constructing the canon: problems in bengali literary historiography

Social Scientist

Constructing the Canon: Problems in Bengali Literary HistoriographyAuthor(s): Mahasweta SenguptaSource: Social Scientist, Vol. 23, No. 10/12 (Oct. - Dec., 1995), pp. 56-69Published by: Social ScientistStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3517883 .

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MAHASWETA SENGUPTA

Constructing the Canon: Problems in Bengali Literary Historiography

Let me begin by stating very clearly that this paper does not claim to be exhaustive in any respect; it is rather a tentative articulation of some issues and problems tnat have interested me as a student of literary history. I should also mention that I consider literature or literary history very much an aspect of the larger cultural history of the people at a particular time and place. In this short paper, I would like to look into the problem of constructing a canon of texts while writing a "history" of literature with particular reference to the history of Bengali literature.

Peoples or nations construct histories of their past for various reasons. These narratives help in formulating a desired sense of identity among societies, and post-structuralist theorizing has commented profusely on the very constitutive nature of any discourse or narrative. Events of the past do not possess any intrinsic meaning by themselves, they acquire meaning in the light of what comes after them and the way these discrete happenings are arranged in a narrative by a historian or a story-teller. In this sense, all history- writing involves mediation and explicit or implicit conscious ma- nipulation to cater to contemporary demands.

Histories of literatures are narratives of the same kind; they are attempts at retrieving and representing a canon which would meet the requirements of changing historical periods. That is why each age interprets facts and texts in a different manner, and there is no dearth of "histories" written at different points of time according to the needs of a particular constituency occupying a certain geographical space. A literary canon takes shape in the form of a narrative that constructs a coherent account of the growth of the literary culture of a people, and necessarily reflects the demands as well as the constraints that remain implicit in the agenda. In any such construction, narratives seek to preserve or emphasize only those texts that perpetuate

* Central Institute of English and Foreign Languages, Hyderabad.

Social Scientist, Vol. 23 Nos. 10-12, October-December 1995



PROBLEMS IN BENGALI LITERARY HISTORIOGRAPHY 57

values which thenarrator considers to be relevant to his/her society. Counter-canons also have specific agendas, and are not free from the ideological biases that more or less infiltrate all human discourse whatsoever. As Frank Kermode put it: "Canons are essentially strategic constracts by which societies maintain their own interests" (Kernode 1979).

My interest here is in examining the nature of some of these "strategies" in order to see the cultural politics inherent in them and also to examine some of the ways in which the term "literature" (sahitya in Sanskrit and Bengali) is constituted according to the ideological inclinations of the writer. This is not to say that these historians of literature were always conscious of their inclinations, which appeared to them as "objective" evaluations of "facts" that had been misinterpreted earlier by other historians.

The cultural heritage of India before the consolidation of the British empire was of an essentially composite texture, a mix of the oral, the performative, and the written forms of expression. Con- stituencies and audiences undoubtedly differed, but there was a large degree of overlap which permitted flexibility and obliteration of rigid boundaries. The modern Indian languages or the regional languages came into existence some time in and around the tenth century, whereas literary historiography in these was not seriously undertaken until much later. Texts circulated in various forms among the people, but there was no serious effort to sift, categorize, or evaluate them in order to form a canon of representation. The social formation of pre-British Bengal (and this may be true of other regional languages in India) supported the flexibility and the mixing of forms of literary expressions without restricting the domain of "literature" to any particular category of texts.

The Sanskrit term for literature is sJhitya, a term that has been taken over in many modem Indian languages as well. Put simply, it means the "joining together" of word (sabda) and sense (artha). This togetherness of sound and sense was largely available in the kavya literature of Sanskrit, and according to Nagendra (1987:144-45), the term sdhitya is used almost synonymously with kavya or poetry in general. All texts were classified on the basis of the possible relationships of these t,wo, word and sense.' In pre-modern Bengali literature however, there does not seem to be any great concern about what exactly constituted the domain of the "literary," and the entire range of human verbal expression was available to audiences of various kinds according to their specific demands. This is why the epics, ballads, lyrics, religious/devotional texts, and even the very earthy mangalakavyas circulated freely in a space that could be shared by anyone living in that society.

The Bengali language, as has already been mentioned, started taking shape



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around the tenth century, and "modern" Bengali literature is said to have been born under the impact of contact with the British during the eighteenth century. Between the tenth and the eighteenth centuries, the creative impulses of the people took various forms of poetic expression; prose as a creative medium appears much later after the establishment of the British rule in Bengal. The effort to evaluate, or characterize this corpus of texts was undertaken only in the nineteenth century by scholars who felt the need to organize and formulate a coherent account of the literary history of Bengal, and I wish to look into a few of these constructions of the literary past.

In fact, it has been observed that these attempts at writing the history of Bengali literature predate attempts to write a general history of the Bengali people (Bhattacarya 1975:1). The earliest' known essay on the history of Bengali literature was Kasiprasad Ghosh's "Bengali works and writers" which was published in 1830 in a' magazine called Literary Gazette. This essay deals with the literary history of Bengal from the earliest times to the 1830s; though not an exhaustive survey, it does offer a feel of the terrain. Another short essay on a related subject appeared in 1852; written by Rangalal Bandopadhyaya and titled Bangala Kabitd Bisayaka Prabandha, it was first read in a meeting of the Bethune Society in May, 1852 and was largely a response to Harachandra Datta's essay "Bengali Poetry," which the latter had read in April of the same year in the Society's meeting in Calcutta.

In a way, this short essay played an important role in the future understanding of the subject. Rangalal sought to answer charges of obscenity against Bharatchandra Roy's poetry, and his comment about the very relative as well as transient nature of any value system was surely indicative of his deep understanding of issues relating to the evaluation of literature. Most interesting is the fact the Rangalal dared to say that if Bharatchandra and others were considered "obscene" in the literary history of Bengal, then Shakespeare also should be designated as "obscene" (Bhattacharya 1975:8-9). He felt that the morality of a literary text was inevi- tably a reflection of the morality prevalent in the society of the time, and the poet alone cannot be blamed for that by future critics. Rangalal categorically stated: "What we consider immoral today could have been quite moral at another time" (Bhattacharya 1975:8-9).

Several other attempts to write short historic accounts of the literature of Bengal were undertaken by Iswarchandra Gupta,2 Harischandra Mitra (1866), Harimohan Mukherjee (1869), and Bankimchandra Chatterjee (1871). The first text with the term "history" in the title was Mahendranath Chatterjee's BangabhJsara Itihdsa published in 1871, though there was nothing new in the material that was presented in the study.




The first comprehensive and detailed account of thehistory of Bengali literature waspublishedin 1872byRamgatiNyayaratnaandwasentitledBaniglzbhasaoBanigla Sahitya Bisayaka Prastaba. Ramgati was the first scholar to demarcate the entire stretch of time into the old, middle, and contemporary periods. Ramgati started with Vidyapati and Chandidas, but confessed that he was not sure if Vidyapati was the earliest poet writing in the language. He made the comment that if we take into account the degree of skill and refinement of these two poets, it seemed inevitable that there had been an earlier tradition of writing in the language. Another important point about this work is that Ramgati discussed the historical and general charac- teristics of the period before talking about individual poets, and also situated the writers within their socio-cultural milieu to some extent.

Rameshchandra Datta's The Literature of Bengal, written in En- glish, was published under an abbreviated name in 1877; in the second edition of 1895, it appeared under his full name. In the preface Rameshchandra stated the reasons for undertaking the work of writing a history of Bengali literature in English:

No work has yet been written from which Englishmen can gather any information regarding the literature and thought of a people in many respects the most striking of those which have passed under their sway.... Even for the Bengali reader there is but one book which gives a tolerably complete idea of the literature of the nation.... In justice to the present attempt I may be allowed to add, this book has been written on an entirely new plan, that nearly one half of the work has been devoted to the elucidation of a most important subject on which no attention was previously bestowed, viz., the character- istic features of different periods of time, and the vigorous though silent and often unperceived influences of religions, of political revolutions, of social changes on the national mind, and therefore on the national literature. It has been my attempt to make this the leading feature of the present work, while in the line of criticism too, the old standard, which held up the vidya sundara as theperfection of poetry, has been departed from and a freer, and, it is hoped, a healthier standard adopted.3

It is obvious that Rameshchandra was writing for an audience who were not familiar with the Bengali language and literature first hand, and his specific target was Englishmen who needed some acquaintance with the literature of a people whom they had colonized. By this time, Rajkrishna Mukherjee had discovered that Vidyapati was a Maithili poet, and Rameshchandra begins his account with Chandidas. His emphasis on situating each literary period or person within the larger milieu of socio-cultural background presupposes the adoption of some basic framework of history, and it would be interesting to find out the parameters of that framework. What is most important is the fact that he claims to have departed from a standard of taste which held that vidya sundarj was the "perfection of poetry" and declares that in this study, he adopts a "healthier" and "freer" standard of judgement.4



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We get into complex problems once the notions of "taste" and "freedom" enter the discussion; it is clear that now there was a standard which was different from the indigenous one. In fact, Rameshchandra himself was aware of the change and thought it to be "healthier" than the prevailing one. What made him decide that the new standard was better than the earlier one should reveal intricate ideological changes that were occurring in the psychic universe of the colonized. While discussing the nature of "poetry," Rameshchandra clearly betrays his alliance with the English Romantic aesthetic which had by that time had vigorously infiltrated the colonized mind in Bengal. He states:

Swift is universally considered a delightful writer in verse, but not a genuine poet. His poems are very pleasant reading, and amuse us and make us laugh out, but they do not affect our finer emotions, and are therefore not genuine poetry.... The composition which would move our emotions must itself take its birth in deep thoughts, and the language of poetry but communicates deep- felt emotions from the heart of the poet to the heart of the reader.... . He who would be a poet, therefore, must possess keen sensibilities.5

The emphasis on "finer" and "deep-felt emotions" as well as the privileging of the "heart" or the "sensibilities" is an indication of the Romantic ideological bias in Rameshchandra and was surely symptomatic of the general drift of the time.

Rajnarayan Basu'sB MglaBhasiv o SJhitya BisayakaBaktrta appeared one year after Datta's literary history of Bengal. Rajnarayan deals with clusters of writers from the time of Vidyapati, and till the modem period his method of dealing with the subject is around a major figure. With the modem age, he organizes his discussion around genres-of poetry, prose, lyric, drama, novel, joumalism, science, music, etc. The title of this book included the word "bhasa" which means language, and it is interesting that everything written in the language could be included for discussion in a study on language and literature. It seems to be clear that Rajnarayan was not working with any specific definition of the term "literature," and therefore he could include diverse kinds of writing as specimens of the "literary" in the language.

The author, however, does employ one form of censorship, and in that respect he found the Manasamaingalakavya of Ksemananda rather below the standard of his taste. Rajnarayan stated:

Ksemananda wrote the famousManasaraBhdsana for uneducated and rustic women, children and the lower classes. I have heard that other versions by Narayandev and Dvijabansi arein circulation in the eastem regions of Bengal, but I myself have never heard or read these. This is why I will not be able to judge them.

It should be noted that this aversion for the "rustic" and the non-urban became quite evident in many critics of the later period. The maingalakJvyas did not find a place in the earlier accounts of the literature of Bengal, and this was the first time they were mentioned as existing in a very different world from the urbanity of Calcutta.




Rajnarayan ended the treatise with a very strong plea for the use and development of the Bengali language and literature by the younger generation, and castigated those who imitated the English. He said that just as a child has to leave his mother's grip so that he can walk on his own, Bengali writers would also have to give up their imitative efforts to become independent and great.

An essay by Haraprasad Sastri entitled "B antglara Sahitya" appeared in 1881 and there he discussed only the modem period of Bengali literature. Sastri noted that Bengal was going through revolutionary changes after the coming of the British:

Innumerable changes are occurring silently in India after the establishment of British rule in the country. No new religion has been thrust, no force has been used; yet our minds are changing. This change and revolut on have been taking place everywhere in India, but it is much quicker in Bengal. The main reason for this revolution is the spread of English education, and the result is seen in social development and the flourishing of literature.6

In a later book titled Vernacular Literature of Bengal, Haraprasad Sastri delved deeper into the manuscripts that were being discovered at this time and formed a more comprehensive view of the literature of Bengal. In fact, the study of literature received an entirely new dimension with the accumulation of ancient manuscripts around this time, and the entire perspective on the literary past of the Bengali people underwent a radical change.

The most comprehensive and serious attempt to trace the literary tradition of the Bengali people by a Bengali was undertaken when Dineshchandra Sen (1866-1939) produced his monumental works on the subject. Baingabhiasa o Sahitya appeared in 1896, History of Bengali Language and Literature as well as his Banga Sahitya Paricaya were published by the University of Calcutta in 1914. Other papers of his that dealt with similar subjects came out around this time.

Dineshchandra lectured on the subject of literary history to generations of students at the University of Calcutta. He travelled extensively in rural Bengal under trying circumstances and single- handedly collected ancient manuscripts that were lying in remote corners of the land. He recorded many of his adventures in the prefaces to the books and one is struck by his tenacity, his commitment, and his rootedness in the world around. In many ways, Dineshchandra was a pioneer in inventing or constructing the Bengali literary canon for his generation.

Another important study that attempted to construct the same tradition later is Sukumar Sen's multi-volume history of Bengali literature namedBainglaSahityera Itihasa (1940-56). Among works that dealt with certain specific areas of the literary history of Bengal, IwasabletoconsultHarendramohanDasgupta'sStudies in Western Influence on Nineteenth Century Bengali Poetry (1757-1857), published in 1919. There are many other literary histories but I chose to restrict myself to these few.

,Sukumar Sen's work was a serious attempt to reassess the canon and comment on it at a later date. Dasgupta's and De's works interest me because they deal with



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the nineteenth century only, the time after the British had consolidated their empire and English education had displaced the indigenous systems of learning prevalent in the country. I want to look into some issues that appear to me as problematic in these efforts to invent a presentable past of the Bengali people.

The most striking difference between Dineshchandra and Sukumar Sen comes out in their assessment of the worth of pre-modern Bengali literature-they have very divergent opinions about the "literary" worth of those texts. As already mentioned, Dineshchandra personally retrieved manuscripts that would have been lost other- wise, and in his works he presented a wide selection from texts that till then were not widely available. This historian does not question the claim of these newly discovered manuscripts as "literary" texts, even though he was aware of the divergence of opinion on this subject. Dineshchandra writes:

An opinion still seems to prevail in some quarters that after all there may not be anything worth preserving in the old Bengali literature. Fortunately, such a view is restricted only to a few anglicized Bengalis, who seemto be ashamed of the soil of their birth and would, if they could, drown it for ever in the Ganges.... What I urge is that this beautiful language of ours, spoken by millions of people dwelling in the lower Gangetic valley, possesses a literature which any nation may well be proud of. It is true that the old Bengali literature in its primitive stages is permeated by a rustic element; but no apology, I think, is needed on our part for this. This is true of all other literary languages of the world in the early periods of their growth. If some of the earlier Bengali poems occasionally show a coarse humor, it also possesses the real poetry of the race, being an expression of hearts that beat with the true emotion of the country-folk (D. Sen 1914:11-12).

Dineshchandra had no problem with the idea that some of the old texts did not necessarily conform to late nineteenth-century notions of the "literary," and was therefore quite flexible and inclusive, covering a very wide variety of texts written in the Bengali language, including its various dialects. In fact, he could easily accommodate all these texts discovered in various parts of Bengal in the broad category of "literature." He did not come up with some definition of the term in order to identify the attributes that constituted the "literary" as something specific and different from other kinds of writing.

In an earlier publication entitled Ban gabha$sa o Sahitya, Dineshchandra was even more emphatic about his dislike for his countrymen who were dying to imitate the English in every respect. He categorically dismissed the idea of not learning English in the present circumstances, but was very critical of those who wanted to "smile," "sneeze," or "talk" like themasters. It is because of this attitude, Dineshchandra felt, that the Bengali people were embarrassed by own their past in its entirety. Remarkably enough, Dineshchandra seemed to be aware of the fact that there was




anew standard of taste and judgement prevalent at tmat time which did not consider many texts to be "literary" enough to be included in the history.

This sense of embarrassment among many people about their own heteroge- neous past which was very different from the present, probably had its roots in the colonial context, where there is a constant comparison between the urban, "supe- rior" culture of the master and the "rustic," "innocent," and "primitive" culture of the colonised. In fact, Dineshchandra shows remarkable insight into the colonial situation when he considers the dearth of scientific/technical terminology in the Bengali language and comments:

Macauley altered the course of Bengali education at an inauspicious moment; he and his assistants decreed that we would have to read everything-from mathematics to ;linguistics-in English. This is how they altered the course of the river which was flowing for a long time. The result of this has been that we are worshipping the muse of poetry and literature only in Bengali. By trying to learn everything else in English, we are wasting our lives in acquiring the English language first and then also the subject concemed (D. Sen 1896:24).

With a very clear perception of the futility of identifying with the English, Dineshchandra sought to infuse a sense of pride into his contemporaries regarding their own literary and cultural heritage. This is not to say that DilLeshchandra was not appreciative of the benefits of the British administration, and it is interesting to note how, in his lectures delivered at the Calcutta University and later published by them, he eulogizes on this point:

Apeaceful administration stimulates andnourishes intellectual activities; and under British rule we are in enjoyment of the manifold benefits of peace. . . . May my country steadily advance in her onward course under the benign administration of our present Rulers (D. Sen 1986 [1914]:1012).

Dineshchandra does not seem to be aware of any apparent contradiction between his assessment of the administrative benefits of British rule and the cultural effects of that rule. He was confident that peace would ensure greater attention to the fine arts and literature, and Bengal would find her place in the world of ideas. What emerges out of this is Dineshchandra's rootedness in his own tradition and his belief in the value of that tradition, particularly literary tradition, as something worth preserving for posterity. That is why he considers all texts as worthy of canonization, because, as he says, "they also possess the real poetry of the race, being an expression of hearts that beat with the true emotion of country-folk" (D. Sen 1914:12).

The story is different when we come to. the literary history written by Sukumar Sen approximately fifty years later. Sukumar Sen unequivocally posits the attributes of the term "literary" and then goes on to construct a history of literature that conforms to those categories. Let us first recount the major premises of his argument. In the preface to the first edition of his multi-volume Banigla Sahityera Itihasa he says:



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The purpose of the present work is objectively and chronologically to describe thehistory of Bengali literature. Without minimizing the importance of earlier research in this area, it should be admitted that those were either incomplete or subjective. An imperfect understanding of the history of the land may be one of the reasons for this defect of our earlier historians. The truth is that it is totally imaginary to divide Bengali literature or Bengal into periods like Buddhist, Brahmanical, etc. It should also be mentioned at the very outset that I have not followed the order of English literary histories, because pre-modem Bengali literature is simply a repetitious narrative, it has nothing of the wide variety and enormous wealth of English literature.

It is interesting to note how Sukumar Sen feels that histories written earlier were "subjective" or "incomplete" in nature. It is not at all clear what he meant by "imperfect understanding of the history of the land." If this is indicative of the difference in the sense of history among the Western and Indian/Bengali cultures, then it surely needed some explanation. It could mean that earlier literary historians had an incomplete or insufficient sense of the historical process in the Western sense-most of our history takes the form of myths, legends, and narratives during the pre-modem eras. But then the question arises, how is it that the historical understanding of the present was in any way better ormore complete than the earlier one?

The underlying assumption seems to be that a "perfect" understanding of the history of the "land" had become possible only at that point of time and was not possible earlier. If we accept the idea of dividing time according to the dominant religious movements as "imaginative" constructs, then we should also admit that other forms of division can also be described in the same manner. After all, periodization is a method of organizing material into meaningful units, and in that sense even chronological arrangements are built on the assumption that each century is different from the other in some pronounced manner. Sukumar Sen appears to be quite sure of the inferior quality of the literature produced in Bengal during the pre- modern period. He explicitly states:

Educated Bengalis became conscious of their own literature after they tasted the literature of the English, and they also became aware of the deficiencies of their own literature.... The refinement initiated by English education and the introduction of new values ushered in the modern spirit in literature. The works of Rangalal - Madhusudan - B ankimchandra were possible because of their English education. English literature nourished the imagination and taste of educated Bengalis, and the sense of self-respect as well as patriotism was the intellectual terrain out of which Modem Bengali literature grew (S. Sen 1977 [1950]:1).

There is no doubt that the notion of the "literary" had undergone a radical change by the time Sukumar Sen was writing his history; the effect of English education on




the Bengali mind was supposed to be liberating, and "modernism" was born under the impact of contact with English education and the attitudes which accompanied it. This change was surely behind the altered understanding of pre-modern Bengali literature, which now appeared to be nothing but a repetition of the same motifs and images centered around a divine figure or a hero. Histories now should concentrate on what was "valuable" to a different standard of taste, and therefore, tie canon would be different.

In fact, the difference between Dineshchandra Sen and Sukumar Sen regarding their understanding of pre-modern Bengali literature could be taken as symptomatic of the general shift in position regarding what literature meant, and is indicative of the effect of colonialism on the discourses produced by the colonised themselves. The cumulative effect of English education and the change in categories among the colonised are evident in the way Bengalis worshipped the English Romantic poets and the aesthetic that privileged the tran- scendental and visionary at the cost of the mundane, material, or socio-historically rooted. Not much has changed since Sukumar Sen published his histories of Bengali literature. In fact, we still seem to subscribe to this particular view of the "literary" in which we tend to discriminate on the basis of the imaginative content of a text. This is precisely the reason why Sukumar Sen's history of Bengali literature is'so apologetic about texts that do not conform to that particular notion of the "literary" whereas Dineshchandra Sen was not tied down to the ideology of transcendentalism/universalism to reject other forms of writing as "non-literary."

This ideological shift is more pronounced in Harendramohan Dasgupta's Studies in Western Influence on Nineteenth Century Bengali Poetry (1935), where the author begins by presupposing the inferior nature of Bengali poetry in comparison with the English literary tradition. He starts by postulating that

The history of a nation's poetry is essentially the measure of its emotional life, but where this emotion is found to be connected to a foreign source, it presupposes for its growth a particular historical background. The descent of a rich literature does not necessarily spell disaster to the product of the soil. It lends, on the contrary, its peculiar colour and energy to its less fortunate rival. It is, indeed, the business of a progressive literature to migrate into uncharted seas of thought; and it is among its merits that it knows how to open "magic casements," and discover fresh fields and pastures anew (Dasgupta 1935:i).

With a distinctively Romantic vocabulary, Harendramohan begins with the assumption that Bengali literature needed energy and colour from a foreign source because it was "less fortunate" and inferior to English poetry. Why it was "less fortunate" is not clarified, and the author goes on to assume that English is the



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"progressive" literature that has travelled far to invigorate lesser literatures by opening "magic casements." In this context, it becomes obvious that the Bengali literary canon presented by people like Dineshchandra Sen would prove to be seriously inadequate and wanting because poets hardly ever ventured into "uncharted seas of thought" or opened "magic casements" as in Keats' poems.

Bengal, Harendramohan claims, "had a cultural past" which "excited the envy of the Aryans when they came to settle in Allahabad," and it was clear to him that the glorious periods of Bengali literature coincided with "important political changes in the country." In that sense, it was only natural that the coming of the British would usher in another glorious period of literary creativity, and he states:

But what renders our literature specially responsive to a cultural stimulus from outside is the nation' s pronounced emotional life, and its inward love for appropriating things good and beautiful; so that every road here leads primarily to the ancient shrine of its pre-eminently lyrical genius (Dasgupta 1935:iii).

The general drift of the argument makes it clear that this historian of literature was sure of the benefits of colonization and was basically repeating the rat onale given by the colonizers themselves. By appropriating material, motif, and ideology from English literature, Bengali was basically enriching itself, because after all, we were only taking things that were "good and beautiful"!

Harendramohan recounted the contribution of the courts of earlier kings and commented that in all periods of its history, Bengali literature had been patronized by rulers. This tradition received a blow with the "dissolution of the Mahomedan government, the ruin of the zemindars and the corrupt influence of the Mahomedan court upon the courts of the noblemen" around the eighteenth century "before the beginning of the English era." He goes on to comment:

But how different in form and spirit is the literary history that was made by Westem education and Westem administration. How more comprehensive was the tome of Westem liberalism than that of the Semitic! How infinitely mnore stimulating was the critical influence of Christianity on the almost extinct life of Hinduism! (Dasgupta 1935:iv)

According to this historian, the "pragmatic character of Western education, of Christian morality working in co-operation with the political and administrative democracy of the West" was behind much of the exuberance of nineteenth-century Bengali literature. Harendramohan describes this phenomenon as the "Romantic Movement in our own literature" and says:

Yet all these results may be compressed into the three prominent character- istics of the Romantic Movement in our literature, as they were of the parent movement in England: subjectivity, picturesqueness and revolt (Dasgupta 1935:xli).

What is abundantly clear through all this is that here is a literary historian who is




commnitted to a framework that is totally foreign. He reads the entire past and the present in the light of the ideological basis of English Romanticism and therefore his canon reflects those interests pretty obviously. Poets are evaluated in terms of their resemblance to the Romantic, idealistic notions of literature; anything different would be hard to fit in. In this canon, the preferences are explicit and the judgement is predictable.

Sushil Kumar De's early study, Bengali Literature in the Nineteenth Century 1757-1857 (1919), is an exhaustive account of the literature of that period. In considering the literature of the period immediately preceding the modem, Sushil Kumar finds that poets and artists (kabiwallahs)

left behind them few things of permanent literary value; for although some of them weremen of undoubted poetic power, they nevercultivated literature for its own sake, but composed their songs chiefly to please their new patrons in society ... (De 1962:33).

What is important in this evaluation is thenotion that only certain kinds of text could aspire to the title of "literature"-texts that were autonomous or autotelic and therefore were of "permanent value." The locus of value is distinctively of the Romantic kind, and clearly fixes the boundaries of the terrain to be traversed.

In this work also, the historian found the corpus of pre-modem Bengali literature to be marked by "monotony of subject and limitation of form" (De 1962:38), and commented:

there was surely nothing wrong with the genius of these poets but something was wrong with the literature itself, that its theme was too narrow and limited to afford the fullest scope for development and progress. One of the remarkable tendencies of later Hindu culture generally and of the old vemacular literature in particular was that they carried the suppression of individuality too far; and that the consequence has been to exalt authority and discourage originality (De 1935:39).

These observations, naturally, were premised on the idea that individualism is a virtue by itself and that earlier Bengali literature was stifled by its narrowness and its monotony. One does not have to think too hard to figure out the broad outlines of this history of literature and Sushil Kumar spelt it out quite clearly:

The literary history of Bengal in the 19th century is really the history of the influence of European ideas on Bengali thought.... The pioneer efforts of the missionary and the schoolmaster for diffusing knowledge and culture through the medium of Bengali had surely a more wide-reaching effect than that of giving temporary impetus to dormant intellectual or literary activities; for the literature which had been brought into being through the influence of westem ideas was only one effect of a vaster revolution in thought, manners and religion which had taken place in this country through its contact with the West (De 1935:55-56).



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In this assessment, thehistory of Bengali literaturein thenineteenth century became an expression of the "revolution" that was taking place in all spheres of life due to contact with the West. It is true, however, that Sushil Kumar grounded his study thoroughly within the socio-historical context of nineteenth-century Bengal and gave exhaustive accounts of the various institutions that flourished at that time. But his understanding proceeded from the basic premise that "individualism" and its expressions are absent inpre-modem Bengali literature, and that literature can exist for its own sake. His canon, therefore, will evolve on these assumptions.

The conclusion to be drawn from the above inquiry is the necessity to be alert as readers and as writers to the ideological underpinnings of the tenn "literary." The construction of any narrative, particularly a narrative or history of literature involves, among other things, a theoretical configuration that dictates our deploy- ment of the term "literary." Which are the texts that we would consider "literary" and why? Who determines these criteria and how are these constituted? What happens when there is apower-relationship at work as in the colonial situation? How do historians succumb to the hegemony of the universalist assumptions of English literary judgments of the preceding century?

Perhaps it is time now for us to consciously deconstruct our assumptions regarding the term "literature" and examine the canon that we have inherited. We should be aware of the exact semantic content or connotations of the termn and fmd out how it includes or excludes texts that do not fit its parameters. In other words, one has to be aware of the ideological agenda behind the construction of any canon or counter-canon, and only then will we be aware of our exact intellectual position in the world of ideas.

BIBLIOGRAHY

Basu,Rajnarayan. 1973.BffTglffBhctTrToSi7hityaB iayakaBaktrta. Calcutta: Granthan. (First ed. 1878) Bhattacharya, Amitrasudan. 1975. Unabiigda ?atake BMAglafSahityetihasa Carca. Calcutta: Sarasvat

Library. Bhadra, Gautam. 1994. "Itihise smrtite itihisa." Visva Bharati Patrika, Srabon-Aswin 1401. Chatterjee, Bankimchandra. 1871. "Bengali literature." The Calcutta Review. Dasgupta, Harendramohan. 1935. Studies in Western Influence on Nineteenth Cen-

tury Bengali Poetry 1857-1887. Calcutta: Chakravarty, Chatterjee and Co. Ltd.

De, Sushil Kumar. 1962. Bengali Literature in the Nineteenth Century 1757-1857. Second revised edition. Calcutta: Firma K.L. Mukhopadhyaya. (First ed. 1919)

Dimock, Edward C. et al. 1974. The Literatures of India: An Introduction. Chicago: U. of Chicago Press.

Kermode, Frank. 1979. "Institutional Control of Interpretation." Salmagundi 43 (Winter).

Nagendra. 1987. A Dictionary of Sanskrit Poetics. Delhi: B.R. Publishing Corp. Nelson, Cary. 1993. "Facts Have No Meaning: Writing Literary History in the

Shadow of Poststructuralism." College Literature 20 (2). Ramanujan, A. K. "Indian Poetics." In Dimock ed. 1974. Sen, Dineshchandra. 1896. Bajigabhdj o Sclhitya: Ingreja Prabhabera Purba Parjanta.

Fifth ed. Calcutta: Gurudas Chattopadhyaya and Sons.




. 1986.HistoryofBengaliLanguageandLiterature. Firstlndianreprint, Now Ddhi: Gian. (First ad. 1914) . 1914.Vailga Sthitya Paricaya or Seclctionsfrom the Bengali Literature: from the Earliest

Times to the Nineteenth Century. Calcutta: U. of Calcutta Press. Sen, Sukumar. 1940-56. Baiglgi Slhityera Itihasa. Five vols. (fifth ed. 1970). Calcuttaw Eastem Pub-

lishers. (Number of vols. varies in some eds.)

NOTES AND REFERENCES

1. See Nelson 1993. 2. See Ramanujan 1974. 3. From 1853 to 1855 he published, in the magazine Sambc7da Prabhlkara, accounts of several

Bengali poets of bygone and recent times. His work involved a lot of research into the biographical and social backgrund of the writers, and in that respect he has supplied the foundation of later research in this area.

4. Quoted in Bhattacharya 1975:24. 5. Unfortunately, I could not consult this woik before wrting this paper and therefore was unable

to analyze the extent of this departure as well as the nature of the change. 6. Quoted in Bhattacharya 1975:25-26. 7. Basu 1973:7. Translation mine. 8. Quoted in Bhattacharya 1975:31. Translation mine. 9. See Bhadra 1994:134-43. This review of Dineshchandra's Brhat Baiga reveals his very in-

clusive sense of "history" writing in which even the most apparently trivial item of the culure becomes constitutive of the larger whole.

10. From the Introduction to S. Sen 1970 (1940-56). Translation mine.



constructing the canon: problems in bengali literary historiography

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