Textures of Time

At a recent literary conference organised by Sahitya Akademi at Rashtrapati Bhavan, writers, poets, and scholars gathered to explore the relationship between literature and time. Poet and cultural chronicler Yatindra Mishra’s evocative address raised questions about how literature lives through and beyond its moment—and how writers must reckon with their own limitations.

“Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world,” Shelley famously wrote. It is a stirring idea—generous in its vision, romantic in its tone. But perhaps, as Yatindra Mishra reminded us with quiet candour, it asks the wrong thing of literature. Even Gandhi, Tulsidas, and Kabir—towering literary and moral figures—could not change the world in the way the phrase suggests. What they did change—slowly, inwardly—was themselves. Writers, Mishra argued, must resist the illusion of transformative power over society. Their real challenge is subtler: to evolve with time, to stay honest to their voice, and to remain porous to the world around them.

Democracies change. People change. The social pulse beats with new rhythms in every era. A writer who does not attune themselves to these changes—who remains locked in the echo chamber of their own certitudes—cannot blame the world for their growing irrelevance. If literature is to remain pro-people, it must first listen to the people. It must tap into their fears, frustrations, idioms, and longings. Not to flatter them, but to reflect them. Not to manipulate, but to mirror.

The Rashtrapati Bhavan conference, marked by a mood of introspection rather than assertion, offered the rare chance to pause and ask: How much has literature truly changed? Or more pressingly—what has it preserved? As Mishra noted, literature is not merely the product of time—it is also time’s mirror, memory, and sometimes its uneasy conscience.

Literature rarely ignites revolutions or rewrites laws. But it helps us remember why revolutions begin and why laws matter. It reminds us of truths that make transformation possible: dignity, justice, love, freedom, fraternity. These are not transient themes. They are the foundational grammar of humanity—and every great work of literature contributes to their expression.

Tulsidas, in Ramcharitmanas, did not craft manifestos—but he sculpted a moral cosmology shaped by dharma and surrender. Kabir, the weaver-poet, challenged orthodoxy, caste arrogance, and spiritual vanity—not through agitation, but through verse. His dohe still carry the urgency of a whispered rebellion. They survive not because of state patronage or academic preservation, but because they echo in the lived oral memory of India.

Even Mahatma Gandhi, before he became the Mahatma, was a writer. Hind Swaraj was not a political strategy—it was a literary meditation on freedom, conscience, and the violence of modernity. His words remain not because they wielded power, but because they held ethical clarity.

Some writers write not to transform society, but to witness its inner churn. Agyeya was one such voice—radical in his restraint, philosophical in his alienation. His concern was not external change but internal depth. His literature chronicled the fragmentation and longing of modern selfhood.

Mahadevi Verma, in contrast, wrote with a fierce, empathetic gaze that lifted the voiceless from silence. Her poetry gave dignity to pain, agency to the marginal, and voice to the otherwise erased. She did not write with an agenda. She wrote with attention—and in doing so, she transformed feminist consciousness in Indian literature.

Writers like Tagore, Bharati, Kamala Das, and Qurratulain Hyder transcended their moment not because they predicted the future, but because they were deeply attuned to the textures of their time. They understood that literature is not about being timeless. It is about being timely with depth—about responding to the world not with slogans, but with soul.

To call these writers legislators, then, is to misunderstand their vocation. They do not govern. They illuminate. They do not command. They compel. In an age of noise and urgency, they remain the keepers of quiet truths.

This is the ontological eternity of literature: its ability to outlive the moment that produced it and still speak to hearts that come after. It does not archive—it resonates.

And yet, literature cannot survive on memory alone. It must stay alive to change. Writers must resist both nostalgia and arrogance. They must stay porous to the public and accountable to time.

At Rashtrapati Bhavan, the question posed was: “How much has literature changed?” But perhaps the more unsettling—and necessary—question is: how much have writers changed? And what must they still refuse to let go?

Let Shelley rest. Writers were never meant to govern the world—they were meant to guard its conscience. If they can bear witness with courage, evolve without vanity, and listen with humility to the shifting heartbeat of democracy, they will remain what the times most need: custodians of the soul of a civilisation.

For it is not in laws that their power endures, but in the silences they break, the truths they preserve, and the futures they quietly prepare.

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