[Reader-list] Talk: Technology is Nature : On the Political Aesthetics of Ritwick Ghatak's Ajantrik

[OISHIK SIRCAR]

 *The Department of English, University of Delhi *nvites you to a talk by

*Rajarshi Dasgupta*
*Technology is Nature : On the Political Aesthetics of Ritwick Ghatak's
Ajantrik
*
 Thursday  ,  October  29, 2009,  2:30 pm

Room 12 A , Faculty of Arts, University of Delhi


The larger concern of this paper is vernacular articulations of Marxism in
India. More specifically, it discusses a film by Ritwik Ghatak to isolate a
distinct current in the cultural experiments set off by the progressive
movement at the time of independence. We can see two sets of preoccupations
in the aesthetic idiom shaped in the process, especially in Bengal. One
dealt with contesting ideas of progress, the meaning of labour and the
potential of creating a new kind of man from ordinary people. The other set
addressed the experience of capitalism, marked by a conflict of mechanical
and human, and an ambivalent attitude to modern technology as opposed to
nature. They converged with a critique of instrumental reason and an
authentic idea of human that stood at the other end of determinist notions
which failed to impress most artists of the day.
 I would like to point out a contending stream of thought in this body of
vernacular Marxism, which saw the questions of human-ness and technology
very differently. As the title suggests, the paper will try to argue that
technology was approached in this thought as precisely nature, of course in
a different register, but all the more a mysterious, magical register. On
the other hand, the question of human-ness came to be posed at the threshold
of a certain kind of transcendence, but one that was immersed in material
world, and which provoked the question of political practice in new
directions. Contrary to its available readings, I want to suggest that
‘Ajantrik’ is an invitation to such thoughts, which help us not only to
frame the question of political aesthetics in a different manner, but also
make us attentive to the political in ways we do not expect.


About the Speaker: Rajarshi Dasgupta has done doctoral work on the intellectual
history of Marxism in the late colonial Bengal from Oxford. His publications
and research interests also include refugee histories, local party politics
and postcolonial governance. Formerly a Fellow with the Centre for Studies
in Social Sciences, Calcutta, he is currently Assistant Professor at the
Centre for Political Studies, JNU, in New Delhi.





-- 
OISHIK SIRCAR

oishiksircar at gmail.com
oishik.sircar at utoronto.ca