Myth of modernity unveiled

Modernist Transitions: Cultural Encounters between British and Bangla Modernist Fiction from 1910s to 1950s, edited by Subhadeep Ray and Goutam Karmakar, published by Bloomsbury Academic India, is a collection of twelve scholarly essays.

- ARPITA GHATAK

A foreword by Pramod K Nayar and a detailed introduction by the editors precede the three parts of the book volume, each containing four essays/chapters.

'Modernism', an innovative and pragmatic approach to art and aesthetics in the wake of the twentieth century, began a transnational interaction while permeating the colonial boundaries. Indian modernism, primarily shaped in and around the British Empire's second and Eastern capital, Calcutta, contrasted and complemented the European and particularly British modernist frameworks. Since Indian and British modernism of the first half of the twentieth century shared colonial/post-colonial history, this book is essential to serious engagements in modernist literature vis-à-vis comparative literature. Modernist Transitions can be called a postcolonial deconstruction of the Western models of modernism, which succinctly spurs the controversy that is inherently present in any and every Eurocentric critical ideology.

Modernist Transitions critically highlights modernism's 'to and fro' transitions between Britain and Bengal through an analogous reading of British-Bangla modernist fiction. It does essential work, i.e., it focuses on intersecting issues like imperialism, consumerism, social history, medicine and psychology, war and violence—a plethora of colonial influences that Western modernist ideologues are oblivious to. The well-crafted volume is divided into three parts, each introducing the contributing aspects of modernity. Each part begins with a brief editors' introduction, ensuring a theoretical and thematic continuity throughout. Each essay pokes at a self-contradictory aspect of 'homogenised' modernism and provokes controversies.