‘The Amateurs’: Saikat Majumdar’s book argues that reading can be a route to claiming selfhood

If you recall Jhumpa Lahiri’s Ashoke Ganguli, growing up in Calcutta in the late 1950s, devouring “all of Dickens” and as much as he could of “newer authors” like Graham Greene and Somerset Maugham, saving up money to buy these coveted books from stalls on College Street; reading The Brothers Karamazov, Anna Karenina, and Fathers and Sons, as he walked the noisy, busy streets of Chowringhee and Gariahat, you have met already, a fictional counterpart of Saikat Majumdar’s amateur reader.

Driven by their “unruly imagination”, distant from scholarly discipline, reading, mostly, for the joy of it, this amateur is closely linked to the one that appears in Majumdar’s 2017 essay titled “The Critic as Amateur”, where he draws a comparison between the “professionally trained reader” who belongs to an organised community that has access to systemic knowledge and archives of study and the reader who lacks “not only expertise in these forms of knowledge, but the means to access them and, moreover, a full sense of the importance of this very apparatus.”

The lack of “expertise” does not stand in the way of either the consumption of the text or the act of meaning-creation: “If the text is linguistically available to her, it is essentially open to interpretation by…

Read more