Barisal and Beyond: Essays on Bangla Literature

The 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 kabya, 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 id 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 Meghananda. The study of twentieth-century writers beings with an appreciations of the poems of Jibanananda das, and a reinterpretation of "banalata sen" based on a new reading of one particular world.  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 explorations 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 llok at several English-language authors of the South Asian Diaspora, a modern subset of Bangla literature, including Bharati Mukherjee, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, and Jhumpa lahiri.