Ritushree Sengupta

A Conversation Wrought in Loss: Exploring the Magical Reality of Rabisankar Bal’s Dozakhnama

Historically, Bengali literature has been acclaimed for its richness of fiction as well as poetry. However, not many Bengali authors have been found to be experimenting with the narrative forms. As far as themes and content of fiction were concerned the Bengali authors abundantly experimented; however, the same cannot be said in terms of the narrative style. For example, a widely accepted style like the magic realism was quite underexplored in the oeuvre of Bengali literature. Even when it is employed, as we can see in the works of Nabarun Bhattacharya, it seldom complicates the story-telling by bringing together historiography and magic realism. Rabisankar Bal precisely does that in his work, the Dozakhnama or Conversations in Hell (2010). Bal dexterously handles two different characters, namely Ghalib and Manto, belonging to two separate time periods, and retells the stories of immense historical significance. His narration provides a unique lens to look at the non-linearity of time and synthesizes discrete historical events of India that happened ninety years apart, namely in 1857 and 1947. This paper analyses some salient features of magic realism and shows how Rabisankar Bal appropriates them in his novel Dozakhnama, and in the process, creates a unique work that seldom finds any parallel in the literary realm of Bengali Literature.