“ওই ঘাসিয়ারাকে বলোনা আমার ওই গাছ গুলো যেন না কাটে”/”গাড়িভি ঘরকা আওরাত হায় ক্যা?”: Examining Rabindranath Tagore’s Bolai and Subodh Ghosh’s “Ajantrik” from a Posthumanist and Transhumanist Perspective Respectively

Abstract

This paper attempts to show Tagore’s Bolai and Ghosh’s Bimal as the harbingers of an imagination that becomes a passage to a space beyond humanism. So then, what is posthumanism or transhumanism? Posthumanism is a philosophical school that imagines a world beyond or after humanity and transhumanism is a method to transcend human abilities and imagine a world of extropianism or immortalism. In other words, posthumanism dismantles the humanist supremacy in an anthropocentric world in order to integrate them with other non-human species and transhumanism with the aid of machinic development tries to transcend the human abilities in order to immortalize them (For example, Cryonics is a branch of transhumanism where the body of the dead is preserved in order to revive them later to achieve a better version of themselves). Tagore’s short story Bolai is a wonderful manifestation of the post-humanist paradigm as the eponymous protagonist seems to be in perfect unison with Mother Nature. On the other hand, Ghosh’s protagonist Bimal imagines his taxi to be his best friend and the abilities possessed by the taxi seem to transcend the human abilities there by giving it a transhumanist turn. This transhumanist turn within the text makes our perception even convoluted and we are confused whether Bimal is the protagonist or his 'mechanized friend' Jagaddal is the protagonist of the story. Therefore, through the course of my paper I wish to investigate such nuances in order to imagine a world that entails a perfect camaraderie between humans, non-humans and machines in order to create a heterotopic Post-dualist space that is beyond the dualisms such as nature/culture, social/natural or humans/machines or precisely all non-humans.

Keywords

• posthumanism
• transhumanism
• post-dualism
• environmentalism