| UNIT 422-1: INTRODUCTION TO CONTEMPORARY LITERARY THEORIES |
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| Again, we fail to decide on the role of Swami Vivekananda: was he merely a missionary for the revival of a religion, or did he mean himself to be the man behind the making of positive nationalism? What is the significance of his deep-rooted awareness of social oppression and his understanding of the dialectics of the stratified class-based society? A prolific reader as he was, did he never know about the philosophy of Marx? What was actually the errand to him from Ramkrishna - the spiritual man from the soil? What was Vivekananda's errand to Nivedita who was expelled from Vivekananda's own institution a few hours after Vivekananda had died (he died when he was only thirty-nine), and who later joined the action-squad of the freedom fighters? All these questions will perhaps remain unanswered. We may only suggest that Shibnath Shastri was a primary inspiration for forming the Communist Party of India and Rabindranatha remembered Vivekananda as he chose him for a model of the central character on his novel 'Gora', an epic novel based on the objective condition at the time of early upsurge of the nationalist action-squed. |
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| Probability of these bridges, these mutual exchanges between great minds come down the memory lane of today's literary theoreticians. Even if it was no Renaissance, the nineteenth century literary and political scene in India had its own importance in time and space, and its own morals and lessons to offer to centuries yet to follow as well as to the centuries preceeding. |
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| Could there be a real Renaissance if the nationalist bourgeoisie emerged in Indian in the nineteenth century? Let one more question be left unanswered because we cannot infer about what might have happened. |
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| 422.1.3.4. ART AND LITERATURE: LOSS OF THE INDIGENEOUS |
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| Absorbing the spacelessness of this never-happened-to-be-there Renaissance, time tells us that nineteenth century has other reasons to be recognized by the students of literary history today. Truly, the nineteenth century responses to transcontinental influence amounted in the loss of many indigenous melodies - romance and naturalism of ballad-singers, imagination and smartness of native composers (tournaments of poets and musicians were regularly held everywhere in Bengal, once upon a time, and surely they happened elsewhere in India, too) were lost to the grandiloquence of Milton and Shelly. The possibility of a new measure is resonance of native languages through contact with Persian and Urdu - tried for in Bengali by Bharatchandra and Ramprasad Sen in the eighteenth century - faded away as the English syntax gradually became the sophistication for chaste Bengali or chaste Hindi. [Thus, experiments in meter and rhyme by poets like kamalakanta - Padmalochan - Mirza Hussain - Gangaram - Iswar Yogi - Haru Thakur - Dasharathi Roy and many others of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century were also in vain.] |
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| Yet, even after being fully aware of all these negative tendencies in it, we cannot reject the nineteenth century altogether, as at that time there were many other positive attainments of space and time. The academic and bookish nationalism of the nineteenth century prepared the spirit of launching movements which united - for a few years at least, in the beginning of the twentieth century - commoners of Bengal with feudalists and the petty-bourgeois. Angry with Lord Curzon's attempt to divide Bengal, in 1905, villagers and urban intelligentsia together realized for the first time that they were in the same boat. Nationalist urge as poets, artists, scholars and philosophers recognized the motherliness of their motherland. 'Bandematatam' gained a new significance, theme of patriotism and mother-worship became a major preoccupation of creative writers. |
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| The participation of Bengal in 1905 posed a threat to the interest of rising bourgeoisie and feudalists who owned landed property on undivided Bengal : Tagore family, for example, had a vast mass of land in Bihar and East Bengal. There had been no such threat to the class-interest of the petty-bourgeois intellectuals in the nineteenth century. |
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| Though we cannot agree to the idea that the feudal lords and entrepreneur industrialists and their petty-bourgeois associates substituted the labour-class and proletarians in early twentieth century, we have to regard their role which proved to be revolutionary in so far as the superstructure of the various native literature-groups or speech-communities of India was concerned. |
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