Chapter 11 - Reading the Nonevental

Summary

Kaliprasanna Sinha’s Hutom Pyanchar Naksha (Observations of Hutom the Owl[GK14]; 1862) provides a bird’s eye view, so to speak, of nineteenth-century Calcutta, the bustling metropolis that also served as the seat of the British government in India. In reading the vignettes of urban life that the text proffers, this essay makes note of Sinha’s even-handed satire of the foibles of natives and the British alike. But given that it is the nouveau riche Bengali gentry that becomes the target for Sinha’s most trenchant critique, the essay considers how Hutom[GK15], written in the aftermath of 1857, an event that Sinha often refers to, presents, nonetheless, a more lateral view that redirects, if not displaces, received notions of colonial resistance. Hutom [GK16]affects, instead, a charged insouciance that revels in its immediate socius that it also critique. It does so, though, by deploying the form of the literary sketch and a narrative mode that is antinarrative or, more specifically – nonevental – in ways that are transimperially imbricated with nineteenth-century literary history, English as well as Bengali.