Humanitiesunderground (HUG) is a three-year-old website, an initiative to deliberate on the various trajectories of humanities triggered by the global phenomenon of arts and humanities losing institutional funding to technical streams. The website features a range of nuanced write-ups across a range of categories. Culling out some of the essays from it, the initiative’s co-founder and Associate Professor of English at the Delhi University, Prasanta Chakravarty, has put together a volume titled “Shrapnel Minima, Essays from humanitiesunderground”. In an interview here, Chakravarty elaborates on the contents of the book as its editor. Excerpts:
When is the book coming? How many essays from the website will it have?
Come October, the book should be out, first in the domestic market by Seagull, India and then through the imprint of Chicago University Press globally. It records the essays from the first two years after humanitiesunderground came into being in 2011. So, you will not get the current essays which have to be part of a latter volume. We have collated 31 essays, three short stories, four sets of poetic ventures and three interviews, with which this volume concludes.
What are the selection criteria?
As I looked closely at how HUG has evolved over the past few years, I could see some patterns emerging. The core overlapping area is of course literature and the political within the context of a new emerging global order. Aesthetic pursuits are considered to be elite and removed from the socias and politics is considered either as practical domain of professional career building or idealistically as do-gooding and ‘taking care’ of our loved ones, community or flock. This is a rut. So, as an editor I assiduously avoid claims of correctness or radicalism. HUG is invested in looking at the forms in and through which our artistic endeavours respond to our political travails and vice versa. So, I have used a trope of the minimal in the introduction in order to describe this process at the level of editorial selection.
The first section is therefore, ‘Appreciations.’ Each writer comes to the subject at hand with a sense of positive reception and indebtedness to his subject. The essayists appreciate a song or a film or a movement with love and positivity but without losing the sharpness of purpose.
Reflective, absorbed writing may not be always purely inward-looking, especially if such reflection wishes to capture and complicate a time and a milieu. So the next set of essays comes under ‘Reflections.’ Followed by ‘Propositions’ — a section which in many ways is the fulcrum on which HUG stands: a consciousness of the new breakthroughs in humanities studies, finding ways and means to grapple with these changes and to sieve what is genuinely new from the chaff.
Finally, ‘Distributions’ deals with some pressing cultural trends, for instance, public religion, race, education, childhood, population, sex and autonomy, the idea of the cult, political iconography, media and so on. This section historicizes our time directly.
Then, at the end, we have fiction, poetry and the depth interviews.
How well-received is the website?
I sometimes get mails from Argentina or Uganda as also from the tiniest of places in India. There are dedicated readers but we are also gaining new readership — everyday. I am not particularly inclined to make it a super-highway with many hits — though some posts have garnered worldwide attention. It is a niche area and I would be happy to have engaged, critical, wry, interactive readers.
We now have around 20,000 readers of every HUG webpage posts just from Facebook.
Also people post kindred concerns about humanities all the time — about policy, nature of the avant garde aesthetics, political domain of the humanities, theoretical breakthroughs, passionate poems and fiction, underground artistic activities and so on — all these are involved posts.
We have been able to wrest a space for arts that is not doing social science but is speaking to other disciplines all the time. In an amorphous manner. One has no illusion of any romantic community here. The word alternative has scant meaning.
HUG is a contingent space; its work done it has to fold.
