A bronze statue of Virginia Woolf in Richmond-upon-Thames, U.K., where the author set up her publishing house Hogarth Press, and lived for 10 years.
| Photo Credit: Getty Images
Prefixing any straitjacketed definition with a defiant “not” can produce startling results. Much like Kabir’s ‘ulatbansi’ (upside-down sayings) or the Advaita philosophy of ‘neti neti’ (not this, not that), it is a stream of consciousness that moves beyond the blindspots of binary thought, resisting convenient categorisation.
Only fitting then that modernist writer Virginia Woolf was the toast of the 10th Symposium in the Literary Activism Series in New Delhi last week, centred on ‘the non-peer reviewed essay’, a work that is more spontaneous, imaginative, intellectual, “essayistic” and, more importantly, immune to slaughter at the conformist hands of “peer review”.
Jon Cook, Emeritus Professor of Literature at the University of East Anglia, said that the essay stemmed from a festering “self-doubt” when imperialist forces started digging their feet in foreign lands. For it to develop dialogue between the “philosophical eye” and “conversable crowd”, it needs the firm footedness of “experience”. He further quoted from a Woolf essay to describe the “transition, the invention of self”, that the form of the essay might facilitate.
Exchange of ideas
Interesting assumptions, each one intersecting with, and adding to, what an essay can (not) entail, emerged from the two-day event, helmed by scholar-writer Amit Chaudhari. One panellist compared the Hindi variant ‘nibandh’ (one without any ‘boundation’ as he puts it) with its Bengali or Odia counterpart ‘prabandh’ (one with form). Poet-professor Sumana Roy believed the essay to be a way of ‘genre-defiance’, genre being a very masculine, rigid entity, while Yale University’s Cynthia Zarin thought it to be a container to hold discursive thoughts.
Dwelling on his decade-long engagement with the series, Chaudhari said the aim was to zoom in on intelligent, thoughtful, playful exchanges, to listen to them and learn from them. The extension of the symposium into a full-fledged online magazine, as well as a dedicated imprint which doesn’t bow down to market forces, are his ways of engaging with and chronicling these ongoing conversations. In the coming years, Chaudhari wishes for the symposium to move to Kolkata and other parts of the country, to “democratise knowledge and rescue these conversations from the stranglehold of academia”.
‘Trust the tale, not the genre’
Is non-fiction only based on verifiable facts, and is fiction its made-up version? Is non-fiction (non) fiction, a dry and drab fact sheet sans narrative and storytelling, the two central tenets of creative writing? How do these forms interact and intersect with each other in a world dominated by free market capitalism? Chaudhari chose the cinematic equivalent of non-fiction — the documentary — to illustrate his point. In focus was Anand Patwardhan’s “bold and perspicacious” Ram Ke Naam (In the Name of God), based on the 1992 demolition of Babri Masjid in Ayodhya.
Chaudhari seemed least concerned with the historicity of the events; the quotidian shots of a milestone, an empty stretch of road, and two chatting farmers piquing his interest instead. These marginal people or objects, simultaneously in and out of the narrative, he said, offer a “looseness, unfinishedness, and distractedness to narrative” making the tale take a flight of its own, without the constrictions of genre, so that we, as viewers “trust the tale, and not the genre”.
Author Saikat Majumdar made a convincing case for the public essay at a time when emotion is animating public conscience. Underlining the Hobbesian theory that pits ‘public sphere’ as a corrective space against the excesses of state, he stressed on the need for an effective emotion — a co-mingling of the ‘rational’ and ‘emotional’ — for effective dissemination of information.
While the turnout at the symposium remained lower than one expected, it was exciting to see specialists from various fields in attendance. An AI engineer working on Natural Language Processing (NLP), with whom I talked over coffee, had come to listen to the recent developments in language and literature. Asked how AI would intersect with creativity, he said that the perceived dangers of AI are being blown out of proportion. “AI might churn out novels on the spur of the moment, but wouldn’t we all be equally quick to spot the ‘artificial’ in them?” he quipped.
The writer is the author of the Hindi short story collection ‘Yeh Dil Hai Ki Chor Darwaja’ (2023).
Published – April 04, 2025 09:45 am IST