Paper long abstract:

In this paper, I consider how a crisis of public conscience and temporality related to the dropping of the atom bombs in Japan in 1945 led to a proliferation of imaginative outputs. My focus is not the USA, Europe or Japan which have received plentiful attention, but colonial India in the aftermath of the attack. How did people in a country which was on the peripheries of World War II respond to the event in a time of colonial oppression and the independence struggle? Using theories of the 'sublime' proposed by Immanuel Kant and developed by others, and 'schizophrenia' as proposed by Jacques Lacan and Felix Guattari, I focus on how heterogeneous dynamics of past and future temporalities manifested themselves in Bombay's expressive culture from the mid-1940s onwards.