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JADAVPUR JOURNAL OF COMPARATIVE LITERATURE

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2013-2014

2013-2014

DEPARTMENT OF COMPARATIVE LITERATURE JADAVPUR UNIVERSITY CALCUTTA

JADAVPUR JOURNAL OF COMPARATIVE LITERATURE 50 — 2013-2014

Founded by Buddhadeva Bose

Editor 1961-63 : Buddhadeva Bose 1964-82 : Naresh Guha 1983-95 : Amiya Dev 1995-2006 : Swapan Majumdar 2007-2013 : Subha Chakraborty Dasgupta

Editorial Board Suchorita Chattopadhyay, Samantak Das, Sayantan Dasgupta, Sujit Kumar Mandal

Special 50th Issue Comparative Literature and Literary Studies Today

Price : Rs. 150.00 / $ 15.00

Published by Pradip Kumar Ghosh, Registrar, Jadavpur University, Calcutta 700 032 and printed by Technoprint, 7 Srishtidhar Dutta Lane, Calcutta 700 006

ISSN 048-1143

JADAVPUR JOURNAL OF COMPARATIVE LITERATURE 50

JJCL 50 our contributors The Jadavpur Journal of Comparative Literature is an annual refereed publication of the Department of Comparative Literature, Jadavpur University. Submissions are welcome. Analytical papers in Comparative Literature, of approximately 5,000 - 8000 words length, may be made available in English or Bangla to the Editor in both soft and printed copy. Soft copies may be sent by email, in MS Word (English) or Abhra (Bangla), to jjcleditor@ gmail.com, or on a CD along with the printed copy in a sealed envelope to The Editor, Jadavpur Journal of Comparative Literature, Department of Comparative Literature, Jadavpur University, Kolkata 700032, India. The in-house style sheet to be followed may be downloaded from http://www.jaduniv.edu.in/htdocs/update_department. php?deptid=65

Kumkum Sangari Ganesh Devy

Aesthetics of Circulation: Thinking between Regions

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Verrier Elwin’s Tribal World and The Tribal view of Elwin’s World

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Revisting Snehalata: The Arrival and Gendering of the Novel in Coloinal Bengal

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Ananya Dutta Gupta

The Topsy-Turvy World of Tagore’s Shey

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Kiran Keshavamurthy

Truth, Habit and Literature - Sundara Ramasami’s J.J.: Some Jottings

141

Pre-History of the ‘Folk’: A Case of Bangla Literary Historiography

161

Evaluating Indian English Literature: Exploring Grounds in Comparative Literature

181

Nandini Bhattacharya

Avishek Ray Shatarupa Sinha

Ipshita Chanda

Book Review Kajal Bandyopadhyay: Tension and Synthesis in Wole Soyinka’s Plays. Dhaka: Dhaka Viswavidyalaya Prakashana Samstha, University of Dhaka, 2012. 207

Sucheta Bhattacharya

Book Review Tarashankar Bandyopadhyay: The Tale of Hasuli Turn. Translated by Ben Consibee Baer. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011. 213

2013-2014 Editor : Kavita Panjabi DEPARTMENT OF COMPARATIVE LITERATURE JADAVPUR UNIVERSITY CALCUTTA

KIRAN KESHAVAMURTHY is Assistant Professor, Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Kolkata.

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AVISHEK RAY is PhD Fellow, Department of Cultural Studies, Trent University, Ontario.

our contributors

SHATARUPA SINHA is Assistant Professor, Department of English, Gargi College, University of Delhi.

This special 50th issue of the Jadavpur Journal of Comparative Literature focuses on “Comparative Literature and Literary Studies Today.” Coming after Rabindranath Tagore’s 150th birth anniversary, it was also planned, after Tagore’s talk “Visvasahitya”, delivered in Kolkata at the Jatiya Shiksha Parishad in 1907, as a reconsideration of the value of the arts and humanities in ever renewed engagements with the “other”. We are honoured to publish the articles by Kumkum Sangari and Ganesh Devy, both invited contributions, and happy to include a refereed selection from the other submissions received for this issue. KUMKUM SANGARI worked as a UGC Professorial Fellow at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library in Delhi, and is the William F. Vilas Research Professor of English at the University of WisconsinMilwaukee. GANESH DEVY is Professor at the Dhirubhai Ambani Institute of Information and Communication Technology in Gandhinagar, founder of the Tribal Academy, Tejgadh and The Bhasha Trust, Vadodara, and initiator of the People’s Linguistic Survey of India. NANDINI BHATTACHARYA is Professor and Head of the Department of English, University of Burdwan. ANANYA D UTTA G UPTA is Assistant Professor, Department of English & Other Modern European Languages, Visva-Bharati, Santiniketan. AGNIVA GHOSH is Research Fellow, Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Kolkata

IPSHITA CHANDA is Professor, Department of Comparative Literature, Jadavpur University, Kolkata. SUCHETA BHATTACHARYA is Associate Professor and Head of the Department of Comparative Literature, Jadavpur University, Kolkata

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Kumkum Sangari AESTHETICS OF CIRCULATION: THINKING BETWEEN REGIONS

Thinking of regional literatures within a nation in a comparativist frame can be problematic because regions are volatile. What constitutes a region? Languages can spread and cluster beyond territory, a linguistic zone may shrink or exceed its given boundary, territorial borders fluctuate, contract, expand or vanish; regional narratives travel as units, tropes, styles, themes or genres. Regions can be reconstellated on many axes - linguistic, religious, political - and host or expel interstitial, migrant or marginalized groups. Most regions are multilingual - monolingual fantasies are usually hegemonic aspirations.1 Indeed these are also crucial questions in any history of the modern. The complexity of linguistic, spatial and temporal provenance raises difficulties in circumscribing the objects of comparison. I propose a critical aesthetic of circulation that understands coconstitution and can step out of usual questions of influence, comparability, commensurability, and set aside hierarchies based on centres/peripheries or the metropolitan/global market presence of art and literature. Co-constitution may be economic, social, patriarchal, ideological, cultural, linguistic, political (as in anticolonial and anti-imperialist struggles), and anchored in subtle and complex histories of translation, circulation and extraction that span these fields. An analysis of co-constitution discloses visible or subcutaneous connections between seemingly discrete, disparate or binarized entities: for instance, owner-slave, white-black, Hindu-Muslim, colonizer-colonized, metropole-periphery, east-west, indigenismJadavpur Journal of Comparative Literature, Volume XLVX, 2013-2014 9

orientalism, tradition-modernity, waged work-unpaid labour, northsouth. The significance of co-constitution is this: radical alterity is easier to recuperate and demonize from imperial, orientalist, regionalist, sectarian and communal positions. A history of implication that shapes material lives, sexuality, labour, consumption, cultural production - in reciprocal or antagonist, distant or intimate connections - cannot serve these ends. Several stories of colonial co-constitution that imbricated the fantasia and materiality of Europe in its others have been assembled by locating interfaces, intersections, links, ties, interdependence, relationality, cultural mixing, interaction, imperial encounters, contact zones, transculturation, hybridity, resistance, as well as within Marxist theories of mediation, uneven and combined development, dependency and world system, slavery and colonization, and these have challenged dichotomous internalist and externalist accounts of cultural production. Yet the depth and significance of wider multidirectional co-constitution as histories, practices, spaces and material places of implication still needs to be elicited. A historical meterialist and political theory of sporadic, unequal, yet mutually formative co-constitution which includes discursive, oral, performative, literary and visual systems - precapitalist, colonial, contemporary - may transform the object of enquiry and surmount rigidities of region. An aesthetic of circulation would follow changing geopolitical maps or work with differing temporal geographical clusters depending on state forms, political economy, cultural production, avoid the hierarchies implicit in the global/local or in unidirectional travel, and see no place as too small for attention. But methodological regionalism is not a solution - witness how new regions are manifested when new historical, cultural or economic questions are asked;2 how old regional constellations lose their energy or synergy, or are reconstellated by the nation form and the political economy, or melted/reconstituted in transnational mass culture, or dematerialized in cyberspace. I argue that the continuous production of crossregional constellations - formal, generic, linguistic, semantic - through older

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aesthetics of circulation not only puncture Hindu/Indian chauvinisms and Eurocentrism, make the question of who ‘arrived’ first irrelevant, but can provisionally point to an aesthetic and yield a critical analytic that answers to a contemporary understanding of national and world history as a history of multidirectional coconstitutions, and a comparative method unconstrained by, yet attentive to, borders. The faded maps of prenational and precapitalist Perso-Turkish, Mongol, Arab, Chinese, Mughal cosmopolitanisms embedded in an Eurasian aesthetic of circulation - are largely undervalued as lineages of the modern - yet they point to the potential force of earlier multidirectional histories of implication, palimpsestic memory structures and multilinear passages to the modern. To this end I assemble a story of Mughal art that rolls a precapitalist cosmopolitanism into the early modern, unfurls at the edges of capitalism and streams into the present, the transformations along the way range from the transregional to the transnational, from patronage to commodity forms. I draw here on an argument first developed in relation to art history,3 because similar questions can be raised about the reconstellation of narrative and discursive fields. My intent is not to superimpose the art historical on the literary, which have overlapping yet distinct logics, rather to defamiliarize literary dispositions that isolate literature as an object of enquiry, and question the artificial separation of visual, narrative and discursive forms that have often relied on, assumed or animated each other. Precapitalist cosmopolitanisms The aesthetics of circulation crafted in precapitalist, prenational and often transcontinental cosmopolitanisms calls attention to dialectical processes of diffraction and sedimentation, diffusion and consolidation. The early cosmopolitanism of the Silk Road in which persons, goods, ideas, beliefs, images and narratives went to and fro for centuries is well known. After Arab conquests of China, the Silk Road and other Asian caravan trade routes became a site of interanimation of Buddhism and Islam, Byzantine and Chinese aesthetics/motifs that

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unsettle any easy separation of the Islamic from the narrowly Indic or the wider Asian and Eurasian. PreRenaissance ‘Islam’, stretching from southern Spain through Central Asia to the Far East, also carried Indian and Chinese goods and ‘culture’ to Mediterranean Europe.4 The elitism of the Silk Road was softened only by millenial duration and slow transaction, or what may be termed the transient intimacy of distance. This cosmopolitanism was an accumulation of irregular transitions over a longue duree that prefaced the more intense interactions and processes of syncretization from the 13th to the 18th century. The webbed histories of circulating narratives, art practices or religions are imbricated in other regions through the expansion and contraction of empires, travel, settlement, and contiguous trading diasporas, and always in formation: what travels back and forth in one configuration and conjuncture, goes elsewhere or returns in changed form in others, piling layer on unsetttled layer, and defies sharp or tidy periodization. These early recursivities, that composed a space of continuous reinscription and re-formation (rather than unidirectional diffusion), comprised a transAsian history of reuse of text and image in murals and folios, generated reserves, latencies, and structures of memory from prenational configurations with shifting political borders in which West, South and Central Asia were relatively diffuse zones of interchange. The Silk Road, the Indian Ocean network, and other Eurasian precapitalist mercantile exchanges of knowledges, technologies et al impelled translation - translation was a sign of extended circulation - and were, as Jack Goody notes, implicated in a process of “segmented secularization” partly generated by contact between religions.5 This became the ground from which the resources of an European early modern (I use the term as a synonym for the Renaissance, secularization, intensified circulation of goods and ideas as well as `contact’ between peoples) - were assembled. It is well established that the European Renaissance and its secular elements were predicated on Greek and Arab or Islamic precursors,6 though these interrelated histories and lineages were disavowed by insular

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narratives of an Italocentric Renaissance or enfolded and systematized as ‘European’ knowledge as early mercantilism was slowly subsumed by the logic of capital. The secular did not constitute a final break with restriction but was an expanding and contracting element in both Eurasia and Renaissance Europe.7 Mughal art: conjunction and circulation Mughal art, particularly folio painting, stood at the edges of capital and was to belong to the realms of commission, patronage, gift, colonial booty and commodity. Significantly, like Persianate folios, painted images illuminated poetry, ‘translated’ prose narrative, carried literary allusions or associations and could be accompanied by text or inscriptions. The Persian painter Kamaluddin Bihzad of Herat, venerated by the Mughals and often copied by their court artists, was ‘inspired’ by many texts and may be unintelligible without them - he illuminated the poetry of Nizami of Ganjeh and Amir Khusrau of Delhi. The embedded text and inserted verses within his figurative painting indicated lines of allegorical reading.8 More significantly, Mughal art made no originary claim. Rather, it was a unique conjunction of West/Central Asian courtly folio painting - that carried the Hellenistic legacy of Islam (as in Nizami’s Khamsa) and by the 14/15th century had blended Arab, Persian, Turkish, Mongol and Chinese elements through a process of “repetition and refinement, modification and embellishment”9 - with both the Indic and late Renaissance European.10 In Mughal courts, artists came from diverse regional schools and often painted across religious boundaries; painters and painting conventions from extant provincial schools in South and Central Asia could come together on the same page, especially in the Hamzanama (that mingles Chinese, Persian, Bihzadian and Hindustani elements).11 Royal collections too juxtaposed Chinese, West Asian, Central Asian and European styles.12 European works and prints brought by Jesuits or merchants percolated into paintings in Akbar’s court that picked up techniques of perspective, naturalism, foreshortening, spatial recession and

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shading, allegorical figures and secular subjects, features from landscape painting (distant landscapes or narrative scenes) and biblical illustrations (European-style angels, winged putti and angel heads), placed elements from other locales (such as a Dutch church tower) in new conjunctions, and often rearranged or reinterpreted Christian themes (especially images of Noah’s Ark, Jesus, Virgin Mary, and Nativity scenes).13 In The Holy Family (Mughal c.1650) Mary, localized by a Mughal crown, jewellery, clothes and bindi, sits on a Kashmiri carpet with a mango tree in the background. Kesu Das, probably a brahmin, painted St Matthew the Evangelist (Mughal, 1588); taken from a Flemish engraving by Philip Galle, it conjoins a lotus lake and forest with a distant European townscape and adds an ewer bearing his own name in the foreground.14 The Virgin and Child with an Angel by Muhabbat and Tara (Mughal c. 1595-1600) places a book of verse by the 14th-century Persian poet Hafiz next to the baby Jesus. (More than two centuries later, in 1827, Goethe’s impulse to embrace nonEuropean literatures to inspire new forms of creativity and interaction in a ‘world literature’ (Weltliteratur) was partly propelled by reading a German translation of the poetry of Hafiz.15) St Jerome painted by Farrukh Beg for Jahangir (c. 1610) modeled on Marten de Vos’s copy of Durer’s woodcut, substitutes some of the Christian iconography, uncloses the contemplative scholar-saint by seating him under a billowing, enfolding Persianate tree (though still facing his desk), and configures him as akin to an inward-gazing sufi adept. A Mughal rendition of Bihzad’s prince and hermit theme (illustrated for the Diwan of 15th-century Persian poems by Shahi of Herat, attributed to Miskin, c. 1595), adds a castled European-type city/world sheltering a temple painted with European Renaissance atmospheric perspective, while the city dwellers - Portugese dressed in European fashion - double as demon robbers.16 Krishna’s Combat with Indra, an illustration for the Harivamsa (c. 1590), is a curious conjunction of vaishnav myth (Krishna on Garuda subduing Indra on his elephant Airavata in the sky) with vignettes from European sources - a ship sailing past a rocky landscape, faces of celestial beings peeping out

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from blue clouds - inset in a wide floral border. In Bichitr’s Jahangir Prefers a Sufi to Kings (c. 1615-18), Jahangir sits on an inelegantly high throne inspired by a European hourglass; winged cherubs turn away in awe or despair as Jahangir spurns worldly monarchs - the Ottoman sultan (based on a European print) and King James 1 (copied from a miniature by the English painter John de Critz) for the company of Hasan Chishti, a sufi mystic.17 The orb or ‘globe paintings’ presented the Mughal emperors magisterially, but awkwardly, as inhabiting and controlling the ‘world’.18 The significant art fact is not merely that European pictures were copied along with the Persianate, subjected to selection based on connossieurship or personal preference, Mughalized and resignified, but that Europeans too were familiar with Mughal painting from the 17th century. Rembrandt, for example, possessed a collection and made 21 copies of miniatures, some of which were sold in an auction in 1656; and Rembrandt and Willem Schellinks copied Mughal versions of the apotheosis of Akbar and Jahangir that had already adapted European Christian iconography.19 Mughal art was conversant with early Eurasian cosmopolitanism and a still coeval, but peripheral, European early modern. It was a node of conjunction and a vector of circulation between Europe, West, Central and South Asia, as well as embedded modalities of circulation of image/text in form, genre and subject matter. Retrospectively, Mughal art can be read as a situated aesthetic of circulation (distinct from postmodern flux or radical instability), and as pointed, self conscious conjunction that was in turn amenable to continuous resignification by regional schools. It can offer a critical position from which to consider the epistemic shift in which copying, assimilation and innovation slipped out of aesthetics of circulation and were locked into the colonial dyptych of derivation and appropriation. These older histories put a question mark on modernist topoi of supersession of the old, compulsive novelty, romantic/modernist masculinist fictions of the individual as creator as well as the modern conceived teleologically as agent of destruction or salvage of

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tradition/archive. For the Mughals, borrowing knowledge from “other countries” could be cast in a language of insight because knowledge encompassed the unfamiliar and was predicated on gathering sedimented “wisdom” in slow time.20 In this episteme, imitation marked apprenticeship, respect, acclaim, elective or formal affiliation, an absorption and transmission of value. It displayed rather than submerged its sources. Yet as K.G. Subramanyan notes, novel images were produced through a series of adjustments, adaptations, deletions and reinterpretions in Mughal, as in Gandhara, art.21 Such an aesthetic of circulation relegates concepts of purity and demands for authenticity - whether non-European or European - since copying could be in the name of reverent transmission or in the name of originality: both were dependent on others, though the one overemphasized it and the other disavowed it when the originality claim became an assertion of colonial power. Both carried authorial signatures but differed in the valorization of singularity. On multidirectional diffusion and bifurcated trajectories The recursivities and topologies of circulation were often noticed but subsumed in other agendas. Non Eurocentric concepts of Asian art began to appear in the 20th century, yet the multidirectional diffusion that fed the European early modern and the West/Central Asian passages to the modern in Europe and South Asia - with their continuously mediated forms of cosmopolitanism, lurking individuation and religious pluralism - remained shadowy and did not overhaul the relational geography of modernity. A bifurcation of streams had occurred in precolonial circulations: West/Central Asian art drew on the Greek, Buddhist, Christian and Byzantine, spread them in South Asia, came to stand in conjunction with the European early modern, and later entered Mughal and Deccani art as well as European modernisms.22 Indian and Persian manuscript illuminations were collected in late 19th/early 20th century Europe (often pillaged from royal collections in Persia/Iran and sold to Parisian collectors) and exhibited several times in Paris and Munich, sometimes with the conscious intent of shaping a modernist avant

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garde.23 One goal of the 1910 exhibition of “Masterpieces of Muhammedan Art” in Munich was that “colour harmony and ornamental grandeur may well serve as inspiration and open up new directions for modern art.”24 According to an organizer of this exhibition, “In the harmony of their colours, in the grandeur of their ornament, the creations of Muhammadan art...are suited above all to provide stimuli to the modern artist and perhaps reveal new approaches to him.”25 The exhibition displayed 180 Persian, 119 Indian, 47 Turkish and 40 Arab paintings, miniatures and calligraphy (excluding book bindings),26 and was crucial in shaping the work of Matisse, Paul Klee and Kandinsky. Kandinsky and Matisse were interested in the formal principles and aesthetic qualities of carpets and Persian miniatures and looking for visual means of transgression of European categories of art.27 These paintings were quickly abstracted, severed from anchoring or attached narrative, poetry and discourse, their use of colour picked up, and reveal how, along with Japanese, Russian, West African, Mexican and Oceanic artefacts, they ‘catalysed’ European modernisms (Primitivism, Impressionism, Fauvism, Postimpressionism, Surrealism, Expressionism, Cubism).28 Amrita Sher-Gil’s often quoted rapturous remark about “those Basohli things” which were “as well painted as Matisse” and “reminiscent of Gauguin,”29 can be read within a Eurocentric art history though her practice was more layered. If the prism was one of circulation rather than western, eastern or universal monoliths, Matisse could be reminiscent of Persian miniatures,30 some of their elements tracked through the Mughal to mid-18th-century Basohli, and Gauguin’s male gaze read as dependant on a thickly gendered ‘primitive’. Till at least the 1950s, the ideological force of colonialism, intensified by collaborationist currents, lay precisely in this: that it could block positions in which the claim to interaction with European art could be made from older coeval histories of albeit elite cosmopolitanisms in which Europe was one among others, rather than from colonial abjection, modernist universalism, or a selfgenerated ‘west’.31 It could prise the subcontinent apart from a

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millenial history of continuous circulation and co-constitution, institute binaries of east-west, Indic-Islamic, indigenous-alien, derivation-innovation, ownership-borrowing, and propel an expenditure of energy on self-definition. Even now, sorting out continuities, transitions and ruptures runs the triple risk of a civilizational indigenism, an adaptive functionalism and an overprivileging of colonialism. Notions of the modern in India crafted in the miasma of colonial cognitive grids and Eurocentric histories squashed the wide Asian, southern European and north African circuits of exchange that predated the European Renaissance but also fed it; nationalism with ‘Hindu’ pretensions went back to an ancient Indian past and rejected alien conquest,32 while the secular national acknowledged these circuits, but more as a lever against communalism than as an affirmation of other lineages or passages to a secular modern.33 Mughal art: co-constitution and resignification Related yet bifurcating trajectories, co-constitutive histories of mutual shaping or implication can be indirect, jagged, angular, power-laden, paradoxical, antagonist, and could in fact be pegged on several historical ensembles and material processes, coeval developments, simultaneous eruptions,34 sequential relays, ideological configurations, production-and-reception circuits and political economies to elicit the simultaneous production of modern visuality in sharply different registers. The story of Mughal art spans the decline and rise of empires as well as the emergence of new political regions; it begins in the coeval spaces of capital, curves into colonization and later the nation-form, and can be grasped through analytic strategies of denaturalized sequences, contemporaneous counterpoints, radical juxtapositions and contrapuntal resistances.35 Co-constitutive historical sequences could unfold in paradoxical relays. As naturalism and perspective came to dot 17th-century Mughal painting: the medieval monsters and Renaissance grotesques in European art gave way with colonial expansion to voluptuous

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orientalisms (culminating in Jean Ingres, Jean-Leon Gerome, Henri Regnault) that defined the self-image and meaning of Europe. Alterities could erupt simultaneously and find dissonant resolutions. In distant yet not isolated Rajasthan, an artist probably trained in Turkman styles in Golconda enacted a euro-chinoiserie in Lovely Chinese Ladies (Mewar, 1700) in which precolonial domestication exceeds conventional visual hierarchies of size, and turns into an accidental allegory of untranslated alterity. Two gigantic Chinese women (servants?) and a huge table (superimposed with tracings from Tabriz) stand athwart a European scene (architecture and figures taken from European engravings) secreting a Chinese dragon, a kissing European couple, a munching goat and a cat and lilliputianize the strolling European men and women. A few years later, in 1719, Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, a would-be slave trader, and a figure for the seduction and domestication of alterity, colonized his tropical island sporting a gun, a “great clumsy goatskin umbrella” and a “large pair of Mahometan whiskers” as his fair skin turned “Mulatto.”36 Aesthetics of circulation persisted, even proliferated, alongside the decline of the Mughal empire. The peak and decline of Mughal ateliers dovetailed with the crystallization of Rajasthani, Pahari and other regional schools often by migrant Mughal court painters37: 18th-century Kishangarh and Kangra-style painting in Rajput courts fused Mughal elements (that had already conversed with the Ramayana and Mahabharat) with sensuous and lissom bodies, vaishnav or puranic stories, romantic and courtly themes (for instance, Taking of the Toll: Radha Intercepts Krishna c. 1750-75, ascribed to Mahesh of Chamba, Mughalizes women’s faces and the clothes of Krisha and Radha). As late Mughal painting straggled into the colonial 1830s/40s and became stiff and nostalgic, it was hybridized by shifts in patronage - some (often anonymous) court painters became bazaar or Company School painters, adapted to the naturalist tastes of East India Company British patrons, mixed elements of provincial miniature styles eclectically with folk patas and English/amateur water colours38; European subjects, hitherto

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novel curiosities and emissaries or small notations of strange firangi traders/spectators contained in the far distance or the edges of Mughal paintings39 became fleshly, regally dressed Europeans in late Mughal/ colonial darbar scenes40; some Muslim painters rendered mythological themes in miniature style and format for Hindu patrons. The emergence of museological decontextualization, ethnographic desires and bazaar aesthetics from the mid-19th century, and their subsequent entanglement with commercial orientalism, retrospectively create an ensemble in which markets function as a vector of expanded circulation and colonial co-constitution. As Mughal art crossed from sumptuary to popular commodity and bazaar aesthetics in colonial India, it was successively and simultaneously mined along with the Persian in interlocking Euroamerican ‘contact’ zones - the ethnographic yet decontexting exhibitionary complex of world fairs, expositions, museums. Mughal themes and court scenes were replicated and mounted on furniture, frames, jewellery et al41 from the mid-19th century in Delhi. West, Central and South Asian artefacts entered an expanding elite market in Euroamerica as the sign of an exotic imaginary that spilled out of the circumference of an older European aristocratic luxury market that had traversed chinoiseries, turqueries and moghuleries. In the mid-18th century, a room in Empress Maria Theresa’s castle near Vienna was decorated exclusively with Indian miniatures from the 16th and 17th centuries which had been bought for her in Turkey.42 Now commercial orientalism permeated private costume balls, fetes, theatre, opera, silent cinema, department stores, trade signs and figures, calendars, posters, furnishings, advertisements, fashion - Persian designs on evening bags and gowns, scenes from Persian miniatures enameled on vanity cases, ‘eastern’-style sets, costumes and dresses, culottes patterned on Turkish harem pants. Department stores - emblems of modernity and sites of hardening scopic regimes - featured oriental extravaganzas, Cairo markets, Turkish harems, Hindu temples, in a ‘market cosmopolitanism’ inevitably striated by empire.43 Indeed museum, fair, exhibition, shopping arcade, department store and silent cinema were often formally interrelated in styles of display, decor and address, and

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could blur the specific provenance of West, Central and South Asian artefacts. Commercial orientalism became an apparatus of modernity in early 20th-century London, Paris, New York, that fashioned a presiding masculinity and feminity, and partly designed the insignia and image of an emancipated New Woman.44 The Parisian fashion designer, Paul Poiret, gave a Thousand and Second Night party to celebrate his new ‘Oriental’ look in 1911: he dressed as a sultan holding an ivory-handled whip and scimitar, guests were greeted by “ebony-black” slaves, his wife and her women “attendants” were confined in a golden cage, and “in a pantomime of slavery and liberation,” released when all the guests were assembled.45 The scenography of the fete - replete with awning, salons strewn with coloured cushions, gardens spread with Persian rugs - drew from the ‘Eastern’ miniatures Poiret had seen in the Victoria and Albert Museum while the booths patterned on souks with craftsmen at work, acrobats, ‘Eastern’ musicians and fireworks reprised typified features of the Euroamerican exhibitionary complex. The script writer for Cecil DeMille’s films on modern marriage, Jeanie Macpherson, was asked to “write something typically American that would portray a girl in the sort of role that the feminists in the country are now interested in...the kind of girl that dominates.”46 In DeMille’s Don’t Change Your Husband (1919) the wealthy Leila Porter, dressed in ornate orientalist fashions, surrounded by Art Deco and Asian artefacts, has a spectacular fantasy of “Wealth” in which she plays an oriental queen in an opulent quasi-Babylonian court serviced by coloured male slaves who bring her caskets, precious stones and silks. This fantasy, which prefaces her rejection of “gray matrimony” and divorce, is an ambiguous sign of a new white feminity/imperial power, sexual license/consumption, of displaying and releasing American mobility. Given the generalized and regionally blurred orientalia that serves as visual culture and prop for Euroamerican modernity, one may ask what did commercial, exhibitionary and cinematic orientalism destabilize and affirm? How did dreams of mobility that refused to lose their place or privilege, turn the orient as zone of erotic transfiguration into a modality of becoming modern

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in Euroamerica, a constitutive imaginary that made both selves and others? If British Orientalism in India was a site for constituting a collaborative and divisible authority that offered middle class and upper caste Hindus a relationship with a generalized ‘west’,47 commercial orientalism in Euroamerica offered to extract and process the appendages of modernity (like other ‘raw’ materials) from what was putatively outside it. Modernity and tradition, autonomy and derivation, appropriation and indigenism, were co-constituted binaries. Ironically, as oil-based realism, schooled painting, and ‘art’ as a professional field took shape in India from the mid-19th century, the British Orientalist E.B. Havell (located in the post-1857 colonial logic of selective preservation and intervention)48 set out to ‘Indianize’ art by propagating a revival of crafts/decorative traditions as the manifest destiny of Indian artists cobbled with an antiwesternism geared to indigenist chauvinism rather than anticolonial resistance49; European commentators read the presence of European forms and artistic conventions in 19th and early-20th century Persian/Iranian and Awadhi art/architecture as loss of artistic autonomy/authenticity, as sign of moral decadence, as vulgar, offensive or incompetent copies50; successive primitivisms and appropriations of non European art into mobile, nonnaturalist, antiethnographic, abstract, disjunctive, subversive form took shape in European modernisms. As ‘local’ forms were transformed into European forms and traveled back into indigenist claims or appeared as modernist novelty, the ‘east’ returned through doubled colonial mediation in England and India: the utopian socialist William Morris, a founder of the late 19th-century Arts and Crafts Movement, dented the enduring gendered hierarchy of fine art and crafts/domestic arts in England;51 yet in a patently feminizing domestication, he recommended the trees, foliage and flowering plants of the Hamzanama for tapestry and wall paper design, and positioned it as reinvigorating mass-market ornament.52 (As textile production and printing in Britain emulated and replaced Asian imports, Indian and Persian designs and patterns were considered exemplary by Morris and others, and adapted to the

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market; this market for oriental fabrics and designs intersected with the Arts and Crafts Movement as well as the exhibitionary complex and the avant garde interest in applied arts). The Bengal Orientalists demoted Mughal art as secular and inauthentic because it was courtly, worldly, and lacking in religious qualities in contradistinction to spiritual and civilizational Hindu-Buddhist art;53 European museums usually incorporated Mughal art as an uncanonized periphery of ‘Islamic’ art from the early 20th century - even though it was not ‘Muslim’ per se; this so-called “Muhammedan art” catalysed European modernisms in the 1910s and 1920s but in another twist entered an indigenist vocabulary in Bengal. In the 1920s, Abdur Rehman Chughtai (from a family of artists who traced their ancestry to Persian architects at the Mughal court), positioned in the double lineage of Persianate/Mughal folio traditions and Bengal School Orientalism (following Abanindranath Tagore), drew in the orientalist ‘eastern’ elements in Pre-Raphaelite and Art Nouveau (especially Aubrey Beardsley), producing a quasi-colonial typology, a poetic rendition of an elite vaguely ‘Muslim’ feminine, and in a gestural return to folios, painted and printed an illustrated edition of Ghalib’s poetry or appended paintings with couplets from the Rubayyat of Omar Khayyam.54 He exhibited his work at the British Empire Exhibition in 1924, and after 1947, tried to embed Persianate and Mughal (but not regional) folio traditions into the institutionalization of a Pakistani national-modern. Such continuous re-mediation and meetings between ‘other’ worlds in both Europe and India relatedly manufactured national/ civilizational heritages or resistant cosmopolitan lineages while the ‘borrowed’ modernism was already deeply implicated in Asian history.55 Within the discrete contours of uneven capitalism and empire, the possibilities of a ‘modernist’ eclecticism were as open to an Indian as to an European artist but the ideological imperatives, mediations, political locations and positions of power differed. Later, in contrapuntal re-readings, Pakistani feminists mustered transgressive political statements, and dissenting arguments from the hybrid trajectory of miniature traditions in critiques of patriarchal

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surveillance, masculinism, militarization and imperialism. Aisha Khalid’s Silence with Pattern (2000) massifies the decorativeness of Art Nouveau and Mughal, colonial, contemporary fabric fetishes into a claustrophobic veiling while Reeta Saeed’s Sorry for the Inconvenience, Work in Progress (2001) positions an underfed, downcast donkey bombarded with hamburgers, aerated drinks and of course bombs in front of allegorically inscribed Persianate tortured rocks; Sumaira Tazeen’s dowry trunks and jutis draw on Basohli paintings to introject the domestic as a demoted yet insistent interiority56; diasporic artists use miniature traditions to layer and erase (Nusra Latif Quereshi in Australia), to mobilize the archive (Raquib Shaw in Britain, Shazia Sikandar in America), or craft a ‘multicultural’ aesthetic that safeguards ethnicity, and connects with both Britain and Asia (the British painters, Rabindra Singh and Amrit Singh’s Painting the Town Red, 2008, ‘glocalizes’ Liverpool). Modernity did not produce its ‘own’ subjectivities sui generis in India, Pakistan or Europe, but was mediated by extant, residual or peripheral ones whose oppositional force could be renewed in very different historical conjunctures, and whose premises could be positioned as antithetical or opposed to forms of the European, colonial or antisecular modern and made consonant with subversive, secular, left, feminist projects. Styles of eclecticism and a critical aesthetic of circulation The faded pre-Renaissance histories of Eurasian constellations remain significant because the same constellations produced quite discrete historical trajectories in South Asia. I cannot describe these here except to note that in India, these earlier West/Central Asian, Persian or Indic cosmopolitanisms and secular imaginings (most vivid in the 15th-17th centuries and at work till the 18th) flitted in and out of the colonial and national-secular imaginary, formed a subterranean current that flowed into the secular modern but were not created by it in the first place; their trans-regional/continental configuration did not belong to the modern nation-state, and could even embarrass it. They composed a longue duree that was neither

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fully absorbed nor obliterated by colonization. Some pathways and trajectories uneasily joined the colonial and later the secular modern while others remained nascent or undertheorized and signify a historical potential that did not run its course. My claim here is neither for a transhistorical (early) modern that severs modernity from capitalism, nor the presence of ‘normative’ European modern elements elsewhere, nor to elicit and authenticate an alternate modernity, nor to a simplistic reversal in which Europe belatedly imports an originary modernity, nor even to place Europe and Asia on the same trajectory with alternate routes through their ‘own’ empires. Rather that specific preceding constellations marked by a precapitalist geographical imagination generated languages that could be consonant with religious pluralism, the secular, or amenable to modernity, but not necessarily with the new extractive economic regimes of capitalism or the fixed boundaries of the nation-state. Thus instead of ratifying the colonial alibi that routinely attributed stagnation or parochialism to colonized countries, or, positioning Europe as ‘first’ in the race to modernity with others lagging behind or catching up, it may be more useful to note that the discursive construction of European modernity as inaugural and (usually) in bleak contradistinction to its predecessors/others was achieved by suppressing the presence of some of the same elements in other regions and reassigning them to Europe.57 These elements can reinflect the significations of a modern predicated as much on West/ Central Asian, Chinese, Mongol, Turk, Arab lineages as on the European. Region and nation can become generic concepts, or controlling claims that cordon, block, capture, annex or invisibilize histories of circulation. An admission of mixed pathways or multidirectional diffusion/ appropriation would weaken all claims to the national (the Indian as well as those of nationally arrayed European modernisms), and complicate particularist (regional, cultural or civilizational) identities. It would also interfere with the cachet of a more diversified ethnographic local/regional/national that now underpins the global art and literature market.

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Such admissions in turn would put the onus not on the ethnographic or cultural uniqueness of a region or nation-space but on a wider grounded visual, narrative, discursive history of circulation and co-constitution. This would be a history of successive styles of eclecticism anchored in the following considerations. First, forms of authorial integration and affiliation; second, types and temporalities of absorption, assimilation and appropriation; third, the historical processes (precapitalist, colonial, decolonizing, globalizing) they refract and internalize in form and genre; fourth, the ideological work they do within specific political economies and conjunctural configurations (nomadic, prenational, vernacular, metropolitan, nationalist, transnational); fifth, the suturing signs (heterodoxy, influence, inspiration, derivation, adaptation, hybridity, syncretism, crossfertilization, crosscultural encounter, indigenization, transculturation, synchrony, simulation, trace) allotted to them in critical lexicons. Critical vocabularies and their institutionalized matrices carry distributions of power and ideological burdens that open some questions yet foreclose others. There are distinctions between styles of eclecticism. The most pertinent for my argument are: first, openly acknowledged eclecticism (the reverent fascination of the medieval copy that signals an absence of spectatorial distance, the casual utilization of postproduction aesthetics58); second, a vernacular/bazaar eclecticism poised between markets and popular beliefs; third, occulting or singularizing terms (appropriation from high modernist optics of aesthetic autonomy, imagination, innovation, originality); fourth, a recoding, parodic or flattening language of open appropriation (postmodernist)59; fifth, a recombinant assemblage from a nonsequential, weightless, infinitely malleable global cybernetic archive (postmaterialist, posthistorical).60 These in turn lead into distinctions between hegemonic and counterhegemonic contexts, recuperative and subversive intertextuality, notions of self/signature and possession as well as the peculiar relation between appropriation and commodification, since neither mobility, circulation nor eclecticism are inherently radical. Distinctions also need to be made between individual affinities (affection,

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intimacy) or standpoints (countercanonical, critical, dialectical) and the quality of interest (ornamental, allegoric, confiscatory) in the used image/language/text. The crystallization of Mughal art from several circuits and its own dispersal through varied aesthetics is a story that can perhaps stand in synoptically for older aesthetics of circulation, a patchy history of some of these styles of eclecticism, and provide an entry into a critical aesthetic of circulation. A critical aesthetic of circulation evidently depends on identifying more than multiple locations of authorship, types of circulation, and their formal and semantic encoding in images/texts. The specific aegis, quality and speed of circulation, its trajectories, circuits and junctures, the places of transmission, formal and semantic transformation, the shift to other mediums, are equally significant. Though akin to cultural studies in the attention to history, class, gendering and all forms of cultural production (e.g. high or low, literary or visual),61 what distinguishes a critical aesthetic of circulation from period studies (ancient, medieval, early modern, colonial, postcolonial) is the willingness to engage the longue duree, the brief conjuncture and an amorphous contemporaneity, as well as the refusal to be inhibited by conventional period (and thus region) brackets which can freeze visual/narrative sequences and loops that may otherwise have varied durations - compressed or elongated and thematized chronologies. Within a longue duree regional constellations too can become conjunctural.62 The shift from transregional to transnational circulation, and within the latter, the shift from the colonial to contemporary forms of accelerated circulation, suggest that a critical aesthetic of circulation contends with morphing vectors. Precapitalist circulation worked through old empires, states, tribes, merchants, pilgrims, travelers, elites, humble artisans and storytellers. With capitalism, circulation - whether appropriative, collaborative, resistant - increasingly followed the transnational arc of capital and worked through colonization, new empires, the nation form, classed literacies, commodification and media. Now cybercirculation, though

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simultaneous with slower and relational forms of circulation, easily sheds the encumbrance of region or nation along with the baggage of dense historicity but is inextricable from the commodity form; it redefines as well as conjures new forms of (im)mobility, (dis)affiliation, spatial and temporal imaginaries. Each transit of image/text brings both resignification and new illegibilities that may collaborate in the production of unevenness. Neither mobility nor circulation can be fetishized. Circulation is bound to acts of subversion and appropriation, the expansion and shrinkage of orality and address, the vexatious ambiguities of reception, translation, self-translation, intertextuality, recontexting or recoding. All these would need to be seen dialectically in relation to apparently stationary forms, images, texts. What did not circulate within and beyond denotated regions? Was the immobile a parochial enclosure, a sign of indifference or rejection, an interlude or a plateau? Does that which cannot circulate continue to change? Can the immobile be as hegemonic or antihegemonic as the mobile? Is that which did not or cannot circulate also be the unmoveable linguistic and semantic substance necessarily left untransmitted by translation? Does that which has been translated retain an integrity or does it contract into a residue, helplessly overwritten and altered by the act of translation - an act now widely recognized as an incomplete, inadequate, never-neutral interpretation that can also misrecognize or violate? Does translation generate nonsynchrony when it leaves behind what it cannot reproduce (especially the temporality encrypted in an image/text)? Does translation create, dialectically, both the mobile and the immobilized (untranslatable) image/text? Which discontinuities, ruptures, and negations does circulation induce or leap across? AUTHORS NOTE: This essay was presented at a conference on Critical Methods Beyond Eurocentrism (School of African and Oriental Studies, June 2013) and a workshop on Indian Literature As Comparative Literature (Rutgers University, September 2013).

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NOTES: 1.

2.

3. 4.

5.

6.

Francesca Orsini has critiqued “the single language object/ tradition” of Hindi and Urdu studies, the problems in perceiving the “Hindi belt” as monolingual or as a region, and makes a strong case for a multilingual literary culture in 15th-16th century north India from a comparative perspective that takes in cosmopolitan and vernacular languages, written archives and oral performances, and texts and genres that ‘circulated’ in the same place and at the same time although they were ‘transmitted’ in separate traditions. (Orsini 2012: 227-28). ‘New’ historical regions have been pitted against Eurocentrism - e.g Euro Meditteranean, Afro-Eurasia, the black Atlantic (slavery), the Indian Ocean world (trade), and the Hemispheric (the Americas). See Sangari 2013. See Goody 2010: 38,41. On the rich periods of cultural production from the 9th century in Baghdad, Bukhara or Persian Transoxania, marked by forms of individuation, cosmopolitanism, rebellion against conventions, scepticism, “secularism” and “humanism,” and the enormous transfer of goods, information and knowledge between “east” and “west,” see Goody 2010: 109-10, 100, 31, 141. On the intensified circulation of goods and people that encompassed Asia and Europe from the mid-16th century, Central Asia as a crossroads for itinerant merchants and migrating peoples, and the Indian Ocean trade from 1400 to 1800, see Frank 2002: 63, 82-83. 85-89. On trade circulations from the 9th to 12th century in Eurasia, see Flood 2009. On Chinese motifs in Persian painting, see Barry 2004: 92, 128-30, 282-87, 314-15, and Gray 1962: 9, 12, 17. Goody 2010: 118, 31; see also Abu Lughod 2008. These networks were also the site of religious syncretism and gradual or partial conversion (Bentley 1993). Goody: 2010: 20-21, 141. Precolonial Europe, as Jack Goody, R.I.Moore and Martin Bernal have demonstrated, was a EuroAsian and Euro-African phenomenon. The “Islamic lands” stretching from Spain to India and the east constituted “an enormous, contiguous, relatively stable, low duty commercial zone.” Hellenic and Byzantine scholarship and philosophy as translated and

7. 8. 9. 10.

11.

12.

incorporated in Arab scholarship was later taken up in western Europe. Secularization in Europe drew on preChristian pagan myths, classical nontranscendental traditions and sceptical tendencies, the heterodox thinking of the Middle Ages became part of a broader movement confining the operations of the repressive church to “spiritual” spheres, though the suppression of alternate views continued till the 18th century (Goody 2010: 121, 12, 106, 126, 129, 36, 62, 82-83; Barry 2004:124). On the multitextured cosmopolitanism of Islam, a “harbinger” of early modernity that provincializes Europe, and European cosmopolitanism as “late, derivative and reluctant,” see Pieterse 2007: 158-63. On Arab philosophers as not mere trustees or passive transmitters of Greek philosophy to the Renaissance but as critical and creative contributors, see Hobson 2006: 114; Trojanow and Hoskote 2012: 41, 78-95. On the Renaissance as a “Eurasian phenomenon” or set of processes involving the Ottoman world, see Inglis et al 2006: 94, 97-104. See Goody 2010: 67. Barry 2004: 130, 201. Barry’s phrase 2004: 65. There are signs of this confluence and painters adjusting styles to suit patrons/clients during the sultanate (see Mitter 2001: 103-04, 99,114). Hybrid painting styles emerged from the interaction of provincial and Persian elements in Jain paintings; a 15th-century Shahnama uses Indian and Persian painting conventions e.g. Indian women are fullbosomed while Persian women are flatchested (ibid: 101). See also Goswamy 2011. See Stronge 2002: 30-34, 111; Mitter 2001: 123, 99. Mughal painters were aware of 10th-century Tantric Buddhist and 12thcentury Jain illustrated texts (Mitter ibid: 99). In the Hamzanama, different conventions to portray humans, landscape and architecture show that artists working with different traditions worked on each page (Stronge ibid: 23, 30). On Jahangir’s collection, see Mitter 2001: 128. Such collections were common in Central Asian courts e.g. Suleyman (14941566), the Ottoman ruler, collected trophies including art objects, icons and illuminated manuscripts through tribute, luxury trade and loot from Europe, China, West and Central

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13.

14. 15. 16.

17. 18.

19. 20.

21. 22.

Asia (Rogers and Ward 1988: 29-32). See Schimmel 2004: 273, 275, 277,282; Mitter 2001: 121,1234, Barry 2004: 76-77; Leach 1998: 53; Asher and Talbot 2007: 138; Stronge 2002: 114, 158-59; Topsfield 2008: 32, 42, 80. On Akbar and Jahangir’s fascination with Christian art and for an inventory of Christian images in Mughal art, see Amaladass and Lowner 2012:35-90. In Deposition from the Cross (1598), Christ’s deposition is juxtaposed with the Last Judgement (Mitter ibid.: 124). Kesu Das represented himself in a self portrait as a brahmin (see Okada 2012). Rahimieh 2011: 297-79. Barry 2004: 376, 378. There is a similar device on the top left of Jahangir Visits the Hindu Ascetic Jadrup, illustration to the Jahangirnama by Govardhan, Agra, 1616-20. See Mitter 2001: 130. In Shah Jahan Standing on a Globe by Hashim (c. 1618-29), the emperor, dressed in flowered leggings, is offered the crown and sword of kingship by European-style winged cherubs from a cloud-swirled heaven above; a third cherub holds a canopy on which Shah Jahan’s lineage from Timur is inscribed (see Leach 1998: 165). See also Emperor Jahangir Standing on a Globe with a Safavid Ruler; and a lifesize painting of Jahangir sitting on a European-style throne holding a globe that is smaller than the nimbus of light around his head (attributed to Abu’l Hasan, c. 1617), which blends Safavid with European conventions. The Mughals claimed a direct family connection to Central Asian Turko-Mongol Timurids, while the Ottomans, less literally, saw themselves as the heirs of Central Asian Timurids. Schimmel 2004: 279, 283; Topsfield 2008:82. Thus a “Letter to the Learned of the West” written by Abul Fazl on behalf of Akbar in 1582 reads: “It has been said by the wise that whoever borrows knowledge from the other countries and enlightens himself by the light of the other people’s wisdom, penetrates all mysteries.” Cited in Vanina 2004: 169. Subramanyan 1992: 26-27. A triangulation of Prince Khusro sees Queen Shirin Bathing (an illustration by Sultan Muhammad of the Khamsa of Nizami,

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23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32.

33.

Tabriz, 1539-43), A Courtesan from Deccan (Golconda?, c. 1630-50) and Decorative Figure Against an Ornamental Background 1925-26 (by Henri Matisse) opens up these bifurcating histories. Hillenbrand 2010: 205; Barry 2004: 28-9. Catalogue, cited in Shalem 2010: 3. Emphasis added. Cited in Labrusse 2010: 27. Emphasis added. Hillenbrand 2010: 217. Both had traveled previously to north Africa (Troelenburg 2010: 60). This process had counterparts in literary modernism, e.g. T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound and W.B. Yeats. Cited in Kapur 2000: 7. Matisse’s traversal of Persian art was noted by his contemporaries. See Labrusse 2010: 29. On the ideology of European diffusionism and cultural internalism and its ‘Hindu’ counterparts, see Sangari 1999: xxix, 410. Complex histories of multidirectional interanimation and interaction were blocked by a narcissistic narrative of outward diffusion of Buddhism/Hinduism in which whatever returned (including Sufism) was an altered image of itself; and by a narrative of the powerful absorptive capacities of a Hinduism (defined as inherently synthetic/syncretic) in which whatever entered the subcontinent was remoulded by it. British Orientalism and this expansive Hinduism often worked in tandem from the 19th century. Rahul Sankrityayana is an emblematic figure here in his passages from the Indian National Congress to the Communist Party of India, from Vaishnav to Arya Samaj to the Buddhist and Marxist, from Sanskrit to Arabic and Persian; the restoration and translation of lost Buddhist texts from China and Tibet and tracking the itineraries of Chinese travelers and of Buddhism till Dunhuang. His magisterial millenial panorama of Central Asian history and settler waves to establish a syncretic tale of class society with sparks of constant resistance (Volga se Ganga 1943 and Madhya Asia ka Itihas 1956) was intended to shed insularity but also affirm a subcontinental/ Indian civilization and heritage.

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34.

35.

36. 37.

38.

39.

40.

41. 42. 43.

There were similarities in class and gendering processes across regional, colonial and metropolitan divides in the coeval spaces of capital, nation formation or urbanization, and within these coordinates, similar genres or forms could emerge independently. On the juxtaposition generated by colonialism, radical juxtaposition of differences in the matrix of the modern, and now as a way of thinking about comparison, see Layoun 2009: 584-85. On contrapuntal reading, see Said 1993. Defoe 1981: 120, 134-5. Blends of Rajasthani and Mughal (and through it, Persianate) traits appear by the 17th century in Bikaner, Marwar and Mewar (see Leach 1998: 99, 105, 136, 139-40, 184; Aitken 2010: 26-36, 76-77, 84-87). Mughalized painting was incorporated in Kota and Bundi, and dominated the mid-17th century court of Mandi; some painters moved between Mughal and Rajput patronage, and some Rajput courts like Amber and Jodhpur employed painters in the Mughal style. B.N. Goswamy’s research discloses that the kalam of painter families overrides the strict demarcation of regional schools (Goswamy and Fischer 1992: 213-17, 272, 292). In Delhi, the same artists worked in similar or differing styles for diverse patrons - the late Mughal court, Delhi satellite courts and Europeans - providing many extraordinary points of interaction (Dalrymple and Sharma 2012: 10, 41-2, 47-50). In the foreground of a A Girl Draws Forth Quicksilver (Mughal c. 1740), a woman huntress rides away from a gushing well of mercury (an item of European trade at the time) while the gaggle of European traders/spectators on the top right corner are balanced and contained by the calm figure of a hookahsmoking hermit on the top left. For instance, Akbar II in Darbar with British Resident Charles Metcalfe, attributed to Ghulam Murtaza Khan, Delhi, c. 181115; and Colonel James Skinner Holding a Regimental Darbar by Ghulam Ali Khan, 1827. Dalrymple and Sharma 2012: 11-12. Amaladass and Lowner 2012: 41. On the orientalism of Selfridges, a department store in early 20th-century London, see Mica Nava 2007: 22-24, 32, 37, 39;

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44.

45.

46. 47. 48. 49.

50. 51.

52.

53.

54.

55. 56.

she, however, interprets commercial orientalism as ‘emancipating’ for Euroamerican women. For instance, harem pants and jupe-cullotes were in high fashion in the 1910s but Turkish trousers and pantaloons were first adopted by some feminists in mid-19th century US while simpler uncorseted silhouettes came to the US from China, Japan, Persia and Arabia (Edwards 2000: 227-29, 232; Hoganson 2003: 269). See Wollen 2008: 1-3. On similar balls and fetes in early 20th century London and Paris based on an Arabian Nights dress code which featured slaves, see Nava 2007: 31; Edwards 2000: 229. Cited in Higashi 2002: 301. See Sangari 1999: xxviii-xxix, 102-115. On the indigenism produced by this colonial logic, see Sangari 1999: xxvi. Havell did however note that the rise of nationalist consciousness and protest against the denationalization of Indian art could lead to an “anti-British movement” (see Michael 2012: 225). He became the superintendent of the Calcutta School of Art in 1896. Flood 2007: 36-37. Domestic arts were the province of women and fine arts were only available to middle class women until the end of the 19th century, a hierarchy that persisted into the 20th century. Cited in Stronge 2002: 21. Sixty folios of the Hamzanama shown at the Vienna World Fair of 1873 were acquired by a museum and displayed at Munich 1910 (Haslauer 2010: 277-8). See Guha-Thakurta 1992; 179-82, 157, 209. On the consequences of this ideological reading of Mughal art as secular yet ‘Muslim’, see Sangari 2013: 136-39. See for instance The Resting Place, untitled Kashmir woodcutter, untitled old musician, Fragrance, Dupatta, Zebunissa. He also painted several mythological themes, e.g. Yasoda Arjuna. See Sangari 1999:25. Heritage 3 (2001), Belongings (2002) and Possessions (2002). The work of Ayesha Durrani and Chicago-based Saira Wasim belongs to this critical constellation.

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57.

58.

59.

60.

61.

62.

Precapitalist and prenational cosmopolitanisms display some of the same features now attributed to the European early modern: contact between diverse peoples, transregional networks, syncretization etc. See also Sangari 1999: xxiii-iv. In Nicolas Bourriard’s Postproduction (2002) contemporary art is “a set of activities linked with the service industry and recycling,” the artist one who “inserts their own work into that of others,” and “the issue no longer to fabricate an object, but to choose one amongst those that exist, and use or modify it according to a specific intention” (cited in Hatherley 2009:154). The question of the legibility of one form of eclecticism to another would arise. Thus modernist appropriations were eclectic and often subversive at ‘home’ but tutelary abroad since colonialism could repress the recognition of earlier connective and eclectic forms. There is also a distinct relation between colonial appropriation by European modernisms and postmodern eclecticism (see Sangari 1999: 25). New chronotopes in art and literary practice readily traverse, disjoin or connect different historical times, register these as malleable temporalities or (cyber) spaces. Cultural studies was also predicated on a formal model of circulation traversing production-reception circuits mediated by lived experience, forms, canons, genres and conventions. As Asian countries occupy the position of creditors, become large players in financial markets, some forms of crossregional co-operation within the global south bypass Euroamerica, and art and literature markets follow in tandem. With the greater integration of bourgeoisies of different countries, and shifting centres of contemporary collection, investment, translation, there has been a double resignification of Asian art and literature in relation to both the ‘west’ and new Asian markets.

REFERENCE LIST: Abu Lughod, Janet. 2008. ‘The World System in the 13th Century: Dead-end or Precursor’, The Transnational Studies Reader eds. Sanjeev Khagram and Peggy Levitt, London, Routlege. Aitken, Molly Emma. 2010. The Intelligence of Tradition in Rajput Court Painting, New Haven, Yale University Press. Amaladass S.J., Anand and Gudrun Lowner. 2012. Christian Themes in Indian Art, Delhi, Manohar.

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Asher, Catherine and Cynthia Talbot. 2007. India Before Europe, Cambridge, Cambridge Univ Press. Barry, Michael. 2004. Figurative Art in Medieval Islam, and the Riddle of Bihzad of Herat 1465-1535, Paris, Flammarion. Bentley, Jerry H. 1993. Old World Encounters: Cross Cultural Contacts and Exchanges in Premodern Times, Oxford, Oxford Univerity Press. Dalrymple, William and Yuthika Sharma eds. 2012. Princes and Painters in Mughal Delhi, 1707-1857, New York and New Haven, Asia Society Press and Yale Univ Press. Defoe, Daniel. 1981. Robinson Crusoe, New York, Bantam. Edwards, Holly. 2000. Noble Dreams-Wicked Pleasures: Orientalism in America, Princeton, Princeton University Press. Flood, Finbarr Barry. Objects of Translation: Material Culture and Medieval ‘Hindu-Muslim’ Encounter, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2009. —. 2007. ‘From the Prophet to Postmodernism?: New World Orders and the End of Islamic Art’, Making Art History: A Changing Discipline and its Institutions, ed. Elizabeth Mansfield, London, Routledge. Frank, Andre Gunder. 2002. ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age, New Delhi, Vistaar. Goody, Jack. 2010. Renaissances: The One or the Many, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Goswamy, B.N. 2011. ‘The Master of the Jainesque Sultanate Shahnama’, Masters of Indian Painting 1100-1650 eds. Milo Beach, Eberhard Fischer and B.N. Goswamy, Artibus Asia Publishers, Supplementum 48 1/11. -— and Eberhard Fischer. 1992. Pahari Masters: Court Painters of North India, Zurich, Artibus Asiae Publishers, Supplementum 38. Gray, Basil. 1962. Persian Miniatures, New York, UNESCO. Guha-Thakurta, Tapati. 1992. The Making of a New Indian Art: Artists, Aesthetics and Nationalism in Bengal, c.1850-1920, Delhi, Oxford University Press. Haslauer, Amely. 2010. ‘Islamic Art in Vienna circa 1900 and the Munich Exhibition’, After One Hundred Years, eds. Andrea Lermer and Avinoam Shalem, Leiden, Brill. Hatherley, Owen. 2009. ‘Post-Postmodernism?’, New Left Review 59, Sep-Oct. Higashi, Sumiko. 2002. ‘The New Woman and Consumer Culture: Cecil B. DeMille’s Sex Comedies’, A Feminist Reader in Early Cinema, eds. Jennifer M. Bean and Diane Negra, Durham, Duke University Press. Hillenbrand, Robert. 2010. ‘Western Scholarship on Persian Painting Before 1914: Collectors, Exhibitions and Franco-German Rivalry’, After One Hundred Years, eds. Andrea Lermer and Avinoam Shalem, Leiden, Brill.

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Hobson, John M. 2006. ‘Revealing the Cosmopolitan Side of Oriental Europe’, Europe and Asia Beyond East and West, ed. Gerard Delanty, London, Routledge. Hoganson, Kristin. 2003. ‘The Fashionable World: Imagined Communities in Dress’, After the Imperial Turn: Thinking with and through the Nation, ed. Antoinette Burton, Durham, Duke University Press. Inglis, David and Roland Robertson. 2006. ‘Discovering the World: Cosmopolitanism and Globality in the “Eurasian Renaissance”’, Europe and Asia Beyond East and West, ed. Gerard Delanty, London, Routledge. Kapur, Geeta. 2000. When was Modernism: Essays on Contemporary Cultural Practice in India, Delhi, Tulika Books. Labrusse, Remi. 2010. ‘The Avant-garde and Islamophilia: Anatomy of an Exhibition’, The Future of Tradition - The Tradition of the Future eds. Chris Dercon, Leon Krempel and Avinoam Shalem, London, Prestel. Layoun, Mary N. 2009. ‘Endings and Beginnings: Reimagining the Tasks and Spaces of Comparison’, New Literary History 40:3, Summer. Leach, Linda York. 1998. The Nasser D. Khalili Collection of Islamic Art: Paintings from India, vol 8, London, Nour Foundation. Michael, Kristine. 2012. ‘A Universal Spirit’, in The Making of a Modern Indian Craftsman: Devi Prasad, ed. Naman Ahuja, London, Routledge. Mitter, Partha. 2001. Indian Art, Delhi, Oxford University Press. Okada, Amina. 2011. ‘Kesav Das’, Masters of Indian Painting 1100-1650, eds. Milo Beach, Eberhard Fischer and BN Goswamy, Artibus Asia Publishers, Supplementum 48 1/11. Nava, Mica. 2007. Visceral Cosmopolitanism: Gender, Culture and Normalisation of Difference, Oxford, Berg Publishers. Orsini, Francesca. 2012. ‘How to do multilingual history? Lessons from 15thand 16th-century north India’, The Indian Economic and Social History Review, 49:2. Pieterse, Jan Nederveen. 2007. Ethnicities and Global Multiculturalism: Pants for an Octopus, Plymouth, Rowman and Littlefield. Rahimieh, Nasreen. 2011. ‘Persian Incursions: The Transnational Dynamics in Persian Literature’, A Companion to Comparative Literature, eds. Ali Behdad and Dominic Thomas, Oxford, Wiley Blackwell. Rogers J.M. and R.M. Ward. 1988. Suleyman the Magnificent, New Jersey, Wellfleet Press. Sangari, Kumkum. 2013. ‘Ruptures, Junctures, Returns: (Un)lived Histories, Feminist Propositions and Nilima Sheikh,’ Trace Retrace: The Paintings of Nilima Sheikh ed. Kumkum Sangari, Delhi, Tulika Books.

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—. 1999. Politics of the Possible: Essays on gender, history, narratives, colonial English, Delhi, Tulika Books. Schimmel, Annemarie. 2004. The Empire of the Great Mughals: History, Art and Culture, London, Reaktion Books. Shalem, Avinoam. 2010. ‘The 1910 Exhibition “Meisterwerke Muhammedanischer Kunst” Revisited’, After One Hundred Years, eds. Andrea Lermer and Avinoam Shalem, Leiden, Brill. Stronge, Susan. 2002. Painting for the Mughal Emperor: The Art of the Book 1560-1660, New Delhi, Timeless Books. Subramanyan, K.G. 1992. The Creative Circuit, Calcutta, Seagull. Topsfield, Andrew. 2008. Paintings from Mughal India, Oxford, Bodleian Library. Troelenburg, Eva-Maria. 2010. ‘Framing the Artwork: Munich 1910 and the Image of the Islamic Artist’, After One Hundred Years, eds. Andrea Lermer and Avinoam Shalem, Leiden, Brill. Trojanow, Ilija and Ranjit Hoskote. 2012. Confluences: Forgotten Histories from East and West, Yoda Press, Delhi. Vanina, Eugenia. 2004. Ideas and Society: India between the 16th and 18th Centuries, Delhi, Oxford University Press. Wollen, Peter. 2008. Raiding the Icebox: Reflections on 20th-Century Culture, London, Verso.

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Ganesh Devy VERRIER ELWIN’S TRIBAL WORLD AND THE TRIBAL VIEW OF ELWIN’S WORLD *

I It was in the early 1980s that I first attended a major conference on Comparative Literature in India. This was held in Delhi and had attracted participation of practically everybody who mattered in Indian Comparative Literature. Being young and not being familiar with the historical trajectory of Comparative Literature, I had argued in that conference that Comparative Literature as then constituted would not provide adequate interpretative or theoretical substance to the study of bewilderingly diverse literature in Indian languages. But, once I started looking more closely at the issues involved, my initial scepticism started turning into an open acceptance. This led me to examining the difficulties arising out of the mutual complicity between Anthropology, Orientalism and Comparative Literature in order to see if a universal comparatism was available as an option to a post-colonial literary critic. My quest did not arise from any desire to establish parity between western literature and Indian literature. Rather it was to see if the historical process of our internalization of western distribution of imaginative life into Anthropology for the ‘savage communities’, Orientalism for the ‘old and tired cultures’ and Comparative Literature for the ‘modern nations’ had not resulted in our inability to grasp the oral and tribal literature in India. The question was, “Did the European * This is an extended version of the article published inAnthropologists, Indigenous Scholars and Research Endeavour: Seeking Bridges Towards Mutual Respect, edited Joy Hendry and Laura Fitznor, New York: Routledge, 2012. Jadavpur Journal of Comparative Literature, Volume XLVX, 2013-2014 39

stereotyping of the colonised mind result in an internal stereotyping of the marginal and remote communities and cultures by Indian literary scholars?” Similarly, was there a counter-stereotyping of the ‘main-stream’ literary imagination by the communities and cultures pushed to the margins? To this end it was necessary to understand how Anthropology views Indian tribal communities and how the tribal communities view Anthropology. The dialectic offers an enormous amount of learning for Comparative Literature in India, particularly as Indian scholars have developed over the last three decades significant insights related to colonialism and patriarchy. The first major attempt to bring face to face Anthropology and Indigenous Studies for a dialogue was the Building Bridges conference organized by Proessor Joy Hendry at Oxfordbrookes in 2009. I went to the Building Bridges conference at Oxford Brookes as a ‘tribal activist’ and without any significant knowledge of Anthropology. Among the participants, there were several eminent Anthropologists as well as advocates of Indigenous Studies. Back home in India at the Adivasi Academy, the institute for Indigenous Studies I founded, I had been talking for over a decade about the need for what was crudely termed as ‘reverse Anthropology’. Therefore, to find Anthropologists themselves trying to build bridges between their field and Indigenous Studies was to see an intellectual combat at close quarters. During the discussion, I realised that the forces on both sides were engaged in the same pursuit, their anxieties just as shared, and indeed that they had better make a common cause, for both the sides have a fairly similar battle to fight for recovering ‘understanding’ out of a wide array of stereotypes arising in altogether different quarters. Perhaps, one of the minimum definitions of Anthropology may be that it is an attempt at ‘understanding’ human groups within a social framework. The understanding aimed at is not so much a hermeneutical explication as a snapshot of the being of the given social cluster. An Anthropological exercise can at best be descriptive while the social structures and phenomena that it seeks to describe are of necessity dynamic in nature. At its most perceptive,

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Anthropology can offer us the brilliance of the Lacanian ‘gaze’ (Lacan 1988: 215) and, at its worst it offers no more than a translated version of the political orthodoxy. Indigenous Studies, described simplistically, is the post-colonial rejoinder to the canonical Anthropology whose foundations are seen intertwined with the colonial advent. It is more of a self-expression of what had formerly been the ‘Anthropological subject’, an attempt to unweave the stereotypes so as to recover the lost selfhood. However, a close scrutiny of the history of the discipline does not bear out this simplistic antithesis. Rather, one is likely to find that both Anthropology and Indigenous Studies are essentially fictional, one a third person narrative and the other a first person narrative. Of course, fiction is perhaps the most perceptive way of speaking about reality. However, it is when one juxtaposes the ‘understanding’ posited by Anthropology with the ‘misunderstandings’ circulated and settled within the discourse of power and politics, one notices that in many ways Anthropology is quite a logical forerunner of Indigenous Studies. The life and work of Verrier Elwin1 may illustrate how fiction created by Anthropology receives but an unfair hearing, and how Indigenous Studies gets anticipated by Anthropology. My comments, however, are restricted merely to the question of ‘understanding’ and are not intended to salvage Anthropology of its ethical transgressions. II The British colonial rule in India was not only a political and economic enterprise; it was also an experiment in restructuring a complex society. For the first two centuries of colonial contact, beginning with the arrival of the East India Company at Surat in 1600 to the establishment of the Asiatic Society in Bengal towards the end of the 18th century, the colonial imagination had great difficulties in understanding the complex weave of the Indian society. Out of these difficulties arose many misconceptions and myths about communities and social conventions. At times these were as comical as the idea that India is a country of snake charmers and magicians.

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But in many instances the wrong reading of the society resulted in untold human misery. This very same ‘knowledge’ formed the basis for formulating law during colonial times. The story of the communities known as ‘denotified’ is without doubt the most mindboggling tale of inhuman collapse of compassion. During the 1830s, the colonial government appointed William Henry Sleeman (1788–1856) to prepare a list of instances of assaults on wayfarers in central India. He took to this task with an amazing devotion and produced a voluminous list of violent episodes. The list would not have amounted to much had it not been for the turn of events during 1857 in central India. In the wake of the battles fought and lost by the Indian states, all isolated and potential groups of soldiers, and even those who were likely to be in the supply chain for them, came to be seen as candidates for the Sleemanlist. Later it was this list that became the basis of the 1871 Criminal Tribes Act (CTA).2 In the CTA the terms ‘tribe’ and ‘gang’ were used interchangeably. These ‘gangs’ or ‘tribes’ were subjected by the CTA to a descriptive tag of ‘criminal tribes’. Their traditional occupations were rendered ‘illegal’. For instance, the traditional coin makers were presented as counterfeiters and the wandering mendicants were presented as thugs: The provisions of the CTA read: If such a tribe, gang or class has no fixed place of residence, the report shall state whether such tribe, gang, or class follows any lawful occupation, and Government shall state, the real occupation of such tribe, gang, or class, or a pretence for the purpose of facilitating the commission of the crimes, and shall set forth the ground on which such opinion is based; and the report shall also specify the place of residence in which such wandering tribe, gang, or class were proposed to be made for enabling it to learn its living therein (Devy 2007: 139).

Once the traditional occupations of the nomadic and semi-nomadic communities were brought under the scanner, the colonial government provided for their being officially declared ‘criminal tribes’.

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If upon the consideration of such report, the Governor-General in council is satisfied that the tribe, gang, or class to which it relates ought to be declared criminal, and that the means by which it is proposed that such the tribe, gang, or class shall earn its living are adequate, he may authorize the local government to publish in the local Gazette a notification declaring that such a tribe, gang, or class is a criminal tribe, and thereupon the provision of this act shall become applicable to such the tribe, gang, or class (Devy 2007: 139).

The government’s powers to declare a community ‘criminal’ were made arbitrary to the extent that the question of inclusion of a given community in the list was taken completely out of the judiciary’s purview. The CTA stated: No court of justice shall question the validity of any such notification on the ground that the provision therein before contained, or any of them, have not been complied with, or entertain in any form whatever the question whether they have been complied with; but every such notification shall be conclusive proof that the provisions of this act are applicable to the tribe, gang, or class specified therein (Devy 2007:140).

After this, even an attempt to move out of the district without informing the local authorities became a punishable offence. The act of questioning the notification in any form too came to be seen as a criminal offence. The colonial government’s right to detain such communities and to do whatever the government decided to do with their lives also came to be seen as a lawful right and duty of the government officials. The officials were charged to prepare Registers of Criminal Tribes; and once a register was prepared for a given district, even the very same official was not allowed to make any deletions in it. The nature of the declaration was made entirely non-negotiable and absolutely final. The victims of this draconian law were given no reprieve. The onus of proving that they were not criminal fell on them, but they were left with no rational argument since their being born in a certain community

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itself was seen as a crime. The persons belonging to these tribes had to spend their entire lives proving to the authorities without any specific reason that they were not criminal. Thus, life itself became a trial for them without any let up whatsoever. The communities ‘Notified’ under the act acquired the form of some ‘social raw material’ for use in empire-building. The members of these communities came to be used in the colonial construction projects of railways and factories. The law provided for the authority to bundle up and shunt them as and where they were of use: Any tribe, gang or class, which has been declared to be criminal, or any part thereof, may, by order of the local government, be removed to any other place of residence (Devy 2007: 140).

Even children were not viewed with any special sympathy. The government decided that the Superintendent of the specific settlement was to be asked to function as the ‘mother’ for the children. Besides, the Superintendent was given the authority to put the children to unpaid labour if it was thought necessary to discipline them. The superintendent of a reformatory settlement for children shall be deemed to be the guardian, within the meaning of Act No. XIX of 1850 (concerning the binding of apprentices), of every child detained in such settlement; and such superintendent, may if he shall think fit, and subject to any rule which the local government may make in this behalf, apprentice such child under the provision of the aforesaid act (Devy 2007: 140).

The sordid saga continued without any significant alteration in the provisions of the CTA for over seven decades, a good three generations. The infamous CTA asked for forced ‘isolation’ and ‘reform’ of the communities listed. These included coin makers, entertainers, petty traders, migratory peasants, wandering groups, nomadic communities, long-distance traders and many others.

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The CTA required creation of ‘settlements’ as reformatories. The Settlements required ‘strict procedures’. These procedures kept becoming increasingly inhuman. Forced labour became the daily fate of the inmates. The CTA of 1871 went through several revisions, every revision brining in new forms of ‘punishment’ for being born within the listed communities. The last of the CTA was passed in 1924. By then a total of 191 communities had been brought under its purview. The total population of all these communities ‘Notified’ under the successive CTAs is, at present, nearly 60 million. That is about 5% of the Indian population.3 Elwin inherited this kind of ethnographic engineering as the background. It is these stereotypes about nomadic communities, and though different in substance, not different in style, imagery of Adivasis – the tribals – that Elwin had to counter. III To be Verrier Elwin, born in England, engaged almost entirely in the tribal communities in India, and writing for an audience that had not yet emerged as a literary class, was altogether difficult. To pass such a life required an Elwin-like sense of adventure, purpose, excitement and humility. If Elwin laid bare before the world the great civilisation of Indian tribal communities, those communities had been conceptualised as the primitive faction of the Indian society by the colonial government. The story extends back to the 18th century. The term ‘tribal’ was in use among European merchants and travellers in India from the 17th century; but it was used to designate just any community. It was brought to use in a specific sense for only certain communities as a result of a series of conflicts between those communities and the colonial rulers. About the same time as the formulation of the CTA, the colonial government produced another list of the Tribes of India. These were the communities that had come in conflict with the British rule on the issue of the sovereignty over the forest areas. During the 1860s, the British had created a Forest Department, primarily to provide

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good quality timber for building railways and naval ships. The forest dwelling communities in India opposed the colonial take over of their forests. They neither cared for the colonial government nor did they understand the idiom of the British law. Not surprisingly, most of these conflicts were often violent and involved armed clashes. Since the political idioms of the conflicting parties were radically divergent, it became difficult for the colonial rule and its diplomacy to forge treaties with the forest dwelling communities. Communities located at all such areas of conflict were bundled together by the colonial government within the term ‘tribe’. Soon after the need to conceptualize ‘tribes’ became stronger, a sophisticated machinery of scholarship was put in place to enumerate, describe and define the Indian tribes. The historical, linguistic and cultural differences among these communities were so vast and complex that it would have been impossible for any rational scheme of sociological classification to place them in a single social category. While all this was happening in India’s political history, already a branch of Orientalism in Europe had emerged in the form of Anthropology, perhaps more appropriately Savageology. Some of the attributes discussed in Savageology were applied to the Indian ‘tribes’, and tribes came to be seen as necessarily primitive. By the end of the 19th century, the concept of tribe and the notion of criminal tribes had received acceptance even among the educated Indians, writers, journalists and lawyers. And so, when the 1891 Criminal Tribes Act made a comprehensive addition to the 1871 list of the branded ‘tribes’, or when the following year the register of forest codes was prepared, there was no evident protest from any quarter. By the turn of the century, the tribe had come to stay as an unchallenged category constitutive of the primitive in the Indian society. At the beginning of the 20th century, the resistance movement that opposed the British rule showed no interest in questioning the wisdom of the British scholarship that had been constructing various images of Indian society. The communities that the colonial scholarship had constructed as the primitive continued to be seen as primitive. The political leadership of the Indian freedom

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movement showed no interest in recognizing tribal rights or the historical contribution that the communities had made during the 19th century. The freedom movement spearheaded by the Congress had a genuine interest in reviving the rural economy; but the social complexities of the rural and traditional communities in India did not count much in the Congress thinking on economy. These were submerged under the fascination for the post-revolution Russian Socialism or the Gandhian understanding of the village as the hub for a cottage industry. The tribal had been essentially a political premise; and the colonial government had managed to seal it off from the 20th century social hermeneutics of India. It was natural, therefore, that by the time Elwin made his first trip to a tribal area, the tribals had already become a forgotten issue in Indian politics and society. It was Elwin’s historic burden to re-examine the category, turn it upside down and gain sympathy, if not respectability, for the tribes. He carried out this seemingly impossible task with an unparalleled dedication. Given the timing of Elwin’s arrival in India, it is not surprising that the young Elwin felt attracted towards Mahatma Gandhi. However, it was not Gandhi but Jamanalal Bajaj, Thakkar Bapa and Sardar Patel who drew Elwin’s attention to tribals. Thakkar Bapa provided Elwin the initial exposure to tribals by taking him to Dahod and Jhalod. Elwin arrived in India in November 1927; he finally decided to move to Karanjia in Mandla District in January 1931. He came in close contact with Gandhi during 1930, and started spending time at the Sabarmati Ashram and traveling with associates of Gandhi to various parts of India. Gandhi was not just the most popular leader that India has known, he was also, and perhaps more essentially, a moral universe. Though Elwin came under the spell of this moral universe, he decided to trespass it in favour of his quest for understanding the tribals. He was austere in his habits – for almost 15 years he walked bare foot – but he could not tolerate making a fetish of not drinking and other such characteristics associated with a ‘good’ satyagrahi. For him to follow Gandhi was not so much to undertake a sadhna but to understand and articulate poetry of a kind.

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From the day in January 1932 that Elwin and Shamrao Hivale, who continued to be his life-long associate, started out in a bullock cart with only a couple of hundred rupees between them through the jungle of the Maikal Hills, to the very end of his life, Elwin spent over three decades living among the tribals, serving them, learning their languages and culture, documenting oral traditions, preparing policy documents, advising the government on tribal issues and writing about them. The turbulent years of the freedom movement and the world-war formed the backdrop of Elwin’s work. After arriving in India, Elwin did not return to England for any long spells, and once he moved to his first tribal village, his contact with cities became reduced. If he was in touch with the rest of the world, it was mainly through his reading, which provided him a certain resonance with modern times. The police persecution that he had to face owing to his affiliation with the freedom movement, and the censure by the Church that he invited upon himself, gave him a sense of being a hero and a martyr. But, all these other sides of his life increasingly kept becoming far less significant for him in comparison to his profound attraction for the tribal communities and his deep emotional ties with them. He liked to describe his life philosophy as the philosophy of love: Love and the duties it imposes is the real lesson of the forest … Among very poor and exploited people there was the need to maintain those imponderable values that give dignity to the life of man; to restore them their self-respect, the feeling of being loved … There was the need for reverence, reverence for all life (Elwin 1988: 348).

It was the sequential unfolding of his many-sided love for the tribals during the three decades of an intimate engagement with them that led to Elwin’s production of such mighty works as The Baiga, The Agariya, Maria Murder and Suicide, Folk-Tales of Mahakoshal, Folk-Songs of Chattisgarh, The Muria and the Ghotul, The Tribal Art of Middle India, The Myths of Middle India, Songs of the Forest, Folk-Songs of the Maikal Hills, Leaves from the

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Jungle and The Aboriginals and Bondo Highlanders. Had Elwin’s style possessed no literary charm, had his prose not reflected an alluring personality, had he not lavished such profound love on the communities that he researched, and had he not belonged to an exciting era, even then just the wealth of information that Elwin’s numerous works contain would have made his contribution phenomenal. Elwin’s love for the tribal communities of India has almost no parallels, with the exception perhaps of Mahasweta Devi and Shankar Guha-Niyogi4. His involvement with them went far beyond an anthropological dedication, aesthetic fascination or altruistic community work. Through the decades of his work, Elwin became increasingly aware that defending tribal well-being was his responsibility. In 1959, he was asked by the Ministry of Home Affairs to prepare a report of tribal development. He argued in it that for any development plan for tribals to succeed, it must acquire a ‘tribal touch’, ‘we must look, if we can, at things through tribal eyes and from the tribal point of view.’ Respect for the tribal way of life and tribal culture was the bedrock of the policy he proposed for tribals. Jawaharlal Nehru’s ‘Foreword’ to Elwin’s A Philosophy for NEFA (the North-East Frontier Agency) captures the essential features of Elwin’s approach to tribal development: We cannot allow matters to drift in the tribal areas or just not take an interest in them. In the world of today that is just not possible or desirable. At the same time we should avoid overadministering these areas and in particular; sending too many outsiders into their territory. It is between these two extreme positions that we have to function. Development in various ways there has to be, such as communication, medical facilities, education and better agriculture. These avenues of development should, however, be pursued within the broad framework of the following five fundamental principles: First: people should develop along the lines of their own genius and we should avoid imposing any thing on them. We

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should try to encourage in every way their own traditional arts and culture; Second: Tribal rights in land and forest should be respected; Third: We should try to train and build up a team of their own people to do the work of administration and development. Some technical personnel from outside will no doubt be needed, especially in the beginning. But we should avoid introducing too many outsiders into tribal territory. Fourth: We should not over-administer these areas or overwhelm them with a multiplicity of schemes. We should work through, and not in rivalry to their own social and cultural institutions. Fifth: We should judge results, not by statistics or the amount of money spent but by the quality of human character that is evolved (Elwin 1960: Foreword).

IV Elwin had spent his years with tribals till 1950 solely in central India. It was not till 1947 that he made his first visit to any of the north-eastern states. Travelling to Nagaland was not easily possible for him, for he was till then a ‘foreign national’. It was in 1953 that the government of India decided to establish a special branch of the Civil Services for the North-East. Elwin was initially asked to assist the government with the selection of officers for this new cadre, and then to move to the north-east frontier as an advisor. As the years passed, he was given further responsibilities of setting up a tribal research institute and providing policy inputs. Previously, Elwin was known as an Anthropologist, a scholar, writer, a friend of tribals and a Gandhian of sorts. It was during the last 15 years of his life that he emerged as an administrator and a policy maker for tribal development. In that role, Elwin left a lasting impact in the field of tribal development. However, despite his move to Shillong as a policy consultant, Elwin’s concern for tribals rights did not diminish. This is evidenced in his comments on the impact of his own work on the Muria institution of Ghotul:

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My memories of life in Bastar and Orissa are, like my memories of Oxford, inconsolable. I shall never see, no one will ever see, the Muria ghotual as I saw it, or the Saoras as I saw them. It may be that I myself helped by my very presence to destroy what I so much admired (Elwin 1988: 193).

Or again, his agonised response to the indignity that tribal prisoners have to suffer in Indian prisons: The NEFA tribesman, who is taken down from the mountains and sent to prison in the plains, suffers, in addition to the inevitable sense of isolation, the affront to human dignity, the loneliness and despair that afflict all prisoners, special deprivations. The heat of the plains is almost unknown to a hillman. It is probable that no one knows his language … Some of us have been very keen to have a special jail for our tribal people, which will be a place of healing and restoration and where the whole idea of punishment and revenge will be banished (Elwin1988: 159).

The government of India did not have a separate ministry of tribal affairs till 1999. When the new ministry was established, an attempt was made to draft a new tribal policy. The document produced by the ministry was so unwieldy that it soon had to be abandoned by the government. In his time, Elwin produced a policy for tribal development which to this day remains the seminal document relating tribal development. At present, there are 87 million of them. The work of Verrier Elwin, a man born in Kent who had accidentally arrived in a tribal village in 1930, continues to influence the destinies of these millions. Had it not been for him perhaps independent India would not have liked to acknowledge that tribals exist in this country. V The terms ‘caste’ and ‘tribe’ have stuck to Indian society ever since the Portuguese travel writers and missionaries decided to describe in these terms the vast variety of ethnic and occupational groups

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and sects of the Indian sub-continent. The result is that today no Indian describes Indian society without taking recourse to the categories ‘caste’ and ‘tribe’. In the initial period of India’s contact with western nations the two terms were used as synonyms, any difference between them lay only in the social status of the groups they described. The colonial rulers finally shattered the synonymy through a legal intervention when an official list of communities was prepared in 1872 as the list of Indian tribes. Since then the ‘tribes’ or ‘Adivasis’, as they themselves like to be described, have come to be perceived as a distinct segment of Indian society. History has indeed been extremely unkind to the Adivasis people in India. None of their brave fights against the British has ever been treated as part of the ‘national’ struggle for freedom. From the Bihar uprising of 1778 to Lakshman Naik’s revolt in Orissa in 1942, the Adivasis of India repeatedly rebelled against the British in the Northeast, Bengal, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Gujarat and Andhra Pradesh. The condition of healthcare delivery and educational infrastructure in the areas inhabited by the 87 million Adivasis has been woefully pathetic. Adivasi land is continuously alienated, their villages constantly threatened with displacement caused by various ‘development’ projects, their access to forest produce increasingly restricted and their balanced ecology hugely disrupted by vast mining projects. Constitutional guarantees for protecting Adivasi interests do not seem to get translated into any significant increase in livelihood support and food security for them. Large-scale migrations, frequent starvation deaths, seasonal unemployment, harassment form petty officials and a perpetual indebtedness to usurious money-lenders continue to haunt the lives of India’s Adivasis, barring a miniscule ‘creamy layer’ among them. In 2004, the NDA government came up with the idea of preparing a National Policy for Adivasis. The main theme of the policy draft produced was ‘mainstreaming’ them. With the UPA government’s coming to power, a new draft was produced. Apparently, the draft had all the right kind of rhetoric. The draft

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was prepared just about the time when the bill for acknowledging Adivasi rights on land under the Forest Department was being shaped. The bill was moved with the expectation that it would ensure that Adivasis will get titles to the agricultural land that they had traditionally cultivated. The bill became an Act, though its implementation has been alarmingly slow and half-hearted. But, if the bill was at least taken forward, the draft policy made no further progress. At this juncture the Adivasi communities and the civil society engaged with Adivasi issues have no clear idea as to what is happening to the policy draft. Just when the policy draft was in preparation, the UPA government took up the related and a far more complex issue of Denotified and Nomadic Communities that had remained entirely neglected since their Denotification in 1950s. After Independence, the Iyengar Committee was constituted in 1950 to think of redeeming these victims of colonial savagery. The process of ‘denotification’ began in 1952. The CTAs promulgated in various Indian states were annulled and replaced by the Habitual Offenders Act (HOA). But by the time the HOAs were framed and the Denotification was completed, the Schedules of Tribes and Castes had already been constituted. Hence, the denotified and nomadic communities did not find an easy entry in these categories. Some of them were given the status of Scheduled Tribes; some communities were admitted as Scheduled Castes, others communities continued to languish. The country, and the successive governments, did almost nothing to change the sad situation of the DNTs. It was in 1998 that the DNT Rights Action Group (RAG) was formed in Baroda as an advocacy group. The national campaign that the RAG ran resulted in the appointment of a technical advisory group and a National Commission. The reports of these two bodies are under consideration of the Ministry of Social Justice. In the meanwhile, the DNTs of India continue to suffer inhuman treatment from all sections of the society and from the law-keeping agencies. Nothing short of a major structural change in the form of a strong protective law will bring about the desired change and

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bring freedom to these communities. They have waited for a nearly a century and a half to get freedom. Their wait continues! In Australia, the Prime Minister officially tendered in 2008 an apology for devastating the ‘lost generations’ of the indigenous people there. At this point of time, in India the Grey Hound Academy was being expanded to deal with tribal militancy. It is the same fear and suspicion that have now resulted in the Operation Green Hunt. It is indeed sad that innocent persons from the paramilitary forces are losing their lives, and indeed some of the tribal villagers are held to ransom in the name of an armed revolution. Such violence cannot be justified on any ground and it needs to be dealt with within the framework of the constitutional means available to us. However, it needs to be asked if as a nation we have really thought deeply about the place of the Adivasis and the notified communities in modern India. Besides, it needs to be recognised that the situation is not entirely local and restricted to India alone. Perhaps it is the story of Anthropology’s subject communities throughout those parts of the world that were formerly colonised. Recognised as ‘Aborigines’ in Australia, as Maori in New Zealand, as ‘First Nations’ in Canada, as ‘Indigenous’ in the United States, as ‘Janajatis’ in India, or as ‘tribes’ in Anthropology, as ‘Notified Communities’ in the administrative parlance of many countries, as ‘Indigenous People’ in the discourse of Human Rights, and as ‘Adivasis’ in the terminology of Asian activists, these variously described communities are far too numerous and dispersed in geographical locations to admit of any single inclusive description. It would be simplistic to perceive them as divergent victim groups of any shared epochal phenomenon such as colonialism, imperialism, modernity or globalisation. In their ethnic, cultural and linguistic attributes, they are so varied that it is almost impossible to speak of them as a common category of humanity. No single term can describe them with any degree of semantic assuredness. Even if one were to accept one or another term for the purpose, its normative frame may run up against numerous contradictions with the strikingly

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divergent history of every community. Though such descriptive sociological terms often tend to perform a degree of communicational theatre, a scrutiny of the range of signification that the term is expected to cover reminds one that most discursive concepts are perennially contestable. Given these difficulties, the United Nations working group established in 1982 for determining the communities that can be described as indigenous came up with a four fold criteria: a) ‘preexistent’ peoples; b) ‘marginalised and dominated’ peoples; c) ‘minority or culturally different’ peoples; and d) peoples who identify themselves as indigenous. Since each of these criteria had spaces within them for contestation, the ‘Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples’ (September 2007) was passed by the UN, but not unanimously. (Countries that voted against the Resolution included Australia, New Zealand, US and Canada.) Notwithstanding these semantic difficulties, the existential pathos of the peoples whether identified from outside, or through self-identification as ‘marginalised, minority, indigenous’, has common features in all continents. The indigenous have been facing deprivation and dispossession of their natural resource base, denial of access to quality education, healthcare and other citizenship rights, and have come to be seen as ‘a problem for the development project of modernity.’ In the words of sociologist Shiv Visvanathan: Four positions, four meditations on the problematic of the Other especially as tribal, have been particularly significant and profound. As a rule of thumb they can be classified as the Rousseauist reflection, the Romantic reaction with its own sense of irony, the ethical pragmatist philosophy and the developmentalist position. The last is an abdication of anthropology which argues that the tribe can survive only be becoming the Other. It is an inversion which not only destroys difference but is banally genocidal (Visvanathan 2008: 4).

The history of the ‘other communities’ during the last few centuries is filled with stories of forced displacement, land alienation, increasing

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marginalisation, the eruption of violence and counter-violence by the nation-state. Going by any parameters of development, these communities always figure at the tail end. The situation of the communities that have been pastoral or nomadic has been even worse. Considering the immense odds against which these communities have had to survive, it is not short of a miracle that they have preserved their languages and continue to contribute to the astonishing linguistic diversity of the world. However, if the situation persists, the existence, memory and the languages of the marginalized face the risk of extinction. Aphasia, a loss of speech, seems to be their fate. Either the silence of the indigenous, imposed on them as aphasia or internalised by them as a profound disapproval of modernity and the modern nation-state, or the ‘voice’ of the indigenous invariably mistaken as insurgency in every part of the world call for a revaluation of the path that the nations and societies across the globe have chalked out for reaching the by now accepted common goal of a new world order. Moreover, the traditional wisdom of these communities, their understanding of managing lives within reasonable limits of resources, their respect for environment and the natural resources can provide for the rest of the country a model of sustainable development. Similarly, the way to end the unrest among these communities is not through demonstrating the might of the state, but through developing a genuine mutual respect and understanding. Therefore, all these issues need to be seen as deeply interconnected. The colonial construction of the communities was based on the very same social and philosophical perspective which went directly into the making of various fields of knowledge. Unfortunately, most of our intellectual capital in the post-colonial societies is deeply mired in the same tradition of knowledge. So long as we do not undertake a rigorous process of questioning the very basis of the fields of social sciences and humanities valorised by us, the situation of the indigenous and the nomads is little likely to change. Policy initiatives can begin the process of their empowerment, but merely

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that can never complete the process unless the ‘understanding’ composed through the colonial intent is finally deconstructed. In that direction, Indigenous Studies need not be seen as an antagonist of Anthropology, but rather as a successor called upon to lay bare the history of formulation of the imagery of the indigenous.

NOTES: 1.

2.

3.

4.

My comments on Elwin draw upon my ‘Introduction’ to Selected Works of Elwin in The Oxford Indian Verrier Elwin, 2009. Further, my comment on the term ‘indigenous’ draws upon my ‘Introduction’ to Indigeniety: Culture and Representation, co-edited with Geoffrey Davis and K.K. Chakravarty, 2008. All quotations from the Criminal Tribes Act 1871 are drawn from the unpublished report by the Technical Advisory Group (TAG) on Denotified, Nomadic and Semi-Nomadic Tribes (1906) appointed by the Ministry of Social Justice, Government of India. The author was the Chairperson of TAG and the author of the TAG report. The population of Denotified and Nomadic Tribes can only be estimated on the basis of the basis of the 1931 Census which was the last census to have clearly enumerated all nomadic and semi-nomadic communities in India. The estimate of 60 million is based on the field research done by the DNT Rights Action Group from 1998 to 2007 culminating in the drafting of the TAG Report. The government of India has taken the TAG recommendation to carry out a DNT Census and modified the Census 2011 exercise to include community-wise enumeration of the DNTs. Shankar Guha-Niyogi was a social activist and leader of a labour union that he founded in Chhattisgarh and with which he worked till his assassination in 1991. Mahasweta Devi is probably the best known Indian author and is treated by the indigenous communities as their inspiring leader.

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REFERENCE LIST: Devy, G.N., G. Davis and K.K. Chakravarty (eds.). 2008. Indigeneity: Culture and Representation. New Delhi: Orient Blackswan. Elwin, V. 1936. Leaves from the Jungle, Delhi: Oxford University Press. Elwin, V. 1939. The Baiga, Delhi: Oxford University Press. Elwin, V. 1942. The Agaria, Delhi: Oxford University Press. Elwin, V. 1943. Maria Murder and Suicide, Delhi: Oxford University Press. Elwin, V. 1950. Bondo Highlander, Delhi: Oxford University Press. Elwin, V. 1951. The Tribal Art of Middle India, Delhi: Oxford University Press. Elwin, V. 1960. A Philosophy for NEFA, Delhi: Oxford University Press. Elwin, V. 1964. Reprint 1988. The Tribal World of Verrier Elwin, Delhi: Oxford University Press. Elwin, V. 2009. The Oxford Indian Elwin: Selected Writing, Delhi: Oxford University Press. Lacan, J. 1988. Seminar One: Freud’s Papers On Technique, 1953– 54 [trans. John Forrester] J.-A. Miller (ed.), New York: W.W. Norton. Visvanathan, S. 2008. ‘Listening to the Pterodactyl’, in G.N. Devy, G. Davis and K.K. Chakravarty (eds.), Indigeneity: Culture and Representation, New Delhi: Orient Blackswan.

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Nandini Bhattacharya REVISTING SNEHALATA: THE ARRIVAL AND GENDERING OF THE NOVEL IN COLONIAL BENGAL

Novelizing Snehalata (1914) I revisit that foundational moment a hundred years ago when a spectacular act of gender-violence compelled the inhabitants of colonial Bengal to consider not just that act but its implicatedness in questions of colonial modernity; newly evolving marriage conventions; volatile gender-equations; and anti-colonial resistance. While such considerations were predictable, given the horrific nature of the act, what was not quite so predictable was the consideration of that act’s implicatedness in terms of genres; the regarding of the act as caused by; as systemically embedded within; and ‘participating1’ within a generic type. It is the second category of consideration that allows me the necessary point of entry into a complex genological2 debate regarding the acculturation, and gendering of narrative generic types in colonial Bengal at the turn of the century. I take my cue from a comment made by Rebatikanta Bandopadhaya in the Pratham Adhyaya (first chapter) of his biographical work — Snehalata (1914) — recording the life-history of a certain fourteen year old Bengali Bramhin girl, Snehalata Mukhopadhaya3. Bartaman samay sadharan bangali grihasthya meyer jibane chouddo batsarer madhye eman kono ghatana ki charitrer ghat pratighat sanghathan hoa- sambhabpar nahe, jahate tahar sansarik jibaner ghatana guli layiya “Chandrashekhar” ki “Sitaramer” mato ekkhani upanyas srishti hoite pare. Sei rup upanyas srishti kora amader ei granther uddeshya noe (Bandopadhaya, in Maleka Begum eds. Snehalata, 21). Jadavpur Journal of Comparative Literature, Volume XLVX, 2013-2014 59

[there is nothing so eventful or dramatic in the life and character of a fourteen-year old ordinary, homely girl that enables one to construct a novel like Chandrashekhar or Sitaram from of its ingredients. Also, such is also not the intention of this book. tr. and emphases, mine].

According to Rebatikanta, a close family friend, Snehalata immolated herself a hundred years ago in January1914 on her residential terrace in North Calcutta, in an attempt to rescue her father Harendralal Mukhopadhaya from impending financial ruin/or social disgrace that would ensue if he succeeded/or failed in paying up the stiff amount of 2000 rupees in cash as promised barpan (groom-price or dowry) to Snehalata’s prospective spouse (over and above the dan-samagri that is, the gold ornaments, clothes, etc). Snehalata’s death on an empty terrace at midday, dousing the white sari she wore in kerosene, and setting fire to the same; after she had completed her housework and besmeared her feet with red alta; sent shock waves through the rank and file of Bengali bhadralok. The tragic event spawned a range of responses from the literary (poetic and narratival) to the polemical; articulating (and directing) indignant horror; deepest sympathies; and visceral anger directed at the inhuman system of dowry. These responses particularly deliberated on the complex and intertwined categories of marriage and colonial modernity4. Contemporary ideologues saw in the valorization/ monetization of English education, the creation of a class who could afford the same; get into government service, and inscribe a new kind of respectability, or bhadraloki thereby5. The demand for a stiff barpan as ‘price’/‘value’ for that hankered bhadrata, resulted in the further marginalization of women within an economy that was already ‘hirsute’ and growing ‘moustaches’6. The burning maiden-Snehalata — became a national icon of female courage, purity and self-sacrificing intent, comparable to the jauhar-undertaking satis of pre-modern Rajasthan, and the focal point of a nation-wide anti-dowry campaign7, that was in effect, an anti-imperial resistance directed against the colonial education system and ensuing deracination/ misogyny of the Bengali bhadralok8.

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The Snehalata incident (supposedly) informed a number of Rabindranath Tagore’s short stories written in 1914 and imbued them with feminist intent preeminent among those being Streer Patra or “The Wife’s Letter.” Sumit Sarkar in “Ghare Baire in its Times” and Tanika Sarkar in “Many faces of Love: Country, Woman and God in The Home and the World” point to Rabindranath’s critical engagement with the woman’s voice, in and around 1914-15 and its expression in a cluster of proto-feminist short stories published in Sabuj Patra9. They also note that this voice is textually constituted through the deployment of chalitbhasha in his short stories and novels, and through a self-reflexive look at ecriture feminine as constitutive of female subjectivity10. While overwhelming sympathy for Snehalata and revulsion directed towards the cultural practice of extorting barpan from the hapless girls’ fathers were predominant ‘feelings,’ there was also a countervailing discourse of indignant pique that ‘read’ this act of self-immolation, as deliberately spectacular, novelistic, melodramatic, attention-seeking and feminine in a deracinated way. It is the ‘fashionable’ nabinas (new women) who read novels; were influenced by the bibis or anglicized ways of Western women; and out of sync with the patient hardy ways of prachinas (traditional woman) of our country who behaved in such an overwrought, attention-seeking manner and what is more, corrupted other impressionable young women by their example. That Snehalata’s suicide was followed by two other young girls Charushila and Nibhanani, taking their lives in a similar fashion, was a case in point. A popular balladeer Gobinda Chandra Das demonizes such acts as ‘novelistic’, and indicts the texts (especially novels) of both Rabindranath and Bankimchandra as informing such acts. What a terrible moment it was when you lifted that bottle of kerosene/it rendered Bengal into a desert for women/ […] you had none of that older resilience and toleration/ that mercy kindness sympathy/which are a woman’s most precious qualities/you had no respect for religion or bratas/why you are a modern Saraswati - for whom the harmonium is the

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only religion!/a luxury loving zero-tolerance beauty that’s you/wearing dilkhosh and kuntalin/you faint at the sight of hard work[…]/the cuckoo reminds you of Rabi and Girish Ghosh songs/ and you imagine you are a Saibalini, a Kunda or a Kamal flower/or perhaps a Rohini or a Bhramar promenading by the pond/whose heart is burnished by the novels she reads […] (Das, Snehalata, Nabyabharat, Bhadra 1321, Aug-September, 1915, ctd and tr. Rochona Majumdar, Marriage and Modernity, 2006, )11

Rebatikanta Bandopadhaya, her first biographer is obviously sensitive to such criticism and at pains to emphasize that there is nothing in Snehalata’s life that is ‘novelistic’or can serve as ingredients of ‘novels’ such as Chandrashekhar or Sitaram. What fascinates me at this point is not Rebatikanta’s difference with his critics regarding the ‘charge’ of Snehalata’s act but the similarity in so far as both parties (for and against Snehalata) code the novel-genre and gender it thereby. Both parties agree that this new narrative mode is culturally coded as spectacle-specific; feeling-centric (as opposed to reasoncentric), sentimental, insubstantial, untrustworthy and typically ‘feminine’. While Rebati wishes to distance Snehalata’s act from a ‘novelistic’ one and thereby prove her genuineness, her critics point towards the similarities between that spectacular act of setting fire to one’s white sari on an empty terrace with novelistic structures of heightened, melodramatic action, and overwrought characterization. In forging similarities between ‘novelistic action’ and Snehalata’s ‘act’ they are able to suitably condemn the latter as attention-seeking; over-excited; culturally inauthentic and therefore, iconically untrustworthy. Arrival and gendering of the novel genre in 18th-19th century England Evaluating the gendering of the novel genre in colonial Bengal necessitates a looking back to the originary site (so far as the Indian colonized subject was concerned in terms of generic dissemination) of the novel form in late 18th–early 19th century England. One couldn’t agree more with K. K. Ruthven’s observation that,

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novels developed as a ‘low’ form in the eighteenth century, and were not only easier to read than poetry, but also suspiciously easy to write. […] To think of the woman as having a special aptitude for writing novels was therefore, something of a backhanded compliment, given the low status of a product […] and therefore as something to be taken no more seriously than women themselves (92).

Ruthven warns that given that the “connection between gender and genre” are “posed in such condescending terms” there is a need to express “spirited protests […]” (93). This condescension-laced ‘connection’ is something that English women novelists were forced to come to terms with in their distinctive ways. Their resistance to (the trivializing of the both the novel genre, and its woman practitioner) and reclamation of generic space (constitutive of writing as well as reading practices) is one of the most important theoretical interventions of the narrative in the 19th century England. I hope the following examples will compel contemporary scholars to consider questions of genres not just in terms of prefabricated and hierarchized taxonomies, ready-made for inscriptive-use but as being continually produced by ‘readerly’ expectations. There is the self-deprecating narrator in Austen’s Northanger Abbey (1803) who at one stroke voices allegations of triviality/femininity associated with the novel, and novel-reading women in her ‘depiction’ of Catherine Morland - the novel-reading heroine, and by so ‘voicing’ reclaims as meaningful, the peculiarly ‘gendered’ writing-reading practice of the novel form. The narrator bemoans that “while the abilities of the nine-hundredth abridger of the history of England, or the man who collects and publishes in a volume some dozen lines of Milton, Pope and Prior, with a paper from the Spectator, and a chapter from Sterne, are eulogized by a thousand pens” as they are seen as masculine (and worthwhile) generic interventions, “there seems almost a general wish of decrying the capacity and undervaluing the labour of a novelist” (especially when a woman writes it), and “of slighting the performances which only have genius, wit and taste to recommend them” The narrator goes on to dramatize the gendering

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(and demeaning thereby) of the novel-writing and reading act in early 19th century England. The young, Mr. Thorpe makes a clearly gendered point (and demarcation) when he trashes novels as a genre (“novels are so full of nonsense and stuff”) and declares he has never read any except “a tolerably decent one” such as “Tom Jones” (that is, needless to say by a male author, NA, ch 5. 29). However, it is only a few pages earlier, that the narrator (gazing fondly at the two female novel-readers, Catherine and Isabella) declares that it is in these (culturally denigrated) novels (written and read by and entitled as) the “Cecilia or Camilla or Belinda” that “the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best chosen language.” (NA, Ch 5, 21). This narratival intervention where Austen claims within the novel-as-a-genre’s patriarchal parameters (note that Sterne has been mentioned) an agency-imbued gendered space, purging the genre of the cultural reproof of triviality and unreality, is a much celebrated one 12. Austen’s redemption and reclamation of a positive space for women writing and reading the novel, however, is achieved in a more fundamental manner, in Northanger Abbey. The narrator encourages the ‘blind’ reader to be deluded by Catherine Morland’s ‘heroic’ pretentions (note how many times the word ‘heroine’ is used in the first five chapters!) and fooled into believing that this novel (that is Northanger Abbey) also possess a silly, overwrought, ‘feminine’ narratival trajectory. At the end of it though, the ‘enlightened’ reader is thoroughly discomfited by the mundane, (and to an extent, sordid) nature of its narratival closure. This subversion of ‘condescension-as-reader response- associated- with novels- writtenby- and- about -woman,’ is where the actual reclamation of gendered narrative space takes place. A more tangential kind of reclamation comes from the pen of George Eliot - a woman-novelist, unequivocally acknowledged as ‘masculine/serious/philosophical’ in her novel-writing approach. Eliot (who, like many of her contemporaries; adopted a masculine inscriptive persona, keeping her female identity of Mary Ann Evans

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under wraps) posits an oblique distinction between the serious and trivial practitioner of the novel form (and its readers) bemoaning the preponderance of silly novels by lady novelists for equally silly lady readers. She regrets that “there is no species of art which is so free from rigid requirements’ (ctd Ruthven, Feminist Literary Studies, 93), and by emphasizing ‘absence’ reclaims the ‘presence’ of a different, more serious kind of novel-writing (and hopefully, reading-community). From Brunetiere to Rabindranath: the novel in colonial Bengal To speak of ‘gendering’ genres13 is to understand generic types as not transcendent, free-floating beings, or simple clear cut categories and conventions out there to be deployed by anybody setting out to write, but dynamic entities culturally and historically conditioned; or even not ‘entities’ but expectations that the reader/viewer imbues a cultural product with at a particular point of time. Such recognition (and shift from the Aristotelian position of hierarchized taxonomies) came to Europe fairly late, via 19th century European Romantic ideologues in general, and Hegelian aesthetics in particular. This new historicist understanding of genres was further leavened by the 19th century French literary critic Ferdinand Brunetiere (The Evolution of Genres in the History of Literature. 1890) who gave genre-scholarship a Darwinian evolutionary spin positing contiguities between organisms and literary types and explaining them in terms of birth, growth, maturation, survival (of the fittest), and extinction (of the unfit). It is a position that has been given a new currency by scholars such as David Fishelov who opine that, genres may become ‘sterile’ and obsolete in certain periods. Todorov’s idea of genres not dying out entirely but mutating and morphing into other genres in different times, participates in Brunetiere’s position. The Russian Formalists developed Brunetiere’s idea further and considered evolution of genres not as isolated developments but in relation to a genre system as a whole within a particular historical/ social period.

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Mikhail Bakhtin is not very far from Ferdinand Brunetiere when he describes the novel in terms of an organism, a newly born, “whose generic skeleton is yet to harden” (Dialogic Imagination, 4) Significantly Bakhtin went on to code the novel form in a very different way, positing a critical difference between older, established, hardened and by implication, geriatric genres such as the ‘epic’ and the ‘tragedy’ with the unmade, unformed, eternally morphing, childlike form of the ‘novel’ where each position was implicated in its other. Bakhtin deploys the term ‘novelize’ to signify that newlyborn; that refusing to grow up; laughter-infused, free-floating, polyphonic contra-form. How else could he tar with the same generic brush of the ‘novel’ the second century BC, Menippean satires of Appuleius; the 14th century French narratives of Rabelais; the sixteenth century English plays of William Shakespeare; and the twentieth century Russian prose narratives of Feodor Dostoevsky? Also, given Bakhtin’s contra-Aristotelian; contra-Stalinist stance, the ‘novel’ could very well act as the site where genres are degenerized; where bonds of categories and types are loosened; and grim, official hierarchies scrambled. Equally important for this study (considering that it takes as its focal point 19th century Bengali literature in general and Rabindranath’s theoretical interventions, in particular) is the position that German Romantics take up vis a vis generic forms in literature. While the neo-classical approaches to genre utilize a theoretical, transhistorical set of categories (or taxonomies) such as epic, lyric, dramatic, to classify literary texts according to internal thematic and formal relations, Romantic approaches to genre have insisted that literary texts achieve their status by exceeding generic conventions/ expectations. Genre-conventions perceived as constraint is a line of thinking that may be traced back to Friedrich Schlegel (Literary Notebooks 1797-1801) who insisted on the singularity of literary texts, with romantic poetry serving as the ideal example: “only Romantic poetry is infinite as only it is free [...] the genre of Romantic poetry is the only one that is more than a genre” (qtd. Threadgold, 112). Genre scholar John Frow (Genre) is of the opinion

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that that Derrida in perceiving genres to be constraints (albeit inevitable) on textual energy, and reminding that “every text participates in one or several genres, yet such participation never amounts to belonging” (“The Law of Genre” 230) continues the Romantic position regarding genres14. I would like to add that Rabindranath Tagore (as early as in 1895) in a poem entitled Purnima (anthologized in Chitra) is entirely ‘Romantic’ (in the German-European sense) in his resistance to categorization (and constraining thereby) of literary works and their auteurs at the behest of literary scholars. Responding to Edward Dowden’s New Studies in Literature (a book he had read in 1895 and recorded in his Chinnapatra), Tagore notes that he is befuddled by panditer lekha (works of scholars) and their categorization and confining (kar kon shreni) of kavis (poets or artists) such as “Shelley, Goethe, Coleridge” and their kavityakala (the artist’s artistry, aesthetics). The scholarly book regarding generic classification finally gives him a headache (tapiya uthilo shir, shranta holo man) and he arrives at the conclusion that these are all lies (mone holo shob mithya) fabricated by lipibaniks (dealing in commerce of words). Culture study scholars, and comparitists such as Amiya Dev note that, “the business of genres was not probably of only being there and not being there but also being in tune with cultures where they were located. And culture by no means is a monosemic organization” (Dev, Genology, 147). May I add that the business of genres is not merely about growth or death but about travels to distant lands, about relocation, and re-culturation. When genres such as the novel and the short story move to disparate locations like nineteenthcentury Bengal astride the colonial endeavour, they mutate in strange ways just as the gendered assumptions associated with them refract and transmogrify at the thresholds of cultural contact. The English novel arrived as the civilizing instrument of the colonizer, and assumed canonicity to a considerable extent by the virtue of it being perceived as emanating from within the ruling culture15. While in real terms the flourishing of the novel genre in the culturally disparate colonial Bengal was a complex process

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of recasting and remaking of itself in relation to available, indigenous narrative structures as well as the theoretical assumptions underpinning them,16 the perceptions of the novel-genre’s ‘masculine’ canonicity, and implicatedness within power structures was overwhelming, so far as the colonial subject was concerned17. Feminist genre-scholars point out that literary canons commonly favour those genres which are historical products of patriarchy. If we consider colonial structures and patriarchy as contiguous then it would be safe to conclude that the novel was canonized just as it was masculinised in 19th century Bengal. In the hands of someone as intellectual, conventionally successful, and partaking in colonial modernity with breath-taking ease as Bankimchandra Chattopadhaya the novel genre assumed the kind of canonicity it had perhaps never enjoyed in Bengal. And none were more taken up by its charms as the cultured Tagores of Jorasanko. In fact if one is to believe the anonymous essayist of “Banglaye Upanyas Lekhak” (the novel writer in Bengal) anthologized in the Haridas Bandopadhaya edited journal Kalpana (1887), the novel genre was of pure European origin and Bankimchandra its finest artist! The essayist informs that though the novel-genre had enjoyed merely twenty-five years of existence in Bengal and could be described as a mere child, yet in the last decade of the nineteenth century it had turned out to be the most popular form of writing: Ekhan upanyaser srote Bangla tolpar.[…] Ekhan ei upanyaser strote mudranjantra chalita; pustakbikreta palita, kretrigan prabhabita, Banglar jubak-jubati shikhitta ebang samalochak badai byatibyastha (ctd Bhadra, 237). [Now Bengal is simply overwhelmed by the tidal waves of the novel; it is the tidal wave that fuels the printing presses, gives book sellers their living; fascinates the readers, and keeps the Bengali intelligentsia and the critics on their toes].

While the Tagores could and did make tongue–in-cheek comments regarding the genre’s feminine-unreliability, the preeminent among them had, not so long ago, celebrated the genre and granted it

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canonicity not so much in terms of gender, as in terms of evolutionary fitness. Rejoicing the coming of Bankimbabu’s novels in a serialized form in the journal Bangadarshan, Rabindranath Tagore asserts that such an arrival was regal in its dimensions, and wiped out at one stroke the primitive childishness; atavistic cultural immaturity; inauthenticity and crude indecency of afsanas and romances: “Kothae gelo sei Bijaybasanta, sei Golebakaoli, sei sab balak-bhulano katha?” (Where did those childish tales, such as Bijaybasanta and Golebakaoli simply vanish?) Rabindranath asserts that, without Bankimchandra and the novel, the Bengalis (and by association the Indian nation) would have remained in the first second or third standards or just been promoted to the fourth fifth or sixth. But Bengali literature would have never assumed adulthood: Amra eto din shishupath granther prathambhag, dwityiobhag, tritiyabhag shesh kariya barajor chaturtha, pancham, shashtha bhage giya upanita haitam. Kintu Banga sahitya bayoprapti hoitona. (Tagore, “Bankimchandra” Adhunik Sahitya, RR 9, 554). In “Bangla Sahityer Kramabikash” (Evolution of Bengali Literature) Rabindranath assumes a similar Darwinian position describing the coming of Bankimchandra and the novel form, with the coming of the fitter genre so that modernity in literature could no longer be held back “sahitye adhunikatar abirbhab ke ar thekano gelona” (The arrival of modernity in literature could no longer be held back, “Sahityarup” Sahityer Pathe, RR, 21, 494). Rabindranath owes this Darwinian (and gendered) analogy to novelist-ideologue Bankimchandra Chattopadhaya (1838-1894) himself. In Bankimchandra’s English essay “A Popular Literature for Bengal” the progenitor of the novel and ‘respectable’ genres in colonial India clears the generic ‘trash’ in his own backyard in condemning Jayadeva’s poetic eulogies to the god Krishna (Gitagobinda) and Bharatchandra’s romance Bidya Sundar as womanly :— […] from the beginning to the end it does not contain a single expression of manly feeling — of womanly feeling there is a

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great deal”, and as informing “a sensual and effeminate race” (98) whose “indolent habits and a feeble-moral organization gave birth to an effeminate poetical literature” (Bankimrachanavali, vol iii, 99)

Bankim, gives the generic question a racial-nationalist spin, as he hails the arrival of respectable genres in terms of adulthood, and masculinification of the Indian/Bengali jati: And so the Bengali stood, crushed and spiritless [...] till a new light dawned on him, [...] And with this new dawn of life came into the country one of the mightiest instruments of civilization, the printing press. Gradually the change set in, and a demand began to be made for a literature of another character than that of the Gitagobinda school (99)

Strangely, even as the novel in Bengal assumed the ‘high’ cultural status and ‘male’ texture given its proximity to the dominant culture, it continued to carry forward the Victorian cultural stigmata of its contra-erudite, feeling-centric, feminine/unreliable essence. In 1877,the novel-reading heroine Hemangini in the Jyotirindranath Tagore inscribed Bengali farce Emon Karmo ar Korbo Na (later renamed as Aleekbabu and published in 1900) defends Aleek babu as not someone who tells untruths but as one who presents events in an imaginative/heightened manner. Significantly, though Aleek means ‘unreal’; in the context of Jyotirindranath’s play, the word is made to carry the semantic charge of ‘lies’/’untruth18’. So Aleek babu literally means the ‘gentleman who lies.’ Fascinated by the novel form, the heroine Hemangini discovers contiguities between Aleek babu’s lying tendencies, and his novel-reading habits. Speaking to her female servant Prasanna or Pishni (as she is endearingly called) about Aleek babu, Hemangini asserts: Aleekbabu, ar sakal rakam lok bhalo, kebal dosher madhye bhuleo tar mukh die ekti satyakatha beroena, kintu bastabik ta noe. Tini ektu shajiye gujiye katha bolen ar loke mone kore mithye katha. [….] Amar bodh hoe tini onek novel parechen. Novel ki ta janish? Novel bole ekrakamer boi

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berieche — tate jemon gyaner katha thake eman ar kichute na. Age Ramayan Mahabharat parte ki bhaloi lagto, kintu novel porte shikhe abadhi segulo ar chunte icche korena. [Aleek babu is good in all respects except that not a single word of truth escapes his lips. However, that is not how things are. He loves to speak in a heightened, ornamental manner, and people feel that he is telling lies. I believe he has read many ‘novels’. Do you know what a ‘novel’ means? It is a new sort of book with all sorts of information that is out in the market. I don’t even feel like touching the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, which I had loved reading earlier on, now that the ‘novel’ is here. Aleekbabu, 11].

Hemangini effectively posits commonalities between the ‘novel’, artifice, untrustworthy charm, and flighty femininity. In pointing out the critical difference between the novel’s inflated, unnatural, feeling-centric language and its effete charms that may be ‘read’ in print; and the plainly told, tedious ‘truths’ of the dharmashastras, accessible orally to the indigenous maid servant Pishni via the kathakthakur (as well as Hemangini in her premodern avatar); Jyotirindranath is surely not so much locating the novel-genre within an effeminate, deracinated cultural domain, as he is playing up to the gallery, to arouse laughter and tickle nationalist sentiments. Such associations between the ‘novel’ and the flighty woman abound in 19th century Bangla literature. However, what must be noted is that while the novel-reading woman and the Bangla novel is designated a ‘low’ position, the novel-form itself and its English avatar is still considered worthy of respect, in the colonial margins. One of the more interesting examples is an anonymous and undated Bangla farce, printed in the popular North Calcutta presses (commonly referred to as Battala). Named Novel-Nayika ba Shikkhita Bou (the Novel-Heroine or the Educated Wife) the play has, at its centre, the novel-obsessed heroine (nayika) Rukmini. She is peculiarly reminiscent of Catherine Morland in her novel-reading mania and her overwrought, heroine-like, self-fashioning on novelistic predicates. Rukmini’s ‘novelized’ engagement with the world precipitates a

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conjugal (and by association, societal) crisis. While the novel-genre is condemned in no uncertain terms by ‘sensible’ women (belonging to the unlettered lower classes) and the ‘sensible’ hard-working men (that include neglected husbands) as insubstantial, and transgressive (in conjugal and communitarian terms), even Rukmini’s closest female associates such as Sarada (and who form the core of a trangressive reading group) condemn Bangla novels as generically inauthentic, as mere mindless ‘translations’ of English situations and characters! (Novel-Nayika 718-19) The difference posited between the authentic, idea-centric (and masculine) English novel and the ‘translated’ (in the pejorative sense of borrowed, mimicked), feminized Bangla ‘nobel’ is revealing. It is within the refractive indices, within the difference between the centre (imperializing Britain) perceiving the ‘novel’-genre as feminized, and the margins (colonial Bengal) perceiving the novel-reader (and the Bangla novel) as ‘translated’ derivative and feminized that the cultural complexities of generic transaction may be gauged. Snehalata/Nirbhaya novelized/narrativized (2014) The Snehalata debate in the second decade of the twentieth century is testimony to the complex cultural reasons that led to the perception of the novel form as masculine but the novel-reading woman as well as novels read by women (especially novels written in Bangla) as transgressive and pejoratively feminine! It is also testimony to how reroof associated with novel-reading and novels in Bengal is culturally mediated to serve the interests of a bhadralok class intent on nationalist self-fashioning. Rebatikanta in his biography insists that, while alive, Snehalata never received English education, which (paradoxically) her brothers did; as did her husband-to-be and for which such a groom was considered ‘valuable’ in the marriage market! Rebatikanta glories in awareness that Snehalata could not read English; could only read the Bangla Ramayana, Mahabharata; other holy texts and had no fascination for plays or novels—” Natak, noveler dike taar adou jhonk chilona” (Bandopadhaya, 22). This forging of contiguity between English education and the novel form

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was a much employed strategy to inscribe the nationally-conscious gender positions. Ironically, as early as in the 1890s, Nabinchandra Sen (1847-1909)19 in a conversation with Bankimchandra, condemns the latter’s novels as “Bilati piriter pindapindanta” (a terrible hash of European romances) and accuses the novelist of fanning the Bengali woman’s suicidal, and hyperemotional proclivities:Chhai bashma naranarir premer ugra chabi ankia apni Bangadesher ardhek narir atmahatyar dai hoitechen (Sen, 1959: pp?)

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3.

4.

(You become responsible for the suicidal tendencies of great many women in Bengal by drawing crude, unreal, trashy pictures of romance in your narratives,]20. As a corrective, Nabinchandra recommended the discarding of the novel-genre altogether, and the espousing of history-writing as a rationality and nationalistic-feeling informing project. Life comes to a full circle when that very Bankimchandra who had initiated the novel-genre as a corrective to indigenous narratives (condemned as prenovelistic, and ‘womanly’ in their non-rational essence!) is now accused of novelistically informing female (and womanly) suicides21! One looks back at the burning maiden Snehalata a hundred years later (and at a time when the centrality and national valence of a raped-tortured-to-death ‘Nirbhaya’ of New Delhi, is being produced by the electronic-media informed narratives) to discover (all over again) how the nation narrativizes itself engaging with that perfectly ‘novelized’ subject.

2.

6.

7.

NOTES: 1.

5.

I use the term ‘participation’ in the Derridean sense (as outlined in his French essay translated in English as “The Law of Genre”)- sense; as taking part in complex and dynamic ways. ‘Genology’ or the study of genres was a term coined by the French comparaitist van Tighiem. It is rarely used now and has

8.

been largely replaced by the more transparent term-‘genrestudies.’ Genre (derived from latin genus or type has been defined as a “set of highly organized constraints on the production and interpretation of meaning” (Frow, 10) Rebatikanta’s biography is considered definitive as it is the first; and Rebatikanta recognized as a family friend who knew Snehalata from close quarters. Refer to Maleka Begum edited Snehalata, (2006) for a range of responses poetical and polemical. Also refer to Raibhadur Chunilal Bose’s essay “Marriage Dowry” that posits a critical difference between pre-colonial times, when the demand [for dowry] was usually moderate and the practice confined to a small section of the community; “the expenses on education were trifling; and most people remained satisfied with simple food, simple clothes” (141), and the modern times where a clerk in a government office, earning not more than fifty rupees monthly “must have a graduate, or at least a college student as his son-in-law, even if the young man has to depend upon his relations and friends for help to defray the expenses of his education” and that “respectability now consists either in being a government servant or belonging to one of the learned professions, and as university degrees are the passports to them, undue importance is naturally attached to these degrees” (142). Refer to Tithi Bhattacharya’s Sentinels of Culture for ways in which colonial and English education became the marker of and constituting Bengali bhdarata and bhadraloki. Refer to Veena Talwar Olenburg’s Dowry Murder for an engaging discussion on the masculinization of the economy under colonial rule, in Northern India and the collusion of the Utilitarian, misogynistic colonial government in marginalizing women even further and raising groom price in the marriage market. Refer to Narasimha Rao’s treatise Snehalata coming from a location as distant, as Madras, to understand the impact of the act of immolation. The more celebrated of such responses — forging connections between modern/colonial education; the commodification of human relations; and the bestial greed of deracinated babus is penned by the popular balladeer Gobindachandra Das. His song/poem

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9.

10.

11.

12. 13.

14.

is entitled “Kanyadayagrashthya Pitar Prati Bibahajogya Balikar Ukti” (The Marriageable Daughter’s Words to her Father). Tanika Sarkar notes: “It was this new presence of women’s writing in the public sphere that enabled Tagore to develop a fresh expressive form at this time. With Streer Patra in 1914, he began to use the persona of a female narrator or writer who writes her own life in first person within his narrative”(“Country, Woman, and God in Home and the World”, 31). Sumit Sarkar writes: “This critical attitude to Hindu nationalist notions of femininity deepened between 1914 and 1917 in a spate of short stories, published […] in Sabuj Patra, itself an experimental, in some ways deeply iconoclastic monthly […] Streer Patra and Ghare Baire were the first works of Tagore written in the chalit (colloquial) Bengali prose. As contrasted with the prevalent, more Sanskritized sadhu bhasha, this must have been intended as a democratising move” (Ghare Baire in its Times, 146). The journal Sabujpatra or green leaves, launched significantly in 1914 on the poet’s birthday 25th Baisakh by Pramathanath Chaudhuri (husband of Rabindranath’s niece Indira Debi Chaudhurani) was informed with the expressed intent of freeing the self from the tyranny of social conformity. That seven of the ten short stories Tagore had inscribed in Sabujpatra are narrated in the first person is testimony to how Rabindranth uses the short story to trace the emancipation of the fictional self from societal shackles, and the narrative genre from its expressed duty of providing a sequential plot. For a quick recapitulation of discursive structures that posit binaries between the hardy, patient indigenous Indian women and the new-fangled, fragile, emotionally unstable, bred-on novels, new women-refer to Bankimchandra Chattopadhaya’s classic essay Prachina O Nabina in his Bibidha Prabandha. Refer to Supriya Chaudhuri’s essay “Understanding Genre” in Dasgupta eds. Literary Studies in India: Genology, 2004. Genre and gender have similar etymological roots (genus) and both refer to ‘generating’, ‘creating’, while signifying the idea of a ‘type’ or ‘class.’ Even today one uses terms- ‘genre-fiction’, or ‘genre-movie’ to indicate an unimaginative; repetitive, and formulaic piece of work.

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15.

16.

17. 18.

19.

20.

21.

This is not to state that within England, the gender-coding of the novel-genre remained a constant. The cultural assumptions of triviality, untrustworthiness, femininity associated with the novel in its early days changed by the middle of the nineteenth century as the novel assumed cultural centrality and became the voice of the respectable Victorian middle class. In the hands of an erudite, philosophical George Eliot, or a sociallyconscious Charles Dickens who had made a successful profession out of novel-writing, the genre assumed a seriousness of purpose; masculine gravity and canonicity thereby. Refer to Subha Chakravarty Dasgupta’s essay entitled “Structural Forces in the Emergence of a Genre: the Novel in Bengal (JJCL, 29, 1990-91, 45-54). Refer to Meenakshi Mukherjee’s Twice Born Fiction and Priya Joshi’s In Another Country for more on this. Additional knowledge that Rabindranath himself played the part of Aleekbabu in Jyotirindranath’s play adds to the fun quotient. Nabinchandra Sen, Bankim’s younger contemporary made a name for himself writing Bangla epic poetry on the three phases of Krishna’s life-Kurukshetra, Raibatak, and Prabhas. Critical lore has it that Bankim deeply regretted inscribing the episode of Kundanandini’s suicide by poison-consumption, in his novel Bishabriksha (The Poison Tree). Amitrasudan Bhattacharya quotes Bankim without citing sources:- “[…] in delineating Kundanandini as consuming poison, I have paved the path for women committing suicide by taking poison. The first to follow such an instance has been my daughter.” (“Srishti O Samaya: Rabindranath–Bankimchandra”, Kolkata: Korok Sahitya Patrika: Bishesh Bankim Sankhya, 37, tr. Mine). Amitrasudan also feels that Kadambini (Kadambari) Rabindranath’s sisterin-law (brother Jyotirindranath’s wife) might have been motivated by Bankim’s Bishabriksha into committing suicide.(37) Ironically, Bankim’s name becomes synonymous with the hyperemotive novel reading woman. A Bangla farce by Durgadas De Miss Bino Bibi B.A. (1898) has a novel reading heroine called Bankim Biharini (or Bino bibi) who wants to commit suicide if she cannot marry for love and become a heroine! (547)

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REFERENCE LIST: Anon. Novel-Nayika ba Shikkhita Bou. 2009. Hardikbrata Biswas eds. Prahasane Kalikaler Banga Mahila: 1870-1909. Kolkata: Charjapada. (Bangla, a collection of nineteenth century Bengali farces). Austen, Jane. 1803. Northanger Abbey. New York: Norton Critical Edition, 2004. Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1981. The Dialogic Imagination. Tr. Michael Holquist and Caryl Emerson. Austin: University of Texas Press. ————— Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. 1986. Tr. Caryl Emerson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ————— Speech Genre and Other Essays. 1986. Tr. Vern. W. Mcgee. Austin: University of Texas Press. Bawarshi, Anish, and Jo Reiff, Mary. 2010. Genre: An Introduction to History, Theory, Research, and Pedagogy. Indiana: Parlor Press. Begum, Maleka. Eds. Snehalata. 2006. Dhaka, Bangladesh: Syed Bari, Suchipatra. (Bangla) Bhadra Gautam. Nyada Batlayae Jaye Kobar. 2011. Kolkata: Chatim Books. (Bangla) Bhattacharya, Amitrasudan. “Srishti O Samaya: Rabindranath – Bankimchandra”, Alok Ray eds. Korok Sahitya Patrika: Bishesh Bankim Sankhya, Kolkata, 33-45. Bhattacharya, Tithi. “A World of Learning: The Material Culture of Education and Class in Nineteenth Century Bengal” in Crispin Bates. Beyond Representation: Colonial and Postcolonial Representations of Identity. 2006. Oxford University Press, 176-209. Chattopadhaya, Bankimchandra. Jogeshchandra Bagal eds. Bankim Rachanavali. 1969. vol iii Kolkata: Sahitya Samsad. (English) Chaudhuri, Supriya. “Understanding Genre”. Dasgupta eds, Genology. 1-16. Dasgupta, Chakravarty, Subha eds. Literary Studies in India: Genology. 2004. Calcutta: University of Jadavpur. Dasgupta, Subha. Structural Forces in the Emergence of a Genre: The Novel in Bengal. Jadavpur Journal of Comparative Literature. 1990-1991. Vol 29, 45-54. De, Durgadas. 1898. Miss Bino Bibi B.A. (Honour). Hardikbrata Biswas eds. eds. Prahasane Kalikaler Banga Mahila: 1870-1909 (Bangla). Derrida Jacques “The Law of Genre” tr., WJT. Mitchell eds. 1981. On Narrative. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,

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Duff, David. Eds. Modern Genre Theory. 2000 Harlow: Longman. Eagleton, Mary. Eds. Feminist Literary Theory: A Reader. 1986. Oxford and New York: Basil Blackwell. Fishelov, David. Metaphors of Genre: The Role of Analogies in Genre Theory. 1993. University park: Penn State University Press. Fowler, Alastair. Kinds of Literature: An Introduction to the Theory of Genres and Modes. 1982. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Frow, John. Genre. The New Critical Idiom. 2006. London and New York: Routledge, Indian rpt. 2013. Frye, Northrop. The Anatomy of Criticism. 1957. Princeton: New Jersey: Princeton University Press. Joshi, Priya. In Another Country: Colonialism, Culture and the English Novel in India. 2002. New York: Columbia University Press. Majumdar, Rochona. Marriage, Modernity and Sources of the Bengali Self: Bengali Women c. 1870-1956. 2003. Chicago: Illinois University Press. Mukherjee, Meenakshi. The Twice-Born Fiction: Themes and Techniques in the Indian English Novel. 1971. New Delhi: Heinemann. Olenberg, Veena Talwar. Dowry Murder: Imperial Origins of a Cultural Crime. 2002. New York: Oxford University Press. Ruthven, K. K. Feminist Literary Studies in Mary Eagleton eds. Feminist Literary Theory. 93-94. Sarkar, Sumit “Ghare Baire: in its Times” Pradip Dutta eds. Rabindranath Tagore’s The Home and the World: A Critical Companion, 2003. New Delhi: Permanent Black, 143-173. Sen, Nabinchandra. Nabinchandra Rachanabali. 1959. Eds. Sajanikanta Das. 4 vols. Calcutta: Bangiya Sahitya Parishad, (Bangla) Swales, John. Genre Analysis: English in Academic and Research Settings. 1990. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tagore, Jyotirindranath. (Asad 1900) Aleekbabu (Prahasan). 1921. 2nd ed. Hooghly: Lalbehari Baral, 1-89. Tagore, Rabindranath. Rabindrarachanabali. 1963. Kolkata: Viswabharati Granthanbibhag (Bangla) Tagore, Rabindranath. (Akhanda) Galpaguccha. 1976. Kolkata: Viswabharati Granthanbibhag, rpt. Threadgold, Terry. “Talking about genre: Ideologies and incompatible Discourses” Cultural Studies, 1989. 3:1.

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Ananya Dutta Gupta THE TOPSY-TURVY WORLD OF TAGORE’S SHEY

I This essay attempts to unravel the ideology, the language and the design of Tagore’s Shey, and the larger cultural purpose embedded in its specific aesthetics. A few disclaimers would not be out of place. My essay may give the impression of dehistoricising Shey, written in 1937. For I do not set out to locate it within either the entirety of Tagore’s writings or an existing tradition of writing that Tagore may well have drawn upon. However, such issues deserve a full-length monograph. I am aware of Sudipta Kaviraj’s stimulating essay (2000, 379-406) on the cultural history of laughter in colonial Bengali literature. Although Kaviraj does not treat of Shey, I implicitly see Dadamoshai and Shey as products of the self-irony that Kaviraj detects elsewhere in Tagore. To the extent that my essay juxtaposes Shey with other stray writings of Tagore’s, I have compared them in terms of internally revealed parity or disparity in subject, ideology and authorial posturing rather than chronological proximity. I would like this essay to be read as a self-conscious experiment in reading a critically neglected Tagore text in the light of a handful of imaginative and theoretical writings that are European but nonetheless pertinent. To that end, it makes consciously heavy use of Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of the Rabelaisian novel and also offers certain independent comparisons between Shey and an Elizabethan English text in terms of literary aesthetics and cultural politics. Shey as a text transcends and critiques the stereotype of heroic male action as a legitimate object of child fantasy which the poem Jadavpur Journal of Comparative Literature, Volume XLVX, 2013-2014 79

‘Birpurush’ in Sishu (Tagore 2007, 61) promotes. ‘Birpurush’ corresponds to Bakhtin’s (1981, 16) definition of the epic as an essentially static, formulaic, monologic mode of writing that espouses, propagates and perpetuates a set of traditional communal values. These values essentialise virile masculinity in terms of a readiness to engage in violence, organised or stray, and reduce the woman – wife, beloved, or mother – to the role of a passively appreciative spectator of such exhibitionism of male brute force. To quote from Sukanta Chaudhuri’s English translation of the poem, aptly titled ‘The Hero’ (Tagore 2002, 44): Then, just as to yourself you’ve said ‘In such a fight, my Khoka must be dead!’ I’d ride up, dripping blood and sweat, Calling ‘The fight’s at end!’ And when we’ve met, Down from the palanquin you’d step And kiss and draw me to your lap. ‘How lucky Khoka was here,’ you’d say, ‘Else I’d have been in dread!’

The child-icon of Birpurush, therefore, is not the child-icon of Shey. Tagore’s writings for children may not be clubbed together under any one ideological rubric. As a body of writing, they make for a tantalisingly ambiguous dialogical playoff of conservative and radical, hegemonic and dissident, cultural values. Sukumar in Shey is the counterpart of ‘Birpurush’ in Sishu. Dadamoshai recounts what transpired during a visit to Sukumar’s He threw up his head and announced, ‘I’m a prince!’ ‘Where’s your sword?’ ‘A broken stick from a half-burnt firework had been lying on their terrace ever since the night of Diwali. He had tied it to his waist with a ribbon, and now displayed it to me.’ I said, ‘A sword indeed! But you must have a horse as well!’ He answered, ‘It’s in the stables.’ ... (Tagore 2007, 103-4) But Pupe’s rejection of the boy-hero-aspirant in favour of the fantastically grotesque Ghantakarna – Bell-Ear – renders Sukumar’s

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heroic fantasy abortive (Tagore 2007, 109). Indeed, the text’s gender politics behind privileging Pupe over Sukumar, comparable with Raktakarabi’s privileging of Nandini over Ranjan, may well be related to Shey’s liberal progressive as opposed to reactionary principle of femininity. One might contrast it with the essentialist dichotomisation in Shesher Kobita of man and woman’s burdens in history as creation and preservation respectively: The race of woman is pure and fluid; not rigid, but lively and vivacious, even setting other things into motion. When the earth was being assembled, the ocean came first. The women floated about on its waters, mounted on cormorants (Tagore 2007, 118).

Shey is the testament of a world-weary and word-weary adult (Tagore 2007, 16) breathing his lost primal, spontaneous, childlike self into his doppelgänger, Shey. He fashions Shey as an intermediary between himself in his imagined ineffectuality and the child-woman Pupe, who is his granddaughter and soulmate in solitude. The text designates Pupe and not Sukumar as the sole intended receptacle of its constituent loosely strung body of magical realist stories. And Pupe owes this distinction not only to her tender age but also her intransigently “ordinary” mind. Dadamoshai reminds the reader that Pupe scores poorly in arithmetic, unlike Sukumar who conforms to the middle-class Bengali ideal of the “brilliant student” (Tagore 2007, 29, 102 & 109). Nevertheless, the putatively senile Dadamoshai is desperate to keep the not so brilliant though intellectually exacting, story-hungry mind of his granddaughter entertained. The text is doggedly “ordinary” and “humble” in its choice of locale, protagonists and action, and for this same reason privileges the “khyati-heen para” (Tagore 1988, IX: 673) – the inglorious neighbourhoods of old Kolkata’s lanes and bylanes. As to the hallowed high streets of fame in the Calcutta of the Raj – the sprawling thoroughfares of Chowringhee – only the tiger goes there for a haircut (Tagore 2007, 54). A particularly scatalogical episode occurs when the incongruously “scholarly” Mohan Bagan goalkeeper Smritiratnamashai first

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“swallows” goals and then licks the Ochterlony Monument that commemorates martyrs of war. He pointedly drops institutional names associated with the putative cultural glory of India under the Raj: But far from satisfying his appetite, they made his stomach growl for more. He found himself in front of the Ochterlony Monument. He began by licking the bottom, but soon he had licked it up to its very tip. Badruddin Mian, cobbling shoes in the Senate Hall of the university, saw him and rushed out in horror. ‘You’re learned in the sacred books, and yet you contaminate this great monument with your spittle!’ he scolded. ‘Fie, fie!’ He then himself spat thrice upon the monument and hurried off to report the matter at the Statesman House (Tagore 2007, 44-6).

In this self-conscious foregrounding of what Bakhtin would call ‘my time’ over ‘epic time’, the mere cobbler Badruddin Mian assumes greater significance than the grand cultural edifice of the Senate Hall out of which he emerges, and he colludes in the symbolic devouring of that edifice when he spits upon it. Bakhtin (1981, 20) writes how the novel, unlike the epic, “is associated with the eternally living element of unofficial language and unofficial thought [holiday forms, familiar speech, profanation].” One notes, in this connection, Tagore’s deliberate use of Bengali diminutives such as “Udho”, “Gobra”, “Ponchu” and “Bheku” (Tagore 2007, 24-5) with their intended comic overtones. These are comparable to names like Feluda, Tenida, Ghonada, and even Bantul the Great or Nonte-Fonte conferred by later Bengali fiction-writers on their protagonists in order to underline their texts’ inextirpable grounding in the lived, everyday reality of a mainstream Bengali urban milieu. Consistent with this feature, Shey addresses Dadamoshai as simply, ‘Dada’, the informal fraternal, quintessentially Bengali, salutation. It marks Tagore’s ironic de-mythicising of his hallowed, valorised, epic identity as “Gurudev” or “Kabiguru”. The

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unselfconscious camaraderie with which Shey interacts with Dadamoshai, now asking for food, now breaking into a song, now lecturing him, suggests a fundamentally human bonding, stripped of societal preoccupation with kinship or class affinities. One will also recall the episode where Pallaram’s pounding on the table creates a pandemonium, prompting Dadamoshai to “yell” for Banamali (Tagore 2007, 40). “Yelling for the servant” — so naturally domestic an act, so quintessentially Bengali a scene — does detract from the hagiographic image of Tagore the sage. Of course, the self-deflation is absolutely intentional. Tagore is implicitly cutting himself down to size by reminding the reader that yelling at a servant is something Dadamoshai is not above doing. The text Shey subjects any attempt on Dadamoshai’s part to foreground that public ‘epic’ identity of his to ruthless deflation. A notable example would be the episode in which Dadamoshai’s endeavour to impress Pupe with a bombastic and admittedly ironic catalogue of committees to which he has been elected meets with candid ridicule: ‘Dadamoshai, you talk so much nonsense for no reason at all that no one ever believes you when you say you don’t have the time for something. Today you simply have to tell me what He did when he got his body back.’ (Tagore 2007, 90-1)

On another occasion, challenged by Shey, Dadamoshai has to confess to having lied about an appointment with the Viceroy: ‘Good, but what did you mean by saying you were going to the viceroy’s house?’ ‘I meant I wished to be rid of your presence. Once you sit down, you show no sign of getting up. It was just a polite way of saying, “Scoot!” (Tagore 2007, 53)

Clearly, to both Shey and Pupudidi, Dadamoshai comes across as a far from reliable or unpretentious narrator. This is a ploy that we, after Bakhtin, may well regard as a typically “novelistic” gesture of ironic laughter at the kind of pretension to grandeur, sublimity, sanctity or authenticity that goes into the making of high literature. In Shey Tagore abjures the magisterial voice of the Wordsworthian

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egotistical sublime – the man speaking to men. Therefore, it is not automatically a Romantic text by dint of its espousal of values contrary to the Enlightenment creed. Both in terms of its willingness to accommodate the actual and the fantastical on the same plane and its refusal to privilege the I-narrator and authorial persona – the septuagenarian Dadamoshai – over Shey or Pupe – the text seems to conform to the Bakhtinian understanding of the carnivalesque, with its “sense of the gay relativity of prevailing truths and authorities”: This experience, opposed to all that was ready-made and completed, to all pretense at immutability, sought a dynamic expression; it demanded ever changing, playful, undefined forms. All the symbols of the carnival idioms are filled with this pathos of change and renewal, with the sense of the gay relativity of prevailing truths and authorities. We find here a characteristic logic, the peculiar logic of the “inside out” (à l’envers), of the “turnabout,” of a continual shifting from top to bottom, from front to rear, of numerous parodies and travesties, humiliations, profanations, comic crowning and uncrownings. ... (Bakhtin 1984, 11)

The political implications of privileging Pupe over Sukumar are also buttressed by Shey’s maker’s insistence on Shey’s scrupulously ordinary, unheroic, character, far removed from the pomposity of epic or romance characters – “a prince, a robber, an ogre or a general’s son”. This amounts to a potent critique of the martialist, masculinist, nationalist, imperialist Western state apparatus which Tagore will go on to denounce in Sabhyatar Sankat – The Crisis of Civilisation. Shey’s alternative masculinity (masculinity, nonetheless) metonymically contained in the reference to his irrepressible animal hirsuteness - is so terrible in its primal, aboriginal, starkness – like the grotesque male faces and forms Tagore sketched and painted so maniacally – that it can by no means be equated with the spruced up, clean shaven, superficially placid, urbane handsomeness of the European male that Kaiser Wilhelm II may well be said to have iconised. The latter - the exact antithesis of the uncontrollably hairy,

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unkempt and uncouth Shey - would be a perfectly allegorical image of the designing and hypocritical European civilisation, advancing its territorial suzerainty under the cover of the White Man’s Burden. The contrast between the noble humanist image of the body and the grotesque Rabelaisian body is also something that did not escape Bakhtin’s notice (1981, 178): To the medieval body, coarse, hawking, farting, yawning, spitting, hiccupping, noisily nose-blowing, endlessly chewing and drinking – there is contrasted the elegant, cultured body of the humanist, harmoniously developed through sports...

The physical description of Shey too betrays the equivocating, antiessentialist indeterminacy characterising the text itself. Shey’s portrayal shows the same dynamics that Bakhtin (1981, 35) writes of: Laughter destroyed epic distance; it began to investigate man freely and familiarly, to turn him inside out, expose the disparity between his surface and his center, between his potential and his reality. A dynamic authenticity was introduced into the image of man, dynamics of consistency and tension between various factors of this image; man ceased to coincide with himself, and consequently men ceased to be exhausted entirely by the plots that contain them.

The first illustration of the text shows a florid, corpulent, face, not unlike portraits by Franz Hals (Tagore 2007, 2). But Dadamoshai is quick to dispel this initial impression of a merely grotesque body by insisting on the actual Shey’s awe-inspiring stature: Those who have actually seen him know that he’s tall and well built, his features grave. Just as the night is lit up by the glow of countless stars, hidden laughter lurks behind his pretence of gravity. He is a person of the very highest order; all our joking can’t demean him. I enjoy disguising him as a fool, because, actually, he’s far cleverer than I am. If we pretend he doesn’t understand anything, it doesn’t hurt his dignity. Rather, it’s convenient, as it helps him match Pupu’s temperament (Tagore 2007, 9-10).

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The enigma of that description reminds us of some of Tagore’s self-portraits. The oxymoronic expression – outward seriousness barely concealing laughter – is a classic feature, we will recall, of the Bakhtinian carnivalesque: It is, first of all, a festive laughter. Therefore it is not an individual reaction to some isolated “comic” event. Carnival laughter is the laughter of all the people. Second, it is universal in scope; it is directed at all and everyone... The entire world is seen in its droll aspect, in its gay relativity. Third, this laughter is ambivalent: it is gay, triumphant and at the same time mocking, deriding. It asserts and denies, it buries and revives. ... (Bakhtin 1984, 11-13)

This is followed by a totally bathetic description of Shey’s loss of his Brahmin’s “holy hair-tuft” and the savage hairiness that ensues from that crisis of identity. No sooner had the doctor smeared on a little of the ThunderTangle ointment a hermit had once given him, than the tuft set itself doggedly to growing, like some endless centipede. If our He dons a turban, the turban keeps swelling like a balloon. At night, the gigantic mound of hair on his pillow resembles a devil’s toadstool (Tagore 2007, 8).

In later chapters where he lectures Dadamoshai on his alternative construct of beauty, we can almost visualise a Shey who fuses into the sublimely ugly creator he apotheosises. Thus his sweetmeatloving corpulence, his height, his hirsuteness, and his advancing ugliness are all accommodated within a strangely androgynous identity complementing the hybridity suggested by his name. Dadamoshai and Pupe remain conspiratorially silent about his name, which, interestingly, is supposed to begin with the ‘p’ of Pupe. Some say Priyanath, some decide on Panchanan, some think of Panchkari, some insist it’s Pitambar, others suggest Paresh, Peters, Prescott, Peer Bux and Piyar Khan (Tagore 2007, 6).

In his dogged reluctance to fetter Shey with a name – ‘Perhaps I’m afraid that if I tell you his name, he’ll come to rest within

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his name alone’ – Shey’s maker seems to have conferred on him an identity at once cosmopolitan and quintessentially Bengali. I endorse the implied logic behind the oxymoronic title of Shey’s English translation as He (Shey), in that it so aptly bears out both the ambiguous gendering and the dichotomous play on the particulargeneral contained in the Bengali word. Shey’s dynamic characterisation – a feature Bakhtin (1981, 10) would associate with the novel’s notion of the hero – nonetheless frustrates the Bakhtinian calculation that the novel’s self-aware protagonist matures through experience. Shey’s is, if at all, a lopsided Bildungsroman, where he regresses steadily into savagery instead of progressing into civilisation. Towards the end of the book when Pupe enquires after Shey, Dadamoshai apprises her is that Shey’s “grown older”: ‘He’s become a thinker. Worries buzz like hornets in his head, and have built a nest of cares. I can no longer match him in argument.’ ‘I see he’s progressing on a line parallel to my own.’ ‘That may be so, but he’s crossed the limits of fiction. Now and then, he clenches his fist and declares, “I must grow tougher!” (Tagore 2007, 111-12)

In Shey’s scheme of things, therefore, regress into childishness is progress. Not surprisingly, he reprimands Dadamoshai in an oxymoron, “Stop being so old. Here you are, ageing, but you’ve yet to mature into childishness.” (Tagore 2007, 23) The first-person narrator of Shey systematically decentres himself, allowing the text and its eponymous protagonist to steer the story away from any readerly expectation of coherence and cohesiveness. Dadamoshai pleads writerly ennui as a reason for authorial slackness and uses this pretext of a limp imagination to accommodate an only too enthusiastic surrogate author – Shey. The narrative mode is carnivalesque in that it allows the text – the matter, the body – to assert itself autonomously – unhindered by an overbearing authorial presence. Instead, the author maintains a

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tactical low profile. Dadamoshai is quick to point out, time and again, how both Pupe and Shey share the authorial mantle with him. About Pupe’s contributions, he writes. My hands alone had begun to build up the history of this man, but now Pupe keeps adding to it wherever it takes her fancy. If I say that at three in the afternoon he came to my room to borrow a razor and some empty biscuit tins, Pupe informs me that he has made off with her crochet hooks. (Tagore 2007, 5)

Then, there is Shey’s importunate insistence on being brought back to life: ‘But I’m not ready to be finished off, Dada. I beg of you, do ease Pupu-didi’s fears. Tell her it was only a story.’ ... ‘I’m the juggler, the shape-shifter in Pupu-didi’s stories – it’ll kill me to be ousted from a position of such importance.’(Tagore 2007, 80)

The latter reverences not Dadamoshai but Pupe as his ultimate arbiter of literary taste: “I’m your Pupu-didi’s He!” (Tagore 2007, 72) In Shey’s perception, Dadamoshai exists solely to please Pupe and Pupe’s literary predilections are emphatically non-epic, nonromantic, anti-intellectual, indeed anti-adult. Shey makes it his business to warn Dadamoshai periodically against seeing the two worlds, his own and Pupe’s, as either identical or reconcilable. The by no means easy task of coming up with stories that Pupe would like, according to Shey, involves a conscious rejection of the kind of marvellous and, at the same time, the kind of the credible, that goes into the conception of epic and romance characters and plots. ‘... The other day, you made up a string of stupid stories about me and reeled them off to Pupu-didi. Being a child, she swallowed it all. If you must tell fantastic tales, put some craftsmanship into the telling.’ ... ‘...But if you insist you’d treated your guest to curried giraffe, whale fried in mustard paste, pulao with a hippopotamus dragged kicking from the mud and stir-fried stumps of palm trees, I can’t but call it clumsy. Anyone can write like that.’(Tagore 2007, 49)

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That is not to say that Shey as a text is either totally realist or totally fantastical, for it allows the realistic and the unrealistic to operate in mutual amity on the same mimetic level. It overturns expectations as to where the real might be expected to surface and where the unreal. Such expectations are generally honoured by the epic and the romance despite their pervasive use of the supra-natural. So that, the character of Shey himself and the life that he ordinarily leads is represented as routinely human, while that of several other human and un-human ones who surface in the narrative every now and then is fantastical and comically grotesque. Significantly, Pupe, Shey and Dadamoshai’s interactions with all the fictive characters, human, animal or supernatural, are reported without a trace of awe, mystique or condescension as being perfectly equitable, matter-offact, and commonsensical. Heroic narratives magnify the human protagonists with a view to glorifying them and, conversely, magnify the subhuman antagonists with a view to glorifying the humans who conquer them. In Shey, by contrast, the subhuman – Ghantakarna or Bell Ear, for example – are often deemed more heroic than the human protagonists. The interchangeability of the human and the animal condition, exemplified in the episode where Shey receives a gorilla’s brain by transplant (Tagore 2007, 92), is here a literary expression of a playful anti-anthropocentrism. Not only is the automatic equation of human action with the heroic played down, the human claim to heroism is presented as no more deserving that that of subhuman creatures. Ironic undermining of human narcissism is also accomplished through a sustained debunking. For an apt example we may turn to that scatological reference to uncontrollable, involuntary, acts of self-assertion by the body such as the sneeze - of human language, man’s mindless abuse of words in intellectual discourse, of preposterously arcane, recondite, scientific projects (Tagore 2007, 11-16). ... They remind us that speech is man’s invention, not Nature’s gift. Our incessant babbling daily shortens our breath, and our lives in the long run. Apes, with their natural intelligence, were the first to discover this. Monkeys, created right in the second

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stage of evolution, survive to this day. Alone on that desolate island, the scientists have pledged absolute deference to this ancient wisdom. They sit in complete silence, gazing at the ground. On that entire island, not a sound issues from human lips; all one can hear are gigantic sneezes (Tagore 2007, 14).

The body mythicised here is, as Bakhtin would say in the essay ‘Forms of Time and Chronotope in the Novel’, ...not the individual body, trapped in an irreversible life sequence, that becomes a character – rather it is the impersonal body, the body of the human race as a whole, being born, living, dying the most varied deaths, being born again, an impersonal body that is manifested in its structure, and in all the processes of its life (Bakhtin 1981, 173).

In the topsy-turvy world of Shey, as in Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, the rational is more fantastical than the fantastical, and vice versa. Ironical though it may sound, in view of Tagore’s professed ambivalence, it is in seminal writings of the European and English Renaissance, in Erasmus’s Praise of Folly (1979, 78), or Montaigne’s Apology for Raimond Sebond (1991, 505) and even in Jonathan Swift’s fictional exercise in an anti-Enlightenment relativism, Gulliver’s Travels, that one may locate a comparable antianthropocentrism. Like all these texts that intentionally dislodge man from his assumed position of Biblically ordained pre-eminence either by presenting human behaviour as preposterously bestial and irrational or by representing animals as more rational and human in their behaviour than they are credited with, Shey too constantly invites the reader to relativise her self-perception as a human being. One is reminded of Dadamoshai’s story about tigers being “scared stiff of being reborn as humans” because, “in their opinion, the human body is entirely bald, and quite grotesque. Men can’t even boast of tails! They need wives just to whisk the flies off their backs. They look like clowns, toddling about on two legs – the sight makes the tigers laugh till they cry.” (Tagore 2007, 60)

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This essay cannot confirm Tagore’s acquaintance with that cult text in Renaissance anthropocentrism – Pico della Mirandola’s Oration (bearing the not entirely misleading title On the Dignity of Man). However, the Tiger Pundit’s ironic comment on man as a hurriedly put together and hence congenitally flawed creation of a resource-starved Creator may well be read as a carnivalesque deflation of that text: The most renowned contemporary tiger-expert on the history and habits of his race says that when Lord Vishwakarma had nearly finished making the world and was running low on materials, he felt a sudden urge to create humans. Let alone paws, he couldn’t even muster a few hooves for the poor creatures – they hide the shame of their naked feet with shoes and of their bodies with clothes. Humankind is the only form of life that suffers from embarrassment. No other creature on earth feels such shame (Tagore 2007, 60).

Earlier on, the Panchatantra tale of The Blue Jackal is retold with a frighteningly Modernist ending. Shiburam the jackal who sacrificed his tail to his own overreaching ends up an alienated outcast, who neither belongs among humans nor in his original habitat, and nostalgically locates his dead soul in his lost tail (Tagore 2007, 23). Gosai-ji’s Prospero-like machinations condemn this Caliban and relegate him to an Existentialist limbo: Shibu is now forbidden to visit the grove where he used to live, because the other jackals, seeing him approach, either run away or growl and snap at him. He lives in the old holy porch in the sole company of a pair of owls. Even Khadu, Gobar, Benchi, Dheri and the other young scamps are too scared of ghosts to go looking for karamchas in that part of the forest (Tagore 2007, 21-2).

Both Dadamoshai and Shey are obsessed with their bodies, the one with the putative infirmity of his age and the other with his unapologetically voracious appetite for the quintessentially Bengali cuisine. Dadamoshai writes of Shey, “if you can build a clear image

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of on of on

this man in your mind’s eye, you’ll realize that when he sits the steps of a sweet shop, gulping down rosogollas, oblivious the juice seeping through the holes in the packet and dripping to his dirty dhoti...” (Tagore 2007, 7) Typically, Pupe too asserts her preference for the story of how Shey found his body back after losing it over Dadamoshai’s long pompous monologue about the numerous offices of importance conferred upon him. This is despite its ironic treatment of officialdom and India’s complacency with an illusory quasistatehood. Shey is a carnivalesque text in its persistent foregrounding, among other things, of forbidden bodily pleasures such as cannabis addiction. It does so as unapologetically as Thomas Nashe’s The Unfortunate Traveller, that strikingly similar piece of prose-fiction, published in 1594, which presents itself as an alcohol-induced afterdinner speech.1 Tagore, like Nashe, seems to be deliberately subverting the norm of respectability in literature by introducing the irreverent and the disreputable. Needless to say, this is a bold statement with significant implications for the politics of literature. It is as boldly radical as Tagore’s presentation of grotesque zoomorphic creatures, of comparably grotesque human forms on canvas, and even some of his deliberately eerie preternatural selfportraits. The prominence attached to the body and to the idea that humans, even texts, live essentially in the body, is the pivot of this upside-down politics of literature. Further, Shey is an overwhelmingly carnivalesque text in the persistence with which it highlights its material, bodily reality as a book and text. This persistence is to be contrasted with the loftier claim usually made by authors to an esoteric, ideological, magisterial, programme of messianic teaching, within which the spirit of a book acquires something of a larger than life immortality countering its material perishability. No wonder Dadamoshai makes such raucous fun of Milton’s Areopagitica, which asserts precisely such suprahuman, immutable immortality for the book. Milton wrote, “for books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul

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was whose progeny they are; nay, they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them.”2 Dadamoshai writes: I was preparing some notes on the Areopagitica for an MA class. For this I needed to consult a book – The International Mellifluous Abracadabra and also had to slit open the pages of Three Hundred Years of Indo-Indetermination, to look things up in its Appendix (Tagore 2007, 79).

The fact that this essay deliberately refrains from designating Shey as a ‘novel’ – which it emphatically is not - or even as a ‘narrative’ – which it only imperfectly is - preferring instead the more ambiguous label ‘text’, makes it incumbent upon me to explain the assumed relevance of the Bakhtinian dichotomisation of the epic and the novel. Needless to say, Bakhtin’s understanding of the novel not simply as a dynamic genre but, more fundamentally, as a literary, aesthetic, cultural ideology, allows him to locate “novelizing” tendencies in “low” literature preceding the advent of the novel. Once the ‘novel’ form, in its narrow generic sense, has been standardised and fixed in the same way as the epic, such an understanding can indeed allow us to locate “novelizing” tendencies in texts like Shey that challenge or subvert the aesthetics and politics of the “classic” novel. Bakhtin (1981, 6-7) writes: What are the salient features of this novelization of other genres suggested by us above? They become more free and flexible, their language renews itself by incorporating extraliterary heteroglossia and the “novelistic” layers of literary language, they become dialogized, permeated with laughter, irony, humor, elements of self-parody and finally – this is the most important thing – the novel inserts into these other genres an indeterminacy, a certain semantic openendedness, a living contact with unfinished, still evolving contemporary reality (the openended present).

In that paradoxical sense, Shey is more of a ‘novel’ than Tagore’s novels precisely because it is not like them.

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Such an understanding of the ‘novel’ as an immanent tendency in literature across the ages would also endorse the deliberately anachronistic comparison that this essay makes between Tagore’s Shey and Thomas Nashe’s The Unfortunate Traveller. The relationship between Shey the person and Shey the text goes beyond mere eponymity. In fact, that relationship may well be understood in comparison with Nashe’s The Unfortunate Traveller. Like Shey, The Unfortunate Traveller, too, is a fantastical narrative that takes liberties with chronology and places real historical personages such as the Earl of Surrey on the same plane with a fictive one like Jack Wilton. It too prioritises the inconsequential story of an un-hero, something of a flaneuronlooker of the pageant of sixteenth-century European history, over, say, an Orlando-Furioso-like grand narrative. In Bakhtinian language, both Dadamoshai, Tagore’s physically infirm story-teller persona, and Shey, his younger, physically active, nomadic, sporadically appearing, counterpart, seem to embody the “philosophy of the third person in private life ... who knows only private life and craves it alone, but who does not participate in it, who has no place in it – and therefore, sees it in sharp focus, as a whole, in all its nakedness, playing out all its roles but not fusing his identity with any one of them.” (Bakhtin 1981, 126) Shey is a supremely vibrant, vital, life-affirming presence in the text. He asserts his vitality in terms of his unabashedly voracious appetite, and the self-professedly infirm Dadamoshai basks in his reflected vitality. This is precisely the irrepressible spirit of Nashe’s The Unfortunate Traveller and its protagonist Jack Wilton, who, like Shey, is identified by a name that is deliberately nondescript and unprepossessing. Moreover, Wilton lives, Nashe underlines by punning on his status as gentleman “page”, exclusively on the pages of the pamphlet. At the same time, both Jack Wilton and Shey are rooted in their respective racial and cultural identities. The one is English and Anglican in faith, the other a thoroughbred Bengali. This privileging of the protagonist’s indigenous identity over a more socially elite, culturally cosmopolitan one could be seen as an extension of the carnivalesque: a rejection, yet again, of the highbrow

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in literature, identified with classical languages and the epic genre. It is also interesting that Tagore should identify oral story-telling as an essentially feminine forte, a domain of the imagination that he wrily remarks in Chhelebela (published 1940) as having beaten a hasty retreat under the tyranny of bookish institutionalised learning. He recalls wistfully in Chhelebela how his mother would sit down on the walled terrace and chat about this and that with her female friends and how these conversations lacked the purely factual news value that one associates with newspapers and other instruments of purportedly serious dissemination of knowledge. His description of the Acharjini’s gossipy bulletins (Tagore 1988, XI:108) recalls the comparable beginnings of news through broadsides and ballads circulated by peddlers in early modern England. One may recall Autolycus in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale. Like Dadamoshai, the adult narrator ventriloquising his childhood self in Chhelebela is ironically self-disparaging in respect of any masculine heroic pretensions or aspirations his actions might betray. Just like Dadamoshai, who is embarrassed about his celebrity status in the world that is outside the solipsistic retreat he shares with Pupe and Shey, the child of Chhelebela is a failed, half-hearted, ambivalent hero, an idle surrogate female, more interested in imagining through lazy afternoons than in book learning, one who spends the bulk of his time in the seclusion of his sister-in-law Kadambari Devi’s attic room. The Introduction to Chhelebela is sardonic about the impact of scientific fact on the imagination: “the distance between the probable and the improbable had not been considerable until scientific survey came to be seen as the sole arbiter of intelligence and rationality.” (Tagore 1988, XI: 95) Not coincidentally, perhaps, Shey’s Sidney-like privileging of literary truth over mere fact is endorsed by Tagore in Sahitya, published in 1907, where he writes .... what I see in nature becomes perceptible to me, my senses testify to its existence. What literature shows is natural but not perceptible. Therefore, literature has to compensate for its own lack of perceptibility.

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There lies the difference between nature’s fact and literary truth. ...

and, again, What the mind picks up amidst the undifferentiated multitude of nature’s facts, literature in its turn acts upon them alone. Just as the mind is not a mirror to nature, so also literature is not a mirror to nature. The mind transforms the natural into the psychic, and literature transforms the psychic into the literary. (Tagore 1989, X: 310-11)

Like Shey the character who arrives unannounced at a pointedly unearthly hour, Shey the text, too, starts unceremoniously. Its ceremony, if at all, is about providing a self-consciously repetitive preamble to its own radical aesthetic parameters. Superficially viewed, the text Shey seems to flow out, unpremeditated, un-preconceived, of the same pen that produced the drawings that along with the purposely disjointed, episodic narrative constitute its totality. It is also representative of Tagore’s enigmatic body of paintings, etchings and sketches. It is not a coincidence that Shey should first make its appearance when Dadamoshai is busy painting and that it should end with Sukumar’s rambling description of his personal history as a painter (Tagore 2007, 153-4). It is worth recalling that Tagore presents himself in stray letters as an untutored painter. The emphasis here is not on having taught himself, but rather on discarding the conscious intervention of the thinking, remembering, self, that reproducing taught lessons in any form of cerebral exercise involves. The emphasis, therefore, is on allowing free-play to the instinctual, imagining self that a child left to its own intellectual devices tends to manifest. If I were a finished artist I would probably have a preconceived idea to be made into a picture. This is no doubt a rewarding experience. But it is greater fun when the mind is seized upon by something outside of it, some surprise element which gradually evolves into an understandable shape. I am so taken with this new game that all my various responsibilities, extraneous to myself, peep in from outside my door only to

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withdraw the next moment with much shaking of the head. If I were a free agent as of yore, unburdened by any cares, do you realise what I would have done? I would live by the Padma and gather a harvest of pictures and nothing but pictures to load the Golden Boat of Time with. (Tagore 2005, 63)

Of course, the seeming randomness and inconsequentiality of the stories that Dadamoshai sets out to weave around Shey, like the seeming randomness of the lines that form his paintings,3 is actually the product of a careful artistic arrangement of a set of non-events. These non-events are carefully chosen by the author precisely because they counter the ingredients of a grand epic narrative: His elder sister falls ill; he goes for the doctor. A cat scratches his dog Tommy on the nose. He hops onto the back of a bullock cart and gets into a great argument with the carter. He slips and falls at the washing place in the yard and breaks the cook’s earthen pitchers. He goes to watch a Mohun Bagan football match and someone swipes three and a half annas from his pocket, so he misses buying sweets from Bhim Nag’s (Tagore 2007, 5).

The Unfortunate Traveller and Shey are remarkably similar texts in that their respective preoccupation with the corporeal and the material extends to their acute self-awareness as texts and to their central protagonists’ self-awareness as existing solely within these texts. Shey begins with a Sidneian pronouncement on literature as poesis, creation with words. ‘Tell us a story,’ meaning, ‘make people out of words’. So new creations evolved – fairy-tale princes, ministers and their sons, spoilt queens and neglected queens, mermaids, the Arabian Nights, Robinson Crusoe, and many, many more. ... Even old men, on office holidays, said, ‘Make some people’, and the Mahabharata was composed, in eighteen volumes. ... (Tagore 2007, 1)

This essentially inventive exercise is mimetic only in the sense that it emulates God’s creation, not in the sense of verisimilitude – “they are only to play with, not answerable to truth or falsehood” (Tagore 2007, 1). But Dadamoshai’s narrative of a history of storytelling

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is also Nasheian in its foregrounding of the textual existence of stories, either oral or written. Hence, the stark, elemental description of the materiality of poesis. Dadamoshai reminds us of the carefree artistic abandon with which he created a personage exclusively of words for whom he is not answerable to anyone in the real world: The chief prop of the story I’ve been telling Pupu-didi bears a pronoun for a name and is constituted entirely of words. So I can do what I like with him, without fear of tripping on any awkward questions (Tagore 2007, 7-8).

The same utter disregard of the compulsion to mean, to make sense, to ground himself in a rationally ordered understanding of what is otherwise experienced as reality at random informs Tagore’s paintings. By contrast, his novels and his short stories and his discursive writings all conform to the principle of a poet-thinker’s didactic responsibility. He writes to Nirmal Kumar Mahalanobis on 7 November 1928: I am hopelessly entangled in the spell that the lines have cast all around me. The muse of poetry has left these quarters for good and all, peeved by my favouritism towards the inconnu – although I am past the age of indiscretion. I have almost managed to forget that there was a time when I used to write poetry. It is the element of unpredictability in art which seems to fascinate me strongly. The subject matter of a poem can be traced back to some dim thought in the mind. Once it leaves the matted crown of Siva, the stream of poetry flows along its measured course – well-defined by its two banks. While painting, the process adopted by me is quite the reverse. First, there is the hint of a line, then the line becomes a form. The more pronounced the form becomes the clearer becomes the picture to my conception. This creation of form is a source of endless wonder (Tagore 2005, 63).

Although it embodies the aestheticism that Tagore promotes in that lecture he delivered in America, ‘What is Art?’ (Tagore 1980, 93),4 Shey, notwithstanding its conscious rejection of didactic, rational, literary purpose, ought not to be seen as Tagore’s self-indulgent capitulation to literary hedonism. In spite of the professed artistic abandon that

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goes into its making, Tagore would say, as he does in Sahitya, insofar as all literature is expression, it implicitly assumes a readership: A literary artist can hardly be believed to write purely to please himself. ... That which is expressed is the text, and not the underlying current of feeling. One ought to evaluate a literary text, knowing that it is written for others and not exclusively for one’s self (Tagore 1988, X: 309).

This self-reflexivity in both Nashe and Tagore leads them to a privileging of their authorial involvement in the text over any other meta-textual concern, be it about mimetic verisimilitude, didactic intent, socio-political responsibility or even aesthetic discipline. Shey announces its revolt against the grand narrative of epic and romance – of “high” literature as Bakhtin would call it – at the very outset: Many stories start, ‘Once there lived a king.’ But I began, ‘There lives a man.’ Also, in this story of mine, there is no trace of what people usually call a story. This man didn’t cross the field of Tepantar on a magic horse. One night, after ten o’clock, he came to my room. I was reading a book. He said, ‘Dada, I’m hungry.’ ... There was a push at the door. Opening it, I saw – not a robber, not an ogre, not even a general’s son – but that very man. He was dripping from head to toe with water, and his dirty wet clothes clung tightly to his frame. ... Every story has a beginning and an end, but my ‘There lives a man’ has no end. ... Now who is this story about? Our He isn’t a prince, but a very ordinary man. He eats, sleeps, goes to the office and is fond of the cinema. His story lies in what everyone does every day. (Tagore 2007, 3-5)

Both Dadamoshai and Shey’s determined ordinariness may be defined in terms of a contrast with Bakhtin’s description of the epic or romance hero as a “public and political man of ancient times, a man governed by his socio-political, philosophical and utopian interests.” (Tagore 1981, 104)

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Like Bakhtin’s novel, which is almost an eternally present continuous form, eternally contemporary, Shey’s story too is antiAristotelian in its rejection of amplitude. Not only does Shey do the same ordinary things every day, he lives in the eternal present of a text that refuses to start or end in accordance with principles of formal classical unity. We recall Bakhtin’s identification of the epic as a genre located absolutely and ineluctably in the past: “Whatever its origins, the epic as it has come down to us is an absolutely completed and finished generic form, whose constitutive feature is the transferral of the world it describes to an absolute past of national beginnings and peak times.” (Bakhtin 1981, 15)

II The prefatory verses addressed to Charuchandra Bhattacharya (Tagore 1988, IX: 670) with which the Bengali text of Shey begins convert the formulaic humility topos of a formal dedication into an alternative paradigm of creative writing. In this aesthetically and politically radical literary manifesto, the insignificant is privileged over the important and the business-like, non-sense over sense, capricious flights of fantasy over serious discourse, the quotidian over the momentous, the crude and rustic over the urbane and sophisticated, the imbecile and the senile over the sane and mature, the irrational over the rational, and, on final analysis, the primitive over the putatively civilised. An alternative poetics inevitably entails for Tagore an alternative subaltern politics of reception, which insinuates that only the humble masses refreshingly unencumbered with serious cerebral exertion can afford to be interested in the refreshingly inconsequential in literature and art. The reading community to which a text like Shey might appeal and from which a protagonist like Shey might emanate is self-consciously dissociated from the power-wielding class that ostensibly shoulders the burden of steering society towards progress and amelioration. Shey’s recognisably urban moorings notwithstanding, he is essentially one with the “pagol” (mad dreamer), “khyapa” (wandering

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madcap), “lokkhichhara” (god-forsaken), “raakhaal chhele” (shepherd boy) or “arab-bedouin” we encounter in Tagore’s poetry and songs. These Romantic personae of the poet Tagore are all voluntary exiles from the collective project of civilisation and progress, all peregrinating, drifting minstrels of an alternative way of life, alternative because it is neither blindly progressive nor automatically retrogressive. Where society insists on stasis, they push for restless action, and where society demands business, they retire into exultant insouciance. They pay court to that brand of progress that is sensitive to nature’s message of combining continuity with change, eternity with contingency. There, this essay would contend, the Romanticist reading ought to pause. For, notwithstanding the Blakeian overtones in Tagore’s assimilation of “amangal” or “evil” in his literary theory, Shey and Shey both transcend the dialectics of the Lamb and the Tyger, reaching back to an imagined grotesque, which though rooted in a re-reading of Indian mythology, has far more in common with the carnivalesque, Rabelaisian, strain in Renaissance European and English literature. After all, Tagore’s Jibansmriti professes serious reservations about English Romanticism, stemming from a reluctance to see literature exclusively as an expression of the unrestrained affect. Tagore was also of the view that English or European Romanticism was after all a phenomenon that emanated naturally from an upheaval that was peculiarly European in its historical politics. It could therefore never quite prove culturally productive by being simply mechanically transported to Indian soil (Tagore 1989, XI: 62-3). The ‘older’ Shey expounds a profoundly ambiguous myth of creation and apocalypse. It is based on a comprehensive understanding of all art – music, literature and painting – as attaining sublimity not via the delicate beauty or ‘fearful symmetry’ but the monstrous, the preternaturally hideous, i.e. the ‘adbhut’. To quote from He (Shey), “The victory of the hideous over the beautiful, the discordant over the melodious – the Puranas celebrate this principle with laughter and rejoicing, as you will notice if you leaf through the Annadamangal.” (Tagore 2007, 122)

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III Notwithstanding the pronounced satire and irony underlying that exposition, an irony that ought to caution us against reading Tagore as a Modernist, its ambiguity stems from the fact that Shey, the dazzlingly eloquent satirist, seems implicitly in sympathy with that alternative mythopoeia. Though, by this time, Dadamoshai, long impatient to rid himself of Shey, seems to have dissociated himself completely from the latter’s point of view, the palpable creative relish which the paradoxical encomium exudes suggests a deliberate authorial equivocation. For, of this ‘self-same’ Shey, we might well say, in Tagore’s own words culled from those songs celebrating the spirit of constructive iconoclasm – “We are the heralds of a new youthful impetuosity/ We are restive, we are weird” (translation mine) “aamra nuton joubaneri dut/ aamra chanchal, aamra adbhut” from Tasher Desh (Tagore 1999, II:588) – or “aamra lokkhichharar dal”: We are a god-forsaken bunch of no-good nincompoops, as tremblingly fleeting as water droplets on a lotus leaf/ Our comings and goings are of no consequence/ We are privy to no causes, know no protocol, nor heed discipline and caution -/ We have unshackled ourselves by dint of our own grit/ Let your trailing satellites gorge themselves on your benisons, o goddess of bounty – let us roam the world with our rags and our backpacks/ your harbours are thick with ships carrying your gold ingots/ there are gems galore at your numerous marts – while we are perennially adrift on our ramshackle boats with torn anchors/ it’s our turn to look for the shores of these shoreless waters, for the lone island amidst the ocean of feeling/ if we do not come by a needle, no matter, we shall dive and plumb the depths of hell. (Tagore 1999, II: 571)5

The text Shey as well as its eponymous protagonist realise a project of long standing. It is a project entailing the systematic reversal of existential priorities, a conscious choice of precisely those paths of life that civilisation tends to dismiss as unworldliness and folly. In this essentially radical blueprint for life, the subaltern status is more of a permanent and cultivated state of mind, a steadfast

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persistence in pursuing lopsided priorities, a paradoxical conviction that in everything from ethics to politics to culture, privation is privilege, disempowerment is power. In other words, it points towards a revolt against everything that a child is systematically taught to renounce in its journey towards adulthood. The untutored child therefore comes to be identified with something like a utopian configuration. It is an epitome of everything that humans have blindly given up in course of their individual and collective march towards what is only purportedly progress and everything that humans therefore have to recover within themselves in order to achieve genuine progress and happiness. In so far as this untutored child is a role model for the adult who has strayed too far from the child within him, the literature that iconises this child is emphatically not children’s literature. It is insidiously prescriptive writing for adults disguised as a self-sufficient piece of ‘pure’ literature meant for children’s consumption. Shey, however, does not idealise this child in the Romantic mode. Pupe is no Lucy, in the sense in which Krishnakali is. Besides, Shey is a pointedly urban text, and this is evident from its systematic mapping of early twentieth-century Kolkata. The person Shey is something of a Dickensian flaneur, about whom Dadamoshai observes on one occasion: “If you ask me, ‘And then?’ I’ll tell you how he then boards a tram, finds he has no money in his pocket and jumps off again. ‘And then?’ Then follow many such events – from Barabazar to Bahubazar, from Bahubazar to Nimtala.” (Tagore 2007, 7) Indeed, pastoral Santiniketan figures only nominally in Shey except in terms of imagined landscapes envisioned on Dadamoshai’s canvas, which are too stark, too rugged, too grim, to be pastoral. There is pointed mention, instead, of Bolpur Station (Tagore 2007, 36). Nor is Shey, by dint of its predominantly urban locale, automatically a Modernist text. Its un-heroic protagonists, Dadamoshai and Shey, are not to be equated with the alienated, disaffected un-heroes of Modernist literature. As in his other writings, Raktakarabi, Raja or Sangeet O Bhaava, or even in paintings leading up to that thunderous denunciation of Western civilisation in Sabhyataar Sankat, so also in a text like Shey, Tagore seems to

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be at pains to steer clear of Western realism. He might not have automatically recognized an ideologically kindred spirit in Western modernism on the basis of what we today perceive as Western modernism’s critique of Western civilisation. Had that been the case, Tagore would not have confessed to having wrenched himself away from English literature when confronted with the disjunction between the humanist ideals of fairness and justice it upholds and the savage reality of English colonial rule in India. There is a tendency in that seminal essay to see literature as either tacitly colluding in the Western state apparatus’ hoodwinking of the world or casting a haze over European realpolitik. In this all-encompassing, blanket denunciation of the totality of Western civilisation, Tagore disowns his youthful infatuation with English literature as a dangerous distraction from the glaring reality of Britain’s imperial rapacity. I was born in a milieu that had come to associate the English race with an overriding sense of fair play, justice and equity. This admiration coupled with our natural affinity for literature had prompted us to apotheosise the English. So much for the first phase of my life. Thereafter came the rift, gradually stemming from terrible sorrow. Daily I witnessed how cavalier the champions of civilisation were in flouting out of sheer avarice precisely the civilisation that they so proudly maintained as an outcome of excellence of character. Soon I felt impelled to leave the ivory tower where I had blissfully immersed myself in the delectations of literature (Tagore 1990, XIII: 736). It is hardly to be expected that Tagore, who translated Eliot’s ‘The Journey of the Magi’, would not have known of the implications of, say, Eliot’s The Waste Land. However, it is significant that he should have chosen to translate the former rather than The Waste Land, a poetic testament to a ravaged, dismembered civilisation

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reeling from the collective suicide of civil war. Indeed, Shey’s ironic paean to the strong-lined verse could well be read as a critique of Modernist poetry: At the beginning of the new age, when Grandfather God created poets to bring mankind under the rule of weakness, he moulded them on the lines of the birds. That day there was a kind of literary gathering in his meeting hall and, as president, he exhorted all the poets who had gathered there to keep flying through space in their minds, to break into song for no reason at all, to turn everything unyielding into rippling liquid, to make soft what was sturdy. You’re the King of Poets – you’ve obeyed his decree to this day.’ ‘I’ll have to go on doing so, until I’m moulded differently.’ ‘The modern age is growing hard and dry; you won’t get your soft waxen moulds any longer. The Goddess of Femininity no longer sits in a nest rocking on the water, swung back and forth by the swaying lotuses. The world isn’t sunk in the depths of languid delicacy (Tagore 2007, 119).

Is this self-disparagement or Tagore’s satire on his detracting poetsuccessors? The answer would probably be the latter. When Pupe confesses to have been taken in by this apotheosis of literary masculinity, Dadamoshai has to correct her feminine fascination with the brute force so antithetical to her being: ‘That’s because you’re a woman. Oppression still fascinates you. You’re charmed by the strength of the person who beats you.’ ‘Well, I can’t say I like to be violently attacked – but when maleness assumes its most terrible form, fist upraised, it seems sublime.’ ‘Let me tell you what I think. Manliness doesn’t lie in a tyrannical flaunting of power – quite the contrary. To this day, it’s been man that’s created beauty and fought with the discordant. Evil pretends to be powerful only to the extent that man is cowardly. I find constant proof of this in the world today.’ (Tagore 2007, 130)

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Dadamoshai is succinctly implicating the logic by which the Modernist aesthetics of literary retaliation against the tyrannical forces of a masculinist Western civilisation endorses the same masculinism by mirroring it. This essay is by no means written in oblivion of Tagore’s critique in Jiban-Smriti of the amoral excess characterising the literature of the Shakespearean age (Tagore XI, 62). It nonetheless contends that in Shey, one is confronted with a worldview that a reader acquainted with the literature of the European and English Renaissance cannot but find intersections with. Tagore’s theoretical position on European Literature is often rigidly essentialist and ideologically resistant, in contrast to the eclecticism marking his artistic vision and practice. His perceived ideological compulsion to critique European civilisation in terms of an Indian antitype often blinded him to the dialogic, as opposed to monolithic, quality in European literature of successive ages, to Europe’s powerful tradition of self-criticism. Imperfect parallels and underlying influences of either Romanticism or Modernism may well be sought in other texts of Tagore’s, notwithstanding his professed reservations about such foreign cultural and literary movements. In terms of an overarching ideology for reading Tagore, who was neither quintessentially Indian nor Bengali, neither exclusively Modern nor pre-modern, in his spatio-temporal, socio-cultural moorings, this essay argues that Tagore studies can be revitalised only through a cautious deployment of the Western theoretical apparatus, Western academic practice, and through an openminded, inclusive readiness to seek aesthetic parallels in world literature. On the other hand, it speaks volumes for the enduring modernity of a text like The Unfortunate Traveller that it should, no less than Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel which it does not acknowledge as a model, have prefigured traits that may then be convincingly located in texts written centuries later and in other worlds. And it speaks no less eloquently for the enduring originality of Bakhtin’s theory of generic paradigms that one should be able to read Tagore’s Shey along its lines. Without simplifying the

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specificities of their respective historical contexts, the perceived intersection of these three writers in this essay, however anachronistic, could perhaps be justified in terms of Tagore’s very own construct ‘World Literature’ – ‘Visva-sahitya’. It has not been the purpose of my article to label Shey as postRomantic, post-Modernist, post-colonial, or even ‘carnivalesque’. Such an exercise would be utterly at odds with the viscerally antiintellectual spirit of the text. In so far as the Bakhtinian notion of the carnivalesque has been used consistently, the objective has been to open up the text to its inherent possibilities rather than to brand it indelibly. The endeavour has been to show how this unique literary pastiche, unquestionably without a peer in the rest of Tagore’s vast oeuvre, is relentlessly redefining itself within its own framework and relentlessly provoking the reader to adjust his understanding accordingly.

NOTES: 1. 2.

3.

4.

5.

Cf. Bakhtin, Dialogic Imagination, 179. John Milton, Areopagitica (The Project Gutenberg of Areopagitica), accessed on 29 March 2011, www.gutenberg.org/ files/608/608-h/608-h.htm Tagore, My Pictures, 64: “The joy in a picture is a joy of a perfect sense of proportion. The restraint of lines makes the picture distinct and definite. To see it is to see the thing itself – whatever it may be, a piece of stone, a donkey, a cactus, an old woman – it does not matter what. Whenever and wherever we envision a thing as true we touch the infinite and that is an endless joy.” (Written to Nirmal Kumari Mahalanobis, 29 November 1928.) Rabindranath Tagore, Lectures and Addresses, 93: “We have said before that where there is an element of the superfluous in our heart’s relationship with the world, Art has its birth. In other words, where our personality feels its wealth it breaks out in display. What we devour ourselves for is totally spent. What overflows our need becomes articulate. ...” Translation mine.

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REFERENCE LIST: Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1981. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Ed. Michael Holquist. Translated by Caryl Emerson & Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press. Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1984. Rabelais and His World. Translated by Helene Iswolsky. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Erasmus, Desiderius. The Praise of Folly. 1979. Translated by Clarence H. Miller. New Haven & London: Yale University Press. http:/ /www.jstor.org/stable/313068 (Accessed on 15/07/2010). Kaviraj, Sudipta. ‘Laughter and Subjectivity: The Self-Ironical Tradition in Bengali Literature’, Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 34, No. 2 (May, 2000), pp. 379-406, Cambridge University Press, Milton, John. Areopagitica. The Project Gutenberg of Areopagitica. www.gutenberg.org/files/608/608-h/608-h.htm (Accessed on 29 March 2011). Montaigne, Michel de. The Complete Essays. 1991. Translated by M.A. Screech. London: Penguin. Nashe, Thomas. The Unfortunate Traveller and Other Works. 1972. Ed. J.B. Steane. London: Penguin Books. Tagore, Rabindranath. 2002. Selected Writings for Children, ed. Sukanta Chaudhuri (New Delhi: Oxford University Press). Tagore, Rabindranath. 2007. Sishu. Kolkata: Visva-Bharati. Tagore, Rabindranath. Gitabitan. 1999. 2 vols. Kolkata: Visva-Bharati. Tagore, Rabindranath. He (Shey). 2007. Translated by Aparna Chaudhuri. New Delhi: Penguin. Tagore, Rabindranath. My Pictures: A Collection of Paintings. 2005. New Delhi: Viva Books. Tagore, Rabindranath. Rabindra Rachanavali. Vol. XIII. 1990. Kolkata: Government of West Bengal. Tagore, Rabindranth. Lectures and Addresses. 1980. New Delhi: Macmillan. Tagore, Rabindranth. Rabindra Rachanavali. Vol. IX. 1988. Kolkata: Government of West Bengal.

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‹%œy£zéôéxy†ÞÝþ 1928–V ‹y˜y˜ !“þ!˜ öë ¢y£zöì„þyéôéxÄy˜y!œ!¢ Ö•% ›öì˜îû xKþy“þ ²Ìöì”öìŸ xíÅyê !˜KÅþy˜ œ%!„þöìëû íy„þy £zFŠéyöì„þ£z ò¢›Ä„þ xyöìœy‰þ˜yóîû myîûy !˜’Åëû „þöìîû˜– ~î‚ öë ›%£)öì“Åþ ö„þy˜ £zFŠéy !˜KÅþy˜ öíöì„þ ¢Kþyöì˜ ‰þöìœ xyö좖 xíÅyê xyîû ›öì˜îû xöì†y‰þöìîû íyöì„þ ˜y ö¢ ›%£)öì“Åþ “þy ¢y£zöì„þyéôéxÄy˜y!œ¢öì¢îû xy@ùÌöì£îû ¢#›yîû îy£zöìîû ‰þöìœ ëyëûÐ !†îû#wö쟅öìîûîû ›öì“þ ò!˜KÅþy˜éôé›öì˜y!î”ó ë!” „þyîû&îû ›öì˜îû òxKþy“þé ²Ìöì”öìŸó ö„þy˜ ò„%þéôé£zFŠéyó ö”…öì“þ þ™y˜ ~î‚ ö¢ ë!” “þy xßþº#„þyîû „þöìîû “þöìî ò!˜KþÅy˜éôé›öì˜y!î”ó “þy!îû’# „þ!îîûyöì‹îû ›öì“þy£z îö윘– òò£ëû– £ëû– zy˜!“þ þ™yîû ˜yÐóó Sî¢%– ×yî’ 1335/‹%œy£zéôéxy†ÞÝþ 1928–V ¢îû¢#œyœ ç îûî#w˜yöìí ²Ì!“þ ¢y£zöì„þyxÄy˜y!œÞÝþ !†îû#wö쟅öìîûîû ßþ™ÜT x!¦þöìëy† öë “¤þyîûy ”%‹ö옣z ¢‚Kþy˜ ç !˜KÅþyöì˜îû þ™yíÅ„þÄ ¦%þöìœ „þíy îöìœöìŠé˜ xyîû ö¢ „þyîûöì’£z ¢y£zöì„þyxÄy˜y!œ!¢¢ !î¡ìöìëû “¤þyöì”îû ›“þ @ùÌy£Ä ˜ëûÐ ¢öìîÅyþ™!îû !†îû#wö쟅öìîûîû ”yî#– ¢îû¢#îyî%îû ²Ìîõþ ‘A Peculiarity in The Imagery in Dr. Rabindranath Tagore’s Poems’ ¢y£zöì„þyéôéxÄy˜y!œ!Ýþ„þÄyœ ˜ö죖 “þy£y ¢y£zöì„þyœ!‹„þÄyœ ›yeÐ xKþy“þ ›öì˜îû ö„þyöì˜y ²Ìy›y!’„þ xyöìœy‰þ˜y£z £z£yöì“þ ˜y£zÐ xy!› ë“þ”)îû ‹y!˜ ¦þyîû“þîöì¡ìÅ „þyîÄ ç xyÝÅþéôé¢Áºöìõþ ¢y£zöì„þyéôéxÄy˜y!œ!¢öì¢îû !”„þ ££zöì“þ ²Ìí› xyöìœy‰þ˜y x•Äyþ™„þ ×#ë%_« îûˆ#˜ £yœ”yîû ›£yŸëû£z „þöìîû˜Ð “¤þy£yîû ²Ìîõþ £z!uþëûy˜ ¢y£zöì„þyéôéxÄy˜y!œ!Ýþ„þÄyœ ö¢y¢y£z!Ýþöì“þ ç £z!uþëûy˜ ¢yöìëûª „þ‚öì@ùÌöì¢ þ™!àþ“þ ££zëûyöìŠéÐ

²Ìîy¢#éôéîû þ™y“þyëû ~ îy”y˜%îy” xyîûç ”%éô颂…ÄyîÄyþ™# ‰þöìœ!ŠéœÐ xy!Ù»˜ 1335éôé~ Sö¢öì²WzÁºîûéôéxöìQyîîû 1928V !†îû#wö쟅öìîûîû öœ…yîû ²Ì!“þîyöì” !œ…ö윘 x!˜œ‰þw ¢îû„þyîû– xyîû x@ùÌ£yëûöì’ S˜öì¦þÁºîûéôé!vþöì¢ÁºîûV x!˜œ‰þöìwîû !îîû&öìkþ !†îû#wö쟅öìîûîû þ™öìÇþ !œ…ö윘 ‹÷옄þ öëyöì†w˜yí ö‡y¡ìÐ vþz¦þëû !˜îöìõþîû£z !Ÿöìîûy˜y› þ™)îÅîê òîûî#w˜yí ç ›öì˜y!îöìÙÕ¡ì’ó £öìœç– îûî#w˜yí !˜öì‹ ~ !î“þöì„Åþ ²Ì“þÄÇþ öëy†”y˜ „þöìîû˜ ˜yÐ !†îû#wö쟅öìîûîû ›öì“þ ëy ˜y!„þ „þyîÄ îy xyöìÝÅþîû !”öì„þ öíöì„þ ¦þyîû“þîöì¡ìÅ ²Ìí› ò¢y£zöì„þyéôéxÄy˜y!œ!Ýþ„þÄyœó öœ…y– “þy !“þ!˜ !˜öì‹îû£z vþzöì”Äyöì† Šéyþ™yîyîû îÄîßþiy „þöìîû!Šéö윘 ö…y” šÊþöìëûöìvþîû !˜öì”ÅŸ˜yëû ²Ì„þy!Ÿ“þ International Journal of Psycho-analysiséôé~Ð vþz_« þ™!e„þyîû my”Ÿ îöì¡ìÅ– 1931éôé~– ‘The Working

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of an Unconscious Wish in the Creation of Poetry and Drama’

!Ÿöìîûy˜yöì› ö¢ öœ…y ²Ì„þy!Ÿ“þ £ëûÐ ²Ìîöìõþ ö†yvþüyöì“þ£z ‹y!˜öìëûöìŠé˜ îûˆ#˜ £yœ”yîû– It is my humble attempt at studying the poetry and drama of Rabindranath Tagore, the greatest poet of India of the present century. (Halder, 1931, 188)

îyöìîûy þ™y“þy îÄyþ™# ”#‡Å ö¢ ò¢y£zöì„þyéôéxÄy˜y!œ!Ýþ„þÄyœó ²Ìîöìõþ îûˆ#˜ £yœ”yöìîûîû xy˜“þ ²Ìöì‰þÜTyîû ”%éôé~„þ!Ýþ ˜!‹îû öþ™Ÿ „þîûy ëy„þÐ ö…ëûy „þyîÄ@ùÌöìsþiîû òþ™öìíîû öŸ¡ìó „þ!î“þy!Ýþîû ²Ìí› ”%!Ýþ Šée– òòþ™öìíîû ö˜Ÿy “þ…˜ öœöì†!Šéœ / þ™í xy›yöìîû !”öìëû!Šéœ vþy„þóó ~î‚ òò@ùÌy› Šéyvþüy ú îûyˆy ›y!Ýþîû þ™í– / xy›yîû ›˜ ¦%þœyëû öîûóó– ~£z îý×&“þ †y˜!Ýþîû ²Ìí› ”%!Ýþ œy£z˜ ßþº„,þ“þ x˜%îyöì” öþ™Ÿ „þöìîû îÄy…Äy „þöìîûöìŠé˜ ›˜ƒ¢›#Çþ„þ– “I possessed by the intoxication of the path — the path had called me” Then in another song “The path of red gravel that leads out of the village, seduces me!” Here “The path of red gravel” is to be marked with attention. In Rabindranath’s drama and poetry there is all along a search for this path. This path is nothing but the via genitalis.” (Halder, 1931, 195)

~…yö옣z öŸ¡ì ˜ëû— ‹#î˜ßþ¿,!“þéôéö“þ îÄî£*“þ ˜y˜y vþzþ™›y ç îû*þ™öì„þîû xyvþüyöìœ œ%!„þöìëû íy„þy ²Ì„,þ“þ latent content ö„þ …%¤öì‹ öîîû „þöìîû ~„þ xyØþëÅ “þy!œ„þy ²Ì’ëû˜ „þöìîû˜ !“þ!˜Ð xyþ™˜yöì”îû ›öì˜yîûO˜yöìíÅ ö¢ “þy!œ„þy ýîý ~…yöì˜ öþ™Ÿ „þîûœy›– 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

Earth — Mother earth — symbolizing mother. The bottom, the inmost storey — genitals. The grey coloured envelope on the surface — clothes. Bamboo — symbolizing the membrum virile universally used in this sense in Bengali proverbs and words of abuse. The charm of digging — Oedipus complex. The man swallowed up bodily in the pit — symbolizes Oedipus coitus. (Halder, 1931, 193)

~›˜£z ¢î ”%”Åyhsþéôéþ™y![þ“þÄþ™)’Åéôé”%ƒ¢y•Äéôé!¢kþyöìhsþîû öŸöì¡ì ²Ìyî!õþ„þ ö‡y¡ì’y „þöìîû˜–

xîöì‰þ“þ˜yîû xî”y˜­ îûî#w˜yí ç !îŸ Ÿ“þöì„þîû îyˆœy ¢y!£“þÄy¢öìîû ›˜ƒ¢›#Çþ’ / 121 We have critically examined some of the poems and dramas of Rabindranath and have seen that the Oedipus complex in his unconscious has provided materials for his artistic creations. Rabindranath’s craving for the transcendental, the distant and the formless is but the transformed desire for union with the mother. (Halder, 1931, 205)

~ öœ…y „þ# ˜‹öìîû þ™öìvþü!Šéœ îûî#w˜yöìíîûÚ xy›yîû x˜%›y˜ þ™öìvþü!ŠéœÐ !†îû#wö쟅îû ç “¤þ yîû x˜%†y›#öì”îû £yöì“þ ˜yhßþy˜yî%” ¢îû¢#œyœ îyîûîyîû ‰þy£z!Šéö윘 îûî#w˜yí ~ !î¡ìöìëû !„þŠ%é îœ%˜Ð !„þlsþ „þ!îîû öíöì„þ ö„þy˜ ¢yvþüy ˜y öþ™öìëû xîöìŸöì¡ì !“þ!˜ !‰þ!àþ !œ…ö윘 „þ!îîû îÄ!_«†“þ ¢!‰þî x!›ëû ‰þe«î“Åþ#öì„ þÐ ö¢ !‰þ!àþîû vþz_îû !”ö윘 ö…y” îûî#w˜yíÐ “þöìî Ö•% vþz_îû !”öìëû£z öíöì› íy„þö윘 ˜y– öþ™ï¡ì 1338 S‹y˜%ëûy!îû 1932Véôé~îû !î!‰þeyéôéëû ò¢y£zöì„ þyéôé ~˜y!œ!¢¢ó !Ÿöìîûy˜yöì› öŠéöìþ™ !”ö윘 ö¢ !‰þ!àþÐ 10 xöìQyîîû 1931éôé~ öœ…y ö¢£z !‰þ!àþîû ~„þ!Ýþ x‚Ÿ£z xy›yîû ~ x˜%›yöì˜îû „þyîû’Ð x‚Ÿ!Ýþ vþzk ,þ“þ „þîû!Šé– x!›ëûöì„þ öë !‰þ!àþ !œöì…‰þ ö”…œ%˜Ð ¢y£zöì„þyéôé~˜y!œ!¢¢ öÇþöìe x˜!•„þyîû ²ÌöìîŸ „þîûöì“þ ‰þy£z ö˜Ð ~£z !îKþyöì˜îû ¢)‰þ˜y!Ýþ ~…öì˜y xþ™!îû’“þ xy„þyöìîû xyöìŠé “þy£z xyþ™˜ £zFŠéy›“þ ëy “þy îœîyîû ›öì“þy ~›˜ vþzþ™œÇþÄ xyîû ö˜£zÐ !îö쟡ì“þƒ !˜öì‹îû ›öì˜îû @Õy!˜öì„þ !îKþyöì˜îû Šéyþ™ ö›öìîû „%þê¢y xy„þyöìîû ‰þyœy˜ „þîûyîû ~›˜ ¢%öìëy† xyîû þ™yçëûy ëyöìî ˜yÐ ~£z “þíy„þ!í“þ !îKþy˜!î¦þyöì† ÷îKþy!˜öì„þîû “þ„þ›y öë ö„þvþz •yîû’ „þîûöì“þ þ™yöìîû– x!•„þyîû# !˜îÅy‰þöì˜îû ö„þyöì˜y „þöìàþyîû þ™îû#Çþyîû !¦þ“þîû !”öì„þ ëyîyîû ”îû„þyîû £ëû ˜yÐ îy‚œyöì”öìŸ îÄ!_«†“þ x¢Á¿yöì˜îû xyîû ~„þ!Ýþ myîû ›%_« £œ— ~ îûöì¢îû îû!¢„þ ë¤yîûy “¤þyîûy þ™%œ!„þ“þ £öìî˜Ð Sàþy„%þîû– 1932– 717V

~£z þ™e ²Ì„þy!Ÿ“þ £çëûyîû þ™îû îûî#w˜yí îyˆy!œ ›˜ƒ¢›#Çþöì„þîû ‹†ê öíöì„þ !˜öì‹öì„þ ¢Á™)’Å =!Ýþöìëû !˜ö윘Р“¤þyîû ¦þyî˜yîû ¢yöìí šÊþöìëûöìvþîû ¦þyî˜yîû ¢yë%‹Ä íy„þöìœç îyˆy!œ ›˜ƒ¢›#Çþöì„þîû ¦þyî˜yîû ¢yöìí ö„þyöì˜y ¢yë%‹Ä ÷“þ!îû £œ ˜y “¤þyîûÐ !„þlsþ ›˜ƒ¢›#Çþöì„þîû ”%!˜ëûy öíöì„þ ¢öìîû ~öìœç “¤þyîû !˜öì‹îû !î‰þîûöì’îû öÇþe– îyˆœy ¢y!£öì“þÄîû ‹†öì“þ “þ…˜ ›˜ƒ¢›#Çþöì’îû Gþvþü vþzöìàþöìŠéÐ ö¢ Gþvþü öíöì„þ îûî#w˜yí „þ# ¦þyöìî îûÇþy „þîûöìî˜ !˜öì‹öì„þÚ

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“þíÄ¢)e ­ ö‡y¡ì– “þöìþ™yîÊ“þÐ 2004Ð îûî#wéôéöŠéyöìÝþy†öìÒîû !ŸÒîû*þ™– „þœ„þy“þy ­ ö”ó‹ þ™yî!œ!Ÿ‚Ð ‰þöìRyþ™y•Äyëû– Ÿîûê‰þw– òò¢y!£öì“þÄîû îû#!“þ ç ˜#!“þó– îDîy’#– ö¢öì²WzÁºîû [xy!Ù»˜]– 241éôé253Ð ”yŸ– ¢‹˜#„þyhsþÐ 1994Ð xydßþ¿,!“þ– „þœ„þy“þy ­ ˜yí þ™yî!œ!Ÿ‚Ð àþy„%þîû– îûî#w˜yíÐ 1883 [1290]Ð òò!î!î• ²Ì¢Dóó– ¦þyîû“þ#– ›y‰Åþ [÷‰þe] 67éôé73Ð

xîöì‰þ“þ˜yîû xî”y˜­ îûî#w˜yí ç !îŸ Ÿ“þöì„þîû îyˆœy ¢y!£“þÄy¢öìîû ›˜ƒ¢›#Çþ’ / 139 ————Ð

1900 [1307]Ð òòxöì‰þ˜yóó– Çþ!’„þy– „þœ„þy“þy– 35éôé37Ð ————Ð 1927 [1338]Ð òò¢y!£“þÄ•›Åóó– !î!‰þey– ‹y˜%ëûy!îû öþ™ï¡ì– 171éôé175Ð ————Ð 1932 [1338]Ð òò¢y£zöì„þyéôéxÄy˜y!œ!¢¢óó– !î!‰þey– ‹y˜%ëûy!îû öþ™ï¡ì– 717Ð ————Ð 1959 [1365]Ð ¢y!£öì“þÄîû þ™öìí– „þœ„þy“þy ­ !îÙ»¦þyîû“þ#Ð ————Ð 1963 [1370]Ð !‰þ!àþþ™e– xÜT› …[þ– „þœ„þy“þy ­ !îÙ»¦þyîû“þ#Ð ————Ð 1964Ð †Ò=FŠé– ‰þ“%þíÅ …[þ– „þœ„þy“þy ­ !îÙ»¦þyîû“þ#Ð ————Ð 1984 [1391]Ð îûî#w îû‰þ˜yîœ#– ²Ìí› …[þ– „þœ„þy“þy ­ !îÙ»¦þyîû“þ#Ð ————Ð 1985 [1392]Ð îûî#w îû‰þ˜yîœ#– “,þ“þ#ëû …[þ– „þœ„þy“þy ­ !îÙ»¦þyîû“þ#Ð ————Ð 1985 [1392]Ð îûî#w îû‰þ˜yîœ#– þ™Mþé› …[þ– „þœ„þy“þy ­ !îÙ»¦þyîû“þ#Ð ————Ð 1992 [1399]Ð !‰þ!àþþ™e– ¢®› …[þ– „þœ„þy“þy ­ !îÙ»¦þyîû“þ#Ð ————Ð 1992 [1399]Ð !Šé§¬þ™eyîœ#– „þœ„þy“þy ­ !îÙ»¦þyîû“þ#Ð ————Ð 2004Ð !‰þ!àþþ™e– |˜!î‚Ÿ …[þ– „þœ„þy“þy ­ !îÙ»¦þyîû“þ#Ð ————, òòþ™Mþé¦) þ “þóó– îû î #w îû ‰ þ˜yîœ# Sx˜œy£z ˜ ¦þy¢Å y ˜V , (http:// www.rabindrarachanabali.nltr.org/node/7545)

²Ì!¢!vþ‚¢ x¦þ !” íy!ÝÅþ˜ £z!uþëûy˜ ¢yöìëûª „þ‚öì@ùÌ¢– 1926Ð šÊþöìëûvþ– !¢†›%uþÐ 1998Ð !” £zrÝþyîûöì²ÌöìÝþ¢y˜ x¦þ !vÈþ›¢– !˜vþz £zëû„Åþ ­ xÄy¦þ˜ î%„þ¢Ð îöì¨Äyþ™y•Äyëû– Ÿîû!”¨%Ð 2012 [1419]Ð Ÿîû!”¨% x›!˜îy¢– „þœ„þy“þy ­ xy˜¨Ð î¢%– x!˜œ„%þ›yîûÐ 1928 [1335]Ð òòîûî#w˜yí ç ›öì˜y!îöìÙÕ¡ì’óó– ²Ìîy¢#– ‹%˜ [xy¡ìy‘þü]– 340éôé343Ð î¢%– x›öìîûw˜yíÐ 2008Ð îûî#w˜yöìíîû òßþ¿îû’ó „þyîÄ ­ ›˜ƒ¢›#Çþöì’îû ”,!ÜTöì„þy’ öíöì„þ ~î‚ x˜Äy˜Ä– „þœ„þy“þy ­ ×#¦)þ!› þ™yî!œ!Ÿ‚ ö„þyÁ™y!˜Ð î¢%– !†îû#wö쟅îûÐ 1928Ð òòîûî#w˜yí ç ›öì˜y!îöìÙÕ¡ì’óó– ²Ìîy¢#– ‹%œy£z [×yî’]– 583éôé584Ð !îÙ»y¢– Ÿyhsþ˜%Ð 2008Ð òòîûî#w˜yí öÝþöì†yîû ~uþ šÊþöìëû!vþëûy˜ íÝþóó– šÊþöìëûvþ ~œˆ †ÄyöìO¢– ¢yœ›y˜ xy…“þyîû S¢Á™y.V– !˜vþz !”!ÍÔ ­ ÞÝþÄyOyÐ ›£yœ˜î#Ÿ– !˜›Åœ„%þ›yîû#Ð 1969 [1376]Ð „þ!îîû ¢öìD ëû%öìîûyöìþ™– „þœ„þy“þy ­ !›e ç ö‡y¡ìÐ ›%öì…yþ™y•Äyëû– ²Ì¦þy“þ„%þ›yîûÐ 1961Ð îûî#w‹#î˜# ç îûî#w¢y!£“þÄôé²Ìöìþ– “,þ“þ#ëû …[þ– „þœ„þy“þy ­ !îÙ»¦þyîû“þ#Ð ¢îû„þyîû– ¢îû¢#œyœÐ 1928Ð òòxy !þ™!„þvþz!œëûy!îû!Ýþ £z˜ !” £zö웋y!îû x¦þ vþ. îûî#w˜yí öÝþöì†yîûó¢ öþ™yöìëû›¢óó– !” „þÄyœ„þyÝþy !îû!¦þëû%– xy†ÞÝþ– 241éôé280Ð

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Kiran Keshavamurthy TRUTH, HABIT AND LITERATURE – SUNDARA RAMASAMI’S J. J. : SOME JOTTINGS

My task is to influence ideas at the root of all action. Without thoughts there can be no deeds. Anyone who has an impact upon ideas can in reality influence actions. By effecting a change in beliefs, mankind itself can be transformed. For this, man should learn to be truthful in all his relationships and interactions. Now, he has taken them for granted. So long as this hurdle remains, preaching will only slip in the moss of habit. A treacherous moss. Can a society, oblivious of copulation, but immersed in love, reproduce itself? Creation means a feel for truth. The mind needs to be turned towards a state of creativity. Man should be taught about himself. If man fails to understand himself, he cannot grasp even the soil under his feet. To desilt the wellspring of creativity is my task. (Ramasami 1981, 171)

Sundara Ramasami’s Tamil novel J.J: Some Jottings (J.J: Sila Kurippagal) (1981) takes the form of a posthumous biography about a fictional Malayalam writer named J.J (James Joseph) and, under the pretext of detailing an equally fictional Malayali literary world to a Tamil readership, satirizes the parochialism of Tamil culture and society. I suggest the novel’s engagement with the cultural and linguistic differences between the Tamil and Malayalam literary worlds is only nominal, and illustrative rather of a fundamental or creative paradox between truth and habit, as embodied in J.J’s character. In the above excerpt from his diary jottings, J.J suggests the access to truth is enabled by effecting a conscious change in ideas and therefore action through creativity. Creativity that here Jadavpur Journal of Comparative Literature, Volume XLVX, 2013-2014 14 1

includes literature, is an embodied and self-reflexive disposition that can bring about a feel for the truth. Creative literature is thus identified as a habitual practice that becomes the experiential ground of truth. But the access to the truth is not, as J.J suggests, direct or unmediated but unavoidably structured by habit, which then requires the repeated undoing of habit. The philosophical import of the narrative lies in the fact that man can never get rid of habits or the habit of forming habits that necessarily mediate his relationship to himself and to others. Habits effect the human engagement with the world in terms of thoughts, actions and choices in a paradoxical manner — they are on the one hand restrictive as they desensitize human consciousness to external impressions, even as they are liberating precisely when consciousness is freed of investment in any particular impression. In habit consciousness is simultaneously present and engaged and absent and indifferent to the subject at hand, giving the act of engagement a mechanical and natural effect (Malabou 2005, 57). The literary and aesthetic function of habit becomes important here. When the act of creativity becomes a habitual state or disposition, it becomes an ongoing movement of a self-differentiated subject towards an essential universal. The creative power of habit lies in its reiterative practices that enable the individual subject to potentially transcend (self) difference and attain the integrity of an ideal form or essence. Creative habit thus constantly reconfigures human subjectivity as an insistent accident in the process of becoming essential (Malabou 2005, 71). In mediating the binary between real and ideal, the contingent and the necessary, the habit becomes a virtual agent that invariably determines the potential choices that the subject makes in her journey to attain a certain ideal of truth. The habitual practice of creativity is then the means of experiencing truth while the experience of truth itself remains an experience that is beyond language and reason. The Philosophy of Habit Before exploring the central thematic of the novel a brief investigation of the philosophical trajectory of the habit is only in order. The

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habit as laid out in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics is a determinate state of character formed by training that gives rise to natural regularities in the individual’s actions over time. For Aristotle, disposition (whether acquired or self-determined) and habitual action share a reciprocal relationship — habitual action helps create a moral disposition and the skills required to act according to specific circumstances, and moral skills in turn make habitual action easier and therefore more habitual. The formation of good habits according to Aristotle will naturally over time harmonize reason and passion so that one naturally feels pleasure in virtue and pain in vice. In the Lectures on the History of Philosophy, GWF Hegel emphasizes the dual principles of change and preservation that Aristotle formulates in his understanding of habit. For Aristotle, Hegel argues, habit is revealed as a principle of internal differentiation only in organic beings, which seek to maintain their unity through the synthesis of differences: difference between the organism and its surrounding environment and difference within the heterogeneous, elements that make up the organism. The organism is at once identical to and different from its non-living origins and environment. As sameness and alterity are interlinked in habit, habit becomes a process of adaptation in a double sense, as a form of what Aristotle calls contemplation — absorbing the environment, passively lending itself to what is given — and exercise, informing and transforming surroundings, appropriating the given conditions for its organic functions. The more complex and developed a living being is, the more it more it assimilates the inorganic environment into the infinite unity of subjectivity. In the Philosophy of Nature Hegel draws a distinction between animal habits and human habits. Animals driven by their instinct for self-preservation acquire and inherit certain habits to adapt to their natural environment. They incorporate and immediately reflect their surroundings for their own survival without creating an imbalance in their environment. Through their habits animals overcome the contingencies of their environment and remain in a

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necessary state of nature. Their bodily existence, which is a summation of the inorganic elements that make their surroundings, merely reflects their environment. And the only way individual animals reflect other animals that make up the genus is through reproduction. Humans on the other hand cannot be reduced to their instincts for self-preservation and reproduction. They do not immediately reflect their environment the way animals do because of their internally divided nature. The essential difference between animal habit and human habit lies in the tendency of human habit to conceal its identity as habit. The human being disavows her lack of self-sameness or, to use Hegel terms, the lack of correspondence between the exteriority or body and the interiority or soul. Language is fetishized as the human medium and instrument through which transparency is apparently achieved. The individual does not realize that she is already the object of multiple and even contradictory perspectives including her own that makes the truth of human nature a fantasy. Through the dialectical structure of habit that mediates the relationality between self and other the individual keeps shifting from one form of expression or signification to another. For Hegel habit is revealed as a process through which man ends by willing or choosing that which comes to him from the outside. He can only potentially arrive at the truth through the reiterative practices of habit that involves in Hegel’s words, “a persistent involvement of his will…through concrete habits that in a single act combine multiple determinations of sensation, consciousness, intuition, understanding and so forth.” (Hegel 1998, 230) The ideal of truth however remains a potential ideal whose realization through habit would put an end to individual existence. Thus even if habit has a deadening effect on the human subject, it is a creative agent that by ever postponing realization spurs the individual to strive to realize her ideal aim. From Aristotle on the habit is understood as difference repeated and made productive connected to the very way of being itself. Habit has an ontological significance for Hegel that goes beyond the anthropological, directing

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the subject dialectically towards an all encompassing and unified whole.1 In Deleuze’s study of David Hume’s philosophy, Empiricism and Subjectivity habit is the very essence of human subjectivity and what Deleuze and Hume call the imagination. As a post-structuralist critique of transcendental philosophy and phenomenology, Hume’s empiricism postulates a subject that unlike earlier postulations of the subject from Plato to Descartes is not an a priori subject but formed by and through experience. If knowledge is not derived from ideas in the mind that preexist experience, this does not imply as Deleuze suggests, that knowledge is passively derived from sensory impressions. The Humean subject according to Deleuze is constituted by what Hume calls the associative principles of human nature that are derived from and structure experience. Hume’s empiricism revolves around a principle of difference that posits a dualism between things and relations where experience becomes meaningful only by the associative links that the mind creates between things. The very ability to structure experience through the mind’s associative links that are external to the things themselves is itself a product of experience. The associative principles of human nature are natural and do not rely on a priori structures of experience. So for Hume and Deleuze the possibility of deriving a unified knowledge of the world is not based on the transcendental operation of mental categories but by the associative principles of human nature that through habit establish and reestablish in varying configurations new and different unities of the world. Thus Hume’s empiricism has to be understood not as an unmediated and passive reception of sensory experience but as an iterative production of the subject and the given, and their relation through what Hume calls the extensive and corrective rules of the imagination. Both these rules find their origin in habit, whose function is to enhance the range of the imagination and constantly correct the imagination and the accuracy of judgment through the understanding. The traditional example that Deleuze cites is that of the balls on a pool table and the process of association that allows

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a subject to form a relation of causality between one ball and the next, so that the next time one ball comes into contact with another, an expectation that the second ball will move is created. Thus any empiricist philosophy, as Deleuze argues, cannot be based merely on difference but requires difference and repetition to relate to each other reversibly. According to Deleuze there is no identity, and no repetition is ever the same. Thus habit is not self-repetitive but reiterative, in that with every ‘repetition’ something new and different is produced. Human subjectivity with every reiteration is never being but becoming. The displacement of the transcendental subject for Deleuze implies the displacement of all transcendentals in his works — questioning the supremacy of reason as the a priori privileged way of relating to the world, questioning the link between freedom and will, attempting to abolish dualisms from ontology, reinstating politics prior to Being. Unlike the Hegelian subject whose dialectical journey of becoming is determined by its mergence with an internally homogenous Whole, the Deleuzian subject is an indeterminable iterative process of identity and difference whose destination remains unknown. The protagonist of the following novel is truly a Deleuzian one to the extent that his ontological journey is an open ended one that entails the repeated assumption and denuding of habit. The Narrative J. J embodies a crisis in the circularity of habit and action and their easy correspondence to moral disposition. His constant predicament in the novel is his inability to determine whether his action is original or derived from habit. He is haunted by his inability to make choices and decisions that reduces him to an apparent state of paralysis. He claims in frustration that he is neither able to act with perfect conviction nor able to die. But his dilemma cannot be equated to inaction. The truth for J.J is potentially experienced precisely in the disjuncture between habit and action where the rejection of socially cultivated habits is estranging even as it opens a space for difference and newness. Every new reconfiguration of

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the relation between thought, action and knowledge brings the subject potentially closer to the truth, which is identified with self-sameness. But self-sameness is an ever deferred ideal; the possibility of attaining this ideal by what is ostensibly original action is always already mired in habit that seeks to integrate particular interests into an artificial collectivity. If habit is a set of conventional and iterative practices that necessarily constitute the subject and her unified understanding of the world, such an understanding is contingent. The impasse between action and habit perpetuates J.J’s journey towards the ideal of perfect unity; a journey that fuels his and indeed, man’s struggle to transform and improve himself as he strives to approximate the truth. The path to this elusive ideal can never be predetermined and every attempt to approximate the truth results in a productive failure that produces new possibilities of being in the world. The narrator bemoans J.J’s exclusion from the rhetorical claims of Dravidian nationalism where Dravidian is equated with Tamil. But the unifying claims of Dravidian nationalism like any other form of cultural nationalism are as inclusive as they are exclusive. These partial claims also determine the politics of literary canon formation. Some may wonder, was J.J a Tamil writer? How can his death be our loss? J.J’s soul, though Dravidian, was not a Tamil one. Yet, he was an artist who used writing to seek insights. Isn’t this important? Isn’t this rare? “Whosoever uses the letters, the arts, philosophy, science or religion (in these times, how can I include politics?) to seek one’s inner light is one among us. He needs to be assimilated into our language and become a part of us. We should recognize this assimilation with ecstasy and think further – if we can think, and if we are so inclined. (Ramasami 1981, 13)

The predicament that drives the narrative and is figured by the narrator and J.J’s character is the irresoluble slippage between repetition and difference that constitutes one’s perception of experience.

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As Deleuze notes in his work on Hume, the habit as convention is necessarily an exclusive basis for any institution and the attempt to make the institution more inclusive by correcting the habit that constitutes it would be transformative but also open up other exclusions. The interplay between repetition and difference as embodied by the narrator/biographer and J.J respectively becomes a narrative strategy that unfurls the human subject’s open-ended journey towards truth and being. While the narrator embodies the unifying and repetitive practices of habit, J.J embodies a principle of difference that can be self-estranging even as it introduces novelty and creativity. The two characters thus function as antithetical correlates that make up the self-corrective structure of habit. The narrator’s urge to include J.J among the list of great Tamil writers only reestablishes the exclusive literary conventions that underwrite the canon when J.J’s crusade is precisely against the very idea of the habit or convention that only creates a necessary but synthetic sense of belonging and unity. His polemic against the institutionalization of literature is continuous with his individuating notion of truth that isolates him from society. In an imaginary footnote from his diary jottings alluding to his fallout with a contemporary philosopher who demolished his orthodox Christian background, the distinctness of the human being J.J suggests lies in his ability to overthrow untrue and outmoded social habits and practices. Today’s radical overtakes yesterday’s radical. A religionist is one who believes himself to be the ultimate radical. Man is not just a living being. He is a different kind of a living being. Ever restless, he can never be cowed down. Never is he satisfied. (Ramasami 1981, 15)

Rather than embodying a distinct character J.J symbolizes man’s restless journeying towards truth; a journey that constantly radicalizes the social and moral values attached to habit and custom. His narrative is itself a dramatization of the uneasy intimacy between identity and difference. As has been suggested earlier, the narrator

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at various points in the book equates truth with stable and perfect identity. He tries to resolve the disparity between languages and literatures in a globalized world by ironing out all differences. He believes the invention of cultural forums that aim to correct or redress the disparity between languages and literatures will logically result in an even and honest exchange of ideas that over time will erase all difference. The narrator/biographer characterizes his book as a holistic response to the global asymmetry both among and between Indian languages and literatures. But this impulse to assimilate difference and impose an artificial ideal of cultural or even human identity conditions the possibility of its own fracture condemning man to an even greater sense of solitude. Fifteen languages are listed in the Eighth Schedule of the Constitution of India. When I asked some writers if they have ever seen the script of all these languages at least once, they all replied warily, “No”. That I too hadn’t did little to assure them…A person who knows of contemporary Italian writers is unaware of present day Kannada writers. A Hindi writer with a doctoral thesis on recent trends in American literature asks if there is New Poetry in Tamil “For the last two decades I have argued that journals devoted exclusively to introducing the literature and culture of one linguistic group to another should be launched in all Indian languages. “When I proposed starting a Tamil journal as part of this larger plan, one of my fellow writers asked, “Has any Tamil reader said he’ll die if he couldn’t read other literatures?” I felt slighted. I could’ve retorted, “So who’s fasting, demanding that you write?” But that would have been the end of our friendship. With the words, “The right to express one’s views is inalienable in the world of letters” he would cease to have any truck with me forever. In the present situation, if he too stopped speaking to me, I’d have to talk to myself. “J.J: Some Jottings are my response to this state of affairs” (Ramasami 1981, 16-17)

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As I argued earlier, the reiterative structure of habit enables without completing the accidental subject’s transformation into an ideal essence. Every transformation in the subject’s understanding of the world preserves earlier transformations even as it paves the way for further change. The narrator aspires to unite all Indian languages and literatures despite their apparently nominal differences all of which can be reduced to a fundamental humanism. The essence of all Indian literature for the narrator is its humanism that overrides all other cultural and linguistic differences and habits. Some may feel I am talking of writers and the world of letters of a different language. That’s right. But not entirely so. Can we forget that our writers are a lot like other writers? The quality of their work may vary. But in their nature, in their practices, in their habits, in betraying others, in lobbying, are they not more or less the same? Even if we speak different tongues, are we not all Indians? Don’t we have some common traits? Therefore you can take this to be a book on our writers also. Writers too are human beings, aren’t they? Thus it is also a book on people. (Ramasami 1981, 18)

The narrator’s unifying impulses are repeatedly undercut by the structural exclusions that constitute liberal universalist claims of cultural institutions to redress the uneven development of languages and literatures. The universal function of literature is to approximate the experience of truth which is however an individual and estranging enterprise. It becomes evident from the novel that the approach to truth may be subjective and determined by socially and historically embedded habits but truth itself is not a singular or universal essence with a particular value or referent. By the end of the novel it becomes clear to J.J that the truth is precisely the irredeemable sense of lack and nothingness that reiterates and transforms human subjectivity. The ongoing quest for truth is thus a creative process in its unraveling of the internal differentiation that constitutes subjectivity. The production (and reception) of literature as one form of creative expression is an authenticating project that irrespective of its social

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and historical context aims to constantly strip human nature of the moulds of habit and custom. For J.J literature is essentially historical and philosophical in its processes in that it symbolizes the “restless” human subject’s everlasting striving for truth in a postmodern world where there are no stable categories (Ramasami 1981, 15). The journey towards truth can never be anticipated or predetermined; truth comes to be articulated as an inexplicable, momentary experience of correspondence between thought and narrative that can never be captured by the temporality of literary meaning. In her orientation towards truth the subject realizes herself. The associative principles of human nature according to Hume account not only for experience in the basic sense but also to the highest levels of cultural and social life. This is the basis for Hume’s rejection of a social contract model of society based on convention alone. Morals, feelings, bodily comportment — these elements of subjectivity are explained not by the transcendental structures but by the innate activity of association. Once the habitual structure of the self is in place, Deleuze argues, the Humean concept of belief comes into play, which is a central part of human nature. Belief describes a particularly human way of going beyond the given through habit. Thus for instance, one expects the sun to rise the next day not because one knows that but out of belief that is based on habit. This reverses the traditional hierarchy between knowledge and belief. Every act of belief is a practical application of habit without any reference to an a priori ability to judge. Thus every human being according to Deleuze’s reading is habitual but also creative even in the most mundane moments of his life. The narrator’s beliefs are completely shattered by J.J’s polemic against social conventions like marriage. The novel traces the development in the narrator’s literary taste from cheap romantic serial novels to discovering J.J’s disillusioning attack on marriage. The narrator notwithstanding his awe and admiration for J.J. is initially unsettled by J.J’s ability to repeatedly strip the pretense

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of the human world; to “erase the line between thoughts and the printed word” (Ramasami 1981, 19). Today’s modern writings, J.J. feels are “a mask that modern man wore to hide his dissatisfaction due to moral reasons” (Ramasami 1981, 19). The narrator’s response to J.J’s critique is one of fear and ecstasy — the fear of being stripped of the comfort of dreams and beliefs and the ecstasy of momentarily experiencing without being able to express the coincidence between experience and language. The joy of experiencing the unity of thought and language and narration in J.J’s writings is an embodiment of an ideal moment of truth and perfection that however is provisional in a world where all values and categories are in crisis. To protect himself from the crisis of meaninglessness, man constantly creates and rationalizes an imaginary world of make-belief and religious faith to serve his own interests. The breakdown of every belief and habit is only replaced by equally fragile and conventional beliefs and habits that reiterate the fact that man can neither give up the habit of forming habits to make sense of the world nor replacing those very habits in his longing for perfection. In the unrelenting creativity that characterizes the ability of the human imagination to go beyond the given, truth however momentary and provisional can only be an experiential category that is outside the realm of reason and representation. Towards the end of his diary notes, J.J suggests truth as perfection is precisely an inexplicable sense of nothingness; a lack of selfsameness that structures human subjectivity and meaning. But as J.J suggests man’s quest for truth is always threatened by the arbitrariness of beliefs and conventions that necessarily structure human perception. Considering the burden of so many theories, it is little surprise that man seeks refuge in god, for a little faith always lurks behind rationalism. Behind every principled position lurks a personal interest revealing its real face. The intensity of the predicament tortures man which breaks down earlier beliefs. Afraid of plunging into nothingness, man embraces new beliefs in a make-believe of holism, closing his eyes to the shortcomings.

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Tested against life, philosophical theories lose their sheen… Then the dressing up of philosophy. Man’s desires, dreams and ideals, his struggle to see god in tangible form, in the embodiment of faith, in conformity with reason—poor man! He does not realize Life is not in the least obliged to ensure victory to truth-quests. It keeps circling in its endless cycle, indifferent to man’s dreams, desires and struggles. Will its cycle and force ever be grasped by his intellect? (Ramasami 1981, 106)

But it is precisely this sense of nothingness that J.J in his diary notes does not equate with a void. This nothingness is a creative lack that reconfigures and reorients the subject towards a potential sense of truth and being. Truth is an ideal of perfection where all differences except for the difference between truth and untruth cease to be. Truth according to J.J is an index of man’s nobility and a dream of perfection that inspires man to improve himself. One’s faith in truth entails being true to oneself and hence to others, which for J.J presumes a historical erasure of differences between and within individuals; of all the different applications of habit— conventions, rules, beliefs, morality and political positions. A sincere faith in truth would put an end to all the rationalizations of habit to arrive at a state of holism; a state where the world is perfectly integrated. But if the achievement of such a state were possible it would end all human creativity that is forever aimed at selftransformation and transcendence. Let me be branded with any name — Optimist or Nihilist, Progressive or Reactionary, Socially Constructive or Destructive. I need to reach a plane where all mean the same. One difference is crucial — that alone counts. Do I speak the truth, whether they call me a reactionary or an enemy of society or by any other such name, I am noble in myself… If, on the other hand, as a result of speaking falsely, acting at variance with my heart, indulging in flattery, betraying friends, following devious tactics, the society is to put me in an exalted position, I do not desire it… I do not speak out of arrogance.

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I’ve numerous frailties. I struggle to overcome them… Mine is a journey… I don’t seek perfection. I know I can’t achieve it. There is no such thing as perfection. Whatever is, is struggle… a struggle for holism… This non-existent thing is the reason for all existence. Man’s nobility is born from it. When man begins to think of this “nullity” as nonexistence, he will descend to the level of beasts… Dreaming of perfection, man kept transforming his condition. To effect this transformation he dedicated himself, destroyed himself and in turn experienced the rapture of his own annihilation… History proclaims man’s faith in perfection. (Ramasami 1981, 182-183)

The reiterative practices of habit are primarily exercised in language in all its forms. Language at once desensitizes human consciousness to impressions (where the subject is as Hegel argues at once present and absent in the subject at hand) through its recursive practices and enunciates different and newer ways of becoming. The act of writing for instance involves making choices within the limits of certain practices that both reinforce them and open up possibilities for freedom. On the one hand, the narrator aspires to forge an intellectual and spiritual relationship with J.J that transcends body and language, which according to the narrator has divided men and “enslaved man — who was born to be on the side of truth — to sound” (Ramasami 1981, 29). And yet language and literature are the only means through which even a sensory experience of truth is possible. In the latter half of the novel the narrator presents us with J.J’s diary notes that he states form the preliminary basis for all his other writings. His notes capture sensory experiences in all their immediacy and the narrator admires his ability to go beyond national, linguistic and communal boundaries and unravel the fetters of religious thought and morality that impede human self-realization. Humans J.J suggests have been ironically forced to forsake their transparency because of religious morality. The chasm between man and life has been widened by the rut of “custom” and “habit” that conceals meaning and passes off as truth

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(Ramasami 1981, 49). For J.J the journey to truth can never be predetermined; it only entails the repeated stripping of outmoded values and positions that no longer suit the needs of the contemporary world. The historical trajectory of truth has the ability to undo norms and disturb the peace and complacency of his readers. For instance, in another section of the novel, J.J critiques the synthetic humanism in the writings of a well known socialist writer Mullaikal Madhavan Nair. Beneath Nair’s claims of portraying poverty in unsparing detail, the narrator feels Nair’s “tactical” exclusions of certain details are meant to satisfy his readers (Ramasami 1981. 85). The synthetic humanism of Nair’s writings are according to J.J only a reflection of his greed for money and fame and his failure to question his own fantastical world of makebelief. In a conversation with his professor Arvindaksha Menon, a mentor known for encouraging young writers to write in what was then a new realist mode, J.J. implicitly critiques Mullaikal Madhavan Nair’s writings, It is not the incident itself that counts…When a body functions without reflection, without sensitivity, in a hidebound manner, stupidly, like a storehouse of reflex actions, everything becomes just an incident. The mechanical response of mere reflection. What is action anyway? Is it my own action or is it just a habit others instilled in me? Reflecting on these lines, philosophical issues take precedence over incidents. (Ramasami 1981, 81)

As mentioned earlier, what distinguishes animal from human habit for Hegel is that the latter conceals its identity as habit, passing off as original. The repetitive practices of habit deaden human sensitivity to impressions so that human consciousness is at once indifferent and engaged in the world. If habit enables certain seemingly spontaneous forms of reflex action, original action requires a constant reorientation of the self towards itself and its relation to the world. Action and habit share an uneasy correlation from the above quote. J.J’s predicament lies in being

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unable to be entirely convinced of the originality of his action that is always already determined by habit and custom. And yet although there is no non-habitual behavior or practice, in that habit constitutes the subject’s orientation to the world, action cannot be reduced to ritual for there to be some possibility of selftransformation. There is thus a slippage between action and habit that can affect change only through constant self-awareness and deliberation. J.J’s reflection on the inexplicable phenomenon of change suggests habit, as Aristotle and Hegel emphasize, is a cumulative process of adaptation and development which preserve earlier modifications that condition future transformation. Thus being a witness to the experience of change is crucial to the undoing of habit and artifice: “Right in the middle stands a huge neem tree… “Without giving a close look, it would be chopped down but if one observed it closely, you would not dream of chopping it. As a protest against a mentality that destroys without a second thought, this tree should remain even after this area is turned into a park complete with a climbing frame for children… “I also have philosophical reasons, pertaining to aesthetics and life preservation, for keeping this solitary tree alive. If I become a king, I transform this spot. After the transformation, where is the evidence for such a transformation? Isn’t the experience of the transformation, the only trace of it? If there is no experience where then is change? “You may ask, aren’t there men? What about their experience? Plants are superior witnesses to men. For that reason too, the tree should remain.” (Ramasami 1981, 82)

In another instance, J.J is struck by the mechanical expression of pity on a leprous beggar’s face. He imagines the various reactions the disabled leper could have to the money he has to offer but nothing prepares him for the leper’s sudden securing of the coin with his toe when J.J tries to help him. J.J realizes no action or

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decision can ever be wholly predetermined by habit or deliberation particularly when the habits of others are involved. He can never completely control any circumstance or event on the basis of his own conviction when the other has not been considered. Later he agonizes to Aravindaksha Menon over the impossibility of escaping habit, I have become incapable of thought and at arriving at decisions. To act is beyond me. I hate habit. But I die over and over again due to habit. All the thought of the world until now, its nobility, its unbounded capacities, has given me nothing. I, for my part, do not possess the strength to make anything of my own. (Ramasami 1981, 87)

The Professor suggests the only way of breaking out of habit is “destroying one’s self in thinking, can truth be touched, felt…” (Ramasami 1981, 87). In other words, as long as one exists one is habituated to act in a certain way. The only resort for J.J is to opt out of an existence where he can be free of habit or indulge in a self-effacing act of creativity that enables self-transformation and transcendence. What was earlier a strictly individual enterprise of seeking truth becomes a selfless one that relocates the ‘self’ from the confines of individualism to a relationality with others where truth can be potentially experienced. Truth lies in the destruction of self-love and empathy; in mutual esteem that integrates particular and partial sympathies to produce a holistic sense of the truth where differences cease to matter. J.J alludes to the game of football where what is important is not winning or losing but participating with the greatest conviction. The ball he says does not belong to any one player but to the team and it is the dynamic and involved relationality between players that can create an experience of truth, however momentary, that cannot be captured by language and representation. It is the institutionalization of the sport that J.J claims has ruined the dynamic relational aspect of the game by imposing rules and restrictions. The importance of destroying the self by indulging in creative activity becomes evident in J.J’s passing

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engagements with carpentry, fishing, photography and painting. His decision against his family’s wishes to study law to indulge in nonprofessional forms of creative and intellectual activity again reflects the importance of aesthetic expression as an end in itself in redeeming a dead life of habit. Creative activity when not determined by institutional considerations of utility offers the “ecstasy” of experiencing truth. The narrator identifies with his bedridden mother whose sickness compels her to stick to intellectual forms of work like writing. When he compares his parents he believes people like his mother would form the basis for a truly noble society based on humility and honesty. Although he imbibes his “morality, and belief and discipline” from his father who has no worldly attachments or needs, he describes his mother as someone who is neither pretentious nor fully affectionate to those she helps. She is “forever active and guilty” and “dreams of the future to bear her current misery” (Ramasami 1981, 180). It is his mother’s ability to dream; to have faith in a better future even in her current misery while silently empathizing with others in the present that make her the basis of a noble society. Individuals like her can create an unspoken sense of understanding and empathy that renders language and meaning inadequate and superfluous. Towards the end however J.J longs to be freed of all relations and embraces death when he realizes nothing can offer a permanent antidote to habit. Like everyone he is bewildered by the empirical world that in its many facets is inexhaustible in its wonders and inscrutable, “Our bewilderment dulls our sensibilities and fools our minds into being machines of habit” (Ramasami 1981, 67). When the narrator discovers J.J is dying he realizes all great writers have been responsible for hastening “little deaths to kill the body on an everyday basis” (Ramasami 1981, 65). He wonders if their short lives have something to do with their inability to countenance the loss of their selves in their struggle to live. In conclusion, the deadlock between action and habit has to be repeatedly undone precisely through certain relational acts of

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creativity that constantly renew the human relationship to the self and to others. Creativity offers the possibility of constantly reconfiguring the habitual structures of understanding and thus the human orientation towards truth. Literature is one among other creative acts that through language ironically constitutes the experiential grounds of truth that cannot be captured within the significatory structures of reason and meaning. If norms, rules and habits or conventions are necessary to crystallize meaning, literature has the power to undo all of them and constantly recreate an understanding of truth that in the novel shifts from being a primarily individual enterprise to a shifting relational act of aesthetic expression. Truth is thus a temporal and historical category that is constantly reexperienced by reconfiguring the relationality between self and other in creative practice. NOTES: 1.

In her reading of habit in Hegel, Catherine Malabou approximates the Hegelian subject to the Deleuzian where subjectivity is a non-teleological process of dispersion driven by the interplay of identity and difference. I however wish to suggest that Hegelian dialectics on the contrary is a totalizing teleological project that traces the processual subject’s ultimate arrival to an all encompassing and unifying Whole.

REFERENCE LIST: Aristotle. 2011. Nicomachean Ethics. Translated by Robert C. Bartlett and Susan D. Collins. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Deleuze, Gilles. 1991. Empiricism and Subjectivity: an essay on Hume’s theory of human nature. Translated by Constantin V. Boundas. New York: Columbia University Press. Hegel, GWF. 2006. Lectures on the History of Philosophy. Translated by R.F. Brown and J.M. Stewart. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

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—. 1977. Phenomenology of Spirit. Translated by A.V Miller. Oxford: Clarendon Press. —. 1976. Anthropology. Translated by R.F. Brown and J.M. Stewart. Oxford: Clarendon Press. —. 1970. Philosophy of Nature. Translated by M.J Petry. London, Allen & Unwin; New York, Humanities Press. Hume, David. 1988. An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. La Salle, Ill.: Open Court. Malabou, Catherine. 2005. The Future of Hegel: Plasticity, Temporality and Dialectic. Translated by Lisabeth During. London and New York: Routledge. Ramasami, Sundara. 2003. J.J: Some Jottings. Translated by A.R. Venkatachalapthy. New Delhi: Katha. —-. 1981. J.J: Sila Kurippagal. Madras: Kriya.

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Avishek Ray PRE-HISTORY OF THE ‘FOLK’: A CASE OF BANGLA LITERARY HISTORIOGRAPHY 1

A significant development in contemporary literary-cultural studies has been the emergence of the notion of modernities and modernisms in the plural. While acknowledging the importance of modernity and modernism for literary analysis, poststructuralist theorists, in particular, have rejected singular definitions of these terms as an illegitimate and overtly restrictive projection of models derived from western European experience onto areas of the world where they may not apply. As an alternative, they have often approached modernity and modernism in a global and comparative fashion stressing multiple, disjunctive temporalities, and multiple vernacular iterations. This explains the foundation of the ‘folk’ as a distinct cultural form and, ever since, its functioning as a legitimate academic discipline. The jargon ‘folk’, or for that matter folk theatre, folk literature, folk music etc., is laden with so much cultural baggage that it is now a naturalized concept within contemporary academics so much so that we never question its ‘order of things’. The aim of this paper is two-fold: first, to genealogically trace the inception of the ‘folk’ and then demonstrate how the idea is appropriated into the discourse of Bangla literary history. Who were the chief proponents of the construction of the ‘folk’? Why was the category set up in the first place? What is the ‘telos’ of this dividing practice? Which politico-historical milieu allowed this ambiguous polarization between the ‘folk’ and ‘non-folk’? And finally, what implications did the birth of the ‘folk’ have in the way the nineteenth century Bengali intelligentsia – grappling with Jadavpur Journal of Comparative Literature, Volume XLVX, 2013-2014 16 1

the utility of the ideas of ‘foreign’ modernisms – fashioned their ‘very own’ literary historiography? This paper, therefore, problematizes the model of Bangla literary historiography with reference to how it perceives the ‘folk’. The ‘folk’ is certainly not an universalizable category; it is perceived differently by different people across different time and place. This paper studies two historians of Bangla literature, namely Dineshchandra Sen (1866-1939) and Sukumar Sen (1900-1992), to illustrate how their gaze towards ‘folk’ differed fundamentally, and how each represents his ‘structure of feeling’ that (re)shapes his understanding of ‘folk’. This paper points to how the time and place they belonged to, their socio-political commitments, their dispositions of taste and so on - the ‘habitus’ in Bourdieu’s expression - bear upon the reception of ‘folk’ as a category in their discourse. They have contentious, rather competing, views on ‘folk’, nevertheless they use folk as an apparatus to grapple with colonial modernity. Sumanta Banerjee (1998, 14) shows how obsessed Bankimchandra Chattopadhayay was with distinguishing between the Baiji and the Khemta dance forms. He took it upon himself to establish the superiority of Baiji dance, which he viewed as a derivative of the north Indian classical music tradition, over Khemta dance, which for him, comprised nothing more than ‘abominable contortions of the middle part of the body’. Indeed in the nineteenth century, there was this burning desire within the Bengali cultural sphere to clinically sanitize the ‘folk’ elements and (re)evaluate their importance or lack thereof in the collective cultural history. No wonder when the history of Bengali literature was being canonized, historians were totally judgmental, and more often than not had contradictory assessments of the worth of the ‘folk’, but all necessarily assumed the category ‘folk’ as an apriori – not only because even in rendering a vernacular history they chose a historiographic model that was inherently western, but also because ‘folk’ functioned as a counter-construct upon which the ‘modern’ Bengali self during the colonial encounter could be mounted. The task of the paper, therefore, is to study the historiography and register the voices of difference and

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discontent, and/or those that are silenced by it, and to understand the stakes involved therein. The trajectory of inception of the ‘folk’ as a category can be traced to the germination of Romanticism. Following the Industrial Revolution, the relationship between the rural and the urban, hitherto complementary, was readily turning conflictual. The ‘city’ boomed as a massive expansionary force devouring the rural traditions: urban life penetrates peasant life, dispossessing it of all its traditional features: crafts, small centers which decline to the benefit of urban centers…Villages become ruralized by losing their peasant specificity. (Lefebvre 1996, 119)

The ‘disenchantment’ following the Industrial Revolution fuelled in some the desire to search for a reality uncontaminated by industrial capitalism and its subsequent discontentment. They were determined to find human beings still in the ‘raw/ natural/ organic’ state. (Caudwell 1937, 86-89) Although Herder is known to have used terms such as Volkslied (folksong), Volksseele (folk soul) and Volksglaube (folk belief) as early as the late eighteenth century; and had his famous anthology of folksongs, Stimmen der Volker in Liedern published in 1778-79, folkloristics/folklore as an academic discipline did not emerge until much later. The Grimm brothers published the first volume of their much-celebrated Kinder und Hausmarchen in 1812 while the English word folklore was coined by Thoms in 1846. By the last decade of the nineteenth century, national folklore societies – the English Folklore Society (1878) and the American Folklore Society (1888) – were already established and the idea of folk(lore) was seemingly associated with a nostalgic ‘reinvention’ of the past. (Bascom 1977) The idea of folklore, if not the term, evolved as the dark side of the Enlightenment, as the contrast to the new ideals to which the age aspired. As Schutze (1921, 118) points out succinctly: “Rationalism ‘regarded the folk and its creative, especially literary, products with contempt and derision, as lacking in refinement, learning, mastery of diction, and subtleness and elevation of thought”. Romanticism, though directed towards a complete reversal

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of Rationalist aesthetics, did not altogether reject the purported binary between literature per se and folk-literature. Following Rousseau2, and more closely his teacher Hammann, Herder idealized the yetto-be-civilized ‘natural man’, and admired his poetic expression, what he loosely called Volklitteratur, Volkspoesie, and Naturpoesie, as “the highest degree of harmony between the personality of the individual author, his subject, and the collective personality of his native audience or ethnic environment…the highest type and the final standard of all poetry.” (cited in Schutze, 1921: 119) Thus, Herder set up the conceptual framework within the grid of which the idea of ‘folk’ would henceforth always be invoked in relation to the ‘high-or-low’ metaphor, but would in any case be non-integrable into literature per se, as became all the more evident with the literarization of ‘folk’ elements. This is because literarization functions on a classist paradigm perpetuating social differentiation: between the affluent and the indigent, the rulers and the ruled, the urban and the rural, the ones with leisure time and those without etc3. The social hierarchy that results from such a development then serves as a metaphor for the valuation of its products: the literarized products become analogous to respective social positions. The difficulty in the various nineteenth century usages of the term ‘folk’ lay in the fact that it was inevitably defined as a dependent rather than an autonomous entity. In other words, ‘folk’ was defined in contrast with or in opposition to some other population group and more importantly ‘civilization’ – it was (as if) the uncivilized element in a civilized society! The ‘folk’, in contrast to the elites, was understood as a group of people who constituted the lower stratum – the so-called ‘vulgus in populo’ – living on the margins of civilization and generally to be equated with the concept of peasant(ry). Let me illustrate the nineteenth century view of the folk and folklore by citing one of its most eloquent spokesmen, Andrew Lang: There is a form of study, Folklore, which collects and compares the similar but immaterial relics of old races, the surviving superstitions and stories, the ideas which are in our time but

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not of it. Properly speaking, folklore is only concerned with legends, customs, beliefs, of the Folk, of the people, of the classes which have least been altered by education, which have shared least in progress. But the student of folklore soon finds that these unprogressive classes retain many of the beliefs and ways of savages…This folklore represents, in the midst of the civilised race, the savage ideas out of which civilisation has been evolved. (1884, 11, 25; italics mine)

In The Handbook of Folklore, Burne’s (1914, 2) definition of ‘folk’ is: “(T)he generic term under which the traditional Beliefs, Customs, Stories, Songs and Sayings current among backward peoples (sic.), are comprehended and included.” Foster (1953, 15973); he however goes on to sharpen the urban-rural/ civilizedsavage distinctions in suggesting that folk society is not even a ‘whole’ society, not isolate in itself; it is rather ‘a half society’, a part of a larger unit (usually a nation) of the urban upper class. Precisely because ‘folk’ was defined primarily with respect to its supposed relationship to the civilized elite, folklore existed only because the latter existed! Bandyopadhyay (1995, iv, 12) points out that the very existence of ‘folklore’ is virtually a ‘myth’ – ‘true and unreal’ at the same time – ‘true’ because the folk/ non-folk binary truly exists within the matrix of hierarchal society as a projection of the super-ordinate’s gaze and ‘unreal’ because its existence cannot be naturalized unless defined from the outside. This idea of the ‘folk’ had immediate resonance in colonial India. The xenophobic colonizers had differentiated themselves from the colonized through the rhetoric of deictic categories: ‘we’ and ‘they’ wherein ‘they’ simply meant inferior, primitive, savage etc. (Said 1978; 1984; 1993) Now, Chatterjee (1997) has argued how the emerging nationalist discourse of the late nineteenth century led to the formation of an ‘inner domain’ insulated from the overwhelmingly racist ‘outer domain’ still coping hard with the changing face of colonial ‘modernity’. For the Indian elites who always predominated the understanding of nationalist politics, and undisputedly accepted the colonizers’ ushering in of all ‘progressive’ doctrines, the repertoire of the ‘folk’ functioned since the late

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nineteenth century as the site upon which their severe ‘castration anxiety’ could be negotiated4. In a desperate attempt to buttress their disempowerment they virtually turned internal colonizers and shored up as the ‘you’, the intermediary collaborators in between ‘we’ and ‘they’. The Indian elites, however, were caught in a serious dichotomy: whether to discount and erase the non-modern ‘folk’ elements from their cultural history in the Rationalist fashion towards embracing western ‘modernism’ (the Anglicist position), or to showcase the same as tokens of cultural differences in the Romantic way towards a ‘re-generation’19 of their ethnic past (the Orientalist position). In either case, it calls for the archiving of documented history. Whether or not one finds room for ‘folk’ within that ‘grand narrative’ would be an issue of serious contestation. Some historians and literary critics alike have tended to view eighteenth century Indian literature as pedantic, degenerate and decadent: The literature which was produced in these decadent times suffered from all ills society was heir to. Its poetry was dilettantish, weighed with euphemism and conceit. Its spirit was shackled by artificial limitations of rhyme, and its mood alternated between the sensuous and the spiritual, neither deeply experienced. Clouds of pessimism and despair hung over it. It sought rest in flight from reality. (Tarachand, cited in Panikkar 1995, 41)5

This view is one-sided and undermines the developing trends in Indian literature during the pre-colonial era. In fact, eighteenth century literature registered a shift, both in form and content, towards ‘popular’ literature from the eloquently verbose Sanskritic tradition of the earlier times. Whether or not one looks at this as decadence reflects more on the position of the onlooker than the literature itself. Hermann Goetz (1938, 6-7) argues that political instability in eighteenth century India, for that matter, never signalled an overall decline in culture: For those symptoms of decadence which have been made a reproach to eighteenth-century India, are clearly discernible in

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all those times which we consider as glorious periods in the history of other peoples…Can we forget the Golden age of Urdu, Bengali and Marathi literature? Can we doubt the high accomplishment of the music and dancing of those times? Or the refinement of social life and the important position of women in that society? Must we not come to the conclusion that the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries have been a period not only of political and economic decline, but also of highest refinement of Indian culture?

With the process of vernacularization steadily gained ground during this period, themes and diction pertaining to upper-class princely courts gave way to that concerning the ordinary individual6. Purists have understandably viewed this shift as decadence on the one hand while the Orientalists, on the other, held a contrary viewpoint. These divergent stances were reflected prominently when it came to the task of historicizing Bangla literature which Dineshchandra and Sukumar Sen, respectively spearheading two canonical but rival schools, saw as an exercise to (re)invent a presentable past for the Bengali people. Literature or literary history is very much an aspect of the larger cultural history of the people at a particular time and place. These narratives, woven carefully and more often than not manipulatively, are geared towards formulating a desired sense of identity among societies, people, race, culture etc. Events of the past do not intrinsically make sense in/by themselves unless they are narrativized in a meaningful way. In other words, they only acquire meaning in the light of what comes prior to or after them and when the historian, who is virtually a story-teller, arranges and links these matrix of events7. Debunking the truth claims generally associated with historical narratives, poststructuralist theories have warned us to take those claims always with a grain of salt, not because they are necessarily false but because they come with “self-referencial, problematical expression of interests – an ideological-interpretative discourse.” (Jenkins 1997, 6) Historical narratives, therefore, far from being non-fictional, objective and scientific, are rather “metahistorical construction, like all constructions, ultimately [an] arbitrary way of carving up what comes to constitute

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its field” (ibid., 8). In the same light, all histories of literatures are narratives of a similar kind: imaginative in form of writing and involving seemingly seamless mediation and implicit manipulation by and for certain ‘imagined communities’, they are rather attempts at retrieving and representing a canon that would meet the requirements of changing historical periods. Therefore, what needs asking at this point is: Why did the historians of Bangla literature narrativize ‘folk literature’ in the way they did? In fact, Bhattacarya (1975, 1) observes that attempts to write the history of Bangla literature predate actually, and indeed quite astonishingly, all attempts to write a general history of the Bengalis. Kasiprasad Ghosh’s essay ‘Bengali Works And Writers’ – not an exhaustive survey by any means, but a cursory overview of the history of Bangla literature so far and the first work of its kind – was published in the Literary Gazette in 1830. Two incredibly interesting points to note in the context of this work are: one, that the first history of Bangla literature was actually written not in Bangla, but in English; and second, that Ghosh’s concern for canonzing ‘Bangla literature’ does not adequately deal with the question of who (he understands) a Bengali is. Different people have different perceptions of Bengali(ness) depending on whether one considers it a linguistic, or cultural-ethnic, or a geo-political entity or a combination of all. But, in a pedagogic environment where Bangla was increasingly being rendered irrelevant, the task for Ghosh, understandably, was to showcase before the colonizers (therefore in English) his language even before starting to chisel out (racially) the ‘Bengali’ based on any exclusionary principle. ‘What we consider immoral today’, writes Rangalal Bandopadhyay defending Bharatchandra Roy (and his poetry) against charges of obscenity, ‘could have been quite moral at another time’ (cited in Bhattacharya 1975, 8-9). This short piece titled ‘Bangala Kabita Bisayaka Prabandha’ (An Essay On Bangla Poetry) was actually written for a speech delivered at a meeting at the Bethune Society in May, 1852. This is acknowledged as the first secondary piece in Bangla on Bangla literature. While reminding readers that literary

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practitioners necessarily work within and cater to contemporary ‘horizon(s) of expectation’ and therefore works of literature are indicative of the taste of the society in general rather than of the individual litterateur, Rangalal categorically remarked, quite daringly in public, that Shakespeare was no less ‘obscene’ than Bharatchandra. What Rangalal did, to sum it up, was to draw attention to the relative as well as transient nature of the value systems we deploy to evaluate literature(s). Rangalal’s insight, though more than a century and half old, now seemingly similar to that of a cultural relativist, lays the grid for a better understanding of what is at stake in this paper. It points to the fact that right from the start historians of Bangla literature fixed a prohibitive gaze towards what ought to be included within (or excluded from) the ‘order of things’ of a canon they envisaged as ‘Bangla literature’. Those invested in canonizing Bangla literary history, to be noted a posteriori to the inception of the ‘folk’, would thenceforth be divided into two distinct schools: one extending a receptive gaze towards the non-urban ‘folk’ components of Bangla literature; and the other thoroughly inhibitive about the same. Tagore, in the first essay of his monograph Loksahitya (1961 [1907], 665-89), cites a very popular Bangla ‘folk-rhyme’, and discusses its content. Featured therein is the acute pain of a family parting with a daughter, a young girl who, newly married according to the Bengali customs, is about to leave for her in-laws place. There is a parallelism in the narrative structure of the rhyme: the first lines of the couplets depict how desperately a particular character is weeping/crying while the seconds explicates his/her relationship with the bride. When he comes to describing the girl’s sister, it appears as if he stumbles for a moment. He candidly apologizes beforehand ‘lest the readers accuse him’ for he is about to say something ‘obscene’. The sister of the bride, now weeping by the bed, had earlier, in a petty household fight with the girl, said something so ‘indecent’ that Tagore, in having to quote her, is ‘ashamed to utter it in the refined society.’ “The expression,” he says, “is obscene, but I cannot completely delete it because it is touchy. I shall rather translate the slang into decent language without

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disturbing the rhyme scheme.” (ibid., 682-83) Tagore thus re-casts the rhyme catering to the ‘refined’ taste of the class he represented. However, the ‘slang’ he seems so embarrassed to utter is bhatarkhaki (>bhatar+khaki), literally meaning one who eats up (>khaki) her husband (>bhatar), conventionally meaning a notorious woman. Interestingly, the word has its etymological root in the Sanskrit word Bhrtri, meaning husband (c.f. Bhrtrihari). And, curiously enough it was still very much in use and had currency in ‘popular’/’mass’ . parlance. Girishchandra Ghosh (1844-1912), who is almost a seniorcontemporary of Tagore, and used to live barely a few miles from Tagore’s ancestral home, quite casually used this phrase in his play Karmeti Bai (1895). Tagore’s is as if the conscientious voice of the nineteenth century Bengali bhadralok (gentry), obsessed with Victorian purity, that rendered irrelevant those assorted chunks of their heterogeneous past that the latter chose to disown and that perhaps still inescapably overwhelms the contemporary voices that are emblematic of Bengali intellectuality8. The legacy of a gentleman’s intervention to sanctify the unrefined, un(der)-cultured elements in the course of Bangla literature had however set in prior to Tagore. Bankimchandra Chattopadhayay, while introducing an anthology of the poems of Ishwar Gupta (1812-1860) that he had edited, blatantly writes, ‘Ishwar Gupta is pious, but a backdated Bengalee, therefore his poems are obscene…Readers, however, won’t find any obscenity in these poems. We have censored it all and published those with a gloss. Some were so obscene that they had to be left out completely.’ (1939, 129,131) Chattopadhyay’s argument simply leaves us clueless. The phrase ‘therefore’ indicates a sense of implicit teleology: it assumes an essentializable causal relation between ‘backdatedness’ and ‘obscenity’ albeit given that neither of the two is static (c.f. Rangalal). Secondly, who is he sharing allegiance with under the guise of the seemingly neutral pronoun ‘we’? Of which ‘we’ does his voice act an agent? The colonial exposure during the nineteenth century vectored in within the ‘enlightened’ English-educated elitist Bengalis what

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Kosambi (1962) calls a ‘creative introspection’: a desire to first tally with the epistemological legacy set forth by the West and then determine on the basis of it what could be deemed fit for sharing allegiance with or not. This fostered a gate-keeping attitude, an inhibitory mindset based on an exclusionary principle determined entirely by the extent of colonial exposure or the lack thereof. The writing of the history of Bangla literature was a milestone in the same direction: it comprised parallel histories of erasure and retrieval, with some getting rid of elements they did not see quite fitting into the canon they were upto building and others counterposing the same elements to assert their marginalized identity. It pertains to both that ‘how one [read: the historian] construes oneself in the present expresses the continuity between how one construes oneself as one was in the past and how one construes oneself as one aspires to be in the future’ (Weinreich & Saunderson 2004, 120). The first compendium on the history of Bangla literature is Dineshchandra Sen’s (1866-1939) magnum opus: Bangabhasha O Sahitya which appeared in 1896. Both his History of Bengali Language and Literature and Banga Sahitya Paricaya were published in 1914. On the other hand, Sukumar Sen produced his Bangla Sahityer Itihasa during 1940 and 1956. In the limited scope of this paper I have considered Dineshchandra Sen and Sukumar Sen only. Both are crucially important figures when it comes to the history of Bangla literature, not because they are purportedly the most authentic, but because they spearheaded, respectively two different schools of historiography into which the rest of their counterparts can easily be clubbed. Dineshchandra and Sukumar are perhaps two flagposts – 1896 and 1956 being two bracketing moments in the history of Bangla literary historiography – prior to the former ‘exclusionary’ history was never felt to be written and after the latter no historian could ever avoid its trope. For that matter, there is no ‘folk literature’ whatsoever in ‘pre-modern’ Bangla literature prior to the colonial contact. It is basically the desire to re-orient Bangla literature based on the Eurocentric historiographic model – in which the Ancient Ages stand for glory, the Medieval for darkness

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and the Modern for Enlightenment9 – that gave rise to a tendency in the historians of Bangla literature to scrutinize ‘folk literature’ as a distinctly separate generic category. Dineshchandra traveled far and wide in (undivided) rural Bengal determined to collect ancient, ‘pre-modern’ manuscripts - of different genres and various dialects - that were lying scattered and unappreciated. He explains, in a very humble and non-ambitious tone, why and how he decided to write a history of Bengali literature: Suddenly (while writing an article on the origin of Bengali language) I got hold of an ancient hand-written manuscript of Mrigalubdha by Ratideb and I came to know from some authentic sources that many such manuscripts were lying ignored and unpublished in the rural interiors of Tripura and Chattogram. [Thus] I traveled extensively and discovered many ancient and-written manuscripts of texts…This is exactly when I determined to write a detailed history of Bengali language.’ (1986, [16])

On the same note, he expresses his anxiety over the fact that these manuscripts unless properly archived might fade into oblivion, and the ‘modern’ Bengalis of future generation might as well feel ashamed (read: like Tagore) of these at some point. While he mentions that he is aware that one may question the ‘literary’ worth of these little-known manuscripts, he clarifies why they needed to be archived: It is true that the old Bengali literature in its primitive stages is permeated by a rustic element; but no apology, I think, is needed on our part for this. This is true of all other literary languages of the world in the early periods of their growth. If some of the earlier Bengali poems occasionally show a coarse humor, [they also express] the real poetry of the race, being an expression of hearts that beat with the true emotion of the country-folk. (Sen, D. 1914, [12]; translated by and cited in Sengupta, M. 1995, 62; italics mine)

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Dineshchandra literally ‘discovers’ manuscripts and has no inhibition in including them in his canon of Bangla literature. While on the one hand he is sure about the ‘archival value’ of what he discovers, his rhetoric – ‘rustic element’, ‘coarse humor’, ‘country-folk’ etc — clearly points to the ‘inferior’ literary quality of ‘pre-modern’ Bangla literature and is indicative of him having internalized the western value-system inherent in the discourse of ‘folk’. But how do we explain the apparent contradiction of him archiving something he already knows is quite ‘inferior’? Dineshchandra sees ‘Bengali literature in its primitive stages…[to be] in the early periods of…growth’ and has completely given in to the logic of historical progression – the trope of what Foucault (1970) calls the ‘increasing formalization of knowledge’ – and his project is understandably one of historically recording Bangla literature grow from primitivity to modernity, from rusticity to Enlightenment. Dineshchandra envisaged the Bengalis, already outpowered by the colonizer in all aspects of the ‘outer domain’, at least as shoring up in respect to the ‘inner domain’ banking on their cultural indigeneity. Dineshchandra wanted to invent and equip the Bengalis with a past, no matter how ‘rustic’ it be, within which they could – re-inscribe their racial identity later. Nearly fifty years later when Sukumar Sen wrote his history, the canon of Bangla literature had already been established. So his endeavor was more about (re)evaluating the canon than inventing it. ‘The purpose of the present work’, writes Sukumar Sen (1962, Preface) as a rationale for writing history: …is objectively and chronologically to describe the history of Bengali literature. Without minimizing the importance of earlier research in this area, it should be admitted that those were either incomplete or subjective. An imperfect understanding of the history of the land may be one of the reasons for this defect of our earlier historians. The truth is that it is totally imaginary to divide Bengali literature or Bengal into periods like Buddhist, Brahmanical, etc. It should also be mentioned at the very outset that I have not followed the order of English

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literary histories, because pre-modern Bengali literature is simply a repetitious narrative, it has nothing of the wide variety and enormous wealth of English literature (italics mine).

Sukumar Sen raises a number of interesting questions to ponder upon. First, he says that all histories before his were ‘either incomplete or subjective’. But, in reality all works of history are necessarily subjective. What, then, is his understanding of a complete and objective’ history? Second, if all earlier histories were flawed because of ‘imperfect understanding of the history of the land’, how is he going to overcome this flaw and achieve ‘perfection’? Third, after all, all periodizations of/in history are essentially ‘imaginary’ only to chronologize and impose meaning to the (grand) narrative. If periodization on religious ground is ‘imaginary’, doesn’t it follow from the same logic that Sen’s periodization of Bangla literature into the Ancient-Middle-Modern also falls into an equally ‘imaginary’ slot? Fourth, he says that ‘pre-modern Bengali literature’, although to be noted as indeed being heterogenous in itself, is so ‘repetitious’ and lacking in the ‘wealth of English literature’ that he has to keep from deploying ‘the order of English literary histories’ – the idea being he wanted to, but ‘pre-modern Bengali literature’ was too impoverished for that10. Isn’t he contradicting himself on what he said on periodization? Is he, then, indicating that all periodizations are bad unless based on ‘the order of English literary histories’? Fifth, if ‘objectivity’ – for lack of a better term – is what he is aiming for, why would he himself be adjudicative when he writes on the Kabigan and the Panchali form? “For more than half a century”, Sen writes: …the ‘Kabi’ poetry and the new ‘Panchali’ reigned supreme in the Calcutta region and in its penumbra and almost threatened to swamp everything else in literature. But the vulgar and stupid artificiality of ‘Kabi’ poetry with its elaborate but soulless music was doomed from its very start because of its over elaboration. The new ‘Panchali’ survived till it was superseded towards the close of the nineteenth century… (1960, 157; italics mine)

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The ‘terminus ad quem’ of Sen’s self-claimed ‘essentially complete survey’ (Sen, D. 1962, ix) is 1941, the year Tagore died. Yet there is no mention of the Battala-culture. The cultural patterns that prevailed, centering primarily around the red-light areas of North Kolkata under the patronage of the nouveaux riche in nineteenthcentury Bengal, had been very significant ones, particularly influencing the literary, printing and painting practices of contemporary times and even beyond. This is not to say that Sen was unaware of this phenomenon; he was to write a whole separate full-length book on the topic in 1984, but was for the moment reluctant to claim its importance when it came to writing history of Bangla literature11! Sukumar Sen was, in fact, vested with an interest in removing from Bengali’s cultural past all those ‘blemishes’ Dineshchandra found worth preserving. That these two maverick historians assumed contradictory opinions on the ‘literary’ worth of the ‘pre-modern’ Bangla literature, that these two schools bore diverging stances on the question of accommodating ‘folk’ within the category ‘Bangla literature’, is symbolic of the bipolar opinion that had prevailed among the nineteenth century bhadralok (gentry) Bengali community on the impact of colonialism and its policies. While on the one hand, Dineshchandra (1896, 34) sees pedagogic pursuits in English, a trend ‘modern’ Bengalees either chose to or were made to embrace after the Macaulean intervention in Indian education, as particularly ‘wasteful’, Sukumar Sen, on the other hand, is eloquently appreciative of “the refinement initiated by English education and the introduction of new values.” (1977, 1) That both Dineshchandra Sen and Sukumar Sen envisaged the ‘Bengali as an imagined community’, each from his respective ‘habitus’, to borrow Bourdieu’s evocative phrase, is reflected in their respective understandings of and endeavors to historicize Bangla literature. Although their rationale for historicizing differs considerably, the colonial exposure seemed to have imbricated in both similar ‘structures of feeling’ towards the ‘folk’. This explains why neither questioned the ‘order of things’ of the construct named ‘folk’, notwithstanding their difference in opinion in evaluating ‘folk’. Assuming it to be a naturalized category, both, in fact, concluded

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that the ‘folk’ element could essentially be generically distilled from the rest of its counterparts. While, for Dineshchandra, ‘folk’ would become synonymous with ‘writing back to the empire’, Sukumar Sen would still question its commensurability with ‘modern’ Bengali literature. However, what they seem to unanimously agree on is the immanent dichotomy between the domain of the ‘folk’ and that of (Bangla) literature. NOTES: 1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

I am indebted to Debaprasad Bandyopadhayay and Tejaswini Niranjana for their insightful suggestions on this topic. Preliminary drafts of this paper have been read at Centre for The Study of Culture and Society, Bangalore, India in March 2010 and at the University of Montreal, Canada in March 2011. I am thankful to the audience who gave feedback. I have put forth similar arguments in a Bangla paper already published (See: Ray, 2013). To note additionally, ‘Bangla’ and ‘Bengali’ at times appear overlapping in the paper: the Bengali people have been called Bengali all through, but as of the language, while I myself preferred to call it Bangla I have retained Bengali wherever it appeared in the secondary sources. All translations cited here from Bangla sources are mine unless otherwise indicated. Derrida (2002), however, presents a critique of Rousseau for having imbibed from Levi Strauss (1969) the legacy of a dialectical either/or rapport between nature and culture instead of a more symbiotic one. Ong (1982), for example, shows how the ‘secondary orality’ of the print culture hegemonizes the ‘primary orality’ of the community authorship prevalent in pre-printing cultures. This argument of mine draws on provocative clues from feminist scholarship that argues that the home and women had also been similar sites. For details, see Sarkar, T. (2001) and Sangari, K. & Vaid, S. (ed.) (1989). Panikkar (1995) cites Tarachand’s History of Freedom Movement in India, I, p. 192; no other details on bibliography cited.

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6.

7. 8.

9.

In Bangla literature, Bharatchandra Ray, author of the trilogy Annapurnamangala set new paradigms in the horizon of expectation in terms of literary taste and came to be considered as the most outstanding poet before Tagore. (Sen, Sukumar 1962, 166-62) Vidyasundara, part of the same trilogy, continued to be influential among literary circles in Calcutta almost till the end of the nineteenth century. (ibid., 153) An important feature of the Bangla poetry during this period was the popular style of composition and an effort to portray gods in the image of common men. In Rameswar Bhattacharya’s Siva-Sankirtana (1710), Siva is a petty and poor farmer and the female protagonist, Gauri, is the farmer’s wife who is content with two square meals and a few yards of cloth. (ibid., 151) the sad plight of forced labor and the protest of the riots against the appointment of the dewan were some of the themes in ballads written in folk style during this theme. (ibid., 158-59) For a more detailed discussion on this, see Huhn (2009). Partha Chatterjee (1997, 8) writes: “…What thrives as mainstream public theatre in West Bengal or Bangladesh today is modern urban theatre, national and clearly distinguishable from “folk theatre” ’...[This] is symptomatic of the fact that these voices are almost always without an exception elitist in nature. Chatterjee is by no means entirely incorrect, but far more interesting to me is his legacy of inheritance and his premise of historicizing based upon which he is able to clearly distinguish between what he calls ‘folk theatre’ and ‘modern urban theatre’. In reality, however, as demonstrated by Bandyopadhyay, D. (2005) and Mukhopadhyay (2001), there is always a symbiotic, two way relation between the two categories, if at all they exist in the first place. Although this model, wherein the Middle stands for darkness and light as a metaphor of the Modern, is actually incommensurable with Indian modernity, it is grossly imitated in Indian historiography too, not just in literary history. Being acutely critical about the Indian Sanskritic-Vedic past, Bandyopadhyay (1999) argues that the revivalist propaganda/ claim was not only baseless but also an elitist-nationalist Hindu ploy to de-historicize and dismiss the glory of the

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10.

11.

(Medieval) Muslim era and marginalize the Muslims in the arena of nationalist politics, while at the same time projecting the Hindus as more competent future administrators in the eyes of the British. However, he was to do precisely – the same: superimpose ‘the order of English literary histories’ and tailor-fit Bangla literature into the Ancient-Middle-Modern pigeon-holes. In fact, Sen was not as dismissive of the rural ‘ballads’ tradition as he was of the Battala and Kabigan culture, which were essentially urban forms. That Sen deemed the ‘rustic’ expressions incompatible with urbanity is symbolic of how he re-appropriates the urban-rural binary. I am indebted to the (anonymous) referee for bringing this up.

REFERENCE LIST: I N

B A N G L A

Bandyopadhyay, Sibaji. 1999. ‘Punar’ Bisaye Punarbibechana: Hindutver Saltamami (Rethinking the ‘Re’ Question in Hinduism), Kolkata: Abavash. Bhattacharya, Amitrasudan. 1975. Unabingsa Satake Bangla Sahityer Itihasacarca (Nineteenth-Century Historiography of Bangla Literature), Calcutta: Sarasvat Library. Chattopadhayay, Bankimchandra. 1939. Bibidha Prabandha (Collection Of Essays), Kolkata: Bangia Sahitya Parisad. Mukhopadhyay, B.. 2001. Lok-Shilpa Banam Ucchamargia Shilpa (Folk Art Versus Classical Art), Kolkata: Adibasi O Loksanskriti Kendra. Ray, A.. 2013. ‘Bangla Sahityer Oitihasikayan O Loksahityer Saltamami’ (Historicization Of Bangla literature With Reference To Geneaology Of Folklore), in Chattopadhyay, D., (ed.), Parikatha, No 20 (May 2013), pp 253-63. Sen, Dineshchandra. 1896 [1921]. Bangabhasa O Sahitya (Bangla Language And Literature), Kolkata: Paschimbanga Rajya Puastak Parshad. _______. 1914. Bangla Sahitya Paricaya (Bangla Literature Compendium), Calcutta: U. of Calcutta Press.

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Tagore, Rabindranath. 1961. Lok sahitya (Folk Literature) in Tagore’s Complete Works, vol 13, Kolkata: Govt. of West Bengal. I N

E N G L I S H

Bandyopadhyay, D. 1995. Folklore and Folklanguage: Myth or Reality?, Kalyani: University of Kalyani. _______. 2005. ‘Blurring the Divide: Folk Art and Classical Art’, in Annual Research Journal of Folklore (Lokodarpan), Vol. 2, No. 1, pp. 181-193. Banerjee, Sumanta. 1998. Under The Raj: Prostitution In Colonial Bengal, NY: Monthly Review Press. Bascom, W.R. (ed.). 1977. Frontiers of Folklore, Colorado: Westview. Burne, C.S.. 1914. The Handbook of Folklore, London: Sidgwick & Jackson. Caudwell, Christopher. 1937 [1986]. Illusion and Reality, Delhi: Peoples Publishing House. Chatterjee, Partha. 1997. The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories, Delhi: Oxford University Press. Derrida, Jacques. 2002 [1976]. Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakrovorty Spivak, Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass. Foster, G.. 1953. ‘What if Folk Culture?’ in American Anthropology, vol 55, Texas. Foucault, M. 1970. The Order Of Things: An Archaeology Of The Human Sciences, London: Tavistock. Goetz, Hermann. 1938. The Crisis of Indian Civilization in the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries, London: Basic Books. Huhn, Peter (et al.). 2009. Handbook of Narratology, Berlin: Gruyter. Jenkins, Keith. 1997. ‘Introduction’ to The Postmodern History Reader, Keith (ed.), London & NY: Routledge. Kosambi, D.D. 1962. Myth and Reality: Studies in the Formation of Indian Culture, Bombay: Popular Prakashan. Lang, Andrew. 1884. Custom and Myth, London: Longmass. Lefebvre, Henri. 1996. Writings on Cities, Oxford: Blackwell. Ong, Walter, J. 1982. Orality and Literature, London & NY: Routledge. Panikkar, K.N. 2001. Culture, Ideology, Hegemony: Intellectuals and Social Consciousness in Colonial India, Delhi: Tulika.

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Sangari, K.& Vaid, S. (ed.). 1989. Recasting Women: Essays in Colonial History, Delhi: Kali For Women. Said, Edward. 1978. Orientalism, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. _______. 1984. The World, The Text and The Critic, London: Vintage. _______. 1993. Culture and Imperialism, London: Vintage. Sarkar, Tanika. 2001. Hindu Wife and Hindu Nation, Delhi: Permanent Black. Schutze, Martin. 1921. ‘The Fundamental ideas in Herder’s Thought’ in Modern Philosophy, vol 19, Philadelphia. Sen, Sukumar. 1940-77. History of Bengali Literature, Delhi: Sahitya Academi. Senguta, M. 1995. ‘Constructing the Canon: Problems in Bengali Literary Historiography’, in Social Scientist. V 23, no. 269-71 (Oct-Dec 1995) pp 56-69. Also available online: Web. 10 September 2013. . Simpson, G.R. 1921. Herder’s Conception of ‘Das Volk’, Chicago: The University of Chicago Libraries. Strauss, Levi. 1969. The Elementary Structures Of Kinship, Rodney Needham et al., Boston: Beacon Press. Weinreich & Saunderson (ed.). 2004. Analysing Identity: Cross-Cultural, Societal and Clinal Contexts, NY: Routledge.

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Shatarupa Sinha EVALUATING INDIAN ENGLISH LITERATURE: EXPLORING GROUNDS IN COMPARATIVE LITERATURE

The scope of comparative literary studies in India is expanding at an exponential rate, and now as comparatists we have arrived at an exciting point where we can start exploring new grounds, and map our own distinct trajectories keeping in focus literatures constructed in our own bhashas. In this context, the reading of Indian English Literature, its methodological complexity and pedagogical implications can be an interesting take-off point for comparative literary studies in India. Buddhadeva Bose’s observation on ‘Indo-Anglian poetry’ as “a blind alley, lined with curio shops, leading nowhere” (qtd. in Mehrotra 15) is an oft-quoted and frequently commented upon phrase. Many scholars have expressed strong views on Bose’s remark, but unfortunately the most genuine concern behind this remark has been entirely missed. Bose’s primary concern as a comparatist was that of Indian English Literature, which was then referred as ‘IndoAnglian’ literature, exercising its monopoly over Indian bhasha literatures. The fear that Indian English Literature would dethrone other Indian literatures from literary, critical and academic discourses was not an altogether imagined fear. Indian English Literature has entered into the Indian literary-cultural space. Most of the English departments in Indian universities, by way of accommodating comparative literary studies, have included this body of writing as part of their curriculum, fuelling the concerns of Indian comparatists who have been arguing for a more inclusive approach by attributing due recognition to Indian bhasha literatures. Indian English Literature Jadavpur Journal of Comparative Literature, Volume XLVX, 2013-2014 18 1

has most certainly established itself as an independent course of study, but it is certainly not a literature that exists ‘in lieu of’ Indian bhasha literatures. It is true that the spurt in its creative output has in recent times surpassed the literary production in several Indian languages. While on the one hand it has generated admiration around Indian English Literature with a plethora of prizes awarded to litterateurs, on the other, this might turn out to be a matter of serious concern for all bhasha literature enthusiasts. Paradoxically though, this phenomenon can be turned favourably towards comparative literary studies in India. The motive of Comparative Literature in the Indian context is not a mere comparison between texts and authors; neither does it lie in applying theoretical tools to study literature, nor in employing a cultural studies approach. Comparative Literature in India stands for something beyond that. It is very different from the western approach towards this discipline which evaluates comparative methodology in the light of a different worldview from the present Indian context, and is certainly culture-specific. Indian English Literature presents an ideal situation for the comparatist to explore possible grounds in comparative methodological tools to decipher the text in its cultural and historical milieu. In this context, it is worth referring to “Can the Non-Western Comparatist Speak?” where Ipshita Chanda makes an emphatic point: The text necessitates theory rather than the other way round. And so, the task of the comparatist is to locate both text and reader in the interstices of literary and extra-literary systems that form the context of its production. The strength of the unglamorous conglomerate of comparative methodological tools, namely thematology, historiography, genology and the relations of contact, is that they enable us to discern the repertoires of questions posed and answered by texts produced and received in particular historical conjunctures (Chanda 2003, 63).

The reception of Indian English literary texts has been fraught with many challenges. The problems of reading this body of literature

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cannot be addressed by way of imposing a theory to understand it, or by contesting its existence as literature. The pedagogical implications of Indian English literary texts can be resolved by trying to locate the texts and their readers ‘in the interstices of literary and extra-literary systems that form the context of its production’, and also analysing it in relation to the contact between English and other Indian languages. English in/and India The history of English in India is rather complex. It is more a story of complicity on the part of both the coloniser and the colonised. In order to meet the desires for further colonial expansion, both in terms of maintaining a strong geo-political control as also an intellectual control, English education was formally introduced in India. Since the policy of providing any kind of formal education was not on the agenda of the East India Company, it is pertinent to note that English had to struggle and negotiate a great deal to be able to formally enter into the space of the Indian education system and become a part of the Indian linguistic repertoire. One is aware of the long and continuous ideological debates between the Orientalists and the Anglicists on the nature, content and the medium of education in India, which was finally resolved by adopting the western system of education, and with the introduction of English in India.1 Alongside these debates were a host of other factors, including several attempts by Indian intellectuals who strongly supported the cause of English education that had significant roles to play in this curious history. Of the independent initiatives taken, the most notable was the efforts made by Raja Rammohun Roy, who conceived the idea of an educational institution that would later come to be known as Hindoo College of Bengal. This was the occasion when, for the first time, interests were being expressed for adopting English as the medium of instruction. In his letter dated May 18, 1816, Sir Edward Hyde East writes:

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An interesting and curious scene has lately been exhibited here, … that many of the leading Hindoos were desirous of forming an establishment for the education of their children in a liberal manner as practiced by Europeans of condition; … The meeting was accordingly held at my house on the 14th of May, 1816, at which 50 and upwards of the most respectable Hindoo inhabitants of rank or wealth attended, including also the principal Pundits; … Most of them, however, appeared to take great interest in the proceedings, and all expressed themselves in favour of making the acquisition of the English language a principal object of education, together with its moral and scientific productions (Basu, 2011: 40-42).

In 1793 while renewing the East India Company’s Charter, suggestions were made to the Company for allocating a portion of its revenues in India for the education of the Indians. The proposal was met with strong opposition, and finally was reconsidered during the next renewal of the Company’s Charter in 1813, where a sum of one lakh of rupees was recommended for improving the state of education and preservation of educational institutions in India. This is evident in a letter dated June 3, 1814, from the Court of Directors to the Governor-General-in-Council of Bengal.1 In 1823, a Committee of Public Instruction was formed to look into matters related to the non-utilisation of this fund, and Horace Hayman Wilson a renowned Sanskrit scholar, was appointed its Secretary. Wilson fervently advocated the cause of oriental learning and strongly opposed the idea of teaching English to the Indians. Rammohun Roy in a letter dated December 11, 1823, to the then Governor-General of India, Lord Amherst, expressed the necessity to impart education based on the European model,2 while the Committee of Public Instruction was in favour of Oriental learning. With Lord William Bentinck’s appointment as Governor-General of India in 1828, there was an increased pressure for Anglicisation of Indian education. Bentinck refused to fund the projects sponsored

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by Fort William College for writing and publishing books in vernacular languages. As the first member of the Indian Law Commission, Thomas Babington Macaulay came to India, and helped in fulfilling Bentinck’s agenda by resolving the Orientalist-Anglicist controversy that ended in 1835 with Anglicisation of education in India. On March 7, 1835, the East India Company’s official language was changed from Persian to English. This was in direct response to Thomas Babington Macaulay’s “Minute on Indian Education” on February 2, 1835, where Macaulay acted as Bentinck’s mouthpiece. Bentinck’s initiative was not in favour of educating the people of India; it was rather a move to anglicise them.3 Marked by several debates and controversies over years, English was finally thrust upon the Indians through a regulated framework of academic curricula, which continues till date. During the twenty years, 1835-1855, the number of those educated in English increased rapidly. In 1857 three Indian universities were established in Calcutta, Madras and Bombay, and subsequently English did not remain simply a language of instruction, but British English literature became a part of the curriculum. English established itself both as languages of education and of literature. The manner in which English was introduced in India reveals a fascinating tale of an affected Indian desire, characterised by a sense of awe and veneration for the English language. The introduction of English in India cannot be simply viewed as a cultural imposition from the top, but as a strategic negotiation of miscalculated interests. The belief that English education would make the Indians intellectually at par with the Europeans was a desire that drove the colonised, while a dependence on English education will make the Indians remain forever subservient to the Europeans drove the coloniser’s desire. In actual terms, none of this materialised, but English gradually became a part of the Indian linguistic space. Therefore, there is nothing unusual in its growth as a medium of creative expression in India. Developing as an independent category of writing and experimenting with different varieties of Indian English, Indian

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English Literature in its present avatar holds a peculiar place within the ambit of Indian literature. While at times, it is both Indian and English literature, at others, it falls neither into the category of Indian nor of English literature. Its peculiarity lies in the fact that it belongs to a completely unique category in itself. Indian literary imagination has eventually developed and formulated Indian English Literature as a distinct body of literary culture. English is certainly more of a strange phenomenon in India than a mere language. It is a curious case of being both ‘Indian’ and ‘English’ at the same time. Interestingly enough, this ‘Indian’ too is not defined in any concrete manner. It surpasses the geopolitical space of nation to an imagined cultural space which tries to negotiate with an ‘Indian way’ of perceiving society. It is this unique quality of being Indian that makes ‘Indianness’ contentious. Several attempts have been made by scholars to define and describe what Indianness is, but it remains a very ambiguous term. The principal concern regarding the nature and scope of Indian English Literature has been largely centred on this abstract notion of Indianness that seems to be the chief determining factor in assessing how much ‘Indian’ is Indian English Literature. Indianness is an abstract concept enmeshed in the theoretical categories of an imagined Indian identity. It comprises of ideological configurations of a particular social milieu that are indicative of the cultural projects of a particular nation. Indianness seems to assimilate all that is characteristic of Indian culture, which again is a highly ambiguous term. For a multilingual and multicultural nation like India, such a term adds much perplexity rather than providing a synthetic solution. However, most of the writings in Indian English unconsciously aim towards achieving a homogenous identity through the idea of an all-encompassing Indianness, an identity that is disintegrated, disruptive and distraught. Defining Indianness through points of convergence and divergence is equally distraught for other bhasha literatures. A large number of Indian English writings fall into the ambivalent trap of a pseudo-Indian identity that neither exists, nor can be made to exist, but forever remains an ideal, yet elusive dream

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for these writers. Depicting an Indian reality is an uphill task, for there is, once again, no single reality, but several layers of realities. The writer is caught between representing the idea of a nation and the idea of an Indian reality by means of a much acclaimed panIndian language, which makes the writing even more complex. What emerges eventually through most of these writings is an image of contemporary India that needs to be projected to the west, although this may not be driven by vested political interests as such, but certainly driven by intellectual interests. The imposition of English on the Indians lends it a very interesting, and at the same time, a problematic character. Dasgupta (2006, 11) makes a critique of the “pan-Indian claim” that Indian English Literature seems to exercise over other Indian bhashas literatures. Unlike other Indian languages, the use of English in India is not defined by any geographical location. English in India bestows a feeling of what may be described as an affective anxiety on its users. The knowledge of English defines and ascribes a specific identity to its user, the possession of which indicates a lack of identity. English regulates the dynamics of status, class and social mobility, and shapes a person’s socio-cultural identity in India today. Indian English seems to have entered the linguistic and cultural spaces of a majority of the urban Indians. Indians’ claim to English is through the process of nativization, which is “the result of the new ‘un-English’ linguistic and cultural setting in which English is used as a tool of communication” (Kachru 1983, 3). English has finally ceased to be a foreign language in India. The ease with which English has entered the literary, linguistic and cultural space of the Indians is a remarkable phenomenon. However complicated and sometimes unsavoury the history behind the introduction of English in India might be, there is no denying the fact that Indian English has indeed become a favoured mode of expression in recent times. Indian English may hence be seen as an interesting phenomenon, whose growth and development offers an analytical understanding of this body of literary writing. A diachronic study of Indian English

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would offer a critical insight into the complex literature-language interface. Since the development of Indian English Literature has a close affinity with the evolution of English as a language of literary expression in India, Indian English may be studied as a category of literary writings, as a category of language in which it is expressed, and as a category of cultural space in which it is situated, thereby employing comparative methodological tools, as mentioned by Chanda. Indian English as a Category of Literary Writings The history of Indian writing in English has been chronicled by various scholars and critics, but “not until the third or fourth decade of this century was there a serious and systematic attempt to place such writing in its proper historical and cultural context and to evaluate it as literature” (Mukherjee 2001, 21). With majority of the systematic projects undertaken in historiography concentrating in the post-1940s, it was perhaps around this time onwards that Indian English Literature began to be accepted with some amount of seriousness. While at the initial stages Indian English Literature developed under the British Romantic influence, it struggled to create a distinct identity of its own in post-independent India. A shift from the idea that Indians could also write in English to the fact that Indians were actually projecting contemporary Indian realities in English, had already taken place. As an increased number of writers began writing in English, Indian English Literature developed its own trajectory in terms of different genres, themes and literary history. As more and more printed material began to be made available in English, the boundary of Indian writing in English began expanding. Interestingly, this process helped to carve a distinct boundary for Indian English Literature within the large corpus of all the writing that was being produced in the English language. Any literary history of this literature for that matter would justify this claim of how English writing in India has developed. Beginning with non-fictional accounts, letters and poetry, the writing

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shifted towards novels and a host of political writings. In the postindependent era, especially since the 1960s, there was a huge upsurge in the production of printed material in English. English was gradually moving from its lingua franca status to being recognised as a language for more intimate as well as widespread usage in India. This was a major shift in establishing English as an independent language whose literary production was sooner to be accepted in literary circles. The Order made by the President of India on April 27, 1960, created provisions for English to be used as the principal official language until 1965. The Order further stated that “provision should be made in terms of clause (3) of article 343 for the continued use of English even after 1965 for purposes to be specified by Parliament by law for as long as may be necessary” (Government of India, 2011). The official status assigned to the English language automatically ascribed a definite and authentic identity to this language. Even the Sahitya Akademi, established in 1954, which honours “the most outstanding books of literary merit published in any of the major Indian languages recognised by the Akademy [sic]” (Sahitya Akademi, n.d.), conferred the first Sahitya Akademi award for Indian English writing to R.K. Narayan’s Guide as early as 1960, while the first Sahitya Akademi awards in other Indian languages were given in 1955. Indian English Literature has rightly been appropriated into the body of modern Indian literature and the discourse of modernism in Indian literature. The scope of Indian English Literature was thus defined and given an official status to establish its identity. Once this was achieved, writing in Indian English gradually became fashionable, and then almost a norm. There has been a current trend where numerous writers have started experimenting with Indian English writing, but the bulk of contemporary fiction that is produced in Indian English in recent times is often devoid of much literary merit. That is perhaps one of the major reasons why Indian English Literature is often considered with the least amount of seriousness, with a few exceptions. The growth of Indian English Literature in terms of creative output has far surpassed suitable critical scholarship

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in this area. The critical reception of Indian English Literature has emerged only in recent times, though in a very insubstantial manner, thereby leading to serious crisis in literary criticism and critical literary theory. The nature of Indian English Literature has always been a debatable issue, whether in discussions pertaining to its critical tradition, or in the writing of its history. Whatever critical work on Indian English Literature has been attempted, several among them have a propensity towards historiography. Though the boundaries between literary criticism and literary history are not always welldefined, that certainly cannot count for an apathetic attitude towards serious critical enterprise. Interestingly, the unique position of Indian English has “engendered such an overwhelming question mark against the relevance of writing in English in India that it has, perhaps, monopolised much of the critical attention” (Dasgupta 2006, 10). This has left comparatively less scope for critical deliberations. Many of the histories of Indian English writing suffer from similar crisis where most of the discussions begin with ‘how Indian’ or ‘how English’ is Indian writing in English, an indeed overwhelming concern regarding Indian English Literature. Writing in English, or for that matter in Indian English, is teleological. The writer knows the final outcome of the work – creation of an image of India that is homogenous, cosmopolitan and is an extensive display of Indianness. The process of writing in Indian English and the formation of Indian English Literature is a discursive act of negotiating with an idea of India, and the notion of Indianness. In response to the ‘pan-Indian claim’, Indian English Literature has come a long way in transgressing the regional insularities which most unfortunately dominate contemporary Indian bhasha literatures. What began as initial attempts of being able to write and express in English has been replaced by a conscious act of writing in English with a definite purpose. The early challenge of proving to the colonial masters that Indians could also write effectively in English is substituted by writing in Indian English for the international market. At this point the journey of Indian English Literature

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through its various nomenclatures offers an interesting insight. At every stage of its naming and un-naming, the focus of different aspects of this literary discourse came to be highlighted. Each name is indicative of the different parameters that were considered significant determining factors in defining this literature. Each name is indicative of the different categories of literary writing that were meant for inclusion (or exclusion). As the scope of this literature widened, it created a special framework for Indian English literary discourse. Indian English thus becomes an important tool in understanding the various changes that have taken place in this literature. An analysis of these changes suggests how the current tag of Indian English Literature emphasises and plays upon ‘Indian English’ as the central thematic concern. A thematological study within the nationalist discourse may be an important tool for reading nineteenth century Indian English novels. A cursory glance at the nineteenth century Indian English writings reveal a nascent space where Indian and British social codes began intersecting and hence tried to mutually determine one another. Indian writers who were writing in English found a new zeal in writing novels assuming a critical stance towards what they viewed as outdated social practices. This is evident since Bankimchandra Chatterjee’s 1864 novel, Rajmohan’s Wife, which was the first English novel to be written by an Indian. By the beginning of the twentieth century, majority of the Indian English writers began emphasizing on an Indian content, especially keeping in mind the nationalist fervour and movements. The desire of intellectual equality with the colonial masters was a quest towards assimilation and acculturation vis-à-vis English literature. Indian English today has become a mouthpiece of othering the self, locating a postcolonial identity and voicing dissent. Writing in Indian English creates a sense of elitism that is discernable in its authorship, readership and setting, restricted to few urban cosmopolitan cities of India, and a small section of Indian society. This makes the claim for pan-Indian literature to appear as restrictive and parochial. The kind of literature that is produced, its place of

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origin, the background of writers, readership, publicity, production and sales are governed by a particular class of urban market forces, thereby making the dynamics of social mobility and identity operational. Creation of social hierarchy, profitable market returns, allure of innumerable prizes and awards make the act of Indian English writing a desirable choice. In this process Indian English becomes a category of a conscious act of culturally-charged literary writings. Indian English as a Category of Language While the introduction of English education in India contributed largely to the origin and development of this language, English matured in its course, absorbing the traits of the indigenous linguistic registers of India, often amalgamating and intermixing with other languages of India, and leading to the creation of a hybrid variety of English that was typically Indianised in its tone and tenor. A new variety of English was in the making that wove creative artistry with flavours of local imagery, cultural symbols and indigenous myths. The production of this new medium of expression, Indian English, prompted a new kind of writing, Indian English writing, which may be viewed as a work of cultural reconstruction in a language that was initially foreign and alien. The growth of this language offers an interesting study of deviations, assimilation and acculturation in the socio-linguistic space of Indian English Literature. “By the term Indian English Literature (or Writing) is meant the fast-growing body of literature which is written by Indians using English as their second language” (Kachru 1983, 85). Though many Indians in contemporary urban India would claim English to be their mother tongue, the fact remains that English is not the primary language here. Through generations of English usage, this language may be the first preferred language of expression for a very limited and small section of Indians, but not at all preferred by the majority. David McCutchion (1973) made an interesting remark about the fascination for writing in English rather than in one’s own mother tongue. These observations indicate a constant creative tension

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between the medium, that is English, and the content, that is based on an idea of Indianness4. In this context, Indian English as a category of language of creative expression offers yet another tool to study the literature-language interface. It can, however, not be said that these writers have difficulty expressing themselves in English. These writers have a background in English education, and perhaps can express themselves more fluently in English than in any other language. Yet the presence of an ‘Indian’ language looms large in the mental space of most of these writers. This paradoxically leads to a contention whether writing in Indian English is a process of continuous translation. In fact, the act of creation in Indian English often becomes an act of transcreation. While this trend was more visible in the pre-independence Indian English writers, the postindependence period witnessed a smoother transition from the thought of creation to the act of creation. This transition may not be that smooth, since the characters that these writers create are people who do not normally speak or think in English, thus effectively dealing with non-English speaking people in non-English speaking situations. The text becomes a site for constant cultural discourse between the non-English speaking characters in non-English speaking situations, and the medium of the text, which is English. This makes Indian English Literature vulnerable to the charge of being labelled as a translated text even before it is actually written. A study of Indian English texts reflect how these texts operate as sites for multilingual and multicultural negotiations. The creative exigencies of Indian English are overcome by the indisputable Indian character that the language possesses. Kamala Das in her poem “An Introduction” (Gokak 1995, 272-273) conveys this sentiment in a spirited defence of Indian English. She writes as a curt response, … Don’t write in English, they said, English is not your mother-tongue. Why not leave Me alone, critics, friends, visiting cousins, Every one of you? Why not let me speak in Any language I like? The language I speak Becomes mine, its distortions, its queernesses

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All mine, mine alone. It is half English, half Indian, funny perhaps, but it is honest, It is as human as I am human, don’t You see? ... (ll. 6-15).

Way back in the 1960s Kamala Das echoed the ‘queerness’ of Indian English, a language that is ‘half English’ and ‘half Indian’, which is equally relevant in present times. Despite all its distortions visà-vis the Standard English, it becomes a personalised active language of expression5. The personalised note of Indian English adds complexity to its usage by Indian English writers. Accepting Indian English with all its syntactical nuances has given way to a crosscultural shift where the writer’s creative medium is exploited to its fullest potential. Indian English is in constant dialogue with other Indian languages; hence it is always in a state of growth. The organic evolution of Indian English lends it flexibility to adapt in various situations, and in this case, primarily Indian situations. It is worthwhile to make a note of the heterogeneity of Indian English with its several variants. The Indian English lexicon consists of a large number of Indian words. There was a time when writers of this literature would provide a glossary at the end of the text to explain the meaning and usage of ‘non-English’ words in the text. Over the years, the reader of Indian English Literature is expected to ‘know’ the ‘Indian’ words in the text as part of the natural reading process, without any intermittence or digression while the explanation of the meaning of a word or phrase is provided. Such words are essentially a part of the narrative, and not isolated terms. Indian English is now an important component of the Indian literary and intellectual milieu, integrating linguistic elements to enhance cultural hybridity. In its initial stages, Indian English writing incorporated essential features of “Indianisms or what you like, which are purely stylistic devices, used… and those that are common features of the language of the most Indian writers in English, and work it as a distinct variety, distinct from other varieties of English in its idiom, imagery and collocational deviations” (Mohan, 1978: 192). Subsequently this

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language has acquired a new identity as an accepted, independent creative language. It has become a part of the heterogeneous cultural milieu which speaks more of a cultural hybridity, rather than of staking one’s own language and culture at the cost of adopting the coloniser’s language and culture. The poem “Goodbye Party for Miss Pushpa T.S.” by Nissim Ezekiel (1989) offers a rather intriguing instance of the very ‘Indianisms’ used in English through the process of nativization of English. Friends, our dear sister is departing for foreign in two three days, and we are meeting today to wish her bon voyage. … Miss Pushpa is smiling and smiling even for no reason but simply because she is feeling. … Whenever I asked her to do anything, she was saying, ‘Just now only I will do it.’ That is showing good spirit. I am always appreciating the good spirit. … Now I ask other speakers to speak and afterwards Miss Pushpa will do summing up.

Initially the poem may arouse laughter, but it promptly demonstrates how English is articulated in India. A significant question arises here regarding its acceptability. But acceptability by whose standards? Who decides what acceptable ‘English’ is in the Indian context? For the average Indian reader, comprehending these lines is not very difficult because this is how English is actually spoken in many parts of the country, and this is as much a part of Indian English

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as any other piece of Indian English literary writing. Since English in India is primarily not the mother tongue of the speaker, the L2 learner of English finds the order and arrangement of words very similar to many Indian languages. For the average Indian who is usually the L2 learner of English, the individual meaning of the words are known, and there is familiarity with wordorder, thereby making it easier and simpler to grasp the intended meaning of these lines. If the situation and context are familiar, the chances of misinterpreting the meanings of unknown words will decrease, and the ability to guess the correct meanings of words will increase. Hence, a process of constant translation takes place in the L2 learner’s mind. The growth of this language reveals an interesting diachronic movement of socio-cultural assimilation and acculturation. The exoticism around Indian English has vanished. Indian English writers are engaged in the process of inventing new styles of communication, drawing often from their personal socio-linguistic milieu, their multilingual literary upbringing, and in due course creating lexical variations. A study of the transformations in Indian English enables one to understand the basis of continuous linguistic and cultural negotiations that are ultimately responsible for the steady evolution of this hybrid language. If one accepts Indian English as an independent language, the best possible way to understand this language is through the literature written in Indian English, which now arguably forms an integral part of Indian literature. It is important to note how Indian English texts use the language keeping in mind different social registers. However, the educational institutions and publishing houses in India still consider and follow Standard English as their model, and many Indian English words remain unacceptable in the academic discourse. What is Standard English in the Indian context, though, remains debatable. Often there is a tendency to follow the British English as the standard form in India. What becomes problematic is that English in India is actually very different from other regions in the world where English

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is the mother tongue of the users of the language. Even if there are instances of increased usage of English over generations, and there may be cases where users are not fluent in their mother tongue, yet the way in which English is used and pronounced in India by Indians is certainly very different from British English or American English or Australian English, if one may use these terms with a sense of broad generality. It is only within the discourse of Indian English Literature that Indian English is actually used in the written/ printed form. Indian English as a Category of Cultural Space The primary focus of Indian English is one of shaping an Indian identity, while continually trying to establish its own identity. This identity formation takes place in the cultural space of Indian society. Though the cultural space is one of plurality, the pan-Indian claim of Indian English Literature pushes for a pan-Indian identity, which is eternally elusive. There is no way of overlooking the melange of cultural idiosyncrasies in the journey of Indian English, and subsequently in that of its literature. India has historically experienced cultural encounters, but the magnitude of this particular encounter with British colonialism has been immense in terms of the expansion of linguistic, literary and cultural boundaries. The modern Indian sensibility, if such can be said, is the direct outcome of this historical cultural encounter. English education has indeed played a very significant role in the creation of India’s cultural space. Indian English has become one of the contemporary cultural markers of urban cosmopolitan India. Indian English texts lie at a unique location within the Indian cultural matrix. The exceptional combination of Indian and English is in fact the attempted coexistence of culture and language together within the larger periphery of literature. The linguistic category of English cuts through the cultural category of Indian, and strives to attain a rare blend in Indian English. The subject matter of most of the creative works in Indian English Literature is a depiction of an Indian way of life. The subject matter makes it a part of

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Indian literature. However, this has always remained a serious matter of contention. Interestingly, it has often been witnessed that most of the Indian English work of fiction is written for a western audience. That justifies the long detailed explanation of numerous everyday experiences which seem mundane and superfluous to the Indian reader. Indian English texts often try to present the Indian setting and situation to the western readers, while trying to nullify the cultural space of the English educated Indian readers, and negotiate with a culturally different readership. Conversely, it is also true that familiarity with the text implies familiarity with an Indian setting. Therefore, the Indian reader is not exactly outside the corpus of Indian English readers. Indian English Literature may be viewed as the superimposition of one cultural text over another, since language too, is a culturally charged term. The challenge faced by Indian English writers is to express the niceties of one’s culture in a language which is the repository of an entirely different worldview6. In this sense, Indian English Literature becomes an active site of interaction between two cultures and two worldviews. The fact that this literature dabbles with two cultural discourses points to the absolute necessity of a suitable critical framework to discuss its merit. Critical discussions on the nature, content and structure of Indian English Literature, however, suffers from want of sound theoretical discussions, since the tools that are employed to study this body of literature is not specified by critical theory. Moreover, there is always the danger of a specifically Indian or western reading. There is no doubt that the peculiar position of English has helped it acquire a special place in India, and one cannot deny that subsequently Indian English Literature has become very much a part of Indian literature over the years. Therefore, a critical approach that takes into consideration elements of Indian critical practice is desirable. The consequences of this shift towards being part of Indian literature has generated a sense of confidence among the writers of Indian English vis-à-vis a much-needed theoretical rigour in asserting an Indian voice in the discourse of reading these texts.

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The critical reception of Indian English Literature has emerged only in recent times, though in a very insubstantial manner. The idea is to challenge “the unconscious colonial desires of the west” which perpetuate a situation where “no Indian critic of English literature or even of Indian literature is taken seriously in Western literary circles” (Devy, 1998: 168-169).7 This may be ascribed to one of the major reasons for lack of sufficient critical discussions on Indian English texts. The lack of critical reading of Indian English Literature makes it more prone to be susceptible to negative criticism, which has taken place in the Indian literary scene. The overpopularity of Indian English literary texts in the international market coupled with a sense of disapproval in the Indian literary circuit has forced Indian English to locate a cultural space for itself and do the balancing act. Ramanujan (1999) evades giving a clear answer whether there exists an Indian way of thinking. There are several indications pointing toward an Indian way of thinking that is independent of any western bearings. This independence is very peculiar in the sense that it is both intra-dependent and inter-dependent at the same time. Since Indian culture is by no means a singular cultural system and neither is it a well-defined system by any means (though there are numerous scholarly material available on Indian culture), the Indian way of thinking is a conglomeration of several cultural strains, making it intra-dependent (within each cultural practice which in turn has its own worldview) and inter-dependent (whereby each cultural value system is dependent on the other). Each specific culture is contextualised in a particular worldview. Ramanujan distinguishes between the Indian and western ways of thinking on the basis of cultural tendencies of each. He makes two interesting categories of cultural idealisation based on context-free and context-sensitive societal rules. Context-free kind of rules tend to universalise, while context-sensitive kind of rules tend to particularise. “In cultures like India’s, the context-sensitive kind of rule is the preferred formulation” (Ramanujan, 1999: 41).

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Ramanujan exemplifies by giving instances from various Indian literary texts. The context-sensitive designs within a text are manifested through various literary devices used in accordance with particular cultural practices and modes. This lends coherence to the literary text, and determines how an Indian text needs to be read and understood within a particular context, keeping in mind the distinct socio-cultural factors. At this juncture it is interesting to note how Ramanujan ironically universalises the context-sensitive modes in Indian literary texts into various forms of arts and practices, where emphasis on coherence is of utmost significance, rather than unity. Ramanujan, however, observes a movement from context-sensitive to context-free society in modern times in India. The Indian way of thinking has never remained constant, and is neither a monolithic vision. It strives to strike a balance, wherever possible, with contemporary issues. It grapples with several issues in its own unique manner, keeping in mind its plurality of discourse. In a similar vein, Indian literary criticism, which is a direct manifestation of the Indian worldview, upholding ideas of Indianness, and rooted in a context-sensitive way of thinking, needs to create its own discursive space within the Indian literary domain, and fit into a discourse of plurality, of which Indian English is now an integral part. Locating Indian, Shaping English Having said that Indian English is an important tool to understand the various nuances of Indian English Literature, and how Indian English operates through various linguistic, literary and cultural categories, the most pertinent academic question one arrives at is the question of Indianness. Since Indian English has surfaced in the most culturally complex situations, is the term Indianness still valid? Because a term like Indianness exists, does it qualify as a pedagogical tool and a critical apparatus to understand and explain this literature? Is the purpose that Indianness serves only to locate? an Indian identity?

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Literary texts represent socio-cultural formations with reference to history, politics, place, language, and other denominators of life and living. Written over long spans of historical periods, these texts cultivate human sensibility and they may appropriately be read as a body of intimate critical discourse on man in his various social and cultural contexts. These literary texts, in turn, become active tools and agencies for understanding the relationship between various tectonic forces that operate within a society, and assist in postulating cultural configurations. All literary texts are cumulatively taken as man’s quest for identity; yet each text differs from the other in the way it articulates human aspirations, and in the style it projects those aspirations. Infusing Indian English texts with elements from Indian culture is an attempt in informing the unfamiliar reader about certain cultural practices, with the object of asserting a difference, and at times connecting the subject with some recognisable western phenomenon. Therein lies a practice of inserting “Indian culture into a global family of human values (and thereby implicitly representing Indian fiction as another branch of that infamously capitalized phrase World Literature)” (Almond 2005, 148). It may be acceptable to a certain extent that Indian English writing infuses elements of Indian culture into these global human values, but a continuing cultural tradition is always accompanied by ideological considerations. The tension between native culture and the other culture is always there, but there is alongside the trap of Indian English writing becoming a provincial imitation of the established western canon. The pedagogical solution made in order to avoid this trap is an over-emphasis on Indianness, and a tendency to read these texts as sociological or anthropological debates. The inevitable lack of suitable critical or cultural theory reduces much of the creativity of Indian English writers to a postcolonial discourse formation, which cannot be ruled out altogether, yet cannot be identified as the exclusive concern of this literature. The problem of labelling this as a postcolonial discourse formation is the result of hegemonic tendencies to idealise a homogenous worldview. Unfortunately our

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cultural conditioning is such that our unprepared responses to Indian English texts may be unconsciously stereotypical and appropriative. The constant tussle between locating Indianness and identifying the themes creates pedagogical problems of dealing with Indian English Literature. The ‘Indian’ in this literature provides a lexicon of a wide experience to understand several ideas of India. We need to conceive of literary texts in broader terms to include cultural productions from different templates of time and space. Texts can be non-canonical and representative at the same time. An author considered minor may reveal much more about a culture than its supposedly ‘major’ authors. The substance and worth of comparative approach will depend on the manner of treatment and the range and depth of concerns we bring to our reading. When comparative literature functions as a mode of apprehending the transactions between the literary, the cultural and the political in all its multivalent ways it would bring about a paradigm shift in its practice. (Ramakrishnan: 2012)

Indian English writing suffers from complexities right from its inception, its medium of expression, and finally its reception. The journey of Indian English is a journey of the complexities involved in the process of the evolution of Indian English Literature. One of the possible solutions to this complex journey is identifying an alternative discourse of reading this literature, which perhaps may be non-western, yet a balance ought to be struck between Indian and western critical practices.

NOTES: 1.

This letter referred to the 43rd Clause in the Act of the 53rd of the King by which the Governor-General-in-Council was empowered to direct “a sum of not less than one lac of rupees out of any surplus revenues that may remain… to the revival and improvement of literature, and the encouragement of the

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2.

3.

4.

5.

learned natives of India.” It also called for “the promotion of a knowledge of the sciences amongst the inhabitants” of India. (qtd. in Basu 2011, 8) In the penultimate paragraph of the letter, Rammohun Roy writes: “But as the improvement of the native population is the object of the Government, it will consequently promote a more liberal and enlightened system of instruction; embracing mathematics, natural philosophy, chemistry and anatomy with other useful sciences which may be accomplished with the sum proposed by employing a few gentlemen of talents and learning educated in Europe, and providing a college furnished with necessary books, instruments and other apparatus” (qtd. in Ramanan 2010, 63). For the full text of the letter, one may refer to Ramanan, Mohan (ed.) Nineteenth Century Indian English Prose: A Selection. New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 2004, rpt 2010. 60-64. Several histories of English education in India have discussed the introduction and growth of English language in India, and its implication on the Indian education system. Though the central argument of the discussion here is not regarding English education in India, one may access B.D. Basu’s History of Education in India under the Rule of the East India Company (2011, first publd. 1922), Gauri Viswanathan’s “The Beginnings of English Literary Study in British India” in The Post-colonial Studies Reader (1995), Ramachandra Guha’s Patriots and Partisans (2012) that offer some interesting and scholarly insights into this history of English education in India. David McCutchion’s Indian Writing in English is a significant volume for reading the history of the debate whether Indians can creatively write in English. McCutchion discusses in detail the Abu Sayeed Ayyub-P Lal-Jyotirmoy Datta debate that started in the 1960s, and analyses the stance of each. Numerous debates have ensued around the recognition of Indian English as a language having an independent identity. While linguists like B.B. Kachru who followed the naturalist discourse on language theory have identified Indian

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6.

7.

English as L2 (second language), critics like P. Lal have vociferously argued for a standardized form of English language usage in Indo-Anglian literature. The conspicuous gaps between language theorists and literary critics on the existence and acceptability of Indian English as a separate category, is fascinatingly discussed by Probal Dasgupta in The Otherness of English: India’s Auntie Tongue Syndrome (1993). The etymology of worldview goes back to Kant’s use of the German word Weltanschauung as a key-concept in the notions of German Idealism and Romanticism, denoting a global outlook on life and the world. The word Weltanschauung was akin to philosophy but without its rational pretensions. By the end of the nineteenth century, it had made its way into virtually every speech community in the Western world. The English equivalent has become more popular as worldview. The relationship between the new idea of worldview and the ancient one of philosophy has remained an area of debate. Philosophy usually retains its ancient association with rational and scientific thought, with its claims to universal validity; whereas worldview has connotations of a more personal and historically relative point of view, which helps shape cultural patterns. For a detailed discussion on the relationship between philosophy and world view, see Albert M. Wolters’ “On The Idea of Worldview and Its Relation to Philosophy”, in Marshall, P. et al (ed.) Stained Glass (1983), University Press of America, 14-25. Devy elaborates how one keeps deferring this process of establishing serious literary criticism in India by trying to consciously think that this is “an exercise in comparative literature”.

REFERENCE LIST: Almond, Ian. 2005. “Dissolving ‘Indianness’: How Europeans Read Indian Fiction.” Orbis Litterarum 60: 145-158. Basu, B.D. 2011. History of Education in India under the Rule of the East India Company. 2nd ed. Delhi: Low Price Publications.

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Originally published Calcutta: The Modern Review Office, 1922. Chanda, Ipshita. 2003. “Can the Non-Western Comparatist Speak?” Literary Research/Recherche littéraire 20.39-40: 58-68. Accessed November 27, 2013.http://www.collectionscanada.gc.ca /eppp-archive/100/201/300/literary_research-ef/no39-40/forum/ forum4.html Das, Kamala. 1995. “An Introduction.” In The Golden Treasury of IndoAnglian Poetry: 1828-1965, edited by Vinayak Krishna Gokak, 272-273. New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi. Dasgupta, Sayantan. 2006. Indian English Literature: A Study in Historiography. Kolkata: Centre for Advanced Study, Jadavpur University. Devy, G.N. 1998. “Some Anthropological Observations on The Study of English Literature Prefaced by The Confessions of an English Teacher.” In Subject to Change: Teaching Literature in the Nineties, edited by Susie Tharu, 159-169. New Delhi: Orient Longman Limited. Ezekiel, Nissim. 1989. Collected Poems: 1952-1988. With an Introduction by Gieve Patel. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Government of India. 2011. “President’s Order, 1960.” Department of Official Language. Accessed June 18, 2013. http:// www.rajbhasha.nic.in/GOLPContent.aspx?t=enpres-1960. Kachru, B.B. 1983. The Indianization of English: The English Language in India. Delhi: Oxford University Press. McCutchion, David. 1973. Indian Writing in English. Calcutta: Writers Workshop. Mehrotra, Arvind Krishna, ed. 2010. An Illustrated History of Indian Literature in English. New Delhi: Permanent Black. Mohan, Ramesh. 1978. “Some Aspects of Style and Language in Indian English Fiction.” In Indian Writing in English, edited by Ramesh Mohan. Bombay: Orient Longman. Mukherjee, Meenakshi. 2001. The Twice Born Fiction: Themes and Techniques of the Indian Novel in English. Delhi: Pencraft International. Ramakrishnan, E.V. 2012. “Is there an Indian Way of Thinking about Comparative Literature?” The Journal of Contemporary Thought (Summer). Accessed November 30, 2013. http://

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globalsouthproject.cornell.edu/files/2012/09/RamakrishnanPDF-1owx4w6.pdf Ramanujan, A.K. 1999. “Is There an Indian Way of Thinking? An Informal Essay.” In The Collected Essays of A.K. Ramanujan, edited by Vinay Dharwadker, 34-51. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Sahitya Akademi. (n.d.) “Sahitya Akademi: National Academy of Letters.” Accessed June 19, 2013. http://sahitya-akademi.gov.in/sahityaakademi/aboutus/about.jsp

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Ipshita Chanda BOOK REVIEW Kajal Bandyopadhyay: Tension and Synthesis in Wole Soyinka’s Plays. Dhaka: Dhaka Viswavidyalaya Prakashana Samstha, University of Dhaka, 2012. 311 pp. Taka 310.

Kajal Bandyopadhyay’s Tension and Synthesis in Wole Soyinka’s Plays is the attempt of a poet and a theatre scholar and practitioner to grasp the essence of drama as an expressive act in its social and political implications. The reader might ask why I do not say ‘cultural’, and cut a long story short. This is because the ‘cultural’ is a fraught area in the academic field of ‘African Literature(s)’ in the world outside Africa. This is most so in Asia, where Bandyopadhyay is one of the few scholars of what Ngugi calls Europhone African literature. Faced with questions as a poet and a citizen about the life of his time, in his country, he seeks answers from other societies and polities, located in other cultures. For instance, how does one deal with conflict in the real world where the politics of identity is then (the book was written as a thesis in the late 90’s, in an Indian university) just beginning to take shape? The context of the work is clear in the prefatory words to the book, but thereafter, it disappears, perhaps remaining as an intended symbol in the two poles between which the book frames its material : tension and synthesis. So his own cultural location as a Bengali speaker, inheritor of the literature written in Bangla, is evident enough in the work. The subject of the work is Soyinka’s theatre : and I do not limit it to ‘drama’, though this being a literature thesis, drama as a literary and verbal form which forms the core of theatre, is the central focus. Soyinka’s themes are located in different parts Jadavpur Journal of Comparative Literature, Volume XLVX, 2013-2014 20 7

of present Nigeria, which emerged out of a unit of colonial administrative convenience, the West African Protectorate. The culture of the texts is not singular, except that it is identified, in its variety, with one nation. Nigeria is a multiethnic, multilingual country and the plurality of these many cultures has been emphasised and contested across different and incongruent periods in the history of the formation of the present state. This complex ‘cultural’ situation was accessible to subcontinental scholars through the mediation of Anglo-american scholars when this book was written.1 I am not certain that the situation has chnaged too much, twenty years on. So ‘cultural’ implications have to be sought in the reader/ scholar’s culture, unless the entire exercise is to be collapsed into a ‘reading’ of Soyinka’s plays, in which case its interest for a journal of Comparatiev Literature (the only one in Asia for a long time) would be considerably diminished. However, in this case, the ‘cultural’ commonalities seem to stem from a particular historical event, which Soyinka has put firmly in its place by describing it as a ‘catalytic event merely’ – colonisation itself, which makes Anglophone African literature available to the English speaking reader across the world, and in Asia. The factors of British domination (history records that the example of India was cited in British colonial administrative policy as exemplary — see Crowder etc), the consequent forced and fractious multiculturalism of the modern ‘nation’ Nigeria and the brutality of colonisation are recognisable situations to readers on the subcontinent. Starting from that basis, the exercise undertaken here is purely a literary one : though a broad framework of marxist theory is followed, this is not necessarily cultural or even literary theory. Rather, the driving force of the book is, as the title proclaims, tension and synthesis. In its genesis, its choice of subject and its aims the book conceives of the process of history as represented in art as being held in a dynamic relation between the two states of tension and synthesis. Soyinka designates ‘myth’ as the connecting link between the fragmented present and the cosmic totality, which is easily evoked

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in the dailyness of the societies in which his plays are loacted. This for Soyinka is an organising principle for the presentation of his plays – the form comes from the mythic narrative, performed in oral cultures. In the oral culture of the Yoruba, the cultural nationality to which Soyinka belongs, a pioneer like D.O.Fagumwa wrote down the myths in Roman script, structuring the written narrative within a ‘frame story’. This book, one of the first to be written in Yoruba, a language without a script was translated by Soyinka into English, and named “Forest of a Thousand Daemons”.2 Myth as form, myth as story are foundational in the written culture that exists together with the oral in contemporary subcontinental and Nigerian societies. The orally performed appears as an organising principle in written literature : and as a writer, Bandyopadhyay seems to include this aspect into the arena of academic engagement. The result is not a scholarly thesis, but the writer’s attempt to understand literature as expressive mode located in a given place and time. Thus the book analyses Soyinka’s dramatisation of historical situations, reading elements of radical marxist sociology in the perspectives dramatically offered by the author. The Jero plays, Madmen and Specialists and The Road are handled thus by Bandyopadhyay. This broader frame allows the scholarly reader to share common grounds for interpretation, despite the particularity of the location of the various plays. Bandyopadhyay speaks consistently of synthesis, but one would wonder if this resonates with Soyinka’s own position vis a vis the ‘old’ and ‘new’ identified with ‘local’/’western’, peripheral/ metropolitan, colonised/coloniser, black/white, traditional/ modern sets that have from time to time dominated academic discourse about literature written in different languages across the world. If Bandyopadhyay approaches the arena of European critical theory, it is through the offices of African explicators of Soyinka : and this appears to be an oblique way of skirting those debates that the texts of ‘African’ writers (albeit writing in European languages, whom Ngugi wa Thiong’o calls Europhone writers) and inevitably raise in the ‘postcolonial’ discourse. The “lived culture

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of a society”, in this case, is the culture of the other – it is not the writer’s and neither is it of this reviewer and many of the readers of the review. This “lived culture” can only be understood subjectively by us. It is perhaps because of the fraught nature of this enterprise that Bandyopadhyay leaves it aside . The usual ‘debates’ in Anglophone African literature, regarding language, canon and the relation to it, the representation of the ‘native other’ are fitted into the larger frame of his reading of Soyinka’s plays. That larger frame is built upon the mutual dynamics of tension and synthesis, the stuff of ‘history’. The writer’s aim, in this book, is to map the structure of the plays as lived situations woven into a pattern through the relation between tension and synthesis. This relation may be crafted, Bandyopadhyay claims, as the logic of a historical and affective performance, the ‘play’. He garners support from critics and the author himself to establish his perspective. The form of the book recalls the placards that we see in Brechtian theatre sometimes : subtitles dealing with various aspects of the play under discussion abound, and lend a declamatory tone to the text, perhaps fitting since the genre under considertion is drama. These varied strands of thought are woven along the themes of tension and synthesis, and the method of building up remarked upon above perhaps also lends a tension to the text itself, which is not always resolved. The categorisation of characters and the thresholds of plausibility constructed for their actions, follow the categorisation available in marxist social theory : labour, elite, proletariat, bourgeois are words that Bandyopadhyay uses with a degree of theoretical precision but expressed in language that is not academic in any sense. It is rather, following the writer whom he is studying, “a dialectic of phenomena and perception”, which Bandyopadhyay quotes approvingly, adding that Soyinka also says “…culture is not parts. It is not even a sum of parts, but a summation, a synthesis”. These parts cohere in the literary object through the process of literarisation, and appeal to the affective capacity of the reader.

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Expressions of feeling , like “creative stresses” words like “tensions”, the various “pressures”, that Soyinka uses to describe the quickening of being in the leaves of literature, are evoked as signs to thread the textual readings together. The commodification of religion and gender relations, the reification of power that capital makes obvious especially when it intervenes violently in the precolonial economy and the very nature of power itself, come in for detailed consideration in the work, following Soyinka’s concentration on these themes. But theoretically, he stops short of the move to approach difference as being, the very basis of critical thoery that Adorno inaugurates with a conceptualisation of the dialectic, questioniong the accepted notion of ‘synthesis’ itself. Hence the appropriation of the other through the modes of thought, which seems the objective of academic engagements with difference, is eschewed in the form of the text and finds no place in the theoretical framework either. Rather, the effort of the writer to creatively engage with the encounter of the other in thought and appearance is understood in terms of the concepts of synthesis and tension as ‘enacted’ in human lives upon the stage of history. So, Soyinka’s work is studied as dramatic realisation on stage rather than a discursive structure built on the basis of a theoretical scheme applied to literature. The use of myth as a coherent frame, and ritual as the formal core of dramatic structure, form the poetics which help Bandyopadhyay to read the plays as specific instances of the practice of theatre in Nigeria and in the centre of the English speaking world, where the instuituions of thetare have engaged with Soyinka’s work. The writer’s eloquent rejection of the practices of the latter are indications of the difference of being, realised through performance that his plays, though written in an accessible language, i.e., English, would present for the English-speaking audience of the metropolis. Bandyopadhyay has a construction of this difference, and there are common grounds for understanding in the similarity of access through language, literary system, cultural policy and economy introduced by the coloniser. Beyond this is the unique

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singularity of the literary act. Though we may take issue with technical points and theoretical proclivities, as an artist, Bandyopadhyay has entered through Soyinka’s plays, a plural world which he and the writer, and this reviewer, inhabit, in societies endowed with plural cultures and plural languages. It is for this reason that his work solicits interest.

NOTES: 1.

2.

Most of these latter have been generous to both African author and Indian scholar, whatever be their personal belief and intellectual pursuit. Bernth Lindfors, to whom this book is dedicated, is one of this community. D. O. Fagunwa, Forest of a Thousand Daemons, trans Wole Soyinka. Soyinka has explaijed in the Preface to this book, why he chose to use daemons rather than demons in the title.

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Sucheta Bhattacharya BOOK REVIEW Tarashankar Bandyopadhyay: The Tale of Hansuli Turn Translated by Ben Conisbee Baer. New York : Columbia University Press. 2011. 373 pp. Tarashankar Bandyopadhyay (1898-1971) was one of those first and rare breeds of ‘bhadralok’ Bengali authors who had ventured to take on the difficult task of narrating the complicated history of the marginalized ethnic communities of the arid red-soil Rarh area (western part of Bengal close to the Bengal-Bihar border) and chronicling their lives. Bandyopadhyay’s vision of life in his novels is epical in its essence. His is not the way to analyse life through the exploration of individual psychology. He refuses to comment on the lives he is portraying, seeming to wear the mantle of an objective and detached chronicler instead. Yet his political thought and inclination come out loud and clear when he describes the groups or types of individuals that he would have been familiar with, as the character of Shibnath the nationalist zamindar in Dhatridevata, or Debu Ghosh, the school-teacher-turned-socialactivist in Ganadevata and Panchagram. However, his strength as a novelist lies in his ability to capture the multifaceted nature of human life rather than in exploring the narrower labyrinths of the human mind. He seems to prefer to look upon life in its totality rather than partially from the dark incoherent interiority of human psychology. Yet the world that is foregrounded in his writing is the one which we are often unaware of, conditioned as we are by our class-determined existence forcing us to turn a blind eye to the presence of a dark community long silenced because they speak different languages from ours in more senses than one. The relationship between the marginalized community, as well as the communities Jadavpur Journal of Comparative Literature, Volume XLVX, 2013-2014 21 3

which are being rendered marginalized (like the weakening zamindars, the relicts of Lord Cornwallis’s ‘permanent settlement’ policy defeated by the rise of a mercantile class) and the bigger social and political structure which he finds changing fast in the latter part of the colonial times in India, particularly in Bengal, is the subject of almost all his major novels. The real protagonist in Bandyopadhyay’s novels is time. A majority of his characters are often passive entities through whom time plays out its games; in their narrative function they are to a certain extent similar to Hardy’s rustics, silhouething out the main protagonists. Time for Tarashankar is linear and evolving, as Hasan Azizul Haq argues in his essay “Tarashankar: Jibaner Garha Samachar”. (89) 1 Hansuli Banker Upakatha (1946-51), translated by Ben Conisbee Baer as The Tale of Hansuli Turn (Columbia University Press, N Y, 2011) has at its core the life of a marginalized community known as the Kahars. This community, as Tarashankar shows, is a hugely hybrid and socially mobile one, a living example of the changing social identities impacted by a deep interplay between the traditional caste system and colonial interests, whereby social mobility for them is never upward but latitudinal. The Kahars are depicted not only as marginalized by the caste system but also criminalized and exploited for furthering the interests of the colony and then treated as pariah by the dominant system for their in-limbo social status and freer sexual practices. Among the Kahars themselves as a community there are deeper stratifications in professional identities, which makes the whole segment that they belong to multilayered and a maze incomprehensible to the uninitiated. Yet what turns the ‘tale’ (upakatha) into a novel (upanyas) is the introduction of certain universal motifs like the conflict between the new order and the old, an eternal one in every sphere of life as we know it, despite the differences in our socio-cultural identities, and the use of the narrative voice, often impersonal, shifting from detached observations on the geographical location against which the novel is set, to a slightly involved one describing the details of Kahar life. This engagement between an impersonal sweeping epic voice and the description of the intimate details of Kahar life is what transforms Hansuli Banker Upokatha from a tale into a novel as Lukacs would have argued. It is a world where human agency is trying to establish

TARASHANKAR BANDYOPADHYAY: THE TALE OF HANSULI TURN / 215

itself, through the figure of young Karali, after being at the receiving end of the interests of the bigger system for centuries. However the epical vision of human destiny that Tarashankar dispenses, renders Karali’s attempts quite futile too. The two main protagonists Bonwari and Karali represent two generations in conflict. Bonwari accepting and living by the standards society has bidden him to and often even colluding with it to maintain status quo. Karali the young harbinger of change resists this slotted-into identities. Between these two lies a multitude of characters belonging to both Kahars and the dominant community, living life with gusto with their individual tragedies, loves, and happinesses. Above all dominates the shadowy figure of ‘Baba Thakur’, the mysterious presence that controls the actions and behaviours of the Kahars and which has to be kept pacified through blood sacrifices if norms are violated. It is interesting to note that the whole community expiates for the false step taken by a single individual. It seems to be a control mechanism built by the Kahars themselves to maintain their own system, though the description of ‘Baba Thakur’itself sounds uncannily like a Brahminical priestly figure, complete with fair complexion and the sacred thread round his neck. The monstrous python that Karali slaughters right at the beginning of the novel is his emissary and Karali’s murder of it is very Freudian in its significance. As most of Tarashankar’s novels, Hansuli Banker Upokatha also ends with the promise of a new beginning after the destruction of the old order. Thanks are due to Conisbee Baer for choosing to translate this text. It entailed a difficult task and he has been majorly successful in carrying it out. He is very clear about the identity of his target readership, which is not Bengali- reading or familiar with sociocultural-religious practices of rural Bengal. Reading Tarashankar in the original can be an aesthetically and intellectually challenging task even for people well versed in Bangla, for his novels speak about communities, practices and political backgrounds which have long been swallowed up by history and imaginative re-structuring can be pretty daunting. Conisbee Baer is successful as a translator because he is very aware of this difficulty and he starts negotiating it with a very informative introduction connecting the novel with the bigger historical background against which it was written as well as laying open the tactics of translation that he

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has employed to ably ‘dance across the abyss between two languages’. An introduction can make or mar a translation, and Baer’s is a happy instance. The other element that one is always wary about in the business of dealing with translations is the quality and nature of the languages and in their comfortableness with each other. Tarashankar’s language is very crisp, formal and informal periodically with demands of a particular juncture in the action of the novel and devoid of deliberate stylization with a photograph-like quality in its rendition of the spoken language. The conjunction of two opposites: the rendering of the formal/informal authorial voice in English and the capturing of the Rarh idiom with the right kind of distortion is not an easy job. Conisbee Baer tries at times to capture the pace of action by dropping the finite verbs which the original does not: ‘A fire burning fiercely in a great stove; overhead a structure of bamboo and palm leaf has been built as a covering. Bonwari sitting on a mound in front of the stove. Roton’s son Lotbor feeding sugarcane husks into the furnace mouth to fuel the fire’…(105). The substitution of the continuous present tense by participles paradoxically invests the description with a static, pictorial quality, which in the original is marked by busy activity. Conisbee Baer perceptively comments in his introduction that ‘…[a] translation, no matter how gracefully executed, is as much of a [new] problem as it is a necessity and a solution.’ No truer comment perhaps has been made in this translation and if we read it in the light of this observation the apparent awkwardness of the translated title is not so awkward any longer. The ‘texture’ of the original title would invoke in the native reader’s mind not a ‘hansuli’ (a sickle shaped neck piece) and not a turn but a more composite image, conjunction of a geographical space and a shape …rising over and above the individual words, a river bend. This awkwardness perhaps is necessary because it takes into account the element of untranslatability that a successful and conscious translation would always evoke. NOTES: 1.

In Tarashankar: Byaktitwa O Sahitya, ed. Pradyumna Bhattacharya, Sahitya Akademi, 2001.

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