‘The Amateur’ by Saikat Majumdar: The evolution of a radical rule-breaker

Though literary scholars have since challenged Huxley’s appraisal of Wordsworth’s relationship to nature, almost every school student in the former British colonies forced to read The Daffodils (sometimes called I Wander Lonely As a Cloud) in English literature classes is aware of the irony of doing so.

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For most of them, sweating under the slowly rotating fans in stuffy schoolrooms of tropical Asia, Africa or the Caribbean, summer hardly evokes images of pleasant excursions into meadows. Yet, reading Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Dickens, Shakespeare and other British literary giants was essential for the colonial subject in the 19th and 20th centuries. It was the key tool for acquiring “white masks" , to borrow a term from French Afro-Caribbean philosopher Franz Fanon, that was the primary aim of a colonial education system. Fanon uses the metaphor of “white masks" to describe Black people or people of colour adopting the behaviour and culture of white people in a racist society to gain more acceptance.

While there is a vast and growing body of literature on the colonial education project, what has often been overlooked by academic or non-academic researchers is the student who rebelled against this education system. In his new book, novelist and academic Saikat Majumdar traces the genealogy of the students in the colonies and post-colonial nations who rebel against this system of education.

“My dream in this book has been to show that a certain kind of reader was inspired to seek their own eclectic, often confused and misdirected adventures with books—particularly books from the metropolitan west that were divorced from their own immediate reality," he writes in the introductory chapter. He describes such readers, who develop their own pedagogy, as a result of choice or circumstance, as the amateur.

There are several reasons for Majumdar’s interest in this figure. First, the increasing recognition within professional and academic circles of the peripheral amateur as central to literary criticism. In many ways, the amateur provides a subjective perspective on the vast canon forged through forces of imperialism. Drawing upon the works of Paolo Freire, bell hooks and Gayatri Chakravarty Spivak, Majumdar asks: “What happens when those who are variously oppressed or excluded seek out texts to read, primarily from Western humanities?"

Majumdar also addresses the growing popularity of amateurs and distrust of professionals, possibly best characterised by the re-election of US President Donald Trump, who has branded himself as an amateur politician. Finally, the amateur also represents a radical possibility. Citing Palestinian-American philosopher Edward Said, Majumdar writes: “Amateurism implies disaffiliation with interests, lobbies, and institutions of power that seek to co-opt intellectuals to the hegemony of state and capital".

Developments in the world of academia, especially the humanities, has informed much of Majumdar’s previous work—both fiction and non-fiction. His last three novels, The Scent of God (2019), The Middle Finger (2022) and The Remains of the Body (2024), are all set on campuses or feature students and academics. While the first one is on a school campus on the outskirts of Calcutta (now Kolkata), the second is on the campus of a private university similar to Ashoka University in Haryana, where Majumdar himself teaches. The Remains of the Body is not set on a campus, but one of its key characters, Kaustav, is a postdoctoral scholar.

In his non-fiction work, too, Majumdar has focused on higher education in India, literary criticism and post-coloniality. In Prose of the World: Modernism and the Banality of Empire (2013), he explored how 20th-century modernist literature was a product of social boredom. He followed it up in 2018 with College: Pathways of Possibility that explored and analysed recent developments in higher education in India. Majumdar writes on both literature and higher education in The Telegraph and The Times Higher Education, among others. Along with US-based academic Aarthi Vadde, he is also the co-editor of the academic anthology, The Critic as Amateur (2019).

Thus, in many ways, The Amateur is a crystallisation of many of Majumdar’s intellectual concerns over the years. In its thematically arranged chapters, he traces, through archival research, the lives and careers of intellectuals in India, South Africa and the Caribbean, all former colonies of the UK. He interrogates what the books that are defined as classics or as part of the canon by the Empire mean to these readers on the margins. Why is reading fetishised by those denied the opportunity to read? Why is education prioritised by communities that are “most sharply deprived of it"? And finally, what does it mean to read from the margins?

While the book narrates many remarkable stories, one that really drives Majumdar’s central arguments home was Trinidadian-Canadian poet Dionne Brand’s description of discovering The Black Napoleon, a book on the 18th-century Haitian slave revolution. Devoid of the cultural and historical context of the book, Brand reads it from a purely subjective perspective, leading to an intellectual awakening that challenged her colonial education. Such an accidental moment of discovery, Majumdar argues, results in the self-making of a poet whose own work “burn the skin and wake readers to the world they had not known they inhabited". Majumdar compares this incident from Brand’s life to Indian writer Pankaj Mishra’s reading of a critical text on French writer Gustave Flaubert, which opens up affective insights into caste and discrimination in rural Uttar Pradesh.

Such a reading, Majumdar argues, is completely an antithesis of professional literary criticism, which places a text in its historical and cultural context. However, instead of rejecting such a reading—as, perhaps, many professionals would do—he makes a radical argument for “the two to meet". Majumdar celebrates and champions the generation of post-colonial readers and writers who found Wordsworth’s Daffodils alienating, but did not reject it outright. The strange flower served as a symbol of the more cosmopolitan cross-current of intellectual stimulation to which these amateurs were deprived any access because of institutional or circumstantial reasons.

So will the amateur and the professional sheath their daggers and join ranks? It remains to be seen. However, Majumdar does make a compelling case for both sides to acknowledge each other. It is, in fact, not only in this book that he does so. His entire writing practice seems to substantiate such a possibility.

This is important in our contemporary world, where, on the one hand, new cultures of digitally consuming text are constantly challenging traditional reading practices. On the other hand, there is growing suspicion of the professional critic, even a rejection of their expertise, in the creative industries. This book is not only an investigation into the past of the practices of non-professional literary criticism—it’s a vision of an exciting, albeit uncertain, future.

Uttaran Das Gupta is an independent writer and journalist.

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