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I have been thinking about bans, or rather, the kind of mind that calls for bans. Apparently the goons camped outside the literary festival demanded ‘rivers of blood’ should Rushdie show up on Skype yesterday afternoon. They were careful not to state who would cause the flowing of the rivers of blood, thus avoiding prosecution under the section of the IPC prohibiting incitement to riot. Because of the law, these people present the putative consequences of our thought crime as if they are a force of nature, as though Rushdie’s appearance will melt some glacier somewhere and cause rivers of blood to thunder down the plains. Like a latter day Apocalypse.
And why should this cataclysm happen? Because of something that might happen inside our heads if we attempt to decode the symbols encoding Rushdie’s work of fiction, The Satanic Verses. Not (please note) something that might happen in the goons’ heads, because reading the Satanic Verses is clearly an intellectual feat of which they are not capable. I am reminded of November 2008 when ‘rivers of blood’ attempted to flow in Calcutta over Taslima Nasrin. In actual fact it was rivers of burning cars. Indeed in spite of city-wide disruption, brickbatting and terror tactics, the only injuries were a few bruises. That suggests discipline to me (or perhaps just our Bangali pusillanimity, of the shore jaan marbo kintu variety). Discipline suggests an orchestrated and carefully thought out show of strength, not mob violence.
Further question: why do this at all? Who is the real target of the Rushdie ban and the disgraceful show at Jaipur? The answer seems to be: the Muslim electorate. It can be no accident that elections are on in UP and other places while the Rushdie tamasha plays out. Notice how neatly the whole thing works. The government and other authorities are put under pressure by the threat of terror tactics. Moderate Muslims see that the government is fuddled and weak about upholding democratic values: it caves abjectly at the slightest touch. If it can’t uphold these values for privileged people like internationally acclaimed authors, how useless would it be if an ordinary man or woman, especially one upon whom the fundamentalists have leverage through community and family, were to stand up and speak out against terror and its users? On the other hand, extremist Muslims are reminded about the ‘blasphemy’ (which people had nearly forgotten) and are shown that the government is soft on thought criminals: instead of allowing the cleansing rivers to wash away the lot of them, the government shoos everyone away and packs up the fairground. So the government is toast if it bans and toast if it doesn’t, and the more it spins and prevaricates the more it is discredited.
In all this, we intellectuals, writers, readers, organisers of literary festivals, we are collateral damage. This is why most of us are bewildered by the passions aroused by these issues. We have got used, through desensitisation, to handling weapons-grade ideas in the classroom and the literary salon without even the gloves of conventional wisdom. We forget how powerful these ideas are in the real world. When we sit at our machines and write, whether we write fiction or commentary, criticism or blog posts, facebook status updates or emails, we are part of a world from which most of the humans on earth are excluded, because of fear, poverty and envy. We didn’t exclude them. We would love it if everyone were like us. But if everyone were like us, governments would fall, corporations would go out of business, juntas would retire to Bali, diamond-mines would lie unbored, brothels would empty and seminaries fill up with dust. So I don’t need to tell you in whose interest it is to ban books.
But there is hope. When Idris Ali wanted the pirs of Furfura Sharif to back him up on national television when he targeted Taslima and incited riots on the street, they refused. As Ramchandra Guha said about Narendra Modi banning Joseph Lelyveld’s book on Gandhi: ‘The answer to a book is another book, not a ban.’
Literary festivals suck. Specifically, the Jaipur Literary Festival sucks. Recent incidents have confirmed me in my resolution never to attend it. Jeet Thayil, Amitava Kumar, Ruchir Joshi and Hari Kunzru, all of whom I respect and admire, have been asked to leave it for reading excerpts from The Satanic Verses. The organisers felt they had to be punished for reading from a book banned within the borders of India. Previously, Salman Rushdie, whom I also respect and admire, was asked not to come because of an alleged ‘death threat’ made against him by persons unknown. The source of this information appears to be a section of the police. Needless to say, the authorities of the Festival caved abjectly under pressure, no doubt because their festival represents big money, big names and plenty of bling, and we can’t let that be endangered, can we? Just think how unsafe it would be for Bollywood celebrities to mingle with the crowd if banned writers trailing clouds of death threats were allowed to wander about.
The Jaipur Litfest has always taken the three ring circus as its business model. It calls itself ‘The Greatest Literary Show on Earth’. Its website says
The DSC Jaipur Literature Festival is now widely acknowledged as the Kumbh Mela of Indian and international writing, drawing writers and readers from across India and the wider world: from the Americas, Europe, Africa and across the breadth of South Asia, the brightest, most brilliant, funny, moving and remarkable all come to Jaipur in January.
It likes lots of quantity, so everyone and her brother are invited, provided they have some kind of kitsch cachet such as having written for the Chicken Soup series. It also likes quality of the Shobhaaa De sort, complete with excess vowelage and unnecessary accents. They don’t have to be photogenic, but it helps. It also helps if they are on first name terms with at least one A list film star/have had a life-changing experience/have done holistic yoga/ designed their home according to vastu, because it gives the poor things something to talk about. God forbid that they should talk about the books. The last thing this circus is about, is the books. So if there is a pair of authors who are known to cut each other dead in public, there will be thrilling speculation over whether they will share dais space, and whether someone will misbehave if they do.
Public relations officers talk guff about the public getting to put faces to beloved names, but really it’s a kind of literary peep show. Authors don’t like interviews and publicity for a reason: the kind of author who writes to get famous is like the doctor who cures people to get papers published in the medical journals and thereby get invited to conferences in the Bahamas. The Jaipur Litfest is our conference in the Bahamas.
Don’t make the mistake of thinking that authors are benefited by literary festivals. Festivals may up the sales of their books, but authors are essentially the proletariat of the publishing industry. They labour, and they are given a fraction of the returns for their work. Every penny that a publisher spends on making books is made by the sweat of authors, and to a lesser extent freelance editors, designers, marketers and printers (the latter two get paid more, the former two the same or less. A festival is just another means of earning their bread (by upping sales) by participating in a circus sideshow act.
Authors are not critics; it’s not their job to explain what their books may or may not mean. The fools often get this wrong and sit there prosing on about why they chose to set their book in Prague and make the central character a postal clerk with allergies and a frustrated wife. That’s not it at all: they are on display because the public wants to know what sticky furtive processes go on in the creative head. Since no ultrasound machine can look into the womb of creativity, we’ve invented the festival to get shy authors to take their clothes off in public. Presumably if they do it in a group, it’s less traumatic.
Stripping in public is a politically transformatory act only if the public doesn’t actually want to see what’s underneath. If they do, it’s just striptease dressed up as intellectual fuckery.
The next level of hopeless marketushiness is going to be a select club of authors who have been banned from literary festivals. Some social entrepreneur smelling of baby soap and garlanded with android phones is going to invent another genre of litfest: the litfest for authors who curse litfests. All sessions will be conducted in absolute darkness, with only a laser pointer for picking out members of the audience permitted to ask a question. The authors will wear masks designed to look like their main character at all times. Authors who do not show an uptick in sales by the end of the week will be allowed to go home; the rest will be thrown in a nearby river. If their sales actually drop after the public inspect the unspeakable workshop of dreams in which they perform their acts of intellectual onanism, they will be awarded a prize: their most popular book will be banned and will thereby become the bestseller of the century, while they will acquire an enduring reputation as the literary crusader of conscience of our times. Money, book contracts and members of the opposite sex will flock to them, and anything they publish, however puerile, embarrassingly self-revelatory or just plain bad, will sell in the millions.
Signups, anyone?
Attention all Utopia and Rhet Comp students. Today and tomorrow I will be taking class in the H.L. Roy Auditorium. Well, not me in person, of course. You are all requested to attend the Sport and the Nation seminar and listen to the fascinating papers by academics from around the world. The reason being, an international conference of this kind happens only once in a while, and certainly on this subject, never again. This is a unique opportunity. Therefore go, and find out what academics really get paid for. Because you are here to get educated, and that doesn’t just mean what happens in the classrooms. That’s why we have a campus, with all kinds of venues in it. You could get educated anywhere: on the bridge, at Milanda, in front of Worldview (I often see many of you getting educated there). And it’s our job as teachers to give you every freedom to do so, while at the same time kicking your collective asses to actually get some work done (remember ickle firsties, short notes due on Monday). So you go do that while I chew my laptop over my goddamn paper. I won’t be able to attend the first half while I wrestle it to the ground (sorry, Supriyadi  ) but I should join you after the break. And remember, when the French say ‘Attendez!’ they mean ‘pay attention’.
Sport and the Nation
International Conference, 19-20 January 2012
Department of English and School of Media, Communication and Culture, Jadavpur University, Kolkata 700032, India
Concept Note
The history of modern sport is intimately linked to the rise of the modern nation-state and its cultures of self-representation. Indeed, though games have existed as long as human beings have inhabited the earth, organized sport in the contemporary sense is thought to be a distinctive product of modernity. Enshrined in the curriculum of the Victorian public school and viewed as a means of training imperial administrators, sport also entered the public sphere as a spectacle for mass audiences, leading to a regulation of its practices and the foundation of sports bodies. The founder of the modern Olympic Games, Baron Pierre de Coubertin, was convinced that ‘organised sport can create both moral and social strength’, and international sporting spectacles became a means for displaying the health and self-discipline of individual nation-states. This ideology, imperial and European in its origin, was transmitted also to the colonised subjects of European imperialism. The postcolonial ideology of the nation invests heavily in sport as a means of national self-projection, while at the very same time, globalization and multinational capital have created a huge sports industry where highly-paid athletes compete in profit-making spectacles for a global audience. As a vital ingredient of contemporary culture, sport has produced a rich literature of its own, as well as representations in other media such as film. But sport may also be, as in India, a problematic constituent in the task of national self-construction: acknowledged but neglected, a focus of hope but also of disappointment. In 2012, as the world’s athletes prepare for yet another Olympic Games, we need to examine both gains and losses in national sporting histories.
A two-day, Interdisciplinary International Conference on ‘Sport and the Nation’, will be held at Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India, on 19-20 January 2011. Conference themes include sporting identities and cultures, the literature of sport, sporting nationalisms, gender, race and multiculturalism in sport, competition, spectacle, and globalized sport, and other related issues. Earlier conferences on linked themes have been held at the University of Leeds and the University of Paris – Sorbonne, and we hope to build up an international collaborative research network in this field.
Conference Convenors
Supriya Chaudhuri supriya.chaudhuri@gmail.com
Abhijit Gupta offog1@gmail.com
Please see below for the Conference Programme
SPORT AND THE NATION
International Conference, 19-20 January 2012: Centre of Advanced Study, Department of English and School of Media, Communication and Culture, Jadavpur University
H.L. Roy Memorial Auditorium, Institute of Chemical Engineers (entry by Gate No. 3)
DAY ONE: INAUGURATION 10.00 -10.15
Keynote 10.15 – 11.15
Partha Chatterjee (Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta) 10.15 -11.15: ‘Football and the Politics of Identity in Colonial Calcutta’
Coffee: 11.15 – 11.30
First Session: 11.30 – 12.45 pm
Alexis Tadié (Paris-Sorbonne) 11.30 – 12.00: ‘Running for Freedom : the Politics of Long-distance Running in Modern Fiction’
Novy Kapadia (Delhi) 12.00 – 12.30: ‘India at the Olympics: What Ails Indian Sports’
Discussion: 12.30 – 12.45 pm
LUNCH 12.45 – 1.45 pm
Second Session: 1.45 – 3.00 pm
Elisabeth Bass (George Washington University) 1.45 – 2.15 pm: ‘Questions for the “Twelfth Man”: Interrogating Gender and Class in Literary Cricket’
Kausik Bandyopadhyay (West Bengal State University) 2.15 – 2.45 pm: ‘Cricket as National Identity: ICC World Cup 2011 and Bangladesh as a Host Nation’
Discussion: 2.45 – 3.00 pm
TEA 3.00 – 3.15 pm
Third Session: 3.15 – 5.00 pm
Student Papers 3.15 – 3.45 pm
Amitava Chatterjee (Ramsaday College, Howrah) 3.45 – 4.15 pm: ‘Sporting Culture in Colonial Bengal’
Amlan Das Gupta (JU) 4.15 – 4.45 pm: ‘Pilgrims and Players: The Secret History of Indian Montaineering’
Discussion: 4.45 – 5.00 pm
DAY TWO
First Session: 10.00 – 11.15 am
Abhijit Gupta (Jadavpur) 10.00 – 10.30 am: ‘A League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: The Culture of Body-building in Colonial Bengal’
Ananya Jahanara Kabir (Leeds) 10.30 – 11.00 am: ‘“Tout le monde danse la zumba”: Kinetic (Trans)Nationalism and the Zumba Fitness Craze’
Discussion: 11.00 – 11.15 am
Coffee: 11.15 – 11.30 am
Second Session: 11.30 am – 12.45 pm
Julie Vatain (Paris-Sorbonne) 11.30 am – 12.00 pm: ‘Of Butlers and Bowlers: Sports in the Novels of P.G. Wodehouse’
Debanjan Chakrabarti (British Council) 12.00 – 12.30 pm: ‘Sportsmanship and Nationalism’
Discussion: 12.30 – 12.45 pm
LUNCH 12.45 – 1.45 pm
Third Session: 1.45 – 3.30 pm
Student Papers: 1.45 – 2. 15 pm
Payoshni Mitra (Independent Researcher): 2.15 – 2.45 pm: ‘Xclusion: Disputed Bodies in Sport’
Samantak Das (Jadavpur) 2.45 – 3.15 pm: ‘The Champion’s Two Bodies: Sport and the Problem of Identity’
Discussion: 3.15 – 3.30 pm
Tea: 3.30 – 3.45 pm
Fourth Session: 3.45 – 5.00 pm
Rimi B. Chatterjee (Jadavpur) 3.45 – 4.15 pm: ‘Gaming Beyond the Nation’
Supriya Chaudhuri (Jadavpur) 4.15 – 4.45 pm: ‘Deep Play: Cultures of Risk’
Discussion 4.45 – 5.00 pm
Valedictory: 5.00 – 5.30 pm
 No Strings Attached Last Chance Concert Sujoy, Diptanshu and friends will be playing for us one last time before Sujoy comes back again (for that, watch this space). Last chance to hear them this time around.
On Friday 6 January 6.30pm to 7.30pm in the AV Room, JUDE.
Rhetoric and Composition
Core Course UG1 Semester 2
This core course is designed to give first year students a sense of how to go about executing academic writing assignments, keeping in mind the purpose and methods of academic writing. The composition aspect will have two components. In the first part, we will discuss the question of how to frame an argument, then go about supporting the argument with evidence. We will deal with how to handle and present material gleaned from other authors and sources with appropriate documentation done to scholarly standards. The class will get practice in using ideas with transparency, in questioning other’s views constructively and in quoting accurately. In the second component, we will address the various types of academic writing. We will start with simple tasks like writing short notes, reference to the context, and simple questions. We will then move on to longer essays, term papers and seminar papers. Finally we will take a quick look at the essentials of proofing and editing manuscripts.
The rhetoric module will cover the principles of prosody, scansion and rhetoric. The class will practice scanning verse lines and spotting the common English meters. They will also learn to identify examples of the common rhetorical figures.
The course will address the following areas:
Week 1: 2/1-6 /1: Introduction and preliminary writing exercises
Week 2: 9/1-13/1: Academic writing: first principles
Week 3: 16/1-20/1: ‘Criticism’ in an academic context: what it is and why it is done.
Week 4: 24/1-27/1: Creating and supporting an academic argument
Week 5: 30/1-3/2: Simple short notes
Week 6: 6/2-10/2: Reference to the context
Week 7: 13/2-17/2: Esssays and papers
Week 8: 20/2-24/2: Avoiding plagiarism
Week 9: 27/2-3/3: Revision and test
Week 10: 6/3-10/3: Documentation: systems and conventions
Week 11: 13/3-17/3: Documentation practice
Week 12: 20/3-24/3: Basics of proofing and editing
Week 13: 27/3-31/3: Prosody and scansion
Week 14: 3/4-7/4: Prosody and scansion practice
Week 15: 10/4-14/4: Rhetoric
Week 16 17/4-21/4: Rhetoric practice
Recommended Reading
R.N. Bose and T.S. Sterling, Rhetoric and Prosody
P. Fussell, Poetic Metre and Poetic Form
Kate L. Turabian, A Manual for Writers of Theses, Term Papers and Essays
The Chicago Manual of Style, (14th edition)
RBC
This story appeared in the December issue of Kindle magazine. Avijit Chatterjee did the layout, a last minute rush job because the page dimensions to publish kept changing like chewing gum. After a big squeeze there was a big swell (okay that didn’t come out right). But we managed to get it done finally. The theme was post apocalyptic worlds. The story loosely shares the same world and timeline as Antisense, happening much before the events that will appear in the novel.
 Survivarium page 1: click to enlarge  Survivarium page 2: click to enlarge  Survivarium page 3: click to enlarge  Survivarium page 4: click to enlarge
ONLY FOR B.A. AND M.A. STUDENTS OF THE DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH, JADAVPUR UNIVERSITY
Posted by request.
Call for Papers
Prof. Debabrata Mukherjee Memorial Annual Students’ Seminar, 2012
Centre of Advanced Study, Department of English
Jadavpur University
Kith, Kin, Care: The Family Textualized
27 January, 2012
This seminar looks at the ways in which the family has been represented – as an essence, as a construct, as an imagined time-space, as a process of negotiation and evolution. The enduring cultural investment in the family is evidenced by a wide spectrum of texts across time and culture – from the theogonies and puranas to the lost-and-found Bollywood flicks and saas-bahu serials. One might also think of the biblical account of the chosen people, codes of family pride and duty in the primary epics and mahakavyas, the tension between the oikos and the polis in tragedies, the striking re-formulations of family and home in the fairy tales, the mystery of bloodline in the foundling narratives, the theme of inter-generational continuity and change in the romans-fleuves, the politicization of domesticity in women’s writings, and the longing for a lost family-space in the texts of diaspora and displacement. The idea of family is sustained and supplemented by the various threats to it. Such contingencies form of the staple of narratives down the ages – conflict of values and interests, transgression and defiance, skeletons in the cupboard, “some natural sorrow, loss or pain”, wars and calamities. It is the objective of the seminar to ask how texts represent and rehearse the family in terms of what it is, what it may not be, and what stands in its way.
The present intellectual climate, which is wary of all essences and transcendental signifiers, necessitates a fresh inquiry into the meaning of the family. Does the family just stand for care and comfort, or is it a space where repressive strategies operate invisibly? Can we think safely of the family as a universal prototype? Is the idea of the family by default exploitative and totalitarian (in the West it has been accused of promoting compulsory heterosexuality)? Or else, is the family better left out of the postmodernist gaze as the last refuge from scepticism and irony? How is the idea of the family governed by ethnicity, religion, class, gender, sexuality, time, and space? How has globalization/glocalization affected the nature of the family? How do long-term social changes make themselves felt within the family? How does the family strike a balance between the public and the private? What are the alternatives to the family? With the advancement of reproductive technology, cybernetics, and robotics, where lies its future? More importantly for our seminar, how are such questions recorded and explored by cultural artefacts?
We invite 15-minute long original presentations on the topic, not necessarily limited to the above outline. The papers should be analytical (rather than descriptive), and focused on a text (a literary work, a piece of visual art, a film, a TV serial, a graphic novel, a videogame, etc.) or a group of them.
An abstract of the proposed paper (200 words long) should be sent latest by 31 December, 2011. A maximum of 10 papers will be selected for presentation. Selected presenters will be notified by 5 January, 2012. The first three papers in the order of merit will be rewarded. All submissions and queries should be addressed to sridebabratamukherjee@gmail.com.
Ramit Samaddar and Abhishek Sarkar
(Co-ordinators)
DEADLINE FOR PITCHES IS 15 DECEMBER 2011
POSTED FOR MANTA RAY COMICS
‘The Small Picture’ is a single page comic on contemporary issues created by Manta Ray for the Mint newspaper. Each week it features a writer/artist’s viewpoint on a topical subject, in a comics narrative. You can take a look at previously published pieces here.
We are inviting guest pitches for a special edition of ‘The Small Picture’. Your pitch can be a concept note(s) in 50-100 words or rough thumbnails. If you are a writer you can send in the concept note and if selected, we will team you up with an illustrator to complete the piece. The pitches will be evaluated on topicality and more importantly on whether it presents an original and interesting point of view. The selected submission will be remunerated upon publication.
The size of the comic is 285mm (W) x 383mm (H). Send in your concept(s) by Thursday, 15 December 2011 to mantaraycomics@gmail.com.
Cut off time is 10 pm IST.
Please feel free to pass on this invitation to writers, illustrators, thinkers and random interesting people.
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