#Upendrakishore Raychaudhuri

[bidyakolpo]

গুপীগাইন বাঘাবাইন – উপেন্দ্রকিশোর রায়চৌধুরী

[deepjuillet]

Tuntunir Golpo: Perception of Violence in Children's Classics

Tuntunir Golpo: Perception of Violence in Children’s Classics

Sometimes I take a look at my collection of ebooks and downloaded pdf books on my phone to find out what hidden gem I would come across. On one such occasion, I came across a must-read from our childhood, written by Upendrakishore Raychaudhuri (উপেন্দ্রকিশোর রায়চৌধুরী), father of another stalwart of Bengali Renaissance literature, Sukumar Ray. The book is called Tuntuni ar bagher golpo (টুনটুনি…

[apenitentialprayer]

Faerie Tale in Bengali Children’s Literature

Except for a sub-genre of stories set in the Sunderbans, where the native child turns big-game hunter and intrepid scientist, the Bengali countryside would seem to be the geography of Upendrakishore Raychaudhuri’s Tuntuni stories. This is an extra-colonial Bengal populated by mischievous birds and animals, a world of stupid tigers and scheming jackals, of urban nostalgia for something rarely experienced but frequently imagined, unabashedly sentimental, free from the demands of rationality and sheepish emasculation. To some extent, this is the landscape of ‘tradition’ that, Sudhir Chandra has noted, was constructed as already lost. Yet neither it, nor the child that might be recuperated within it, is unmarked by the colonial modern, not least because the part of the intertwined agendas of creating modern societies and modern childhoods. Bengali writers such as Abanindranath, Rabindranath and D.R. Mitra Majumdar generally accepted the Romantic equation of the folk with the child, and the folk tale as a naturally juvenile literature. The Romantic and the modern are not contradictory and certainly the idea of the primitive past can be a powerful ingredient in the imaginations of the modern present, in India as well as Europe. [...] At the same time, apparent parallels with European children’s literature must be treated with caution. The nature of ‘compilation’ is not the same in Bengal as it is in Germany or Denmark. The lack of an assertive authorial gesture in Indian collections like Thakumar Jhuli (which is less strongly associated with D.R. Mitra Majumdar than Grimms’ fairy tales are associated with the Grimms) undermines the historical writer-parent, and locates the Romantic child within a mythical collective that resists historicization. Also, in the Bengali case, the Romantic imagination generated a children’s literature that is considerably darker than its European counterparts. Compared with the increasingly sanitized European fairy tale, the Thakumar Jhuli stories are nakedly violent: the standard edition still features cannibal mothers feasting on their hapless children, complete with transliterated sound effects like the crunching of bones. The Bengali version of the Romantic child existed not only as a controlled and celebratory resuscitation of the primitive within the modern, but also the point around which colonial modernity might fragment, revealing other possibilities and inevitabilities. The Bengali Romantic is, in fact, marked by a pervasive unease. The countryside is not simply a happy escape from a castrating urbanity. It is also a geography in which one wanders lost, in which friends, family and identities are irrevocably lost, and in which there is no assurance of recovery. In Jogendra Nath Gupta’s story Pathey Bipathey (‘Roads and Wrong Turns’), Tepantar -the great wilderness of Thakumar Jhuli- emerges as a frightening emptiness on the edge of the idyllic village, which is itself located on the margins of the present, in a time called shekal (‘those days’, or the past). [...] Thus, while some of the problems of the other geographies of childhood can be addressed and even resolved in the countryside, this is not necessarily an imaginary space that can be triumphantly owned and thereby tamed. It generates a pessimism and a dissipation of identity that are fundamentally opposed to the demands of modernity, and that catapult the child into what is literally a no-man’s-land.

- Satadru Sen (Disciplined Natives: Race, Freedom and Confinement in Colonial India, pages 54, 54-55, 55)

[eyeburfi2]

‘The imprisoned Hanuman being led away by rakshasas’, from Chheleder Ramayan [The Children’s Ramayan] by Upendrakishore Raychaudhuri, 1907 edition

Source: Children’s Books from Bengal: A Documentation

[ebookshead]

Tuntunir Boi is a popular book by Upendrakishore Raychaudhuri. The book is another popular epic for children Upendrakishore Raychaudhuri. Upendrakishore Ray Chowdhury was a famous Bengali writer, painter, violinist and composer. He was also known as Upendrakishore Ray.

[ebookshead]

Cheleder Mahabharat is a popular book by Upendrakishore Raychaudhuri. The book is another popular epic for children Upendrakishore Raychaudhuri. Upendrakishore Ray Chowdhury was a famous Bengali writer, painter, violinist and composer. He was also known as Upendrakishore Ray. He was the father of the famous writer Sukumar Ray and grandfather of the famous filmmaker Satyajit Ray.

[ebookshead]

Upendrokishor Somogro is a popular book by Upendrakishore Raychaudhuri. The book is another popular epic for children Upendrakishore Raychaudhuri. Upendrakishore Ray Chowdhury was a famous Bengali writer, painter, violinist and composer. He was also known as Upendrakishore Ray. He was the father of the famous writer Sukumar Ray and grandfather of the famous filmmaker Satyajit Ray. Upendrakishore Ray Chowdhury was born on 12 May 1863 in Kishorgonj, Bangladesh and died December 20, 1915 in Jharkhand, India.