A Geographical Analysis of a River-centric Bengali Novel: Titash Ekti Nadir Naam

Abstract

Written texts are the storehouse of knowledge of a particular area and its population and can quest the underlying social structures, individual experience and at the same time their implications on the background of a specific time as per the vision of the writers. Interpretation of the written text in qualitative way is more effective in acquiring specific cultural information related with the beliefs, values, opinions, behaviours, and social contexts of a particular community. In this respect novels produce a sense of sharing, and endorse an understanding of different sections of people, place and their different cultural values and at the same time explore how different groups reflect their own imprints on cultural landscape. This paper through a study of Bengali novel-Titash Ekti Nadir Naam written in the middle of the twentieth century searches the different aspects of a marginalized community's age old culture that evolved along the natural course of a river and try to re-visit an idea that when rhythmic behaviour of natural element, like a river's natural flow fluctuates then it brings an unwanted social change in inter community culture as well as   intra culture among the communities living within its basin.

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