Navakanta Barua's Posthuman Wonderland in Siyali Palegoi Ratanpur

In the wake of the emerging body of scholarship on Posthumanism and Animality studies, the borderline between the human and the `non-human' has been `thoroughly breached'. Interestingly, one of the key areas where the boundaries between the human and the animal are problematized is the field of children's literature. Children's literature has the potential to radically challenge the anthropocentric worldview of Man as an `exceptional' being by deploying a playful, but subversive logic. The paper attempts to examine how Navakanta Barua deploys nonsense and fantasy in his novella, Siyali Palegoi Ratanpur to challenge this very prospect of human supremacy as opposed to the non-human `other'. The paper also seeks to examine how the fantastic encounters between Barua's child-protagonist and the mysterious non-human entities challenge the centrality and superiority of the ` human', and, in doing so, how the text draws attention to the complexities of our lived relations with non-human others.