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The Aftermath of the Naxalbari Movement: Nabarun Bhattacharya’s Urban Fantastic Tales

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Postcolonial Modernity and the Indian Novel

Part of the book series: New Comparisons in World Literature ((NCWL))

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Abstract

The Naxalbari movement sparked two kinds of immediate literary representation: disillusion and despair by an urban protagonist and a historically specific, analytical, aesthetically dynamic projection showcasing the struggles of urban and tribal-peasant resistance, as in Devi. The movement was followed by economic liberalisation in the country and a consumerist Left politics in West Bengal marked by clearance of slums and of informal means of trading on the streets for courting multinational capital. Nabarun Bhattacharya, son of Mahasweta Devi, satirises these practices in his novels, Harbart (1994) and Kāngāl Mālshāt (2003). Bhattacharya’s writing has mainly dealt with the victimised and marginalised communities in the postcolonial urban metropolis—beggars, hawkers, domestic helps, small state-level workers and businessmen, mad people, loafers, criminals, etc. In these novels, he has turned these characters into active resistant beings. They declare war against the state’s anti-people practices taking recourse to fantastic powers such as flying in the air or using occultism and black magic to confuse and subdue statist apparatuses. In their militant politics, Bhattacharya brings the Naxalite tactics and ideology, that the state may want to marginalise and crush these people but they will continue to live, politicise themselves, furnish them, in the absence of capital and resources, with the powers of the other-worldly and vandalise state machinery in a way that resembles the Naxalite guerrilla warfare. Calling the dominant modes in these novels as urban fantastic and drawing further upon Michael Löwy’s concept of “critical irrealism,” this chapter situates the capitalist injunctions and a utopian-transformative ideology of resistance from the weak in the aftermath of the historical Naxalbari movement.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Critical Studies, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, UK

    Sourit Bhattacharya

  2. School of Critical Studies, University Gardens, Glasgow, UK

    Sourit Bhattacharya

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Bhattacharya, S. (2020). The Aftermath of the Naxalbari Movement: Nabarun Bhattacharya’s Urban Fantastic Tales. In: Postcolonial Modernity and the Indian Novel. New Comparisons in World Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37397-9_4

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