Abhishek Sarkar | Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India (original) (raw)
Papers by Abhishek Sarkar
Shakespeare Bulletin, 2022
Shakespeare Bulletin, 2022
Borrowers and Lenders, 2024
This article examines five Bengali essays published in periodicals in the long 19th century, whic... more This article examines five Bengali essays published in periodicals in the long 19th century, which compare Miranda intensively with the eponymous heroine of Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay’s 1866 novel Kapalkundala. The five essays in question (Shrish Chandra Majumder, 1880; anonymous, 1889; Sudhindranath Tagore, 1891; anonymous, 1909; Kshirode Bihari Chattopadhyay, 1918) discuss how Shakespeare’s and Bankim’s texts address the condition of a woman brought up outside human society. They are especially concerned with what they mark as the inherent feminine kindness and the pristine form of sexual innocence featured in the heroines of these texts. These essays ignore invariably the possibility of reading The Tempest as an allegory of the colonial project. The elision of the political context enables these essays to create a universalist space where Shakespeare and Bankim may be treated as coequal artists, without undue deference to Shakespeare’s colonially propagated canonicity. These essays thus refuse to be defined by a colonial relationship of cultural subordination. However, the paradigm of universality evoked by them is posited on the fetishization of feminine innocence. These essays, my article argues, naturalize and replicate a patriarchal vision that they attribute to The Tempest and Kapalkundala.
Shakespeare's Richard III may be seen as a case study of how lives and deaths of children are... more Shakespeare's Richard III may be seen as a case study of how lives and deaths of children are juggled as an aesthetic agenda in collusion with (and/or as an exposé of) the dominant adult discourses that deny children agency and discount their individuality. The act of mourning for the children may be just another way of interpellating them. Whereas it is the political contingency of the Tudor myth that dictates the killing of Arthur and York, it is also necessary to correlate the fashioning of these children's death to the cultural status of early modern children, to the crisis over the Protestant reformulation of afterlife and repudiation of idolatry, and also, to the demands of the theatrical idiom that condition the represented death and mourning.
Multicultural Shakespeare, 2016
The essay examines a Bengali adaptation of Macbeth, namely Rudrapal Natak (published 1874) by Har... more The essay examines a Bengali adaptation of Macbeth, namely Rudrapal Natak (published 1874) by Haralal Ray, juxtaposing it with differently accented commentaries on the play arising from the English-educated elites of 19 th Bengal, and relating the play to the complex phenomenon of Hindu nationalism. This play remarkably translocates the mythos and ethos of Shakespeare's original onto a Hindu field of signifiers, reformulating Shakespeare's Witches as bhairavis (female hermits of a Tantric cult) who indulge unchallenged in ghastly rituals. It also tries to associate the gratuitous violence of the play with the fanciful yearning for a martial ideal of nation-building that formed a strand of the Hindu revivalist imaginary. If the depiction of the Witch-figures in Rudrapal undercuts the evocation of a monolithic and urbane Hindu sensibility that would be consistent with colonial modernity, the celebration of their violence may be read as an effort to emphasize the inclusivity (as well as autonomy) of the Hindu tradition and to defy the homogenizing expectations of Western enlightenment
Multicultural Shakespeare
My article examines how the staging of gender and sexuality in Shakespeare’s play As You Like It ... more My article examines how the staging of gender and sexuality in Shakespeare’s play As You Like It is negotiated in a Bengali adaptation, Ananga-Rangini (1897) by the little-known playwright Annadaprasad Basu. The Bengali adaptation does not assume the boy actor’s embodied performance as essential to its construction of the Rosalindequivalent, and thereby it misses several of the accents on gender and sexuality that characterize Shakespeare’s play. The Bengali adaptation, while accommodating much of Rosalind’s flamboyance, is more insistent upon the heteronormative closure and reconfigures the Rosalind-character as an acquiescent lover/wife. Further, Ananga-Rangini incorporates resonances of the classical Sanskrit play Abhijñānaśākuntalam by Kālidāsa, thus suggesting a thematic interaction between the two texts and giving a concrete shape to the comparison between Shakespeare and Kālidāsa that formed a favourite topic of literary debate in colonial Bengal. The article takes into accou...
ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes and Reviews
ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes and Reviews
South Asian History and Culture
ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes and Reviews
The Byron Journal
The Bengali literary reception of Lord Byron in the nineteenth century is characterised by opposi... more The Bengali literary reception of Lord Byron in the nineteenth century is characterised by opposing tendencies-fascination with his poetic corpus and personal heroics on the one hand and indignation at his amoral and nihilistic stance on the other. Byron's liber-tinism and melancholy are censoriously registered in several Bengali essays in the late nineteenth century, but a sizeable body of Bengali poetry produced around the same time seeks to appropriate Byron through quotation and adaptation. Byron's celebrated cosmopolitanism as well as his satire does not figure conspicuously on the agenda for his Bengali appropriations, because his precedents are deployed predominantly for imagining a nation. Poets such as Hemchandra Bandyopadhyay and Nabinchandra Sen rework the Byronic text into a lament for a lost national (specifically Hindu) glory. At the same time, Biharilal Chakraborty and Akshaychandra Sarkar echo Byron's meditation on Nature but divest it of his characteristic malaise or misanthropy. The poetic appropriations of Byron in Bengali, this essay argues, presuppose a public morality and political function , and hence consciously eschew Byron's irony and self-dramatisation. 1
Jadavpur University Essays and Studies, 2009
This article contextualizes and assesses the Shakespearean quotations mouthed by the brilliant an... more This article contextualizes and assesses the Shakespearean quotations mouthed by the brilliant anti-hero of a nineteenth-century Bengali comedy. This article also provides an overview of the growth of English literary studies in colonial Bengal, especially in the classroom atmosphere. This article will be useful to students of post-colonialism, translation and adaptation studies, comparative literature and the global reception of Shakespeare.
The Byron Journal, 2018
The Bengali literary reception of Lord Byron in the nineteenth century is characterised by opposi... more The Bengali literary reception of Lord Byron in the nineteenth century is characterised by opposing tendencies-fascination with his poetic corpus and personal heroics on the one hand and indignation at his amoral and nihilistic stance on the other. Byron's liber-tinism and melancholy are censoriously registered in several Bengali essays in the late nineteenth century, but a sizeable body of Bengali poetry produced around the same time seeks to appropriate Byron through quotation and adaptation. Byron's celebrated cosmopolitanism as well as his satire does not figure conspicuously on the agenda for his Bengali appropriations, because his precedents are deployed predominantly for imagining a nation. Poets such as Hemchandra Bandyopadhyay and Nabinchandra Sen rework the Byronic text into a lament for a lost national (specifically Hindu) glory. At the same time, Biharilal Chakraborty and Akshaychandra Sarkar echo Byron's meditation on Nature but divest it of his characteristic malaise or misanthropy. The poetic appropriations of Byron in Bengali, this essay argues, presuppose a public morality and political function , and hence consciously eschew Byron's irony and self-dramatisation. 1
TheSpace.ink, 2019
This is a brief article written for a non-academic webzine. It provides an overview of the coloni... more This is a brief article written for a non-academic webzine. It provides an overview of the colonial police officer Priyanath Mukhopadhyay's literary output, considering the strategies and techniques adopted by him to render his first-hand experience of crime investigation into the literary codes of the detective narrative. This article will be of interest to researchers working in the fields of criminology and police history, detective and crime fiction, urban studies and governmentalities. The article pays attention to his representation of Kolkata and his negotiation of the colonial apparatus.
Multicultural Shakespeare, 2018
My article examines how the staging of gender and sexuality in Shakespeare's play As You Like It ... more My article examines how the staging of gender and sexuality in Shakespeare's play As You Like It is negotiated in a Bengali adaptation, Ananga-Rangini (1897) by the little-known playwright Annadaprasad Basu. The Bengali adaptation does not assume the boy actor's embodied performance as essential to its construction of the Rosalindequivalent, and thereby it misses several of the accents on gender and sexuality that characterize Shakespeare's play. The Bengali adaptation, while accommodating much of Rosalind's flamboyance, is more insistent upon the heteronormative closure and reconfigures the Rosalind-character as an acquiescent lover/wife. Further, Ananga-Rangini incorporates resonances of the classical Sanskrit play Abhijñānaśākuntalam by Kālidāsa, thus suggesting a thematic interaction between the two texts and giving a concrete shape to the comparison between Shakespeare and Kālidāsa that formed a favourite topic of literary debate in colonial Bengal. The article takes into account how the Bengali adaptation of As You Like It may be influenced by the gender politics informing Abhijñānaśākuntalam and by the reception of this Sanskrit play in colonial Bengal.
The text is a facsimile of the print edition. © SFS
My paper seeks to locate Thomas Dekker's handling of underworld jargon at the interface of oral a... more My paper seeks to locate Thomas Dekker's handling of underworld jargon at the interface of oral and literary cultures. The paper briefly looks at a play co-authored by Dekker and then examines two ''coney-catching pamphlets " by him to see how he tries to appropriate cant or criminal lingo (necessarily an oral system) as an aesthetic/commercial programme. In these two tracts (namely, The Bellman of London, 1608; Lantern and Candlelight, 1608) Dekker makes an exposé of the jargon used by criminals (with regard to their professional trappings, hierarchies, modus operandi, division of labour) and exploits it as a trope of radical alienation. The elusiveness and ephemerality of the spoken word here reinforce the mobility and deceit culturally associated with the thieves and vagabonds – so that the authorial function of capturing cant (whose revelatory status is insistently sensationalized) through the intrusive technologies of alphabet and print parallels the dominant culture's project of inscribing and colonizing its non-conforming other. Using later theorization of orality, the paper will show how the media of writing and print distance the threat inherent in cant and enable its cultural surveillance and aesthetic appraisal.
The essay examines a Bengali adaptation of Macbeth, namely Rudrapal Natak (published 1874) by Har... more The essay examines a Bengali adaptation of Macbeth, namely Rudrapal Natak (published 1874) by Haralal Ray, juxtaposing it with differently accented commentaries on the play arising from the English-educated elites of 19 th Bengal, and relating the play to the complex phenomenon of Hindu nationalism. This play remarkably translocates the mythos and ethos of Shakespeare's original onto a Hindu field of signifiers, reformulating Shakespeare's Witches as bhairavis (female hermits of a Tantric cult) who indulge unchallenged in ghastly rituals. It also tries to associate the gratuitous violence of the play with the fanciful yearning for a martial ideal of nation-building that formed a strand of the Hindu revivalist imaginary. If the depiction of the Witch-figures in Rudrapal undercuts the evocation of a monolithic and urbane Hindu sensibility that would be consistent with colonial modernity, the celebration of their violence may be read as an effort to emphasize the inclusivity (as well as autonomy) of the Hindu tradition and to defy the homogenizing expectations of Western enlightenment An obscure and undistinguished poet named Girish Chandra Laha wrote an effusive sonnet entitled "Shakespeare" for the June 1899 issue of Prayas, a little-known Bengali periodical. The poem may be roughly translated and paraphrased thus:
Shakespeare Bulletin, 2022
Shakespeare Bulletin, 2022
Borrowers and Lenders, 2024
This article examines five Bengali essays published in periodicals in the long 19th century, whic... more This article examines five Bengali essays published in periodicals in the long 19th century, which compare Miranda intensively with the eponymous heroine of Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay’s 1866 novel Kapalkundala. The five essays in question (Shrish Chandra Majumder, 1880; anonymous, 1889; Sudhindranath Tagore, 1891; anonymous, 1909; Kshirode Bihari Chattopadhyay, 1918) discuss how Shakespeare’s and Bankim’s texts address the condition of a woman brought up outside human society. They are especially concerned with what they mark as the inherent feminine kindness and the pristine form of sexual innocence featured in the heroines of these texts. These essays ignore invariably the possibility of reading The Tempest as an allegory of the colonial project. The elision of the political context enables these essays to create a universalist space where Shakespeare and Bankim may be treated as coequal artists, without undue deference to Shakespeare’s colonially propagated canonicity. These essays thus refuse to be defined by a colonial relationship of cultural subordination. However, the paradigm of universality evoked by them is posited on the fetishization of feminine innocence. These essays, my article argues, naturalize and replicate a patriarchal vision that they attribute to The Tempest and Kapalkundala.
Shakespeare's Richard III may be seen as a case study of how lives and deaths of children are... more Shakespeare's Richard III may be seen as a case study of how lives and deaths of children are juggled as an aesthetic agenda in collusion with (and/or as an exposé of) the dominant adult discourses that deny children agency and discount their individuality. The act of mourning for the children may be just another way of interpellating them. Whereas it is the political contingency of the Tudor myth that dictates the killing of Arthur and York, it is also necessary to correlate the fashioning of these children's death to the cultural status of early modern children, to the crisis over the Protestant reformulation of afterlife and repudiation of idolatry, and also, to the demands of the theatrical idiom that condition the represented death and mourning.
Multicultural Shakespeare, 2016
The essay examines a Bengali adaptation of Macbeth, namely Rudrapal Natak (published 1874) by Har... more The essay examines a Bengali adaptation of Macbeth, namely Rudrapal Natak (published 1874) by Haralal Ray, juxtaposing it with differently accented commentaries on the play arising from the English-educated elites of 19 th Bengal, and relating the play to the complex phenomenon of Hindu nationalism. This play remarkably translocates the mythos and ethos of Shakespeare's original onto a Hindu field of signifiers, reformulating Shakespeare's Witches as bhairavis (female hermits of a Tantric cult) who indulge unchallenged in ghastly rituals. It also tries to associate the gratuitous violence of the play with the fanciful yearning for a martial ideal of nation-building that formed a strand of the Hindu revivalist imaginary. If the depiction of the Witch-figures in Rudrapal undercuts the evocation of a monolithic and urbane Hindu sensibility that would be consistent with colonial modernity, the celebration of their violence may be read as an effort to emphasize the inclusivity (as well as autonomy) of the Hindu tradition and to defy the homogenizing expectations of Western enlightenment
Multicultural Shakespeare
My article examines how the staging of gender and sexuality in Shakespeare’s play As You Like It ... more My article examines how the staging of gender and sexuality in Shakespeare’s play As You Like It is negotiated in a Bengali adaptation, Ananga-Rangini (1897) by the little-known playwright Annadaprasad Basu. The Bengali adaptation does not assume the boy actor’s embodied performance as essential to its construction of the Rosalindequivalent, and thereby it misses several of the accents on gender and sexuality that characterize Shakespeare’s play. The Bengali adaptation, while accommodating much of Rosalind’s flamboyance, is more insistent upon the heteronormative closure and reconfigures the Rosalind-character as an acquiescent lover/wife. Further, Ananga-Rangini incorporates resonances of the classical Sanskrit play Abhijñānaśākuntalam by Kālidāsa, thus suggesting a thematic interaction between the two texts and giving a concrete shape to the comparison between Shakespeare and Kālidāsa that formed a favourite topic of literary debate in colonial Bengal. The article takes into accou...
ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes and Reviews
ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes and Reviews
South Asian History and Culture
ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes and Reviews
The Byron Journal
The Bengali literary reception of Lord Byron in the nineteenth century is characterised by opposi... more The Bengali literary reception of Lord Byron in the nineteenth century is characterised by opposing tendencies-fascination with his poetic corpus and personal heroics on the one hand and indignation at his amoral and nihilistic stance on the other. Byron's liber-tinism and melancholy are censoriously registered in several Bengali essays in the late nineteenth century, but a sizeable body of Bengali poetry produced around the same time seeks to appropriate Byron through quotation and adaptation. Byron's celebrated cosmopolitanism as well as his satire does not figure conspicuously on the agenda for his Bengali appropriations, because his precedents are deployed predominantly for imagining a nation. Poets such as Hemchandra Bandyopadhyay and Nabinchandra Sen rework the Byronic text into a lament for a lost national (specifically Hindu) glory. At the same time, Biharilal Chakraborty and Akshaychandra Sarkar echo Byron's meditation on Nature but divest it of his characteristic malaise or misanthropy. The poetic appropriations of Byron in Bengali, this essay argues, presuppose a public morality and political function , and hence consciously eschew Byron's irony and self-dramatisation. 1
Jadavpur University Essays and Studies, 2009
This article contextualizes and assesses the Shakespearean quotations mouthed by the brilliant an... more This article contextualizes and assesses the Shakespearean quotations mouthed by the brilliant anti-hero of a nineteenth-century Bengali comedy. This article also provides an overview of the growth of English literary studies in colonial Bengal, especially in the classroom atmosphere. This article will be useful to students of post-colonialism, translation and adaptation studies, comparative literature and the global reception of Shakespeare.
The Byron Journal, 2018
The Bengali literary reception of Lord Byron in the nineteenth century is characterised by opposi... more The Bengali literary reception of Lord Byron in the nineteenth century is characterised by opposing tendencies-fascination with his poetic corpus and personal heroics on the one hand and indignation at his amoral and nihilistic stance on the other. Byron's liber-tinism and melancholy are censoriously registered in several Bengali essays in the late nineteenth century, but a sizeable body of Bengali poetry produced around the same time seeks to appropriate Byron through quotation and adaptation. Byron's celebrated cosmopolitanism as well as his satire does not figure conspicuously on the agenda for his Bengali appropriations, because his precedents are deployed predominantly for imagining a nation. Poets such as Hemchandra Bandyopadhyay and Nabinchandra Sen rework the Byronic text into a lament for a lost national (specifically Hindu) glory. At the same time, Biharilal Chakraborty and Akshaychandra Sarkar echo Byron's meditation on Nature but divest it of his characteristic malaise or misanthropy. The poetic appropriations of Byron in Bengali, this essay argues, presuppose a public morality and political function , and hence consciously eschew Byron's irony and self-dramatisation. 1
TheSpace.ink, 2019
This is a brief article written for a non-academic webzine. It provides an overview of the coloni... more This is a brief article written for a non-academic webzine. It provides an overview of the colonial police officer Priyanath Mukhopadhyay's literary output, considering the strategies and techniques adopted by him to render his first-hand experience of crime investigation into the literary codes of the detective narrative. This article will be of interest to researchers working in the fields of criminology and police history, detective and crime fiction, urban studies and governmentalities. The article pays attention to his representation of Kolkata and his negotiation of the colonial apparatus.
Multicultural Shakespeare, 2018
My article examines how the staging of gender and sexuality in Shakespeare's play As You Like It ... more My article examines how the staging of gender and sexuality in Shakespeare's play As You Like It is negotiated in a Bengali adaptation, Ananga-Rangini (1897) by the little-known playwright Annadaprasad Basu. The Bengali adaptation does not assume the boy actor's embodied performance as essential to its construction of the Rosalindequivalent, and thereby it misses several of the accents on gender and sexuality that characterize Shakespeare's play. The Bengali adaptation, while accommodating much of Rosalind's flamboyance, is more insistent upon the heteronormative closure and reconfigures the Rosalind-character as an acquiescent lover/wife. Further, Ananga-Rangini incorporates resonances of the classical Sanskrit play Abhijñānaśākuntalam by Kālidāsa, thus suggesting a thematic interaction between the two texts and giving a concrete shape to the comparison between Shakespeare and Kālidāsa that formed a favourite topic of literary debate in colonial Bengal. The article takes into account how the Bengali adaptation of As You Like It may be influenced by the gender politics informing Abhijñānaśākuntalam and by the reception of this Sanskrit play in colonial Bengal.
The text is a facsimile of the print edition. © SFS
My paper seeks to locate Thomas Dekker's handling of underworld jargon at the interface of oral a... more My paper seeks to locate Thomas Dekker's handling of underworld jargon at the interface of oral and literary cultures. The paper briefly looks at a play co-authored by Dekker and then examines two ''coney-catching pamphlets " by him to see how he tries to appropriate cant or criminal lingo (necessarily an oral system) as an aesthetic/commercial programme. In these two tracts (namely, The Bellman of London, 1608; Lantern and Candlelight, 1608) Dekker makes an exposé of the jargon used by criminals (with regard to their professional trappings, hierarchies, modus operandi, division of labour) and exploits it as a trope of radical alienation. The elusiveness and ephemerality of the spoken word here reinforce the mobility and deceit culturally associated with the thieves and vagabonds – so that the authorial function of capturing cant (whose revelatory status is insistently sensationalized) through the intrusive technologies of alphabet and print parallels the dominant culture's project of inscribing and colonizing its non-conforming other. Using later theorization of orality, the paper will show how the media of writing and print distance the threat inherent in cant and enable its cultural surveillance and aesthetic appraisal.
The essay examines a Bengali adaptation of Macbeth, namely Rudrapal Natak (published 1874) by Har... more The essay examines a Bengali adaptation of Macbeth, namely Rudrapal Natak (published 1874) by Haralal Ray, juxtaposing it with differently accented commentaries on the play arising from the English-educated elites of 19 th Bengal, and relating the play to the complex phenomenon of Hindu nationalism. This play remarkably translocates the mythos and ethos of Shakespeare's original onto a Hindu field of signifiers, reformulating Shakespeare's Witches as bhairavis (female hermits of a Tantric cult) who indulge unchallenged in ghastly rituals. It also tries to associate the gratuitous violence of the play with the fanciful yearning for a martial ideal of nation-building that formed a strand of the Hindu revivalist imaginary. If the depiction of the Witch-figures in Rudrapal undercuts the evocation of a monolithic and urbane Hindu sensibility that would be consistent with colonial modernity, the celebration of their violence may be read as an effort to emphasize the inclusivity (as well as autonomy) of the Hindu tradition and to defy the homogenizing expectations of Western enlightenment An obscure and undistinguished poet named Girish Chandra Laha wrote an effusive sonnet entitled "Shakespeare" for the June 1899 issue of Prayas, a little-known Bengali periodical. The poem may be roughly translated and paraphrased thus: