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A goodbye to storytelling

HOW do you say goodbye when people want you to go on? The community you created does not want to die but you realize the tiredness in you; you feel a sense of limits. Also, one needs to do other things, you have to draw a line. This July issue is the last performance of Seminar as an act of conversation and an attempt at storytelling. But one should not see it as a stark closure. Seminar remains an open house to ideas, hospitable to other experiments. One must remember a cycle is always a prospect of a reopening to other incarnations and other worlds.

The word seminar itself sounds old-fashioned, in fact official. A seminar in academics represents the bow tie of formal thought rather than a carnival of ideas. In fact, the first thing we did was to make the Seminar informal, less starched, an adda, a place of gossip, a commons of ideas. A world which debated scholarship but where academics were not the starched, corseted carriers of ideas. Ideas needed to dance, quarrel, invent a different theatre each month, a different performance of conversations. Every month was a number, each number a mnemonic of a dialogue, each year leading to a dozen festival of ideas.

For us, at Seminar, festival and friendship went together. Seminar was a pretext for friendship. Between conversation and friendship, there arose a community which became a commons of ideas. I remember a friend asking me why we did not submit to rules of Scopus. Scopus, we sensed, was productive, something out of the factory line. Seminar, we sensed was something informal and creative. Seminar was an opus of ideas opposed to the clericalism of the Scopus. An opus of ideas which reflected the best of civil society. It might be less professional but was far more intellectual.

Maybe it was, as one of us reflected, that we did not stay long enough in the university to understand the vintage nature of ideas. Ferment belonged to wine and ideas, and we toasted life with it. As Mala put it, ‘I was thrown out of Miranda House. The only classes I attended were the long investigations of the Shah Commission. This was my diploma to talk freedom and all Seminar did was to debate freedom.’ Emergency was the turning point and the Emergency showed the power and poignancy of a civil society of ideas. To alter Descartes a bit, we differ therefore we are. Being as difference was an affirmation of plural society. We hoped Seminar captured the poignancy and laughter of ideas.

Also, dissent meant hospitality, it was an open invitation to difference. An affirmation of debate of left, right, and liberal in one neighbourhood of ideas that we called a journal. In one location, we could read a Romila and Ashis Nandy and Arun Shourie and George Fernandes, where each would affirm and contest the other. In that sense, hospitality and dissent were siblings. Each made the other possible, so Seminar became the monthly journal of dissent and difference, a panchayat of ideas with themes like the future, the constitution, federalism, even the technology missions, each rubbed shoulders like an anarchic syllabus. Each month, an affirmation of fresh ideas. Each month saw a different lot of friends and scholars celebrating the world they studied and shared. Seminar was a celebration of liberty, equality and plurality and diversity became the signature of our world. What might have begun as a club, quickly became a commons of concepts, stories, and ideas. Seminar became an informal history of India and displayed our obsession with democracy. We realized what kept India playful was democracy.

It did not make us always popular but it made others realize that we respected difference and valued friendship. Our list of friends seems almost endless. Some issues have literally become a memorial to those who have left us. Seminar was a mnemonic of an India of ideas and everydayness. We felt we were archivists and storytellers, trustees of memory. Seminar affirmed authorship and the creativity of readership.

One is reminded of Mario Vargas Llosa’s, The Storyteller. It is a tale of a tribe in the Amazon where a group kept walking perpetually, reciting its creation myths. The belief was that the tribe would die the day their stories ceased. Today, we feel like that tribe, only we want a new generation of walkers, a new generation of storytellers. Seminar in that sense examined all the cherished myths and shibboleths of modern India.

A friend of ours claimed that the magic of Seminar lay not in the power of the monthly text, but in the orality of the process, the jugalbandi of ideas, struggling to refine and define an issue. Gossip as orality was fundamental to text as an issue. Violence was a repeated theme and the varieties of violence from rape to riot was subject to scrutiny. Sometimes one feels that the oral history of Seminar, the gossip of work that went into each issue, from the quarrels of who to invite, to the strange loneliness of editing, needs to be told. This final letter should have been more like a graphic novel, capturing a day in the life of Seminar, chronicling the craft of ideas that have accompanied every issue. Seminar for us was a cottage industry of ideas with the annual issue as the afterthought of the year. The annual captured the best and worst of India. What was wonderful was legends like Amartya and Manmohan could rub shoulders with an anonymous student, yet both could feel a part of the fraternity of evolving ideas.

For a journal like Seminar, an aesthetics of closure becomes necessary. But closure is always a reopening. Seminar should now become a living archive of quarrelsome hypothesis, a gossip house for a more creative future. Seminar as a living memory, not as a monument of memorial, now becomes an act of trusteeship, a heuristics for continuity between the past and future.

One needs to go beyond memory to the creation of the new. Somewhere now a simulacra of Seminars is taking place waiting to be christened. We wish it well. We would be proud to be a part of a such a future. A playful world of surprises. We know the work we did was incomplete, we need a more vibrant theory of peace, a more experimental sense of democracy, a more ruthless chronicle of India dreaming everything from childhood to the future. Dissent and pluralism should always declare a readiness for new futures. It is time to celebrate the past as a toast to the future. We thank you all who joined us in this pilgrimage of ideas, our friends, our critics, our readers, who made Seminar a liveable, lovable world.

Shiv Visvanathan