Capturing the philosphical spirit of Utopia
Reviewed by D S Cheema

The Politics of (Im) Possible: Utopia and Dystopia Reconsidered
Ed Barnita Bagchi
Sage. Pages 241. Rs 750

A conference held in Paris, in 2008, under the auspices of the Indo-French Cultural Exchange Programme forms the basis of the present volume, edited by Barnita Bagchi, a faculty in Literary Studies at Utrecht University; the Netherlands. The book has been very carefully divided in three parts, part I debates the basic concept of utopia and dystopia and has chapters on the history, political theory, and cultural politics of utopia-dystopia, Part II contains gender politics of utopia/dystopia and Part III, a finale to the volume, deals with resistance to utopian dreams in a globalised world.

The word Utopia was first coined by Sir Thomas More in 1516 in his book in Latin, Utopia. It is a work of imaginative fiction with central theme as "the good society" and equality is its central value. It is the paradise that exists elsewhere". Utopia is a place of dreams, a place of the good, and a place which is nowhere to be found. In the Indian context, Krishan Kumar's Utopia and Anti-Utopia in Modern Times is an emerging rigorous analysis of these concepts.

In The Spirit of Utopia and The Principle of Hope, Ernst Bloch sees "Being" simultaneously as a process, unfinishedness and tension towards the perfection and argues for a view of utopia as radical alterity. The essay also explains Marx's concept of utopia as "the poetry of the future". Echo of an Impossible Return analyses the political unconscious, the seeds of time and archaeologies of future, the works of Marxist literary critic Fredric Jameson. In Dystopia, Utopia, and Akhtruzzaman Elias's Khowabnama, the focus of the author, Dasgupta, is how dystopia can come dangerously close to utopia, yet in practice they are poles apart.

It was William Thompson who set the ball of women rights rolling in 1825, when he wrote his Introductory Letter to Mrs. Wheeler at the start of Appeal of One Half of the Human Race, Women Against the Pretensions of the Other Half, Men, To Retain them in Political, and Thence in Civil and Domestic Slavery. Here Thompson acknowledges his 'debt of justice' in framing the Appeal, which looks at the relation of power between men and women and arguing for women's equal political and legal rights. The author of Meye Parliament or A Parliament of Women, written in 1880, in Bengali, creates a full-fledged vision of a dystopia of a land ruled by the New Women. In Empire Builder, the author analyses the periodical The Imperial Colonist, a women's review— written by women for women, which first appeared on January 1, 1901 with the main objective of encouraging the emigration of British women "of the right sort", to the colonies. At the end of the book, the arguments extend to concepts such as "man has as much craving for utopia as for bread." The author also infers that modernism and development have blurred the line between war and revolution and has suggested a new concept of topos , between utopia and dystopia.

The book presents an in-depth philosophical account of why 'utopia has been the mother of exact sciences. Writings of different thinkers on utopia and dystopia display a rather complex interplay between the actual and the possible, dream and reality and ideal or the monstrous communities. A must read

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