Lineage, Legacy, and Historical Memory

<p class="ql-align-justify">This study examines Shirshendu Mukhopadhyay’s <em>Durbin</em> as a powerful example of the family saga genre within twentieth-century Bengali literature. Using family saga theory, narratology, and postcolonial studies, this article employs close textual analysis to examine how the novel departs from conventional linear genealogies through its non-sequential, bifurcated narrative design. It analyzes the concepts of theorists such as Mikhail Bakhtin, Gérard Genette, Mieke Bal, Homi Bhabha, Paul Ricoeur, and Monika Fludernik to reveal how <em>Durbin</em> integrates generational memory, ideological transformation, and cultural rituals into a multi-layered narrative structure that interrogates the intersections of domestic life and historical rupture. This article places personal narratives within the socio-political context of colonialism, Partition, and post-independence disillusionment to argue that Mukhopadhyay’s novel reconfigures traditional saga structures. This research also suggests that <em>Durbin</em> offers a critical intervention in genre discourse by provincializing Eurocentric models and foregrounding South Asian epistemologies. This article contributes to the expanding field of global saga studies by showing how <em>Durbin</em> functions as both a literary and historiographic text that engages with the complexities of inheritance, identity, and resistance in a postcolonial context.</p>