Upside-Down Purāṇ”: A Bengali Mock-Purāṇa from 1927

Abstract

In colonial Bengal, parodies and satires became particularly popular genres, which targeted a variety of modern urban characters who haunted the colonial city. It was common for these satiric and comic writings in Bengali to not only mock and overturn characters and situations but also to readapt traditional literary genres to new literary goals and offer ‘inverted’ visions of history. For example, classic genres of Indian religious literature like purāṇas, stotras and māhātmyas had a second life under colonialism, as they were often repurposed to serve other literary and political ends for the new reading publics. In this paper I explore how the genre of purāṇa is subverted and adapted to completely new goals in modern Bengal. After an overview of how this classical narrative mode has evolved in Bengali writing, I focus on a short story from 1927 which seems to use a pauraṇik frame to re-write colonial history: “Ulaṭ purāṇ” (Upside-down Purāṇa/Old Story) by Rajshekhar Basu (1880-1960), the noted Bengali humourist better known under his nom-de-plume Parashuram. “Ulaṭ purāṇ” is a comic story which ironically projects a utopic, or perhaps dystopic, counter-history of India’s colonization in a comic style, typical of this Bengali author and chemist. Focusing on selected passages of this text, I try to show how classical tropes and motifs of narration could be adopted and adapted in satiric-comic writing to open different horizons of meaning for India’s colonial past and present.