I said to a friend of mine recently that my sociological eyes developed much earlier than my writerly voice. I have been a reader forever. I learnt my alphabets pretty early, and had begun to read in both English and Bengali by the time I was three. I had written too. I wrote my first story in third grade, other short stories in high school, poems in college. But I never had this systematic urge to write in the way I do now. I would finish a poem in two days, and then I wouldn't think of setting pen on paper for another six months, and I would be perfectly fine with that. I wouldn't feel empty or cranky because I haven't written.
Also, I was a pretty active participant in the anti-SFI leftist student movement in Kolkata. Which meant, I needed to write leaflets, pamphlets, political analyses etc. These writings emerged from an urgent need to create a political community rather than a personal engagement with “creative” expressions through writing. During the same phase, I also began to write non-fiction essays on gender. Most of them were readings of cultural texts, although there was one which mixed a lot of memoir-style narrative strategies with political-sociological analyses. Although, I wasn't aware of these writing/narrative issues during that time. What I was more concerned about was this need to communicate a politics, a way of seeing.
What is more, I avoided the more writerly-literary types. I knew a fair number of them. Some of them I was friends with. But mostly, I preferred to keep a respectful distance from that “creative” crowd. Most of them seemed blissfully and pitifully devoid of any sociological observation, knowledge of social history, politics of writing and cultural production. And I conceived of myself as a politico, more than an artist/writer. Art was a personal thing. Something I enjoyed doing in my own time. Although, there was also this reality that I would be mostly take an AWOL from all my political activities (and school work, of course) during the second week of November. That is, the film festival week in Kolkata. Or during the days of Kolkata bookfair. So, basically the way I see it now, my early youth was a lot about this inability to create any kind of conversation between the aesthetic and the political. I think, there are complex historical reasons for it. It's impossible to delve into all of those in this blog post. But one thing I have been wondering, in the last few days, that if my being a girl played any role in my avoidance of the “aesthetic” and the “literary” during those years.
I saw myself, then, primarily as a reader, a critical recipient of art. Not as someone who is creating it.
I mean, by no means I am unhappy that it turned out this way. I don't think any writer worth his/her salt can write anything remotely worthwhile without being a keen observer of the “social” and the “political.” Or, if I have to break that statement, without an awareness of the fact that existence itself is a powered thingie, and as writers, in order to make sense, we need to be able to represent the ways in which that power works in forms. And then, of course, forms, in themselves are implicated within complex configurations of power. So on and so forth. If I hadn't spent nights writing leaflets no one really cared about, I don't think I would have ever felt the urge to write a story about a teenage girl's relationship to smoking. But still... why was I so evasive, and clearly nervous about letting out my “creative” side?
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