Caste and Class as Unconscious: A Reading of the Bangla River-Novels Padma Nadir Majhi and Titash Ekti Nadir Naam

The article tries to examine Manik Bandopadhyay’s Padma Nadir Majhi and Adwaita Mallabarman’s Titash Ekti Nadir Naam, two novels set in the rural river-scape of late colonial Bengal that depict the socioeconomic and cultural life of the fishermen, boatmen, and ferrymen communities. Examining the process of subject formation in the two novels, the paper explores how caste and class figure as unconscious in the novels. The imagination that animates Manik’s novel, which characterizes the fishing community as a class and evades the question of caste, has an undercurrent of caste running through the novel as an unconscious. On the other hand, Mallabarman’s novel invokes caste in politically self-conscious ways, but the imagination is structured by an unconscious that depicts social relations in terms of class. The analysis points to the need to reflect upon the structure and dimensions of the unconscious to make our understanding of the subject in the Indian novel richer and nuanced. The article makes a symptomatic reading of Padma and Titash to understand how caste and class figure as unconscious in them and frame the narratives even when their overt interests rest elsewhere.