Bhattacharya Sourit - Nabarun Bhattacharya : Aesthetics and Politics in a World after Ethics

This is an exceptional and painstaking work of rare dedication that is structurally expansive and conceptually rigorous. Most significantly, the editors and the team of translators, interviewers and critical essayists have elegantly woven a complex tapestry of aesthetics, politics and ethics that marks one of the most involved, committed and intricate authors of our time. The book radiantly brings to light the myriad trajectories through which Nabarun Bhattacharya was able to catch and express the deepest undertones of our overwrought times.

Beneath that tale lies another layerthat, like all true political prophets, Bhattacharya could presciently prefigure and predictan ominous and macabre sublunar future, the contours of which continue to remain spectral and contingent.

Professor Prasanta Chakravarty,

Department of English, University of Delhi

This is a timely introduction to Nabarun, a major activist writer of minor literature, inhabiting the borderlands of the ubiquitous modern order of capital, in the space-time of contemporary Kolkata. The book contains short stories, poems, an interview with the writer and essays on hima well-curated collection, offering a rounded representation of Nabarun. As the book highlights, the deep subaltern denizens of Nabaruns world may be voided of agency and use but cant be voided of the imagination of freedom. Through the intervention of this text, Nabaruns radical insight and technologies of posthuman praxis will be available widely, inspiring many versions of another kind of life, a plural participatory anarchy of friendship.

Debashish Banerji,

Haridas Chaudhuri Professor of Indian Philosophies and Cultures and Doshi Professor of Asian Art, California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS), San Francisco, CA

Nabarun Bhattacharya

Nabarun Bhattacharya

Aesthetics and Politics in a World after Ethics

Edited by

Sourit Bhattacharya, Arka Chattopadhyay and Samrat Sengupta

BLOOMSBURY INDIA

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First published in India 2020

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Contents

This book on the aesthetics and politics of Nabarun Bhattacharya comes at a critical moment in global politics as in Indian history, one that might have drawn a savage, satirical response from Nabarun himself. Much of his work is haunted by a darkly prescient foreshadowing of postmodern apocalypse. Despite the cult status and devoted following Nabarun Bhattacharya enjoys in contemporary Bengali literary circles, this is to my knowledge the first extended study of his work in English, offering translations of primary sources (an interview with the author and several of his poems and stories) and eleven long critical essays, as well as an editorial introduction. The editors are to be congratulated on their devotion to a difficult task and the critical intelligence with which they have focused on the key features of Nabarun Bhattacharyas revolutionary aesthetics. These include his fierce dismantling of the illusions that sustain the capitalist culture; the black humour with which he subverts the conventions of realism while focusing on marginal existences, the lives of the underclass; his linguistic and generic inventiveness and, above all, his dissolution of the boundaries between human, non-human animal and thing.

The radical power of Nabarun Bhattacharyas vision, in a world after ethics, lies precisely in his moral interrogation of contemporary society, politics and art: in his awareness that a world founded on violence and exploitation is ultimately self-destructive, and that the oppressed will rise. In some ways this is figured by a recurrent image in his work, that of the explosionwhether of the human bomb or of a hidden stockpile of weapons. Yet, in a richly absurdist oeuvre, such explosions are rarely the product of conscious intention, of a revolutionary enterprise dedicated to the destruction of class enemies. Rather, they occur by accident or oversight, through the self-conflagration of incendiary material that has, we realise, accumulated over time. Thus, instead of a narrative of revolutionary progress, of the kind that preoccupied his Communist forebears, Nabarun Bhattacharyas poetics are imbricated in a far bleaker landscape of waste, decay and deathin which we sense, as he writes in one of his poems, that:

Somethings burning

In front of everyone, right before your eyes,

Amidst all the people

Homeland!

For a Marxist poet, novelist and political commentator, writing in a dystopian world, one that has abandoned both the principles of social justice and the pretence of benign power, such a vision is compounded equally of melancholy and anarchic humour. Whether in the volume of poems with which he burst on the Bengali literary scene, Ei Mrityu Upatyaka Amar Desh Noy (This Valley of Death Is Not My Country, 1973), or in his first two novels, Harbart (1993) and Kangal Malsat (2003), Nabarun Bhattacharya sought to subvert the conventions of social realism that had ruled left-wing Bengali literary representation, replacing them by a rich medley of motifs taken from popular culture and occult practise, a language that freely employed slang and obscenity, and a vision of subaltern actors ascending to take their place in the sky as a tribe of Fyatarus, winged offenders against social propriety and complacency. The subversive task of the radical writer, as Nabarun sees it, is, thus, not to preach revolution, but to employ his aesthetics as a form of politics: to upset hierarchy by elevating the downtrodden, to unsettle bhadralok sensibility by scatological humour and to disenchant our technological urban utopias by imagining fantastic weapons of mass destruction.

In its choice of literary material as well as of critical themes, this book explores the many aspects of Nabaruns vision: its obsession with waste, filth and detritus, its focus on destruction and death, its vision of a dystopic city, its critique of class and caste and its use of language to subvert literary propriety. What is particularly striking, however, is its attention to a distinctive but little-explored aspect of his work, its post-humanist dissatisfaction with an anthropocentric universe, as expressed in a deep concern with the lives of non-human animals and of objects. Nabarun, always a cerebral and self-conscious writer, himself reflected on this concern, seeing itat least sometimesas a way of escape from the greed and rapacity of the human race that appears to have appointed itself the task of destroying our planet. In the novella