Questioning the Historiography and Evaluating the History: Manik Bandopadhyay’s “Today, Tomorrow and the Day After” and the Presentation of the Great Bengal Famine.

Abstract

History has its own limitations. Sometimes it fails to cover everything in general terms; at another time, it proves to be manipulative being subservient to the propagandistic narrative of the ‘master’. Thus the narrative becomes politicized by the deliberate negation of that very dimension which is not considered by the historiographers as ‘important’. It lacks the human touch; it runs after the structured ‘facts’ only. By taking the Great Bengal Famine of 1943 at the background, the paper proposes to mark the limitations of history and show how literature can contribute to the historiography of the Famine. The paper also tries to ‘problematize’ the binary between ‘fact’ and ‘fiction’ on the basis of the ‘politics’ of representation and try to locate the more reliable version. The text that has been taken here is Manik Bandopadhyay’s short story, the fictional tale of “Today, Tomorrow and the Day After” and the setting is the Famine stricken Bengal.