10 Years of Literary Activism: The Pursuit of Delight and Melancholy as an Alternative to Post-Globalisation Euphoria
Date: 24 October 2025
Time: 5 PM - 7 PM
Venue: Hall 1, 4th Floor, KCC
Marking a decade of Literary Activism, this special session of Fridays at KCC celebrates a critical alternative to globalisation’s literary buzz. Originating in annual symposia from December 2014, developing a website (literaryactivism.com), and now operating a publishing imprint at Ashoka University’s Centre for the Creative and the Critical, Literary Activism carves out space for conversation among writers, artists, translators, publishers, and academics. Distinct from conventional activism, the initiative is a form of serious play, encouraging creative exploration over immediate outcomes. Its project aims to free critical discussion from both academic custodianship and the routine celebrations of book launches, making room for dissent, delight, and melancholy in literary practice even as globalisation narrows opportunities for genuine engagement in festivals and conferences.
Speakers, Amit Chaudhuri, Samik Bandopadhyay, Ranajit Das, Oindrilla Maity amd moderator Madeleine St John, will explore the moorings of such a space and how globalisation has reshaped literary life across languages.
ABOUT THE SPEAKERS
1. Amit Chaudhuri is one of world literature’s great experimentalists, a novelist, poet, and musician whose works radically reimagine form and voice while refusing the spectacular. Across eight acclaimed novels and celebrated non-fiction Chaudhuri revels in precision and lyricism, mapping the aesthetics of everyday life from Kolkata to Oxford. He is a recipient of the Commonwealth Writers Prize, Sahitya Akademi Award, Rabindra Puraskar, the Infosys Prize, and the James Tait Black Prize, and his restless reinventions have inspired readers, critics, and composers worldwide. His searching prose and radical questioning of tradition redefine what the contemporary novel and art can be.
2. Samik Bandopadhyay is a legendary Kolkata-based critic whose rare insight and intellectual range have profoundly shaped Indian film, theatre, art, and literature. With a career spanning decades as scholar, publisher, editor, translator, and mentor, he has illuminated the complexities of modern Bengali and Indian creativity introducing generations to the radical possibilities of translation, power, and performance. Bandopadhyay's devotion to collecting and reading has built an extraordinary library, now a public treasure, and his influence reverberates in surreptitious ways through major cultural institutions in Bengal and in India.
3.Ranajit Das is an eminent Bengali poet, known for his authentic urban voice and striking originality. He has published twelve books of poems, two collections of literary essays and one novel. His poetry collections include Amader Lajuk Kabita, Ishwarer Chokh, Sandhyar Pagol, Asamapta Atimya etc. He’s a recipient of the Rabindra Puraskar (2013), Birendra Chattopadhyay Memorial Award (1994), Paschimbanga Bangla Academy Award (2010) and Ramanath Bhattacharya Literary Foundation Award (2019).
4. Oindrilla Maity is an independent art curator and art historian. She has curated exhibitions beyond the paradigms of the commercial gallery. Her major contributions lie in her conversion of the exhibition spaces as sites of resistance. She holds a PhD in Culture Studies from Visva-Bharati, Santiniketan, and has graduated from the Gwangju Biennale Foundation International Curators’ Course, Gwangju, South Korea.
