Kalyani University hosts international dialogue on life, self and autobiography

Is autobiography really a faithful map of a writer's life, or is it just a story that memory, desire and silence have been carefully edited? This provocative question was the topic of discussion during an international seminar of a day, organized by the Journalism Certificate Course at the University of Kalyani. It was a platform where scholars and writers from India and abroad got together to dissect the complex relationship between life and literature in Bengali and world writing.

During the opening of the seminar, well known expatriate fiction writer Nabakumar Basu, with his characteristic honesty and irony, set the mood for the event. “Autobiography in literature is a kind of gulgappo,” he remarked, questioning the very premise of truth in self-writing. “If someone has three love affairs after marriage, will all of them find a place in an autobiography?” he asked, triggering animated debate among students and scholars alike. Basu argued that life-based literature is far rarer and more demanding than commonly assumed, both in India and in the West. Referring to Samaresh Basu’s unfinished attempt to fictionalise the life of sculpture Ramkinkar Baij in Dekhi Nai Phire, he pointed out the immense emotional and temporal cost of such endeavours. “Not everyone bears the responsibility of writing life as literature,” he said, adding that even while living in England, he continues to grapple with this challenge.

The discussion naturally returned to Rabindranath Tagore’s famous assertion — ‘Kobire pabe na tar jiboncharite’ — questioning whether the poet can ever truly be found in the chronicle of his life. If autobiography is ever thought to pledge truthfulness to lived experience, then is it a distortion of the truth in art creation that it has to do it?

Taking the debate further, beyond Bengal, Barun Jyoti Choudhury, Professor of Assam University, pointed out that autobiography is not just a personal account but a creative artistic practice capable of recording time and society. Based on the literature of the North, East region of India, he said that tea gardens, hills, and regional rugged tranquility are often sources of living philosophies rather than being passive scenic backgrounds. Besides personal memory, such works turn out to be invaluable, living documents of national history, he added, pointing out that similar research is being done in London.

Contemplating that there is a gradual decrease of interest in writing based on one's own life, Sumita Chatterjee, PhD, Associate Professor at Banaras Hindu University questioned the idea that autobiography is a literary inheritance from the West. She referred to Ardhakathanak (1641), the autobiographical poetic work of Banarasi Das Jain, a merchant from Jaunpur at the time of Mughals, as a solid proof that self, writing is an integral part of Indian literary tradition.

The seminar also featured insightful interventions by Professor Nandini Bandyopadhyay, head of the department of Bengali at the University of Kalyani, and Professor Sukhen Biswas, Director of the Journalism certificate course. Nearly 400 students and researchers attended the event, alongside academics including Professor Prabir Pramanik, Dr Tushar Patua, Dr Shyamsree Biswas Sengupta and Dr Piyush Poddar.

By the end of the day, the seminar had firmly established that autobiography, far from being a simple recounting of life, remains one of literature’s most complex and contested forms — suspended between truth and art, memory and imagination.