Gargi Chatterjee
Independent Researcher, Kolkata, West Bengal, India
E-mail: gargi.shasan@gmail.com
Issue: Vol. 2 No. 3 (September 2026) – Anubodhan
Received: 23 September 2026 / Revised: 26 September / Accepted: 30 September 2026 / Published: 30 September 2026
DOI: https://doi.org/10.65885/anubodhan.v2n3.2026.131
Abstract
This paper examines Syed Mustafa Siraj’s Colonel series — one of the most beloved yet critically underexplored bodies of popular Bengali fiction — as a site where questions of class, rural identity, humour, and cultural power are actively negotiated. Drawing on Bourdieu’s theory of cultural capital, Stuart Hall’s encoding/decoding model, Raymond Williams’s concept of structures of feeling, and Janice Radway’s ethnographic methodology, this study argues that the Colonel series occupies a uniquely democratic space in Bengali literary culture. The series simultaneously challenges the elitist boundaries of the canonical tradition, gives voice to the working-class milieu of rural Bengal, and mediates the anxieties of a modernising society through laughter and embodied folk wisdom. Through close attention to the cultural conditions of its production and reception — including its circulation through the thek (neighbourhood lending library) system — the paper argues that the dismissal of such fiction as subliterary reproduces class hierarchies that literary studies must urgently interrogate. The paper situates the Colonel series within its comparative literary-historical context, examining how it relates to other popular Bengali traditions across the Partition divide, and concludes that recovering vernacular popular fiction is not merely an act of scholarly recovery but of cultural democratisation.
Keywords: Bengali popular fiction, Colonel series, cultural capital, Bourdieu, vernacular literature, thek library, working-class readership.
How to cite: Chatterjee, G. (2026). Beyond Rabindranath: Popular Literature, Working-Class Readership, and the Politics of the Popular in Syed Mustafa Siraj’s Colonel Series. Anubodhan, 2(3), 356–361. https://doi.org/10.65885/anubodhan.v2n3.2026.131