Is it strange that I remember the exact moment I decided to apply to graduate school for an English Ph.D.? It was a muggy night in Mumbai, and I was on my way to a bar for drinks after work. The train was crowded, and I was bone-tired and miserable. Hemmed in on all sides, breathing other people’s sweat, I suddenly realized that I hadn’t read a book for weeks. I had a vision of my brain turning to mush, of neural networks physically decaying within my skull, and I knew I had to escape.
Once I was sure I had to leave India, I managed to jump through all the hoops without complaint: taking the GRE, cobbling together a project proposal, making small talk to a computer to prove my proficiency in English (never mind my bachelor’s degree). After receiving an offer of admission, I obediently lined up for a visa interview at the heavily fortified U.S. embassy on Kolkata’s Ho Chi Minh Street (yes, that Ho Chi Minh). It probably wasn’t a good sign that the consular officer’s eyes glazed over as I described my research project, but I didn’t care. Nine months after that muggy night in Mumbai, I was in Philadelphia, walking into a bare apartment that smelled vaguely of air conditioning and carpet cleaner, a smell I have associated with America ever since.
I had never been outside India, and I thought graduate school would unlock the world for me — and it did. Not only was my stipend six times what I had been earning as a journalist in Mumbai; it was also more than what my father made back in India as a surgeon. Although the cost of living in the United States was much higher, the sheer strength of the dollar relative to the rupee ensured that graduate school felt like a second chance at life. I learned to eat with chopsticks and tell wines apart; I experienced snowfall for the first time; I squandered my summer funding on a trip to Europe just because, just to tell myself I too could stand before Marx’s grave or walk down the same bridge as Kafka. I didn’t realize how lucky I was till later. My university paid better than most, and unlike many Americans of my generation, I had no education loans to repay.
I suspect that the graduate-school-to-green-card pipeline will burst soon, defeated by its own success.
I had moved to the United States with no inkling of the severity of the crisis afflicting literary studies. For a long time, I could not see the crisis at all. After five years in Indian public universities, I registered only a disarming and sometimes alienating opulence. No graffiti on the walls, no stores running a thriving trade in illegal photocopies of textbooks, no pi-dogs rummaging through trash cans or lounging around students furtively smoking ganja. An unbelievably well-stocked library that would even find ways to borrow books it didn’t have in its catalog. Borges-meets-Brutalist architecture. No more scrounging for bootleg e-books on Russian websites. I spent my first few months in a daze, trying to recall the titles of half-remembered books I had always wanted to read but never managed to locate in an Indian library or bookstore.
Even now, as I prepare for the job market and confront the stark lack of available options, I have trouble reconciling myself to the apocalyptic imagery of The Chronicle’s “Endgame” series. Describing “academe’s extinction event,” Andrew Kay reminds us of a viral image from 2017: three golfers in Oregon blithely ignoring a devastating wildfire raging all around them, determined to get in one last game. It’s an arresting image. But unlike Kay, I can’t find it in myself to be angry or disappointed with the golfers. All I seem to want is a chance to get in a game myself before everything burns down.
This is not to say that graduate school turned out to be everything I wanted it to be. I had half-expected graduate seminars to sound like scenes from a ’90s Whit Stillman movie: garrulous and pretentious, but, ultimately, sincere. In reality, I often struggled to understand what was at stake in this argument or that. In the end, Twitter turned out to be a better guide to American identity politics than the literary critics I had read back home. In India the stakes of a book, a talk, or a poetry reading were clear to me; here, I drank single-origin coffee, cultivated my CV and credit score, and wondered what my intellectual vocation was. Like Stephen Dedalus in front of his British dean of studies, I found my tongue stumbling over familiar words, intimidated by how naturally Americans spoke English: caressing each word, adding lilts and twangs in the most unexpected places.
When I began graduate school, I was sure that I was on the right side of history, that my work would be part of a long process of decolonizing the university. I used to be invigorated by the promise of Edward Said’s call to literary scholars to “intrude” on other disciplines, to refuse to accept any restrictions on what our objects of study should be. Now I’m a little less smug, a little less sure that we are speaking truth to power just because we say we are. Besides, the problem with intruding into conversations among more empirical social scientists is that, while they may nod politely at uninvited guests, they refuse to take us seriously till we learn how to read census data. And as soon as we are out of sight, they promptly forget the names of the literary texts we recommended and use their free time to rewatch Game of Thrones. And who can blame them, when we can’t even persuade one another to read beyond our own subfields?
I’m not sure when elation began to give way to a mild, confusing disappointment. Confusing because it was unreasonable to be disappointed in the presence of so much opportunity, with so many grants to be had and fellowships to be won, in an Ivy League university where even the urinals had managed to find themselves a donor (“The relief you are currently feeling is made possible by …"). But the hyper-professionalization of American academe left me cold. At times, being in graduate school felt like scaling Mount Everest, not as a team, but with each of us on separate, progressively narrowing paths that we call literary fields. Halfway up the mountain, the fields/paths diverge to a point where we lose sight of one another. The oxygen begins to thin, and it’s no longer possible for us to talk together or (heaven forbid!) spend a summer reading Tolstoy or Naguib Mahfouz. Are you a 19th-century Slavicist? No? Then War and Peace is irrelevant to your literature degree. Hurry up and get to the top. There’s a line at the summit.
Had literary studies always been like this — so insular and … incurious? Or was our collective intellectual retreat into sharply demarcated subfields a creeping effect of the job crisis, reaching backward to infect and destroy everything it touched? I can’t say. But if this really is the “endgame” moment for literary studies, maybe the honorable thing for us to do as graduate students is to go down in style: to read as widely and furiously as possible during these five to seven years, instead of chasing a model of narrow professional expertise that the rest of the world does not take seriously anyway.
As I write this, my fellowship is close to running dry, and my visa’s expiration date is perilously near. I face the very real prospect of having to finish my degree in a hurry, with nothing to show for so many years abroad, not even an accent that might convince skeptical relatives that I did really teach “English” to native-born American undergraduates. But my sense of gratitude outweighs all other emotions.
Every year, during application season, I receive emails from Indians I do not know, asking for tips and suggestions about applying to graduate school. For international students, even relatively privileged ones, the cost-benefit analysis of American graduate schools will always be skewed by things the first world takes for granted: sexual freedom, scholarships, the ability to access paywalled digital archives. It is a remarkable privilege to be paid to study (and teach) literature for so many years. I suspect that the graduate-school-to-green-card pipeline will burst soon, defeated by its own success (after all, how many instructors do you need to teach those two global-lit courses?). But when future historians look back at our moment, it may not be the decline of once-prosperous English departments that will shock them — as much as the fact that they existed at all.
