Hypereventing History: Ecological and Political Disaster in Bengali Dalit Narratives on Partition

Abstract

The proposed article would attempt to draw a relationship between the political and ecological disaster through select Bengali Dalit migrant narratives. Narratives of Bengali Dalit migrant writers like Manohar Mouli Biswas or Jatin Bala, dislocated from East Pakistan/Bangladesh to India, suggest in their narratives how an event like the Partition of Indian subcontinent makes the caste subalterns permanently precarious and vulnerable before natural disasters. The spatial destitute becomes doubly dislocated by dual forces of political and ecological catastrophe. Elaborating upon Timothy Morton’s concept of hyperobjects (2013), the Partition of the subcontinent here would be viewed as a hyperevent produced by humans that become immanent, and like second nature, creating and naturalizing patterns of social inequalities. The article would explore the entanglement of the natural and the biopolitical which produces a hyperevent. The hyperevent this paper would argue, unlike a generic event like Partition which marks a moment in history, sublimates it as a transhistorical longue duree. This study would attempt to fracture the temporal and structural hierarchies of nature and politics and examine the continued effect of an entangled form of geopolitical catastrophe like Partition on caste subalterns in West Bengal.

Keywords:

• Event
• partition
• dalit
• memory
• ecology

Disclosure Statement

The author reports there are no competing interests to declare.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Samrat Sengupta

Dr. Samrat Sengupta is an Associate Professor, Dept. of English, Sidho-Kanho-Birsha University. His research interests include Experimental Bengali Literature. Gender studies, Post-structuralism, Memory Studies, and Posthumanism. He has Guest edited a special issue of the International journal Sanglap on “Caste in Humanities.” He has authored a Bengali monograph titled Pratibader Pathokrom (Syllabi of Resistance). His co-edited volume on Bengali experimental writer Nabarun Bhattacharya titled Nabarun Bhattacharya: Esthetics and Politics in a World after Ethics has been published by Bloomsbury.