Resisting agrarian privatisation: epigraphs as protest in Govinda Samanta: or the history of a Bengal Raiyat (1874).

Abstract

There is debate about whether Lal Behari Day’s novel of peasant life, Govinda Samanta: or the history of a Bengal Raiyat (1874) is resistant to or compliant with colonial discourse about land ownership and the zamindari system. On the one hand, it narrates how a zamindar who has been given excess power by British legislation causes the demise of a peasant Govinda. On the other hand, the narrative’s use of realism and its ethnographic style has been seen as replicating British colonial ideas about the peasant. Moreover, while individual bad landlords are criticised by the narrator, there is no condemnation of the zamindari system as a whole. The representation of resistance in the novel appears to be constrained by dominant discourses and the frame of genre. What has largely been overlooked in criticism of Govinda Samanta, however, is Day’s use of epigraphs which head each of the novel’s sixty-one chapters. Drawing on Amelia Hall’s (2020) use of Genette’s theory of paratexts, I examine the epigraphs which include: extracts from Eighteenth-century British poems protesting about the enclosure of land by the rich in Britain; the successful peasant action of Schiller’s William Tell, and famous anti-slavery lines. The epigraphs have an aggregative effect, reframing the narrative by making connections to historical global issues of land marketisation and amplifying the instances of resistance in the novel.