Nabarun Bhattacharya:

Aesthetics and Politics in a World after Ethics

Volume editor: Sourit Bhattacharya, Arka Chattopadhyay, Samrat Sengupta

About Nabarun Bhattacharya

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.

Table of contents

Foreword by Supriya Chaudhuri
Preface by Tathagata Bhattacharya
Acknowledgements
Nabarun Bhattacharya and His World: An Introduction by Sourit Bhattacharya, Arka Chattopadhyay and Samrat Sengupta
Part I: Nabarun Bhattacharya’s Works in Translation
Short Stories
Immersion, translation by Rijula Das
Scarecrow, translation by Rijula Das
Fyataru in Spring Festival, translation by Debadrita Bose
4+1, translation by Arka Chattopadhyay
Toy, translation by Arka Chattopadhyay
Leopard-Man, translation by V. Ramaswamy
Terrorist, translation by V. Ramaswamy
American Petromax, translation by V. Ramaswamy
Nuclear Winter, translation by Sourit Bhattacharya
Poems
This Valley of Death Is Not My Country, translation by Atindriya Chakrabarty
Who in the Moonlight, with Rifles on Shoulders…, translation by Atindriya Chakrabarty and Malini Bhattacharya
What Kind of City Is This, translation by Supriya Chaudhuri
Tram, translation by Supriya Chaudhuri
Something’s Burning, translation by Supriya Chaudhuri
Type, translation by Samrat Sengupta
Disabled Three, translation by Samrat Sengupta
A Family Poem, translation by Samrat Sengupta
Interview with Nabarun Bhattacharya
There Is an Uncanny Pluralism in Marxism, translation by Partha Pratim Roy Chowdhury
Part II: Critical Essays on Nabarun Bhattacharya
Kolkata and the Poetics of Waste in Nabarun Bhattacharya’s Spectral City, Anuparna Mukherjee
Fyataru As Political Society: Nabarun Bhattacharya and the Postcolonial Politics of the Governed, Anindya Sekhar Purakayastha
Counter-History, Counter-Memory and the Harami: The Fictional World of Kangal Malshat, Anustup Basu
A Cyborg Goddess? Baby K and the Symbolisms of Gendered Violence, Priyanka Basu
Dancing Skulls and Red Hibiscus Flowers: Nabarun’s Tantric Imaginaries and the Radical Aesthetics of Subversion, Carola Erika Lorea
The Revolt of the Bete Machine: Animality, Language and Resistance in Lubdhak, Aritra Chakraborti
Machine, Bio-Politics and Death in Nabarun Bhattacharya’s Fiction, Arka Chattopadhyay
#Animalosa: A Study of the Theroid Cosmic in Nabarun’s Fiction, Dibyakusum Ray
Toxic Ecologies of the Global South: The Ecogothic in Nabarun Bhattacharya’s Toy City, Sourit Bhattacharya
The Unknown Something: Objects beyond the Economy of Use in Nabarun’s Short Stories, Samrat Sengupta
‘Fyant Fyant Snai Snai‘-The Clarion Call of the Masses and Bengali Entertainment, Arnab Banerji
List of Contributors

Reviews

“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 layer-that, like all true political prophets, Bhattacharya could presciently prefigure and predict-an 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 him-a well-curated collection, offering a rounded representation of Nabarun. As the book highlights, the deep subaltern denizens of Nabarun’s world may be voided of agency and use but can’t be voided of the imagination of freedom. Through the intervention of this text, Nabarun’s 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