His early life in the intimate natural setting of Barisal and Silchar, the great Bengal famine of 1943, the violent legacy of Partition, and above all his experience of service in the armed forces went to the making of Manindra Gupta(1926-2018), one of the major architects of Bangla poetry in the post-Jibanananda era. He assimilated all that was best in his predecessors and carved out a style all his own. Dispensing with the conventional lyric mode marked by effusion, Gupta brought his intensive reading of world literature, critical thinking, and unsentimental worldview to bear on his unique style of presentation that is manifest in the deft employment of the occult and the absurd. This book offers an interpretation of Gupta's life, his texts and times.

Click here to read an excerpt from this book.

Learn More

Apart from offering an extended chronology of postmodern literary and representational events, this revised second edition of the book deals with the history of postmodern aesthetical practices and examines certain Bangla texts in the light of postmodern cultural tendencies. Learn More

Instead of offering a neat, coherent ideological perspective, this book uses various conflicting strands of feminist, postcolonial and postmodern thought to comment on the politics of embodiment and its cultural implications. In an attempt to understand how the body is put into discourse and organized in multiple ways, the short prose fragments in this book deal with issues like voyeuristic gaze, masterbation, fetishism, nudity, objectification, ageing, body-mind dualism, forms of otherness, ingredients of intimacies in interpersonal spheres and altered states of consciousness. The issues range from these to the uses of the body as a contested space in matters relating to the ethos of ascetic purity, trends in esoteric cults, management of death and reproduction, practices of mindfulness as a form of self-care and the links between the performance of power and the constitution of self. Click here to read an excerpt from the book. Learn More