Skip to main content

Sourit Bhattacharya

University of Edinburgh, English Literature, Faculty Member

Presidency College, Department of English, Undergraduate

Jadavpur University, English, Graduate Student

Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta, Cultural Studies, Graduate Student

University of Warwick, English and Comparative Literary Studies, PhD Candidate

Indian Institute Of Technology, Roorkee, Humanities and Social Sciences, Faculty Member

Followers

610

Following

39

Co-authors

6

Public Views

Lecturer in Global Anglophone Literatures, University of Edinburgh
Former: Lecturer in Postcolonial Studies, University of Glasgow
Former: Assistant Professor in English, IIT Roorkee, India

Books:
* Postcolonial Modernity and the Indian Novel: On Catastrophic Realism (Palgrave, June 2020): https://www.palgrave.com/gp/book/9783030373962
* Nabarun Bhattacharya: Aesthetics and Politics in a World after Ethics (co-edited; Bloomsbury, July 2020): https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/nabarun-bhattacharya-9789388630511/
* Postcolonialism Now (Orient BlackSwan, 2023)

Co-editor, Sanglap: Journal of Literary and Cultural Inquiry 2014-
Address: Room 2.23
School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures
University of Edinburgh,
50 George Square
Edinburgh EH8 9LH

less

InterestsView All (38)

Uploads

Articles by Sourit Bhattacharya

“Postcolonial Disaster”: Purdah, Precarity, and Hunger in Abu Ishaque’s Surja Dighal Bari (The Ominous House)

South Asian Review, 2023

ABSTRACT The 1943 Bengal famine had severely changed the social landscape in rural Bengal. Thous... more ABSTRACT
The 1943 Bengal famine had severely changed the social landscape in rural Bengal. Thousands of peasants who mortgaged or sold their lands to the economic elite to migrate to Calcutta for food had to start over landless and precarious. Married women who were forcibly repudiated by their husbands (“talaq”) during the famine had to abide by the religious law of purdah (of keeping women at home) and accept death by hunger. Abu Ishaque’s 1955 novel, Surja Dighal Bari (The Ominous House) evocatively captures these harrowing moments of hunger and poverty in the majority rural population through the life-events of Jaigun and her family. The novel shows how a resilient single mother’s will to work and provide for her children is crushed by the male elite through religious injunctions and social alienation. In this essay, I will comment on the intersection of land, hunger, purdah, and patriarchy, reading them together as an instance of “postcolonial disaster,” which conspires to produce an endless condition of precarity for the socio-economically vulnerable in post-independence rural East Pakistan, and consequently a raw esthetic of realism in the postcolony.

Review Essay: Pallavi Rastogi, Postcolonial Disasters: Narrating Catastrophe in the Twenty-First Century

Comparative Literature and Culture, 2022

This review essay reads literary-critical works of what is broadly understood as ‘postcolonial di... more This review essay reads literary-critical works of what is broadly understood as ‘postcolonial disasters’. It outlines how literary critics in the last decades have drawn upon cultural-geographical and anthropological readings of disasters to develop critical frameworks around how literary writers have used style, form, and aesthetics to represent postcolonial catastrophes. It then offers a detailed review of Pallavi Rastogi’s 2020 monograph, Postcolonial Disasters: Narrating Catastrophe in the Twenty-First Century. Through an engaged and critical reading, the essay attends to Rastogi’s insightful theorizing of the topic of ‘Disaster Unconscious’ and her wide-ranging interrogation of fiction from South Asia and Southern Africa. Her committed exploration of the dialectic of story and event, the review offers, is a fine example of materialist literary criticism indicating the ethical and aesthetic urgency for close and comparative readings of postcolonial literatures of disaster.

Regional Ecologies and Peripheral Aesthetics in Indian Literature Tarashankar Bandyopadhyay s Hansuli Banker Upakatha

South Asian Review, 2021

Despite the wide availability of "regional novels" in India, academic scholarship in this area ha... more Despite the wide availability of "regional novels" in India, academic scholarship in this area has been surprisingly lacking.
For environmental literary scholars, this is unfortunate because
regional narratives compellingly capture the conflicts between
local social dynamics and global capitalist cultures, resulting in an
aesthetic that is ecologically sensitive and stylistically complex. In
this essay, I will first situate the Gandhian call for ruralism as an
important reason behind the rise of regional narratives in latecolonial India. Then, drawing from Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee’s
eco-materialism and recent scholarship in "peripheral realism," I
will show how the noted Bengali novelist Tarashankar
Bandyopadhyay in his classic Hansuli Banker Upakatha (1947/51;
The Tale of Hansuli Turn) historicizes the tragic fate of the Kahar
tribe in the face of colonial-capitalist developments in the rural
interiors of Bengal. Closely engaging with the complex narrative
structure of the novel, especially his pitting of a social realist narrative of "tradition versus modernity" against an experimental
style "upakatha" or tale, I will argue that Tarashankar’s literary peripherality is socio-ecologically aware and self-consciously political,
representative of world-literary aesthetics.

Writing Famine, Writing Empire: Food Crisis and Anticolonial Aesthetics in Liam O'Flaherty's Famine and Bhabani Bhattacharya's So Many Hungers!

Irish University Review, 2019

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the colonies controlled by the British, the Dutch, and... more In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the colonies controlled by the British, the Dutch, and other European countries witnessed a number of devastating famines. These famines did not solely arise for the ‘natural’ reasons of the shortage of rainfall or food availability problems, but were aggravated by the systemic imperialist exploitation of the world by these major European powers. Taking as its case study the two great famines in Ireland and India – the 1845–52 Irish Famine and the 1943–44 Bengal Famine – the essay offers a reading of Liam O'Flaherty's Famine (1937) and Bhabani Bhattacharya's So Many Hungers! (1947). It shows that these works – apart from registering the devastating impact of the famines on the colonial population – have pointed through their powerful uses of content, form, and style to the world-historical reasons of long-term agrarian crisis, political instability, tyranny of the landlord classes, inefficiency of the British Empire, and others as responsible for the famines.

Against his self, against his time: modernist aesthetic, post-war London, and the failure of imagination in J. M. Coetzee's Youth

Textual Practice, Apr 2017

J. M. Coetzee’s Youth (2002), born in the heated times of the reconciliation of races in South Af... more J. M. Coetzee’s Youth (2002), born in the heated times of the reconciliation of races in South Africa, has invited scholarship primarily on two areas: the problem of storytelling and the nature of place. Its predominant aspects, modernism, and post-war London have hardly been taken up for an analytical discussion on the issues of land, race, and storytelling. These aspects merit attention for three specific reasons: to understand the nature of exile for a white intellectual or artist from a peripheral colonial geography to a white metropolitan centre and the related notion of ‘real’ and ‘configured’ racial foreignness in post-war London; to comprehend the ‘evental’ in art and cityspace as against the everyday and the contemporary influenced by 1920s European modernism; and to see the masculinist aspect in such project, especially in relation to the problem of love. The essay concludes with the argument that the author’s repeated focus on the aspect of John’s conscious dismissal of his essentially Romantic nature for this modernist quest is a suggestion that art, entirely dissevered from contemporary social and political reality, is bound to be futile and failed.

Colonial Governance, Disaster, and the Social in Bhabani Bhattacharya's Novels of the 1943 Bengal Famine

ARIEL: An International Review of English Literature, 2016

How does a creative writer, situated in a geography of disaster, represent a disaster? Which area... more How does a creative writer, situated in a geography of disaster, represent a disaster? Which areas or factors of the disaster does he highlight and which does he ignore? What happens if that writer is also a professional historian, journalist, and social scientist? These are some of the questions that this essay asks through a reading of the representation of the 1943–44 Bengal famine in Bhabani Bhattacharya’s novels. The first section concerns the relations between late colonial governance, disaster, and violence in So Many Hungers! (1947), and the second analyses the roles of caste, law, and subaltern agency during this famine in He Who Rides a Tiger (1954). This essay argues that the Second World War, the class basis of the disaster, and the immediacy of suffering compelled Bhattacharya to write in a deeply analytical-ethnographic mode that also had to negotiate with the literary. By studying the novels’ representations of the economic, historical, and political elements of the era, this essay attempts to situate the wider horizons of the social in times of famine.

"Looking Back in Anger": Multiculturalism, Ethnicity and the Commodification of University Space in Ouyang Yu’s 'The Eastern Slope Chronicle’

Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities, Dec 2012

The article studies multiculturalism and ethnicity in Australia through the literary lens of the ... more The article studies multiculturalism and ethnicity in Australia through the literary lens of the Chinese-Australian writer, Ouyang Yu. His novel, "The Eastern Slope Chronicle," written from the embattled perspective of an international student’s difficult negotiation with the term “postcolonial,” throws a compulsive doubt into the case of official celebration of multiculturalism. Apart from primary engagement with central postcolonial issues like nationhood, foreign policy, repatriation, violence, and immigrant identity, the novel presents an embittered picture of the corporate packaging of the multicultural and postcolonial into the body of the diasporic student, inviting critical questions on the issues of university research, the category of the international student, and the commodification of love in a late-capitalist world.

The ‘Textual’ Subaltern: Locating ‘Subaltern’ Subjectivity and Praxis in the Postcolonial State

Literature Discipline and Power: Sherlock Holmes and the Crime Fiction

(This draft, ostensibly inspired by my enthusiasm for Foucault then, derives from a postgraduate ... more (This draft, ostensibly inspired by my enthusiasm for Foucault then, derives from a postgraduate special paper I wrote in 2010. The journal, Contemporary Discourse, part of the Literary Insight Forum, published from Maharashtra, India, was seeking brief development-of-thought papers in literary-critical studies. They accepted it. Unfortunately, I could not get time to develop it into a fuller article. Sometime in the future may be. Anyone interested in Sherlock Holmes studies or in crime fiction may find the directions, or the references, useful.)

This paper attempts to understand the rise of crime fiction in 19th C Britain as something integrally related to the importation of statistical reasoning and the rigorous practice of routine disciplining of the body in contemporary everyday life. Tracking Foucault's and Hacking's contributions, the paper situates the fictional figure of Sherlock Holmes in the dialogue between the normal and abnormal and the criminal and the detective, thereby inviting questions on the gaps in reason-making in everyday life in late-Victorian Britain.

Derridean Blinking: Reason and Animality in Kafka’s 'The Metamorphosis'

Rupkatha, Hingsha o Kothon: Mahasweta Devi’r 'Mahadu Ekti Rupkatha'

Book Chapters by Sourit Bhattacharya

The Postcolonial Afterlife in South Africa: AIDS, Xenophobia and Healing in Phaswane Mpe’s Welcome to Our Hillbrow

Contagion Narratives: The Society, Culture and Ecology of the Global South, edited by R. Sreejith Varma and Ajanta Sircar, New York: Routledge, 2023

The twentieth-century history of South Africa is marked by racist and colonialist laws of segrega... more The twentieth-century history of South Africa is marked by racist and colonialist laws of segregation and apartheid. The post-apartheid, ‘postcolonial afterlife’, instead of auguring a world of social justice and equality, has painfully witnessed, among other persistent ‘colonial’ problems, the crisis of AIDS epidemic. In this paper, I will show through scholarly engagement that there is nothing South African or African about this epidemic. Epidemics, in the last centuries, had a social and cultural history of travel often from European countries to the colonial world, which, via discourses of European civilisation and ‘western’ science, were rendered into problems of the colonies that European colonisers had to study and eradicate. In South Africa, colonial epidemics were understood to have been borne by poor back and Asian migrant workers in the mines which were used for the racist urban segregation laws that have crystallised into a postcolonial xenophobia in the globalised world. I will engage with these concerns through a close reading of content, style, and form of Phaswane Mpe’s short novel, 'Welcome to Our Hillbrow' (2001). I will further argue that Mpe’s novel envisions an overcoming of the ‘contagious community’ by a ‘community of healing’ through storytelling, talking, fellow feeling, and an empathetic solidarity.

Toxic Ecologies of the Global South: The Ecogothic in Nabarun Bhattacharya's Toy City

Nabarun Bhattacharya: Aesthetics and Politics in a World after Ethics, eds. Sourit Bhattacharya, Arka Chattopadhyay, and Samrat Sengupta (London and New Delhi: Bloomsbury), 2020

Nabarun Bhattacharya's novel, 'Toy City' (2004) is based on a small working-class habitat named K... more Nabarun Bhattacharya's novel, 'Toy City' (2004) is based on a small working-class habitat named Khelna Nagar or Toy City surrounding a now-defunct toy city factory from capitalist greed and nuclear detonation. Borrowing from environmental literary critics like Lawrence Buell, Rob Nixon, Sharae Deckard and others, I discuss here the toxic ecologies of the Global South, which, I argue, takes up the form of an ecogothic with fabular dimensions to reflect the ‘disposable’ nature of life and living in this part of the world.

Magic and Realism in South Asia

Cambridge Critical Concepts: Magical Realism and Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge UP), 2020

(This is an uncorrected proof copy. Please cite from the published book.) This chapter tracks the... more (This is an uncorrected proof copy. Please cite from the published book.)
This chapter tracks the development and use of magical realism in South Asia. It argues that realism in the colonial novel grew in a complex fashion, drawing upon elements from fables, myths, puranas and epics. The term's South Asian ‘boom‘ arises in the decolonized context, specifically in the political turmoil of the 1970s, and with the publication of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children. While the essay offers a through reading of the novel, it situates Rushdie alongside a host of lesser-known English and vernacular-language writers from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Further, it shows that beyond this time frame the term has been used by writers with tremendous heterogeneity to address social issues ranging from gender, caste, religion, ecology, identity, refugee movements and others. Offering a list of resources, the essay builds a much-needed archive on the vast and diverse examples of magical realism in South Asia.

Modernity, Catastrophe, and Realism in the Postcolonial Indian Novel

Postcolonial Modernity and the Indian Novel: On Catastrophic Realism (Palgrave), 2020

This is the introduction chapter of my monograph, "Postcolonial Modernity and the Indian Novel: O... more This is the introduction chapter of my monograph, "Postcolonial Modernity and the Indian Novel: On Catastrophic Realism (Palgrave 2020). The chapter argues that British colonialism in South Asia was marked by modernisation programmes of agriculture and industry. These programmes resulted in a long-term agrarian and food crisis which then led to a number of catastrophic events in the long twentieth century. The book is about three such events from India’s late-colonial and postcolonial periods—the 1943–1944 Bengal famine, the 1967–1972 Naxalbari movement, and the 1975–1977 national emergency. The chapter contends that these events are all linked with the historical crisis and yet distinct in their nature and orientation. It further argues that such a condition of relation through difference can be better understood via a reading of form and mode of the novels of these events. Showing that writers have predominantly used the realist form to represent the long-term historical crisis, the chapter then points to their employing a range of modes—from social realist, critical realist to metafictional, urban fantastic, gothic, and others (many of which are conventionally understood as anti-realist or non-realist). These modes have shaped their realisms into a deeply heterogeneous and dynamic form, and, in so doing, composed the aesthetic framework of catastrophe-prone, crisis-ridden condition of life and living in postcolonial India, which is called here as “catastrophic realism.” The chapter situates the link between crisis and event by drawing upon the works of Fredric Jameson, Veena Das, Shahid Amin, and Louis Althusser. Its take on catastrophic realism is mediated through a thorough reading of realism, form, and mode in the European and postcolonial/Indian contexts, where Sa’adat Hasan Manto’s pre- and post-partition stories are offered as examples.

The Question of Literary Form: Realism in the Poetry and the Theatre of the 1943 Bengal Famine

The Aesthetics and Politics of Global Hunger (eds. Manisha Basu and Anastasia Ulanowicz. New York: Palgrave), 2018

The 1943–1944 Bengal famine is a watershed in Indian history. Caused by a long-term crisis in agr... more The 1943–1944 Bengal famine is a watershed in Indian history. Caused by a long-term crisis in agriculture and economy in British South Asia and the immediate reasons of the Second World War, nationalist agitation, black-marketing practices, and so on, the famine reflected powerfully the contemporary socioeconomic questions, and shaped the literary-cultural productions in its wake. The writers of the famine attempted to understand the causes and effects of the disaster through their uses of literary content, form and style. Reading the works of Sukanta Bhattacharya and Bijan Bhattacharya, this chapter investigates how the poets and theatre artists spoke of the use of a realist literary vocabulary which would be able to address the suffering of its times, to analyze the historical reasons and material conditions responsible for the famine, and to mobilize a trenchant critique of colonialism, imperialism, and establishment politics.

The Margins of Postcolonial Urbanity: Reading Critical Irrealism in Nabarun Bhattacharya's Fiction

Postcolonial Urban Outcasts: City Margins in South Asian Literature (Eds. Madhurima Chakraborty and Umme Al Wazedi)

(From Intro para) This chapter discusses the dynamics of marginal space in the postcolonial city.... more (From Intro para) This chapter discusses the dynamics of marginal space in the postcolonial city. It looks at the way marginalized humans utilize the urban space and resist in significant ways the postcolonial state's imposition of the capitalistic logic of clearing the space for multinational investment and development. It situates what it considers to be the central contradiction within post-colonial urbanity: the thesis of rationality as against the practice of " irreal " activities. It takes the term "irreal" from the Marxist scholar, Michael Löwy, who separates it from the domain of "unreal" and "anti-real" and argues for a case of dissent and critique in the term's use. Through a reading of work on Indian modernity, anthropological findings by postcolonial scholars, and recent literary criticism on urban space, the chapter argues that "irreality" is integral to the dispensation and practice of space in the postcolonial urban world. For the literary part, the chapter reads the fictional work of Nabarun Bhattacharya (1948–2014), son of Mahasweta Devi and Bijon Bhattacharya, whose work centers around the margins of postcolonial society. It is argued here that he provides the urban poor with the "armory" of the spectral and the mysterious to fight the bourgeois weapon of instrumental rationality and class dominance. The deliberate narrative effort at blurring spaces, times, and processes of reason-making contributes to his empowering of the subaltern and the outcast, and push for a rethinking of the matrices of postcolonial urbanity and modernity.

Zygmunt Bauman: Liquid Modernity and Consumer Culture

Modern Social Thinkers, 2012

Locating ‘Subaltern’ In Literature: An Examination of Mahasweta Devi’s Tribal Novels and Stories

History in Literature/Literature as History, 2012

Conference Presentations by Sourit Bhattacharya

Disaster, Geography, and Literary Realism: Three Novels of the 1943/44 Bengal Famine

for the conference, 'Reframing Disaster,' 28-29 Nov, 2014, University of Leeds

“Postcolonial Disaster”: Purdah, Precarity, and Hunger in Abu Ishaque’s Surja Dighal Bari (The Ominous House)

South Asian Review, 2023

ABSTRACT The 1943 Bengal famine had severely changed the social landscape in rural Bengal. Thous... more ABSTRACT
The 1943 Bengal famine had severely changed the social landscape in rural Bengal. Thousands of peasants who mortgaged or sold their lands to the economic elite to migrate to Calcutta for food had to start over landless and precarious. Married women who were forcibly repudiated by their husbands (“talaq”) during the famine had to abide by the religious law of purdah (of keeping women at home) and accept death by hunger. Abu Ishaque’s 1955 novel, Surja Dighal Bari (The Ominous House) evocatively captures these harrowing moments of hunger and poverty in the majority rural population through the life-events of Jaigun and her family. The novel shows how a resilient single mother’s will to work and provide for her children is crushed by the male elite through religious injunctions and social alienation. In this essay, I will comment on the intersection of land, hunger, purdah, and patriarchy, reading them together as an instance of “postcolonial disaster,” which conspires to produce an endless condition of precarity for the socio-economically vulnerable in post-independence rural East Pakistan, and consequently a raw esthetic of realism in the postcolony.

Review Essay: Pallavi Rastogi, Postcolonial Disasters: Narrating Catastrophe in the Twenty-First Century

Comparative Literature and Culture, 2022

This review essay reads literary-critical works of what is broadly understood as ‘postcolonial di... more This review essay reads literary-critical works of what is broadly understood as ‘postcolonial disasters’. It outlines how literary critics in the last decades have drawn upon cultural-geographical and anthropological readings of disasters to develop critical frameworks around how literary writers have used style, form, and aesthetics to represent postcolonial catastrophes. It then offers a detailed review of Pallavi Rastogi’s 2020 monograph, Postcolonial Disasters: Narrating Catastrophe in the Twenty-First Century. Through an engaged and critical reading, the essay attends to Rastogi’s insightful theorizing of the topic of ‘Disaster Unconscious’ and her wide-ranging interrogation of fiction from South Asia and Southern Africa. Her committed exploration of the dialectic of story and event, the review offers, is a fine example of materialist literary criticism indicating the ethical and aesthetic urgency for close and comparative readings of postcolonial literatures of disaster.

Regional Ecologies and Peripheral Aesthetics in Indian Literature Tarashankar Bandyopadhyay s Hansuli Banker Upakatha

South Asian Review, 2021

Despite the wide availability of "regional novels" in India, academic scholarship in this area ha... more Despite the wide availability of "regional novels" in India, academic scholarship in this area has been surprisingly lacking.
For environmental literary scholars, this is unfortunate because
regional narratives compellingly capture the conflicts between
local social dynamics and global capitalist cultures, resulting in an
aesthetic that is ecologically sensitive and stylistically complex. In
this essay, I will first situate the Gandhian call for ruralism as an
important reason behind the rise of regional narratives in latecolonial India. Then, drawing from Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee’s
eco-materialism and recent scholarship in "peripheral realism," I
will show how the noted Bengali novelist Tarashankar
Bandyopadhyay in his classic Hansuli Banker Upakatha (1947/51;
The Tale of Hansuli Turn) historicizes the tragic fate of the Kahar
tribe in the face of colonial-capitalist developments in the rural
interiors of Bengal. Closely engaging with the complex narrative
structure of the novel, especially his pitting of a social realist narrative of "tradition versus modernity" against an experimental
style "upakatha" or tale, I will argue that Tarashankar’s literary peripherality is socio-ecologically aware and self-consciously political,
representative of world-literary aesthetics.

Writing Famine, Writing Empire: Food Crisis and Anticolonial Aesthetics in Liam O'Flaherty's Famine and Bhabani Bhattacharya's So Many Hungers!

Irish University Review, 2019

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the colonies controlled by the British, the Dutch, and... more In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the colonies controlled by the British, the Dutch, and other European countries witnessed a number of devastating famines. These famines did not solely arise for the ‘natural’ reasons of the shortage of rainfall or food availability problems, but were aggravated by the systemic imperialist exploitation of the world by these major European powers. Taking as its case study the two great famines in Ireland and India – the 1845–52 Irish Famine and the 1943–44 Bengal Famine – the essay offers a reading of Liam O'Flaherty's Famine (1937) and Bhabani Bhattacharya's So Many Hungers! (1947). It shows that these works – apart from registering the devastating impact of the famines on the colonial population – have pointed through their powerful uses of content, form, and style to the world-historical reasons of long-term agrarian crisis, political instability, tyranny of the landlord classes, inefficiency of the British Empire, and others as responsible for the famines.

Against his self, against his time: modernist aesthetic, post-war London, and the failure of imagination in J. M. Coetzee's Youth

Textual Practice, Apr 2017

J. M. Coetzee’s Youth (2002), born in the heated times of the reconciliation of races in South Af... more J. M. Coetzee’s Youth (2002), born in the heated times of the reconciliation of races in South Africa, has invited scholarship primarily on two areas: the problem of storytelling and the nature of place. Its predominant aspects, modernism, and post-war London have hardly been taken up for an analytical discussion on the issues of land, race, and storytelling. These aspects merit attention for three specific reasons: to understand the nature of exile for a white intellectual or artist from a peripheral colonial geography to a white metropolitan centre and the related notion of ‘real’ and ‘configured’ racial foreignness in post-war London; to comprehend the ‘evental’ in art and cityspace as against the everyday and the contemporary influenced by 1920s European modernism; and to see the masculinist aspect in such project, especially in relation to the problem of love. The essay concludes with the argument that the author’s repeated focus on the aspect of John’s conscious dismissal of his essentially Romantic nature for this modernist quest is a suggestion that art, entirely dissevered from contemporary social and political reality, is bound to be futile and failed.

Colonial Governance, Disaster, and the Social in Bhabani Bhattacharya's Novels of the 1943 Bengal Famine

ARIEL: An International Review of English Literature, 2016

How does a creative writer, situated in a geography of disaster, represent a disaster? Which area... more How does a creative writer, situated in a geography of disaster, represent a disaster? Which areas or factors of the disaster does he highlight and which does he ignore? What happens if that writer is also a professional historian, journalist, and social scientist? These are some of the questions that this essay asks through a reading of the representation of the 1943–44 Bengal famine in Bhabani Bhattacharya’s novels. The first section concerns the relations between late colonial governance, disaster, and violence in So Many Hungers! (1947), and the second analyses the roles of caste, law, and subaltern agency during this famine in He Who Rides a Tiger (1954). This essay argues that the Second World War, the class basis of the disaster, and the immediacy of suffering compelled Bhattacharya to write in a deeply analytical-ethnographic mode that also had to negotiate with the literary. By studying the novels’ representations of the economic, historical, and political elements of the era, this essay attempts to situate the wider horizons of the social in times of famine.

"Looking Back in Anger": Multiculturalism, Ethnicity and the Commodification of University Space in Ouyang Yu’s 'The Eastern Slope Chronicle’

Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities, Dec 2012

The article studies multiculturalism and ethnicity in Australia through the literary lens of the ... more The article studies multiculturalism and ethnicity in Australia through the literary lens of the Chinese-Australian writer, Ouyang Yu. His novel, "The Eastern Slope Chronicle," written from the embattled perspective of an international student’s difficult negotiation with the term “postcolonial,” throws a compulsive doubt into the case of official celebration of multiculturalism. Apart from primary engagement with central postcolonial issues like nationhood, foreign policy, repatriation, violence, and immigrant identity, the novel presents an embittered picture of the corporate packaging of the multicultural and postcolonial into the body of the diasporic student, inviting critical questions on the issues of university research, the category of the international student, and the commodification of love in a late-capitalist world.

The ‘Textual’ Subaltern: Locating ‘Subaltern’ Subjectivity and Praxis in the Postcolonial State

Literature Discipline and Power: Sherlock Holmes and the Crime Fiction

(This draft, ostensibly inspired by my enthusiasm for Foucault then, derives from a postgraduate ... more (This draft, ostensibly inspired by my enthusiasm for Foucault then, derives from a postgraduate special paper I wrote in 2010. The journal, Contemporary Discourse, part of the Literary Insight Forum, published from Maharashtra, India, was seeking brief development-of-thought papers in literary-critical studies. They accepted it. Unfortunately, I could not get time to develop it into a fuller article. Sometime in the future may be. Anyone interested in Sherlock Holmes studies or in crime fiction may find the directions, or the references, useful.)

This paper attempts to understand the rise of crime fiction in 19th C Britain as something integrally related to the importation of statistical reasoning and the rigorous practice of routine disciplining of the body in contemporary everyday life. Tracking Foucault's and Hacking's contributions, the paper situates the fictional figure of Sherlock Holmes in the dialogue between the normal and abnormal and the criminal and the detective, thereby inviting questions on the gaps in reason-making in everyday life in late-Victorian Britain.

Derridean Blinking: Reason and Animality in Kafka’s 'The Metamorphosis'

Rupkatha, Hingsha o Kothon: Mahasweta Devi’r 'Mahadu Ekti Rupkatha'

The Postcolonial Afterlife in South Africa: AIDS, Xenophobia and Healing in Phaswane Mpe’s Welcome to Our Hillbrow

Contagion Narratives: The Society, Culture and Ecology of the Global South, edited by R. Sreejith Varma and Ajanta Sircar, New York: Routledge, 2023

The twentieth-century history of South Africa is marked by racist and colonialist laws of segrega... more The twentieth-century history of South Africa is marked by racist and colonialist laws of segregation and apartheid. The post-apartheid, ‘postcolonial afterlife’, instead of auguring a world of social justice and equality, has painfully witnessed, among other persistent ‘colonial’ problems, the crisis of AIDS epidemic. In this paper, I will show through scholarly engagement that there is nothing South African or African about this epidemic. Epidemics, in the last centuries, had a social and cultural history of travel often from European countries to the colonial world, which, via discourses of European civilisation and ‘western’ science, were rendered into problems of the colonies that European colonisers had to study and eradicate. In South Africa, colonial epidemics were understood to have been borne by poor back and Asian migrant workers in the mines which were used for the racist urban segregation laws that have crystallised into a postcolonial xenophobia in the globalised world. I will engage with these concerns through a close reading of content, style, and form of Phaswane Mpe’s short novel, 'Welcome to Our Hillbrow' (2001). I will further argue that Mpe’s novel envisions an overcoming of the ‘contagious community’ by a ‘community of healing’ through storytelling, talking, fellow feeling, and an empathetic solidarity.

Toxic Ecologies of the Global South: The Ecogothic in Nabarun Bhattacharya's Toy City

Nabarun Bhattacharya: Aesthetics and Politics in a World after Ethics, eds. Sourit Bhattacharya, Arka Chattopadhyay, and Samrat Sengupta (London and New Delhi: Bloomsbury), 2020

Nabarun Bhattacharya's novel, 'Toy City' (2004) is based on a small working-class habitat named K... more Nabarun Bhattacharya's novel, 'Toy City' (2004) is based on a small working-class habitat named Khelna Nagar or Toy City surrounding a now-defunct toy city factory from capitalist greed and nuclear detonation. Borrowing from environmental literary critics like Lawrence Buell, Rob Nixon, Sharae Deckard and others, I discuss here the toxic ecologies of the Global South, which, I argue, takes up the form of an ecogothic with fabular dimensions to reflect the ‘disposable’ nature of life and living in this part of the world.

Magic and Realism in South Asia

Cambridge Critical Concepts: Magical Realism and Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge UP), 2020

(This is an uncorrected proof copy. Please cite from the published book.) This chapter tracks the... more (This is an uncorrected proof copy. Please cite from the published book.)
This chapter tracks the development and use of magical realism in South Asia. It argues that realism in the colonial novel grew in a complex fashion, drawing upon elements from fables, myths, puranas and epics. The term's South Asian ‘boom‘ arises in the decolonized context, specifically in the political turmoil of the 1970s, and with the publication of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children. While the essay offers a through reading of the novel, it situates Rushdie alongside a host of lesser-known English and vernacular-language writers from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Further, it shows that beyond this time frame the term has been used by writers with tremendous heterogeneity to address social issues ranging from gender, caste, religion, ecology, identity, refugee movements and others. Offering a list of resources, the essay builds a much-needed archive on the vast and diverse examples of magical realism in South Asia.

Modernity, Catastrophe, and Realism in the Postcolonial Indian Novel

Postcolonial Modernity and the Indian Novel: On Catastrophic Realism (Palgrave), 2020

This is the introduction chapter of my monograph, "Postcolonial Modernity and the Indian Novel: O... more This is the introduction chapter of my monograph, "Postcolonial Modernity and the Indian Novel: On Catastrophic Realism (Palgrave 2020). The chapter argues that British colonialism in South Asia was marked by modernisation programmes of agriculture and industry. These programmes resulted in a long-term agrarian and food crisis which then led to a number of catastrophic events in the long twentieth century. The book is about three such events from India’s late-colonial and postcolonial periods—the 1943–1944 Bengal famine, the 1967–1972 Naxalbari movement, and the 1975–1977 national emergency. The chapter contends that these events are all linked with the historical crisis and yet distinct in their nature and orientation. It further argues that such a condition of relation through difference can be better understood via a reading of form and mode of the novels of these events. Showing that writers have predominantly used the realist form to represent the long-term historical crisis, the chapter then points to their employing a range of modes—from social realist, critical realist to metafictional, urban fantastic, gothic, and others (many of which are conventionally understood as anti-realist or non-realist). These modes have shaped their realisms into a deeply heterogeneous and dynamic form, and, in so doing, composed the aesthetic framework of catastrophe-prone, crisis-ridden condition of life and living in postcolonial India, which is called here as “catastrophic realism.” The chapter situates the link between crisis and event by drawing upon the works of Fredric Jameson, Veena Das, Shahid Amin, and Louis Althusser. Its take on catastrophic realism is mediated through a thorough reading of realism, form, and mode in the European and postcolonial/Indian contexts, where Sa’adat Hasan Manto’s pre- and post-partition stories are offered as examples.

The Question of Literary Form: Realism in the Poetry and the Theatre of the 1943 Bengal Famine

The Aesthetics and Politics of Global Hunger (eds. Manisha Basu and Anastasia Ulanowicz. New York: Palgrave), 2018

The 1943–1944 Bengal famine is a watershed in Indian history. Caused by a long-term crisis in agr... more The 1943–1944 Bengal famine is a watershed in Indian history. Caused by a long-term crisis in agriculture and economy in British South Asia and the immediate reasons of the Second World War, nationalist agitation, black-marketing practices, and so on, the famine reflected powerfully the contemporary socioeconomic questions, and shaped the literary-cultural productions in its wake. The writers of the famine attempted to understand the causes and effects of the disaster through their uses of literary content, form and style. Reading the works of Sukanta Bhattacharya and Bijan Bhattacharya, this chapter investigates how the poets and theatre artists spoke of the use of a realist literary vocabulary which would be able to address the suffering of its times, to analyze the historical reasons and material conditions responsible for the famine, and to mobilize a trenchant critique of colonialism, imperialism, and establishment politics.

The Margins of Postcolonial Urbanity: Reading Critical Irrealism in Nabarun Bhattacharya's Fiction

Postcolonial Urban Outcasts: City Margins in South Asian Literature (Eds. Madhurima Chakraborty and Umme Al Wazedi)

(From Intro para) This chapter discusses the dynamics of marginal space in the postcolonial city.... more (From Intro para) This chapter discusses the dynamics of marginal space in the postcolonial city. It looks at the way marginalized humans utilize the urban space and resist in significant ways the postcolonial state's imposition of the capitalistic logic of clearing the space for multinational investment and development. It situates what it considers to be the central contradiction within post-colonial urbanity: the thesis of rationality as against the practice of " irreal " activities. It takes the term "irreal" from the Marxist scholar, Michael Löwy, who separates it from the domain of "unreal" and "anti-real" and argues for a case of dissent and critique in the term's use. Through a reading of work on Indian modernity, anthropological findings by postcolonial scholars, and recent literary criticism on urban space, the chapter argues that "irreality" is integral to the dispensation and practice of space in the postcolonial urban world. For the literary part, the chapter reads the fictional work of Nabarun Bhattacharya (1948–2014), son of Mahasweta Devi and Bijon Bhattacharya, whose work centers around the margins of postcolonial society. It is argued here that he provides the urban poor with the "armory" of the spectral and the mysterious to fight the bourgeois weapon of instrumental rationality and class dominance. The deliberate narrative effort at blurring spaces, times, and processes of reason-making contributes to his empowering of the subaltern and the outcast, and push for a rethinking of the matrices of postcolonial urbanity and modernity.

Zygmunt Bauman: Liquid Modernity and Consumer Culture

Modern Social Thinkers, 2012

Locating ‘Subaltern’ In Literature: An Examination of Mahasweta Devi’s Tribal Novels and Stories

History in Literature/Literature as History, 2012

Disaster, Geography, and Literary Realism: Three Novels of the 1943/44 Bengal Famine

for the conference, 'Reframing Disaster,' 28-29 Nov, 2014, University of Leeds

The Naxalite Movement and Diaspora: The Historical in Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Lowland and Neel Mukherjee’s The Lives of Others

It is interesting to note that the shortlisted novels in the last two years for the Man Booker Pr... more It is interesting to note that the shortlisted novels in the last two years for the Man Booker Prize had one thing in common: a Bengali "diaspora" writer telling us a story of the Naxalite uprising in the 1960s West Bengal (India). Jhumpa Lahiri's The Lowland (2013) situates diasporic strategies in migration, home, and disturbing family relations in "foreign lands," while Neel Mukherjee's The Lives of Others (2014) brings up the diasporic through the geographical location of the writer himself (Mukherjee now lives in London), let alone the constrictive and liberatory use of space in his novel.

Book Review: What Postcolonial Theory Doesn't Say (Routledge, 2016)

Book Review: Realism in the Twentieth-Century Indian Novel: Colonial Difference and Literary Form by Ulka Anjaria (Cambridge UP, 2012)

How was literary realism introduced to the Colony? Was it derivative in form or were there disrup... more How was literary realism introduced to the Colony? Was it derivative in form or were there disruptions made into it? Was realism passively determined by the political energies of the times or did it actively inform the radical qualities within politics and help constitute the individual’s
differential relations with the nation? These are some of the questions that Ulka Anjaria raises in her book, Realism in the Twentieth-Century Indian Novel.

Book Review: Natural Disasters and Victorian Empire: Famines, Fevers and the Literary Cultures of South Asia by Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee (Palgrave, 2013)

South Asian History and Culture (DOI: 10.1080/19472498.2015.1063219)

SANGLAP CFP 2020: Genres in Literature

by Arka Chattopadhyay and Sourit Bhattacharya

Sanglap CFP, 2020

Discussing the epic and the novel, Mikhail Bakhtin refers to a "historical struggle of genres" th... more Discussing the epic and the novel, Mikhail Bakhtin refers to a "historical struggle of genres" that underwrites "the establishment and growth of a generic skeleton of literature." Literature as a diverse discursive domain consists of various forms and genres that shape and functionalize it. There is a thin line between specific literary forms and genres. Is novel a form or genre? If novel is a form, we can think of particular genres of the novel such as gothic, whodunit, comedy, historical drama and so on. On the other hand, if novel is a genre, there are literary forms such as realism, naturalism, pastiche, parody, etc. Be it the Platonic notion of the 'genera' or the literary idea of genre which thrives on particular conventions, codes, or raising and playing with specific readerly expectations, genre is not an exclusively literary concept. Bakhtin, Todorov and others have talked about genres in speech and discourse in general, while the term has seen purchase in life sciences, taxonomy, politics, as well as social studies.

ACLA 2019 CFP: Does the Untranslated Travel: Towards a Regional World Literature

by Arka Chattopadhyay and Sourit Bhattacharya

The session will delve into the possibility of treating untranslated regional literature across t... more The session will delve into the possibility of treating untranslated regional literature across the world as world literature and hence the titular question: does the untranslated travel? The predominant framework of 'world literature' is premised on translation where only translated texts travel across cultures to be worthy of the appellation, world literature. Against the grain of this Anglocentric and monolingual edifice, the seminar suggests that even an untranslated text can travel and become an important case study for world literature, if it addresses questions that go beyond regional, ethnic and national boundaries to echo transcultural experiences and motifs. The inherently multilingual literary cultures of South Asia, for example, extend this point about vernacularizing world literature as a political mode of reading. At a deeper level, we have to ask, what language we perceive our 'worlds' in. If a regional subject thinks in a regional language, which is one of the many languages spoken in her nation and acquires a notion of the world in that tongue, the literature, she composes, has an appeal to her understanding of the world. Is the resultant text an instance of world literature? This is a question about the coupling of language and the subjective and cultural/material experience of 'worlding.' How is the 'world' of world literature different from regional content to a normatively Anglophone material? We will also displace the notions of travel and circulation, endemic to world literature, from the plane of language to that of idea and matter. In other words, can ideas travel across cultures without linguistic translation? Can matters or material situations expressed in ideas be 'worldly'? For example, a text which is rooted in the material specificity of a particular region and written in a regional language, can still have a material extension into the 'world.' How is this regionally grounded arrival at the notion of the 'world' different from an Anglophone translation, deemed as world literature in the standard sense of the term? When the region travels to the world or inheres the world within itself, or better still, makes an inductive gesture towards the world, it is a materiality that travels and circulates without their being any linguistic translation. These points beg the question whether an untranslated regional text, marked by a trans-national idea or materiality can be significant in a discussion of world literature. The session hopes to tackle the varied nuances of this question through readings of untranslated regional literatures from across the world. Some possible topics could be: Worlds of World Literature

CFP: Why World Literature? (Deadline May 15, 2017)

by Sourit Bhattacharya and Arka Chattopadhyay

What is the ‘world’ of world literature? How can this ‘world’ pose a challenge to or offer a mode... more What is the ‘world’ of world literature? How can this ‘world’ pose a challenge to or offer a model of critique for the ideology of globalisation? How does world literature’s accent on the circulation of literature reflect back on the content that gets circulated? If world literature underlines literary circulation, how do we consider the role of technology as a means of instant global circulation? What does it mean to create literature in the world which is also of the world in the current realities of Brexit and Trump when the very notion of the world is eaten up by heterogeneous zones of conflict? Can a local, untranslated, and little-circulated text have ‘world’ features?

CFP Sanglap Journal 2.2 Literature and Censorship (Deadline Sep 30, 2015)

CFP Peripheral Aesthetics and World Literature

CFP for Sanglap Vol 2 No 1: Speculation and Fiction

by Arka Chattopadhyay and Sourit Bhattacharya

This is a CFP for Sanglap: Journal of Literary and Cultural Inquiry (https://sanglap-journal.in/) ... more This is a CFP for Sanglap: Journal of Literary and Cultural Inquiry (https://sanglap-journal.in/) an open access bi-annual peer-reviewed academic journal. We are preparing for an issue on Speculation and Fiction in July 2015.

Prospective papers addressing the issue should be sent to [email protected] by April 30, 2015. The decisions will be communicated to the authors by June 30, 2015. The papers should be between 4000 and 7000 words in length excluding notes and references, sent along with an abstract not exceeding 200 words and five or six keywords. For further information on style and guidelines, please log on to: https://sanglap-journal.in/

Sanglap CFP: Literature and Censorship (Vol 2 Issue 2)

by Sourit Bhattacharya and Arka Chattopadhyay

ECSAS2016 Panel: Peripheral Modernity and South Asian Literary-World

by Sourit Bhattacharya and Priyanka Basu

This is a conference panel, jointly held by Sourit Bhattacharya (University of Warwick) and Priya... more

Democracy, Resistance and the Practice of Literature: Introduction, co-written by Sourit Bhattacharya

by Sourit Bhattacharya and Arka Chattopadhyay

This is our second joint introduction from the 2014 Sanglap issue (Vol 2: Issue 1) on Democracy, ... more

Speculation and Fiction: Introduction, co-written by Sourit Bhattacharya

by Sourit Bhattacharya and Arka Chattopadhyay

Our third joint introduction for Sanglap's third issue (Vol 2: Issue 1) on Speculation and Fiction

Nabarun Bhattacharya: An Introduction, co-written by Sourit Bhattacharya

by Sourit Bhattacharya and Arka Chattopadhyay

Our fourth joint introduction for Sanglap's 2015 special memorial supplement on the Indian Bengal... more

Critiquing Humanism: Introductory Conversations

by Arka Chattopadhyay and Sourit Bhattacharya

A joint introduction to Sanglap 3.1 (August 2016) Critiquing Humanism

Censorship and Literature: Introductory Responses

by Sourit Bhattacharya and Arka Chattopadhyay

The intro to our latest Sanglap issue on Censorship and Literature (2:2, 2016)

Provincializing World Literature: Multilingualism, Resistance and Literary Internationals Seminar organizer: Dr Neelam Srivastava

by Neelam Srivastava, Ruth Bush, Sourit Bhattacharya, and Maryam Mirza

World literature has become hegemonic in the English humanities, subsuming postcolonial, minority... more World literature has become hegemonic in the English humanities, subsuming postcolonial, minority, and 'Anglophone' writing into its capacious remit. Influential narratives of the field favour a systematic approach, in which the centre-periphery model reigns supreme. The premise of this panel is that if world literature can be conceived as a corpus of texts that rise to planetary status through a literary market whose mechanisms of selection and gate-keeping rely on the university, prize culture, and a multinational publishing industry, its interpretative paradigms need to move beyond the analysis of the hierarchies of international capital to include language and translation. This panel invites papers exploring alternatives to world literature studies in the criticism of contemporary texts. The aim is to question world literature as a (mappable) system, one that uncannily echoes the " EU-niversalization " of global literary publishing, marked by the dominance of the Anglophone novel. Prevailing models of " world literature " often separate the literary from the political. For Pascale Casanova, literary internationalism means " standing united against literary nationalism, against the intrusion of politics into literary life ". This panel seeks to set the idea of an internationalist literature and Casanova's " literary internationalism " against each other. In our reading, internationalist literature is premised on a multilingual literary sphere in which translation plays a prominent role. Decolonization struggles show that revolution and culture are interdependent , and that resistance is translatable across different contexts. We welcome proposals that train their gaze on a different temporality, namely on short-lived, topical, and/or politically oriented literature, often produced with little to no infrastructure. By eschewing a fixation with " universal " literary values, we aim to revalue the contingent and political imperatives of the historical " moment ". Such an emphasis would offer a riposte to the center-periphery model, shifting it instead to the vital South-South alliances that permitted the formation of " literary internationals " in the period of decolonization and after —alliances which appear to have been largely forgotten in contemporary theorizations of the world-literary field. Paper topics might include, but are not limited to: • Alternative theoretical models to " world literature " • " Resistance literature " (e.g. protest poetry, Dalit writing) • The role of radical/independent presses in disseminating anti-imperialist and marginal writings; • Anti-colonial/Third-Worldist periodical culture (e.g. Présence Africaine, Lotus: Afro-Asian Writings, El Moudjahid) • Internationalist networks during colonialism and decolonization that fostered the emergence of a " resistance " aesthetics, such as Congresses of Black Writers and Artists, All-India Progressive Writers' Association, PEN • The role of translation in disseminating literature in non-metropolitan languages Deadline for submitting paper proposals: September 23, 2016 ACLA website: https://www.acla.org/

Pallavi Rastogi, Postcolonial Disasters: Narrating Catastrophe in the Twenty-First Century (2020): Review Essay

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Dedicated to the dissemination of scholarly and professional information, Purdue University Press... more Dedicated to the dissemination of scholarly and professional information, Purdue University Press selects, develops, and distributes quality resources in several key subject areas for which its parent university is famous, including business, technology, health, veterinary medicine, and other selected disciplines in the humanities and sciences. CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, the peer-reviewed, full-text, and open-access learned journal in the humanities and social sciences, publishes new scholarship following tenets of the discipline of comparative literature and the field of cultural studies designated as "comparative cultural studies." Publications in the journal are indexed in the Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature (Chadwyck-Healey), the Arts and Humanities Citation Index (Thomson Reuters ISI), the Humanities Index (Wilson), Humanities International Complete (EBSCO), the International Bibliography of the Modern Language Association of America, and Scopus (Elsevier). The journal is affiliated with the Purdue University Press monograph series of Books in Comparative Cultural Studies. Contact:

Magic and Realism in South Asia

Magical Realism and Literature

Magical realism is a world literary genre that stages and enables radical crossing of illicit bou... more Magical realism is a world literary genre that stages and enables radical crossing of illicit boundaries. Intradiegetically, the mode explores questions of faith on the same ontological level as rationality. In the Arabic and Hebrew-Mizrahi contexts, magical realism serves to puncture the purportedly rational language of the state with the fantastic as a vehicle of minoritarian empowerment. These texts narrate subaltern histories without constantly reproducing the hegemonic language of Othering and subjugation. They disrupt dominant national, ethnic, religious, racial and gender historiographies and ontologies in their respective contexts, but this disruption is all the more powerful when Arabic and Hebrew texts are placed in relation extradiegetically. The networks of relationality created by this dual reading allow us to see ‘Arabness’ with the proverbial third eye – from the positions of minority and majority simultaneously, thereby allowing for a complex, textured and multifaceted understanding of its identitarian and performative meanings.

Censorship and Literature

The Oxford English Dictionary defines censorship as “the suppression or prohibition of any parts ... more The Oxford English Dictionary defines censorship as “the suppression or prohibition of any parts of books, films, news, etc. that are considered obscene, politically unacceptable, or a threat to security.”1 There is at least a two-fold meaning in this definition: first, certain factors give rise to censorship including obscenity, security, etc.

I don’t need to fear, do I?

Biren was one of those people, you come across or talk to almost every day and then forget immedi... more

Be it Irfan or Mandol’s, whosoever’s country liquor-shack it is, there are days when there is no ... more

Fyataru by Nabarun Bhattacharya [translation]

Sanglap, Aug 1, 2015

Literature, discipline, and power: Sherlock Holmes and the crime fiction

Higher Education and Research Society, 2011

No abstract available

Nuclear Winter, translation by Sourit Bhattacharya

Bloomsbury India, Sep 30, 2020

No abstract available

Machines, discipline and the excess: reading Kafka’s In The Penal Colony

Barloni Books, 2012

No abstract available

Regional ecologies and peripheral aesthetics: Tarashankar Bandyopadhyay’s The Tale of Hansuli Turn

Taylor and Francis, Jun 1, 2021

Abstract Despite the wide availability of "regional novels" in India, academic scholars... more Abstract Despite the wide availability of "regional novels" in India, academic scholarship in this area has been surprisingly lacking. For environmental literary scholars, this is unfortunate because regional narratives compellingly capture the conflicts between local social dynamics and global capitalist cultures, resulting in an aesthetic that is ecologically sensitive and stylistically complex. In this essay, I will first situate the Gandhian call for ruralism as an important reason behind the rise of regional narratives in late-colonial India. Then, drawing from Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee's eco-materialism and recent scholarship in "peripheral realism," I will show how the noted Bengali novelist Tarashankar Bandyopadhyay in his classic Hansuli Banker Upakatha (1947/51; The Tale of Hansuli Turn) historicizes the tragic fate of the Kahar tribe in the face of colonial-capitalist developments in the rural interiors of Bengal. Closely engaging with the complex narrative structure of the novel, especially his pitting of a social realist narrative of "tradition versus modernity" against an experimental style "upakatha" or tale, I will argue that Tarashankar's literary peripherality is socio-ecologically aware and self-consciously political, representative of world-literary aesthetics.

Zygmunt Bauman: liquid modernity and consumer culture

Setu Prakashani, 2012

No abstract available

Rupkatha, Hingsha o Kothon: Mahasweta Devi’r Mahadu Ekti Rupkatha (Fairytales Violence, and Narration: Mahasweta Devi’s ‘Mahadu Ekti Rupkatha)

Chiranjib Sur, 2013

No abstract available

The invisible process of governing

No abstract available

Derridean blinking: reason and animality in Kafka’s The Metamorphosis

No abstract available

Toxic Ecologies of the Global South: The Ecogothic in Nabarun Bhattacharya's Toy City

Nabarun Bhattacharya, 2020

No abstract available

Regional Ecologies and Peripheral Aesthetics in Indian Literature: Tarashankar Bandyopadhyay’s Hansuli Banker Upakatha

South Asian Review, 2021

Despite the wide availability of "regional novels" in India, academic scholarship in th... more Despite the wide availability of "regional novels" in India, academic scholarship in this area has been surprisingly lacking. For environmental literary scholars, this is unfortunate because regional narratives compellingly capture the conflicts between local social dynamics and global capitalist cultures, resulting in an aesthetic that is ecologically sensitive and stylistically complex. In this essay, I will first situate the Gandhian call for ruralism as an important reason behind the rise of regional narratives in late-colonial India. Then, drawing from Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee's eco-materialism and recent scholarship in "peripheral realism," I will show how the noted Bengali novelist Tarashankar Bandyopadhyay in his classic Hansuli Banker Upakatha (1947/51; The Tale of Hansuli Turn) historicizes the tragic fate of the Kahar tribe in the face of colonial-capitalist developments in the rural interiors of Bengal. Closely engaging with the complex narrative ...

Writing Famine, Writing Empire: Food Crisis and Anticolonial Aesthetics in Liam O'Flaherty's Famine and Bhabani Bhattacharya's So Many Hungers!

Irish University Review, 2019

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the colonies controlled by the British, the Dutch, and... more In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the colonies controlled by the British, the Dutch, and other European countries witnessed a number of devastating famines. These famines did not solely arise for the ‘natural’ reasons of the shortage of rainfall or food availability problems, but were aggravated by the systemic imperialist exploitation of the world by these major European powers. Taking as its case study the two great famines in Ireland and India – the 1845–52 Irish Famine and the 1943–44 Bengal Famine – the essay offers a reading of Liam O'Flaherty's Famine (1937) and Bhabani Bhattacharya's So Many Hungers! (1947). It shows that these works – apart from registering the devastating impact of the famines on the colonial population – have pointed through their powerful uses of content, form, and style to the world-historical reasons of long-term agrarian crisis, political instability, tyranny of the landlord classes, inefficiency of the British Empire, and others ...

Modernity, Catastrophe, and Realism in the Postcolonial Indian Novel

Postcolonial Modernity and the Indian Novel, 2020

British colonialism in South Asia was marked by modernisation programmes of agriculture and indus... more British colonialism in South Asia was marked by modernisation programmes of agriculture and industry. These programmes resulted in a long-term agrarian and food crisis which then led to a number of catastrophic events in the long twentieth century. The present book is about three such events from India’s late-colonial and postcolonial periods—the 1943–1944 Bengal famine, the 1967–1972 Naxalbari movement, and the 1975–1977 national emergency. It argues that these events are all linked with the historical crisis and yet distinct in their nature and orientation. The chapter contends that such a condition of relation through difference can be better understood via a reading of form and mode of the novels of these events. It shows that writers have predominantly used the realist form to represent the long-term historical crisis, while they have employed a range of modes—from social realist, critical realist to metafictional, urban fantastic, gothic, and others (many of which are conventi...

The aporia of postcolonial governance: biopolitical operations and the possibility in literature

The margins of postcolonial urbanity: reading critical irrealism in Nabarun Bhattacharya's fiction

This chapter discusses the dynamics of marginal space in the postcolonial city. It looks at the w... more This chapter discusses the dynamics of marginal space in the postcolonial city. It looks at the way marginalized humans utilize the urban space and resist in signicant ways the postcolonial state’s imposition of the capitalistic logic of clearing the space for multinational investment and development. It situates what it considers to be the central contradiction within postcolonial urbanity: the thesis of rationality as against the practice of “irreal” activities. It takes the term “irreal” from the Marxist scholar, Michael Lowy, who separates it from the domain of “unreal” and “anti-real” and argues for a case of dissent and critique in the term’s use. Through a reading of work on Indian modernity, anthropological ndings by postcolonial scholars, and recent literary criticism on urban space, the chapter argues that “irreality” is integral to the dispensation and practice of space in the postcolonial urban world. The literary writings on postcolonial urbanity that specically highlig...

Nabarun Bhattacharya: Aesthetics and Politics in a World after Ethics

by Arka Chattopadhyay and Sourit Bhattacharya

Nabarun Bhattacharya Aesthetics and Politics in a World after Ethics, 2020

The book aims to introduce the Bengali writer (1948-2014) to a global audience through some of hi... more The book aims to introduce the Bengali writer (1948-2014) to a global audience through some of his short stories and poems in English translation and a series of critical essays on his works. A political commitment to literature frames Nabarun Bhattacharya's aesthetic project and the volume wishes to tease out the various perspectives on this complex meeting of politics and aesthetics. Be it the novel on dogs or those on petro-pollution and the machine, the political question in Nabarun echoes significant contemporary issues, such as animal rights, global warming and techno-capitalism. This opens up the possibility of questioning the traditional paradigm of humanist values in a world of catastrophic and violent encounters such as nuclear war or holocaust, which keeps returning in Nabarun's works.