97. Pragya Sen Gupta & Dr. Sriparna Das

Abstract 97
Pragya Sen Gupta & Dr. Sriparna Das

Politics of Representation: Reading Bani Basu’s Ujan Yatra

Abstract

This paper is an attempt to understand the politics of representation of Santhal and Bengali cultures by reading Bani Basu’s Ujan Yatra. The novel Ujan Yatra by Bani Basu is a quest for lost identity. This paper aims to look into this quest as an attempt of the mainstream to look into the issues of lost spaces and identities and craft a new meaning from the friction and tension that arises out of this loss. Kasturiben (Kiki), a Gujrati woman whose childhood was spent in Calcutta, comes back from Ahmedabad to search for her mother in the tribal belt of Bengal. Kajal Munda, a researcher, who studied in the Baptist Mission and then in the Ramakrishna Mission, has willingly rejected his family and his native village though he takes pride in calling himself a Munda than a part of the non-tribal Bengali society. Kasturi, Kajal, Mitu and Shikharini travel to the interior of Bengal, and through this Yatra they discover the origin of a culture that had subsided in the homogenisation of so-called superior non-tribal Bengali culture. The Quest for Identity is a journey towards discovering the ‘self’.

The immigration from one culture to the other recalls Rushdie’s article “Imaginary Homelands” where he says that the word translation comes, etymologically from the Latin for “bearing across”. According to Rushdie, the men coming from one culture and entering another become “translated men” who have “borne across”. It can be said that their identity takes a re-birth in the new culture. This translated identity is a symbol of their acceptance of the new land they have entered in. Their social position in the new land is not same as that of their position in the previous land. The change of their position depends on the difference between the power of the settler’s group in the new land and the power of the migrant’s group. However, the translated men continue to live with their new identity without forgetting the previous one. If past is the original text of a man, and present the re-written one, then the translation occurs within his self which stands at the union of the two. Their hybrid selves entice them to return to their pasts, but on returning also they find that the past is not as familiar as it was earlier. Kajal Munda’s past was preserved in his memory of traumatic childhood spent in the forests of Jhargram. But when he returns to the place, he finds it changed. At the same time, this paper will try to explore the relations as well as the difference between the centre and the periphery, and at the same time locate the marginalised and the mainstream in a relation with the two.