First, I propose to look into one particular text. A very powerful Bengali novel, Kangal Malsat. It is written by Nabarun Bhattacharya, one of the most radical of contemporary Bengali litterateurs. While the form of the novel—intertextuality, self-reflexivity, et al—may invite post-modern fandango, our focus is different.  This novel tries to deal with the concepts of insurrection, revolution and war against state in minute detail and with commendable theoretical nuance. Local, traditional knowledge corpus and international solidarities combine in fantastic ways to make a subaltern-led war on the government of Bengal possible. Resources and networks of trust are tapped into, patterned and created by the rebels perturbed by pervasive inequality. The loud tone, the carnivalesque ambience and the fantasy genre should not obfuscate the underlying guideline for a possible revolution. The intractable problems, the looming threat of failure are all touched upon, but this text is indeed a rich source of how a community of sufferers plans, manages and builds, block by block, resistance. In doing this, the intentionality of the author will be understood by complimentary readings of his other texts, and his communicative situation constructed through the author’s commentaries on his own writings.

Then on I would draw on my nascent fieldworks and research on segments of laborers in the city’s transport sector and meditate on the commonalities with and deviations from the modes of resistance planned in Nabarun Bhattacharya’s oeuvre. In a political environment where official parliamentary left has become an ally of state and capital, the alternative is a consolidation of conservative forces and the two strategies of coercive flexibilization and deliberate fragmentation are pervasive in the sites of labour and production, corroding the possibility of proletarian politics, we need to understand articulations of the tortuous logistics of revolutionary struggle, be it texts or movements or quotidian struggles, without insinuating that these must be mutually exclusive sets.

Bionote

Agnibho Gangopadyay studied history in Presidency College, Kolkata, and Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. He is associated with Calcutta Research Group, a Kolkata-based research collective. His interests include intellectual history or history of ideas, oral history, labour history and ethnography. He will start his DPhil in History from the University of Oxford in September 2011. His aim is to establish textual studies within archival regimes of research. Weary of specialization, he would want to work on labour history workshops after his doctoral research in the area of intellectual history. A monograph on the land acquisition and its aftermath in Singur written by him will be coming out shortly.