Sandipan Chattopadhyay’s Bharotborsho: Sexuality beyond Nation-State’s Control

Perhaps every literary work has its own time-of-becoming. The time-of-becoming for the work is not necessarily the time-of-being, narrated in it. It is a time in its afterlife, when the work becomes more relevant than ever. The time for the Bengali (post-)modernist writer Sandipan Chattopadhyay’s (1933–2005) novel Bharotborsho (1999) seems to have arrived only now! The time narrated in the novel begins in 1992 and ends in 2042 with a dystopian vision of the future. As I write this chapter, India (Bharotborsho) is at the cusp of a complex and unpredictable negotiation between the hyper-nationalism of Hindi-Hindu-Hindustan propagated by the current far-right dispensation and the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic that halted socio-political life and the previously ongoing anti-CAA and NRC protests. With the inauguration of the Ram Mandir in Ayodhya, we have stepped into a new era of Indian history where religious and communalist politics has taken over from an older notion of a syncretic and secular India. Chattopadhyay’s text looks out into an uncannily familiar future that contains both the dominant elements of our times: Hindu hyper-nationalism and viral epidemic.