CENTRE FOR WOMEN’S STUDIES, JNU
Invites you to a
Interdisciplinary Research Students’ Colloquium
on
The Fantastic World of the Bengali Rupkatha—Gendering the Creation of a Popular Literary
Genre in 19th and early 20th Century Bengal
by
Raahi Adhya
(PhD Scholar Department of Cultural, Literary and Postcolonial Studies, School of Oriental and African Studies, London)
Abstract: The publication of Thakurmar Jhuli (‘Grandmother’s Bag of Tales’, 1907) marks a significant moment in the development of Bengali literature for children. It was an anthology of folktalescollected by Dakshinaranjan Mitra Majumdar over the first few years of the 20th century,categorised neatly into a genre, ‘rupkatha’ , and promoted by none other than Rabindranath Tagore as the most ‘swadeshi’ of all genres. Only two years before the publication of Thakurmar Jhuli, the British colonial government had taken the administrative decision to divide Bengal into East and West, unwittingly laying the seeds for the high tide of the Swadeshi movement. An important exercise that marked this movement, which, in differing degrees had already been gaining ground over the 19th century, was the drive to collect ‘indigenous’ Bengali literary material so as to construct the ‘true’ literary history of Bengal. The establishment of the Bangiya Sahitya Parishad or Bengali Academy of Letters in 1893 symbolised as well as bolstered this endeavour to consolidate the Bengali language and literature through a process of ‘collecting’ material from the countryside that was ‘unmolested by modern influences’ (Sen 1920: 264-265). One of the most popular literary genres that was birthed in the process of transmuting oral tales into literary forms was that of the rupkatha, or magical tales meant to be narrated to children. Thakurmar Jhuli was one such collection and it can be argued that it became an exemplary one for decades to come.
Date: 9th September 2019, Monday, Time: 4.00 PM
Venue: Committee Room No.401, Fourth Floor, SSS-I
All Are Welcome
