Mainstream WeeklyAnti-adda as an Academic Stance
Recently, Professor Surinder Singh Jodhka officially ‘retired’ from Jawaharlal Nehru University—an event that academia likes to treat as both real and entirely fictional. After all, we are trained early on to believe that a ‘true scholar’ never retires; they simply stop drawing salary for doing the same amount of work or more.
If that cliché must be invoked, it might as well be in Jodhka’s case. Few in the discipline have matched his propensity to keep writing. Decades of fieldwork, a commitment to empirical rigor, and a steady stream of publications and invited-talks that refuse to slow down. Villages, caste, agrarian relations, modernity, workplace discrimination—he has studied them all with a persistence.
This is not a dutiful tribute, nor an attempt to wrap his work into a neat, evaluative bent. It is, more modestly, an acknowledgment of a trait that is both rare and romantic: the relentless appetite to produce, publish, and keep the academic machinery humming.
On the second day of his farewell, I was invited to speak in a session grandly tasked with reflecting on the discipline’s institutions and practices. It went by the disarmingly casual title gap-shap—which, depending on one’s generosity, can mean either ‘informal exchange’ or ‘structured digression.’
I should confess: as an introvert scholar, I am deeply anti-adda—despite my belonging to Kolkata that treats adda both as method and achievement, often substituting conversation for any tangible output. In academic life, I refuse to enter the circuit of talks, panels, and conferences even though it runs the risk of remaining unpopular and professionally invisible.
My problem is simple. I have a persistent distrust of the unwritten. This prejudice keeps me at a safe distance from most forms of speech, whether academic or otherwise. With the exception of teaching—which I passionately honour—I avoid addressing audiences otherwise. Text, for me, has the power to stay put; speech, on the other hand, evaporates, before the audience reaches their respective homes.
Ironically, on this occasion, I went against the spirit of gap-shap itself and chose to speak about a crisis that bothers me: the persistent refusal to write. The social sciences and humanities in India have long thrived in cultural and institutional settings where non-productivity is not merely tolerated, but quietly valorised—sometimes even mistaken for depth or thought-immersion.
Categories of Procrastination
There is a celebrated image of an academic—perpetually ‘thinking’—so profoundly, in fact, that the act of writing would only trivialize their insights. Emerging from such depths to produce an essay would, one assumes, be an unforgivable compromise. Then there are those in pursuit of the perfect paper: a masterpiece so immaculate that it has remained unwritten for the past ten or twenty years—and, by all indications, will continue to do so for at least another twenty.
In this farcical ecology, writing becomes almost incidental; what truly matters is the illusive performance of thinking—preferably prolonged, publicly acknowledged, and indefinitely deferred.
Then there are these worshiped stalwarts, who are so deeply lost in their fields that little or nothing is produced beyond prolonged stagnation or its verbal enunciations. The verbal intensity and frequency of this make-belief struggle is repetitive; and the output, less so. It is a clumsy affair sustained almost entirely on the feeling of doing something, with very little to show for it in writing.
Another category return from the field thoroughly drenched in ‘experience’, only to discover that immersion does not automatically translate into articulation. After years of fieldwork and library-labour, what finally appears on the page is either unbearably obvious, impressively obscure, or utterly meaningless. This trash, we are assured, is nothing but theoretical density’.
And then, of course, there are the indefatigable readers—forever catching up, forever buying and piling-up books of all kinds: rare, first editions, second-hand, new releases. Faced with an ever-expanding reading wish-list, they either run out of time, or quietly lose the thread altogether. Somewhere between annotated PDFs and chaotic notebooks, the original argument is laid to rest—underlined yet undermined.
Writing is NOT an Optional Course
The point that I am trying to make is fairly simple: there is nothing academic about not writing. Within a university, few crises have been as socially, politically, and intellectually pertinent as the quiet normalization of not-writing (irrespective of the political regime). One need not genuflect before the Western mantra of ‘publish or perish’. But we have managed something far more inventive—we have institutionally reversed it. Here, one may comfortably not publish and yet persist.
It is a formula considerably more damaging to the very possibility of original research. The formulae is further justified by the group of procrastinating scholars in the name of remaining lost in ‘deep-thoughts’. Or there is, apparently, nothing left to write—especially when accompanied by the reassuring cushion of job security and salary. Meanwhile, institutions that demand twenty or more hours of teaching each week have made their priorities clear: research, if it happens at all, is incidental. Quality, even more so. In such a setting, not writing ceases to be a lapse; it becomes the system.
There are, of course, exceptions to this carefully cultivated tradition of inertia. Across the social sciences, some scholars have taken writing seriously—not as an optional afterthought, but as the very condition of intellectual work. They write to register observation, to present an analysis, and to make their interventions available for disagreement. Because writing, inconveniently, demands responsibility. It fixes an argument in place, makes it answerable, and exposes it to the discipline of scrutiny. One cannot endlessly gesture toward ideas once they are written; they must stand, or fail, on their own terms.
To write, then, is not merely to stay relevant or to avoid professional extinction—as the non-writing academic would have it. It is to accept the basic obligation of scholarship: to think in a form that can be examined, contested, and held accountable. In that sense, writing is not an accessory to intellectual life—it is its most minimal requirement.
Text as Sacrosanct: The Discipline within the Discipline
Let us have no illusions: writing is not an elective one may or may not take, nor an occasional indulgence to be fitted in between more pressing engagements. It is certainly not another talk—performed, applauded, and forgotten before the audience reaches home. Writing is the discipline within the discipline. It demands time, clarity, and a willingness to be pinned down. To write is to express, but also to exist and to assert—to leave behind something more durable than intention or performance. Its value exceeds the bureaucratic arithmetic of scores, impact factors, and citations. Writing is not merely a metric to be met; it is a mode of inhabiting academic life.
It is immaterial what one studies—whether empirical data or ethnographic detail, sweeping narratives or minute particularities, familiar variables or eccentric ones. The university, at least in principle, accommodates this diversity of approach—what to write and how to write it—provided there is a willingness to write at all. Beyond these methodological preferences lies a more basic commitment. Whether general or specific, empirical or reflective, all such practices claim allegiance to a single, unfashionable objective: the pursuit of truth—or at the very least, an honest approximation of it. Whatever truth one arrives at—tentative, partial, or contested—demands to be written with rigor, with clarity, and, if one is not entirely fatigued by the enterprise, with a measure of conviction.
This brings me to another matter of communicability—an aspect of academic practice we routinely sidestep with remarkable consistency. Many of us prefer to believe that knowledge, once produced, is best preserved within the safe confines of classrooms and journals—assuming, of course, it is produced at all. Few things are as quietly self-defeating as this cultivated insularity. Not because our work resists translation into clearer, more accessible language, but because we have convinced ourselves that such translation is beneath us—or, more conveniently, not our responsibility. Or it has to be outcasted. The usual alibis follow: there is no time, no incentive, or no appetite to distill a 7,000-word article into a 700-word piece that someone outside the discipline might actually read. What is often missed is embarrassingly simple: clarity of language is rarely a stylistic failure; it is a failure of thought. Obscurity, in many cases, is not depth—it is camouflage.
And for the social scientist in particular, this evasion is harder to justify. One studies the very society one inhabits, drawing from its lives, its contradictions, and its crises. To then retreat into incommunicable prose—or worse, into silence—is not modesty; it is abdication. Unlike the laboratory scientist who may claim distance from their subject, the social scientist has no such luxury. If the research begins in society, its articulation cannot remain estranged from it.
What we write may age poorly; we may even wince at it a few years later. But these are not arguments against writing—only convenient excuses for avoiding it. Datedness is the fate of all thought that risks expression; only the unwritten enjoys the illusion of permanence. If one is reading, writing is the natural response—not a heroic act, but a basic intellectual reflex. If one is observing, writing is how those observations acquire shape and consequence. And if one is thinking, writing is where thought is forced to organize itself, to move from vague inclination to something resembling an argument. To not write, then, is not caution—it is a lazy and irresponsible evasion.
Writing does not begin where thinking ends; the two are not adversaries. We write as we think, and we think more precisely because we write. The page is not the afterlife of thought—it is where thought learns to exist. As academics, if we respect anything at all, it ought to be those who write. For writing remains one of the few reliable ways to access, examine, and contest another person’s thinking. Everything else—conversation, performance, recollection—fades too easily into approximation. Text, then, is not sacrosanct because it carries one’s name in print. It is sacrosanct because it produces tangibility, invites scrutiny, and endures long enough to be held accountable.
(Author: Sreedeep Bhattacharya, Associate Professor, Sociology, Shiv Nadar University)