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Fyataruder hatekhori mane oi bhangchur, chherachheri, hisu kora. [fyatarus are committed to sabotage, subversion and urination at the establishment] (Nabarun Bhattacharya 2004: 14)
Fyatarura attack kore, bhangchur kore, nongra kore but never churi [fyatarus attack, subvert, dirtyfy but never do they resort to corruption] (2004: 24)
Ki nirjib, ki nirjib
Nirghat oti budhhijib [how lifeless, how indifferent to the surrounding plight!! he must be an intellectual] (Kobi Purandar Bhat, Nabarun Bhattacharya 2013: 38)
In his just published work, The Reject: Community, Politics, and Religion after the Subject (2015), Irving Goh critically engages with the discursive narratives of the contemporary post-ideological age and elucidates his theoretic observations by addressing Jean Luc Nancy's question Qui vient apres le sujet, or who comes after the subject? Needless to say that Nancy's question comes in the wake of the so called dissolution or the "liquidation" of the subject. This critique or deconstruction of subjectivity is a fall out of poststructural scepticism of the totalised, unified cogito that ultimately borders on to the male, colonising, Euro-centric sovereign self/subject. This heteronormative subject is liquidated to accommodate the polysemic or heteroglossic selves who are de-subjectified or deflated of all totalitarian hubris. This hypothesis of the deconstructed self however led to a sense of groundlessness or paralogy, a condition that disavows any effort to constitute a different grammar of subjectivity, an entity that envision a non-sovereign but dissenting agency, a dissident self that reconfigures the contours of subjectivity beyond the position of tyrannising power. Such is the notion of Badiouian subject who composes a counter-narrative of dissident act - the act of subtraction as mentioned by Slavoj Žižek that disentangles the self from the hegemonic logic of global capital. Following Irving Goh we can call it the act of reject, the act of dissent. In what follows I would argue that Nabarun Bhattacharya, the radical voice of literary Bolshevism in Bengal demonstrates such notions of the act of reject, the act of subtraction. His fictive dissenting subjects, the fyatarus, the choktars typify such rebellious and dissident roles in a post-ideological era when complicity and conformity are rewarded as the norm. The subsequent sections would dwell on the Nabarun, his legacy of literary crusade, his interrogation of the status quo and his composition of...