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READING BAKHTIN
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with reinforced vitality and articulateness. This is our best response to the increasingly decentred and dehumanized counter-world because by concentrating on the life-affirming forces enabling connections in our tension-prone society and mask-stricken space of language, we situate the architectonics of insatiable existence. Bakhtin implores us to understand and interpret our life as the structure of quest or a project which constantly renovates the dialogic relations between self and other in the context of openness and unfinalizability. It is almost intriguing as to how the appearances of sameness emerge from the reality of difference. This cardinal concept is immensely significant for comprehending the basic dialogics of simultaneity and difference richly manifested through multifarious lived experiences of the Bengali people. In fact, by making judicious use of the Bakhtinian conceptual framework, one can better understand the historicised evolution of the multi-linear Bengali society, culture and creative milieu as well as blatant interference of history.

The lived experiences of a community and their literary and cultural manifestations unmistakably prove that historicity of given situatedness is indeed one of the most powerful proponents of becoming. Inside such a community, the spaces of individual selves exist dialogically. As self is never a self-sufficient site for eventfulness and performances, it can never be such a presence where any ultimate privilege of the real is lodged. Its relationship with other selves and their sites conditions the flourish or decline of the existential performance. Self no doubt constructs itself but it is always answerable to the sites of all others which include history of communal existence. Bakhtin's cardinal concept known as the architectonics of answerability is no metaphysics, rather it is a hermeneutics of dialogical performance. It may be justified in the context of constantly shifting experiences of the Bengali community, for instance, and the individual selves residing within that site. Those who prefer