Author Saikat Majumdar.
If you recall Jhumpa Lahiri’s Ashoke Ganguli, growing up in Calcutta in the late 1950s, devouring “all of Dickens” and as much as he could of “newer authors” like Graham Greene and Somerset Maugham, saving up money to buy these coveted books from stalls on College Street; reading The Brothers Karamazov, Anna Karenina, and Fathers and Sons, as he walked the noisy, busy streets of Chowringhee and Gariahat, you have met already, a fictional counterpart of Saikat Majumdar’s amateur reader.
Driven by their “unruly imagination”, distant from scholarly discipline, reading, mostly, for the joy of it, this amateur is closely linked to the one that appears in Majumdar’s 2017 essay titled “The Critic as Amateur”, where he draws a comparison between the “professionally trained reader” who belongs to an organised community that has access to systemic knowledge and archives of study and the reader who lacks “not only expertise in these forms of knowledge, but the means to access them and, moreover, a full sense of the importance of this very apparatus.”
The lack of “expertise” does not stand in the way of either the consumption of the text or the act of meaning-creation: “If the text is linguistically available to her, it is essentially open to interpretation by her, and in this interpretation, she brings to the text the knowledge of life as she possesses it, regardless of the relation of such knowledge to institutionalised scholarship.” The amateur, thus, is distinct from the scholar but is not to be valued any lesser.
The good / bad reader
With The Amateur: Self-making and the Humanities in the Postcolony, Majumdar’s subversive amateur returns, in the very specific form of the non-metropolitan, lay reader, stumbling upon (accidentally, serendipitously), metropolitan texts that they have no cultural context for. Leaning into the history of English literary study, Majumdar writes of the shift in the discipline, from criticism as a means of aesthetic education to reading as “a means of cultural diagnosis.”
The intrepid amateur, free of any restrictive institutional affiliation, steps into the intersections of the postcolonial and the postcritique, provoking the question, “What happens to reading when the goal is not original interpretation, the quest for truth, or even the enhancement of knowledge?” The “bad reader”, standing outside of both elite academic institutions and high culture, becomes an autodidact, creating their own dissonant archive.
In its celebration of what the author terms, within the parameters of the discourse, “poor reading”, The Amateur becomes a sharp and engaging study of how marginalised identities in diverse parts of what used to be the British Empire re-create for themselves, an empowered subjectivity that is defiant of and resistant to hegemonic structures of political and cultural power, even as it draws, critically, on the reading of texts from Western humanities.
In an expansive yet meticulously researched sweep, the book traces the autodidactic drives of “exceptional individuals and their reading and thinking programmes” from South Africa, the Caribbean islands, and India. The imperial project, aiming at political and cultural subjugation in each of these sites, used education as a tool of both homogenisation and servitude. In South Africa, the Bantu Education Act of 1953 furthered the cause of Apartheid, giving legal sanction to the decline in educational standards for Black students, severely limiting opportunities and professional roles accessible to them. In the face of this hostility, emerge powerful narratives like Peter Abrahams’s 1954 memoir, Tell Freedom. The strange mélange of a conscientious teacher and a chance encounter with a public library introduced Abrahams to the dazzlingly disparate worlds of Elizabethan England and the Harlem Renaissance, leading him into travel and radical self-fashioning.
Lewis Nkosi, author of Home and Exile, a collection of literary essays, recognised the same experience of living in contradictory worlds – that of literature and lived experience – and found the same familiarity in Elizabethan literature as Peter Abrahams: “Ultimately, it was the cacophonous, swaggering world of Elizabethan England which gave us the closest parallel to our own mode of existence; the cloak and dagger stories of Shakespeare; the marvellously gay and dangerous time of change in Great Britain, came closest to reflecting our own condition.” For both, reading Shakespeare brought into focus the disparities of their own world, nudging the reader/thinker/writer into clearer articulations of the self and their community.
Referring to postcolonial subaltern studies historian Dipesh Chakrabarty’s critique of historicism, the process that legitimised colonisation as a necessary linear progression from savagery to civilisation, thus enabling the European domination of the world, the book examines the erasures of history in the educational and political discourse of the Caribbean islands and the consequent acts of connection that the writings of self-taught amateurs like Dionne Brand, CLR James, and, later, VS Naipaul attempted. Naipaul’s desire to become a writer does not transcend but rather foregrounds the multiple marginalisations of his hybrid identity as a Trinidadian Hindu, witness to the oppression of religious minorities in the aftermath of decolonization, and aware of the ways in which the “outer world”, that of England, and the United States, and Canada, affected cultural and ideological life on the islands. A similar tension between the colonial project, the cultural capital implicit in English education in the colony (continuing into the postcolony), and the failures of a pedagogic system awarding merit on the basis of examinations that sought answers relying on rote rather than critical thinking, is apparent in the making of the late-colonial and postcolonial Indian amateurs that Majumdar identifies – Toru Dutt, Nirad C Chaudhuri, AK Mehrotra, and Pankaj Mishra, all now known to the average Indian reader as influential names in their respective genres of writing.
A celebration of reading
With its lens tightly focused on the dissident reader in the postcolony, this book is more than the sum of its very relevant social-cultural politics. It is also a celebration of the romance of reading, of finding yourself in the pages of a book far removed from your lived experience, like Dionne Brand, who discovered the history of the Haitian Revolution of 1791 in a book hidden away in her grandmother’s wardrobe while searching for the forbidden taste of black cake, catapulting the child’s desire for sweetness into the colonial subject’s desire of discovering her hitherto hidden-away history of oppression and resistance. Or, Pankaj Mishra, in the volatile campus of Allahabad University in the 1980s, finding a resonance between the badlands of Uttar Pradesh and the unrest of Parisian society culminating in the French Revolution, as represented in Gustave Flaubert’s Sentimental Education. As in his fiction, Saikat Majumdar allows gender to claim space in these narratives of the amateur as well. He writes, among others, of Sindiwe Magona, A Xhosa writer who worked as a domestic servant and clawed her way into education and the written word despite the aggressions of the Bantu Education Act and the patriarchal impositions thrust on her in her roles as wife and mother.
The encounters of these amateurs with texts from the Western humanities are not passive acts, bookmarking coincidental intersections, but turn into agentic gestures of claiming selfhood. Their flawed reading, as the author suggests, can encourage professional reading to shift from its preoccupation with historical context, towards a more inclusive aesthetic education.
With their reliance on libraries and encyclopedias, on books given away in seeming acts of charity or rescued from discard piles or discovered in forgotten wardrobes, in their disdain for the classroom and for colonial pedagogies and their attendant drives towards professionalisation, their reclamation of leisure from the relentlessness of productivity, and in their framing of new narratives for themselves and their communities, Majumdar’s amateurs are a fascinating study in themselves, but as rewarding to the interested reader, is the carefully historicised roadmap of education, literary study, and the shifting dynamic of power in the postcolony.
The Amateur is an invitation, to both the lay and the professional reader, to question certainties, to allow for segues between seemingly disconnected histories, and to remember the words of Tom Lutz, lest we slip into the complacency that is characteristic of knowledge societies: “We readers are amateurs before we are anything else.”
The Amateur: Self-making and the Humanities in the Postcolony, Saikat Majumdar, Bloomsbury.
This post was originally published on here
