<strong>Saikat Majumdar appointed a Fellow at the Stellenbosch Institute of Advanced Study, South Africa</strong>

The Stellenbosch Institute of Advanced Study, located in Stellenbosch, near Cape Town, is one of the leading research centres in Africa. Here, leading researchers and intellectuals from across the globe are supported to think innovatively and to pursue sustainable strategies to the challenges facing the world, with a special reference to, but not limited to Africa. Recent fellows include the writer Abdulrazak Gurnah, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, 2021; Tsitsi Dangarembga, novelist from Zimbabwe; James Ferguson, the leading African anthropologist; Derek Attridge, noted literary scholar.

STIAS launched the Nobel in Africa Initiative in partnership with Stellenbosch University, under the auspices of the Nobel Foundation and the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences with funding from the Knut & Alice Wallenberg Foundation. The Nobel Symposium activities were initiated in 1965. Through the Initiative, STIAS will become the first institution outside of Scandinavia to host Nobel Symposia on behalf of the Nobel Foundation.

Saikat Majumdar has been awarded the fellowship to support his research project – The Amateur: autodidactism and self-making in the postcolony, a book about unexpected forms of reading, writing, and learning as they unfolded on the corners of the historical British Empire. It offers accounts of autodidactism and personal growth under forms of colonial rule and repressive or exclusionary systems of education – and the consequent amateurism that have shaped public intellectuals of wide and popular appeal.

The book draws on three locations: a group of black intellectuals in mid-century South Africa in the aftermath of the exclusionary Bantu Education Act of 1953, a number of 20th century Caribbean writers who offer diffident encounters with England as part of their literary bildung, and a group of writers from late-colonial and early-postcolonial India whose intellectual amateurism chart dissident relations with the British project of professionalizing a particular kind of colonial subject. The book will be published internationally by Bloomsbury, who has also published a collection of essays on this subject, The Critic as Amateur (2019), edited by Saikat and Aarthi Vadde from Duke University, with contributions from India, US, UK, Australia, and South Africa.

“I’ve been working and thinking about this project for several years now,” Saikat said. “the core question I’m trying to address is whether thinking and writing about art and literature is a specialist pursuit, or can anyone with passion for them join the conversation productively, irrespective of training or background. As a novelist who also writes about literature and education for the mainstream media, the idea of amateur, popular, or generalist criticism has occupied me for a long time. Looking at the growth and development of writers and thinkers who variously struggled with poor or exclusionary education systems in the colonized world but developed as entertaining amateurs has given me many insights.”

“South Africa, particularly black intellectuals under apartheid, play a crucial role in this book, so I’m excited to be able do some of the work while based at the Stellenbosch Institute of Advanced Study.”

Some of Saikat’s work on this subject has already been published – in the journals PMLA (Publication of the Modern Language Association) and New Literary History, and is forthcoming in the Cambridge Companion to the Essay, as well as in popular venues such as the Los Angeles Review of Books, Hindu, Scroll, etc.

“This project, along with the South African experience,” Saikat said, “I’m hoping, will also re-energize my teaching as a return to Ashoka after my sabbatical, particularly with my Foundation course, Literature and the World, and my course for English majors, Postcolonial Literature.”

51˛čšÝ

‘Of New Checks and Old Mates’ by Sankalp Khandelwal (YIF ’19)

My mother suggests my father and I play chess, a proposition I do not find unpalatable. I know that even though my mother would not proclaim it, what she really wants is for me to spend some time with my father. Maybe even chat a bit. And, if God is merciful, she hopes that this will set in motion a series of fortunate events—the first game leading to many others in the future, each bringing the two of us, my father and I, closer together, our bond becoming ever stronger as we make move after move against one another. 

My father inhales deeply before he gives his assent.

I rescue our chessboard from its years of disuse and start arranging the pieces. As I do so, my mind wanders back to a similar setting on a Sunday afternoon of about fifteen years ago: my father and I sitting across from each other, the chessboard between us, awkwardness permeating the room like an industrial room freshener. At the time, my father’s king—all on its own—brought down my feeble fortifications, took half of my pieces, returned to its ranks, and then sent the pawns for the final kill.

Never before that had I suffered such a humiliating defeat. Never since then have I been defeated so humiliatingly. In which universe does the king do all the hard work while the queen sits back and watches the drama unfold? 

After arranging the board, I tell my father the ‘international’ rules that I know he is unacquainted with: the pawns sprint before walking, the rook is more powerful than the knight and the bishop, and see, this is how you castle, in one single move. 

I learnt how to play chess when I was in primary school. I started with observing the men in my house—my grandfather, my father, his two brothers, and their sons—play with each other in the afternoon after lunch. Sometimes, one of my aunts joined too. But she was considered an unformidable player and was, therefore, avoided when one wanted a ‘good game’. 

For months, I remained a curious spectator to the silent battles. I watched but did not comprehend. One day, after I expressed interest in learning the game, I was asked to come prepared the next day. All these years later, I don’t remember who took charge of my initiation, but I do recall that the following afternoon, I was so restless to start learning that I made a small ball of the roti my mom served me for lunch and stuffed it in my mouth all in one go. 

That day, the rules I was taught were different from the ones I now know. My grandfather—who offered 20 rupees to anyone who could checkmate him— called them the ‘Indian rules’. The pawns didn’t sprint, the rooks barely mattered, and to castle you moved the king once like the pawn and the second time like the knight. 

I took a liking to the game almost immediately. Unlike other games I played in those days—Ludo, cricket, WWE playing cards—there was no element of luck involved in chess. No dice, no tosses. No Rank 1 Hitman losing to a 500-pound Yokozuna. Chess was all focus, strategy, patience, and control. It did not demand of you to run fast or to hit hard or to cheat when nobody was watching. All that it asked was that you focus longer and harder and be more resilient than your opponent. And this came naturally to me. 

After I finish explaining the new rules to him, my father protests. As the man of the house, he dislikes being at a disadvantage, hates being vulnerable. I tell him that this is how chess is played all over the world, that even though the rooks are holed up in the corner, they have the power to turn around games. Reluctantly, my father acquiesces. 

“Where did you learn all of this?” he asks. “In college,” I reply. 

Within the first few weeks at my undergraduate college, I joined the campus chess club, which essentially comprised a group of boys—including an international and a national player— who would play a few games in the sports room after classes. They were the ones who taught me the standard ‘international’ rules and forced me, through a series of defeats, to unlearn the chess knowledge my family had inculcated in me years ago. 

In the same way that I discarded the ‘Indian’ rules for the ‘international’ ones in the sports room, I unlearnt many domiciliary rules in my English literature classes and instead adopted new and arguably ‘international’ charters. Lecture by lecture—as our class dissected writings of Dostoevsky, Blake, Flaubert, Woolf, Milton, Tagore, Marx, and their ilk—my vision became unblinkered. My world transformed. Idol worship gave way to atheism, blacks and whites transitioned to infinite shades of grey, boundaries of gender and sexuality expanded and dissolved, and politics saturated all aspects of the personal. Suddenly, anywhere and everywhere I looked, all I saw were specters of patriarchy, casteism, racism, and heteronormativity. I started questioning everything, from family traditions and festival rituals to why the hell did we worry so much about what people would say?

My parents did not welcome this newfound curiosity. 

“Why do Indian women punish themselves by fasting all day on festivals?” 

“You think you have become too clever by reading all your books? You can’t put a question mark on everything.” 

“Why go to weddings of people we don’t like?” 

“You are too young to understand. We need to do these things to live in society. Go get ready.” “All this dowry business is so wrong. Don’t you think Uncle should have just rejected the match?” 

“That’s how it works there. You have to be more practical in life. Can’t just rely on bookish knowledge.”

Faced with such a famine of logic but too dependent on home to stir up a revolution, I began to emancipate myself. This process, unsurprisingly, fostered disaffection and resentment. Cracks materialised in our relationship and soon turned into deep-seated fault lines. Their traces remain to this day— years after we commenced the intricate work of de-estrangement. 

Parenting, I have come to realise, resembles reverse osmosis more than a steady movement downstream. It is not just something that parents do to raise their kids, but also all the conscious and unthinking ways in which children raise their parents. Children initially parent by depending on you for everything and, later, by dragging you through the agonising process of un-depending, which culminates with the complete severance of the umbilical cord. Parents, on the other hand, parent with the same lens throughout their life—of protecting their children from harm.

Years ago, when I started un-depending, I tried to reduce mutual suffering with my parents. I meticulously strategised, instead of acting on impulses. I sacrificed the pawns—visiting insufferable relatives, skipping night outs, attending pujas—to get to the rooks and the queen—taking up jobs that I liked, studying things that I wanted, going on holidays my way. Now, we are past the stage of severance and have traversed a long distance. We now know that there are some things we can never change, and realise that there is merit in becoming accustomed to the discomfort. From a place where an inter-religious marriage would have been detestable to them, my parents have come to a point where they may just tolerate, even celebrate, a same-sex union. I, meanwhile, show enthusiasm for the Diwali puja, going as far as singing bhajans in chorus with my mother.

As the game advances, I gradually realise that even though my father agreed to the new rules, he does not really believe in them. He frowns when I exchange my knight with his bishop in the first few moves.

“Why are you being destructive?” he asks. “They are equally valuable. That’s how the game is played.” A few moves later, he willingly exchanges his rook with my bishop. “I told you the rook is more valuable,” I say

My father remains quiet. 

His outdated approach doesn’t stand a chance against my advanced know-how. Checkmating him is child’s play. For neither of us, this was a ‘good game’. I sense my father is upset. To be reminded that your long-cherished beliefs are flawed can be painful. As can the reminder that your childhood heroes are imperfect.

I pack up and return the board to its resting place, for what looks like will be another period of hibernation.

***

About the Author: 

Most of my life after school has revolved around editing and writing. As I studied towards an English (Hons) degree at Hans Raj, I wrote more than 500 SEO articles as a freelance writer. Graduation done, I joined a publishing house in Delhi as a copy and commissioning editor, where I helped dozens of authors hone their fiction for three years. The necessity to fatten my paycheck thereafter led me to the corporate parks of Gurgaon, where I edited business reports and proposals for four years. Then I took a break and joined YIF.

At YIF—both in Critical Writing and other courses—my writing oeuvre expanded to include a rich variety of genres, including a manifesto on validation, a critical essay on Kabir’s poetry, and the narrative non-fiction piece featured in this journal. I also found a mentor in Professor Janice Pariat, whose feedback and recommendation helped me secure a scholarship to study creative writing at a summer school in Edinburgh—an experience that I fondly remember as a month of writing and reading in the parks, cafes and libraries of the stunning Scottish city.

Since graduating from YIF, I have been working with the communications team at a global management consulting firm.

***

About the Final Draft: The Journal of YIF Critical Writing:
The goal of Final Draft, the annual journal of YIF Critical Writing, is to showcase both the range—in topic and genre—and strength of writing in a student body that is itself highly diverse in terms of its educational, disciplinary, professional, geographic, linguistic, and socio-economic backgrounds. Through the process of writing multiple drafts, student-authors discover their own unique voice, and recognise writing as an ongoing, open-ended activity as signalled by the title of the journal itself. As the Fellows learn to bring critical thinking tools to the drawing board, readers of Final Draft can witness a clear attempt by them to negotiate with texts and social phenomena as they make sense of the world around them.

About the Critical Writing Programme at the YIF:
The YIF Critical Writing Programme has few visible contextual precedents within the Indian higher education system. Acknowledging the importance of writing as central to processes of knowledge acquisition, production, and consumption, the programme has developed a pedagogy geared towards building critical reading, writing and thinking skills to help Fellows engage with the world of ideas and enable them to develop and express their own ideas in a well-reasoned, lucid, and engaging manner. We do this by helping students innovate with genres of writing across different disciplines to develop a metacognitive awareness regarding their own reading and writing practices. These skills act as building blocks for the liberal arts education they receive at 51˛čšÝ and enhance their abilities to navigate academic, professional, and social spheres once they graduate from the Fellowship.

51˛čšÝ

#AshokaBookTower – ‘The Scent of God’ – Written by Prof Saikat Majumdar, the book is a journey of friendship and love wrapped in a sensuous tapestry against the backdrop of a spiritual institution and published by Simon and Schuster India

Synopsis: 

In an elite all-boys’ boarding school run by a Hindu monastic order in late-twentieth century India, things aren’t what they look like on the surface…

Anirvan, a young student, is fascinated by the music and silence of spiritual life. He dreams of becoming a monk. But as he seeks his dream, he finds himself drawn to a fellow student, and they come together to form an intimate and unspeakable relationship. The boys sweat at cricket and football, crack science and mathematics in pursuit of golden careers, and meditate to the aroma of incense and flowers. It’s a world of ruthless discipline shaped by monks in flowing saffron. A sceptical teacher mentors Anirvan and reveals his suspicion of this vigilant atmosphere. Does the beating of the boys reveal urges that cannot be named? What is the meaning of monastic celibacy? What, indeed, holds the brotherhood together?

Against himself, Anirvan gets sucked into a whirl of events outside the walls of the monastery, in the midst of prostitutes, scheming politicians and the impoverished Muslims of the villages surrounding the school. When the love of his life returns to him, the boys’ desire for each other push them towards a wild course of action. But will that give them a life together in a world that does not recognize their kind of love?  

In conversation with the author, Saikat Majumdar, Head of the Department, Creative Writing, and Professor of English and Creative Writing, 51˛čšÝ. 

Please give an insight into The Scent of God. 

The Scent of God is a story of friendship and romantic love between two teenage boys growing up in a boarding school run by an order of Hindu monks. They live a life of close daily intimacy, and their deep friendship becomes something that promises to take over their lives. The quiet world of the ashram and the tough and dusty city streets outside offer them some difficult choices, as do their ideologically divided adult relations. In the end, they must take some decisions that will radically change their lives. 

The book talks about monastic celibacy, draped in an artistic sensuousness along with the power of religion. What is the juxtaposition of these in the present scenario? 

 Novels come from a wilderness inside you, but when the work takes final shape, you realise that the spirit of history has touched you without your knowing it. 

There is a poor Muslim village just outside the walls of this ashram, and there is tension with them over a land dispute from the past. This was actually the case with the real-life inspiration behind this fictional school. The hostility flashes at moments such as India-Pakistan cricket matches, when the predominantly Hindu boys construct them as imaginary enemies. However, saffron forces were not a political power in Bengal during the period in which the novel is set, even though it had started to rise in other parts of the country, with the demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992. Looking back, it now feels that this novel brings out the Islamophobia among “bhadralok” (gentleman), middle and upper-middle-class Hindu Bengalis, often disguised in the language of class. The long period of communist rule in Bengal – which plays a key role in this novel – only somehow suppressed this communalism without really addressing it.

It makes for a very powerful read. What was the inspiration behind writing this book? 

I know this world; I spent five years in the real school that inspires the school in this novel. It was a magnetic atmosphere – a mix of flowers, incense, violent discipline, the ideal of monastic celibacy, and a gang of boys attaining puberty in the middle of it all. The main story is invented, but the setting is reality-inspired, and some of the characters are a blend of the real and the fictional. I have always imagined Hinduism to be a very sensory religion, as opposed to the abstraction of the major Abrahamic religions. Saffron becomes alive and sensual in an atmosphere as this. You start wondering whether this austere, all-male environment is truly celibate as it seeks to be. 

But at its heart, it is the story of a set of characters, their hopes and desires and confusion, in the strange reality India has become in recent history.

There has been an outpouring of praise for this book. Your comment. 

I have been deeply moved by the messages I have received about this book, many people who grew up with intense friendships bordering on the physical, or deep into it, with people they least expected – and were bruised or healed by such relationships, sometimes both at the same time. Some of these people knew life in a boarding school, but for many others it was just a part of growing up, outside any particular kind of atmosphere. 

I have also heard from many people who live, or have lived in intense relationships with religion. Many of these messages have revealed very private stories, and these secrets are now buried inside me. On a key level these personal messages matter even more than the attention it has received in the media, which is of course a very happy event for any writer. I think this was one of the first books on an alternative sexuality to come out after the abolition of Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, which criminalized non-heteronormative sex. Somewhat expectedly, this novel became part of much of the discussion, festivals, and media attention that followed this historic event. I guess many people also found it a timely book, given the charismatic but ominous pall of saffron all over the story, though timeliness was the last thing I had in mind while digging out the seeds of this story from the pit of memory. But I am very grateful, and still a little taken aback by the attention it keeps getting, in the media and social media, in personal blogs, and now in academic gatherings.  

At the end of the day, there is nothing more satisfying for a writer than to have started a conversation, and this book seems to have triggered a few.

Any anecdote you wish to share.

There are so many! Researching the memory of the alumnae of the real-life school that inspired the setting, gathering unforgettable stories! When teenage boys get tired of eating dal-rice and wake up at midnight to catch a pigeon from the hostel ledge to roast and eat it. When the same boys think throwing the mess-dinner away is a way to show rebellion against what they feel is the tyranny of the monks, and come shockingly face-to-face with the poverty of the adjacent village. Both incidents found their ways into the novel. Post-publication, joining a vibrant discussion at the Rainbow Literature Festival with Ghazal Dhaliwal, the writer of the film Ek Ladki Ko Dekha To Aisa Laga, a story of romance between two women, to discuss a crucial question: â€œWho Tells a Story? An Artist or a Queer Artist?”

A good part of my writerly life following this book has been spent discussing this question, with people who feel the hopes, desires and fears expressed in a novel must always be the writer’s own, as well as with people who don’t believe in this art = life equation.  

What is next in the pipeline? 

 I have finished the draft of a new book and am now deep into revision. It is a contemporary college campus novel that refashions a story about mentorship from a classical myth. At its heart is the question: what is the nature of the teacher-student relationship, and what are its limits in terms of ethics, power and intimacy? I am also working on several academic articles, including two book chapters for the Cambridge Companion series. I also write articles for mainstream media, including my weekly  column on academics and campus life, and a new column for  on books from India. 

Anything else you would like to share.  

One writes a novel alone, but always has rich company in solitude. 

So many people have helped create the life of this novel, before, during, and after publication. And two institutions. Wellesley College, for making me a Fellow at the Suzy Newhouse Center for the Humanities, where a good part of the writing was done. 

But the greatest debt is to 51˛čšÝ, which is the best home a writer and a teacher can have! 

 There are so many good writers here, both among the students and the faculty. The Centre for Studies and Gender and Sexuality (CSGS) helped me with providing student interns who helped with research and editing. And the next novel will reveal the important place Ashoka has to come take up in my writerly imagination. 

To know more about Saikat Majumdar, click here. You can follow his work .  

Reviews of The Scent of God

“A fascinating tapestry that expertly captures the painful tensions among love, sex and guilt as two teenage boys grapple with their mutual attraction in a spiritual institution where same-sex relationships is criminalized. In this sensitively-rendered coming-of-age story, Majumdar also explores a talented young man’s conflicting attractions to secular, political, and spiritual ways of life in a tale that sheds much light on the tumultuous subjects of love, politics, and spirituality in India today.” – Michael Rezendes, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, for The Boston Globe subject of the Academy Award winning film, Spotlight 

“At this period in time when religion and politics have commixed to besmirch each other, Saikat Majumdar’s brilliant novel The Scent of God explores their meeting points. Alos, the moments in which the personal encounters the social. Saikat is one of those rare voices who can describe this world with insightful details and authenticity.” – Vivek Shanbhag, author of Ghachar Ghochar 

“Beautiful and fragile as a dream.” – The Hindu 

“The Scent of God is revelation draped in sensuousness.” – Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar, Indian   Express

“Saikat Majumdar’s writing is powerful. It reveals and conceals at the same time. Every word is carefully crafted and the subtle carelessness in every sentence opens an ocean of interpretations. The poetry-prose captures the tension of the two entangled world orders, spiritual and material. The sense that does prevail is of the blurring fine line between the pure and the profane, love and lust, and how deeply flawed our education system is; a system that can frown upon imparting sex education but can trick and trap innocent boys into doing the unimaginable.” – Hindustan Times

The book has been featured in .It has also been listed as one of Huffington Post’s 35 Books to look forward to in 2019, one of National Herald’s 10 Best Books of 2019, one of Times of India’s Best Romance Novels in 2019 among others. To read more review of the book, . 

__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

About #AshokaBookTower The newly launched #AshokaBookTower campaign showcases books written by our faculty and staff members. The campaign aims to highlight the rich variety of subjects and intensive scholarship these books represent. An in-depth conversation with the author also gives a glimpse into what went into the writing of the book. This is a recurring affair and highlights some of the newest launches as well as the old collection.  Do follow us on social media ( |  |  | ) to know more about the campaign!

Cover Image Credit - The Edict 

51˛čšÝ

51˛čšÝ in collaboration with the University of Chicago Centre and Teamwork Arts organised a Two-Day Symposium on Creative-Writing

Writing Across Borders - Globalizing the Creative Writing Program, a symposium on creative-writing, was organized by 51˛čšÝ in collaboration with the University of Chicago Center and Teamwork Arts on 24-25 March, 2018 at the UChicago Centre, New Delhi. The two-day conclave brought together celebrated writers, poets, translators, editors and scholars from India, the US and the UK. The event served as a platform for 20 participating speakers and moderators from across borders, and 150 attendees to discuss and witness global perspectives from various discourse communities in conversation with each other.

“New Delhi, as the subcontinental, hub of publishing is a unique place to initiate an interface between the academy and a larger public. The world of letters and creative writing pedagogy, a relatively new practice in India, appears all set to play a key role in the larger landscape of liberal arts education,” said Saikat Majumdar, Organiser and Professor with the Department of English and Creative Writing, 51˛čšÝ.

The symposium focussed on the interaction and intersection of the present and future of writing programmes, pedagogy, liberal arts education, publishing industry, and the role of the University in bridging the creative writing program with reading publics. At the student reading session at the symposium, 10 students from 51˛čšÝ shared their work â€” poetry, translations and excerpts from longer prose pieces â€” with the audience. The symposium ended with three parallel workshops on poetry, fiction and translation conducted by faculty members from the University of Chicago.

51˛čšÝ recently launched an Undergraduate Minor in Creative Writing and similarly, the University of Chicago also recently launched a Creative Writing Program. The symposium opened up possibilities for exciting opportunities and collaborations with 51˛čšÝ and other South Asian universities in the future.

51˛čšÝ