Review: Emotional World of the Bengal Renaissance

Reviewed Work(s): Exploring Emotional History: Gender, Mentality and Literature in the
Indian Awakening by Rajat Kanta Ray
Review by: Sekhar Bandyopadhyay
Source: Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 37, No. 44/45 (Nov. 2-15, 2002), pp. 4513-4514
Published by: Economic and Political Weekly
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4412806
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against him. Was the colonial imagination, from the NWFP is of a piece with thisof US global domination and supremacism
one wonders, puzzled by his non-violence developmental orientation, but Chowdhry in the late/post modern world? Also,
and did they need to bring him in line with also argues that it served a more pragmaticChowdhry's hints regarding the ways in
the more familiar coupling of rebellion which empire cinema both interpellated as
political consideration of trying to portray
with violence? Or were the demands of the colonialism as a protector of these dicta-well as inferiorised its subordinate sub-
adventure film genre responsible for this torial states at a time when the Congress jects at 'home' - that is, the white woman
remarkable miscegenation? I may add that was urging their abolition. and the lower classes represented in this
the best part of the essay is the decoding A significant element of this book con-genre as memsahib and subaltern respec-
of'Gunga Din's' loyalty by the post Kipling cerns the questions which Chowdhry tively - could also be profitably extended.
world of anxiety among white army offic- gestures at and which can provide areas Chowdhry's argument is an interesting
ers about the new recruitment policy and for further work. The most interesting ofone and will, one hopes, open up a new
the possibility of serving under 'native' these is the fact that the films were made sub-field of study. The interactive approach
officers. by Hollywood. Besides the identification to ideology and processes of signification,
Chowdhry locates ruptures within the of the US with the imperial project of the which is, seeing them as fields that are
overall frame of colonial ideology in two west in general (a point made by constantly being renegotiated by the
sites. For one, it is found within the cin- Chowdhry), other areas can be explored: colonised and coloniser, is a fruitful one,
ematic narratives themselves. This is most does the American project depart in any as the comprehensive scope ofChowdhry' s
evident in 'Gunga Din' where the Guru's significant way from British produced study indicates. If there is a regret about
diatribes against the British can work against representational strategies? What role does the scope of the book, it is that one wishes
the grain of the imperial theme. The second the domination of the cultural consumer Chowdhry had analysed films produced
- and more crucial - location is that of themarket play in the inexorable developmentover a longer period of time.[ll
world of the colonised. Here, Chowdhry's
discussion of the popular responses to 'The
Drum' is valuable. Chowdhry shows that
the film sparked off a movement for its
ban, first among middle-class leaders and
Emotional World of the
Bengal Renaissance
then spilled over into the streets where a
vast Muslim underclass took the initiative.
Of added significance was the fact that this
movement pitted itself against a Congress
government, which (possibly because of repression and sublimation in society.
its earlier rhetoric against the act of ban- Exploring Emotional History: While dealing with his literary sources Ray
ning) dragged its feet - although the Gender, Mentality and Literature inconsciously rejects the methods of
agitators appealed to the secular nation- the Indian Awakening by Rajat deconstruction or discourse analysis. In-
alist sentiment. Chowdhry places these Kanta Ray; stead, while drawing his material from a
events against the heterogeneous contexts Oxford University Press, 2001; novel, for example, he "treat(s) the ideas
of German and Italian propaganda about pp xii+333, Rs 595. and feelings of the subject as if she is a
British oppression of Muslims especially in real person for that moment rather than a
the NWFP, the politics of the Khan Abdul fictional character..." (p 21). In this explor-
Gaffar Khan and the movement against SEKHAR BANDYOPADHYAY atory exercise, he focuses mainly on the
western cinema on financial grounds by sex-gender system of the Indian society as
the fledgling Indian cinema industry. Having made his debut as a politicalit evolved through interaction with its
The resentment caused by the two films historian of Indian nationalism and material structures during the period of
and their subsequent banning encouraged Calcutta municipal politics, and establish- Indian 'Awakening' or 'Renaissance'.
a shift away from the ideology of law and ing his credentials as an economic histo- Ray accepts the ontology of a 'Renais-
order articulated through the military rian of the Bengal peasantry and Indian sance' and its impact on the structures of
adventure plot. What we have in 'The industrialisation and entrepreneurship, emotions and gender relations and writes
Rains Came' instead, is the projection of Rajat Ray in his latest book has made this a story as a narrative of progress towards
a caring maternal imperialism that is case for emotional history. Although at the modernity. The Renaissance, he argues,
wedded to an ideology of development in base universal and timeless, he argues, started in the 1890s, exposing a small
which the colonised is permitted to be emotions too, particularly some culture-group of Indians to a whole range of new
active and progressive, but only under the specific emotions have a history of their ideas from the west, and creating in the
overall dictates of the white colonisers. own, and it constitutes the core of the process a limited civil society, which
This ideology is embodied by the figure history of mentality. Ray explores this debated various issues of public interest.
of Edwina, the wife of a wealthy British history by going beyond the methods of This modernity gradually expanded itself
Lord, who falls in love with the heir psycho-analysis, by looking closely at the and in the 1920s penetrated the country-
designate of a Ranchipur princely king- side, thus preparing the grounds for an
literary sources, which reveal, in his opin-
dom. She dies conveniently and leaves ion, a both the subconscious. and the con-Indian awakening. The creation of this
huge legacy to the prince for the redevel- scious minds of the subjects and shed lightpublic space brought into existence its
opment of the state that has been ravaged on their expressed and submerged emo- other, the private sphere, where the emo-
by rain. The shift to a princely kingdom tions, focusing on both the processes of tions and sentiments remained firmly rooted

Economic and Political Weekly November 2-9, 2002 4513

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in Indian tradition. India therefore had a that love had acquired a social value and to the high caste gentry, the middle ranking
modernity that remained anchored in herthat premarital love was possible, but given Sadgop peasantry and the untouchable
own culture, and it is the emotional tensionthe realities of social relations, it did not Kahar landless labourers.
involved in this transformational process always find fulfilment in the narrow con- This book, using literature as its primary
that Ray seeks to capture from the creativefines of arranged marriages, abiding by the source, takes us very successfully into the
literature of the time. rules of caste and patriarchy. Love is inner domains of love, emotions and sen-
As we mentioned earlier, Ray providestherefore sublimated in 'viraha' or parting timents of the Bengali society, which
this story as a narrative of progress from theand ultimately in 'bhava-sammilan', which remained for a long time outside the gaze
late 18th century poetry, when love was fullRay translates as 'union in spirit and not in of the historian, preoccupied with official
of passion and sensuality, which could beflesh' (p 111). The Benoali fiction of this records in the archives, which gave us little
had only outside the family, in a domain ofperiod thus adequately reflects the dilem- information on this private sphere. Litera-
wine and courtesans. From this 'age of mas of Bengali psyche, their new conscious- ture is as good or as bad as any other source
dissolution' or 'decline', there was a sharp ness, which remained tormented by con- material that a historian may use, and we
break in the late 19th early 20th centuries, tradictory conventions of love, ranging need not be unnecessarily defensive about
primarily due to the intervention of western from extramarital relations to premarital it, as long as we remember the history of
thoughts. Ray tries to capture the nuances courtship, from divine passion to human the production of our sources. It will be
of this break from three texts, Rabindranath attachment, from sexual partnership to unfair to say that Ray is unaware of the
Tagore's verse Play 'Chitrangada' (1892), platonic relations. Love and relationship constructed nature of his sources. Yet, he
Bhai Vir Singh's Punjabi epic 'Rana Surat between man and woman were thus concep- also argues that the 'portrayal of psychic
Singh' (1905) and Vallathol Narayana tualised in the emotional world of Bengal and social reality' by some of the Bengali
Menon's Malayalam narrative poem renaissance in ways that were fundamen- novelists, "is sufficiently faithful and
'Magdalana Mariam' (1921). In contrast to tally different from those of the west. convincing to give the historian a feel of
the earlier Urdu and Persian poetry, in this Chapter five in this book certainly stands life and love in their society" (p 79). Here
new literature women were no longer imag- out as a superb example of Ray's imagi- a historian, it seems, is seeking to recon-
ined just as physical beings, but with minds native use of Tarasankar Banerjee's three struct the 'reality' from a 'portrayal', rather
of their own, claiming equal partnership novels ( 'Dhatridevata', 'Ganadevata' and than treating it as a specific representation
with men. This new romanticism was how- 'Hansuli Banker Upakatha') as windowsof that reality. To put it in a different way,
ever blended with Indian tradition of pathos into the inner emotional complexities of despite his empathy and intimate knowl-
and spiritualism, thus love for man being a village community in western Bengal inedge, Tarasankar's description of Kahar
sublimated into love for god. This combi- the first half of the 20th century. In this life and their emotions is not - and cannot
nation of eroticism and spiritualism was chapter he shows how values, emotionsbe - the 'view from within' (p 249). It
very much within the Indian tradition that and sentiments were inextricably tied toleaves possibilities of alternative narra-
could trace its origin from bhakti and sufism. the structures of wealth and power in a fasttives of Kahar worldview, and also the
It could also accommodate the apparent changing countryside. As it appears fromKahar chronicle cannot be generalised to
contradictions between literary imagination Banerjee's novels, there had been threeunderstand the dalit mental world in .the
and the hard realities of unchanging asym- distinct segments in Bengal rural society,whole of Bengal, let alone in India. But
metric gender relations within the family. the gentry, the peasantry and artisans andnevertheless, Tarasankar's novels remain
the untouchables. They lived in three an important entry-point - a window - into
Changing Notions different geographically defined as well as the innerdomains of Kaharcommunity life.
socially demarcated spaces, with different This book also makes an important con-
Further progress towards new idioms of concepts of womanhood, honour and sexualtribution to the ongoing debate on Indian
man-woman relationship can be traced in morality. There were interfaces between modernity. It uses the trope of 'Renais-
the novels, and Ray here relies primarily the three mental worlds, but separationsance' to identify the whole package of
on Bengali novels, which he thinks devel- was more significant than the points ofideas associated with modernity and argues
oped in direct response to the intellectual contact. The three categories were relatedforcefully, using a wide range of literary
impulses of the 'Bengal Renaissance'. Here to each other in exploitative vertical rela-sources, that this modernity was firmly
again, although the literary genre was tionships, but forms of symbiotic exchangerooted in Indian culture and was not a blind
borrowed from the west, its content re- and ties of mutual dependence bound themimitation of the west. It was a modernity
mained Indian, thus blending western ideas into an 'organic society'. These bonds ofin which western ideas and Indian senti-
with indigenous sentiments or essence. interdependence, however, began toments were blended together. This hybrid
The trend gradually evolved from the early crumble under pressures of extraneousnature of Indian modernity has also been
romantic novels by Bankim Chandra factors, as village was increasingly drawndiscussed in recent years by a number of
Chatterjee, appearing in the late 19th into the modernising process. Education, other historians, whom Ray has criticised
century, through the novels of Rabindranath political movements, the coming of the- somewhat unnecessarily - in his book.
Tagore and Sarat Chanidra Chatterjee and railways, the junction station and the dis-Indeed, this book - whieh is in its own right
others in the early 20th, finally blossoming trict town - all combined to destroy the a major contribution - would have been
in the novels of the 1930s and 1940s written autonomy of the village and impacted ona much more pleasant read without this
by such masters as Bibhuti Bhushan its social values, inter-personal relationsfutile polemical debate with the 'Marxists',
Banerjee and Tara Sankar Banerjee deal- and modes of interaction between castes, 'subalternists' and 'postmodernists'.
ing with the romantic realities of rural classes and sexes. Ray describes theseFinally, for an Oxford University Press title
Bengal. What we find in these novels is changes with fascinating details in relationthe printing errors are too many. BZ?

4514 Economic and Political Weekly November 2-9, 2002

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