Source: The Hindu Literary Review

Writers Workshop is now a part of modern Indian literary history. Many writers who are ‘big’ names today got their first breaks with WW decades back. Well-known academic and literary critic Meenakshi Mukherjee takes a look at the evolution of an enterprise that has been kept going by the efforts of a single man, Purushottama Lal.

P. Lal nurtured two generations of writers, offering timely words of encouragement and keeping up a personal correspondence with each person. Shashi Deshpande told me, “He was the first literary figure to give me a sense that my work mattered.” When there was a bad review, Lal sent it to her saying, “Forgive him. He does not understand.” Yet, Lal has many detractors as well, and some of them are people who had benefited from his generosity. Pritish Nandy, in a touching tribute to P. Lal which appears on the Writers Workshop website, says, “We were, of course, almost uniformly ungrateful to him. For, we never respect those who give us a leg up. It embarrasses us.”

It is possible that people who have discovered Writers Workshop late will have a better perspective on this extraordinary enterprise. Already, Rubana Huq, a young researcher from Dhaka, has begun working in the archives of WW — sheaves of letters and pages boxed in a steel cabinet — and has published a 408-page Golden Treasury of Writers Workshop Poetry in 2008. A young IT whiz-kid — Arunabha Sengupta, now in Amsterdom, created a website for WW three years ago ( http://www.writersworkshopindia.com/ ) and another young man, Jed Bickman, from Brown University, is updating it from time to time . Perhaps one needs some distance and a sense of history to appreciate the value of this extra-ordinary man who has sustained an alternative publishing venture for so long.

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