Hindi Hauntology in Post-Liberalization Kolkata by Rahul Bjørn Parson
April 16, 2021
Registration/RSVP
Rahul Bjørn Parson received an MA and PhD from UC Berkeley, with a specialization in Modern Hindi literature.
Kolkata’s others are largely marked by religious, regional, and linguistic difference, namely as non-Bengali in language and ethnicity. Therefore, Hindi-Urdu speakers (mostly Marwari and Bihari) are seen as permanent outsiders even after generations in Bengal. Hindi and Urdu narratives perform their belonging to Kolkata by consistently exploring the deep temporalities of urban spaces and summoning the specters of bygone Calcuttas and Kalkattas. Their literary mappings calibrate the metric of historical imagination, as the narrator of Alka Saraogi’s Kalikath?: Via Bypass (1998) says explicitly, re-centering and recovering minor or lost figures of the past as agents of history and ghosts of futures canceled. The talk will explore Hindi and Urdu literary conjurings of