A Way of ‘Happening’: Amitava Kumar’s THE YELLOW BOOK
Amitava Kumar’s The Yellow Book: A Traveller's Diary (2023), conceptualizes the journal itself as an art object, where the act of journaling becomes a form of artistic practice.
A New Yorker article describes Michel Leiris, the French author and ethnologist, as a man who “applied the rigour of an objective observer to his recording of the subjective,” and “a tireless witness to lived experience.” Leiris once wrote: “I wish for two things: that happening turn into writing. And that writing be happening.”
Allan Kaprow, who first used the happening in context of performance art, called it a conjunction of visual, aural, and physical events, performed together by the audience and artist. One significant aspect of happening is its rejection of the traditional separation between art and everyday life. It emerges from the challenge of finding a genuine artistic language that might record our lives.
In a similar vein of happening, Amitava Kumar’s The Yellow Book: A Traveller's Diary (2023), conceptualizes the journal itself as an art object, where the act of journaling becomes a form of artistic practice. Bestrewed with the text are his gouache paintings and drawings, arousing an ekphrastic sense of writing. Engaging with a painting through the lens of literature serves as a kind of interpretive tool to see paintings in new and unexpected ways.
Kumar is birthed by the art he consumes. A rich stockpile of literature populates his artistic conscience, while he is constantly in dialogue with other writers. From being influenced by Virginia Woolf’s disregard for other duties in favour for writing, to VS Naipaul’s copious note-taking, Kumar’s unique associations with both the dead and living writers bring out a lost freshness in our engagement with literature. He reads, wonders, and witnesses, and no sooner, the world comes rushing in.
By weaving together disparate threads of history, literature, and personal anecdotes, Kumar is seen flâneuring the streets of a bustling metropolis, witnessing death, changing seasons, his favourite trees bearing flowers, mapping titles of books being read by his co-passengers, and so on.
A jugalbandi (medley) of ideas, adorned with vibrant paintings, The Yellow Book is predominantly bathed in primary hues. These paintings, often chosen for their yellow tint, reflect the author's inclination for the random—an ode to the unintentional nature of Roland Barthes’ dead author. Kumar cuddles with the spontaneity of his journal, which he calls a “rough draft of literature”, chronicling everyday experiences like a riyaaz (systematic practice). During the launch of this book at India Habitat Centre on December 6, 2023, he sentimentally called the book a “Triumph of Amateurism”.
Whether it is Raj Aryan Malhotra of Mohabbatein (2000) or a certain Ram Shankar Nikumbh of Taare Zameen Par (2007), the agency of students often suffers at the hands of a progressive educator, who is flexible yet ideologically rigid; if taken to an extreme, this rigidity could potentially lead to dogmatism. The feeling is pervasive in the sections involving Kumar’s American students. His unconventional teaching techniques, though, do inspire a vitalizing effect. Around this time, Kumar also visits his hometown Motihari. Throughout these experiences, Kumar keeps a journal to document the events he was living through and how he wished to remember them.
He often asked, “How to mark our separate days? The places we have been. Our individual passions, our pain. Against the blurring of years, the clarity of a record. And even amidst crises, how to keep creativity alive? I want these books to be read for the way in which memory is distilled in their pages.”
At the book’s launch last year, Kumar candidly admitted that “he became a writer because he failed as a painter”. But art—in other forms—remains a steady presence in his writing, too. Kumar embeds unconventional wisdom about making art and keeping a journal, jokingly passing it off as a piece of fashion advice. He compares it to owning a thin jacket like Naipaul did, one that can be worn even in warm weather, and always keeping a small notebook and a pencil in its inside pocket. For Kumar seems to see reality as more radical than imagination, and remains very much conscious of this practice slipping into the realm of aesthetics.
Navigating the line between journal-like immediacy and memoir-like reflection, Kumar’s use of the diary format allows him to engage in deeper introspection. His literary references and cultural observations contribute to the book’s hybrid nature, blurring the lines between a travelogue, journal, and memoir. By weaving together disparate threads of history, literature, and personal anecdotes, Kumar is seen flâneuring the streets of a bustling metropolis, witnessing death, changing seasons, his favourite trees bearing flowers, mapping titles of books being read by his co-passengers, and so on.
In a perceptive and fervent response to the attack on Salman Rushdie, The Yellow Book explores the transformative power of literature and how art can respond to contemporary politics. He encourages the reader to embrace curiosity and discusses how literature can serve as a bridge between cultures, allowing us to empathize with experiences that are different from our own. “As my life has been given over to reading and writing books, I hold on to the belief that if we read widely and deeply, we will encounter people and places unlike ourselves. This sense of difference, its pleasures and challenges, will perhaps steer us away from intolerance.”
The Yellow Book is a departure from the analytical works he had written and edited in the past, including Poetics/Politics: Radical Aesthetics for the Classroom (1999) and Class Issues: Pedagogy, Cultural Studies, and the Public Sphere (1997). His deep engagement with critical theory and his commitment to challenging established narratives and power structures are seen in his academic writings, which bridge the gap between theory and practice.
In the realm of visual arts, Kumar’s writings also echo the paintings of Frida Kahlo, which often depicted her personal struggles as well as broader political themes such as feminism, indigenous rights, and anti-imperialism. challenged dominant narratives. This intersection of personal and political is particularly significant from a postcolonial viewpoint, where art becomes a tool for resistance, identity assertion, and decolonization. Kumar writes in The Yellow Book: “One of the first things I told the small audience was that Macaulay's Minute on Education in 1835, introducing the teaching of English in India, was meant to produce a nation of clerks. Instead, we became writers.”
Kumar’s engagement is always deeply personal, whether it is with his own father’s death, or that of a stranger on the metro. His cosmopolitanism emphasizes the need for critical engagement with images and narratives of suffering, questioning the authenticity of their portrayal, considering the perspective from which it is presented, and being aware of the potential for distortion. John Berger, another major influence on Kumar, impinges upon the role of the artist as an active participant in shaping what is represented, stressing the subjective nature of artistic expression and its potential for political influence.
The challenges of finding a genuine artistic language are highlighted as ‘happening’. Amitava Kumar quotes Woolf, “But words, words! How inadequate you are! How weary one gets of you! How you will always be saying too much or too little! Oh to be silent! Oh to be a painter!”
Each ‘happening’ in the book is like a small-scale representation of the avant-garde art world, absorbing and reshaping these influences. In this way, The Yellow Book is a commentary on contemporary culture as much as it is a testament to the radicalism of reality.
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Pranavi Sharma is an independent journalist based in Delhi. You can find her on Instagram: @ispranavi and Twitter: @Pranavi_sharma.
