The Department of English and Humanities (ENH) organised a series of two talks by Professor Subhoranjan Dasgupta of the Institute of Development Studies, Kolkata giving an opportunity to connoisseurs of literature to engage with the works of two great authors of our time.
One of the talks was on Nobel-winning German author Günter Grass titled “Outspoken Disgust to Warmest Love: Günter Grass’s Relationship with Kolkata” at GDLN Centre on Sunday, 22 July 2018.
The other was on Ekushey Padak recipient writer Akhtaruzzaman Elias titled “History’s Creative Counterpart and Dirge on Partition – Elias’s Khowabnama” in the ENH seminar room on Tuesday, 24 July 2018.
Professor Firdous Azim, chairperson of the ENH department, said Professor Dasgupta’s lecture on Grass reminded of a European school of writing of the 70s and 80s which was departing from the country’s syllabi and intellectual horizons.
She said Western writers always looked through a post-colonial lens when writing about the East, exoticising, eroticising and distancing it.
But here Kolkata becomes a trove of dialectic paradox, where many things come together, where Professor Dasgupta drew Grass’s vision of Kolkata and bridged it with Grass’s whole earth, she said.
In the second talk, Professor Dasgupta questioned whether great examples of creative literature, especially fiction, should be disregarded as “non-history” or be applauded as imaginative transcriptions of history.
He describes it as an attempt by writers to uncover the reality surrounding them as well as the reality of the past by threading together actuality with memory, events with legends and the struggle of the exploited with its mythic correlative.
He proposed calling this narrative suggesting the possible and imagined “metahistory”, saying that such fiction was not non-history per se but a historical narrative of another genre where the meaningful reality was given its poetic-rhetoric representation.