Abstract
This article aims to highlight the significance of the gendering of the emerging nation that literature in India’s nationalist period generated, nurtured and reinforced. This article focuses on what Judith Brown (1985) identified as the ‘decisive decade’ (1930–1940) of the nationalist movement, when nationalist vision and imagery extensively penetrated people’s imagination. It will examine two contexts (Hindi and Bengali), which are certainly different but in some ways interestingly similar, through the works of two poets, both ‘independent’ of both literary movements and political parties. Besides having been published the same year, Harivansh Rai Bacchan’s Hindi collection Madhuśālā (1935) and Jibanananda Das’ Bengali poem Banalatā Sen (1935) are romantic works, somewhat distinctive to most literary production of this period, and both exploit in a rather similar way an evanescent female figure who continues to fertilize Hindi and Bengali imaginations. The purpose of this paper is to question the practice and the function of these romantic figures in nationalist imagination and to examine the issues of differences and similarities they raise regarding the vision of the utopian nation in both Hindi and Bengali contexts.
Highlights
Over the past decades, a number of studies (Orsini, 2002; Trivedi, 2003; Chatterjee, 1993; Kaviraj, 1995; Chandra, 1992) have sought to determine that literature has conveyed and rooted and reinforced anti-colonial and nationalist discourses in North India since the end of the nineteenth century
The Hindi movement of nineteenth century north India expressed a Hindu nationalism whose essence lay in the denial of existing assimilation to cultural traditions associated with Muslim rule and the affirmation of potential differentiation from these traditions. [...] In other words, one can view the Hindi movement as part of a process of multi-symbol congruence in which Hindu supporters of Hindi strove to transform the existing equation of Urdu = Muslim + Hindu and Hindi = Hindu + Muslim into Urdu + Muslim and Hindi = Hindu
Literature can document the complexity of history, ideologies and mentalities. Both Madhuśālā and Banalatā Sen reveal the appropriation of female figures and, more widely, of romanticism to embody the hopes and utopia of nationalism, which deeply permeated popular imaginations
Summary
A number of studies (Orsini, 2002; Trivedi, 2003; Chatterjee, 1993; Kaviraj, 1995; Chandra, 1992) have sought to determine that literature has conveyed and rooted and reinforced anti-colonial and nationalist discourses in North India since the end of the nineteenth century. It gave birth to both a pan-Indian nationalist discourse during the Swadeshi Movement, especially after 1905 Partition, and a specific Bengali culture, clearly defined by a collective ‘reconstructed’ imagination and traditions (Sarkar, 1973: 244–69) and delineated ‘cultural boundaries’ (Kaviraj, 2003: 534–42). Both Bengali and Hindi, for different reasons, aimed to progressively construct a national literary discourse, through the denunciation of colonial oppression and through collective local images and symbols that imbued the nationalist imagination with common history, culture and values. The purpose of this paper is to question the practice and the function of these romantic figures in nationalist imagination and to examine the issues of differences and similarities they raise regarding the vision of the utopian nation in both Hindi and Bengali contexts
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