Barisal and Beyond: Essays on Bangla Literature

Language: English
Pages: 336






















About the Book

 

This collection of essays, spanning the
author's academic career, starts by looking back to his early experience of
Bengal in Barisal, Bangladesh, hometown of Bengali poet Jibanananda
Das, and goes on to analyze some important works of Bangla
literature.

 

One of the most prominent genres of premodern Bangla literature, the mangal kavya, is
examined in detail with attention paid both to Bharatcandra
Ray's eighteenth-century classic Annada Mangal and to Rabindranath
Tagore's effective use of that very mangal-kavya structure
to inform his twentieth century dance-drama, "Taser Desh"
(Land of the Cards). The nineteenth century is represented by Mir Mosharraf Hosain's prose
retelling of Hasan and Hosain's
martyrdom, and by playwright and poet Michael Madhusudan
Datta' s
iconoclastic epic poem, "The Slaying of Meghanada.
"

 

The study of twentieth-century writers begins
with an appreciation of the poems of Jibanananda Das,
and a reinterpretation of "Banalata Sen" based on a new reading of one particular word.
The essays in this section include a study of Tagore's novella "Charulata," about his sister-in-law, Kadambari, and its subsequent translation onto celluloid by
Satyajit Ray, while another focuses on novelist Rizia Rahman's exploration of
questions of identity, national and ethnic, through her fictional Anglo- Indian
De Cruz family of Chittagong, Bangladesh's southeast port city.

 

The volume concludes with a look at several
English-language authors of the South Asian diaspora,