Nabarun Bhattacharya, Raghab Bandyopadhyay, Subimal Mishra

(From Intro para) This chapter discusses the dynamics of marginal space in the postcolonial city. It looks at the way marginalized humans utilize the urban space and resist in significant ways the postcolonial state's imposition of the capitalistic logic of clearing the space for multinational investment and development. It situates what it considers to be the central contradiction within post-colonial urbanity: the thesis of rationality as against the practice of " irreal " activities. It takes the term "irreal" from the Marxist scholar, Michael Löwy, who separates it from the domain of "unreal" and "anti-real" and argues for a case of dissent and critique in the term's use. Through a reading of work on Indian modernity, anthropological findings by postcolonial scholars, and recent literary criticism on urban space, the chapter argues that "irreality" is integral to the dispensation and practice of space in the postcolonial urban world. For the literary part, the chapter reads the fictional work of Nabarun Bhattacharya (1948–2014), son of Mahasweta Devi and Bijon Bhattacharya, whose work centers around the margins of postcolonial society. It is argued here that he provides the urban poor with the "armory" of the spectral and the mysterious to fight the bourgeois weapon of instrumental rationality and class dominance. The deliberate narrative effort at blurring spaces, times, and processes of reason-making contributes to his empowering of the subaltern and the outcast, and push for a rethinking of the matrices of postcolonial urbanity and modernity.

Magic Realism came of German language first used in 1925 by Franz Roh an Art Critic, in her criticism on an Art Exhibition. Latter, Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier used the term for literature and consequently it got world-wide popularity as a trend of Latin American prose. Gradually, especially after eighties, it became a vital literary element. The entrance of the essay is a brief reflection of magic realism in the works of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and then how Gunter Grass applied it in his novel Tin Drum (Grass 1959). After that, to illuminate its application in the South Asian literature, magic realism in Salma Rushdie’s Midnight's Children (Rushdie 1980) has been analyzed. Then, the essay deals with Bangla Literature – Pterodactyl, Puran Sohay and Pirtha (1989) written by Mohashweta Devi, Herbert (1992) and Kangal Malsat (2003) of Nabarun Vatcharjee, Khoabnama (1996) by Akhtaruzzaman Elias, Se Ratey Purnima Chilo (1995) by Shahidul Jahir and Che and Kolabati (2014) by Angsuman Kar. Moreover, the essay discusses South Asian literature in Urdu, Hindi and Bangla languages in light of the theory of magic realism. The essay finally concludes by stating that the history of magic realism in literature proves that some literary movement overcomes borders of East and West, North and South it comes to be a universal atmosphere.