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Abstract
As an ethical project, critical posthumanism acknowledges that life-forms have intertwined histories. Life, both human and nonhuman, is about mutual interconnections, relationality rather than about isolation, separation, and boundedness. The article seeks to examine the posthumanist vision of Satyajit Ray as expostulated in his films and scripts. His swansong, Agantuk (The Stranger, 1991), acknowledges that environment-induced science/technology outmatches modern rocket science and the launch of the Voyager. His proposed science-fiction film The Alien (1967) conjectures the possibility of a visit of an alien from a technologically superior planet to earth and predates the films about extraterrestrials in the decades to come. Ray explores the idea of artificial intelligence in a short story named "Anukul" (later filmed by Sujoy Ghosh), which raises some pertinent issues about the degree of autonomy reached by robots and the pressing need to develop new rules to manage them. As robots become more autonomous, the notion of computer-controlled machines facing ethical decisions becomes much more complicated.

This paper seeks to shed light on the formation of communities in a transnational space in Amitav Ghosh's Sea of Poppies which chronicles the lives of a motley group of people who, after many upheavals, board the Ibis. The Ibis becomes a space where cross- cultural caste, class, gender, and national collaborations blur all sorts of boundaries and enable the formation of new alliances. The ethics of compearance defiantly resists the instruments of power, colonial or otherwise, to orchestrate divisions and exclusions through its politics of immediate conjunction, conjuncture, coalition and collaboration. The paper tries to unravel how the novel presents the emergence of reconstituted families within contexts of domination and resistance. With the erasure of the boundaries of language, class and caste among these migrants, they replaced the notion of authentic, discrete national cultures with a shared openness to the world, espousing a utopian belief in a trans-racial human collectivity. The crisscrossing oceanic trading routes offer an affective map of the world of unlikely kinships and intimacies formed on the fluid world of the ocean as a consequence of the machinations and practices of Empire. The paper argues how the narrative creates a transnational space above the narrow confines of a singular culture, nation, territory and community, a free space (in a world without binaries) which is supposed to be above all temporal or spatial constraints.

Abstract
Satyajit Ray's faith in the integrity of his middle-class protagonists and his philosophical detachment coupled with his aesthetics of contemplation have often been brutally criticized by his Marxist critics. They have accused Ray of being a bourgeois humanist, a political effete without any specific ideology, estranged from tackling pressing contemporary social and political issues. The article attempts to trace Ray's thoughts on cinema and analyze how his films, even those that seem to be fantasies, are not situated in a rarefied atmosphere but are determined by a number of sociopolitical events that intersect and interact in myriad ways. A ghost story by Upendrakishore Ray Chowdhury, provided the filmmaker with the perfect narrative trope to critique what he considered the germs of contemporary social and political conditions, the vantage point from which his allegory could address not only the contemporary scenario but also the distant future. In his fantasy-based musicals Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne (The Adventures of Goopy and Bagha, 1969) and Hirak Rajar Deshe (The Kingdom of Diamonds, 1980), Ray decided to be at his subversive best. These films based on magic realism were not simply departures from his neo-realistic narratives but also veiled satires that indicted the establishment.

Tarashankar Bandyopadhyay's The Tale of Hansuli Turn depicts a utopic, autochthonous, and indigenous rural community, the Kahars, in a state of transition. The marginalized community is certainly not a homogeneous and monolithic one, there are stratifications in professional identities; women are forced to migrate to be employed in workshops or rail-line employment. The airbase and airplanes during World War II signify offstage imperial and existential catastrophe. The narrative celebrates change and subtly sympathizes with the rebel Karali, who has embraced the gospel of development and is a harbinger of radical change, returning to Hansuli Turn, with the promise of a new beginning after the destruction of the old order. A "New Hansuli Turn" is born after negotiations with the colonial order. Unlike many other postcolonial texts, The Tale of Hansuli Turn re-conceives the present by re-telling the past without being nostalgic. Its vision of the future is a transformation of the present.