“Not just a woman, but a child”: filtering alterities through the child-woman’s dream in Kankabati

Before I get into my paper I’d like to make a personal observation, which is that for me, Trailokyanath’s Kankabati is forever associated with the memory of my grandmother. I was introduced to Kankabati by my grandmother in my early teens. She was born exactly one hundred years ago, in 1911 – the year that Trailokyanath Mukhopadhyay died. And now I am beginning to grasp why this children’s novel, which hardly makes sense to children any more, may have been so gripping for my grandmother in her early teens. In her later life she was as committed to preserving the heterogeneity of the human family as Trailokyanath the museologist, except that they were both clueless in the face of the evolutionary scheme of things.

So in this paper I am wondering whether the interrogation of the duality of the child-adult relationship is also not a call for learning how to deal with other kinds of dualities – such as that between the narrator and the protagonist, between the author and the reader, between man and woman, between the colonizer and the colonized, and eventually between power and powerlessness. It is not so much a reversal or reconceptualization of these binaries as their transcendence that children’s literature suggests to us – by making immanence an essential component of our being. I am aware that all this sounds vague and unfashionable. So let me explain what I mean.

Around this time last year I read a paper entitled ‘Siding with the Child’ in another children’s literature seminar. It was on a little-known picture book by Russell Hoban and Quentin Blake, called How Tom Beat Captain Najork and His Hired Sportsmen, which Peter Hunt calls ‘one of the twentieth century’s masterpieces for children’. Tom, the hero of the book, insists on fooling around to retain his rights to be a child under the disciplining threats of his aunt, Miss Fidget-Winkham Strong. ‘Too much playing is not good, and you play too much. You had better stop it and do something useful’ – she says all the time, and makes Tom so irritated that he must go out and fool around to satisfy himself that he is not falling under her spell. Unable to manage him on her own, Miss Winkham-Strong calls to her aid the impeccable male authority of Captain Najork who, as she warns Tom, ‘is seven feet tall, with eyes like fire, a voice like thunder, and a handlebar moustache’. But eventually when Captain Najork arrives, Tom finds – to his dismay and delight – that the man is not half as threatening as he has been described. Tom manages to beat him at every game in which he challenges Tom, even though the Captain does not tell him the rules of the game. The vanquished Captain’s broken spirits are repaired when Tom arranges to have him married to his aunt, so that they can carry out their disciplining practices like teaching children to read almanacs – on the dumb hired sportsmen.

Tom is thus left free to wander around on Captain Najork’s boat. But since he is a minor, he must have a guardian to take care of him. So he advertises in the papers for an aunt whom he can select through an interview only if she satisfies his requirements of not setting down the rules like Aunt Winkham-Strong. ‘No greasy bloaters, no mutton and no cabbage-and-potato sog. No Nautical Almanac. And I do lots of fooling around. Those are my conditions’, says Tom, and of course every sane parent would agree that there is nothing wrong with this view. But there is an interesting strategy at play here. Even though the implied reader in this book is ostensibly the child, the author does not simply disregard, or meet halfway, the suspicion of the adult reader about the book’s overt message of rebellion. So far, I have been giving you a potential parent’s fascinated reading of Hoban’s book. But his other objective is to enlist the child-reader’s assent to the parent’s pedagogical point of view by siding with the child. So in the last picture of the book – the doting and vacuous expression of Tom’s ‘hired’ aunt Bundlejoy

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Cosysweet, who is shown sitting in the shade of a tree with a wine glass in her hand to keep Tom perpetually satisfied, conveys the limits of Tom’s childish fantasy of liberation even to the implied child reader. From the point of view of Tom, however, the narrative enacts a simple reversal of the ruler-ruled relationship by permitting him to exalt in a sense of autonomy that is based on his experience of the disequilibrium of power. And the books allegorical focus on the theme of games and sports highlights the weak spots in a simulacrum of patriarchal power.

Now this is one way of representing the relations between the powerful and the disempowered – which assumes that power struggle is at the core of being, and only a clash of authority determines the set of circumstances within which the drama of the adult-child relationship is carried out, unmitigated by other forces. But if we look at Trailokyanath’s Kankabati, we are struck by the enormous plenitude of other modes of existence that is evoked in the delirium of Kankabati and the way that this surreal world, kept in its place in the dreaming mind of Kankabati, still has the effect of altering the set of social relations around her when she wakes up to her familiar surroundings. It is not a reversal of the existing relations of power or liberation from the supervision of male authority that is involved here. What is magically enabled at the end of the novel is a transformation in the nature of things, as far as they affect Kankabati and the people around her.

In the appendix to Deleuze’s book on nonsense which is called The Logic of Sense, we come across two rival philosophies in ancient western tradition which Postmodernist writers thought necessary to acquaint their readers with. One is the Platonic philosophy of essences and appearances. The other is the pre Platonic, Lucretian philosophy of natural diversity. ‘In our world’, writes Deleuze, ‘natural diversity appears in three intertwined aspects: the diversity of the species; the diversity of individuals which are members of the same species; and the diversity of the parts which together compose an individual. Specificity, individuality, and heterogeneity…From these three points of view, we can deduce the diversity of worlds themselves: worlds are innumerable, often of different species, sometimes similar, and always composed of heterogeneous elements.’

The novel opens with a Prologue in the voice of the authorial narrator, with an incomplete allusion to a traditional tale about Kankabati which every Bengali reader must have heard in his childhood. Kankabati’s brother had bought a mango and forbidden anyone to eat it. ‘If anyone should eat it,’ declared Kankabati’s brother, ‘I will marry her.’ Kankabati was still too much of a child to understand what he meant. So she ate it and her brother resolved to marry her. When their parents attempted to dissuade him, he would not listen. Kankabati in her shame ran away from home, took a boat, and floated down to the middle of the fishpond in their backyard. So her brother couldn’t marry her after all. The narrator stops conclusively at this point, but any reader would guess that this tale of patriarchal oppression is not the entire story.

I have no idea whether such a tale of Kankabati was still circulating among the educated classes of Bengal at the turn of the nineteenth century. If there was, it never showed up in the numerous collections of folk tales and fairy tales that were published by Reverend Lal Behari Day and his early twentieth century nationalist successors – Dinesh Chandra Sen and Dakkhina Ranjan Mitra Majumdar. But in terms of its morphology this story is not so very different from any wonder folk tale with a father-daughter or a brother-sister incest motif which were collected and rewritten by 18th and 19th century anthologists from other parts of the world. Yet the veiled point that Traiokyanath is making at the end of his Prologue is that this is the kind of low culture stuff that urbane, literary retellers of fairy tales are

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now ashamed to acknowledge as a heritage. So the author plunges into a modernized version of the fairy tale with these words:

This is how the tale of Kankabati goes. But it does not seem credible. Could anyone want to marry his sister for the sake of a simple mango? The story is impossible. What is possible, let me tell you…

The opening frame therefore self consciously draws attention to a metafictional world of traditional folklore, obsolete beliefs and primitive culture. It sets its own limits by invoking at least two standards of western realism to emulate in the ensuing narrative – that of credibility and possibility, but it is obvious from the very first chapter of the novel that the author is going to violate both. This modernized fairy tale is thus poised between the credible and the incredible, the possible and the impossible in a realm of literary nonsense. Trailokyanath’s extensive travels among rural and tribal peoples in different parts of the world may have made him unusually aware how the contents of traditional tales were erased and modified in their civilized versions, and he makes a valiant attempt to recover some of the dissonant voices of an irrational, if not inscrutable past of colonial Bengal in the second half of his narrative by inventing a new narrative technique.

The main thrust of Trailokyanath’s nonsense, I think, is to invent this narrative technique that radically alters our perception not only of narrative realism but also of ‘dreams and other realities’ – to use an expression Wendy Doniger uses as the title of her book on Indian dream stories. His book is divided into two parts, and a series of three possible closures draw attention to the constructive design of the narrative. The structure of the plot is dualistic, but not dialectical. The first part of the novel ends with Kankabati driven to the brink of death by the insensitive cruelty of her father and the ‘real’ social world that she inhabits. At the height of a delirious fever, Kankabati’s body is burning and her throat is dry. She cannot recognize the faces around her. She is poised to go any moment.

The second part of the book plunges underwater into a dream narrative in which Kankabati is resuscitated and encounters a teeming multiplicity of voices and denizens of other worlds – fish, animals, insects, ghosts and mythic monsters. Kankabati goes to the river to quench the feverish pain of her body and she is called away into the middle of the river by a disembodied voice, which she later understands to be that of Grandmother Fish. From this point onward, the overarching implied narrator of this tale becomes Kankabati herself. We don’t notice the novelist’s abandonment of the narrative because he is no longer an authorial or authoritative narrator, but is making his way through a nonsense world of unreal and uncivilized forms with as much uncertainty as that of Kankabati, the child woman.

Towards the close of Kankabati’s dream narrative, however, Kankabati herself is resolved to commit Sati in the funeral pyre of Khetu. Her belief in Sati has convinced her that for a woman there is no reason for existence other than her husband, and all her hopes of a happy union with him in this life are lost for ever. In a third turn of events, after Kankabati has once again yielded her body to the cooling touch and happy oblivion of death by fire, Kankabati is returned to the everyday world that she had left behind. Although neither Khetu, nor anyone else but Niranjan Kabiratna, the ethical intellectual, is ready to believe her account of immersion in the nonsense world of the dream -- all obstacles to the marriage of Khetu and Kankabati are miraculously removed. Everyone who had initially posed a threat to it has now turned over a new leaf. Kankabati and Khetu are reconciled to the world which had rejected them

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and their marriage is celebrated as a mark of their assimilation into the social reality of the everyday world.

Even so, the narrator intervenes at the end in the authorial voice to point out that he would rather leave unsaid whether the head of the notey shak was cropped at last (as in the epilogue to so many traditional tales) or whether it was not. Unlike the traditional folk tale, the narrator refuses to dwell either on the happy ending of the story, or on the customary recital of the lines that clinch a narrative closure: ‘Amar kathati phurolo, natey gachti mudolo’. This disclaimer suggests that conventional endings are not part of the author’s design. Rather – he leaves it to the readers and to the destiny of characters to finally decide whether the happy ending is deserved by the turn of narrative events, and then all criticism of the final closure will cease to matter.

The question that intrigues us today about Trailokyanath’s Kankabati is whether we can still see it as a children’s book. Children in our culture have long been cut off from taking any pleasure in it, and we sometimes suspect that it has become as antiquated as Trailokyanath suggested that the older tale of Kankabati had become. Why are Khetu and Kankabati, the hero and heroine of the novel, repeatedly referred to as ‘a mere child’ in the novel? They are more in the age-group of what we might call ‘young adults’ in the vocabulary of our time. One answer might be, as Perry Nodelman (check) has suggested, because they are not so much immature as childish in the overall context of the novel. Neither Khetu, nor Kankabati are equipped to handle the hypocrisies and contradictions of their world as dexterously as an adult. At the end of the dream narrative Khetu and Kankabati are the darlings of the village folk, and they too have learned to accept the ways of the world as an extension of the comical absurdities of nonsense. Even though Kankabati has played an extraordinarily self-willed role in undertaking a quest for her husband’s life in the dream narrative, it fails at the end of the dream and Kankabati falls silent when she wakes up and emerges from its hangover. Khetu’s hypermasculine tendency to confront any evil by a physical combat is reduced to the coy reticence of a bridegroom among a plethora of ladies, including the murderer’s wife who once excommunicated his mother, but now has the liberty to box his ears. Both Khetu and Kankabati have learned to live in their position of youngsters in a society of elders.

But as Rabindranath Thakur observed in his review essay on Kankabati, it merits the status of a children’s classic also because Trailokyanath’s narrative had been able to ‘retain the essence of a fairy tale and the innocence of its childlike, unsuspicious sense of faithfulness’. Rabindranath hailed Trailokyanath as a pioneering writer of books which could entertain children as well as their parents. He also noticed that Kankabati had some similarities with an English book called Alice in Wonderland, but it failed to convey the truly incoherent, changeful and entertaining dreamlike nature of a fantasy.

The reasons for which Rabindranath found Kankabati deficient as a fantasy were those for which it might qualify as a text of magic realism today, as Professor Tapodhir Bhattacharya suggested long ago. Most readers might feel that its striking dissimilarity with Victorian fantasy fiction is Trailokyanath’s juxtaposition of two conflicting realities in the two parts of the novel. The first half follows the conventions of a social realism that is caustic and satirical; the second half represents an imaginary world of hyper-magical reality. Rabindranath thought that the social realism of the first part of the novel was almost morbid and bordered on the tragic, while the second part suddenly introduced a new train of events that could not possibly be contained within the capacity of a girl child’s dream. This disjunction was likely to arouse a feeling of surprise mingled with irritation in the reader, just as he was about to be swept away in a flood of suspense and tears.

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It is as if the story was traveling by train and in the middle of the night, all unawares, another train came from the opposite direction and hit it; so the whole thing was derailed and died a sudden death.

Rabindranath also criticized the way in which the author attempted to offer a rational and naturalistic explanation of Kankabati’s dream at the end of his novel. This, he suggested, was a betrayal of the dream reality of literary nonsense. In all, Rabindranath found Kankabati lacking a) against the nineteenth century conventions of narrative realism and b) against the standards of ‘children’s literature’ set by a conflation of dream and nonsense in Victorian writings like Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland.

I hope I will be forgiven if I say that I think Trailokyanath was far ahead of his time in devising his method of narration. Rabindranth’s metaphor of the clash of trains by night shows an uncanny awareness of what Trailokyanath was up to – displacing the logic of colonial reason with an alternative mode, or perhaps modes of perception. ‘Delirium’ as Foucault reminds us in Madness and Civilization is akin to madness in some traits of its unreason, but it has a fully consistent logic internal to itself. As a Latin term it shares its root ‘delire’ with the word ‘derailment’.

Let us see how Trailokyanath proceeds to give a rational explanation of Kankabati’s dream. Once Kankabati has woken up to the familiar reality of her everyday world, Khetu, the English-educated fiancé of Kankabati tends to take a skeptical view of the fantastic ‘reality’ of her dream. To pull her leg he grabs a mosquito from the air and presents it to her as her bosom friend Raktabati in the dream, but Niranjan Kabiratna, the pundit versed in traditional Hindu philosophy as well as in post enlightenment rationalist thought, warns him against thus belittling Kankabati’s imagination.

What a wonderful dream! (Says Kabiratna)You must not laugh it away as a dream or delirious nonsense, Khetu, we really don’t know what a dream is not. This life of ours, its hopes and beliefs, pains and pleasures appear all as dreams to us. We have no understanding of the beauty of this cosmic illusion…If only our senses were constructed differently the material things in this world might appear in other forms to us.

Kabiratna then proceeds to supply a number of possible explanations for the dream, which have been related to Berkeleyan idealism, traditional Hindu Mayavad, or Cartesian self division predicated upon the dichotomy of the dream experience and wakeful reason. The long discourse on dreams between Khetu and Kabiratna could even be read as an evolutionary account of dream theory, ending with the latest associationist interpretation, which leaves Kabiratna most unsatisfied even as he has to accept it in the face of Khetu’s scientific reasoning. Kabiratna himself prefers a rudimentary theory of the unconscious: “Just as the external world is constructed by our waking senses, Kankabati’s dream world is created by her sleeping senses. There is not much of a difference”, says Kabiratna. We must remember that Kankabati was written eight years before the publication of Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams. At any rate, the last explanation that Kabiratna offers is that Kankabati’s dream world was created entirely of her own personal and subjective imaginings. No one else but Kankabati had a part to play in it while she dreamt. Kabiratna notes that there are factual errors in Kankabati’s dream that are due to the limitations of her knowledge, but he is struck by the strange autonomy and objectivity of the

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comprehensive dream world thus created. And yet he is compelled to conclude that it is only Kankabati’s mind that informs the dream and keeps it all together.

Now it is possible that Trailokyanath was acquainted with another influential line of late nineteenth century dream theory that was connected with parapsychology and occult research. As a scientist he does not include it in the explanatory passage on dreams at the end of his novel, but the supernatural atmosphere of his story is set as early as the first chapter of the first part of his novel. In a style of literary Gothic set in the landscape and architecture of Bengal the narrator refers to a widespread belief in bhutas in the region of Kusumghati. That belief was spawned by the memory of numerous killings of innocent travelers in the neighbourhood, whose skeletons lay buried everywhere. They were rumoured to have been killed by the thyangades or local robbers until quite recently, when the practice became obsolete. Later in the novel, however, it is revealed that some veteran thyangades are still living as regular villagers in Kusumghati, and that both Brahmins and Shudras had participated in the murder of men of all castes including Brahmins – even in this village ridden with the most rigid caste rules. ‘Nowadays’ says the narrator, young boys and girls were coming to believe less and less in these specters of the past, but they were still in terror of other supernatural forms of existence on land or in water against whom their parents continued to warn them. Moreover, the mountain range and the forests nearby were infested with vicious animals. There were marauding tigers that might learn to be man eaters any moment, and then they would feed on nothing but man. Lately, however, the contact with Kolkata for silk trade and some villagers’ capacity to read English had begun to dispel the belief in ghosts and witches.

When they read about ghosts they laugh at it. ‘There are no ghosts on the earth’, they say. ‘And even if there are, what can they do to us?’ Looking at the examples of these people, some boys and girls of our time have begun to acquire some courage in their hearts.

Khetu’s metamorphosis into a tiger is the first confirmation of these supernatural forms of existence in Kankabati’s dream narrative. The narrator says in the first Chapter:

A tiger or two is so sly that no one can kill him. Some people say that it is not a real tiger – he is a man. There is a kind of root in the forest, which a man might wear on his head to take at once the form of a tiger. When a man has a fight with another man, he wears the root on his head and becomes a tiger. Having turned into a tiger, he kills his enemy. Then he takes off the root and becomes a man again. There are some who cannot take off the root. Such a person always remains a tiger. Those are the tigers which oppress men the most.

Khetu makes a startling appearance in Kankabati’s dream narrative, in response to her father’s declaration that he will marry his daughter off to the next person who knocks on the door, even if it is a tiger. But it does not intimidate Kankabati or the reader for long. She discovers that Khetu has resorted to animorphism with the help of an enchanted root in order to evade the evil eye of Nakeswari bhutini, a female ghost empowered to kill any man who covets the buried treasure of Messrs Skull and Skeleton. The irony of Khetu’s entrapment in the body of an animal is that he has been offered the wealth by these two ghosts who were the anatomical parts of its legitimate owner’s body in mortal life. But having assigned a little girl to take charge of it in the form of a spirit and ritually starving her to death, they are no longer free to bestow their wealth upon Khetu in his human form. So they give him the enchanted

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root to deceive Nakeswari, but this convoluted logic of unreason prevents them from intervening any further in Khetu’s fate. But Khetu considers himself fortunate because he can now pay off the dowry he has promised to Kankabati’s father.

In spite of his use of traditional fairy tale motifs, Trailokyanath manages to build up a hierarchy of strangeness and fearfulness about these uncanny transformations of the man into a tiger or the abducted girl child into a formidable she-ghost. Kankabati’s task in the dream narrative is to encounter different levels of such strange forms one after another and overcome her queasiness and fears of their strange motives or evil intentions even when she is inadequate to match up to their power. One such instance comes when she offers herself to be eaten by Nakeswari, thinking that her husband is already dead and will soon be devoured by her. But Nakeswari blows her right out of the haunted palace with one whiff from her nostrils.

In an entirely opposite strategy, mythical monsters are familiarized into pets. In a remarkable pastiche of the story of Lalkamal-Neelkamal, Kankabati, accompanied by the mosquito and his brother elephant, sets off to catch some khokkosh babies which will fly her to the moon. The big khokkoshes sit guarding their babies in the darkness of the forest, and when they smell Kankabati’s presence they start screaming: Haun maun khaun, manusher gandha paun. With admirable presence of mind, the mosquito plays Neelkamal and puts fear in their hearts by pretending to be a ghokkosh. By a spot of nonsense reasoning, the khokkoshes figure out that since the letter gha comes after the letter kha in alphabetical order, ghokkoshes must be more powerful than them. They ask the speaker to cough as a proof of the ghokkoshes superiority. The mosquito beats on a drum. Then they ask for a specimen of his hair. The mosquito throws a thick rope into their lair. At last they ask to see a louse from his hair and the mosquito throws down the elephant. This clinches the matter. The adult khokkoshes fly away, terrified, and the baby khokkosh is left at the disposal of Kankabati and her party. But the mosquito asks her to take good care of the baby and return it to its mother after her job is done, because it is still a nursling and can’t have any use for them beyond the needs of the moment. Kankabati, accordingly, acts is very kind to the khokkosh fledgling and returns it after her work is done.

Now if you look at the picture of the khokkosh baby, you will recognize that it is a Persian-looking monster, resembling a cross between the illustrations of Arabian Nights and Victorian fantasy fiction, which often presented them with the reptile body of a dinosaur and a head with human features. It also has a close resemblance with John Tenniel’s etching of the Jabberwocky in Through the Looking Glass. The absurd combination of this grotesque image and the overflowing maternal sentiment of this passage might remind the reader of Alice’s desire to save the Duchess’s piglet from domestic abuse. But Trailokyanath’s text also underlines the irony of the intruders’ need to exploit the natural capacities of a group of foresters who might feel their existence more threatened even though they are physically more powerful than the cleverer animals. The questers in Trailokyanath’s novel never resort to killing anyone. If this is a lesson in compassion that was also advocated in late Victorian children’s literature, Trailokyanath seems to suggest that such an ethos is rooted in the Hindu perception of Vishnu as Patitapavana more than in the British evangelical mission.

As the concept note of this seminar so aptly points out, social and aesthetic categories like ‘nonsense’ or ‘children’s literature’ are enmeshed in the complex interplay of dominant, residual and emergent ideologies in works of children’s literatures in the erstwhile colonies, countries inhabited by people deemed ‘childish’ and ‘feminine’ in the imperial discourse. Children’s literature itself has been

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described by some critics as a colonizing discourse, and its status as a separate genre is often validated by foregrounding the colonial relationship of domination and subjugation, if only in terms of ‘education’ or ‘knowledge’. The status of the child woman as heroine becomes even more problematic in a context thus fraught with colonial overtones of the civilizing mission.

Trailokyanath, I would suggest, is eminently aware of these tensions. His novel is full of allusions to nineteenth century colonial debates over social reform and legal amendments concerning the marital rights of the Hindu girl child. Much of the satire and humour in the first part is directed at the age of consent bill controversy (phulshojya ain) and the widow remarriage act passed at the initiative of Vidyasagar. e.g.

Even though these references clearly suggest that the status of the girl child became the centre of a battle between civil law and the Hindu shastric code, we would be mistaken if we read these references as a sign of Trailokyanath’s own engagement in the conflict of colonizing and colonized ideologies. Rather, he attempts to show how unscrupulous individuals can become the beneficiaries of both systems of governance. Kankabati’s father, Ramtanu is willing to grab any opportunity that is made available by colonial reforms to extort more money from the prospective bridegroom. He distorts and interprets the laws of the traditional dharmashastras to suit his own ends, even going to the extent of inventing his own shastra to support his point. Niranjan Kabiratna, the ethical individual who has inflicted poverty and disrepute on himself in his refusal to compromise with the evils of the world, reminds Ramtanu again and again that all shastras forbid the father to sell his daughter for money. Eventually Niranjan chooses to side with Khetu and his mother when they are ostracized from society by hypocrisy and caste politics. In the first part of the novel the duality of the terms dharma and adharma is repeatedly invoked at cross purposes by the characters who believe in ethical living and the characters at the centre of caste politics in the village. By the end of the novel, however, the characters who were engaged in making only an instrumental use of shastric dharma have been brought under the sway of the metaphysical directives of a greater and more humane dharma.

In a reading of Alice in Wonderland Gilles Deleuze shows how nonsense demonstrates that sense is a non-existing entity by representing the paradoxes of sense. At the same time that Kankabati becomes the implied narrator of the dream narrative, there is a contesting of her personal identity and the loss of her proper name. In the underwater dream world into which Kankabati plunges, everyone seems to know her and yet she is not the one that she has known. If her life had been uneventful before, everything that she experiences now is an event. ‘Personal uncertainty’ says Deleuze ‘is an objective structure of the event itself, insofar as it moves in 2 directions at once, and insofar as it fragments the subject.’ So Kankabati’s ideas of good sense, like Alice’s are contradicted at every turn. The full implication of this paradox is that it destroys good sense as the only direction, but also that which destroys common sense as an assignation of fixed identities. Like Alice, Kankabati appears both rebellious and lost in this dream world. Check

What, then, is the unstable identity of Kankabati that is so repeatedly evoked in the novel? That she is not only a woman, but a child. To my mind, it would be pointless to view Kankabati as a girl child heroine in search of her own identity, as in a lot of contemporary English imperial girls’ fiction. It is obvious from the beginning that Trailokyanath is writing no tale of woman’s emancipation. Nor is the child in Kankabati a universal child. The relentless gendering of Kankabati’s nameless identity has other purposes to serve.

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The first is to suggest the pointless nonsense of a girl-child’s literacy in the new system of education. Kankabati, the narrator appreciatively tells us, was taught to read her first alphabets and numerals by Khetu and after that she required no guidance to help her advance in learning. Kankabati becomes an avid reader, eagerly pursuing books, newspapers and even the advertisements printed in them. Yet she is as helpless as her illiterate mother against the authoritarian and oppressive decisions of her father. Ramtanu Ray, a money-wise and conservative Brahmin, greedy for dowry, settles Kankabati’s marriage with an aged and wealthy widower.

The second significance of Kankabati’s symbolic status as a child-woman is that it positions her in a common grid with the perpetually marginalized, whether in relation to the colonizer’s reason or that of the colonized. For example, when Kankabati apologizes for her stupidity in learning to read by comparing it with the disability of her kitten, her teacher Khetu chides her with the words: ‘Kankabati, are you mad?’ Kankabati’s mother is similarly charged with madness by her illiterate son when she fails to see the reason why Kankabati should be married to the octogenarian landlord rather than to Khetu. The son, like the father, is amazed at the ignorance of a woman who cannot understand what wealth and prestige it will bestow upon Kankabati’s paternal family if her husband dies soon, leaving her a rich widow. If Kankabati gets sympathy from women, they have no power to alter the decisions of the men in their families. That Kankabati is also excluded from the group of women is most evident in the dream narrative, when the three wives of Mosquito are appalled at her stupidity, and excuse her only because she is a child.

In Trailokyanath’s novel Kankabati is less an agent of change than a passive recipient of advice. She is more acted upon than actor, even in the midst of her most fervent actions. And Kankabati’s supreme virtues, as everyone seems to appreciate in the novel, are her obedience and incomprehension. In the first half of the novel she appears as the uncomplaining victim of patriarchal oppression, but in the second half of the novel she suddenly seems to have sprouted an identity of her own. Even so, she is hardly what one might perceive as a budding feminist. Kankabati’s mother has much more agency than Kankabati in the dream narrative, when she threatens to leave her Ramtanu if he will not take his daughter back into her home. But Kankabati, misled by her father, disobeys her husband’s orders and burns the magical root hidden in Khetu’s hair. Then when she realizes that Khetu is going to die for it, Kankabati resolves either to bring him back from the dead like a true Indian sati, or give up her own life if Khetu’s cannot be saved. All her perilous adventures and encounters with the absurd are undertaken and sustained in the hope of reviving Khetu. But Kankabati fails at the end of the dream narrative.

What Trailokyanath is able to show by making the discourses of tradition and modernity run parallel courses in both parts of his novel is that the ‘unreal’ world of Kankabati’s dream is not an uncolonized space. It is, rather, the space of the dispossessed and marginal entities pushed to the brinks of colonial history and the empire of reason. Even if we interpret Kankabati’s dream as a journey into the wilderness of a racial unconscious, the daytime reality of the English-educated, ‘enlightened’ perspective of a group of villagers and the nocturnal, indigenous reality of the non-human creatures who inhabit the same space, but not the same world with them, is in many ways a symbolic separation of realms as much as a real duality. But they are not in opposition to each other.

And this is another reason why Trailokyanath’s indigenization of the dream narrative of a girl as protagonist, is very similar to, but not quite the same as the prevalent form of nineteenth century

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children’s fantasy or nonsense fiction. In Kankabati Trailokyanath is anticipating the mood of postcolonial nonsense. In Mr. Gamish the toad we recognize a specimen of the poor native Anglo Indian or simply a toady of the white man. Dressed a bit like the frog footman in Alice in Wonderland, he has made himself both conspicuous and ridiculous, as it seems to Kankabati, by his bare feet. The toad, on the other hand rebukes Kankabati as a mannerless child and will not answer her queries unless he is addressed respectfully as a Sahib. “What, lassie? Can’t you see that I am dressed in European clothes?” When Kankabati apologises, Byang Saheb takes her into his confidence and tells her of the time he was crossed by an elephant and how it had insulted him by calling him a snub-nosed creature that might have been stamped flat if dharma had not protected him. The inflated ego of the toad is matched by the imperiousness of the Mosquito, who graciously helps Kankabati to learn for the first time about a parallel system of property relations in which human beings are territorially divided as the subjects of mosquito lords. Gleefully, the mosquito tells his dwarf subject Kharbur that all the freedom of travel that was granted by the British government to men was about to be curtailed by the new Shastric codes, so that they would now be compelled to sit in the darkness of their homes and offer blood to their own mosquito lords. Ready to shoot off ex tempore Sanskrit verse in support of the rights of mosquitoes over their human subjects, he sounds much like a traditional priest anxious to keep intact his livelihood of the jajmani pratha. It has been observed that Trailokyanath’s novels offer a rich ground for Bakhtinian analysis. I will not get into that, but certainly each person has his or her own quirks in this subaltern world, and each suffers a secret sorrow or grievance against the system – however absurd it may seem from the dominant perspective of reason.

This gives rise to the narrative machinery of the worlds within worlds that Kankabati tries to negotiate and is baffled out of her wits. From a traditional, or traditionalist perspective of the linear plot, as Rabindranth observed, Kankabati’s dream is not as incoherent as the real dream, nor as amusing as the dream of nonsense fiction. It has a teleological storyline. Kankabati braves all perils, like an undaunted Sati, to retrieve her husband from the possession of Nakeswari and revive him from his deathlike stupor, but she cannot do so without the help and hindrance of other characters.

Kankabati’s fantastic adventures include the quest for an exorcist and a frantic search for the droplets of her husband’s life which Nakeswari bhutini has hidden away folded in a yam leaf in some obscure corner of the earth. But in spite of the best efforts of Kankabati and her helpers, obstacle after obstacle arises in the way of the desired end. Unknowingly, the byang sahib who had befriended Kankabati earlier in the story has swallowed the droplets of Khetu’s life. Kankabati must fly up to the moon to bring back a piece of its main root for Kharbur to make a drug that will cause the toad to throw up the droplets. Before that, she must get hold of the khokkosh baby. The tales within tales of the dream narrative multiply in a self generating, meaningless, and dizzying sequence, only to achieve the endless deferral of a happy union of Khetu and Kankabati every time she swears that she will show everyone what the might of a devoted sati can achieve.

At last it is the fateful sequence of events within a closed narrative, rather than the workings of any malevolent force that brings about the death of Khetu. These cyclical episodes keep gathering more and more speakers and participants through the dream narrative, until they are all drawn together in the great field where Kankabati ascends the funeral pyre with the corpse of Khetu. The narrator makes it very clear that Kankabati proceeds to commit Sati by her voluntary decision, with a prayer to absolve Khetu’s sins and the hope that she will be reunited with him in a future life. All her friends of the dream world, except Nakeswari bhutini and her aunt, who stand to benefit from the death of the couple, try to dissuade

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her from this act of self-immolation. But at the end of a long debate on the pros and cons of the British law forbidding Sati, when they see that Kankabati will not be persuaded to give up her resolve, they decide to call their wives and other family members to witness this act of great merit and collect her sacred sindur.

The duality of sense and nonsense in Kankabati’s dream world is not the same as that of her real world. Kankabati feels more at home in the ‘other world’ from the time that she is given a warm welcome by Grandmother Fish and the other denizens of the underwater world. They want to make her their Queen because she will be able to release the fish hooks from their mouths when they are caught and let them go free. Grandmother fish even promises that she will bring Khetu to her and make him the King. The underwater creatures make her a royal costume and a motimahal out of an oyster shell, but ironically, again, Kankabati gets caught by human hands when the oyster shell is picked up by a milkmaid unawares. On the whole Kankabati finds the speeches and actions of the creatures in the dream world more soothing, understanding and compassionate than the human society she has run away from. She can participate in its laughter and absurdity even when she is desperately searching for a way to save Khetu. But she cannot continue to live in it without Khetu.

In the narrative beyond the dream Kankabati wakes up to find that Khetu is alive, and all the self-interested characters in the first part of the novel now appear to have understood their faults and changed their ways. This transformation cannot be seen only as the effect of Kankabati’s subjective longing, if only because such an end was beyond the scope of her wildest dreams. Unlike the way Rabindranath and Niranjan Kabiratna perceive the dream in Kankabati, Trailokyanath, I would say, does want his readers to notice that nothing about Kankabati’s dream is explained by referring it only to her personal desire and wish fulfillment. Kankabati’s personal happiness is attained after she has both realized how the alterities that surround her in the dream world are constitutive of her being and has risen beyond their existence. Kankabati’s active role of following everybody’s instructions in the dream narrative is not simply a colonial mimicry of the girl child in Victorian children’s literature setting out on a quest for her own identity. It is also symbolic of the burden of history that the Orient carries for the West. In this process the child woman in Kankabati becomes an allegorical vision of the transcendental subject, the other of Western man, who is enabled to carry in her all the ghosts of the past and yet not be possessed by them.

To recall this vision expressed in more competent language than I can, please allow me to read those memorable lines in Foucault’s 1961 Preface to his book Madness and Unreason, that provided the inspiration for Said’s Orientalism.

In the universality of the Western ratio, there is this division which is the Orient: the Orient, thought of as the origin, dreamt of as the vertiginous point from which nostalgia and promises of return are born, the Orient offered to the colonizing reason of the Occident, but indefinitely inaccessible, for it always remains the limit: the night of the beginning, in which the Occident was formed, but in which it traced a dividing line, the Orient is for the Occident everything that it is not, while remaining the place in which its primitive truth must be sought.

This division, Foucault suggested, and the structure of refusal that it causes to appear is constitutive of what is sense and nonsense, or rather of that reciprocity through which the one is bound to the other…

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It also seems likely that in Kankabati Trailokyanath was narrativizing his response to a hint about the relation between dream and reality with which Lewis Carroll closed the first volume of Sylvie and Bruno in 1889. Its last chapter, “Looking Eastward” is woven around a metaphysical discourse about the relation between the power of God and the laws of Nature, and contains the following lines in its centre:

Our walk home was a silent one, till we had nearly reached the lodgings: then Arthur murmured--and it was almost an echo of my own thoughts--"What knowest thou, O wife, whether thou shalt save thy husband?"

The chapter concludes with the hope that from the east will come ‘the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen’. In The Logic of Sense Deleuze again draws our attention to those lines from Sylvie and Bruno and rewrites them as the hope and culmination of the project of postmodernity: “The admirable conclusion of the first part is to the glory of the East, from which comes all that is good, ‘the substance of things hoped for, and the existence of things not seen’.”

The plenitude of history is only possible in the space, both empty and peopled at the same time, of all the words without language that appear to anyone who lends an ear, as a dull sound from beneath history, the obstinate murmur of a language talking to itself – without any speaking subject and without an interlocutor, wrapped up in itself, with a lump in its throat, collapsing before it ever reaches any formulation and returning without a fuss to the silence that it never shook off. The charred root of meaning….That is not yet madness, but the first caesura from which the division of madness became possible. That division is its repetition and intensification, its organisation in the tight unity of the present; the perception that Western man has of his own time and space allows a structure of refusal to appear, on the basis of which a discourse is denounced as not being language, a gesture as not being an oeuvre, a figure as having no rightful place in history. This structure is constitutive of what is sense and nonsense, or rather of that reciprocity through which the one is bound to the other…

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