Tuhin Bhattacharjee (New York University)
This paper examines an unexpected encounter, and the conversation that unfolds, between
Orestes, the ancient Greek prince, and Paraśurāma, the ancient Indian sage who travels to Greece
across the Silk Route. This conversation is not from a lost Greek play, nor from an ancient
Sanskrit text. It can be found in a Bengali book written by Sisir Kumar Das and published as
recently as 2011. The book, aptly titled Aloukik Sanglap (Unearthly Dialogues), contains a
collection of speculative conversations, in modern Bengali, between ancient Greek and ancient
Hindu characters, forming a fascinating triangulation of cultures. But what are the material,
linguistic, and philosophical conditions that enable such a conversation? How do ancient Greek
and Indian thinking about friendship and the maternal translate into each other? What happens
when such thinking, already so distant from us, is translated into modern Bengali and then again
into English? I investigate Das’s dialogue called “Dui Mātṛghati” (“Two Matricides”) that stages
a dramatic meeting between Orestes and Paraśurāma, with the dialogue’s title referring to the
two heroes’ crime of murdering their own mothers. In the course of this encounter, as the two
men pour their hearts out to each other, they begin to realize that despite the convergences
between their actions, their ethical responses to it are after all distinct, that the image reflected in
the mirror does not neatly coincide with oneself, that there is something that resists translation.
By focusing on the strange circumstances of the birth of Paraśurāma—whose fetus was
transferred to a different womb across a generation—as well as that of Athena—who acquitted
Orestes in the murder trial and was herself born out of her father Zeus’s head—I read Das’s
dialogue in the context of ancient sexological literature, classical notions of dharma (Sk.) and
dikē (Gk. law/justice), recent developments in reproductive technologies like surrogacy and IVF,
and the possibility of unpredicted friendships grounded on the untranslatable.