Village life and community, festivals and celebrations, rituals and superstitions, the sense of belonging to the ‘place’, the events of history witnessed individually and as a community, thread of nostalgic moments which weave the several generations altogether and the changes in perception and experience can form the matrix of the study. Such Study may lead us to the understanding of change that accompanies a village. The text chosen is: Pather Panchali. Through the analysis of the text the nature of everyday life of Bengali village will be looked into. The pictures of village life represented in the selected novel, with their culture and rituals, their superstitions, their festival and celebrations will be analysed. The way the characters are constructed and situated in poverty, socially and culturally, will be contrasted with earlier Bengal. And also how they react to their situation, and the way poverty effects their modes of expression and changes the relation among them. Memory will be used as a record of shared past and a marker of past to look into the texts. Such production of memory by the writers in the fictional texts should also suggest the idea of memory as a textual strategy. The rituals, festivals or celebration bridges the relationship of memory, particularly in its collective form and its ability to create a sense of ‘identity’ and ‘community’. The place is characterized by references to the both, a collective past and a collective ideal of small villages and better times; an ideal that many of its inhabitants either did not know, or experience in a very different way than how their earlier generations used to do. Their engagement with the past has resulted in a community built both aesthetically and ideologically with the nostalgia which has an operational role too in rendering the environment habitable.
