The 10,000 Moment: HUG Pauses. To Look Back & Ahead
humanitiesunderground “There are two kinds of poets. Poets and local poets. Those who write in big and reputed magazines are poets. The rest are local poets.” Prasun Bandyopadhyay, Poet’s Preface, Collected Works This is a fine moment. On facebook, we are now 10,000 of us, and counting. And many more outside: those who routinely visit, interact and send us feedback. We receive good wishes and messages from the tiniest of towns in India as well as from such far flung places like Uganda and Chile. We started with 300-odd kindred souls. Then this platform gradually became animated and acquired a life of its own. It grew far wider in scope and participation than we had ever imagined. This continues to surprise us pleasantly. This is a space for all of us and this is an opportune moment for us to collectively acknowledge, without being self-congratulatory, that we have, in fact, been silently doing something here, howsoever small its scope might be. And that we are growing and evolving. Disagreeing on details about the many ways one can think about the humanities as a vocation, as a passion and as a way of living, but keeping the argument going—an impulse we had felt in the originary instant (and still feel) that certain other kinds of people—powerful people—are ill at ease with. These people abhor the flight of imagination and fear the biting edge of invested analytic thought. But this is also possibly a moment to take stock of things. For once, we are also mildly worried about the growing numbers on this platform. Does it take away from the underground spirit which is also kind of sectarian in temperament? And yet it is democratic to get on board as many members as possible. We simply wish every single one of us to have a larger sense of what humanitiesunderground stands for. And we think it is incumbent on us to clarify that aspect anew, to and for ourselves. This moment of introspection and speculation comes after taking into consideration what we have learnt over the past few years, once the site was open to everyone, and it is primarily based on the feedback that we have been receiving steadily from all of you. The second aspect that we need to consider is the actual content and quality of the humanitiesunderground site and the corresponding space on facebook too. Again, there is a democratic proposition that one needs to be catholic and broad; accept ideas from far and wide and debate over them. But is this a space merely to air our brainwaves, a space for indulging in mental jousting and announcing talks and seminars? Or to let lose our solitary flights of fancy? We think we need to highlight emphatically the partisan nature of this endeavour. We have, interestingly enough, received a great deal of feedback from members of our facebook group-page about what should or should not go on it, in order to sustain the brazen edginess that many say they are drawn to HUG for. It was in response to very strong urging from many of you that we changed the character of the group from ‘open’ to ‘closed’, since the increased number of members meant that posts that were irrelevant or even downright opposed to the spirit of the group were creeping into our space. Now, post the ‘closing’ of the group, while we do sift out advertisements and so on, we have still been putting the rest up on the page as long they speak widely to the humanities. But we have begun to agree with many of you who have indicated to us that our facebook page may eventually be in danger of losing its distinctive character by indulging too far a certain democratic sense of ourselves. We have been told by you that we would do better by HUG if we were to be rigorous and even autocratic in choosing what does, and does not, address directly our passionately shared beliefs and concerns, and in fact, if we were to remain bold and intrepid by declaring – through our sieving of what goes on the HUG page and what can be left for many other worthy pages/groups to carry – what our politics are. This emboldens us as we move forward across the 10,000 mark into possible future centuries to play the bat on the front foot, as it were – to give ourselves the guiltless right to collectively decide that announcements and posts that are perfectly valid and relevant for humanities questions at large may in fact dilute the rather more diabolical, quixotic or irreverent issues/ideas we love to juggle with in our humanitiesunderground blog, its facebook page and our margHumanities outfit. Henceforth, therefore, encouraged by you all, we shall try to streamline our contents by being more alive to the nuances of posts and notices, and upload only those which we think are challenging us to think productively along the paths we have chosen to tread. In other words, what we all believe to be part of a borderless broad humanities, however laudable, is irksome, and will no longer find a space on our page. We hope that this will answer the demand for a more rigorous humanitiesunderground group-page post this 10,000 member mark. It is important to clarify the very nature of humanitiesunderground—based on our perception and your feedback—because there is just no use having one more watered-down, all-encompassing space for the humanities people. Just as it is useless to carp on the regressive and self defeating ‘humanities in crisis’ story—a stimulus we had abandoned right from our inception. Those ways may gain us a wider audience but this is surely not a popularity contest we are in. In fact, our whole endeavour is to steer clear of