Abhishek Sarkar

Shakespeare's Richard III may be seen as a case study of how lives and deaths of children are juggled as an aesthetic agenda in collusion with (and/or as an exposé of) the dominant adult discourses that deny children agency and discount their individuality. The act of mourning for the children may be just another way of interpellating them. Whereas it is the political contingency of the Tudor myth that dictates the killing of Arthur and York, it is also necessary to correlate the fashioning of these children's death to the cultural status of early modern children, to the crisis over the Protestant reformulation of afterlife and repudiation of idolatry, and also, to the demands of the theatrical idiom that condition the represented death and mourning.

My article examines how the staging of gender and sexuality in Shakespeare’s play As You Like It is negotiated in a Bengali adaptation, Ananga-Rangini (1897) by the little-known playwright Annadaprasad Basu. The Bengali adaptation does not assume the boy actor’s embodied performance as essential to its construction of the Rosalindequivalent, and thereby it misses several of the accents on gender and sexuality that characterize Shakespeare’s play. The Bengali adaptation, while accommodating much of Rosalind’s flamboyance, is more insistent upon the heteronormative closure and reconfigures the Rosalind-character as an acquiescent lover/wife. Further, Ananga-Rangini incorporates resonances of the classical Sanskrit play Abhijñānaśākuntalam by Kālidāsa, thus suggesting a thematic interaction between the two texts and giving a concrete shape to the comparison between Shakespeare and Kālidāsa that formed a favourite topic of literary debate in colonial Bengal. The article takes into accou...

The Bengali literary reception of Lord Byron in the nineteenth century is characterised by opposing tendencies-fascination with his poetic corpus and personal heroics on the one hand and indignation at his amoral and nihilistic stance on the other. Byron's liber-tinism and melancholy are censoriously registered in several Bengali essays in the late nineteenth century, but a sizeable body of Bengali poetry produced around the same time seeks to appropriate Byron through quotation and adaptation. Byron's celebrated cosmopolitanism as well as his satire does not figure conspicuously on the agenda for his Bengali appropriations, because his precedents are deployed predominantly for imagining a nation. Poets such as Hemchandra Bandyopadhyay and Nabinchandra Sen rework the Byronic text into a lament for a lost national (specifically Hindu) glory. At the same time, Biharilal Chakraborty and Akshaychandra Sarkar echo Byron's meditation on Nature but divest it of his characteristic malaise or misanthropy. The poetic appropriations of Byron in Bengali, this essay argues, presuppose a public morality and political function , and hence consciously eschew Byron's irony and self-dramatisation. 1

This article contextualizes and assesses the Shakespearean quotations mouthed by the brilliant anti-hero of a nineteenth-century Bengali comedy. This article also provides an overview of the growth of English literary studies in colonial Bengal, especially in the classroom atmosphere. This article will be useful to students of post-colonialism, translation and adaptation studies, comparative literature and the global reception of Shakespeare.

The Bengali literary reception of Lord Byron in the nineteenth century is characterised by opposing tendencies-fascination with his poetic corpus and personal heroics on the one hand and indignation at his amoral and nihilistic stance on the other. Byron's liber-tinism and melancholy are censoriously registered in several Bengali essays in the late nineteenth century, but a sizeable body of Bengali poetry produced around the same time seeks to appropriate Byron through quotation and adaptation. Byron's celebrated cosmopolitanism as well as his satire does not figure conspicuously on the agenda for his Bengali appropriations, because his precedents are deployed predominantly for imagining a nation. Poets such as Hemchandra Bandyopadhyay and Nabinchandra Sen rework the Byronic text into a lament for a lost national (specifically Hindu) glory. At the same time, Biharilal Chakraborty and Akshaychandra Sarkar echo Byron's meditation on Nature but divest it of his characteristic malaise or misanthropy. The poetic appropriations of Byron in Bengali, this essay argues, presuppose a public morality and political function , and hence consciously eschew Byron's irony and self-dramatisation. 1

This is a brief article written for a non-academic webzine. It provides an overview of the colonial police officer Priyanath Mukhopadhyay's literary output, considering the strategies and techniques adopted by him to render his first-hand experience of crime investigation into the literary codes of the detective narrative. This article will be of interest to researchers working in the fields of criminology and police history, detective and crime fiction, urban studies and governmentalities.  The article pays attention to his representation of Kolkata and his negotiation of the colonial apparatus.

My paper seeks to locate Thomas Dekker's handling of underworld jargon at the interface of oral and literary cultures. The paper briefly looks at a play co-authored by Dekker and then examines two ''coney-catching pamphlets " by him to see how he tries to appropriate cant or criminal lingo (necessarily an oral system) as an aesthetic/commercial programme. In these two tracts (namely, The Bellman of London, 1608; Lantern and Candlelight, 1608) Dekker makes an exposé of the jargon used by criminals (with regard to their professional trappings, hierarchies, modus operandi, division of labour) and exploits it as a trope of radical alienation. The elusiveness and ephemerality of the spoken word here reinforce the mobility and deceit culturally associated with the thieves and vagabonds – so that the authorial function of capturing cant (whose revelatory status is insistently sensationalized) through the intrusive technologies of alphabet and print parallels the dominant culture's project of inscribing and colonizing its non-conforming other. Using later theorization of orality, the paper will show how the media of writing and print distance the threat inherent in cant and enable its cultural surveillance and aesthetic appraisal.