Tug-of-Ear: The Play of Dialect in Modern Bengali and Tamil Literature

The dissertation foregrounds Bengali and Tamil ideas of nonstandard language that complicate dominant discourses of literary language and its political contexts, including modernism, nationalism, and contemporary movements. The first half of the dissertation explores dialect, place, and literary form in Bengali through the idea of “dēśer kathā” (“dialect,” from dēś “homeland” and kathā “word-form”). I begin with how kathā (oral and dialectal forms) disrupts the dominant paradigms of sādhu (“pure”) and calit (“current”) Bengali in the modernist novel, through readings of three classic works by Manik Bandyopadhyay, Advaita Mallabarman, and Tarashankar Bandyopadhyay. Then I examine how the discourses of indigeneity (ādibāsī) and refugee experience (udbāstu) in Bengali āñcalik (regional) and Dalit poetry, short fiction, and kabigān (poet’s songs) complicate conceptions of dēś (homeland) and jāti (birth community). The second half of the dissertation carries these questions into contemporary Tamil literature through the idea of vaṭṭāra vaḻakku (“dialect,” from vaṭṭāram “region” and vaḻakku “practice”). Here too, regional language problematizes the dominant “spoken/written” (pēccu/eḻuttu) binary by stressing place and practice. I trace these threads in the work of contemporary Tamil authors, highlighting dialect as a mode of attention in the work of Kanmani Gunasekaran, regional author and lexicographer based in Virudhachalam, Tamil Nadu, and dialect as play in the work of Tamilselvi, feminist author from Tiruvarur district now based in Virudhachalam. These ideas, I argue, offer innumerable places from which it may be possible to challenge hegemonic concepts of the nation and the global as well as complicate or reimagine past and present regional discourses. Thus, dialect offers a space to grapple with the problems of representation of and by marginalized communities, minorities, Dalits, and women