Colonial coal and peripheral modernity: Shailajananda Mukhopadhyay’s Patalpuri as world-ecological literature

ABSTRACT

Recent scholarship on world literature has called for an increased focus on asymmetries of materialist conditions. This article considers “world ecological literature” with a focus on the capitalist world-systems and colonial energy extraction. It invokes Imre Szeman’s periodization of culture according to the use of energy resources to acknowledge the immense global impact of fossil fuels and examine Shailajananda Mukhopadyay’s 1934 Bengali colliery fiction, Patalpuri. The novel is read here as a part of the “world-system literature” that responds to the era of coal as the primary energy resource of capitalist modernity. Drawing on the Warwick Research Collective’s use of Trotsky’s concept of “combined and uneven development” and their proposal for a “new materialist basis for a revivified literary comparativism”, the article reads Patalpuri as offering a view of colonial environmental extractivism from the “periphery” through diverse literary forms including European social realism and native mythologies and folklore.

KEYWORDS:

• Shailajananda Mukhopadyay
• PATALPURI
• world literature
• coal
• India
• peripheral realism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Malm (2017a) writes that “[i]n the second quarter of the nineteenth century, following the occupation of Assam in 1825, the British Empire resolved to fill the rivers of India with steamboats. These vessels of the new age would serve the Raj in several ways. The representatives of the metropolis saw before them a subcontinent finally opened to commerce, its rivers ‘turned into great steam highways for bringing cotton and other products of the interior to the coast, and for transmitting English manufactures in return,’ at one stroke supplying Britain with an abundance of raw materials – apart from cotton also silk, indigo, hemp, timber, rice, opium, tea – and a teeming market on which the surplus of manufactured goods could be dumped” (para. 18).

2. Ram Mohan was the torchbearer, followed by Iswar Chandra Bandopadhaya (Vidyasagar) (1820–91), Michael Madhusudan Datta (1824–73), Bankim Chandra Chattopadhya (1838–94), Rabindranath Thakur (1861–1941), Saratchandra Chattopadhya (1876–1938), Nazrul Islam (1899–1976), and many others.

3. The Santal (or Santhal) are a Munda ethnic group native to India and Bangladesh.

4. The Bauris are recognized as an Indigenous Bengali Hindu community.

5. All translations from Patalpuri are my own.

6. Though primarily conceptualized in the context of depleted soil fertility, the notion foregrounds a common coordinate of human and natural exploitation, as Marx points out:

“[A]ll progress in capitalist agriculture is a progress in the art, not only of robbing the worker, but of robbing the soil. [ … ] Capitalist production, therefore, develops technology [ … ] only by sapping the original sources of all wealth – the soil and the worker” (1976, 637–638).

7. See also Arup K. Chatterjee’s (2018) study of ghost stories in the context of the Indian railways: https://scroll.in/magazine/862609/haunted-trains-and-railway-stations-have-a-long-history-in-bengal-and-its-literature

8. Kalidasa’s Shakuntalam narrates the tale of a king who gets married to a hermit girl in the forest and forgets about her due to a curse. Eliade (1963) points out numerous instances in Matsyendranath folklore where the master yogi falls in love with a beautiful woman (Ceylon’s queen/women of Kadali) and forgets about his former identity.

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Swaralipi Nandi

Swaralipi Nandi is an assistant professor of English at Loyola College, Hyderabad, India. She has a PhD in English from Kent State University, USA and is currently working on postcolonial ecocriticism and colonial commodity frontiers. She has edited two books: The Postnational Fantasy: Essays on Postcolonialism, Cosmopolitics, and Science Fiction (2011) and Spectacles of Blood: A Study of Violence and Masculinity in Postcolonial Films (2015). Her most recent publication is Oil Fictions: World Literature and Our Contemporary Petrosphere (2021), co-edited with Stacey Balkan.