"Skeletons around me breathed deeply": Nature, beauty, and death in Śaratcandra Caṭṭopādhyāy's Śrīkānta
Abstract
Śaratcandra Caṭṭopādhyāy's semi-autobiographical novel Śrīkānta is one of the author's most famous and poetic pieces of work. In the story of the life of Śrīkānta, the novel's narrator and main hero, descriptions of nature in various circumstances have a prominent position, especially the imagery of water (rain, rivers), forest, flowers, and animals, both in daylight and in darkness/moonlight, and the imagery of places of death, i.e. cremation grounds and graves.
There are three prominent narrations of a night adventure in the novel: (1) in the hero's boyhood with his friend Indranāth, when Śrīkānta experiences the terror and beauty of darkness in the forest, river and cremation ground for the first time, (2) during his stay in a prince's hunt camp, where he proves his courage by staying alone in the cremation ground during the midnight hours, (3) in the course of his voyage to Burma, when he refuses to hide on the lower deck, and therefore witnesses a devastating storm on the ship. In Śrīkānta, the combination of night and nature is mostly connected to the motifs of darkness, beauty, death, and terror.
The motif of death is present as both the ultimate necessity (skeletons, corpses) and the imminent possibility (a storm, snakes), a peaceful rest (graves) and eternal restlessness ("breathing" skeletons, ghosts). The proposed paper will examine the way in which the narrator works with the motifs of nature, death, darkness, terror and beauty with consideration to the categories of time and space and/or the chronotope, i.e. taking into account the time of the year and day/night, and the significant topoi such as waters, forests, gardens and cremation grounds.