Meet the reader inspired to seek their own eclectic, confused and misdirected adventures with books

Cramming half-heartedly for the Scholarship,
I looked up from the red-jacketed Williamson’s
History of the British Empire, towards
the barrack’s plumed, imperial hillsides
where canon-bursts of bamboo sprayed the ridge,
riding to Khartoum, Rorke’s Drift,
through dervishes of dust,
behind the chevroned jalousies
I butchered fellaheen, thuggees, Mamelukes, wogs

— Derek Walcott, ‘Another Life’, quoted in Abdulrazak Gurnah, ‘Learning to Read’

The imagination of the modern high school or college classroom across the historical stretch of the British Empire is incomplete without a certain student right at the back of the lecture hall. They are perpetually distracted, immersed in their own unruly imagination; they shirk homework and fail at examinations. But they are scandalous in a special way. Their failure is both a rebellion and a creation, a glazed indifference to an instrumental system of education whose colonial character – often long past decolonisation – is hinted rather than directly established.

Rabindranath Tagore’s short story, “Tota Kahini”, translated as “The Bird’s Tale”, is iconic in this indictment. In this allegorical story, a bird is captured by the order of the king. Infuriated by its wild and unrestrained singing, the king hands the bird over to pundits who train it day and night, drowning it in tables and grammar, till the bird eventually becomes a lifeless body, silent at last, brought to the king, who squeezes its corpse stuffed with paper and nods with satisfaction at the death of its wild song.

Rabindranath’s legendary impatience with institutionalised education of the kind he saw in existence ranged from his own shirking of school as a boy to his establishment of Visva-Bharati as a university of alternative education. The vastness of his critique of traditional education is not my subject here. I wish rather to return to the figure of that scandalous student who variously articulates failure, frustration, and disappointment in their institutional experience of colonially derived curricular education that has, for instance, taken on a particularly pervasive form in India, all the way to our postcolonial present.

Recalling his education at the University of Calcutta sometime in the second decade of the 20th century, the Bengali memoirist and essayist Nirad C Chaudhuri had this to say about all but a few exceptions among his professors: “I paid no attention whatever to what they said and sat on one of the back-benches, either reading a book of my choice, or scribbling, or thinking my own thoughts.” Shirking lectures, loafing off in the back benches, he however turned to another institution, the library, to which he credits “nearly all my higher education”.

Nearly forty years later, writing about his undergraduate education at the University of Allahabad in 1964, the poet Arvind Krishna Mehrotra recalls the pettily strategic character of his curricular study, comprising subjects that were “scoring”, the frenzy of note-taking and rote-learning, and efforts to game the examination system by guessing possible questions from test-papers of previous years and decades – all the while privately growing as a poet and a thinker entirely outside this institutional space. And another twenty years later, remembering his newly minted college degree from 1988, also at the University of Allahabad, Pankaj Mishra describes it as “three idle bookish years at a provincial university in a decaying old provincial town” that had left him with stodgy but patchy learning in a dated colonial fashion but ironically with the desire to fill these large lacunae as hungrily as possible.

Debates around western education in the British colonies are now vast enough to make up their own subfield. I return to some of its key contours later in this book. But long before I became familiar with these ceaselessly evolving debates, and long past my own stumbling familiarity with them, I cannot overcome my own memory of the slow, tedious violence of the apparatus of test papers and note-taking and cheat sheets that were our sole weapons to deal with the giant demon of examinations that tested how well we knew the periodic tables of literary history and style taxonomies of authors – even in the last years of the previous century.

But why did we feel this violence? And what was this strange force behind the urge to defy it? Perhaps it was the anxiety of being irresponsible young people in a developing nation where the responsible chose careers in medicine and engineering. Perhaps it was urgency for a kind of cosmopolitanism only attainable from books in the pre-digital age; perhaps a kind of bohemeana that only eclectic reading could read and support.

In the end, it was not something purely definable by any of these forces, significant as they all were. But my dream in this book has been to show that a certain kind of reader was inspired to seek their own eclectic, often confused and misdirected adventures with books – particularly books from the metropolitan west that were divorced from their own immediate reality. Perversely, their inspiration was powered by frustration with patterns of the strategic instrumentalism, sometimes of an exclusionary kind, that western humanistic education came to constitute in the colony and the postcolony.

The reasons behind them vary according to history and geography, and yet certain unifying patterns are discernible across the stretch of the historical British Empire (which occasionally overlapped with other forms of domination). The ironic centrality of British colonial education to the making of these adventurous autodidacts makes the English language my natural and primary archive, but this is in no way to suggest that that was the only language in which these figures conducted their reading lives.

While Nirad C Chaudhuri read and wrote just as much in Bengali as in English, Toru Dutt’s connection with French literature was possibly deeper than her connection with English, along with the reading she did in Bengali and rudimentary Sanskrit. Peter Abrahams memorably chronicles his rich and troubling relation with Afrikaans literature as trapped between a beloved teacher and a history of racist nationalism, and Sindiwe Magona recollects early tremors of movement between Xhosa and English, and describes her later classroom challenges while teaching Afrikaans. The unique history of the Black and Brown diaspora in the Caribbean has left most writers there only with European languages and their creolised variations, and for the figures I read from that part of the world, English accounts for their primary reading and writing lives.

Historically, however, the global identity of the British Empire has been richly multilingual and deeply polyphonic. My focus on English in this book is, to a great extent, a gesture of offering unity to a large cultural and territorial expanse through my own scholarly expertise on world English. But the logic and reality of British colonial education in the humanities and the future writing lives of these figures also point to English as the natural archive of this study.

Most people would agree that autodidactism is vital to any form of aesthetic education, even when institutions and systems are fulfilling to students. Recent trends in critique and post critique have also established the amateur reader to be more central to criticism than it might have been assumed in the decades of high professionalisation of literary study in the twentieth century. But there is a unique urgency and aspiration in the amateur self-making of the literary subject in a structure of peripheral colonial education, distant from the imperial metropolis of power and culture that claims special attention. No doubt that my own memory of this desolate aspiration is one of the contexts of my interest in this process. But this small personal inspiration aside, my journey through the memorable accounts of reading and self-making left by a group of exceptional thinkers across the stretch of the British Empire across three continents has revealed to me the enabling idiosyncrasies of aesthetic education when self-willed in isolation, amidst conditions far from ideal for it.

Excerpted with permission from The Amateur: Self-making and the Humanities in the Postcolony, Saikat Majumdar, Bloomsbury.