Relocating Tagore’s Binodini: New Spaces of Representation in Rituparno Ghosh’s Chokher Bali (original) (raw)
Related papers
Muse India, 2015
The paper is about the story of man and woman in a country under foreign rule – about a nation and its rising nationalist consciousness, trying to come to terms with its political subjugation on one hand and its problematic negotiations with the ‘colonial modernity’ on the other. The ‘colonial’ brand of modernity was largely responsible changes in civic space, social modes of behaviour, emergence of ‘clock-time’, new kinds of economic activities and most importantly changing equations between the ‘home’ and the ‘world’ (ghar o bahir). These changes were happening throughout the greater part of the nineteenth century and its impact was still strongly felt in Bengal in the first half of the twentieth. The main focus of my paper, however, will be a study of the portrayal of Tagore’s ‘women’ (and the dynamics embedded in their relationships with men) in his three novels, Chokher Bali (1903), Chaturanga, (1916), Yogayog (1929). Critics most often pay attention to Tagore’s three other more celebrated novels, Gora (1909), Ghare Baire (1916) and Char Adhyay (1934). They single out these three novels, as his quintessentially ‘political’ novels where nationalist concerns and issues are dealt with in a consistent manner. But my contention is that alongside the three ‘political novels’, it is absolutely essential also to closely look into his three other major novels (which I wish to categorize as Tagore’s ‘domestic’ novels as opposed to the ‘political’ ones) in order to get the full picture.
PostscriptuISSN 24567507 m , 2022
This paper seeks to look at the larger socio-political discourse that informs the two cinematic texts Ghare Baire Aaj by Aparna Sen and Ghare Baire by Satyajit Ray. Ray’s adaptation of Tagore’s novel explores the gendering of the public and private domain within the framework of the nationalist ideology. The film temporally embedded within a colonial context imagines the nation metaphorically through the woman whose possible transgression from private to public domain challenges both nationalist and colonial construction of the titular binary. Counterpoised against this, Sen’s deconstructive post-colonial and postglobal adaptation challenges further the dichotomy of the public and private to expose its fault lines. Sen’s film brings to the fore the contemporary ideological contradictions interpellated within the construction of secularism and liberal discourses of gender. The genderization of popular discourses of nationalism, colonialism and identity constructing the core of both Tagore’s novel and Ray’s film has been further extended and problematised by Sen through the Dalit identity of the central woman character of her movie. The paper then will try to unfold these critical nuances manifested through the dialogical engagement of these texts to unfold the influence of their multi-layered ‘sites’ on the gendered identity construction in the respective cinemas of Satyajit Ray and Aparna Sen.
International Journal of Linguistics, Literature and Translation, 2024
The cultural icon and trail blazer of Bengali Renaissance Rabindranath Tagore has experimented successfully upon some great female protagonists in his fiction who have managed to curve a niche for themselves in world literature. A master artist, he has also depicted with his dexterously professional brushstrokes a host of highly progressive and brave female identities with a strong voice of protest against all prejudices of the contemporary backward and prejudiced Hindu communities as well as against all conservative forces of fate and society. Tagore has portrayed extremely meticulously some female voices, attributing them to the strength of motherhood, the beauty of the beloved, and the strong power of womanhood, allowing them to develop their own individual status and identity in a stereotypical, male dominated, and patriarchal Bengali society. This paper undertakes to explore Binodini, a finely crafted character in the Novel 'Chokher Bali' by Tagore, who battles over her identity breaks a fresh ground for her own, and emerges as an uncompromisingly assertive woman with a voice and brand of her own. It explores that she is not terrified by the severity of the male gaze or trodden down by the repression of the male centric society in her journey through liberty and blossoms an individual very sure of herself by breaking the image of the traditional Indian womanhood.
Journal of Social Sciences and Management Studies
Women have often been deployed from many social representational practices for their absently marked subject positions; they have been made to function as the ‘subjects’ of absent political representations. Feminism as such had no pinpointed strategy of commencing in Indian geography, except for personalities protesting against social rules to demand equal spaces for the women. In the field of Indian English Literature that can be considered as feminist writings, we indeed have remarkable contributing personalities like Mahasweta Devi, Jhumpa Lahiri, and many more. Culture functions as a foundationalist fable in shaping identities and sustaining them, and such Bengali culture has also created women as a separate entity definable by few ‘fixed’ characteristics of linguistic absence. In this regard Judith Butler beautifully stated that “Women are the sex which is not “one”. Within…a phallogocentric language, women constitute the unrepresentable…women represent the sex that cannot be t...
'Chokher Bali': Unleashing Forbidden Passions
Silhouette: A Discourse on Cinema , 9:3 (2011), 2011
In this paper, the patriarchal politics involved in remarrying the widow in colonial Bengal is delved into with special reference to Rituparno Ghosh's highly successful cinematic adaptation of Rabindranath Tagore's novel 'Chokher Bali'. The paper then shifts to the filmmaker's attempt at reversing the 'gaze' of popular cinema, and examines how successfully or not so successfully he could address the issue. Is a 'female' or 'queer' gaze at all possible? Is it possible not to subscribe to the patriarchal language of cinema?
Advanced Centre for Women's Studies, TISS, 2014
Rabindranath Tagore’s literature spanned the most glorious years of Indian history. Large-scale social reforms were introduced, both by the colonial rulers and the colonized society, the prime target of which were women. Tagore, in his literature, exposed the unjust social structure that oppressed women on one hand and created spirited women who defied tradition on the other. Rabindranath Tagore displayed an outstanding understanding of the women’s psyche and encouraged greater freedom and decision-making power for women in the family and the larger society. Satyajit Ray translated many of his works into films and while borrowing Tagore’s imagination, added his own insight. It is this representation of the “new woman” that I aim to examine through their great pieces [Broken Nest (Nashtanir) & Charulata] and the difference in its representation owing to the different context of time.
Postcolonial Resistance of India's Cultural Nationalism in Select Films of Rituparno Ghosh
2020
The paper would focus on the cultural nationalism that the Indians gave birth to in response to the British colonialism and Ghosh's critique of such a parochial nationalism. The paper seeks to expose the irony of India's cultural nationalism which is based on the phallogocentric principle informed by the Western Enlightenment logic. It will be shown how the idea of a modern India was in fact guided by the heteronormative logic of the British masters. India's postcolonial politics was necessarily patriarchal and hence its nationalist agenda was deeply gendered. Exposing the marginalised status of the gendered and sexual subalterns in India's grand narrative of nationalism, Ghosh questions the compatible comradeship of the "imagined communities".