Journal Articles by Debayudh Chatterjee
FORUM: University of Edinburgh Postgraduate Journal of Culture & the Arts, 2023
My paper studies J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace (1999) to understand the transnational, transcultural mu... more My paper studies J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace (1999) to understand the transnational, transcultural mutations of two key figures of German Romanticism: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Heinrich von Kleist. Coetzee's novels are reflections and reproductions of his extensive reading of politics and literature; these texts grant the lives and works of old masters a renewal, a re-introspection, and most importantly, a resurrection into contemporaneity. Set in post-apartheid South Africa, Disgrace operates as a site of racial and sexual contentions. Through the character of David Lurie, Coetzee initiates a dialogue between the 'visions' of the former colonizer and the 'revisions' of the newly emancipated colonized. While the scholarship on the Romantic element in Disgrace (Beard 2007; Easton 2007; Hawkins 2009; and Cass 2013) is predominantly centred on the afterlife of British Romanticism, more particularly, on the roles Byron and Wordsworth play in shaping plot and action, I attempt to read the novel in the light of Coetzee's critical prose to understand how he draws upon the German Romantic tradition. If Wordsworth and Byron are evoked to characterize the outer, more conspicuous texture of the novel, then the inner, hidden threads that stitch the form and content together are borrowed from Goethe and Kleist. I argue that Coetzee's romantic sensibility is as much German as British. These two traditions are brought together in Disgrace to re-enact four major leitmotifs of Romantic literature--desire, transgression, punishment, and finally, salvation--in a transformed political dispensation.
FORUM: University of Edinburgh Postgraduate Journal of Culture & The Arts, 2021
The paper analyses the buddy cop TV show Comrade Detective in the light of Jacques Derrida's Spec... more The paper analyses the buddy cop TV show Comrade Detective in the light of Jacques Derrida's Spectres of Marx (1994) to demonstrate how it launches a satiric critique of the American state and diplomatic machinery in the aftermath of the fall of the Second Bloc. I argue that this visual text, released in 2017, addresses three contemporary global concernsthe dominance of the USA in a unipolar world, the neoliberal celebration of consumerism, and finally, the rise of right-wing religious fanaticism-through a satiric recreation of the bygone regime of communist Romania of the 1980s.
The Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences, 2018
Introduction
The organized history of the Bangla Dalit literature in post-independent Bengal beg... more Introduction
The organized history of the Bangla Dalit literature in post-independent Bengal began with the formation of Bangla Dalit Lekhak Parishad under the leadership of Nakul Mullick in as late as 1987 although undivided Bengal was a crucial site of Dalit agency in the colonial era. The establishment of the BDLP marked the culmination of a spurt of small scale Dalit magazines that were brought out from all corners of West Bengal albeit in a scattered format since the late 1960s and 1970s. The movement, which the BDLP initiated, paved the way for the formation of Chaturtha Dunia (The Fourth World) in 1992, shortly after the tragic suicide of Chuti Kotal in 1991. (Byapari 2007: 4118) Chaturtha Duniya went on to become the defining enterprise of Bengali Dalit cultural activities. Under its aegis, studies have been carried out to trace the intellectual history of Dalit thought and expression in post-independent Bengal. Jatin Bala’s noteworthy history of Bengali Dalit literature also acknowledges the inception of the BDLP as the starting point of Bengali Dalit literary activities and sheds light on the creative and critical works that proceeded. There is absolutely no mention of any under-caste literary agency before 1987. Such a hiatus in literary and political enterprise has been explained by looking at how the partition affected the Dalits in Bengal.
Research Questions
Having turned back to the 1960s, an important phase in the post-partition life of Bengal, one might be provoked to pick up a series crucial points of enquiry. Was there no member of the lower castes who had taken to writing during this period? If so, what did s/he write about? How were the questions of caste anxiety and caste identity articulated in those writings? Why are the texts produced by them not included in the Dalit literary cannon that Bala has constructed in his record? My paper will attempt to fill up these gaps by looking at the unlikely figure of an under-caste writer who emerged in the decade of the 1960s in Bengal.
Methodology
To undertake such a project, it is necessary to look at the major literary movements that characterized this decade. At the other end of the Krittibas legacy that flourished under the command of Sunil Gangopadhyay and his associates to become a part of the mainstream, stood the Hungry Generation poets, avant-garde in their approach, immersed in the quest of writing and performing poetry to redefine the contours of poetic imagination. My paper intends to single out Haradhon Dhara (alias Debi Roy) from the pantheon of the Hungry Generation poets and probe into the quagmire of identity politics of Bengal at that time to comprehend how he negotiates caste in his corpus. Being under-caste writer who emerged came into prominence in the wake of the so-called Hungryalist movement of litterateurs during the 1960s, Haradhon Dhara had to change his name to survive in the Brahminical thresholds of Bengali literature. Conducting a detailed survey and analysis of Roy’s life and works, I argue that the absence of an Ambedkarite discourse propelled Roy, otherwise deeply troubled by angst about his caste status, to find other idioms of anti-caste assertion. The quotes used in the paper are mostly in Bengali and have been translated into English by me, unless otherwise indicated.
Literature Review
It would be crucial to mention that in spite of several studies conducted on Debi Roy and the Hungry Generation, none have brought into account the poet’s caste identity in order to read his poetry along the lines of Dalit criticism. In attempt to gather my primary material, I conducted a detailed interview of Debi Roy at his residence in Howrah on how he perceived caste and dealt with his identity. This interview, published subsequently on the literary web-magazine, Sunflower Collective, provided me with an entry-point to his stray articulations regarding caste. I have also consulted Debi Roy: Shristi-Samiksha (2013), a volume of essays dedicated to his corpus, to look at how the existing body of criticism, intentionally overlooking the complexity of his caste identity, is inadequate in understanding the unique position of the poet that deserves more attention.
How does the proposed paper add to existing knowledge?
My paper is an attempt in constructing an alternative historiography of Bangla literature coming from West Bengal in the sixties from the perspective of Dalit criticism. It interrogates the Brahminical literary field to comprehend how the infamous invisibilization of caste occurred in mainstream Bengali literature in the first place through the tactical silencing of under-caste voices. The paper concludes by asserting how the absence of an Ambedkarite discourse coupled by the problematic history of religious reform movements in Bengal limited the potential of these writers to emerge as what one might call ‘Dalit’ heroes.
This paper looks at how marijuana operates as a symbol of dissidence and an idiom of counter-cult... more This paper looks at how marijuana operates as a symbol of dissidence and an idiom of counter-culture in America in the 1960s and 1970s. At the onset of the Vietnam War, when the nation was sharply polarized, the strengthening of anti-drug laws under President Nixon's rule reduced marijuana to an excuse to prosecute whoever disagreed with the state apparatus. The use of drugs, especially marijuana, also became a means to leave the battlefield in one piece, if not a strategy to avoid flying to Vietnam at the first place. Through three war memoirs – Things They Carried, Passing Time, and Busted – produced respectively by Vietnam veterans Tim O'Brien and W.D. Ehrhart, the cultural history of marijuana is tracked in light of the social, medical, and psychological studies conducted on marijuana around that time. It is argued that the soldier's docile body, as Foucault explains, becomes a site of resistance against the war-mongering government with the consumption of cannabis. Ehrhart's Busted, a sequel to Passing Time, directly addresses this conflict between war machinery and individual agency, as the biographical narrative traces the author's nuanced encounter with the law after being caught red-handed in possession of marijuana. This paper understands the Vietnam War as a psychedelic experience by studying the use of cannabis on the battlefield through O'Brien's and Ehrhart's memoirs. Subsequently, by bringing into account the drug laws of that period, it explains why and how marijuana, intrinsically related to the anti-war movements of that time, became a prominent symbol of peace, fraternity, freedom, and coexistence , as opposed to the lethal propaganda perpetuated through the recurrent images of napalm, helicopters, and destruction. Statistically tracking the rise and fall of marijuana use throughout the War and beyond, the paper concludes by commenting on how both of Nixon's advances, against Vietnam and marijuana, miserably failed.
Book Reviews by Debayudh Chatterjee
The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association 56:1, 2023
Chatterjee, Debayudh. The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association, vol. 56, no. 1, 202... more Chatterjee, Debayudh. The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association, vol. 56, no. 1, 2023, pp. 155–58. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/48771497.
Book Chapters by Debayudh Chatterjee
Organizing Equality: Dispatches from a Global Struggle, 2022
McGill-Queen's University Press eBooks, Aug 15, 2022
Bengali articles by Debayudh Chatterjee
জঙ্গলমহল (সংখ্যা ১৩) , 2023
Uploads
Journal Articles by Debayudh Chatterjee
The organized history of the Bangla Dalit literature in post-independent Bengal began with the formation of Bangla Dalit Lekhak Parishad under the leadership of Nakul Mullick in as late as 1987 although undivided Bengal was a crucial site of Dalit agency in the colonial era. The establishment of the BDLP marked the culmination of a spurt of small scale Dalit magazines that were brought out from all corners of West Bengal albeit in a scattered format since the late 1960s and 1970s. The movement, which the BDLP initiated, paved the way for the formation of Chaturtha Dunia (The Fourth World) in 1992, shortly after the tragic suicide of Chuti Kotal in 1991. (Byapari 2007: 4118) Chaturtha Duniya went on to become the defining enterprise of Bengali Dalit cultural activities. Under its aegis, studies have been carried out to trace the intellectual history of Dalit thought and expression in post-independent Bengal. Jatin Bala’s noteworthy history of Bengali Dalit literature also acknowledges the inception of the BDLP as the starting point of Bengali Dalit literary activities and sheds light on the creative and critical works that proceeded. There is absolutely no mention of any under-caste literary agency before 1987. Such a hiatus in literary and political enterprise has been explained by looking at how the partition affected the Dalits in Bengal.
Research Questions
Having turned back to the 1960s, an important phase in the post-partition life of Bengal, one might be provoked to pick up a series crucial points of enquiry. Was there no member of the lower castes who had taken to writing during this period? If so, what did s/he write about? How were the questions of caste anxiety and caste identity articulated in those writings? Why are the texts produced by them not included in the Dalit literary cannon that Bala has constructed in his record? My paper will attempt to fill up these gaps by looking at the unlikely figure of an under-caste writer who emerged in the decade of the 1960s in Bengal.
Methodology
To undertake such a project, it is necessary to look at the major literary movements that characterized this decade. At the other end of the Krittibas legacy that flourished under the command of Sunil Gangopadhyay and his associates to become a part of the mainstream, stood the Hungry Generation poets, avant-garde in their approach, immersed in the quest of writing and performing poetry to redefine the contours of poetic imagination. My paper intends to single out Haradhon Dhara (alias Debi Roy) from the pantheon of the Hungry Generation poets and probe into the quagmire of identity politics of Bengal at that time to comprehend how he negotiates caste in his corpus. Being under-caste writer who emerged came into prominence in the wake of the so-called Hungryalist movement of litterateurs during the 1960s, Haradhon Dhara had to change his name to survive in the Brahminical thresholds of Bengali literature. Conducting a detailed survey and analysis of Roy’s life and works, I argue that the absence of an Ambedkarite discourse propelled Roy, otherwise deeply troubled by angst about his caste status, to find other idioms of anti-caste assertion. The quotes used in the paper are mostly in Bengali and have been translated into English by me, unless otherwise indicated.
Literature Review
It would be crucial to mention that in spite of several studies conducted on Debi Roy and the Hungry Generation, none have brought into account the poet’s caste identity in order to read his poetry along the lines of Dalit criticism. In attempt to gather my primary material, I conducted a detailed interview of Debi Roy at his residence in Howrah on how he perceived caste and dealt with his identity. This interview, published subsequently on the literary web-magazine, Sunflower Collective, provided me with an entry-point to his stray articulations regarding caste. I have also consulted Debi Roy: Shristi-Samiksha (2013), a volume of essays dedicated to his corpus, to look at how the existing body of criticism, intentionally overlooking the complexity of his caste identity, is inadequate in understanding the unique position of the poet that deserves more attention.
How does the proposed paper add to existing knowledge?
My paper is an attempt in constructing an alternative historiography of Bangla literature coming from West Bengal in the sixties from the perspective of Dalit criticism. It interrogates the Brahminical literary field to comprehend how the infamous invisibilization of caste occurred in mainstream Bengali literature in the first place through the tactical silencing of under-caste voices. The paper concludes by asserting how the absence of an Ambedkarite discourse coupled by the problematic history of religious reform movements in Bengal limited the potential of these writers to emerge as what one might call ‘Dalit’ heroes.
Book Reviews by Debayudh Chatterjee
Book Chapters by Debayudh Chatterjee
Bengali articles by Debayudh Chatterjee
The organized history of the Bangla Dalit literature in post-independent Bengal began with the formation of Bangla Dalit Lekhak Parishad under the leadership of Nakul Mullick in as late as 1987 although undivided Bengal was a crucial site of Dalit agency in the colonial era. The establishment of the BDLP marked the culmination of a spurt of small scale Dalit magazines that were brought out from all corners of West Bengal albeit in a scattered format since the late 1960s and 1970s. The movement, which the BDLP initiated, paved the way for the formation of Chaturtha Dunia (The Fourth World) in 1992, shortly after the tragic suicide of Chuti Kotal in 1991. (Byapari 2007: 4118) Chaturtha Duniya went on to become the defining enterprise of Bengali Dalit cultural activities. Under its aegis, studies have been carried out to trace the intellectual history of Dalit thought and expression in post-independent Bengal. Jatin Bala’s noteworthy history of Bengali Dalit literature also acknowledges the inception of the BDLP as the starting point of Bengali Dalit literary activities and sheds light on the creative and critical works that proceeded. There is absolutely no mention of any under-caste literary agency before 1987. Such a hiatus in literary and political enterprise has been explained by looking at how the partition affected the Dalits in Bengal.
Research Questions
Having turned back to the 1960s, an important phase in the post-partition life of Bengal, one might be provoked to pick up a series crucial points of enquiry. Was there no member of the lower castes who had taken to writing during this period? If so, what did s/he write about? How were the questions of caste anxiety and caste identity articulated in those writings? Why are the texts produced by them not included in the Dalit literary cannon that Bala has constructed in his record? My paper will attempt to fill up these gaps by looking at the unlikely figure of an under-caste writer who emerged in the decade of the 1960s in Bengal.
Methodology
To undertake such a project, it is necessary to look at the major literary movements that characterized this decade. At the other end of the Krittibas legacy that flourished under the command of Sunil Gangopadhyay and his associates to become a part of the mainstream, stood the Hungry Generation poets, avant-garde in their approach, immersed in the quest of writing and performing poetry to redefine the contours of poetic imagination. My paper intends to single out Haradhon Dhara (alias Debi Roy) from the pantheon of the Hungry Generation poets and probe into the quagmire of identity politics of Bengal at that time to comprehend how he negotiates caste in his corpus. Being under-caste writer who emerged came into prominence in the wake of the so-called Hungryalist movement of litterateurs during the 1960s, Haradhon Dhara had to change his name to survive in the Brahminical thresholds of Bengali literature. Conducting a detailed survey and analysis of Roy’s life and works, I argue that the absence of an Ambedkarite discourse propelled Roy, otherwise deeply troubled by angst about his caste status, to find other idioms of anti-caste assertion. The quotes used in the paper are mostly in Bengali and have been translated into English by me, unless otherwise indicated.
Literature Review
It would be crucial to mention that in spite of several studies conducted on Debi Roy and the Hungry Generation, none have brought into account the poet’s caste identity in order to read his poetry along the lines of Dalit criticism. In attempt to gather my primary material, I conducted a detailed interview of Debi Roy at his residence in Howrah on how he perceived caste and dealt with his identity. This interview, published subsequently on the literary web-magazine, Sunflower Collective, provided me with an entry-point to his stray articulations regarding caste. I have also consulted Debi Roy: Shristi-Samiksha (2013), a volume of essays dedicated to his corpus, to look at how the existing body of criticism, intentionally overlooking the complexity of his caste identity, is inadequate in understanding the unique position of the poet that deserves more attention.
How does the proposed paper add to existing knowledge?
My paper is an attempt in constructing an alternative historiography of Bangla literature coming from West Bengal in the sixties from the perspective of Dalit criticism. It interrogates the Brahminical literary field to comprehend how the infamous invisibilization of caste occurred in mainstream Bengali literature in the first place through the tactical silencing of under-caste voices. The paper concludes by asserting how the absence of an Ambedkarite discourse coupled by the problematic history of religious reform movements in Bengal limited the potential of these writers to emerge as what one might call ‘Dalit’ heroes.