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Creole Glossary: Tārāshankar Bandopādhyāy's HānsuIT Bānker upakathā

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Benjamin Conisbee Baer
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Abstract

Tārāshankar Bandopādhyāy's novel Hānsulī Bānker upakathā ‘The Tale of Hansuli Turn’ (1946–51) straddles the period of independence and partition in India. Its literary staging of the creolized Bengali spoken by a marginal, un‐touchable, semiaboriginal group is both formally innovative and politically imaginative. Tārāshankar disperses the book's glossary throughout its text, and the workings of this glossary embody an unusual perspective on class and caste segregation in modern India. Te novel's historical narrative tells of the disin‐tegration of a rustic, semifeudal Kahar community under the crises of war and modernity in the 1940s. While this history says that proletarianization and loss of idiom are inevitable for such figures of the rural margins, Hānsulī Bānker elaborates a counterfactual possibility. Tis alternative history is not simply a romanticized novelistic preservation of a dying way of life but a minimal imag‐ining of a different line of connection between the realm of subalternity and the public sphere. In its reimagining, Hānsulī Bānker also rethinks and prefigures modern India's other internal partitions, internal diasporas, and emergent political dilemmas and the history of the Bengali novel itself.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 125 , Issue 3 , May 2010 , pp. 622 - 639
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2010

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