Satinath Bhaduri’s Bengali Novels Jagari (The Vigil) and Dhorai Charit Manas as Utopian Literature.

This article analyses two novels in Bengali by Satinath Bhaduri, Jagari
(1946, translated into English as The Vigil) and Dhorai Charit Manas
(1949–51, translated into English as Dhorai Charit Manas). It analyses
them as examples of vernacular Indian utopian literature, with specific
reference to competing visions of utopia as crystallized in the anti-colonial
Quit India Movement in India and to Gandhian notions utopia. Neither of
these novels adopts the well-known and canonical Eurocentric format of a
utopian novel, in which a traveller from the outside world goes to a utopian
country. Bhaduri’s two novels, rather, show us how inhabitants of India in
the very last years of British colonialism engage in social dreaming, with
Gandhian utopia, and critiques thereof, as central themes. Gandhi’s modern
and radically non-Eurocentric reinvention of utopia—driven through the
topoi of Ramrajya, of the ashram as utopian locus and of the oceanic circle
of future Indian villages—demands a reconsideration of utopian writing.
Both novels discussed in this article represent Gandhian utopian themes,
but both also critique idealized Gandhian utopianism. Gandhian, socialist,
communist and militant social dreaming play dialogically through the novels.
This article traces the utopian impulse in these novels, as well as their
ways of opening out multiple utopian programmes.