Reading Time: 3 minutes
Amit Shankar Saha’s “A Portrait of the Artist” explores his journey from student to scholar through essays, memoirs, and criticism. A review by Sutanuka, exclusively for Different Truths.
Amit Shankar Saha is an award-winning short story writer, poet and academic. The title A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Essayist is intriguing for it reminds us of James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man first published in 1916, the story of a semi-autobiographical coming-of-age narrative that follows Stephen Dedalus’s intellectual and emotional development – the journey from childhood to adulthood, exploring his struggles with family expectations, religion, and the scholarly pursuit of artistic expression. “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Essayist” is a collection of 36 essays that “maps the young essayist from his school days to his days at the university as a doctoral scholar, and his emergence as a poet, curator, and assistant professor at a university,” writes Sanjukta Dasgupta. The collection is an eclectic mix of memoirs, personal essays, and criticism that expresses a range of ideas and emotions serving as a conduit bridging theory, art, and criticism.
The first essay “My First Writing Experience” sets the tune to the collection as it successfully captures the tryst of a young boy with writing/destiny the – ‘germinal experience which has birthed all that has come afterwards’. The famous American photographer Mary Ellen Mark had once observed “In a portrait, you always leave part of yourself behind”. In all the essays of the collection under review, we find that Saha has left part of himself behind—taking his time to allow his writing to bloom and flourish. He reminiscences, “While doing my graduate studies in Mathematics the world turned Kafkaesque and I knew that I was not doing what was my vocation. I had a sense of non-belonging not because I liked mathematics less but because I liked literature more” (“The Castle—Franz Kafka”). “Remembering a Room and an Age” where innocence-laden pranks—a slice of the past is crafted with care and written with flair.
Some essays “Revisiting Amartya Sen’s Lecture on “Justice”, “Symposium on Literary Activism”, “How a Conference Made Me Ponder”, “Tagore: Place and Space”, “Post Postcolonialism”, “At the Mohini Mohan Bhattacharya Memorial Lecture” help the readers delve into how seminars, symposiums lectures by iconic literary figures shape expression, identity, and desire, reflecting on the perpetual process of constructing and reconstructing literary theories and criticisms. These recordings of intellectual discourses will motivate young researchers to find their calling.” Sudeep Sen’s ‘Love in the Time of Corona’ is a fine essay where Saha has wielded his pen like a master craftsman –unerringly capturing the essence of Sudeep Sen’s poetic experiences and his emotional responses to them—“In ‘Love in the Time of Corona’ Sudeep Sen Meditates but the reader too can ruminate with him for this is the time for contemplation when the world is passing through a time like never before”.
“The Psychological Sense of Exile and Alienation: A Selection from Anita Desai’s Fictional Characters” projects a modern sensibility with clean crisp ideas, razor-sharp analysis, and a play of ratiocinations pulling the readers right into the critical matrix. In another essay “Rabindranath Tagore and the Paradox of Modernity” Saha urges to extract the maximum meaning from every component of Tagore’s concept of modernity and its associated paradoxes. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Essayist provides a lens through which readers can examine personal and artistic identity intersections. The volume is surely going to influence subsequent generations of writers and thinkers. Its exploration of individualism, artistic rebellion, and the tautness between tradition and novelty will continue to resonate in contemporary discussions of the identity and self-discovery of the artist as a young essayist.
Cover photo sourced by the reviewer.
