Recovering the Ephemeral: Production and Circulation of Bangla Dalit Periodicals

Abstract

The periodical press in Bangla started its journey in the early decades of the nineteenth century and generated a space for debate and shaping of public opinion on varied topics, but a stable print market emerged only after the 1860s. The journey of the Bangla periodical press, for the majority of the nineteenth century, had been marked by an anxiety of discovering a sustainable market and had jostled through the debates of propriety over popularity, sanctions aimed at literary decorum and definitions of usefulness. The periodical press, thus emerged at the last quarter of nineteenth century in Calcutta and Dhaka, was a sanitised platform of instruction and erudition deemed suitable for carrying the baton of a glorious literary inheritance and establishing a prestigious Bangla literary and cultural identity in comparison to its colonial British counterpart. However, the process of sanitisation of language and content along with the competition for survival in a budding print market normalised the exclusion of voices and suppression of cultural expressions that belonged to the lower caste population and women. This monopoly over the production process was challenged by the lower caste communities as Namasudra, Poundra-Kshatriya and Rajbanshi – all major lower caste communities – entered the arena of the periodical press from the beginning of the twentieth century. But their journey was not smooth, not only due to political events such as the partition of India and national independence, but maintaining a steady flow of production of Dalit periodicals was more often than not thwarted by severe crises of institutional attachment, lack of subscribers and a dependable circulation network.