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
