Celebrating Gayatridi in Bergen

Lakshmi Subramanian

I had the singular privilege of participating in a symposium that was put together under the auspices of the Holberg Prize Committee in the city of Bergen, home to Ludvig Holberg, the 18th century essayist, writer, philosopher and historian and in whose name the Holberg Prize is named after and awarded annually by the Norwegian government to an outstanding scholar in the Humanities and Social Sciences. In accordance with convention, the theme of the symposium was suggested by the laureate Professor Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and a panel recommended by her to speak on it. The theme that Gayatri di chose was ‘The Power of the Humanities’, entirely appropriate to the work that she has done for more than sixty years as an academic, an activist and a life-long champion of the right to learn that carries with it the obligation to listen.

The symposium was the inaugural event of the Holberg week (2-6 June, 2025) that had several events featuring the Holberg laureate Gayatri di and the Nils Klim laureate Daniela Allattinoglu. It was an extraordinary week, where I had the opportunity of listening to Gayatri di’s interactions with Nordic scholars, in particular the Nils Klim laureate, and of engaging with the school programme that is also part of the Holberg week. I do not wish to present a summary of the events (all of them happen to be available on the internet as YouTube recordings) but will use this occasion to reflect on my appreciation of Gayatri di’s work as I have come to know it, albeit in a limited way. Being neither a student of literature nor of philosophy and post-colonial theory, my familiarity with her work is limited but not without consequence. It was her essay, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” that spoke to me powerfully, an essay that I could relate to and one that acted as a conduit to understanding her extraordinary scholarship that was theoretically rooted in Western philosophical traditions and equally at home with local realities. It is this combination that has continued to exercise for me a powerful appeal—a combination that resists easy stereotyping of her work and positionality and renders her work of translation as a self-conscious political act. I got to know Gayatri di better when our mutually close friend Hari Vausudevan helped develop a project that we called ‘Radiating Globality: Old Histories and New Geographies’, that took us to Chandernagore, Kolkata, Prince-ton, Dakar, and Yunnan. It was in course of this project that I really got to know the seductive power of Gayatri di’s imagination in revisiting globalisation, its antecedents and pre-histories that we have tended to overlook in our linear study of colonial power and dominance. It was also during our discussions that I got to know firsthand the extraordinary work she has done with schools, the everyday challenges she encountered and the uncompromising stand she takes on learning in the mother tongue and in enabling the process of learning and training, what she calls muscle memory and which has been denied for millennia to the impoverished and marginalised in India. Her work is not, she vehemently insists, philanthropy but an act of entering voluntarily and sincerely into the texture of society.

In the symposium that we were part of, in the Holberg Laureate lecture that she delivered thereafter, and the acceptance speech that came at the end, all these facets came forward as she took us through her work. The power of the Humanities, she demonstrated emphatically, lay in training the soul, training the imagination by displacing oneself; something that was absolutely essential if one is to take democracy seriously. The Humanities, she demonstrated, is a powerful tool that can actually be deployed in tackling the crisis that faces the world, but only if we consider the practice of learning seriously. This cannot be reduced to knowledge management structured around speed and efficiency, put forward by corporate universities, but has to engage with a textural focus on different needs, respecting the wealth of local and global languages, an engagement with desire and aspirations in the classroom, be it Columbia or Purulia. The Holberg Laureate lecture elaborated the power of the Humanities in reimagining the future, in reimagining imperatives–collective, individual–in rearranging desires that alone can help participate in democracy and in taking a planetary view of the future. Training the imagination was the recurrent motif of the lecture that she delivered with elegance and eloquence. Bergen came together to celebrate this remarkable display of scholarship and empathy which came full circle when she gave the final acceptance speech for the award and referred to another prize that she had got in West Bengal, when villagers voluntarily gave her a building for the school that she proposed.

It was a magical and enchanted week when students, scholars, school children, and teachers came out in full numbers to hear what is undoubtedly one of the most important voices we have in our midst, at a time when the world is battling uncertainty and divisiveness and speed running fascism. Two words suddenly carried more potency for all of us assembled there and with which I would like to conclude this brief note: imperative and imagination.

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Frontier Autumn Number
Vol 58, No. 14 - 17, Sep 28 - Oct 25, 2025