The Shah of Blah Kills the Tiger by Words: Premendra Mitra’s Ghanada

The main objective of this chapter is to evaluate how Ghanada builds up a technique of presenting himself as a storyteller superhero in an adda, a twentieth-century phenomenon in Bengal. This chapter also delineates how Ghanada’s proleptic imagination anticipates and answers all possible objections and creates a defamiliarization effect that collapses the divide between truth and untruth, reality and illusion. By referring to the works of Erving Goffman, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Hannah Arendt, and Adriana Cavarero, this chapter analyses how Ghanada’s figural imagination creates an imaginary identity of a superhero that gives him freedom to live a parasitic, non-instrumental, and leisurely life escaping from the policing desire of social and political institutions.