The debate over the essential attributes of an Indian might continue to be centre stage but Amit Chaudhuri would rather approach it at a tangent, trying to locate it through political analysis, lived experiences and through literary and intellectual imaginations. In fact, this multiplicity of approach lies at the heart of his literary activism series, which first began as a symposia and now finds space in a literary imprint that hopes to take forward non-mainstream literary and critical pursuits. In this interview, Chaudhuri speaks of his expectations from the series, of how globalisation has come to limit our understanding of diversity and dissent and why he thinks Neeraj Chopra's mother Saroj Devi is an organic intellectual. Edited excerpts: You make a crucial case for literary activism being freed from the demands of 'market value'. What are your hopes for this literary activism series that you are helming? To allow for and extend the sort of discussion that has been happening since the literary activism symposia began in December 2014, some of which is also being recorded and curated on the website, literaryactivism.com. What sort of discussion do I mean? I mean a discussion on creative practice and critical thinking that’s free of the contexts created by book launches, literary festivals, plugs: in other words, mainstream publishing. And also to free them from the constraints of academia, where only certain things can be talked about, and talked about in a certain way: the so-called canon may have been thrown out, but professionalised orthodoxies have replaced them. If a poem can’t be discussed under the rubric, say, of Empire or identity, it will either be made to somehow fit into that rubric, or not discussed at all. In other words, that poem may be consigned to a sort of non-existence, and, along with it, poetry. We will only get to read the things that, currently, fit in. Literary activism acknowledges the importance of poetry and literature for their own, ongoing, ill-fitting definition. The imprint hopes to do this not only through the kind of books it publishes, but through its production values and aesthetics of design. In On Being Indian, you speak of how post 9/11, globalisation has essentially come to mean a market-driven acceptance of the West as a repository of democratic values. In what ways has it limited our understanding of diversity and dissent? 9/11 gave Western elites the excuse to conflate their own agendas with something they called ‘Western democratic values’ – a coded term for a deeply exclusionary mish-mash of globalisation, free market policy, and conservative thinking. Among the realities this term excluded were the struggles and histories across the world that have contributed so profoundly to our inheritances to do with democracy and liberty. According to a certain post-9/11 narrative, democracy suddenly became the ‘way of life’ of a certain group of people, and not the rest of the world’s. This is a terrible misreading to ascribe to democracy. The ascendancy of English in the time of globalisation has also played a role in this: not just the consequent marginalisation of the authenticity represented by other languages, but the way we have forgotten how these languages (and their literatures) are expressions not necessarily of identity, but of secular modernity: they are the product of important shifts in history that have made us what we are. It’s unfortunate that, whenever we hear the word ‘liberal’ these days, we think of an Anglophone group, and we also, at once, think of newspapers and history books: we don’t think of Tamil, Marathi, or Bengali; nor do we think of poetry. In the last decade, the imagination of the traditional intellectual has been weaponised to create the bogey of the elite anti-national. What would you say has been the failure on part of the traditional intellectual in countering this? The deep sense of hierarchy within this class contributes to its failure. More and more, over the last three decades (the decades of economic deregulation), it has embraced, and depended on, hierarchy and consensus. The Anglophone Indian liberal intellectual also has – in comparison to their European counterpart, or their counterpart in the Indian languages (like DR Nagaraj and Ranajit Guha) – a minuscule place for the artistic, literary, or imaginative in their lives. This is worth pointing out, because the liberal in India is not even aware of this fact and its own uniqueness in this regard. It is difficult to think of an intellectual class elsewhere which is so indistinguishable from a governing class, with so little place for, and comprehension of, idiosyncratic enthusiasms and ostensibly useless passions (as, say, literary activism is). This narrowed-down instrumental understanding of the public and private spheres has made it less free and courageous than it could have been. You locate the Gramscian 'organic intellectual' in the ordinary man who can offer a pushback from within the system. In the time since you wrote this, has your opinion changed about those you recognise as organic intellectuals? Do any others come to mind who have since answered to the description? There was a certain kind of individual speaking out in India from the end of 2019 to early 2020, like the person at Zomato who tweeted on its behalf when dealing with a customer who didn’t want his food delivered by a Muslim: ‘Food doesn’t have a religion. It is a religion.’ It took a great deal of courage and self-possession to put out that tweet. And it was quite different in character from the frothing-at-the-mouth tweets that come from the Right, and the self-righteous pieties of the left liberal. Other instances of such rebuttals began to emerge: like Saket Gokhale’s RTI enquiry into who the members of the tukde tukde gang were. If such a gang existed, his RTI reasoned, it should have identifiable members. When the reply to the RTI failed to provide the names of the gang, Gokhale concluded that the gang had to be a ‘figment of the imagination’. Gokhale was still not a politician then. Nor were others, like Kannan Gopinathan of the IAS, who made comparable interventions. These voices and arguments weren’t emerging from the identifiable enclaves of professionalised dissent in academia either. Gramsci’s idea of the ‘organic intellectual’ – a blue- or white-collar worker who works from within the system, and takes the lead not just against the system, as the professionalised Left often does, but within it – was useful to me for understanding this particular kind of figure: for example, the person, whoever it was, who put out the Zomato tweet. Recently, I was moved by the athlete Neeraj Chopra’s mother Saroj Devi’s balanced and humane phrasing in her response to a journalist’s statement about her son having defeated a Pakistani athlete: ‘In sport, someone or the other will always win. I’m glad the Pakistani athlete did well too.’ Could you speak of how our religious traditions encompass ideas of liberalism that are now lost in increasingly narrow interpretations? The great religious critiques are always using reason and logic to reject the longstanding problem of bogus religiosity: the Brahmin’s ‘sacred’ thread, say, or the ostentatious building of temples in a way that equates devotion and power, or ritual pieties undertaken as a show of religious devotion. Even Krishna, in the Gita, cautions Arjun against the idea that studying the Vedas, or practising austerities (like fasting, say), or performing rituals will add up to a spiritual life. ‘Neither Vedas, nor sacrifices, nor studies, nor benefactions, nor rituals, nor fearful austerities can give the vision of my Form Supreme’. That’s a very early bit of reasoning; a sobering wake-up call to those who claim to be religious; a caveat against the unreason of much religious practice. The most powerful and witty critiques of religion come from within religion, not outside it. And they create a basis for a rationality and humanity in our culture much more generous than the idea of scientific objectivity, and deeper and more intimate than the notion of ‘humanism’. What would you say is the role of humour in dissent? Humour, logic, and reason are wedded to each other in dissent’s quest to question the pieties of a dead language: like the placard that said Bure din wapas karo in an anti-CCA rally in Calcutta, instantly estranging us from the piety of achhe din. So much of academic dissent is itself couched in a dead language – the language that has been dominating the seminar room – that it often refuses to open anything up. Universities and classrooms have traditionally been spaces where diversity, debate and dissent have flourished. Yet, in recent days, from religion creeping into classrooms in unimaginably corrosive ways in which a teacher encourages her students to hit a classmate from a minority community as punishment, to a university distancing itself from a paper written by one of its faculty, these spaces of sanctuary are constantly shrinking. As an educator yourself, what are your thoughts on this? About the teacher singling out a pupil for corporeal punishment (to be meted out by classmates) on the basis of his religion – I’m sorry to say that this is what everyday experience becomes when you live in fascist state. Insanity has descended on us all; none of us are exempt; the conditions, I’m afraid, have been created by capitalism, which is a world-view that sanctifies unbridled desire. Once desire is legitimised in this way, you’ll want your every wish to be fulfilled, including the wish to punish those you don’t like, and those who oppose you. Co-existing with unpredictability, disagreement, and difference is, for better or for worse, at the core of human existence, and begins the moment you’re born, inside your family. India is passing through a utopian phase in which it wants to deny this. If we are to last – if our family is to last – then this can’t last.
