**3. Life Writing in Nineteenth Century Bengal: The Mutation of the** *Carita* **Genre**

Partha Chatterjee (Chatterjee 1993) and Tanika Sarkar (Sarkar 2014) are among some of the historians who seriously explore the emergence of life narrative genres in colonial Bengal. That life stories, variously described as *carit, j¯ıbancarit, atmaj ¯ ¯ıbani*, were developing into distinctive public genres in the modern Indian languages from about the middle of the nineteenth century in colonial India, and that the depiction of such lives was "obvious material for studying the emergence of the 'modern' forms of self-representation" and indicative of "the emergence of a new concept of the 'individual' among the educated elite" is something that Partha Chatterjee testifies ("The Woman and the Nation" in *The Nation and its Fragments*: *Colonial and Postcolonial Histories*). Almost every great personage of this 'educated elite' class, wrote their *atmacarit ¯* s, *j¯ıbancarit*s, or autobiographies. A few of the *atmacarits ¯* that one immediately recalls are those composed by Rajnarayan Basu (Basu 1909), Debendranath Tagore (Tagore 1928), Shibnath Shastri (Shastri 1915), Ishwarchandra Vidyasagar (Vidyasagar 1891), Nabinchandra Sen (Sen 1902), and Acharya Prafulla Chandra Ray15. Nabinchandra Sen's *Am¯ ar J ¯ ¯ıban* in five volumes is perhaps the most elaborate of elite Bengali lives, and it is not coincidental that Sen also wrote lives of Buddha (*Amitabha ¯* ), Christ (*Khrister J¯ıban*), and a life of the Egyptian queen *Cleopatra.* Sen's *Amitabha* published on 29th Ashad (Sen 1895) is particularly fascinating as Amitabha or Buddha's life is—like Krishna's *caritra*—examined in verse, as psychologically convincing as well as divinely potent. Some great men such as Madhusudan Dutt and Ishwarchandra Vidyasagar also had contemporaries or followers penning their *carit* or life-narratives. Brajendranath Bandopadhyaya and Sajanikanta Das's collection entitled *Sahitya S ¯ adhak Caritm ¯ al¯ a¯* (Bandopadhyay and Das 1968) (*A Garland of Lives of Those Devoted to the Cause of Literature* in 17 volumes, 1957)16 outlining a map of cultural milestones of an imagined *jati ¯* (nation), served the same cultural-revivalist function that Leslie Stephen's *Dictionary of National Biographies* (1885–1891) had done for England.

Partha Chatterjee complicates the question of individuality, noting that the new colonial modernity-informed patriarchal structures retained traces of older hagiographical adulation towards the male subject, and this is especially evident in modern Indian language genres such as the *carit*s and *gath ¯ a¯*s. It is in the intimate, fallible, hesitant and deferred subjectivity formation, contra structures of Bengali women's *smritikatha¯*s and *j¯ıbans* (recollections and lives), that such subjectivities were achieved. Chatterjee's finest example is Rassunadari Devi's *Am¯ ar J ¯ ¯ıban* (Devi 1876). It is in this intimate *andar* (inner domestic space) of real women writers and the feminized, indigenized *katha¯* forms they assumed that the real differentiation between the older hagiography and the newer biography took place.

I would also direct my readers' attention to Rabindranath Tagore's naming of his anthology of exemplary life narratives, *Caritrapuj ¯ a¯* (Tagore 1907). Such a naming collapses the critical distinction between suprahuman deity worship as 'ritual practice' (puja) and 'reading' of exemplary human lives as 'worship'. Ishwarchandra Vidyasagar is first on Tagore's list of *carit*s, given that Vidyasagar's life was truly exemplary, but also because he had understood the pedagogic value of the *carit*-reading exercise for an emergent *jati ¯* , and had recast Robert Chambers' *Exemplary and Instructive Biography* (Chambers 1836) as *J¯ıbancarit* (Vidyasagar 1858) as a necessary primer for Bengali children. Vidyasagar's *J¯ıbancarit* was incidentally critiqued by the orthodox thinkers such as Amritalal Basu17 for its inclusion of secular, foreign, and culturally dissonant 'lives' such as those of Charles Duval (in imitation of Chambers' *Eminent Lives*) and its complete occlusion of indigenous 'lives'. Basu grieved the replacing of *Si´ ´ subodh*, an older prescribed primer for Bengali children in *pathshalas* (village schools usually not divided into several classrooms or teachers), which had the 'life' of god Vishnu as its constituent, with Vidyasagar's 'godless' and 'strange' *J¯ıbancharit* in Bengali school curriculum.

<sup>15</sup> Prafullachandra Ray's book is named after the great nationalist scientist's profession, the *Autobiography of an Indian Chemist* (Ray 1958).

<sup>16</sup> Brajendranath Banerjee composed more than 96 lives as part of the Bangiya Sahitya Parishat's (the Council for/of Bengali Literature) plan of publishing authentic 'lives' of litterateurs.

<sup>17</sup> Refer to Basu's *Puratan ¯ ¯ı Katha¯* for more on this.

Incidentally, James Long voiced the general European critique regarding extant indigenous primers noting that "the *Shishubodh*, however, still holds its ground in village schools with its absurdities and obscenities" (Long 1850). I refer to this not quite connected piece of information because it is these same set of accusations of "absurdity and obscenity" that would be levelled against the Vishnu/Krishna figure and which Bankim would be obliged to defend in his *Krishnacaritra.*

Bankimchandra's use of the *carit* genre, which had by the mid-nineteenth century become synonymous with psychologically convincing, historicised, life writing of great public figures, was part of a complex cultural process and numerous scholarly studies have enriched our understanding of its complex genealogy.18 *Carit* as a genre was deployed variously, as narratives about ten princes (as in Dandin's *Da´sakuaracarita ¯* ), as eulogizing and recording kings' lives (as in Banabhatta's *Harshacarita*), as celebrating saints (Syed Sultan's *Rasoolcarit*, Krishnadas Kaviraj's *Caitanyacaritamrita ¯* ) and praising godly personages (Tulsidas' *Ramcaritm ¯ anas). ¯* Modern Indian languages such as Bengali have often used the *carit* form in a mock-heroic manner, exploiting the critical gap between the gravity of the genre and the inconsequentiality/venality of the subject described. Troilokyanath Mukherjee's *Damarucarit ¯* (Mukherjee 1923), Jogendrachandra Basu's *Cinibas Carit ¯ amrita ¯* and *Bang ¯ ali carit ¯* (1885–1886) are cases in point.

The relation between life writing and history writing—given that Indians were 'othered' by British colonialism as contra-historically inclined—is acute because history writing in Bengal in its inception often assumed the *carit* form. A reference to Ram Ram Basu's *Raj¯ a Prat ¯ ap¯ aditya Caritra ¯* (Basu 1801), Mrityunjay Vidyalankar's *Rajabali*, and Rajiblochan Mukherjee's *Krishnachandra Rayasya Caritram* will suffice. Then of course Rajendralal Mitra (1822–91), one of Bankim's closest ideological partners, and known as the inceptor of proper history writing in India, also contributed two *carits*, *Siv ´ aji Caritra ¯* (Mitra 1860) and *Mewarer R ¯ ajeitibritta ¯* (Mitra 1861) as dedicated to the Hindu revivalist cause.

Bankim's recasting of *carit* forms in modern times had the weighted support of a venerable Sanskrit aesthetic tradition, given that great aesthetician Bhamaha chose Bana's *Harshacarita* to explicate the difference between the *akh ¯ ayik ¯ a¯* or historicised narrative that is the auto/biography, and the *katha¯* or imaginative narratives19. It also had the weighted support of endeavours such as Basu's *Raj¯ a¯ Pratap¯ aditya Caritra ¯* , critically embracing as it did the *carit* genre in its attempts to write one of the earliest histories of Bengal.

Bankim's other *carit* exercise, *Muchiram Gurer J ¯ ¯ıban Carit* (Chattopadhyay [1880] 1953), published not too long before *Krishnacaritra*, deploys the *carit* form in a comic-satiric manner to portray the fictitious life of a rogue called Muchiram. Bankim writes under the pseudonym Darpanarayan ¯ Putatunda of the Gur (of a 'low caste Koibarta origins) who is also born of a mother Jashoda (a name ¯ inevitably associated with god Krishna's foster mother) and has his playful *l¯ılas¯* (manifestations) in a parodic inversion of Krishna's childhood exploits. This illiterate rogue, Muchiram Gur, is elevated ¯ through the mysterious operations of the colonial state, and its essential misunderstanding of the Bengali language, to the state of a titled *Raib ¯ ah¯ adur ¯* (landlord-zamindar), and whose *carit* then becomes worthy of study! I mention this because if negation is the motor of history, then the obverse of any such Muchiram is that great god who assumed a human avatar, ¯ Sri Krishna. ´
