Current Issue

Chief Editor’s Note

This is the sixtieth issue of The Bombay Literary Magazine. The first fifty issues varied a lot in the number of items they contained, so the count of how many issues depends on what counts as an “issue”. But still, we’ve been at it since 2013 and persistence is a potent magic. The two-dozen or so editors we have, that took a while to build. Our graphic fiction vertical has begun to really take off. Or take translations. A few days ago, we realised that we’d published translations in 26 languages so far. The latest addition to the list, “Hansi”, which is classical Korean Chinese, can be found in this issue. We’ve been clearly busy, and what’s particularly satisfying, busy for no earthly reason. So what’s next on the agenda?

We can’t say “nothing”. There is no such thing as “nothing”. Even vacuum is more crowded than an unreserved Indian railway compartment. Every Planck-sized cubic cell of the universe is choc-a-bloc with quarks and barks and Higgs boosums getting upto all sorts of quantum jiggery. There you are, waiting in the queue, hot day, noisy, Delhi in an headache-inducing airlock that’s what it is, and you come upto Mother Nature and say, very nicely, “nothing, please”. Sure, says Mother Nature, and then she hands you a brand new universe. And everyone in the queue laughs.

In short, we have to do something. It’s easy for the head honchos to say they want change, but how exactly can a literary magazine change? Sure, it can change its people, that is, its sensory apparatus, but at the end of the day, it’ll still be publishing stories and poems. And sure, we have a perennial list of transformative initiatives: opening of new verticals, reducing our social media footprint, launching a substack, website changes, process changes. Starting from Issue 61, we’ll source essays, not by invitation, but by open call. So on and so forth. But the question we’re asking is a deeper one. What is it that we are being by doing?

There’s no such thing as progress in literature, after all. What we have is one rearrangement of passions followed by another. It’s phoney to claim things like we want excellent stories (who wants lousy stories?) or “literature, uncommonly told” (that used to be our motto) or that we want to change the world for the better (for god’s sake madam, who doesn’t??).

So what are we after? I think that’s it, really. The question is the answer. We are engaged in finding out what we want, and that’s where you come in. It takes a minimum of two to build a universe. If Literature, as Barthes remarked, is “the question minus the answer”, then uncertainty must lie at the root of our enterprise. We don’t know what we want (at least I don’t), and I hope we stay that way.

I think our publication history reflects that taste for surprise. Look at the collection of stories and poems in this issue! It’s a slice of the world. The world is plural to begin with, and as William James said, it’s pluralism all the way down. No one word, one concept, one quest can ever do justice to this plurality. There’s only way to curate a literature for such a world: set aside the sieves. Equip oneself with a cloud chamber. Arrange the editors around it like magnets. Watch the world stream, fission, spark into life, curl towards the magnets. We call the resultant coruscant pattern, give or take a quark, an issue. The next one will simply be the next one and that suffices for the day.

Welcome to Issue 60 of The Bombay Literary Magazine.