আখ্যানের প্রান্তিকতা ও পরিবেশ-রাজনীতি : ‘হলং মানসাই উপকথা’-য় সাব-অলটার্ন ও উত্তর-ঔপনিবেশিক পাঠ / Marginality and Environmental Politics in Narratives: A Subaltern and Post-colonial Reading of ‘Halong Mansai Upakatha’

Abstract

Amiya Bhushan Majumdar’s Holong Mansai Upakatha explores the changing relationships among rivers, forests, and marginal communities in North Bengal. Through close reading, this paper brings narratology into dialogue with political ecology, Subaltern Studies, and postcolonial criticism to examine how narrative form connects environmental change with unequal relations of power. It uses “narrative marginality” to describe how marginal people’s memories, oral knowledge, and lived experiences shape narrative perspective, temporal organisation, and historical understanding. Folk accounts, nonlinear time, and river-centred memory question linear, state-centred accounts of history.

     The analysis examines how roads, mills, markets, and administrative institutions reshape local livelihoods, shelter, and social relationships, producing uneven forms of insecurity. Rivers and forests shape movement, memory, danger, and refuge, while their changing presence exposes the limits of human control. Chandani’s rejection of Gajen’s claim over her and her flight in search of safety reveal both patriarchal domination and the failure of institutions to protect her. Her decisions express a constrained but significant capacity to act. The paper also examines whose experiences gain recognition and how the narrator mediates marginal voices, without assuming that literary representation grants them an unmediated voice.

     The study reads the novel as a counter-archive: a narrative that preserves and reworks local memories, oral accounts, and experiences of insecurity that state-centred histories overlook. By connecting these experiences with the changing landscape, the novel questions developmentalist accounts of progress and postcolonial relations of power. The paper’s contribution lies in showing how marginal memory and ecological change shape narrative form, making the critique of power integral to the novel’s storytelling.