The River, the School, and the Future: Education in Abdus Samad's Herai Puwa Prithibi (The Lost World)

Abstract

This article argues that education in Abdus Samad’s Assamese novel Herai Puwa Prithibi (The World Found Again) does not constitute development in that it does not act as a tool for economic mobility, but constitutes a transformation in the environment of the char chapori community. In the following discussion based on textual clusters such as Naji’s self-aware epistemic wound and the lost land lease, Adili’s romantic-educational consciousness and the geographic boundary represented by the Champavati river, and the community’s collective housing of Mozammel and the construction of a school in two days, this analysis proposes that in Herai Puwa Prithibi, education constitutes what this paper would like to call ‘subaltern educational futurity’, i.e., a uniquely environmentally situated educational desire that is grounded in material practices at once collective and local. This educational desire that this study is referring to is distinct from the dominant developmentalist model in which literacy and education function as instruments for individual economic mobility. Using the concepts of Paulo Freire’s conscientization, Elinor Ostrom’s commons management, and José Muñoz’s notion of futurity as a political act, the paper argues that Char Chapori novels have presented a vision of educational aspiration that remains unexplored within the South Asian literary tradition and the field of education studies.