Dirty Issues

Reconsidering the ‘Impure’ in Two Bengali Texts

Abstract

In Sandipan Chattopadhyay’s fiction, Jakhon Shabai Chhilo Garbhoboti (“When All Looked Pregnant”), and Sappho’s anthology Chhi! Tumi Naaki…we find the writers’ effort of revealing the ‘truth’ as conceived by Baldiou, by making visible the invisible issues that are strategically kept under the carpet, in the name of prejudice and guilt, to the convenience and comfort of our ambivalent conventions. By pulling many serious but invisible issues out from under the rug and placing them before the reader, these books  actually challenge the construct of Bengali society (a microcosmic representation of the Indian macrocosm) that conveniently ignores/suppresses whatever deviates from the regulated categories of ‘right’ and ‘normal’. This article tries to highlight how these texts become a psychological playground where not only the personal intersects with the socio-political but even the private becomes eloquent and creates a ‘Carnivalesque’ through the ‘plurality’ of de-familiarized habits/desires (auto-eroticism) and alternative sexual orientations (lesbianism) which is ultimately essential to deconstruct the monolith.