The Social Life of Modernism: Conversation, Literary Community, and Espionage in 1930s Calcutta

This talk from TORCH Global South Visiting Professor Supriya
Chaudhuri will be illustrated with images from the Parichay
archives and related documents and correspondence. Literary
communities - often intersecting with the more exclusive
segregations of coterie or group – are constitutive of the social
life of modernism. In India as elsewhere, modernist communities
were formed around a shared writing platform, that of the ‘little
magazine’, and a shared social expression, that of conversation.
One such community in 1930s Calcutta grew up around the literary
journal Parichay. Its members met regularly at the homes of the
journal’s editors for sessions of animated discussion that are
known in Bengali as adda. The group included not only poets and
artists, but also scientists, historians, sociologists, disaffected
British colonialists, nationalist politicians, and spies. The 1930s
was a period of literary radicalism, of shifting party allegiances
and political fault-lines, linked to the fortunes of the Comintern,
the rise of National Socialism and fascism in Europe, and the last
phase of the struggle for modern nationhood in India. At the same
time, the cosmopolitanism of the Parichay circle, responding to the
major currents of international modernism and to the idea of a
‘world literature,’ was co-extensive with its commitment to its own
‘provincial’ literary culture.