From Dublin to Delhi: The Afterlives of James Joyce’s Ulysses

Photo by Shanai Tanwar

Yesterday I found the soul of Delhi in London. 

As I gathered alongside hundreds of Indian students and allies in Aldwych to protest the recent hunger strikes asking for education reform and government accountability in Delhi’s Jantar Mantar, the energy was palpable. Under the greenery, surrounded by Urdu poetry and chanting “Inquilab Zindabad,” I could have sworn the homeland had manifested itself in this colonial capital this evening. 

Which is funny because last month, I found the soul of Dublin in Delhi. 

I was visiting my birth city for a ten-day period to meet with family (and ostensibly research for my Master’s dissertation) when I heard that one of the city’s most celebrated photojournalists was hosting an exhibit in honour of James Joyce’s Ulysses. I’ve followed the work of Mayank Austen Soofi or over six years and was overjoyed to be in Delhi in time for Bloomsday week (June 16-21) when the “visual diary” would unfold for its audience. I was fortunate enough to attend on the last day and was part of a small group of Joyceians who were given a tour of the exhibit by Soofi himself. 

“Joycewale: Notes on Photos, a Diary Between Dublin and Delhi,” named after Soofi’s daily column “Delhiwale” in the Hindustan Times, was a curation of his experiences with Ulysses’ literary world. Funded by the Irish Ambassador to take a trip to Dublin last year, Soofi brought his photojournalistic skills to this faraway place. What he found was that perhaps Dublin and Delhi aren’t so unlike each other at all. 

“It all happens in a day,” Soofi noted while guiding us through his exhibit. We heard about the lasting imprint Joyce’s life and work has left on Dublin, transforming it into a city where you can find him around every corner. Photos of Dubliners dressed for Bloomsday, street art featuring Joyce and his wife Nora, and busts of the Irish writer populated the exhibit.  

Photo by Shanai Tanwar

Soofi’s classic style of documenting Delhi, from the everyday street peddlers to doors in the Walled City, thrives in the mundane. His inspiration comes from the stories he finds on foot, traversing a city whose history and culture predate today by several centuries. It is with this attention towards the ordinary that he approached Dublin – he focused on how both Joyce and Ulysses have sublimated themselves into the city’s identity naturally. 

One of my favourite aspects of “Joycewale” was the many parallels Soofi drew between Dublin and Delhi. Aside from photos hung side-by-side of groups of men huddled around ubiquitous doors in both cities, there was a recognition of how Dublin and Delhi share a similar history of enduring British colonisation. This appears not just in colonial architectural fixtures in both cities, but also in how Dublin and Delhi are energised politically, culturally, and aesthetically. 

Amongst the photos on the walls were images of the various copies of Ulysses owned by Soofi himself. Some copies were acquired from Delhi’s famous Sunday Book Bazaar – which has been around for over 70 years – while others were bought in Ireland, gifted by friends, or found in other ways. The multitude of editions were a testament not only to Ulysses’ enduring popularity, but the ways in which Joyce’s work has found itself appreciated across cultures. 

At the end of our intimate “tour” with Soofi, I asked him what he thought of the deliberate, calculated difficulty of Joyce’s writing. After all, Ulysses has been proclaimed by readers around the world and even Joyce himself as being one of the most reference-heavy texts of all time. But for Soofi, this doesn’t take away from the effect of the narrative. In fact, he believed that this is simply the way Joyce wrote and would have wanted his work to be read. 

Per Soofi’s advice, I, too, might one day pick up Ulysses without an intention to decode it, choosing instead to enjoy it as it is, as it comes. Having only previously encountered Joyce in classrooms where we’ve been encouraged to dissect his novel and perform a careful autopsy of its various “episodes,” maybe it’s time for a new approach to Joyce.