JBS Vol 26. Num 2. 2024. Article 6 - Turning to Taste - Towards a History of Literary Judgments in Colonial Bengal

In the nineteenth century, Bengali literature came to be irrevocably transformed by the rise of new technologies, the emergence of new reading publics and the affirmation of literary prose. This article tracks how these transformations were extended and enabled by a more general overhaul of the ways in which Bengalis related to literature. Bengali intellectuals ceased to value the artful ingenuity of poets as the primary criterion for literary adjudication and, decrying prosodic virtuosity as artificial ornateness, to argue instead – following an inventive vernacularization of the categories of Romantic literary criticism – that good literature ought to be apprized with reference to an innate aesthetic capacity of the Self, a manifestation of ‘taste’.