In the late 1990s, I read a short story by Nirmal Verma called “Terminal.” It had been written, like all of Verma’s fiction, in Hindi, and translated into English by the critic Alok Bhalla. I knew something of Verma’s work, because his reputation was a national one. I had taken him to be a kind of European writer in Hindi, though I hadn’t formed this thought clearly in my head, and, if I had, wouldn’t have known with certainty what “European writer” meant. Let’s say a kind of vague symbolist aura—an aura of lyricism but also the air of the nouveau roman—adhered faintly to the reputation. Europeanness was confirmed by Verma’s peculiar personal history: how he went to Prague in 1959 as a literary translator and spent nearly a decade there until his departure during the upheaval of the Prague Spring. During his time there he wrote a travelogue as well as his first novel, Ve Din (translated into English under the title Days of Longing), arising from his experience of Prague. And this period also saw in Hindi literature the emergence of the nayi kahani movement, which in its literal translation—“New Story”—conveyed its own breakaway nature, its movement away from conventional realism toward (given the ethos of the time) the “existential” and the inward (terms that have become obsolete in a way that the stories haven’t), the word nayi or “new” containing in it a powerful suggestion of the strange. Verma was among the movement’s helmsmen.
I was reading Verma because I was generally reading around in the Indian languages at the end of the last millennium in order to make a selection for an anthology I was editing, The Picador Book of Modern Indian Literature. My interest in the literatures in the Indian languages didn’t come from a desire to acquaint myself with the “authentically Indian” but to enter a domain that I felt modern Indian literatures inhabited more successfully than English-language writing: a domain of play, emptied of authenticity. “Terminal,” written relatively late in Verma’s career, in 1992, confirmed that sobriety is impossible without intellectual and artistic playfulness. To summarize the story briefly: a man and a woman who meet by chance at a performance of Mozart’s The Magic Flute enter into a relationship. To all purposes happy, and yet (especially in the woman’s case) strangely troubled, the two take a tram to a fortune teller to get a sense of whether their relationship has a future. The fortune teller’s stop is the last stop, the “terminal” of the title.
When, after making the final selection, I came to write the headnote for Verma, I realized there were at least two things that drew me to the story. The first was its delicate specificity, the confluence, in its details, of what I’ll call thereness and otherness. The “there” constituted an inner weather and outlines familiar to us from European towns in the second half of the twentieth century, their characteristic mix of contemporaneous features and of “old town” precincts: cobblestones, bridges across canals. The otherness had to do with the self-sufficiency of the details; an aloofness to the story’s emotional undertow; their refusal to be co-opted into “symbolizing” it in any way.
I was fascinated, maybe even more, by the story’s second principal feature: the town had no name; nor did the streets; nor did the characters. And nor did the continent they were all in and by which, to some extent, they—human beings and objects—had been turned into what they were. The story abounded in specificity, but the specificity of identity that comes from proper names was absent, turning detail itself into absence: by which I mean not a void or abstraction, but into a negation or refutation of some kind. This refutation was a liberation.
Once I became aware of this absence, “Terminal” went out of focus. I don’t mean the story became unclear. It seemed to be put on hold. On the page, the words became blurred, the sentences patterns I was unequipped to decode. Then, after an interval, the paragraphs congealed and I began to be able to read the story even as it hung in abeyance. I read it now for the lucidity of what it wasn’t. It wasn’t a story about an Indian abroad. It wasn’t a postcolonial story of migrancy. It wasn’t a symbolic tale of metaphysical exile: its sense of the humdrum was too exact for it to stand for anything else. It wasn’t a story about Europe. It wasn’t a translation of a story about Europe. It could have been an English-language story about Europe except that it wasn’t. It could have been a European story translated into English, but it wasn’t such a story either. There was no indication in what I read of “Hindi literature” or writing. Thematically, it wasn’t an account of a cross-cultural romance between an Indian man and a European woman: to impose such categories on it would be to be distracted from the case it was making for its own terminology. The only specificity to do with cultural identity of any kind was the name below the title, “Nirmal Verma.” This was the author, but now those words became a locus not of origination and ownership but of the story’s play with everything it might have been but wasn’t. They threw the story onto an unfamiliar plane of meaning. “Nirmal Verma” was not external to the story, as both titles and author’s names are. “Nirmal Verma” was at once inside the story—the invisible presence of “Hindi literature”—and in tension with it. Despite being the story’s one marker, “Nirmal Verma” failed to clarify the narrative’s relationship to nationality or history as we understand them in the context of the literary.
It was at this point that I realized “Terminal” belonged to a certain alternative tradition: the works of art that reject markers, including those of nationality. This formulation might lead to the assumption that such artistic and literary practices must be internationalist or even universalist by nature: by belonging to no nation, they belong to all nations, or to everyone. But the universal depends on particularities of identity or nationality: it requires them in order to transcend them. When those particularities are withdrawn, the larger categories waver. The relationship between the specific and the general (foundational, once, to so much literary discussion) seems less useful as a starting point.
The work without markers should also be distinguished from what critical theory has for over thirty years been calling sites of “difference.” “Difference” was domesticated early on through sets of identifying markers: aberrations from what came to be seen as the universalist norm—white, male, middle-class, heterosexual—constituted “difference.” The work in which markers are absent asks, on the other hand, for a kind of poetic attention that opens up to the strange without taking refuge in “otherness.” It unsettles many of the critical paradigms we fall back on.
While writing the headnote to Verma for my anthology, I thought of my encounter one afternoon at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (which had, at the time, shifted location for renovation) with Picasso’s Night Fishing at Antibes. Moving from one dark and crowded room to another, I arrived at a painting that seemed to be dominated by black and that I had to squint at. It was as if a patina of poor lighting had obscured the scene; or it could have been that my myopia had worsened. When I peered at the caption that provided the title, I felt my myopia improve. I began to gradually see the details that comprised the moment of night fishing. But what ensued was not “seeing” as much as understanding a process through which an absence occupies its own space and tradition, and won’t readily fit into art history (Cubism) or national history (Europe) as we expect it to. The title seemed as much an invention as the image itself. It didn’t play an external, identificatory role. It was less a marker than part of the manipulation of material that comprises Picasso’s genius. It took me back to the name “Nirmal Verma,” which could also be deemed an invention except that the author had to ostensibly expend no effort toward creating it—but it had the same effect on the story and its location as Night Fishing in Antibes did on the painting; the clarification took place in the reverse direction, too, as both Night Fishing at Antibes and “Nirmal Verma” gathered new meanings that aren’t generally available to titles and author’s names. The fact that Nirmal Verma is the author’s name was a coincidence, but not one that diminished the invention. This might appear to presage a way of thinking about fiction that we now classify as “autofiction,” but it’s worth reminding ourselves that “Nirmal Verma” remains—unlike the author’s name in autofiction—outside “Terminal,” and inside it only invisibly. The same is true of Night Fishing at Antibes: it seems to refer to a painting, or to a scene, but enters the work invisibly to organize it from within. These adjustments are characteristic of the work without markers.
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The chief theorist of the tradition that queries markers is Jorge Luis Borges. Borges has no use for the idea of “national” or “international” literature; or “historical” or “contemporary” writing. In his essay “The Argentine Writer and Tradition,” he places the questions these categories raise in the realm of the “pseudo problem” rather than whatever comprises a genuine “mental difficulty.” This is an intellectual move descending from the Buddha, for whom all metaphysical and quantitative questions (“Where does the universe end”; “What happens after death”; “What is eternity”) are redundant or avyākata questions (to believe otherwise is to give veracity to “pseudo problems”) that distract from the tricky matter, the genuine problem, of attention.
I should rephrase: it’s not so much that Borges has no use for the idea of the “national” or “international,” or the “historical” or “contemporary”: it’s just that he believes that they can’t be arrived at through markers. The national, international or the historical must, if they exist, be felt plausibly through an absence rather than the presence of elements that indicate these things. Borges takes up this position in a refutation of a particular literary school among his contemporaries: the gauchesque writers, for whom the Argentinian qualities of Argentinian writing are of paramount importance, and for whom these qualities are to be introduced through “local color.” In response, Borges points out that encountering Argentinian detail in a work is no guarantee that the reader is encountering Argentinian literature; in fact, the opposite is probably true. “Gibbon observes that in the Arabian book par excellence, in the Koran, there are no camels; I believe if there were any doubt as to the authenticity of the Koran, this absence of camels would be sufficient to prove it is an Arabian work.” In “Terminal,” too, there is moment-to-moment specificity, but no equivalent of the “camel.” The one indubitable carrier of national and cultural particularity in the story’s environs—the name “Nirmal Verma”—also slips away from performing a camel-like function: of proclaiming that this is a story about an Indian in Europe, or a Hindi story about Europe. If anything, it suggests that we can’t arrive at these categories via narrative in ways we assumed we might. I should add that Verma admired Borges.
The other principal argument on behalf of a tradition against markers is developed by Borges in his famous mock-essay, “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote.” Menard is an early twentieth-century French poet and scholar who, according to the unruffled commentator, “did not want to compose another Quixote, which surely is easy enough—he wanted to compose the Quixote.” We’re told at the outset that Menard’s own creative and scholarly work includes a “visible” oeuvre, which is “easily enumerated,” and, presumably, a body of work that’s invisible, describing whose importance is the true job of the Menard critic. Here, too, even before we encounter Menard’s singular Quixote, is a firm rejection of the idea of the way the tradition of markers self-reflexively legitimizes itself, by implying that only that what’s framed as a “work” is one. This notion of a writer’s work is too “easy.” When it comes to the two Quixotes, Cervantes’s and Menard’s, the commentator eventually performs a simple literary-critical comparison, placing a Cervantes paragraph next to one by Menard. To the untutored eye, the paragraphs are identical, but the commentator, trained to reject the visible as “easy” and the unseen as plain, irrefutable and immediate, is excited by the difference in style and purpose between Cervantes’s rhetorical flourish and Spanish contemporaneity and Menard’s William James-like pragmatism and his deliberate archaisms.
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Other writers have, since, added to this lineage. By doing so, they have deviated from the national, the international, the particular, the local, the universal, the historical and the contemporary. While putting together the Picador anthology in the late 1990s, I thought I’d revisit a text that had had some traction in the tiny universe of English writing in India when I was a teenager: the first, substantial part of the poet Arvind Krishna Mehrotra’s essay “The Emperor Has No Clothes,” which had come out in 1980 in the Cuttack-based magazine Chandrabhaga. Indian English writing, then in its last year of freedom from Midnight’s Children, was mainly poetry- and Bombay-centered, with as little inkling of the global novels to come as, nine years later, people in Berlin had of the demolition of the Wall. The red clothbound issue of Chandrabhaga was still recoverable from a bookshelf in my flat; I may have safeguarded it because it contained some poems I had written as a seventeen-year-old, but, equally, because of the vague importance I’d once accorded the Mehrotra essay. Rereading it, I felt I was in dialogue with debates that had taken on new forms. Mehrotra grapples, in the course of his disagreements with the poet and critic R Parthasarathy, with what constitutes an “Indian poem”: an idea, once in circulation in that tiny world of Indian English letters, that in the 1990s, with “novel” substituting for “poem,” had mutated into a global conceit. This question of the “Indian poem” or “Indian” anything—another “pseudo problem”—perhaps continues to be relevant only for the Indian writer in English. (The Urdu or Marathi poet not only thinks in terms of Urdu or Marathi poems rather than the “Indian poem”—for them, the poem itself as a category breaks down into various kinds of formal practices like the ghazal, abhang or free-verse poem, which in turn are subject to further disintegration.)
Mehrotra’s disagreement with Parthasarathy in “The Emperor Has No Clothes” centers on the poetry of A.K. Ramanujan—a multilingual poet, writer and scholar who wrote poetry in English and translated from Kannada and ancient Tamil—and his relation to the “Indian poem.” For Parthasarathy, Tamil and Kannada form the deeper strata of Ramanujan’s consciousness (as he belonged to the southern parts of India) and English the upper stratum (he lived in Chicago, where he taught at the University). The poem Ramanujan wrote about a Tamil god, “Prayers to Lord Murugan,” expresses, as far as Parthasarathy is concerned, Ramanujan’s deep Tamil self in the English language. For Mehrotra, it’s uncertain whether a poem by Ramanujan about Chicago (like “Chicago Zen”) is less Tamil and more American than “Prayers to Lord Murugan.” If there are camels in the Qur’an (and there apparently are, contra Gibbon), it would be reckless to take them to be integers of Arab-ness of greater reliability than any other element in the Qur’an.
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For me, the immense, mysterious photographs that comprise Belgrade-born, Toronto-based photographer Ljubodrag Andric’s exhibition, Spazi, soglie, luci (Spaces, Thresholds, Lights), premiered last year in the Palazzo Cini in Venice, make most sense—and their remarkable imaginative impact becomes most palpable—when they are placed in the history I have spent some time outlining. As photographs, they are records of reality. But they refuse a reality mediated by our ideas of categories, including the “national” and the “international.” (I am reminded of an observation that the art critic Barry Schwabsky made about a feature of my own writing that he suggested I share with Andric: a “capacity to present things in their concreteness without interpreting them.” It was Schwabsky who introduced me to Andric and his work.) The exhibition gestures toward the international by placing photographs of doors, passages and ceilings of historical buildings in Jaipur, Lucknow, Hampi, Bundi and Mandu in India inside another historic building in Venice (the Palazzo Cini) and then situating them, in the same exhibition, in close proximity to three large, pale photographs of buildings in Venice. It gestures toward this internationalism only to suggest that its concerns lie elsewhere—that assumptions to do with cross-cultural locatedness are of relatively little interest to it. This means it eschews curatorial comparativism—of the kind that, a few years ago at the Tate Modern, placed Matisse’s collages alongside similar work that the Bengali painter Benode Behari Mukherjee created late in his life when he had lost his vision. Comparativism always implies a secure ground from which to view something else. In the Tate Modern, Matisse (and French experimentation) provided that ground. It directed us how to compare and see by looking at one thing in terms of another. The fact that Mukherjee’s collages were made when he was blind was a reminder that seeing, in itself, is not enough, but the more radical implications of this for the juxtaposition in the room were never really investigated by the Tate. On the other hand, in Space, Thresholds, Lights, neither Jaipur nor Lucknow nor Venice provide the secure ground from which to make a comparison. Andric’s photographs of India and Venice are, in a sense, anti-sight, or, at least, antithetical to sight’s historical baggage. Once we start looking for markers, as we’re in the habit of doing, and find none, the pictures start to blur, like the words on the page on which Verma’s “Terminal” is printed. They take away from our dogged comparativist selves the vantage point from which we like to see one thing in terms of another.
Ljubodrag Andric, JAIPUR 49
Ljubodrag Andric, LUCKNOW 10
Ljubodrag Andric, VENEZIA 9
Since the photos of Venice are interchangeable with the photos of Jaipur, and the ones of Jaipur with those of Lucknow (and so on), the difference between locations, surfaces and textures are—as with Cervantes’s and Menard’s passages of the Quixote—at once strikingly obvious and invisible. What is it that, in an Andric photograph, separates a Jaipur door or arch from a Lucknow window or ceiling or a Venetian wall? What distinguishes a vertical outline, which seems to be neither opening nor carving, from a geometrical figure that has burst into the center of a picture? It’s the name of the photograph: “Jaipur”; “Lucknow”; “Venice.” These are as transformational as the images. “Jaipur” is not the name of a place; it’s not even the title of a photograph. It is a photograph. Similarly, Night Fishing in Antibes doesn’t refer to an independent event or place that the painting is about: it is the painting, and nothing else. “Nirmal Verma” is a man with a biography and an author, but in the context of “Terminal” it is the one proper name associated with the story: we’re not being asked to consider what other meanings “Nirmal Verma” might have. As names and titles in this lineage I’m describing neither serve an identificatory function nor assert ownership, and as the works themselves relinquish marks confirming nationality or essence, we are moved, in their presence—whether they’re by Borges, Verma, Picasso or Andric—to confront a different itinerary of how tradition and particularity travel. The photographs in the exhibition don’t stand outside tradition and particularity; they stand outside itineraries we’ve been educated in. To look at an Andric photograph does not involve seeing an object, but refocusing on what we know and on whatever is unaddressed by the inherited, institutional ways of recognizing a “Western,” “non-Western,” “modern” or “ancient” object.
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Before and after my wife and I visited the Palazzo Cini, we wandered around Dorsoduro. We were staying there and not on the San Marco side, as we had on our only other visit to Venice more than a decade ago. Dorsoduro is less crowded: Andric tells me it’s because it’s not a stop on the way to somewhere else, as the other islands are. So, although it has important buildings and exhibition spaces, its alleys, lanes and what seem like residential houses have a faintly nonparticipatory air that must speak more directly to the visitor than landmarks can.
It was fiercely hot. But this was not what reminded us of North Calcutta. It was the very narrow alleys, including the one we were staying in, the glimpse, each time we approached or came out of our door, of clothes drying from clotheslines at the far end, the patchy discoloration on walls, the metal gauze covering some windows, the specific type of residential houses we passed and the (often green) wooden shutters on windows. North Calcutta is the “old town”; it goes back to the eighteenth century. It was where Bengali modernity emerged over two hundred years ago; but the last century saw the main settlements of middle-class professionals move to South Calcutta, engendering houses with hybrid forms that combined, from the 1920s and 1930s onwards, straight lines, local Bengali features and art deco styles—residences that were smaller in dimension than the North Calcutta mansions, and with comparatively few or no neoclassical features. Continuities between North and South Calcutta include those windows, whose slats (unlike the ones in Europe) can be maneuvered up and down on levers, and patterned ventilators carved into the walls, which we also noticed in the converted monastery in Florence that is now the Museo di San Marco with Fra Angelico’s frescoes—each an astonishing, sequestered, dynamic moment—on the walls of the cells on the first floor. In these cells we recovered a bit of ourselves when my wife suddenly saw the ventilators on the lower corners of rooms.
The windows—and the ventilators, ever since I had taken conscious note twelve or thirteen years ago of their place in the composition of a Bengali room—constitute, for me, the beginning of history. This is because they go back to the origins of Calcutta, and for me, history stretches no further back than what I call “Calcutta”—and this is not because I was born there (I was, but I grew up in Bombay), but because the history of my sensibility begins, I believe, with those windows. And the windows are the essential bit of history that’s at once foundational and won’t fit in: they won’t be Bengali, although they’re Bengal itself; they won’t be colonial in the way we have come to understand colonization through the British Empire, because they’re not to be found in Britain; they are at once immediate and modern and an element in the way we configure episodes to do with mythology and cosmology, in that you can see them in the background of eighteenth-century Kalighat oil paintings in which Shiva and his family occupy the foreground; they are not so much the Europe we recognize as Europe, of well-known monuments, as the Europe that we don’t quite see. Hannah Baader of the Max Planck Institute in Florence told us that, oddly, they’re called “Persiane” windows in Italy. So, again, Europe won’t hold.
The West as exemplified by the United Kingdom and America is, even when it’s at its most intimate through various interfaces with my life, still exterior to me; but “Europe,” as an alley in Venice or the moss-covered steps by a canal, is a madeleine—I taste it; it takes me back to where I began; it’s a memory, a place without ready markers. I have seen Venice only twice, but it’s not as if I’ve been to North Calcutta many times. One is almost as distant as the other. To go to North Calcutta is to travel a long way even for those who grew up in the city (and aren’t outsiders, as I am). It’s to confront a site you recognize precisely because recognition means forfeiting your vantage point. The terms “Europe,” “Venice” and “Calcutta” are interchangeable as Prague and Hindi literature are in a Nirmal Verma story or Andric’s photographs are in Spazi, soglie, luci. When I say “interchangeable,” I don’t mean “dispensable.” I mean we have to rethink what location is, and how we account for, and respond to, our historical formation. Andric isn’t a European abroad in the conventional sense. Neither does he exemplify the “universal” human being. His photographs emerge from a momentary insight into a common inheritance that arises at exactly the same moment as an acknowledgment of the uselessness of what we call common inheritances.
This essay has been adapted from “The Art of Ljubodrag Andric,” by Amit Chaudhuri. Copyright © 2026 by Amit Chaudhuri. The essay is excerpted from INDIA by Ljubodrag Andric. Published by Hartmann Books on May 26, 2026.
Art credit: Ljubodrag Andric, JAIPUR 36; JAIPUR 49; LUCKNOW 10; VENEZIA 9. © Ljubodrag Andric. Courtesy of the artist and BUILDING Gallery, Milan and Robert Koch Gallery, San Francisco. Both images appear in Andric’s upcoming book, INDIA, published by Hartmann Books on May 26, 2026.
In the late 1990s, I read a short story by Nirmal Verma called “Terminal.” It had been written, like all of Verma’s fiction, in Hindi, and translated into English by the critic Alok Bhalla. I knew something of Verma’s work, because his reputation was a national one. I had taken him to be a kind of European writer in Hindi, though I hadn’t formed this thought clearly in my head, and, if I had, wouldn’t have known with certainty what “European writer” meant. Let’s say a kind of vague symbolist aura—an aura of lyricism but also the air of the nouveau roman—adhered faintly to the reputation. Europeanness was confirmed by Verma’s peculiar personal history: how he went to Prague in 1959 as a literary translator and spent nearly a decade there until his departure during the upheaval of the Prague Spring. During his time there he wrote a travelogue as well as his first novel, Ve Din (translated into English under the title Days of Longing), arising from his experience of Prague. And this period also saw in Hindi literature the emergence of the nayi kahani movement, which in its literal translation—“New Story”—conveyed its own breakaway nature, its movement away from conventional realism toward (given the ethos of the time) the “existential” and the inward (terms that have become obsolete in a way that the stories haven’t), the word nayi or “new” containing in it a powerful suggestion of the strange. Verma was among the movement’s helmsmen.
I was reading Verma because I was generally reading around in the Indian languages at the end of the last millennium in order to make a selection for an anthology I was editing, The Picador Book of Modern Indian Literature. My interest in the literatures in the Indian languages didn’t come from a desire to acquaint myself with the “authentically Indian” but to enter a domain that I felt modern Indian literatures inhabited more successfully than English-language writing: a domain of play, emptied of authenticity. “Terminal,” written relatively late in Verma’s career, in 1992, confirmed that sobriety is impossible without intellectual and artistic playfulness. To summarize the story briefly: a man and a woman who meet by chance at a performance of Mozart’s The Magic Flute enter into a relationship. To all purposes happy, and yet (especially in the woman’s case) strangely troubled, the two take a tram to a fortune teller to get a sense of whether their relationship has a future. The fortune teller’s stop is the last stop, the “terminal” of the title.
When, after making the final selection, I came to write the headnote for Verma, I realized there were at least two things that drew me to the story. The first was its delicate specificity, the confluence, in its details, of what I’ll call thereness and otherness. The “there” constituted an inner weather and outlines familiar to us from European towns in the second half of the twentieth century, their characteristic mix of contemporaneous features and of “old town” precincts: cobblestones, bridges across canals. The otherness had to do with the self-sufficiency of the details; an aloofness to the story’s emotional undertow; their refusal to be co-opted into “symbolizing” it in any way.
I was fascinated, maybe even more, by the story’s second principal feature: the town had no name; nor did the streets; nor did the characters. And nor did the continent they were all in and by which, to some extent, they—human beings and objects—had been turned into what they were. The story abounded in specificity, but the specificity of identity that comes from proper names was absent, turning detail itself into absence: by which I mean not a void or abstraction, but into a negation or refutation of some kind. This refutation was a liberation.
Once I became aware of this absence, “Terminal” went out of focus. I don’t mean the story became unclear. It seemed to be put on hold. On the page, the words became blurred, the sentences patterns I was unequipped to decode. Then, after an interval, the paragraphs congealed and I began to be able to read the story even as it hung in abeyance. I read it now for the lucidity of what it wasn’t. It wasn’t a story about an Indian abroad. It wasn’t a postcolonial story of migrancy. It wasn’t a symbolic tale of metaphysical exile: its sense of the humdrum was too exact for it to stand for anything else. It wasn’t a story about Europe. It wasn’t a translation of a story about Europe. It could have been an English-language story about Europe except that it wasn’t. It could have been a European story translated into English, but it wasn’t such a story either. There was no indication in what I read of “Hindi literature” or writing. Thematically, it wasn’t an account of a cross-cultural romance between an Indian man and a European woman: to impose such categories on it would be to be distracted from the case it was making for its own terminology. The only specificity to do with cultural identity of any kind was the name below the title, “Nirmal Verma.” This was the author, but now those words became a locus not of origination and ownership but of the story’s play with everything it might have been but wasn’t. They threw the story onto an unfamiliar plane of meaning. “Nirmal Verma” was not external to the story, as both titles and author’s names are. “Nirmal Verma” was at once inside the story—the invisible presence of “Hindi literature”—and in tension with it. Despite being the story’s one marker, “Nirmal Verma” failed to clarify the narrative’s relationship to nationality or history as we understand them in the context of the literary.
It was at this point that I realized “Terminal” belonged to a certain alternative tradition: the works of art that reject markers, including those of nationality. This formulation might lead to the assumption that such artistic and literary practices must be internationalist or even universalist by nature: by belonging to no nation, they belong to all nations, or to everyone. But the universal depends on particularities of identity or nationality: it requires them in order to transcend them. When those particularities are withdrawn, the larger categories waver. The relationship between the specific and the general (foundational, once, to so much literary discussion) seems less useful as a starting point.
The work without markers should also be distinguished from what critical theory has for over thirty years been calling sites of “difference.” “Difference” was domesticated early on through sets of identifying markers: aberrations from what came to be seen as the universalist norm—white, male, middle-class, heterosexual—constituted “difference.” The work in which markers are absent asks, on the other hand, for a kind of poetic attention that opens up to the strange without taking refuge in “otherness.” It unsettles many of the critical paradigms we fall back on.
While writing the headnote to Verma for my anthology, I thought of my encounter one afternoon at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (which had, at the time, shifted location for renovation) with Picasso’s Night Fishing at Antibes. Moving from one dark and crowded room to another, I arrived at a painting that seemed to be dominated by black and that I had to squint at. It was as if a patina of poor lighting had obscured the scene; or it could have been that my myopia had worsened. When I peered at the caption that provided the title, I felt my myopia improve. I began to gradually see the details that comprised the moment of night fishing. But what ensued was not “seeing” as much as understanding a process through which an absence occupies its own space and tradition, and won’t readily fit into art history (Cubism) or national history (Europe) as we expect it to. The title seemed as much an invention as the image itself. It didn’t play an external, identificatory role. It was less a marker than part of the manipulation of material that comprises Picasso’s genius. It took me back to the name “Nirmal Verma,” which could also be deemed an invention except that the author had to ostensibly expend no effort toward creating it—but it had the same effect on the story and its location as Night Fishing in Antibes did on the painting; the clarification took place in the reverse direction, too, as both Night Fishing at Antibes and “Nirmal Verma” gathered new meanings that aren’t generally available to titles and author’s names. The fact that Nirmal Verma is the author’s name was a coincidence, but not one that diminished the invention. This might appear to presage a way of thinking about fiction that we now classify as “autofiction,” but it’s worth reminding ourselves that “Nirmal Verma” remains—unlike the author’s name in autofiction—outside “Terminal,” and inside it only invisibly. The same is true of Night Fishing at Antibes: it seems to refer to a painting, or to a scene, but enters the work invisibly to organize it from within. These adjustments are characteristic of the work without markers.
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The chief theorist of the tradition that queries markers is Jorge Luis Borges. Borges has no use for the idea of “national” or “international” literature; or “historical” or “contemporary” writing. In his essay “The Argentine Writer and Tradition,” he places the questions these categories raise in the realm of the “pseudo problem” rather than whatever comprises a genuine “mental difficulty.” This is an intellectual move descending from the Buddha, for whom all metaphysical and quantitative questions (“Where does the universe end”; “What happens after death”; “What is eternity”) are redundant or avyākata questions (to believe otherwise is to give veracity to “pseudo problems”) that distract from the tricky matter, the genuine problem, of attention.
I should rephrase: it’s not so much that Borges has no use for the idea of the “national” or “international,” or the “historical” or “contemporary”: it’s just that he believes that they can’t be arrived at through markers. The national, international or the historical must, if they exist, be felt plausibly through an absence rather than the presence of elements that indicate these things. Borges takes up this position in a refutation of a particular literary school among his contemporaries: the gauchesque writers, for whom the Argentinian qualities of Argentinian writing are of paramount importance, and for whom these qualities are to be introduced through “local color.” In response, Borges points out that encountering Argentinian detail in a work is no guarantee that the reader is encountering Argentinian literature; in fact, the opposite is probably true. “Gibbon observes that in the Arabian book par excellence, in the Koran, there are no camels; I believe if there were any doubt as to the authenticity of the Koran, this absence of camels would be sufficient to prove it is an Arabian work.” In “Terminal,” too, there is moment-to-moment specificity, but no equivalent of the “camel.” The one indubitable carrier of national and cultural particularity in the story’s environs—the name “Nirmal Verma”—also slips away from performing a camel-like function: of proclaiming that this is a story about an Indian in Europe, or a Hindi story about Europe. If anything, it suggests that we can’t arrive at these categories via narrative in ways we assumed we might. I should add that Verma admired Borges.
The other principal argument on behalf of a tradition against markers is developed by Borges in his famous mock-essay, “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote.” Menard is an early twentieth-century French poet and scholar who, according to the unruffled commentator, “did not want to compose another Quixote, which surely is easy enough—he wanted to compose the Quixote.” We’re told at the outset that Menard’s own creative and scholarly work includes a “visible” oeuvre, which is “easily enumerated,” and, presumably, a body of work that’s invisible, describing whose importance is the true job of the Menard critic. Here, too, even before we encounter Menard’s singular Quixote, is a firm rejection of the idea of the way the tradition of markers self-reflexively legitimizes itself, by implying that only that what’s framed as a “work” is one. This notion of a writer’s work is too “easy.” When it comes to the two Quixotes, Cervantes’s and Menard’s, the commentator eventually performs a simple literary-critical comparison, placing a Cervantes paragraph next to one by Menard. To the untutored eye, the paragraphs are identical, but the commentator, trained to reject the visible as “easy” and the unseen as plain, irrefutable and immediate, is excited by the difference in style and purpose between Cervantes’s rhetorical flourish and Spanish contemporaneity and Menard’s William James-like pragmatism and his deliberate archaisms.
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Other writers have, since, added to this lineage. By doing so, they have deviated from the national, the international, the particular, the local, the universal, the historical and the contemporary. While putting together the Picador anthology in the late 1990s, I thought I’d revisit a text that had had some traction in the tiny universe of English writing in India when I was a teenager: the first, substantial part of the poet Arvind Krishna Mehrotra’s essay “The Emperor Has No Clothes,” which had come out in 1980 in the Cuttack-based magazine Chandrabhaga. Indian English writing, then in its last year of freedom from Midnight’s Children, was mainly poetry- and Bombay-centered, with as little inkling of the global novels to come as, nine years later, people in Berlin had of the demolition of the Wall. The red clothbound issue of Chandrabhaga was still recoverable from a bookshelf in my flat; I may have safeguarded it because it contained some poems I had written as a seventeen-year-old, but, equally, because of the vague importance I’d once accorded the Mehrotra essay. Rereading it, I felt I was in dialogue with debates that had taken on new forms. Mehrotra grapples, in the course of his disagreements with the poet and critic R Parthasarathy, with what constitutes an “Indian poem”: an idea, once in circulation in that tiny world of Indian English letters, that in the 1990s, with “novel” substituting for “poem,” had mutated into a global conceit. This question of the “Indian poem” or “Indian” anything—another “pseudo problem”—perhaps continues to be relevant only for the Indian writer in English. (The Urdu or Marathi poet not only thinks in terms of Urdu or Marathi poems rather than the “Indian poem”—for them, the poem itself as a category breaks down into various kinds of formal practices like the ghazal, abhang or free-verse poem, which in turn are subject to further disintegration.)
Mehrotra’s disagreement with Parthasarathy in “The Emperor Has No Clothes” centers on the poetry of A.K. Ramanujan—a multilingual poet, writer and scholar who wrote poetry in English and translated from Kannada and ancient Tamil—and his relation to the “Indian poem.” For Parthasarathy, Tamil and Kannada form the deeper strata of Ramanujan’s consciousness (as he belonged to the southern parts of India) and English the upper stratum (he lived in Chicago, where he taught at the University). The poem Ramanujan wrote about a Tamil god, “Prayers to Lord Murugan,” expresses, as far as Parthasarathy is concerned, Ramanujan’s deep Tamil self in the English language. For Mehrotra, it’s uncertain whether a poem by Ramanujan about Chicago (like “Chicago Zen”) is less Tamil and more American than “Prayers to Lord Murugan.” If there are camels in the Qur’an (and there apparently are, contra Gibbon), it would be reckless to take them to be integers of Arab-ness of greater reliability than any other element in the Qur’an.
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For me, the immense, mysterious photographs that comprise Belgrade-born, Toronto-based photographer Ljubodrag Andric’s exhibition, Spazi, soglie, luci (Spaces, Thresholds, Lights), premiered last year in the Palazzo Cini in Venice, make most sense—and their remarkable imaginative impact becomes most palpable—when they are placed in the history I have spent some time outlining. As photographs, they are records of reality. But they refuse a reality mediated by our ideas of categories, including the “national” and the “international.” (I am reminded of an observation that the art critic Barry Schwabsky made about a feature of my own writing that he suggested I share with Andric: a “capacity to present things in their concreteness without interpreting them.” It was Schwabsky who introduced me to Andric and his work.) The exhibition gestures toward the international by placing photographs of doors, passages and ceilings of historical buildings in Jaipur, Lucknow, Hampi, Bundi and Mandu in India inside another historic building in Venice (the Palazzo Cini) and then situating them, in the same exhibition, in close proximity to three large, pale photographs of buildings in Venice. It gestures toward this internationalism only to suggest that its concerns lie elsewhere—that assumptions to do with cross-cultural locatedness are of relatively little interest to it. This means it eschews curatorial comparativism—of the kind that, a few years ago at the Tate Modern, placed Matisse’s collages alongside similar work that the Bengali painter Benode Behari Mukherjee created late in his life when he had lost his vision. Comparativism always implies a secure ground from which to view something else. In the Tate Modern, Matisse (and French experimentation) provided that ground. It directed us how to compare and see by looking at one thing in terms of another. The fact that Mukherjee’s collages were made when he was blind was a reminder that seeing, in itself, is not enough, but the more radical implications of this for the juxtaposition in the room were never really investigated by the Tate. On the other hand, in Space, Thresholds, Lights, neither Jaipur nor Lucknow nor Venice provide the secure ground from which to make a comparison. Andric’s photographs of India and Venice are, in a sense, anti-sight, or, at least, antithetical to sight’s historical baggage. Once we start looking for markers, as we’re in the habit of doing, and find none, the pictures start to blur, like the words on the page on which Verma’s “Terminal” is printed. They take away from our dogged comparativist selves the vantage point from which we like to see one thing in terms of another.
Ljubodrag Andric, JAIPUR 49
Ljubodrag Andric, LUCKNOW 10
Ljubodrag Andric, VENEZIA 9
Since the photos of Venice are interchangeable with the photos of Jaipur, and the ones of Jaipur with those of Lucknow (and so on), the difference between locations, surfaces and textures are—as with Cervantes’s and Menard’s passages of the Quixote—at once strikingly obvious and invisible. What is it that, in an Andric photograph, separates a Jaipur door or arch from a Lucknow window or ceiling or a Venetian wall? What distinguishes a vertical outline, which seems to be neither opening nor carving, from a geometrical figure that has burst into the center of a picture? It’s the name of the photograph: “Jaipur”; “Lucknow”; “Venice.” These are as transformational as the images. “Jaipur” is not the name of a place; it’s not even the title of a photograph. It is a photograph. Similarly, Night Fishing in Antibes doesn’t refer to an independent event or place that the painting is about: it is the painting, and nothing else. “Nirmal Verma” is a man with a biography and an author, but in the context of “Terminal” it is the one proper name associated with the story: we’re not being asked to consider what other meanings “Nirmal Verma” might have. As names and titles in this lineage I’m describing neither serve an identificatory function nor assert ownership, and as the works themselves relinquish marks confirming nationality or essence, we are moved, in their presence—whether they’re by Borges, Verma, Picasso or Andric—to confront a different itinerary of how tradition and particularity travel. The photographs in the exhibition don’t stand outside tradition and particularity; they stand outside itineraries we’ve been educated in. To look at an Andric photograph does not involve seeing an object, but refocusing on what we know and on whatever is unaddressed by the inherited, institutional ways of recognizing a “Western,” “non-Western,” “modern” or “ancient” object.
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Before and after my wife and I visited the Palazzo Cini, we wandered around Dorsoduro. We were staying there and not on the San Marco side, as we had on our only other visit to Venice more than a decade ago. Dorsoduro is less crowded: Andric tells me it’s because it’s not a stop on the way to somewhere else, as the other islands are. So, although it has important buildings and exhibition spaces, its alleys, lanes and what seem like residential houses have a faintly nonparticipatory air that must speak more directly to the visitor than landmarks can.
It was fiercely hot. But this was not what reminded us of North Calcutta. It was the very narrow alleys, including the one we were staying in, the glimpse, each time we approached or came out of our door, of clothes drying from clotheslines at the far end, the patchy discoloration on walls, the metal gauze covering some windows, the specific type of residential houses we passed and the (often green) wooden shutters on windows. North Calcutta is the “old town”; it goes back to the eighteenth century. It was where Bengali modernity emerged over two hundred years ago; but the last century saw the main settlements of middle-class professionals move to South Calcutta, engendering houses with hybrid forms that combined, from the 1920s and 1930s onwards, straight lines, local Bengali features and art deco styles—residences that were smaller in dimension than the North Calcutta mansions, and with comparatively few or no neoclassical features. Continuities between North and South Calcutta include those windows, whose slats (unlike the ones in Europe) can be maneuvered up and down on levers, and patterned ventilators carved into the walls, which we also noticed in the converted monastery in Florence that is now the Museo di San Marco with Fra Angelico’s frescoes—each an astonishing, sequestered, dynamic moment—on the walls of the cells on the first floor. In these cells we recovered a bit of ourselves when my wife suddenly saw the ventilators on the lower corners of rooms.
The windows—and the ventilators, ever since I had taken conscious note twelve or thirteen years ago of their place in the composition of a Bengali room—constitute, for me, the beginning of history. This is because they go back to the origins of Calcutta, and for me, history stretches no further back than what I call “Calcutta”—and this is not because I was born there (I was, but I grew up in Bombay), but because the history of my sensibility begins, I believe, with those windows. And the windows are the essential bit of history that’s at once foundational and won’t fit in: they won’t be Bengali, although they’re Bengal itself; they won’t be colonial in the way we have come to understand colonization through the British Empire, because they’re not to be found in Britain; they are at once immediate and modern and an element in the way we configure episodes to do with mythology and cosmology, in that you can see them in the background of eighteenth-century Kalighat oil paintings in which Shiva and his family occupy the foreground; they are not so much the Europe we recognize as Europe, of well-known monuments, as the Europe that we don’t quite see. Hannah Baader of the Max Planck Institute in Florence told us that, oddly, they’re called “Persiane” windows in Italy. So, again, Europe won’t hold.
The West as exemplified by the United Kingdom and America is, even when it’s at its most intimate through various interfaces with my life, still exterior to me; but “Europe,” as an alley in Venice or the moss-covered steps by a canal, is a madeleine—I taste it; it takes me back to where I began; it’s a memory, a place without ready markers. I have seen Venice only twice, but it’s not as if I’ve been to North Calcutta many times. One is almost as distant as the other. To go to North Calcutta is to travel a long way even for those who grew up in the city (and aren’t outsiders, as I am). It’s to confront a site you recognize precisely because recognition means forfeiting your vantage point. The terms “Europe,” “Venice” and “Calcutta” are interchangeable as Prague and Hindi literature are in a Nirmal Verma story or Andric’s photographs are in Spazi, soglie, luci. When I say “interchangeable,” I don’t mean “dispensable.” I mean we have to rethink what location is, and how we account for, and respond to, our historical formation. Andric isn’t a European abroad in the conventional sense. Neither does he exemplify the “universal” human being. His photographs emerge from a momentary insight into a common inheritance that arises at exactly the same moment as an acknowledgment of the uselessness of what we call common inheritances.
This essay has been adapted from “The Art of Ljubodrag Andric,” by Amit Chaudhuri. Copyright © 2026 by Amit Chaudhuri. The essay is excerpted from INDIA by Ljubodrag Andric. Published by Hartmann Books on May 26, 2026.
Art credit: Ljubodrag Andric, JAIPUR 36; JAIPUR 49; LUCKNOW 10; VENEZIA 9. © Ljubodrag Andric. Courtesy of the artist and BUILDING Gallery, Milan and Robert Koch Gallery, San Francisco. Both images appear in Andric’s upcoming book, INDIA, published by Hartmann Books on May 26, 2026.
If you liked this essay, you’ll love reading The Point in print.