The Vagabond”s War Cry:

The Other in Nabarun”s Narrative

Abstract

The objective of this article is to discuss, in brief, how Nabarun Bhattacharya deals with the question of the “other.” Bhattacharya treats the ‘other’ not as a convenient literary device, but as an ever explosive, ever truant fantastic object that jumps at the face of the ‘I’ (the author and the reader) and says “NO”.

Bhattacharya, spanning roughly four decades, presents not only the human subaltern as a belligerent agent of chaos, but also depicts cats, dogs and lunatic footpath dwellers in a similar role. Paranormal humanoids with wings come out of his pages to shock and destroy the audience’s perception regarding what the life-world should be like. He speaks in a language that might be forever out of my comprehensibility. This essay is on the culminating phase of Bhattacharya’s prose writing career, and I wish to explain how such a culmination becomes apparent in the handling of theme, style and ideology; 1999 onwards to be more precise.

The author presents the “other” as the ultimate voice of dissent and a thorough reading of his oeuvre shall make clear that he slowly removed himself from the linear assumption that once the marginalized assumes the power, all shall be equal forever. In this article, I have attempted to demonstrate  how Bhattacharya does not thrust any emancipatory role on the “other” but lets them speak freely while being on the margin, posing maybe a greater challenge and a more intense threat to normative powers—thematically and linguistically.