Satinath Bhaduri’s Bengali Novels Jagari (The Vigil) and Dhorai Charit Manas as Utopian Literature

Abstract

This article analyses two novels in Bengali, or Bangla, by Satinath Bhaduri, Jagari (translated into English as The Vigil) and Dhorai Charit Manas (translated into English as Dhorai Charit Manas). It analyses them as examples of vernacular Indian utopian literature, with specific reference to competing visions of utopia as crystallized in the anti-colonial Quit India Movement of the 1940s in India, originally called for by M. K. Gandhi (henceforth referred to as the Quit India Movement). That modern India, as a highly diverse, culturally rich, populous, multilingual and geopolitically influential sub-continent in the world, has produced much utopian art and literature is not surprising. Bill Ashcroft's volume Utopianism in Postcolonial Literatures (2016), a key recent scholarly monograph that considers Indian literature from the colonial and post-Independence periods in relation to utopianism and to postcolonial studies, sees postcolonial utopianism structured firmly round critique, offering a vision of utopia positing transformation of coercive power, and offering, as in Salman Rushdie's writings, various fluid, destabilized hybrid utopian worlds as alternatives. Ashcroft sees utopia constantly adumbrated but never secured in postcolonial utopian writing, with Rabindranath Tagore, Gandhi and Salman Rushdie being his foremost examples from India. There is little engagement with bhashas or vernacular art and literature from India in Ashcroft's book, though.

Introduction

“…The present collection continues the line of argument begun by Bagchi (2016) in the context of South Asian and transcultural utopian imagination: religion plays a far more important role than is usually recognized in utopian writing and practice. The articles in this collection further explore the fruitful paradox expressed in the phrase "prospective memories of the future" as a means of crystallizing the social dreaming upon which utopia depends.…”

“…Recent scholarship has made substantive analysis of modern South Asian utopian and dystopian imagination, alerting us, notably, to the importance of analyzing women's utopian writing and practice from South Asia (Bagchi 2016(Bagchi , 2020, to the insights afforded by including bhasha or vernacular Indian literature and film in our canon of utopia and dystopia (Bagchi 2019(Bagchi , 2020Banerjee 2019;Chatterjee 2019;Chaudhuri 2019;Mohan 2012), to the importance of religion in utopianism (Bagchi 2016), to the recurring imagination of the rural and the urban as sites of social dreaming and nightmare (Mohan 2012;Banerjee 2019). This collection expands the current scholarly debates on these subjects.…”

Modern Indian Utopian Art and Literature: An Introduction

“…We build on existing work by scholars of utopia and India such as Michael Gordin, Helen Tilley, and Gyan Prakash (2010), Konrad Meisig (2007), Barnita Bagchi (2012), andAnupama Mohan (2012). We also pay sustained attention to literature written in bhashas (vernacular Indian languages), and to the work of classic modernist writers expressing themselves in bhashas from 20th-century India, such as Satinath Bhaduri (Bagchi, 2019) and Tarasankar Bandopadhyay (Chatterjee, 2019): such work is enormously fruitful to analyze from utopian and literary studies approaches. Besides presenting these aspects, the Special Collection addresses both unique and conventional themes in utopian and dystopian studies; while conventional and canonical themes such as delineation of good places and bad places are adopted in modern Indian utopian writing, the village as a place emerges in modern Indian utopian and dystopian writing as far more important than in canonical Eurocentric utopian narratives.…”