Laughter and Colonial Bengali Subjecthood: Rajshekhar Basu’s Satire and the Caste Question

• Published in: Contemporary voice of dalit
• Main Author: Mandal, Durba
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: 02.07.2025
• ISSN: 2455-328X; 2456-0502
• DOI: 10.1177/2455328X251346567

In this article, I will attempt to read a few short stories by the Bengali satirist Rajsekhar Basu and analyse how he constructs a unique Bengali selfhood by blending together satire, parody and cosmopolitan awareness. Using his signature witty brand of humour, he succeeds in creating a subject who is a product of their Bengali cultural roots as well as the global dilemmas of the colonial world. Even more interesting is this subject’s political sensibility that constantly oscillates in the twain between the modern and the traditional. This paper intends to note a gap in Basu’s idea of a twenty-first century (post)colonial Bengali subject, that is, of caste identity. Most of Basu’s protagonists belong to the educated urban middle-class society that he himself represents; the issues of caste in this modern Bengali society are not addressed in his stories as such. Baidik Bhattacharya, in his fascinating essay on some of Rajsekhar Basu’s works, notes that the processes in his parody ‘rearticulate and reconfigure’ the reality of the orient and can help us deterritorialize the topographic orient away from mythic notions of orientalism that facilitate colonial governmentality. I would like to add to his argument that this ‘reality’ of the orient is positioned upon internal erasures. An attempt to reverse colonialism and racism through political humour, in the case of Basu, lacks an acknowledgement of multiplicity within the Hindu social systems. This at once brings my attention to the sociopolitical predicaments that might have influenced Basu’s authorial decisions, as well as the issues of subjectivity and authenticity in writing humour. In case Basu had chosen to represent certain layers in the society he was personally not familiar with, would that have rendered the political potency of his satire inauthentic or offensive? My aim is to attempt an understanding of a progressive upper-caste satirist’s attitude towards a contested issue like caste in colonial Bengali–Hindu society.