READING BHARATCHANDRA

Abstract

In this essay, I suggest that to uncover the construction of literary production-whereby the dominant group constructs its reality and its history-is to interrogate the ‘pure’ text of traditional literary criticism in the context of the entire historical moment. The nineteenth-century literary sphere in Bengal witnessed a period of struggle between the popular indigenous inheritance in poetry and the formulation of a new modern poetry after English poetic convention; this period of give and take is read here through a study of the fluctuating fortunes of the reputation of the premier poet of the eighteenth century, Bharatchandra Ray, whose inheritance was a mixed one among the new Bengali readership that was created in this period.

Reading against the grain of conventional literary critical approaches, it should be possible to acknowledge the enabling element in certain aspects of both the English and Bengali literary conventions in the formulation of a modern literature, and here I shall place the common inheritance of the various languages as they came together to formulate the idea of the literary in the nineteenth century side by side. It is my argument that contentions between the major literary languages of India, including the classical and folk languages, nouveau urban and mixed languages, colonial and ‘native’ languages, played an instrumental role in the many negotiations between modernity and nation in early nineteenth-century Bengal. This essay will be as much about literary criticism and the construction of certain dominant tropes of modernity through literary practice as about the practice of literature itself, aiming to highlight and understand the suppressed lineages of languages within the central discourse of nineteenth-century poetics and nationalism.

Keywords:

• multiple modernities
• literary practice
• nineteenth-century Bengal
• suppressed lineages
• dominant tropes