The Voices of The Repressed: Probing The Palimpsest of Saradindu Bandyopadhyay’s “Bishkanya”

Abstract

This paper seeks to look at the politics of selective representation and characterisation in Saradindu Bandyopadhyay’s ‘Bishkanya’ (1938) within the context of colonial modernity, resistance, nationalist self- fashioning andidentity formation in the early 20th Century with the rise of nationalist consciousness. It employs a close reading of the text aided by a postcolonial intersectional reading as part of its theoretical framework. The paper is unique in its in-depth analysis of the highlighted text, with a special focus on the character, unearthing the propagandist ideology of nationalist discourse embedded within the text, which has not been adequately researched. The paper argues that ‘Bishkanya’ is an attempt of nationalist identity formation with its problematic exclusionary politics and ‘postcolonial subalternization.’