Chowringhee .'Modernity and Popular fiction from the vagaries of time. But don't the texts marked opprobriously as 'popular fiction', more often than not, also produce an image of a coherent identity, at once stable, sealed and sanitized? Are the two questions, 'Who speaks in Literature's name?' and 'Which fictive self is given common currency in so-called popular fic-88 tion?' at all separable? Or, does the concept of 'Literature' and its counter 'popular fiction' work hand-in-glove to pay obeisance at the altar of the self-same subject? An investigation into the matter makes it necessary to determine the parameters, the network of relations in and by which a subject is situated, and to be sensitive to the charge of desire that sustains it. Take, for example, the pronoun 'we': the word designates a constituency to which I happen to belong as one with another or among others; then again it can also be used in place of the singular T—the substitution of the egotistical sound of a repeated 1' by the royal/ common-sounding 'we' gives an impersonal/non-personal air to discourse. Grammatical rigidity notwithstanding, the first person plural is elastic enough to serve as a surrogate of singular-I, the communal and anonymous 'we' may enable an individual to give voice to a 'collective will'. Like all linguistic signs, the word 'we' is not neutral, forever fixed in its meaning, but depending on the context of utterance it can occupy different positions of meaning. However, as a sign of collectivity, as a marker of subjectivity, the term is particularly privileged in having a high hegemonic potential. The word 'we' can be made to signify any space in the hazy in-between of an isolated individual and a composite whole, be used to pass off particular, sectoral interests in the guise of the universal. Though cursory, this reflection on the discursive function and politics of the pronoun may serve as a strategic entry-point for a reading of Shankar's Chowringhee, for the text itself begins by focussing on the operation of two inter-related pronouns: They say—Esplanade. We say—Chowringhee.' THET-'WE' At the very outset the novel introduces an equivocal note—it begins by demarcating a space to which not one but two names are assigned. Rhetorically, the 'Esplanade-Chowringhee' dyad—'heart of Calcutta' in common parlance— corresponds to the trope of synecdoche, though a part of it stands not just for the city but for Bengal as a whole. The semantic intermix allows a set of multiple significations to crisscross and produce an image of a land construed in a scattering of meaning. The novel's first tactical move, then, is both daring and provocative: as a textual gambit this opens up the possibility of conceiving the bipolar term 'Esplanade-Chowringhee' as a site of contestation in which the two components attest to two conflicting claims. The moot question is: does the rest of the narrative remain consistent with the first signal that it sends out? Do all its textual operations play upon and accentuate the differences between the two claimants, Journal of Arts & Ideas