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Abstract
My paper focuses on two vignettes published in 1845, in the Tattwabodhini Patrika, the Brahmo periodical published from Kolkata. Written by Akshaykumar Dutta, the editor of the periodical, the articles reveal the myriad contours of the troubled, tentative definitions of modern selfhoods in colonial Bengal. The textual resonances of the articles enable us to read them not merely as derivative discourses of Eurocentric modernity. Rather, their transgressive potencies are revealed. Such readings do not interpret the articles as being merely limited by Akshay kumar’s puritanical convictions about rationalism, anthropocentrism and normative sexuality. Rather, they reveal the subversions embodied in texts as pointing out to the post-human, no modern evocations of the Chthulucene in which the ambivalences of race, sexuality and species are not resolved into ossified categories but are inhabited, performed and incessantly shattered.