Resurrection of Bengali Folk Ballads: Search for a Communal Camaraderie in Colonial Bengal

Abstract

The connoisseurs of Bengali literature in the early twentieth century had found a new treasure trove of folk ballads from the far-flung villages of eastern Bengal. The discovery of these ballads is often ascribed to Chandra Kumar Dey who first published the details of a few ballads in a periodical named Saurabh. Later, Dey worked under the guidance of noted historian Dinesh Chandra Sen to collect more of these ballads which mainly existed in shared memory of people and were disseminated orally from one generation to the next. Dinesh Chandra Sen had successfully used the findings of this research to secure a consecutive Ramtanu Lahiri Fellowship and drew considerable critical attention from Indologists such as Romain Rolland and Stella Kramrisch. Sen’s Eastern Bengal Ballads (1926) and Mymensingh Gitika (1921) published as part of Ramtanu Lahiri Fellowship shed important lights on the nature of these ballads and how these ballads can be important tool to recover a pre-colonial and pre-Brahminic renaissance past which exhibit the features of an unadulterated Bengali past of peaceful coexistence of Hindu and Muslims.

Dinesh Chandra Sen and certain other contemporary intellectuals used these ballads as an important cultural tool to encounter a political outrage that tore through Bengal with the proposal of Bengal Partition of 1905. Though Lord Hardinge had annulled the proposed partition in 1911 yet the tension remained palpable. With the establishment of All India Muslim League (1906) and separated political interests communal riots became a more regular phenomenon in the twentieth century of which the Mymensingh riot of 1906-07 and a series of riots in and around Calcutta between 1918 and 1926 are few more prominent disastrous examples. Therefore, the discovery and subsequent popularity of these ballads cannot simply be termed as literary endeavour, underneath, there was this quasi-political urge to encounter the series of political violence that were to leave a permanent scar upon Bengali minds. The proposed paper would try to trace the dissemination of these ballads in the cultural sphere of twentieth century Bengal and the possible political implications of it.