অনেকান্ত সাহিত্যতত্ত্ব । খন্ড-১।

The author has deployed the Jaina anekantavada (theory of many perspectives) as well as syadvada (syat= “somehow) as a method. In case of literary theory as well as linguistic theory, the author has utilized this pluralistic methodology, which inaugurated the simultaneous cohabitation of many possibilities in contrast with the Law of excluded middle. This is a collection of English and Bangla papers published since 1990s. These papers are on the pluralistic interpretations of literary texts by Ramprasad Sen, Tarasankar Bandyopadhyay, Sudhin Dutta, Samares Basu, Loknath Bhattacharya, Miroslav Holub, Sandipan Chattopadhyay et al. There are also two papers on “Death of Reader”-hypothesis and on the literary theory of Abu Sayed Ayub. 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 Sahibs. This imagination of plurality, or one may call, following Krishnachandra, the concept of alternity, as a response to the singularity of enlightenment-project inaugurated another problem in the context of Political Philosophy. Partha Chatterji raised the following oft-quoted 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?….” (1993:5, emphasis added) The author of this collection waned to extend this question and wished to switch over from the nation statist space to the epistemological space. Did we have no imagination at the level of epistemology? 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, 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 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).