Modernism in Bengali literature (original) (raw)

From Imperial to International Horizons: A Hermeneutic Study of Bengali Modernism

This essay provides a close study of the international horizons of Kallol, a Bengali literary journal, published in post-World War I Calcutta. It uncovers a historical pattern of Bengali intellectual life that marked the period from the 1870s to the 1920s, whereby an imperial imagination was transformed into an international one, as a generation of intellectuals born between 1885 and 1905 reinvented the political category of “youth”. Hermeneutics, as a philosophically informed study of how meaning is created through conversation, and grounded in this essay in the thought of Hans Georg Gadamer, helps to reveal this pattern. While translocal vistas of intellectual life were always present in Bengali thought, the contours of those horizons changed drastically in the period under study. Bengali intellectual life, framed within a center–periphery imperial axis in the 1870s, was resolutely reframed within a multipolar international constellation by the 1920s. This change was reflected by the new conversations in which young Bengalis became entangled in the years after the war. At a linguistic level, the shift was registered by the increasing use of terms such as bideś (the foreign) and āntarjātik (international), as opposed to bilāt (England, or the West), to name the world abroad. The world outside empire increasingly became a resource and theme for artists and writers. Major changes in global geopolitical alignments and in the colonial politics of British India, and the relations between generations within Bengali bhadralok society, provide contexts for the rise of this international youth imagination.

'Notes on a Bengali Modernist Poetics of Desire'

The Oxford Handbook of Modern Indian Literatures (Eds. Anjali Nerlekar, Ulka Anjaria), 2023

Modernist poetry has always wrestled with the impossibility of articulation and the limits of language. In reading a selection of poems by two Bengali poets of the 20th century—Jibanananda Das and Binoy Majumdar—this chapter suggests that Bengali avant-garde modernist poetry attempts a sleight of poetic hand that elides this dilemma by transforming desire into poetry, rather than by attempting to express desire in poetry. No human gratification of passion remains relevant then; nor is the poem simply its approximation or representation in language. Instead, the poem becomes a material embodiment of human desire: ful􀁿lled, failed, needy. This chapter asks if this metamorphosis can be seen as a queer praxis of poetry-making, because in its production of a desire—a poem—that distills gratification and its embedded failure at once, it becomes anti-normative. Politically, it uses the textured body of the poem on a page to both assert desire and predict its loss, vulnerability, and death.

The History of Modernism in India

Swati Publications, 2021

Orientalism left a hysteresis effect as our English-educated leaders diminished the vast pluralistic culture into a monolithic Hindu India. They diligently maintained the human degradation in Caste and created Quotas, levels, and sub-levels of the society. We live in a fractured society, and post-colonial modernism is its critical frame. Modernism challenges the reliability of elitist history that gave birth to the structure of the "national-popular" where the claim is: the ideas of the Nationalist elites motivated the people to the arena of "politics" from their "pre-political" state. Gandhi significantly created a vital strategy with 'mass,' using a larger front of the population in his peaceful protests. Since then, the presence of a large mass, the Janata, became a front in post-colonial politics. But this mass, ahistorical as they are, sometimes Hindus sometimes Muslims or Christians, the tribal or the city workers, but they always took the brunt of social maladies. They died in Bengal Famine, once crossed the borders during the Partition of India; now, they are the migrant-workers in millions lost job, shelter, and food, due to the sudden lockdown of the nation in the Covit-19 pandemic. This mass has no profile, never had, but essential in endless Yojanas, Bollywood scripts, and political rhetoric. Modernism has a historical belonging to the west. But ideas always traveled and found another context in new localization. In the Indian context, modernism could not be viewed as a simple translation as much of the realities and innovations have had different challenges. With the larger population outside the cities, modernism is not all urban-centric dialogue, like in Europe. It has its autonomous space and critical expressions, such as in literature, cinema, theatre, music, and contemporary folk expressions; it is a search in academic discourses and the Mantra in all developmental dynamism. Modernism creates ideas and consciousness but does not control individual or social action. However, within change and chaos, the tolling bell is already ringing. In essence, the emergence of corporatization created another sense of 'authenticity,' contextualizing global modernism. As it prioritized the global system, it already foreclosed on the autonomous trends of culture, focusing on transregional expansion. Westernism is yet the central theme where post-modernism flourishes with another connotation, the global modernism.