The literary genre of essays, especially the rich oeuvre of personal essays penned by Charles Lamb that I got introduced to in my young days as a literature student, had long back opened my eyes to the appreciation of the inherent human spirit, the human quest for survival, self-discovery, and redemption. Later, my reading of modern essayists in American nonfiction writing broadened my horizons with their rich tapestry of words depicting the quintessential human condition. As a writer of personal essays and memoirs myself in the later years, I have been curious to find out how the art of essay-writing would flourish in the pen of an Indian author, within the domain of Indian Writing in English.
When I got to read about the art of writing essays in my Creative Nonfiction coursework, the first aspect that struck me was the deep internalization of fact and fiction, factual truths and metaphorical truths of the essayist converging to culminate in a world of universal possibilities. When I started reading the essays of my fellow author, deeply sensitive poet and academician Amit Shankar Saha, in his poignantly compiled book of essays, intriguingly titled A Portrait of The Artist As A Young Essayist, it is this intense and deep-rooted amalgamation of his factual truths (the physical truths of his home in Kolkata, India, his childhood and his academic world) and the metaphorical representation of the universal truths about life and writing and the academic microcosm that he unfolds in his later essays which formed the essence of the book in my mind. Bearing an almost uncanny and thus, very alluring resemblance to the title of James Joyce’s classic work The Portrait Of a Young Man As The Artist, this book, as I read and re-read some essays, became a force to reckon with, as it stood out to me as an emblem of the author and essayist’s intellectual, cerebral consciousness.
Dr Sanjukta Dasgupta, renowned author, literary critic, and academician, has very aptly written in her blurb of the book that the contents of this collection encompass a whole gamut of human experiences ranging from ‘intellectual discourse to sensitive impressions’, ‘recorded with enthusiasm and critical understanding’. When one reads the more personal essays of Saha like Why Do I Write? in which he traces his metaphorical journey as a storyteller within the framework of literature or The Castle -- Franz Kafka, where he deconstructs the meaning and nuances of the image of the Castle in Kafka’s novel, it is his sensitive poetic mind that documents the various intimate particulars of his richly stimulating literary and personal experiences. In the same breath, essays in his collection, like Bright Star -- John Keats, in which he beautifully paints his imagination and creative vision while sculpting the wondrous images of Keats’ magnum opus Hyperion in his mind, or A Memoir as a Tribute, in which he essays the workings of his young mind when he discovered the scholarly mind of Professor Chinmoy Guha and understood the literary bridge between Bengal and France, he presents his intellectual consciousness in a subtle, yet inviting way, while clearly portraying his deep enthusiasm. He writes: “Almost a decade and a half passed by in the innumerable vagaries of life that smothered all precociousness … It has been nineteen years now and still that piece of paper has not ceased to delight. And ever so more, whenever I chance to see that man, who wrote that article, I feel simultaneously a teenage awe and a mature affinity.” In this portrayal of the nuances of his academic mind and his odyssey, his quest for varied life experiences shines on.
His voice is that of a truth-seeker sharing his authentic universal perspectives with vivid details of his surroundings and his intimate physical world
Saha has enriched the volume with two subtly different voices and styles of narration. While in his academic essays in the book, his voice is that of an eager, enthusiastic scholar with critical insights, in his more personal essays, his voice is that of a truth-seeker sharing his authentic universal perspectives with vivid details of his surroundings and his intimate physical world. In his deeply layered, incisive epistolary essay titled Tagore: Place and Space, where he addresses the revered professor, poet and scholar Dr Sanjukta Dasgupta, he presents his intense scholarly analysis of the post-modern perspectives of Tagore’s literary works and various scholars’ interpretations of Tagore, how the Nobel laureate poet of Bengal defines the binaries of his nationalistic vision and his assimilation into the Western ethos by virtue of his aesthetic sensibilities and his fine sense of creativity. In his use of language and diction, he is precise and scholarly here, with an analytical tone throughout. Again, in his academic essay My Three Guineas: Reflections on a Seminar, his intimate revelations regarding feminist authors Virginia Woolf, Simone De Beauvoir from the West and Ashapurna Devi from his own Bengali, Indian soil spring up, and in a stream-of-consciousness style, he goes on to dissect the various binaries and the deep-rooted connections between the inner worlds of Ashapurna and Simone, Virginia and her Indian corollary, including the various scholarly voices who analyze and interpret their disparate worlds and connect them with a bridge of understanding culture, society and feminism. It is not only feminism and diaspora studies on which he gives his critical commentary, but the oeuvre of his essays also consists of the study of humanities as a discipline and how he analyzes it as an ethnic marker embedded with “cultural peculiarities” (as mentioned in Bias against Humanities in Diasporic Indian Families).
On the other hand, in the personal essays like Remembering a Room and an Age, the essayist’s voice is more intimate and deeply connected with the pulse of his readers. He begins the essay with a beautiful expository style: “It was perhaps the room, the classroom at the farthest corner of the top floor. Or perhaps, it was my age, thirteen years, an unlucky number for some, but also the threshold between innocence and experience.” In both of these voices, the essayist opens up the windows to his inner world and his outer world for his readers in distinctly different ways.
Salman Rushdie had once famously quoted: “Literature is where I go to explore the highest and lowest places in human society and in the human spirit, where I hope to find not absolute truth but the truth of the tale, of the imagination and of the heart.” In my humble understanding, the essayist, like a fiction writer, while attempting to establish an effective and remarkable tone and style in nonfiction writing, has to find this truth of the human spirit, delving deep into his/her emotional world. In this collection of diverse essays, the author has delved into both the deeply intellectual, literary world which forms his consciousness and his emotional world where he transitions from a dreamy, creative teenager writing stories to a professor and literary artist. And it is his overall journey and the reflections that come with it that makes it a valuable read.
Lopamudra Banerjee is an author, poet, translator, editor with eight books and six anthologies. In fiction, nonfiction and poetry. She has received the Journey Awards (First Place category winner) for her memoir ‘Thwarted Escape: An Immigrant’s Wayward Journey,’ the International Reuel Prize for Translation (2016) and also International Reuel Prize for Poetry (2017) and other honors. Her poetry, short stories and memoir have been published in renowned platforms including Setu International Bilingual Journal, Different Truths, FemAsia, About Place Journal, Dhaka Tribune: Arts and Letters and ‘Life in Quarantine’, the Digital Humanities Archive of Stanford University.
