In 2014, the novelist Amit Chaudhuri launched a project called Literary Activism, beginning with a Symposium held in Calcutta. This movement, unique in the history of Indian letters in some respect, has tried to slowly reorient the conversation around literature toward its purported object, the “literary”’.
What exactly does the literary stand for? What distinguishes it from other modalities of thought? These are some of the questions that the subsequent symposia have tried to elaborate upon and grapple with. There is also a website, literaryactivism.com, which has published a series of essays, poems, and fiction drawn from the various contributors at the symposia.
Arvind Krishna Mehrotra has in some sense been a lifelong insurgent in the world of Indian poetry. His early years as an Indian poet writing in English were spent trying to find platforms that would take this form of writing seriously. Failing this he went on to create his own “little magazines” and founded the pioneering Clearing House publications along with the poets Arun Kolatkar, Gieve Patel, and Adil Jussawalla. This year, Literary Activism, in collaboration with Westland and Ashoka University has launched a new imprint, beginning with the publication of Mehrotra’s first collection of poems in 25 years, Book of Rahim…
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