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

Abstract

This article analyses two novels in Bengali by Satinath Bhaduri, Jagari (1946, translated into English as The Vigil) and Dhorai Charit Manas (1949–51, 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 in India and to Gandhian notions of utopia. Neither of these novels adopts the well-known and canonical Eurocentric format of a utopian novel, in which a traveller from the outside world goes to a utopian country. Bhaduri’s two novels, rather, show us how inhabitants of India in the very last years of British colonialism engage in social dreaming, with Gandhian utopia, and critiques thereof, as central themes. Gandhi’s modern and radically non-Eurocentric reinvention of utopia—driven through the topoi of Ramrajya, of the ashram as utopian locus and of the oceanic circle of future Indian villages—demands a reconsideration of utopian writing. Both novels discussed in this article represent Gandhian utopian themes, but both also critique idealized Gandhian utopianism. Gandhian, socialist, communist and militant social dreaming play dialogically through the novels. This article traces the utopian impulse in these novels, as well as their ways of opening out multiple utopian programmes.