The Counter-Culture of Abol Tabol Relative to Bankim Chandra Chatterjee’s Idea of Nation-Building

Bankim, in many of his essays, laments Bengal’s lack of history, raising key questions—why does Bengal, and by extension India, lack a history? If true, then what history is being propagated when Bankim is engaging in history creation, inciting us the rediscover the “real” history of India? Tagore in his essay, “Bharotborsher Itihash”, says that the mundane history of “real” India, has been vanquished due to a lack of written records and has been replaced by a history of wars, which detaches the common man from the roots of what is, as Anderson puts it, the imagined community of India, causing degradation of the inter-religious communal idea that has always enveloped India. But Bankim’s goal in constructing a new history of Bengal and India is quite different - to reawaken, an idealistic, romanticized regeneration of the Hindu ethos to construct a national identity and a collective memory that serves to expound a nationalistic ideal that, arguably, finds its place within the religio-political discourse. Anandamath showcases that while both the Muslims and the British are the enemy, Bankim often places the British on a pedestal of racial superiority. What we wish to explore here is this religious othering, presented in the garb of nationalism. And while there is the creation of the demonic other, there is also the creation of the pure self that is, for Bankim, an ideal national identity. This very construction of the self and the other is then, questioned by Sukumar Ray in his Abol Tabol collection of poems and illustrations. This paper seeks to understand Ray’s counter-culture to Bankim’s established national memory. We will also contrast the function of Ray’s work to the function of manga1, an intellectual state apparatus that, like Ray’s poetry, strives to establish narratives and counter-narratives regarding Japan’s national identity and memory.