RESEARCH WORKS: AT A GLANCE

Debaprasad Bandyopdhyay (b. 1965), through his 20 years journey in the realm of
institutionalized academics did 27 different types of works, which are someway different
from the earlier paradigms or, one might say that those works are not only mere
reproductions of his inherited institutionalized cultural capital or a mimicry of a colonially
imposed model that leads to intellectual anorexia or rather a type falsification of earlier
paradigms.
However, that might be not only a lofty claim but it also hid the fact that all our
information and knowledge are socially accumulated knowledge that was, it is matter of
regret, posed as private property through the sign © and the wisdom is rarely available.
Bandyopadhyay’s works and projects are the products of his social milieu.

Bandyopadhyay is a local sub-altern public sphere academician, who avoids the

technical intelligentsia (followers of Sahib’s models and they are not committed to the
persons who are accommodating surplus work-time to them by performing surplus
labour) or inorganic intellectuals and thus fails to be a part of academic tribe and its
subsequent socialization process. Of course, that socialization process does not lead to
legendary Socratic dialogue.

He is also a political activist though he has not affiliated to any political parties as he was
always talking about the corporatization of political parties within the money-sign-based
democratic system. He is a regular participant in TV. and radio talk-shows and
documentary films, street-corners’ talks and International seminars on socio-political,
psychological, linguistic, environmental and economic issues.

He is also a part of parallel academics as it is found in West Bengal’s Little Magazine

Movement, though that was not counted as the part his academic pursuit by his parent
institute. His parent institute justifiably does not believe in the domain of parallel
academics as this unorganized sector does not directly contribute in the transactions of
formal/organized print capitalist eco-enemy paper-publication. Though the dissemination
of knowledge is also observed in this space of these parallel academics as all these
writings in public sphere simultaneously influence the classroom-discourse and some of
them are translated into English, French and Italian.

Not only that, Bandyopadhyay also sought engagement with the people, who, by
supplying their surplus labour, are sustaining his livelihood. Bandyopadhyay, a linguist by
training and a Ph.D.-holder (1996), a junior lecturer (since 1999) in an autonomous
central government institute in India, tries his best for those from he has received and is

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receiving the manifestation of surplus labour by executing some self-funded projects on
economic issues in West Bengal, India.
He (henceforth Stalker) has done following 27 research works:
1. CRIPPLED CREATIVITY: AN INQUIRY INTO LANGUAGE, PSYCHE, SOCIETY:
2. VALENCY OF BANGLA VERB AND PROBLEM OF COMPOUND VERBS:
3. ARCHAEOLOGY OF BANGLA GRAMMAR :
4. CAN COMPUTER SPEAK?
5. FUZZY LOGICAL EXPRESSION IN BANGLA :
6. FOLKLORE AND FOLK-LANGUAGE: MYTH OR REALITY?
7. HISTORICISM IN THE DISCOURSE OF BANGLA LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE
8. ABHABA, ECP, DELETION AND TRACE
9. SVATVA OR MY-NESS AND ECONOMIC ENTITLEMEMT
10. TRANSLATION STUDIES
11. MASCULINITY STUDIES
12. YAYATI COMPLEX
13. SOCIO-ECONOMIC SURVEYS IN AGRICULTURE AND INDUSTRY IN WEST
BENGAL
14. CONCEPT OF BODY IN INDIAN PHILOSOPHY AND ARCHITECTURE
15. THE CONCEPT OF ERROR (KHYATI) IN MAD-(WO)MEN’S LANGUAGE
16. THE CONCEPT OF PERCEPTUAL TIME AND GRAMMATICAL TIME IN BANGLA
17. BANGLA CALLIGRAPHY, LANGUAGE ART AND LINGUISTIC PEDAGOGY
18. WO(L)D SPACES: NON-EXISTENCE OF WORDS
19. ANEKANTA METHODS
20. SILENCEME: SILENT OTHER IN LINGUISTICS
21. IMAGINED BOUDARIES AND PRE-COLONIAL INDIAN IMAGI-NATION
22. MAKING OF THE INDIAN PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE
23. SEGMENTING THE SUPRASEGMENTALS : MUSICKING IN SPEAKING
24. INTERPRETING GENETIC STRUCTURE BY DEPLOYING LINGUISTIC
STRUCTURE
25. GLOTTOPOLITICS OF LINGUISTIC SUBALTERNITY OR AN AGENDA FOR
PLANNING FROM BELOW
26. SEMIOTICS OF PHOTOGRAPHY

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27. SOCIOLOGY OF CONTEMPORARY ACADEMICS

A brief description of his 27 research works (both old and on-going) is represented
below:

1. The transcendental cogito of context-free Speaking/Hearing Subject (S/HS) does

exist really. Context-sensitive S/HS are creating finite well-formed syntagms
within the violent locus of behavourial manipulation, and that is encretic
language. Psycho-social (psi) properties are working—be aware— genotext is
mingling with phenotext—

1.1. as Yayati complex is working. It may be a narrative of patriarchal age-

discrimination: Old Yayatis are snatching away the vitality of Purus. Instead of
Oedipal “having mother, being father”, it is yayatic patriarchy that is reigning. It
emanates from father’s ego, not from the Id. Of course, there is no universal
truth claim.

1.2. On the other hand, the caring attitude towards younger generation is named
after war-monger Babar, by remembering his effort to save his child. In this case,
the nexus between saving the progeny and the preservation of private property
is also being observed. (S)talker questioned the Freud’s taxonomy of mind and
proposed a different taxonomy by rearranging the concept of mind as it is found
in sahajiya tradition. The simultaneous and overlapping operations of Yayati
and Babar complex (thanatos and eros) originate from context-sensitive ego.

1.3. Drona compelled Ekalavya to cut off his right thumb. Translation-project in the
colonial context has got Ekalavya’s fate. Thus, from now on, we shall call source
language text as Dronacarya text and target language text as Ekalavya text.
Violence and threats are all pervading realities in the world of competition.
Sudhindranath Dutta’s text was analyzed by the (s)taker.

1.4. Captive S/HSs are suffering from crippling of creativity and simultaneously
bypassing the threat and violence by remaining creative in the midst of violence.

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 Thus creativity is at a time a presence and an absence—it is at a time bheda
and abheda.

1.5. How do we distinguish between error (khyati) and non-error (akhyati), when we
are talking about normal and natural language? Well-formed syntagms are used
as examples in the syntactic analysis. That is sanity. Let us suffer severe
insanity to understand at least at the dream stage of madhyama.

2. Kindly note that all of them, Drona and Yayati, are male icons. Feminism, in
return, is working and the male space is almost deleted within the Bengali
imagined community. Since 19th C., super-males are spending calories for
woman emancipation. What is the psychological status of such super-males?
The semantics of some condemned public-sphere-words (antonyms of super-
males) that trigger against testis-poisoning are discussed to understand the
misandrous Bengali-mindset, the worshipers of the goddesses at the crossroads.

3. If grammar is within S/HS, why are you writing grammar? Speaking on speaking
means meta-speaking and that is the project of grammar, philology and
linguistics despite their fuzzy as well as determined thresholds. Grammatical
orders of things are controlled/appropriated/approximated/codified by the statist
and familial non-discursivity. Grammar is political action that codifies S/HS’s
docile body. Text books of grammar were analyzed to show the affinities between
statist constitution and the constitution of grammar.

3.1. Therefore, let us have an anti-grammar—a pedagogical praxis in

unschooling.
3.2. Linear deterministic history of language is a nation statist project—a
genealogical fantasy confirmed by pratyavijna. Inanimate arbitrary signs
are animated—thus philology has become leisure class’s cup of tea.
None talks about historicism.
3.3. Linear history of Bangla literature had overlapped with the “development”
and “origin” of the Bangla language in the discourses of philologists and
literary historians. Put why-question here as a connoisseur.

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 3.4. Compensatory lengthening or deaspiration phenomena as described by
Bengali philologists, are results of writing-obsession. Reduplication, as a
term , tautologous. Relative degree of arbitrariness or switching over of
sense organs in case of so-called icons, though was observed, were
ignored. However large corpus was generated to show the autonomous
status of imagined order: Nation state Bangla.
3.5. Kolkata “dialect”, the process of and history of standardization, the
triglossic situation was observed by the (s)talker in the early stage of his
career.

4. What a division: Folk and non-folk! Loukika fact has become aloukika fiction and
vise versa. The folk and tribe are colonially (either internal or external) created
categories that surrogate history and physiology. Reporting of folklorists and
anthropologists helps governmentality. S/HSs’ docile bodies are penetrated with
anato-bio-political tools.
4.1 The differance between folk-art/songs/plays and classical -art/songs/plays has
become blurred if nature of sponsorship is to be considered. Thus economics of
such dividing practice is to be investigated.

5. S/HS is desiring to be a machine: Machine= f (S/HS). Non-algorithmic zones of

S/HS with n-nary options are annihilated. Meaning is solidified. Binary machine
does not understand what “understanding” is. Do we not consider Russell’s
paradox or Godel’s theorem here or are making fun with non-biodegradable and
disposable ostentatious talking toys?

5.1. S/HS is searching truths of Bangla verbs with surface syntactic rules of valency.
Toys are made and mechanical predictability is fine. How does such a particular
S/HS find labour-time to do such work? Others are supplying surplus labour and
S/HS, as a member of leisure class or academic tribe is fragmenting the baikhari
(speaking with arbitrary signs at the time of waking) . What wastage! Truths of
Bangla verbs are not revealed, instead transitivity is swinging like a pendulum.

5.2. One thing is certain that meaning is uncertain. What a paradox! Aporia! Invented
numerals are fuzzy—indeterminacy prevails. An ostentatious toy was made.

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(S)talker tried to depict some non-deterministic and uncertain phenomena revealed in
the expressions of numerals by Bangla speakers. The points of arguments are as
follows: 1. Human quantification is partly or fully different from analyst’s rigorous
quantification. 2. The following corpus from Bangla has a peculiar nature of non-
componentiality or they are rather prototypical. This prototypical nature of fuzzy
numerals cannot be handled in computational framework or even in the Logical Form.
The first set of data deals with idiomatic expressions like: 1. Sat-paMc Seven-five “pros
and cons”; 2. nOy-chOy nine-six “topsy-turvy”; 3. unis-biS, nineteen-twenty “trifle
difference” jaHa bahanno taHay tippanno. 5. jaHa baHanno, taHai tippanno “Whatever
is fifty-two, that is fifty-three” (i.e. 52=53) "A trifle difference does not count."
The second problem may be termed as “one is not equal to one” problem. A rule of “one
deletion” was proposed by Probal Dasgupta (1987).5 dokanduTo shop-two-classifier. 6.
dokanTa shop-singular-classifier. Obviously, "one” is deleted in 6. However, Dasgupta
mentioned that ‘one deletion’ is not true in the cases like 7. jOlTa, Water-classifier or
8. telTa oil-classifier. In Bangla, one cannot say 9. *EkTa jOl ‘One-classifier Oil”
However, there are some pragmatic cases where such expressions like 9 is possible.
The Speaking subject’s perception may still be “one" in those cases-- it is ‘one’ as a
mass body. Of course, this is not a deterministic physical ‘one’, but one as a whole.
When any Bangla speaker says, 10. phrij theke jOlTa ano. fridge from water-
classifier bring "Bring water from the fridge.”, his/her intention is to refer “one bottle of
water”. Therefore, ‘one” is there in the D-structure, but it is a fuzzy one. The concept of
this fuzzy "one" can be further illustrated in the following movement-transformations,
where deterministic numeral expressions are changed to non-deterministic Determiner
Phrases:
11.a) paMcTa five-classifier (definite)
11.b) goTa paMcek classifier( indef. ) five-one "more or less five "
12.a) paMcjon five-classifier (definite)
12.b) jona paMcek classifier( indef. ) five-one "more or less five "
13.a) paMckhana five-classifier
13.b) khan paMcek ,classifier( indef. ) five-one "more or less five "
14.a) paMc Hajar "five thousand"
14.b) Hajar paMcek thousand five-one. "more or less five thousand"
15.a) paMc lakh, five lacs

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15.b) lakh paMcek lacs five-one "more or less five lacs"
Examples like 11-15 show those deterministic expressions in (a) and non-deterministic
expressions in (b). Compared to (a), examples in (b) show the fronting of classifiers with
subsequent morphophonemic change and an addition of /ek/ “one” to the specific
numeral x. This one is not deterministic +-1, but this “one” has a range more or less than
+- 1.
These Bangla numeral expressions show the world-views of the community concerned
with a special reference to their psychophysical way of looking at things (perception) and
ways of making order of things (understanding). Therefore, it is a hermeneutic problem
that involves the relative gap between human perception and understanding in relation
to their habitat. The range of +-1 is different in different persons belonging to different
socio-economic classes or even it may be different in a single person in different
psychosocial context. A game had been developed by his engineering students and
several papers on this topic had been read in conferences and published in journals.

5.3. Perceptual time is supplemented by grammatical tense. Do we need to deploy

tensor calculus here? That is ridiculous. Let us watch the watch in the time of eco-enemy
technocratic society guided by technical rationality. After all, the members of academic
tribe are technical intelligentsia/inorganic intellectuals, snatchers of surplus labour.
Organic intellectuals are endangered species (Can you provide statistics? –Sorry, I
cannot).

5.4. If notation system is available at hand and can be noted by human hearing, why
should we use machine for gauzing that? Why should we use High, Mid and low
parameter with unknown intervals in determining (dis)continuous string of speech? Do,
re, mi, fa, so, la, ti are available nodal points with universal interval 2 root 22. If this
formalism would be deployed, one can cut that, which cannot be cut off—
suprasegmentals can be segmented.
What is about the difference between speaking and musicking? Both of differs due to
institutionalization of speech and at the moment of speaking we are deferring musicking
and vise versa. Differance can be solved, but how?

6. Nirmal kumar Basu and Stella Kramrisch were arguing: were the bodies of the Hindu
temples constructed on the basis of physiological corporeal or meta- physiological

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conjecture of body? Mira Mukherjee showed the path when she introduced Visvakarmas
to us.

6.1. The so-called metaphysical body is evident in the so-called “Hindu”

architecture. The bisuddha-baikhari-jagrat (falsest), anahata-madhyama
(speaking when dreaming) -svapna (falser), manipura-pasyanti-susupti
(falsest) association might be established here with many sadhaniya margas.
Kavir, Dadu, Lalon, Rabindranath (though they were not writers of papers in
academic journals) and other sahajiyas with the authors of
Mandukyoponisad, Vakyapadiya and Tantraloka can be consulted to attain
the level of paravak. Why then was I fragmenting brittle baikhari, when I was
waking up?

6.2. Waking existence is traumatized by the violent other. Insomniac (S)talker is

searching the atomic level of biological existence. He swinging from
formalism to non-formalism and vise versa.

This project is based on a presumption: triplets in a genetic string behave almost like
linguistic structure. The investigators of this projects analogically considered genetic
string as a body of linguistic structure. By virtue of potentiality of occurrence in a
certain context, a linguistic unit (like phoneme [In case of codons, all the nucleotides
A, G, T, C may be metaphorically considered as smallest units], Morpheme, lexeme
[all the triplets/exons are, for the time being metaphorically considered as words],
sentence) enters into interdependent syntagmatic relation. Each triplet occurs
syntagmatically with each other, e.g., ATG syntagmatically co-occurs with TTT or
TGC, i.e., all the 64 triplets have a definite selectional restriction rule and they are
subjected to the Projection Principle at the moment of producing innumerable
proteins. One may also say that if some triplets are producing same amino acid are
said to be in a paradigmatic relationship (one can be substituted by the other). They
are metaphorically considered as synonymous. However, there are some crucial
questions: in a given syntagm of a genetic string, how the triplets are distributed? Is
there any (inter)dependency relationship among triplets? Before going to answer
such crucial questions and before going to deploy Chomskian syntactic tool, we had
set our primary task to find out the rank-frequency distribution of triplets. We had

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 deployed a particular statistico-linguistic law, i.e., Zipf’s Law, to understand the rank
versus frequency distribution of the codons. What we had found was that the Zipf’s
exponent differentiates in case of genetic sequences.

7. Paravak is a supposed silent zone. Before attaining that let us concentrate on, for the
time being, at the level of baikhari and madhyama, the proliferation of silencemes:
the silent other in mainstream linguistics.
7.1. If linguistics is stipulated, for the time being, as an epistemological
anthropocentric discipline for the deployment of algocentric (a discourse that
is motivated by metamathematical formalism or computational algorithmic
simulation and which ignores the non-algorithmic constitutive “rules”) meta-
symbolic order on the symbolic order, one may find a marginal other in
linguistics—an order of non-signs. For these non-signs, let me introduce a
term: “silenceme”, which is at a time a non-sign and a sign and does not have
a fixed componential meaning and thus violates the law of excluded middle.

A blank parchment with the supposed seal of Caesar, when was “read” by
Antony, swayed the commoners (Julius Caesar, 3.2). In Tagore’s play, Post-
office, a conspirator, out of fun, sent a blank letter to an “illiterate” boy, who was
expecting king’s letter, when he was waiting for death. However, another
character altogether differently interpreted that blank letter. This blankness of the
white letter, then, was not interpreted as a poisonous fun, but as a “real” remedy
for that boy. Thus, the blank spaces are emitting different meanings in different
situations and non-signs were endowed with the supposed sign-ness. That’s the
de-sign of silenceme as it is de-sign-ated within the sign-ness.

When you were asking me, “What’re you doing?” I said, “Nothing.” This single
word, ”nothing” , a supposed minimal “free” (Where does the essential freedom
of word lye? ) form, is not free at all—“nothing” ’s freedom was pervaded by
“other” non-signs, nothingness, the unspoken or something unspeakable, the
non-discursive sonority or unintended sounds (as in John Cage’s musical
compositions or in Rauschenberg and Robert Ryman’s Minimalist paintings with
almost white surfaces.)

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7.2 Word does not exist at the moment of speaking. Let us hear the debate between
word-atomist and discourse holists.
A word-atomist introduces three definitions of “word” per se and the opponent,
a discourse-holist, nullifies those three claims of the word-atomist. The three
definitions given by the word-atomists and are as follows: (a)Word (W) is
subordinate to sentence (S) and thus W S; (b) Word is a minimal free form;
(c)Word as a signifier denotes matter or the order of world.

According the opponent’ strategic definition, word is something (visual

black/any other colored figure) in between two (white or any other colors)
spaces (grounds) and the boundaries of word depend on the particular literate
community’s way of manipulating blank ( “other” spaces or “silenceme”) spaces
in their printing/writing. Thus, “word” is a culture-specific concept, which has
only visual representation. A literate speaking subject, in her printing culture,
has only a visual sensation of word. The blank/other spaces may be
perceived /cognized as a category called absence or abhava. Opponent’s first
argument was against the vyaiakaranika definition of “word” as one of the
levels of hierarchical linguistic analysis. At that moment of speaking, from the
subject’s position, it is not (word-) stress, but it is rather a harmonic intonation
of a discourse (that follows logarithmic pattern), which the S/HS is expressing
as a continuum without being ontologically conscious about the grammarians’
order of things. The memory of these blank spaces may also influence the way
of speaking of a literate speaker. The isolated words are citation forms as it is
lemmatized in the dictionary produced by the print capitalism. Thus, the
typological differences of languages on the basis of word-morpheme ratio hold
no water at all if one does not consider the literate culture-specificity of “word”.
The opponent also opposes the definition-b by questioning the ethico-
epistemological meaning of “freedom” of word as a minimal free form.

7.3. Silenceme is a subjective spatio-temporal “perception” of absence of speaking.

In case of definition-c, that puts word as a signifier, which is signifying
something (signified), the opponent proposes (x) word as signifying
representation represents other representative signifiers, but not the object,
thanks to the anthropocentric perceptive limit as supposed object is always

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 unknown and unknowable and all wo(l)ds are not subservient only to
ostensive definition; (y) the order of supposed signified is always subservient
to the spatio-temporal de-sign-ation and therefore, bears different
representations in different space -time and thus equating pada (word as
deployed in sentences) with padartha (matter) or wor(l)d-logic that pursues
minimal substantive representation as the static meaning of the wor(l)d cuts a
sorry figure. After refuting word-atomist views, the opponent proposes her
discourse-holism (not the sentence-holism as proposed by Bhartrhari)
hypothesis by introducing the theory of intimate attachment of sound-
continuum in a given discourse that also bears the marks of scattered,
fragmented blank loci of silencemes.

7.4. Primarily, (s)talker had faced a problem with so-called bound morheme –Ta
(classifier) in the Bangla sentences like
1. korchiSTa ki?
do-pr.cont-(-Hon)-classifier what?
2. korchoTa ki?
do-pr.cont-(+-Hon) classifier what?
3. korchenTa ki?
do-pr.cont-(+Hon) classifier what?
4. Hocche Ta Ki ?
happen-pr.cont- classifier what?

In all these cases bound morpheme Ta is lonely as it is not a part of the

preceding verbs which have already got inflections and thus are closed though
orthographically Ta is written with those verb. In all these cases wh-object is
missing as the speaker of these sentences does not have the cognition of that
wh-object or otherwise s/he is cognizing the absence. The second possibility is
that s/he may have the pragmatic competence of cognizing that wh-object but
s/he is pretending to be an ignorant, i.e. s/he has a cognition of absence of
absence which is otherwise a presence. At that time, the author structurally
interpreted this phenomenon from the perspective of dead Empty Category
Principle. Concept of relational absence or abhava might be introduced to
strengthen the semantics of the ECP and deletion. Any moved element that

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leaves behind a trace in the locus may be considered as a case of posterior
absence. The open question is whether a moved element actually leaves behind
a trace or not. It can be solved by an independent reason of posterior absence
or uttara-abhava, which, by assigning the absential qualifier to the empty locus,
points out the once-upon-a-time cognition of existence of the counter-positive. An
NP-trace is an instance of posterior-absence. The trace of moved element can
be cognized in the locus from where the counter-positive is moved. Thus the
“trace of X” can be interpreted in the chain of (qulifier, qualificand or
counterpositive, locand, locus) X, t or binder-bindee relation. This is called as L-
relation or sub-super stratum/locus-counterpositive or bindee-binder relation or
the antecedent-trace association. Assigning absential qualifier emphasized the
fact emphasized that any case of chain like (John, t) is not to be interpreted as
only a simple case of “copy and delete” but a case of a definite locus-
counterpositive relation or L-relation. If the locus’s (where trace occurs) being the
absence of counterpositive amounts to the locus’s being the object referred by
the word ‘absence’ that is occasioned by a prior cognition of the counterpositive.
In the case of posterior absence, the counter-positive is destroyed and the
counter-positive is responsible for this type of abhava. PRO is a locus of the
counterpositive or antecedent. It may be called posterior absence where lexical
element is destroyed and thus contraction is possible, e.g. in case of wanna-
contraction. PRO is always controlled by its counterpositive. Posterior absence is
also found in the case of pro in Null subject languages or pro-drop languages like
Italian, where pronominal is dropped or destroyed though the locus of that
counterpostive is there. The property of counterpositive is reflected in the Agr or
phi-features in those pro-drop languages. The absence cognized in the t is under
the mode of limitorship of the moved element. Thus, there must be a locus for an
absence, though the content of the counterpositive is moved. In a given
sentence, whenever a phonological matrix is lacking, the category as a locus for
that moved or destroyed counterpositive exists for absential cognition in a given
sentence. If locus is there the delimiting properties of counterpositiveness is also
there. Thus, in case of deletion, both the category and content is not hammered
and erased, it is only the content that is absent from the category-ness of
locushood. Thus, though deletion is a posterior absence, it has the delimiting
property of being counterpositive-ness, e.g., in case of wh-deletion, the locus of

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 wh lacks the wh (where there is no overt wh) as well as wh-ness or is marked by
the posterior absence of wh and wh-ness in its locus. The underlying wh-phrase
undergoes wh-movement to COMP leaving an absence or trace behind and then
Wh-deletion or posterior absence of wh occurs. The category persists by means
of inherence-relation. The application of universal recoverability condition is
subject to the awareness of cognition of absence in the locus of the category.
Thus the absential quantifier solves a crucial problem of whether a deletion
erases category and content or only the contents of a category by positing the
category as a locus of the counterpositive. However, there must be a distinction
between a moved element and a deleted element. In case of moved element, the
resident of t or R-expression is an instance of posterior absence.

8. Let us return at the level of baikhari for the sake of lokasmgraha.

8.1 (S)talker is now engaging both western and eastern tradition of understanding
signs by analyzing both the still photography and cinematic representations. He
is deploying both Vedantic tools (ghatakasa-patakasa tatva) and post-structuralist
method for understanding all pervading sign-system in the image-messages. He
had also conducted several seminars on visual literacy, eco-photography, Politics
and ethics of photography.
8.2 (S)talker is searching the imagined boundaries. He was then searching
linguistically movement-prone zones--where there was a need/demand/desire for
monolingual state, (s)talker would be there. How did people identify themselves
with their language? Stalker was albeit confused as s/he could not find out the
enumerated boundary of monolingual state anywhere in India. Even some people
had cut a sorry figure to name their own language.
8.3. Under the hegemonic control of standard language within an imagined nation
state, the capital-incentive language-Industry is proliferated by the
introduction of electronic as well as print capitalism with the help of
ideological state apparatuses. If “other” captive varieties’ (so-called dialect)
the S/HS, revolt against the central EL and withdraw their affiliation from the
abstract umbrella of the supposed monolingual nation state, the situation is
observed as language movement. This is a case of mutual resemblance or
anyonyopratibimba, where the dominated is reflecting on the images of the
dominator; the dominating paradigm is followed and copied—all the state

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 organs, ideological and repressive state apparatuses, are repeated in a form
of reverse mimicry. Thus, here svatva is not established, but is manifested in
a form of self-other exchanges and reflections.
8.4. However, there is another side of the story, (S)talker had seen the barefoot
pilgrims’ journey— pilgrims’ progress. They were communicating with each
other, at the vyavaharika level, but surprisingly enough, they are maintaining
their languages without using speed capitalist instruments. There is no
question of identification of language as communication is more important.
This pluriligualism needs no money. I was associating my experiences with
Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj as (s)talker had found such instances in that book.

8.5. This project of (s)talker was an account of pre-colonial symbolic distributions

of imagined boundaries in the geo-political construct called “India” and it is
also a response to the Partha Chatterji- Amartya Sen polemic regarding the
pre-colonial (non-/)existence of Indian model.
Chatterji raised the following question:
“If nationalism in the rest of the world have to choose their
imagined community from certain ‘modular’ forms already made
available to them by Europe and the Americas, what do they
have left to imagine?….” (Chatterji, 1993:5, emphasis added)
The question, raised by Chatterji may lead us to a reading that as a so-called third world
subalterns, we do not have any imagined model and we, as a colonial subject, are only
aping the dominant domain. In response to this, Sen commented:
“The conceptual forms of ‘the nation as an imagined community’,
which Anderson peruses, may not have much to commend it (I
personally think that it does—but this is a different issue), but the
fear that its western origin would leave us without a model that is
our ‘own’ is a somewhat peculiar concern.” (1996: 17-18, fn. 13)

Chatterji’s question (“…what do they have left to imagine?….”) inaugurates the

question of “rem(a)inder” (in Lacanian sense of the term) in the context of colonial
subjectivity, which is, though destroyed by the imposed imagined symbolic order,
constructs its imagined “real(-ity)” as rem(a)inder through some so-called “mythical”,
“spiritual” (thus un-“scientific” from the perspective of enlightened gaze) constructions.
The author will try to discuss three evidences of pre-colonial imagined boundary-

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constructions in the context of Southeast Asia in connection with Chatterji-Sen debate.

(A) Fragmented Body of the Holy Mother: Bharat is a body—a female body—Sati’s
(The holy mother goddess, Siva’s wife) body-parts are scattered all over India—
these female organs are worshipped in different (almost 51, though numbers
differ in different puranas as well as in some marginal printed documents as
found in side of different sati-pithas ) Indian tirthas. Thus, we have found Bharat
as an imagined integration of corporeal-state. If the different distributions of
different scattered body-parts are to be put into the map, that cartographical as
well as symbolical account of iso-corporeal ( cf. isopleth, isoline, isogram or
isorithm) gives us an integrated picture of imagined boundary. The author would
not venture to attest empirically the archival values of the “real” documents (as it
was investigated by some empirical historians in the case of Ramjanmobhoomi),
but the author will try to unfold the discourses of puranas as well as marginal
documents. The presence or absence of the Sati’s body-part in the certain part of
the territory is not the author’s concern.

(B) The celebration of Mela: Certain Southeast Asian aquatic regions are selected in
connection with certain configurations in the celestial sphere (though, one must
remember, the placement of constellation does not follow contemporary
astronomical account) to celebrate ritualistic fairs. Pilgrims from different part of
South-East Asia gather (in which “language” do they communicate?) in the
particular region and they are forming certain type of symbolic solidarity. What is
noticeable here is the association among geographical region, aquatic region and
celestial sphere. The gathering of different margis (< marga or road) or panthis
(<pantha or road, both means followers of certain marga or pantha), again
makes us remember the connected pathways in the South-east Asia.

(C) Four Mathas of Shankarcharya: It was told that the adi Shankarcharya (8 th C.)
established four mathas in four different parts of India: (1)the Uttarāmnāya
matha, or northern matha at Joshimath ; (2)the Pūrvāmnāya matha or eastern
matha, the Govardhana matha, at Puri; (3)the Dakshināmnāya matha, or the
Sringeri Sharada Peetham, the southern matha, at Shringeri ; (4) the
Paśchimāmnāya matha, or the Dwaraka Pitha, the western matha, at Dwarka .

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 The cartographical account of such planned distribution of mathas also provides
us a concept of imagined boundary, though that is not a mimicry of European
nation statist model.

The problem was inaugurated by the empirical historians, when they were searching the
“real” birthplace(s) of lord Rama as if the “true” birthplace of Rama would solve the
problems raised by the Sangh Parivar. If that is not the case, the (s)talker wishes to
address all these imaginations of iso-corporeal as the Schrodinger’s cat problem in
Archaeology. All these imagined evidences remind us the remainder of pre-colonial
genealogy of “our” imagination.

9. What does it mean by the word “our”?

(S)talker had anticipated the incidence of the secret moments of eco-enemy primitive
accumulation and thus he acted with his theoretical weapons before Singur-Nandigram
incidence. He started with these two quotations from Karl Marx:

“From the standpoint of higher economic form of society, private

ownership of the globe by single individuals will appear quite absurd as
private ownership of one man by another. Even a whole society, a nation,
or simultaneously existing societies taken together, are not the owners of
the globe, its usufractuaries, and like bona partes familias, they must hand
it down to succeeding generations in an improved condition.”--Karl Marx,
1894/1959: 776

“The person, who by virtue of the title of portion of the globe has become
the proprietor of these natural objects will wrest these surplus-profit from
functioning capital in the form of rent.” --Karl Marx, 1894/1959: 773

Then he switched over to the concept of svatva as proposed by Kana Raghunatha. He

argued in his padarthatatvanirupanam—

“ Another new category is possessedness (svatva).

Objection: That is nothing but being fit for use as one wishes.
Answer: Not precisely, for one may use food belonging to others.
Objector: One is not enjoined not to eat food belonging to others.
Raghunatha: You see, you must already understand possessedness in order
understand such an injunction. Possessedness is a property that belongs to
people when they receive gifts and that they loose when they give things away.”

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To summarize, svatva as a category does not depend on the exchange value as
ascribed by the market economy, therefore (s)talker was paraphrasing “fit for use”
(viniyogayogyata) as “use value” and it eradicates the self-other differences in the
context of my-ness.
He was then not talking about I-dentity or I-ness, but on my-dentity or my-ness, i.e.,
what “I” possesses or what are (being) belonged to me—my ownership, endowment,
possessed-ness or rather entitlement or in other word, private property. Following
navyanaiyayika term, one may call this category as svatva. Thus this project was a
psychoanalytic shift from the individual ego to the possession of ego as imagined and
symbolized within certain domain order.

This paper starts with some problematic questions:

 Does “I” possess something or something is imposed upon my I-dentity or as my
“own” by following certain rules of socio-cultural or politico-economic legitimacy?
 As a homo sapiens, except my supposed genetic endowment, do I have
something as my “own”? Do I have my ownership of four Ls: Land, Language,
labour and Love in the context or locus of this planet or universe ?

Then what is about legal entitlement as proposed by Amartya Sen (1981: 1-2)? An
entitlement relation applied to ownership connects one set of ownerships to another
through certain rules of legitimacy. It is a recursive relation and process of connecting is
repeated.”

Amartya Sen then cited an example of private ownership from the market economy and
elaborated an exchange of commodity by using money, which is mere a signifier that
metaphysically makes unequal as equal and I really do not know the sufficient and
necessary conditions behind such equation of exchange. Without questioning the
stipulated value ascribed to a currency note, Sen put “etc.” at the beginning of the
exchange process. The origin of entitlement starts with “etc.”, i.e. “ityadi” (iti+adi, iti
means the “end of a process or state or an event”, on the other hand adi means the
“origin”) is put at the “adi” or origin. This is the paradox of his framework as it leads to
fallacy of infinite regress.

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10. As there are several references to the Indian philosophical technicalities in
(s)talker’s enunciation, he was eager to look at the archaeology of the discursive space
called “Indian Philosophy”.
There are three main problems, when we are talking about something called Indian
Philosophy (IP). We forget, at the moment of speaking about it that
(a) “India” is a socio-political construct that was born out of (mainly) 19 C. Industrial as
well as print capitalist imagination of nation state.
(b) and that imagination was also appropriated by the different modes of colonialism.
(C) “Philosophy” is equated with the “darsana” as a part of political translation. Apart
from their obvious similarities, there are also differences as Bankimchandra pointed
out that “Philosophy” is sadhya (is to be mediated) and darsana is sadhaniya
(ought to be mediated. Chattopadhyay, B. ,1879/1974:217-18)
(d) What are categorized under the umbrella of homogenized “lP” is a purely “good
orient”-al project that excludes “other” non-Sanskritized way of thought and
methods of proving truth. This had a precedence in Sayana Madhava’s
“savrvadarsansamgraha (14th. C A.D.), which was taken, at the moment of
constructing “IP” as an appropriate paradigm for setting up order of things.
(e) This order of things are approximated and appropriated by the western knowledge-
base. Thus what is called as “IP” is also a derivative discourse.
(f) “vijnana” in the Indian tradition means “consciousness” (as translated by Dasgupta,
1936:86). Nothing was classified separately as “science’ in the so-called Indian
tradition, though some elements of so-called “Indian culture” obviously may be
categorized as “science” from the European point of view.
(g) What, as a whole, may be called and perceived as “lP of Science” today is merely a
result of retrospective effect ( pratyavbhijna) , i.e. appropriating past knowledge by
deploying today’s knowledge-base and techniques, which may be called
“epistemological recurrence” following Bachelard.
(h) Due to this recurrence and appropriation by the western epistemology, the de-sign
of modem “lP” has emerged as a result of “epistemological amalgamation”.

All these problems must be seriously explained and elaborated before going to venture
into the realm of “IP of Science” as all these statements should be “proved” (i.e. need
pramana) according to the need of “global”(?) Philosophy of science.

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11. (S)talker, out of his severe guilt feeling as he is a member of the leisure class,
executed some self-funded projects related to socio-economic conditions of West
Bengal. He had surveyed jute cultivation and industry; mines and quarries; unorganized
retail market and shopping mall; brick industry; cotton mills; tea-gardens in West
Bengal, India. Methodologically speaking, he had not followed any statistical sample
survey techniques as he wished to reject state-statistics unholy nexus following
Foucauldian paradigm; secondly, under the deployment of scheduled survey techniques,
subjects were objectified and they underwent metonymic transformation. According to
(s)talker, that is a sever violence. Therefore, instead of this technique he followed his
own version of ethnomethodology or snow-ball method for understanding such domains.
His findings are as follows:
 Economics is not a so-called natural science that could be guided by the laws of
physics. Thus the universalization of economic laws is not at all possible.
Econometric analysis does not able to predict future economic condition.
 The governmental statistics does not match with the ground-reality narratives.

 The so-called binary division between organized and unorganized sector does
not work at all— a fuzzy zone of organized-unorganized sector has been evolved
in the West Bengal industrial scenario.
 The existence of disembodied (a ghost-like entity) owners of several industries
has been observed in organized jute industry, coal industry as well as in
unorganized basalt-quarries.
 Due to automation and manipulative procedures taken by the owners of
industries and due to the conversion of surplus labour-necessary labour ratio in
the form of money-sign, null-workers are “working” without any work in the
sphere of economy. The extraction is possible due to the diachronically
accumulated surplus labor from the deceased null workers. Null workers exist
and do not exist.
 By the virtue of the labour of the deceased null workers, owners are creating a
accumulative space, where one can convert money-sign to another money-sign,
i.e., the domain of dangerous share market. Specters of the null workers are not
at all haunting here, where capital to commodity transformation has become
merely a place of conspicuous consumption of the minority super-rich people,

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 who have the fetish for the ostentatious display of eco-enemy commodities.
 The role of state is minimal—collusion of super-rich, a minority, is reigning with
the help of ideological state apparatuses.
 Image processing and remote sensing satellite technologies make it easier to
know the mineral resources. The minority hedge account holders with
Malthaseian mindset, evacuate, terminate and annihilate the people of the land
to be accumulated by creating a simulated war. Hedge account holders are
supplying weapons to the (“terrorist”) state and to the so-called anti-statist
(though they are subscribing the statist order of things) “terrorists” ( (s)talker is
now collecting linguistic data for understanding the import- export of arms and
ammunition. Different terms or antilanguage are used both for the fragmented
parts of imported arms, which are to be assembled and the division of labour)
---a case of simulacrum or theory of double reflections (anyonyopratibimba) –one
is mirroring an-“other”.
 (S)talker is emphasizing on using local terms to depict the nature of economics
as it is found in glocal (global+local) context of West Bengal. If Sahibs could use
so-called antilanguages like plum or lemon market, what is wrong with the terms
like lokkhibar (no consuming day), tola (illegal levy), pORta (covert weight),
gunda tax (tax to be paid too the goons), bani (the hidden residue of the gold at
the time of reselling), Soru line (illegal path) phoRe (the illegal agent), cinHat
(signs or a type of archewriting that regulates the parallel market with legal
conflict)?
 The role of political parties here surprising enough. There is no question of
ideology as advertised by the respective parties, rather they are using ideology
as a mask. They are acting as private limited company as the corporatization of
those parties guided by management gurus has successfully established in the
dollar-controlled democracy.
 (S)talker added a variable, viz. ecological factors to analyze the socio-economic
situations. He is against the market fundamentalism and industrialization as well
as urbanization instead he is an activist of eco-economics.
 (S)talker’s utopia largely depends on the concept of socially necessary labor, i.e.
making one’s own food, clothes and living space. That is the basic education at
the vyabaharika level.

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  (S)talker is proposing “samavaya” in a special sense of the term. Taking cue from
the Nyaya darsana, he is explaining samavaya as an non-detachable contact
( samnikarsa) in contrast with “samyoga” (detachable contact). By this term he is
not only emphasizing on the samavaya at the vyavaharika level, but also at the
paramarthika level. The concepts of samavaya and paravak thus have
completed a full circle in the (s)talker’s system of philosophy.

12. As (S)talker is now deeply interested in primary education, his concern for children
leads to a pedagogical project. A primer was developed and it is meant for the primary
Bengali school-teachers, who were introducing Bangla alphabets to the children below
six years. The strategy adopted here for introducing target language graphemes to the
Bengali children was altogether different from the usual cultural practice of introducing
Bangla alphabet with sequential Sanskrit phonetic order of things that created
ambiguities and confusion in the mind of learning-subjects as there was no strict one-to-
one correspondences between Bangla speech sounds and traditional graphemes. There
might be one-many or many-one or zero –one (or vice versa) correspondences.
Therefore, altogether different approach was taken to teach language art by introducing
art samples already available in the Bengali culture. The simple contours of Alpana
(“ritual painting in the floor of the house” mainly practiced by Bengali women at the time
of religious festival; the term denotes 'to coat with’. The idea of using Alpana in the
context of learning was taken from the understanding of Satyajit Ray’s Bangla
calligraphy. Graphemes were introduced to children after teaching straight lines,
adjoining straight lines with dots, triangle, rectangle and circle respectively. All the
shapes are formed either by the way of drawing or by using clay. These basic shapes
were gradually metamorphosed into the graphemic shapes and that was a strange and a
new experience to the child learner. Graphemes, on the basis of their homogeneity, e.g.,
sounds like b, r, k, dh, jh etc. with their atomic triangular shapes or o, t, ou, oi with the
basic circular shapes were put together with the contours of “alpana” for executing
learning process. Along with this artistic learning, songs containing the sounds related to
graphemes were sung with few musical instruments. Later on stories are told and
performed as a play (both teachers and students participate in the extempore dramas
and relevant musicking) with a view to write stories in the latter stage of learning. Thus
the whole process had become a joyful bi-way “learning” process rather than that of one
way “teaching”.

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In all the cases, the learning process, apart from its context-specific lingua-aesthetic
content, depended on the prior knowledge of the linguistic features of Bangla language.
By anticipating phonetic features, phonological rules and child language acquisition
theory, the whole (open) text was built with the help of a Bengali child-learner. All the
sketches of this open text were drawn by Master Akhar Bandyopadhyay (He started
drawing when he was 3 years old and he finished learning graphemes within one and a
half years. In case of above six-year old illiterate learners, it took 20 to 25 days to learn
almost all the Bangla graphemes along with few allographs, if s/he is taught in this way.)
The redundant and opaque clustered graphemes are avoided in this phono-centric
lingua-aesthetic direct learning process.

12.1. (S)talker provided an account of Satyajit Ray’s calligraphic techniques. Satyajit

Ray designed two English typefaces, viz., Ray Roman and Ray Bizarre. (S)talker made
another paper concentrating on Ray’s artistic playing with the Bangla graphemes as it
was revealed in the cine posters and cine promo-brochures’ covers (This paper
excludes book-cover designs by Ray). (s)talker found deep impact of
(a) Artistic pattern of European staff notation in the graphemic syntagms;
(b) Alpana in Ray’s graphemic representations.
Thus, so-called division between classical and folk art was blurred in Ray’s
representation of Bangla graphemes. The three-tier X-height of Bangla graphemes was
presented in a manner of musical map and the contours, curves in between horizontal
and vertical meeting-point, follow the patterns of alpana. Authors also showed the
metamorphosis of graphemes (This might be designated as “Archewriting”) as a living
object/ subject in Ray’s artistic manipulation of Bangla graphemes. (s)talker also
mentioned Ray’s calligraphic impact on the Bangla printing technology. Bengali children,
when were to be introduced in the Language Art (especially Bangla writing system),
might practice alpana with a festive mood for the easement of their finger-movements
and for alpana’s affinity with the Bangla graphemes.
An archive of Bangla graphemes was made in collaboration with the Asiatic Society,
Kolkata. (s)talker was the one of the principal investigators of this project.

13. What type of methodology (S)talker did follow in all these projects? Let us see
stalker’s position in this regard.

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 “And the people in the houses/All went to the university/Where they were put in
boxes/And they came out all the same...Little boxes all the same, ”-- Malvina Reynolds
(sung by Pete Seeger, 1962).
Here I am reiterating Nietzsche – truth-seeking is a disease – will to know leads to will to power.
Even then, we have truth rooms (TR) and we are celebrating our truth claims. We are following,
either in our life-spaces/statist-space or in academic spaces, different “original/fundamental” TRs.
When I am branding one TR as fundamentalist, I do not consider my TR as fundamentalist,
though it is “fundamental original” piece of work. Following Malvina Reynolds, I want to call all
these TRs as little boxes. Within this little box or TR of one vegetarian, all the animal proteins,
onion are prohibited and another vegetarian thinks s/he can consume onion and egg and still
preserves vegetarian status. In case of determining the semantic status of the term ‘vegetarian’,
how do we incorporate two TRs of two vegetarians? On the other hand, the ‘meaning’ of the term
might be decided positively by terminating one of them. Where are the entry-points and closures
of such TRs? Or, they “all look just the same”? My Little Box gives me security and provides me
with discomfort. This very much claustrophobic dependence on a single TR makes me remember
of a giant, Damastes or otherwise Prokrustes, who laid all human beings on his bed and then “lop
them or rack them out to make fit it.” Are these TRs Procrustean Bed? Let us scrutinize some TRs
in reference to different academic disciplines. M. Rouget argued that scientific statements are
often “as if” “true”. As sometimes in Classical Physics, we presume such vacuum to continue our
agenda for model-theoretic approach. In case of Linguistic TR, Chomsky’s “ideal” speaking
subject stands in a vacuum. Chomsky’s TR is like this: “Context free ideal creative speaking
subject with zero history”, on the other hand in another TR, one may postulate, “Context-
sensitive creative speaking corporeal with history (childhood configuration etc.)”. In Science, we
generally idealize a formula by considering “other” variables as non-existent entities. In Cricket ,
we can say, without any hesitation that Shane Warne is continuing his 6.5 over. What is the
status of .5 in six-balls’ over? If Wittgenstein is to be believed, mathematics is a practice,
performance of a community. For Wittgenstein, communalism of mathematics is determined by
the communities’ convenience and necessity. In case of Economics, I can write “3 goats= 1 cow
or “one apartment= $ 200000” by adding some sufficient causes. How do I put the sign= in
between two unequal things? Questioning the equalizing effect of a sign as a dangerous
supplement, a properly signed signifier called money, is prohibited within economics’ TR. I am
representing the presentations of a priori, though it is neither analytical a priori, nor the synthetic
one, but something called historical a priori—an a priori approximated by the historical
incidences and they get epistemic status within a ghetto of a TR. I had then switched over to
some problems of ordinary language, the problem of fuzzy numerals in Bangla, which, from
Logical Positivist perspective, is illogical. According to (s)talker, if I do not like one TR, let me
take it as a legitimate possibility without any commitment and on the other hand, if I feel comfort

24
in one of these TRs, let me commit myself to that particular TR. Alternatively, we may swing from
one TR to another TR. What (S)talker was paraphrasing here is nothing but the re-reading of

Jaina anekantavada by Krishnachandra and Kalidas Bhattacharya. (S)talker also took his
inheritance of anekantavada from Abu Sayed Ayub, Buddhadeb Basu and Sudhindranath
Dutta in Bangla literary criticism and translation theory; P.C. Mahalanabis and J.B.S.
Haldane in Statistics and natural sciences. All of them deployed anekanta-theory in their
respective fields.

14. (S)talker is now not at all interested in aparavidya, he is now searching for para
vidya. The unsuccessful and wounded persons are generally taking this type of course in
their life.

NEOLOGISMS USED BY THE (S)TALKER: Crippled Creativity, Psi-properties,

Epistemological Amalgamation, allocurriculeme, triglossia, n-glossia, Anti-Grammar
(=GrammEr), de-sign, de-sign-ate, de-sign-ation, Schrodinger’s cat problem in
archaeology, Pendulum of transitivity scale, Algocentric Discourse, Electronic
Capitalism, reverse mimicry or theory of double reflections (anyonyopratibimba as
mentioned in samkhya darsana), Sagina Mahato Syndrome, Drain of Language,
Linguistic Terrorism, Bhasa-samavaya, xduction, iso-corporeal, Silenceme, my-ness/my-
dentity, Yayati and Babar Complex, Ekalavya text and Dronacarya text, colotage
(colonial subotage), Marxise, Language police/managers/judges, pracalit.

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