Literary Action as Cure

This article focuses on literary representations of women’s disability and its “cure” to explore the links among literary, political, and medical discourses within a colonial context. During the late nineteenth century, an important transition occurred in Bengal from the pre-colonial system to the colonial. New systems—of thoughts, education, governance, and, most importantly, human expressions—arrived in the name of a vastly appealing concept of modernity, thus creating tension between the existing and the emergent systems. Many political ideals of the time were translated into literary action, giving rise to new literary genres, language, and style. Such a new genre was novel. This article argues that early novels of colonial Bengal can provide glimpses of the construction of normalcy, which is inextricably linked with the medical discourses of the time, and the more extensive nation-building process. To substantiate these points, this article primarily draws on the works of Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay (1838–1894), known as the first modern author of colonial Bengal.