In Search of Creative Commons: Crisis, Catastrophe, and Responsive Literature in India

This book contains selected papers presented at the international conference titled 'In Search of Creative Commons: Crisis, Catastrophe, and Responsive Literature in India', held at the Abid Ali Khan Centre for Digital Archive and Translation of Cultures, Gour Mahavidyalaya (College) from 31 August to 2 September, 2023 in collaboration with the Department of English, Dr. Meghnad Saha College. The conference was funded by the Indian Council of Social Science Research (ICSSR).

In this book, three basic questions are considered. First, as humans try to live in-and-through catastrophes and exceptional situations in the contemporary world, what new perspective can literature as a creative form offer for healing and restorative purposes? Second, what new idioms and narrative styles, massive crises such as famine, partition, migration, the decimation of forests, rivers, and the disappearance of villages held up in creative articulations in colonial and postcolonial times in India? Can these representations be called “responsive literature”? Further, and this is the third major contention of this book, how can responsive literature be thought of as a conceptual category? What new transdisciplinary optic should be adopted to go beyond the limits of the “literary” and eventually include the “non-literary”?

The objective of these discussions was to contribute to the larger discursive literature on disaster studies, which we believe has been excessively hegemonized by concepts from the West. By bringing in indigenous ideas from Bhasa Sahitya (language and literature), the images of samaj (society), samata (equity), and ahimsa (non-violence), the existing literature on catastrophe and crisis studies can finally be decolonized.

Dhritiman Chakraborty, apart from teaching Literature in English as an Assistant Professor, working as Joint Director of Abid Ali Khan Centre for Digital Archive and Translation of Cultures, Gour Mahavidyalaya, University of Gour Banga, India, he is interested in traditions of postcolonial political thinking, decolonial thinking, literary and social imaginaries of the non-West and critical thinking from the Global South. He completed his doctoral research from a premier research center. He adopted a unique aesthetic and cultural optic to study postcolonial dissent in his doctoral work. He received invitations to present his research in Brown University (USA) & Tsinghua University (China), among others. He is jointly editing a book on Majoritarianism in South Asia, forthcoming from Sage in 2024.

Sanchayita Paul Chakraborty is now working as Assistant Professor in English and as the Director of Kailashbasini Centre for Women’s Studies in Dr. Meghnad Saha College. As a Doctoral Research Scholar in the Department of English, Bankura University in India, she has submitted her Ph.D. thesis on the critique of Hindu Brahminic Patriarchy in Bengali Women’s writings in the colonial Period. Her research interests include women’s studies, decolonial studies, gendered intellectual history, and translation studies. She is also working as Translator in various literary projects. She has published books, articles, and translations in Bengali from reputed publishers. She has also worked as Reviewer for Springer and for other reputed journals.

Mukunda Mishra is Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography and designated Vice-principal of Dr. Meghnad Saha College in West Bengal, India. He completed his postgraduate studies in geography and environmental management at Vidyasagar University and holds a Ph.D. in geography from the same university. He has more than 10 years of hands-on experience in dealing with development issues at the ground level in various districts of eastern India. Dr. Mishra has, in his credit to publish one monograph and six edited research volumes from the house of Springer-Nature, and he has more than thirty research articles and book chapters published in the journals and books of international repute.