The Novel In Nineteenth Century Bengal

"Examines a history of reading practices in 19th-century Bengal at the intersection of Sanskrit and Perso-Arabic aesthetics, British colonial pedagogy, and the rise of Bengali novels"--

How does a reader learn to read an unfamiliar genre? The Novel in Nineteenth-Century Bengal answers this question by looking at the readers of some of the first Bengali novelists, including Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay and Mir Mosharraf Hossain. Moving from the world of novels, periodicals, letters, and reviews to that of colonial educational policies, this book provides a rich literary history of the reading lives of some of the earliest novel readers in colonial India. Sunayani Bhattacharya studies the ways in which Bengalis thought about reading; how they approached the thorny question of influence; and uncovers that they relied on classical Sanskrit and Perso-Arabic literary and aesthetic models, whose attendant traditions formed not a distant past, but coexisted, albeit contentiously, with the everyday present. Challenging dominant postcolonial scholarship, The Novel in Nineteenth-Century Bengal engages with the lived experience of colonial modernity as it traces the import of the Bengali reader's choices on her quotidian life, and grants access to 19th-century Bengal as a space in which the past is to be found enmeshed with the present.

Excerpt from History of Bengali Literature: In the Nineteenth Century 1800-1825 To a mere literary taster; but even in this seemingly dullest period of our literary history, there is much more than is ever dreamt of in the philosophy of the airy generaliser who hurries over it to pastures more agreeable. It is the silent but strenuous efforts of the hosts of forgotten or half-forgotten writers, both foreign and native, of this and later periods that have built up the whole fabric upon which the present-day literature is based but it has always been the misfortune of the worthy pioneer authors to be kept in the background and looked upon as notable curio sities. It is time, however, when their records are fast vanishing and in a few years will be irretrievably lost, that we must hasten to estimate their work and worth, reconstruct their history, and give them their respective share of credit in the growth and progress of the national mind. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

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