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 18th-century classic Annada Mangal and to Rabindranath Tagore’s effective use of that very Mangal Kavya Structure to inform his 20th-century dance-drama, Taser Desh (Land of the Cards). The 19th century is represented by Mir Mosharraf Hosain’s Bishad Sindhu (The Sea of Sorrows), 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 20th-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, arguably about his sister-in-law, Kadambari, and its subsequent translation onto celluloid by Satyajit Ray, while another essay 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 port city
The volume concludes with a look at several English-language authors of the South Asian diaspora, a mo a modern subset of Bangla literature, including Bharati Mukherjee, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, and Jhumpa Lahiri.
