Category Archives: Art of Resistance

This work is a deliberate act of counter-propaganda — a sustained, repetitive, and self-consciously plagiaristic agit-prop by two melancholy Kolkata Bandyopadhyays who describe themselves as residents of a “non-nation.” Written in a deliberately hybrid register that mixes formal Sadhu Bangla with colloquial Chalit, code-switching, Sanskrit citation, and street humour, the text performs its own central argument: that the imposition of linguistic and cultural uniformity is itself a form of violence. The book’s governing question is the political and civilisational fate of Bengali identity under Hindutva’s ascendant national project. The argument unfolds across seven chapters and proceeds on several interlocking planes. It opens by mapping the deep genealogy of anti-Bengal prejudice within Brahmanical Sanskrit literature — from the Ṛgveda and Aitareya Āraṇyaka to the Baudhāyana Dharmasūtra — showing how the term vāyaṃsi (birds, creatures of unstable motion) was deployed to mark the peoples of Bengal and the eastern territories as ritually impure, geographically ungovernable, and socially excludable. This ancient ideology of exclusion is read as the structural antecedent of contemporary Hindutva’s hostility toward Bengal. The book then interrogates the ideological apparatus of nationalism itself. The concepts of mātr̥bhūmi (motherland) and mātr̥bhāṣā (mother tongue) are traced to their origins in Christian ecclesiastical vocabulary — adopted into Bengali and Indian nationalist discourse during the colonial period — rather than to any ancient Sanskritic or “Sanatan” tradition. Through a close reading of Bankimchandra’s “Bande Mataram” and Rabindranath’s Ghare Baire — particularly the counter-nationalist voice of Nikhilesh — the authors argue that the nationalist invocation of the “mother” is a manufactured intoxication (nesha) that substitutes enchantment for genuine political freedom. The category of “Hindu” identity is subjected to rigorous historical disaggregation. Drawing on Rajataraṅgiṇī, Chola-period inscriptions, and the long record of Shaiva-Vaishnava conflict, the book demonstrates that the “one religion, one nation” claim of the Sangh Parivar has no historical foundation: what existed was a complex, internally contested plurality of sects, practices, and cosmologies — a plurality that colonial administration and contemporary Hindutva alike have violently flattened. A substantial chapter examines the political economy of language. Grierson’s own admission of the impossibility of distinguishing language from dialect is mobilised to expose the census-driven erasure of Odia, Assamese, and other eastern linguistic identities in the service of a Hindi-dominated national demography. The historical construction of Bengali geographic identity — from Pundra, Gauda, and Banga through the Mughal Suba-e-Bangla to the colonial Bengal Presidency — is traced to show that “Bengal” itself is a layered historical formation rather than an eternal essence. The chapter ends with a detailed empirical treatment of what the authors call the carabeef paradox: the coexistence of cow-vigilante violence and lynching with India’s status as the world’s largest exporter of bovine meat under Hindutva governance — complete with data on the Allana Group’s political donations and the corporate structures behind the trade. The critique of Bengali identity is turned inward as well. Drawing on Nirad C. Chaudhuri’s Ātmaghātī Bāṅālī while contesting his Eurocentric prescription, the authors indict the Bengali bhadralok’s chronic self-deception, selective memory, and hypocritical Islamophobia — the same community that produced Derozio, Vidyasagar, and Nazrul now reaches for saffron affiliation or comfortable silence. The book closes with a rereading of the Sanskrit tarpaṇa (ancestral water-offering) ritual as a philosophical statement of radical solidarity — one that extends water and recognition even to enemies, to serpents, to trees, to the dispossessed. The “I” (ayam) is asked to journey toward “we” (vayam), a movement the authors align with the Bantu concept of ubuntu. The final aspiration, voiced through Nazim Hikmet, John Lennon, Juan Ramón Jiménez, and Carl Sagan, is not for a better nation but for the dissolution of the nation-statist form itself — a trans-planetary, non-violent dwelling in the (other-than-)human species-condition, from Kolkata to the pale blue dot.