Modernist Transitions: Cultural Encounters between British and Bangla Modernist Fiction from 1910s and 1950s, edited by Subhadeep Ray and Goutam Karmakar, published by Bloomsbury Academic India, is a collection of twelve scholarly essays. A foreword by Pramod K Nayar and a detailed introduction by the editors precede the three parts of the book volume, each containing four essays/chapters.

‘Modernism’, an innovative and pragmatic approach to art and aesthetics in the wake of the twentieth century, began a transnational interaction while permeating the colonial boundaries. Indian modernism, primarily shaped in and around the British Empire’s second and Eastern capital, Calcutta, contrasted and complemented the European and particularly British modernist frameworks. Since Indian and British modernism of the first half of the twentieth century shared colonial/postcolonial history, this book is essential to serious engagements in modernist literature vis-à-vis comparative literature. Modernist Transitions can be called a postcolonial deconstruction of the Western models of modernism, which succinctly spurs the controversy that is inherently present in any and every Eurocentric critical ideology.

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Modernist Transitions critically highlights modernism’s ‘to and fro’ transitions between Britain and Bengal through an analogous reading of British-Bangla modernist fiction. It does essential work, i.e., it focuses on intersecting issues like imperialism, consumerism, social history, medicine and psychology, war and violence—a plethora of colonial influences that Western modernist ideologues are oblivious to. The well-crafted volume divides into three parts, each introducing the contributing aspects of modernity. Each part begins with a brief editors’ introduction, ensuring a theoretical and thematic continuity throughout. Each essay pokes at a self-contradictory aspect of ‘homogenised’ modernism and provokes controversies.

The first part, “Setting the Paradigms: Nations and Narrations,” evaluates the relationship between nations and different forms of modernist narrations. Especially in the first segment, where the essayists take radical standpoints and challenge the reification of Western modernist models. French-Canadian scholar Amar Acheraiou’s essay probes into British canons’ literary-biographical engagements, aesthetics and politics, culminating in ethical dilemmas. Acheraiou reads the British modernists as the products of their times and culture—imperialism, industrialisation, anti-colonial struggles, fascism and the two World Wars being at the backdrop. In the following essay, Ritwick Bhattacharjee points out the ambivalences of Indian modernity through a close reading of Nehru’s Discovery of India, which, as the editors explore, bears a strong connection with the modernist movement in Bangla. In the third essay, Angshuman Kar dwells on the politics of ‘canon formation’, which often leads to unethical standardisation. He insists on the distinct development of Bangla modernism despite the impact of hegemonic ideologies, examining how school/college curricula, advertisements, and propaganda influence the canons and vice versa. In the final essay of the first part, Santanu Banerjee follows the Western critical trajectories on hero worship in reframing a glorified Indian nationalist identity through DL Roy’s memoirs on Indian-global heroes like Tagore, Gandhi, Netaji, Rolland and Russell.

The essayists of the first section address mutual influences on cultural traditions, personal lives, education, democracy, individual ethics and institutional morality, among several interim issues. Subsequently, it illustrates the complex nature of home-spun Indian modernity by reappropriating the subjectivities and ethical dilemmas of the British modernist writers, the reactionary inception of postcolonial India, the subversion of the trends in the canonisation of the Bangla modernist fiction and hero-worshipping at the backdrop of the two World Wars.

The second part of the book—“Everything is the Proper Stuff of Fiction”: Intersections of Modernism and Realism in Narratives of Corporeality, Subjectively, Alienation and”War”—links the readers directly to Virginia Woolf’s concept of close reading. Projecting elements of reality and subjectivity in British and Bangla modernist texts, the section unveils the conventional binary between modernism and realism as two distinct objects. On the contrary, as the chapters of this part unravel, the experimental aesthetics of modernism derive much of their elements from realism, and in the case of the vernacular writers of the colony, socio-political engagements with reality are a part of their declaration of a new artistic self. For example, essayist Supriti Debnath compares modernist-romantic writer DH Lawrence’s medical narratives on health, illness, and death with those of Bengali doctor-author Bonophul. Jemima Nasrin’s essay on Manada Devi’s fictional autobiography An Educated Woman in Prostitution (1929) and Katherine Mansfield’s short autobiographical fiction The Singing Lesson (1922) explores the intricate maze of feminism and modernism. Bipranarayan Bhattacharyya uses a modernist alienist framework when reading James Joyce’s Ulysses and Satinath Bhaduri’s Dhorai Charit Manas. At the same time, Partha Sarathi Nandi examines Bangla’s late-modernist war literature, the labyrinthine relations of culturally and historically rooted modernity, and the incumbent violence. This part of the book interrogates the impetus of social realism, from health humanities to feminist readings to Marxist-psychoanalytical readings of war literature.

The third part, “Interplay Between Traditions and Genres of Modernist and Late-Modernist Fiction,” deals with multiple aspects, i.e., children’s literature, domestic writings, working-class narratives, and detective fiction. This book section deciphers the highly composite spatio-temporal journey from modernity towards postmodernity—children’s, domestic, working-class, and detective fiction. Stella Chitralekha Biswas contrasts and compares British and Bangla children’s literature as a distinct modernist genre in their historical contexts and, hence, takes a postcolonial departure from the Western models. The next essay by Nilanjana Chatterjee, Nibedita Mukherjee, and Anindita Chatterjee focuses on the works of Virginia Woolf and Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain, which helps the readers to understand the culturally nuanced domestic space of the nineteenth century and shows that women’s writings remain critical in restoring authentic female voices. In the following essay, Aratrika Ganguly attempts a Marxist reading of the coalmine fiction of D.H. Lawrence and Sailajananda Mukhopadhyay, unveiling the dehumanised face of capitalist exploitations, death, insanity and complicated/tragic romantic relationships—a dimension where Lawrencian passion meets Mukhopadhyaian realism. Essayist Animesh Bag focuses on the genealogy of modernist Bangla vis-à-vis English detective tales, from Edgar Allan Poe to Arthur Conan Doyle, and Priyonath Daroga to Byomkesh Bakshi. Since detective fiction manifests a modernist nostalgia for an orderly and idealised past through its narratives, the crime stories, murders, and mysteries in twentieth-century Calcutta provide a panoramic view of the psychoanalytic/social transitions and the fragmented selves within their conflicts and ambivalences.

Apart from the fact that Modernist Transitions highlights an absence of records on mutual influences in British and Bangla novelists, it contributes significantly to a cross-textual and intertextual reading of British and Bangla literature. Moreover, it foregrounds the distinctive traits of Bangla modernism and the intersections of the colonies and the colonisers’ literature. As a counterfeit to Western modernist models, noncanonical Indian writers are placed next to canonical Western writers like James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf.

Modernist Transitions questions any homogenised concept of modernity that can be studied monolithically. Dedicated “To Democracy and Cosmopolitanism,” the volume foregrounds the significance of understanding the contemporary power struggles across the globe. Furthermore, it advocates for rationality, cultural inclusiveness, and empathy for the colonial ‘other’ in today’s tumultuous world. Overall, this volume is fundamental to studying the intersecting subjectivities of British modernism and the cultural interactions between Britain and Bengal that led to simultaneous modernities.

The reviewer is assistant professor of English, Bidhan Chandra College, Asansol

Spotlight

Modernist Transitions: Cultural Encounters between British and Bangla Modernist Fiction from 1910s to 1950s

Edited by Subhadeep Ray and Goutam Karmakar

Bloomsbury, 2023

260 pages, Rs 1,599/-