Miranda and Kapalkundala in Bengali Comparative Studies: Feminine Innocence across the Colonial Divide

This article examines five Bengali essays published in periodicals in the long 19th century, which compare Miranda intensively with the eponymous heroine of Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay’s 1866 novel Kapalkundala. The five essays in question (Shrish Chandra Majumder, 1880; anonymous, 1889; Sudhindranath Tagore, 1891; anonymous, 1909; Kshirode Bihari Chattopadhyay, 1918) discuss how Shakespeare’s and Bankim’s texts address the condition of a woman brought up outside human society. They are especially concerned with what they mark as the inherent feminine kindness and the pristine form of sexual innocence featured in the heroines of these texts. These essays ignore invariably the possibility of reading The Tempest as an allegory of the colonial project. The elision of the political con-text enables these essays to create a universalist space where Shakespeare and Bankim may be treated as coequal artists, without undue deference to Shakespeare’s colonially propagated canonicity. These essays thus refuse to be defined by a colonial relationship of cultural subordination. However, the paradigm of universality evoked by them is posited on the fetishization of feminine innocence. These essays, my article argues, naturalize and replicate a patriarchal vision that they attribute to The Tempestand Kapalkundala.