Antiserious — Body, 2016
All about our Issue 1
THE EPICS — the national epics, if we must have tautology — are full of blind men. Blindness is, we know from the time we slip into the colloquial, a handy metaphor. We love to ascribe it as a lack in others, seeing — vision — being exclusive to us. Whether it’s the blind poets writing the epics or the blind men in them dependent on second hand reportage of events, the narration’s primary axis is violence. War, statehood, expansion and protection of national boundaries, all of these given gravitas by philosophical asides in the epics, a poetry that drew a large part of its energy from the violence that it described and analysed.
Blindness is now a transferred epithet.
As I write this, a mock-epic using the same tropes is being orchestrated near a margin where the Indian map ends, margins from where most of the nation’s bloodletting takes place. A blind government is conducting a nation building exercise by using blindness as contagion. Delhi’s gone blind and so must Kashmir. The Six Blind Men of Hindostan is now our national anthem. Where will our serious historians put this in the books they shall write about India — the blinded people of Kashmir?
In our nonfiction section, we carry an excerpt from Do You Remember Kunan Poshpora?, a book that documents a mass gang rape in two Kashmiri villages in 1991. Vaginas and eyes, the body, bodies — the state survives by dismembering its Kashmiri citizens. Also in our nonfiction section is another crime scene, where Nina Bhatt asks a very antiserious question in her essay: ‘Could the light falling on friends be sourced from elsewhere?’
In our poetry section, we have poems by Sophia Pandeya, Sujit Prasad, Arup K Chatterjee, Gaurav Deka, and Hemant Divate. I realise only now, while re-reading them, how they constitute different sub-genres of the antiserious. Hemant Divate’s poem, “mail address”, looks at the antiserious discourse around modern day communication, using the rhetoric of technology to end with the overwhelming anticlimax — ‘and I don’t even know his email id’. Sophia Pandeya’s “Flood” references Kashmir in the way only poetry can — ‘the Promethean eyes of the poem are witness’. Sujit Prasad’s companion poems, “Memory-Forgetting”, seemingly constructed as binaries, challenge the mainstream ideas of seriousness that surround these complicated political and neurological processes. The politics of memory is constructed around an axis of seriousness — Prasad challenges that by including neglected things like prayer into this space. Who’s ever considered prayer a serious political action? Here is Prasad: ‘But remember, prayer requires someone on the other side’. Arup K Chatterjee’s “Aloe Vera and Eucalyptus in Rain” makes us aware of how discourse around plant life is marginalised in narratives of seriousness: ‘There is only so much fiction that we can make with leaves’. And Gaurav Deka’s poem, “What is there to Love in a Man?”, maps love beyond the loudspeakers of socialised and serious romance: ‘where is the skill in desiring things that do not produce?’
Devashish Makhija’s story “On Silkworms and Interlocks” is constituted by his engrossed attention on things that rarely evince such narratorial curiosity. I have not read a story where the ‘breeze’ is paid such wholesome attention. Hence antiserious. Teresa Milbrodt’s story about a ‘tattoo artist’ derives its energy from its parable like narrative, but its beauty is to be found in the efficient refashioning of something as innocuous as shoes — shoes for the American President. Whoever’s paid any notice to that? We also have, again, a translation of a piece of fiction by Subimal Misra, a writer — anti-writer? — who has relentlessly written against the mainstream definition of seriousness. Sudeep Sen’s photo series on tree barks is as antiserious as it gets — on plant life, standing at the bottom of the hierarchy of seriousness. Gopal MS’s photo-essay is a study of the postures, the gait, the angles of bone and muscle that constitute the aesthetic that we have come to call the antiserious.
With a small team that constantly finds itself having to negotiate with the seriousness of the world, Antiserious is both overwhelmed by the large number of submissions that it has received and also apologetic for the occasional delay in response time. The move from being a weekly to a quarterly was also necessitated by the same logistics. We now read submissions only between August 1 and January 31.
We introduce a new segment from this issue: Not Trending.
The market survives on a currency of immediacy and Antiserious has, right from the very beginning, tried to work against the grain of market logic. Not Trending is a crystallisation of the curatorial work that my co-editors Debojit and Manjiri have been doing for Antiserious for the last one and a half years. And what better writer than the avowedly anti-market author Amit Chaudhuri to inaugurate this new section? In this short story republished from A Strange and Sublime Address (1991), we are allowed entry into snippets of conversation between a young male servant, Jadav, and his employers, a young man and his father. The story is narrated from the boy’s perspective, and yet it is titled “Jadav” (a technique Chaudhuri would tweak a decade later, in “The Man from Khurda District”, Real Time). Trained as postcolonial mechanics, an apparatus that leaves one blind to the humour in the kind of episodes that are described in the story, we find that stories of this genre, common in other languages in India, have almost no counterpart in the collections of stories that come out of English India. Antiserious chose this story because it made us laugh — we are serious like that.
Our ambition, to fulfil which we need the help of our readers, is to create an archive of the contemporary — these could be visuals and videos that document the everyday, sound recordings of hawker calls, doodles made during classroom lectures, or anecdotes that are edited out of mainstream conversation for their apparent lack of seriousness. Antiserious pledges — one must use at least one serious bureaucratic word in an editorial — to document and bring to you most matters of national and international unimportance.
Sumana Roy
co-founder and editor,
Antiserious
Contents
Fiction
Not Trending
Poetry
Poetry in translation
Nonfiction
Photo essay
