Post-Partitioning Thakurmar Jhuli and Abol Tabol: the Translated Text, the West Bengali Bhadralok, and the East Bengali ‘Other’
Esha Sil completed her MA in Postcolonial Literary and Cultural Studies at the School of English, University of Leeds, U.K., in 2008, and thereafter commenced her doctoral study at the University of Leeds in 2009. She was funded for both her postgraduate and doctoral programs by the School of English Bonamy Dobrée Scholarship. Her research is based on the ‘quintessential’ Bengali leisure pursuit, adda, a long, informal talking session among friends, and takes its cue from Dipesh Chakrabarty’s acclaimed essay on adda to examine this social practice along the theoretical axes of radical capitalism and the 1947 Bengal Partition. She has presented her work at various conferences and is currently co-editing a special issue for Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, titled, ‘Re-evaluating the Postcolonial City: Production, Reconstruction, Representation’.
Her Zukunftsphilologie fellowship project will revisit the textual scholarship of Bengali children’s literature through a study of Sukumar Ray’s anthology of nonsense rhymes, Abol Tabol (Nonsense), and Dakshinaranjan Mitra Majumdar’s Thakurmar Jhuli (Grandmother’s Bag of Stories), a compilation of popular Bengali folktales.
