Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay Research Articles

The secular cleansing that wasn’t: “Vande Mataram” and the expurgated story of Indian nationalism

ABSTRACT This article shows the religious iconography of Indian nationalism by observing the manner in which the defining text of the Hindu Right came to legitimize an unapologetically majoritarian nationalism. It revisits the history of the Indian independence movement through its architects’ handling of the song “Vande Mataram” and its idolization of the nation as a Hindu goddess. Tracing its relevance to the hegemony of Hindutva in India today, the article then reads Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay’s 1881-82 novel Anandamath to study the connection between the song and its parent text, and to thereby understand the politics of secular cleansing which strives for the secular by purging from the communal that which is unambiguously sectarian. Consequently, the article argues that the story of “Vande Mataram” becomes an unparalleled example in Indian history of how the secular is structured on the ideological foundations of the communal and is therefore conceptually intertwined with it.

Imagining the Nation: Rabindranath Tagore and His Quest for Creating a Past

The spread of Western education in Bengal in the wake of British conquest of the province made the province’s literati painfully aware of the contempt with which the new rulers treated them. British portrayal of India as a subjugated country passing from its Muslim conquerors to the British hurt their pride. Their ancient religion came under attack from Christian missionaries for its bigotries and social superstitions. This produced a strong reaction among its leading intellects such as Raja Rammohun Roy, Debendranath Tagore, Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay and Iswar Chandra Vidyasagar, who tried to resuscitate the glory of ancient Indian civilisation by blending them with European ideas of Enlightenment and rationality. Rabindranath Tagore gave a fillip to it by arguing that Indian civilisation did not deserve to be judged by Western yardsticks as it had fixed its ideals in the assimilation of all conflicting influences from outside. India might have been invaded from the outside, but thereafter the invaders always merged with the local people and became India’s own. Therein lay the greatness of Indian civilisation.

Historicizing Hindutva Ideology

Historicizing Hindutva Ideology

The Novelist and the Nationalist: Bankim Chandra in the Life of Subhas Chandra Bose

This article seeks to explore a hitherto unploughed field of research on Indian freedom movement in general and Subhas Chandra Bose in particular that is the influence of Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay, the famous novelist of Bengal in the life of Subhas Chandra Bose, the militant nationalist. While Bankim Chandra was never embroiled in politics, yet his influence on Indian nationalist movement was most profound. It was particularly discernible in the firebrand revolutionaries of Bengal whose legacy was inherited by Subhas Chandra Bose. No work on Bankim Chandra’s influence on the inception, germination, evolution, articulation maturation and expression of Bose’s concept of nationalism has been produced so far. The article tries to recapture and reassess the extent of reflection of Bankim Chandra’s outlook on British rule in India and India’s subjection to British imperialism, the contentious issue of Hindu nationalism and also related pertinent issues like communalism and secularism. It is a comparative study which intends to review these issues and questions in critical perspective. The central point is that Bankim Chandra’s influence on Bose was not transitory but everlasting and Bankim was always an abiding source of inspiration behind all his nationalist endeavour.

Women, Violence, Sovereignty: “Rakshasa” Marriage by Capture in Modern Indian Political Thought

Nineteenth-century colonial jurists, sociologists, and Indian nationalists revived the ancient Indian legal concept of rakshasa marriage by bride capture after vanquishing her kinsmen, which the Hindu “lawgiver” Manu condemned but permitted to the warrior caste alone. Only the Kshatriyas, India's designated sovereigns, could break patriarchal and brahmanical authority in this way. But rakshasa marriage was also identified with the demon Ravana, who abducted Sita in the epic Ramayana, and with Hindu nationalism's Muslim enemy. Preoccupied with the loss of kshatriyahood, Hindu nationalism uniquely premised sovereignty on the power to dispossess enemy Fathers of their women: from Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay's celebration of epic hero Arjuna and Krishna's own rakshasa marriages, to the appropriation of this supposedly Muslim method by the architect of Hindutva, Vinayak Damodar Savarkar (1883–1967). Transcending the “sexual contract” in the Indian case, rakshasa marriage's association of bride capture and miscegenation with sovereignty sheds new light on gendered Partition violence, beyond brahmanical notions of (defiled) purity and honor.

How Not to Read like a Victorian: Reimagining Bankim’s Reader in Nineteenth-Century Bengali Novels

AbstractThis article examines the novels of the nineteenth-century Bengali author Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay in light of classical Sanskrit literature and the rasa theory and argues that practices of Sanskrit kāvya literature are as dominant in the structural and aesthetic elements of the Bengali novel as are Western forms of novel production. The arguments are located in the reader to suggest that Bankim’s novels train readers to read the Sanskrit past as encoded in the text and as coexisting with the westernized colonial present, albeit in a difficult relationship. The article pays particular attention to the novelist’s adaptation of two forms of Sanskrit prose, the kathā and the ākhyāyikā, and his exploration of the śṛngāra (erotic) rasa. While the Bengali novel emerges after the introduction of its Victorian counterpart, the former is a product of engagement with tensions foreign to the British novel. Exploring this alternative reading practice provides an opportunity to understand how Bengali and Sanskrit—in terms of literature and culture—are part of the lived experience of both Bankim and his nineteenth-century readers, and part of the aesthetic and ethical foundation of the early Bengali novel.

A Nation within a Nation: English Education as a Tool of Divide and Rule Policy in Colonial India

Famous Irish political scientist and historian, Benedict Anderson, in his book, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism has described nations as imagined communities. Stephen May, the British novelist, playwright, and TV writer, has viewed that language is used as a political tool to strengthen the imagined community of a nation-state. Eventually, many countries have been named after the language predominantly used in a particular country. But during the colonial expansion that the linguistic identity of a colonised nation like India and its people has been transformed in different ways. With the English Education Act, 1835 Lord Bentinck defeated the Orientalists and promoted English education in India. Consequently, different missionaries like Joshua Marshman, William Carey, William Ward, and Alexander Duff, who principally used English education to preach Christianity among the Indians, and British officials like Charles Grant, Lord Macaulay, William Hazlitt, and also some higher-class Indians like Raja Rammohan Roy, Keshab Chandra Sen, Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay supported the Anglicist view and tried to spread the English education in India. Different English schools like Dharmatala Academy were built and in the curriculum of different universities, the writings of different English authors like Francis Bacon, William Shakespeare, John Milton, Joseph Addison, Alexander Pope were included. Many higher-class Indians became more interested in English study losing their interest in vernacular education. Vijay Agnew in her autobiography, Where I Come From, and Madhu Kishor in her article “The Dominance of Angreziyat in Our Education” have accused English education of making them unaware and ignorant of the Indian culture and writings. In this way, the higher-class English educated Indians have created one English nation within the Hindustan. Even the translation of different Indian classical texts into English like Sir William Jone’s translation of Abhjnanasakuntalam in 1789 and Sir Charles Wilkins’ translation of Bhagabadgita in 1784 has also paved the way for forming a different identity. In this context, the present paper aims to show how the different tools for spreading the English language divided the nation into two, supporting the divide and rule policy of the British, which is still effective in the so-called united, equal, and democratic India.

‘Bharat Mata’ and ‘Ma Victoria’: Forms of Divine Motherhood in Colonial Bengal

This article attempts to explore the cult of the ‘Bharat Mata’ that was born out of the patriotic fervour of Indian nationalist leaders who transformed their nationalist passion into an image of the nation as mother, and the widely promoted idea of Queen Victoria as a mother to her subjects in the nineteenth-century Bengal. The image of ‘Bharat Mata’ was conceived with the rising tide of nationalism in the nineteenth century, the impetus provided by the Bengali novelist Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay’s novel Anandamath (1882). The image of Queen Victoria as a mother to her Indian subjects found its most emphatic projection in Bengali texts like Raja Sir Sourindro Mohun Tagore’s poem Srimad-Victoria-Mahatmyam, The Greatness of the Empress Victoria: A Sanskrit Poem, Set to Music with English Translation (1897). Composed on the occasion of the completion of 60 years of Queen Victoria’s reign, the poem was a ‘humble offering of loyalty’ to the Queen-Empress, whose reign over India was glorified and regarded auspicious. The article looks into the apparently contradictory nature of the worship of the feminine form as the ‘mother’ in a pre-independent nineteenth-century Bengal, through a consideration of texts like Anandamath, Srimad-Victoria-Mahatmyam and Girishchandra Ghosh’s play Hirak Jubilee (1897), among others. In this context, the article also takes into account the theoretical perspective of the cultural ‘Other’, inherent in a study involving the dynamics of colonial relations.

BANKIM’S RAJANI: A STUDY INTO HEALTH AND HUMANITY

Though there has been a plethora of books and articles written on Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay’s eponymous fiction Rajani, what is conspicuous after all these is the necessity of a medical humanities’ perspective into this masterpiece of Chattopadhyay. To fulfill such lacuna in the previous studies, the present article makes a hermeneutical attempt to contextualize Rajani at the backdrop of medical knowledge and medical culture during Colonial India. With this hypothesis, the paper proves how Bankim stirs the public imaginations about human health, hygiene and disability along with their cultural and clinical manifestations and ramifications, especially in colonial Bengal.

Women and Cultural Transformation: The Politics of Representation in the Novels of Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay

Women and Cultural Transformation: The Politics of Representation in the Novels of Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay

Politics and Social Consciousness in Bankim Literature in the context of Lokrahasya: A Post-Colonial Reading of a ‘Colonial’ Text

The very title of the article suggests a journey back in not only time but politico-socio-cultural situation as well. The ‘Text’ taken for consideration is a piece of colonial literature in terms of the period of its creation; the ideas within it, however, can be seen from a ‘postcolonial’ perspective, in a period which is again ‘post-colonial’. The author Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay continuously juxtaposes the ‘colonialist’ and the ‘colonized’ in a series of metaphors, comparing one with the other. In the context, at one level creates a critique of colonialism; at a deeper level he shows how the processes of colonialism have been appropriated by the ‘colonized’ through both acceptance of, and, resistance to colonialism. Subversion of the ‘superior’ by the ‘inferior’ is a recurrent theme. Finally, his project was cultural regeneration of a colonized society—his own—by imbibing the best elements of both the Orient and the Occident.

Bankim’s Use of Familiar Patriarchal Tropes/Frameworks in Rajmohan’s Wife to Define and Re-Define Womanhood

The present paper aims to look at the concept of womanhood as defined and revised upon by Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay, in his debut novel, and, incidentally, the first Indian novel, written in English language, known as Rajmohan’s Wife. Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay is the great Indian novelist, and, poet, who has given a new dimension to the genre of Bengali novel. In this present novel, he has tried to show the Bengali woman trying to come out of the conservative, conventional patriarchal ethos, and, slowly trying to make a room/space of her own. And, this, by not abandoning/rejecting patriarchy outrightly, but by staying very much within the patriarchal zone, and, yet asserting her individuality/personality.

Shakespeare's Ariel versus Kālidāsa's Yaksha: Revisiting a comparative study from 19th century Bengal

AbstractMy article considers how a lesser‐known Bengali periodical essay of 1884 capitalises on the canonical eminence of Shakespeare's Ariel to establish by contrast the aesthetic and ethical merits of the unnamed yaksha, a semidivine being who forms the protagonist of Kālidāsa's poem Meghadūtam (4th–5th centuries CE). Comparison between Shakespeare and Kālidāsa, the classical Sanskrit poet and dramatist, has been a commonplace of Bengali literary criticism in the 19th century, with inputs from such luminaries as Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay (1887) and Rabindranath Tagore (1907). While the poet Hemchandra Bandyopadhyay eulogised Shakespeare with the aphorism Bhārater Kālidās, jagater tumi (“You are to the world what Kālidāsa is to India”), the other acts of comparison (including the essay's in question) are not so unqualified and effusive. The essay, entitled “Ariel o Yaksha” (Ariel and the Yaksha) and written by one Bishnucharan Chattopadhyay, plays a clever game in that it starts by accepting Shakespeare as a universal favourite and enlists his character Ariel as a yardstick for assessing the yaksha but it then goes on to expose tacitly the bestiality and impetuosity of Ariel when compared with what it finds to be the higher instincts of the yaksha. The essay thus engineers a reversal of the dominant critical opinion by puncturing the aura of nobility ascribed to Ariel and countering the allegation of base sensuality often levelled against Kālidāsa's lovesick yaksha. It attempts an ethical re‐evaluation of Kālidāsa's yaksha and shows Kālidāsa to be more edifying than is often suggested by commentators. The essay gestures towards a nativist and traditionalist agenda but does not fully enunciate it or subscribe to it, thus exemplifying the ambivalence inherent in the (post)colonial modernity of 19th‐century Bengal.

Между вестернизацией и самобытностью: западная цивилизация и колониальная система глазами Бонкимчондро Чоттопаддхая

Между вестернизацией и самобытностью: западная цивилизация и колониальная система глазами Бонкимчондро Чоттопаддхая

Irreverent Reading: Humor, Erudition and Subalternity in the fiction of Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay and Fakir Mohan Senapati

This essay examines scenes from prose fiction in which two Indian novelists (Bankim Chandra Chatterjee and Fakir Mohan Senapati) interrogated subalternity in colonial India by talking about books. It first examines narrators’ frustration with books as acts of “irreverent reading” in colonial India, where the presence and scarcity of readable print produced anxieties about language and community. It then examines “reading” in the novels and compares how different kinds of irreverence allows narrators to introduce women characters as agents of very different kinds of violence in colonial India. Following insights of Gayatri Spivak, Elleke Boehmer, and Leah Price, and others, this article argues that Fakir Mohan Senapati’s sensitivity to his readers’ inability to access books enabled his novel to empower readers without books and emphasize how community in colonial India was constituted by the collective forgetting of women.

SOVEREIGNTY AS A MOTOR OF GLOBAL CONCEPTUAL TRAVEL: SANSKRITIC EQUIVALENTS OF “LAW” IN BENGALI DISCURSIVE PRODUCTION

How may one imagine the global travel of legal concepts, thinking through models of diffusion and translation, as well as through obstruction, negation, and dialectical transfiguration? This article offers some reflections by interrogating discourses (intertextually woven with Sanskritic invocations) produced by three celebrated Bengalis: the nationalist littérateur Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay (1838–94), the Rajavamshi “lower-caste” peasant leader Panchanan Barma (1866–1935), and the international jurist Radhabinod Pal (1886–1967). These actors evidently took part in projects of vernacularizing (and thereby globalizing through linguistic–conceptual translation) legal–political frameworks of state sovereignty. They produced ideas of nexus between sovereignty, law, and “divine” lawgiving activity, which resemble as well as diverge from notions of political theology associated with the German jurist Carl Schmitt. Simultaneously, these actors critiqued coercive impositions of state-backed positive law and sovereign violence, often in the name of globally oriented concepts of “ethical”/natural law, theology, and capacious forms of solidarity, including categories like “all beings,” “self/soul,” “humanity,” and “world.” I argue that “sovereignty,” as a metonym for concrete practices of power as well as a polyvalent conceptual signifier, thus dialectically provoked the globalization of modern legal intellection, including in the extra-European world.

Creating of Hinduism’s Image in Religiosus-Philosophical Thoutht of the Bengal Renaissance

Based on the sources on religious-philosophical thought of the Bengal Renaissance (XIX - early XX century), author represents the process and results of creating of the Hinduism’s image by Brahmo Samaj leaders (Rammohun Roy, Debendranath Tagore, Keshubchandra Sen) and Neo-Hindu thinkers (Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay, Swami Vivekananda). Perceived from European orientalists, the term ‘Hinduism’ was filled the meanings and content by Bengal thinkers according to the epoch’s needs. For explaining of the features of the image construction method and results, multiple influences on Bengali thinkers are described, such as the influences of traditional Sanskrit education and intellectual culture, caste consciousness, Islam, Christianity, European orientalism and scientific rationalism. Using hermeneutical, axiological and comparative methods, the Bengal thinkers had created the image of Hinduism, which contained the experience of critical analysis of indigenous religious trends and the experience of creation of ‘ideal type’ (M. Weber) of native religion. General image of Hinduism has two sides in representation of positive and negative facets both for Indians and for the World.

Mimeticism and Historiography: The Making of a Hindu Past in the Thought of Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay

ABSTRACTMimesis is a key theme in scholarly discussions of conventions of representation. The crucial role mimesis plays in behaviour formation has been noted by European theorists such as Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin and Reinhart Koselleck. However, in post-colonial discussions of historiography, mimesis rarely appears as a concept deserving of sustained scholarly attention. Addressing this lacuna, I discuss here mimeticist aspects of anti-colonial historiography. For this purpose, I analyse the historiographical agenda of the Hindu nationalist author, Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay (1838–94). I demonstrate that as Chattopadhyay attempted to promote a mimetic relationship with the pre-colonial past, he also undermined, at times, the nineteenth-century principles of factual history.

Social Reform in Colonial Bengal: Revisiting Vidyasagar

This paper looks at Vidyasagar’s programme for widow marriage while also discussing his campaign against Kulin Brahmin polygamy, child marriage and prostitution – some of the evils that plagued nineteenth-century Bengali society. Vidyasagar’s diligent effort for the legalisation of widow marriage ultimately paid off in 1856 as the British colonial administrators drafted widow marriage into law. The two tracts that Vidyasagar published in 1856 in favour of widow marriage have been looked into some detail as well as opposition to his programme from none other than Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay, arguably the greatest Bengali novelist till date. Statistically speaking, not many widows married under the Hindu Widow’s Remarriage Act, making the Act, according to some critics, almost a dead letter. However, whether statistics alone does justice to the long-term impact Vidyasagar’s movement has had on Bengal’s social and intellectual life is also discussed.Philosophy and Progress, Vol#55-56; No#1-2; Jan-Dec 2014

The “Indian” Monotheism

This essay is a wide-ranging inquiry into an early and consistent monotheistic impulse in Hindu nationalist discourses and identity formation since the late nineteenth century. It argues that the consolidation of a pan-Indian Hindu demographic and religious identity, cutting across a formidable and awry range of local devotional traditions and deities, entailed a form of modernist transcoding that was tendentially monotheistic. It would seem that a singular Hindu national imagination could be secured only when such myriad energies–differing vastly in terms of caste, class, region, local cosmologies, linguistic, and cultural formations–could be harnessed into a monotheistic edifice of faith. Only then could that singular faith be parlayed into nationalist feeling for one Hindu nation. The aspired-for Hindu monotheism would then not just yield a Hindu nation in the world but would also be equipped to synchronize with other monothematic mantras of modernity like scientific progress, democracy, or techno-financial development. The essay visits some nodal moments of this historical narrative–the coming into being of a Hindu “tradition” under the auspices of colonial Indology, Rammohun Roy’s defense of Vedic monotheism, Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay’s efforts at using modern disciplinary knowledge (history, philosophy, science, aesthetics) to formulate a system of Hindu ethics and to establish Krishna as a singular messianic figure like Christ or Buddha, or a later moment in Savarkar’s time, when the theological question had to be sidelined altogether in favor of a more pragmatic Hindu cultural nationalism. The essay visits some cardinal points of tension and historical consequences in the fragmented, still unfolding story of this monotheistic drive.