Women in the Novels of Bankimchandra Chatterjee, Saratchandra Chatterjee and Rabindranath Tagore

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Harlem and Abroad: Notes to an International \u27Renaissance\u27

Like other intractable figures of the Harlem Renaissance, the movement’s visual artists sometimes exceeded their expected parameters, and thus their anticipated representativeness of a locality. Their images, in other words, did not automatically disclose Harlem-bound or even US-bound concerns. Now familiar through continual reproduction in exhibition catalogues, scholarly monographs and literary compendia, certain artworks from the period – such as Archibald J. Motley’s Blues (1929; Figure 1) and Aaron Douglas’s Congo (c. 1928; Figure 2) – subverted any definition of the Harlem Renaissance that would hinge on a narrowly delimited urban geography or national imaginary. Motley, who painted ‘Blues’ during a stint in Paris (rather than in his native Chicago, or Harlem), explained that his subjects – musicians and dancers in a café ‘practically on the outskirts’ of town – were ‘all people from Senegal, people from Martinique . . . people from North Africa and French people, but no Americans’ (Barrie np). Douglas, from his Harlem studio, differently dreamed up mystic rituals performed in a timeless Africa, and cultivated a modernist sensibility by fusing Art Deco aesthetics and Ancient Egyptian figuration. Moreover, and besides manifesting in subject matter and style, Harlem Renaissance internationalism developed through direct cross-cultural encounters. The transcontinental itineraries of Harlem Renaissance artists are by now well documented in literary and historical scholarship and in art-historical projects. However, whereas previous work has largely focused on ‘New Negro’ and diaspora connections, my premise here is that international conceptualisations of a ‘renaissance’ also merit consideration. Examining the term’s evolution abroad offers a framework for situating interrelated developments in places like Oxford, Cairo, Calcutta (now Kolkata) and Johannesburg in addition to the better-known ‘overseas’ locales of London, Paris and Havana. The purpose of this inquiry is neither to detract from the importance of Harlem as a cultural hub, nor to impose an African American model onto a wider art history. Rather, it is to chart how international perspectives fed into and were furthered through the Renaissance of the 1920s and 1930s in the United States

God and the Novel in India

The novel especially the realist novel has been generally understood as a secular, disenchanted form, but the history of the Indian novel complicates this view. A seminal trajectory of realist novels situated in India, by native and non-resident writers alike, presents a perception of God in the daily that is rooted in Indian religious traditions in contradistinction to the deus absconditus European realist novel which has generally restricted itself to the secular sphere. Despite the conspicuous and consequential enchantment of the Indian novel, even postcolonial literary critics have followed in the critical tradition that takes secularism to be the precondition of the novel and dismisses instantiations of religion as mere anomaly, symptom, or overlay. I contend that the powerful realism brought to India by the British novel was immediately injected with a strong dose of enchantment drawn from the popular religious and mythopoetic imagination. The novel invited God to come down to earth to become more real and more compatible with a self-consciously secularizing India unwilling to dispense with its spiritualism; reciprocally, God's presence in the naturalist novel engendered a radically new sense of both the genre and reality. Of all the existing art forms in India, it was only the realist novel with its worldly orientation that could give shape to the profane illumination in everyday life and provide a forum for the praxis of enchantment. The Indian novel was part of a larger phenomenon in which the enchanted worldview became the grounds for independence from England whose disenchanted ethos was understood as the underpinning and justification for its imperialism. Not surprisingly, the place namely, Bengal and that birthed the novel also sparked India's anti-colonial struggle and its religious revival and reform movements. The novel in particular was seen as a privileged form for preserving a spiritualized cosmology, renovating it in some ways, and using it to enable Indian sovereignty. Straddling both the British and the Indian, the worldly and the spiritual, the novel offered a unique opportunity for cultivating a modern religious sensibility. By analyzing the various literary techniques my novelists deploy to enchant a putatively disenchanted form in a (post)colonial context, I rediscover overlooked possibilities for the novel-writ-large. The trajectory I analyze teaches us that mimetic realism can offer a more congenial home to religious enchantment than the non-mimetic experimental modes, such as magical realism, usually considered more apt. My project charts the course of what I call the enchanted realist novel tradition via five seminal novels set in India and published between 1866 and 1980. In this arc, divinity is first made immanent in the phenomenal world, then it becomes internalized, only to meet with a birfurcated fate in the mid-twentieth century. The indigenous writers continue with realist first-order rendering of the divine in the daily, whereas the more international novelists formally distance themselves from the felt enchantment of the first order they struggle to represent. Another way to view that bifurcation: as the disenchanted, statist worldview comes to prevail in the national imaginary at Independence, the enchanted novel must henceforth either restrict itself to tiny local pockets of extant enchantment; or, if the novel still has ambitions to be a national allegory, it must register disenchantment as the nearly thorough-going a priori to what now can only be called a deliberate re-enchantment

Authority and Tradition: A Study of (pseudo)-Feminist Voice in Bankim Chandr Chattopadhyay’s Rajmohan’s Wife

Babu Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyaya is a renowned name in the history of Indian struggle for Independence. He is the writer of the national song ‘Vande Mataram’ of India. This song created an effervescence among Indians in that era to be united for the freedom of their country and to break together the shackles of slavery. Apart from this he is a strong signature in Bangla Literature. This is disappointing to know that Rajmohan’s Wife is his only novel written in English though it records the true picture of its time at its best. Authority and tradition are two words which seem synonymous to each other. Tradition apparently denotes a continuation and acceptance of norms and myth in society. It also showcases a peculiar kind of imitation. When tradition becomes an integral part of normativity it also exhibits a strong authority towards those traditions. Patriarchy may be the similar kind of traditional authority that was spontaneously born due to the flow of imitation, approval and power. This paper tries to explore those issues closely related to authority a form of power and tradition as an internalized system in determining and demeaning the position and status of women in the early decades of the 19th century India. Indeed, India was facing the high tides of upheaval in its social, political and cultural milieu that became the fundamental factors in generating turmoil in the lives of the people. Our paper attempts to explore the feminist or pseudo-feminist voice in the novel along with its connection with authority and tradition

Cities in translation : some proposals on method

This article argues for the existence of a category of linguistically divided cities and provides four examples: colonial Calcutta, turn of the century Trieste, Barcelona and Montreal. These are cities which-at specific historical moments-are characterized by competition between two languages each claiming entitlement to the space of the city. Because there are two strong languages claiming the allegiance of citizens, these cities are different from most other multilingual cities where there is one overarching dominant language. In the context of current debates over linguistic citizenship and increased global migration, the contact zones of divided cities offer lessons that are particularly valuable. While the potential for violence and civil war haunts every divided city, the differences of the city also offer possibilities for creative interconnections. The interactions of such cities can be studied as forms of translation

Tradition and Modernity: A Study of the Articulation of Feminist Modernity in Nirad C. Chaudhuri’s Bangali Jibane Ramani (Women in Bengali Life)

Nirad C. Chaudhuri has always been the sentinel of abounding controversies especially pertaining to his autobiography’s dedicatee. But there exists a rich corpus of his works in Bengali where he succinctly explores various themes pertaining to Bengali life in the early and late nineteenth century. This work of his, ‘Bangali Jibane Ramani’, serves as a point of converge in the women’s question in Bengal (as Partha Chatterjee had masterfully enunciated) primarily in the scenario of literature and cross-cultural literary influences. Through this particular text of Chaudhuri’s, the question about the nascent transvaluations about the engaging transformations of the alternating role of ‘as the alter ego’ of her male counterpart emerges in contrast to the rather restrictive inclusionary secluded mode of patriarchal domination which pervaded the feminine microcosm before the advent of modernity. This work does not exactly touches the women’s question as such but rather the changing contours of the literary portrayal of the ‘feminine’ in a society which had been entangled under the reels of a colonial ages just a century ago. In a co-incidentally equivalent scenario, the portrayal of the feminine, though gushing forth in sublime beatitudes, still is in the process of reeling underneath the patriarchal values, enunciated by her male counterpart. The cardinal purpose of this study is to offer an alternate feminist reading of a work pertaining to late modernity wherein a fundamentally poignant structural episteme was enunciated so as to provide a new framework for approaching this question. Chaudhuri’s approach to the question reveals his dependence on literature as a mode of understanding the changing contours of feminist consciousness and also the drawbacks of such a kind of over-reliance on a literary constructs and its innuendoes

Un ama de casa bengalí del siglo diecinueve y sus días como Robinson Crusoe: viajes e intimidad en The diary of a certain housewife de Kailashbashini Debi

Kailashbashini Debi’s Janaika Grihabadhu’r Diary (The Diary of a Certain Housewife; written between 1847 and 1873, serialised almost a century later in the monthly Basumati in 1952) chronicles her travels along the waterways of eastern Bengal. Her travels are firmly centred around her husband’s work; in his absence, she is Robinson Crusoe, marooned in the hinterlands of Bengal with only her daughter. Bearing in mind the gendered limitations on travel in the nineteenth century for upper-caste Bengali women, this essay investigates Kailashbashini Debi’s narration of her travels and the utopic vision of the modern housewife that Kailashbashini constructs for herself. The essay looks into the audacious nature of Kailashbashini’s effort: to claim a space in public memory alongside her husband. In the process, the essay seeks to address the restructuring of domestic life made possible by the experience of travel, and explore the contours of women’s travel writing in nineteenth-century India.La obra Janaika Grihabadhu’r Diary de Kailashbashini Debi (The Diary of a Certain Housewife, escrito entre 1847 y 1873, y publicado por entregas después de casi un siglo en la revista mensual Basumati en 1952) narra sus viajes por los canales de Bengala del este. Sus viajes se centran firmemente en el trabajo de su marido, en su ausencia, ella es un Robinson Crusoe, abandonada sola con su hija en la zona rural del país. Teniendo en cuenta las limitaciones de género que regían la actividad de viajar para las mujeres de las castas altas de Bengala en el siglo diecinueve, el presente ensayo investiga la narración de Kailashbashini Debi de sus viajes y la visión utópica de ama de casa moderna que se construyó para sí misma. Este ensayo investiga la audacia de su esfuerzo: reclamar un espacio en la memoria pública al lado de su marido. En el proceso, este ensayo busca abordar la reestructuración de la vida doméstica hecha posible por la experiencia del viaje, y además explora los contornos de la escritura de viajes por mujeres en el siglo diecinueve en la India