The Epic of Damarudhar

by Trailokyanath Mukhopadhyay
translated by Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay
contributions by Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay

Seagull Books, 2020
Cloth: 978-0-85742-745-8 | eISBN: 978-0-85742-768-7

ABOUT THIS BOOK | AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY | REVIEWS | TOC

ABOUT THIS BOOK
Originally published between 1910 and 1917, and collected in book form in 1923, The Epic of Damarudhar story cycle occupies an important and unique position in the history of Bengali literature. Tackling cosmology and mythology, class and caste abuse, nativist demagoguery and the harsh reality of rural poverty, all by means of unrelentingly fierce black comedy, Trailokyanath Mukhopadhyay’s cycle of seven stories featuring the raconteur Damarudhar remains prescient social commentary to this day.

With its generic fusion of tall tales, science, myth, politics, and the absurd, the work also announces the emergence of the genre of modern fantasy in Bengal. A detailed introduction, bibliography, and extensive annotation bring to life the context for these stories, highlighting key intertexts, political nuances, and important mythological references. This volume also contains the first translation of a rare biographical piece on the author, which includes long autobiographical parts written by Trailokyanath himself. Carefully translated and thoroughly researched, this volume will introduce a trenchant Indian voice to the English-language readership.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
Trailokyanath Mukhopadhyay (1847–1919) was a leading figure of the Bengal Renaissance. He was an intrepid social reformer who contributed extensively to the development of sales networks for Indian traditional art and handicrafts and curated botanical exhibitions in Europe and India. He wrote one of the most widely read English-language travelogues from nineteenth-century India, A Visit to Europe, as well as many history books, novellas, and encyclopedic monographs and catalogues. Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay is senior researcher at the Department of Culture Studies and Oriental Languages, University of Oslo. Chattopadhyay is also a fellow of the Imaginary College, Center for Science and the Imagination, Arizona State University.

REVIEWS

‘In the last decade of the nineteenth century and first two decades of the twentieth, Trailokyanath gradually unfolded an alternative hermeneutics of life as well as an alternative creative mode. While doing so, he reinterpreted the unexplored legacy of the marginalized, revisited the socio-cultural perspective and more importantly, opened the closed door of the prison-house of the colonial elites . . . Literary fantasies were not a mechanism of escape for him, rather he tried to prove that his microcosm bespoke of a new literary mode which subverted the generic and textual structure imposed on it. This new mode discovered the lost horizon of traditional narrative in order to counteract the model of westernized novel on the one hand while on the other added the element of carnival to the process of subversion. As a result, Trailokyanath’s new textual model madly tore up its generic bonds until it rent everything asunder—the well-defined frontiers as well as its very self . . . Our close encounter with his literary texts would show that these appear to be free from many of the conventions and restraints of more realistic texts. We also find that these refused to observe unities of time, space and character and did away with prevalent notions of chronology, three dimensionality as well as rigid distinctions between animate and inanimate objects, self and other, life and death.’—Tapodhir Bhattacharjee, Makers of Indian Literature: Trailokyanath Mukhopadhyay

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Translator’s Introduction
Chapter 1 The Third Marriage
Chapter 2 The Treasure
Chapter 3 The Avatar
Chapter 4 The Wish
Chapter 5 The Company
Chapter 6 The Scheme
Chapter 7 The Mantra

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