Textures of the Earth: notes from rural Birbhum in the short stories of Tarasankar Bandyopadhyay

Abstract

The vision of the ‘rural’ in Indian literary and aesthetic traditions is significant for a critical interpretation of literary and cultural texts emerging from India. This article presents a critical reading of select short stories of the Bharatiya Jnanpith Award recipient Tarasankar Bandyopadhyay (1898–1971) in the context of rural writings. Having spent most of his life in Birbhum, Bandyopadhyay internalized the peculiarities of rural Bengal in his stories. Bandyopadhyay’s visualizations of the rural transcend conventional notions, weaving a rich, earthy texture that construct an artistic and symbolic system of language and images drawn from everyday life. The conceptual framework of the present research is supported by the theory of literary carnivalization proposed by the Russian thinker Mikhail Bakhtin (1895–1975). The short stories of Bandyopadhyay might be read in the light of the social realism that weaves elements of ‘grotesqueness’ into the pastorality of rural landscapes. Through close readings of two stories; ‘Tarini Majhi’ (1936) and ‘Santan’ (1938), the study explores certain facets of rural life, highlighting the visceral interplay between survival and crisis. The select stories encapsulate the rich and multifaceted world of Bandyopadhyay’s Birbhum which are at once sensuous, artistic and eccentric, offering profound insights into the lived experiences of its characters. Bakhtin’s concepts of the idyllic and the grotesque in his discussions of Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (1984) and Rabelais and His World (1984) provide the conceptual basis to the present research on Bandyopadhyay’s stories. This study aims to creatively understand aesthetics of the ‘rural’, positioning Bandyopadhyay’s short fiction as a critical space to reimagine the literary representation of rural India and its enduring complexities.