Sarovar and his narrative describing his month long package trip vouches for the changes that both the pilgrim and the pilgrimage had undergone to the same places almost half a century later.

Keywords: pilgrimage, Himalayas, trek routes, multifarious observations, Kailasa, Kedarnath

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Generic Shifts in Women’s Travel Writing between Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century Bengal

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Shrutakirti Dutta

PhD Scholar, Department of English, Jadavpur University, West Bengal, India. Orcid: 0000-0002-6781-9307. Email: shrutakirtidutta.93@gmail.com

Volume 12, Number 3, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n3.02

Abstract

Women’s travel writing in Bengal proliferated in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century through the popular form of serialized publications in journals such as Bharati (1877), Dasi (1892), Prabasi (1901), among others. However, to perceive this rich output of travel literature as a single, homogenous genre would be fallacious. Travel writing in this time undergoes several generic modifications as it journeys through the turn of the century. Through my paper I would like to trace these shifts within Bengali women’s travel narrative using the stretch of aryavarta as the anchoring landscape. From Prasannamae Debi in 1888 to Nanibala Ghosh in 1933, these travellers from Bengal travel to the north and north-west regions of India, mapping the same landscape but within diverse narrative frameworks, and in so doing, dramatically (and one could argue deliberately) alter the land they wish to represent. Their subjective position as women writers further inform and complicate their work, as do the contemporary political framework of the time they respectively inhabit. What the reader is left with can conservatively be termed travel writing, but can equally and with ease inhabit the roles of memoir, political writing, ethnographical study, among others.

Keywords: Travel Writing, Colonial Bengal, Women’s History, Hindu Revivalism, Aryavarta

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Emergence of Secular Travel in Bengali Cultural Universe: Some Passing Thoughts

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Simonti Sen

Professor of History & Director in the Directorate of State Archives, West Bengal. Email: sensimonti@gmail.com

Volume 12, Number 3, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n3.01

Abstract

This paper by no means presumes to provide a comprehensive analysis of the genesis and ramifications of Bengali travel consciousness either in thematic or chronological terms. It only seeks to highlight certain key aspects of Bengali ‘secular travel’ culture as it germinated in the colonial period. The term Bengali specifically implies the world of Hindu bhadralok and bhadramahila from where emerged the earliest writers of ‘secular’ travel accounts. This is of particular interest because travel, apart from pilgrimage, had no sanction within the traditional Brahamanical orthodoxy. The same cannot be said of the Islamic paedia, which was favourably inclined towards travel. Yet in the colonial period Bengali Muslims did not, in general, produce travel narratives of the ‘secular modern’ variety. One outstanding exception will be considered in this article. Travel among Bengalis took different forms. While there grew a tradition of travel within the country and producing books on them from the early eighteenth century, books on journeys to Europe and different eastern countries received the attention of publishers towards the end of nineteenth and early twentieth century. All these narratives are replete with binaries, such as we/they, home/ world and similar other usual tropes of articulation of ‘Self’ and the ‘Other’. The essay will end with a brief discussion of Deshe Bideshe (account of Kabul from 1927 to early 1929) by Syed Mujtaba Ali, which was quite exceptional in terms of both content and mode of ‘telling’.

Keywords: secular travel, Bengali society, colonial period, binaries of vision, Hindu bhadralok

Women and Cultural Transformation: The Politics of Representation in the Novels of Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay

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Sudip Roy Choudhury

Ph.D Research Scholar, Raiganj University, West Bengal, India. Orcid: 0000-0003-4833-7975. Email id: sudiproychoudhury60@gmail.com

 Volume 12, Number 2, April-June, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n2.07

 Abstract

This paper begins by arguing that Bankimchandra, a pioneering novelist and nationalist thinker of India, sought to contain the nineteenth century ‘woman question’ within his nationalist project of ‘cultural transformation’. But this nationalist ideal is based on a gendered differentiation of the nation-culture into spiritual and material which has a far reaching implication in terms of his novelistic re-presentation of the nineteenth century ‘woman question’ and the ‘hierarchical inclusion’ of women in the political space of the nation. Hence, by contextualizing the works of Bankimchandra in a time of colonial encounter the present paper aims to bring out the complexities and paradoxes inherent in Bankimchandra’s formation of the strategy of re-presentation of women and reform in several of his novels.

Keywords: Colonial encounter, cultural transformation, nationalist consciousness, gender, social reform.

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Transport, Mobility and Mobile Groups in Bengal: Deconstructing Colonial Myths of Movement and Migration in the Eighteenth Century

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Baijayanti Chatterjee

Assistant Professor of History, Seth Anandram Jaipuria College, Calcutta University.

ORCID: 0000-0003-1176-6557. Email: chatterjeebaijayanti@gmail.com

 Volume 12, Number 2, April-June, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n2.04

 Abstract

This article sets out to dismiss the European notion of a lazy and static Bengali perennially averse to movement, by looking at transport networks, mobility and mobile groups in eighteenth century Bengal. The article argues that Bengali society was highly mobile, owing to the presence of an efficient system of transport by land and water which sustained movement. The so-called ‘indolence’ of the Bengali and his reluctance for movement was in fact a ‘myth’ created by the Europeans with a vested interest to disparage native society and to justify European domination over Bengal.

 Keywords: Colonial myth-making, transport & mobility, eighteenth-century Bengal

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