The Gendered Journey Of The Roopkotha
Channel: British Library
Date: 2021-07-06

In the history of Bengali literary culture, the roopkotha has held a particularly lasting significance. Commonly (but loosely) translated to English as ‘fairytales’, it is a literary genre that was carefully curated out of oral tales collected from rural Bengal, published for middle and upper class children over the turn of the 20th century and which has continued to be retold and re-adapted to the present day. The crystallisation of the roopkotha was crucially linked to the Swadeshi or anticolonial movement in Bengal that escalated over the turn of the 20th century. 

This talk contextualises the genre of the roopkotha within the gendered discourse of 19th and early 20th century cultural-nationalism in Bengal, changing class relations in the region, and the shifting domestic patterns within the Bengali household at the time. Using a number of sources like letters, prefaces, reviews, the tales themselves, similar tales or plots in different forms and journal articles, Raahi Adhya locates the roopkotha within the seemingly dichotomous pulls of the ‘Western’ and the ‘indigenous’, the ‘scientific’ and the ‘literary’, the ‘traditional’ and the ‘modern’. Centering an often overlooked, yet omnipresent figure that drives as well as haunts the genre, this talk will trace the emergence of the roopkotha as a modern literary genre over the turn of the 20th century in Bengal.

Raahi Adhya is a third year PhD student at the Centre for Cultural, Literary and Postcolonial Studies at SOAS, University of London. She has completed an MPhil in Women's Studies from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, MA in Women's Studies from Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai and BA in English Literature from Jadavpur University, Kolkata. Her research interests include concepts of childhood, print histories, folktales, gender and culture. Through her doctoral research, she explores the crystallisation of a literary genre (roopkotha) as both children’s literature and anti-colonial literature in Bengal during the early 20th century, putting it in the context of histories of print and debates about gender, sexuality and childhood at the time.

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