Reading Pleasure, Rhyme in Print: Studying a history of reading in colonial Bngl

Abstract: Roland Barthes Le Plaisir du texte (1975) connected the term pleasure to the idea of text. To differentiate the preferential intensity of the relish in art two distinct terms Pleasure and Bliss are available. This relates to degree of being readable and writable respectively. But this arrangement can not avoid the essentially scriptocentric archetype. Therefore what to read, and how to read that same, have always been pertinent a question in any ongoing cultural space, be it colonial, or the post-colonial. Amidst the widely-available and extant reading-practice(s) in late nineteenth century colonial Bengal, we observe a specific cultural practice where Rabindranath Tagore began an archiving process for Bngl oral rhymes (namely Chelebhulno Char') from East Bengal districts. On his persuasion, a large number of rhymes came into print in serious literary journals, including his own ones. Because the archiving posed no extra advantage to retain it in the collective memory system of East Bengali women, they never had to access those printed journals to placate or distract their children. Could the then Kolkata intelligentsia, for whom those rhymes were printed, find pleasure in the constructs coming from altogether a different literary framework and transmitted in a mode different from their scripted literature? A fair number of them vehemently criticized Tagore, describing his attempt to collect rural, feminine rhymes into the scripted purview, as kuruchipra (perverted). Taking a cue from this, I shall locate how does the colonial knowledge-system function wherein a reader or a reading-practice operates. That very colonial reading, in turn, can create alternative reading spaces; and can also provide the forthcoming post-colonial culturalspace(s) to cope itself up with that alternative one. This paper would try to understand the very location of a reading-practice and the alternative that it creates alongside.

Arnab Dutta PG I, Department of Comparative Literature Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India Mobile no. +91-9038210206 Email: bonjourarnab@gmail.com