51²è¹Ý

The 11th Symposium in the ‘Literary Activism’ series, titled ‘Doing the Dirt on Tragedy’, is being organised by the Centre for the Creative and the Critical, 51²è¹Ý, in partnership with the India International Centre, New Delhi, on 27th and 28th March 2026.

Dates: 27th and 28th March 2026

Timings: 10:45 am – 4:30 pm IST

Venue: India International Centre, Max Mueller Marg, New Delhi

Ashoka faculty, staff, and students can register their attendance using . Please only indicate your confirmed registration, as we will be arranging lunch and travel to and from the IIC based on the sign-ups.

The deadline to sign up is Monday, 23rd March, and the registrations are capped at 40.

The speakers, in alphabetical order, are:

• Aditya Bahl is a poet and critic who teaches literature at UCLA. He has written for Caravan, London Review of Books, New Left Review, The Nation, and The New Statesman. He is the author of four chapbooks of poetry, including MUKT (NYC: Organism for Poetic Research, 2021) and NAME AMEN (Malmö: Timglaset, 2018).
• Amit Chaudhuri is a novelist, poet, essayist, and musician. He is Professor of Creative Writing and Director of the Centre for the Creative and the Critical at 51²è¹Ý. He conceptualises the ‘literary activism’ symposia.
• Simon Cooke is a Senior Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Literature in the Department of English and Scottish Literature at the University of Edinburgh. He is the author of Travellers’ Tales of Wonder: Chatwin, Naipaul, Sebald (2013), and has published on writers including Henry James, Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys, and Muriel Spark.
• Tishani Doshi publishes poetry, fiction, and essays. Her fifth collection of poems, Egrets, While War, explores the body, violence, and renewal in fractured times. A former lead dancer with the Chandralekha company in Madras, she is the author of multiple award-winning and shortlisted books, and a visiting professor at NYU Abu Dhabi.
• Kirsty Gunn writes novels, short stories and essays and is Research Professor of Writing Practice and Study at the University of Dundee. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a winner of various awards for her writing, including the Scottish Arts Council Book of the Year Award.
• William Harris is a writer and critic who lives in Chicago, where he is finishing up a PhD in English literature at the University of Chicago. He is an associate faculty member at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research. His writing appears in n+1, New Left Review, Jacobin, and elsewhere.
• Saikat Majumdar, a novelist and critic, is the author, most recently, of The Amateur, and is currently working on The Critic as Artist: An Autoethnography of World Literature, from which his talk is drawn.
• Jatin Nayak retired from Utkal University, Bhubaneswar, in 2016 as Professor of English, and is currently Professor Emeritus, KISS deemed to be University, Bhubaneswar, and Language Expert, New India Foundation, Bengaluru. He has been editing margASIA, a biannual journal devoted to exploring Asian literatures and cultures, since 2013.
• Sumana Roy is the author of two works of nonfiction, How I Became a Tree and Provincials: Plant Thinkers of Twentieth-Century Bengal, a work of literary criticism, Missing: A Novel; My Mother’s Lover and Other Stories; and two collections of poems.
• Udayan Vajpeyi lives and works in Bhopal. He has published five collections of poems, including Kewal Kuchh Vakya & Wah, four collections of short stories, including Ret kinare ka ghar, three books of essays, a book on tribal painting and folk tales, Jangarh Kalam.

Schedule:

Friday, 27th March

10.45 am | Opening remarks

11 am – 12 pm | Saikat Majumdar – ‘The deviant and the social: the paradox of difficult style’

12.15 – 1.15 pm | Aditya Bahl – The Portrait of a Poet as a Calendar’

1.15 – 2.15 pm | Lunch

2.15 – 3.15 pm | William Harris – ‘Adult Education: Raymond Williams in Korea’

3.30 – 4.30 pm | Jatin Nayak – ‘The Allure of Sad Endings: Stray thoughts on some Odia authors’

Saturday, 28th March

11 am – 12 pm | Udayan Vajpeyi – ‘Story of Nagnajeet and its implications’

12.15 – 1.15 pm | Amit Chaudhuri – ‘The Music-Making Socrates’

1.15 – 2.15 pm | Lunch

2.15 – 3.15 pm | Sumana Roy – ‘Dali’s Moustache, Chaitanya’s Raised Hands, উ, & Other Micro-Agitations Against Tragedy’

3.30 – 4.30 pm | Simon Cooke, Tishani Doshi, and Kirsty Gunn in conversation with Amit Chaudhuri – ‘Absent and Extant Lineages of Celebration: Puritanism, Joy, and Dance’

4.30 pm | Closing remarks

Mission statement

I was trying to track down a quote from D H Lawrence that’s been in my head for a long time: ‘doing the dirt on tragedy’. Unable to find it anywhere, I asked some Lawrence experts if they knew where it was from. Frances Wilson, Lawrence’s biographer, reminded me that the actual quote – a very famous one – was ‘doing the dirt on sex’ (my emphasis). Of course! But how had I arrived at the misremembered formulation?

On reflection, it seems to be what musicians nowadays call a ‘mash-up’: a mash-up or segueing between Lawrence’s observation on sex and his feelings about tragedy – because there’s little doubt about his impatience with the latter, his rebellion against what it symbolises regarding weight and ‘meaning’ in the post-Socratic, post-Christian, and, finally, the post-Enlightenment world. If by post-Socratic, post-Christian, and post-Enlightenment we mean the ‘West’, then Lawrence’s rejection of the tragic gestures towards the limits of what the ‘West’, or ‘Europe’, means for him. How do we know about this rejection? It occurs in constant bursts through his writing, informing it throughout. And it accounts for his polemical investment in what he calls ‘life’, a key-word for Lawrence signifying the antithesis of all values religious, metaphysical, otherworldly, and tragical. This investment deepens, instead of diminishing, with the proximity of his own death. The closer he is to death, the more he rejects the hereafter, as in the opening pages of Apocalypse: ‘ Whatever the dead or the unborn might know, they cannot know the marvel of being alive in the flesh.’ Descending the Etruscan tombs, he notes the frescoes on the walls: ‘It is all small and gay and quick with life… here is the real Etruscan liveliness and naturalness. It is not impressive or grand. But if you are content with just a sense of the quick ripple of life, then here it is.’ Then: ‘the underworld of the Etruscans was a gay place’. And, echoing Nietzsche: ‘This profound belief in life, acceptance of life, seems characteristic of the Etruscans’. (My emphasis)

In Etruscan Places, Lawrence identifies the civilisation that the tombs contain as a world-view predating, and destroyed by, Rome: by what we now take to be ‘the West’. Is rejecting tragedy necessary to recuperating lineages outside that putative West – lineages that do not fit into the self-awareness of Empire (‘Roman’/‘impressive or grand’) or into the legacies of Christian piety, or Enlightenment rationality? That would be too simple. After all, the Etruscan tombs are situated, geographically, within the boundaries of Europe. So it’s Europe’s self-awareness that Lawrence is aiming to open up by questioning tragedy’s ultimate dominance. Our ambition is similar: to make possible new conversations between diverse cultural lineages about what has lain, and lies, beyond tragedy, while discarding the usefulness of the idea of the West and its others through this act of distancing.

Amit Chaudhuri

23.11.2025