Undecidable Spaces:

Rethinking Caste and the Technologies of Abandonment in Manoranjan Byapari

Authors

  • Samrat Sengupta

Keywords:

Politics of Space, Ambedkar, Abandonment, Precarity, Dalit Narratives

Abstract

Organization of space in a modern urban locale is apparently secular and unmotivated by any divine or religious principal. Yet it always functions on the basis of exclusion. Simultaneously the dread of the excluded returning to haunt the stability of the city structures its organization of space. In this paper we shall see how the pre-modern system of Casteism has similarities with as well as difference from the modern democratic system of governance across the world and its distinct form of abandonment. It shall also be suggested how abandonment becomes an indispensible technique through which a governmental apparatus comes into existence both in pre-modern Caste Society in Indian subcontinent as well as modern democracy. This work shall focus on Bengali Dalit author Manoranjan Byapari, coming from Namashudra, a Dalit subcaste in Bengal to show how autobiographical form of writing resurfaces the quintessential question of caste pushed back in modern normative arrangement of space.

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Author Biography

Samrat Sengupta

Samrat Sengupta is Assistant Professor and Head of the Dept. of English at Sammilani Mahavidyalaya. He has a PhD from the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta. His latest publication is on Bernard Stiegler and Jacques Derrida’s take on tile technology and modes of power, published in an anthology of essays on Posthumanism from Springerlink. His work exists in the fields of Gender theory, Post-structuralism, Memory Studies and Philosophy of literature. His forthcoming work included a co-edited volume on Bengali Author Nabarun Bhattacharya from Bloomsbury and a guest-edited issue of the international journal Sanglap on “Caste in Humanities”.

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Published

2021-11-10

How to Cite

Sengupta, S. (2021). Undecidable Spaces:: Rethinking Caste and the Technologies of Abandonment in Manoranjan Byapari. Sanglap: Journal of Literary and Cultural Inquiry, 6(1), 64–77. Retrieved from https://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/120