The Post-humanistic Turmoil: A Critical Analysis of Satyajit Ray's "The Diary of a Space Traveller", "Professor Shonku and Robu", "Bonku Babu's Friend" and "Anukul"

Indian literature in different regional languages is immensely rich in its manner of depicting various themes and portraying issues of the society, nation, and world. But it was beneficial only to the group of people knowing those specific languages i.e. Gujarati, Marathi, Bengali, etc. Hence, this research paper aims to deal with four Science-fiction short stories by Satyajit Ray: the first two short stories, “The Diary of a Space Traveller” and “Professor Shonku and Robu” from The Diary of a Space Traveller and Other Stories and the remaining two “Bonku Babu’s Friend” and “Anukul” from The Collected Short Stories. These stories are originally written in native Bengali language and later got translated into English. The main objective of this paper is to critically study these stories from the Post humanistic perspective as in the 21st century, people fall in the trap of science & technology i.e. Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, etc. Humanism believes in the central role of the human-being, while post-humanism challenges it. It is about the intersection of human, non-human and technology. This paper brings forth the unintended effects of technology and shows how excessive use of technology and machines make a threat on human identity, how it overpowers and rules humans, and creates danger for the world as it is portrayed in the selected short-stories of Ray.