Can ignorance, mistake, failure shape ways of reading, or do they disrupt its proper practice? What happens when the authority of modern education and culture places canonical western texts in the way of readers who live in worlds remote from their material contexts?
The Amateur reads patterns of autodidactism and intellectual self-formation under systems of colonial education that are variously repressive, exclusionary, broken, or narrowly instrumental. It outlines the development of a wide range of writers, activists, and thinkers whose failed relationships with institutions of knowledge curiously enabled their later success as popular intellectuals. Bringing current debates around reading together with the history of higher education in the postcolony, it focuses on three primary locations: Black intellectuals in apartheid-era South Africa in the aftermath of the Bantu Education Act of 1953, 20th century Caribbean writers who sought to understand the disembodied legacy of the diaspora through accidental encounters with literature and history, and writers from late-colonial and postcolonial India whose disruptive self-formation departed from the administrative project of professionalizing a particular kind of colonial subject.
Celebrating flawed and accidental forms of reading, writing, and learning along the periphery of the historical British Empire, Majumdar reveals an unexpected account of the humanities in the postcolony.
Reviews:
Amateurism and Self-Making as a decolonial project: Review by Shamayita Sen in The Book Review Literary Trust |December 2025|
Raiding the Cupboard: The West’s literary legacy for readers around the world |Times Literary Supplement| August 8, 2025|
The philosophy of literature intersects markedly with literary criticism: Review by Lantz F. Miller in The Philosophy of Review |May 2025|
Best Books:
Featured among the ‘Best Scholarly Books of 2024’ by Priya Satia in The Chronicle of Higher Education.
Featured among the ‘Best Books of 2024: My Choice” by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra in Open The Magazine.
Excerpts:
The Birth of the Amateur Intellectual | The Wire | October 18, 2024|
Meet the reader inspired to seek their own eclectic, confused and misdirected adventures with books |Scroll.in | October 18, 2024
The Accident of Aesthetic Education |Literary Activism | September 03, 2024
Poor Reading, Weak Theory: An Excerpt from “The Amateur” | Los Angeles Review of Books | July 9, 2024
Reviews:
‘The Amateur’ by Saikat Majumdar: The evolution of a radical rule breaker | Mint Lounge | February 9, 2025
‘The Amateurs’: Saikat Majumdar’s book argues that reading can be a route to claiming selfhood | Scroll.in | January, 19 2025|
In Praise of the Amateur: By Rajesh Sharma | Medium | December, 15 2024|
Event Recordings:
The author in conversation with Prof. Huzaifa Omair Siddiqi on The Amateur |HDFC Library, Ashoka University, March 15, 2025|