Like humans, supernatural beings have culinary likes, dislikes and idiosyncrasies. In their stories can be found reflections of our biases and tragedies.
The Reverend Lal Behari Day, who had converted to Christianity, was a Christian missionary and a pioneer of Indian English writing. He was a journalist, writer and collector of Bengali folk tales, which he published in English.
He wrote about peasant life and the life of rural Bengal. His novel
Govinda Samanta (1874) was celebrated as an account of the lives of the rural and working class populations and earned the admiration of Charles Darwin.
Folk-Tales of Bengal (1883) was praised widely and is still regarded with great affection.
His personal life was marked by bold choices made from early youth. Day was born to a family of Subarna-banik caste in Sonapalasi near Burwan. He came to Calcutta and studied at Reverend Alexander Duff’s General Assembly Institution (now Scottish Church Collegiate School) where under Duff’s influence he converted to Christianity in 1843, when he was 19.
Traversing the overlapping print worlds of Portuguese, Konkani and English, Rochelle Pinto has been studying how colonialism and its aftermath has shaped life in Goa and the larger Goan diaspora in Mumbai and beyond. In this interview with Murali Ranganathan, she looks back at her engagement with print history and its connection with politics and land
At what point of time in your career did you realize that you had evolved into a book/print historian from a professor of English literature? How did the evolution happen?
A Master’s degree at JNU opened up a world of different methodologies thanks to an extraordinary range of teachers who introduced us to nineteenth century writing in India and to theoretical questions about the history of literary studies both in England and in India. This led to questions about how the field of literature was shaped during colonial rule and after, and about the assumptions that underlay our use of the category literature. Amo