This is the text of Ashis Nandy's opening talk at the Almost Island Dialogues Three, between Indian and Chinese writers--Bei Dao, Li Tuo, Ouyang Jianghe, Zhai Yongming, Xi Chuan, Ge Fei, Shuang Shen and Kunwar Narain, Irwin Allan Sealy, Joy Goswami, Vinod Kumar Shukla, Rukmini Bhaya Nair, Vivek Narayanan and Sharmistha Mohanty, with Ashis Nandy.
I wanted to start with two brief excerpts, one from prose and one from poetry. The first I accidentally found in Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities.
“In the lives of emperors there is a moment which follows pride in the boundless extension of the territories we have conquered. And the melancholy and relief of knowing we shall soon give up any thought of knowing and understanding them. There is a sense of emptiness that comes over us at evening...It is the desperate moment when we discover that this empire which had seemed to us the sum of all wonders, is an endless, formless ruin, that corruption's gangrene has spread too far to be healed by our sceptre, that the triumph over enemy sovereigns have made us heirs of their long undoing.”
I want to offset this against a couple of lines from Kunwar Narain's poem, Kafka in Prague, translated from the Hindi by his son Apoorva.