A Note on Pre-History of the ‘Folk’: The Case of Bangla Literary Historiography
Posted: 23 Sep 2013
Date Written: September 23, 2013
Abstract
Caught between a serious dichotomy: whether to believe in western Enlightenment as a panacea, or to ‘re-invoke’ ethnic-cultural indigeneity, the nineteenth century ‘Indian’ intelligentsia started to fence off an assorted chunk of their heterogeneous inheritance in the name of the ‘folk’ towards historicizing a ‘presentable’ past to re-inscribe their (racial) identity brutally thwarted in the thoroughly racist ‘outer domain’. This paper questions the legitimacy of folklore as a discipline and seeks to understand the politics of in/exclusion in the ‘order of things’ of the canon of ‘Bangla Literary History’. Pointing to the contestation on the ‘literary’ worth of what has been in/excluded in the canons officialized by two rival schools spearheaded respectively by Dineshchandra and Sukumar Sen, the paper sheds light on the stakes in the nineteenth ‘literary historians' sanitizing the corpus of (Bangla) literature against ‘folk’ literature and argues that it is symptomatic of their 'exclusionary' identity politics in their envisioning of 'Bengali' as an 'imagined community'.
Keywords: Folk, Bengali, History of Bangla Literature, Colonial Historiography, Comparative Literature, Cultural Studies
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