1

Long Live Counter-revolution: Bourgeois Rewriting of Naxalbari and the Return of the Impure

Samrat Sengupta, Doctoral Scholar, Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta and Assistant Professor, Department of English, Kharagpur College

Suddhabrata Deb, in an essay, makes a detailed critic of novels by mainstream Bangla writers like Sunil Gangopadhyay, Samaresh Basu, Shirshendu

Mukhopadhyay, Gourkishor Ghosh, Samaresh Majumder et al. He quotes another important critic of Bangla literature Asrukumar Sikdar who comments on Samaresh Basu (which however might be applicable to other above mentioned writers as well): The way Samaresh makes his repetitive negative critic of Communist activism and Party in his novels that his novels have become propagandist. 1 Deb continues to criticize the way these authors often feign objectivity though actually they are critical of Naxalbari movement. They claim to represent what has actually taken place. Samaresh Majumder is taken up as an example of how the novelist tells his story with the objectivity of a reporter and finally the protagonist of the novel realizes that he was directionless.2 The two chief receptions, and thereby representations, of Naxalbari movements are as follows - firstly, a certain sympathy for the revolution hinting upon its inevitability because of the failure of Indian democracy and secondly, to think it as an aberration of normal life destined to failure. The novels which I mentioned above constitute mainly those supporting the later view whereas its critics constitute those supporting the former. However it is necessary to interrogate the process of the production of this normal and how it is complexly Discourses on Naxalbari edited by Pradip Basu, (Kolkata: Setu, 2010), 47-62

2 connected with that aberration that violent rupture of order. The centre-stage of this revolution was occupied by a group of urban middle-class youth who attempted to collaborate with the peasants to mobilize a radical mass uprising motivated by the teachings of Mao and the Chinese revolution. So it is necessary to have an apt understanding of the middle-class intelligentsia. Ranajit Guha, in an interesting essay called Torture and Culture, discusses torture of rebels in police custody as an alternative to the contemporary culture which is both implicit in it and appropriated by it. This culture is principled by what Guha calls comprador liberalism3 normal institutional means of mind-bending schools, universities, ashrams, mass media, etc.4. The Indian civil society churned out of this liberal forms of education is supposedly more imperialist than liberal and they are made to appropriate the system of pedagogy and disciplining which helps in the continuation of domination and gives a temporary, circumscribed and selfish sense of autonomy and security received as normal. This nature of Indian bourgeois who appropriates feudal modes of thinking has perhaps a deep-seated economic reason which Sumit Sarkar discusses in an essay while analysing the role of an intellectual in the context of so called Bengal Renaissance which is often claimed to have taken place in the nineteenth century. He writes: More fundamentally, therefore, the limitations of, our intellectuals, radical and conservatives alike, were connected with the socioeconomic structure moulded by colonialism. In Bengal, this meant firstly the progressive tightening of British control over industry and commerceThe bourgeois values imbibed by the intelligentsia through their Western education and contacts thus remained bereft of material content or links with production.5

So in the intellectual culture of India after colonization idea/ideal becomes materially bereft. Rather the material operates on a separate realm devoid of any ideal, inclined towards a selfish circumscribed end of undisturbed, conformist,

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3 middle class life helpful for the maintenance of once imperialist and then pseudonationalist, self-colonizing statuesque. The revolt of the Naxalites was not simply against a political system going astray, a failed democracy to be altered by the forces of communism, but against this renaissance burden of ideals bereft of materiality the imperialist hogwash. The immediate expression of this was, as Ranajit Guha has discussed, the attacks upon the education system and institutions which is used to maintain the statuesque. The attack was also on the great father figures of Bengal renaissance like Rammohan Ray and Vidyasagar whose idols were violently hurled down. This move against the imperialist-nationalist episteme however is like an Oedipal desire to murder the father. Now is it possible that as has been proposed by Freudian Oedipus Complex, the son who wants to kill the father also wants to be the father or unconsciously wants to adopt the fatherposition? Is it possible to be epistemically free? There is an inturruptive relationship between the naxalite present and so-called Renaissance past which can be illustrated through Saibal Mitras novel Agnir Upakhyan (The Tale of Agni)6 where the protagonist Agni narrates his own tale of becoming a Naxalite. His narrative moves between his immediate past and his origin. He draws a genealogy of himself, his great grandfather being a thangare one of the Bengals own highwaymen who suddenly becomes a wealthy landowner. The story of his predecessors constantly interrupts his narrative, these interruptions being deeply suggestive. Agni ironically remarks that his great grandfather Buno Roy (the Bangla word Buno means uncivilized) was a contemporary of Vidyasagar. Perhaps the same system which produced Buno Roy produced Vidyasagar. Agnis narrative demonstrates tremendous selfishness, material greed and lecherous livelihood of his predecessors who were the outcome of Permanent Settlement and British imperialist policies which made so-called Bengal Renaissance possible. But that is a different story and there might be separate discussions on the relationship between Naxalite movement and Bengal Renaissance. My point of inquiry is that if according to Ranajit Guha the Naxalite violence is a violence against a certain kind

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4 of hierarchy, against elements of feudalism that haunts our liberalism, against culture that is only an alternate to torture, against idealism that is complacent, against materialism which is governed by greed and self-seeking ends, then is it possible to be completely free of that burden of episteme? Why Agni wants a revolver? If he kills the killer he himself might also become the killer he cannot but kill his own self. Killing the father is killing the son. Without predecessors how can Agni be there! In a culture where torture has an indispensable visible/invisible omnipresence violence becomes a possibility both on the part of the oppressive/repressive state the system, as well as on the part of the victimized subject. If torture is the other face of liberalism, violence is the other face of revolutionary benevolence. Therefore it is observed that the revolutionaries often ignore the originary, founding violence hidden behind the law which Jacques Derrida discusses in his essay Force of Law: The Mystical Foundation of Authority: It is quasi-logic of the ghost which, because it is the more forceful one, should be substituted for an ontological logic of presence, absence or representation7. This violence implicit in the force of law according to Derrida is mystical as it cannot be justified with the use of reason. The capacity to use law is because of the authority which enables it and force which implies violence. The logic of this force can be well demonstrated by the quote from La Fontaine used by Derrida in the preface of his book Rogues: Two Essays on Reason:

The Strong are always best at proving theyre right. Witness the case were now going to cite.8

This shows how the very act of strength precedes justice and righteousness even before the case begins. Derrida while discussing Walter Benjamins Critique of Violence demonstrates how such originary violence or the possibility of such originary violence lies dormant in Benjamins preference of divine violence which manifests itself in revolution and is just natural (i.e. just because it is natural like an

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5 earthquake for example and also natural because it is just) over the mythical violence i.e. the violence of law. Derrida comments:

All revolutionary situations, all revolutionary discourses, on the left or on the rightjustify the recourse to violence by alleging the founding, in progress or to come, of a new law, or a new state. As this law to come will in return legitimate, retrospectively, the violence that may offend the sense of justice, its future anterior already justifies it. The foundation of all states occurs in a situation that one can thus call revolutionary. It inaugurates a new law; it always does so in violence.9

There is then a founding violence behind the precipitation of revolution. The roots of such violence are to be discovered in the ideology of the Bengali middle-class educated and idealist, ideal being the other of material. They form what Talcott Parsons would call a societal community separate from state and economy who Parsons thinks can act independently and autonomously to affect and transform the state towards the protection of rights and freedom and protection from exploitation and injustice. They, according to Parsons, can ensure equality and also simultaneously protect the liberty of people. Societal community through association can make this possible. So Parsons ideals become the champion of the highest realization of the democratic principles of liberty and equality through the third principle of fraternity in the guise of association. However this association is formed on the principle of universal reason where the members can understand and negotiate reasonably with the state and the law and Parsons did not, however, had explainedhow these forms can be protected against penetration by economic wealth and political power. 10 Gramsci on the other hand in the line of Marx thought civil society a hegemonic-ideological production of capitalism. He believed in the possibility of a counter-hegemony that would transform the civil society and

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6 help in the acceleration of revolution which would eventually help creating a socialist totalitarian state. So both Democracy as well as Socialism precipitates an idea of a state in their respective ways and both are supposed to be championed by a civil society apparently reasonable or to be transformed into self-conscious, socially aware individuals. Two important factors which are not elaborated in such analysis and which haunts the existing political discourses of democracy as well as socialism like a spectre are the fundamental presence of a certain kind of absence of reason at the heart of any idea of justice and the rejection of family or the private sphere because of the identification of civil society more with the public sphere. These two factors shall produce the actual rupture in the discourse of revolution particularly in the context of naxalite movement. Many of the literary works written on Naxalite revolution concerns the family of the revolutionaries - their love life or personal life. Particularly the image of the mother becomes very important. In stories like Samaresh Basus Sahider Ma or The mother of the Martyr, Manabendra Pals Abhinoy or Acting, in Samaresh Majumdars novel Kalbela or Afternoon or in Mahasweta Devis Mother of 1084 we see this image of the mother repeatedly appearing the mother of the martyr who cannot mourn her son properly and incomplete mourning creates the spectre the apparition that haunts and observes without being observed. This is the uncanniness with which the spectre of buried idealism continues to disturb us. Now this idealism has a long history or the very idea of history since Hegel is fraught with an essence of idealism or the ism of an idea that is universalised to an extent that we dont consider an idea as an idea any more it seems natural and an order before any order the imperative that creates all other orders. Revolution is an effect of such an order The novel Kalbela by Samaresh Majumdar or the short story Shobsadhona by Saibal Mitra shows the severe torture of the beloved or the wife in police custody in front of the convict to extort a confession about his fellow revolutionaries before which the revolutionary stands erect. Animesh, the protagonist in Kalbela always suffers a sense of guilt for not being able to attend his

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7 beloved Madhobilata properly. Critics like Suddhhabrata Deb would associate such weakness and repentance with bourgeois revisionism. However Derrida in his Spectres of Marx in an explosive argument smashes such objections of revisionism:

There is nothing revisionist about interpreting the genesis of totalitarianism as reciprocal reaction to the fear of the ghost that communism inspired beginning in the last century, to the terror that it inspired in its adversaries but that it turned inside out and felt sufficiently within itself to precipitate the monstrous realization, the magical effectuation, the animist incorporation of an emancipatory eschatology which ought to have respected the promise, the beingpromise of a promiseand which could not have been a simple ideological phantasm since the critic of ideology itself was inspired by nothing else.11

The emanicipatory eschatology itself functioned as the haunting spectre of ideology which owes its origin in enlightenment idea of the possibility of reasonable, universal justice. However revolution though celebrates the spirit wants to exorcise the spectre. In fact, a revolution is possible only by turning against itself. Derrida uses the famous quote from Hamlet that the time is out of joint. The time is out of joint because though every revolution is in some way a celebration of a spirit the spirit of emancipation and reason, it tries to deny the spectre that is associated with the past and also the fact that revolution cannot but be only an act of repetition a repetition of the idea of revolution as positive emancipatory transformation. The denial of this repetition makes possible for the revolution to turn against itself. The death nail of Naxalbari was precisely rooted in its middle-class origin fed in by the Bengal-renaissance ideology of humanism and progressivism which however, as I have already discussed, the movement consciously at least attempted to subvert. Rajarshi Dasgupta in an essay comments: Today the naxalites also know very well

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8 why attacking the renaissance is similar to suicide.12 Derrida in his Spectres of Marx shows how Marx desperately tried to oppose the spirit of revolution against the spectre. 13 The German word for spirit geist as Derrida exemplifies can also mean the spectre and the difference between the two collapses as the idea of a spirit as inherited from Hegel also means an idea existing in the past and if past is negated in preference for the new the present, then the past haunts like a spectre in the idea of spirit of time itself which is nothing but a repetition. So the very idea of impossibility of absolutely just action is the predicament of any political formation haunted by the spirit of history that is supposed to be left behind. Both Democracy and Socialism are fraught by this violence of law. Derrida asserts quoting Kierkegaard that the moment of taking decision is madness. This madness negates or suppresses other necessities or factors like the family or other basic human necessities which are both material as well as ideational. The material is the concrete universal that is to come. This universal is therefore the level of ideas whose spectrality cannot be denied. The ideal is however sought by the material, i.e. the material desire for a being, a presence that is to be felt. The madness of reason affects both the law-giver and the receiver the one who legitimately casts a spree of violence upon other and the one who becomes a victim or volunteer to be a victim through the act of deciding to follow a path that creates such probability of victimhood. In the short story Nigraha or Assault by Bimal Kar14 the police who is the narrator of the story interrogates a Naxalite activist called Subodh. He psychologically harasses him by hinting upon his knowledge about him, exercising power and threatening violent physical torture which might unleash any moment. While observing a wound the police touch the sensitive area of his feet and he kicks him in the surge of pain. The story ends with the admittance of the boy that he couldnt help himself kicking the policeman as that area of his feet produces a lot of pain and he was afraid that the interrogator might play some trick. After this the narrator shakes his head in pain of being kicked on the face and wanted to say I know! I also feel pain15. This comment transforms both the oppressor and the

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9 oppressed into victims the victims of a founding violence which is justified because of the idea of justice behind an idea which each must try to accomplish or follow. Both remain the victims of taking decision which has already become a symptom that makes one suffer yet fall in love with. Generally the idea of justice is understood in terms of justness of action which implies acting reasonably with respect to the other or to reasonably payback some unjust action done to the other. However justice can only be committed through law which has the mystical authority of using force which Derrida discusses. Now authority itself has the power to do justice because it is considered just by virtue of the founding violence it implores and it does not need the use of reason to be justified the justification in law is only procedural as the decision is to be taken with a degree of finality beyond negotiation and understanding. So there is a fundamental unreason that negates the possibility of justice that is to come. This fundamental unreason can be understood in terms of concrete materiality the material need to do justice to make it possible actually. So there is a materiality or material desire for the actual behind law as justice which is irreducible. This materiality shall always make the ideal of revolution impossibly possible as on one hand there is the to-come-ness of revolution on the other hand there is the material necessity to actualize it which cannot be negotiated. This produces an aporia a non-passage that cannot be resolved. The aim of materiality is to transform an idea into material. Spivak in an essay comments: - If anything is "proper to man," it is the potential for this peculiar commodification: to create exchange-value in use 16 . Marxs theory of money is largely based on this production of symbolic value which is also behind the production of ideology it is an ideation of concrete and the material. So behind all ideas there is the presence of this materiality which however becomes a spectre an absent presence that haunts. It observes us with a visor-effect i.e. by not being observed itself. So the spectre of Marx is not simply ideational but material. When in Kalbela Animesh returns home in a taxi after being set free from his imprisonment he observes:

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10

Kolkata is as it is. It has not changed at all. Trams and Buses are running as usual as it used to run before, people are lazy as ever or are moving in a hurry.There has been such a big revolution, so many boys died or have become living dead Kolkata is undisturbed by that. Animesh felt a pain in his chest. While watching Kolkata through the Taxi he unmindfully touched his paralysed legs.17

The Kolkata returns to Animesh but he can never return to Kolkata his desire for a better home made him permanently homeless or unhomely. He like many naxalites of his age was in love with the possibility of a new establishment and got lost in that desire without realizing that revolution is itself haunted by the spectre of ideology which is also the spectre of materiality the materiality behind all foundations behind all great ideas and behind the being the being that is a nothing because it is thingified, because it cannot be anything but a thing a body that cannot transcend its materiality or whose possibility of transcendence is only in the realization of its materiality. Therefore it is impure no pure idea being available without the haunting of the spectre of materiality. The Aporia of revolution is not only that we cannot reconcile the materiality of the ideal in revolution with the ideality of the material in law or in sovereignty which is not only to be counter-acted but also to be reiterated in a new form by revolution. The Aporia is fundamentally because in man the materiality and ideality are interpenetrated by each other - one cannot exist without the other, both being connected in a double-bind. If materiality or material longing is more animal than human it is often thought necessary to be idealized, to be transformed into ideas. This according to Derrida is the principle of carnivorous sacrifices which attempts to kill the animal that does not belong to the realm of right or law. This consumption of the animal which is essential to the structure of subjectivity18 however for Derrida is cannibalism as the animal is within us. The double-bind of

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11 human animal is the material and the ideal the material ideal and the ideal material. Therefore Derrida remarks: Nothing can ever take away from me the certainty that what we have here is an existence that refuses to be conceptualized19. In Nabarun Bhattacharyas short story Khochor 20 where Khochor is a sort of clandestine police spy of extremely lower class origin who helps police to take resort to certain illegal actions to accomplish their legal duties, the dirt and filth of a Khochors mind is depicted the crude animality and desire to kill makes him incomprehensible to any discourse of reason. The activity of Khochor imbibes a violence that has no cause. Perhaps violence is without cause born out of the crude animal desire to live. Outside the enlightenment reason which probes man to care for the other because of the healthy functioning of the society to which he himself is a part and with which his self-interests are related outside the law which through its founding violence ensures such functioning there is this irreducible animality. This animality is there in each of us and is related to reason and the violence of reason it is also something that cannot be negotiated with reason. It is only through the acceptance of this absolute alterity in recognition, spectral presence of an absolute unreason in the reason that revolution can precipitate revolution that is teleopoesis. Spivak comments:

Teleopoiesis is indeed one of the shocks to the idea of belonging in a collectivity, for it makes a constant and risk-taking effort to affect the distant in a poiesis or imaginative remaking, without guarantees.21

Teleopoesis is the messianic unknown that is always to-come. The last few lines of another short story by Nabarun Bhattacharyas Pratibiplab Dirghojibi Hok or Long Live Counter-revolution (which also forms the title of this paper) poetically mythifies this impossibly possible future that captures inevitability of violence, death and vulnerability in which the order of the being survives and wait wait for unbecoming towards an unknown messianic future:

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Before I arrive Kolkata my heart starts beating like a drum and in excitement I hang out with the help of the rod to see how far Kolkata is still. While watching, the soft air blowing on the forehead shall invite sleep. At this moment it happened. After the head flung out getting banged against the post the torso hanged against the rod for a while. The head is just not there. To pick up the head I will gently get down. The whole train cannot move away till I could collect the head. At least I will be able to jump into the guards coach. After that according to the promise when with a lot of people I shall reach the black coat gentleman collecting ticket will he not allow me inside?22

However, alongside this deconstructive recognition of a to comeness there should also be an apt understanding of a binary-possibility i.e., the possibility of the creation of a binary absolute in human culture per se forgetting of an erasure to give a narrative an ontic presence. This happens in case of historical analysis, which often disposes of the point of view of the historian and feigns a certain kind of objectivity. This might also happen in case of memories which tries put a truth claim on an event based on the actuality of experience. Haunting doesnt depend simply on an absence of ontology but on the presence of it the presence of the past as an ontic absolute. So a binary-possibility of presence-absence is being created. This binary-possibility can very much be present in any act of decentring or questioning the centre-periphery relationship. What is peripheral in a different ontic logic might become universal. The critiques of naxalite movement more often than not fall in this trap of binary-possibility they either look at the movement from a reasonable objectivity (this includes the bourgeois revisionist rewritings by authors like Samaresh Basu, Samaresh Majumdar et. al.) or from an emotional sensitivity (often fed in by critiques of those bourgeois rewriting like Suddhabrata Deb or Asrukumar Sikdar whom I have already quoted). What often is not

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13 recognized is perhaps the inalienable uncertainty that haunts every act of interpretation. It is neither reason nor emotion, but the excluded middle of this binary which is the spectre of this hauntology. In this case it is the materiality of the ideal and ideality of the material which is the excluded middle in the mindmatter/ideal-material binary. An inherent selfishness is the marker of the excluded materiality of ideas which haunts and in this haunting resides another binary possibility where materiality ripped of any ideality shall violently replace the old order of existence the order ruled by idealism and desire for freedom from hierarchy and exploitation. Anirban Das while discussing Raghab

Bandyopadhyays memoir of his days as a naxalite activist titled Journal Sottor (Journal of 70s) shows how in his account nostalgia is here of ones own selves, emotions and rationalities instead of being simply mourning for what one had destroyed23. Raghab Bandyopadhyay himself claims:

My primary attachment was through emotions. Now, when in the light of reason I judge the doings of the movement, I understand its faults. But I cannot tear off the emotional attachment.24

It is important to have this auto-anthropological approach while studying Naxalbari and its presumable failure. That can eventually recognize the excluded materiality which comes back gathering stupendous force in the name of consumerism and globalization. In a short story titled Halaler Parampara (The Tradition of Slaughtering) Raghab Bandyopadhyay tells the story of the rise and fall of a labour movement. It is the story of labour union leader Comrade Rana Mukherjee trapped between his excluded material longing and idealism and commitment to his fellow labourers. When he was asked by the higher party authorities to withdraw a barricade organized by the labourers of Bangalakhsmi Jute Mill, which historically continued for 256 days and which took away security and daily bread of many labourer activists, he was reluctant to do so. He was torn

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14 between the material longing and prick of idealism. He has been hating the idea of good life, quality life projected by media, all his life but the projection of item girls and their sexual temptations makes him feel vulnerable:

Comrade Rana could realize how visualizing itself can be so dangerous, it separates his conscience from his body, it seems he doesnt know about his own body. However as he cannot forget that according to dialectical materialism matter or body should be given more importance he remains in a dilemma.25

This reference to Marxian dialectical materialism is intriguing as it shows how in the scheme of Marxist revolution the material ideal is made bereft of its materiality. Perhaps there lies the lacuna of idealism which transforms its inherent materiality into an excluded spectre. Its spectrality is beyond control, understanding, and reasoning. Materiality, which was already there as a ghost, however, is reborn in the letters of globalization. At the end of the story the movement dies down Rana Mukherjee is murdered not physically but ideologically he was made a nobody by the party and his whereabouts remain unknown (perhaps thereby creating another new hauntology of excluded ideality which can potentially be a topic of another discussion). Akbar and his hotel located near the mill which was running at a loss also underwent a sea change. Akbar who was once an accomplice of that movement, as closing down of the mill made his hotel incur a loss, now started wearing thick gold chain and bracelet and carrying a mobile. His hotel is also transformed into a plusher one with a poster of popular film actress and item girl Bipasa Basu. The spectral other of revolutionary ideal appears on world-stage and is reborn finally to transform the ideal into a spectre now.

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Notes and References:

Asrukumar Sikdar quoted in Suddhabrata Deb, Somayer Sankote Koyekti Bangla Uponyash in Uttal Shat-Sottor: Rajniti, Samaj o Sanskriti, edited by Arjun Goswami (Kolkata: Chayanika, 2006), 157. The quotation is translated by me.
2 1

See Suddhabrata Deb, Somayer Sankote Koyekti Bangla Uponyash in Uttal ShatSottor: Rajniti, Samaj o Sanskriti, edited by Arjun Goswami (Kolkata: Chayanika, 2006), 163. Ranajit Guha, Torture and Culture in The Small Voice of History, (Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2009), 573. Ibid., 566.

Sumit Sarkar, The Radicalism of Intellectuals: A Case Study of Nineteenth Century Bengal in A Critique of Colonial India, (Kolkata: Papyrus, 2000 [1985]), 82.
6 7

Saibal Mitra, Agnir Upakhyan, (Kolkata: Deys Publishing, 2006)

Jacques Derrida, Force of Law: The Mystical Foundation of Authority in Acts of Religion, edited by Gil Anidjar (New York and London: Routledge, 2002), 257.
8

Jacques Derrida, Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, translated by Pascal-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), xi.

Jacques Derrida, Force of Law: The Mystical Foundation of Authority in Acts of Religion, edited by Gil Anidjar (New York and London: Routledge, 2002), 269.
10

Jean. L. Cohen and Andrew Arato, Civil Society and Political Theory (Massachusetts, and London: MIT, 1992), 136

Jacques Derrida, Spectres of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, translated by Peggy Kamuf (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 105-06.
12

11

1st-2nd
13

Rajarshi Dasgupta, Marxbader Bhut Bonam Marxbader Gotro in Ababhash, 6th Year, issue, 34.

Jacques Derrida, Spectres of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, translated by Peggy Kamuf (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 107-08.

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16

See Bimal Kar Nigraha in Naxal Andoloner Golpo, edited by Bijit Ghosh (Kolkata: Punascha, 1999), 17-27.
15

14

Ibid., 27. Translated by me from Bangla.

Gayatri Chakraborty Spivak, Ghostwriting in Diacritics, Vol. 25, No. 2. (Summer, 1995), 75. Samaresh Majumder, Kalbela (Kolkata: Ananda, 2007), 404. Translated by me from Bangla. Jacques Derrida, Force of Law: The Mystical Foundation of Authority in Acts of Religion, edited by Gil Anidjar (New York and London: Routledge, 2002), 247. Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I am (More To Follow) in Critical Enquiry (Winter 2002), 379. Nabarun Bhattacharya, Khochor in Sreshtho Golpo (Kolkata: Deys Publishing, 2006), 30-41. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Note on the New International in parallax, 2001, vol. 7, no. 3, 12. Nabarun Bhattacharya, Pratibiplab Dirghojibi Hok in Sreshtho Golpo (Kolkata: Deys Publishing, 2006), 47.
23 22 21 20 19 18 17

16

Ibid., 68.

24

Raghab Bandyopadhyay quoted in Anirban Das, In(re)trospection: suturing of selves past in from the margins, February, 2001, 71-72.

Raghab Bandyopadhyay, Halaler Parampara in Ashmani Katha (Kolkata: Gangchil, 2007), 124.

25

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