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There are conferences of all sorts, but one that truly outdid all my other "conferential" experiences was the recent Triennial Conference of the Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies (ACLALS) in Hyderabad on Nation and Imagination: the Changing Commonwealth. With some 300 participants of international repute, it was marked by the presence of writers and critics like Vikram Seth, Homi Bhabha, Helen Tiffin, Gayatri Spivak, Aijaz Ahmad, Shashi Deshpande, Girish Karnad, Austin Clarke, Jayanta Mahapatra, David Dabydeen, Ashis Nandy, Suniti Namjoshi and many others. For six exciting days, the delegates interacted with everyone who had anything to do with postcolonial literature and theory (once called Commonwealth literature) while making their own presentations, which were of the highest academic quality. No doubt, the five-star hotel on Banjara Hills where the event was hosted stirred a regrettable though legitimate protest among the students of the local universities (who incidentally had been allowed to attend with a hugely discounted fee), but there could have been no other venue with bigger halls, foyers for book stalls, uninterrupted supply of electricity, massive lunches and dinners (all prepared under hygienic conditions), not to speak of the residential infrastructure to accommodate all guests. Vikram Seth was the keynote speaker. Flitting across genres like Pushkin—travelogue, poetry, novel, biography—Seth made "conversation" with Meenakshi Mukherjee, preferring a dialogue instead of the conventional speech. He believes that there is "no point is trying to pre-empt your muse" and so uses a form of writing which suits the moment. His next book, Two Lives, for which he has received an advance of `A3 1.3 million, is a literary memoir about his great uncle, Shanti, and his German Jewish wife, Henny, both of whom looked after Vikram when he studied in Oxford. This double biography tells the story of Shanti, the dentist, who had his right arm blown off in the World War II and was forced to practice with his left. Henny had managed to escape the Holocaust just as the war broke out. The plenary session ranged from discussions on the appropriation of ecological resources, animals and landscape in the construction of the "imagined community" called nation to the critical examination of the very being and survival of the nation at a time that appears to be remote from when nations were first formed. Most of the "hard facts" that earlier nationalists asserted had led to decolonisation were debunked or even reaffirmed in the iteration of the Hindutva model by some speakers. It was interesting to see foundational historians like Aijaz Ahmad together with literary critics who have changed the courses of disciplines with the sheer force of their philosophies of ephemerality, like Bhabha and Spivak. Even more surprising was the way in which the opposite parties were finding ways of communicating: Ahmad emphasised in a post-modern vein the presence of "nationalisms" or "processes of formation", whereas Bhabha, in his talk, Scrambled Egg and a Dish of Rice: National Internationalism and Literary Imagination, sought links between Lala Lajpat Rai and W. E. B. DuBois in a novel attempt to understand history, admitting humorously that he was venturing into uncharted territory. Warm, cheerful and full of wit, Bhabha broke every stereotype of the way he might have been grimly pictured by the readers of his difficult theorising. Gayatri Spivak's talk about "rememoration" recalled her childhood and then a period of adulthood in Calcutta during India's national struggle. It was peppered with Bangla songs that she sang in a modulated high timbre: Sa re ga ma pa dha ni, bom phheleche japani. Bomber bhetor keutey shap. British bole baap re baap. (Do re me fa so la ti, dropped a bomb, the Japanese. In the bomb, a cobra snake. The British screamed: O Lord, Help Help!) It is not easy to say which of these two critics were at the centre of attention, but she made a volte face when I probed the need for essentialism in struggles throughout the third world, saying her enchantment with subaltern studies was short-lived and that she had retracted from her position. Extravagant banquets at the Taj Residency and the Kakatiya Sheraton, sponsored by Penguin and Orient Longman, and book launches, awards and tours were all packed dexterously into six days. Shashi Deshpande's new novel, Moving On, vied for attention with Karnad's readings from Tipu Sultan amid Shahi Hyderabadi biryani and kebabs. Yet the extravaganza begged the question what academics, more so the variety that empower the subaltern, had to do with all this? Surely, the teacher, whom we all revere as the "noble cow", deserves much less (irony intended). While bureaucrats and administrators, doctors and engineers may be spared the conscience-attack, not so with teachers in humanities, who are still expected to follow in the footsteps of the umbrella-carrying "master-ji" and work in institutions where crumbling classrooms sometimes do not even boast of a blackboard. Matters came to a head when at the end of the last session, Kancha Ilaiah demanded why no Dalit speaker had been invited. Were Dalits not professional?" Nevertheless, there were many sessions on Dalit writing and subaltern history, gender and nation, diaspora and language, and minorities. |
