Barisal and Beyond : Essays on Bangla Literature

Contents: Acknowledgements. Prologue--atmaparicay. 1. Secular and sacred legitimation in Bharatcandra's Annada Mangal (1752 CE). 2. Say it with structure: Tagore and Mangal Kavya. 3. Homeric similes, occidental and oriental: Tasso, Milton, and Bengal's Michael Madhusudan Datta. 4. Ravana and Rama in Michael's hands. 5. Rama in the nether world: Indian sources of inspiration. 6. Winds of change: Michael Madhusudan Datta and The Slaying of Meghanada. 7. Shifting Seas and "Banalata Sen". 8. Pointedly foolish can be frightening: Oxymoron in the poetry of Jibanananda Das. 9. Viewing Bangla literature. 10. A Muslim voice in Modern Bangla literature: Mir Mosharraf Hosain. 11. Translating between media: Rabindranath Tagore and Satyajit Ray. 12. Raja Pratapaditya, problematic hero. 13. Serious Sahitya: the prose fiction of Bangladesh's Rizia Rahman. Epilogue--comings and goings: from Madhusudan to the Diaspora of today. Notes. Select bibliography. Index.

"This collection of essays, spanning the author's academic career, starts by looking back to his early experience of Bengal in Barisal, Bangladesh, hometown of Bengali Poet Jibanananda Das, and goes on to analyze some important works of Bangla literature.

One of the most prominent genres of premodern Bangla literature, the mangal kavya, is examined in detail with attention paid both to Bharatcandra Ray's eighteenth-century classic Annada Mangal and to Rabindranath Tagore's effective use of that very mangal-kavya structure to inform his twentieth century dance-drama, "Taser Desh" (Land of the Cards). The nineteenth century is represented by Mir Mosharraf Hosain's prose retelling of Hasan and Hosain's martyrdom, and by playwright and poet Michael Madhusudan Datta's iconoclastic epic poem, "The slaying of Meghanada."

The study of twentieth-century writers begins with an appreciation of the poems of Jibanananda Das, and a reinterpretation of "Banalata Sen" based on a new reading of one particular word. The essays in this section include a study of Tagore's novella "Charulata," about his sister-in-law, Kadambari, and its subsequent translation onto celluloid by Satyajit Ray, while another focuses on novelist Rizia Rahman's exploration of questions of identify, national and ethnic, through her fictional Anglo-Indian De Cruz family of Chittagong, Bangladesh's Southeast port city.

The volume concludes with a look at several English-language authors of the South Asian Diaspora, a modern subset of Bangla literature, including Bharati Mukherjee, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, and Jhumpa Lahiri." (jacket)