অনেকান্ত সাহিত্যতত্ত্ব Anekanta Sahityattva

Abstract:     
The author of this book had deployed the Jaina anekantavada (theory of many perspectives) as well as syadvada (syat=somehow/maybe/probably) as a method. In case of literary theory as well as linguistic theory, the author had utilized this pluralistic methodology, which inaugurated the simultaneous cohabitation of many possibilities in contrast with the Law of excluded middle. This book was a collection of English and Bangla papers published in the mid eighties. Papers were on the pluralistic interpretations/anekanta understanding of literary texts by Ramprasad Sen, Tarasankar Bandyopadhyay, Sudhin Dutta, Samares Basu, Loknath Bhattacharya, Miroslav Holub, Sandipan Chattopadhyay Utpal Dutta, Rabindranath Tagore and a anthropological field text of Ashutosh Bhattachary on Verrier Elwin. There are also two papers on “Death of Reader”-hypothesis and on the literary theory of Abu Sayeed Ayyub, who discussed rhetorical theories of Kuntaka's Vakroktijivita with Paul Valéry's pendulum (on the form-content polemic) and Sartre's concept of literature. The author extended Ayyub's hypothesis with major changes. The whole book avoided structural stylistic and statistical interruptions of texts with critical attitude.

Brief History of Anekanta Method: What the author was paraphrasing here was nothing but the re-reading of Jaina Philosophy by Krishnachandra Bhathacharya (1925) and Kalidas Bhattacharya(1982) in the context of Philosophy It was a response from the colonized domain against the monolithic enlightenment project of the colonizers. This imagination of plurality, or one might call, following Krishnachandra Bhattacharya, the concept of alternity, as a response to the singularity of enlightenment-project as imposed by the colonizers in the realm of academiocracy. Thus this book was also related to the problems of political philosophy.

The author of this collection wished to switch over from the derivative nation statist space to the epistemological space. Did the colonized had no imagination at the level of epistemology? This question inaugurated the question of “rem(a)inder” (in Lacanian sense of the term) in the context of colonial subjectivity, which, though destroyed by the imagined symbolic order, constructed its own imaginative “real(-ity)” as rem(a)inder through a negation of nationalism (Gandhi, Rabindranath Tagore) and by introducing anekanta (theory of many perspectives) alternity ( Krishnachandra Bhattacharya and Kalidas Bhattacharya in Philosophy; Abu Sayeed Ayyub, 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).

Note: Downloadable document is in Bengali.

Number of Pages in PDF File: 85

Keywords: anekantavada, theory of alternity, death of readers, Kuntaka's Vakroktijivita, Valéry's pendulum, post-structuralism, colonialism

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