On the Lokayata Blog: A Round-Table

On the 4^th of June, the members of the Study Circle met to consider the possibility of doing something special to mark the milestone of having the 50^th post up on the Lokayata blog, come July. It was unanimously agreed to obtain our own domain name in order to reach more people and remove advertisements pushed by the hosting platform, WordPress. Members chipped in with their contributions and our readers donated over Rs 11000. We cannot thank them enough. Because of their generosity, we have been able to raise enough funds to sustain the blog in this manner for the next three to five years at least. We wanted this expenditure to be borne jointly by the members and our readers — to keep ourselves accountable, and you informed. In the same meeting, it was decided that the 50^th blog post would be co-authored by the members together, reflecting the collective spirit of the Study Circle. Thereafter, we met twice virtually to discuss the intellectual trajectory of the blog, what it means to us, and why it might matter today. Members weighed in with their opinions and a long conversation spanning several hours ensued. What follows is a truncated and edited transcript of that discussion. It had to be abridged for it to stay true to the nature of a blog post. The text has been altered to enhance readability. Yet, it remains thoroughly imbued with conversational flavour and spontaneity — a testament to our intellectual introspection as a team. Ultimately, it is up to you, the reader, to make of this what you will. We would only be glad to hear from you, should you choose to write to us here. Happy reading!

Ananyo: To start with, I will put across two questions. Among all the contributions that you have made to the blog, which piece is your own favourite? This is for people who have written more than two articles, obviously. There is also another question — which is the one essay written by somebody else that has intrigued you the most?

Shashi: I think I like Suchintan’s piece, ‘The Pernicious Pitfalls of the New Education Policy’, the most. I think it is a very important text, because when it was published, I was not yet in college. I could not then see the ulterior motives behind the policy. After reading this article, I could see the repercussions the NEP would have on higher education in India. I sent this article to other student activists in Delhi, and they told me that it helped them enhance their understanding of the policy too. I mean, the blog in general has shaped my own writing. I would say that even before I had joined the study circle I used to read the articles that were published on the blog and, you know, the articles were very, very important in helping me understand the nuances of the topics being talked about. For instance, the article by Nabila Ansari titled ‘How Muslim is Muslim Enough’ is a very good read, and then there is an article on Periyar. That latter is important because it starts with a quote by Periyar where he seems to insinuate that the same treatment should be meted out to the Brahmins, as has been done to the Jews. This is a very controversial point, and this was used as a pretext to attack Periyar’s ideas in his own time. So, this article, I think, really helped me to unpack a lot of things. When I started writing, I used the articles that were published on the blog as my references, and they helped me improve my own writing. When I submitted my first article on D.D. Kosambi I was told to make some changes, some major changes, and then submit it again. Then once again, I was told to redraft the piece. Finally, when it was published, I could clearly see the difference between the piece that came out on the blog and the initial draft that I had submitted. The difference was clearly visible, and for the better.

Tushar: This question makes me think a little bit about my own association with the Study Circle now that we are going to publish our 50^th blog post. I never joined the Study Circle when I was in college and it was only after college that I got pushed into this community, trying to avoid the seclusion of research. Picking favourites is an idiosyncratic exercise. But I think that the beauty of the blog is that there are two types of writing. One is the author’s original piece, which is to say that the author is creating it themselves. That work can be political, it can be conceptual, it can be a report, but there is a sense of ‘originality’ in that writing. But the blog also has translated pieces. Translation is something that is very intimate to me. But translation in general is linked with the question of authority and agency. I think that there is a lot of ‘originality’ that goes into translation too. So, I had to pick a translation as my favourite piece, and I found Satyam’s translation very powerful because it can stand tall in its own originality. One of the reasons why I associated with or thought of becoming a member of the Study Circle in the first place was because there is a certain academic bent to it. But more appealing is this very strong idea of writing for the public. Writing is always, you know, a kind of a lovemaking exercise between you and who you are writing for.

Debayan: My article on the Mask-Makers of Charida is an easy pick for me because that was based on my lived experience and fieldwork.  Otherwise, I specifically have a couple of articles on my mind. One is written by Rayan, called ‘Documenting Dissent through Art’. That offered a great summary for somebody who wants to get introduced to the usage of art forms or whatever they are creatively passionate about, in expressing their ideas for bringing about positive change around us. The artworks by Picasso or Safdar Hashmi’s introduction of music in street theatre were important cases in point. I had even written an article on politics, aesthetics and spaces for the blog. I don’t like those arguments anymore. I feel like its narrative elements could have been more concrete. Now that I think about it, one article that I really love is by Suchintan called ‘The Making of the Anti-Nation’. I love that article. The ideas discussed in it were very instrumental in helping me explain certain things to my friends that I could not articulate myself, such as why certain terms like ‘anti-national’ are used by the ruling dispensation to begin with. One more article that I really like is the latest piece by Monjima on the displacement of slum-dwellers from Tughlaqabad. Specifically, because I have also been documenting the impact of similar eviction drives in Delhi for the Srishti Trust, the last organization that I was working with. I could personally relate to the contents of the article.

Monjima: It is difficult to choose a favourite piece. I write something, I like it for a while, and then I hate it with all my heart. But I genuinely like Arnaaz’s articles, all of them. Her pieces on the performing arts intrigue me a lot and open up new ways of looking at them.

Ritabrata: I’ll begin with the article that has moved me the most. At a time when I was not yet a member of the Study Circle, I came across Suchintan’s article titled, ‘ Biopolitics of Pandemic and the Cult of Stupidity’. It opened a new vista of thinking for me. It really led me to think about how the immediate and the obvious can be seen in a much broader context and critical light. The centrality of biopolitics, not just in our times, but in times of exigencies in general, struck me the most. I also liked the article by Ananyo on his visit to an exhibition showcasing the sonorous histories of Kolkata. The way he managed to draw larger linkages between the need to preserve such histories and our current fast-paced capitalist predicament was quite remarkable. The blog articles have also been portals for me to know the members of the Study Circle. For a very long time, I had not really known anybody because we could not meet in person during the pandemic. However, the articles provided me with insights into the psyche of the members. I never knew Satyam prior to his unfortunate demise. I could get a glimpse of his character and his ideas by reading his translation of Rahul Sankrityayan’s Dimagi Gulami. I also did not know Rajarshi initially when he joined, however, after reading his article on the Lokayata philosophy, I got a sense of how he could be as a person. And lastly, I have only written two pieces so far. It is a question of preference really, and I certainly prefer the recent article on corruption that I wrote earlier this year. 

Suchintan: I feel that the article that I wrote titled “The Shikari and the Empire: Jim Corbett’s Silence and the Ghosts of Tree Tops” is probably the most mature piece I have written for the blog because a lot of thought had gone into it. I read Jim Corbett as a child, and I was enamoured by his mythical stature. And I only viewed him as this legendary shikari at that time. It was only after reading Kenyan history, about the Mau Mau insurgency, the British policy and Corbett’s time there, that I began to arrive at a different perspective. You know, to think about Corbett in a historical moment can be very productive. And I tried to do that by connecting several thoughts that I had on the Mau Mau insurgency, on Corbett himself — as a man of his time and out of his time — and also on displacement and dispossession everywhere, including in Palestine, which is the note on which the article ends. Of late, I have tried to go back to my very initial writings. The first article that I wrote for the blog, the first article that is up on the blog after the ‘Aims and Objectives’ post is called ‘When the farmers came marching and students sang: A Participant Observer’s Guide to the Kisan Mukti March’. I like that because that is the only reportage that I did for the blog and that was the first reportage of its kind by the then nascent Study Circle too. I have this weakness for reportages, which is why my favourite piece is Debayan’s ‘Mask, Maker, and the Market’. One of our strengths is of course translation but the other strong pivot for the blog is reportage-based writing. Riya, Monjima, and Debayan have all contributed so many reportages for the blog. It goes on to show that we are a public-facing collective that is not just engaged in introspection and abstract thinking but is also conscious of what is happening around us. These reports have often been accompanied by documentary photographs too, which I think is an understated asset of our blog. Some of these photographs are so immediate and original that you would not find them anywhere else. And this is where our blog approximates the role of the alternate media — inquisitive and incisive.

Ananyo: Among the pieces that I have written, I like my latest piece called ‘Walking through the Blind Alleys of Culture’ the most. It is interesting to notice the shifts that have taken place in my writing since 2019. There was a time when I did not like my first article, but now I think it serves its purpose. Among the pieces by others, Suchintan’s essay on ‘The Making of the Anti-Nation’ is my favourite. It was a very mature piece coming from a second-year undergraduate student at that time. I also liked Shashi’s article on Kosambi and Satyam’s translation of Sankrityayan very much, too. I consider both to have been the best debut articles.

Pritha: I am really happy with a lot of translations that are coming out. Since I have come in, I think there have been three translations now. I appreciate the increasing literary inclinations of the blog. As far as my favourite blog posts are concerned there are several. I really liked Riya’s recent translation because it was about the social reception of and expectations around pain — themes that we discussed while reading Mahasweta Devi’s Rudali together, a couple of months back. But one article that really moved me was Diya Maria Abraham’s ‘Can Periyar’s politics be accepted in today’s anti caste discourse’ because of its style: how provocatively it starts off and then moves around Periyar’s discourse which is not so much about separate rights and spaces to grab, but calls for an absolute dismantling of the system. This is why neither Periyar nor his politics can be very easily co-opted. And that is what I think the blog also demonstrates with this particular article, because I think it actually takes you along a very critical way of thinking through what you have already read. That kind of intellectual indulgence is important.

Riya: The piece in which I think I had put in the most effort was my article on the Baghjan gas tragedy. It was right in the middle of the pandemic, and I could see the blowout from my house. I was experiencing the tragedy even though at a distance. While writing it, I think I felt like I had to ensure that my personal voice comes out in a way that works. I also contacted one of the individuals who was evacuated. There are ethical concerns involved in interviews like this, when you are speaking to a person just to gather information from them. I have never been entirely comfortable with the idea. It always feels a bit extractive. I often go back to the first article that Suchintan wrote on the Kisan Mukti March and also Debayan’s report on the Safdarjung Relief Drive that we carried out in early 2019. Those two were my introductions to the collective that we call the Study Circle and its blog. When I wrote my first article, I was not sure of how critical we could be of the establishment, but then Suchintan said that nothing was out of bounds. Our writings come from an engagement with the world, and not just from the texts we read. They come from a place of sensitivity towards what is happening around us. And I think that is important to me, and I think that it is central to our blog. There is also this piece by Monjima called ‘Society Spectacular’. When I read it for the first time, it did not click with me as such but then I read it again and again. Now I find myself associating this idea of grandeur with fascism wherever I see a spectacle. I think it left a mark.

Vighnesh: I would start with the pieces that I liked, one of the first that I was reminded of was Nabila’s ‘How Muslim is Muslim Enough’. It was about the expression of the Muslim identity in public spaces and the extent to which any Muslim person is allowed the scope for its performance. This had come out in the backdrop of the anti-NRC and CAA protests and that article really seemed like an important intervention to me because of its very refusal to give in to conformity while socially anchoring acts of resistance. Apart from that article, I really appreciated those based on reportage and first-hand fieldwork. Monjima’s recent article puts the experience of seeing the demolished settlements in Tughlaqabad in dialogue with the sort of legal-political framework within which such demolitions are happening. But it also goes beyond that because it establishes how even legality is a murky territory in this case and raises fundamental questions about the claims of different groups to urban spaces — whose labour sustains the city and who are not finding a place in it. Some articles, I appreciate for their very incisive political critique, for example the Suchintan’s assessment of the NEP. He takes various parts of that NEP document and reads them against the grain to see the implications and the possible motivations behind a lot of the things that were not very clear when the policy was adopted. And amongst my own writings, there is really only one to speak of: the one on admission policies and higher education in India. This was on the MCQ based entrance exams being instituted at that time, changing the entrance requirements for various colleges. Of course, now with hindsight, I see problems with the article, but I keep going back to it.

Rajarshi: It will be very difficult to pick one or two, but I have kind of selected three, first being Suchintan’s ‘The Shikari and the Empire’. I have grown up reading Corbett. Many people think that he was one more British Hunter, who just went around the forest, killing tigers, looking for game. But he was also a brilliant wildlife photographer, and he was somebody who documented a lot of things. Suchintan made that point despite pointing out Corbett’s indifference to the Mau Mau rebellion. Corbett’s role as a conservationist was handicapped by his own prejudices and his social location in the Metropole. The second one will be Monjima’s article, more so because one does not find much reporting on and from Tughlaqabad. The accompanying photographs also add value to her reportage.  And lastly, I would mention Shashi’s article on the legacy of Kosambi, which is a bit different because it is not very topical unlike most other blog posts, but he goes back to the 1950s to engage with Kosambi’s classical Marxism and asking how it might be relevant even today.

Suchintan: This has been a very productive conversation so far. Hoping to continue in that spirit, let me put forward a couple of questions — the first is perhaps a bit mundane, and the second might require you to pause and reflect for a moment. What do you think about the popularity and outreach of the Lokayata blog? What is your opinion on our blog as not just a medium of communication and an online platform but also as a space that we have created for each other? And lastly, what are we lacking in our blog?

Monjima: If we have more dedicated pieces on contemporary issues, they might attract more readership than the other posts. But we cannot just talk about contemporary matters only. We also have a theoretical emphasis, and we try to draw in meaningful connections, nonetheless. But I do really think that even if we are writing, say once a month and we are publishing blog posts, there are only a handful of readers who are actually making the effort to go through the whole thing. I do not think that our blog posts are very popular. That again does not have to say anything about the quality of the writings. But then when I think again, about popularity, I think we do need to come to terms with the fact that we want to reach out because when we are writing something, we are not just writing it for ourselves. Yes, the reading sessions are definitely for us. But if we are writing, that is not just for us and one of the main things to do in this regard is to reach beyond a niche audience. I mean, a niche readership definitely has its own, you know, attraction. I have nothing against it. But we cannot constrain ourselves. In terms of what we are lacking — sometimes when I go through the blog posts, they do display a lot of diversity, but that has its own drawback as well. There is not much cohesiveness — even though there are running themes — because of course we have quite different interests. I don’t really see this as a lacuna. I’m just saying that it has its own, you know, pros and cons.

Suchintan: I believe that the diversity of the blog is a strength that we must harness. It is fairly representative of the members and their eclectic interests. Ultimately, if one happens to read most of the articles, they can and do notice a common thread connecting them after all. And that is consistent with what the Study Circle stands for. It may not be that apparent, but it is not absent either. However, I do feel that the blog lacks interviews. I have some plans to address this shortcoming and will disclose them in the coming months, but I hope others would take an interest in conducting interviews too.

Tushar: In order to reach out to more people, we need to be more active on Twitter. That is where most academicians dwell nowadays (chuckles). We should also invite people from outside our Study Circle — young scholars and activists — to write for the blog. This would help us to venture out into uncharted terrains and we can benefit from such engagement. The blog is always a good platform for experimentation.

Ananyo: Due to the idiosyncrasies of social media, a lot regarding publicity is beyond our control. However, I feel that as a politically committed collective we should also be mindful of being more accessible to people at large. We must think more about our articles in terms of style. We should be in constant conversation with the broader progressive movement. On the question of what we lack, I feel that art or cinema has been underrepresented to a great extent. Probably literature has been represented more than arts or performing arts, because only two articles, by Arnaaz, are on dance, Debayan has one article on music and there is one by Monjima which deals with films a bit and my piece on Ghatak was specifically on films. So I think performing art, visual arts, paintings — paintings Rayan had covered to some extent in his article — are underrepresented to a great extent. I feel that we should undergo a ‘cultural turn’ of our own (chuckles) where we bring in criticality to bear on the culture of our times. On thinking about the blog as a space, I kind of touched upon it in my earlier ruminations. It is arguably a very comforting space. A while back, I was having this conversation with Suchintan that spaces like these often disintegrate due to skirmishes between members and we have avoided that very skilfully so far. That is a major takeaway. I know that our sex ratio is now very skewed and that needs to be worked on very significantly. However, there have been times when I personally have not been able to make sense of the world around me, but the Study Circle discussions have kept me sane. I feel that we should keep our blog thriving and keep building this space as an alternate institution. With the gradual demise of the public university in India, it should be our prerogative to keep these spaces of critical thinking alive. They can facilitate remarkable political solidarities among young thinking people.

Suchintan: There are a couple of other questions on my mind, but let me put them forward this way: what do you think when you are asked to contribute an article to our blog? What motivates you to write? Do you reflect on what is already there on the blog and what is missing? Do you end up writing exactly what you thought you wanted to or planned to write about?  These are of course connected to your opinion of the blog, which is not just an online platform or medium, but also a space — one that is distinct from the reading sessions and our meetings — as we have discussed so far. They do feed into each other, but the blog does have its own thrust. It has its own existence — a public-facing existence. So, to reiterate this slightly convoluted question, what do you think about the nature of the blog?

Pritha: I think the blog has matured a lot over the last few years. The editorial rigour has also improved. Moreover, despite all the lectures that we have organized so far and our newsletter that we have been running for almost a year now, I believe that the blog is our main voice — it is the mouthpiece of the Study Circle. It is how we primarily communicate with our audience. It offers a lot of latitude. We do want to reach out to a lot of people through the blog but not simply for the sake of becoming popular. The blog accommodates articles that are accessible and those that are a bit difficult—not difficult, rather those that cater to a different audience. So, very different articles can and do exist side by side on the blog, which makes it an interesting space. I really appreciate that. 

Riya: Whenever I write something for the blog, the urge to do so comes from within, it is a very personal motivation — the urge to be authentic, something that will give me satisfaction. The writing does not always go according to a plan, for example I wanted to write about the Partition Museum but ended up translating Yashpal instead in my most recent article. This sort of thing is possible because the blog has become very diversified now. But I do think we can diversify even more, not just our themes but also in terms of the thinkers we engage with, to write about those who are not very popular but have made important interventions nonetheless. Take them to the people, so to say, because the blog lets us do that. It allows us to experiment with both style and content and makes enormous room for mistakes and disagreements. That should count as its strength.

Vighnesh: My motivation for writing something for the blog is the opportunity to give a form to something that has already been on my mind for some time. One way of thinking about the blog is as an analogue to the reading sessions, where discussing the text suddenly makes you have a number of ideas about it that you would not have had otherwise. So, in a sense, the blog is also an opportunity to just have thoughts, but in a more organized way and a narrative form. The blog has an established readership and is an accessible avenue. It is almost as accessible writing a social media post or a personal blog, but it is not the same because of the rigour involved. The editorial process is very important. But I also want to make a general remark about certain articles or rather certain tendencies in certain articles. Of course, we have a very strong political dimension to the work we do and our thinking, and a lot of it is topical and responding to things that are happening right now. And perhaps there is sometimes a danger of letting that imperative set the parameters of discussion. There is a danger in letting the critical style overdetermine our engagement with the issues around us. It can be somewhat stifling. There is a lot of value in having a broad political orientation in our writings, but our actual engagement should be deeper, richer.

Rajarshi: My response will not be very coherent, but I would like to start at the beginning. When I was introduced to the Study Circle by Ananyo, it was in the middle of the pandemic. So, everything was online and very informally organized. I was just transitioning into college life and had not written a long piece before Suchintan pestered me into writing one for the blog. Of course, I was aware of the blog’s existence even before joining the Study Circle, but being a part of it was different. Looking back at my article on D.P. Chattopadhyaya and Lokayata philosophy now, I do not feel very good about it but I will not negate it either. It is the only article I have written for the blog so far and I can trace my personal growth since then. The blog really does not put any limit on what you can contribute. So, there are unlimited topics that can be written on. For the very same reason, there are innumerable themes that we have not yet covered. But it is also important to look at the blog as a reader. Writing is a two-way process. You do not jump off to write something out of nowhere but read first and gain a lot from the different perspectives on offer and our blog does offer a lot. It is rewarding to read what others have written and because the blog serves as a repository of our collective thoughts too, I feel that it is important for us to keep it thriving.

So far, the Lokayata blog has hosted the writings of twenty contributors, some of whom are no longer members of the Study Circle and a couple of whom had never been members in the first place. In a way, this blog is also an archive, representing the various associations of the Study Circle — past and present. This conversation took place between eleven present members, that is over half of our contributors were involved. Yet, we felt that it would be remiss of us if we did not reach out to at least one former member, whose article came up multiple times during our discussion. This is what our founding member Nabila had to say:

Lokayata, the official blog of the Sankrityayan Kosambi Study Circle, was born out of a collective effort to create a space for meaningful conversations about various issues by a bunch of first-year undergraduate students of the Delhi University. The blog provided us with an avenue to think and write about matters that were of concern to us — including but not limited to higher education, Indian politics, history and culture — in line with the aims and objectives of the Study Circle. As a non-institutional yet serious space, it became a forum for critical engagement with a myriad of issues by members of the Study Circle as well as their peers. Although I am no longer formally a member, I am nonetheless grateful for the experience and opportunities that I had in my time in reflecting and writing for the Blog. It is endearing and heartening to witness how, in a span of less than five years, the blog has expanded and grown along with the activities of the Study Circle and the lives of each of its members.

The online discussions were moderated by Ananyo Chakraborty and Suchintan Das, and transcribed by Ritabrata Chakrabarty, Rajarshi Adhikary and Shashi Singh. The transcribed text was edited for publication on the blog by Ananyo and Suchintan.