Biswabrata Goswami
KRISHNAGAR, 5 FEB: Is autobiography ever the truthful map of a writer’s life, or merely a carefully edited tale shaped by memory, desire and silence? This provocative question lay at the heart of a one-day international seminar organised by the Journalism Certificate Course at the University of Kalyani, which brought together scholars and writers from India and abroad to interrogate the fraught relationship between life and literature in Bengali and world writing.
Inaugurating the seminar, noted expatriate fiction writer Nabakumar Basu set the tone with characteristic candour and irony. “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 claims fidelity to lived experience, does it inevitably distort the deeper truth of creativity?
Extending the debate beyond Bengal, Professor Barun Jyoti Choudhury of Assam University highlighted that autobiography is not merely a personal ledger but a powerful artistic method of preserving time and society. Drawing from writings rooted in North-East India, he observed that tea gardens, hills and the region’s rugged tranquillity often function not as passive backdrops but as living philosophies. “Alongside personal memory, such narratives emerge as invaluable, living documents of national history,” he said, noting that similar lines of research are currently underway in London.
Reflecting on the waning inclination towards life-based writing, Dr Sumita Chatterjee, Associate Professor at Banaras Hindu University, challenged the notion that autobiography is a Western literary inheritance. She cited Ardhakathanak (1641), the autobiographical verse narrative by Banarasi Das Jain, a merchant from Jaunpur during the Mughal era, as compelling evidence that self-writing is deeply embedded in 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.
