The Brown Adventure Romance: Chander Pahar and the Management of Racial Capital

Abstract

Abstract: Can the archetypal imperial adventurer—the hero of empire's interlinked fictions of discovery and conquest—be brown? This question finds expression in a genre of Bengali literature yet to receive significant scholarly attention. Rather than viewing these novels as a case of Bengal "writing back" to the British genre of the imperial romance, I read them as enquiries into the turbulent shifts of race, migration, and fractured self-fashioning in the age of decolonization. Through a closer look at Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay's Chander Pahar or The Mountain of the Moon (1937), the essay demonstrates how traces of indentureship and coolie labor as abject and elided forms of brown/ness fracture both the category of the brown expeditioner and its effect on the stereotypes of the dark continent.