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| July 03, 2000 | ||
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| Kool
School Why Stephanians write-and why contrived literary trends are wrong By Ashok Malik FICTION OF ST STEPHEN'S
The book sets out to explain why a number of Stephanian undergraduates of the 1970s became writers and whether this constitutes something as grandiloquent as a "School of Writing". Thankfully, very few of the contributors take this noble task seriously. Rukun Advani puts it best in an entertaining piece, "When people start doing roughly similar sorts of things ... journals with a highbrow profile begin harassing reluctant critics to cook up some theory." Why did the fallow 1950s yield to a literary bloom a decade and a half later? As other institutions of learning (Calcutta, Allahabad) fell into a political morass and Delhi University gained a character of its own, much talent gravitated towards Stephen's and its neighbours. Better writers make this point more elegantly, amid a prolificity of references to a college mag called Kooler Talk. Lola Chatterji additionally emphasises the generation's "facility in using English" and "casual, 'laid-back' attitude" to the language. The lady seems to err, however, in her analysis of why the "moment has passed". It is not that "today's collegiates tend to be materialistic and thick-skinned". Maybe the cream of creative school-leaving India now goes to the campuses of America. Perhaps in a year or two some smart cookie will "cook up some theory" and the good Ravi Dayal will round up the usual suspects for another collection of essays. Postscript: The dangers of appropriation are not unique to Stephen's. Calcutta's Presidency, incidentally this reviewer's alma mater, prides itself on its economists. It produced P.C. "Gosplan" Mahalanobis. I rest my case. |
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 © Living Media India Ltd |
Yesterday
I carried this book to a friend's house. The friend, a Stephanian, turned
up her nose at the title. "Ha, I suppose it'll be bought by parents
of wannabe Stephanians," she sneered, "in preparation for the
admission interviews at the end of this month." "Stephanians,"
I muttered; they don't have a chip on their shoulder, they have a whole
Pentium III. Like my friend's deliciously wicked mood, this book is a
tribute to the great Stephanian quest for hierarchies. The principal
divide, of course, is the one that posits Stephen's and Stephania as the
Brahminical Mind against the Mandalised Udder, the lesser college (the
"c" in lower case is essential). You could call it simply the
"pathshaala", as Khushwant Singh does Hindu College in his
foreword.