Provincial Epic

Historians of the novel (whether in the West or in India) emphasize the genre’s urban beginnings, and its links to the culture, of the emerging metropolis. And certainly the modern experience of city life, with its crowds, clamor, anonymity, and disruptive encounters—what Walter Benjamin called the Chockerlebni—appears to have shaped the sensibility of the novelist in most traditions. Paradoxically, however, the novel is not an urban form in terms of content. Almost as a reaction to the conditions of its emergence, it seeks to validate itself by putting down roots in the countryside, in provincial and village society, even in the experience of wilderness or desolation. This is as true of the European novel in the eighteenth century as it is of the American novel in the nineteenth, and, in its global travels, the genre continues to manifest the unresolved tension between city and country that characterizes the literature of our modernity.

In India, the nineteenth-century novel is a product of the colonial encounter, but it develops a sustained critique of what Fredric Jameson described as “that immense process of transformation whereby populations whose life habits were formed by other, now archaic, modes of production are now reprogrammed for life and work in the new world of market capitalism.” This process, with its dangers, hardships, and tragic histories of loss and recuperation, is a central concern of the great novels written in Bengali and set in eastern India in the first half of the twentieth century by a trio of Bandyopadhyays (not related to each other): Bibhutibhushan, Tarashankar, and Manik. Together, with such contemporaries as Advaita Mallabarman and Satinath Bhaduri, they write of village, peasant or fisher communities in rural Bengal and Bihar at a time of transition and change: communities unsettled by migration to the city, wasted by poverty and exploitation, and racked by natural disasters. In so doing, they produce what might be regarded as variants on the “provincial epic,” drawing less upon master-narratives of the nation than on community memory, folk-narrative, and subaltern history, and combining a distinctively modernist social realism with the lyric and epic strains of their material.

American readers may not be as familiar with these writers as the range, depth and complexity of their works merit. This is largely a failure of the enterprise of postcolonial translation, which has not done justice to the “immediate precursor,” that is, the great modernist literature produced in India in the 1930s and 1940s. That imbalance is now being redressed, and Ben Baer’s remarkable translation of Tarashankar Bandyopadhyay’s Hansuli Banker Upakatha (The Tale of Hansuli Turn, 2011) will introduce a new generation of readers to a writer whose major novels (with the exception of this one) have still not been adequately translated into English. Yet Tarashankar’s work has resonances with American fiction of the same period— Faulkner, Steinbeck, or Zora Neale Hurston— though this is not so much as a matter of cross-cultural influence as of the parallel developments of global modernism. If readers in the West have felt curious about Tarashankar or his contemporary Bibhutibhushan, this may be because they inspired the globally reputed modernist cinema of Satyajit Ray, whose “Apu” trilogy was based on novels by Bibhutibhushan, while his Jalsaghar (The Music Room, 1958) and Abhijan (The Expedition, 1962) drew on short stories by Tarashankar.

The Tale of Hansuli Turn first appeared in a much shorter form in 1946 and underwent revisions and expansions right up to 1951. Thus, as Ben Baer notes in his introduction, it straddles the critical phase of India’s accession to political independence in 1947, from the violence of its Partition to the adoption of its Constitution. Dedicating the book to his friend and mentor, the poet Kalidas Ray, Tarashankar presents it as a tale of “Rarh,” a region of western Bengal containing the writer’s own district of Birbhum through which the River Kopai of the novel flows. The novel’s opening pages, vividly describing the Kopai...