‘Interesting to see how many people have suffered from the brunt of storytelling’: Amit Chaudhuri

Peter D McDonald, Professor of English and Related Literatures at the University of Oxford and author of various books including Artefacts of Writing (OUP) and, most recently, The Double Life of Books (Edinburgh), was in conversation with the novelist, critic, and musician Amit Chaudhuri about Against Storytelling, a collection of essays by various writers edited by Chaudhuri. Against Storytelling is part of a new series of books (whose general editor is Chaudhuri) titled Literary Activism. The series is published by Westland Books in partnership with the Centre for the Creative and the Critical, Ashoka University. Excerpts from the conversation:

Peter D McDonald: The first thing I noticed as someone who has been reading your work for years – and it would come as no surprise to anyone familiar with your work – is that you personally, as a writer, are against storytelling. So it’s no surprise that you wanted to organise a symposium under that theme. One example I have here, right from the beginning in 1991, is A Strange and Sublime Address. At one point, the narrating voice, thinking about the character Sandeep, observes:

“But why did these houses – for instance, that one with the tall, ornate iron gates and a watchman dozing on a stool ... or this small, shabby house with the girl Sandeep glimpsed through the window, sitting in a bare, ill-furnished room, memorising a text by candlelight, repeating suffixes and prefixes from a Bengali grammar over and over to herself – why did these houses seem to suggest that an infinitely interesting story might be woven around them? And yet the story would never be a satisfying one, because the writer, like Sandeep, would be caught up in jotting down the irrelevances and digressions that make up lives and the life of a city rather than a good story – till the reader would shout ‘Come to the point!’ and there would be no point, except the girl, memorising the rules of grammar, the old man in the easy chair fanning himself and the small, empty porch that was crowded, paradoxically, with many memories and possibilities. The ‘real’ story, with its beginning, middle and conclusion would never be told because it did not exist.”

So I’ve always understood that you, for reasons which you may want to tell us about, right from the get-go, have set yourself against “story” as a clear, understandable narrative of plotted events, or grand or important happenings worthy of being novelised. Instead, your work is made up of stuff that looks like it should be the bits that are left out.

Amit Chaudhuri: Right.

That was in 1991. Now, over 30 years later, these issues are still bugging you. You’ve clearly never been able to get over them. You wanted to orchestrate a larger discussion about this, bringing in other people to have a symposium. It’s part of the Literary Activism Series, a connection which we also need to think about a bit, and it’s called Against Storytelling.

Yes, this was the fourth symposium. I started the Literary Activism Symposia in the December of 2014. You know that because you were there as one of the speakers. The first of these symposia was just called Literary Activism, and then each subsequent one has had its own theme or preoccupation. The fourth one tried to uncover, address, and understand this unease about story.

But before I come back to the symposium and the reasons why it happened, let me return to A Strange and Sublime Address since you just read out an excerpt from it. This section has been pointed out before by critics and people who’ve written about my work. Sumana Roy, who wrote a PhD on my work, has also written about this particular section as a “manifesto”. Even before that, this was a chapter that came out in the London Review of Books and I remember a friend of mine called Meena Dhanda, a political scientist at Oxford, read it and said that she liked this paragraph very much because it was telling us how to read – what she took to be – a story (because that chapter had come out as a standalone story in the London Review of Books).

I wrote this paragraph without really thinking that it was making a statement. I didn't even realise that there was no story in the book. I thought that writing a book about a boy going on holiday was enough in terms of structure, form, and narrative. But obviously, there was very definitely a kind of polemic in my head, even before or as I began to write the novel.

I now trace back a decision I realised I’d instinctively taken, to jettison psychology and inwardness in favour of exteriority and the street, to a couple of things. I remember clearly thinking that I had had enough of what was really my own misreadings of Bergman, Sartre, and Camus, that whole “existentialist” or “absurdist” drama of the self. I wanted to escape its tyranny, out into the open, into the street. This novel was a way of addressing this need to break out of interiority. That’s what was going on. It may be connected to what lies outside of story, what cannot be contained by story, if story or a novel is supposed to be the tale of a protagonist’s inner life and what happens to them in the course of the novel. I wanted to get out of that set of expectations. I anyway had a form of, what should I say, disability, which made concepts like character very difficult for me to understand. So this decision to do with what kind of novel this would be was playing out at a polemical level.

There was also the fact of my having discovered, when I was 23 or 24, that reality was more fecund and unexpected than anything the imagination could produce. I remember writing this down at the back of the notebook in which I was writing A Strange and Sublime Address. This paragraph must have been part of a similar line of thought. The writing of this novel was essentially a polemical move, though it wasn't taken to be that.

However, there were some people who did realise that it was odd. Marina Warner said something to me about the strangeness of the fact that it had won the Betty Trask Award, which, by the donor’s definition, was supposed to be an award for a first novel of “a traditional and romantic” nature.

In some ways, there are good reasons for not thinking of it as a novel at all.

Yes. Since the judges all ignored the donor’s definition [for the Betty Trask Award for first novels in the traditional realist style] and gave it to what they thought was the best first novel that year, she said to me, “Did the judges realise what an experimental work it is when they gave it that prize?” I had a chance to speak at the awards ceremony to some of the judges, including the people who had supported the book getting the prize, like Francis King and Isabel Quigley. One of the judges, John Walsh, who used to be the literary editor of the Sunday Times, said to me, “Congratulations, but I wasn't completely convinced because I didn’t think it was a proper novel.” I was taking this in. I mean, I might have been thinking polemically on some level when writing the novel, but at the same time, the fact that this was not a proper novel and that it had no story in it, as pointed out in a very positive review by John Lanchester, was partly news to me. My conscious self hadn't realised that I was doing something that couldn't, and certainly shouldn’t, be done in the form of a novel.

My trajectory is one that began with the rejection of story. Even if I wasn't doing it in a self-aware way, I was on some level doing it pointedly. But there was also enough there that I am still unconscious about, for me to be able to encounter this afresh when you read it out. I think, what was I thinking of over there? So I have the ability to repeatedly revisit not just that paragraph but this whole matter of rejecting story.

So over a quarter of a century later, with quite a lot of water having passed under the bridge, you still wanted to collectivise and make it part of this literary activism discussion. What was that about?

It relates to what happened at that time after I wrote the book. I published it in 1991 having finished writing it in 1988. It went into this limbo for a bit while publishers were deciding what to do with it. When it was published in 1991, it was the year of economic deregulation in India. The Berlin Wall had collapsed. We had entered a new world. The book came out at a time when this new world was coming into existence, and this world of globalisation had a particular way of allocating meaning, often by conflating narrative with culture, more so with certain cultures.

Though the dates don’t quite fit, this is also the moment of Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man (1992), which declared Euro-American liberal democracy to be the triumphal telos of human civilisation.

Yes, absolutely, and the time of globalisation, and, to narrow our focus to literary London, the commercialisation of the Booker Prize. There was this idea that a novel from India or Turkey or Africa (always oddly treated as a country!) promised stories and narrative because story was the best way to bring news of these “new” cultures without us having to engage with the old, modernist, often formalistic sense of the “new.” I’m referring to new literary forms or whatever Ezra Pound meant when he said “new.” We didn’t have to contend with newness in that sense to receive news of these cultures, which were themselves “story,” interchangeable with narrative. This was the milieu being established around the time A Strange and Sublime Address came out. It took over and possessed that decade. Many erasures and elisions took place in the process. We also began to hear more of the kind of things I’ve said in my mission statement, things like “We are all storytellers”. The word storytelling, like some other words, started becoming a mystical term, and also began to lend itself to the general air of celebration that we now saw as the norm at literary festivals, book launches, and discussions.

Another context might be relevant as well, one flagged recently by the American literary critic, Peter Brooks. Brooks made his name in the 1980s with a book called Reading for the Plot (1984) which blends narratology and psychoanalysis. In Seduced by Story (2022) – the title says it all – he revisited his earlier work and issued a kind of mea culpa. He began by citing the opening of the earlier book in his preface:

“Our lives are ceaselessly intertwined with narrative, with the stories that we tell and hear told, those we dream or imagine or would like to tell, all of which are reworked in that story of our own lives that we narrate to ourselves in an episodic, sometimes semiconscious, but virtually uninterrupted monologue. We live immersed in narrative, recounting and reassessing the meaning of our past actions, anticipating the outcome of our future projects, situating ourselves in at the intersection of several stories not yet completed.”

He follows this with the mea culpa about being a facilitator of narrative/story’s cultural ubiquity, dating it to a specific moment at the turn of the millennium:

“For myself, the moment I knew narrative had taken over the world came with President George W. Bush's presentation of his cabinet in December 2000. Said Bush of his appointees,: ‘Each person has got their own story that is so unique, stories really explain what America can and should be about.’ And more simply, in presenting Secretary of State, Colin Powell: ‘a great American story.’ And simpler still, while introducing his Secretary of Transportation, Norman Y Mineta: ‘I love his story.’ One had the impression that Bush’s understanding of reality was wholly narrative. No other form of speech or cognitive faculty came close.”

This is the moment at which he starts to worry about his whole academic project. And one of the things you’re talking about is that within the discourse of globalization that emerged at the turn of the millennium, it was as if the whole world had become a kind of a 1980s US American graduate seminar on narratology.

I mean, the narrative turn was important and I was becoming more and more aware of it in academia but of course, it was there everywhere. I have written about this in an essay called, “Notes on the Novel in the Time of Globalisation.” There was a definite turn towards thinking about narrative, text, textuality – not necessarily by the thinkers who originally formulated these ideas – but the way these ideas were received and interpreted prepared us intellectually for globalisation and prepared us for the novel somehow being continuous with the fabric of globalisation, in a way that poetry couldn't be. Poetry had to opt out. The other thing you noticed about the matter of opting out was that, unlike the pre-globalisation world, where opting or dropping out was an option, it didn't mean extinction or non-viability. After globalisation, as you saw with what happened to poetry, opting out meant annihilation. It was no longer a critical position.

I had been dismayed by the groundwork done in critical theory for the idea of narrative segueing into the upbeat fabric of globalisation. The groundwork had been done in the way, let’s say, poststructuralism or Derrida was read only for certain phrases and certain aspects of the work that could be read in a particular way. “There is nothing outside the text.” This was also true with Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities and its setting up a correspondence between the idea of the nation and the act of reading novels, or Nation and Narration by Homi Bhabha. It became the kind of collective religious tic that happens if you belong to a cult.

So we had a cult of storytelling basically. That’s what it was. And it was worldwide because the ideology that began driving it was free market globalisation. Each – story and the market – was indispensable to the other. So the wide-eyed approbation of being in the globalised world, and the wide-eyed approbation of storytelling as an utterance that confirmed one's being at home in this new world was becoming increasingly, not just disturbing, but puzzling. One immediately needed to know what its provenance was.

Since storytelling was denied the necessity of genealogy or provenance because it seemed to come from who we were as human beings from the beginning of time, it needed to be inquired into all the more. It was leaving a great deal out. For example, from the 1980s onwards then into the time of globalisation, the idea of the Indian novel in English was leaving out everything else that happened in India in literature. There was a time when Indian literature became the Indian novel in English after the 1980s. One could talk about this Indian novel in English as Indian writing without for a moment thinking that this is in itself a story. It was disturbing to me to see how much was being left out by these various accounts of the Indian novel, Indian writing, the story, storytelling. What is being left out when you celebrate these things?

We will have to come back to this question of what's being left out because there’s a way to formulate this as, “Oh, so what we need is just more multifaceted, more multiple-threaded stories so we need to get more into our stories.” But there's a more fundamental problem with the notion of story that you talk about in A Strange and Sublime Address. It’s not just a question of adding more to the stories because they leave things out. There's an aspect of “leaving out” in the very structure of story as it is understood.

Yes, and this is the root that decolonisation or diversity has taken. The idea of “let's just add more stuff.” That’s an idea and type of solution I’m countering when I’m referring to the exclusionary nature of the story.

Yes, just add more stuff and leave the thing in place. Therefore it's not a serious transformative process. This is perhaps a good point to turn to the symposium itself and to the book you've edited under the title Against Storytelling. Because once you start formulating this discussion in the context of the book, it then becomes, in many ways, more interesting and possibly also more anarchic, and less easy to pin down. In fact, it can even become about being against whatever you want storytelling to mean. I found it fascinating to read the book and to see how many people from very different backgrounds, experiences, and positions see storytelling as a major problem in their own lives – often in their professional lives but also in their lives as citizens or public figures.

Take the essay by Jeremy Harding, a journalist, for instance. He writes about the pressures he experienced as a young journalist, of editors wanting him to go and “get the story.” He has an engaging take on what it means to be experienced through language and to be caught up in language, which he links to his own unease with journalistic storytelling. And then you’ve got your own essay where the key thing that you’re targeting is the novel, or a particular professionalised version of it which you find objectionable. Then there’s Tiffany Atkinson, the poet who teaches at the University of East Anglia, and writes about literary criticism as a form of storytelling. She uses this nice phrase, describing literary criticism as “housekeeping, a tidying-up”. whereas she prefers to look for what’s more embarrassing or awkward, what doesn't fit. So there’s a sense that professionalised, academic literary criticism is also a form of storytelling, which she finds difficult. Charles Bernstein's piece itself is a tour de force of experimental writing. As an American language poet of his generation, he takes on Trump and American politics, focusing on the ubiquity of story and storytelling in contemporary politics, much like Brooks.

So there’s storytelling and political discourse, journalism, literary criticism, and the novel. I wonder, when you started to see it in all these lights, did your own conception of the project begin to unravel a bit? Did it start to look like the term storytelling was beginning to do too loose?

So you’re saying that in this collection, there are too many takes on what story might be?

I’m obviously framing that as potentially a bad thing. But I don’t necessarily think that. Let’s look at this in another way, what did you learn from the process of bringing together all these other people and voices into the discussion? Instead of simply working from your own concerns, given your own projects, you now made it a more collective enterprise and added these other voices. How did that shift the discussion?

It’s nice to have an anti-storytellers anonymous. Of course, it wasn't anonymous. But it's nice to have a group of people who bring their own story—no, no, one shouldn't call it that. It’s a form of shared discourse against sharing. One of the things that goes into this idea of story, which maybe came from groups like Narcotics Anonymous and has now gone into social media, is the idea of sharing. That strange American word. It has become quite ubiquitous and used for any kind of exchange. This idea of sharing muffles exchange in a way. So what we have here is a sharing of ideas against sharing, which is what storytelling often is.

And it’s good to see an overlap of experience that is fruitful in some way, an overlap of anomalousness, disgruntlement that can lead to a conversation, because this is exactly what literary festivals militate against. They do not believe that writers are a bunch of disgruntled people whom you might bring together because of a common agenda. They believe that writers are there to bring happiness to the world. So for me, it’s interesting and instructive and enlivening to see how many people have suffered from the brunt of storytelling, and deployed measures or thought about countering the ethos in which storytelling dominates. Coming as they are from completely different angles and places, these are subterranean dissatisfactions which are very important, and when they find expression, they have to by definition be completely different from a bunch of upbeat writers talking about their latest books in a festival.

So this is what we wanted to do. To give a voice to people who are against the idea of the ease with which this notion of giving voice is nowadays used. Many of them prefer silence. At the same time, we are not allowed to be silent. We have to always speak in a certain way, in a certain tone and language. It’s to uncover whether alternatives to this idea of decorum, which strangulates us now, is possible. So the book is one instance of what the literary activism symposia has been trying to do.

I mean, when you’re reading the book, it comes across very clearly just how, to give you the opposite side of the argument, the concept of storytelling becomes so all-encompassing that it starts to lose traction. By contrast, the positive way of reading it is that when you go through each essay, you see how each person has found it enabling to think about its orchestration in the universe of discourse in which they live their lives, whether that's literary criticism or journalism or, for Bernstein, the poet-citizen, the political discourse of the United States in the (first) Trump era. They all find it an enabling concept for understanding the challenge of finding new forms of expression, language, etc.

What is an enabling concept?

Storytelling as something to push against. In all its different ways, it becomes a catch-all for the accepted rules and norms of journalism or literary criticism or political discourse, or in your case, the novel. Bernstein picks up on auditory activism and talks about it as the desire to develop and practise a form of activist poetics, which is an interesting formulation.

Also the specificity of their approaches. It stops storytelling from becoming all-encompassing. They explicate with particularity what it is that they're trying to describe or formulate.

To return to the issue I raised earlier about people thinking we just need to add more stuff to the stories. This obscures a more profound cognitive problem with narrative as such. This came to mind when Bernstein quoted an essay of yours called “Unconstitutional Spaces” from The Origins of Dislike, where you quote Tagore. Interestingly, Tagore at the end of the 19th century addressed the problem, which was also central to his own thinking, in cognitive terms.

Here is Tagore – I'm reading from page 71 of the book where Bernstein quotes you quoting Tagore on the propensity to filter out what doesn't fit from our story: “Only a small fraction of the tremors and comings and goings of perception are acknowledged.” And then there's this quotation from Tagore:

“Because one’s mind, like a fisherman, casts a net of integration and accepts only what it can gather at a single haul. Everything else eludes it. The mind has the power to move all irrelevancies far away from the path of its set purpose.”

Tagore, it strikes me, shifts the debate into the cognitive realm. At the risk of creating even more echoes, this move made me think of Samuel Beckett, especially this passage from Proust (1930):

“‘Enchantments of reality’ has the air of a paradox. But when the object is perceived as particular and unique and not merely the member of a family, when it appears independent of any general notion and detached from the sanity of a cause, isolated and inexplicable in the light of ignorance, then and then only may it be a source of enchantment. Unfortunately, Habit has laid its veto on this form of perception, its action being precisely to hide the essence – the idea – of the object in the haze of conception – preconception. Normally we are in the position of the tourist (the traditional specification would constitute a pleonasm), whose aesthetic experience consists of a series of identifications and for whom Baedeker is the end rather than the means.”

A Baedeker was the standard European travel guide of the 1930s. Beckett is critiquing a touristic view of the world shaped by the stories Baedeker tells and the categories it uses. In opposition to that, he writes about recovering “the enchantments of reality,” which goes back to what you were talking about earlier. The section about needing to separate things “from the sanity of a cause” and to see them “isolated and inexplicable in the light of ignorance” reminded me of your concerns about storytelling and Tagore’s worries about the “calculating mind.”

And the idea of narrative or story. There’s a connection between these three: story, habit and the calculating mind. Other connections could be found but since we are talking about Against Storytelling, this is the connection of interest.

Yes, the key being, when the object is perceived as unique and not merely the member of a family, when it appears, independent of any general notion and detached from the sanity of a cause.

Yes, so this is what is getting left out, but not in the sense of, you know, addressing what's getting left out by a decolonisation or diversity programme.

It’s also asking the question, not just simply of what's left out but also what is being obscured or buried in the process of you construing something in the way that you’re construing it. So even what's being shown is not being seen.

A story is a fiction that occludes what Beckett and Tagore are talking about as being surprising and dislocating in a positive sense. Both of them I think would agree that we don't generally experience that kind of moment of surprise. We don't encounter things in that way. Something is occluding that encounter. One could call story performing one such occlusion and preventing that encounter. And this is what I mean by something getting left out. Not the important things. Not what diversity says are important books in the other cultures, or decolonisation says in relation to the colonised’s culture, these were the important books that need to be brought in. Tagore is talking about the occlusion of the superfluous, the redundant. How do we find a way of approaching or moving towards everything that is animated and alive and according to the story, superfluous? Or according to the calculating mind, superfluous? Or even according to a programme like decolonisation, superfluous?

Because when they’re looking for more, they are looking for other histories which themselves are stories. You add another story to a story that's present. These are all ways of constructing an idea of relevance, an idea of what's germane, what most represents something. The histories of encountering the redundant will always get left out. Except in certain kind of moments during certain epochs or certain movements. This is what literary activism is also trying to do.

You speak about cognition. I became interested in some ideas from Buddhism because they were twice applied to the stuff that I was doing. One person a very long time ago brought up Buddhism and the Buddhistic idea of flux in response to something I’d said about my aims as a writer, and the novelist and critic Pankaj Mishra spoke about being reminded of the Buddhistic idea of dependent origination, or dependent arising, while reading Friend of My Youth. So I became very curious about Buddhism as a kind of intellectual resource, which it actually was for a lot of modernists. I began to scratch the surface of what I knew, which was what I had learned at school, you know, the story of the Buddha, desire is suffering, the encounter with the dead man or the sick man, etc. etc. The parables and the shorthand through which we know Buddhism, which leaves out its philosophical peculiarity, which is of great interest for those who are interested in the poetics of writing and don't see imaginative writing as the construction of stories.

I was looking up things on YouTube to do with dependent origination. Gradually over the last few years, I began to get a sense of dependent origination and this other word, “emptiness” or shunyata, being basically very close to Saussure's and Derrida’s idea of difference. And Saussure may well have got it from Buddhism because he was a teacher of Sanskrit. Sorry, I’m straying but I’ll bring it back to story in a few minutes. Basically, the idea of shunyata, as Nagarjuna understands it (shunya meaning zero), is the inability of something to have an absolute identity or absolute existence. Everything is what it is not. Each thing is caught up in this fabric where its identity is completely contingent and completely negative. Not in a bad sense as we understand that word from our inheritance and our associations with it, but negative in the sense of contingent, of having no absoluteness, or no absolute quality. Dependent arising or dependent origination then is a confrontation of a reality that has no fixity, in which no detail is what it actually is. Because it is what it is not.

This form of disruption is also a practice in the Buddhist tradition, at least in the Zen or Chan Buddhist tradition, which is a sort of counter-tradition to mainstream Buddhism, the practice of the koan: pithy, paradoxical, provocative sayings, the main purpose of which is to effect cognitive disruption.

I just want to mention this YouTube video of an English monk who used to be an academic at some point. I can't remember which part of England his accent was from, but, in his English way, he was kind of talking about dependent origination to his audience. He was making jokes and being chatty, and a little sceptical as well. One thing he said was that the consciousness is unable to concentrate on anything for any period of time. It thinks it does, but it doesn’t. So this idea of focusing on something, or the story being about something, or you having read about something, are to a great extent fictions, according to this critical approach to what our consciousness is doing.

He says that if somebody asks you, “What did you do this afternoon?”, you would say, I went to listen to this monk talk about dependent arising, and I was in this room, and we were in an audience of thirty. But this is a story, he says, because the truth is you were doing this and that and that and that. Your mind was doing this, you were listening to me, you were looking at the vase…This idea that you spent an afternoon listening to me is a story. And so what you’re leaving out is the surprising nature of consciousness, or the irreducible and completely contingent nature of your encounter with the world. This is not something we are prepared to take on board. We are not prepared to take this idea that nothing around us and forms our setting and our field of relationships has an absolute identity. We are very invested in the idea that you are you, Peter. You have meaning to me as being Peter. And this book has a particular meaning to me for its status of being what it is. A status in every sense of the word. A particular kind of writing opens itself up to this field of contingency. To do that, it has to jettison the construct. The construct is story.

We’re back with Beckett being liberated from the sanity of a cause isolated and inexplicable in the light of ignorance. This touches on the “de-creative” aspect of Beckett’s project, which remained with him throughout his life. I was also reminded of one of the signs you created [from an art project that Chaudhuri exhibited in 2018] which Bernstein reproduces in his essay. Again, it’s from the Tagore song. It’s not just about what is superfluous or what's ignored but also the things that, even within the known, are unknown. Made me think of Beckett’s brilliant phrase “the light of ignorance.”

But, to wrap up, I wanted to step back from the details of your version of storytelling and the underlying cognitive issue that we've been talking about, to ask about what it is that you're also doing more broadly, say, in an institutional way. Because what you're also trying to do with this project is to create a space for a certain set of conversations to happen. It's now a space that's evolved over the last decade. The 10th year of the Literary Activism Project is coming up. First, there were the symposia and the meetings, which entailed people getting together, talking about these issues, and orchestrating a gathering. But now you’ve got this collaboration with Ashoka University and Westland Publishers to produce the book version of this.

And we’ve got a website – literaryactivism.com. There’s also the Centre for the Creative and the Critical at Ashoka University.

There’s a whole series of interconnected platforms that you’re trying to make for these discussions. The obvious impression that one would get is that this is because there's a need for this, from your perspective, and that if you don’t create it, it won’t exist. So the creative side of what you’re doing is not just writing novels or books. You’re also creating these social, institutional, and material spaces for this kind of thing. Why do you feel the need for this? I mean, why don’t you just publish essays in the New York Review of Books and the London Review of Books?

Interestingly, the Centre for the Creative and the Critical sounds like an actual building or space, but it actually has no existence as a tangible space, which saves it from being a utopian project. Most programmes and projects funded today, manifesting themselves as centres and buildings, are doomed to be utopian projects, part of the larger utopia. So sometimes I despair of the fact that these things you mention I have no actual location, that what they are and where they are is continually in process. And yet I do feel that it's important that what is a shortcoming also facilitates the only way of making these projects happen, ensuring they exist.

This one has existed in the form of the symposium, as you said, for 10 years – well, it’s going to be 10 years next year – without a location. In a way, if you walk around the campus of Shantiniketan, Tagore’s experiment with pedagogy, and if you look at the buildings and the houses that Tagore himself built to inhabit, you do see a place that is trying to escape “locatedness” in an institutional sense. But the pervasiveness of a particular kind of rhetoric, which Tagore himself often gave a ballast to, threatens to turn our idea of Shantiniketan into an idea of utopia, which it never was. It was always meant to be a place that undercut utopia by undercutting a sense of proper locatedness.

I think it's great that we don’t have a building. Maybe we will at some time in the future, maybe we won't. But this absence of location allows Literary Activism to be so many things. It’s almost the only way in which it can exist in the present world where most centres for the arts are doomed to be utopias in a very self-conscious way, that are built mainly for career networks and some sort of sop being thrown towards the idea of creativity, to satisfy not just the creative writers but to satisfy some managerial directive of also needing the creative. We have, I think, been able to avoid this by existing only in text and in iteration.

By definition, what you're committed to and what you're talking about and thinking about must be makeshift.

It has to be makeshift, yes. Sometimes we think it’ll be good to have a few rooms or a room in a building, but at the same time, the fact that we have existed only through argument has helped us.

Perhaps you could think of the situation as being analogous to the ancient hill farmers, the anarchic, acephalus communities in Southeast Asia, as contrasted with the settled, rice paddy farmers of the valleys. This division goes back to the earliest formation of the state, wonderfully described by James C Scott in The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (2009). The people of the valley, the rice paddy farmers, are the people who settled, who created the state, defined territory, and marked out a place. And then there are the nomadic hill farmers who practice swiddening. It’s a great word, swiddening. Without settled territory or permanent abode, they simply clear a space to plant something that grows quite quickly. They nurture and harvest that crop, and then move on. They don't own territory or claim it.

That’s generally how I work. I like to go into some other territory and carve out a space and then think, Okay, what does this literary work (understood as a noun and a verb) have to do with, say, international relations, or legal thinking, or philosophy, or whatever? I clear a space, produce something, and then move on.

Yes. Exactly.