‘A new route for thinking’: Four writers on ten years of Amit Chaudhuri’s ‘Literary Activism’

In 2014, writer and academic Amit Chaudhuri wrote the mission statement on “literary activism” – as the starting point of the project. It began in 2014 with a series of annual symposia with Ashoka University. Its aim was to create a space for the kind of discussion on creativity no longer available in mainstream contexts (literary festivals, book launches) or in academic ones (conferences, classrooms, monographs).

Chaudhuri writes, “The idea of the symposium arose from a number of impulses: firstly, the belief that it’s no longer enough for writers to simply devote themselves to ‘creative’ practice and teach or study creative writing and have nothing to do with the conceptual underpinnings of their writing and their lives, any more than it is for academics in literature departments to simply produce monographs and shut out the problem of writing itself. Secondly, there’s been a feeling among many that there’s an urgent need for a conversation, and a forum, that goes beyond what you hear or encounter either at a literary festival or an academic conference. To achieve this one has to, on the one hand, eschew celebrity and book signings in favour of dialogue and response; on the other hand, steer clear of the closed professionalism of...

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