Literary Criticism-Bengali
By Himani Bannerji
According to Bannerji, Tagore’s prose writings, including correspondence, are being read through new critical lenses to meet the need of our times. Three aspects of his socio-political thought become especially relevant from this point of view: his critique of nationalism and imperialism, including his assessment of various modes used and proposed for eradicating these; his universalist and humanist understanding of the politics of freedom and civilization; and lastly, the connection between the previous two issues and his modernism, as expressed by his philosophy and his projects of social reform.
By Trailokyanath Mukhopadhyay. Translated from the original Bengali by Sucheta Dasgupta
Well-known magic realists like Marquez, Borges, Kundera and Rushdie are known to have resorted to the mode because the world they lived in was beleaguered by political upheavals that aroused profound personal turmoil, and the totality of the experience could not be rendered entirely through realistic narrative. Marquez had recounted how his mother told him tales set in real surroundings that get permeated by something incredible, but with the blandest of expressions, as though to say nothing beyond the real had been superimposed on the real story, and that the unbelievable and absurd are also part of everyday reality.