TheDaak review

This essay reads Nabarun Bhattacharya’s Herbert as a critique of modernity’s reliance on repression, exception, and the erasure of political memory. Set in post-liberalisation Calcutta, the novel reveals how neoliberal development, bureaucratic domination, and ideological exhaustion weaken democratic life. This essay argues that Herbert stages a politics of the spectral, where unresolved grief and abandoned struggles disrupt the narrative of rational progress. Calcutta, like the novel Herbert, becomes a repository of discarded lives and failed revolutions. Through its aesthetics of waste and haunting, the novel exposes the fragility of democratic promises and suggests that transformation begins with confronting the histories modernity seeks to forget.

By Ditsa Roy

Nabarun Bhattacharya’s magnum opus Herbert was published at one of the most pivotal moments in this nation’s historical trajectory. India was weakly oscillating between globalization’s fading sun and fascism’s stormy promise. The novel opens on May 25, 1992, the day of Harbart’s death, and then traces his life from birth in a Bildungsroman style. The year 1992 was significant for India, as it marked the official onset of economic liberalization following the 1991 reforms. On the other hand, the demolition of the Babri Masjid and the subsequent communal violence between Hindus and Muslims exposed the deep-rooted feudal and neo-colonial aspects of society (Bhattacharya 2017, 146). The dichotomy of this moment is further laid bare in the setting of the novel. 

‘The frothy-foaming light-dust of the streetlights…At the turn of the Cowmen’s slums a Corporation tap…a mad woman sitting there in rags, legs wide open, splashing water…skin rotten street dogs…on the roof of Herbert’s house sat a STAR TV signal sucking satellite dish hoping to swallow a falling star.’ (Banerjee 2019, 7) – tearing apart the promise of modernity, producing a profound existential break between ideas of progress and human ‘exceptionalism’, and the subtle forms of domination tied to a particular configuration of power — one inherited from colonial rule and sustained by bureaucratic logics and a post-independence system of ‘passive revolution’ (Basu 2020, 185). 

In fact, one of the central preoccupations in Nabarun Bhattacharya’s literary universe has been creating an aesthetic and political economy of trash, refuse and waste as something pushed out of the human economy of use and consumption. In Bhattacharya’s world, it is not the commodity form that organizes life but what capitalism leaves behind, the unproductive, the wasteful and the abject (Sengupta 2016, 298). These objects as waste create a crisis of interpretation and pose an actual threat to the structure of power through their subversive, grotesque, radical imagination. He is raising his voice against an egoistic, economic logic that separates the usable and the waste, the productive and the unproductive, the meaningful bodies of citizens that matter and the precarious lives that are simply disposable (Sengupta 2020, 309). This has been very well crafted in the coeval character of modernity as shown in his novel, Herbert. 

The author, throughout this novel, has attempted to show the crisscrossing interlocking tendencies and a co-constitutive intimate relation between norm and exception in modern politics. Exceptionality has been given a political, epistemological and historical primacy in Nabarun’s world, such that it exists as a central foundation, constitutive presence, and destructive force and a negative absence. This is reminiscent of Marx’s concept of ‘Estranged Labor’: the more the worker produces, the less he has to consume, the more value he creates, the more valueless and unworthy he becomes. The better formed his product, the more deformed the worker becomes, the more civilized his object, the more barbarous the worker becomes. The spatial organization of Herbert offers a lens to examine the coexistence of norm and exception. At its center lies the enclosed intimacy of Herbert’s rooftop attic, a refuge from abuse that opens onto a self-empowering world of kites, sexuality, and the afterlife. Beyond this is the external city: the affluent colonial streets Herbert traverses in his long coat, muttering ‘cat, bat, water, dog, fish,’ alongside landscapes of consumerist violence marked by multi-storeyed buildings, video shops, and fast food outlets. Adjacent to these lies the largely invisible space of the urban poor—dilapidated houses, red-light districts, roadside stalls, and leper bodies on pavements, saturated with smoke and urine—unnoticed by the cultural and economic elite. Pushed to the periphery, this is where the working class, which sustains the bourgeoisie, resides (Bhattacharya 2017, 153). This novel moves rapidly in time compressing entire centuries of violent history (colonialism, Naxalite movements, the corruption of the postcolonial state, the violence of a Communist government and the counter-revolution of the market) into the brief life of its titular character, showing us how exceptionality becomes a fundamental determination for the making of modern political structures and social institutions; such that the state of exception becomes an inescapable condition of possibility of the modern. Set in this context, this novel is a tragicomic life arc of a once rich babu Herbert, growing lonely and friendless in his uncle’s house after the tragic death of his parents. This novel shows him juggling between his isolated existence and alienated surroundings, between revolution and afterlife, between cockroaches and fairies. The author deliberately uses racy street slang throughout the novel to mark his protest against what he points out in one of his interviews: ‘a Namby-pamby breed called Bengalis who are attracted to refined mediocrity and find it difficult to register anything outside the grammar of normalcy’. 

As the novel begins, one finds similarities between the story of Herbert and Calcutta as a city; born to rich parents, tragically orphaned and now living in the fringes of a society that barely notices and understands him. Similarly, Calcutta once a grand colonial capital but torn asunder by the trauma of Partition, political turmoil and violence and economic stagnation. A city that welcomed people looking for livelihood opportunities is now barely able to provide for its own. After his parents’ death, Herbert is raised in his uncle’s household, where affection is reduced to pity from his Jyathaima. He grows up amid paralysis, selfishness, and hollow intellectualism—enduring ridicule from his cousin Dhana-da and local boys, and fleeting companionship during bangla-cocktail gatherings. Despite this, Herbert harbors what the author calls an ‘intoxicating attraction for death’, intensified by his teenage discovery of a human skull hidden in a trunk, an encounter that filled him with grief. He later disposes of the remains in the Ganga, withdraws from school, and becomes an autodidact, spending his days on the rooftop reading about the afterlife. A decisive shift occurs with the arrival of his nephew Binu, who comes to Calcutta for higher studies and treats Herbert as a fellow human being for the first time. A Naxalite revolutionary, Binu disrupts Herbert’s isolation, bringing renewed energy to both Herbert’s stagnant life and a crumbling city, and drawing him into a shared imagination of revolution. Binu was a Naxalite revolutionary who questioned Herbert’s obsession with the afterlife and made him a compatriot in his activities. But it is also important to point out that though Herbert was moved by Binu’s activities it was not out of political consciousness but because he loved Binu and loved to imagine revolutionary death and sacrifice. It was Binu who brought to him the beauty of sacrifice and death for a revolutionary cause. Binu represented the promise of change, vigor and hope both in the dilapidated life of Calcutta and Herbert. It is remarkable how the changes brought by his death were portrayed by the author both in Herbert and in Calcutta. It was seemingly an episodic shift in Calcutta. He writes, ‘since then the stinking and stagnant and wholly insignificant period came to pass was so wearisome that we would be hard put to find its parallel in the annals of history. A change of taste had been provided by developers who tore down ancient homes and replaced them with the newfangled multistoried. Then came the video shop and a roll shop too at the mouth of the lane. Now the trees lining the main road were gone. Now only the frantic frenzy of traffic. The pushcart men had a favourite resting spot in the neighbourhood- that was gone.’ (Bhattacharya 2019, 36) 

Irrespective of the physical spatial changes in the city, one of the most important changes was portrayed by the author: ‘One night there had been an earthquake. One of the old pushcart men started shouting in terror trying to warn his sleeping friends. Yet the next morning, on the decadent street, yesterday’s gamblers and yesternight’s drunks walking bleary-eyed to the market, the clumps of hair on the floor of the saloon, the rattle of the rickshaws – which was man enough to tell from all this that just the night before this place had been rocked by an earthquake.’ (Bhattacharya 2019, 36).This draws one’s attention to the fact that attention and concentration have become a fiction with advanced technological progress. Recent studies find that the repetitive content of social media reels might have stretched our imagination, but it also stretched our anthropological distance from other human beings. As this writer read the novel, she felt that the most important part or aspect of the novel was the episode where Herbert had a dream in which Binu was saying, ‘prayer room, diary… Herbert…kaka…diary behind Kali’s picture…diary…’ (Bhattacharya 2019, 38). As he shared this dream out loud with his cousins and aunt, and when it was discovered, Herbert felt charged and empowered for the first time in his life. This is the most interesting part because Herbert had completely forgotten that Binu had spoken those words to him on his deathbed at the hospital. When Binu was being cremated with all those policemen, police vans and guns- it scared the daylights out of Herbert, wiping his memory clean. This is where one asks oneself how is this possible? How does one forget? Is it something spontaneous or conscious or both? When does living memory transform into a dream or the ghosts of one’s past? Where does this constant urge to replace bad memories and haunted pasts with glittery illusions come from? Is it a mode of escape from perennial guilt and atonement? Is it a mode of exercising power and control? Or is it the only and the easiest way to achieve fulfillment and happiness? Does it help us to progress as a civilization or does it drag us further behind? The author writes that after Herbert shouted his dream out loud to his family and when they found the diary at the mentioned place: ‘Herbert could sense it. He would have to charge a barrage now. Binu had his time. It was Herbert’s time now. He would have to produce pandemonium- rip apart everything, turn everything upside down until the entire universe reeled in the dance of devastation’ (Bhattacharya 2019, 39).

It is this episode of forceful forgetting and later remembering it through dream that marks a deeper trauma and guilt; the repression of revolutionary memory and the collapse of meaning in a modern world driven by violence and disillusionment. But what begins as a haunted return turns into performance, Herbert starts practicing necromancy, offering fabricated stories to those seeking comfort. This shift from dream to deception reveals how modernity turns grief into spectacle and mourning into commodity. 

This concept closely resembles Derrida’s idea of the ‘hauntological’, where the line between the mirror-like reflection (specular) and the ghostly illusion (spectral) becomes significant. Commodities originate from intrinsic social qualities of labor, emerging from violent human and social processes. Yet, what starts as a reflection of social relations transforms into a spectral figure—an eerie inversion where commodities seem to live independently, acting like spirits whose value appears intrinsic rather than derived from human effort. Derrida further deconstructs Marx’s idea of commodity fetishism, arguing that commodities not only obscure the social labor behind them but also begin to actively possess objects and people, creating a surreal reversal: inanimate things seem alive, and living beings become ghostly echoes of their economic roles. Haunting indicates an unsettling presence—an absence that paradoxically asserts itself. In haunted films, ghosts often symbolize unresolved issues like revenge, murder, injustice, or betrayal. Marx argued that capitalism mediates human connections through the exchange of objects, hiding social relations and giving the illusion of self-acting commodities. Derrida’s language of phantoms and spectralisation deepens this critique, suggesting that capitalist social relations are not merely hidden but inherently haunted. The economic system creates an illusion where human labor becomes invisible, replaced by the autonomous circulation of commodities. This invisibility, however, does not erase labor but manifests as spectral hauntings of both commodities and their producers. Reading the novel reveals that fear stems from alienation. Power and domination, seeking to erase contradiction and guilt, generate fear that prevents confronting suppressed memories, leading to perceptions of threatening specters rather than lived experiences (Derrida 1993). Herbert and Calcutta, in attempting to justify their existence amid globalization, have turned memories of Binu, rebellion, revolution, and struggle into symbolic garbage—like Dalit sanitation workers hired by a progressive society to clean its historical excreta. Susan Morrison notes that every break with the past produces waste—leftovers that symbolize historical debris (Bhattacharya et all. 2020, 150-3). Trashing the past is a strategy for progress, but this debris lingers as ghosts in the present, surviving as ‘anachronic’ figures that don’t quite fit into the new urban landscape. As a result, successors of revolutionaries are now labeled threats to the nation. Herbert and Calcutta have lost their poetic essence amidst the rush for development and competition, becoming mummified symbols of an acquisitive society (Bhattacharya et al., 2020). They can be summarized by the line: ‘And once his business began to thrive, his good sense entirely left him. There was nothing he wouldn’t do for money.’ (Bhattacharya, 2019, 43). After Herbert’s powers are revealed, a new spectacle unfolds, with Herbert claiming knowledge of the afterlife and attracting middle and upper-middle-class clients who share secrets and fears, seeking penance or material gain from the unknown. 

Modernity’s drive to produce a unified, rational subject suppresses unresolved trauma and injustice through simulacra and a culture of curated consumption, masking alienation, insulating against critique, and producing a crisis of meaning (Purkayastha 2020, 172). The novel’s true protagonist, then, is not Herbert but the complacent Bengali reader—immersed in capitalist fantasy while clinging to an inflated myth of a progressive past, captured in the claim that ‘what Bengal thinks today, India thinks tomorrow.’ There is something almost Satanic about complacency and conformity, and deeply idiotic about retreating into dominant narratives of an idealized, progressive past. Such retreat signals a profound anxiety about confronting the uncertainties and failures of the present. While a damned present often forces recognition of what was once taken for granted, the real danger lies in repressed and unresolved guilt that accompanies it. This denial generates paranoia, externalizing responsibility in order to eliminate it, producing fear and a haunted condition that deepens the rift between humans and humanity. 

It is to be contended that the larger argument both in the novel and by Nabarun Bhattacharya in most of his works has been a critique of an overemphasis on rational ideology while staying within the arc of progressive politics. It must also be said that any emphasis on irrationality is not anti-rational but a critical view of its limitations. And its biggest limitation is not just its inability to drive meaningful political transformation but its inability to see those who come under its wheels of progress. There was clearly an unconscious, buried guilt behind Herbert’s dream and that is most likely about ‘not being able to do anything’; a sense of lost agency. One might counter-argue that this character was never allowed to exercise agency throughout the novel, then why at this point? It is the emotional rupture that pushes one to act and try to make meaning. His performance, rituals and ghosts are not political strategies but emotional mechanisms. Herbert critiques a mythography of perpetual modernization that is laid out by institutional history, bureaucratization of culture and a political economy of laissez-faire and cannibalization. Even though it represses revolutionary memory and emotionally freezes from within, yet emotions and living memory are the form repressed history returns in. Grief returns when revolutions are suppressed and comrades are forgotten, guilt returns when one is forced to an animalistic existence on two square meals and dead hopes and fear returns as paranoia. This is why forgotten histories of violence come back not through rational politics but by establishing a sense of personal connection with the larger cause, something which cannot be done without addressing unresolved trauma.

As has been mentioned earlier, the author captures the dynamics and co-existence of rational and irrational elements of modern material progress–how instrumental knowledge and bureaucratic rationality co-exist with local, custom based ritual and cultural practices.The public’s attraction to Herbert after the incident exposes the myth of material development. When the Rationalist Association later accuses him of trickery and threatens arrest, Herbert’s furious, nonsensical outburst—mocking their English and chanting ‘cat, bat, water, dog, fish’—registers Bhattacharya’s contempt for the self-assured urban scientific elite and signals a verbal revolt against Anglicized reason (Bhattacharya 2019, 70). Though Herbert is subsequently found dead, his suicide note frames death as pilgrimage rather than closure, warning against reading it as final. The novel ends with the explosion of his corpse at the crematorium, confounding police and journalists—the bourgeois rational subject—and affirming his spectral return. (Bhattacharya, 2017). It ends with the most famous line from the novel: ‘when and how the explosion will happen and who will make it happen is something the state machinery is yet to have any clue about’ (Bhattacharya 2019, 82). Thus, the explosion is not in a literal sense but also a metaphorical sense. This echoes Benjamin’s concept of ‘blasting an object free’, which refers to a radical intervention in historical time, where the past is seized in a moment of danger and reactivated in the present. Herbert’s fragmented body and the supernatural revolt at the novel’s end can be seen as a materialist haunting—history refusing to be buried, much like Benjamin’s messianic vision of history interrupting the present (Fritsch 2005, 172). Thus, to conclude, Herbert is not simply a story about death or delusion—it is about what happens when revolutionary memory is too painful to hold and too dangerous to forget. Herbert’s forgetting of Binu’s final words, their return as a dream, and his turn to necromancy mark a deeper emotional rupture—a guilt that modernity cannot process. His performance of the afterlife becomes a way to mourn what has been buried: comrades, struggles, hopes. 

Haunted by what it has repressed, democracy reveals its own exceptionality: a system that secures order by disavowing the lives, memories and futures it renders disposable. This novel exposes the cracks in this order and gestures towards the possibility of another political imagination. Through this haunted return, the novel reveals that political transformation emerges not from ideology, but from the spectral force of unresolved grief. 

References

Bhattacharya, Sourit. 2017. “The Crisis of Modernity : Realism and the Postcolonial Indian Novel.” PhD diss., University of Warwick

Bhattacharya, Nabarun. 2019. Harbart . Translated by Sunandini Banerjee New Directions Paperbook. New Directions Publishing Corporation. (Original work published 1994) 

Bhattacharya, Sourit, et al. 2020. Nabarun Bhattacharya: Aesthetics and Politics in a World After Ethics. Bloomsbury Publishing 

Fritsch, Matthias. 2005. Promise of Memory, the: History and Politics in Marx, Benjamin, and Derrida. SUNY Press https://doi.org/10.1353/book4983 

Derrida, Jacques.  2012, Specters of Marx: The state of the debt, the work of mourning and the new international. Routledge, 2012.

Marx, Karl. 1844. Estranged Labour. Karl Marx Internet Archive. www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/labour.htm

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Ditsa Roy is pursuing a Research training program at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences Calcutta. She has a Masters in Political Science from Centre for Political Studies , Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.