Granthaalayah
THE TEMPORALITY OF LONGING: WAITING, SILENCE, AND EMOTIONAL TIME IN SARAT CHANDRA CHATTOPADHYAY’S PARINEETA

Original Article

THE TEMPORALITY OF LONGING: WAITING, SILENCE, AND EMOTIONAL TIME IN SARAT CHANDRA CHATTOPADHYAY’S PARINEETA

 

Supriya 1*

1 PhD Research Scholar, Department of English, Baba Mastnath University, Asthal Bohar, Rohtak, Haryana, India

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ABSTRACT

Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay occupies a singular, almost peerless position in the canon of Indian literature as the quintessential chronicler of the "private life.". Where the Jewish geniuses of his time, with whom, or even with the greatest of them, the Great Nationalist Project was underway, or the moral awakening of the Indian soul, Sarat Chandra retreated, to the microscopical pang of the English fireside Basnet (2011). The epochal political movements in the colonial Calcutta or even the changes of the British Raj do not consider the time in his 1914 novella Parineeta. Rather it is estimated by the movements of the grandfather clock in the fancy hallway Nabin Roy; the charmless and inexpressive measures of the beating of the heart of Lalita.

 

Keywords: Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay’s, Time, Parineeta

 


INTRODUCTION: The Chronotope of the Domestic Sphere

Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay occupies a singular, almost peerless position in the canon of Indian literature as the quintessential chronicler of the "private life.". Where the Jewish geniuses of his time, with whom, or even with the greatest of them, the Great Nationalist Project was underway, or the moral awakening of the Indian soul, Sarat Chandra retreated, to the microscopical pang of the English fireside Basnet (2011). The epochal political movements in the colonial Calcutta or even the changes of the British Raj do not consider the time in his 1914 novella Parineeta. Rather it is estimated by the movements of the grandfather clock in the fancy hallway Nabin Roy; the charmless and inexpressive measures of the beating of the heart of Lalita.

This paper proposes that Parineeta is a profound study in Emotional Time. Unlike "Historical Time," which is linear, objective, and documented through dates and events, Emotional Time is inherently elastic and subjective. All the above renders Emotional Time subjective and in contrast to the Historical Time that is linear, objective and dated by the time and events, very elastic Nandi (2023). It is one of those moments, upon which a word of dispensation, or a scornful look can be prolonged throughout a philosophical eternity, years of youthful friendship in one another are a sentence or two of hindsight, a spell of nostalgia. Pondering over two columns Waiting and Silence, this study research is underpinned by the strategies wherein Chattopadhyay has developed a contemporary belief, feminize subjectivity. Lalita, the main protagonist of the story, keeps the time of her feeling hidden in herself, to be able to achieve some degree of agency, in which the time of society will fail to offer her.

 

Socio-Historical Context: The Brahmo Samaj and "Social Time"

To understand the tension in Parineeta, one must situate the characters within the specific socio-religious friction of early 20th-century Bengal Ray (2019). It is not a family quarrel, it is a battle between two incomparable Social Times, the dissident orthopraxy of the Hindu tradition which may be represented in Nabin Roy and the reformist, progressive, modern time which may be represented in the character of Girin and the inclinations of the family of Gurucharan.

 

The Brahmo Movement as a Temporal Disruptor

Brahmo Samaj that was launched by Raka Ram Mohan Roy and later developed by Debendranath Tagore and Keshab Chandra Sen was aimed at eliminating elements of idolatry and caste inflexibility in those who began the Hindu religion. The influence of Brahmo in Parineeta environment takes the leader of the conventional home year. In the situation of Nabin Roy, the social time is dictated by descends of castes, blood relations and possession of the ancestral property Gupta and Mahavidyalaya (2015). The process of learning is associated only with time, the social advances and the radical concept companionate marriage in the case of the Brahmo leanings.

The moment the Lalita uncle Gurucharan starts to incline towards the religion of Brahmo the reason being the difficult financial stand and in search of social phenomenon the religion forms a sort of sort-temporal schism. Roy family feels that this transition is selling out to the Hindu time that is immortal. This puts Lalita in a pressure form of tension; she is in her trans-stage of existence; her adherence to her previous state of being to existence is in conflict to new time of reformation Girin imparts on her home.

 

The "Reformist Clock" vs. The "Ancestral Clock"

Girin as a character is what provokes the contemporary experience of time to occur. He is incidentally the symbol of a sex where women are not only educated but also marriage is a choice of marriage to the matrimonial bonding and without the dowry and debt bartering Chattopadhyay (2005). His coming speeds up the social occasion of the family of Gurucharan and provides to them I exit mode of stagnation of debt.

Nevertheless, speed is a trauma to the main hero of the story Lalita. It is already in her heart time when she is married to Shekhar with the silent communication of the garland delivery. The need that the modern time Girin is  the time that intrudes upon her of this holy time of her occult pact Hoffheimer (2009). Chattopadhyay does an incredible job of proving that the social freedom bestowed to the women, using the movement of Brahmo movement, resulted in the formation of a new emotional dilemma to the transition women.

 

Economic Determinism and the Pacing of the Plot

With the Brahmo-Hindu conflict in Parineeta, the economic period of the characters is too big to be broken. The time bomb is the debt that Gurucharan owes to Nabin Roy that determines the rhythm of the story Chatterjee (1996). Of the old world is a debt generation chain, a stale, remaining, repressive time. An example of a linear way out is the Brahmo way out (as portrayed by Girin who offers financial assistance to him).

Lalita does not submit such external financial time measures, a chance to balance the emotional side of her life. The fact that she has remained silent as well as her submission of attitude to wait to Shekhar despite his viciousness and his father in avarice demanding capacity is the unwillingness to conform to time upon social reform or economic need Mishra and Mishra (2012). She in her own Emotional Time where the Parineeta (a betrothed woman) status is not hinged as by the legal, or religious, pigeonholes with which that group of men she is playing with.

 

The Intersection of Silence and Reform

The Brahmo movement had to name itself the Social Time-- voicelessness of protest, the tasked argument about the reform, the end of silence with reference to social vices. As a matter of fact, the idea and approach; the Emotional Time presented by Sarat Chandra, this Indian Bengali family is based in the unspoken.

It is her silence, the greatest weapon of retaliation that Lalita uses and the oppression of the traditionalism of Nabin Roy and the reformism (which is instituted, yet intrusive) of Girin. Her silence is somehow a mediator between two worlds where she stands by to claim her dignity when her image concerning her future is under discussion by the men in her circle who surround her socially and religiously Mishra (2008). This kind of silence allows her to explore the process of childhood turning into womanhood the one that attests that the things that happen do not always lead to any change, but are the ones that take part quietly in the heart of a human being.

 

The Phenomenology of Waiting

The pattern of narration in Parineeta romanticizes waiting to a great extent of being. It is passive action and the phenomenologists would term it as active in that even though the subject is seemingly not doing anything according to the eyes of the world, the subject is actually waging a huge internal battle of hope, preservation and moving emotional endurance Singh (2020). These gaps between the existence of Shekhar characterise the life of Lalita. It is more of an interstitial life of her thriving on the edges of the narrative of the society.

 

Bergsonian Duration vs. Clock Time

In a bid to examine the psychological environment of Lalita we are going to take note of the chronos (quantitative time, chronological time) and Duree (Duration) difference forwarded by Henri Bergson. Clock Time is a social phenomenon; it can be also further categorized into minutes, hours and years and regards time as a string of beads Sarkar et al. (2012). Duree, on the contrary, the stream of inner time is a qualitative, continuous feeling, which the past never comes behind us, it is before us, and it pervades our present consciousness.

Lalita is not continuing the years in a chronological series with the aid of which she has been living before the eyes of Roy households. On the contrary, they are unified, unbroken emotional attitude. Time is a long one, when Shekhar is away on his expeditions, or transacting his business in the city, the time of the outer world can easily read of the time passing, but when Lalita is time is lengthened. The eternal present is developed into the waiting when Shekhar is waiting to keep the silent promise of the garland.

And in this condition of dureé the object of which she has thrown the garland upon his neck is not of the past, but is a living breathing reality which is the decisive shaper in her present conduct Bhattacharya (2017). It is the fact that she may turn off other suitors, even accept humiliation in the society; she has already fallen in love with him, in her Emotional Time. We could say that her waiting is somehow the maintenance of such a moment of the past which will not be swept away by the irrational passage of the social time.

 

The Threshold and the Window: The Architecture of Liminality

The spaces of the novella are at least those at which this wait is being done, in the event that the wait of the inner state of the characters is waiting. Sarat Chandra employs architecture of Bengali house as liminal space and employs on the rooftop of the house (shilekotha), the window (janala) and the boundary wall of the house Somaaya (2008). Thresholds are time and space distances that are between here and there.

The Boundary Wall: probably one of the most apparent chronotropic symbolism in the book is the fence that encloses Roy mansion and small house of Gurucharan. It is the edge of classes and caste of the 20 th -century Calcutta, and on the one hand, it is The touch point on the way of Shekhar and Lalita Maiti (2018). The communications they carry by this wall, or through it, are transient and even scanty. The very wall is the sign of the frozen time of their relationship-constructed which makes them address each other throughout the piece and prolongs the time of their desire.

The Window: This is a term applied in the literature of the Bengal where the window is the entrance of a world that the woman will never get a possibility to enter. Lalita is in fact visualization of the active passivity of the women by the way she is waiting at the window. She sees all the social time of the street, Roy household through the window yet she is still in her emotional time Saiam (2012). The window reflects her wish that causes her subjective wait a picture of iconic perseverance without words.

The Rooftop: It is the location that lacks the vitality of freedom, no ability to receive the gaze of patriarchal gaze inside the rooms. It is a house time up on the roof much, and time of the kitchen, or time of the counting-house is secondary Ray (2011). The image of the wide duree which Lalita bears in her is that of this case the wide sky.

 

Waiting as Agency

The act of waiting is understood as weakness of feminine nature, subversion in most of the classical interpretations. But in the phenomenological perspective of the premier of Parileeta, the waiting is an agency of a sort to Lalita. In refusing to act, she backs her back to the concept of the modern time, be it Girin or the transactional time, which the creditors of her uncle require.

Waiting Lalita is infuriating over the commoditization of her personality. The gift of the here and now when she is choosing the husband of the garland, when she is bringing in the world of the world of her boyfriend to her inner world Patel (2012). At last, the novella is resolved not by the time passing through it, but by the fact that the social conditions which had tried to rewrite the Emotional Time of Lalita in and to itself failed and were not so true.

 

Theoretical Framework: Bergson, Bachelard, and the Bengali "House"

In order to arrive at the emotional climate of Parineeta, one must forego the Newtonian meaning of time which views time as a linear absolute and encloses things and embrace a more psychological meaning of the term time. Such theorists will constitute the essential part of this study because they will be used to produce the required vocabulary they are Henri Bergson and Gaston Bachelard Mahima et al. (2019). The combination of these, not only brings with it the implication that Bengali home is a place, but it is also a stage of the soul in which the time is experienced, rather than being perceived.

 

Bergsonian La Durée: The Fluidity of Inner Time

The idea of Henri Bergson which is the most significant to the depiction of passion by Sarat Chandras is that of La Duree (Duration). Spatialized time is Clock Time (time of science and of the marketplace), according to Bergson time is a time we imagine as being marks along a line, or numbers on a dial Ausaja (2009). This is not the situation of our inner life though. The consciousness as described by Bergson is a flux, according to him, where past is devouring the future and filling it up on its way.

Parineeta has made this duree as a form of a character of Lalita. One can observe that a viewer would see there are several years between her childhood and when she is married to Shekhar. It is the Social Time of Calcutta, and she is becoming old, her marital ability is becoming less, and the debt of her family is becoming larger. But in her time within herself, the moment she has shaken the garland off upon Shekhar, is no past, it is a present, present tense, existence, life, a present and a present Ali et al. (2021). Her perceptions are not passing minute after minute but it is the interminable, unending existence, flowish. The art of genius Chattopadhyay is such that time is not a chain of events before the lover but this experience. The suspension is not like a break between two events, but rather is an explanation of the current situation.

 

Bachelard’s Poetics of the Household: Space as Soul

Bergson an initiator of time and Gaston Bachelard an initiator of space. In his master piece work, the Poetics of Space, Bachelard is of the view that house is a state of psyche being. It is an instrument that examines the soul of a man since our memories about our initial experience and our strongest emotions, these are the ones that they retain in their memory Raj (2009). The architectural design of the two neighbouring houses Roy mansion and the cottage of Gurucharan in Parineeta is symbolic expression of problems of characters conflicting inside.

Roy mansion represents and is a symbol of the oppression age. It is a seat of uncle light furnishing, great grandfather clock and austerity. Time in this instance is defined in terms of greediness by Nabin Roy and patriarchy by Shekhar. It is a stagnant time sphere and the cage is the tradition. On the contrary, the house of Gurucharan, that is poor, and that which is being dismantled by its gloss of debt is a House of Humanized Time. It is a vacant nest of helplessness; the meals of family and the Childhood of her Pop was with Shekhar and Lalita they used to have a long time ago.

 

The Chronotope of the Boundary Wall and Corridors

The two houses symbolize the two time realities with location change as a time change between two places where Lalita lives. It is not the physical wall, but that of chronotropic boundary.

The Corridors: According to Bachelardians, corridors are spaces of transition and uncertainty spaces. Lalita stalks Roy family Tripto and Ali (2023). The fact that she is actually waiting is literally portrayed because she is engaging in it without uttering words in these transit areas. She does not belong to the Roy family; she is not an outsider but she is a real person in the hallways, neither the state of the ever-changing nor the existence.

The Shared Wall: It is the place where Time of the Law (the property rights of Nabin Roy) and the Time of the Heart (the meetings of the main characters secret) confront each other. The moment is crushed as the physical wall pressures us in the Shekhar and Lalita talking between each other. They are forced to talk fast, mumble and however much time they spend together is becoming so many times more explosive.

 

The Domestic "Nook" as a Sanctuary of Silence

The eyes of Bachelard can provide the value of the nooks and corners where the soul can retreat and dream. She takes shelter either in the bedroom of Lalita or the far end of the roof. In this she does not dream about the recipient of the creditors of her uncle, or that of the jealousy of Shekhar Mukhopadhyay (2023). Her nook quiet is in a degree which is no otherwise than a species of reverie- state, which causes her to be able to conduct her duree without breathing interruption.

It is with his Bachelardian insight that we would come to the fact that Lalita, is not a passive subject of her situation, but a maker of her interior world. At the same time as the outer world is evolving, his uncle considers the decision to resort to Brahmoism and Calcutta to become modern, Lalita is standing in the externalism of her home paradise.

 

The Anatomy of Silence: Power and Subterfuge

In this part, the semiotics of silence is explored within Parineeta Johny (2024). This silence is not a nothing, but as thick a substance as the death of the world, and is charged with it, as are the stages of the social contract of silence, of ethical willed rebellion, as that stage of the transition in which the world of the child play is transferred to the world of the adult passion.

The classic literary criticism on the colonial Indian novel conventionally assumes the notions of silence as an image of the subaltern or to the oppressed- an image of agency deprivation. The silence in Parineeta is radically reinvented though Ghosh (2023). Not the lack of speech alone, but a real mode of communication, is capable of executing that, which the social taboos and the distribution of classes, language, fails to do. The silence of this novella is a kind of protective garb of the weak as well as of the morally decisive people even.

 

Lalita’s Silence as Moral Superiority and Gambhirya

The other cultural peculiarity of the Bengali culture that determines the personality of Lalita is Gambhirya (solemnity or seriousness). She is a woman, who is also an emotionally loaded woman even at a young age. Her strategy of silent being is the most predictive of this seriousness. When her uncle Gurucharan turns his unbiased mounting debt into the stuff of town scandals and gossip, Lalita makes neither complaint nor in her own defence. The fact that she does not speak suggests that she does not desire to be part of social time scandal.

This is no subaltern silence, unable to speak but the silence of the stoic that has no wish to speak. It is because she holds her mouth tight by the weight of wasting her life in poverty and at other times pompousness of Shekhar that the high morale dominating in her suffices to support the day Mishra and Mishra (2012). Even her silence puts pressure on people surrounding her and it is even better that it causes Shekhar to question his own noise, his own ego and his own inconsistency. To an extent, silence can be regarded as the reflector and, in some way, as a way of returning the moral inadequacies of the world of the speakers to them.

 

The "Emotional Vacuum": The Return from Giridih

This is the climax of the anatomy of silence in which Shekhar goes back to his visit and discovers that Lalita has grown up without Shekhar. It is a masterpiece of acting when it comes to what I would refer as Vacuum of Emotion.

In their growing years their relations had been by word, romantic on the basis of dictates and bickering. Helping him back, the vocabulary used in his life during his childhood cannot be used anymore Saiam (2012). The attraction which now has grown between them in their adult lives has no already prepared social language in the strictness of their relation as neighbours. They come before and among one another, and cannot seal the gap that is open. This inability to find a new language is a kind of vacuum, a vacuum of nothingness in the condition of high stress, which forms the movement of the plot. Because they are unable to express their love in a direct form they do it indirectly; Shekhar by remaining jealous and domineering is of course, and Lalita by remaining more aloof and submissive. This is the case, which is not uttered at all, and the focus of tension in the story.

 

The Secret Covenant: The Garland as the "Loudest" Silence

The climax of the story of silence is obviously the symbolic act between the gift of the garland. This scene in Bengali literature is unique in structure because there was no noise that would be involved in a traditional Hindu wedding Ray (2011). No shells of conch, no Vedic mantras (chanted), no visitors, no witnesses.

The marriage is taking place in the middle of the night, completely quiet and thus, this makes the marriage go into a time-free zone. It is the silence of this, which makes it a sacred one to Lalita. It is a betrothal of two souls, which does not involve the verification of the social clock. Even the silence is a guarantee of the truth to her.

With Shekhar, however, considerations of silence are the source of high anxiety. His rationality cannot perceive it to be a reality since in the social sphere the marriage was not voiced. He is being tormented by the silence of that night Patel (2012). Despite the fact that the unspoken contract is a strength to Lalita, it is a nightmare to Shekhar and therefore, demonstrates the gendered difference in the experience of silence where it is a refuge of truth to the woman and a nightmare of absence of the demonstration to the man.

 

The Phenomenology of Waiting: The Long "Interstitium"

Not waiting is neither an accident nor event in the story world Parineeta lives in, but in reality it is the predominant psychological disposition which is employed by all characters to treat world Mahima (2019). Novella is riddled with cross-over waits: Gurucharan waits: until he can have a financial miracle that will save his face; Nabin Roy waits: until the time elapses and the clock of the law runs out, and he can take possession of the land that his neighbour Callicott mistakenly declares his own; Lalita waits: until the man she has so silently married acquires the emotional maturity she takes him to. It is such interstitial between the silent vow and the social recognition in which is the moral heart of this novel.

 

Waiting as an Active State: The Power of Will

To Lalita it is no passive submission before the lot of fate, but a question of radical and extended will-power. She is in a state of extreme liminality since the exchange of garland. She is in a social no-man-land. not the frolicsome body Shekhar can make fun of or the realizeldubois so avowed that the Roy family will accept him as a wife Chattopadhyay (2005). She is neither a stranger nor a neighbor.

Liminality compels one to be vigilant of him/herself. Lalita is forced to selectively censor her behaviours, her words and even the air that she breathes so as to be in conformity with a marriage which is the only one that she believes in. Her waiting is not passive in the sense that it consists of rejection of any other possibility of being which is realized every day. The wait tracing to Lalita becomes a resistance when Girin gives her a way of escape something that is a wedding based on the modern respect and economic stability Hoffheimer (2009). Girin was to be a time traveller, that to pass with Shekhar would be to move in the time of Social, to wait with him in the time of Emotional. Another confirmation of her being stronger than the pressures of poverty and social transition that are slowly stressing inwards, is her suffering.

 

The Stages of Waiting: The Window and the Rooftop

The designated degrees of feminine emotional life were defined inside architectural specifics in the land of early 20 th -century Bengal domestic space Chatterjee (1996). The window, the rooftop (shilekotha) in parineeta do not belong to a house, but are literally walls of the actual space Lalita occupies as her interstitium.

The Window as a Frame of Longing: The window is a viewing screen upon which Lalita is gazing at the world of the Shekhar. The window is the only place in Bengali literature where a woman can feel the outside but safe by the inside. It is the window, which in the case of Lalita is where she can measure the geographical and sexual distance between her home and his.

The Rooftop (Shilekotha): It is the roof where we can liberate ourselves vertically. It is at the roof during which Lalita is also free to spend her time in an emotional manner, out of the reach of the elders as well as the work of the kitchen Mishra and Mishra (2012). The roof is her nest of reverie where she may dwell in the flashbacks of the garland trade without the loss of the cold-blooded transactional reality of unpaid debts of her uncle.

 

The Cruelty of Delayed Recognition: Shekhar’s Reactive Time

As long as the waiting Lalita does is active and founded on one truth, the waiting that Shekhar does is responsive and fragmented. The male gaze characterizes his patience of waiting; a possessive one and a one who cannot afford Lalita the right to do what she wishes to do. Shekhar is even waiting till Lalita is going to retaliate or confess, and is forcing his security issues over his silence on her.

The sorrow of this is the emotional clock which Shekhar has is always out of time with Lalita. Since she is in the eternal present of their marital life, he is suffering in the present of late recognition Mishra (2008). He goes about her like an object that is waiting to be passed by him unaware of the fact that he is the one that is under fire.

The meanness of what he has made him wait is what gives him pride. He passes the months and years chilly, and he only opens out through his love upon the appearance of a threat in the person of Girin. This demonstrates that emotional period of the characters in the case with Shekhar is ruled by the jealousy and external competition, whereas only inner persuasion is observed in the case with Lalita Singh (2020). His discovery is a discovery of crisis-response but her discovery was an exploration of foundational-truth. Here is the key theme of the two-factors of the man who is waiting to own and the woman who is waiting to live.

 

The "Long Interstitium" as a Moral Test

Last, but not least, there is the Parineeta long wait which is a type of moral test ground. It gets rid of the superficiality of their relationship, the squabbling like a kid, the disparity in social status, and it is applied to expose the nature of their characters. It is the perfected silent patience that the time when Lalita is removed out of the silence that results in making her the moral centre of the novella Bhattacharya (2017). The interstitium is none too soon, it is what it always needed the swellings of pride in Shekhar at last to sink in the long run under the heavy load of the emotional permanence of Lalita.

This section gives the socio-political context, and the comparative discussion that needs to be done in order to convert the paper into a research work. Indeed, putting this touching tale in the context of the Bengal Renaissance we come to a mental, but also to a socio-historical criticism.

VI. Socio-Historical Intersections: Brahmoism and Class

The silence of Parineeta was a psychological spin-off of desire yet a Social Silence needed by Bengali society: the tensions between ideologies of the dawn of the 20 th century. The transformation of the family of Gurucharan to the Brahmo Samaj, even though it might have been the first one caused by financial stress, introduces another type of Time Somaaya (2008). This is the era of social change, secular education and of a new, modern and individualistic identity that reminded of the repetitious time of orthodox Hinduism.

 

The Clash of Calendars: Orthodox vs. Modern

One can even speak about the central confrontation of the novella as a Clash of Calendars. On the one hand, Roy family lives with Traditional Hindu Patriarchal Calendar. Having this insight, our world enjoys a time that is mediated by Kula (lineage) and Achar (custom) Maiti (2018). The wedding is a bargain which is entered into to protect caste purity and property consolidation. By the ways of Lalita, she is valued in Nabin Roy calendar through her dowry and the debt of her uncle and a chess piece playing in a game of conquering the ancestral land.

The antagonist Girin on the other side is Time of the Modern/Brahmo. The calendar is promoted by progress, movement and equality in the society. In Girin case, time might have been spent better- educating Lalita, medical service to poor and activism of rights of women. It is a time that is linear and optimistic.

Lalita gets into the Inter-calibration of these two worlds. She admires the freedom that Girin gives her in the contemporary society but in her mind she is bound to the old custom that she has with Shekhar Saiam (2012). It is primarily her wait to a solution in which she can become a modern woman (that is by making her intellectually and emotionally free) without severing the lines of her traditional love.

VII. Comparison: Parineeta vs. Devdas – Decay vs. Ripening

In order to value how Chattopadhyay approaches the concept of Time in a new way based on his successes, it is essential to make a comparative study of Parineeta (1914) and a masterpiece composed by Sarat Chandra (which he published earlier) (1917) based on his work. Though, both stories are the story of childhood lovers and the impediments of the classes, in the chronological order, they have inverted-polar structures.

Table 1

Table 1 Devdas and Parineeta

Feature

Devdas

Parineeta

Primary Mode

Regret and Nostalgia

Endurance and Hope

Temporal Focus

The Lost Past

The Potential Future

Outcome of Time

Physical and Moral Decay

Emotional Ripening

Symbolism

The Train (Speeding toward death)

The Wall (Static, waiting for collapse)

 

Devdas: Time as a Vector of Decay

The aspect of time is devastating in Devdas. Devdas is a retrograde man, whose Emotion is a dreadful era of regrets Ray (2011). Time is the only thing that can make him lose a state of decay and his alcoholism, ruining of his body and death in the no man land of the gate to Paro are the indicators of the same. It is a subdued hope of waiting in the Devdas. The protagonists are not able to advance to the current reality by prototyping their emotional clocks leading to a colonizing break.

 

Parineeta: Time as a Process of Ripening

In a sharp contrast, time in Parineeta is exhibited as a kind of Ripening. The waiting of this novella is not life squandering but maturing and making a final union. And, should Devdas be the Fall, Parineeta the Ascent.

The future is what rescues Lalita and Shekhar since they dedicate their emotional time to grow up. The separation is when they are stripped of the childish squabbling, the shallow pride which belonged to them in the first place Patel (2012). Lalita is applying her Internal Duration in an attempt to form a visionary cocoon around herself as opposed to Devdas who is rendered incapacitated by the past. It is not that when the union eventually comes about is to go all the way back to an absent childhood but the choice as an adult relationship.

Time can destroy (as in the case of Devdas) or it can be sanctified by confronting the appropriate form of silence and patience as suggested by Chattopadhyay. The most favourable notion of the agency of the Bengali woman that Sarat Chandra can suppress is the process of Lalita, with which the socio-historical turmoil of her family causes the gradual development of her personality.

 

The Resolution: Breaking the Silence

The final section of this research paper is how the tension of time and silence developed in the writing of the novella was solved Mahima (2019). It serves to blend both philosophical arguments of Bergson and Bachelard and the emotional end of the text.

VIII. The Resolution: Breaking the Silence as the "Collapse of Time"

A phenomenological interpretation of Parineeta is that the resolution is that of a standard romantic reunification, but a phenomenological time travel aids in revealing that there is more in this explanation of a Collapse of Time Ausaja (2009). Years of incessant insomnoliteness of the Internal Time, the secret marriage of Lalita, the External Time the misery of her social position which she is an unmarried, poor neighbor have kept the story going. It is resolved when at long last these two non-similar timelines strike and converge.

 

The Moment of Recognition

The secret about the garland is discovered by the mothers of Shekhar thereafter revealed to Shekhar Ali et al. (2021). The revelation that has now dawned on him is interrupted (not by word or phrase) this time by this revelation that it is a suddenness and revealment and Power which cannot be disputed. It is such a breaking of the silence, like a time-bomb.

The above scheme which has been identified as Bergsonian asserts that this is the triumph of the True Time over the Clock Time. The three year gap, feelings of jealousy and social ostracism are not only ended, they are erased out of her memory. It is the violent search in the scorching sun heat of this moment of realization that renders the time of their misery meaningless and turns it into a moment. The True Time, the Time of mutual belonging, concerning which, across a number of years, there has been a de facto potency, at once overlays their physical distance, which is the Time of Clock.

 

The Validation of the Silent Covenant

He does not do anything novel when Shekhar finally confides that Lalita was his wife; he is validating some prior action, the silence of which was held in a status of quietness. The resolution goes to show that it was not one of the whims of childhood that the garland exchange happened, but it was a time-hook Raj (2009). It can be said that the time is the reason of the breakdown here since in the human feeling world, it is not the emergence of the bond that makes the strength of a relationship, but the survival of the bond in the inner heart. The waiting periods have also been discovered to be the periods of preservation rather than the periods of loss.

 

Conclusion: The Legacy of Parineeta and the "Clock of the Heart"

One of the most significant works of Indian literature is the Parineeta by Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay because this work offers a complicated examination of how duration and identity are experienced out of our perception. Setting forth to develop the plot whose subject was the domestic virtues of waiting and silence, Chattopadhyay supports not the passivity of women, but displays another sort of feminine strength, the strength of making the time on oneself as a reaction to the external disorientation.

 

Love as a Function of Endurance

The Parineeta tradition has been the awakening of the fact that love is very much a long term exercise. Lalita achieves a high morality status which outshines all other characters in the novella because she learns how to wait. The social ceremony, which is the finishing touch of the book, does not make her the Parineeta (The Betrothed), but the three years of perfect psychological devotion that preceded it. The remaining wedding is merely but a show; marriage was a covert affair which was performed in the silence of her belief.

 

The Universal "Emotional Time"

Lastly, Sarat Chandra has proposed that a human being has a clock within the heart. Since the world surrounding the Calcutta in the 20 th century was rapidly changing to the time of the Modern Nature, the time of reform, the time of debts and interests, in other words, the Economic Time, Lalita has remained in the time of the Emotional Time. This is the subjective perception of time, which is governed by the memory, the desire and the silence it is this time which forms the human experience in the world that Chattopadhyay creates.

According to the novella, the actual domination is the ability not to get this internal clock to fit the vile and cold standards of the community. Sweet Lalita presents us with silence as a language of its own and an element of patient waiting at the silent moments of the house of Gurucharan which are the Roy mansion shadows. Parineeta is an eye-witness of the truth that though the social world may demand words and show, however, the most important truths of the human soul are such as are embodied in the long interstitium of the human heart.

  

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

None.

 

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