The Ghosts of Futures Canceled: The Hauntological in Film and Literature of New India

Abstract

Contemporary Calcuttan film and fiction diagnose India’s current condition as one in which the present has given up on the future, and therefore, relics and ghosts of the future are to be found in the unactivated potentials of the past (Mark Fisher 2013). This talk situates these specters within literary trends in multi-lingual Calcutta in order to make visible the ‘deeper motives’ (Benjamin) of Bhasha literature vis-à-vis the new political and cultural coordinates of contemporary India.

The talk will explore and compare Hindi, Urdu, and Bengali literary and filmic conjurings of Calcutta’s diversity of people and times, the alterity of deterritorialization, and the ‘structure of feeling’ across cultural texts that confront and denature India’s post-1991 neoliberal political economy and the concomitant ascendance of Hindu nationalism. Exemplars of the Calcutta hauntological include Nabarun Bhattacharya’s Harbart (1994), Alka Saraogi’s Kali-Kathā: Vāyā Bāipās (1998), Bani Basu’s Moom (1998), Siddiq Alam’s Lamp Jalāne-vāle (2008), and Anik Datta’s 2012 film Bhūter Bhabiṣyat. The title of this film carries the wonderful play on the double meaning of bhūt: the title can mean The Future of the Past or The Future of Ghosts. By working across three languages, this paper connects and contrasts how speculative fiction narratives resist political and material dispossession—through spiritual (re)possession. The strategies include evoking the deep temporalities of urban spaces and summoning the specters of bygone Calcuttas that re-center and recover minor or lost figures, alternate imaginaries, and ghosts of futures canceled.