Mayur Bora speaks at Sahitya Akademi writers' meet in Agartala: transcript

Key points

• He thanks the organisers and audience at the second day of the Sahitya Akademi meet in Agartala and jokes about nervousness and age.
• He cautions that he is a development banker and student of history and philosophy, not a literary scholar, so his talk will lack academic framing.
• He says he writes mostly in Assamese and that creative literature spans novels, short stories, poems and one-act plays.
• He draws on Eric Hobsbawm's idea of a long 19th century and a short 20th century to frame his periodisation.
• He takes 1979, the year of the Assam agitation, as a landmark and describes the violence, protest and sense of betrayal that followed.
• He stresses that turmoil is not the only narrative in post-1979 Assamese literature but is the theme he chose because of limited time.

Chapters

1. 0:00Opening remarks and humour about age
2. 1:06Caveat: speaking as a non-academic
3. 1:41Assamese creative literature and diversity
4. 3:16Hobsbawm's periods and the 1979 landmark
5. 4:36Turmoil, betrayal and contrasting narratives

Full transcript

0:00Thank you. I think before going to the restrictive confines of formality on this wonderful Sunday morning in Agarthala, Sukantabhavan, in a beautifully organized program by Sahita Academy, a respected chairperson, my fellow panelists, and the people in the audience, respected Rao Saab, Ramkumar Mukha Paddhaji, and all the poets and scholars and academics who have assembled in the Halod Auditorium on the second day, I think just taking a cue from what you say, I would like to say, because I am not getting box behind a lectern and getting with a seminarist.

0:34I am also not a seminarist. So when I have to read from some paper, I really get a lot of nervousness. So I have lots of butterflies in my stomach. So in order to drive out those butterflies, let me tell you one thing. When you say that I am a young man, at least my wife would be happy this afternoon, this evening when I go and get back home. I will tell her, because all along, in all the meetings, I always try to remember. When somebody tries to tell my A's, I remember what the first Prime Minister said, that gray hair should be respected and black hair should be suspected.

1:06That's Nehru's famous statement on a lighter wind. And I think in this beautiful morning, let me go, at the outset itself, let me give you a caveat. The caveat is extremely honest. My caveat is, I am, I am, it will be disquietingly. It is insufficient or inadequate if you expect me to find some scholastic underpinnings or academic overtones in my lecture. Because I am not trained to be a person who can appraise or examine literary merit from the perspective of a professor or a teacher.

1:41As a development banker, as an informal student of human behavior, and as a student of history and philosophy in Delhi University during my 80s, when I was truly young, when there was no hormonal holiday. So remembering those days, let me come back to the topic of literature today. Literature today is a very, very broad and all-encompassing subject. So definitely I'll be taking up my mother tongue as I write mostly in SMEs these days, although earlier times in Delhi, I was more regular in writing my English columns.

2:14So, in SMEs also when you talk about creative literature, it becomes quite difficult to define it in some restrictive straight jacket because when you say creative literature, it encompasses, it covers such a wide area of novels, novela, short stories and poems, not to speak of the one-act plays and other genres of literature that have really enriched not only SMEs literature, but the diversity of the poets and scholars who have assembled today underlined.

2:44and underscored the fact that we really celebrate that diverse spirit. And Sahita Akarni with this wonderful program, I think is a... Robust testimony to the fact that pluralism and diversity of the country has been celebrated by all of us, some knowingly and perhaps some unknowingly. Coming back to Asini's literature, I think the turmoil and turbulence, triumphal, sometimes over tragedies, the need, the narrative that's been written down by different scholars and writers, that I have picked up.

3:16And drawing inspiration from the British economic historian, Eric Hobsbawm, who said that 19th century is very long. 19th century did not start in 1801. It started in the year 1789 from French Revolution and continued up to 1914. That's the advent of the First World War. And the short 20th century of starting from 1914 and ending in disintegration of Soviet Russia, fall of communism and when famous celebrated author Francis Fukuyama wrote the end of the history and the last man.

3:49So my period of Assamist filtration will be extremely short. 1979 I have taken as a landmark year because that was the year of the famous Assam agitation when the student leaders and whole of Assam especially in Brahmaputra Valley rose in protest against some of the policies of infiltration at one point of time and immigration at other point of time from the other side of the border. We know nations and all their emerging communities. But as I think Saras Sudri and Mukhopadhyay sahab also yesterday was referring, we live in a fragmented time and when the question of social science, geography, history and other aspirational aspect and politics of primordiality that has come to define the political and socio-economic discourse not only in India but all throughout the world, I think those things need to be highlighted.

4:36So that's why I have taken up this particular aspect and I am just talking about the backdrop. The backdrop is inescapable. When you have lot of violence, when you have some people trying to non-violently protest against some of the policies and machinations of the government and some of the politicians cutting across party lines and after the failure and betrayal of that leadership of Assam hesitation, we have our own people. If I can in a very narrow sense, I can also straight-jacket myself in that we.

5:08Then we also show all those people, they come and occupy power. But then there is a saga of betrayal. Then we show the rise of secessionist tendencies of all those people who went to different parts of other countries and trying to wage a revolt, revolution in their world. Whereas the state said that it is nothing but an wanton in gracious acts of violence. So in those contrasting narratives, some of the writers, some of the academics, some of the novelists, they try to weave a story keeping that thing in background. But let me tell you one thing, it will be gross injustice to their merit, to their contribution. If I say that is the only narrative in Assamese Mitresar in the post-1979 period, that is not the only narrative. They are a contrasting narrative.

5:55But I am trying because of paucity of time, I have taken up the subject of turmoil and turbulence and how it can influence really the literature of that time.

Source and licence

Recording: File:Mayur Bora's Speech in Sahitya Akademi's meet 1.webm by Nalbarian (2021-06-01), via Wikimedia Commons. Licence: CC BY-SA 4.0. The transcript, summary and chapters on this page are shared under the same licence (CC BY-SA 4.0).

The transcript is machine speech-to-text by the TidyTools Audio & video transcriber; the summary, key points and chapters were written by Claude from that transcript. Both may contain errors: check the recording before quoting it.