Prabhatkumar Mukhopadhyay’s Short Story ‘Debi’ : A Study in the Society and Culture of the Nineteenth-Century Bengal/ প্রভাতকুমার মুখোপাধ্যায়ের ছোটগল্প ‘দেবী’ : ঊনিশ শতকীয় বাঙলার সমাজ ও সংস্কৃতিতে স্বপ্নের উপস্থাপনের একটি বিশ্লেষণ

Abstract

Thoughts and studies about dreams have been a concern in almost every culture, regional, national or international, in almost every nation. In Bengali culture also, dreams have undergone various levels of discussions since the inception of this culture. Until the publication and popularity of Freud’s ground-breaking book The Interpretation of Dreams in 1900, Bengali literature, starting from our epics, has incorporated dreams, especially the prophetic ones. Previously dreams were chiefly taken as mediums of divine beings to send messages about morality or future events to the mortals on the earth. This was largely the same in British literature and culture as well until Freud published his study on dreams. Some pro-psychological studies about dreams had been initiated in Britain from the beginning of the nineteenth century, growing towards its end, ultimately culminating in Freud’s book. But such psychological studies about human minds and dreams were yet to appear in the British India even in the beginning of the twentieth century. Therefore, the superstitious, irrational and prophetic dreams encompassed Bengali literature and culture, canonical or popular. In this context, this article makes a study of Prabhat kumar Mukhopadhyay’s story, ‘Debi’ (‘The Goddess’), which makes a use of the cultural practice of divine dreams. The story was published around the same time of Freud’s observations on dreams and became famous after Satyajit Ray had adapted it into a film in 1960. This paper intends to investigate Prabhat kumar’s representation of such a dream in this story and its reception by the characters, both upper class and lower class. It also makes a query, from the feminist angle, of how the characters, both male and female, receive the divine aspect of dreams and react to this. By doing this, this paper attempts to observe Prabhat kumar’s approach to prophetic or supernatural dreams and thereby note whether there is any representational differences between a Bengali writer’s approach to dreams and that of the British literary masters around the same time. Finally, this paper seeks to see, with respect to Prabhat kumar’s stance on dreams, whether British literature holds its crown of being an iconic tool of their cultural hegemony over colonies, as the colonial masters had claimed to be.