ABSTRACT
At the close of his great novel of rural life, Hāṇsulī Bāṇker Upakathā (The Tale of Hansuli Bend, published between 1946 and 1951), Tarashankar Bandyopadhyay employed a metaphor that appeared to reflect both upon the relation between aesthetic forms and upon those between region, nation, and trans-nation. Tarashankar’s self-appointed task of capturing the life-habits of a subaltern group is haunted by questions of language, custom, and memory. The speech of the Kahars, distinguished by phonetic and lexical features that are commented on by the novelist, can be reproduced only in part, often with an accompanying gloss. The project of modernity had been a central concern of the Bengali novel from its inception, driving its search for subjects and representational techniques, most of all the social realism that sought to render the sufferings of the rural poor and the urban unemployed.
