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“...[A] poor priest, Chandi Das, was shocking Bengal by composing Dantean songs to a peasant Beatrice, idealizing her with romantic passion, exalting her as a symbol of divinity, and making his love an allegory of his desire for absorption in God; at the same time he inaugurated the use of Bengali as a literary language. "I have taken refuge at your feet, my beloved. When I do not see you my mind has no rest .... I cannot forget your grace and your charm,—and yet there is no desire in my heart." Excommunicated by his fellow Brahmans on the ground that he was scandalizing the public, he agreed to renounce his love, Rami, in a public ceremony of recantation; but when, in the course of this ritual, he saw Rami in the crowd, he withdrew his recantation, and going up to her, bowed before her with hands joined in adora-
tion.”
― Our Oriental Heritage
tion.”
― Our Oriental Heritage
“The intention (of the puja pandals) is not so much to entertain as to disorient and astonish; to tap into the Bengali’s appetite for the bizarre, the uncanny.”
― Calcutta: Two Years in the City
― Calcutta: Two Years in the City
“The Bengali was the Marwari of the early nineteenth century.”
― Calcutta: Two Years in the City
― Calcutta: Two Years in the City
“The detective embodies, even more than the romantic drifter, rationality; this intriguing and apparent dichotomy pertains to a significant part of Bengali children’s literature as well – that ofen, especially in the proliferation of adventure, spy and mystery genres in Bengali in the first half of the twentieth century, children’s literature is not so much an escape from the humanist logos of ‘high’ literary practice, but a coming to its irreducible possibilities from a different direction.”
― Clearing a Space: Reflections on India, Literature and Culture
― Clearing a Space: Reflections on India, Literature and Culture
Rk’s 2024 Year in Books
Take a look at Rk’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
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