The 'Swadeshi Jinish' from the 'Didima Company': an analysis of the connection between Thakurmar Jhuli by Dakshinaranjan Mitra Majumder and nationalism in Bengal in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century

This thesis provides a critical analysis of the Bengali folktale collection Thakurmar Jhuli (1907) by Dakshinaranjan Mitra Majumder linking it to the prevalent notion of Bengal folklore and Bengali nation of late nineteenth and early twentieth century Bengal. I focus on the ways in which the dominant scholarly and political ideologies of the time shaped the choice of tales in the collection. In particular, this study analyzes Majumder’s writing in its historical context by drawing upon Benedict Anderson’s theory of nationalism and Herder’s concept of romantic nationalism. Moreover, I discuss the content of this collection adopting Sadhana Naithani’s idea of “prefaced space” and Maurice Bloomfield’s “Hindu motif” to discuss the connection between Bengal folklore and nationalism of the time. Taking a folkloric approach of analyzing the content and context of the collection, I demonstrate that this collection by Majumder introduced a Bengali folktale genre named “rupkatha” against the colonial genre of folktales and fairy tales. In so doing, he also assumed a power position where he made representational choices in including and excluding the religious, linguistic and cultural elements of the people of Bengal. Finally, demonstrating examples from other Bengali folklore genres, the thesis asserts the importance of addressing the absence of Islamic elements in Majumder’s collection, and the investigation of different versions of rupkatha to create a more complete sense of the genre