Regional Ecologies and Peripheral Aesthetics in Indian Literature: Tarashankar Bandyopadhyay’s Hansuli Banker Upakatha

Abstract

Despite the wide availability of "regional novels" in India, academic scholarship in this area has been surprisingly lacking. For environmental literary scholars, this is unfortunate because regional narratives compellingly capture the conflicts between local social dynamics and global capitalist cultures, resulting in an aesthetic that is ecologically sensitive and stylistically complex. In this essay, I will first situate the Gandhian call for ruralism as an important reason behind the rise of regional narratives in late-colonial India. Then, drawing from Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee's eco-materialism and recent scholarship in "peripheral realism," I will show how the noted Bengali novelist Tarashankar Bandyopadhyay in his classic Hansuli Banker Upakatha (1947/51; The Tale of Hansuli Turn) historicizes the tragic fate of the Kahar tribe in the face of colonial-capitalist developments in the rural interiors of Bengal. Closely engaging with the complex narrative structure of the novel, especially his pitting of a social realist narrative of "tradition versus modernity" against an experimental style "upakatha" or tale, I will argue that Tarashankar's literary peripherality is socio-ecologically aware and self-consciously political, representative of world-literary aesthetics.

Keywords:

• Postcolonial and world literatures
• regional novel
• ecocriticism
• Tarashankar Bandyopadhyay
• peripheral realism

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 On this, see Snell 1998; Head 2017.

2 For this term, I am drawing from Christopher Schliephake who builds upon Bennet and Teague’s understanding of ‘urban ecologies’ (1999) to argue we view “cities as spatial phenomena that have manifold and complex material interrelations with their respective natural environments, and that harbor “minds”—in the sense of Bateson—of their own: Ideas, imaginations, and interpretations that make up the cultural symbolic and discursive side of our urban lives and that are stored and constantly re-negotiated in their cultural and artistic representations” (9).

3 For a historical reading of these conditions, see Sarkar 1989, 254–348.

4 In defining regions, the question of scale is as important as of history, culture, and colonialism (cf. Talbott (2001), Cohn). South Asia may be considered a region in one perspective while the Rarh region in West Bengal, India where Tarashankar’s novel is located, may be considered so in a more local sense, which I am drawing at for my reading here. For the question of scale, see Marston 2000.

5 I will not have much to say here about realism for reasons of space. For this, see my recent work on Catastrophic Realism (Bhattacharya 2020), especially pp. 1–39.

6 Tarashankar was an immensely popular Indian writer whose work was translated into several Indian languages and who won multiple national awards including the prestigious Sahitya Akademi and Jnanpith awards. He was honoured with the Padma Shri and Padma Bhushan awards (highest citizenship awards in India). For a reading of Tarashankar’s biography and literary work, see Mahasweta Devi 1975; and Ranjitkumar Mukhopadhyay 1987.

7 This however may indicate Tarashankar’s Hindu-Brahminical concerns here. As cultural geographer Ananta Gope in a recent article (2020) on the novel notes, historically there is no such caste as Kahar (he calls Kanhar). Tarashankar draws from the palanquin bearer castes of Bauris and Bagdis and locates them in the transitional Rarh region between the Chotanagpur plateau and Gangetic deltas, which have historically seen a mixture of semi-Hinduized/aborigine caste communities (460).

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Sourit Bhattacharya

Sourit Bhattacharya is Lecturer in Postcolonial Studies at the University of Glasgow. His research and teaching interests include postcolonial literatures, food security and environmental studies, realism and modernism, translation studies, and Marxism. His works in these areas have appeared in such journals and edited volumes as ARIEL, Textual Practice, Irish University Review, Magical Realism and Literature (Cambridge UP, 2020), Aesthetics and Politics of Global Hunger (Palgrave, 2018), and others. His first monograph, titled Postcolonial Modernity and the Indian Novel: On Catastrophic Realism was published by Palgrave in May 2020. He is the coeditor of Nabarun Bhattacharya (Bloomsbury, 2020) and Sanglap: Journal of Literary and Cultural Inquiry.