ABSTRACT
This essay outlines the condition of emergence of a cultural phenomenon in India which may be called “the literary lumpen.” Karl Marx had, famously, disparaged the “lumpenproletariat” as social “refuse,” which, for him, included such colorful members as “rag pickers, knife grinders, tinkers, beggars” and numerous other persons incapable of revolutionary class-consciousness. In the first two-thirds of the twentieth century, many participants in international Marxist movements followed Marx’s lead in writing about the urban political scene, simultaneously inflecting and nuancing the lumpen in local terms. Here I focus on one such mid-twentieth century Bengali writer and cultural critic: Binoy Ghosh. I discuss how the literary lumpen emerges as a contradictory inhabitant of urban space in mid-twentieth-century Calcutta, negotiated in Ghosh’s refashioning of the literary naksha, a nineteenth-century Bengali hybrid of English satire and Persianate naqshah. Blending critique, parody, and hyperbole, the literary genre of the naksha formally paralleled the interaction between indigenous and colonial cultures, articulating the tensions between the Left’s attempt to conceptualize as well as to mobilize the itinerant poor and deviant classes in the postcolonial city. A consideration of Binoy Ghosh alerts us to the imbrication of literary form, precarious subjectivity, and postcolonial nationalism, even as the lumpen prove resistant to representation.
