Joining minds for celebration of creativity

Shihab Sarkar | Published: August 07, 2015 00:00:00 | Updated: November 30, 2026 06:01:00

A lot of inquisitive people are eager to learn about the secrets of how creative ideas are born. Most of us presume that it is the inspiring moments in solitude which help spark ideas and thoughts. It's true, though partly. A writer, a painter, or a philosopher doesn't necessarily have to go into a kind of exile to get the flashes of creativity. Some creative people do prefer seclusion to crowds. They include scientists and thoughtful revolutionaries as well. But as the history of literature, painting, philosophy and science shows, creative thoughts can visit one even at places frequented by other people, even strangers.
Arab world's popular novelist Naguib Mahfouz has said themes of most of his works come from his hours-long leisurely gossip with people at a café in Cairo. He was blindly in love with Cairo and its people. The late Egyptian Nobel Laureate in Literature was famous for his daylong gossip with both friends and strangers over hookah at the street-side café in Cairo.
Despite the popular saying that they love to be alone, many authors, both poets and novelists, like to pass their time at small-talk sessions with people. The audience could include their contemporaries, admirers, as well as acquaintances. Great French painters in the 18th and 19th centuries could not have possibly emerged without the salon sessions. These get-togethers used to draw the artists and authors to one or another salon on a particular day. Normally, the salon assemblages continued for hours together, sometimes getting dragged late into the night. The Paris salons finally turned out to be the inevitable hangouts for celebrated authors, painters, and also the pioneers of a lot of literary and philosophical movements. The impact of the French salons on the evolution of the early modernist literary and art activities is considered phenomenal by critics. Without the salon sessions and other passion-charged get-togethers in Paris, the movements of Impressionism and Surrealism could not possibly have reached their zenith.
   In the following periods, the salons have witnessed their localised emergence at many literary and painting centres in Madrid, London, New York and San Francisco. While Madrid has been brought under global spotlight by poets Garcia Lorca, Antonio Machado, Rafael Alberti and others, artist Pablo Picasso virtually turned out to be the lone representative of Spanish creativity. Madrid and Paris in the first half of the twentieth century emerged as two cultural capitals of the world, with writers such as Pablo Neruda and Ernest Hemingway coming from the distant Americas to join the celebration of creative minds.
    When it comes to creativity, minds need to be engaged with that of others and remain ever active. Creativity, in general, cannot blossom remaining detached from one's surroundings. Even in ancient Greece, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle eventually discovered themselves engaged in a world of thoughts joined by their disciples.
Perhaps it was due to the typical nature of the times that Shakespeare in the Elizabethan Age had to go ahead with his creative pursuits almost unnoticed. But in the Indian sub-continent Rabindranath Tagore came of age in a totally different reality. Born in the colonial India of 1861, the poet spent his carefree childhood to finally reach an eventful youth shaped by the major socio-political bearings of his times. Despite his iconic stature in the later years, Tagore came out of the highly elitist environs of his ancestral Jorasako residence. He wanted to meet people. A great poet as he was, he could not afford to detach himself from the outside world, one peopled by both the new-generation writers and admirers. As the founder of Shantiniketan, a unique type of educational institution, Tagore took it upon himself to run it as he had dreamt. But his mind was wide open to others' ideas and thoughts which led to a vast pool of creative minds at the school.
Essentially a private and individual exercise, creativity eventually expands its boundaries to make room for the echoes of other minds. Let's pick, for instance, the philosophical school of existentialism propounded by Danish thinker Kierkegaard. From its initial stage in the 19th century, the most influential philosophy of the modern times found its final shape in the works of French Jean-Paul Sartre in the 20th century. In between, existentialism had to pass through changes and newer interpretations brought on by German philosophers Heidegger, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. However, Sartre could not shape the radically changed philosophy as a unanimously accepted one. As had been expected, he had to take along his compatriot Albert Camus with him. The two minds met, but differences arose. Camus did not agree with Sartre on certain postulations of the new-version philosophy. Sartre dug his heel in. The two parted ways which was a cause of anguish for many. But existentialism became enriched with newer interpretations.
    In Bengali parlance, 'Adda' is one which has been in use for nearly a hundred years. Although the term's literal meaning ranges from a concentration of things to a meeting place for persons of ill repute, it now stands for an informal and highly casual gathering of otherwise busy people. In modern times, the Bengalee 'Adda' is integral to all creative activities -- especially literature.
Many feel tempted to link 'Adda' to the sessions of the Bloomsbury Group in England. The group used to hold regular sittings at a place near Bloomsbury, London. The participants included writers, philosophers, economists and artists. Among others, Virginia Woolf, John Maynard Keynes, E M Forster and Lytton Strachey were active members of the group. The sessions of the Bloomsbury Group continued until the end of the first half of the 20th century.
A legendary get-together of writers began taking place at a book shop in San Francisco city in the USA in the 1950s. It opened and continued for some time at City Lights Bookstore owned by the Beat Generation poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti.
In the first half of the twentieth century, people in the socio-political and cultural milieu of the undivided Bengal had a firm faith in mutuality; and, of course, in empathy. Except for the occasional schisms created by vested interests, harmony prevailed at the community level. Despite the occasional phases of unrest, insularity remained an alien issue. In those good old days, literary circles, mostly centred in Kolkata, were able to muster the honest courage and strength to defy parochialism and provinciality of all shades. They were no revolutionaries - but dissidents they were. What bound them together was a unique type of camaraderie defined by no-frills creativity. Groups of gifted poets, composers, novelists and artists emerged in the cultural landscape, all of them committed to the quintessential arts and humanity. Those joining this expedition of the human mind included the youths who assembled around the famous journals of the time. By the decade of the 1940s, the Bengali cultural world could boast of creative stalwarts like Kazi Nazrul Islam, Jibanananda Das and Buddhadev Basu.
Notwithstanding the continuity of the celebration of creativity, even amid hurdles and repression in the neo-colonial Pakistan days, the joy of creativity began trailing off in the 21st century Bangladesh.
The creative people had opened their chorus in independent Bangladesh with style and a distinctive élan. Then what has happened afterwards to prompt many in our arts to withdraw to their cocoons? Sociologists can come up with the right answer. Bangladesh is going through a creative deadlock. The authors, painters, musicians and thinkers increasingly discover, to their horror, their sensibilities are frozen under a siege. Gone are the mediums that bridge minds. Wounds made by intermittent assaults on our collective dreams of an unalloyed nationhood turn gangrenous. Bruises hurt artists more than laymen. Then it's of no use blaming them for their present silence. A creative upsurge may not be that far.                      
shihabskr@ymail.com