Dissertation Information
| Title: | Archaeology of Bangla Language and Literature | |
| Author: | Sibansu Mukhopadhyay | |
| Email: | click here to access email | |
| Degree Awarded: | University of Kalyani , Ph. D. Linguistics | |
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Degree Date:
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2002 | |
| Linguistic Subfield(s): | Discourse Analysis Anthropological Linguistics | |
| Subject Language(s): |
Bengali
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| Director(s): |
K.S. Ghatak
Debaprasad Bandyopadhyay |
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| Abstract: |
This thesis is primarily on the ‘origin’ ‘birth’ ‘genesis’ of a language ‘Bangla’, revealed in the discursive formation of a subject, The History of Bangla Language and Literature, written in the colonial and post-colonial period.
The thesis shows that the imagination of territory ‘Bengal’ was subscribed by the disciplinary technology of ideological state apparatuses as it was constituted in the colonial period. As an imagined nation, Bangla had to have a definite territory with a centrally controlled standard language and ‘other’ variations. The ‘other’ speakers under the umbrella of Bangla, though captivated by the standard language, got the status of Bangla through the epistemology of linguistics. As a nation, then, it needs a definite history with deterministic linear development. History of Bangla language and literature is no exception. The discourse of Bangla language and literature produces a linear deterministic periodiztion of languages and literatures. There are three certain periods in Bangla language as well as literature: Old, Middle, Modern. This thesis argues that this is mere historicism and a mimicry of colonizers’ periodization. Not only that, the history of language overlaps history of literature, as if changes in externalized language determines the changes of literary content. In the first chapter of the thesis, the methodology of research was discussed. In this chapter the key words are: archaeology, non-discursive formation, historical a priori, episteme, genealogical fantasy, mimicry of over-determination, etc. The second chapter, explores and questions the essential geopolitical construction of a nation (in this case Bengal) and its totalizing effect on the subjects. The term ‘Bangla’ is liable to semantic change. However, in the process of constructing history per se, whatever is diachronically constructed as Bangla ultimately subscribes the construction of heritage in a form of genealogical fantasy. The third chapter of the thesis is on the ‘History of Bangla literature’, which as a nationalistic enterprise was framed on the basis of Hindu-Bangla equation. On the other hand, this equation was pervaded by a different discourse, where the discourse of Islam was foregrounded. To define Bangla, the Hindu intelligentsia emphasized: 1. Bangla is equal to Hindu, so, the Muslims should be excluded from the history; 2. for the sake of fantastic genealogy Bangla had to be proved as a classical entity, therefore, the categories like ‘folk’ ‘tribe’ had been marginalized but were not excluded and were put into a different bin; 3. history was considered as a biological process of monolithic and linear ‘development’. In the fourth chapter, the birth of Bangla as a discipline in the colonial period was elaborated. And the last chapter concentrates on the Bangla diaspora and Bangla as a hyper-reality. |
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Page Updated: 06-Sep-2010 |
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