LIVE with Shashi Tharoor...

LIVE with Shashi Tharoor! | Delhi: A Soliloquy

DC Books and Westland Publications organized a LIVE MEET on the occasion of the launch of the English translation of M Mukundan's Delhi Gathakal by Dr Shashi Tharoor.

The conversation was moderated by literary critic Resh Susan (The Book Satchel)

with Shashi Tharoor, 

Maniyambath Mukundan, (Author)

Fathima EV & Nandakumar K (Translators)

LIVE on Thursday, 29 October, 7 PM

But before that, the blurb to Delhi: A Soliloquy

It is the 1960s.

Delhi is a city of refugees and dire poverty.

The Malayali community is just beginning to lay down roots, and the government offices at Central Secretariat, as well as hospitals across the city, are infused with Malayali-ness.

This is the Delhi young Sahadevan makes his home, with the help of Shreedharanunni, committed trade union leader and lover of all things Chinese.

Then, unexpectedly, China declares war on India.

In a moment, all is split asunder, including Shreedharanunni’s family.

Their battle to survive is mirrored in the lives of many others: firebrand journalist Kunhikrishnan and his wife Lalitha; maverick artist Vasu; call girl and inveterate romantic Rosily;

JNU student and activist Janakikutty.

As India tumbles from one crisis to another - the Indo-Pak War, the refugee influx of the 1970s, the Emergency and its excesses, the riots of 1984 - Sahadevan is everywhere, walking, soliloquising and aching to capture it all, the adversities and the happiness.

Writer Mukundan observed…

There are no tragic events I won’t write about.

So these tragic events I particularly wanted to write about.

But usually I don’t respond immediately. That’s my nature.

This novel I’ve been thinking for more than 15 years.

So I got up at 4 o clock in the morning, had black tea and started writing till 8 am.

This is a little advice I’m sharing with you.

I wanted to talk about the Malayali migrants.

In the 60s very few Malayalis made it to the top. They were struggling.

There is a rosy image of the city of Delhi especially of Kerala.

But there is another side of Delhi, and I wanted to talk about this also.

The Malayali migration and the dark somber side of Delhi…

Fathima and Nandan came to my help. And a wonderful translation is there.

Sashi Tharoor then commented on author Mukundan and the book –

'Writers Are the Dream Mechanism of the Human Race...’

A Date with Bill | @ SCILET

The 2020 Paul L Love Endowment Lecture was delivered by Professor Bill Ashcroft at 11 am on 28 October 2020 on the virtual Zoom platform. 

Professor Bill Ashcroft spoke on the topic, ‘Postcolonialism Today’.

Dr. Bill Ashcroft, one of the founding exponents of Postcolonial Theory and a renowned critic, is currently Fellow, Australian Academy of the Humanities (FAHA), Professor Emeritus, School of Arts and Media, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia.

Professor Bill Ashcroft began by talking about the importance and relevance of postcolonial studies continues to the present contexts!

‘One reason for its relevance even today is because it is dynamic’, he observed.

Says Bill -

On developing Postcolonial studies with reference to –

Postcolonial Utopianism

Borders and Bordering

Utopianism

The Utopian Studies Society was established in the year 1988.

It was just sheer coincidence that The Empire Writes Back was published in the very next year, in 1989.

He also cited from two books, titled,

Ernst Bloch’s The Principle of Hope (1986)

And

Fredric Jameson’s Archaeologies of the Future (2005)

Excerpts from his Lecture -

There’s a difference between Utopia and Utopianism

A difference between the ‘placeless place’ and the spirit of hope, between the representation of utopia and the anticipatory function of utopianism.

Sargent, ‘social dreaming’

Levitas – “the desire for a better way of living expressed in the description of a different kind of society that makes possible that alternative way of life”.

The irony of postcolonial utopia

King Utopus invades the land, changes its name, ‘civilises’ the indigenous inhabitants and cultivates the natural ‘wasteland’!

He also spoke on Literature’s Anticipatory Function.

On the importance of art and literature in imaging a different world.

In this regard he alluded to Ben Okri’s famous line, where he says, ‘Writers are the dream mechanism of the human race’.

Vorschein or ‘anticipatory illumination’, the revelation of the ‘possibilities for rearranging social and political relations to produce Heimat.

Heimat – the home we have all sensed but never experienced or known. It is Heimat as utopia that determines the truth content of a work of art!

For Bloch, Heimat always lies beyond the borders!

Borders have become very significant for Postcolonial Studies!

What would the world look like without borders?

How would the walling in become porous?

Thinking about that becomes Utopian!

The growth of borders

End of WW II – 7 borders

When Berlin wall fell – 15 Border Walls

Today – 77 border Walls or fences

A border is not a thing, but a practice.

It’s an ideological practice.

It is both a consequence and production of power relationships.

Without borders we don’t have a nation, said Trump.

The idea of a border is something that gives us the sense of nation.

But border doesn’t go around a nation, but it goes through a nation, and helps in construction of power relationships.

He then quoted the following lines from Cavafy’s “Waiting for the Barbarians”.

Waiting for the Barbarians

BY C. P. CAVAFY

TRANSLATED BY EDMUND KEELEY

Why this sudden bewilderment, this confusion?

(How serious people’s faces have become.)

Why are the streets and squares emptying so rapidly,

everyone going home lost in thought?

Why isn’t anything going on in the senate?

Why are the senators sitting there without legislating?

Because the barbarians are coming today.

What’s the point of senators making laws now?

Once the barbarians are here, they’ll do the legislating.

Because night has fallen and the barbarians haven't come.

And some of our men just in from the border say

there are no barbarians any longer.

Now what’s going to happen to us without barbarians?

Those people were a kind of solution.

Borders and the Horizon of Literature

The Borders Within

The boundary of the state never marks a real exterior… It is a line drawn internally, within the network of institutional mechanisms through which a certain social and political order is maintained! (Mitchell 1991: 90).

Bordering practices include rules, laws, restrictions, surveillance and more subtle forms of pressure such as nationalistic rhetoric.

Simonsen – Eight borders or boundary markers as criteria for national membership –

1. National ancestry

2. Being of the national religion

3. birth on the country’s soil

4. having lived in the country for most of one’s life

5. language skills

6. respect for the country’s laws and institutions

7. having host national citizenship

8. feeling as part of the nation.

Borders and the Horizons of Literature

Rushdie, Step Across this Line

Good writing assumes a frontierless nation. Writers who serve frontiers have become border guards… In our deepest natures we are frontier crossing beings. We know this by the stories we tell ourselves; for we are story-telling animals.

Edward Said – Exile is both ‘the mind of winter’ and the invigorating condition of the public intellectual’s engagement with regimes of identity control such as nation, religion, culture and ethinicity.

The Creative spirit, for which literature is a powerful metonym, is the ultimate border crosser. It is inherently postnational because its tendency is not to belong, the nationality of literatures being a function of reading rather than writing.

Heimat is not a nation but the range of possibilities.

The concept of Transnation!

Postcolonialism and the Nation

Postcolonial dissatisfaction with the concept of Nation

Soyinka – Africa carved up ‘like some demented tailor who paid no attention to the fabric, colour or pattern of the quilt he was patching together’.

The borders that form a nation are colonial borders, and a nation is a colonial construction.

Hobson says, ‘Empire bred nationalism undermined the chance of true internationalism’.

Internationalism – does not construct through bordering practices.

Partha Chatterjee – nationalism undermines the progress of decolonization because the ‘national form’ is hostile to their own cultures.

Postcolonial Utopianism and the critique of the nation state –

Tagore, Gandhi

Transnation –

Is the nation that circulates around the bordering practices of the state.

Transnation – is the fluid migrating outside of the state that begins within the nation. A way of talking about subjects who circulate around the bordering practices of the state.

Deleuze and Guattari –

‘smooth vs striated space’

Texture –

Striated space is the space of the State.

Smooth space is the space of the Transnation.

Scott, ‘infra politics’ –

1. The undramatic, everyday and mundane acts of quite evasion

2. Slowdowns, false compliance, feigned ignorance and sabotage carried out by factory workers – that when performed by many change or alter a landscape of power.

The creative spirit is the ultimate border crosser.

That’s where we bring together the notion of utopia.

The creative spirit is of unbelonging, it looks beyond the border.

Postcolonial approaches to literature generate that kind of realization, that, literature could imagine a possible world – potentially disruptive –

Particularly in Australia, they are wary of any kind of creative work!

The end of Bill Ashcroft’s Talk!

This was followed by a rewarding time of questions and answers.

Special congratulations to SCILET for having hosted such an amazing speaker of international repute.

In fact, I still remember going all the way to Pune, a couple of years ago, to listen to Bill talk on Postcolonial Utopias. [You may want to watch the YouTube video, that I had done then, on his talk, HERE]

Hence it was a double blessing to listen to Bill Ashcroft speak, from the luxury of our own homes!

Thanks a million to Dr. Premila Paul, to Dr. R.P. Nair and to all the lovely minds who made our day with Bill!

Bill Ashcroft!

Read-Out-Aloud Challenge!

Readers’ Rendezvous

Proudly presents

The Read Out Aloud Challenge!

Give Your Speed Reading Skills a Shot!

Remembering R. K. Narayan!

7 pm | Saturday

07 November 2020 | ZOOM

First Prize – Rs. 3,000/-

Second Prize – Rs. 2,000/-

Third Prize – Rs. 1,000/-

Participants have the option of choosing from any one of the following short stories -

Short Story 1: R. K. Narayan’s Fruition at Forty

Short Story 2: R. K. Narayan’s A Snake In the Grass

Short Story 3: R. K. Narayan’s An Astrologer's Day

Rules –

1. Anyone who is interested in reading out aloud, can participate in this contest. Age no bar.

2. Participants need to register in advance.

3. There is no registration fee.

4. While reading, participants should be careful not to misspell a word.

5. No awkward pauses allowed.

6. Fluency, Word clarity and coherence will be taken into consideration.

7. There will be a maximum of seven participants. Hence participants will be selected purely based on first-come-first-served basis alone!

8. Organisers are not responsible for any network problem from the participant’s side.

9. Winners will be awarded cash prizes by a reputed publishing house based in Chennai.

10. Participants who are selected, will be asked to send a snap of yours for the flyer and the brochure.

11. The decision of the judges will be final and binding on the participants.

12. Since this is a speed reading challenge, participants who finish the fastest [with clarity] in the minimum time, will be declared the winners.

To Register, click HERE -

https://forms.gle/6BVNDntDuXrLJZih7

Regards,

Team

Read-Out-Aloud Challenge

'The Olympic medal had been the most precious thing that had ever come to me...'

Muhammad Ali: I Am the Greatest

Dr. Maria Preethi Srinivasan our second Delegate on our Books & Coffee Meet presented a review of the book titled, Muhammad Ali - The Greatest: My Own Story, on Friday, 31 July 2020. 

Just a few excerpts for us all, from Dr. Preethi’s review –

Dr. Preethi -

Well, it’s just a happy coincidence that I also have a life-writing for review.

Before that, I would like to read a poem.

There again I see serendipity.

I chose a poem not realizing that it would connect with my book review.

It’s titled, ‘Explosion Contained’.

Just four lines -

I wish I could put my body

through the motions of an explosion.

If you can’t bear to see me dismembered

Do appreciate what it takes to stay together!

I prefer the term life-writing, because I feel it is all-encompassing.

I’ve always looked at life-writings through a lens, and that lens is the power of expression.

Because for me, and for many of us, the power of expression is therapeutic.

So if you’re mapping the journey of the oppressed from silence to the voiced position, and to think that there are so many stories that go unheard because they’ve been untold, the fact that, the story of an African-American in the 1960s has been told, presupposes that, there has been empowerment in his life, a kind of empowerment that has been able to express himself.

His primary mode of expression was his sport – boxing.

We might be amused by his assertion of being the ‘greatest’.

Malcolm X and Mohammed Ali had a very strong friendship.

One of the highlights of his life and his life story is the winning of the Olympic gold medal.

But you know what he did with that medal?

He threw it into the river Ohio!

Why did he do that?

It was the result of a humiliating experience.

He goes into a hotel where they refuse to serve him.

Preethi ma'am then reads out snippets from the Text... here goes...

The Olympic medal had been the most precious thing that had ever come to me.

I worshiped it. It was proof of performance, status, a symbol of belonging, of being a part of a team, a country, a world.

It was my way of redeeming myself with my teachers and schoolmates at Central High, of letting them know that although I had not won scholastic victories, there was something inside me capable of victory.

How could I explain to Ronnie I wanted something that meant more than that?

Something that was as proud of me as I would be of it.

Something that would let me be what I knew I had to be, my own kind of champion.

“We don’t need it,” I said. “We don’t need it.”

SO WHAT I remember most about the summer of 1960 is not the hero welcome, the celebrations, the Police Chief, the Mayor, the Governor, or even the ten Louisville millionaires, but that night when I stood on the Jefferson County Bridge and threw my Olympic Gold Medal down to the bottom of the Ohio River.

It had taken six years of blood, blows, pain, sweat, struggle, a thousand rounds in rings and gyms to win that medal, a prize I had dreamed of holding since I was a child.

Now I had thrown it in the river.

And I felt no pain and no regret. Only relief, and a new strength.

As I had been looking at this book through a certain lens, the lens of how he expressed himself, how he dealt with the trauma of racism, why did he choose boxing?

The thing about Ali is that, he is also a poet!

He tends to compose lines!

All those lines you have in the song are slogans he composes when he challenges his opponent.

“To make America the greatest is my goal,

so I beat the Russian and I beat the Pole,

and for the USA won the medal of gold.

Italy said, ‘You’re greater than Cassius of Old,

we like your name, we like your game,

so make Rome your home if you will.’

I said I appreciate kind hospitality,

but the USA is my country still,

‘cause they’re waiting to welcome me in Louisville.”

Snippets from Dr. Benet's Book Review...

Dear friends,

This delightful series starting today, will be a fond recollection and celebration of each of the lovely books that our delegates had presented on our Books & Coffee Meets over the past three months, starting 31 July 2020.

The first Book review was by Dr. Benet!

Dr. Benet reviewed Orhan Pamuk’s memoir titled, Istanbul: Memories and the City

Just quoting his introductory words -

In recent times, circumstances have forced me to become a digital migrant, and I have joined the digital natives. So I’m happy. Today I would like to share with you some of the important things related to this book (shows the book).

Istanbul: Memories and the City

This is by Orhan Pamuk. This book I did read ten or twelve years ago. And recently I saw a piece of news which said, that, Hagia Sophia verdict seen as an attempt to ‘mask economic failure’

This book is a memoir – and you find the life story of the author that he writes it in Turkish. A great memoirist, whom I like a lot. It’s a beautiful book about memories.

When he talks about his childhood memories, he says, they are all in white & black.

It has nearly some forty black & white photographs and it reads like a history book, and then it reads like an autobiography, and then it reads like a journalist’s account of a city, and then it reads like a curator’s account of a city.

Orhan Pamuk is a very powerful writer!

This book was published in the year 2005, when the author was hardly 50 years.

A memoirist has a moral obligation to tell the truth. And that too, to tell the truth objectively.

Orhan Pamuk does it. The chapters make an interesting read.

Especially the chapter 11, that deals with four 20th century poets. These were very popular poets...

said Dr. Benet!

So here’s quoting from the chapter for us all -

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Four Lonely Melancholic Writers

From Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul: Memories and the City

I knew little of these writers as a child. The one I knew best was the great fat poet, Yahya Kemal: I’d read a few of his poems, which were famous through the country. I knew another, the popular historian Reşat Ekrem Koçu, from the history supplements in newspapers —

I’d been very interested in the illustrations of Ottoman torture techniques that accompanied his articles. By the time I was ten, I knew all their names because their books were in my father’s library. But they still had no influence on my developing ideas about Istanbul.

When I was born, all four were in good health and living within a half-hour walk of where I lived. By the time I was ten, all but one were dead and I’d never seen any of them in person. I am not unaware of acting like a starstruck fan who takes details from the lives and films of his favorite stars and uses them to imagine coincidences and chance encounters.

But it is these four heroes, whom I will discuss from time to time in this book, whose poems, novels, stories, articles, memoirs, and encyclopedias opened my eyes to the soul of the city in which I live.

For these four melancholic writers drew their strength from the tensions between the past and the present, or between what Westerners like to call East and West; they are the ones who taught me how to reconcile my love for modern art and western literature with the culture of the city in which I live.

A Breezy Virtual Rendezvous with Anuradha Roy...

Anuradha Roy | SCILET Live

A very productive and rewarding afternoon today, over a vibrant LIVE CONNECT with Award-winning novelist Anuradha Roy, thanks to SCILET, The American College, Madurai.

The programme started on time, and Dr. Premila Paul made the session so exciting and engaging for all of us, who’d gathered on the virtual ZOOM platform to connect with the renowned novelist.

The LIVE MEET that happened over the ZOOM virtual platform, started exactly at 2 pm and went on till around 3.40 pm.

A few memorable excerpts from the Q & A session for us all –

Anuradha Roy, on publishing her first book when she was forty years old…

Well, I had never wanted to become a writer. I had really wanted to be a publisher. And that’s what I was! I worked at OUP after my studies. 

I was completely happy working there. After leaving OUP, there was some space that opened up. So I made use of this space to write my own book.

Maybe I was 37 years old then. For a year or so, it kept getting rejected by publishers in India and abroad. The whole process of acceptance took a year or so! Only when I turned forty my first book was published, says Anuradha Roy!

Dr. PP asks,

“I’m just eager to know why you’ve named it Permanent Black!” Do you see white as a binary of black!?

Novelist Anuradha replies –

The name was partly a rebellion over the ‘whiteness’ of OUP! Partly against the whole hegemony of the white world in the kind of publishing we’ve been doing! That apart, we used to write in black ink! That’s added reason!

Dr. PP asks,

Your mother Sheela Roy has been a companion in your life, in your research tours, in your writing of novels, helped you in your hill climbings, your father has been an inspiration in your novels. Is there any female character in your novel inspired by Sheila Roy whom you admire and adore?

Novelist Anuradha replies –

My mother is an artist. She paints. When you build characters, it doesn’t happen that way. Characters begin with a kind of few molecules. So I’ve not directly drawn on my mother in my novels!

Dr. PP asks,

In your novels, historical figures and imaginary characters jostle with each other. Where do you draw the line between the demands of authenticity and the demands of integrity! 

Does your extensive research come in the way of your imagination or rather, choke your imagination?

Novelist Anuradha replies –

While reading historical novels, I don’t feel like getting mere information, where the knowledge is so plain, and you can’t enter the book intellectually or emotionally.

I had been reading this American writer Janet Malcolm who’s written a book on a murder case. She’s described the realm of writing as a space like a house in which a journalist or the historian is a tenant, but the fiction writer is the owner. So the tenant writer can live in the house but has to leave it that way.

But a fiction writer can break down the house, and remake it according to what they have in their minds.

So I had to digest the history and bring it out as fiction, says Anuradha Roy.

Dr. PP asks,

The pain of abandonment is so real also. The societal identity gets established for this little boy, as the son of a white man! 

Added, it’s a kind of broken promise as well. Bali as a dream destination. Gayatri has been a very special mother, her parenting style, as a singer, as a story-teller… but why does she leave her son behind… 

Well, you have captured the essence of the patriarchal notions prevalent in the country…

Anuradha replies -

Gayatri’s need to be an artist, find the independence and the space to do what she needs to do. 

It’s a stereotype that women will always leave to be with another man. Bali is a place she ends up coincidentally. She did intend taking her child….

Dr. PP asks,

But the fact is, she didn’t…

Anuradha Roy replies -

All kinds of enormous forces of history like the pandemic, can overturn all our notions…

Dr. PP observes,

Anuradha does not work with words or visuals alone! She works with mud as well.. Her able fingers make powerful artefacts with mud (video is being screened now…)

Dr. PP continues,

Anuradha I understand that you don’t sell your lovely creation.

Anuradha Roy replies -

Earlier if I made something precious, I couldn’t part with it. But I recently sold my first two pieces and find very victorious about it. But I’ve never had exhibitions. I only give them to people who are interested in them. All our household mud teapots, tables, are all made by me…

Replying to a participant’s comment – Anuradha Roy observes –

You probably were too young to have written letters. A letter is a very physical thing. Your handwriting tells people a lot. Miscoth was my second dog. I was amused when you said ‘You read to your dog’. When I was seven years old, I was similarly convinced that I could teach my puppy to write… The presence of dogs around us, creates an anarchy around us that’s so wonderful. They’re absolute fun and so hilarious to be with!,

says novelist Anuradha Roy!

Prof. Sharon had two interesting questions -

Ma’am, do you have any kind of writing ritual – like you exile yourself, or a particular room where you sit and write… Do you think all of that is needed for writing to be possible, or do you think writing can be possible anywhere… Do you have a ritual or a process before writing…

Anuradha Roy replies –

You do need quite a lot of routine… I can’t write when things are disrupted. I need to start writing in the morning. When I began my first book, it was in Delhi. It was in the studio, which is a calm place. But I’ve written in plenty of other spaces as well. Like I’ve written in airports, hotels, houses of guests, etc. So the thing is, you just need to keep writing…

observed novelist Anuradha Roy!

Dr. Premila Paul proved the ideal moderator for the session, as usual, and on the whole, the evening proved quite a rewarding evening, with all of us blued and glued to Award Winning Novelist Ms Anuradha Roy.

PS: Dr. Premila Paul has been with us with the Department of English, MCC on many occasions in the recent past, to give Endowment Lectures and Invited Talks. Incidentally, she also gave the introductory address on our Meet the Author Programme, where she introduced Ms Anita Nair, in her own inimitable charming way, to our gathering, a few years ago.

You may want to link to the event HERE in our past post.