Anticipating India
This will be where I blog. And I will blog a lot, every day if possible, with whatever words I can generate: expect no cohesion—it’ll range from literary to ramble as I ramble.
Of course, the occasion of this is that I’m about to go to India for eleven months. I feel like I’ll have more to say every day than I do in America, and I think that you might be more interested in it because I’m elsewhere. But to be honest, the raw geographical shift is only the occasion for the blog. When I went to India before, my blog was called Jed in India. But for this trip, I feel that there’s just more to say about everything than “in India” can encompass. It’s more Jed in the World. Or Jed in His Own Head. Which isn’t as inherently interesting or attractive as India is.
I want to start out this blog and my trip with some sort of statement of intentions. But the truth is, that I have no idea what this year will hold; it’s a giant vast unknown, and I hope that I’m not about to naively write something that I will look back on and laugh for how erroneous it is. All I want to do is offer some of my thoughts and expectations as I ready myself for this.
I am going to India in pursuit of writing. That’s what my fellowship project is based on, and that’s the focus of my personal goals outside of the project. The project is founded on the suspicion (backed up by hearsay, reading, and the internet) that there is in Kolkata a vibrant literary culture—much of it in English—that can and should be in dialogue with my mostly American literary culture. There hasn’t been enough meaningful exchange between Indian and American writers and publishers, despite the recent trend of bestselling Indian and Indian-American writing. I hope to meet and work with amazing Indian and Bengali writers, to understand their cultural context and background, and just see what will come out of collaboration. (I have some fantasies, of course, about what would come out of that collaboration, especially in terms of publishing and printing, but I don’t want to talk about them yet).
I really have no idea what shape this discovery of literature will take. But my anticipatory thinking about it has been informed by a couple of textual bodies that I’d like to mention here.
The first one is totally culturally irrelevant, but it gives an interesting theoretical framework. It’s from Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s essay on Kafka (I continue to be a stereotype of myself; for those of you who don’t know, I used Deleuze and Guattari’s Capitalism and Schizophrenia in my thesis, which you can read here). Deleuze and Guattari develop a theory of “Minor Literature” which is written by a minority in the language of the oppressor or colonizer—in a major language. Kafka, as a Czech Jew, could have written in Czech or Yiddish, but he chose to write in German. By using the language of the bureaucratic state, meaning became unhinged from words, which serves to illustrate how bizarre, meaningless, and, well, Kafkaesque the world of the oppressor is. Minor literature is always immediately political, even if (and usually this is the case) it doesn’t directly address political issues—because it takes on the collective values of the group that produced it. “[…] literature finds itself positively charged with the role and function of collective, and even revolutionary, enunciation. It is literature that produces an active solidarity in spite of skepticism” (17). I found exactly this in my research on American Prison Literature; any given independent work of prison literature isn’t usually particluarly amazing, but taken as a whole, the body of American Prison Literature forms a powerful critique of the American system of social domination. It’s partly a matter of getting away from the massive egos of the writers of dominant literature, to whom we attribute immense cultureal power, and understanding instead that literature is a product of an entire people.
From afar, it seems that the work of Professor Lal and the Writer’s Workshop is the work of minor literature. Indian and Bengali writers writing in English consciously choose to write in the language of India’s colonial past—an entirely different project than creating a native literature in Bengali or Hindi (another important and valuable project). Of course, I don’t yet know what the project of these writers is—I am excited to find out. But, for example, Professor Lal has dedicated his life to translating the entire Mahabarata, the greatest epic ever written, from Sanskrit to English. By doing so, he affirms the relevance and importance of the Mahabarata to the contemporary world of globalization. If we are to live in a truly international world, then we must regard the Mahabarata (and the Ramayana and on through the canon of Indian literature) along side Homer and Shakespeare. Prof. Lal’s translation project is a vehement affirmation of Indian culture, not as an interesting novelty to the westernized culture of globalization, but as an equal member of the global dialogue. Because of the work of scholars of minor literature, England, Europe, and America can no longer pretend to have authority over the canon. And as India grows in economic power, its cultural capital ought to increase as well. For the betterment of the entire world—surely we would all be better off if all Americans read the Bhagavat-Gita.
To psych myself up for going to Kolkata, I’ve been reading A Blue Hand: The Beats in India by Deborah Baker, an account of Ginsberg and his entourage in India. It seems cosmically correct that such a well done book should come out just before I leave, and that Ginsberg—who has always been a huge influence on me and my writing—should have spent seven months in Kolkata himself. However, the book also provides good warning about what not to do and how not to behave; my sense from the book is that Allen was only open to the India that he thought would be there, the psychedelic India of conciousness-expansion, and wasn’t open enough to changing himself to the India that he found.
I’ll be flying out of Colorado on September 17th and arriving in Kolkata on September 19th. I’m staying with a family who has an extra room for rent for the first couple weeks. In early October, there’s the Durga Puja, the biggest festival of the year in Kolkata, so that’ll be an interesting introduction to my life there. And so that’s what’s going on.
I’m excited to go discover a new literature in Kolkata. I’m also excited to have space to do a new type of writing myself—I have some goals and desires for my own writing, which is always deeply effected by the environment in which I live. Moreover, I am excited to learn Bengali; I’m not fluent in any language besides my own, but it is time to make a real effort to learn one. And, of course, there’s music: I plan to dedicate myself to the study of Tabla, to improve my rhythm and theoretical understanding of music. More than anything, I can’t wait to be there.