A Tryst with Colonial Modernity: Science and Rationality in Devaki Nandan Khatri’s Chandrakanta

Abstract

In this reading of Devaki Nandan Khatri’s Chandrakanta, the paper proposes to engage with the wonder tale in the context of the emergent commercial publishing and rise of varied literary cultures, in the nineteenth century, on the one hand and the indigenisation of imperial scientific discourses on the other. The rise of literary genres like periodicals, journals, novels, romantic fiction, chapbooks provided a productive platform for debating the emergent discourses on science and its impact on the extant religious and cultural processes. Chandrakanta deployed this platform to forge a unique idiom of Hindi that could train its neo literate readers in contemporary discourses on science and rationality. The procedures embedded in the construction of this scientifically attuned Hindi not simply contested the universality of western power but also constructed a new class of western educated (upper caste) elite, who eagerly sought ways of deploying science as a value system that could enrich the indigenous knowledge traditions of India. Chandrakanta further illustrates how these scientific discourses played a significant role in contesting the extant gendered contexts of the nineteenth century. The language of rational modernity seized the language of gender dynamics, seeking to redefine the networks of hierarchies within it.