Journal of Boredom Studies

No. 2 (2024)
Articles

Beckett in Bengal: Boring Futures and Non-arrival in Ashish Avikunthak’s Kalkimanthankatha

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  • Tirna Chatterjee
Tirna Chatterjee
Department of Cinema Studies, School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India

Published 2024-10-11

Keywords

  • Future,
  • Time,
  • Boredom,
  • Aesthetics,
  • Politics,
  • Eschatology,
  • Postcolonialism
    • ...More
    Less

How to Cite

Chatterjee, T. (2024). Beckett in Bengal: Boring Futures and Non-arrival in Ashish Avikunthak’s Kalkimanthankatha. Journal of Boredom Studies, (2). Retrieved from https://www.boredomsociety.com/jbs/index.php/journal/article/view/26

Copyright (c) 2024 Tirna Chatterjee

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Abstract

This paper looks at Kalkimanthankatha, an adaptation of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, as an aesthetic object where the absurdist postwar ‘tragicomic’ play becomes an avant-garde film where two protagonists search for the mysterious messianic figure of Kalki, whose arrival, in Hindu mythology, marks the end of one temporal cycle [yuga]. God as absence and the boredom of waiting and non-arrival turns from direct translations of dialogue from the play; discussions on esoteric philosophical dilemmas like the value of inaction; acceptance of the unknowable; and ceaseless search as affirmative to faith; to conspiratorial speak on impending war marked by passages read from Mao’s Little Red Book (published 1964) evoking the history of the Naxalite movement.  This paper will look at how the a priori acknowledgment of the cyclical rather than linear structure of time ratifies the motif of uncertain and infinite repetition that marks the absurd quality of Beckett’s work and ask: does the cyclical promise of the future as regeneration condemn its prospects to an absolute boredom? Does linear eschatology maintain certain circuitous elements—the coming/return of the messiah (in/as the/a future)—that enclose waiting and boredom as a way of life? Are boredom and waiting fundamental threads interlacing eschatological thoughts? Through this film, the paper will ask what happens to ‘future/s’ when this seemingly unanticipated encounter of contrarian positions and bodies of knowledge take place as sacred/profane, modernity/tradition, aesthetics/politics, linearity/circularity and to see how boredom plays a pivotal factor in shaping such thought, discourse, and understanding.

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