Journey With Literature

When I was an undergraduate student, literature existed only as a word printed on the timetable. My days were spent scrolling through my phone, attending lectures with the body but not the mind, and studying only in the final week before examinations. I passed my exams, but I did not understand what I was passing through. Literature, if it existed at all, was something to be memorised and forgotten.

In our B.A. syllabus, The Canterbury Tales appeared like a rumour. The book itself was nowhere to be found. Instead, we had Kautilya—a guide of questions and answers that reduced Chaucer’s living voices to dead summaries. I remembered fragments: the Knight’s son, the Wife of Bath—remembered not as a complex character but merely as a woman who flirted and married often. That was not literature; it was debris.

When we studied Christopher Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta, I actually read the play. I followed its story, understood its events, and reproduced them faithfully in the exam. I passed. Yet the play remained sealed in its own time. I did not know how to connect it to the present, to power, money, or identity. I had learned the what, but not the why.

Ironically, before Marlowe, I had read a book that was not part of any syllabus. It was about a nineteen-year-old boy who was studying in college while simultaneously getting an opportunity to represent something abroad. That book astonished me. It showed me that life could be lived differently—that education could open doors instead of closing them into classrooms. That sense of wonder led me to Harry Potter. I read the entire series without guidance, without theory, without purpose. I read because the reading itself felt alive.

Then came confusion. I had read books, but I did not know what to do with them.

During that crisis, I turned to motivational books. They promised clarity, confidence, and direction. They told me not to be negative, not to criticise myself, not to doubt. At the time, they felt necessary. Only later did I realise that some self-criticism, had it come earlier, might have been useful. Motivation gave me energy, but no method.

It was only during my postgraduate studies that literature truly arrived.

I encountered ideas that did not tell me what to think, but how to think. T. S. Eliot taught me that the self must dissolve into the work. Roland Barthes announced the “death of the author” and shifted authority from the writer to the reader. I learned what it meant to read between the lines, to place novels within their historical moments, to see how politics, ideology, and power shape stories.

Yet even then, I remained obedient. I believed whatever the book told me because I did not yet know how to argue with it.

That, perhaps, is what literature finally taught me.

Literature is not information. It is not moral instruction. It is not even pleasure alone. Literature is a training in uncertainty. It teaches you to sit with contradiction, to recognise that meaning is unstable, that truth changes with context, that no single voice is final.

It shaped me by slowing me down. By forcing me to ask questions instead of seeking answers. By making me aware that every text is a negotiation between language, history, and the reader’s own mind.