“Are You Home?”: Erotics of Leisure in Bengali Poetry From the 60s

Presenter:

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Abstract

Speed and newness are frequently found to be central to the postcolonial imaginary. While the newly decolonized nation-state ceaselessly seeks to define itself in fresh and unique terms, it is also riddled by an internal impetus of ‘catching up’ with erstwhile imperial powers, hence the obsession with speed which almost echoes imperial futurism. Such was also the fraught case of South Asia where post-independence writing had the burden of radically reinventing the nation even while they played out diverse postcolonial developmental desires. In this paper I argue that the avant garde poetry of the 1960s from Bengal refused to align itself with this vision of speed and development, and instead chose to pursue newness through a cerebral and corporeal engagement with leisure, verging on the erotic. 1960s in post-independence Bengal saw the progressive nation-building rhetoric of Nehruvian poetics, premised on work, future, and focused purposefulness. But avant garde poets were disillusioned by the trauma of partition and neo-colonial unemployment. They invented an amoral universe of leisure, shadowy nostalgia, and purposeless meandering. Through the work of one quintessential poet, Shakti Chattopadhyay, I will investigate two aspects of this poetics which found in leisure a suitable anchor. First, leisure provided the poets with a conceptual space to dive into Freudian depths or travel across civilizational histories and planetary time. Second, unheeded in the public, power translated itself into a private polymorphous sexuality, frequently experimenting with itself on the passive female. This libidinal economy of leisure marked a new mode of marking postcolonial time.