Rupkatha, Rupok-katha and Beyond: Trailokyanath Mukhopadhyay’s Kankabati as a Postmodern Retelling

Abstract

Trailokyanath Mukhopadhyay’s novel Kankabati (1892) is a retelling of the folklore of Kankabati which was well-known in the late nineteenth century colonial Bengal. Mukhopadhyay’s novel anticipates the early twentieth century attempts of anthologising and appropriating folk tales of Bengal (as exemplified in Dakshinaranjan Mitra’s 1906 anthology of Bengali fairy tales titled Thakurmar Jhuli) which emerged out of the revivalist enterprises of contemporary cultural nationalism. Taking a cue from the self-reflexive distinction between the premodern ‘hearing’ of an oral tale and the new appropriation of the same by an author in the medium of writing—as suggested by the narrator of Kankabati in its prologue, this paper would aim at engaging with the workings of the authorfunction (in its Foucauldian sense) within the textual space of Kankabati. The self-conscious mediation of the authorial agency in the narrative seems to facilitate the construction of a hybrid narrative space comprising the elements of both the oral conventions of a traditional folk tale and a self-conscious narration loosely modelled upon social realism. This hybrid narrative space that emerges out of the transactional relationship between the orally disseminated folk tale and its literary appropriation in writing makes use of elements of parody. This paper will contemplate on the nature of these parodies by judging their effects through the lens of Fredric Jameson’s understanding of pastiche. Thus, by borrowing its conceptual tools from the Foucauldian notion of author function and Jameson’s understanding of parody or pastiche, this paper would attempt to read Kankabati as one of the earliest examples of postmodernism in Bengali literature.