Published Paper Details:

Jyotirindra Nandi stands out in Bengali literature for his distinctive introspective style in the post-World War II era. Eschewing ideological optimism and escapism, his fiction probes human consciousness with Freudian psychoanalytic depth. Against a backdrop of global conflict, partition, and social upheaval, Nandi focuses on middle-class lives exposed to existential decline. These concerns coalesce in Samudra (1961), a short story inspired by Nandi's voyage to Puri. In Samudra, the narrator is a conventional middle-class husband whose orderly marital life is upended by the sea's majesty. The ocean's vast beauty shatters his habitual worldview and reveals latent erotic and destructive impulses: confronting the water's power evokes Freudian tensions of love and aggression, symbolized by his predatory gaze at the sleeping wife Hena. Birenbabu's eccentric uncle, an obsessed sea-wanderer, introduces mythic resonance. Believing the ocean to be a living Rudra-like deity, he carries legendary ideas of sacrifice (as in the Ramayana's justice episode) and infects the narrator with a quasi-religious mania. By contrast, the narrator's wife Hena initially embodies pragmatic middle-class morality, dismissing the sea's roar as mere noise. As the narrative progresses, however, Hena paradoxically gains agency: she experiences a wild delight in the waves, which in turn provokes her husband's jealousy and a Freudian sense of rivalry. Nandi's prose employs rich metaphor and sensory imagery (for example, evoking "a huge blue cup" of sun above the sea) to heighten the story's symbolic texture. Ultimately, Samudra reads as an eco-critical parable: the sea's churning duality instills both fear and awe, illustrating that treating nature as inert can invite catastrophe. The narrative's arc--from a nocturnal ocean vision to a train journey home--marks the narrator's psychological transformation. At the end, the protagonist finds relief in earthy sounds (crickets and rustling palms), symbolizing middle-class resilience and a tempered reconciliation with the natural world.