(In)auspiciousness, Discipline, and Sympathy in Bankim Chandra Chatterjee’s Bishabriksha and Rabindranath Tagore’s Chokher Bali

The article traces how, in two extremely influential early Bengali novels, a widow’s “inauspiciousness,” the destructiveness she trails in her wake (variously defined), is instrumentalized to inaugurate a new domesticity and a new bourgeois couple who inhabit it. These novels, in other words, use a widow’s inauspiciousness to create modern citizen subjects. And they do so, the article argues, both within their own pages (the householder protagonists are transformed into citizen subjects) and beyond them (their readers are transformed into citizen subjects too). By the end of these texts, however, the widow herself is hurried offstage, effectively containing the danger of any further social change and banishing inauspiciousness as such to a realm outside modernity.