The Magic of Boredom & the Making of Modern Literature

How do you get the ideas behind your short stories? Someone had asked the Russian writer Anton Chekhov. Reportedly, Chekhov had responded: “Put your cigarette on this ash-tray and I’ll write a story about it.”

This response presents the perfect picture of modern literature that came into existence with the popularisation of print culture and the making of novels and short stories.

Classical epics, oral tales, and myths and legends of the past took a great, telescopic view of grand subjects, particularly those of war and romance, in a world full of magic and fantasy populated by gods and kings.

This lecture will show how modern literature, shaped by the rhythm of the factory, dominated by clock-time and full of industrial workers and a middle class, turned to everyday themes that resonated with ordinary people, and focused a microscopic lens on the small magic of the cigarette on the ash-tray.

About the Speaker

Saikat Majumdar is a novelist, critic and educator. He taught literature at Stanford University for nine years, has been a fellow at Wellesley College, the institutes of Advanced Study in JNU, Stellenbosch, Budapest, and Brasov, and is currently Professor of English & Creative Writing at Ashoka University.

He is the author of five novels, most recently, The Remains of the Body, published as Penguin Random House’s 2024 Pride Month Selection. His other novels include The Scent of God (2019), a story of love between two teenage boys in a Hindu monastic boarding school, The Firebird (2015), which narrates a young boy’s destructive obsession with his mother’s life as an actress, and The Middle Finger (2022), a queer, contemporary college-campus retelling of the Ekalavya story.

He has also published four books of nonfiction and criticism, including Open Intelligence: Education between Art and Artificial (2026), which outlines possibilities for education in the age of Artificial Intelligence with particular attention to the changing definitions of talent, merit, and career, The Amateur, a book about people who learned to read and write without proper educational support, and College: Pathways of Possibility (2018), a popular book on interdisciplinary liberal arts education in India.