ABSTRACT
This chapter reads a selection of Indian avant-garde poetry of the 20th century in two of its languages, one naturalized – English – and another native – Bengali – and theorizes the texture of an aesthetics and poetics in, and as, minor literatures (in a Deleuzian sense). I call it ‘intransigent’ for its persistent tenor of a resolute, recalcitrant resistance to all dominant forms of literary expression of its time is in itself then a ‘minor’ affect/effect. India has 22 official vernacular languages; English is its 23rd language, the illegitimate progeny of the country's historical encounter with British imperialism for over 200 years. Bengali – or Bangla – is one of the many Indian vernaculars known for vast and rich literary output but one of the few that has produced substantial avant-garde literature. A small corner of Indian poetry in English, too, has occupied this space of risk.
Gilles Deleuze, in his essay ‘Literature and Life’, talks of literature as delirium and as a becoming-other of a language, what he calls its minorization, ‘a witch's line that escapes the dominant system’ (translated in Critical Inquiry, Winter 1997, 229). Avant-garde poetry in an acquired or vernacular Indian language may be considered a triple delirium. I will use madness/delirium as method and metaphor to examine avant-garde poetry in Indian English and Bangla, framing them within two entities that are almost endemic to the avant-garde, the ‘manifesto’ and the ‘little magazine’. While in many ways the avant-garde method lies in its madness, its dishevelment, and its investment in the small and the contingent, there is also a bold purposefulness in its manifestos, in its declamations for the future, particularly for the future of the word.
Connected by the geopolitics of ‘Indian-ness’, the English and Bangla avant-gardes also diverge as much as they converge in the radicalism they might espouse for poetry by just ‘being’, and it is from these cracks and chasms that a method of reading them may emerge – a minor way of reading – embracing derangement, the local and the fabular at once, in difference and in resonances.
