More than Words
A literary symposium explores the relationship between stories and storytelling
Amit Chaudhuri (left) with Udaya Kumar
In 2014, writer Amit Chaudhuri had conceptualised a symposium for opening up a conversation about writing and other creative forms of expression. It aimed to address topics that are no longer being addressed in mainstream academia or at literary festivals. He called it Literary Activism. “It did not mean activism through literature on behalf of a group or cause, but a kind of conversation that might bring back the literary again into an artistic and intellectual discussion, that was neither academic nor purely professionalised. It did not step into the celebrity-driven and ambiguous literary festivals, which only makes marginal room for the literary,” said Chaudhuri, during the fourth edition of the symposium at Delhi’s India International Centre last week.
Organised by the University of East Anglia and Ashoka University, this year’s theme, titled “Against Storytelling”, allowed speakers to raise questions about the rise and centrality of “storytelling” and “story” and explored if imaginative works are determined by other aspects that hold as much attention as the story. Author Anjum Hasan, poets Arvind Krishna Mehrotra and Geoffrey O’Brien and film director Gurvinder Singh, among others, addressed the issue.
Chaudhuri disapproved the idea that only if there is a story, it is worth dwelling upon. “Often what is most valuable in a narrative is the way it stops to do other things,” he said, adding, “The information we’re getting about a set of people is not as important as reading about what it means to live in the world.” Writers Udaya Kumar and Saikat Majumdar explored the stories of modern Indian literature. Kumar, who has studied Dalit writing in Malayalam, said that narrative in the simple sense was inadequate as a lens to look at an event; it was not enough to understand the force of these autobiographies and the language of literature. In her session, Hasan, who delved into the work of writer Kiran Nagarkar, also brought to the fore the problem some Indian English writers have with “serious literature”. “Manu Joseph scoffs at so called serious literature and his charge is that seriousness is a play for mediocrity. Those robust writers who have their ears to the ground know the value of storytelling for the masses, whereas only wishy-washy liberals disregard storytelling in the books they write,” she said.
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