Colloquialisms and humour in select short stories of Tarasankar Bandyopadhyay

The short stories of Tarasankar Bandyopadhyay (1898–1971) represent an intersection of the everyday speech of rural Birbhum and the high classicism of early 20th-century Bengal. In his corpus of more than 190 short stories, the interplay of humour and high seriousness is a subtle undercurrent. Apabhrangsha bhÂsh (interpreted in this paper as the language of the people) that Bandyopadhyay has used in his stories have an intrinsic quality of colloquial expressions. Some of these stories often border on irreverence and ‘inappropriateness’ from the perspective of ‘elite’ bhÂshÂ-sahitya. Through a close reading of two short stories by Bandyopadhyay, ‘Chor’ (1940) and ‘Jadukari’ (1941), this research presents a comparative study of the semiotic and rhetorical devices that reflect freedom from the rigid constraints of ‘official’ conversations. In these stories, humour is present as a subtext of the narrative in the form of sarcasm and tongue-in- cheek devices. A close reading of the select stories opens dialogic possibilities to understand the intertwined and complex nature of caste and class discourses. Mikhail Bakhtin’s (1895–1975) concept of literary carnivalisation forms the focal theoretical backdrop of this research. Bandyopadhyay’s stories render colloquial speech and verbal expressions that are sometimes light-hearted but often sharp and piercing, evoking the language of the ‘people’. The literary carnivalisation, a characteristic of Bandyopadhyay’s writing style, reveals deeper undercurrents of cultural uniqueness and peculiarities that showcase the charm of rural life and livelihoods in India.